“And there wasn’t a baby, Ma’am! What happened to the baby? I looked all over that hut and I couldn’t find the baby” body anywhere. What happened to it, Ma’am?”
George stopped and stared at his glass. Then he looked at the young pregnant woman once again. He had told her a terrible story, a story he had never told anyone before. He would have been ashamed to tell the story to another woman. Ashamed of himself. But she didn’t even react. Not a twitch. He wanted answers from her. He was sure she knew the answer to the story, but she kept her peace. She just sat there and stared at him.
Again George stared at his glass. He continued, but talked more to himself than to her. “It was hot. Real hot. And with the corpse and what she’d done, and with the baby gone, just gone, one of the men lost it, you know? It was so hot! He opened up with his machine gun. She didn’t even cry.” George downed the rest of his glass. “That boy must have shot the corpse a couple dozen times.”
George finished fixing the door and left. As he was leaving, turning his back, the woman said “Thank you,” softly, flatly.
George stared out the bedroom window. Tonight he couldn’t even smoke; anxiety rippled up and down his torso, put needles into his fingertips. He couldn’t keep them still.
The house on the corner, her house, looked as it had every night. The single dim light burned somewhere near the back. He was alone. Margaret was spending the night with her mother. The motorcycle gang was nowhere to be seen, nor the cats, nor the coyotes. Nothing approached the woman’s house at all. There were no signs of life. But for some reason this change made him even more agitated.
Make a man of yourself. Die if you have to, like your daddy. He wasn’t afraid, even burning’ like that!
George thought he heard a moaning from the house on the corner. A small cry. The woman would have no one to help her deliver the child; he could not imagine her going to the hospital.
A louder cry. A groan that seemed to carry with the wind and slip by his window.
Before he could think about it George had gone downstairs, opened the door and headed across the street to the woman’s house. He stopped on her front porch to catch his breath.
The light in the back of the house seemed obscured by gauze. He heard a louder moan, a wet sound. George jerked open the door and started through the house.
She was naked in the bedroom, with her back to him. He could hear her grunting. The bare light bulb overhead, so dim and grimy it appeared to be yellow, illuminated only the center of her back. Her black hair blended with the shadows so that she seemed headless, all enormous female torso and buttocks giving birth on the filthy sheets.
He started around her, and then stopped. He could see a large leg, someone else’s leg, then another, a belly, slipping wetly from between her thighs and into the shadows at the end of the bed.
George stood at the end of the bed. The woman sat on the bed, staring at him, saying nothing—keeping it all inside, George thought angrily—staring at him, looking emptied. No longer pregnant. Like an old brown sack.
He could barely see it with the dim light. But it was unmistakable. Three or four days decomposed. A fully-grown, adult male corpse. A corpse child. And the face, all personality rotted away, decay having wiped the face clean. It could have been his own. It could have been.
THE MEN AND WOMEN OF RIVENDALE
The thing he would remember most about his days, his weeks at the Rivendale resort—had it really been weeks?—was not the enormous lobby and dining room, nor the elaborately carved mahogany woodwork framing the library, nor even the men and women of Rivendale themselves, with their bright eyes and pale, almost hairless, heads and hands. The thing he would remember most was the room he and Cathy stayed in, the way she looked when she curled up in bed, her bald head rising weakly over her shoulders, the way the dark brocade curtains hung so heavily, trapping dust and light in their intricate folds.
Frank thought he had spent days staring into those folds. He had only two places to look in that room: at the cancer-ridden sack his wife had become, her giant eyes, her grotesque, baby-like face, so stripped of age since she had begun her decline. Or at the curtains, constantly adrift with shadows. They were of a dark, burgundy-colored material, and he never knew if they had darkened with dust and age or if they were meant to be just that shade. If he examined the curtains at close range he could make out the tiny leaf and shell patterns embroidered over the entire surface. From a distance, when he sat in the chair or lay on the bed, they looked like hundreds of tiny, hungry mouths.
