The Sisters Page 21

  "We both of us thought that what we were doing would help it survive,"

  the Potter replied, thinking of the unlaundered years, "and as long as it survived, it would evolve."

  Kaat reached over to rest her hand on the Potter's, but he jerked it away. It wasn't that he was afraid of physical contact with her; it was more a matter of wanting it too much.

  They continued on in a westerly direction, one of them driving, the other dozing in the passenger seat. They stopped at an all-night diner next to a drive-in movie, and Kaat phoned Millie back in Brooklyn, but she hadn't heard anything more from Peter. The Potter was afraid they had lost him forever, but Kaat remained hopeful. She found a road map and spread it across her knees and dangled her grandmother's ring over it, and announced that they should continue west. They stopped in a cheap motel, slept four hours, ate breakfast at a truckers watering hole, then continued on west. By noon they had made it as far as Indianapolis. Kaat disappeared into a telephone booth while the Potter downed a cheeseburger, and emerged a few moments later shaking her head in disappointment.

  They slept outside Indianapolis that night in a motel with a sign that said "No dogs" and had yellowish powder sprinkled on the sides of the cabins to discourage the strays that did show up. As soon as they settled into their room, Kaat phoned Millie, but all she got was the tape-recording machine. "It's me again," she said into it. "I'll call back." She wandered into the bathroom and the Potter heard her drawing a bath, heard also (his ear was fine-tuned to such things) that she didn't throw the lock on the door. Could he-dared he-take it as an invitation?

  In their cheap motel the night before, he had dreamed that his bed was a raft tossing about on a turbulent sea, surrounded by a circular horizon as sharp and as menacing as a razor blade. His mouth had felt parched, and it was only when he looked over, still in his dream, at the next raft and saw the naked woman clinging to it that he identified his thirst. What he wanted, he had realized with surprise, was to take her in his mouth as if she were a wet sponge, to suck the last drop of moisture from her. Now, listening to her in the bathroom-the toilet flushed, the water stopped running in the tub, a body settled gingerly into it-lie permitted himself the luxury of imagining Kaat's body: of composing it the way a police artist puts together a composite portrait of a criminal: pointed breasts with insolent nipples, a visible rib cage, lean thighs, a soft bed of pubic hair, a flat backside that arched smoothly up to thin, bony shoulders. He felt the stirring of an erection-but only the stirring! He was, he reminded himself with a tired shrug, tied up irrevocably to that pier of old age.

  He slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie, wedged the back of a chair under the doorknob as a precaution, removed the clip from his Beretta and then reinserted it, savoring the metallic sound of its being wedged home, and put the pistol under his pillow. He walked over to the bathroom door, listened for a long moment, then rapped lightly on it with his knuckles. "Did you say something?" he called, hoping she had; hoping she would.

  "No," she answered. He could hear her splash in the water. He put his hand on the knob and silently turned it and felt it give way. And he realized that there was nothing to stop him from opening the door except his own view of himself as someone Kaat would not voluntarily choose to make love with.

  It was enough. He let the knob ease back. It closed with an audible click.

  "Are you still there?" Kaat, suddenly alert, asked from the bathroom.

  The Potter listened to his own breathing until it was regular again.

  "No, he replied, and he went over to the bed and pulled off his shoes and stretched out on it.

  She emerged from the bathroom a quarter of an hour later dressed in an ankle-length printed woollen nightdress that she must have owned since she was a teenager. She peeled back the blanket of the other bed and slipped between the coarse sheets. "You wanted to ask me something?" she said, looking across the room at him from the other raft. When he didn't answer, she said, "Before, when you were at the door of the bathroom.

  What did you want to ask me?"

  "I wanted to ask you what it was like ... he began, and he left the rest of the question hanging.

  She regarded him for a moment with her deep-set eyes. "Here s the thing," she said matter-of-factly. "With two, it is very often heavy, pompous, weighed down with appropriate sentiments, impossibly serious.

  But with three it has the saving grace of at least being humorous.

