I didn’t hate either of them. I was cold—cold as any self-respecting corpse should be.
With the proceeds of the collision insurance I bought a good used car. I wasn’t cold about that. It frightened me. That was unexpected. I sat behind the wheel, and when I shut my eyes I could feel the car rolling, first sideways and then end over end. I opened my eyes quickly and the world returned to sanity. The first time I drove to the city, the sweat ran down from my armpits, soaking my shirt. I had the checks photostated on that first trip, front and back. I returned them to her file.
That night, at dinner, I put the next brick in the foundation. I looked across at Connie. “You’re mine, you know,” I said.
Little puzzled wrinkles appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Of course, dear. What brought that on?”
“I just was thinking. You know how you imagine things. I was imagining how I would react if you ever wanted to leave me. The answer is very simple. I’d never, never let you go.”
She smothered the quick alarm. “Why think of such a thing, George? Such an impossible thing!”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Say, the new car holds sixteen gallons of gas.”
The fork trembled in her hand. “What’s that got to do with—”
“Nothing, Connie. Don’t be so silly. I saw the conversation disturbed you, so in my own feeble way I was changing the subject.”
“Oh!”
“The steering seems pretty sound. I had it checked at the station. That Palmer boy seems to know his business.”
Vacant stare. “Palmer? Oh, Louie, the dark one.”
She was getting better at it. That was really a good effort. I thought it was too bad I couldn’t tell her just how good an effort it was. Then she spoiled it by being unable to finish the dinner she was eating with such appetite. That’s one thing about her that always amazed me. A tiny girl, yet almost rapacious about her food. Red lips eager and white teeth tearing and champing. Once upon a time it had been cute. Funny how little you can learn about a woman in seven years of marriage.
I had to make her see Louie. I had to give her a reason.
Over coffee I said, “I’ve been asking around.”
“About what, darling?” A shade too much casualness and disinterest.
“We could make a good deal on this house right now.”
The petulance showed immediately. “But, George! I love this house and this neighborhood. I don’t want to move.”
“I stopped in at the office. I told Mallory how the docs recommend I keep out in the air as much as possible. He hinted that they might be able to give me a traveling job, based in California. I’d cover eleven Western states, part promotion work, part digging up new talent for the list. I’d also do some coordination work with the movie agents. I’m to let him know.”
She looked as if somebody had hit her in the stomach. “But isn’t the job you had a better one? I mean, we could see that you got plenty of fresh air.”
“I don’t know if I’m too anxious to pick up this commuting treadmill again. I’m going to give it a lot of thought. We’d make a profit on the house. In the new job my trips would be so long that you would travel with me, naturally.”
“I do get a little carsick,” she said, the dread showing.
I laughed. “Say, remember in the hospital when I told you I was going to drive slow from then on?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Found out today I’ve got my nerve back. I kicked it up to seventy-five on Route Twenty-eight. The old reflexes seem pretty good.”
I watched and saw the speculative look dawn. She covered it by getting up to bring more coffee. But when she poured it into my cup, she spilled some in the saucer and didn’t seem to notice.
At a quarter to nine she said she was going for a walk. I knew that the station closed at nine. I yawned and said I might go to bed. She left. I waited five minutes and backed the car out. The station was six blocks away. I was curious to see how it was done. I took the parallel road, then turned left after six blocks and parked in the tree shadows. I could see the station. Connie walked by it, very slowly, silhouetted against the station floodlights. She continued on down the street. I turned around in a driveway, went back to the parallel road, sped down three blocks, and parked as before. Soon Connie went by, walking quickly now, high heels twinkling. I eased out after her.
Thirteen blocks from our house on April Lane she turned left. It was a cheap neighborhood. Midway in the second block was a green neon sign against a pale brick front: Unicorn—Bar and Grill. Beyond it was another sign. Ladies’ Entrance. She darted in there, reluctant to linger under the harsh green light.
I could remember the exact stage of pain that green light represented. Not the worst, but bad.
I went down the street, turned around, parked on the same side as the Unicorn, facing toward it. I was barely in time. A ‘40 Ford convertible parked across the street and Louie Palmer in jacket, open sports collar, hatless, walked across the street. He stopped in the full glare of green and lit a cigarette. He handled it in a thoroughly Bogart fashion, hand cupped completely around it, lowering it with calculated slowness after each drag. He looked up and down the street. He flipped it away, squared his shoulders, and went inside. After all, he was a desperate character. A real killer. The murder didn’t quite pan out, but what the hell. The intent was there. Louie was a real sharp apple, all wound up in a capital A affair, just like out of James M. Cain.
It would be nice to tell him that he was a sniveling little grease monkey preening himself over a tramp wife, a hired rooster with grease in his hair. But that was a pleasure I would have to forego.
I was in bed when she got home an hour later. I heard her in the bathroom. I wondered how radiant she looked.
Miranda lived alone in an efficiency apartment crowded into what had apparently been one of the bedrooms of a vast old Victorian house. To the left of the house was the parking lot for a supermarket. The street had been widened until the bottom step of the porch was a yard from the sidewalk.
She came down the street from the bus stop, lean legs in the white cotton stockings scissoring below the hem of the cheap coat.
