Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [92]
She vaguely remembered him, and he came on all niggery and boasted his way into a date with her, and after that one furtive night with her, which ended up on the shabby carpet of her one room (they didn’t find the time to pull down the bed), all the real pleasure went out of the affair, and Billy became obsessed. She had been fantastic, beyond anything he had ever known. He could not keep away from her, and he felt terribly guilty. He wondered how long he could stand it. When he would come home early in the morning and climb into bed with his wife, he dreaded her awakening for fear she would want to make love; he did not have an ounce of energy left in his body and he was afraid she would understand, and move away and take the children. The thought of this almost panicked him; it was all right for him to dream of leaving her, but the very hint of a suggestion that she might leave him was terrifying. And what if she, too, had a lover? After Luanne, Billy knew to a certainty that he had been a poor lover with his wife, infrequent, hurried, uninventive—in short, everything he suddenly was with Luanne, he had not been with her, his wife, the woman he ought to have been loving in increasing depth and passion; the woman he had been neglecting, avoiding, keeping fed and housed and clothed and little else—the woman he had imprisoned to raise his family. Wouldn’t she have every right to seek out a lover? And wasn’t it possible (and the way he felt about himself, statistically probable) that this lover of hers would give her the passion and depth of intimacy she needed and didn’t get from her husband? And wouldn’t she be tempted to run away with him?
It did not occur to Billy yet that she, if his nightmares were true, would probably feel as guilty about it as he did; it did not occur to him that she ought to feel guilty. He was the one in the wrong, not she. If she went into an affair, it would be out of need; but in his case it was—well, something else. Pride, randiness; something less honorable than need. He knew that. He did not even like Luanne; every time he left her furnished room he swore to himself that he would never return and that in a couple of days, when he had his strength back, he would come home and make love to his wife as she had never been made love to before. But he never did, and by the time he had his strength back he would again have visions of Luanne, and cursing himself he would telephone her for a date.
Luanne did not care; that was part of her attraction. She was unwomanly in that she did not need affection, lived without it, considered it corny and disgusting. Anyone who would bring her a few dollars, a handful of joints, a bottle, was welcome. She loved to make love and seemed to have an endless supply of wriggles, groans, and passionate profanity; but between bouts she was terribly dull. When she was drunk or naked, Billy decided, she was a ball; but sober and dressed she was nothing at all. Another thing she lacked, from Billy’s viewpoint, was time. A girl like that was popular, and Billy had to content himself with being squeezed in between the other men in her life; many of them bigger and blacker and tougher than Billy. At one point there were no fewer than three pimps hanging around dreaming of the fortune to be made of this abundance, but she never did fall for their patter; life was too easy to go professional.
There was no question about it, Billy was beginning to despise himself; with desperation he cast around for something, any part of himself, he could admire. At about this time, when Billy could hardly shave for fear of seeing his own eyes in the mirror, the high-roller hotshot from Phoenix hit town and began knocking off all the poolshooters.
Billy heard about him long before he saw him; how he had come into the Two-Eleven downtown one afternoon, this short, stubby Arizona guy, and had bulled and bragged around about what a great eight-ball player he was, and then had finally been challenged to a game of straight