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Pauline knew where she was before she opened her eyes. Nothing surprised her. She had slept but not deeply enough to let go of anything.
She had waited for Brian in the parking area of the lodge, with the children, and had asked him for the keys. She had told him in front of his parents that there was something else she needed, from Campbell River. He asked, What was it? And did she have any money?
“Just something,” she said, so he would think that it was tampons or birth control supplies, that she didn’t want to mention. “Sure.”
“Okay but you’ll have to put some gas in,” he said. Later she had to speak to him on the phone. Jeffrey said she had to do it.
“Because he won’t take it from me. He’ll think I kidnapped you or something. He won’t believe it.”
But the strangest thing of all the things that day was that Brian did seem, immediately, to believe it. Standing where she had stood not so long before, in the public hallway of the lodge-the bingo game over now but people going past, she could hear them, people on their way out of the dining room after di
As if he had known all along, all along, what could happen with her.
“Okay,” he said. “What about the car?”
He said something else, something impossible, and hung up, and she came out of the phone booth beside some gas pumps in Campbell River.
“That was quick,” Jeffrey said. “Easier than you expected.”
Pauline said, “I don’t know.”
“He may have known it subconsciously. People do know.”
She shook her head, to tell him not to say any more, and he said, “Sorry.” They walked along the street not touching or talking.
they’d had to go out to find a phone booth because there was no phone in the motel room. Now in the early morning looking around at leisure-the first real leisure or freedom she’d had since she came into that room-Pauline saw that there wasn’t much of anything in it. Just a junk dresser, the bed without a headboard, an armless upholstered chair, on the window a Venetian blind with a broken slat and curtain of orange plastic that was supposed to look like net and that didn’t have to be hemmed, just sliced off at the bottom. There was a noisy air conditioner-Jeffrey had turned it off in the night and left the door open on the chain, since the window was sealed. The door was shut now. He must have got up in the night and shut it.
This was all she had. Her co
She believed that she would never again care about what sort of rooms she lived in or what sort of clothes she put on. She would not be looking for that sort of help to give anybody an idea of who she was, what she was like. Not even to give herself an idea. What she had done would be enough, it would be the whole thing.
What she was doing would be what she had heard about and read about. It was what A
The others, the adulterers, were seen as irresponsible, immature, selfish, or even cruel. Also lucky. They were lucky because the sex they had been having in parked cars or the long grass or in each other’s sullied marriage beds or most likely in motels like this one must surely have been splendid. Otherwise they would never have got such a yearning for each other’s company at all costs or such a faith that their shared future would be altogether better and different in kind from what they had in the past.
Different in kind. That was what Pauline must believe now- that there was this major difference in lives or in marriages or unions between people. That some of them had a necessity, a fate-fulness, about them that others did not have. Of course she would have said the same thing a year ago. People did say that, they seemed to believe that, and to believe that their own cases were all of the first, the special kind, even when anybody could see that they were not and that these people did not know what they were talking about. Pauline would not have known what she was talking about.
It was too warm in the room. Jeffrey’s body was too warm. Conviction and contentiousness seemed to radiate from it, even in sleep. His torso was thicker than Brian’s; he was pudgier around the waist. More flesh on the bones, yet not so slack to the touch. Not so good-looking in general-she was sure most people would say that. And not so fastidious. Brian in bed smelled of nothing.
Jeffrey’s skin, every time she’d been with him, had had a baked-in, slightly oily or nutty smell. He didn’t wash last night-but then, neither did she. There wasn’t time. Did he even have a toothbrush with him? She didn’t. But she had not known she was staying.
When she met Jeffrey here it was still in the back of her mind that she had to concoct some colossal lie to serve her when she got home. And she-they-had to hurry. When Jeffrey said to her that he had decided that they must stay together, that she would come with him to Washington State, that they would have to drop the play because things would be too difficult for them in Victoria, she had looked at him just in the blank way you’d look at somebody the moment that an earthquake started. She was ready to tell him all the reasons why this was not possible, she still thought she was going to tell him that, but her life was coming adrift in that moment. To go back would be like tying a sack over her head.
All she said was “Are you sure?”
He said, “Sure.” He said sincerely, “I’ll never leave you.”