Cathy had told him little about the place before they came—that it was a resort in Pennsylvania, in the countryside south of Erie, and that it used to have hot springs. He hadn’t asked, but he wondered what happened to the spring water when it left such a place. As if somebody somewhere had turned a tap. It didn’t make any sense to him; natural things shouldn’t work that way.
Her ancestors, the family Rivendale, had run the place when it was still a resort. Now many, perhaps all of her relatives lived in the Rivendale Resort Hotel, or in cottages spotted around the sprawling grounds. Probably several dozen cottages in all. It had been quite a jolt when Frank walked into the place, stumbling over the entrance rug with their luggage wedged under his arms, and saw all these Rivendales sitting around the fireplace in the lobby. It wasn’t as if they were clones, or anything like that. But there was this uneasy sort of family resemblance. Something about the flesh tones, the shape of the hands, the perpetually arched eyebrows, the sharp angle at which they held their heads, the irregular pink splotches on their cheeks. It gave him a little chill. After a few days at Rivendale he recognized part of the reason for that chill: the cancer had molded Cathy into a fuzzy copy of a Rivendale.
Frank remembered her as another woman entirely: her hair had been long and honey-brown, and there had been real color in her cheeks. She had been lively, her movements strong and fluid, an incredibly sleek, beautiful woman who could have been a model, though such a public display would have appalled her and, he knew without asking, would have disgraced the Rivendale name.
Cathy had told him that filling up with cancer was like roasting under a hot sun sometimes. The dusty rooms and dark chambers of Rivendale cooled her. They would stay at Rivendale as long as possible, she had said. She could hide from nurses and doctors there.
She wouldn’t have surgery. She was a Rivendale; it didn’t fit. She washed herself in radiation, and, after Frank met these other Rivendales with their scrubbed and antiseptic flesh, the thought came to him: she’d over-bathed.
She never looked or smelled bad, as he’d expected. The distortions the growing cancer made within the skin that covered it were more subtle than that. Sometimes she complained of her legs suddenly weakening. Sometimes she would scream in the middle of the night. He’d look at her pale form and try to see through her translucent flesh, find the cancer feeding and thriving there.
One result of her treatments was that Cathy’s belly blew up. She looked at least six months pregnant, maybe more. It had never occurred to either of them to have children. They’d always had too much to do; a child didn’t have a place in the schedule. Sometimes now Frank dreamed he was wheeling her into the delivery room, running, trying to get her to the doctors before her terrible labor ceased. A tall doctor in a brilliant white mask always met him at the wide swinging doors. The doctor took Cathy away from him but blocked Frank from seeing what kind of child they delivered from her heaving, discolored belly.
Nine months after the cancer was diagnosed, the invitation from the Rivendales was delivered. Cathy, who’d barely mentioned her family in all the years they’d been married, welcomed it with a grim excitement he’d never seen in her before. Frank discovered the invitation in the trash later that afternoon. “Come to Rivendale” was all it said.
One of the uncles greeted her at the desk, although “greeted” was probably the wrong word. He checked her in, as if this were still a resort. Even gave her a room key with
the resort tag still attached, although now the leather was cracked and the silver lettering hard to read. Only a few of the relatives had bothered to look up from their reading, their mouths twitching as if they were attempting speech after years of muteness. But no one spoke; no one welcomed them. As far as Frank could tell, no one in the crowded, quiet lobby was speaking to anyone else.
They’d gone up to their room immediately; the trip had exhausted Cathy. Then Frank spent his first of many evenings sitting up in the old chair, staring at Cathy curled up on the bed, and staring at the curtains breathing the breeze from the window, the indecipherable embroidered patterns shifting restlessly.
The next morning they were awakened by a bell ringing downstairs. The sound was so soft Frank at first thought it was a dream, wind-chimes tinkling outside. But Cathy was up immediately, and dressing. Frank did the same, suddenly not wanting to initiate any action by himself. When another bell rang Cathy opened the door and started downstairs, and Frank followed her.
