by Peter Straub
“I have to use the bathroom when we get to the library,” Nora said.
Dandy, he’d go with her, fact was, he had to bleed the lizard.
Dart parked across the street from a long stone building resembling the Supreme Court, complete with Supreme Court steps. In a wide marble hall on the second floor, the ladies’ room, like the reading room downstairs, was empty. Dick Dart lounged in behind her. Nora took one stall, he another. They left together, startling a pop-eyed, quavery woman whose mouth opened and closed like a molly’s until they had passed out of sight on the stairs.
Dart pushed Nora not ungently into a chair before a long wooden table, sat beside her, and opened a fat volume entitled Shorelands, Home to Genius. She sat beside him, now and then hearing tiny, metallic voices like the voices of insects. She was within the envelope, the envelope excluded feeling, she was fine. Dart grinned at his book. She pulled toward her Muses in Massachusetts by Quinn W. S. Dogbery, opened it, and read a random paragraph.
Due to the erratic nature of the artistic personality, any community like Shorelands will produce scandal. On the whole, Georgina Weatherall’s colony of gifted personages ticked peacefully along, producing decade after decade of significant work. Yet problems did arise. There are those who would list the “strange” disappearance of the minor poet Katherine Mannheim among these, though the present writer is not of their number. This young woman had alienated both staff and fellow guests during her brief residence. There can be no doubt that her hostess was resolved to issue her walking papers. Miss Mannheim, who did not wish to face an humiliating expulsion, departed in a fashion calculated to cause a maximum of confusion.
Shorelands’ true scandals, as we might expect, are very different in nature.
Dart thumped two telephone directories on the table and patted her on the back.
Perhaps most distressing to Georgina Weatherall was the disappearance, not of a troublesome young malcontent, but of a favorite work of art from the dining room, a drawing by the Symbolist Odilon Redon of a strapping female nude with the head of a hawk upon her shoulders. There can be no doubt that Georgina’s desire for the Redon drawing had its origin in its title, identical to that of a central Shorelands tradition. The works in the dining room were typically of a more traditional nature. The Redon drawing, measuring some eight by ten inches, hung far up on a wall filled with more notable works. A guest with a particular interest in Redon first noted its absence in 1939. An immediate search of the rooms and cottages yielded no result. Georgina Weatherall remarked several times to guests during the succeeding years that it would not surprise her to discover that Miss Mannheim had absconded with it during her “midnight flit,” and while the matter may never be resolved, it may be not uncharitable to acknowledge that the drawing did then and does now possess considerable monetary value.
Dart said, “Out of here,” gripped Nora’s arm, and pulled her outside into the heat and light.
They made three trips to get all the bags and packages into the hotel.
“Clark, my old friend, could you spare a moment to help us convey these essentials up to our charming room?”
Clark licked his lips. “Whatever.” He leaned into the office behind him and said something inaudible to whoever was in there. Then he emerged through the lobby door, glanced at Dart, and moved toward the suitcases. He was shorter than he had seemed behind the counter, four or five inches over five feet.
“I’ll get the suitcases,” Dart said. “Help my wife.”
“Whatever.” Clark picked up as many bags as he could. Nora took up three others, leaving one on the floor. Clark looked up at Dart, who smiled, opened his mouth, and chopped his teeth together. The boy glanced at Nora, and bent over, bit down on the twine handles of the remaining bag, and jerked it upward.
The three of them crowded into the elevator.
“I’m interested in your use of the word ‘whatever,’ ” Dart said. “Mean something, or merely verbal static?”
The boy grunted and clutched his armful of bags. Sweat ran down his forehead.
“Is it as rude as it sounds? Sort of a hint that the person who says ‘Whatever’ feels a mild disdain for the other party. Is that accurate, or am I being paranoid?”
Clark shook his head.
“A great relief, Clark.”
The elevator reached the third floor, and Dart led them down the hall. “Clark, old dear, deposit those shopping bags in front of the closet and hang the suit bags.”
