Hurricane Trio Read online

  Something happened .

  In the other bed, Lois abruptly turned on her side, facing him, She reached over to the night table between the beds, found a cigarette. The wind died just then, taking a deep quiet breath for the next shriek; and in the jolting silence a great sea smashed the cliff below. Lois struck her match, and the light and the explosion of water together plucked Yancey's nerves in a single shattering chord. He steeled himself and did not start. In the blinding flare of the match, Lois' face seemed to leap at him -- a partial mask, centered on the arch of an eyebrow, the smooth forehead over it, the forehead's miniature counterpart in the smooth lowered lid beneath. The arches were stable, flawless; things on which could he built a strong and lovely structure if one could only . . . only . . .

  He lost the thought in the ballooning glow of her cigarette as she lay back and puffed quickly, too quickly for her to enjoy it, surely. She drew the glow into a ruddy yellow sharp-tipped cone, and the smoke must have been hot and harsh to taste. Hot and harsh. He moistened his lips.

  A surge of anger began to rise within him, matching again the sea outside. With an approaching breaker, the anger mounted and swelled and exploded. But the breaker could turn to foam and mist, and disperse, and he could do nothing but clench his teeth and press his head back into the pillow, for he must not wake Beverly.

  This thing was so . . . unjust ! Beverly gave him everything he wanted. She always had, especially since that time at the lake. Especially since . . . Her capacity for giving amazed him, almost awed him. She gave with everything she did. Her singing was an outpouring. She laughed with all her heart. Her sympathy was quick and complete. She gave constantly, to him more than to anyone or anything else on earth. They had -- now -- a marriage that was as good as a marriage could be. How, then, could there be room in him for this -- this thing , this acute, compelling awareness of Lois? Why must there be this terrible difference between "want" and "need"? He didn't need Lois!

  The anger subsided. He bent his arm and touched Beverly's hair. She moved, turning her head from side to side, burrowing closer in to his shoulder. This won't do, he thought desperately. Aren't I the boy with the Brain? The man who can't be pushed around, who is never puzzled by anything?

  Go back, Yancey. Go back again to where your world was full of Lois and you could control it. If you could do it then, with a tenth of the mind you have now, then why . . . why can't you . . . why is your heart trying to break your ribs?

  He closed his eyes against the shouting silver of the night and the bloom of Lois' cigarette. Back, he demanded, go back again. Not to the hand on the shoulder. Afterwards. The rain's letting up, and scurrying through the puddles and the sky-drip to their own cabin, the one next door. Hold it. Hold it right there . . . ah. He had it again; he was back two years, feeling again what it was like to be able to keep Lois to himself, and his heartbeat normal.

  Impossible! But he had done it for almost two whole weeks. Lois on the diving platform, then painted on the sky, forever airborne -- forever because awareness such as his photographed and filed the vision; in his memory she hung there still against a cloud. And the square dance, with the fiddle scratching away into an overloaded p.a. system and feet clumping against the boards, and the hoarse, happy shouter: "Alamen lef an' around we go, swing yore potner do-si-do . . . now swing somebody else . . . an' somebody else . . . an' somebody ELSE . . . " and ELSE had been Lois, turning exactly with him, light and mobile in his arms, here and gone before he knew completely that she was there, leaving him with a clot in his throat and a strange feeling in his right hand, where it had taken the small of her back; it seemed not to belong completely to him any more, as if her molecules and his had interpenetrated.

  Oh, and Lois breaking up a fight between one of the summer people and a town man, drifting close, ruffling the hair of one and laughing, being a presence around whom no violence could take place; Lois backing the station wagon skilfully among the twisting colonnades of a birch grove . . . And Lois doing unremarkable things unforgettably -- a way of holding her fork, lifting her head, ceasing to breathe while she listened for something. Lois glimpsed through the office window, smiling to herself. Lois reading the announcements at lunch, her voice just loud enough for someone else on, say, a porch swing, yet audible to eighty people.

