Darker Masques

by J N Williamson

  I waited over half an hour. Then, quite suddenly, Jill appeared in the company of a tall dark-haired man in a blue raincoat. Jill immediately hailed a passing taxi and climbed into it, but the man began to walk at a brisk pace toward Columbus Circle, turning his collar up as he did so.

  I hesitated for a moment, and then I went after him.

  He turned south on Seventh Avenue, still walking fast. The sidewalks were crowded and I had a hard time keeping up with him. He crossed Fifty-seventh Street just as the lights changed, and I found myself dodging buses and taxis and trying not to lose sight of him. At last, a few yards short of Broadway, I caught up with him. I snatched at his sleeve, said, “Hey, fellow. Pardon me.”

  He turned to stare at me. He was olive-skinned, almost Italian-looking. Quite handsome if you had a taste for Latins.

  He said nothing, but turned away again. He must have thought I was excusing myself for having accidentally caught at his raincoat. I grabbed him again, and said, “Hey! Pardon me! I want to talk to you!”

  He stopped. “What is this?” he demanded. “Are you hustling me, or what?”

  “Jill Deacon,” I replied, my voice shaking a little.

  “What?” He frowned.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” I replied. “I’m her husband.”

  “So? Congratulations.”

  “You were with her just now.”

  The man smiled in exasperation. “I said hello to her in the lobby, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know her?”

  “Well, sure. I live along the hall. I’ve known her ever since she moved in. We say good morning and good evening in the lobby, and that’s it.”

  He was telling the truth. I knew damn well he was telling the truth. Nobody stands there smiling at you at a busy intersection in the pouring rain and tells you lies.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I guess it was a case of mistaken identity.”

  “Take some advice, fellow,” the man replied. “Lighten up a bit, you know?”

  I went back to the office feeling small and neurotic and jerkish; like a humorless Woody Allen. I sat at my desk staring at a heap of unpaid accounts and Fred and Sheila left me very well alone. At four o’clock I gave up and left, took a cab down to the Bells of Hell for a drink.

  “You look like shit,” Norman told me.

  I nodded in agreement. “Alien trouble,” I replied.

  Maybe my suspicions about the Latin-looking man had been unfounded but Jill remained irritable and remote, and there was no doubt that something had come adrift in our marriage, although I couldn’t quite work out what.

  We didn’t make love all week. When I tried to put my arm around her in bed, she sighed testily and squirmed away. And whenever I tried to talk to her about it, she went blank or scratchy or both.

  She came home well after ten o’clock on Friday evening without any explanation about why she was late. When I asked her if everything was all right, she said she was tired, and to leave her alone. She showered and went straight to bed; and when I looked in at the bedroom door only twenty minutes later, she was fast asleep.

  I went to the bathroom and wearily stripped off my shirt. In the laundry basket lay Jill’s discarded panties. I hesitated for a moment, then I picked them out and held them up. They were still soaked with another man’s semen.

  I suppose I could have been angry. I could have dragged her out of bed and slapped her around and shouted at her. But what was the use? I went into the sitting room and poured myself a large glass of Chablis and sat disconsolately watching Jackie Gleason with the volume turned down. “The Honeymooners,” blurred with tears.

  Maybe the simple truth was that she had married me because I was Robbie’s brother; because she had hoped in some distracted and irrational way that I would somehow become the husband she had lost. I knew she had been nuts about him, I mean truly nuts. Maybe she hadn’t really gotten over the shock. Robbie would live forever; at least as far as Jill was concerned.

  Maybe she was punishing me now for not being him. Or maybe she was punishing him for dying.

  Whatever the reason, she was cheating on me, without making any serious effort to hide it. She might just as well have invited her lover into our bed with us.

  There was no question about it: Our marriage was over, even before it had started. I sat in front of the television with the tears streaming down my cheeks and I felt like curling myself up into a ball, going to sleep and never waking up.

