12

Sunny left her apartment early, hailed a taxi, and gave Page’s address to the driver in a confident voice. When she got out in front of the new apartment building, it was forty minutes before their date. She decided he was probably taking his shower.

Inside the front door she found his mail box with a button beneath the name. There was a small speaker and she knew he might ask through it who was there.

Well, the worst he can do is make me wait down here till he’s ready, she thought. Still, how much better to get a foot in the door. He’d never be able to resist that foot—not when it was followed by her slim, silky leg. So she boldly pushed the buzzer. A wave of goose bumps fanned over her back and neck while she waited.

In a moment the speaker came on. To Sunny’s amazement, a feminine voice answered. Sunny looked to see if she had pushed the right button. She had. The voice repeated, “Who’s there?”

“The florist,” Sunny said. “I have a corsage Mr. Pringle ordered.”

“Oh. Okay.” The speaker went off and a buzz sounded. Sunny went inside and up a flight of stairs. On the second floor she found his door to the left of the landing. It opened before she could knock.

Sunny found herself facing a valentine-pretty girl, very young, very efficient looking, with her hands full of typed copy. The girl stared at Sunny, fully as startled as her visitor. After an anxious pause she said, “Was Mr. Pringle expecting you?”

“Apparently not,” Sunny said coolly. “May I come in?”

The girl hesitated briefly and then stepped aside. “Please,” she said. “I—I should explain, I was just here to bring Mr. Pringle some notes I took for him at the library. He doesn’t have time to do all his own research, so I—”

“Oh, you don’t have to explain,” Sunny said with dangerous charm. “I understand perfectly.” She looked sharply at the flustered girl who lowered her eyes in confusion. “Of course you’re his secretary.”

“Yes. I’m Pat Burridge. I—hope you won’t jump to conclusions,” she said with a clumsy laugh.

“Why not?” Sunny said.

“Oh, but really, it’s not what you think!” Pat cried, wide-eyed and innocent as milk. But there were a few sour curds floating around. She was ready to defend herself and fast if Sunny didn’t ease up. And she was impatient to know who Sunny was. Sunny made her wait.

“What do you think I think, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said. “That you’re sleeping with him?”

“How dare you!” the girl exclaimed.

“Well, Mr. Pringle and I have been having a little affair ourselves for some time now,” Sunny said, pulling off her gloves. “I’m not surprised he’s getting tired of me.” She gave Pat a critical going-over that made the secretary frantic.

“Whoever you are, you have no right to talk to me that way!” she cried.

“Oh, hell, if you’re going to be a bitch, be a good honest bitch,” Sunny said. The shock of the situation had frozen the fury in her veins and given her a sardonic composure that staggered Miss Burridge.

“If you think I’m having relations with Mr. Pringle,” the girl panted, “it might just interest you to know that I’m engaged to a very nice man.”

“Poor man. This will come as something of a shock, won’t it?”

“And I happen to be a virgin!” Pat declared.

“Fancy!” Sunny said, sauntering across the room. “All hail to the last member of a vanishing race.”

“You have a filthy mind!” Pat said.

“And you have a filthy habit: sleeping with a married man.”

“Evidently I’m not the only one,” Pat snapped.

“Ah, but there’s a difference. I’m a married woman.”

“Besides,” Pat went on with noisy outrage, “Mr. Pringle is not a married man.”

“Really?” Sunny said with genuine astonishment. “Did he tell you that?”

“He certainly did. His divorced wife calls him on the office phone all the time but he has me tell her he’s out.” She evidently considered a divorced man even less attached than a bachelor.

“Well!” Sunny said with sugary sarcasm. “I guess that makes it all right for you to sleep with him, then, as long as your fiance doesn’t find out what his bride-to-be does in her spare time.”

Abruptly Page burst into the room behind Pat, who turned around with a gasp.

“Page, darling!” Sunny said, beautiful in her anger.

Page’s face fell. “Oh, God,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Which one of us are you referring to, darling? Well? Go on, introduce us.”

He looked distractedly from one to the other, caught between two fighting females; a nightmare for any man. “Miss Burridge,” he said resolutely. “My wife, Mrs. Pringle.”

