Free Cancel All Our Vows by John D. MacDonald Page B

getting older and I’m getting smarter. I knew some girls before I met you. I’ve learned something. The first time is no good. You aren’t adjusted to each other. You know absolutely nothing about the other person’s wants or needs or tempo or anything else. It takes a lot of times of being together before you’re—damn it, I hate to sound so clinical—proficient. And that means just from the physical angle, without thinking of any emotional or spiritual aspects.
    “We’ve been together a long time, Jane. I love you and I don’t want to lose you. Both of us have a strong streak of the voluptuary. So with us it’s good. I’m not a kid. I’m not looking for illicit thrills. I’m not trying to prove anything to myself, or to anybody else. To make any deal with Laura worth while, assuming that I could seduce her, or, as you might say, vice versa—a long long time would have to pass before we could do each other any good. And frankly, I’m too old and too weary and too lazy and too damn set in my ways to embark on any campaign like that, believe me.”
    There was a long silence. He decided he did not want to plead any longer. He stared glumly ahead, sucking hard on the cigarette, seeing, against the slant of the windshield, the reflection of the glowing red end of his cigarette. Itwas the dead still part of the morning. The time when old people died. The time when hospital corridors were empty echoing places, smelling of pain.
    He felt Jane move close to him, the long warm length of her thigh against his, her hand light on his knee.
    “God, I’m silly,” she said in a small voice.
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “Yes you would. I rattle on and on and you listen to me half the time and I hardly blame you for that. I guess I’ve got everything in the world I want. I forget that. I let the little darn things pile up on me—things that aren’t important. And then I give you a bad time because I get stupid jealous of you. But you did spend an awful long time down there with her, and I guess the old gabby-noses will find somebody to talk about Mostly I didn’t like being left with that Ellis creature. He’s so ponderous. And we’ve got to bear with them on Sunday, bless us.”
    “Let’s not make them a habit, hey?”
    “I’ll take opium first. Now kiss me and let’s go to bed.”
    He smiled in the night and kissed her and she made her arms tight around his neck, and then whispered in his ear that she was sorry for saying so many nasty things. She sat close to him on the way home.
    He was in his bed and she was in the bathroom and he fought to keep awake for her. Weariness ran like molten lead through his veins. She came into the bedroom, silhouetted for a moment against the bathroom light before she reached back to turn it off. And then she was heavy and sweet-smelling against him. The night was warm, and he channeled his thoughts to maintain his awareness of her.
    Long after she had gone to sleep and he could hear her breathing deeply in her own bed, he thought of Laura Corban, thought of the thin, clear, delicate articulation of her, the clever intricacies of knee and ankle and oiled socket of hip. She moved lightly across the backs of his eyes, and, on the very edge of sleep, he thought that she was a symbol of some subtle depravity, that there was something about her which was unclean, and yet something that he had to learn. With Jane he had gone through the accustomed rites of their love, and all the time it had been happening, he had seen the watchful face of LauraCorban. She had watched them with remote, indifferent interest. With a faint trace of amusement. As one might watch the antics of the clumsier beasts at a zoo, filled with self-awareness of her own more motile deftness, more astringent delights, and degenerate devices.
    He slept and his dreams were full of unnamed fears, of running—but never fast enough; of hiding—but never cleverly enough; of fighting—with awareness of defeat. Ellis