The Comedy is Finished

by Donald E. Westlake

  “We aren’t a family anymore.” She was holding him tighter and tighter, burying her face in his chest, her words muffled. He felt the trembling of her shoulders beneath his hand. “We aren’t together anymore.”

  “After this is over—” But there was no way to end that sentence; it had become impossible to think about life after this was over.

  She raised her head, and he saw tears on her cheeks. “Make love to me,” she whispered.

  He wanted to, suddenly, overpoweringly; she had to be aware of the physical manifestation. But he turned his head toward the closed door to Koo’s bedroom: “Where—”

  “In here,” she whispered, leading him by the hand to the bedroom on the opposite side of the landing. “We’ll leave the door open, you’ll be able to see that door.”

  The bedroom was in darkness, with the view of the ocean a kind of unfinished empty diorama seen through the wall of glass doors on the opposite side. Low massive furniture, indistinguishable in the dark, hulked like sleeping beasts on the wall-to-wall carpet. The room was large, muffled, quiet.

  Larry wanted her achingly, demandingly, in waves of concupiscence; his hands trembled with the need of her. He’d been away from active thoughts of sex for such a long long time, and now sexual desire was like a revelation. He touched her breasts through her clothing, the shape of her body exciting him further. “Take everything off.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  They pulled off their clothing with great haste, but then stopped and looked at one another, smiling slowly together, like old acquaintances unexpectedly meeting, who learn they can still be friends. Joyce was surprisingly voluptuous naked, with a long-torsoed body and full breasts, mysterious in the dim indirect illumination from the small chandelier at the head of the stairs. Larry cupped the side of her right breast with his hand, touching the hard berry of nipple with the ball of his thumb. Her face was wide-eyed and solemn in the shadows. He pulled her close, kissing her, rubbing himself against her.

  “Yes. Oh. Don’t hurt me.”

  “Down,” he whispered.

  He held her hand, helped her lower herself to the carpeted floor, then knelt between her legs. Memory now only increased the novelty of this desire; had she always been so serious, so grave, and yet so open and warm and pliant in her lovemaking? Penetrating her, he would have lowered onto her breast but she held him up with her forearms under his shoulders, whispering, “I want to see you.”

  “Yes. Good.” The posture was awkward for him, hands splayed on the floor, but he maintained it. Below, their bodies moved together, rolling in the tidal motion, while their somber faces remained still. He watched her in wonder, the shadowed eyes, the soft smooth skin of her face, the parted lips, stray shards of light glinting from her moist teeth, her hair fanned on the carpet beneath her head and curling around her small ears. A door was opened in his mind, and he saw that for all these years he had been in love with Joyce. In personal exclusive demanding love with one individual human being; as though nobody else existed. He had spent years denying it, refusing to distract himself from his concern with all of humanity, refusing to recognize the awful jealousy in the early days when she would go to bed with Peter or Mark or any of the others who were still with them then; and all this time had successfully hidden from himself the truth.

  Years ago, in college, he had memorized a portion of Pope’s An Essay on Man, thinking it expressed his own beliefs better than he ever could, and only now understanding he had always misunderstood it. In a murmuring voice, slowly, in time with their lovemaking, he recited:

  “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great: with too much knowledge for the skeptic side, with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, he hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; in doubt to deem himself a god or beast; in doubt his mind or body to prefer; born but to die, and reasoning but to err; alike in ignorance, his reason such, whether he thinks too little or too much.”

  “Don’t think,” she whispered, and the hint of a smile touched her lips in the semi-dark. “Larry, don’t think at all.”

  “I love you.”

  “Oh, don’t say that. Not now.” Then, her expression fierce, she clamped his face between her hands. “Come in me.”

  Yes. Still holding him so she could see his face, her own face suffusing, the eyes losing focus, she strained and pulsed beneath him, and he could feel the surge of her body just before his own final, demanding, insistent thrust. “Forever,” he cried, forgetting silence and noise, and collapsed atop her.

