I looked him in the eye, with the one I had left. “You see, Doc,” I said, “I’ve got everything to live for.”
The way I said it made him uneasy.
“Mr. Corliss, you’re not going to be exactly as good as new.
We can improve that face for yon by hooking a plastic eye in those muscles so that the eye will turn in its socket, but the two big scars will still show. You’ll limp for a few years and you will have to be very careful for the rest of your life, protecting that plate in your head from any sudden jars. No sports, you understand. Bridge is going to be your speed.”
“You’ve said this before, Doc.”
“I want to impress it on you. A man can’t go through what you went through and expect—”
“Doc, I don’t expect a thing. I was thrown through a shatterproof windshield and then the car rolled across me.”
He didn’t like me as a person. He loved me as a case. I made his mouth water. He had showed me to every doctor within a ten-mile radius. He was writing me up for some kind of medical journal. The before-and-after pictures were going to go in his scrapbook. But we always parted with him looking as though he wished I was healthy enough to hit in the mouth.
Pain to the average person is just that. Pain. Nothing else. A mashed finger or a bad headache. But when you have it a long time something else happens to it. It turns into something else. You live with it and get to know it. With me, it was a color. Green. Green is supposed to be restful. I would see it behind my eyes. Eye, I should say. I’d wake up in the night and look at the color. Dull dark green. That was good. That was above standard. That was more than you could expect. But there were the nights in the beginning when it was a hot, bright, harsh green, pulsating like a crazy living plant. That was when the night nurse was always there. During the first weeks she used the needle when it was bad, and later it was pills, which never worked as fast or as well.
One time it was that new green that they say you can see for two miles on a clear day. It stayed that way, they told me later, for four days. Something about those pinched nerves.
And one day I searched and searched and could find no green at all, even the dark, almost pleasant kind. I missed it. Believe me, I missed it.
I didn’t want them coming, and they sensed it and didn’t come any more. But I liked to have Connie come. I liked it when there was traction on the two arms and the leg and both legs felt dead and the bandages on my head covered all but my mouth and my right eye.
She came every day. She wept a little every time she came.
“Don’t cry, Connie.”
“I—I can’t help it, George.”
“I’m getting better, they keep telling me. So why are you crying?”
“It’s so awful to see you there like this.”
“Just think, Connie. I might be dead. Wouldn’t that be worse, Connie? Wouldn’t it? Or maybe you’d like that better.”
“What do you mean? What do you mean?”
“Then there wouldn’t be all this pain and suffering.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think I meant, Connie? What on earth could I have meant except that, dearest? I know that you love me very much. You’ve told me so often.”
“It’s hard to understand you, George, not seeing your face and all. Just your . . . eye. What you say just comes out . . . and it’s hard to know what you mean sometimes.” She always worked hard on that explanation. It meant a lot to her to get it right. Her knuckles always had a bone-white look while she talked to her loving husband.
Every time it was a lovely game. And I had all the time in between to plan the next visit.
“Connie, I hope you’re taking good care of the car.”
“But, George! It was a total loss.”
“Sorry, dearest. I keep forgetting. We’ll have to get a new one. But when we do you’ll help me see that it’s well taken care of.”
“Of course, George.”
There was a continuity about it. If I kept after her too hard she’d get suspicious. Then the fear would show in her eyes. I’d let her carry the fear around for a few visits and then I would drive it away.
“I’m so lucky to have a wife like you, Connie.”
“Thank you, George.”
“I know I’ve been acting strangely. But I haven’t the courage to do what I planned. I wanted to estrange you, to drive you away, so that you could find a new life with a whole man, not some smashed item like me.”
“Is that what you were doing?”
“Of course!”
“Oh, George! Darling, I thought—” A very abrupt stop.
“What did you think?”
“Well, that maybe the accident had . . . well, hurt your head in some way so that you were beginning to think I was to blame for the accident.” Then she laughed to show how silly that idea was. She flushed, too. I imagine she was considering her boldness to be the best defense, in addition to being rather fun because of the risk.
“You? Hey, I was alone in the car, remember?”
“You’ve always driven too fast.”
“Never again.”
At the end of the visiting period she would kiss me and go. Before the bandages came off my face she would press her lips to mine very sweetly. Loving little silver-blond Connie with those enormous gray eyes and that dainty figure.
After the bandages came off and there was just the patch on the eye she kissed hard, but not in passion. As though it was something she had to do hard and quick in order to do it at all.
After her fears had gone away and after, I guessed, she had told Louie that she had been wrong about thinking that I might have guessed, I would slowly bring her suspicions back to a boil.
I was giving Connie and Louie some exciting dates. Giving them something to talk about.
A good thing about carrying too much life insurance is that you sometimes have too much accident insurance along with it. And I had a lot. Complete coverage of all medical expenses plus thirty-five hundred consolation prize for the loss of the eye plus six hundred a month for complete disability until I could get back to my job. They said a full year from the time of discharge from the hospital.
