Desperate Asylum

by Fletcher Flora

  “I don’t know, Carl.”

  He got up and took her by the arms again.

  “I will tell you something. I will be perfectly frank. I don’t really care a damn about Avery. I am not concerned about him. It is you I’m concerned about. I am willing to ruin him if it is a means of saving you. However, I do not think he will be ruined. I think it will work out for both of you. It is your chance, Lisa, your best and maybe your last chance for the asylum that is necessary in the beginning. You said you trusted me. You said you would try to follow my advice, and now I am asking you to try.”

  “Marry Avery?”

  “Yes. Will you do it?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “I do.”

  “All right. I will do it for you.”

  “Not for me. For you. That’s the way you must think of it.”

  “For me, then. I will do it for me.”

  He leaned forward suddenly and kissed her on the cheek. His lips on her cool flesh felt dry and hot. “Perhaps I shall see you later downstairs,” he said. Turning, he went over to the door and let himself out, and she walked into the bathroom and got the glass and the whiskey and brought them back and poured some of the whiskey into the glass and drank it. Then she lay down on the bed again and tried to relax completely and make her mind a blank. She was not able to accomplish this completely, but was at least partially successful, and she lay there for a long time, well over an hour, before she got up and went into the bathroom again and stripped and took a cold shower and then, after drying herself, brushed her teeth thoroughly with a dentifrice that was supposed to kill all odors on the breath, including the odor of whiskey.

  When she was dressed, she went downstairs and out onto the terrace and stood by the balustrade looking down across the beach to the ocean. The hard glitter of the day was gone, and the air was softening and darkening, and the water beyond the beach was a vast shadow shifting uneasily in the cavities of the earth. She was cold, very cold, but the coldness was something that originated inwardly and had nothing to do with the descent of the sun, and was nothing that she could do anything about, except, perhaps, to get a drink as soon as possible. She did not go into the bar, however, but remained standing by the balustrade until Avery came up from behind and stood beside her.

  “Here you are,” he said.

  “Yes. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Am I late?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I came down early.”

  “Would you like to have dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry. I’m sure I couldn’t eat a thing. Don’t let me interfere with your own dinner, though.”

  “It’s all right. I’m not hungry, either.”

  “Really? I’ll go and sit with you if you wish.”

  “No, really. I’m not hungry at all. I’d prefer not to eat.”

  “In that case, I would like a drink.”

  “How would you like to go someplace different? I have been to a place I liked. A small place. It’s quieter.”

  “All right. But first I would like one for the road.”

  “Fine. That’s a good idea.”

  They went into the bar and had a drink and then went out into the lobby and waited until the Caddy was brought around. In the Caddy, they started for the other place he’d been to and liked. She sat in her corner of the seat and said nothing and reminded herself over and over that she had made a promise to Carl and that it was necessary for her own sake, as well as for the sake of abstract ethics, to keep the promise. The drink she’d just had was of some value in helping her face this necessity, but it was inadequate on the whole and wouldn’t last and would soon need the assistance of another.

  They came to the place they were going to, and it was small, as he’d said. And as he’d said, quiet. There were some tables and chairs and half a dozen booths and a bartender and a waitress and very little light. It was obviously a place to go and drink and talk if you wanted to, and if you had anything in mind besides drinking and talking, it was much better to go someplace else. They went in and got across from each other in a booth and began drinking, and pretty soon they began talking. “Have you talked to Carl?” he said.

  “At lunch.”

  “Not since then?”

  “No,” she lied. “Not since lunch.”

  “I saw him on the terrace of the hotel this afternoon. Late. I had just come up from the beach. He told me you are returning north this Saturday.”

  “Yes. He wants to be home by Christmas.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. I would like to stay here all winter.”

  “In Miami?”

  “Not particularly in Miami. Somewhere in the sun and the warmth. I would like never to have to live in the cold again.”

  “I’m going to Mexico City soon. Did you know that?”

  “Carl may have mentioned it. I don’t remember.”

  “Have you ever been in Mexico City?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t get as warm there as it does in Miami, but on the other hand it doesn’t get cold, either. The nights are cool, and a topcoat is necessary, but the days are pleasant.”

  “You sound as if you’d been there.”

  “I was there once. A long time ago.”

  “Did you see a bullfight?”

  “No. I was only a child. All I can remember is Chapultepec Park.”

  “I don’t think I’d want to see a bullfight.”

  “I guess they’re pretty brutal.”

  “It’s not so much that. I think they would be dull.”

  “They sound interesting enough in Hemingway.”

  “Everything sounds interesting in Hemingway. It’s the way he writes.”

  “Perhaps I’ll see one while I’m there. It would be interesting to find out, anyhow.”

