Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  At three minutes to nine I got out of the car and walked up the drive, through the gate, and just as I stepped off the asphalt onto the grass those damn lights came on. All five of them, going up like a wall right before me, and it turned that yard into something like a prison court. I froze stiff. I waited for that shot in the back of my head. The way you’ll do, at such a crazy moment, I wondered if I’d hear the shot that would kill me or be dead before the sound waves got to my ears. But nothing happened. Not a thing. Just the click of the metal hoods on the lamps as the bulbs warmed up. On the white wall of the house I could see the flickering flight of some big moth. Nobody yelled, no alarms went off, so I went along the flagstone steps in the lawn to the door at the side, the one to her room. I gave it a very light tap, and she said, “Come in.” I opened the door cautiously, peered in, and there she was in bed.

  She had her head propped on some pillows, a book in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and after giving me a warm, superficial smile she returned to her gum.

  “You sick?”

  “Mr. Mattson called long-distance from New York but he missed Mrs. Mattson, so he has to call again. Somebody just has to be here to receive the call.” She cracked the gum.

  I suppose the two pillows behind her head made her hair stick up and look a little frowsy. She wore one of those sheer honeymoon gowns advertised for their transparent glamour, but it was in the wrong color, and somehow it wasn’t her style. I was reminded again that no woman looks good sitting up in bed.

  “Hmmmmm—” I said, stepping inside, and for the first time noticed the posters on the walls. Big prewar German travel posters. The ruins along the Rhine. Then I looked at the modern Rhine maiden in the bed. I hate parallels. But there it was.

  “Come sit down,” she said, and patted the bed.

  “You had to go to bed,” I said, “to answer the phone?”

  “I am raising and feeding five children,” she replied. “You know what that’s like?”

  “What you reading?” I said, to change the subject.

  “Dostoevski.” She actually was. “About the white nights of Russia,” she added.

  I tried to recall the white nights of Russia, but the dark night at Malibu intervened. In her ash tray was an apple core, just beginning to darken, a wad of pink gum, and half a dozen cigarette butts.

  “There’s another awful thing—” she began, then put down her book and sat up straight. A car was coming up the drive and the lights came through the windows, flashed on the walls.

  “You’ve got to hide,” she said, looking around, “somewhere.”

  “I’ve got to what?”

  “She’s going to come back here and look at the baby. She’s going to ask me if her husband called.”

  I was sitting on the bed. I got up and tried to look under it. A camp locker and some soup cartons took all of the space.

  “There’s a closet—” she said, waving her arm behind her, and I walked to the corner and looked into the closet. It was packed with her clothes and had her shoes and a vacuum cleaner on the floor. There was no room to stand, anywhere, so I pulled out the vacuum cleaner, got in behind it, then crouched down on the floor. Just in time. I heard the door close at the front of the house. Two of the older kids came running through the house right to her room, ganged inside, and plopped down on the foot of her bed. They were all out of wind but dying to tell her about the movie they had just seen. She let them ramble till Mrs. Mattson came back, who asked them to please be quiet, then inquired about the call from New York. Eva told her that he would probably call again. Mrs. Mattson left the room and came back once more to speak to the children. The Greek yawned and said that she was all worn out.

  “Who belongs to this?” asked one of the kids, and I knew. It was my hat. I’d left it on the floor or the foot of the bed.

  “My brother’s,” she replied. “Isn’t it nice?”

  I heard the girl try it on. “It’s big for me,” she said.

  “But I can wear it,” said the Greek, and tried it on.

