“And now how about leaving Jack the Ripper to the hangman, and kissing your husband good-bye?” He waited for her.
She smiled quickly and stood up and kissed him. She was a nice girl, Walter had been nice when she married him, and she really kissed him, wanting to, not hurrying. But wondering, as always, how anybody with five functioning senses could put out the delicious tastes and smells of breakfast—ice-cold grapefruit, just the perfume from its peel a good-morning in any language; and coffee, and toaster-fresh toast; and that friendly little waft of pansies—with a cigar. Then she re-reminded herself that Walter, poor boy, could barely smell at all, with his nasal trouble. He probably had no idea what a flower or a cigar—or he himself—smelled like.
“Why do you read the police stuff if it makes you as sick as that?” he asked impatiently, staring at her face as it separated from his.
“What? Oh.” She giggled companionably. “Well, here these characters are, in the same world we are, maybe right in the next block. I’m the nightmare type. If I try too hard not to think about something it haunts me. So I heroically catch Jack’s eye—” she glanced at the picture captioned this time, youth strangles blonde on park bench, “—and I try to understand why he—rips. Would you call my effort Social-Consciousness-for, or Inoculation-against?”
“Good Lord, we going to have mental back-bends now? Okay, play your games, it’s your funeral.”
He was gone, coughing.
So he was annoyed at her calisthenics; she’d been afraid of that, a man who couldn’t touch his knees, let alone the floor. She made as little of her exercises as she could, but there isn’t much privacy, you soon discover, in a two-room apartment. Every night and morning she touched the floor and reached for the ceiling ten times, and did a shoulder rotation to keep from getting one of those dowager humps on the back of her neck. But mostly exercising just made her feel good; loose, free. She’d had a horror, she admitted to Walter, from childhood, when her Aunt Ida lived with them, of ever getting fat and having to wear one of those concrete foundation garments. She hated stockings even; garters, fitted coats, tight slacks; clothes stifled her. What she wished she’d been born, she decided now, was a squirrel; they moved quicker than you could think, and had that delightful dispensation against gravity— She would have liked to tell Walter that, once. Now of course it would be unkind.
She emptied her coffee cup and poured herself some hot, and shed her mules and shifted sideways until she could rest her bare heels on the window sill and be sunning her shins while she finished the paper. She enjoyed her legs.
The sun was just right. But after a moment she put the paper down, thoughtfully. The defiant, very young man in the picture. His name wasn’t Jack, it was Milton. Imagine naming a baby Milton and then seeing his picture in the paper like this, on a morning as soft as a day in June in the English country. Milton. Paradise Lost. An English family, torn bewildered from their paradise, their beautiful Sussex countryside, to move to sooty, slap-bang New York. The father probably escaping from some sort of trouble; perhaps he hadn’t even told them, so they never did see any reason. And they never got over being homesick, of course; the little boy lonely, made fun of at school for his foreign way of talking, and then in high school still alone; never enough money to take an American girl out properly. When he saw this girl all pink-and-white skinned and fair haired, like an English girl, like those Anglos that someone in history mistook for angels—of course, he didn’t mean to hurt her. Not at first. Not till she screamed, like a stupid little fool.
—For heaven’s sake, I am balmy. She laughed, but uneasily, and stared with something suddenly much stronger than uneasiness at her hands. They were shaking. Wet.
I’ve got to stop going into people this way, she thought sharply.
For although what she had told Walter had once been all there was to it, twice lately, without any warning, something had happened.
The first time might possibly have been only a hysterical reaction of sympathetic shock, since nobody else had appeared to notice anything odd. A terrified boy was being hustled by an officer at one elbow and a policewoman, from her cast-iron facade, at the other, along East Fiftieth Street. “I was waiting for her, I sure never thought she’d rat!” he muttered, stunned and half-sobbing, his sad dark eyes sweeping east and west despairingly for help. But there were only shoppers like herself, the Safe people; the enemy. He couldn’t bear it; suddenly he had given a jerk with both elbows—and she, Lynne Harris, had found herself running like a thief, dodging down a stairway into a Chinese laundry.
