The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  (She always slept so well on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Thursdays she always lay awake half the night reminding herself that the following night was Friday. She never stopped to analyze this; if she had, what would it have told her? What could it have, if she didn't realize it already?)

  As far as the house was concerned, let it be said at once that it was not a depressing house in itself. People can take their moods from a house, but by the same token a house can take its mood from the people who live in it. If it became what it became, it was due to him—or rather, her reaction to him.

  The interior of the house had crystallized into a very seldom evoked period, the pre–World War I era of rococo and gimcrack elegance. Either its last occupant before them (an unmarried older sister of his) had had a penchant for this out of some girlhood memory of a war-blighted romance and had deliberately tried to re-create it, or what was more likely, all renovations had stopped around that time and it had just stayed that way by default.

  Linda discovered things she had heard about but never seen before. Claw legs on the bathtub, nacre in-and-out pushbuttons for the lights, a hanging stained-glass dome lamp over the dining-room table, a gramophone with a crank handle—she wondered if they'd first rolled back the rug and then danced the hesitation or the one-step to it. The whole house, inside and out, cried out to have women in the straight-up-and-down endlessly long tunics of 1913, with side-puffs of hair over their ears, in patent-leather shoes with beige suede tops up to the middle of the calf, suddenly step out of some of the rooms; and in front of the door, instead of his slender-bodied, bullet-fast Italian compact, perhaps a four-cornered Chalmers or Pierce-Arrow or Hupmobile shaking all over to the beat of its motor.

  Sometimes she felt like an interloper, catching herself in some full-length mirror as she passed it, in her over-the-kneetop skirt and short free down-blown hair. Sometimes she felt as if she were under a magic spell, waiting to be disenchanted. But it wasn't a good kind of spell, and it didn't come wholly from the house or its furnishings...

  One day at the home of some people Mark knew who lived in the area, where he had taken her on a New Year's Day drop-in visit, she met a young man named Garrett Hill. He was branch head for a company in Pittsfield.

  It was as simple as that—they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be simple, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.

  Then she met him a second time, by accident. Then a third, by coincidence. A fourth, by chance ... Or directed by unseen forces?

  Then she started to see him on a regular basis, without meaning anything, certainly without meaning any harm. The first night he brought her home they chatted on the way in his car; and then at the door, as he held out his hand, she quickly put hers out of sight behind her back.

  "Why are you afraid to shake my hand?"

  "I thought you'd hurt me."

  "How can anyone hurt you by just shaking your hand?"

  When he tried to kiss her, she turned and fled into the house, as frightened as though he'd brandished a whip at her.

  When he tried it again, on a later night, again she recoiled sharply—as if she were flinching from some sort of punishment.

  He looked at her, and his eyes widened, both in sudden understanding and in disbelief. "You're afraid physically," he said, almost whispering. "I thought it was some wifely scruple the other night. But you're physically afraid of being kissed! As if there were pain attached to it."

  Before she could stop herself or think twice she blurted out, "Well, there is, isn't there?"

  He said, his voice deadly serious, "What kind of kissing have you been used to?"

  She hung her head. And almost the whole story had been told.

  His face was white as a sheet. He didn't say another word. But one man understands another well; all are born with that particular insight.

  The next week she went into the town to do some small shopping—shopping she could have done as easily over the phone. Did she hope to run across him during the course of it? Is that why she attended to it in person? And after it was taken care of she stepped into a restaurant to sit down over a cup of coffee while waiting for her bus. He came into the place almost immediately afterward; he must have been sitting in his car outside watching for her.

  He didn't ask to sit down; he simply leaned over with his knuckles resting on the table, across the way from her, and with a quick back glance toward the door by which he had just entered, took a book out from under his jacket and put it down in front of her, its title visible.

  "I sent down to New York to get this for you," he said. "I'm trying to help you in the only way I know how."

  She glanced down at it. The title was: The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Writings.

  "Who was he?" she asked, looking up. She pronounced it with the long a, as if it were an English name. "Sayd."

  "Sod"' he instructed. "He was a Frenchman. Just read the book" was all he would say. "Just read the book."

  He turned to leave her, and then he came back for a moment and added, "Don't let anyone else see—" Then he changed it to "Don't let him see you with it. Put a piece of brown wrapping paper around it so the title won't be conspicuous. As soon as you've finished, bring it back; don't leave it lying around the house."

  After he'd gone she kept staring at it. Just kept staring.

  They met again three days later at the same little coffee shop off the main business street. It had become their regular meeting place by now. No fixed arrangement to it; he would go in and find her there, or she would go in and find him there.

  "Was he the first one?" she asked when she returned the book.

  "No, of course not. This is as old as man—this getting pleasure by giving pain. There are some of them born in every generation. Fortunately not too many. He simply was the first one to write it up and so when the world became more specialized and needed a separate tag for everything, they used his name. It became a word—sadism, meaning sexual pleasure got by causing pain, the sheer pleasure of being cruel."

