John D. MacDonald Page 16

  And then, he told me, her face changed and broke in a way that was quite the most horrible thing he had ever seen.

  He lost track of her and then heard from a friend, about a year later, that she was with another show, that she was wing-walking again. He caught up with that other show at the Herkimer County Fair in upstate New York a week later, but found that she had turned slut and her trailer was a very public place indeed. It sickened him to see her like that.

  And I was both. Not only the body falling, but the one who watched without true comprehension. And it was not yet clear to me what had happened to me. I was filled with a dreadful and aimless terror. It was good when Paul ordered me into the boat with the big flashlight. We went out onto the lake. It was one of those lights that contain a big square battery. The water looked like black oil. When I held the lens above the surface, the light rebounded. By touching the wide lens carefully against the surface, I could send a murky beam down and see motes drifting through it, like dust in a path of sunlight. I do not know what good it did. Sometimes I would see a flick of arm or leg in the beam as they fought their way down. I could hear the others talking on the dock with that peculiar tone of repression in the presence of sudden death. The side of the boat bit into the flesh of my upper arms, but I held the light steady, pointing down. I was aware of the timeless stars over me, the ancient hills around me, and of my own peculiar meaninglessness, a soft thin white creature in a boat he could not build, holding a light that he could not understand, while others dived, looking for the body of a woman he had never known.

  Then I heard the sirens, rising and falling through the hills and the night, crying of lost things, a thin beast message of alarm and regret.

  And Paul clung to the side of the boat, shoulder muscles bunched and gleaming in the starlight, and said we would stop looking, that too much time had passed.

  They tipped the boat wildly as they came aboard. Hayes grasped a paddle and thrust us strongly toward the dock. I sat holding the dead light, trembling with exhaustion as though I too had dived hopelessly for her, straining lungs and muscles. When I got up onto the dock as Steve tied the runabout fast, my knees started to give way and I nearly fell before I caught myself.

  They came out, walking heavily in their official manner, asking questions in voices calculatedly harsh and bored, asking names. And I stood there and heard the boats coming down the lake toward us, outboard motors out of cadence, bright lights moving closer.

  I found Noel and I stood close to her. Close to her strength and her contempt, and I felt the helpless shame of a child caught in a nasty act. An act for which there are no amends, no excuses, no explanations. A child with that new awareness of evil in itself, and aware for the first time of the strangeness of the world and all that is in it, aware of the inevitability of loneliness.

  “Noel, I…” I could not continue, because I had to close my throat against sobbing. She turned and looked up into my face. Her face was still and white. In that light it had an Egyptian look. A still face in a temple frieze, classic and cold.

  I moved apart from the others and she followed me. I had not expected her to. “Yes?” she said in a low voice.

  “Everything is…” And there was no word. Lost? Broken? Gone? Maybe in olden times men had words and were not ashamed to use them. Back when language was permitted to be dramatic. Before we muted ourselves with odd shame. We say, “I love you,” and suffix a nervous laugh, taking comfort in a diluted form of drama. We never declaim. It is all underplayed. Little Sheba never comes back. And we stand on no cold towers in the rain and talk with ghosts.

  So I had no word.

  Yet she knew how close I was to breaking. She touched my arm and we went up the curving concrete steps to the big terrace and in through the glass doors and to the left and down the corridor and to the room Wilma had given us.

  Once the door was shut I lay on the bed. I looked blindly at the ceiling. For a time I was able to withstand the self-pity. And then I let it come in a sour flood. Taking sour comfort from it. No savings, no job, no pride, broken health, and a wife I had degraded. While the hypnotic focus had existed, all that had not mattered. I had been content, almost eager, to slide down and down and down. Now that shameful meaning was gone from me. So self-pity came, in all its tormented weeping ugliness. And she sat on the bed beside me and put her hand on my forehead. It was the gesture of a nurse. A starched white gesture performed without meaning, while the nurse counts the night hours and thinks of the laughing intern. And the knowledge that I did not even deserve that gesture of clinical comfort increased the spasms of self-rejection.

