by James Jones
And this hatred was what fascinated her. After all, hatred was her forte, wasn’t it?
At the top of the stairs, she went directly to Bob’s bedroom and to the closet. At the very back on the very top shelf were three not large heavy-pasteboard boxes and one very small long box of 35 mm slides. She had to get a chair to reach them. Then she got Bob’s little slide projector. Usually, she took them to her own bedroom, but tonight with a flamboyant recklessness she took them back downstairs to the kitchen.
Why her father had them in his possession she had no idea, but she suspected that psychologically some way it had something to do with her mother. Where he had come by them she hadn’t the least idea, and what he did with them she did not know. Evidently, he looked at them. She had discovered them years ago, long before her mother died, in the house out by the school in Parkman, while rummaging through the back corners of a storage closet looking for something else. She had looked through them, her breath getting shorter in her chest (she was past twenty-five, and already knew—by hearsay anyway—everything they depicted), and then had put them back exactly as she found them (while she listened to her mother downstairs serving tea to one of her committees) and had said nothing. If Bob knew she found them, he never gave any sign. It was hard to tell with Bob; you never knew what his motives were for anything, and he had a very devious subtle mind, really. After that she kept track of them, and noted that he took them out from time to time. When she herself, in moments of rebellion and sick fascination, took them out to look at them, she found that he often had added new ones to them. It was turning out to be quite a bulky collection. When they had moved out here to Israel, it was as if she consciously divined beforehand just exactly where he would put them, and sure enough when she looked, he had.
In the kitchen, Gwen spread the whole conglomeration out on the big dining table. There were several of those little packs of playing cards with pictures on the faces, a great number of simple photographs on glossy paper, a number of little printed books of stories with a few badly reproduced photographs which said they were made in France but which obviously were not since some of the photographs were the same as those printed on the paper. Anyway, the people in them didn’t look like Frenchmen, they looked American.
All of this stuff she did not bother with, but instead set up the little projector (which she had seen Bob use a thousand times right here in this room, to show his own color snapshots and nature pictures) so it was focused on the wide white brick wall of the fireplace, the only blank wall in the room. Then she took the box of color transparencies and started running them through it.
She was well aware there was a strong element of danger in all of this, a possibility that she might be caught, but she welcomed it. Something wild and outraged and violated in her made her almost wish for it. It would make quite a nice little scene. It was only a little after nine, and Wally Dennis might still show up lugging along that chicken-headed little idiot Dawn, whom he was trying so hard to seduce. Or Bob himself might very easily come home a little early. Well, let them come; damn them; damn them all. Let them catch her. She wished they would. Wouldn’t they be surprised, and then she could tell them how she was a nymphomaniac.
There were a few pornographic scenes among the color transparencies, but mostly they were only posed portraits of nude women.
It was always a startling thing to think of Bob being interested in such things. He was really such a dear, sweet old thing. She could just see him, hiding his pictures away like a small boy and looking at them guiltily in his room. It would be funny if he did catch her, Gwen thought, and giggled nervously like a girl. Would his face be red! Who would ever have thought of him, Robert Ball French the poet, philosopher, recluse, collecting pornography?
Suddenly, a wild idea came to her and she laughed outright as she began immediately to put it into action. She had wanted to do something wild, hadn’t she? All evening, she had dimly heard people going along the sidewalk outside the little fence, hadn’t she? Laughing to herself with a kind of insane ribaldry, she selected one of the most garish, chorus girl-looking nudes, put it into the projector. Then she went around turning all the lights off. When the room was dark, she carried the little projector into the living room to the window edge and opened the window.
The cold air from the open window poured in over her. There were two slightly open spaces between the trees and bushes where you could see in a straight line to the street. Still laughing to herself nervously, Gwen switched the projector on and focused it through one of them, adjusting it till the picture of the nude, which she had put in sideways, appeared to be lying in the gutter beside the sidewalk. Then she switched it off and waited.
There was a streetlight at the corner whose feeble light would help hide the beam of the projector through the air, while at the same time not being strong enough to kill the picture on the ground. The way the trees were situated before the house it would be next to impossible for anyone to see the beam. She waited patiently.
Pretty soon she could hear voices coming down the sidewalk on the other side across the street, a man’s and a woman’s. She couldn’t recognize them. She waited until they were about a hundred feet away. Then laughing silently she switched the projector on.
“What’s that?” the man said, in a startled voice.
“Where?”
“There!”
The nude, which Gwen had switched on briefly and then off again, looked to be reclining in the gutter, the arms behind her head to arch her beautiful breasts, very nearly life-size, perhaps a little over. She had recognized the voices now. It was the druggist and his wife, on their way home from closing up their store.
“It looked like a naked woman,” the wife said faintly.
“That was what I thought it looked like,” the druggist said.
Gwen switched the projector on again, and doubled up with silent laughter.
“There it is again!” the druggist said. They had stopped and were standing close together on the sidewalk.