  You can’t cry forever, though; and after about an hour of utter misery I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and finished my glass of wine and thought: right, okay. I’m not giving Jill up without a fight. I’m going to find out who this bum is who she’s been sleeping with, and I’m going to confront him, face to face. She can choose between him and me, but she’s going to have to do it right out in front of us—no sneaking, no hiding, no hypocrisy.

  I went to the bedroom and opened the door and Jill was lying asleep with her mouth slightly parted. She was still beautiful. I still loved her. And the pain of still loving her twisted inside me like a corkscrew.

  I hope you live forever, I thought to myself. I hope you live to know how much you’ve hurt me. Immortooty, immortaty. Ever, ever, after.

  On the dressing table her key ring lay sprawled. I looked at it for a long moment, then quietly picked it up.

  Next day it was windy and bright. I sat in the coffee shop opposite Jill’s agency building, drinking too much coffee and trying to chew a bagel that tasted of nothing but cream cheese and bitterness. At a few minutes after twelve, I saw Jill march smartly out of the front of the building, and lift her arm to call a cab. Immediately I ducked out of the coffee shop and called another taxi.

  “Follow that cab,” I told the driver. He was a thin Puerto Rican with beads around his neck and a black straggly mustache.

  “Wheesh cab?” he wanted to know.

  “That Checker, follow that Checker.”

  “You thin’ this some kinda movie or somethin’? I ain’t follnin’nuttin’.”

  I pushed a crumpled-up fifty into his hand. “Just follow that Checker, okay?”

  “Whatever you say, man. Your fewnral.”

  As it turned out, I paid fifty dollars plus the fare to follow Jill back to Willey’s apartment on Central Park South, where I should have known she was going anyway. The Puerto Rican saw Jill climb out of the cab ahead of us. Those long, black-stockinged legs, that smart black-and-white suit. “Hey man, she’s worth fifty, mat one. She’s worth a hund’ud!”

  Jill walked without hesitation into the apartment building. I allowed her five clear minutes, pacing up and down on the sidewalk, watched with unwavering curiosity beside an old man selling balloons. Then I went into the building after her, through the lobby to the elevators.

  “You’re looking for somebody, sir?” the black doorman wanted to know.

  “My wife, Mrs. Deacon. She arrived here just a few minutes ago.”

  “Oh, sure.” The doorman nodded. “You go on up.”

  I went upward in the small gold-mirrored elevator with my heart beating against my rib cage like a fist. I could see my reflection, and the strange thing was that I looked quite normal. Pale-faced, tired, but quite rational. I certainly didn’t look like a husband trying to surprise his wife in flagrante with another man. But then, who does? People die with the strangest expressions on their faces. Smiles, scowls, looks of total surprise.

  I reached the third floor, stepped out. The corridor was overheated and silent and smelled of lavender polish. I hesitated for a moment, holding the doors of the elevator open. Then I let them go, and they closed with a whine, and the elevator carried on upward.

  What the hell am I going to say, if I actually find her with somebody? I thought to myself. Supposing they turn around and laugh at me, what can I possibly do then?

  Reason told me that I should walk away—that if I was sure Jill was cheating on me, I should call a lawyer and arrange a divo
rce. But it wasn’t as simple as that. My ego was large enough to want to see what dazzling hero could possibly have attracted Jill away from me after such a short marriage. Such a passionate marriage, too. If I was lacking in any way, I wanted to know why.

  I reached the door with the name-card that read “Willey.” I pressed my ear against the door and listened; and after a moment or two I was sure that I could hear voices. Jill’s, high-pitched, pleading. And a deeper voice; a man’s voice. The voice of her lover, no less.

  I took out the extra key that they had made for me at American Key & Lock the previous evening. I licked my lips, took a deep breath, and then I slid it into the door. I turned it, and the door opened.

  You can still go back. You don’t have to face this if you don’t want to. But I knew that it was too late and that my curiosity was overwhelming.