She watched the sidewalk ahead of her and suddenly looked across the street directly into my eyes and stopped. It did not seem strange that she should have that utter awareness.
She waited and I walked across to her. The small blue eyes narrowed just a bit. Her heavy lips were laid evenly together. She wore no lipstick, and the strange thinness of the skin of her lips made them look peeled, raw.
We did not speak to each other until she had shut the apartment door behind us. “You should take stairs more slowly,” she said.
“Showing off, I guess.”
“You look better, George. Give me your coat.”
The apartment was absolutely characterless at first glance.
Then the signs of her presence intruded. An ashtray squared precisely to the edge of a table. Three birch logs, so perfect as to look artificial, stacked in the shallow, ashless fireplace. Shades all pulled to exactly the same level. She plunged back and forth through the room, physically threatening to derange all its neatness, but her touch on each object was light and precise. She pulled a glass-topped table closer to the armchair where I sat. From the kitchenette alcove she brought bottle, glass, small bowl of ice cubes, new bottle of soda. She set them down with evenly spaced clicks against the glass top. She made the drink deftly and said, “With you in a moment,” and shut herself into the tiny bath.
She came out with her hair fluffed out of its rigid nurse’s style, and she wore a turtle-necked gray sweater and a harsh tweed skirt in a discomfiting orange shade. No stockings. Ancient loafers. She fell toward a chair, sat lightly in it. The bones of her wrists and hips were sharp. She looked harsh, brittle, angular. I thought irrelevantly that she was a woman made for a blind man. To his touch she would have the remembered softness and warmth.
I put the drink down. “How do we sta
rt?”
“Tell me how we’re going to do it.” The sentence faded away. Each of her sentences brought silence after it, so that forever we spoke across silence more clearly than with words. Her eyes were dedicated blue flames.
“Not that fast. I want to know if you still insist on sharing this thing. Without knowing when or how we’re to do it.”
“I insist.”
I studied her. “Have you ever wondered about your own sanity, Miranda?”
“Of course. Everyone does. They say that to wonder means that you are really quite all right.”
“Odd that you’re a nurse.”
“Is it? People fighting, dying. I’m there. I can watch and decide about them. Oh, you don’t have to do anything crude, like the wrong medicines. I like them caught between living and dying. Like you were. Then you can do it with words. You can decide, and it always comes out the way you say. It makes you strong to think about it.”
I smiled, and my lips felt stiff. “Have you decided against anyone lately?”
“Oh, yes. This past week. An old man. They wanted him alive because, you see, he was a great-grandfather and in another month he’d be a great-great-grandfather and it was all a matter of pride with him and with them. To have all those generations living at once. He fought, that one, to keep living just for the sake of living, which is never any good. I whispered in his ear. ‘Give up,’ I said. ‘Let it go. Stop fighting. Give up.’ They say they can’t hear you, but they can. They always can. He finally gave a great sigh and died. They couldn’t understand why he died. But, of course, I couldn’t tell them.”
“You like doing that?”
“You kill the rotten ones and keep the good ones. Like sorting things. Like being neat about yourself.”
“I’m one of the good ones?”
She shook her head, as though puzzled. “No, and yet I kept you. I keep wondering why.”
My glass was empty. She sprang toward me, and had I not learned about her I would have flinched away. But she stopped in time and the new drink was made.
I caught her wrist and pulled her onto my lap. Oddly, she seemed lighter than Connie, though she was much heavier, I knew. The calm lips folded against mine. But there was nothing there. It was holding a senseless pose, like a charade that no one can guess. She went back to her chair.
“I expected anything but that,” I said.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait until afterwards. There isn’t enough togetherness yet. Afterwards the thing shared will make it right.”
“Maybe I died,” I said. “Maybe this is a fancy-type hell, like the mythological one where the sinner is chained for eternity just out of reach of food and drink.”
“Am I food and drink?” She showed, for the first time, a trace of coyness. Like a child’s rattle placed atop a small white coffin.
“Maybe not that. But necessary. In an odd way. Essential.”
“That’s because I know more about these things. I’m like a guide. You’re just learning.”
“Is it a taste you can acquire?”
“That you can’t help acquiring.”
“But when there’s no one left to kill?”
“Then we’ll help each other find someone else. And do it in a better way than words.”
I stood up. “I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
On the way home I could feel the clear imprint of the plate inlaid in my skull, the perfect outline of it, as though gentle fingers were pressing it against the jelly of my brain.
I went into the cellar and fitted a length of soft white pine into the lathe. I let my hands work the way they wanted to work, without direction. The cutting tool ate away the wood, turning angles into curves. I took it off the lathe and turned on the sander. I held it one way, then another way, rounding it the way my hands said. It turned into the crude elongated torso of a woman, a woman as thin as Miranda. Then I put it back into the lathe and cut it down to a round rod, shaving away the woman form.
The pressure against the plate had turned into an ache, the beginning of green behind my eyes. I broke the rod over my knee.
I went up to Connie and said, “Rub the back of my neck.”
