The End of it All Read online

She laughed. "Aren't I awful? Talking about my own daughter this way? That little bitch."

  She slurred the last two words. She'd gunned her drinks—Black and White straight up—and now they were taking their toll.

  We danced some more. She stepped on my foot a couple of times. Every once in a while I'd find myself looking over at the table for a glimpse of Kendra. All my life I'd waited to dance like this with Amy Towers. And now it didn't seem to matter much.

  "I've been a naughty girl, Roger."

  "Oh?"

  "I really have been. About Kendra, I mean."

  "I suppose a little rivalry between mother and daughter isn't unheard of."

  "It's more than that. I slept with her boyfriend last year."

  "I see."

  "You should see your face. Your very handsome face. You're embarrassed."

  "Does she know?"

  "About her boyfriend?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Of course. I planned it so she'd walk in on us. I just wanted to show her—well, that even some of her own friends might find me attractive."

  "You felt real bad about it, I suppose?"

  "Oh, no. I felt real good. She naturally told Randy and he made a big thing over it—smashed up furniture and hit me in the face a few times—and it was really great. I felt young again, and desirable. Does that make sense?"

  "Not really."

  "But they got back at me."

  "Oh?"

  "Sure. Didn't you see them tonight on the dance floor?"

  "Pretty harmless. I mean, she's his daughter."

  "Well, then you haven't had a talk with good old Randy lately."

  "Oh?"

  "He read this article in Penthouse about how incest was actually a very natural drive and how it was actually perfectly all right to bop your family members if it was mutual consent and if you practiced safe sex."

  "God."

  "So now she walks around the house practically naked, and he rubs her and pats her and gives her big, long squeezes."

  "And she doesn't mind?"

  "That's the whole point. They're in on this together. To pay me back for sleeping with Bobby."

  "Bobby being—"

  "Her boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend I guess."

  Kendra and Randy came back on the floor next dance. If any attention had been paid to Amy and me, it was now transferred to Kendra and Randy. But this time, instead of the theatrical, they embraced the intimate. I was waiting for Randy to start grinding his hips into Kendra dry-hump style, the way high school boys always do when the lights are turned down.

  "God, they're sickening," Amy said.

  And I pretty much agreed with her.

  "She's going to try to seduce you, you know," Amy said.

  "Oh, come on now."

  "God, are you kidding? She'll want to make you a trophy as soon as she can."

  "She's what? Twenty? Twenty-one?"

  "Twenty-two. But that doesn't matter, anyway. You just wait and see."

  At our table again, I had two more drinks. None of this was as planned. Handsome Roger would return to his hometown and beguile the former homecoming queen into his arms. Technicolor dreams. But this was different, dark and comic and sweaty, and not a little bit sinister. I could see Roger touching his nearly nude daughter all over her wonderful body, and I could see Amy—not a little bit pathetic—hurtling herself at some strapping college student majoring in gonads.

  Jesus, all I'd wanted to do was a little old-fashioned home wrecking ... and look what I'd gotten myself into.

  Kendra and Randy came back. Randy abused a couple more waiters and then said to me, "You having all that plastic surgery—surprised you didn't have them change you into a broad. You always were a little flitty. Nothing personal, you understand."

  "Randy," Amy said.

  "Daddy," Kendra said.

  But for me this was the supreme compliment. Randy Big Ten Carson was jealous of me again.

  I wasn't sure where Kendra was going when she stood up, but then she was next to me and said, "Why don't we dance?"

  "I'm sure Roger's tined, dear," Amy said.

  Kendra smiled. "Oh, I think he's probably got a little bit of energy left, don't you, Mr. Daye?"

  On the floor, in my arms, sexy, soft, sweet, gentle, cunning, and altogether self-possessed, Kendra said, "She's going to try to seduce you, you know."

  "Who is?"

  "Amy. My mother."

  "You may not have noticed, but she's married."

  "Like that would really make a difference."

  "We're old friends. That's all."

  "I've read some of your love letters."

  "God, she kept them?"

