John D. MacDonald Read online

  “What did he say?”

  She rolled over and up onto her elbows, half over me, one large perfect breast eclipsing half the world. “He said, Randy, that he could isolate the cause for my so-called nymphomania. He says there is absolutely no physiological basis for it. He says there very seldom is. It’s because usually a person wanted to be loved so badly. And there’s some obstacle. Mine was the way I looked. My God, underneath I was a mess. All a bunch of crazy longings. And that family of mine! Brother. They’d crack you for nothing, just for walking by. Funny, thinking about it, about spending the rest of your life getting even. He said that was what I was doing. That I resented the male. He hadn’t noticed me when I wanted to be noticed. He said it was too bad, because now I can’t really love anybody. Hell, I guess I don’t miss that. I asked him why I needed so much physical love. He said it was just a symbol. He said that given time, he could cure me. And I thought about that and told him I would go along as is, thank you very much. So you see, Randy. I really hate you. Can you believe it?”

  And, looking up at her, I could believe it. And yet understand her. Yet pity and love the child she had once been.

  And pity myself for having been standing in the right place and time to have been run down by this implacable female machine, and still know that it was no excuse for me. She had merely uncovered a basic sensuality, a masochistic weakness in me that I had not suspected.

  She seldom talked that way to me. My role was more generally that of whipping boy.

  There was another time. “Does Noel know about this, Randy?”

  “I haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But she knows?”

  “I’m pretty sure she does.”

  “Doesn’t that make you feel bad? Wouldn’t you like to give all this up and try to make her happy again?”

  “I know that’s what I should do.”

  “But you’re going to keep on with this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I guess I am.”

  “Tell me why you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me why you’re not going to give this up.”

  “Because… I can’t.”

  “That’s what I wanted you to say. Let me tell you about the others, Randy. Don’t you want to listen to me?”

  “Please don’t, Wilma.”

  “I like to talk about them. Like I talk to them about you.”

  “Stop it, Wilma.”

  “I’ll stop it. Tell me what you are. Are you weak?”

  “Weak and vile and foul.”

  “And ashamed?”

  “No. Not ashamed.”

  “Should you be?”

  “Yes, I should be. What I’m doing is a sin in the eyes of man and God.”

  “That sounded nice. You must say it again sometime. But right now we’ll stop talking, won’t we, Randy? Right now, darling, we’ll stop talking. Won’t we? Won’t we?”

  And there was no escape, as there never was. As though I needed vileness. As though I sought degradation. As though I had to go on punishing myself for inconceivable crimes, for a guilt that had not yet been explained to me. And I wondered if I would ever kill her. It was the only possible release. She did not tire of the little humilities. The emptying of her ash trays. Sorting her clothes for the cleaners. Taking care of her shoes. Picking up after her. She was a robust animal and she casually littered the rooms in which she lived. She liked to have me tell her about how important I used to think I would become. Sometimes she made me tell her those old dreams while I was making up her bed while she sat at the dressing table, watching me in the mirror.

  I knew of her other affairs. She made certain that I knew of them. Ears should be able to be closed, like eyes. But I was not deposed. I had the most of her and that had to be enough. Until she took unto herself Gilman Hayes.

  “He’s no good, Wilma. You’ve got to get rid of him.”

  “We’ll have a nice talk about him. As though you were my girl friend, Randy.”

  “He’s no good.”

  “He’s a fabulous artist, my dear.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Steve Winsan says so. I’m paying him to say so in the right places. The places where it counts. Be good, Randy. And be patient. He’s a very arrogant young man, and a very splendid animal, and after he has been properly broken to the halter, we shall send him on his way and forget about him.”

  “He’s costing you too much money.”

  “You nag me like an old hen, Randy dear. Be your sweet and patient self, and Wilma will be back soon. Poor Gil has the absurd idea he’s doing me some sort of a favor. That’s a little attitude I shall manage to correct. And then, because he’s a bit dull, we’ll send him on his way, older and wiser.”

  She had told me the list for this week end. Hayes and the Dockertys and Steve and Judy and Wallace Dorn. There was one small gain in this Hayes affair. It had given me time to go over her accounts. And I did not like what I saw. I had a talk with her on Tuesday. I tried my best to frighten her. I made it strong. She smiled and ticked the things off on her fingers.

  “Rent the Cuernavaca house. Check. Get a smaller apartment here. Maybe. Drop Gil and cancel out Steve’s efforts for both of us. Check. Stop spending so much on other things. Check. And you know, dear, as long as we’re making changes, I’m getting awfully tired of Judy and Wallace Dorn, too. I think I’ll make some changes. And wouldn’t you say you’re an expense to me too?”

  “That’s up to you to decide,” I told her.

  “Brave Randy. So very casual about it. Get Mavis on the phone for me, dear.”

  “Were you serious about… letting me go too?”

  “Now you’ve spoiled it by getting anxious. You just be a good boy this coming week end. Then we’ll see. Get Mavis, and while I’m talking, you can leave for the day. Gil will be along soon. Poor dear, he just detests finding you here. I don’t think he likes you at all.”