  “Do they have them in winter? Is there a season for them, or do they have them the year around?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it, to tell the truth.”

  “How long will you stay there?”

  “Until spring.”

  “Will you go home then?”

  “Yes. Back to Corinth. Have you been in Corinth?”

  “Once. I don’t remember much about it.”

  “There’s not much to remember. It’s not much of a place.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “Well, it’s just a town. I was born there, and I’ve lived there all my life, and I expect I’ll die there. My mother is dead, and my father is dead, and I live alone in a brick house on High Street above the river that my family has lived in for four generations. I’ve thought about going away to live in some other house in some other town, but if I did I’d probably spend the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t and wanting to go back.”

  “You could go back if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

  “Of course. And I would. So it’s much simpler not to go away at all. Except for a while at a time, like now. I’ll go to Mexico City and see Chapultepec Park again, and maybe a bullfight, and then I’ll go back. Some other time I’ll go some other place. And back. Always back.”

  Their glasses were empty, so he signaled the waitress, and she came and took them away and brought them back full. He took a drink and looked at her and thought how cool her pale flesh looked and how her loveliness was something almost detached, something related in only the most incidental way to flesh and bone and the arrangement of features.

  “I’ve been wondering something,” he said. “I’ve been wondering if you would care to come with me.”

  “To Mexico City?”

  “Yes. And then back to Corinth. I’ve been wondering if you would care to marry me.”

  �
�I doubt that you want me to marry you, really.”

  “I do, though. I’ve thought about it very carefully, and I’ve decided.”

  “It’s a fine compliment. Thank you very much.”

  “Does that mean you will do it?”

  “If you’re sure it’s what you want.”

  “I’m sure. I tell you I’m sure.”

  “Perhaps, before we make it definite, I had better tell you something about myself.”

  “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  “But I want to. I want to tell you that I will make a very unsatisfactory wife. This is because I have no desire for you. If we are married, I will try to learn to desire you, but I doubt that I can ever learn. It is not only you, you understand. It is a deficiency in me in relation to all men.”

  “You mean you are frigid?”

  She considered the truth but could not tell it, and so she told the lie.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. And now you can retract your proposal, and we will have some more drinks and forget all about it.”

  He looked down into his glass, and she could see that his shoulders had begun to shake, and she thought with horror that he was crying, but then after a moment she saw that he was not crying but laughing, and this only increased her horror because the laughter contained this arid agony of hysteria and was far worse than the crying would have been. Without thinking, in her urgent need to stop him, she reached across the table and laid the fingers of one hand against the side of his face, and he looked up at once, the laughter dying in his throat.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

  “Forgive me. I was laughing because I’m a coward and have been relieved of the necessity of acting with courage.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. I would still like very much for you to marry me.”

  “In spite of the way I am?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The way you are and the way I am are things that may change or may not change, but in the meanwhile we will go to Mexico City and back to Corinth, and eventually we will find out.”

  She could not look at him any longer. She folded her hands on the edge of the table and looked down at the hands and listened to the sound within her of the dry weeping.

  “You are very kind,” she said.

  Which was an echo of the oracle, he thought.

  Women like kind men, the oracle had said. In the end, she had said, it is more important than anything else.

  He wondered if it was true.

  SECTION 5

  The night was alive, and all things in it. He lay in the center of the living night and was the focus of the living things. They crouched and waited and watched in darkness, and he rose and fell in silky, sickening motion on the breast of the breathing bed, and nothing happened, nothing at all.

  Getting up, he moved among the living things and lit a cigarette and opened the blind at the window and admitted the slanting light of the circling moon. His body was wet, and the wetness evaporated in the air, and he was cold. Turning, he saw the other body, the white body in the white light, and it was perfectly still and from appearances might have been dead.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s not all right,” she answered. “It never will be.”

  “Eventually it will. It is something we can learn.”

  “You don’t know. It’s not the way you think it is.”

  “I know that we must be patient with each other.”

  “Do you really think it is so simple? I shouldn’t have married you. It was a dirty trick that you didn’t deserve.”

  “No. You told the truth. As you now know, that is more than I did.”

  “You think I told you the truth? Oh, well, it is too late to worry about that. It is too late for anything.”

  “You’re just feeling depressed. Futility is always depressing, but you will feel better tomorrow. Can I get you something? A cigarette? A drink?”

  “No, thank you. Nothing.”

  He left the window and lay down beside her on the bed. The living things had quit living and watching and waiting and had become the dead fittings of the room. Outside, the moon moved on.