  Something funny is always happening. All the ridiculous things we do to each other, the way we attack each other s bodies, the awkward angles our limbs make as we flail away at each other-it s all very comic really. Have you ever looked at dogs copulating and not laughed?

  Watching humans make love is pretty much the same. She smiled across at the Potter, adrift on his raft. "Does that answer your question?

  He nodded in a distracted way. "Excuse me, if you please. I didn't mean to ...

  "It's all right,' she said, and he glanced sharply at her and realized it was.

  Kaat tried Millie once more before they went to sleep. She answered on the second ring. "He called, she cried in an agitated voice. "Half an hour ago. You want to hear the tape?"

  Kaat motioned to the Potter and held the earpiece so they could both listen to it. "Of course I want to hear the tape," she told Millie.

  The Sleepers voice could be heard on the line. "Are you in the mood for a bedtime story?' he asked Millie. He must have been in a public place, because from the background came the sound of people talking, of dishes being rattled.

  "Am I ever," Millie said gleefully on the tape.

  A woman's voice asked, "Why are you giving me that?"

  "So you can say hello.' the Sleeper told her.

  "Hello," the woman said into the phone without much enthusiasm.

  "Hello," Millie answered on the tape.

  "All those hellos!" the real Millie complained to Kaat.

  "You want what?" the woman could be heard asking the Sleeper. She laughed uneasily. "You have got to be kidding." The woman said to Millie, "Are you still there?" Then she gasped.

  "Am I ever," Millie told her. "Where are you?"

  "I remembered to ask her right off where she was," Millie told Kaat.

  "Well," said the woman, and then she gasped again and was silent for a time.

  "Old Peter must be shoving it right in," Millie whispered to Kaat. She spoke quickly, as if she were afraid of interrupting the tape recording.

  "This is crazy," the woman could be heard saying. She must have brought the telephone close to her mouth then, because her voice became very distinct. "We're in this restaurant on top of the hotel. The view's terrific, though to tell you the honest-to-God truth, I haven't paid much attention to it. He doesn't want me to tell you the name of the hotel, or the name of the city we're in. We're over the river now, but we-" She gasped, then laughed weakly.

  "Go on," the Sleeper could be heard encouraging her.

  "-we won't be over the river for long. We made love in the hotel before we came up here to eat." Her voice became muted; she was holding a hand over the mouthpiece. "Do you want me to tell her about that part?" She came back on the line to Millie. "Okay. What he wants me to tell you is what we're doing now. Here's what we're doing now," she began in a singsong voice, as if she were starting a composition on how she spent her summer vacation. "The restaurant is kind of dark, see, and the tablecloth comes down low over the edge, and we're sitting on a banquette-type bench with our backs to the river, only the river isn't there anymore, see, the river has moved on and the city is there now, and I'm not wearing any underwear, right- She stopped talking for a long moment. "Oh God." Another pause. "Yeah, well, like I was saying, I'm not wearing any underwear, see, and your friend here has disappeared under the table because nobody's looking our way, and even if they were looking our way it is much too dark for them to see anything, and me, I am just sitting here with my back against this banquette-type bench with my legs apart talking to yo
u on this phone they plugged in, looking as if nothing . . . nothing out of the ordinary is going on, only it is. If you ask me, something very out of the ordinary is going on." Suddenly the woman hissed in panic, "The waiter's heading this-"

  And then the phone went dead on the tape recording-Millie giggled and told Kaat, "I'll say something out of the ordinary is going on. Jesus! You got to hand it to him, does he have his nerve!"

  This time Kaat woke W.A. up when she phoned him on the coast. "What are ex-husbands for if you can't ring them any hour of the day or night,"

  she told him.

  "You exaggerate," W.A. reproached her "You always did. Maybe that's what was wrong between us."

  "What was wrong between us," Kaat fired back, "is that there was nothing but sex between us."

  "You used to think the sex was pretty damn good," W.A. muttered unhappily.

  Kaat's voice softened. "It was more than pretty damn good," she said. "I just wanted more than sex, W.A."

  "Have you found the more with somebody else?"

  "Not yet, W.A. But I'm still looking."

  "Break your heart," W.A. said gruffly. "What's it to me? Why'd you call?"