It was over in seconds. She had apologized for mistaking the address, taken a taxi home, poured herself a drink; and been afraid to drink it. And afraid—why on earth?—to tell Walter.
But last week in that bus there were plenty of corroborating witnesses. An appalling woman in a large-flowered chemise-type garment was clambering fatly into a Sixth Avenue bus with a crammed shopping bag and an umbrella, yanking and slapping at a scrawny desperate child. It was outrageous that such a woman was permitted by law to have, for all practical purposes to own, a helpless child. But then she, Lynne, really saw the woman’s face, how deadly tired she was, probably always was. (Her poor feet!) And ugly, too fat to buy even a hideous housedress ready-made, they don’t come that monstrous. How she must hate every other, less-burdened woman in that bus—Lynne herself, she realized with a flash of chill, most of all! And when the woman stumbled and the conductor, himself worn down pretty well to the primitive by five o’clock, bawled her out for blocking the door, she let out a kind of animal squeal.
But it was Lynne Harris who felt herself swearing, in a voice she’d never heard before, “Just you shut your God-damned mouth and gimme my change!”
Then she was staring around her as astonished as the rest of the passengers. “I—did somebody back here—?” she asked in her own soft voice, of the man beside her. But he only looked embarrassed, and that busful of eyes, every pair of them focused on her, told her.
She had left the bus at the next stop, and when she got home, she was sick. She knew that for however brief a moment there, she actually was that horrible woman. So, logically—what an unthinkable idea!—that woman was Lynne Harris?
Shuddering, she had looked up the number of a psychiatrist whose name she remembered, and made emergency note of it in plain sight on the telephone. All right, think this thing through. Right now.
Surely to try to learn how others—what used to be called the Other Half—live and feel, was necessary these days, with no more halves about it, just one big mishmash. But completely to empty your own private mind, practically inviting somebody else to invade it? That wasn’t so smart, that could be dangerous. Better go easy at first, mentally as well as physically. That last she had learned the hard way, by overdoing her exercises the very first day; every muscle howled all night.
Well, anything you’re doing of your own volition you can simply stop doing, when you find yourself heading for trouble, and that’s that. Although—exactly how do you know when you’ve reached the point of no return? With no uninhibited muscles to warn you, how can you tell until the very event itself; the disconnecting, the catastrophe?
She sat arrested, then put down her untouched coffee slowly.
You can’t tell.
So that was why people went to psychiatrists. To learn when. First they’d just feel a suspicion of oddity in themselves. Then, all at once, one day there it would be like a hard lump, the definite, increasing fear. Because the oddity itself was increasing. Maybe an ordinary doctor could tell you the moment to backtrack. And how to. Surely you could backtrack mentally, couldn’t you?
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course you can, you can do anything if you put your mind to it,” she said aloud with impatience, and slammed a slice of bread into the toaster, and intended to eat it and like it. Look what they used to say about strokes, that the third one was always fatal. That old wives’ tale was good and exploded; everybody has lots of littl
e hardly-noticed strokes as they get older. Yes. But bad ones? Three. Funny, maybe not so funny, how that number three, like seven, did seem to persist. It was twice now that she had—face it, gone out of control. Someone else had slipped in and momentarily but completely taken over. Twice. The next time would be the third.
She snapped off the toaster, deserting the bread in it.
But what could she tell a psychiatrist that he wouldn’t smile away as easily as Walter did, and advise her, probably in Walter’s own words, to leave Jack the Ripper to the hangman? Especially on an English-garden morning like this. No, the thing to do was buy a new hat and ride out to the Cloisters and walk around in all those flowers, and let the blue of the river and the sky straighten you out. The color blue was the best doctor in the world; she had long ago discovered that. She liked wearing blue; even looking into the blue of her own eyes in the mirror could always steady her.
Always could before.