  “Now you look like your boy friends,” one said, but they left when she asked them to leave. She asked them to come back and close the door, and one of them did. I sat there on the floor, on the toes of some rubbers, my eyes on the crack of light beneath the door, listening to the bed the Greek was lying on creak and twang as she laughed. As I’ve told you several times, I’m forty-one. My hair is gray at the temples and there are slight pouches under my eyes. When she finally had the strength to open the door, and looked in and saw me, that set her off again. To keep from laughing hysterically she bit down on her arm. I saw the teeth marks on the flesh when I came out. I crawled out: sitting had made me stiff and there was no room in the place to stand upright. Out in the room I stayed on the floor beside her bed. It was three or four minutes before she got control of herself. That’s just time enough, for a man of my age, to reconsider what had happened and reach the conclusion that the world’s greatest jackass was himself.

  In her fit of giggling she had stretched out face down on the bed, hugging her pillow, and the foot of her left leg dangled near my face. The polish on the nails had been cracked for some time. The heel was dirty. It was not a pretty foot, nor a pretty ankle, nor was it attached to a pretty leg. The girl was tremendous as a piece, but not in the parts. There were several swollen mosquito bites on her arms. Before she stopped wheezing I had made something like peace with my situation, had brushed the lint off my knees, found and put on my hat. But I had to wait till the house was quiet before I could leave. Now that the lady was home I might really get that shot in the back.

  She was still sprawled on her face when she said:

  “Didn’t I tell you you wouldn’t like me?”

  “You did,” I said, “and you were right.”

  “Does it matter—now?”

  I was slow to answer. I don’t know why. It mattered to beat hell, right at the moment, but I suppose I wanted to believe in the past. She rolled on the bed to look at my face, her own wet with tears of laughter, and that piece of pink chewing gum at the front of her mouth. She reached for the hat I had put on, tossed it on the bed, and ran her hand through my hair.

  “Let me tell you what I like, first,” I said, “just in case I might forget it. You haven’t lied to me. There has been no talk about love. You said that I aroused your desire, and I suppose I did. I said you were one of my basic needs, and you are. I think it’s fairly unusual for a man and woman, more or less strangers, to lie so little to each other and still do so much.”

  She did not reply, and I went on. “As part of your development you should know what I had planned. I came here to sell you a bill of goods on Mexico. It’s a wonderful place. We’re doing a little musical on the subject, a sort of Love Among the Cannibals number, and it crossed my mind that the songs might be better if I knew a little cannibelle, personally. One like you. One I was really crazy to eat. I’d be wonderfully frank. I’d only lie to you on one small point. I’d tell you that a week would be long enough, but I’d kidnap you with two weeks in mind. As you know, two weeks can be a long time. If they were anything like the last thirty-six hours I wouldn’t be around at all, at the finish, so one week would probably prove to be more than enough. That’s what I would tell you—we would be lying, of course, on that bed in Malibu—and there’s only one thing I like to do more than lie in bed with you and talk. We’d have done that, so the talking would be all right. Then I would mention, just in passing, that if Mexico sounded interesting to you, it just so happened that we had a vacant seat in the car. In case you’d like to come along you might meet me, say, about ten in the morning. To that you would reply, ‘Any particular place?’ and I would say, ‘Make it the same place,’ meaning that corner on the campus where I picked you up.”

  She pushed the pillow from under her head so that her eyes dropped down on a level with mine.

  “When my friend Mac asked me if I was crazy enough to let a woman use me—you know what I replie
d? I said yes. Yes, if that woman was you. I want to be used. I mean I’d like to be used till I’m worn out. As for whether I like you, or you like me, it’s something like the hand asking the body if it likes what it can’t help reaching for. And I reach for you.”

  She closed her eyes, parted her lips, and I said, “But now I’m going to cut you, the way you’ve cut me. Just to see if you’ll bleed. You seem to think that a lover is a bar-bell exerciser for your soul, a set of Indian clubs for your inner development. But you know what you are?” She waited. “You’re a baby cannibelle. You like raw meat You like to eat it alive. You have eaten my heart, the strings of my eyes, you have eaten my lights, my guts and my liver, and if you had a chance you would scoop out the hollow of my skull.”

  She did not deny it. Opening her eyes, her gaze on mine, she said, “And you?”

