by Diana Ramsay
"No, it's not enough. Not nearly enough." Calmly Charlotte picked up the half-eaten cookie from her napkin and nibbled at it. "You've done wrong, and now you're being punished for it. We're all of us put here on this earth to help each other, not hurt each other. All the time I was in the hospital, I thought and thought about how much you deserve to be punished for what you did to me. Night after night, when I couldn't sleep because of the pain, I thought about all the things I would do to pay you back. To make you suffer the way I suffered."
"I'm not to blame for what happened to you! Whatever I may have set in motion, I'm not responsible for that. You were a free agent. If you want to blame somebody, blame the man who attacked you, don't blame me!"
"I don't know who he is." Charlotte popped the remainder of the cookie into her mouth, chewed it quickly, and swallowed with a voracity that stretched the tendons of her neck. "I don't even know what he looked like. The police kept asking me to describe him. Over and over and over and over. Asking and asking and asking and asking the same questions until I was ready to scream. Did he have any distinguishing marks? What color were his eyes? What color was his hair? As if I could tell them! Why, I don't even know if he had hair. When he came in here he had his hat on, pulled down over his face, and I don't think he ever took it off. I don't remember. It's all fuzzy in my head. About all I do remember is that he was tall. Taller than I am. That's unusual, even for a man, but the police didn't seem to think it was very much help. I guess it wasn't. A man with no face. How do you describe a man with no face?"
"How indeed. And so I'm to be his stand-in."
"You have a face." Charlotte licked her fingers. Greedily. With relish.
"Yes, I have a face." Joyce lifted her hands and passed exploratory fingertips over her cheekbones. They were sharp; the skin over them was dry and rough and unpleasant to the touch. "People used to think it was a nice face. I used to think it was a nice face myself, once upon a time. It's not a nice face anymore. Not a face anybody would enjoy looking at for very long. But I suppose that's not unusual. I don't see too many faces that bear looking at for very long nowadays." Her hands returned to her lap. "Where will it all end? Maybe there's some magic formula that might induce you to stop persecuting me, but if there is I can't guess it. I'm not even going to try to guess it anymore. I've spent too much time at the game already. Charlotte, for the last time I'm begging you to lay off. For your own sake as well as mine. Anybody who keeps up a campaign like yours departs from the human race and becomes—"
"Oh, that's rich! That's really rich! I suppose next you'll tell me you're worrying about saving my soul!"
"No, I'm worrying about myself. First and foremost, last and always. Just like everybody else. And isn't that a pretty sad confession, when you come right down to it. But then who else is there to worry about except number one? There isn't room for anybody else. We spend our lives in little boxes. Sleep in one box, work in another, try to relax in still another. If we ever find out the sun is shining, it's probably by accident. It's so soul-destroying to live like that. It turns the mind in on itself, erodes any sense of proportion we might have started out with. Everybody becomes a victim. I'm a victim, you're a victim, and there doesn't seem to be anything either of us can do about it. Unfortunately." Joyce thrust her hands into her pockets. "Not that any of this is relevant now. Where do we go from here, Charlotte? If begging you for mercy isn't enough, where—"
"You haven't begged me for mercy."
"But—" Joyce broke off.
It was as though a light had suddenly been turned on behind the blue eyes. Exultation? Triumph? Inspiration? The pale, pointed tongue darted out, passed over the upper lip, paused over the lower lip, retreated. Charlotte placed a forefinger at her temple, held it there for a moment, sending a message: Think, Joyce. Use your head. Then, with great deliberation, the forefinger descended to point at the floor.
Joyce felt her stomach heave, and fought against nausea. It was important not to let revulsion show. So very important. The message was crystal clear. Nothing for it but to obey. Yet somehow she couldn't move, couldn't lift her lead-weighted body from the sofa. She slid. Off the cushion and into the narrow space between the sofa and the coffee table and down onto her knees. Her hands came out of her pockets, clasped in an agony of whitened knuckles under her chin. "Charlotte—"
"No, not Charlotte. Miss Bancroft. I'd like you to call me Miss Bancroft from now on."