  I quietly closed the door behind me and stood in the hallway, listening. On the wall beside me were framed Deccan paintings of the eighteenth century, showing women having intercourse with stallions. Highly appropriate, I thought. And sickening, too. Maybe Jill was having an affair with Willey, after all. He seemed to have a pretty libidinous turn of mind.

  I heard murmurings from the bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, and I could see sunlight and pale blue carpet. The sheets rustled. Jill said, “You’re marvelous; you’re magic; if only I’d known.”

  God, I thought, I shouldn’t have come. This is almost more than I can stand. And what am I going to look like if they discover me? A creeping cuckold; a jealous husband who couldn’t satisfy his wife.

  “Promise me,” said Jill. “Promise me you’ll never leave me.

  The man said something indistinct.

  “All right,” Jill replied, with tart satisfaction. “In that case I’ll get the champagne out of the icebox, and we’ll—”

  I hadn’t realized, listening to her talking, that she had climbed out of bed and crossed the bedroom floor. She opened the door, naked, flushed in the face, and caught me standing in the hall.

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. The color emptied out of her face like ink spilled from a bottle.

  Without a word, I pushed past her, and threw open the bedroom door.

  “All right, you bastard!” I roared, in a voice so hoarse that it was almost insane. “Get up, get dressed, and get the fuck out!”

  The man on the bed turned, and stared at me; and then I froze.

  He was very pale. He was almost gray. His eyes had a stony faraway look that was more like a statue’s than a man’s. He was naked, his gray penis still glistened from sex. His chest was bound tightly with wide white bandages.

  “Robbie,” I whispered.

  He drew the sheet right up to his neck but he didn’t take his eyes away from me once.

  “Robbie?” I repeated.

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”

  When he spoke, his words came out in a labored whisper. Massive chest injuries, that’s what the doctors had told me. He didn’t feel a thing.

  I managed one mechanical step forward. Robbie continued to stare at me. He was dead; and yet here he was, staring at me. I had never been so frightened of anything in my entire life.

  “What happened?” I asked. “They told us you were killed instantly. That’s what the doctors said. ‘Don’t worry, he didn’t feel a thing. He was killed instantly.’”

  Robbie managed a tight, reflective smile. “It’s the words, George. They work!”

  “Words?” I demanded. “What words?”

  “Don’t you remember? Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever, after. I saw the truck coming toward me and I shouted them out. The next thing I knew, it was dark and I was buried alive.”

  He raised his hand, and turned it this way and that, frowning at it, as if it didn’t really belong to him. “I don’t know, maybe ‘alive’ is the wrong word. Immortal, sure. I’m immortal. I’m going to live forever—whatever that means.”

  “You got out of your casket?” I asked him in disbelief. “It was solid Cuban mahogany.”

  “The one you paid for might have been solid Cuban mahogany. The one I kicked my way out of was pine, tacked together with two-inch nails.” He gave me a grim smile. “You should sue your mortician. Or then again, maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “Jesus.” I was trembling. I couldn’t believe it was he. But it really was. My own brother, gray-faced and dead, but still alive.

  “Jill!” I shouted. “Jill!”

  Jill came back into the room, wrapped in a red robe.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked in a whisper, although I couldn’t stop myself from staring at Robbie. He remained where he was, wrapped in his sheet, his eyes fixed on me with an expression that was as cold as glass. God Almighty, he looked dead, he looked like a corpse. How could Jill have . . .?

  “I love him,” Jill told me, her voice small and quiet.

  “You love him?” I quaked. “Jill, he’s dead!”

  “I love him,” she repeated.

  “I love him, too, for Christ’s sake!” I screamed at her. “I love him too! But he’s dead Jill! He’s dead!”

  I snatched hold of her wrist but she yanked herself angrily away from me. “He’s not dead!” she shrieked. “He’s not! He makes love to me! How can he be dead?”

  “How the hell should I know? Because of a rhyme, because of a wish? Because of who knows what! But the doctors said he was dead and they buried him, and he’s dead, Jill!”