  The darkness was comforting. Their bodies were warm together, her hands and arms were soothing as she stroked his back, the warm suspiration of her breath beside his ear was reassuring. His lower body trembled, spending itself, the aftershocks of orgasm rippling through him, but his head at least was at peace, drooping downward, forehead touching the friendly roughness of the carpet. A long stretch of Nontime went by, and then Joyce sighed, shifting beneath him, and he knew they had to go forward again. Lurch forward, into the impossible. He echoed her sigh, and lifted himself onto his elbows, feeling the sudden chill air on his chest.

  “Larry.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Let him go.”

  Larry closed his eyes. It was the other impossible goal; first to love Joyce, second to be finished with Koo Davis. “We can’t,” he whispered. “Peter would never allow it. Not now, not when he’s been humiliated.”

  “Will he kill him?”

  “No.” Larry was certain of that part, he’d thought it out before. “That’s just another way to admit defeat. Peter will want to make up for it now, to get his dignity back.”

  “The longer we go on, the worse it is for us. For us.”

  “It’s already too long,” Larry said, and kissed her, and rolled off onto the floor.

  This bedroom had its own lavatory; Larry used it, then returned to find Joyce already dressed and standing in the bedroom doorway, frowning across the landing at the door of Koo’s room. She said, “I’ll watch him. You go talk to Peter.”

  “I promised Koo.”

  “Larry, it’s all right.” Something had made her stronger, more sure of herself. “I can deal with Mark just as well as you can. Besides, I think he’s gone, this time I think he’s finally run away for good.”

  “None of us will get away for good,” Larry said, but he didn’t argue anymore. He shivered, all the warmth out of his body now, and began to dress.

  It was the worst day of Peter’s life. He had gone through defeats before, and had his triumphs, and suffered those periods which can sometimes seem even worse, when nothing at all happens, neither for good nor ill, when one’s life seems to have stopped, when you might as well be dead—but this was the worst. To be made a fool of, a laughingstock, before the entire world. To have one’s plans exposed as the vaporings of a simpleton, a dunce with no grasp on reality, an ass, an egotistical buffoon capering in the streets—this was the way he described himself to himself, in his mind. His self-loathing was such that he positively strove to punish his cheeks, grinding and gnawing, biting till he couldn’t stand it any longer, then biting again. The tears glistening in his eyes, which might have been caused by humiliation, or rage, or regret, or despair, were from pain.

  This house belonged to a friend of Ginger’s in the music business, and a smallish room behind the kitchen reflected this vocation. The room was soundproofed, and built into the walls was a complete small studio of recording and playback equipment. The furnishings were simple and quiet, with leather swivel chairs and Formica-topped small tables. A console along one wall contained the instrumentation for all the equipment, plus three keyboards. Two heavily draped windows looked out on not much at all; some shrubbery, the tall paling fence belonging to the neighbor next door. It was to this room that Peter retired, once the interminable horrible ghastly program was over, to sit in one of the leath
er chairs, unmoving, staring at the floor, enveloping himself in pessimism and despondency and self-hatred.

  But such feelings about oneself cannot last. They are too painful to be endured for very long; soon we must either forgive ourselves or punish ourselves, with the strongest form of punishment for the strongest level of self-loathing being death. Peter was not a man to willingly end his own life—he was too utterly the center of his universe for that—so that soon he began to shift his angle of view and to see things in a slightly different way.

  He wasn’t the one who had gone wrong. He had remained true to his ideals, true to the plan and vision of Revolution, while those others had fallen by the wayside. Eric Mallock! Who could believe such a failure from Eric Mallock? Had they castrated him?

  It was true that Peter hadn’t fully researched all ten people before putting their names on the list, it was true he personally knew fewer than half of them, even at the level of nodding acquaintance, but surely a few years ago the reaction would have been very different. There wouldn’t have been more than one or two at the most who would fail to rally if placed on such a list. What had happened? Peter had remained constant, what had happened to all those others? Only three would even answer the call; one a renegade Panther, one an internationalist whose primary involvement wasn’t with the Second American Revolution anyway, and one a simple bank robber. Those three could rot in prison, they meant nothing to Peter at all.

