“No.”
“Suppose,” I said thinly, “your handsome husband did kill Regan? Or suppose Canino did, without Eddie’s knowing it. Just suppose. How long will you last, after turning me loose?”
“I’m not afraid of Canino. I’m still his boss’s wife.”
“Eddie’s a handful of mush,” I snarled. “Canino would take him with a teaspoon. He’ll take him the way the cat took the canary. A handful of mush. The only time a girl like you goes for a wrong gee is when he’s a handful of mush.”
“Get out!” she almost spit at me.
“Okey.” I turned away from her and moved out through the half-open door into a dark hallway. Then she rushed after me and pushed past to the front door and opened it. She peered out into the wet blackness and listened. She motioned me forward.
“Good-bye,” she said under her breath. “Good luck in everything but one thing. Eddie didn’t kill Rusty Regan. You’ll find him alive and well somewhere, when he wants to be found.”
I leaned against her and pressed her against the wall with my body. I pushed my mouth against her face.26 I talked to her that way.
“There’s no hurry. All this was arranged in advance, rehearsed to the last detail, timed to the split second.27 Just like a radio program.28 No hurry at all. Kiss me, Silver-Wig.”29
Her face under my mouth was like ice. She put her hands up and took hold of my head and kissed me hard on the lips. Her lips were like ice, too.
I went out through the door and it closed behind me, without sound, and the rain blew in under the porch, not as cold as her lips.
1. An appropriately fuzzy entry to this two-chapter interlude, a kind of set piece in which we step outside the normal flow of events and into a zone where the hard-boiled plot comes crashing into a nest of archetypal romantic themes.
This chapter is drawn from “The Curtain,” where it remains much more firmly in the confines of the hard-boiled genre. “Silver-Wig” is not as lovely and ethereal. She pulls off her wig, but you don’t know why she’s wearing it or why she does it. And the conversation is pulpier. He to her: “And you Joe Mesarvey’s wife. Shame on you. Give me some more of the hooch.” She to him: “Beat it, strong guy. I’ll be seeing you some more. Maybe in heaven.” For TBS, Chandler further romanticizes Mona—or rather, has Marlowe do so—turning her into a kind of fairy figure.
2. platinumed: The novel’s third blonde. (See note 17 on this page.) Platinumed hair is bleached white.
3. Facing death, Marlowe responds with a vein of dark humor mixed with fatalism that begins here.
4. The return of the repressed fairy-tale motif, which Marlowe thinks silly in his hard-boiled situation (bound and waiting for death). Even after a whack on the head, Marlowe is thoroughly self-conscious. And despite this self-critical awareness, his inappropriate romanticism continues throughout the scene.
Chandler began his writing career as a poet with a highly Romantic style. We can only imagine what Marlowe would say about lines like “I left my learning for a maiden’s breast, / I scorned my wisdom to become her thrall” (Chandler, “The Quest,” 1909). Or these from Chandler’s “The King” (1912):
The lost waves moan: I made their song.
The lost lands dream: I wove their trance.
The earth is old, and death is strong;
Stronger am I, the true Romance.
The pulps beat these tendencies out of Chandler, one might say. Here they collide: Marlowe’s idealism pokes through his cynicism. One could even argue that it will save him, in its appeal to the romantic torch singer Mona Mars.
5. Ironically recalling the scene that began Marlowe’s journey: he has gone from Greystone’s luxurious domed orchid room, in which he represented exemplary vitality in the face of the General’s decay, to a seedy shack awaiting his own doom. Mortality becomes the main theme from here on out.
6. Not surprisingly, Marlowe refuses the sentimental option in a statement that beautifully unites Romantic morbidity and hard-boiled attitude.
7. The most bizarre, seemingly out-of-place line in the novel. The worms themselves are classic symbols of mortality, but what are we supposed to think of Marlowe’s woozy remark regarding their bisexuality? It’s tempting to think that something significant about our hero’s psyche is coming out in this unguarded moment. (See the “Chandler, Marlowe, and the Boys” text box on this page.) Then again, it occurs in the most traditionally “romantic” scene in the book.