  She started shaking all over as if the place were drafty. "It is that." She had to whisper it, she was so heartsick with the discovery. "Oh, God, yes, it is that."

  "You had to know the truth. That was the first thing. You had to know, you had to be told. It isn't just a vagary or a whim on his part. It isn't just a—well, a clumsiness or roughness in making love. This is a frightful thing, a deviation, an affliction, and—a terrible danger to you. You had to understand the truth first."

  "Sometimes he takes his electric shaver—" She stared with frozen eyes at nowhere out before her. "He doesn't use the shaver itself, just the cord—connects it and—"

  She backed her hand into her mouth, sealing it up.

  Garrett did something she'd never seen a man do before. He lowered his head, all the way over. Not just onto his chest, but all the way down until his chin was resting on the tabletop. And his eyes, looking up at her, were smoldering red with anger. But literally red, the whites all suffused. Then something wet came along and quenched the burning in them.

  "Now you know what you're up against," he said, straightening finally. "Now what do you want to do?"

  "I don't know." She started to sob very gently, in pantomime, without a sound. He got up and stood beside her and held her head pressed against him. "I only know one thing," she said. "I want to see the stars at night again, and not just the blackness and the shadows. I want to wake up in the morning as if it was my right, and not have to say a prayer of thanks that I lived through the night. I want to be able to tell myself there won't be another night like the last one."

  The fear Mark had put into her had seeped and oozed into all parts of her; she not only feared fear, she even feared rescue from fear.

  "I don't want to make a move that's too sudden," she said in a smothered voice.

  "I'll be standing by, when you want to and when you do."

  And on that note they left each other. For one more tim
e.

  On Friday he was sitting there waiting for her at their regular table, smoking a cigarette. And another lay out in the ashtray, finished. And another. And another.

  She came up behind him and touched him briefly but warmly on the shoulder, as if she were afraid to trust herself to speak.

  He turned and greeted her animatedly. "Don't tell me you've been in there that long! I thought you hadn't come in yet. I've been sitting out here twenty minutes, watching the door for you."

  Then when she sat down opposite him and he got a good look at her face, he quickly sobered.

  "I couldn't help it. I broke down in there. I couldn't come out any sooner. I didn't want everyone in the place to see me, the way I was."

  She was still shaking irrepressibly from the aftermath of long-continued sobs.

  "Here, have one of these," he offered soothingly. "May make you feel better—" He held out his cigarettes toward her.

  "No!" she protested sharply, when she looked down and saw what it was. She recoiled so violently that her whole chair bounced a little across the floor. He saw the back of her hand go to the upper part of her breast in an unconscious gesture of protection, of warding off.

  His face turned white when he understood the implication. White with anger, with revulsion. "So that's it," he breathed softly. "My God, oh, my God."

  They sat on for a long while after that, both looking down without saying anything. What was there to say? Two little cups of black coffee had arrived by now—just as an excuse for them to stay there.

  Finally he raised his head, looked at her, and put words to what he'd been thinking. "You can't go back anymore, not even once. You're out of the house and away from it now, so you've got to stay out. You can't go near it again, not even one more time. One more night may be one night too many. He'll kill you one of these nights—he will even if he doesn't mean to. What to him is just a thrill, an excitement, will take away your life. Think about that—you've got to think about that."

  "I have already" she admitted. "Often."

  "You don't want to go to the police?"

  "I'm ashamed"' She covered her eyes reluctantly with her hand for a moment. "I know I'm not the one who should be, he's the one. But I am nevertheless. I couldn't bear to tell it to an outsider, to put it on record, to file a complaint—it's so intimate. Like taking off all your clothes in public. I can hardly bring myself even to have you know about it. And I haven't told you everything—not everything."

  He gave her a shake of the head, as though he knew.

  "If I try to hide out in Pittsfield, he'll find me sooner or later—it's not that big a place—and come after me and force me to come back, and either way there'll be a scandal. And I don't want that. I couldn't stand that. The newspapers ..."

  All at once, before they quite knew how it had come about, or even realized that it had come about, they were deep in the final plans, the final strategy and staging that they had been drawing slowly nearer and nearer to all these months. Nearer to with every meeting, with every look and with every word. The plans for her liberation and her salvation.

  He took her hands across the table.

  "No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won't be able to get you back; it's too big; he won't even be able to find you. The company's holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I'm going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me."

  He raised one of her hands and patted it encouragingly.

  "You wait for me here in the restaurant. I have to go back to the office, wind up a few things, then I'll come back and pick you up—shouldn't take me more than half an hour."

  She looked around her uneasily. "I don't want to sit here alone. They're already giving me knowing looks each time they pass, the waitresses, as if they sense something's wrong."

  "Let them, the hell with them"' he said shortly, with the defiance of a man in the opening stages of love.

  "Can't you call your office from here? Do it over the phone?"