I stretched out on the couch. She was awkward about it, lacking the skill of Miranda. I turned and held her close, telling myself she was precious. I kissed her. I saw surprise in her eyes and then a most patient resignation. I sat beside her on the couch and took the patch off the empty socket. She shut her eyes hard. Her small fists were clenched. I tiptoed away from her and up the stairs and shut myself in my room. I heard her go out. I lay in the livid green and the world was green neon and the outline of the plate changed slowly, forming letters, pressing the word Unicorn deep into the gray-green brain, deep into the softness in which forever a car rolled and leaped and bounded like a child’s toy thrown aside in petty rage.
“You won’t be needing the car, will you?” I asked Connie.
She gave me her prettiest frown. “Gosh, I don’t think so. How long will you have it?”
“Overnight.”
“Where on earth are you going?”
“I went in and talked to Mallory yesterday. We decided I’d start to take on a few odd jobs, just to get my hand in. That splendid creative artist up in Crane is yammering at his agent to arrange a switch of publishers again.”
“But that is where you were going when—”
“Correct. Sort of like a movie. This is when I came in.”
“When are you leaving?”
“He keeps crazy hours. Starts writing after a midnight breakfast. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I’ll leave tonight after dark, and after I see him I’ll hole up somewhere and come back down tomorrow. No point in getting too tired at this stage of the game.”
The upper surfaces of her rounded arms had the faint tan that she never seems to lose, even in the dead of winter. I held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. She was facing the light. I saw then, and for the first time, the slight yellowness of the whites of her eyes. Once they had been that bluey-white that only children seem to have. The pores of her snub nose and on her rounded cheeks were faintly enlarged, and everywhere, eye corners, around her mouth, across her forehead, I could see the spreading inevitable network of wrinkles, cobwebby against the skin. Enlarge those wrinkles to the maximum, and she would have the face of a withered monkey, out of which the gray eyes would still stare, acquiring through that contrast the knowledge of evil which had always been there but which I had never been able to see or understand.
She moved uncomfortably in my grasp. “What are you staring at?”
“My fine true wife, my loyal little Connie. Darling, what did I do to deserve you?”
She had the grace to blush. “Oh, come now.”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Why, any other woman would be scheming and planning how to get rid of me. But not you, Connie. Not you. Love is bigger than expediency, isn’t it?”
“If you say so, George.”
“Read any good books lately?”
“George, right now you seem . . . more like yourself. You’ve been so odd, you know.”
“I’ll be my very own true self very soon now.”
“Are we going to move away from here?”
“I think so.”
Her voice became wheedling. “Darling, before you make up your mind for sure, let’s go up to the cabin for a long week. Just the two of us. There won’t be anybody around at this time of year. We can walk in the woods. Oh, we’ll have a wonderful time.”
“Just the two of us?”
Her eyes grew as opaque as gray glass. “Call it a second honeymoon,” she breathed.
That would be ideal for them. Not difficult to arrange at all. So many ways to do it up there. I could almost see Louie Palmer pushing me off the high front porch onto the lake-front rocks and then lighting a cigarette in his Bogart way, saying, “I’ll run along. You drive out and make the phone call. Remember, he complained about
feeling dizzy and you told him not to go near the steps.”
There would be a deep satisfaction in that for them. An end of tension. It had failed the first time. Their frozen world would begin to revolve again.
“A second honeymoon,” I said.
In the late afternoon I took the car down to the station. Conner, the owner, was there as well as Louie Palmer. Louie was in his coveralls, his sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms, a smear of grease on his chin near the corner of his mouth, a lank end of black hair curling down across his forehead to the black eyebrow. He avoided meeting my eye.
“Taking a little trip,” I said heartily to Conner. “First one since my accident. Have Louie check the tires, steering arms, kingpin, front wheel bushings, please.”
“Put it on the rack, kid,” Conner said in his husky, domineering voice. I wondered how much Conner’s constant scorn was a factor in Louie’s bold play for big money. I watched the coveralls tighten across Louie’s broad shoulders as he ducked under the car. How had it started? A few sidelong glances? The realization that the Corliss woman was coming around oftener than strictly necessary? Then, probably, “I guess we better road-test it, Mrs. Corliss. Just move over and I’M take the wheel.”
How does it start?
“Change the oil, sir?” Louie asked.
“No thanks, kid,” I said. I rasped that “kid” across him, saw the color creep up the back of his neck.
I waited, and when he was through I tipped him a quarter. He looked as if he might throw it in my face. “Buy yourself a beer,” I said. “Try the Unicorn. I hear that’s a good bar.”
His mouth sagged a little, and the color left him. I grinned into his face and turned away. Louie was jumpy.
“Take it easy, Mr. Corliss,” Conner advised.
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Made myself a promise that I’ll never drive over forty-five again, and I’m sticking to it.”
Beyond Conner I saw a puzzled look on Louie’s lean white face.
I went over right after dinner. Miranda was waiting for me. Her eyes seemed deeper in her head, their glow strong and steady. The wide lips were parted a faint fraction of an inch. It added to the breathlessness of her words. The spring within her was wound as tightly as the key could be turned. A deb waiting for the grand march. A horse player waiting for the sixth race. An animal watching, from a limb, the trail beneath.
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