  I was two people. One rolled and gasped and wept weakly on a guest-room bed, cursing God. And the other stood behind Noel and looked down at the figure on the bed and grinned in an evil way and chuckled silently and thought, Not enough, not enough, not nearly enough, you excommunicated priest, you filthy choirboy, you self-dramatizing fool. You threw yourself back and you know it’s too late. Baby wants candy. Buddy wants a bike. Roll and choke, you hopeless son-of-a-bitch.

  “Here!” she said. “Here!”

  And I propped myself up on one elbow and took the three round yellow pills from the palm of her hand, washed them down with a swallow of the water.

  “Drink all the water.”

  I did so, obediently, and handed her back the glass and lay back. I heard her in the bathroom, running water. She came back and stood by the bed.

  “You ought to sleep. Will you be all right now?”

  “Noel, we’ve… we’ve got to talk.”

  For the first time she showed expression, her face twisting in something like pain. I saw that sometime during my unpleasant scene she had changed to skirt, sweater, and jacket

  “Maybe we don’t have to talk, Randy. We never have.”

  “But I…”

  “Just try to sleep. That’s all. I’ll be here. I’ll sit here in the dark until you fall asleep, if that’s what you want.”

  I nodded. I was glad when the lights were out. When my face was in darkness, unseen. She had moved a chair close to the bed. I held my breath and I could hear her faint breathing. I began to feel the quietness of the drug. It moved out from the middle of me, crawling slowly down the marrow of my bones. It deepened my breathing.

  Once when I was eleven I was very ill. Big faces loomed over me and moved back into shadows. Days and nights were all mixed up. And I would awake in darkness and hold my breath and then I could hear my mother in the big chair near my bed, breathing softly.

  I knew what I wanted to ask of Noel. I flushed in the concealing darkness and then I made my voice as matter of fact as I could. “Would you mind very much holding my hand, Noel?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  She found my hand in the darkness. She held it in both of hers. Her hands were warm and dry. And very still. Why should it matter? They are hands. Tools for holding, lifting, grasping. Why should there be comfort in a touch?

  The sleep of the drug began to come. I could feel it. It is like walking along balancing yourself on a curb that gets increasingly higher. You fall off and step back up, and fall off and step back up, and each time it is harder to step back up until you finally fall all the way off.

  When the maid awakened me by banging on the door, I had absolutely no idea of where I was. The drug was still strong in me, deadening my mental reactions. I had the idea that I was on some sort of a business trip and this was a hotel room. I sat on the edge of the bed. It was early daylight. I stumbled into the bathroom, ran the cold water, cupped it in my hands, and scrubbed my face hard. It was coming back. Not all in a rush. Bit by bit, each inevitable piece fitting into the previously assembled pieces.

  There is always an aspect of hope in awakening. It is a little like birth. A new day of life ahead. But each increment of memory destroyed a portion of that vague and feeble hope until there was none left. I stood alone in a gray place. The maid had called out something about everyone going to the big room.
Maybe they had found the body. That fierce bright body, tumescent, full ripened, vigorous, and voracious. It could not be flesh, as other bodies are flesh. It could not die as others die. Not that thing of gloss and firmness, delicately pelted, ancient in its knowledge of hyperesthesia.

  I went down the corridor. It had an odd look of being out of true, as though the right angles had suffered a distortion through pressure. And when I went into the big room and saw them there, saw them glance at me, their faces were odd, like cinema faces seen from a seat too far to the side of the screen.

  I saw a chair beside Judy Jonah and sat in it and asked, too loudly. “What’s up, anyway?” My voice came back to my ears with that timbre of the voices of doctors and nurses as you are going under anesthesia. No one answered.

  I leaned closer to Judy. “Did they find the body?” I asked her.

  She gave me a surprised look. “Oh, yes. Almost an hour ago.”

