Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  “Well, I know the feeling,” I told her. “Every day, when I wake up, I have to remind myself that he’s dead; and that I’m never going to see him again, ever.”

  We went into the Brew Burger across the street for a drink. Jill ordered tomato juice; I ordered Four Roses, straight up. We sat by the window while torrents of people passed us by.

  “That’s my trouble,” Jill told me, picking at her freshly lacquered fingernails. “I’m sad; I keep crying; but I can’t really believe that he’s dead.”

  I sipped my whiskey. “Do you know what he and I used to play when we were younger? We used to pretend that we were wizards, and that we were both going to live forever. We even made up a spell.”

  Jill stared at me; her wide gray-green eyes were glistening with tears. “He was always full of dreams. Perhaps he went the best way, without even knowing what was going to happen.”

  “Immortooty,, immortaty—ever, ever, after!” I recited. “That was the spell. We always used to recite it when we were scared.”

  “I loved him, you know,” Jill whispered.

  I finished my whiskey. “Haven’t you talked about it with anybody else?”

  She shook her head. “You know my family. They practically disowned me when I started dating Robbie, because he was still married to Sara. It was no use my telling them that he and Sara were already on the rocks; and that he despised her; and that they would have been divorced anyway, even if I hadn’t shown up on the scene. Oh, no, it was all my fault. I broke up a healthy marriage. I was the scarlet woman.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” I told her, “I don’t think you’re scarlet at all. I never saw Robbie so happy as when he was with you.”

  I walked her back to her apartment on Central Park South. Thunder echoed from the skyscrapers all along Sixth Avenue; flags flapped; and it was beginning to rain. In spite of the swanky address, the flat that Jill and Robbie had shared together was very small, and sublet from a corporate lawyer called Willey, who was away in Minnesota for most of the time; something to do with aluminum tubing.

  “Won’t you come up?” she asked me in the brightly lit entrance lobby, which was graced with a smart black doorman in a mushroom-colored uniform and a tall vase of orange gladioli.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I have a heap of work to finish up at home.”

  There were mirrors all around us. There were fifty Jills, curving off into infinity, fifty doormen, and fifty me’s. A thousand spears of gladioli.

  “You’re sure?” she persisted.

  I shook my head. “What for? Coffee? Whiskey? More breast-beating? There was nothing we could have done to save him, Jill. You took care of him like a baby. I just loved him like a brother. There was no way that either of us could have saved him.”

  “But to die that way. So quickly; and for no reason.”

  I grasped her hand. “I don’t believe everything has to have a reason.”

  The doorman was holding the elevator for her. She lifted her face to me, and I realized that she expected me to kiss her. So I kissed her; and her cheek was soft and cold from walking in the wind; and somehow something happened between us that made both of us stand for a moment looking at each other, eyes searching, not speaking.

  “I’ll call you,” I told her. “Maybe dinner?”

  “I’d like that.”

  That was how our affair began. Talking, to begin with; and spending weekends together with a bottle of California chardonnay; listening to Mendelssohn’s violin concertos, while Christmas approached, our first Christmas without Robbie.

  I bought Jill a silver Alfred Durante cuff watch and a leather-bound book of poems by John Keats. I left a silk marker in the page which said,

  Love! Thou art leading mefrom wintry cold,

  Lady! Thou leadest me to summer clime.

  She cooked wild duck for me on Christmas Day, and Robbie’s photograph watched us, smiling from the chiffonier while we drank each other’s health in Krug champagne.

  I took her to bed. The white wintry light arranged itself across the sheets like a paper dress-pattern. She was very slim, narrow-hipped, and her skin was as smooth as cream. She didn’t speak; her hair covered her face like a golden mask. I kissed her lips, and her neck. Her oyster-colored silk panties had tucked themselves into a tight crease between her legs.

  Afterward we lay back in the gathering twilight and listened to the soft crackle of bubbles in our champagne, and the sirens of Christmas echoing across Central Park.

  “Are you going to ask me to marry you?” said Jill.

  I nodded.

