Escape the Night Read Free Page B

of cause and effect. In his father’s hugs, he felt his mother’s loneliness.
    He pondered how to reach her, searching for clues in his parents’ barren touches. At length, deciding, he waited until she was alone.
    She sat in the library, a volume of poetry unread in her lap, a champagne glass in her hand, staring into a shaft of afternoon sun which burned her fair, perfect profile to porcelain in the light. Peter approached on tiptoe, standing still and irresolute. She seemed not to notice. Hesitant, he asked, “Do you need a hug from a boy?”
    She started, dropping the glass. It shattered on the parquetry. Peter flinched, reaching out to her as Alicia stared at the shards of crystal. Her eyes, rising to meet her son’s, filled with hysteria and tears. “Don’t you sneak up on me!” she cried. Her hand flailed at the glittering pieces. “It’s broken now. Look , dammit— look at what you’ve done.”
    Backing from the library, from the hatred and confusion in her eyes, Peter Carey understood what he had done. He had destroyed his mother, and stolen his father’s love.
    In the loveless act that led to Peter’s birth, Charles Carey had felt the death throes of his marriage.
    The chill had touched him months before.
    Tension ran through Allie’s laughter, in the way she grasped at moments, inflating them with brittle gaiety. A bottle of champagne became perfect in his company, its cold tang lingering like velvet on her tongue. At the Byline Room, she sat transfixed by smoke and darkness, the pulse of jazz notes crowding, fighting, pushing one another for space as still others blew them out the door, until the night was magic. The filet at “21” was flawless, Maria Tallchief more tensile than Pavlova. She cried hearing Robert Lowell.
    Charles Carey was her thrilling lover.
    She writhed against him, body glistening with sweat, strain and hysteria until she lay exhausted, eyes fixed and staring as though in desperate search for what she had not found, and then in a rush of words she would describe to him the beauty of their act.
    On their wedding night, she wept.
    In subtle flight, for the first time in his life, Charles Carey retreated from reality.
    Suppressed, doubt festered in his subconscious, leeching conviction from his laughter and the things they did in bed. Allie could not speak to him of her fantasies; Charles could confess his fears to no one. She became gayer and more desperate, drinking more champagne as she organized vast parties, placing new friends or entertainments as barriers between them, flirting carelessly with Phillip. Bereft of real intimacy, Charles’s lovemaking turned mechanical, brain cooling to an eerie detachment in which he came full circle to the truth: his wife was an actress in bed.
    He began to contemplate divorce.
    The last time they made love was in the morning. Fall sunlight through their window seemed to etch his life with crystalline clarity. Coolly, deliberately, he began stroking her arm until it prickled with goosebumps, then turned her face toward his and kissed her neck, his mouth and tongue running toward her nipple, lingering there to raise it as he slid two fingers between her thighs. His tongue moved downward across her stomach to where his fingers had been, and slipped into her moistness. Her hips thrust upward. She screamed when he entered her.
    As she called his name again and again, he knew that the sounds came from her throat and not her body. He made love to her for over an hour, driving, pounding, moving slow and then fast, sliding and teasing, back glistening with sweat, jaw and sinew clenched in an agony of reaching, straining to at last wrench cries from deep inside her, until she scraped his back in a spasm of feigned climax, signaling its finish, and he looked over her shoulder, at his watch.
    Two months later, Alicia Carey told him she was pregnant.
    From the first weeks of her pregnancy,