Dart motioned Nora through the door. Clark bent over to deposit on the floor the bag he held with his teeth, exhaled a shaking breath, and lowered the shopping bags. He succeeded in getting the hanger wires over the rail in the closet and backed out into the corridor.
Dart locked the door and came into the room to stand smiling in front of her. Nora drew up her knees and hunched her back. He moved away, and she looked up. He was selecting a length of rope. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
She kicked off her shoes. Her fingers, which did not have to be told what to do, began unbuttoning her shirt. Dart went to the bathroom for the pharmacy bag and carried it to the table as she undressed. One by one, he took the items out of the bag and arranged them on the table. When everything had been satisfactorily aligned, he took the scissors from their plastic case and beckoned Nora into the bathroom.
“Straddle the toilet,” he said. Quivering, Nora positioned herself over the bowl, and Dick Dart hummed to himself as he cut off most of her pubic hair and flushed it away.
“Okay,” he said, moved her backwards like a mannequin, turned her around, planted a hand between her shoulder blades, and urged her back into the bedroom, where he tied her hands behind her back and taped her mouth shut.
She looked up at the flat white ceiling. Dart hiked himself up onto the bed. “It’s not going to be as bad this time, see?” She turned her head to see him brandishing a tube of K-Y.
It was slightly less painful than before, but every bit as bad.
50
“KEEP YOUR HEAD upright. You have to cooperate with me, or you’ll end up looking like a ragamuffin.” Bath cream scented the air in the bathroom, and her hair, still wet, hung straight and flat. Dart lowered his head alongside hers so that the mirror framed their faces. “Tell me what you see.”
Nora saw a terrorized version of herself with shocked eyes, parchment skin, and wet hair, posing with a hyena. “Us.”
“I see a couple of fine desperadoes,” said the hyena in the mirror. “You needed me to open your eyes, and along I came. Wasn’t any accident, was it?”
“I don’t know what it was, but—”
Before she could add I wish it had never happened, the eyes in the mirror charged with an illumination. “Used to do this with hubby dear, didn’t you? Put your heads together and looked at yourselves in the mirror. I know why, too.”
She did not have to tell him he was right” he already knew that. “Why?”
“Until now, I hadn’t seen how much you and Davey resemble each other. Bet there’s a nice little erotic charge in that—probably helped Davey get it up. Like making it with who you’d be if you were the opposite sex. But Davey isn’t your male self. The biggest risk Davey-poo ever took was getting into bed with Natalie Weil, and the only reason he did that was his old man made him so insecure about his manhood that he had to prove he could use it.”
Nora clamped her mouth against agreeing, but agree she did.
“I’m your real male self. Only difference is, I’m more evolved. Which means that eventually we are going to have tremendous sex.”
The hyena surged into his face once more. “In fact, Nora-boo, didn’t you have a bit of an orgasm that time?”
“Maybe,” she said, thinking it was what he wanted to hear.
He slapped her hard enough to snap her head back. A broad, hand-shaped red mark emerged on her cheek. “I know you didn’t come, and so do you. Goddamn it, when I make you come, they’ll hear you howling in the next county. S
hit.”
He slammed his fist against the bathroom door, then turned around and pointed at her face in the mirror. “I bust you out of jail, I buy you clothes, I’m going to give you the best haircut you ever had in your life, after that I’m going to do what your mother should have done and teach you about makeup, and you lie to me?”
She trembled.
“I have to keep remembering what women are like. No matter how much a man does for them, they stab you in the back first chance they get.”
“I shouldn’t have lied,” she said.
“Forget it. Just don’t do it again unless you want to hold your guts in your hands.” He wiped his face with a towel, then draped it over her shoulders. “Stop shaking.”
Nora’s eyes were closed, and in some world where the demons did not exist she felt a comb running through her hair. “This is going to be an inch or two shorter all over, but it’ll look completely different. For one thing, I cut hair a lot better than the last guy who did this. Also, I know how you ought to look, and you don’t have the faintest idea. It’s too bad we have to turn you into a blonde, but that’ll be okay too, believe me. You’ll look ten years younger.”
