by Robert Bloch
She shook her head, and her eyes filled. She didn’t see rainbows through her tears, just black and white. He had been special. So she had hung on, hoping that something that she could do would restore how wonderful things had been when they’d started out together. Bring back the pink tulips and the red roses and the truffles they’d fed the waitress at the Rainbow Room, where he’d taken her the night they’d seen Phantom. Her tears were nostalgia only for the dreams, not for Sheldon. And now her dreams were only black and white.
“It’s not working, Sheldon,” Stephanie said softly. “I want out. I have to get out.” She waited for him to say something. He didn’t, so her abject demon possessed her and she said, “I’m sorry.”
“You should be!” Sheldon’s food arrived. He gestured the waiter curtly away. “I hope you realize I won’t be able to eat a bite. Just you remember. I helped you get started. I bothered with you when no one else would, when you were so crazy it was a wonder you didn’t wind up on the street.”
He thrust vicious chopsticks into his curry.
“I did my best,” Stephanie offered. “I’m sorry.”
Why apologize, dammit? Hedda had probably apologized each time Joel slammed her into the wall. Sorry for being bad. Sorry for being.
“Sorry isn’t good enough!” Sheldon exploded in a whisper. “You’re not sorry. You’re crazy and hateful. What if I let people know just how crazy and hateful you are?”
The one time before she had tried to break up with him, he had called her every five minutes until she’d been so worn down, she’d let him come over in a taxi.
“I’d rather do this with dignity,” Stephanie said. “But if you cause trouble, this time I’ll tell people, ‘I’m trying to break up with my boyfriend, and he’s harassing me.’ Don’t try to reach me. I’ll give the phone company your name and address. The post office, too. And my friends. . .already know. . .”
I’ll call the cops, she thought. I’ll throw your stuff out for beggars. I’ll call a priest to exorcise my place.
“You told them about us?” He took an outraged bite of curry, then gulped water. His discomfort would be her fault, too. He glared at her, and she remembered: he wore one contact lens, a red one, to correct a mild case of color blindness. Maybe he didn’t see colors, either; maybe he struck out at her because he too was afraid that he didn’t measure up, couldn’t see colors, couldn’t be what he dreamed of being—the writer, or the doctor, or the man.
Stephanie looked at him. Black and white. Flat. History. Her hands trembled beneath the table as she fumbled for the sidewalk Vuitton handbag he’d ridiculed her for buying, though all his clothes had designer labels. She groped for her wallet, and drew out the first bill she came to. A ten.
“This should cover lunch,” she said.
She drew a breath. The balloon in her belly groaned, it was so full. If he stopped her, she’d scream and the balloon would break, spitting violent colors all over the room.
She rose and shut her eyes, imagining Four Winds. Where, she imagined, buttery sunlight came in through sparkling windows, and where breakfast came arrayed prettily on trays; where even the arrangement of the lunchtime carrots and celery and apples was soothing. Where walks were prescribed and people spoke softly, helping you heal.
More savagely hurt than she, Hedda had Four Winds to help her. Stephanie, with only her own strength, had to envy her. God, what dirt she was, envying Hedda.
Carefully, she edged past Sheldon, flinching as if she expected him to grab at her, gesturing at the waiter that the money was on the table. A clatter behind her. An overturned chair. Her eyes filled, black and white blurring to gray, and she felt her way outside, down Bayard, back onto Mulberry.
Halfway down the street, she found herself stopped by a TV in a laundry window. Hedda again, covering her face with tissue, Joel flicking a basilisk stare at her. She wore her violet sweater. At Four Winds, they’d probably chosen it, helped her dress, combed her gray curls to hide the bald patches, and told her she looked nice, their Niobe with cauliflower ears.
A hand caressed the nape of her neck, then closed on it. She stiffened, ready to whirl and scream.
“Poor darling,” came Sheldon’s voice. “You’re so melodramatic. You make it sound like you’re fighting for your life. As if everything’s black and white.”