  Kaat told him. The friend they were trying to catch up with was in a restaurant on top of a hotel. Apparently it had a great view. It seemed to be situated over a river, too, except the river moved on, whatever that meant, and the city took its place.

  "Whatever game you're playing sure sounds like fun," W.A. said. "Call me back in fifteen minutes." And he hung up.

  "What did he say?" the Potter asked.

  "He said for me to call him back in a quarter of an hour."

  "Why?"

  "He probably wants to look something up in his diary, Kaat said.

  A feeling of frustration consumed the Potter. Here they were waiting for Kaat's ex, as she called him, to look up something in his diary! It was the kind of thing that happened in spy stories, but not in real life. It went against every instinct in his body, against every experience he had ever had, against everything he had taught the sleepers who passed through his school in Moscow. Yet what choice did he have? And he had always said there were no rules.

  "You're sure she said the river moved on and the city took its place?"

  W.A. asked Kaat when she called back.

  "That's what she said," Kaat insisted. "Does it make any sense to you, W.A.?"

  "The river has got to be the Mississippi," W.A. said. "The city has got to be St. Louis. The restaurant has got to be the revolving restaurant over a hotel named the Riverview. They wanted me to play there right after they built it, but I got seasick because of the motion and vomited and couldn't perform."

  "W.A., if I were in L.A. right now, you know what I'd do?"

  "Heck, let me guess," W.A. said, shifting his voice into what he considered to be his seductive register.

  "You've got one dirty mind," Kaat chastised him.

  "That's not what I'd do. What I'd do is give you a kiss on the lips.

  "I'll take whatever I can get," W.A. said.

  Kaat hung up the receiver and regarded the Potter, who was already shoving the few things he had into his small overnight bag. He straightened, his eyes closed of their own accord and he found, to his astonishment, that he could remember Kaat, remember what she looked like, and with his eyes still closed he said in a hollow voice, "I am still needing you.

  Kaat spoke slowly, discovering herself in every word, in the spaces between the words. "I still need to be needed."

  Within twenty minutes they had woken up the night clerk to pay their hotel bill, loaded the little they had in the Chrysler and started west on Route 70 toward St. Louis. The road was still wet from a late-night cloudburst, and the occasional car or truck passing in the opposite direction sent pinpricks of light spitting up at them from the rain-soaked highway; the effect, Kaat said, was like watching fireworks burst under them. First light, seeping over the brim of dark clouds stretched along the horizon, caught up with them as they crossed the Wabash. By the time sun popped up behind the brim of clouds, almost like a target in a shooting gallery, they had taken a good bite out of southern Illinois. They stopped at a service station for gas and paper cups filled with muddy coffee dispensed from a bright red vending machine.

  The Potter went around back and urinated at the edge of a clearing rather than use the rest room, which smelled as if it hadn't been hosed out in years. On their way out of the service station, they passed a hand-lettered sign that wished them "Happy Motoring," "an example," the Potter noted in annoyance, "of the curious American idea that motoring involved something more than getting from one place to another."

  Gazing out at farmers already perched on their tractors, at the furrowed fields that looked as if giant fingernails had been scratched across the surface of the earth, K.aat remarked that getting from one place to the other, for her at least, had never been accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. "I suppose yon have to want not to get where you're going in order to really enjoy the trip," she said thoughtfully.

  They passed through a series of villages masquerading as towns, and towns with all the trappings of cities except size, and the Potter commented that every town and village in Russia had its Communist Party headquarters, whereas in America the thing they all had in common seemed to be the funeral home, usually Colonial or at least neo, always sober, with a gleaming black hearse with lace curtains on its windows stationed in the driveway, nose outward, as if ready for a fast getaway. "From a business point of view," Kaat noted absently-she had had a certain amount of experience with funeral homes-"you can always rely on people dying."