“I see it! I see it!” his wife said nervously.
“It is a naked woman,” the druggist said.
“But what would a naked woman be doing lying in the street?” the wife said. “On such a cold night. We must be seeing things.”
“She might be dead?” he said. “She might be murdered?”
“Surely not,” the wife said. “Not in Israel.” Inside, Gwen switched it off.
“Now it’s gone!” the druggist said.
Inside the house, laughing silently and almost hysterically, her eyes beginning to brim with tears, Gwen switched the projector on again, left it on a second, then shut it off and doubled over holding her nose and mouth.
“There it was again!” the druggist said. They were still standing indecisively on the sidewalk.
“Maybe it’s some kind of a ghost,” his wife said.
“There aren’t any such things as ghosts, Mother,” the druggist said without conviction. “Come on, Mother, I think we better get on home. It’s late,” he said bravely. Through the trees, Gwen watched him take her arm. They began to walk fast in the direction of the bridge, increasing their speed as they approached the spot where the nude had appeared to be lying, across the street from them on Gwen’s side.
“Maybe somebody threw it there from a car passing over the bridge,” the wife said. “A gangster.”
“From two blocks away?” the druggist said. “Anyway, there’s nothing there now.”
They were well past the spot now. And while their steps did not slacken, a sort of relief seemed to emanate from them.
“Maybe we’d better call the police?” the druggist said.
“What? and have them find there’s nothing there? Are you crazy?” his wife said. “We’re going right straight home and go to bed.”
Shaking silently, and doubled up with a pain in her stomach, Gwen kept her hand clamped over her nose and mouth and waited until they had gone on a little ways, then turned the proj
ector on again.
“There it is again!” the druggist said from down the block, his voice fainter.
“Stop looking back!” his wife said.
Gwen switched it off and shut the latticed window. Then she collapsed, sitting down weakly and letting out a very unladylike roar of laughter. Feeling some kind of strange release, she sat and laughed herself out until her lungs were aching. Finally, she got up and still shaking weakly with laughter carried the projector out to the kitchen and turned on the lights.
She did not even bother to look at any of the rest of the stuff, but began putting it back in the boxes. She was very careful to put it all back just exactly like she found it. Twice as she was putting it away she burst out suddenly with great deep throaty roars of laughter. Something had happened to her. She was no longer angry, no longer outraged, and she didn’t feel violated anymore. In fact, she felt completely at peace with the world. She carried the stuff all back upstairs and put it all back very carefully on its shelf and replaced the chair exactly as it had been. Then she came back down to the kitchen and collected her theme papers she had to grade before tomorrow, and carried them up with her to do in bed. Then she remembered the fire and came back down and put another small log on it. While she was doing it she thought of the druggist and his wife and suddenly exploded into laughter.
In her bedroom, she took a scalding hot shower in the cabinet shower Bob had had put in, and rubbed herself down vigorously with a kind of narcissistic pleasure and masochistic enjoyment. Only when she was safely tucked in bed with the themes, her arms and thighs still quivering with the nervous tension she had been subject to, and the muscular exhaustion of the laughter, did the fear hit her. The fear that Wally might have come; the fear that Bob might have come home early; the fear that the druggist or his wife might have seen the beam from the projector. It would have been very easy for her to get caught. It was an insane thing to do. But then the picture of them, the druggist and his little wife, scurrying along the sidewalk, made her burst out into another healthy roar of laughter.
Anyway, half of her had known all along that nothing would happen, that she would not get caught. She had known Wally wasn’t coming, she had known Bob would not come home early. Just the same, she promised herself not to ever do anything outlandish like that again. What on earth had ever made her do it? she thought with a sudden stab of fright, and embarrassment at herself made her flush.
She had to read late on the papers. It was after one o’clock before she finished them, so she was still awake at twelve when Bob came in, tiptoeing a little unevenly up the stairs to his room.
Bob had been right about Wally after all, she thought. He hadn’t come. She wondered what had kept him from it? An attempted seduction of Dawn Hirsh, undoubtedly.
Chapter 25
WALLY DENNIS, Wally French Dennis, had fully intended to go over to Gwen’s that night when he called her earlier. But it just hadn’t worked out that way. It really didn’t matter much anyway. And Gwen wouldn’t mind.
Being as this was Thursday, he had had no classes under Gwen. And when just after noon, he finished rewriting the last few pages of the two chapters she had marked for him, his first reaction was a feeling that he wanted her to read them and brag on them. And so he thought of calling her. But instead, he went downstairs in the big house and out to the kitchen and made himself a thick ham sandwich and got a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. He had just recently scored a TD over his mom’s team in the matter of keeping beer in the refrigerator. His mom’s team consisted of his mom and Mrs Mertz the cleaning woman, who was a Holy Roller. Both were dead set against beer in the refrigerator. Finally, taking the bull by the horns so to speak, he had bought a dozen bottles of Schlitz and without saying anything just put them in the refrigerator, where his mom would later discover them.
