Deep Cover

After a while Forrester said, “You may as well finish it, Ro

Her eyes were barely open. “In the weeds behind the bowling alley. He’d been clubbed and his wallet and class ring were gone. The police never found the muggers who’d done it”

“Was he dead when you found him?”

She gave a start. “I—I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She withdrew her hand and twisted her face away from him. “I don’t remember it very well.”

“That’s natural. Sometimes—”

“No. It wasn’t just a minor thing. I feel ashamed of it—you see the truth is I had a pretty severe blackout and it lasted quite a while. I spent several months in a sanatorium, Alan. I came out of it, of course. All kinds of therapy. Insulin, hypnosis—the doctors put the pieces back together, more or less, but there are things that still haven’t come back to me. I’m sure it’s just as well. I don’t know, I’ve never been able to work it out in words. It seemed to burn something out of me and I’ve never wanted to work up the strength … Perhaps there just isn’t enough of me left over to offer anyone again. Phil and I gave each other everything we had.”

She seemed willing to let the conversation die but Forrester revived it deliberately: “That was eleven years ago.”

“I know what you’re trying to make me admit. It’s true enough but it’s not as easy as it seems. Maybe there’s something wrong with me—a wire down, inside.”

“That’s ridiculous. Possibly you let yourself brood your way into an obsession but it’s time you came out of it.”

“Now who’s being tough?”

“An eye for an eye,” he said in a mausoleum tone, and it made her laugh and suddenly she was on her feet moving gaily toward the easel. She lifted the covering cloth and threw it back and stood aside proudly. “Do you like it, Alan? Please like it.”

The painting was incomplete around the edges but the subject was unmistakable—the great pink mesa that towered at the corner of the ranch. She had caught it in late-afternoon sunlight, all magenta shadows and cruel incisions. Her bold brushstrokes had dispensed with trivial distractions and left only the great looming rock against a cobalt sky and he heard her say with an embarrassed little laugh, “That’s how I really see you, you know. But don’t take that in a trite Freudian way. I want to finish it by the weekend.”

“Why?”

She moved around the room, suddenly shy. “Because you’re probably going back to Washington soon and I want you to take it with you.”

She was trying very hard to keep it casual but the strain in her face proved the deceit of it. He turned his back to her, ostensibly to look at the painting again but actually to hide his face from her because his throat was thickening and his eyes felt tight and he didn’t want her to watch him do combat with the sudden confusions inside himself. This was what he had not only wanted but subconsciously pla

He had meant to break down Ro

The sudden insight stu

He felt her weight behind him and he turned quickly and drew her close to him so that she wouldn’t see his face; he tipped his head to get the noses out of the way and kissed her with crushing violence but she kept her lips tightly compressed and hard.

She pulled herself away from him and touched her mouth. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Ro

She stared. “What are we getting ourselves into?”

“Are you frightened?”

“I feel rocked—and I don’t want to.”

“Ro

“I’ve never been any good at the casual oh-hell-after-all-we’re-both-adults game, Alan.”

“Neither have I. It’s nothing to do with that.”

“Then what is it?” She was pleading to know.

He was shaking his head as if to clear it and her face came into sharp focus before him. Suddenly he realized what had been wrong before: he had been looking at her only in relation to himself, seeing her only as a part of his own difficulties and the possible instrument of a cure for them, but not as herself, a complete and separate being with difficulties and a unique identity of her own. In his mind she had been an antidote to the memory of Angie: he had kept thinking of her as a means of deliverance—a departure rather than an arrival.

“It isn’t like that now,” he said.

It startled her. “It isn’t like what?”

He smiled. “I’m not making sense, am I? I’ve been standing here making discoveries. It’s hard to explain.”

He stood quite still and put his hands on her arms; after a while her mouth lost its nervous smile and began to soften and when she lifted her glance to his face her whole body suddenly was in her eyes. She brought her hands up under his elbows and slipped her arms around him as if they had been designed to fit exactly there and she said, “I think I’m falling in love with you. You were right, I am frightened.”

“Of me?”

“No. Of myself. I didn’t want this to happen.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want anything intense—I can’t play games of ships that go bump in the night, but I can’t do it the other way either.” She shook her head with abrupt impatience. “Now I’m the one who’s not making sense—but there are things I just can’t put into words.”

“It’s all right.” He was smiling gently and he slid his hand slowly and lightly up her arm and felt her shudder; her lids became drowsily heavy, a humid lowering that seemed to express both desire and regret, and when she spoke his name her voice underwent a subtle thickening modulation. He embraced her, gathering her hair in his hand at the back of her neck, feeling her tremors and the warmth of her legs and breasts. They kissed slowly and this time her mouth opened against his, luxurious, and he tasted the flick of her tongue.

“Maybe I had better go.”

“No.” Her answer was very grave. “Please stay? Please?”

They made love on the bed with long languor. She was warm and lovely and he had a vivid sense of déjà vu, as if it were a union of long custom between them, as if they had already known the intimate secrets of each other’s bodies. There was no awkwardness and no urgency but only the gentle pleasures of caress and coupling that led without haste to the high rigid pain of ecstatic climax. But afterward when they lay close together, so close her two eyes blended into one, she seemed afraid again and when he tasted her lips he felt the startling salt dampness of her tears.