  "No, there are some papers that have to be signed—they're waiting for me on my desk."

  "Then you run me back to the house and while you're doing what you have to at the office I'll pick up a few things; then you can stop by for me and we'll start out from there."

  "Isn't that cutting it a little close?" he said doubtfully. "I don't want you to go back there." He pivoted his wristwatch closer to him. "What time does he usually come home on Fridays?"

  "Never before ten at night."

  He said the first critical thing he'd ever said to her. "Just like a girl. All for the sake of a hairbrush and a cuddly negligee you're willing to stick your head back into that house."

  "It's more than just a hairbrush," she pointed out. "I have some money there. It's not his, it's mine. Even if this friend from my days in Rome—the one I've spoken to you about—even if she takes me in with her at the start, I'll need some money to tide me over until I can get a job and find a place of my own. And there are other things, like my birth certificate, that I may need later on; he'll never give them up willingly once I leave."

  "All right," he gave in. "We'll do it your way."

  Then just before they got up from the table that had witnessed such a change in both their lives, they gave each other a last look. A last, and yet a first one. And they understood each other.

  She didn't wait for him to say it, to ask it. There is no decorum in desperation, no coyness in a crisis. She knew it had been asked unsaid, anyway. "I want to rediscover the meaning of gentle love. I want to lie in your bed, in your arms. I want to be your wife."

  He took hold of her left hand, raised the third finger, stripped off the wedding band and in its place firmly guided downward a massive fraternity ring that had been on his own hand until that very moment. Heavy, ungainly, much too large for her—and yet everything that love should be.

  She put it to her lips and kissed it.

  They were married now.

  The emptied ring rolled off the table and fell on the floor, and as they moved away his foot stepped on it, not on purpose, and distorted it into something warped, misshapen, no longer round, no longer true. Like what it had stood for.

  He drove her back out to the house and dropped her off at the door, and they parted almost in silence, so complete was their understanding by now, just three muted words between them: "About thirty minutes."

  It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.

  His car had hummed off; she'd finished and brought down a small packed bag to the ground floor when the phone rang. It would be Garry, naturally, telling her he'd finished at the office and was about to leave.

  "Hello—" she began, urgently and vitally and confidentially, the way you share a secret with just one person and this was the one.

  Mark's voice was at the other end.

  "You sound more chipper than you usually do when I call up to tell you I'm on the way home."

  Her expectancy stopped. And everything else with it. She didn't know what to say. "Do I?" And then, "Oh, I see."

  "Did you have a good day? You must have had a very good day."

  She knew what he meant, she knew what he was implying.

  "I—I—oh, I did nothing, really. I haven't been out of the house all day."

  "That's strange," she heard him say. "I called you earlier—about an hour ago?" It was a question, a pitfall of a question. "You didn't come to the phone."

  "I didn't hear it ring"' she said hastily, too hastily. "I might have been out front for a few minutes. I remember I went out there to broom the gravel in the drivew—"

  Too late she
realized he hadn't called at all. But now he knew that she hadn't been in the house all day, that she'd been out somewhere during part of it.

  "I'll be a little late." And then something that sounded like "That's what you want to hear, isn't it?"

  "What?" she said quickly. "What?"

  "I said I'll be a little late."

  "What was it you said after that?"

  "What was it you said after that?" he quoted studiedly, giving her back her own words.

  She knew he wasn't going to repeat it, but by that very token she knew she'd heard it right the first time.

  He knows, she told herself with a shudder of premonition as she got off the phone and finally away from him. (His voice could hold fast to you and enthrall you, too; his very voice could torture you, as well as his wicked, cruel fingers.) He knows there's someone; he may not know who yet, but he knows there is someone.

  A remark from one of the nightmare nights came back to her: "There's somebody else who wouldn't do this, isn't there? There's somebody else who wouldn't make you cry."

  She should have told Garry about it long before this. Because now she had to get away from Mark at all cost, even more than she had had to ever before. Now there would be a terrible vindictiveness, a violent jealousy sparking the horrors, where before there had sometimes been just an irrational impulse, sometimes dying as quickly as it was born. Turned aside by a tear or a prayer or a run around a chair.

  And then another thing occurred to her, and it frightened her even more immediately, here and now. What assurance was there that he was where he'd said he was, still in the city waiting to start out for here? He might have been much closer, ready to jump out at her unexpectedly, hoping to throw her off-guard and catch her away from the house with someone, or (as if she could have possibly been that sort of person) with that someone right here in the very house with her. He'd lied about calling the first time; why wouldn't he lie about where he was?

  And now that she thought of it, there was a filling station with a public telephone less than five minutes' drive from here, on the main thruway that came up from Boston. An eddy of fear swirled around her, like dust rising off the floor in some barren, drafty place. She had to do one of two things immediately—there was no time to do both. Either call Garry at his office and warn him to hurry, that their time limit had shrunk. Or try to trace Mark's call and find out just how much margin of safety was still left to them.