8. Mona Mars’s remarks keep pace with Marlowe’s black humor. This one resounds ominously with the title of the novel.
9. Marlowe, who has authoritatively stated the time throughout, now lacks the power to be able to do so. Not only has he been removed from this privileged narratological perch, but he has also been knocked outside of chronological time into that alternate temporal arena that the Greeks called kairos—the immeasurable moment when the decisive event happens. As he puts it in Farewell, My Lovely: “Time passed…I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.” (See note 31 on this page for a related Greek idea of kairos as opportunity. Both of these fluid notions of temporality come into play in Realito.)
10. More black humor. The idea of having a date with death runs deep in human rumination about mortality. In the 1933 play Sheppey, W. Somerset Maugham retells a Middle Eastern folktale about a man who sees Death in the marketplace in Baghdad. Terrified, the man flees to the city of Samarra. For her part, Death is startled to have seen the man in Baghdad that day—for she had an appointment with him that night in Samarra. Novelist John O’Hara liked this story so much he used it as the epigraph to his striking, death-bound Depression tale, Appointment in Samarra (1934).
Recall that after Canino kills Harry Jones, Marlowe has “a blurred vision of Mr. Canino driving fast through rain to another appointment with death.” Inevitably, Canino will keep his appointment.
11. Literalizing the foregoing figurative “graves” (Mona’s grave stare, the lamplight’s grave luster). Chandler, who loved the nuances of language, would have delighted in this shift from the Latin-derived sense of “grave” as weighty, serious, to the Anglo-Saxon sense of a hole in the ground. The rhetorical progression goes from the metaphorical to the brutally factual, from mind and perception to earth. Is it coincidental that gravel features prominently in the encounter with death in the following chapter?
12. We are not told that the knight figure in the Sternwoods’ “stained-glass romance” carries a sword, but of course he would have. There, however, it was the lady who was bound.
13. The figure of blood has flowed throughout the novel, from the General’s bloodless lips and hands contrasting with the vitality in Marlowe’s veins, through the blood on Geiger’s floor and Vivian betting red, to the questions regarding the Sternwood bloodline and Marlowe’s warm- or cold-bloodedness with Vivian. Here, Mona bending over him starts his blood flowing again, but Marlowe’s tentativeness reflects a dire reality.
14. Marlowe has just unleashed a string of strikingly poetic similes: rain like someone else’s rain, eyes glancing like the sweep of a sword, bubbles rising like false hopes, blood moving like a prospective tenant. Mona’s matching effort sounds suitably more blunt, but she may be misspeaking. A collision mat does not bear the trauma of an impact: it’s the heavy tarp or patch that covers a hole in the side of a ship after it has been breached. A nautical Band-Aid. Perhaps the hull of Marlowe’s face needs one?
15. That is, inexpensive, and more for appearance than comfort.
16. Actually, he isn’t: he was paid off in Chapter Twenty-One and never was looking for Rusty Regan. Or was he?
17. An ironic statement, considering Marlowe’s admission that he concealed Geiger’s murder from the police and tampered with evidence. He also flouts the law in the drugstore.
18. suborner: Someone
who convinces or bribes another to perform unlawful acts.
19. cabbage: Money. See note 9 on this page.
20. Another game of appearances.
21. The sands of sexuality shift again.
22. A kind of physical sword, materializing her swordlike glance and flipping the traditional gender roles of heroic saviors and damsels in distress. (Compare the scene depicted in Sternwood’s stained glass at the beginning of the novel.) Mona is Marlowe’s knight in shining wig. She saves him.
23. Chandler leaves some room for him to save her.
24. racking: Torturously strained.
25. It’s a tug-of-war over who will save whom.
26. Reasserting conventional gender roles, by force.
27. “Arranged” by whom? By fate and the strictures of classical tragedy (see note 12 on this page)? By the demands of commercial storytelling (see next note)? Or—and of course the answer to all of these is yes—by Chandler himself (see note 8 on this page)?