  Noel and I drove up on Friday, chatting with the faintly evasive formality of people who meet on a train. She looked very trim and pretty, but for me it was like looking at a picture of a girl I had known once upon a time. There was nothing personal in looking at her. The whole world was dry and vague and flat. The only vividness in the world, the only reality, was a demanding body that was labeled Wilma and in which there would be another time of forgetfulness, of the great blindness that surpasses all regrets.

  I timed the trip so that we could arrive early. Gilman Hayes had come up with Wilma in her car. They were there when we arrived. Wilma had told me the room we would have, so I carried our luggage in. I believe that she has told José that I am a person of very small importance and not to help me. He even mixes and serves my drinks with an almost detectable reluctance. It is a typical example of her small methods.

  After Steve Winsan arrived I could tell by the way he kept glancing at me that he wanted a word with me. I suspected what it was. When he found a chance to ask me, I agreed. He was fool enough to treat me with contempt. I was firm with him, wishing all the time that Wilma had given him no hint of danger. And then he was shrewd enough to put his finger directly on Wilma’s personal threat to me. After vaguely threatening me. He is an alert and dangerous man, perfectly capable of using any weapon he can find. But I couldn’t think of any weapon available to him. Wilma had said he was out. And she is not the sort who changes her mind.

  Mavis was as gushingly tiresome as usual. Judy Jonah was almost herself, but I sensed tiredness in her. Paul Dockerty seemed rather out of place in our little group. Once upon a time I might have been, also. Gilman Hayes was at his obnoxious best, insulting the ones he didn’t ignore. There was a lot of strain in the air. It looked like a bad week end. It made me nervous. I tried to keep remembering what the doctor had told me. Take it slow and easy. Try to relax whenever you can. But my doctor had never spent a week end with Wilma Ferris. She creates strain. She feeds on it. She deliberately creates cross-purposes, misunderstanding.r />
  Wallace Dorn was his normal pompous self. Noel sat as though she had deliberately taken herself out of the group. Wilma is always almost excessively sweet to her. We drank and we ate and they played games. I wandered around and watched, and drank too much. Mavis danced with Gilman Hayes. It was not an entirely pretty thing to watch.

  I was glad when the evening ended. Noel went to bed early. She was asleep in her bed when I went to our room. I undressed and lay in the darkness, feeling as if my nerves had poked out through my skin, waving in the night, sampling all the emotions that moved through the big house. I paired them off. Perhaps Steve had found his way to Judy’s room. Paul and Mavis would be rightly together. And Gilman and Wilma. All the dark blinding plungings, while I lay bloodless. The rustlings and kissings, while I lay dead. It was all there was. They gave you the big words, the philosophical words. Man’s destiny. And then you learned the only destiny was function. Be born, breed, and die. And of the three, there was only one over which you had control. Function of man. And, with us, an empty function. A sterile sensation, creating not. Destiny and function in a dark house, in the nerve-end night while my long untouched wife lay deep in her silver dreamings, deep in the precise and immaculate imaginings of her viscid brain, the unused body composed and still, and the blood moving within her and the oxygen molecules trundling along the crowded corridors. It was a secret I could tell her. There is nothing left but function, my bride. Nothing but that. No big words any more. No pride and no shame. No honor and no dishonor. Nothing but the body and its needs and the forgetfulness of filling its needs. I lie here dead and know that I am dead. And with so little effort I could take Wilma with me. To hell. Why did I say that? If there is only function, then there is no hell. No temptation, no evil. Just the pretenses we build for ourselves in order to make life endurable to a limited extent. Because we need those fictions. Were we ever to come face to face with the ultimate meaninglessness, we would die. As I have died in so many little ways over so long a time that there is nothing left.

  And then, astonishing myself, I rolled over and ground my eyes into the pillow and cried with the muted helplessness of a sick child. It astonished me, because I had not thought there was even that much left.

  I went to sleep thinking of how Wilma would look were she dead.

  Noel was up and gone when I awakened. Most of them had finished breakfast and were down by the water. I had slept long, but there had been no rest. It has been like that for some time now. Sleep so heavy that I awaken in the same position. Dreamless sleep. A little death. But I get no rest from it. And I wonder about the significance of that. The doctor said it could be related to my physical condition. I think it a part of the death wish. There are other indications.

  Back in the happy days Noel used to tell me that I made a fetish of orderliness. That was true. The yellow pencils aligned and needle-pointed. The soldierly columns of the figures with their inevitable totals. The gray steel files and the little colored signal tabs. The April report. The stock listing. Staples and the creamy gleam of the file folder, and the appointment pad with each day bisected by the scalpel of the clock. My world was in order. Even to the socks placed just so, and the shoes containing their trees, and the clean scalp and the close shave and the morning moment of elimination. I was clean and I put my heels down with firmness when I walked and I conversed with rhythmic logic, in confidence-inspiring cadence. I was clean and my wife was clean and my life was clean, and I could shut my eyes and reach into any part of my life and put my hand on what I wanted, and I could look through all my prisms into the clean future and see the etched extension of the selected path.