Two places were set for them at one of the long, linen-draped tables. “Cathy” and “Frank,” the place cards read. He wondered briefly if there might be someone else staying here by those names, so surprised he was to see his name written on the card in floral script. But Cathy took her chair immediately, and he sat down beside her.
There was a silent toast. When the uncle who had met them at the desk tapped his glass of apple wine lightly with a fork, the rest raised their glasses silently to the air, and then a beat later tipped them back to drink. Cathy drank in time with the others, and that simple bit of coordination and exaggerated manners made Frank uneasy. He remained one step behind all the others, watching them over the lip of his glass. They didn’t seem aware of each other, but they were almost, though not quite, synchronized.
He glanced at Cathy; her cheek had grown pale and taut as she drank. She wasn’t eating real food anymore, only a special formula she took like medicine to sustain her. Although her skin was almost baby-smooth now, the lack of fat had left wrinkles that deepened as she moved. Death lines.
After breakfast they lingered by the enormous dining room window. Cathy watched as the Rivendales drifted across the front lawn in twos and threes. Their movements were slow and languid, like ancient fish in shallow, sun-drenched waters.
“Shouldn’t we introduce ourselves around?” Frank said softly. “I mean, we were invited by someone. How do these people even know who we are?”
“Oh, they know, Frank. Hush now; the Rivendales have always had their own way of doing things. Someone will come to us in time. Meanwhile, we enjoy ourselves.”
“Sure.”
They took a long walk around the grounds. The pool was closed and covered with canvas. The shuffleboard courts were cracked, the cracks pulled further apart by grass and tree roots. And the tennis courts … the tennis courts were his first inkling that perhaps he should be trying to convince her of the need to return home.
The tennis courts at Rivendale were built atop a slight, tree-shaded rise behind the main building. He heard the yowling and screeching as they climbed the rise, so loud that he couldn’t make out any individual voices. It frightened him so that he grabbed Cathy by the arm and started back down. But she seemed unperturbed by the noise and shrugged away from him, continuing to walk toward the trees, her pace unchanging.
“Cathy … I don’t think …” But she was oblivious to him.
So Frank followed her, reluctantly. As they neared the fenced enclosure the howling increased, and Frank knew that it wasn’t people in there making all the noise, but animals, though he had never heard animal sounds quite like those.
As they passed the last tree Frank stopped, unable to proceed. Cathy walked right up to the fence. She pressed close to the wire, but not so close the outstretched paws could touch her.
The tennis courts had become a gigantic cage holding hundreds of cats. An old man stood on a ladder above the wire fence, dumping buckets of feed onto the snarling mass inside. Mesh with glass insulators attached—electrified, Frank thought—stretched across the top of the fence.
The old man turned to Frank and stared. He had the arched eyebrows, the pale skin and blotched cheeks. He smiled at Frank, and the shape of the lips seemed to match the shape of the eyebrows. A smile shaped like moth wings, or a bite-pattern in pale cheese, the teeth gleaming snow-white inside.
Cathy spent most of each day in the expansive Rivendale library, checking titles most of the time, but occasionally sitting down to read from a rare and privately-bound old volume. Every few hours one of the uncles, or cousins, would come in and speak to her in a low voice, nod, and leave. The longer he was here the more difficult it became to tell the Rivendales apart, other than male from female. The younger ones mirrored the older ones, and they were all very close in height, weight, and build.
When Cathy wasn’t in the library she sat quietly in the parlor or dining room, or up in their own room catnapping or staring up at the ornate ceiling. She would say every day, almost ritualistically, that he was more than welcome to be with her, but he could see nothing here that he might participate in. Sitting in the parlor or dining room was made almost unbearable by the presence of the family, arranged mummy-like around the rooms. Sometimes he would pick up a volume in the library, but invariably discovered it was some sort of laborious tome on trellis and ornate gardening, French architecture, museum catalogs. Or sometimes an old leather-bound novel that read no better. It was impossible to peruse the books without thinking that whatever Cathy was studying must be far more interesting, but on the days he went he never could find the books she had been looking at, as if they had been kept somewhere special, out of his reach. And for some reason he hesitated to ask after them, or to look over his wife’s shoulder as she read. As if he was afraid to.