The happy couple. She’d seen men playfully convey struggling women by the scruffs of their necks, and she’d wondered why in the world anyone would think that was cute. She used to love it when Sheldon called her darling. Now she knew that “darling” meant punishment—and no one would ever know, because he called her darling and enforced his wishes by a grasp at the scruff of her neck, like a kitten he wanted to drown.
“We need to talk about this. About us,” he crooned.
She jerked her head free, her attention on Hedda. Her stomach felt bloated.
“Why are you watching that shit?” His voice went momentarily sharp. “I can’t believe it. That’s what’s bothering you? Stupid bitch. She asked for it. She should have trusted him. Maybe then he wouldn’t have had to. . .”
He could make black seem white and white, black. And if he went on talking, she might even believe him. She had to get away, but his fingers were groping beneath her hair for her neck and that hateful, mock-loving pinch.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Why?” That was another trick. Get her to do what he called “discuss,” which meant that she stammered and he got to interrupt with “isn’t it true.”
“Have I ever laid a hand on you?”
She freed herself from the neck vise. “You push!” Stephanie felt herself goaded into replying, as the balloon in her stomach throbbed. “We’re walking down the street, and you push me away.”
“Only because I see further than you, and I’ve seen someone I don’t want to get near you. You’re so trusting, darling, so vulnerable. What if I weren’t there to protect you and a bum or a mugger hurt you? You know you can’t take care of yourself. Come on. I’ll walk back to your office with you and you can explain that you need to take the rest of the day off. Maybe more. Isn’t it true you’re not in good shape, Stephanie. . .”
Let him get her alone, “taking care” of her, and she’d be his prisoner. She might not wind up with a face like Hedda’s, but the eyes, the damned, lost look in the eyes would be the same. He might never hit her, but she knew what her life would be like: a life of soft-voiced, cloistered terror, worrying if Sheldon had the right brand of tuna for the sandwich he’d expect her to fix him at midnight, if she wore the appropriate dress for an important dinner, as he said, with the ballbreaker (pardon my French, darling) he was stuck with as a boss, if she spoke one word too many, or too few. She would have to fear him as she had feared her first supervisors, and he would never let her go. He would devour her and her fear.
“Just leave me alone,” she said, low-voiced.
“Steff, darling,” he began, stalking her. “Isn’t it true I have a right to care for you? Don’t I deserve the best? That’s you, babe.”
“Then why do you make me feel like shit?”
“You make you feel like shit!”
Sensing potential craziness, Asian and Western passersby began to ignore them. The sky and ground began to whirl, the garbage and the dog crap and the people. Whirling with it came the crunch of heavy vehicles on broken glass and the lugubrious, inept Chopin.
“Get away!”
With two long steps he was at her side, had grabbed her arm in a grip that pinched and bruised. “This has gone on long enough!” he said. “Now you’re coming with me, and I’ll teach you how to behave to a man who only wants to keep you from hurting yourself.”
And so she would go with him. She could see it clearly. He would probably make her quit her job, too. And when her surrender was finally abject enough, maybe he would marry her. Maybe they would have children: two children. She had been absurdly please
d when he’d praised her for wanting just the same number of children that he did. Assuming that she could have them. For the past six months, he had begun to lecture her how her biological clock was running out. Because the fault would have to be in her genes, wouldn’t it? Sheldon was entitled to undamaged genes. . .
Though he was color-blind, if they had a child who was flawed, he’d blame it on her. Why would she want to have kids with his problems? Hedda couldn’t have kids; maybe she couldn’t, either. Would he steal kids for them, too?
Either way, once kids came, she could never escape.
She’d never be smart enough to sneak the kids away, and she’d be afraid of how he’d bring them up alone: little Sheldons, precise, cold, and hateful. Monsters. Her kids as monsters.
“No,” she said. “No.” Of all the torments in Hedda’s hell, the worst surely had to be that she’d let her kids be used, let one be killed, even, and stood by because she trusted the man who did it. Where was mother tiger when they needed her?