Pat Burridge’s expression changed from anger through shock to mortification. “Mrs. Pringle?” she repeated to him. “But you said—”

“Never mind what I said!”

“How do you do, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said with savage courtesy.

“I’d better go,” Pat said. “Here’s your key, Mr. Pringle.” She stopped, raising a hand to her mouth. “Oh! I mean—Well, he only gives it to me so I can bring him the notes when he’s not home!” she cried, and ran weeping out the front door.

The Pringles were so mad at each other that neither of them could talk for a few seconds. Finally Page said, determinedly calm, “You promised me you wouldn’t come here. Your promises aren’t worth a damn, are they?”

“It’s forbidden for your wife to come here; only your secretary is allowed,” she shot back.

“For your information, Pat Burridge comes over here nearly every afternoon about this time with a bunch of research notes I’ve assigned to her. She puts them on the desk and leaves,” he said.

“After she warms up the bed.”

“She doesn’t go near the damn bed!”

“Oh, an experimenter. She likes the couch in the living room.”

“Sunny, cut it out. Pat is a nice decent kid, but I’m not sleeping with her.” He glared at her over the back of a chair upon which he was leaning stiff-armed.

“Why not, darling? You could climb in bed with her and still feel nice and clean. After all, she’s not your sister.”

Surprised at her, he answered, “I could, but I don’t.”

“I suppose she means more to you than your own wife!” Sunny cried unhappily.

“How many times do you have to be told, Sunny? You’re not my wife.”

“Then don’t introduce me as Mrs. Pringle. It might confuse people.”

“That was a slip of the tongue.” His anger blew itself out suddenly. “Sunny, for the love of God, how could I make love to any other woman while you’re alive? Do we have to shout at each other? This is our first meeting in three months. Darling ... my love, my wife—”

“You just got through hollering that I’m not your wife,” she wept. “Make up your mind before I lose mine, will you?”

Page dropped his head in his hands to compose himself and then lifted it to look at her. “I’m going to read you something,” he said, going to his desk, “from an outline of American law.” He picked up a big black leather-bound book with torn matchbook covers marking various pages, and turned to an underlined passage.

“‘Where the parties to the marriage are closely related,’” he read her, “‘—such as brother and sister or ancestor and descendant—the marriage is void.’ Void, Sunny. ‘And a decree of annulment should be and apparently is unnecessary.’” He shut the book and dropped it on the desk with a bang, looking at her.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“It means we aren’t married. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it even if we want to. We are automatically un-married, because our marriage was never valid in the first place.”

“There is something we can do about it,” Sunny said, trembling.

“What?” His face and voice were weary but, like her, in his heart he kept hoping ... hoping for nothing less than a revolution in Heaven’s laws and Earth’s traditions.

“Keep it a secret,” she said. “What the law doesn’t know the law can’t very well change.”

He sat down heavily in his desk chair and said, “the law has eyes and ears, Sunny. We might get away with it for a while, but—”

“I’d rather have that little while than nothing at all.”

He put his head down on his crossed arms for a minute and the sight of him like that, near despair, twisted her heart. “Oh, Page,” she whispered, afraid to touch him. She folded into the chair he had been leaning on moments ago. “Can’t we live with it? Can’t we even try? Do we have to be so damn tragically moral?”

“I’ve been reading,” he began, but she interrupted:

“So have I.”

“Have you read Freud?”

“A little,” she said.

“Have you any idea what a childish, immature, emotionally crippling sort of thing incest is?”

“Page, we didn’t commit incest! It happened to us!” she said passionately. “We had no idea we were brother and sister. We chose each other as normally and innocently as other husbands and wives.”

“Did we, Sunny?” He spoke softly, looking away from her. It frightened her.

“What on earth do you mean?” she said indignantly.

“I mean, isn’t it just possible that we recognized each other subconsciously? People fall in love with the people who remind them of themselves, Sunny. Couldn’t we have fallen in love and refused to admit the awful truth we were half-aware of? Tried to hide and deny it so we could get married with a clear conscience?”

“No!” she said appalled.

“Isn’t it possible that what we fell in love with and desired in each other was our own selves, without ever permitting ourselves to realize it? If we did that, we’re as guilty as anybody else who ever committed incest.”