She called that number and made an appointment for the following afternoon, and came back from the phone and sat at the sunny window, drinking cold coffee.
She dressed and did some shopping, but the afternoon turned hot, too hot to go anywhere even in a new hat. (She had needed that hat, it was just more fun to let yourself feel extravagant.) Home again, she made an aspic salad and got it in the refrigerator, and took a shower.
Walter slumped in, beet-red in the face, his collar mercifully melted down, hands and feet swollen; he wore high shoes, as heavy men have to, he had explained shortly, to support their ankles, as she might have figured out for herself if she was so interested.
She thought, if he would only bend somewhere, or unbend; relax, take something off. But Walter always just washed his hands. He said again—when she again insisted that she wouldn’t mind a soppy shirt on him, or undershirt, or nothing at all—that undressing was as much work as dressing; just let him alone, for God’s sake. He mixed a pitcher of martinis and waited, with the unopened evening paper and his cigar, for dinner.
After dinner, an electrical storm spoiling television, he buried himself in his big hot leather chair with his cigar. and tried, she could tell, to keep awake. Melting his life away—Walter’s life, she thought with a surge of the old feeling for the Walter she remembered, who would have been out there in the cool rain this minute, himself quicksilver, dragging her by the hand, laughing at her wet hair and face, laughing at the rain. Laughing.
And Walter wasn’t dumb. Somewhere deep inside those layers of fat and years—and how did she know what else, what disappointments, what frustrating limitations?—the kernel, Walter, must really see himself as he was now. And really hate himself. And wish to God he could backtrack. And know he couldn’t.
She saw that his embedded eyes were still open, watching her, and pityingly she knew their effect of toadlike malevolence for inarticulate helplessness.
“Oh, darling!” she breathed, her heart one agony for him.
But the words caught, strangled. She put her hand to her throat and drew it away as from something obscene. Her hands flew together so wildly that she dropped—she must have been holding—
God in heaven.
She dropped her cigar.
And looking, knew she couldn’t pick it up, that she couldn’t bend that far, from this deep-seated chair to where a cigar butt lay on the floor between her two brown, tight-laced shoes.
She felt the scream tearing up through her whole body, but it too caught and was lost in a paroxysm of coughing.
“Undo your collar, dear, I’ll get you a glass of water!” swiftly, kindly, smugly offered the slim girl from over by the window where she had been standing, in her own cool blue dress, who now—
For a second her startled hand lay, quieting, against strange leather, before it reached for a fresh cigar.
A Matter of Ethics
CAROLYN THOMAS
Although Trinidadians, native or transplanted, grow bored with hearing their island described as the Crossroads of the Caribbean, there remains enough truth in the cliché to keep it going. Sooner or later, it seems, everybody you’ve ever known is apt to turn up in Trinidad. This is especially true of the Queen’s Park Hotel in Port of Spain, where I encountered Barton Wentworth again after the long years.
It was a sweltering afternoon in mid-May, and the cocktail lounge at the Queen’s Park is air-conditioned. As a medical man, I am aware that there are certain objections to sudden, extreme changes of temperature, but as a mere sweaty human being the vision of a rum punch, slowly sipped in delectable coolness, was irresistible.
Moreover, I told myself virtuously, Ellen, my secretary and girl-of-all-work, was looking drawn and pallid from the heat and from having transcribed notes since early morning. She deserved a refresher. In any case, we weren’t going to finish the book that day or even the next. One of the pleasant things about having an independent income is the release from pressures.
While we waited for our punches, I glanced briefly at our reflections in one of the mirrors paneling the big room. I saw myself, a man of fifty-four, with smooth brown hair flecked by gray, with deep-set gray eyes that held few illusions and a high-cheekboned, almost ascetic face.
Although I am only a respectably average five feet ten, I looked very tall beside Ellen, who is a tiny little thing, barely five feet and slim. Just twenty-two and fresh out of business college, she has curly dark hair, and her face with its intelligent brown eyes has an elfin quality, piquant rather than pretty. But she looks pretty when she smiles, for her smile is an exceptionally sweet one. She has, as is so common in the West Indies, just a touch of the tar brush, although I wouldn’t have guessed it if she hadn’t told me.