  I looked over at Noel. Her eyes moved across me and away, a bit unsteadily. Something about her puzzled me. As though she were newly vulnerable. No longer cold and classic and remote. Needing something. As though she needed to be reassured. She looked exhausted. And she sat awkwardly, with none of her customary grace. In some odd way she looked younger.

  Steve was the last one. He had hurt his face somehow. He looked angry. Deputy Sheriff Fish stood and began to talk. I tried to follow what he was saying, but I could not. It was like one of those foreign movies without subtitles where you have to try to follow the plot from the actions and the facial expressions of the characters. They all had an odd look in the morning light. Peculiarly distorted. I was aware of a feeling of shock in the room and I leaned forward and I believe I probably frowned earnestly as I tried to translate. It seemed to be something about Wilma. And I saw Noel leave the room and I wanted to follow her and have her explain all this to me. It was as though, at a party, I had joined a group in the middle of a conversation and stood there, smiling and nodding, laughing when the others did, utterly unable to pick up the thread of meaning that would make everything clear. A group that I did not know, using its own private language, erecting little social walls, and waiting for me to go away. Voices heard under water. The voices of others on a train when you are more than half asleep.

  It happened to me once, in college. I had gone into the wrong lecture. A lecture on symbolic logic. Each individual word was a perfectly good normal word, but try as I might, I could make no sense of what was being said. It made me wonder if I were going mad. As if communication were being blocked.

  I wanted to go to Noel. There was my only safety. The only known place in the world.

  But first…

  Chapter Fifteen

  (MAVIS DOCKERTY—BEFORE)

  ON THE WAY UP he had to make one of his usual snotty cracks about Wilma, on account of how he is crazy jealous. What he ought to have is a dandy mechanical wife. Take her out of the closet and plug her into a light socket. He doesn’t want me to be a person.

  After I put him in his place we drove on without talking, and I cried a little bit. He drove too damn fast, but I certainly wasn’t going to say a word about it, no matter what he did.

  I sat ’way over there in my corner of the seat and I thought about the lovely new clothes I would wear. And about being a house guest where there are important people. Big people. The only flaw in the ointment was having to go up there with Paul. Like a race where your feet are tied together, like on picnics. I couldn’t be myself, not with him along. I couldn’t be free. And I decided right then and there that I’d let Wilma know that the next time there was a party, I’d certainly appreciate it if I could come without that dead stone weight hanging around my neck like the bird on that sailor in the poem we had in seventh grade.

  And she would know what I meant, all right. She had him typed right down to the dotted i. “Mavis, dear,” she said, “he’s just a very ordinary man. He’s good in business, and I’m glad he works for me. But I couldn’t bear being married to him. God! Pipe and slippers and a household budget. You see, dear, he’s no challenge to you. And you need challenge. You need life and excitement. You didn’t know how dull your life really was, did you?”

  She has him typed. He’s Rotarian and stuffy and provincial. He’s living in the Middle Ages. I just wished and wished that somebody else was driving me up to Lake Vale. Because I could see, from his snotty mood, that he was going to try to spoil things for me. That’s all he does. Spoil things. And someday he’s going to make me so mad that I’m going to let him know about Gilman Hayes and that afternoon in Wilma’s apartment. I can just imagine the look in his eyes.

  Wilma had told me about the place, but gosh, words can’t describe it. It was like in House Beautiful. Only more so, if possible. I got real excited when I saw it. I could hardly breathe. And there was cars there already, like you don’t see just anyplace. One of those big sporty Buicks, and a little black English car with red wire wheels, and a gorgeous white Jaguar, with a cute little cartoon of Judy Jonah on the door of it. I wished I’d put my foot down harder and we had got a Jaguar. They’re so smooth looking. But no, Paul has to have this thing because he says there isn’t enough room in those.