To go home would give me more time for the game I was playing with them. But it was good in the hospital, too. I could lie there at night, and it was as if I had them fastened to a string, two puppets. When I yanked the string they jumped.
The books talk about having to live with guilt and how it can subtly change the relationship of lovers. But I was no body, firmly and safely planted away. I was between them. I wondered if she could taste my lips when she kissed Louie, and if he looked deep into her eyes and saw a hospital bed . . .
The nurse was something else. A tall, gawky girl, almost grotesquely angular and yet full of a strange grace. Miranda. She charged at the bed looking capable of tripping and falling over it, yet always her hands were light as moths. Her eyes were deep-set, smallish, a brilliant and Technicolor blue. She knew.
I saw it in the strange, wry amusement in her eyes.
Once she told me she knew. She cranked the bed up a little to rest tired muscles. She stood and folded her arms. I heard the starched rustle of the material. Her hair was a soft dusty black under the cap. Her mouth was wide and quite heavy.
“Delirium,” she said in her abrupt voice, “is usually dull.” She had a trick of starting a sentence boldly and then letting it fall away.
“I was delirious, I expect.”
“But not dull, George.” That was the tip. Up until that point it had been a most discreet and proper Mr. Corliss.
“Like living out a soap opera, Miranda?”
She shrugged. It was typical of her to shrug too hard, hiking her wide, thin shoulders almost up to her ears. “But no part in it for me, I would think.”
I watched her. There was nothing awkward in our silence.
“Delirium isn’t much to go on, Miranda. Not when there’s been a brain injury.”
“Perhaps th
e delirium is partly due to her. So sweet. She’s all tinkle and ice and teensy little gestures. Oh, she’s a one, that one. What mothers want their daughters to grow up to be—on the outside.”
“And the inside. Will you hazard a guess on the inside, Dr. Miranda?”
No more banter. She looked hard at me, and up through the little blue eyes welled the fanatic light. “Rotten,” she whispered. “Dead, soft rotten.” She turned and walked out with her lunging stride, a whisper of starch.
It made the game better. A new piece on the board, allowing more permutations and combinations.
Later that day I had my arm around her as I walked. She looked as though her back and shoulders would feel hard, slatted. She was a softness and a warmth. I took five steps away from the bed and four back to the wheelchair. Her lip was caught under her teeth and her breath came hard as though it were she who was making the effort.
The next day, dozing on the sun porch, I felt someone staring at me. I looked over and saw Miranda in the doorway. We looked at each other for an impossible time, the white antiseptic walls and the neat floral arrangements tilting and spinning away until we looked across a bottomless void at each other and there was nothing alive in creation except the wild blue of her eyes. When she turned and left, without speaking, the time weave was ripped across with a sound I could almost hear.
The young doctor and the absentminded old one came in one morning and told me that this was the day I would go home, that an ambulance was being provided, that Connie had been informed, that arrangements had been made for Nurse Wysner to live in for a time until Connie became accustomed to the necessary work.
“In a couple of months you’ll be ready for the eye work,” the young doctor said.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “We mustn’t forget that.”
He turned away, looking as though his mouth hurt him.
They didn’t use the siren, and it awakened in me a childish disappointment. It would be fitting to arrive with siren, that sound which in our neat world has replaced the night cough of the unknown beast.
When they rolled me out onto the asphalt of the drive I lifted my head and looked at the house. This was where the big amiable clown who sometimes looked a little like V. Johnson had lived. All the details of it were sharp and it looked unreal, a house seen in a movie. I knew that all things would now look that way. Two eyes give depth perception. One eye gives everything a two-dimensional flatness.
Miranda Wysner, blinding white in the sun, stood tall and straight, with a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. A smile no one else could see.
Connie trotted delicately back and forth between the wheeled cart and the side door, telling everybody to be careful, please, don’t bump him on anything, and her voice was like the mirrored wind chimes in a lost lake house of long ago.
Connie had moved into the guest room across the hall from the bedroom we had shared—or rather the bedroom she had shared with George A. Corliss, who died in such an unfortunate accident. They put me in the big double bed, and the Hollywood frame creaked in a well-remembered way and I was very tired and went to sleep almost immediately.
I dreamed I was laid out in that room with candles at head and feet and the smell of flowers and soft chanting. I awoke in the purple-gray dusk and there were flowers and a distant chanting but no candles. The chanting was a muted newscaster, his Airedale voice tamed by a half twist of the dial. There were the sharp yelps of neighborhood children at play, and for a moment I was a guy who had taken a nap. Just a nap. Get up, go down, kiss Connie, mix the drinks, check the stove to see what dinner might be.
But Miranda came in with her starchy rustle and bent over me and put her hand on my forehead. “Cool,” she said. “Probably a little subnormal.”
“We’re living in a subnormal household. Where are you?”
“The next room. Beyond the bath. With both doors open, I’ll hear you if you cry out in the night.”
Connie smells sweet and dainty and feminine. Miranda had her special scent. Long illness makes the senses acute. Miranda smelled of medicinal alcohol, antiseptic, and, underneath, a deep perfume that throbbed. It was probably against regulations. It had a musky jungle beat.