We might, I thought, from the disparity in our ages, have been taken for father and daughter. And I was aware of a fleeting pang at the thought, not because of my advanced years, which don’t oppress me unduly, but because I have never had a daughter and I would have liked one. For that matter, I will say, at the risk of inspiring bawdy remarks, that I take a fatherly interest in Ellen. She is a bright girl and a hard worker, and I admire her determination to lift herself above an unfortunate home situation. I also like her young man, Leon, who is studying to become an architect. He is an extremely handsome lad, no darker than many of the tourists off cruise ships, and completely devoted to Ellen.
Despite what I have said about people turning up in Trinidad, I was startled when, midway through our drinks, I glimpsed Barton Wentworth at a table not far from ours. Perhaps instead of startled, I should say shaken. I had known Wentworth fairly well at one time, and seeing him reminded me of events I preferred not to dwell upon.
He was with a woman, naturally—nobody I knew—and I observed that his technique had, if anything, improved with the years. Ten years it would have been, and they had dealt kindly with him. He was eight years my junior, of course, but if there was any gray in his thick black hair I couldn’t see it. Nor could I detect marks of age or dissipation on his bronzed face. It wasn’t an especially handsome face, and I had often puzzled over what made Bart Wentworth so undeniably attractive to women. It must have been a kind of animal vitality that emanated from him and, possibly, his own conviction that he was irresistible. He was a big man—six feet two—and brawny, but he thought too much of his body to allow it to become fat. I wondered whether he still took cold showers and hiked five miles before breakfast and gobbled vitamins by the handful.
He may have felt my gaze, for, while I was debating whether to get up and leave without speaking, he glanced our way. The years must not have changed me too much either, physically, because his recognition was immediate. And following recognition, just for a second, an odd expression crossed his face. It might have been doubt, if one could imagine Bart Wentworth’s ever being unsure of himself; it could have been apprehension, except that would have been beneath his manly vigor and he knew of no reason to fear me. Whatever it was, the expression vanished almost at once to be replaced by a genial smile. We were, I knew, in for it now
and I slowly got to my feet as he came toward me, his hand outstretched.
“Heffner! Paul Heffner! Well, I’ll be damned! If you’ll pardon the expression, imagine meeting you here!”
“Hello, Bart,” I said, shaking his hand as briefly as possible.
He still took a childish glee in crushing one’s fingers in his grip, and his sheer looming bulk still made me feel dwarfed when I stood beside him.
I forced cordiality into my voice as I presented him to Ellen, adding, “Bart is the Barton Wentworth whose byline you’ve seen in the paper. Pretty widely syndicated now, aren’t you, Bart?”
Ellen’s eyes grew round with respect, which spurred him to greater heights of good fellowship.
“Sure am,” he agreed. “I’ve just been in Venezuela on a yarn. Aren’t they always having a hell of a time about something? So then I got this brilliant thought of stopping here a few days—maybe get a story on how the new West Indies Federation is panning out. Say, what are you doing here, Doc? Just playing around?” He grinned meaningly at Ellen.
“I live here. I’ve lived here about eight years now.”
“The hell you do! Knew you’d dropped out of sight, but didn’t think much about it—I’ve lost touch with so many of my old friends.”
I felt sure he was speaking the truth. Bart Wentworth would lose touch with his old friends as he mounted the ladder. I murmured something, wishing he would leave. Bart, however, had always had all the sensitivity of an ox.
“Say, this is great running into you, Heffner. I’ll bet you can give me a lot of tips on the local situation. I came in from Caracas this afternoon, and haven’t got to work yet.” He glanced quickly toward the table where his companion waited, impatiently, I imagined. And he added, with his old insinuating smile, “Not real work.”
The Lethal Sex Page 13