  They spoke in undertones about the institution of death; of how some people avoided the notion of its being an end by visualizing it as a beginning; of how others, tired of beginnings, took comfort in anticipating the closing of the curtain, the end of the act. At one point the Potter said he thought it was a phenomenon peculiar to America that the approaches to its great cities were more often than not lined with used-car lots and cemeteries. In the chaos of the inner cities there was barely room for automobiles or the living, and the Potter considered there was a certain logic to the used and the dead setting up camp on the periphery. It was where they belonged, he said; it left the center of the cities reserved for the living, he said, and he thought to himself: for the killing also.

  St. Louis turned out to be no exception-though the cemetery that tilled the fields on either side of the road was a graveyard not for people but for cars. They were piled on top of each other, silent, solemn leaning towers of rust, monuments, the Potter said, to the two unpardonable transgressions of people and machines: growing old and growing obsolete.

  The Potter pressed his foot down on the accelerator and sped past the gateway of the city toward the rendezvous with the living, the killing at its center.

  Ourcq was stretched out on the bed, his scuffed black oxfords still on his feet, inflating and deflating his stomach in one of the Canadian Air Force exercises designed to strengthen abdominal muscles. Appleyard stood gazing out of the window, listening to the rain beat against the panes, memorizing the sound. Moistening his lips, pursing them, he began to imitate the rain, and when he had gotten it just right he slowly turned up the volume until it sounded as if it were raining inside the room. Ourcq's head snapped around in Appleyard's direction. "Can't you imitate the tucking sun shining for a change?" he flared.

  With a shrug, Appleyard cut off the sound of rain. "I can do the sun setting, but not shining,' he said.

  Ourcq sat up in bed. "How much fucking longer we got to stay cooped up in this fucking pigeonhole?"

  Appleyard glanced at his wristwatch. "He checked out four hours ago. We should hang around for another twenty hours if we go by the book."

  "Twenty fucking hours!" Ourcq groaned. "Fucking sweeping is fucking impossible."

  "You want me maybe to get some magazines up here?" Appleyard offered.

  "Something with a lot of fucking ass in it," Ourcq
agreed. "Get a receipt and we'll put it on the fucking expense account."

  Appleyard started to slip into his suit jacket. Just then the phone next to the bed purred. Appleyard, struck by the sound, imitated it.

  Ourcq said, "Who the fuck would be calling us?" as he reached for the receiver. He listened for a moment, then muttered to the person on the other end, "You don't fucking say," and hung up.

  "It's the fucking girl," Oureq told Appleyard. He looked around for his suit jacket. "She doesn't have the fucking pussycat under her fucking arm, but he's sure it's her."

  Two minutes later Ourcq and Appleyard arrived in the lobby. Separately.

  Ourcq, who hated stairs, had taken the elevator; Appleyard, who suffered from nosebleeds in elevators, had taken the staircase. Ourcq nodded toward the desk clerk who had tipped them off. The desk clerk nodded toward a door behind the newspaper stand. Ourcq and Appleyard wandered casually across to the door and stood with their backs to it for a moment, surveying the lobby. Ourcq said, "The fucking dwarf's still unaccounted for. You stay here and keep a fucking eye peeled for him.

  I'll go find the fucking girl."

  "Why don't I maybe go find the girl for once?" Appleyard complained.

  "Because it is me who gives the fucking orders," Ourcq whined. "Besides, I am a better fucking shot than you are.

  "I missed," Appleyard explained, obviously not for the first time, a pained expression clinging to his face, "because he jerked the car when I pulled the trigger. It could happen to anyone."

  "But it fucking happened to you." Ourcq insisted without a shred of sympathy. He opened the door a crack, saw that the long corridor on the other side of it was empty, and ducked through, closing the door behind him. He kept his right hand on the butt of his pistol in its shoulder holster as he moved along the corridor, trying doorknobs on either side.

  They were all locked. Which left the door on the far end of the corridor. Ourcq approached it without a sound, tried the knob with his left hand, realized that this door wasn't locked. He withdrew his hand, pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and went back along the corridor unscrewing the three overhead bulbs. Then he felt his way back along the wall to the unlocked door. He drew his pistol from its holster, took the silencer from his jacket pocket and screwed it into the tip of the pistol- Flattening himself against the wall, he again reached for the knob and softly eased open the door.