The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels) Page 7

  "The plow," he said.

  "Sure. The plow."

  "That's going to have to wait."

  Her confusion was evident, and a slight hint of anger. "What is it? You don't want to work with me?"

  "No," he said quickly. "Don't be silly. You've convinced me you'll be invaluable."

  "Fucking right I will."

  "And your command of the language will stand you in good stead with all my better customers." He laughed. "No, what I mean is—I'm going to take a short break from it for a while. It's driving me nuts, and I hate that. I don't think straight. That music I told you about, the sheets for Dale Blake? I've decided —right now, in fact—that I'll hunt that up first. It'll clear my mind so I can get back into mudwalking with a smile instead of a groan."

  "Oh." She dropped her hands into her lap. "Oh."

  "Andy, it's not you, believe me."

  "I do. It's just that . . ." And she lifted her shoulders, lowered them; it wasn't a shrug but an admission of disappointment. "You'll be going away for a while."

  He nodded. "I know I'm not going to find it here. I'll have to hit New York again, and who knows where the hell else. It shouldn't . . ." He stopped, tried again. "That is, I doubt I'll be gone . . ." Faltered. Licked at his lips. Said nothing when she pushed away from the table and picked up the cups to bring to the sink. He stared at her back, thinking he'd just destroyed whatever it was he had built over the past hour or so. "Andy, listen, as soon as I get back I'll—"

  She turned slowly. Her blouse was undone, her bra parted in the center. A glimmer of perspiration shone hard between her breasts, shadows sweeping down over her stomach toward the top of her jeans. Her hands commanded the direction of his astonished gaze, dipped to the snap and unfastened it, yanked down the zipper to expose a band of laced white. She pointed at him.

  "You're naked under that, right?"

  Without thinking, he nodded.

  "Good," she said. "We'll fuck first, make love later."

  Chapter 8

  It was not quite dawn, not quite dark; a few birds in the hickory that overspread the front yard had begun to stir noisily, a milk truck had passed five minutes before, and a large white cat strolled down the center of the street, head high and tail arched. Josh followed it as far as he could without turning his head, his palms pressed to his cheeks, his elbows hard on the trestle desk. He had not bothered to turn on a lamp, and the pack of cigarettes lying within reach had not been touched.

  It's all right, she had told him; don't worry about it, it happens.

  Perhaps it does, he thought for the tenth, or the hundredth, or the one millionth time, but knowing that did not make the experience any less unpleasant, or any less unnerving.

  And worse: it wasn't that he felt inadequate, or unmanly—he felt, simply, incredibly stupid. As if he had forgotten everything he had learned (or thought he had learned) since the night he had lost his virginity during the third month of his Air Force tour. As if his body had abruptly reverted to prepubescence, realizing that something momentous was about to happen and not having the faintest idea what to do about it yet.

  Over the past two hours, after he had finally crept sleepless from the bed, he had lectured himself on the various important stresses of anticipation, on the way the mind sometimes worked when it was overburdened and suddenly overloaded, on the way the functions of sex were not always given to command responses. He went over it all a dozen and more times, and still he felt . . . incredibly stupid.

  Don't worry, she had said, drifting off in his arms, I'm here and that's what counts so don't worry about it there'll be other times now and you don't have to worry.

  A board creaked. He glanced over his left shoulder toward the staircase, waiting, breathing shallowly through his mouth. There was no other sound. The silence was so loud he put his hands to his ears.

  He had trailed numbly after her, and the tantalizing shower of clothing, wondering if this weren't a dream he was having, an attempt by his subconscious to soothe the anxieties he had stockpiled during the day. It must have been, he thought, because he wasn't this lucky. He had stopped at the bedroom doorway, shivering, and watched her sink to the mattress, shadows rippling languidly across the planes and curves and angles of her figure; he watched her lie back and cup her hands behind her head to fan her soft hair out across the covers; he saw her right hand rest in the dark pool between her breasts while a grey ghost arm lifted toward him and beckoned. He had found his robe on the landing afterward, not recalling the discarding as he'd walked, remembering only that he had walked stiffly to her, uncertain, nervous, stopping when he felt her foot run along the outside of his leg. His vision adjusted further to the dark, and he saw her eyes holding him beneath half-lowered lids.