“Wallace!” she had said. He had been sitting in the front room, reading. “Wallace, what’s this beer doing in my icebox?”
“I put it there,” he said coldly, and pretended to go on reading.
“In my icebox?”
“I can’t afford to buy an icebox,” he had said, turning the page.
Standing in the hall, behind him, she had hesitated—just a fraction—and he knew he had won. It was the coldness.
“But whatever for?” she had said.
“To keep it cold,” he said. “What would you think?”
“Mrs Mertz will see it there,” his mom said.
“She’ll probably see me drinking it, too,” Wally said.
“I don’t like to think of my boy drinking beer,” she said, but there wasn’t much force in it.
“I’m going to drink it anyway,” he said and turned another page.
“Well . . .” she said, and let it dwindle off, thereby offering him a chance to say something else to her, something that would ease her defeat and his triumph. But he had ignored it, and coldly gone on reading in silence, and after a moment she had gone on off. The beer stayed. Some time ago he had deduced that whenever he showed pity or kindness to his mom, it invariably wound up losing him the victory he had already won.
Eating the ham sandwich and drinking the beer alone in the kitchen, Wally thought with satisfaction that he was beginning to learn how to handle her. This was the first real major triumph he had ever won over her. And it was all in the coldness, when you analyzed it. Somehow or other in the past year—since he had returned from Florida—the balance of power had changed over from her to him, although he was still only twenty. It was all in the coldness, and because she did not want him to leave her. He had sensed the change, but up until the Battle of the Beers had not known how to take advantage of it. Mrs Mertz’s day was Tuesdays, and the next time she had come, he had made a point of drinking a beer openly at lunch. The little wizen-faced old shrew hadn’t dared to say anything. His mom had not, either.
She was gone now, off to some luncheon meeting somewhere. She and Dawn’s mother were on some kind of committee together again, like the Red Cross, or maybe the Xmas Baskets for the Poor committee. Probably that one was it. You never knew. They were on so damned many.
Wally reached into the center of the kitchen table where there was a lazy susan and pulled forth a narrow folder which he kept there and opened it up and began poring through it. He liked having the house to himself. The folder was the catalog of W D Randall, Jr of Orlando, Florida, maker of Randall Made Knives. Wally kept it there on the table where he could look through it whenever he wanted—usually in the mornings when he made his breakfast before he went to work at his typewriter.
Wally had only seen one Randall knife in his lifetime, and this one was a constant source of chagrin to him. He had gone to Florida in the beginning with Steve Bennett from Parkman, who had been a year ahead of him in high school, to work around the resort beaches of St Petersburg and Tampa. Steve had been there the year before and knew people and had come home and was going back. They had stayed five months the time Wally was with him and Steve had since gone back again. It was before Wally had definitely decided to be a writer and was doing nothing but playing his trombone in some dance bands around home and was getting bored with that. They had worked around Tampa and The Cigar City until they ran into a guy who owned his own tarpon boat and was fitting out to go down to Venice-Nokomis in March and had hired them both as hands but only for the duration of the tarpon-tourist season. It was at Venice that he first saw the knife. It was in a decrepit little drugstore where he and Steve had gone looking for sheath knives to use on the boat. The minute you held it in your hand, Wally thought again, you knew it was a real work of art. However, the old man at the drugstore asked seventeen dollars for it. He did not know where it had come from. It had been in the store when he acquired it. And he only knew vaguely that some man in Orlando named Randall made a few knives like this and sold them. Wally had wanted it so bad he could hardly stand it, but both of them were so short of money that he knew they could not afford it. In the end, Steve bought it for f
ourteen, haggling the old man down, and Wally had bought a cheap one. It was only after getting home that he had seen a tiny ad in the back pages of a sporting magazine and written for the catalog.
Wally still could not think about Steve and the knife—and his own damned lack of courage that had kept him from buying it—without getting so frustrated his spine twitched, and he thought about it every time he looked at the Randall catalog. There were nine or ten different models in the catalog and Wally had studied them all, giving a great deal of careful thought to which one he would eventually buy. What he would have liked was to own one of each, but that was out of the question. Even one, with the way finances were here at home, was out of the question, now. But when he could afford the money, he knew which one he was going to buy. The one he had decided on was the Randall #1 All-Purpose Fighting Knife, with the double hilt, the eight-inch blade, staghorn handle, and the butt cap drilled for a wrist thong.
This might not seem such a good selection at first glance, but the way he reasoned it was this: The #1, while basically a combat knife, could also be used as a camping knife—and even as a general purpose boat knife, if you were extra careful with it around salt water. That was the reason for the stag handle, which would stand up much better around salt water than a laminated leather one; in case he ever went back to sea. And, of course, this way, he would have a combat knife if the Army ever got him. So far, he had been let off the draft because of a bad ear and his mother, but he was too shrewd to expect to stay out of the Army forever.