  Lois walking, for that matter, standing, writing, making a phone call . . . Lois alive, that was enough to remember.

  Nearly two weeks of this, waking with Beverly, breakfasting, swimming, boating, hiking with Beverly, and his preoccupation cloaked in the phlegmatic communications of familiarity. What difference did it make if his silence was a rereading of Lois' face instead of a reconsideration of the sports page? He would not have attempted to share either one with Beverly; then what was the difference? Earlier in their marriage she might have complained that it was useless to have a vacation if be acted just the same during it as he did at home; at this stage, however, he was completely -- one might say invisibly -- Yancey. Just Yancey, like always.

  But there was a line between possible and not-possible in Yancey's ability to contain his feelings about Lois. He did not know just where it was or what would make him cross it; but cross it he did, and there was no mistaking it once it happened.

  It was a Thursday (they were to leave on Sunday), and in the afternoon Yancey had asked Lois to come to their cabin that evening. He blurted it out; the words hung between them and he stared at them, amazed. Perhaps, he thought, he was being facetious . . . and then Lois gravely accepted, and he fled.

  He had to tell Beverly, of course, and he didn't know how, and he made up, in advance, seven different ways to handle her in anticipation of the seven ways in which she might react. Each, of course, would result in Lois' coming. Exactly what the evening would be like he could not predict, which was strange in a man who was so ready with alternatives when it came to making a hostess out of Beverly.

  "Bev," he said abruptly when he found her pitching horseshoes back of the lodge, "Lois is coming for a drink after dinner."

  Beverly tossed a horseshoe, watched it land, skip, and fall, then turned to him. Her eyes were wide -- well, they always were -- and their shining surfaces reminded him at that moment of the reflecting side of a one-way mirror. What would she say? And which of the seven ripostes must he use to overcome her resistance? Or would he have to make up an eighth on the spur of the moment?

  She dropped her eyes and picked up another horseshoe, and said, "What time?"

  So Lois came; her light, firm knock might just as well have been on the base of his tongue, so immediately did he feel it. If, later on, his will failed him a little, it was because now he sat still using it up, and let Beverly go to the door.

  Beverly, he thought, for Beverly's sake, should not permit herself in the same room with Lois. Lois came in and filled the room, but without crowding; Lois went back and down into an easy chair as if carried by flying things; Lois' body grew up out of the cushions supported by what she breathed like an underwater plant. And Beverly bounced about with glasses and ice and talked . . . talked . What Lois did was something different; Lois conversed. He sat dully, contributing little, watching and thinking his own thoughts. He was achingly aware of many things, but foremost was the realization that Lois was making an effort -- a completely successful one, as far as he could judge -- to put Beverly at her ease. She made no such effort for him, and he told himself with pride that this was because she had no need to; they understood one another, and must make things easy for poor Beverly.

  He lay back almost drowsily, soaking in Lois' presence as if she were the sun and from her he were gradually acquiring a sort of tan.

  Then they were alone in the room, when Beverly went to the kitchen, and then Beverly was wailing something about ice, oh dear, but the Johnsons in nine will have some, no don't bother I'll be right back; the screen door in the kitchen slammed and Beverly's quick feet went bam bam bam down the back steps, and ceased to exist as they encountered pine needles; all
this in a brace of moments, and he was alone with Lois.

  He rose and went to the couch and sat where its corner touched the arm of the easy chair. It seemed to take all the energy he had; he wanted a cigarette, he wanted tb speak. He could do nothing.

  After a silent time he felt Lois' gaze on him. He turned to her quickly and she dropped her eyes. He was glad, because their heads were so close, and he had never examined her this way, slowly. He wet his lips. He said, "Only ten days."

  She made an interrogative syllable.

