The Deceivers Read Free Page A

six inches tall, a round, brown-haired woman, with an open face, a woman probably merry and competent. She would weigh about a hundred and forty pounds, and she would be forever attempting miracle diets. The man wears a pale gray sports jacket, a white dress shirt with a blue necktie. The wife wears a gray skirt, a white blouse, with a dark red cashmere cardigan around her shoulders.
    Nothing startling about this pair. Perhaps there is a detectable flavor of contentment, the aura of a marriage that is good and has lasted, and will continue to last.
    But the stranger would not see what happened when Carl looked at his watch and said, “Time to saddle up.”
    Then Joan found his hand under the table and squeezed it very hard, and he looked into her eyes and saw the shadows.
    “I guess I’ve got a right to be a little scared,” she said.
    “I would be completely terrified. So go ahead. Be scared a little.”
    She smiled at him. “I’m okay now.” And they left. As he followed her out, he thought, You look at your woman from the time she is twenty-three until she is forty, and somewhere along the line you stop being able to see her. You see a face that is dear to you, and a body you love, and you have no idea how she looks to anyone else. I like her tidiness and her gift of laughter. Her face is round and her eyes are gray and her hair is brown and silky. Her waist is slim and her legs are good, and her body is firm and solid. I feel good when I see her across a room. In the beginning it was magical, full of electric excitements, quivering emotional scenes. Now it is all warmth and custom and habit and content. But in the beginning she was a stranger. And now, when I thinkof the scalpels and the wound they will make, I feel a horror and a sickness as though it were my own belly they will cut.
    She stood by the car while he unlocked the door for her, and then they drove to the hospital and parked in the big lot as the afternoon visitors were leaving at the end of the two-thirty to four visiting hours. He carried her small bag and they went to the admissions office. They gave the information required and he turned over the hospitalization policy. Bernie had reserved a bed in a semi-private room on the third floor, Room 314.
    The visitors had left by the time he took her up to her room. The bed was freshly made and turned down. A floor nurse came in and explained the call system. The other bed was rumpled but empty. Just as he was about to leave, a small sallow brunette on aluminum crutches came hobbling in and went over to the bed by the windows. “Welcome to good old 314,” she said. “I’m Rosa Myers and a jerk kid ran a stop sign and busted my hip and cracked my pelvis and I’ve been here nine and a half weeks and you’re my sixth room buddy.”
    “I’m Joan Garrett and this is my husband.”
    The girl worked herself onto the bed. “Honey, I’m pleased to meet you because I’m happy to have a change. The little old lady who was in that bed was released at noon. She snored ten hours a day and groaned the other ten. By the way, the room service stinks and the food is inedible. Otherwise, you’ll have a ball. What are you in for?”
    Carl said, “I better go before I get thrown out. See you at seven, honey.” He kissed her. She seemed distracted, as though already she had gone a little bit apart from him.
    He went down the corridor to the self-service elevators. When the elevator door opened, two nurses rolled a bed off the elevator. It contained an unconscious girl of about ten or eleven. There was a flask fastened to a post and a tube taped to her arm. The child’s face was gray and sweaty, and there was a lingering sick-sweet smell of anesthetic.
    He rode down on the elevator and when he got off he was facing a panel board of the names of doctors, and a light was blinking beside two of the names. The hospital seemed full of a silent bustling impersonal efficiency. He felt as if there were more things he