Panic!

“There’s always something to say.”

“Not in my case.”

“Jack,” she said simply, “I want to know.”

“All right. I’m thirty-three years old, a native of the Pacific Northwest, divorced and a gentleman of the road, as they used to say. I work when I feel like it, and play when I feel like it, and move on to new places when I feel like it.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

She was silent for a time, and then, softly, “Are you involved with those men out there?”

“What?”

“That story you told me about seeing them kill somebody—is that really true?”

“Of course it’s true.”

“And that’s why they’re chasing you—us?”

“Yes. What did you think?”

“I don’t know. You lied about your name ...”

“That has nothing to do with this.”

“What does it have to do with?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re running from something else, aren’t you?” she said. “Something besides those men.”

He stiffened slightly. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Suppose it is. What difference does it make?”

“None, I guess. I just want to know.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not—now?”

“You want my life history, but you won’t say a thing about yourself,” Lennox said. “Let’s try that tack for a while.”

“I told you all there is to know last night.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

Lennox studied her—and, slowly, he realized just what the bond was between them, the kinship he had intuited last night and today. “Maybe we’ve both got something to hide,” he said. “Maybe you’re running away from something else, too.”

A kind of dark torment flickered across Jana’s features, and then was gone. “Maybe I am,” she said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

“Why?”

“It’s ... I just couldn’t, that’s all.”

“Any more than I can.”

“Any more than you can.”

They fell silent. Lennox wanted to say something more to her, but there did not seem to be anything to say. He thought: I wonder if it would do any good to bring it out into the open, I wonder if I could talk about it? He looked at her, bathed in the soft moonshine—the weary, pain-edged loveliness of her—and suddenly he was filled with an overpowering compulsion to do just that, to unburden himself, to lay bare the soul of Jack Lennox. He had wanted to do it, without consciously admitting the fact to himself, ever since he had impulsively confessed his real name to her that afternoon. It was as if the weight of his immediate past had become dead weight, too heavy to carry any further without throwing it off for just a little while. It had been coming to this for some time now, you can only dam it up inside you for so long, just so long, and then it has to come out; the levees of the human mind can hold it no longer. He was going to tell her. There was a fluttering, intense sensation in the pit of his stomach, the kind of feeling you get when you know you’re going to do something in spite of yourself, right or wrong, wise or foolish, you know you’re going to do it anyway. He was going to tell her, all right, he was going to tell her—

“Phyllis,” he said. The word was thick and hot in his throat.

“What?”

“That’s what I’m running from. A woman and a life and a hell named Phyllis,” and it all came spilling out of him, floodgates opening, words rushing forth—all of it, from the beginning:

The night he had first met Phyllis at a cocktail lounge, she was new in his town then, a secretary with a Seattle firm that had opened a branch office there, and how he had fallen in love with her after their fourth Gibson, a major joke between them when the feeling had been fresh and good and clean in the beginning. The courtship and the love-making, the whispered endearments, the plans, the hopes, the dreams, the promises. The picnics and hikes through giant redwood forests. The afternoon they had gone swimming nude in the Pacific and he had been pinched by a sand crab on his left buttock, another fine private joke to be shared. The engagement, the marriage, the long hours at Humber Realty, the striving for growth and position and monetary security. The house he had built and the things he had bought to fill it. Phyllis’ reluctance to have children—“why don’t we wait a few years, darling, we’re not ready for parenthood just yet.” Her increasing awareness of social standing, her desire to belong to organizations and country clubs and in-groups, her attraction for expensive clothes, expensive appointments, expensive friends.

The change—or the realization of things having changed: The pushing and the pettiness and the mild rebukes of his manners, attitudes, feelings in public and in private that had soon become open ridicule. The breakdown of all communication. The taunting sexual denial. The emergence of a predator, demanding everything and giving nothing, shutting him out, using him, denying his worth as a man and a human being. The sudden, bitter understanding that the thing he had once thought was love in her was only sugared hate.