  "Knowing you," he said. He rose suddenly and crossed in front of her. He put one knee on the broad arm of her chair so that his foot was by the back. He sat back on his heel, his other foot steadying him on the floor. She stayed just as she was, looking down at her long brown hands. "I want to tell you something, Lois."

  A small frown appeared and disappeared on her smooth forehead. She did not raise her eyes.

  "It's something I've never told even to . . . never told anyone."

  Lois moved a little. She did not raise her face, but now he had a three-quarter view of her profile. She waited, still as a dewdrop.

  "The night when we arrived. You made coffee and I sat at the table. You came up behind me to put something down.

  "You touched me."

  He closed his eyes, and put his arm across his chest and his hand high on his own shoulder. "Something . . . happened ," he said, with an unaccountable difficulty.

  Yancey was, in a small way, an engineer. He began abruptly to explain, in didactic tones, "It wasn't static electricity. It couldn't have been. It was pouring rain outside and the air was humid, not dry. You were on the bare floor in your bare feet; it wasn't one of those deep-pile-rug phenomena. So it wasn't anything . . ." He opened his eyes, swallowed. "Static, or anything like that," he managed. Then he was quiet, watching her.

  Her face, the flexible mask, was breaking up like an ice floe in a sudden warm strong current. Her brow was like a snowbank with the marks of a kitten's claws on it. There was a tear drop on her left cheek, and the streak of a tear on her right, and her teeth were driving into her lower lip. The corners of her mouth were turned upward, precisely as they would be in a smile, and there was a delicate pucker in the flesh of her chin. She made not a sound. She rose, her eyes seizing his and holding them as she backed to the door. There she turned and ran out into the dark.

  When Beverly came back he was still half-crouched, balancing on the arm of the chair. "Why -- where's Lois?"

  "She left," he said heavily.

  Beverly looked at him. She looked at his eyes, quickly at his hairline, his mouth, and again at his eyes. Then she went into the kitchen and he heard the ice she was carrying fall explosively into the sink. She called out, "Is anything the matter, Yancey?"

  "Nothing's the matter," he said, getting up.

  She said, "Oh." They cleared up the glasses and ashtrays and went to bed. Lois was not mentioned. Nothing was mentioned. They went about the ritual of retiring in silence. When the lights were out he said, "I've had enough of this place. Let's go home in the morning. Early."

  She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "If you want to."

  He thought she slept badly. He did not sleep at all.

  In the morning he drove furiously. For the first twenty miles he could not understand what he felt; then he began to understand that it was anger. For another fifty miles he could find no direction for the anger; none of the people involved had, after all, done anything, so how could there be anger?

  Occasionally he glanced at Beverly. Ordinarily she sat back, looking forward at the sky, sideways to scenery, or inward to whatever it was she communed with during those silent times they spent together. This morning, however, she sat straight and kept her eyes on the road ahead, which made him aware that he was driving too fast and which annoyed him beyond description. Childishly, he increased both his speed and his anger.

  And at last, with a feeling that approached relief, he found something to be angry at.

  Beverly.

  Why wouldn't she say, "Slow down!" Why had she agreed to let Lois come to their cabin? Why had she gone on blandly being herself this whole time, while he was tearing himself apart inside? Why hadn't she even questioned him when he decided so abruptly to leave? "If you want to," she'd said. "If you want to." What kind of self-respect is that?

  Or -- maybe she just didn't care.

  'If you want to' . . . for the first time he realized that this was her code, her basic philosophy of life. They had red curtains in the living-room. They had always had red curtains in the living-room. Well, he liked red curtains. He'd said so. She had put up red curtains.

  He glanced at her. She was watching the road tautly. He squeezed down a bit more on the accelerator.

  The place they lived in, the job he kept; the food they ate and probably the clothes she wore; were they really chosen because they were what he wanted?'

  Were they what he wanted?

  Should he have what he wanted?

  Why not? Beverly had.

