The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin

that had to end in a vow
or a broken promise. Thank God, the appetites are faster and shrewder
than the mind, or else there wouldn't have been Jo and Harry naked
and famished for each other. And a great deal of tender and
passionate embrace.
    After the lovemaking, I'd sat back against the
headboard, arms behind my head, and wondered why on earth I had once
thought this would never work. Then, late in the evening, when the
air was cooled by a sudden breeze that flushed through the apartment,
I remembered why. I remembered that core of reserve, that sudden
toughness that would change her into a stranger in a place that I
shared no part of. Remembered the admiration I'd felt for that
tough-minded independence. And the guilty sense of relief, because
that reserve was like an assurance that things could only go so far
and no farther, that there would always be that piece of her I
couldn't share. A buffer zone. A moat. How good it had made me feel
until, one afternoon, I'd discovered that what she kept there, behind
the moat, was her heart.
    It was the detective that did me in. Rummaging,
exploring, running hands and eyes over a drawerful of her
things--Jewelry, make-up, a heart-shaped watch on a golden chain, a
Japanese fan, some silk underwear, and, in the back, buried beneath
the panties, the hard corner of a photograph set in a cardboard
frame. I flicked it with my finger, teased it with my eye. And,
finally, I pulled it out. It was a wedding picture of a very young Jo
and of a tow-headed Marine corporal with his cap buttoned on his
shoulder and a loose grin on his face. She caught me with it in my
hand.
    She walked over to the dresser and pulled the
photograph away and tucked it back in with the underwear. "Why
didn't you tell me?" I asked her.
    "I suppose because I didn't want you to know."
    "It doesn't make a difference."
    "It does to me," she said, closing the
drawer. "We're still married."
    And then I got what I'd angled for, told patiently,
unblushingly, by this strong, black-haired woman with the bridge-club
spectacles and the pretty, heart-shaped face. He was an M.I.A., her
corporal husband, whom she hadn't seen in five years and whom she
still loved enough to cry over with regret.
    When she was done, I wandered off into the living
room and fumed at myself and called myself a dictionary full of dirty
names. And, in a few minutes, she came in, too, and curled up beside
me and said, "Now, you know," in her husky voice. "Can't
love anybody else. Not for awhile. Maybe not ever. Not until I've
gotten over him. You're the closest I've come, though. Real close.
Only when I think I'm almost there with you, it's not you I'm
thinking of. And that scares me."
    A few weeks later we'd told each other goodbye. Both
of us, I think, feeling relieved that we wouldn't have to carry the
affair any further, that that moat wouldn't have to be crossed and
the keep inside taken by storm. Or not taken.
    But, that hot July night, with Jo sleeping beside me
again after three years of absence, I suddenly felt infinitely more
valorous. Maybe it was the box of photographs sitting on the living
room coffee table. Or the thought of the totally loveless and carnal
act they pictured. Or the memory of the Jellicoes. Because those are
the folks that never cross moats and carry castles, Harry, I thought.
They're the sick by-products of a selfish and unromantic age. And you
can either line yourself up on their side and pretend indignance. Or
you can try to love the woman lying beside you and take the risk of
being hurt.
    But not of being hurt like
Cindy Ann was hurt. Not brutalized like a thing. I tried to picture
that sixteen-year-old girl-child in a hiked-up skirt with white
plastic boots on her legs and a pound of pancake and mascara on her
face, hooking the tough bar rail of the Golden Deer. It was just
possible. Perhaps the Jellicoes had given up on her. Or, perhaps, she
was only acting as bait. Or, maybe, Red Bannion had an old man's eyes
and sixty