“We didn’t do it,” she protested. “Page, we don’t look that much alike.”

“Oh, don’t we, though!” he said, rising quickly and grabbing her hand. “Look at my eyes. My hair.” He took a handful of hers and held it out so her eyes could compare. “Same color, same texture, same everything,” he said.

“A lot of people have hair like that. There aren’t that many kinds of hair!” she said.

“Look, Sunny, even our hands,” he said, and though his was heavier and hairier, the basic bone structure was the same.

But Sunny was incapable of hating their similarities. She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it and suddenly he leaned over her, almost tumbled into the chair with her, and kissed her mouth hard.

Before they knew it, they were making love in the chair. It was awful; agonized, furtive, rushed. The chair tipped precariously. They hurt each other, half on purpose. And yet, in spite of that, it was beautiful. They gripped each other with hands like traps. They kissed each other everywhere, desperate to leave a touch of love all over each other.

Sunny clung to him ecstatically, sobbing his name when he freed her mouth for a second. He felt himself losing control, and the harder he tried to fight free the more deeply entangled he became.

“Sunny, no,” he pleaded at the very moment that he was tearing the buttons off her dress in a fever to touch her warm satin skin. “Oh, dear God, stop me,” he muttered, kissing her all the while so that she couldn’t answer him.

He wanted to punish her for making him do the terrible thing he had resisted so long. He took a bite in her delicate shoulder that made her sob with startled pain. His hands twisted the shining flesh of her back and his lips bruised her full sweet breasts.

Sunny knew why he was doing it and at first she didn’t try to stop him, hoping it might ease him. But it got too bad. She finally combed his cheeks with her nails in self-defense and shocked him into gentleness. After that they made love, as much love as blood and breath would bear, until they were utterly worn out. Only sheer exhaustion stopped them.

* * *

The chill air woke them. Page got up and fetched a down comforter from his bedroom and wrapped her in it, giving her a cigarette while he fixed them a drink.

He had put on his bathrobe. His actions, as he poured the drinks, were almost normal. But his grim-lipped silence belied them.

There was a mournful quiet, broken only by the rustle and crack of the liquor flowing over the ice cubes. He walked over to her, handed her a glass, and sat down on the rug beside her. They leaned back against the sofa and drank. Page put an arm around her.

“Page,” she said. “Do you really think we can live apart when we love each other like this?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally, and she wondered if it were the first break in his armor of rectitude.

“Tell me you don’t want me, darling,” she teased.

“I can’t,” he said softly.

“Tell me you want me more every time we make love. Tell me that pretty soon you won’t be able to resist me at all any more. Tell me we can try living together again ... just for a while.”

He inspected his drink. “How do you feel right now?” he asked her. “After we’ve made love. Tell the truth.”

“I’d be unbearably happy if I weren’t so afraid it will be the last time,” she said.

“Is that all? No shame? No regret? No wonder, even, that maybe it’s wrong?” He looked at her.

“No,” she said, sniffling. “I’m too glad to be back in your arms to care about the rest.”

“Suppose,” he said, his voice still low, “that your father—our father—went a little crazy and forced you to go to bed with him. I mean, made love to you. Would you feel anything then?”

“Don’t you ever speak like that again,” she said rigidly.

“It’s exactly the same thing,” he said.

“It is not the same thing! I grew up in my father’s house, I knew all along he was my father. I could never let him touch me that way. He could never want to.”

“You’re saying the only difference between him and me is, you knew all along who he was. If you and I had always known we were brother and sister, you couldn’t let me touch you, either,” he said. And he was right.

Sunny groaned and hung her head. “Darling, I’m not much for logic,” she said at last. “All I know is I’m miserably in love with you and I don’t care who you are.” Her voice rose, becoming stubborn.

He looked so unhappy that she set her drink down and took his face in her hands, trying to kiss some cheer into him. But he stopped her. So she stayed where she was, kneeling in front of him, afraid to look at him again. In silence she began a tormented debate with herself, deciding at length to make one final try; one ultimate sacrifice.

“Page?” she said unsteadily.

“Hm?” He fingered the slim knee winking out of her blanket at him.