  He laughed, making Beverly start violently. He shook his head at her, which meant either "I won't tell you" or "Mind your own business." He had disqualified himself from finding any flaw in this new and breath-taking conclusion and it made him exultant. He enjoyed speed in his exultation, and control. He sent the car howling through a deep cut in the crest of a hill, and around the blind turn on the other side, which is where he collided with the space ship and was killed.

  As it will at times in the wake of a hurricane, the wind died. Less tractable, the sea punished the cliff unabated. The night was as noisy, but the noise was so different it was as shocking as sudden silence. In it, Lois twisted and angrily rammed her cigarette into the ashtray on the night table. With a crisp angry rustle of sheets, she turned her back and then sighed. The sound was only half vocalized, but such a voice propagates more like light than like sound. Beverly came hurtling up out of slumber and flashed free like a leaping fish, only to fall back and swirl near the under surfaces of sleep. She raised her head, turning it as if seeking, but her eyes were closed. "Hm?" she said sleepily. Then her face dropped to Yancey's chest again and she was still.

  What I should do, thought Yancey wildly, is to sit her up and slap her awake and say, "Look, Bev, you know what? I got killed that morning when we had the accident, I was dead altogether, the late Yancey Bowman, r.i.p., and when they put me back together I was different. For two years now you've been living with a man with a mind that never sleeps and never makes mistakes and does . . . can do. . . anything it wants. So you can't expect ordinary conduct from me, Bev, or rational behavior based on any reason you can understand. So, if I do anything that . . . that hurts you, you mustn't be hurt. Can't you understand that?"

  Of course she wouldn't understand.

  Why, he thought desperately, when they put me back together, didn't they iron out that little human wrinkle which made it possible for Pascal to make that remark about the heart having "reasons which reason does not know"?

  He snorted softly. Heart. Heck of a name for it.

  He lay on his back and watched the motion of surf-scattered moon on the ceiling. He let his mind float into the vague shadows, be one with them away from, above, beyond his insupportable, insoluble problem. And gradually he found himself back there again, two years ago -- perhaps because of the momentum of his previous thinking, perhaps because, in reliving a time when there was Lois (and he could stand it) and a time when there was Lois (and he could not), it was a welcome thing to go into a time where Lois, and Beverly, and for that matter Yancey Bowman, had little significance.

  As the space ship lifted, it retracted its berthing feet; it was one of these which Bowman's sedan struck. The car continued under the ship, and the edge of the flat berthing foot sliced it down to the belt line, leaving a carmine horror holding the wheel. The ship hovered momentarily, then drifted over to the side of the road where the mangled automobile had come to rest. Directly above the
car, it stopped. An opening appeared in the bottom of the ship and dilated like a camera iris. There was a slight swirl of dust and leaves, and then what was left of the car rose from the ground and disappeared into the ship. The ship then slid away to the clearing in the woods where it had lain hidden during its stay on Earth. Here it settied. It camouflaged itself and lay outwardly silent.

  Exactly what was done to him, Yancey could not how. He was made aware of the end results, of course. He knew that what had been injured had been repaired, and that in addition certain changes had been made to improve the original. For example, his jaw hinges had been redesigned to eliminate a tendency to dislocation, and a process was started which would, in time, eliminate the sebaceous cysts which had kept forming and occasionally inflaming ever since he was an adolescent. His vermiform appendix was gone -- not excised, but moved in some way which would indicate, in the event of an autopsy, that it had never formed in the first place. His tonsils had been replaced for reasons which he could not understand except that they were good ones. On the other hand such anomalies as his left little toe, which since birth had been bent and lay diagonally across its neighbor, and a right eye which wandered slightly to the right when he was fatigued -- these were left as they had originally been. The eye was one of the most interesting items, he thought later; the toe had simply not been improved, but the eye had been restored with its flaw. His teeth, too, were as irregular as before, and contained fillings in the same places, though he knew there had been little enough left of them. In sum, he had been altered only in ways which would not show.