Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Free Page B

“I don’t know anything any more. It’s not like any of those Hollywood men. I don’t even know if it’s love. I don’t know what it is. At first I was just sorry for him, and I despised Sally. I talked to him. I told him how good I thought the book was. We made a date to walk in the mountains. Sally didn’t catch on. For some reason she didn’t think I was dangerous. Martin and I saw each other more and more…”
    “Do we need the sordid details?”
    She heard that and looked up, not angry, just wilted and suffering. “I’ve got to make you understand. I was something strong, I suppose. At least he thought I was. And, almost before I knew it, he was relying on me. I felt the whole weight of him. He was clinging to me as something to balance Sally. I was frightened. It was like the Old Man of the Sea.” Her shoulders seemed to shrink. “Then, suddenly, it wasn’t the Old Man of the Sea any more.”
    “And he stopped drinking? And he started writing again? And what he started writing was good? All that?”
    “Yes.” She stared at me defiantly. “Corny, but yes.”
    “And you alone can make something of him?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he’s very beautiful?”
    “If you like—yes.”
    “And if I said it was all hooey, that you loved me, that this was just—glamour?”
    “Peter, don’t say it. Please don’t say it. It’s too late.” She jumped up, ran to me, and clutched my arms as if they were the only firm thing in a toppling building. “How can I say it? How can I say that I loved you, that I left New York loving you in spite of all those ghastly times? We were wrong. What we did was horribly wrong. We should have stayed together, stuck it out somehow. I came here, alone, exposed. Without you, there wasn’t any armor.”
    She wasn’t crying. Her body was dry and hot in my arms. It was the same body I had known and loved for five years. Part of me wanted to fight for a cause that was obviously lost. Another part remembered Martin’s face and my own face in the mirror. Something shriveled inside me and I knew I wasn’t going to fight.
    I looked at a bowl of lush pink roses. I wondered if Martin had bought them for her before I came. I could see him with the roses clutched in his hand, sober, rather awkward.
    I said quietly, “Okay. What are you going to do?”
    Her face was buried against my shoulder, her soft hair brushed my cheek. “He’s—he’s going to leave Sally. He has friends in Pie de la Cuesta, near Acapulco. He’s going there.”
    “And you?”
    Her voice was muffled against the tweed of my jacket.
    “I’m going to Pie de la Cuesta too.”
    “In sin?”
    “It isn’t that way, Peter. He’s terribly English about me. He wants to marry me.”
    “And divorce Sally?”
    “She’ll raise a howl that they’ll hear in Guatemala. But yes. He’s going to ask her for a divorce.”
    I was still looking at the roses over her shining head. They wobbled slightly. “And how about me? They say Mexico’s a good place for a divorce, short and cheap. Shall I start proceedings today?”
    She pulled away from me and stared as if that was her death knell instead of her release.
    “Peter…”
    My pride, what there was of it, came out as anger. “For God’s sake, what do you expect me to do? Crawl on my hands and knees to you and whine about a broken heart? You’ve found a man you want more than you want me. Do you imagine it’s the first time it’s happened since Krafft-Ebing? Do you imagine I’d want to cling to a wife with a head in someone else’s gas oven? What’s done is done. Take your little genius and mother him and wallow in it.”
    “Peter…”
    “And if the wife makes trouble, shoot her over to me.” I felt taut and hard, but the way ice is taut and hard over water. “I’ll help you get your man if he’s too feeble to help himself. God knows, I hope it’s heartbreaking when you get him. But if she acts up, I’ll fix Sally Haven for you. And I’m not being noble.