  When she smiled he'd dropped over her and embraced her and the shock of her cool flesh against his had made him groan aloud.

  And his fantasies crumbled into little more than fancies.

  The middle step protested wearily; he lowered his hands.

  The square of the window slowly grew defined, the flocked pattern of the curtains gaining darker substance.

  He whistled in a breath and there were hands on his shoulders, kneading, and the faint scent of lilac when she lowered her cheek to his from behind.

  "Feeling sorry for yourself?" A gentle question, a whispering against his ear.

  "No." He saw the white cat drift by again, something dark and squirming in its mouth. "Well, a little, I suppose. Mostly, I feel just . . . stupid."

  "For heaven's sake, why?"

  A shrug. "I don't know. I just do."

  "But—"

  "I know what you said." He reached for the cigarettes, felt her stiffen, and stopped himself in time. "I know. I just . . ." And he shrugged again, helplessly.

  She kissed his cheek, the side of his chin, her thumbs drifting up under his hair behind his ears. "Am I ever going to see your face again?"

  He smiled, and could not remember the last time he had seen dawn.

  "Come back to bed," she said, feather-soft. "I'm not mad, if that's what you're afraid of, and I don't care. Just come back to bed."

  "I . . . it's not your fault, you know."

  He could feel her grin. "I know."

  A light breeze began to tousle the leaves, stir the shrubs. A car sped past with its headlights on.

  He offered the car a Bronx cheer and scratched at his nose. "I might as well stay up. It's Wednesday already. A couple of hours and I'll have to get to work anyway."

  "Why?"

  He opened his mouth, closed it. "Beats the shit out of me."

  She patted his head. "Good boy. You're the boss, you can go in whenever you want to. Today, as of now, is a half-day holiday in honor of . . . that cat. Come back and get some sleep. If you don't you won't be worth a damn to anyone. You'll also start feeling sorry for yourself and ruin everyone else's day, too. Let Felicity handle things, she knows what to do. Come on, Josh, come back to bed."

  He rose and her hands dropped away, palms sliding softly down his back. By the time they reached the stairs she had one arm around his waist, and he didn't mind it a bit. "You can tell me how we're going to look for the plow."

  "You're kidding. You still want to do it?"

  "Sure, why not?" She paused one step higher than he and looked at him oddly. "You don't think I wanted to sleep with you just so I could go walking in the woods, do you? Do you really think I'm that bored?"

  "No, of course not," he said quickly. "That's stupid."

  "Good answer," she said with a mocking pat to his cheek. "If you'd said yes, you know, I would have cut off your balls."

  He walked into the office just a few minutes past noon and intercepted Felicity's explanation-demanding glare with a firm, and startling, kiss on the lips. By the time she had recovered sufficiently to begin questioning his tardiness he had already forestalled her by launching energetically into a series of dictations that, at the close of the second hour, had cleared up a substantial po
rtion of the correspondence he owed both contacts and clients. And his good humor was such that he could not stifle an occasional laugh at the looks she was giving him when she thought he wasn't watching.

  Beautiful, he thought; god damn but it's beautiful.

  The next item on the mental list he had made on his way to High Street was a stop at Bartlett's Toys. With a jaunty wave to Felicity, then, he strolled briskly over and spent a comfortable hour with Dale Blake and her husband Vic, trying to unearth as much information as he could about the sheet music she wanted. That accomplished he rose to leave, and when they protested his refusal to accept a fee for the search, he told them he would have to start driving all the way to Hartford if they didn't stop pushing. They laughed. Agreed. Never once mentioning what all of them knew: that for all the money Josh spent in the shop, neither of them could have bought a single meal a month at the corner luncheonette.