“You go to hell!” She dodged out into the narrow street and he followed her.
If he touched her, the red balloon would burst, and all her rage, all her hurt, all her hatred would spew out on the street, leaving her limp, like the damp, flaccid scrap that’s all you have left when balloons burst.
The Funeral March grew louder, and voices buzzed in the background, rose in alarm, as the crunching neared and the rumble of powerful engines grew louder.
“You’re so bad! Stop fighting me!” Sheldon grabbed her arm again, sinking in well-manicured fingers just where he’d bruised her before. She yelped and turned at bay.
“They should never have let you loose. You ought to be locked up to pick the wings off flies. They should never turn you loose on people!”
He backhanded her face, and she whirled, breaking free in her fury. Blood spurted from her nose onto the dirty street.
She was facing yet another mourning dragon of a funeral procession, all black and white, from the hood of the hearse to the opulent coffin to the black, open mouth of the driver. All black and white, even the flowers, except for the flowers above the dead man’s photo: a heart worked of carnations as red as a throbbing heart—or a red balloon.
She screamed and the balloon inside her went thin and stretched. If there’d been letters on it like there were on the balloons she’d gotten at county fairs in her childhood, they’d have gone all pale, then vanished.
Then the balloon burst. Fragments of color and sound exploded from her mouth and eyes and transfixed Sheldon where he stood, his own mouth open. For an instant, they saw each other in each other’s eyes, surrounded by violent flame. Then the balloon released everything it held. Blame, hatred, and fear splattered at their feet.
This was the time he had abandoned her at a party; that was the time he had turned away from her in bed after she had corrected him in public; that was the time he had ridiculed a report she’d slaved over, scribbling on the final copy; and this one was for the embarrassment of submitting to public fondling that she’d hated as he made her demonstrate the soft-voiced and charming docility he liked, while his men friends grinned and their dates’ nostrils flared with fear and contempt.
He caught the vision of himself in her eyes and tried to speak, but her sheer audacity in fighting and the image of Sheldon as monster stunned him. All the months and years of “darling,” of abuse, trapped him as if fury had melted the asphalt at his feet.
The explosion stabbed at him from her eyes and mouth, and he flinched from it, flinched, for the first time, from his victim.
Propelled by its force, impossibly lithe with rage and terror, Stephanie jumped for the curb. “He’s going to kill me!” she screamed, and heard answering shouts in English, Spanish, and Mandarin.
“Whatsa matter, lady?”
“Hey, gotta crazy!”
“He gotta knife?”
“Get a cop! Someone call 911!”
Her screams and the shouts of the crowd cut off the Funeral March, which flatted and honked, not into silence, but into the shriek of brakes and horror as the hearse, unable to stop in time, rolled into Sheldon, then over him, crunching, followed by the rest of the cortege, a dragon trampling its prey into a damp and tiny red rag.
Not even three hardhats could keep her from seeing what lay beneath the hearse when it finally ground to a stop. The mourners swarmed out, screaming, and Stephanie sank to her knees, vomiting a thin red stream into the gutter.
She was shaking, but her hands felt warm; and the balloon in her belly was gone.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” The voice was Brooklyn, with Irish overtones. “All right, youse all, move ’em on out, gedda move on here. Lady, you move too, you don’t wanna see that.”
She felt a large, official presence take up its stance over her as another, equally official voice sent people about their business, then sank into a routine buzz of names- and number-taking.
“Here’s another one!” came the first cop’s voice. “Jeez, they say she was running away from this dude, like he was trying to kill her, and she’d run out into the street, screaming. Who says he had a knife? Hey, Joe, you finda knife, some kinda edged weapon there?”
A shout came from beyond him.
The man standing over her muttered. “Another damned crazy. Like that fucking Steinberg.” He bent, and used gentle force to pry Stephanie’s hands away from her face.
“Say, lady, are you all right? Did he hurt you?” A long pause. “Touch you. . .you know?”