"Miss Bancroft—" Joyce's voice quavered, and, all at once, she didn't have to force herself to plead: the words came pouring out. "Miss Bancroft, I have descended to my knees to beg you to show mercy to a poor, downtrodden wretch, to stop making my existence hell, to raise us both up to the level of human beings again. Miss Bancroft, please, I beg of you, get off my back."
Silence. Joyce's heart stopped beating. Time stood still. The room receded in perspective, became as remote as a room in a photograph. Only Charlotte was real. Only Charlotte, sitting as motionless as a figure of stone. Until the stone moved, nothing else could move.
Charlotte shook her head, and the world started moving again. Moving in the wrong direction.
Joyce sank down on her heels. She unclasped her hands and thrust them into her pockets. "Okay, Miss Bancroft, what next? It's your party. I'm sure it isn't going to end with ground glass slipped into my coffee or a tarantula crawling out of the woodwork to bite me. At least, not yet. Not until you've had all your kicks. So what next?"
"Oh, that's witty, Joyce. So very, very witty. And you say you're at the end of your rope. Well, you're not, are you? Not quite. You wouldn't be so flippant if you were. You're still Madam Hoity-Toity who looks down her nose at other people, aren't you? As if they're not quite human. As if they belong to some inferior species."
Charlotte leaned forward. Her color was vivid, her eyes hot. "You know something? I've been facing that look for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. I'm sick and tired of being snubbed by superior beings, believe you me. It's bad enough when they really are superior, but when it comes to nobodies like you— Who are you to queen it over me? Who are you to queen it over anybody? Oh, I've met your kind before, don't think I haven't. You pop out of your nice, cozy little home where you've had it made for years—or maybe you're booted out—and you expect things to be handed to you on a silver platter just like they were before. Move over, everybody, here she comes, the new liberated woman. What a laugh! Drones aren't new, they're an old story to everybody. But you don't know that. You're so surprised when people aren't falling all over themselves to hire you for jobs you're not equipped to do. So surprised when you have to pound the pavements. Pound and pound and pound and pound. After a lifetime of thinking you're somebody, you find out you're nobody. Nobody, Joyce. You're nobody. You're nothing. Who are you, Joyce?"
"Nobody."
"What are you?"
"Nothing."
"Say it again. As if you mean it this time."
"I'm nobody. I'm nothing."
"Better, but not good enough. Not nearly. You know why? Because you don't really believe it yet. Deep down you still think you're somebody or you wouldn't have the nerve to be flippant with me. Deep down you still have some shreds of self-respect. Well, I'll knock them out of you, I promise you that. Before I'm through with you, you'll crawl up those stairs on your knees, if I ask you to. You'll kiss my foot, wipe my ass, do whatever I ask you to do whenever I ask you to do it. And there are lots of things I'm going to ask you to do, I promise you that. Lots and lots of things. Right now I'll ask you to get out. I'm sick of the sight of you. Smug, supercilious, arrogant bitch!" Charlotte pursed her lips and spat.
The spray struck Joyce on the cheek, sharp and stinging, like pellets of hail. She cringed. Dropping her head to her shoulder, she rubbed the afflicted cheek against her robe. The terry cloth felt as abrasive as sandpaper, but she went on rubbing and rubbing. When at last she raised her head again, her cheek seemed to be on fire.
All emotion had gone out of Charlotte's face. The blue
eyes were dull, empty; the mind dwelling behind them was closed off, inaccessible.
"Well, that appears to be that. There isn't a shadow of a doubt as to where we stand now, is there? Not that I really thought there was. Not really. Once a person sets out on the destruction of another, it's like a toboggan ride downhill. The momentum grows and grows, and the destroyer is powerless to stop. He may want to stop, because he knows going on will play such havoc with his conscience that he may never recover, but he can't. I'm wasting my breath, I know. I suppose it would be wasting more to plead my case one last time?"
No response. Charlotte's face was a mask, and the mask was impenetrable.