  “It’s not against the law or anything, is it? For a widow to marry her late husband’s brother.”

  “Of course not. In Deuteronomy, widows are ordered to marry their late husband’s brothers.”

  “You don’t think Robbie would have minded?”

  “No,” I said, and turned over to pick up my glass, and there he was, still smiling at me. Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever, after.

  Robbie, in Paradise, may have approved, but our families certainly didn’t. We were married in Providence, Rhode Island, on a sharp windy day the following March, with nobody in attendance but a justice of the peace and two witnesses whom we had rounded up from the local bookstore, and a gray-haired old lady who played the “Wedding March” and “Scenes from Childhood.”

  Jill wore a cream tailored suit and a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons around it and looked stunning. The old lady played and smiled and the spring sunshine reflected from her spectacles like polished pennies on the eyes of an ivory-faced corpse.

  On our wedding night I woke up in the early hours of the morning and Jill was quietly crying. I didn’t let her know that I was awake. She was entitled to her grief, and I couldn’t be jealous of Robbie, now that he had been dead for over six months.

  But I lay and watched her, knowing that by marrying me she had at last acknowledged that Robbie was gone. She wept for almost twenty minutes, and then leaned across and kissed my shoulder, and fell asleep, with her hair tangled across my arm.

  Our marriage was cheerful and well organized. Jill left her apartment on Central Park South and moved into my big airy loft on Seventeenth Street. We had plenty of money; Jill worked as a creative director for Palmer Ziegler Palmer, the advertising agency, and in those days I was an accountant for Henry Sparrow, the publishers. Every weekend we compared Filofaxes and fitted in as much leisure time together as we could; even if it was only a lunchtime sandwich at Stars on Lexington Avenue, or a cup of coffee at Bloomingdale’s.

  Jill was pretty and smart and full of sparkle and I loved her more every day. I suppose you could have criticized us for being stereotypes of the Perrier water generation, but most of the time we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. In July I traded in my old BMW for a Jaguar XJS convertible in British racing green, and we drove up to Connecticut almost every weekend a hundred and ten miles an hour on the turnpike, with Beethoven on the stereo at top volume.

  Mega-pretentious, n’est-ce pas?—but it was just about the best fun I ever had in my whole life.

  On the last day of July, as we were sitting on the old colonial veranda of the Allen’s Corners hotel where we used to stay whenever we weekended in Connecticut, Jill leaned back in her basketwork chair and said dreamily, “Some days ought to last forever.”

  I clinked the ice in my vodka and tonic. “This one should.”

  It was dreamily warm, with just the lightest touch of breeze. It was hard to imagine we were less than two hours’ driving from downtown Manhattan. I closed my eyes and listened to the birds warbling and the bees humming and the sounds of a peaceful Connecticut summer.

  “Did I tell you I had a call from Willey on Friday?” Jill remarked.

  I opened one eye. “Mr. Willey, your old landlord? What did he want?”

  “He says I left some books round at the apartment, that’s all. I’ll go collect them tomorrow. He said he hasn’t relet the apartment yet, because he
can’t find another tenant as beautiful as me.”

  I laughed. “Is that bullshit or is that bullshit?”

  “It’s neither,” she said. “It’s pure flattery.”

  “I’mjealous,“I told her.

  She kissed me. “You can’t possibly be jealous of Willey. He’s about seventy years old, and he looks just like a koala bear with eyeglasses.”

  She looked at me seriously. “Besides,” she added, “I don’t love anybody else but you; and I never will.”

  It thundered the following day and the streets of New York were humid and dark and strewn with broken umbrellas. I didn’t see Jill that lunchtime because I had to meet my lawyer Morton Jankowski (very droll, Morton, with a good line in Lithuanian jokes); but I had promised to cook her my famous pesce spada al salmoriglio for dinner.

  I walked home with a newspaper over my head. There was no chance of catching a cab midtown at five o’clock on a wet Monday afternoon. I bought the swordfish and a bottle of Orvieto at the Italian market on the corner, and then walked back along Seventeenth Street, humming Verdi to myself. Told you I was mega-pretentious.