He positioned her head and started cutting with small, precise movements of the scissors. Dark hair fell onto the towel and drifted down to her breasts. He said, “Hold still. I’ll get the hair off you later.” Wisps of hair landed on her forearms, her stomach, her back. Dart was humming “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” “Good hair,” he said. “Nice full texture, good body.”
She opened her eyes and beheld exactly what he had promised, the best cut of her life. It was too bad that she should be given such a cut when she was a corpse being prepared for the coffin. His hands flew about her head, fluffing, cutting.
“Pretty good, if I do say so myself.” He snapped the towel away from her shoulders and brushed hair from her body. “Well?”
Nora snatched the towel and wrapped it around her chest. Dart grinned at her in the mirror. She ran her fingers through her short, lively hair and watched it fall perfectly back into place. Apart from the fading red mark on her cheek, the only problem with the woman in the mirror was that beneath the cap of beautifully cut hair her face was dead.
Dart opened the box of hair coloring and removed a white plastic bottle with a nozzle and a cylinder of amber liquid. He snipped off the tip of the nozzle. “You won’t be as blond as the picture, but you’ll be blond, anyhow.” He wiggled his hands into the transparent plastic gloves from the inner side of the instruction sheet. After pouring in the amber liquid, Dart shook the bottle.
“Bend forward.” She leaned over the sink, and Dart squeezed golden liquid into her hair and worked it in with his fingers. “That’s it for twenty-five minutes.” He looked at his watch. “Sit here so I can use the mirror.” She dragged her chair in front of her as she backed toward the toilet.
Dart leaned forward and began cutting his own hair. He did a better job with the back of his head than Nora had expected, missing only a few sections where long hair fanned over the rest. “How’s it look?”
“Fine.”
“In the back?”
“Fine.”
He snorted. “Guess that means close enough for jazz.” He opened the box of black hair color and mixed the ingredients. “I’m going to have to close my eyes, so I want you to put your hand on me. If you take it off, I’ll smash your head open on the bathtub.”
“Put my hand where?”
“Grab anything you like.”
She hitched herself forward and, shivering with revulsion, placed her hand on his hip.
Dart squeezed the fluid into his hair. “I wish I were a woman, so I could have me do this for myself. Without doing it like this, I mean.”
“You wish you were a woman,” Nora said.
He stopped massaging the lather into his hair. “I didn’t say that.”
Goose bumps rose on Nora’s arms.
“I didn’t say I wanted to be a woman. That’s not what I said.”
“No.”
Violence congealed about Dart’s heavy body and sparkled in the air. He lowered his hands and faced her.
“I mean, I would enjoy having these things done to me by me. The women who get my special treatment are extremely lucky people. I think it would be nice to be pampered, like I pamper you. Anything strange about that?”
“No,” she said.
He turned back to the sink and shot her a simmering glance. She settled her hand on his hip. “You’re tied down by the crappy little conventions that inhibit melon-heads like your husband. The truth is, there are two kinds of people, sheep and wolves. If anyone should understand this, it’s you.”
He peeled off the smeary gloves. “That’s that.” She lowered her hand and looked at the door. “Nope, we’re staying in here. Sit on the side of the tub.”
Nora moved. Dart frowned, tossed the gloves into the basket, checked himself in the mirror, and sat on the toilet. “We have some time to kill. Ask me something, and try not to make it too stupid.”
She tried to think of a question that would not infuriate him. “I was wondering why you live in the Harbor Arms.”
He held up his finger like an exclamation point. “Very good! First of all, my parents will never come there—the place gives them hives. Secondly, nobody gives a shit what you do.” For fifteen minutes, he described the advantages of living in a place where the fellow residents willingly supplied drugs, sex, and gossip—the members of the Yacht Club universally assumed that their waiters and busboys, Dart’s confidants, chose not to overhear their private conversations.