"Yes, I can see it would be. All right, I'll be off now." Joyce's left hand emerged from her pocket, hovered above Charlotte's knees. "Would you mind giving me a lift up? I'm afraid I'm wedged in here."
For a moment, Charlotte did not move; did not react at all. Then, with a slight shrug, she held out her own hand to be taken. It was seized, gripped hard. Astonishment began to dissolve the mask.
Joyce vaulted to her feet, drew her right hand out of her pocket, slashed it across Charlotte's throat, leaped aside. Blood spurted from Charlotte's throat, spurted upward and forward like a gusher, spurted for what seemed an eternity, drenching the tray and the table, cascading to the floor. But of course it wasn't an eternity. The human body contains only a limited quantity of blood, after all.
Blood stopped spurting. Joyce extended her right arm over the table, shook her wrist vigorously. Only a few drops of blood fell from the wet, reddened razor blade, and the fingers that held it were, amazingly, untainted. She reached into her left-hand pocket, took out a wad of cotton and a plastic bag, wrapped the blade in cotton, put the cotton in the bag, replaced the bag in her pocket. Easy. So very, very easy. It had all gone without a hitch.
What else needed attending to? She had touched nothing. Except the sofa cushion, which sagged a little. She pounded it with her fists. There. Now it was firm. A needless precaution, unless the police were taking impressions of backsides these days. The thought started a giggle in her throat. Bad, bad, bad. A prelude to hysteria.
A look at her handiwork squelched any impulse to laugh. Charlotte's lifeless head had fallen back against the sofa; above the bloody gash running from ear to ear, wide blue eyes and parted lips cast astonishment at the ceiling. Mild astonishment. Astonishment that hadn't progressed very far into the depths of consciousness. Well, there hadn't been time enough. And whose fault was that?
"I begged you, Charlotte. I got down on my knees and begged you. What more could I have done? What more could anyone have done?"
Joyce went to the door, took hold of the knob with the skirt of her robe, glanced back over her shoulder. A last look at poor Charlotte. Poor, poor Charlotte. From this angle, the pearly glint of the new front teeth was conspicuous. Window dressing. Useless adornment for someone with nowhere to go.
"It's rough, Charlotte, but you know what they say. They say if you inadvertently drive your car over something and it moans, back up. Otherwise you find yourself saddled with an incubus and you never get out from under."
An Ending
...suddenly stopped and I heard somebody going up to her floor. Then there was a bit of tramping around upstairs and then it got quiet. I dozed off, but a little later I was roused by the footsteps tearing down the stairs. How much later I couldn't say. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps half an hour— I honestly don't know. I wasn't fully awake, and I didn't think to look at the clock. I fell asleep again right away. I was out of the house most of the next day, so I didn't have cause to wonder about her till the evening, and then I began to feel a little uneasy because it was strange not to hear her moving around up there, to say nothing of that ghastly radio. I remembered what had happened to her before—I could hardly have forgotten—and around ten-thirty I went up and knocked on her door. There was no answer. She hadn't been out a single evening that I know of since coming back from the hospital, and I decided it would be wisest to call the police.
Signature:..............
Date:.....................
...
Joyce started to sign her name, hesitated, then put down the pen and began re-reading the statement? Her face was drawn and pale, the flesh slightly puckered as though inroads had been made by some internal parasite, and there were dark blotches around her eyes. She sat on the visitor's side of a massive oak desk, opposite a gaunt red-haired man with penetrating eyes that contemplated her steadily, patiently. They were both smoking, she with quick, nervous puffs, he with long and leisurely inhalations. When she crushed out her cigarette, he was instantly on the alert. She reached up to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and went on reading. The alert subsided.
Moments passed. The red-haired man lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. His gaze moved from Joyce to the blank white wall behind her, but returned to her at once when she picked up the pen. Again, on the verge of signing her name, she hesitated.
"Something you want to change, Mrs. Chandler?" The man's voice was low-pitched and slightly grating.