  Jill usually left the office a half hour earlier than I did so I expected to find her already back at the loft; but to my surprise she wasn’t there. I switched on the lights in the sparse, tasteful sitting room, then went through to the bedroom to change into something dry.

  By six-thirty she still wasn’t back. It was almost dark outside and the thunder banged and echoed relentlessly. I called her office but everybody had left for the day. I sat in the kitchen in my striped cook’s apron, watching the news and drinking the wine There wasn’t any point in starting dinner until Jill came home.

  By seven I was growing worried. Even if she hadn’t managed to catch a cab, she could have walked home by now. And she has never come home late without phoning me first. I called her friend Amy, in SoHo. Amy wasn’t there but her loopy boyfriend said she was over at her mother’s place, and Jill certainly wasn’t with her.

  At last, at a quarter after eight, I heard the key turn in the door and Jill came in. The shoulders of her coat were dark with rain, and she looked white-faced and very tired.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded. “I’ve been worried bananas.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a muffled voice, and hung up her coat.

  “What happened? Did you have to work late?”

  She frowned at me. Her blond fringe was pasted wetly to he forehead. “I’ve said I’m sorry. What is this, the third degree?”

  “I was concerned about you, that’s all.”

  She stalked through to the bedroom, with me following close behind her. “I managed to survive in New York before I met you, she said. “I’m not a child anymore, you know.”

  “I didn’t say you were. I said I was concerned that’s all.”

  She was unbuttoning her blouse. “Will you just get the hell out and let me change!”

  “I want to know where you’ve been!” I demanded.

  Without hesitation, she slammed the bedroom door in my face; and when I tried to catch the handle, she turned the key.

  “Jill!” I shouted. “Jill! What the hell is going on?”

  She didn’t answer. I stood outside the bedroom door for a while, wondering what had upset her so much; then I went back to the kitchen and reluctantly started to cook dinner.

  “Don’t do any for me,” she called out, as I started to chop up the onions.

  “Did you eat already?” I asked her, with the knife poised in my hand.

  “I said, don’t do any for me—that’s all!”

  “But you have to eat!”

  She wrenched open the bedroom door. Her hair was combed back and she was wrapped in her terry-cloth bathrobe. “What are you, my mother or something?” she snapped at me. Then she slammed the door shut again.

  I stabbed the knife into the butcher block and untied my apron. I was angry, now. “Listen!” I shouted. “I bought the wine, and the swordfish, and everything! And you come home two hours late and all you can do is yell at me!”

  She opened the bedroom door again. “I went round to Willey’s apartment, that’s all. Now, are you satisfied?”

  “So you went to Willey’s place? And what were you supposed to be doing at Willey’s place? Collecting your books, if my memory serves me. So where are they, these precious books? Did you leave them in the cab?”

  Jill stared at me and there was an expression in her eyes that I had never seen before. Pale, cold yet almost shocked, as if she had been involved in an accident and her mind was still numb.

  “Jill . . .” I said, more softly this time, and took two or three steps toward her.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not now. I want to be alone for just a while.”

  I waited until eleven o’clock, occasionally tapping at the bedroom door, but she refused to answer. I just didn’t know what the hell to do. Yesterday had been idyllic; today had turned into some kind of knotty, nasty conundrum. I put on my raincoat and shouted through the bedroom door that I was going down to the Bells of Hell for a drink Still she didn’t answer.

  My friend Norman said that women weren’t humans at all, but a race of aliens who had been landed on earth to keep humans company.

  “Imagine it,” he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing out smoke. “If you had never seen a woman before tonight, and you walked out of here and a woman was standing there . . . wearing a dress, with blond hair, and red lipstick, and high-heel shoes . . . and you had never seen a woman before—then, then, my friend you would understand that you had just had a close encounter of the worst kind!”

  I finished my vodka, dropped a twenty on the counter. “Keep the cha-a-ange, my man,” I told the barkeep, with a magnanimous W. C. Fieldsian wave of my hand.