28. Radio waves in the 1930s were awash with great heroic serials like The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, as well as melodramatic romance serials like Our Gal Sunday and Mary Noble, Backstage Wife. The melodramas were largely sponsored by manufacturers of soap because they targeted a midday audience of housewives: hence, “soap operas.” Marlowe is rather less cynical here about Golden Age radio than earlier, when radios sounded like so much bleating to him.
Chandler considered the crime novel itself a species of melodrama, in spite of its purported realism. He wrote to editor Blanche Knopf in 1948:
There is a strong element of fantasy in the mystery story; there is in any kind of writing that moves within an accepted formula. The mystery writer’s material is melodrama, which is an exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally experiences in life….The means he uses are realistic in the sense that such things happen to people like these and in places like these. But this realism is superficial; the potential of emotion is overcharged, the compression of time and event is a violation of probability, and although such things happen, they do not happen so fast and in such a tight frame of logic to so closely knit a group of people.
29. Marlowe, perhaps still light-headed from the knockout blow, seems to think that he’s fallen into one of the melodramatic serials and delivers (ironically? the ending will suggest not) the most clichédly romantic line of the novel. Although he recovers by The High Window, where “the heartrending dialogue of some love serial” will “hit me in the face like a wet dishtowel,” he will not have recovered by the end of this novel.
TWENTY-NINE
The garage next door was dark. I crossed the gravel drive and a patch of sodden lawn. The road ran with small rivulets of water. It gurgled down a ditch on the far side. I had no hat. That must have fallen in the garage. Canino hadn’t bothered to give it back to me. He hadn’t thought I would need it any more. I imagined him driving back jauntily through the rain, alone, having left the gaunt and sulky Art and the probably stolen sedan in a safe place. She loved Eddie Mars and she was hiding to protect him. So he would find her there when he came back, calm beside the light and the untasted drink, and me tied up on the davenport. He would carry her stuff out to the car and go through the house carefully to make sure nothing incriminating was left. He would tell her to go out and wait. She wouldn’t hear a shot. A blackjack is just as effective at short range. He would tell her he had left me tied up and I would get loose after a while. He would think she was that dumb. Nice Mr. Canino.
The raincoat was open in front and I couldn’t button it, being handcuffed. The skirts flapped against my legs like the wings of a large and tired bird. I came to the highway. Cars went by in a wide swirl of water illuminated by headlights. The tearing noise of their tires died swiftly. I found my convertible where I had left it, both tires fixed and mounted, so it could be driven away, if necessary. They thought of everything. I got into it and leaned down sideways under the wheel and fumbled aside the flap of leather that covered the pocket. I got the other gun, stuffed it up under my coat and started back. The world was small, shut in, black. A private world for Canino and me.1
Halfway there the headlights nearly caught me. They turned swiftly off the highway and I slid down the bank into the wet ditch and flopped there breathing water. The car hummed by without slowing. I lifted my head, heard the rasp of its tires as it left the road and took the gravel of the driveway. The motor died, the lights died, a door slammed. I didn’t hear the house door shut, but a fringe of light trickled through the clump of trees, as though a shade had been moved aside from a window, or the light had been put on in the hall.
I came back to the soggy grass plot and sloshed across it. The car was between me and the house, the gun was down at my side, pulled as far around as I could get it, without pulling my left arm out by the roots. The car was dark, empty, warm. Water gurgled pleasantly in the radiator. I peered in at the door. The keys hung on the dash. Canino was very sure of himself. I went around the car and walked carefully across the gravel to the window and listened. I couldn’t hear any voices, any sound but the swift bong-bong of the raindrops hitting the metal elbows at the bottom of the rain gutters.
I kept on listening. No loud voices, everything quiet and refined. He would be purring at her and she would be telling him she had let me go and I had promised to let them get away. He wouldn’t believe me, as I wouldn’t believe him.2 So he wouldn’t be in there long. He would be on his way and take her with him. All I had to do was wait for him to come out.