“Maybe I’ll just whimper.”
“I’ll hear that, too.” There was just enough light so that I could see her teeth flash white. “I told her not to try to talk to you until tomorrow. Excitement, you know.”
“Just like a county fair.”
“I’ll bring your tray.”
When I awoke in the morning, a fat rain, oyster colored, viscid, was coming down in straight lines. I could see it bouncing off the roof peak across the street. The bedside clock said three minutes of six. Hospital habits. In three minutes Miranda came striding in with a basin of warm water, glass of cold, toothbrush, comb.
“I’ve put the coffee on,” she said. I had finished breakfast and was shaving with an electric razor when Connie came in, her pink housecoat belted tightly around her child’s waist, her face all cute and vacant with sleep.
“Goodness, you people get up early!”
Miranda turned from the window. “Good morning, Mrs. Corliss.”
“Good morning, nurse. Welcome home, darling! Oh, welcome home!” She came over to the bed. Miranda watched stonily. Connie bent and gave me that quick, hard kiss. I got my hand around the back of her frail neck and prolonged it. When I released her she took a step backwards, her eyes wide, bringing her hand up as though to scrub her lips, not quite daring.
“Well!” she said unevenly.
At the end of the week, I made four full circuits of the room. At the end of two weeks I went downstairs, dressed for the first time. The clothes hung on me. The more independent I grew, the more coldness appeared in Connie’s manner toward Miranda.
At the end of the second week she brought it to a head, in Miranda’s presence.
“George, I think we can get along beautifully now without Nurse Wysner.”
“I’ll leave in the morning,” Miranda said. “I’ll pack tonight. That is, if you really feel you don’t need me, Mr. Corliss.”
I gave the words the proper emphasis. “I can handle everything myself,” I said.
“You mustn’t get too confident,” Miranda said.
“I know my own limitations,” I replied.
“You two talk as if I weren’t here to help,” Connie said with small-girl plaintiveness.
“I’m certain you’ll be a great help, Mrs. Corliss,” Miranda said, starting bluntly, sliding into her odd breathlessness at the end of the sentence.
“Then it’s settled,” Connie said brightly, clapping her hands once, a habit I had at one time found almost unbearably sweet . . .
In the middle of the night Miranda’s hand against my cheek awakened me. The bed stirred as she sat on it. The night was as black as a sealed coffin.
Her whisper had the same quality as her speaking voice. “You can’t do it alone, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever it is that you’ve been planning, my darling.”
“May I take this as a declaration of your great and undying passion?”
“See? You can’t hurt me that way. You can’t hurt me by trying to hurt me. That’s a sort of secret we have. We’ve said more things with a look than we can ever say with words.”
“I’m touched, deeply.”
Her nearness was more vital than any caress. “You’ve got to let me help. You’ve got to let me share.”
“Why?”
“Doing something and never having a sharing of it is bad. Then it’s all on the inside. We can talk, you know. Afterward.”
Nurse and patient, probing together a deep and desperate wound.
“But I have a way and you aren’t in it.”
“Then there must be a new way. Two can think better. You might forget something important.”
“You’re accepting the correctness of the decision, then?”
“Only because it’s yo
urs. I don’t matter. I’ve never had any strong feelings about right and wrong.”
“That’s a lie, Miranda.”
Hoarsely: “So it’s a lie! When you’ve seen the evil I’ve seen—”
“I’ll let you help on one condition, Miranda.”
“Anything.”
“We haven’t used the words yet. I want you to say the words we’ve been skirting so carefully. I want you to say them slowly. All the words. Now, what are you going to do?”
Her hands found my wrist and the moth touch was gone. Her nails dug in with a surprising force. “I am going to help you kill your wife and her lover.”
“Why?”
“Because they hurt you so badly, and it’s something you want to do.”
“But more than that. The other reason.”
“Because after it is done it will be something so strong between us that we’ll never be apart again.”
“Love, then?”
“No. Something stronger than that. Something more exciting.”
“You want half a man?”
“I’m strong enough for two. I knew it would be this way. Ever since that night I kept you from dying. You gave up that night. I sat and whispered in your ear why you had to live. Over and over. And you did.”
“It’s settled, then. Go in the morning. Be patient. I’ll come to you when I can.”
She left quickly, plunging towards the doorway, miraculously finding it in the blackness.
Strength slowly came back. My clothes began to fit again. Tone came back to the mended muscles. Connie stayed in the guest room. For a long time she seemed to be waiting, and when she saw that there would be no demands on her uxorial capacities, there seemed to be a relief in her. Once, when she was out, I went over her personal checks against the small income from her father. I checked back far enough to find out when it had started. They had been a little careless several months before my accident. Instead of cashing two of the checks, she had turned them over to her friend. The endorsements were a scrawled L. Palmer, with a self-conscious flowery squiggle under the name. I took those two checks. They were both for twenty-five.
Modern Masters of Noir Page 4