  It was the others, the seven. What a betrayal! Never mind that they’d made Peter look like a fool, it was the Movement they had betrayed, the Movement they had held up to public scorn and ridicule, the Movement they had turned their backs on. Peter’s self-hatred reversed itself, extended outward, enveloping the seven who had made this horrible thing happen.

  The day would come when they would pay. Did they, like most Americans, think the Revolution was dead? Quiescent, yes, but the same problems of power and responsibility still existed, the same separation of the governed from the governing, the same potential for the misuse of power and for horrors done in the name of the people but without their cognizance or their will. Those who now held power would be unable forever to restrain themselves from using it; the Revolution was a bomb with a fuse that only the Establishment could light, but they would light it. And on that day, Peter’s list would still exist. And the people on it would pay, they would dearly pay.

  He had gone this far in his thinking when Ginger entered the room, took a chair facing him, and said, “Well, what now, genius?”

  Peter barely heard the sarcasm; his mind was already too full. Nor had he yet considered Ginger’s question. What now? He had no idea. “We go on,” he said. “If we were willing to be stopped by temporary setbacks, we would never have succeeded at all.”

  “Temporary setbacks!” Ginger’s true astonishment superseded his half-artificial scorn. “You call this a temporary setback?”

  “We still have Koo Davis.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Peter, get out of that dream! You don’t think you’re going on!”

  “What else can we do? Give up? There’s no way to give up.”

  “Let Davis go,” Ginger said. Waving one hand in a frail parody of his usual ebullient style, he said, “I’ll buy you tickets out of the country. You people go to Algeria.”

  “With our tails between our legs? No, Ginger.”

  “While you still have tails and legs. Peter, you are a very very silly person, I understand that now, it’s undoubtedly what attracted me to you in the first place.” Bit by bit, Ginger was regaining his normal stance toward life; this disaster seemed, if anything, to have improved his spirits. “You and your little friends go play pattycake in Algeria,” he said. “La grande affaire est finie.”

  “No,” Peter said.

  Ginger made shooing motions. “C’est dangereux. Allez vous en.”

  “No, Ginger.”

  Angry and flippant at the same time, Ginger waggled a nervous accusatory finger at Peter: “Je tiens à ce que vous partiez immédiatement!”

  “I’m staying,” Peter told him. “And Koo Davis is staying.”

  “Vous voulez rire!” Ginger turned aside to an imaginary audience, spreading his hands and saying, “Ecoutez cet homme!”

  “And you’re staying.”

  Ginger was startled briefly back into English: “What? I certainly am not! Il y va de ma vie! Je pense à mon avenir!”

  “And my future.” Peter was unassailable. He had stopped grinding his teeth, and the resurgent blinking had once again disappeared. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, where or how he would move from this abyss, but nevertheless he was calm, secure, confident in himself to a degree he’d never known before. He had touched bottom, and was no longer afraid. “You are tied to me, Ginger,” he said, “and if things go badly for me they’ll go just as badly for you.”

  Ginger seemed truly depressed now, and not merely play-acting at gloom.

  “J’ai mal à la tête,” he said, slowly getting to his feet. “Je vais me coucher.”

  “Sit down, Ginger,” Peter said. “And speak English.”

  Ginger’s shrug was exquisitely Gallic. “Pourquoi?”

  Peter surged to his feet, his right hand whipping around so fast that Ginger never saw it coming. The sound of the slap was a quick flat cracking noise in the soundproofed room, leaving a reddening blot on Ginger’s astounded face. “Sit down,” Peter said. “No more playing. Sit down, speak English, and stop pretending you’re not a part of this.”

  “My God, you struck me!”

  “Will you sit down, or will I strike you again?”