  “I’m a cannibal too,” I said, and reached for her hand, the arm with her teeth marks. “You see?” I said. “We are two cannibals,” and I put my lips to the wound, bit her, and crooned:

  “A cannibelle’s affection is a dangerous thing.

  She prefers the knuckle to the wedding ring.

  The banquet of love

  Is the one she cooks

  Without the aid of how-to-do-it books.”

  My words, if not my intentions, made love to her. Her hand was still in my hair, and it drew me toward her, down to her lips, her beautiful mouth, where the pink gum was stuck to the yellow tooth until I put it aside.

  A police car made a tour of the place a little later and flashed its spotlight on the windows and around the yard. I don’t think she heard it. Her breathing was deep and regular. I carried my shoes so I wouldn’t make a racket in the gravel, and remembered too late that I’d left my hat on the floor. I drove back to our mansion, where I found Mac, in the room with the mirrors, trying on the tropical touring clothes he had bought, English walking shorts, a pith helmet, and several pairs of sand boots.

  “I take it the chick’s in the bag?” I said.

  He smiled. That inimitable full-of-heart, baby-face smile.

  “We’ll probably be alone,” I said. “I figured the girls wouldn’t take to each other.”

  He dropped his pants on the floor. Then he remembered what they cost him, picked them up.

  “Man, you crazy?”

  “Everything for the team!” I said.

  He watched me cross the room to the hallway, where he suddenly remembered he had something to tell me.

  “Man—” he said, “guess what, man.” I didn’t guess, so he added, “We still goin’ to Acapulco?”

  I nodded.

  “Guess what, man. We got a free house. We got a villa, which is what they call it. Says there’s fruit to beat hell just growin’ all over. All you need to do is just lean out and pick it.”

  “Who says?”

  “Guy who owns the villa. He’s up here right now. Says we’re welcome to it. Says bay is so close you can almost spit in it. How you like that, man?”

  All I wanted to do, right at that point, was get away. Acapulco was away. It was also far away, and it was free. We could write off the chick as part of the production, but the studio’s experience with song-writing teams ruled out villas, especially those in Acapulco, as part of the act.

  “Ah’m sho yoh an’ Miss Hah-cum will luv it,” I said.

  “What about another li’l chick?” said Mac. “What about a li’l Acapulco chick, f’rinstance?”

  Just to keep him off the subject I said, “I told the Greek I’d let her know in the morning.”

  “Who—man?” he barked.

  I didn’t reply. He had heard me the first time, for he said, “The Greek? Christamighty man, whatta name.” He shook his head, then said, “Too bad she’s not goin’ along.”

  V

  At a quarter to ten we picked up Billie Harcum in a Bullock’s Wilshire version of the femme fatal. Also five pieces of aluminum luggage, roughly the size of two steamer trunks, one of them so heavy Mac could hardly carry it to the car. You have to draw the line somewhere, so I said:

  “Billie, dahlin’—there’s a luggage limit at the border. Two bags per bag. Which two do you pick?”

  About forty minutes later we had those five bags packed into two. I managed to get her to leave about forty pounds of toothpaste, cold cream, shampoo, and skin food. Somebody had told her there were no white women in Mexico.

  Purely as a matter of sentiment I drove down Sunset to the UCLA campus, then across the campus to the comer where I had first picked her up. All I wanted to do, I suppose, was reassure myself. See with my own eyes the spot that marked the scene of the accident. You won’t believe it when I tell you, but Mac saw her first. He simply said Wow, not particularly forceful, but the way it escapes you when you mean it. Up ahead, all alone on that comer, was my Greek. It looked to me like the purest coincidence. She had a sort of striped beach bag with her, nothing else, and I didn’t even swing the car over toward her. I just made the stop I had to for the STOP sign, then we sat there and watched her walk around to my side. I think she saw that I couldn’t speak, so she said:

  “My mother is sick.”