  "All of them. From all the boys who were in love with her. She's got them all up in the attic. In storage boxes. Alphabetized. Whenever she starts to feel old, she drags them out and reads them. When I was a little girl, she'd read them out loud to me."

  "I imagine mine were very corny."

  "Very sweet. That's how yours were."

  Our gazes met, as they like to say in novels. But that wasn't all that met. The back of her hand somehow passed across the front of my trousers, and an erection the goatiest of fifteen-year-olds would envy sprang to life. Then her hand returned to proper dancing position.

  "You're really a great-looking man."

  "Thank you. But did you ever see my Before picture?"

  She smiled. "If you mean your high school yearbook photo, yes, I did. I guess I like the After photo a little better."

  "You're very skilled at diplomacy."

  "That's not all I'm skilled at, Mr. Daye."

  "How about calling me Roger?"

  "I'd like that."

  I wish I had a big capper for the rest of the evening at the country club, but I don't. By the time Kendra and I got back to the table, Amy and Randy were both resolutely drunk and even a bit incoherent. I excused myself to the john for a time, and as I came back I saw Amy out on the veranda talking to a guy who looked not unlike a very successful gigolo, macho variety. Later, I'd learn that his name was Vic. Back at the table good old Randy insulted a few more waiters and threatened to punch me out if "I didn't keep my goddamned paws" off his wife and his daughter, but he was slurring his words so badly that the effect was sort of lost, especially when he started sloshing his drink around and the glass fell from his hand and smashed all over the table.

  "Maybe this is a good time to leave," Kendra said, and began the difficult process of packing her parents up and getting them out to their new Mercedes, which, fortunately, she happened to be driving.

  Just as they were leaving, Kendra said, "I may see you later," leaving me to contemplate what, exactly, "later" meant.

  After one shower, one nightcap, most of a David Letterman show, and a slow fall into sleep, I found out what "later" meant.

  She was at the door, behind a sharp knock in the windy night, adorned in a London Fog trench coat that was, I soon learned, all she wore.

  She said nothing, just stood on tiptoes, wonderful lips puckered, waiting to be kissed. I obliged her, sliding an arm around her and leading her inside, feeling a little self-conscious in my pajamas and robe.

  We didn't make it to the bedroom. She gently pushed me into a huge leather armchair before the guttering fireplace and eased herself gently atop me. That was when I found out she was naked beneath her London Fog. Her wise and lovely fingers quickly got me properly hard, and then I was inside her and my gasp was exultant pleasure but it was also fear.

  I imagine heroin addicts feel this way the first time they use—pleasure from the exquisite kick of it all but fear of becoming a total slave to something they can never again control.

  I was going to fall disastrously in love with Kendra, and I knew it that very first moment in the armchair when I tasted the soft, sweet rush of her breath and felt the warm, silken splendor of her sex.

  When we were done for the first time, I built the fire again, and got us wine and cheese, and we lay bene
ath her trench coat staring into the flames crackling behind the glass.

  "God, I can't believe it," she said.

  "Believe what?"

  "How good I feel with you. I really do."

  I didn't say anything for a long time. "Kendra."

  "I know what you want to ask."

  "About your mother."

  "I was right."

  "If you slept with me only because—"

  "—because she slept with Bobby Lane?"

  "Right. Because she slept with Bobby Lane."

  "Do you want me to be honest?"

  I didn't really, but what was I going to say? No, I want you to be dishonest. "Of course."

  "That's what first put the thought in my mind, I guess. I mean coming over here and sleeping with you." She laughed. "My mom is seriously smitten with you. I watched her face tonight. Wow. Anyway, I thought that would be a good way to pay her back. By sleeping with you, I mean. But by the end of the evening—God, this is really crazy, Roger, but I've got like this really incredible crush on you."

  I wanted to say that I did, too. But I couldn't. I might be a new Roger on the outside but inside I was strictly the old model—shy, nervous, and terrified that I was going to get my heart decimated.