  “Sir, there is no change. That’ll be three dollars and seventy-five cents more.”

  “That’s inflation for you,” Norman remarked, with a phlegmy cough. “Even oblivion is pricing itself out of the market.”

  I left the bar and walked back up to Seventeenth Street. It was unexpectedly cool for the first of August. My footsteps echoed like the footsteps of some lonely hero in a 1960s spy movie. I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drunk, either. I wasn’t very much looking forward to returning home.

  When I let myself in, the loft was in darkness. Jill had unlocked the bedroom door but when I eased it open, and looked inside, she was asleep. She had her back to me, and the quilt drawn up to her shoulders, but even in the darkness I could see that she was wearing her pajamas. Pajamas meant we’re not talking; stay away.

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself the dregs from a chilled bottle of Chablis, switched the television on low. It was a 1940s black-and-white movie called They Stole Hitler’s Brain. I didn’t want to sit there watching it, and at the same time I didn’t want to go to bed either.

  At a little after two, however, the bedroom door opened and Jill was standing there, pale and puffy-eyed.

  “Are you coming to bed?” she asked, in a clogged-up whisper. “You have work tomorrow.”

  I looked at her for a long time with my lips puckered tight. Then I said, “Sure,” and stood up, and switched off the television.

  In the morning, Jill brought me coffee and left my Swiss muesli out for me and kissed me on the cheek before she left for the agency, but there were no explanations for what had happened the previous evening. The only words she spoke were “Good morning” and “Good-bye.”

  I called, “Jill?” but the only response I got was the loft door closing behind her.

  I went to the office late and I brooded about it all morning. Around eleven-thirty I telephoned Jill’s secretary and asked if Jill were free for lunch.

  “No, Mr. Deacon, I’m sorry She had a last-minute appointment.”

  “Do you happen to know where?”

  “Hold on, I’ll check her diary. Yes . . . here it is. One o’clock. No name, I’m afraid. No address, either. It just say
s ‘Apt.’”

  “All right, Louise, thank you.”

  I put down the phone and sat for a long time with my hand across my mouth, thinking. My assistant, Fred Ruggiero, came into my office and stared at me.

  “What’s the matter? You look like you’re sick.”

  “No, I was thinking. What does the word ‘apt’ mean to you?”

  Fred scratched the back of his neck. “I guess it means like ‘appropriate,’ you know. Or ‘fitting.’ Or ‘suitable. ‘You doing a crossword?”

  “No. I don’t know. Sheila!”

  One of our younger secretaries was bouncing along the corridor in beaded dreadlocks and a shocking-pink blouse. “Yes, Mr. Deacon?”

  I wrote ‘apt’ on my notepad and showed it to her. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  She grinned. “Is this a trick? If you’d been looking for someplace to rent as long as I have, you’d know what that meant.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Apt. Don’t you read the classifieds? Apt equals apartment.”

  Apartment. And whenever Jill mentioned “apartment,” she meant one apartment in particular. Willey’s apartment.

  Fred and Sheila stared at me. Fred ventured, “Are you okay? You look kind of glassy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  I coughed and nodded. “I guess I do feel a little logy.”

  “Hope you haven’t caught a dose of the Szechuan flu,” Sheila remarked. “My cousin had it, said it was like being hit by a truck.”

  She realized suddenly what she had said. Everybody in the office knew how Robbie had died. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was truly dumb.” But I was too busy thinking about Jill round at Willey’s apartment to care.

  It was still raining, a steady drenching drizzle; but I went out all the same. All right, I told myself, I’m suspicious. I have no justification; I have no evidence; and most of all I have no moral right. Jill made a solemn promise when she married me: to have and to hold, from this day forth.

  A promise was a promise and it wasn’t up to me to police her comings and goings in order to make sure that she kept it.

  Yet there I was, standing on the corner of Central Park South and the Avenue of the Americas, in a sodden tweed hat and a dripping Burberry, waiting for Jill to emerge from her apartment building so that I could prove that she was cheating on me.