Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [12]
Vivian
Razors of light flicker behind the shades at the windows. A stale metallic taste is in her mouth, and her temples are caught in a vise. Still the knocking continues.
“Go away,” Vivian calls faintly from the bed.
She lifts her head from the pillow and a wave of nausea ripples to the back of her throat. She has no memory of returning to her room last night, or was it actually this morning? She does remember seeing the ugly scissored scar on Dickie’s knee, and then, later, finding him in the bathroom, naked, dozing on the black and white tiles in a fetal position. And, oh God, did she really sleep with the man?
The images come with the jerking motions of a Movietone newsreel: emerging from Dickie’s room at eight o’clock in the evening and changing into the rose opaline while Dickie sat at the end of her bed, smoking and recounting a story about a woman who drowned in the Hotel Plaza rooftop pool in Havana; Sylvia crying at dinner, she was that drunk, and John saying to her, in his affected drawl, You’re stinking; walking barefoot into the hotel from the beach, her wet feet covered with sand, while the weasely Franco desk clerk pretended not to notice her. Under the covers, Vivian moves her legs and notes with dismay that her underwear is missing.
She sits up sideways from the bed, not straightening her neck until she is certain she won’t be sick. She will have to pretend it didn’t happen at all. Dickie will do that for her; he is good at dissembling. If she encounters him today, she will simply suggest she was elsewhere and see if he takes the hint and runs with it. Is it too much to hope that he has already moved into his new house?
She studies the skirt of the rose opaline with its hundreds of new small wrinkles, tributaries of streams surrounding the lake of a stain. When did she spill the highball? At dinner with John and Sylvia?
There is one shoe beside the bed. She has no idea where the other is. She thinks briefly of packing, of leaving the hotel altogether, but where exactly would she go? Her head hurts terribly, and the sun threatens behind the shades.
Sexton
“I’m going to get supplies,” he says, and leaves the house as if he’s done it all his life.
His breath is high and tight inside his chest, and he wants, ridiculously, to shout. It isn’t the sudden east wind, against which he raises the collar of his coat. No, he feels like a kid again, a kid with a new bike, riding it hard over a bump, soaring, getting air under the wheels. He’s left Honora sleeping on the bed, her hair mussed all around her face, the flawless white skin of her back begging to be touched. Hard to walk away from.
He slides into the driver’s seat of the Buick, more gray than blue now with road dust. He will have to buy a bucket, give the car a wash, maybe Simoniz it afterward. He puts the clutch in and adjusts the power lever. He stabs the starter button on the floor with his foot and feels the familiar lurch and purr. He picks up a crumpled napkin and tosses it out the window. He likes to keep the Buick tidy.
The only stores he’s seen are in the mill town they drove through the day before. He remembers a five-and-dime where he could get cleaning supplies, a market where he could buy food. And he ought to get gas there as well, he thinks, at the Texaco station.
But first he wants to check out the coast road. An open road always tempting, promising surprises, the possibility of luck. It’s why he is a traveling salesman, why he chucked it all back home. Nothing better than to find an unfamiliar road on the map, see where it takes him. He got the Claremont Bank account that