  Slowly, unbelievingly, Ginger backed to the sofa, lowered himself into it, and turned aside as though for thought or self-composure, touching his fingertips to his red cheek. When he next looked over at Peter, his eyes were blank, all his fey mannerisms gone, leaving not a monkey but a monkey-god, stonefaced and unforgiving. “You have just made, Peter,” he said, “perhaps your most serious mistake of all.” Except for the red mark on his cheek, his face had drained of color.

  “You aren’t leaving this room,” Peter told him, “until you really do understand that you’re as deep in this thing as I am. Don’t you think I know what you had in mind?” He parodied Ginger’s former manner, more insultingly than accurately: “ ‘Oh, I have a headache, oh I’m going to bed.’ Right out the door, you mean, a quick stop for the anonymous phone tip to the police, and then off to Cold-water Canyon or some such place to work up your alibi—‘I was screwing this young thing, Officer, I never did go to that place in Malibu, it’s all some horrible coincidence.’”

  “Horrible, at any rate.”

  That Ginger neither denied the charge nor made fun of it was disturbing, but it confirmed Peter in his guess. “I didn’t want you in this, Ginger,” he said, “but now you’re in, and you have to ride it through with the rest of us.”

  “Why am I in it? How did the police happen to poke around that house anyway? Some other misjudgment of yours?”

  “I have no idea,” Peter said. Privately, he suspected that Mark might have done something, either deliberately or inadvertently, during the time he was gone from the house after the fight with Larry, but he was hesitant to say so, because the accusation might get back to Mark. Peter was not prepared to challenge Mark directly; it was better to keep that killer rage directed outward. With Ginger, on the other hand, the direct approach was best: “The point is, we had to move, and here we are, and now you’re no longer merely our backer, you’re part of the action.”

  “And if I walk out? Or do you intend to stand guard over me twenty-four hours a day? Can you really keep an eye on two prisoners at once?”

  “If I’m arrested,” Peter said, “the first name I speak will be yours.”

  Ginger was still considering that threat, his expression calm but his lips thrust out, when the door opened and Larry entered, looking earnest and troubled and eager to be of help. “Can I join the conversation?” He left th
e door open.

  Peter said, “Where’s Mark?”

  “Joyce says she thinks he’s gone for good.” Larry sat to Peter’s right, saying, “Peter, do you have any idea what to do next?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” It had just come to him, while looking at Larry’s obtuse face. “Ginger, I want to make a tape.”

  “For the police?”

  “They’re my only audience.”

  Ginger rose, turning toward the recording equipment, while Larry leaned closer to Peter, speaking in a low and confidential voice, saying, “I was thinking, Peter, maybe we ought to cut our losses.”

  The sweet predictability of Larry cheered Peter enormously, after the intricacies of Ginger. Almost laughing, he said, “Larry, you want to turn Koo Davis loose. The answer is no.”

  “I just thought—”

  “I know what you thought, and what you always think.”

  Ginger said, “Sit in this chair here. You want to make the tape yourself?”

  “That’s right.” Peter switched chairs, and Ginger positioned a microphone on the white countertop in front of him, saying, “Don’t sit too close when you talk. Just the way you are now.”

  “All right.”

  “We should close that door. We’ll get outside noise.”

  “Leave it.” Peter was irritable, impatient. “We’re not interested in high fidelity. They’ll understand the message.”

  Ginger shrugged. “Let’s make sure we’re using blank tape.” He turned away, seating himself at the controls. He hit switches, and a faint hissing sound came from concealed loudspeakers.

  Larry said, “Peter, are you sure you don’t want to discuss it first, get it down on paper?”

  “I know exactly what I want to say.”

  “All right,” Ginger said. “It’s clean. Give me a sentence for level.”

  Peter looked at the microphone. “This is Rock,” he said, “Commander of the People’s Revolutionary Army.” ‘Rock,’ the original meaning in Greek for the name ‘Peter,’ was the code name he’d used ever since first going underground.

  Ginger touched switches and dials, and from the speakers Peter’s voice sounded, repeating the sentence. Listening, with that sense of foreignness that people invariably feel when hearing their own recorded voices, Peter decided he approved; the voice sounded determined, cold, capable of backing up its words with action.