  I nearly made a terrible booboo when a man came hurrying out. He was kind of foreign-looking and I thought he was one of the guests and then I remembered Wilma talking about the Mexican servants and I realized, just when I was about to stick my hand out and smile, that it was José. I would have been mortified to death if I’d done anything as terrible as that, shaking hands with a servant. It would be nice to have a little Mexican maid, to live in.

  The servant told us to take the path around the house. He was very polite, even if he was sort of fierce-looking. We went by a big croquet place and around to a big terrace overlooking the lake. It was like a picture, really. You could see right away that Wilma knows how to live. Like she says, gracious living is an art, and you have to work at it all the time. There were two fast-looking boats tied up at the twin docks. I saw Judy Jonah down there and Gilman Hayes was near her. They were sun-bathing. I met Judy a couple of times in the city at Wilma’s apartment, but she’s sort of strange. I mean she isn’t like you would expect, being so famous. She even looks a little plain, somehow. The others were on the terrace. Wilma hurried right over to us. You could tell she was glad to see us. Glad to see me, anyway. She gave me a little hug, and explained that we were all friends here and it would be a sort of informal-type house party. I acted pleased, but honestly, I had been hoping there would be some other important people there I hadn’t met before.

  I told her her house was lovely, and she took us back to our room. I bet that next to hers, it was the best room in the house. Like she says, it was gracious living. José was just putting the last of our suitcases on one of those rack things.

  Then Wilma said José would bring us a drink and we could freshen up and then join the others. I ordered an extra-dry Martini, but Paul, he had to ask for that damn bourbon he likes. It doesn’t even sound like a drink with any class. Now, if it was Scotch on the rocks or a Scotch mist or something. No. Bourbon and water, bourbon and water. He hasn’t got any taste. He hasn’t got any sense of gracious living. He’s provincial.

  Not only that, but after the drinks came he had to try to tell me not to get drunk and complain about the last party we went to. I know when I’m drunk and when I’m not drunk. He just doesn’t like to see anybody having any fun. He’s like a big schoolteacher. If he had his way, everybody would sit in a corner and he’d give lectures and mark papers.

  I made the mistake of standing there drinking my drink and wearing just my bra and panties. And of course, he had to start leering at me in that way he has. I told him not to get messy. Honestly, he wants to get messy at the darnedest times. There’s never any buildup. He just looks at you and boom. Right then and there. He’s got about as much romance as a toad in the grass. I didn’t even wait for him to come out of our private bath. I went out and joined the others, an
d believe me it was a relief to be away from him for just a few minutes after spending the whole darn day with him. Wilma helped Randy start the music and it was lovely. Honestly, I just lay back on that couch thing and José brought me a fresh drink and I looked at the blue lake and heard the music and it was like being on a cruise or something. It was perfectly lovely. Nice people and nice civilized conversation and somebody to wait on you. Judy and Gilman Hayes came up from the dock and after a while that nice Wallace Dorn arrived. I wish Paul would dress like that and act like that. Wallace is so obviously a gentleman. Paul could be just anybody. He looks like a hundred other men on the street.

  There we were, all friends, just drinking and talking and enjoying ourselves. I guess Paul would have tried to be a damp blanket if somebody had given him half a chance. But maybe he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut and not try to spoil the party for the woman who, after all, is his boss, any way you want to look at it. Anybody could see that Wilma was having a good time. She positively sparkled. It made me feel warm and good just to look at her.

  I was glad when finally it was time to eat. Everything had got sort of swarmy and when I stood up I didn’t think my legs were going to work just right. But the food was so spicy hot it made my eyes cry, and it was what I needed to make all those Martinis behave. After dinner I felt just wonderful. Floaty and half excited. I kept wishing Paul wasn’t around. I didn’t feel the least bit provincial.

  Gil Hayes had changed into pale slacks and a white shirt. He had knotted the shirttails in the front, just above the edge of the trousers, and he left it unbuttoned. The white shirt made him look real tan, and wearing it that way made his shoulders look broader and his hips look slimmer. After dinner and after some brandy Gil Hayes asked me to dance. He’d found some South American records.