  “Who?” I said, then, “She is? For how long?”

  “She’s going to be sick for just a week,” she replied.

  “A week,” I repeated. So she had wangled a week. But nothing really registered until she said, “But if there isn’t room?” and looked at the two beside me in the seat. That did it. I turned to Mac and said, “You kids mind moving into the rear?”

  “Christ no!” barked Mac, meaning every word of it, and started to climb over the back before he remembered Billie. He slid back and let himself out the door, the normal way. But when Billie stepped out, I wasn’t sure at all she would climb back in. But she had bought all that luggage, all those tropical rags, and she had probably told her friends what a dream she was living. So she decided to live it. The girls were never officially introduced. If you’ve ever noticed the way a big show dog will get into a car with a ficey small one, you’ve got the picture. It’s not one to take at the start of a trip.

  Somewhere along the freeway east of Palm Springs it occurred to me that in the past I had run off with books, rather than women, to Mexico. Books, that is, were my idea of self-development. One of the things I seemed to resent about the girl with her legs tanning in the seat beside me was that she preferred to take her life and literature raw. Having read me, mind and body, she would then move on to somebody else.

  One of the books I took to Mexico had been on the bullfight, which I thought I had better read up on, but what I remembered was the author’s advice to go to Spain. Ronda. They held bullfights in Ronda, but that was not it. Ronda was where you should go in case you bolted with someone. That word caught my eye at the time because I had wanted to bolt with someone, but hadn’t. I was saving myself, at the time, for those marvelous girls that never turn up, most of them having bolted with somebody else or settled down with some books. Pride had kept me from asking a slant-eyed girl who worked the night shift at the local diner, and fear that she would turn me down kept me from asking the girl I was mad about. Pride and fear, that is, made me scrupulous. A young man with high principles, I bolted with myself. I had a fine time in Mexico, which I recommend to bolters who don’t get to Ronda, but I did not see the country reserved for those who bolt with someone. I didn’t cross that line. I turned back at that frontier.

  When you hear people complain about customs regulations, passports, officials, and the rest of it, they are really telling you they don’t want to leave the interior. They’ve come to a line, real and imaginary, they don’t want to cross. When you bolt it helps to have one on the map, plainly visible. A threshhold. Like the door to that cabin in Malibu. When the Greek crossed that line she knew it, and kicked off her shoes. I like that. That’s life as literature. You can have an affair in any old place, but in order to bolt with a woman you’ve got to cross a line, a frontier, in your interior. You’ve got t
o burn certain bridges that won’t be there in case you come back.

  In El Centro, where we stopped for coffee, Mac heard the gas attendant tell me that it was so-and-so many miles to the state line.

  “State line, man?” he said. “We cross a state line?”

  “It’s not a line, Mac,” I said, “it’s a river.”

  But that didn’t help. This line was not on the map. It was down in Mac’s interior. He led me off to the men’s room to tell me that if we crossed that line—the chicks had a case. A veteran of forty-three bombing missions, I’d never seen him so scared. I bought a comb from the comb dispenser and stood facing the mirror, combing my hair, while he made up his mind whether to cross that line or not.

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked.

  “Ten to twenty years,” I said, “or a photogenic Latin wedding.”

  Nothing amuses him so much as the idea of marriage, but he didn’t laugh. When we came back to the lunchroom the girls were gone but their lipstick-stained cups were there, with five cigarette butts in Billie’s saucer, one in the Greek’s. You know that uneasy feeling you have when the women make peace? This pair of chicks who couldn’t stand the sight of each other came up the stairs arm in arm, my big German police dog and Mac’s little drugstore marble faun. They still hated each other, but they had established common ground. I’ve seen that happen time and again—the men go to the men’s room and come back the same—but the women come back with all Gaul divided into two parts. Mac felt that worse than I did, since he relies on the women fighting. “Keeps their fire scattered, man,” he says. “You know what I mean?”