The sympathy in his voice lured her back, and she opened her eyes to meet his. When Irish eyes were frowning—blue, in a ruddy face, with black hair, going a little salt and pepper—she’d got her colors back! He released her wrists, and light glinted off the wedding ring he wore as he wiped the blood from her nose with a tissue.
She shook her head. “He hit me today. That’s the only time,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Was he your husband, or maybe your fyan-say?”
“Just my boyfriend, thank God.” She held out her bruised arm. “I’d been trying to break up, and he said I was crazy, had been going crazy for months now. . .and I had to get away, and he grabbed me. . .”
Her voice rose up into a thin wail, and she knew how feeble her protestations that she’d be fine, she should be let go, let alone, must sound.
“Another one,” said the policeman. “Get an ambulance. We gotta get this one to Bellevue. Women! Why do nice women link up with these creeps? Oughta plug these guys in the electric chair. Somebody get me a blanket, or she’s gonna go into shock! Awright, lady, don’ worry.”
The first blanket that the laundryman brought out was maroon, like the blood clotting in the gutter, and Stephanie shuddered away from it. The second, a blackish-green, she let the nice officer wrap around her, and she just shook as he patted her head, waiting for the ambulances to arrive.
She woke in sunlight. She had pleaded that she was fine now, but they had not believed her, had they? Now she remembered needles in her arm, murmurs, being dressed while half-awake, and a ride past miles of buildings, past them to a place of hedges and clean walls.
A tray of toast and juice rested on a table near the bed. She looked around for a knife. The toast was already buttered. When she finished eating, she sat, waiting like a child.
Gradually, the fact that the room contained a closet occurred to her, and she explored it, found clothes, and dressed. Shortly afterward, a nurse came in, praised her, and took her for a walk in the sun. But people came, with cameras, and they had to hurry away.
She sat in a place where other people did crafts. She looked for Hedda, who wasn’t there. A big man came and led her to an office, interrupting her thoughts and halting words. She was upset, he told her. She had a right to be upset. She’d been subjected to sadism and psychological abuse, followed by a terrible accident. But she was not to worry. There would be no indictment.
Indictment?
He shook his head and his authori
tative face grew grave. Her fiancé’s parents were wealthy, influential. They had pressed for an indictment against her. They blamed her for the death of their only son. But enough people had seen him hit her, had heard her scream. And Officer O’Shea had made a deposition: she had been abused. So she was not to worry. She was only to get well.
“Did they want to squash me like a bug with torn-off wings? Like their son.”
“You didn’t let him,” said the doctor.
“It was self-defense,” she said, almost parroting the words from New York Post headlines. She folded her hands across her stomach as if it held something: a red balloon, maybe, or her unborn self. She was fine; she knew it, but they didn’t. Or maybe they did, and this place was a gift of gentle treatment, her prize for the months of suffering. She would look at it that way. After all, it wasn’t all black and white.
“You should be very proud of how you fought.”
Now she actually had a right. She never had a right before. Her new self leapt beneath her hands, moving toward birth.
There were hazel flecks in the doctor’s eyes, the color of the wood of his desk. She felt like she could drown in this restored world of colors. After a while, he called a nurse. Lunch was ready, nicely laid out, with a sandwich and a red apple. All food you could eat with your fingers.
This place had sun and trees and walls. She didn’t know if it was really Four Winds or not. Did it matter? It was health; it was help; it became the world. The people in it were kind. For a while, they were all that was.
A little later, the people from work sent fruit and flowers and a card saying not to worry about her job. The nurses let her share the fruit, and everyone smiled at her. Nice Stephanie. Generous Stephanie. That was a good day. The next days were good, too. The feeling of being stuffed with anger she couldn’t get out never returned.
The good days drew out. One morning, it occurred to her that even walls had a gate. Tomorrow, perhaps, she might go and look at it. She might even step outside.
She sat and crooned a lullaby to her unborn self, which crooned back silently. When the nurse turned the lights out, she slept without a pill, and her dreams, when they came, were all in color.