  As he left the store—grinning and feeling somewhat self-satisfied and smug—he was snared by young Sandy McLeod, who promptly dragged him into Yarrow's to introduce him to the bookstore's owners, Iris and Paul Lennon. While Josh stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like an adolescent in the throes of a woman's effusive praise, Sandy told the elderly couple—in a rambling, rattling, gesticulating narrative—how he had discovered the pewter teaspoon in the orchard and how much Josh had actually paid him for it. The pride in their eyes (they had no children of their own), the excitement in the boy's voice (he was virtually supporting his own way through college by working for the Lennons), was almost too much, and when he was finally back on the pavement, he felt as if he had just learned through proclamation that his middle name was Claus.

  A glance at his watch, a double check with the bank clock, and he was ten paces down the street toward the Mariner Lounge before he remembered Lloyd had canceled their lunch date the afternoon before. Good god, the old man is cracking up, he thought as he reversed his direction with a sharp about-face; cracking up at last, and loving every goddamned minute of it.

  He laughed aloud, nodded pleasantly to a startled woman, and returned to the office thinking about Andy.

  He was barely settled behind his desk when Felicity handed him a sheet of paper. He stared at it, at her, back to the paper again.

  "What's this?"

  "Your trip, or have you forgotten already." She jabbed with a red-nailed finger. "That's the hotel there, you've been there before. This is an appointment tomorrow at three with that creepy guy from Equity—the train leaves at nine-ten, by the way, plenty of time for you to check in and wash up—and this is one, at five, with a guy who used to do some publicity for a few of the theaters and now he runs an actor's school or something on the upper East Side. You've already talked to him on the phone a couple of times. I didn't make any arrangements for the day after because you might get lucky and be home for the weekend. If you don't, though, you'll have to change hotels because the whole damned city is booked up. A convention, three or four, though why anyone would want to go there beats the hell out of me."

  Josh took a breath, feeling as though he had just run a fast mile.

  "Something wrong?"

  He shook his head in amazement. "Why? I haven't said I'd be—"

  She put her hands on her hips, changed her mind, and took the paper back to fold it. "Because," she told him, "whenever you do your letters like you did today, it means you're going away again. You do it every time. That's why."

  He leaned back and stared up at her. "Felicity, can you be honest with me?"

  She nodded warily.

  "Is there anything, I mean anything at all you don't know about me?"

  "Yes," she said. "All this time and I still don't know why you don't take me out."

  He reached out to punch her arm playfully in lieu of an answer he did not have, missed, and struck her breast instead. He swallowed and looked away quickly, but not before she had slapped his hand. Hard.

  "I don't stuff tissues in there, Miller," she said tightly. "Keep your hands to yourself."

  He could think of nothing to say, was grateful when Lloyd called him a few moments later to apologize again for having to back out of their meeting.

  "Don't worry about it," Josh said, feeling marvelously magnanimous. "But as long as you're on the wire here, can you tell me if there was anything important, or was it because you just wanted to see my rugged face again."

  "There was, uh, no. No, Josh, nothing important."

  "All right, just so I know. I'm leaving town tomorrow anyway, and I wanted to be sure I had all the loose ends tied up."

  "No loose ends here, Josh."

  "Good. Tell me, by the way, what you hear about that woman. Saporral? Can you give me something I can give to Mrs. Thames. Just to keep on her good side, you understand."

  "Well, Josh—hey, my friend's here, I have to go. Take care, have a good trip."

  Some friend, he thought, and made a bet with himself that it wasn't a man at all. When he looked to Felicity to make a comment, however, she gave him clear signals she did not want to talk. Did not; in fact, speak with him for the rest of the day, responding to his increasingly strained and ultimately cross inquiries with nods, grunts, vague gestures that conveyed nothing. And when she left at four-thirty he was at once relieved and tempted to chase after her. Temptation won, but he stopped himself at the partition when he was struck with the idea that he had done more than inadvertently brush against her chest. Suppose, he wondered without knowing where the supposition came from, that all those coy stories of her uproarious nightlife were nothing more than that . . . stories. And stories that were intended to draw a reaction from him, prod from him the impulse to be alone with her socially. He blinked slowly, considering, knowing that after his nonperformance the night before and Andrea's gentle acceptance, nothing about the depth of his stupidity in the face of female psychology would surprise him anymore. And he knew damned well he wasn't enjoying the lesson. "Dumb," he muttered. "Dumb, dumb, dumb." Then he shrugged and returned to his desk to clean up for the day.