“If I don’t have this baby—could we—would you live with me?”

He looked slowly up at her green eyes that glittered with tears and took her hands. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re too far along now. If you’d been willing three months ago....”

“I wanted the baby so much,” she whispered. “But I’d do anything to have you back, darling. I almost wish I could tear it out now—” She stopped, feeling the baby kick. It made her sick. Grasping one of his hands, she put it on her abdomen and held it there fiercely, over his protests, until he felt the solid thump of a small foot under it. He looked up at her, astonished. At that moment, for the first time, his child became real to him: a human being with a beating heart and moving limbs.

He got up and walked to the other side of the room and she could tell from the inclination of his head that he was deeply disturbed.

“Can we live together if I destroy this child?” she asked.

“This child,” he repeated in a daze. “Our child. My son.”

“If it’s between you and the baby, I choose you,” she said, trembling uncontrollably. “I don’t know how I’d get rid of it now, I don’t know if it would kill me just to try. But I’m willing.”

“No, Sunny,” he said firmly.

“You thought it was a good idea not so long ago,” she reminded him. “You said—”

“I know what I said. It was barbarous!”

“You asked me to get an abortion and I didn’t think I could. But I hadn’t been living without you for three months then. I think I could do it now.”

“I won’t let you do it now and don’t ever bring it up again,” he said.

“Well then, can we live together anyway, even if I have the baby?” she implored him.

“No we can’t, Sunny!” he cried, throwing out his arms for understanding. “I wish that poor little kid had never been conceived but I’m not going to murder it,” he added. “The night I found out about us I was half mad with grief and that baby seemed like the crowning blow. But it wasn’t a person, then, honey. It was just a mess of proliferating cells. Now it’s a baby. You can’t go around murdering babies. Go ahead and have it.”

“Thanks a lot! You’re too generous, Page,” she said. “You get me pregnant and then graciously allow me to have the damn baby. And just how shall I support this creature, now that I’m permitted the joys of an illegitimate birth, labor pains, no money in the bank, no husband in my bed, no father for my child? Shall I feed it pipe dreams and dress it in lullabies? Shall I wrap Junior in an old rag and pass the tin cup around to my neighbors?”

“Good God, Sunny, there’s money in the bank,” he said.

“I’ve been spending some these past few months, you know,” she said. “There’s the rent. And I can’t seem to stop eating—not entirely, anyway. Oh, and the doctor bills. And I’ve seen at least two movies.”

“Well, God damn it, I know you’ve spent money. I’m making money and every cent I don’t need is in your bank account.”

“It is?”

“Don’t you ever read the balance sheet they send you?” he demanded, insulted that she should have thought he would let her starve.

“No. I can’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t know if it was the top figure or the bottom one.”

“Oh, God,” he murmured, almost laughing with exasperation. “Sunny, did you think I’d send you to the poor house?”

“I didn’t know. I don’t know you at all any more, Page.” She got up from the floor and walked across the room to where he stood with his back to her, putting her hands lightly on his hips.

“I always thought we were so much alike before we got married, darling. And I don’t mean our faces, either. I mean in the way we thought, the way we looked at life.

“Remember when we met? I ran out of the bushes and there you were, standing by the lake, completely bare. Anybody else would have covered himself up and acted like a silly fool. I kept waiting for you to make an ass of yourself. But you just stood there and kidded me and let me look at you and didn’t seem to mind at all that your clothes were piled up under a tree twenty feet away.

“Page, I never was so excited, so scared, so thrilled, in my life. The way you looked at me, the way you stood there, seemed to sum up your whole attitude toward life—and mine. You were bold, you were amused with me and with yourself. You were so wonderful to look at. And you weren’t ashamed. All I could think of from that day on was, ‘That’s the kind of man I could adore and live with and take care of for the rest of my life.’

“You made me feel so womanly, Page. So feminine and passionate. I always liked boys and I’d had my share of crushes. But I’d never felt like that before till I met you.”

“I know, baby, I know,” he said softly. “It was wonderful. But hell, it was normal, sweetheart. Moral.” He paused, trying to keep himself controlled, pulling her arms around him as he continued. “God, you were gorgeous. I couldn’t quite believe you. When you suddenly burst in on me I was too surprised to move. And when I could, I was afraid I’d lose you if I did. So I stood there and kidded you to make you stay. To make you look at me as long as possible.”