  By dawn, we'd made love three times, the last time in my large bed with a jay and a cardinal perched on the window watching us, and soft morning wind soughing through the windbreak pines.

  After we finished that last time, we lay in each other's arms for maybe twenty minutes until she said, "I have to be unromantic."

  "Be my guest."

  "Goose bumps."

  "Goose bumps?"

  "And bladder."

  "And bladder?"

  "And morning breath."

  "You've lost me."

  "A, I'm freezing. B, I really have to pee. And C, may I use your toothbrush?"

  In the following three weeks, she spent at least a dozen nights at my place, and on those nights when one or both of us had business to attend to, we had those lengthy phone conversations that new lovers always have. Makes no difference what you say as long as you get to hear her voice and she gets to hear yours.

  Only occasionally did I pause and let dread come over me like a drowning wave. I would lose her and be forever bereft afterward. I was suffused with her tastes and smells and sounds and textures—and yet someday all these things would be taken from me and I would be forever alone, and unutterably sad. But what the hell could I do? Walk away? Impossible. She was succor, and life source, and all I could do was cling till my fingers fell away and I was left floating on the vast, dark ocean.

  The eighth of December that year was one of those ridiculously sunny days that try to trick you into believing that spring is near. I spent two hours that afternoon cutting firewood in the back and then hauling it inside. Fuel for more trysts. On one of my trips inside, the doorbell rang. When I peeked out, I saw Amy. She looked very good—indeed, much better than she had that night at the country club—except for her black eye.

  I let her in and asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee, which she declined. She took the leather couch, I the leather armchair that Kendra and I still used on occasion.

  "I need to talk to you, Roger." She wore a white turtleneck beneath a camel hair car coat and designer jeans. There was a blue ribbon in her blond hair, and she looked very sexy in a suburban sort of way.

  "All right."

  "And I need you to be honest with me."

  "If you'll be honest with me."

  "The black eye?"

  "The black eye."

  "Who else? Randy. He came home drunk the other night and I wouldn't sleep with him so he hit me. He sleeps around so much I'm afraid he's going to pick up something." She shook her head with a solemnity I would never have thought her capable of.

  "Does he do this often?"

  "Sleep around?"

  "And hit you."

  She shrugged. "Pretty often. Both, I mean."

  "Why don't you leave him?"

  "Because he'd kill me."

  "God, Amy, that's ridiculous. You can get an injunction."

  "You think an injunction would stop Randy? Especially when he's been drinking?" She sighed. "I don't know what to do anymore."

  This was the woman I'd come back to steal, but now I didn't want to steal her. I didn't even want to borrow her. I just felt sorry for her, and the notion was disorienting.

  "Now, I want you to tell me about Kendra."

  "I love her."

  "Oh, just fucking great, Roger. Just fucking great."

  "I'm know I'm a lot older than she is but—"

  "Oh, for God's sake, Roger, it's not that."

  "It isn't?"

  "Of course it isn't. Come over here and sit down."

  "Next to you?"

  "That's the general idea."

  I went over and sat down. Next to her. She smelled great. Same cologne Kendra wore.

  She took my hand. "Roger, I want to sleep with you."

  "I don't think that would be a good idea."

  "All those years you were in love with me. It's not fair."

  "What's not fair?"

  "You should have gone on loving me. That's how it's supposed to work."

  "What's supposed to work?"

  "You know, lifelong romance. We're both romantics, Roger, you and I. Kendra is more like her father. Everything's sex."

  "You slept with her boyfriend."

  "Only because I was afraid and lonely. Randy had just beaten me up pretty badly. I felt so vulnerable. I just needed some kind of reassurance. You know, that I was a woman. That somebody would want me." She took both my hands and brought them to her lips and kissed them tenderly. I couldn't help it. She was starting to have the effect on me she wanted. "I want you to be in love with me again. I can help you forget Kendra. I really can."

  "I don't want to forget Kendra."

  "Deep down she's like Randy. A whore. She'll break your heart. She really will."

  She put two of my fingers in her mouth and began sucking.