  Robbie slowly drew back the sheet from the bed and eased himself up. His skin was almost translucent, like dirty wax. From the bandages around his chest, I heard a whining inhalation and exhalation. The scaffolding pole had penetrated his lungs; he hadn’t stood a chance.

  “I dug my way out of the soil with my bare hands,” he told me; and there was a kind of terrible pride in his voice. “I rose out of the earth at three o’clock in the morning, filthy with clay. Then I walked all the way to the city. Walked! Do you know how difficult that is, how far that is? And then the next day I called Jill from a public telephone in Brooklyn; and she came to rescue me.”

  “I remember the day,” I told him.

  He came up close. He exuded a strange, elusive smell; not of decomposition, but of some preservative chemical. It suddenly occurred to me that embalming fluid must be running through his veins instead of blood. He was my brother; I had loved him when he was alive. But I knew with complete certainty, now, that he was dead; and I loved him no longer.

  Jill whispered, “You won’t tell, will you? You won’t tell anybody?”

  For a very long moment I couldn’t think what to do. Jill and Robbie watched me without saying a word, as if I were a hostile outsider who had deliberately set out to interfere and to destroy their lives.

  But at last I grinned, nodded, and said to Robbie, “You’re back, then! You’re really back. It’s a miracle!”

  He smiled lopsidedly, as if his mouth were anesthetized. “I knew you’d understand. Jill said you never would; but I said bull. You always did, didn’t you? You son-of-a-gun.”

  He rested his hand on my shoulder, his dead gray hand; and I felt the bile rise up in my throat. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and if I had betrayed any sign of disgust, I would have ruined it,

  “Come on through to the kitchen,” I told him. “I could use a beer after this. Maybe a glass of wine?”

  “There’s some champagne in the icebox,” said Jill. “I was just going to get it.”

  “Well, let’s open it together,” I suggested. “Let’s celebrate! It isn’t every day that your brother comes back from the dead.”

  Jill dragged the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around Robbie like a toga. Then they followed me into the small green-tiled kitchen. I opened the icebox, took out the bottle of champagne, and offered it to Robbie.

  “Here,” I told him. “You were always better at opening up bottles of wine than I was.”

  He took it but looked
at me seriously. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve got the strength anymore. I’m alive, you know, but it’s kind of different.”

  “You can make love,” I retorted, dangerously close to losing my temper. “You should be able to open a bottle of champagne.”

  His breath whined in and out of his bandages. I watched him closely. There was doubt on his face; as if he suspected that I was somehow setting him up, but he couldn’t work out how.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Jill coaxed him.

  I turned around, opened one of the kitchen drawers. String, skewers, nutmeg grater. “Yes, come on, Robbie. You always were a genius at parties.”

  I opened the next drawer. Tea towels. Jill frowned and said, “What are you looking for?”

  Robbie began to unwind the wire muzzle around the champagne cork. “My fingers feel kind of numb, you know? It’s hard to describe.”

  I opened the third drawer, trying to do it nonchalantly. Knives.

  Jill knew instantaneously what I was going to do. Maybe it was genuine intuition. Maybe it was nothing more than heightened fear. But I turned around so casually that she didn’t see the nine-inch Sabatier carving knife in my hand; she was looking at my eyes; and it had penetrated Robbie’s bandages right up to the hilt before she understood that I meant to kill him. I meant to kill him. He was my brother.

  The champagne bottle smashed on the floor in an explosion of glass and foam. Jill screamed but Robbie said nothing at all. He turned to me, and grasped my shoulder, and there was something in his eyes that was half panic and half relief. I pulled the knife downward and it cut through his flesh as if it were an overripe avocado: soft, slippery, no resistance.

  “Oh, God,” he breathed. His gray intestines came pouring out from underneath his toga and onto the broken glass. “Oh, God get it over with.”

  “No!” screamed Jill, but I stared at her furiously and shouted, “You want him to live forever? He’s my brother! You want him to live forever? “