Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [126]
He was astonished to learn, when he got home that night, that Sally did not want to have children. Not just yet. It was something he had always assumed, and suddenly he remembered that they had never actually talked about it at all, not seriously, not talked about it. He lost his temper.
“Look, I’m for it,” he said. “We aint getting any younger, and I read that it’s best to have the kids when you’re pretty young, so’s you don’t get tired of them too quick. And anyway, it’d give you something to do, something to make plans for. So how about it? Are you just scared?”
“Maybe I’m too old already,” she said. They were both in bed now, the night-light on overhead. She looked a little frightened. Her hair was up in pins, and her nose stuck out shrewishly. The light from above gave her skin a sallow, unattractive look, and made her eyes smaller and not blue at all.
“Well,” he said, “we’re gonna do it. And we might just as well start trying right tonight. You don’t have your diaphragm on, do you?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “You know when I put my hair up I don’t. You’re going to rape me, is that it?”
He gritted his teeth. She was about as lovely as a corpse. “If I have to, I will,” he said.
“You mean it, don’t you,” she said. “You’d just make up your mind like that, and do it.” She laughed sourly. “I should have known. It always comes down to that. This is the way you do everything. You sit down and think it out, and then when you’ve got it thought out, you do it. Nobody else matters. Just you. No wonder they threw you in prison.”
“We have to have kids,” he said stubbornly. “Or it’s all bullshit.”
“Maybe it’s all bullshit anyway,” she said. As if saying goodbye to something ineffable, something long gone anyway, she held her arms out to him, and they made what passed for love. Just to be sure, they made love fifteen nights in a row, and the irony was that these hurried matings were the least loving in their marriage. When Sally’s period was eight days late (and she was very regular), she disappeared and was gone for a week.
Jack went nearly crazy. He thought she might have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, or done something equally dramatic and final. But he was stubborn, too, and he would not look for her. He did not have that right. They were only married, as she had once said, not sewn together.
At the end of the week he was standing out in front of the parking lot on Broadway, in his white knee-length coat, his hands in his pockets, waiting for the crowds to start coming out of the club, when a Rolls-Royce sedan pulled in next to him and Myron Bronson stuck his hand out and smiled at Jack. “When do you get off?”
“Couple hours. How are you?”
“I have a message from your wife.”
Jack was not surprised, and he kept his face blank. “Meet me at Vesuvio’s about one, then. Okay?”
“Where is it?”
Jack told him, and the huge rich car backed out and tooled off.
Vesuvio’s was crowded, as usual, but Jack had no trouble spotting Bronson, with his beautiful wavy gray hair. They took a table by the window, and Bronson ordered Bushmills for them, and they talked.
Sally had been staying in Bronson’s elegant Pacific Heights mansion, alternately getting drunk on Bronson’s excellent brandy or bitchily begging him to get her an abortionist, on the cuff. One of the sins of poverty, Bronson told him with a shy smile, was the lack of funds needed for a good abortionist. He would have given her the money, he told Jack, if she’d only been a little dishonest and not told him why she wanted it; because she knew that he, Bronson, did not believe in either contraception or abortion.
“Are