  She was quite good in bed, maybe even better technically than Kendra. But she wasn't Kendra. There was the rub.

  We lay in the last of the gray afternoon and the wind came up, a harsh and wintry wind suddenly, and she tried to get me up for a second time, but it was no good. I wanted Kendra and she knew I wanted Kendra.

  There was something very sad about it all. She was right. Romance—the kind of Technicolor romance I'd dreamed of—should last forever, despite any and all odds, the way it did in F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. And yet it hadn't. She was just another woman to me now, with more wrinkles than I had suspected, and a little tummy that was both sweet and comic, and veins like faded blue snakes against the pale flesh of her legs.

  And then she started crying and all I could do was hold her and she tried in vain to get me up again and saw the failure not mine but her own.

  "I don't know how I ever got here," she said finally to the dusk that was rolling across the drab, cold Midwestern land.

  "My house, you mean?"

  "No. Here. Forty-two goddamned-years old. With a daughter who steals the one man who truly loved me." A gaze icy as the winter moon then as she said, "But maybe things won't be quite as hunky-fucking-dory as she thinks they'll be."

  Later on, I was to remember what she said vividly, the hunky-fucking-dory thing, I mean.

  Kendra appeared at nine that same night. I spent the first half hour making love to her and the second half trying to decide if I should tell her about her mother's visit.

  Later, in front of the fireplace, a wonderful old film noir called Odds Against Tomorrow on cable, we made love a second time and then, lying in the sweet, cool hollow of her arms, our juices and odors as one now, I said, "Amy was here today."

  She stiffened. Her entire body. "Why?"

  "It's not easy to explain."

  "That bitch. I knew she'd do it."'

  "Come here, you mean?"

  "Come
here and put the shot on you. Which she did, right?"

  "Right."

  "But you didn't—"

  I'd never had to lie to her before and it was far more difficult than I'd imagined it might be.

  "Things get so crazy sometimes—"

  "Oh, shit."

  "I mean you don't intend for things to happen but—"

  "Oh, shit," she said again. "You fucked her, didn't you?"

  "—with all the best intentions, you—"

  "Quit fucking babbling. Just say it. Say you fucked her."

  "I fucked her."

  "How could you do it?"

  "I didn't want to."

  "Right."

  "And I could only do it once. No second time."

  "How noble."

  "And I regretted it immediately."

  "Amy told me that when you were real geeky-looking that you were one of the sweetest people she ever knew."

  She stood up, all beautiful, brash nakedness, and stalked back toward the bedroom. "You should have kept your face ugly, Roger. Then your soul would still be beautiful."

  I lay there thinking about what she said a moment, and then I stalked back to the bedroom.

  She was dressing in a frenzy. She didn't as yet have her bra on completely. Just one breast was cupped. The other looked lone and dear as anything I'd ever seen. I wanted to kiss it and coo baby talk to it.

  Then I remembered why I'd come in here. "That's bullshit, you know."

  "What's bullshit?" she said, pulling up the second cup of her bra. She wore panty hose but hadn't as yet put on her skirt.

  "All that crap about keeping my face ugly so my soul would remain beautiful. If I hadn't had plastic surgery, neither you nor your mother would have given me a second glance."

  "That's not true."

  I smiled. "God, face it, Kendra, you're a beautiful woman. You're not going to go out with some geek."

  "You make me sound as if I've really got a lot of depth."

  "Oh, Kendra, this is stupid. I shouldn't have slept with Amy and I'm sorry."

  "I'm just surprised she hasn't managed to tell me about it yet. She's probably waiting for the right dramatic moment. And in her version, I'm sure you threw her on the bed and raped her. That's what my father told her the night she caught us together. That I was the one who'd wanted to do it—"

  "My God, you mean you—"

  "Oh, not all the way. They had one of their country club parties, and both Randy and I were pretty loaded and somehow we ended up on the bed wrestling around and she walked in and—Well, I guess I tried very hard to give her the impression that we'd just been about to make it when she walked in and—"