  Andrea was gone when he returned home that night. There was no note. Only the faint scent of lilac clinging to the sheets and one of the bath towels.

  He walked through the room for nearly an hour, turning on all the lights and switching them off again.

  Four times checked to be sure he had Felicity's schedule in his pocket; packed and repacked until he had to order himself to stop it.

  Stood shivering on the front stoop, almost wishing he could feel as though someone were watching him just so he could feel anything at all.

  But the saltbox house with all its trees and flowers, its books and mirrors, seemed suddenly too empty, suddenly too large. He returned inside and reached for the phone. No, he thought then; don't press your luck. It was entirely possible she was having trouble, too. The notion did not please him, and he went to bed early, took a long time to sleep.

  Dreamt of bees and wasps and hornets in a field, filling the air in dark clouds, filling his ears with angry snarling, filling his mouth his eyes his ears with sweet poison; dreamt of a woman in a black masque who walked through walls and loved him scorched him promised him left him; dreamt of Felicity riding a huge Burmese cat that clawed and howled its way through his bedroom wall to trap him under the sheets and flail his skin gouge his cheeks snare his testicles to make him scream; dreamt of a darkness as soft as the sweep of Andy's hair, a floating and a drifting and a scent of cloying lilac.

  Woke at dawn and stared at the ceiling.

  Oh hell, he thought. I think I'm in love.

  Chapter 9

  Despite Felicity's hope and his own expectations to be home before midnight, by Friday noon at the latest, Josh had no luck at all during his first day in the city. All the man from Equity did was fill an hour with complaints about scale wages and scabs, a traffic jam on Sixth Avenue made him late for the five o'clock meeting and the actor's studio was closed after he ran up four dingy flights, and when he got back t
o his hotel he discovered the room still hadn't been readied.

  He slept badly, fitfully, awoke the next morning with a headache that took an hour to subside.

  He ate breakfast quickly and remade the missed appointment for Saturday evening. Swearing, then, he called Felicity, told her of the delay, and was astonished (and delighted) to find himself involved in four more searches that had come in that morning. Manuscripts they were, and odd enough to make him smile.

  "I don't suppose you've set me up for some meetings?" he said after she'd given him the want-list and the clients' names.

  "You're down there and I'm up here," she said. "And it's cheaper if you call. Do your own work for a change."

  He laughed and rang off, and decided that this would be the vacation he'd been needing. The weather was on his side, as close to perfect as it could have been without looking for miracles: cool mornings, comfortably warm afternoons, a breeze that only occasionally sharpened to unpleasant gusts as he walked to all his appointments, to all the shops and hideaways he usually frequented on such tasks, to the hotels (as Fel had warned him) he had to change three times during a stay that eventually stretched into two days shy of three weeks.

  The sheet music remained elusive for much of that time, but the manuscripts he was able to garner without much trouble at all. It pleased him immensely; he hadn't lost his touch. And every other night he telephoned Andrea to report his progress, and grouse about his failure. At one point he threatened to head home as soon as he could until she soothed him out of it with melodramatic portraits of Dale Blake, heartbroken and despondent, and Vic muttering dire threats about bodily harm. He laughed. He stayed. He ignored with an aching grin Felicity's observation that she was not at all surprised at the trouble he was having. After all, she told him with a sour edge to her voice, it was always the free ones that cost him the most money, and the most days lost from searches that paid the rent. When he reminded her he had already completed a quartet of others she herself had arranged, she grumbled incoherently and told him they didn't count.