  Now I know where nothing is. Even the little business details. I throw the papers in a drawer. Sometimes I crumple them first. I wear shirts too long. I am often able to smell the odors of my own body. I do not walk as I did before.

  It is odd, because back in that other life I was aware that there were men who became obsessed with a woman, with the living body of a particular woman. I thought of such men as being closer to the animals, of being more elemental in their heats and furies. I was a cool man. People did not tell off-color jokes in my presence. I had an austerity. And a dignity.

  Now I am obsessed, and now I know that it is the type of man that I am that is most often subject to this warm disaster. The man who seems somehow to have skipped childhood, to have been born solemn, the boy who leads scholastically and in nothing else, who corrects papers, is inclined to preach, who has thought dimly of the ministry, who becomes an accountant or a teller or a teacher or an actuary. Such coolness subconsciously seeks warmth. The spirit seeks the body. The ice looks for flame.

  Now I sleep in heaviness, and seek disorder and demand cruelty. In debasement I seek an ever deeper pit, a continually increasing darkness. A death wish. For the final function of flame is to consume entirely. I can see myself and what is happening and I do not care. I am nothing but function. And through function I look for death.

  The day was warm. They swam. I pulled the water skis behind the runabout for a long time. I kept score and made decisions when they played croquet. They were drunk. Paul was the worst. When they did not like a decision, they ignored what I said. Wilma had changed to a rose-colored denim sunsuit for the game. I watched her body as she would walk, as she would bend and strike the ball, as she would turn from the waist to watch someone else play. Once when I stood too close she swung the mallet back and hit the side of my knee, wood against bone. It was painful. She apologized profusely. Everyone knew she had done it on purpose. They were silent. I felt their contempt and it washed over me and I liked it. Then they forgot. After a time the pain went away. I stood close again, but she had a knowing look and she did not strike me again. Because she knew I wanted her to.

  It was later, much later, that I realized that I had not seen Noel for a long time. A boat was gone. I found Wilma and I asked her if she had seen Noel. She said that Steve Winsan had taken her out in one of the boats a long time ago. I realized then how Winsan had thought he had selected a weapon. It made me want to laugh.

  I sat alone and watched the lake. No boat moved. I thought of the other man I had once been. A man who, perhaps, would have tried to kill Winsan. But Noel was a girl I had once known. She could do as she pleased. I could warn her about Winsan, as I would warn any pleasant stranger I saw getting too close to him. I pictured him seducing her. I made vivid pictures in my mind, trying to summon some fragment of anger, some morsel of regret, some pinch of pain. And there was nothing;

  I was there a long time. Finally I saw the boat coming. It had come from behind a distant island. It was dusk. I wanted to know, out of objective curiosity, so I went down the steps and out onto the dock, and when the boat stopped its noise I asked in a quiet voice where they had been. Her answer was coarse, unlike her, and unmistakable. So I knew. Even in semidarkness Winsan had the uneasy look of guilt. I walked away before I laughed in his face. I heard him hush her. It meant nothing to me. So one more thing had been taken from me. And I had moved one step closer to death.

  They swam that night. They were all there, except Paul, and all quite high again. Noel, in her new freedom, laughed too much and with an odd note in her voice. I did not wish to swim. I sat on the dock to be near them. They decided to swim without suits. Steve went up to turn off the lights. Moments later, playfully, he turned them back on for a second, freezing all of them there in a blinding whiteness against the night. Noel was in the act of stepping out of her suit. Then her slimness was gone, fading slowly on the back of my eyes. It gave me a strange feeling. It is difficult to describe. Very much like that feeling you have when you are starting out on a trip and you slow your car because you are certain you have forgotten something. You think, but you cannot remember what it was. And then you shrug and push down on the gas pedal and tell yourself that it was nothing important, nothing that cannot be replaced wherever you are going.

  They swam and shouted with the daring self-conscious boistero
usness of people who mistake silliness for boldness.

  I got up and went silently, quickly, breathlessly to the very end of the dock and my eyes were used to the night and I could see the white body of Wilma, almost luminous in the water, in the faint starlight, and I wondered if she could see me outlined against the stars. I could not reach her throat. But…

  Chapter Seven

  (MAVIS DOCKERTY—AFTERWARD)

  IT WAS the most dreadful thing that ever happened. She was the most wonderful woman in the world. No one else understood her. They didn’t know what she was like. None of them. The way they acted, they might as well have laughed or something. Like they were glad. Like nothing had happened at all.

  I scraped my hip getting up on the dock and for a minute I couldn’t find where I left my robe. I knew the lights would go on. Honest, I was terrified. I don’t mean of the lights on me, but just of its being so dark and not finding things, that feeling of things coming after you out of the night. But I found it and I just pulled the belt tight when the lights went on. Those lights can make you go blind, when you’ve been in the dark. When I could see I found my suit and wadded it up and wrapped it in my towel. It had to be some kind of dreadful joke or something, but I guess all the time, deep in my heart, I knew that something had happened to her and she was dead. I knew it because that was my luck, because that was the way things always are for me and always will be. If a wonderful thing happens, I know it will go bad for me. The way I used to think Paul was wonderful before he started making my life a hell with his insane jealousy.