  CHAPTER IV

  SECTION 1

  Emerson usually handled the bar himself until Roscoe came in around eleven. Mornings were slack, and it was hardly worth hiring someone to do the job, and besides, Emerson liked to do a share of work around the place. It kept his hand in and gave him a good, solid feeling of personal intimacy with the things he had created and developed and loved. He was polishing glasses and looking through them against the light for smears when the postman came in.

  “Well,” he said. “The good man in gray.”

  The postman put his leather pouch on one stool and sat down on another. His name was Marvin Groggins, and he hated all people who wrote letters and was very proud of his casual rapport with all the business men on his downtown route, no matter how God-damn important they were, or thought they were.

  “Crap,” he said.

  Emerson grinned. “What do you mean, crap? You better watch out, Marv, or you’ll be getting investigated for subversive talk or something. You got to show proper respect for public servants, even if you happen to be one of them yourself.”

  “Oh, sure. Public servant. You know what I am? I’m a God-damn errand boy for a lot of fatheads, that’s what I am. You see that bag? Look at it. Just look at the God-damn thing. Bulging. Running over. And you know something? I could take at least half of that stuff and throw it down the nearest storm sewer, and no one would be a damn bit the worse off for it, and the truth is, they’d probably be a hell of a lot better off.”

  “Except you, Marv. You’d be worse off. You’d be in the pokey, as a matter of fact.”

  “I know. Durance vile. Just for throwing away a bundle of lousy trash. I’m not so sure I’d be worse off, at that. You got to put up with a hell of a lot in this postman racket. Take Aunt Lucy, for instance.”

  “Who’s Aunt Lucy?”

  “Well, she’s just a for-instance, damn it. The point is, she hasn’t got anything worth while to do with herself, so she writes letters. She writes them to everyone in her lousy family right down to umpteenth cousins, and no one wants the letters, and probably don’t even read them, and all they really want is for Aunt Lucy to mind her own damn business, but after they get the letters their lousy consciences won’t let them alone until they’ve answered them, and the thing keeps going on in a vicious circle, and it’s the postman who suffers. Trouble is, stamps are too damn cheap. If stamps cost more, there wouldn’t be all this stuff to peddle. By God, I’ll vote for the first guy who runs for president on a platform calling for dollar postage stamps, and I don’t give a damn if he’s a Republican or a Democrat or a Druid.”

  “Druid? Druidism’s a religion or something, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what it is, and I don’t give a damn. All the guy has to do is advocate dollar stamps. Minimum, that is.”

  “You’re pretty bitter this morning, Marv. What you need is a couple fingers on the house.”

  Marv shook his head. He had a long, lugubrious face with a big nose that was now bright red from the cold. Emerson liked to get him going when there was time to listen, and he knew damn well that Marv loved his job and wouldn’t have traded places with the postmaster general.

  “Not while I’m on duty,” Marv said. “Everyone else can take time out for a little drink if he pleases, but if a postman takes a drink on duty it’s a stinking crime or something.”

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Well, coffee’s something else. Even a postman can have a cup of coffee, I guess.”

&nbs
p; “Okay. You can have the coffee now and come back on your own time for the drink.”

  “Thanks, Em. I’ll do that.”

  “Meantime, while I’m getting the coffee, you can dig my mail out of that bag. I want to get it before you decide to take it out and throw it down the sewer. You take cream and sugar?”

  “Hell, no. You know better than that.”

  Emerson went back to the kitchen and got the coffee and brought it into the bar. Marv had sorted out half a dozen envelopes, and Emerson set the coffee down in front of Marv and picked up the envelopes. He went through them slowly, reading the return address on each one.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said.

  Marv had his big red nose stuck down into the fragrant steam rising from the coffee. He rolled his eyes up at Emerson without removing his nose from the steam. “Bad news?”

  “No. I don’t suppose so. How the hell would I know, Marv? I haven’t even opened the envelope.”

  “The way you sounded…”

  “I was just surprised. It’s from Mexico City, as a matter of fact. From Avery Lawes.”

  “Avery Lawes? I thought Avery went to Miami.”

  “He did, but apparently he went on to Mexico City later. He told me he might do that when he was in here the night before he left town.”

  “Some guys sure lead a hard life. I suppose he’ll come back with the birds, after it gets nice and warm and everything. You a particular friend of Avery’s?”

  “Not particular. I’ve known him sort of casually ever since we were kids.”

  Emerson held the envelope against the light to locate the letter inside and tore a strip off the end of the envelope. Removing the single sheet of stationery, he began to read. The letter was very brief, only a note, and the reading required no more than half a minute. Marv lifted his coffee cup and drank from it and tried to act as if he wasn’t interested. Emerson put the letter back into the envelope and began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?” Marv said.

  “Nothing. Nothing’s funny.”