Pleasure Thieves

Harry took hold of her arm hard. "You cunt, what's your story? All this mystery for what? Keep it for Phillip. He's the one who likes to believe he is the wolf fucking Goldilocks. What an egomaniac to think his cock is the only substitute in the world for a little girl's doll. And you're a very little girl, Carol."

Harry let her arm go loose. Carol was wooden, staring blankly at him as he spoke.

"You don't really have any pride, do you? After all that efficiency has melted away, there isn't even pride."

This time Carol spoke as though she had just come out of shock, with a curious softness. "All I can say, Harry, is that if I can say I love you, if this means I haven't any pride, then I haven't. But you can't admit you love. This affair was an accident, a miracle, whatever affairs between people are. No matter how strange they become, one still finds love in them.

"I know you are going to leave. And alone. You're like a priest Harry. Your parish might be anywhere, and your flock will always be made out of the same stuff." Carol turned her head away from him and closed her eyes, trying to keep her pain from showing. She was quiet now.

"Okay, Carol." He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and blew the smoke in her direction. "Later."

He went out the door. A blue circle of smoke floated in the air above Carol's head.

CHAPTER XIV

Carol lay in the bed as Harry had left her. The house was quiet. It had been quiet for six days. Phillip stayed carefully out of the room, letting his daughter digest the terrible pain of Harry's disappearance.

But Phillip knew where he was, and Carol knew it too. They were both afraid of the big thing Harry had to do, afraid that somehow his act of defiance was a final act, and he would be forever out of their lives.

Harry wanted a white elephant, and he wanted the Llewellyn jewels as a gesture. When a thief becomes an artist, he is finished. His art has to be tragic art, and he has to be his victim's victim. It was to Carol as if a genius, hardly more than an idea, had slipped through her fingers, had escaped her. But Harry didn't belong to himself. She couldn't have him because he couldn't have himself. He was too big for her, and too small for her, because he really wasn't there. But he had left her and she was depleted, her flesh crying. He had left her hot for a phantom, and emptied by what? By something in her own head. In hers and Phillip's head.

When Wilbur came to the door and knocked gently, she said, "Come in," firmly, wanting her voice to ring in the still room. He entered with a tray of coffee and thin buttered toast. She sat up in the bed, pale and weak.

"How are you feeling today, Miss Carol?" Wilbur said.

"Is Mr. Johns awake?" she asked.

"Oh yes." Wilbur was genuinely perturbed. "He's hardly slept at all since you've been ill."

"I'm much better now," she assured him. "Tell Mr. Johns I'm better."

"Are you sure you won't see a doctor?" His voice was pleading, the prerogative of the oldest slave on the plantation. "It might be that you have a vitamin deficiency."

So that's what the kitchen talk was about. Vitamins. They'd probably read an article about vitamins in one of the issues of Femme.

Get some Park Avenue doctor to talk about B complexes, and all kinds of complexes. The ladies liked to read about complexes.

A clear blue-grey light filled the room. Carol lay back on the pillows, much as Harry had left her, her eyes half open, staring toward the open window.

Phillip walked into the room. He was dressed in robe and pajamas.

He was clean shaven, but his eyes looked haggard, his skin sick and dull. It had been a difficult wait for Carol. Without looking at Phillip she said monotonously, "Where did he come from anyway?"

Phillip walked to the window and looked out at the dense garden.

The light outside was bleak.

"Where he comes from doesn't interest me now," he said softly, a strange softness. "I know where he's gone."

Carol looked directly at him, then looked away.

"Will he come back?"

"I don't know, baby." Phillip stood over the bed, serious and tired.

"Do you want him to come back?"

"I don't know." She was trying to reach out to Phillip. "Maybe I don't want him to come back. Maybe he's done everything to me that can be done. Maybe he's finished and there's no point in his coming back." She started crying. "Maybe that's why he left. Because he finished me, and there was nothing more to be done."

Phillip sat at the edge of the bed and took her delicate wrist between his thumb and forefinger. "He took my gun," he explained, "and the sedan."

She was silent. "Then if he makes it, he'll be back."

Phillip bent his head and kissed the crook of her arm. She trembled in subtle response. "If he makes it."

"I bet he makes it," she said half aloud and half defiantly, fighting for her life.

Phillip's head was down on the pillow, beside hers. It would all go on, wouldn't it, as if another man had never touched her. It would all go on, and nothing would go on.