“There was never anything Puritanical about our romance,” she said. “A lot of people say we went too far.”

“I’m no Puritan, honey,” he protested. “We were two unrelated kids as far as we knew. If two people are clean and decent and really in love, then what they do with their bodies is only an expression of their love. No sin, certainly. But there are some things I won’t and can’t do, things that offend me morally.”

“You break down and do them, though,” Sunny said. “You hypocrite. And don’t you call me a moral offense.”

“Do you have to twist everything I say? Don’t you know—”

“I know we used to agree on everything!” she wailed. “Now we can’t agree on anything at all.”

“That’s because everything in our lives resolves around the central fact of incest.”

She reclaimed her arms and moved away from him, the old despair fighting up in her again. “No, it’s not just that,” she said. “You’ve changed, Page. You’re a different man from the one I married. You even had a bad argument with Jack Mann, your best friend, because he tried to put in a good word for me.”

“I suppose Laura told you,” he said angrily. “Well, Laura’s all wet. Sure, he put in a good word for you. I expected him to. But that’s not why I broke off with him.”

“You broke off with him because you couldn’t take the truth!” She cried. “You broke your promise to me and told him our secret, and when he told you what a twerp you are, you went to pieces.”

Across the length of the small room they looked at each other as if the Grand Canyon, narrower but just as deep, yawned between them.

“That had nothing to do with it,” Page said. “I dropped him because he’s a damn fairy!”

Sunny was too startled to answer him for a moment. When she finally did it was with a dour laugh. “Page, I really think you’re dotty,” she said. “Jack Mann is about as much of a fairy as you are. And I’m here to state you aren’t.”

“He told me so himself,” Page said. “He was trying to make me understand, as he put it, that abnormality can be fun.”

“Like hell he was,” Sunny flashed. “He was probably trying to get it through that thick skull of yours that you can live with abnormality. You don’t have to turn tail and run.”

“Don’t you listen when I tell you something?” Page shouted. “He’s queer, Sunny!”

“Well, what do you want me to do, write to my Congressman? Besides, there are all kinds of homosexuals. You don’t have to put on lipstick and skirts and flirt in the streets. If Jack is a homosexual, that’s his business. If we’re incestuous, that’s ours!”

“I might have known you’d react like this,” he said harshly.

“Jack Mann is a good friend of mine,” she cried with feeling, “and I wouldn’t care if he were an ape in the zoo; it’s all the same to me. I like him and I’m grateful for his friendship. If it weren’t for Jack, I would have been even more miserable than I am.”

Page picked up his forgotten drink and finished it, as if the only way to deal with such idiocy was to get drunk.

She marched up to him as he smacked the glass down on his desk. “You listen to me, Page Pringle,” she said. “I’m ashamed of you.”

“You’re what? You’re ashamed of me!” he said in disbelief.

“I’m ashamed of the way you treated Jack. You weren’t afraid to be his friend when you thought he was normal. You would never have guessed, and he didn’t have to tell you. Don’t you suppose it hurt him to speak the truth? And why did he do it? Because he’s a true friend. Because you matter to him.”

“I’ll bet I do!”

“And I don’t mean that way!” she broke in. “Did he ever lay a finger on you?”

“I’d have tied him in knots if he had.”

“You’re a damn coward, Page. You’re afraid of Jack because he’s more of a man than you are.”

He stared at her open-mouthed, his face going scarlet.

“He has guts. I mean that, Page. He had the courage to tell you a terrible secret, to risk losing your affection and respect—which by the way he did—because he had faith in you. He wanted to help. His mistake was that you weren’t worth it.”

“Sunny, that man is a degenerate—”

“And you’re a rotten coward!” she said with bitter tears. “I know what Jack is, and it isn’t degenerate. If you had his courage, you’d be a better man.”

“You mean I’d be in your bed. Like the coward I am not,” he said, slamming a heavy fist down on the desk and making his whiskey glass jump.