If she were alive, Nora thought, most of what she would feel about this vain, destructive, self-important man would be contempt. Then she realized that what she was now feeling actually was contempt. Maybe she was not entirely dead after all.
“Anyhow,” Dart said, “time to wash that gunk out of your hair and do the conditioner.”
“I’d like to do it by myself.”
He held up his hands. “Fine. Use a little warm water, lather up, and rinse. Then take that tube on the side of the sink and massage the whole thing into your hair. After two minutes we’ll rinse it out.”
Nora worked her fingers through her hair until a cap of white foam appeared, then lowered her head beneath the tap and washed it away.
“Amazing,” Dart said.
Nora looked up.
A drowned sixteen-year-old blonde stared at her from the other side of the mirror. Short, wet hair only slightly darker than Natalie Weil’s lay flat against her head.
“I didn’t think it’d be that good,” Dart said. “Don’t forget the conditioner.”
Nora took her eyes from the drowned girl’s and unscrewed the cap, then faced the strange girl again and squeezed the contents of the tube over the top of her head in a long, looping line. Together she and the girl worked their fingers through their hair.
“My turn.” Soon a black-haired Dick Dart was grinning at his image in the mirror. “Should have done this years ago. Don’t you think I look great?”
A greasy crow’s wing flattened over his head. Stray feathers adhered to his temples and forehead.
“Great,” she said.
He pointed at the sink, and she came forward to rinse out the conditioner.
“Okay, next step.” Dart pulled her toward the bedroom and sat her at the table. “Watch what I’m doing so you’ll be able to do it for yourself, later.” He flipped open a mirrored case and handed it to her. He smoothed a dab of makeup across her cheekbones and feathered it down her cheeks, stroked mascara into her eyelashes, brushed lipstick onto her mouth. “When we’re all done, I want you to clean up your nails and cuticles and put on that polish. I suppose you have done that before?”
“Of course.” She could not remember the last time she had applied nail polish.
“One last touch,” Dart said, putting a dime-sized dab of the sculpting spritz on his palm. Behind her, he began massaging her sca
lp. He combed, patted, combed, tugged at her hair. “Impress myself. Go in the bathroom and take a look.”
Nora slipped into her blue shirt.
“You won’t believe it.”
Nora stood in front of the mirror and lifted her eyes. A woman just beginning her real maturity, the second one, a woman who should have been selling expensive shampoo in television commercials, looked back at her. Her glowing gamine’s hair had been teased into artful ridges and peaks. She had perfect skin, a handsome mouth, and long, striking eyes. She was what the lacquered twenty-somethings who lived on mineral water from Waldbaum’s wanted to be when they grew up. For some reason, this woman wore Nora’s favorite blue shirt.
Nora moved her face to within three inches of the mirror. There, lurking beneath the blond woman’s mask, she saw herself. Then she pulled back and disappeared beneath the mask. A howl of rage came from the bedroom.
Dick Dart was seated at the table with the newspaper he had taken from the lounge. The bottle of Cover Girl Clean stood open on the bottom half of the paper, and he was jabbing the brush at a story, spattering the paper with tan flecks. “Know what these idiots are saying?” He turned toward her a face from a trick photograph, its left half smoothed into a younger, unlined version of the right. “I should sue the bastards.”
Nora went past the row of shopping bags outside the closets. “What’s wrong?”
“The Times, that’s what. They got everything wrong, they fouled up in every possible way.”
She sat on the bed.
“Know what you are, according to this rag? A socialite. If you’re a socialite, I’m the Queen of Sheba. ‘To abet his escape, Dart seized a hostage, Westerholm socialite Nora Chancel, 49, wife of David Chancel, executive editor at Chancel House, and son of the current president and CEO of the prestigious publishing company, Alden Chancel. Neither David nor Alden Chancel could be reached for comment.’” He read this in a mincing, sarcastic drawl which made every word seem a preposterous lie.