I couldn’t do it. I shifted the gun to my left hand and leaned down to scoop up a handful of gravel. I tossed it against the screen of the window. It was a feeble effort. Very little of it reached the glass above the screen, but the loose rattle of that little was like a dam bursting.
I ran back to the car and got on the running board behind it. The house had already gone dark. That was all. I dropped quietly on the running board and waited. No soap.3 Canino was too cagey.
I straightened up and got into the car backwards, fumbled around for the ignition key and turned it. I reached with my foot, but the starter button had to be on the dash. I found it at last, pulled it and the starter ground. The warm motor caught at once. It purred softly, contentedly. I got out of the car again and crouched down by the rear wheels.
I was shivering now but I knew Canino wouldn’t like that last effect. He needed that car badly. A darkened window slid down inch by inch, only some shifting of light on the glass showing it moved. Flame spouted from it abruptly, the blended roar of three swift shots. Glass starred in the coupe. I yelled with agony. The yell went off into a wailing groan. The groan became a wet gurgle, choked with blood. I let the gurgle die sickeningly, one choked gasp. It was nice work. I liked it.4 Canino liked it very much. I heard him laugh. It was a large booming laugh, not at all like the purr of his speaking voice.
Then silence for a little while, except for the rain and the quietly throbbing motor of the car. Then the house door crawled open, a deeper blackness in the black night. A figure showed in it cautiously, something white around the neck. It was her collar. She came out on the porch stiffly, a wooden woman. I caught the pale shine of her silver wig. Canino came crouched methodically behind her. It was so deadly it was almost funny.
She came down the steps. Now I could see the white stiffness of her face. She started towards the car. A bulwark of defense for Canino, in case I could still spit in his eye. Her voice spoke through the lisp of the rain, saying slowly, without any tone: “I can’t see a thing, Lash. The windows are misted.”
He grunted something and the girl’s body jerked hard, as though he had jammed a gun into her back. She came on again and drew near the lightless car. I could see him behind her now, his hat, a side of his face, the bulk of his shoulder. The girl stopped rigid and screamed. A beautiful thin tearing scream that rocked me like a left hook.
“I ca
n see him!” she screamed. “Through the window. Behind the wheel, Lash!”
He fell for it like a bucket of lead. He knocked her roughly to one side and jumped forward, throwing his hand up. Three more spurts of flame cut the darkness. More glass scarred. One bullet went on through and smacked into a tree on my side. A ricochet whined off into the distance. But the motor went quietly on.
He was low down, crouched against the gloom, his face a grayness without form that seemed to come back slowly after the glare of the shots. If it was a revolver he had, it might be empty. It might not. He had fired six times, but he might have reloaded inside the house. I hoped he had. I didn’t want him with an empty gun. But it might be an automatic.
I said: “Finished?”
He whirled at me.5 Perhaps it would have been nice to allow him another shot or two, just like a gentleman of the old school. But his gun was still up and I couldn’t wait any longer. Not long enough to be a gentleman of the old school. I shot him four times,6 the Colt7 straining against my ribs. The gun jumped out of his hand as if it had been kicked. He reached both his hands for his stomach. I could hear them smack hard against his body. He fell like that, straight forward, holding himself together with his broad hands. He fell face down in the wet gravel. And after that there wasn’t a sound from him.
Silver-Wig didn’t make a sound either. She stood rigid, with the rain swirling at her. I walked around Canino and kicked his gun, without any purpose. Then I walked after it and bent over sideways and picked it up. That put me close beside her. She spoke moodily, as if she was talking to herself.
“I—I was afraid you’d come back.”8
I said: “We had a date. I told you it was all arranged.” I began to laugh like a loon.9
Then she was bending down over him, touching him. And after a little while she stood up with a small key on a thin chain.
She said bitterly: “Did you have to kill him?”
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 36