“You are a coward, Page, because you can’t face this thing,” she said, calmer now but still crying. “Because from the very night you found out you were my brother you’ve been running away from me. You ran out that night and you’ve been running like a frightened hare ever since.”

“I have the courage to see this marriage has to end,” he said, shaking with rage. “Hopelessly as I love you, I have the courage to admit that our life together would be one long nightmare and our baby’s life would be ruined by it.”

“You’d see to that, wouldn’t you?”

“The hardest thing I ever did was leave you, Sunny. If that’s being a coward, all right, I’m a coward. I love you, I never loved anybody like I love you, but—”

He stopped, too broken up to talk. “But it’s over,” he said hoarsely at last. “If you think a coward could face that, you’re wrong. You’re the coward, Sunny, as long as we’re pointing fingers. You’re the one who’s clinging to rosy dreams.”

“Page, you think if you look the other way and keep your front door locked this whole mess will clean itself up. God, I wish I had the strength to slug you! That law book you read me: ‘We don’t have to do anything, we’re automatically un-married.’ How nice for you. That’s a coward’s way out, Page, and that’s what you are. Coward!” She shrieked.

His eyes took on a hot shine and she could see the muscles working under the skin of his face. “You come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.” He was perilously angry and Sunny’s temper vanished suddenly in wave of fear. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her roughly after him into his small kitchen. Sunny scrambled after him, afraid he would crack her wrist. She had never seen him like this before, and yet it was a strangely familiar expression he wore. She gasped when she recognized it: it was the look her father, Ben Rotheli, wore one time when a local business rival tried to ruin him by impugning June’s virtue. It was a look of uncontrollable fury.

Page released her by the sink and went to a drawer in one of the cupboards. She stood silent and shaking while he pulled the drawer open and fumbled in it. But when he took out a chef’s knife, heavy-handled and with a massive blade of spotted steel, she gave a little scream.

“Now who’s a coward?” he said, glaring at her, waving the blade slowly back and forth under her face.

Sunny stood white and still in front of him. “Go ahead, operate,” she whispered. “You never wanted the baby, anyway.” There was almost more contempt than fear in her voice.

“Not on you,” he said and his voice went deathly quiet, like hers. Sunny dared to look at his face then. “If I hurt you you’d have a good reason for calling me a coward,” he said. “And you’d be right.”

Her eyes went huge with alarm then. “Page, don’t hurt yourself,” she begged. “I didn’t mean it. Page!”

“Sure you meant it.” He was temporarily demented with wrath and humiliation, and before she could stop him he put his left hand down on the drainboard of the sink, palm up and with the fingers spread, and struck a terrible blow to the little finger. Sunny shut her eyes.

There was an awful silence. Page dropped the knife with a nerve-scraping clatter into the sink and lifted his hand. Slowly Sunny opened her eyes and looked at it. The finger clung to its place by a forlorn thread of skin, hanging horribly backwards and upside-down against the back of his hand and bleeding heavily. He picked up the knife again and sawed it free and threw it at her feet.

Sunny had covered her mouth with both hands in an effort to stifle her shock. Now she stooped as if in a dream and recaptured the severed finger. A strange sort of calm enveloped them both as she straightened up. Having touched the awful thing, so lately living, her horror left her. She was almost drowned in a well of love and pity.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she wept softly. “You fool. You big baby.” His disembodied finger vanished within her clenched hand. She stared at the tiny red rivers seeping through the cracks of her own fingers and blending with her tears.

“Yes, I did,” he said, holding his left hand up carefully to stem the copious blood flow. The pain was only half-real to him. The whole action, in fact, seemed dreamlike. “It was worth it. I can tell by your eyes. I’m not a coward, Sunny.”

“I didn’t mean this way, darling,” she said. “You’re the bravest man in the world. I meant—the other way. Morally.”

“You mean I did all this for nothing?”

She shook her head. “Page, if you offered me the world on a string it wouldn’t mean half to me what this poor bloody finger means,” she wept. “Darling, what a stupid, gruesome, brave thing to do. Page ... I love you more than I can bear. Forgive me.”

And she went to him and kissed him and his gory hand. They stood together with their arms around each other; damp and discolored with blood and tears; too stunned to talk any more.