This growing climate of awkwardness and fear angered Frank so that his neck muscles were always stiff, his head always aching. It was worse because it wasn’t entirely unexpected. His relationship with Cathy had been going in this direction for some time. Until he’d met Cathy, he’d almost always been bored. As a child, always needing to be entertained. As an adult, constantly changing lovers and houses and jobs. Now it was happening again, and it frightened him.
The increasing boredom that was beginning to permeate his stay at Rivendale, in fact, had begun to impress on him how completely, utterly bored he had been in his married life. He’d almost forgotten, so preoccupied he’d become with her disease. When Cathy’s cancer had first begun, and started to spread, that boredom had dissipated. Perversely, the cancer had brought something new and near-dramatic into their life together. He’d felt bad at first: Cathy, in her baldness, in her body that seemed, impossibly, both emaciated and swollen, had suddenly become sensuous to him again. He wanted to make love to her almost all the time. After the first few times, he had stopped the attempts, afraid to ask her. But as she approached death, his desire increased.
Sometimes Frank sat out on the broad resort lawn, his lounge chair positioned under a low-hanging tree only twenty or so feet away from the library window. He’d watch her as she sat at one of the enormous oak tables, poring over the books, consulting with various elderly Rivendales who drifted in and out of that room in a seemingly endless stream. He’d heard one phrase outside the library, when the Rivendales didn’t know he was near, or perhaps he had dreamed his eavesdropping while lying abed late one morning, or fallen asleep midafternoon in his hiding place under the tree. “Family histories.”
The pale face with the near-hairless pate that floated as if suspended in that library window bore no resemblance to the Cathy he had known, with her dark eyes and nervous gestures and narrow mouth quick to twist ugly and vituperative. They’d discovered it was so much easier to become excited by anger, rage, and all the small cruelties possible in married life, than by love. They’d had a bad fight on their very first date. He found himself asking her out again in the very heat of the argument. She’d stared at him wide-eyed and breathl
ess for some time, and then grudgingly accepted.
Throughout the following weeks their fights grew worse. Once he’d slapped her, something he would never have imagined himself doing, and she’d fallen sobbing into his arms. They made love for hours. It became a delirious pattern. The screams, the cries, the ineffectual hitting, and then the sweet tickle and swallow of a lust that dragged them red-eyed through the night.
Marriage was a great institution. It gave you the opportunity to experience both sadism and masochism within the privacy and safety of your own home.
“What do you want from me, you bastard?” Cathy’s teeth flashed, pinkly … her lipstick was running, he thought. Frank held her head down against the mattress, watching her tongue flicking back and forth over her teeth. He was trapped.
Her leg came up and knocked him off the bed. He tried to roll away but before he could move she had straddled him, pinning him to the floor. “Off! Get off!” He couldn’t catch his breath. He suddenly realized her forearm was wedged between his neck and the floor, cutting off the air. His vision blurred quickly and the pressure began to build in his face.
“Frank …”
He could barely hear her. He thought he might actually die this time. It was another bad joke; he almost laughed. She was the one who was always talking about dying; she could be damned melodramatic about it. She was the one with the death wish.
He opened his eyes and stared up at her. She was fumbling with his shirt, pulling it loose, ripping the buttons off. Maybe she was trying to save him.
Then he got a better look at her: the feverish eyes, the slackening jaw line, tongue flicking, eyes glazed. Now she was tugging frantically at his belt. It all seemed very familiar and ritualized. He searched her eyes and did not think she even saw him.
City Fishing Page 15