"No, I don't think so. It's accurate. Exactly what I said." Joyce looked up with a rueful smile. "The thing is, I sound almost like a monster. Heartless. Now that I see my sentiments about her set down in black and white, I feel I should have tried to cover them up. Out of decency. Still, how could I have? I'm sure you found enough noise-making paraphernalia in her apartment to stock a sound effects library. If I'd failed to mention how she was bombarding me, I'm sure you would have wondered about it."
"Very likely. It's always better to level with us. When people act cagey, we tend to think they have something to hide, and that isn't the case with you, is it?"
"Certainly not. As I've told you, the only reason I can think of for her persecution of me is that she was venting her hostility against the world at large on the nearest target." Joyce signed her name and put down the pen. "Is that all?"
"For you it is. For us"—he shrugged—"far from it. We can't even be sure what really happened. The obvious hypothesis is that the guy who beat her up came back to finish what he started, but we have a few reservations about buying that. There are things about the mise-en-scène that bother us. Also"—he offered a cigarette—"guys who get their kicks by bashing women around with chains don't usually go in for techniques as quick and clean as severing carotids with razor blades."
Joyce refused the cigarette with a shake of her head and clasped her hands on the edge of the desk. "Are you suggesting that there were two different people who—who did things to her? It seems so hard to believe. Like lightning striking twice."
"Often it does. When somebody starts leading the kind of life she was leading, it's an open invitation to disaster. As to that, I'm curious about your reaction to having the building suddenly transformed into Times Square. You said that the traffic disturbed you less than her radio, but—"
"One of the many things in the statement that make me sound like a monster." Dryly.
"No, like a fairly typical New Yorker. All the same, Mrs. Chandler, a change in the life style as radical as hers doesn't happen every day. Didn't it start you wondering?"
"Naturally. It also shocked me, I'll admit. But not for long. One doesn't get far past adolescence without finding out that being shocked by the things people do is a waste of time and energy."
"Fair enough." Amusement glinted in his eyes. Fleetingly. "You know, there's a funny angle to that change. She was launched on her new career in slam-bang style. Cards spelling it all out were left in public places all over the city. We found that out when we were investigating the beating. She clammed up about the advertising campaign. Denied knowing anything about those cards."
"Did she?" Joyce's clasped hands were white at the knuckles.
"Yes. Understandable, under the circumstances, but there's another possibility, too. Could be somebody else launched her. Somebody who wanted to annoy her and distributed the cards as a nasty pr
actical joke and watched the whole thing go out of control. If that's the way it happened, that person must be feeling guilty as hell right now."
"If there is such a person." Joyce unclasped her hands and picked up her purse.
"Only a hypothesis, naturally. The point I want to make is that if such a person exists, he—or she—shouldn't be feeling guilty. Nobody forced Miss Bancroft into anything, and the only one with cause to feel guilty is the murderer. Is there something you'd like to tell me, Mrs. Chandler?"
"No. Should there be?"
The red-haired man gave her face a long scrutiny, then got up from his chair, went to the door, opened it wide. "Okay, Mrs. Chandler, that's it. Thanks for your co-operation." Joyce rose and moved to the door with the exaggerated slowness of someone repressing a desire to do a bolt. As she passed in front of the man, under the intensity of his gaze, she gave him a faint, apologetic smile. "It's such a relief to know that it's over. Really and truly over."
"I can believe that. I'm sorry we had to put you through such a grilling. Goodbye, Mrs. Chandler. Look after yourself."
The man stood in the doorway, watching Joyce walk down the corridor until she turned a corner and was lost to view. He closed the door and strode across the room to the window.
In a moment, the door opened. "Did you pull an admission out of her?"
"Didn't seem necessary. There's no doubt in my mind that she's responsible for circulating the cards. When I brought them up, she could hardly hold herself together. If I'd leaned on her a little it would all have come pouring out, but what the hell. Why bother?"
"Well, it would make things tidy for the records."
"Stuff the records. With Jack the Ripper to worry about, why waste time compiling a dossier on a poor wretch who's eating her heart out with guilt?" The red-haired man took a step closer to the window. "There she goes, scurrying across the street as though all the demons of hell were after her."