by Jack Ketchum
He looked at her and couldn't help it-he pictured her dead.
Lelia dead.
Sickeningly, the sight of her still aroused him.
You’re crazy, he thought.
She turned in the water and saw him watching, got to her feet and came splashing out to him on a run. He must have showed, though. Because she stopped then in front of him and said, “What? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on. What?”
She stared at him and then smiled. Comprehension lit her face. “You were worried about me, weren’t you?”
“A little. For a second there.”
She laughed. “You fool. That’s wonderful!”
“You think so?”
“Of course I do.” She touched his face. Her hand was cold and wet, clammy.
“You thought I’d drowned out there.”
“For a second or two, yes.”
“That’s lovely. You’re a sweet man, Robert.”
“Am I?”
“Yes you are." She reached for the towel, dried her hair, draped it over her shoulder and looked at him.
“But I think you worry too much, Robert. I don’t know what about. I know you’ve been hurt somehow and you’re very gloomy sometimes. It’s all right. It really is. I can take care of you.”
She kissed him. He tasted salt.
“Trust me. I can take care of you.”
She kissed him again more deeply this time and there were people there close by and he felt an erection growing-but her mouth was warm and fine.
And still in his imagination he saw her, floating.
Dead man’s float.
The dead would float higher, wouldn't they? Gasses in the body. But the caress would be the same, the cold caress of seawater, the heat above.
He returned her kiss.
Forget the dead, he thought.
Forget whoever’s watching. The erection was insistent now and her mouth was nearly everything.
He took her hand and led her back into the water.
LELIA
What belonged to her was hers alone and now she could feel the sudden white-hot anger choking her inside like an imploding star, turning in upon itself, pulling into her silent rage the entire table full of them, even the entire island. Just to see him smiling at her, this other woman, this stranger. While she, Lelia, had given him her body twice now, in the sea, had bathed his prick in the slick of her.
Who is this bitch? How dare he?
It was dinnertime and Lelia was a little angry.
They sat at the taverna at the farthest edge of town, overlooking the bay. Danny, Michelle, the German girls, Lelia, Dodgson and now this other one. It was the best place in town for fish and seafood and Lelia saw that the cats knew it too, probably better than the tourists did. They prowled the floor searching for morsels of food, a bit of kalamari here, a flake of swordfish there. Over a dozen of them. She’d had to shove one away in order to pull out her chair and sit down, a mangy little tabby that looked at her hopefully now, creeping close. As though it knew.
Cats.
That’s what the bitch was saying.
“Idon’t like ’em.”
Sitting right next to him, a pretty green-eyed blonde. Dodgson listening as though he could care. As though he could actually give a damn.
Her face was burning. She bathed it in a cold inner control.
Billie. A man’s name. Billie Durant. From England, Danny said.
“Cornwall, actually."
You little cunt.
Lelia forced herself to talk to her. Make her face you. Yes.
“You have a problem with cats?”
“Well, yes. When I was a child, you see, six or seven, I got between a pair of them. It was very stupid. They were fighting.”
She laughed. Her teeth were very white and even.
“Little bugger left me with some very pretty scars. Here…”
She indicated a long curved line on her left calf. A good calf, thought Lelia, golden brown. No doubt she was a real blonde too.
“…and here.”
There were two smaller scars at her collarbone.
“And here.” She poked at her thin blue dress just above the left breast. She laughed again.
“Climbed me like a bloody tree.”
“Could we see that last one up close, please?” Danny said.
“You’re lucky,” Dodgson said. He pointed to the scars at her collarbone. He was right, of course. They were only inches from the jugular.
“I suppose I am. They had to pull her off me, you see. I still don’t care for cats much.”
Noted, thought Lelia. The tabby at her feet nudged her ankle with a dirty wet pink nose.
“You must be…uncomfortable,” she said. She swept the cats with her gaze and then fixed upon the girl, who met and held her eyes.
“A little. Perhaps just a little.”
There was just enough reserve in her voice so that Lelia knew the girl had heard her, had heard subtext as well as text and was resolved to tough it out. All right. Dare me, she thought.
“That’s a shame,” she said.
And hugged her rage like a lover.
BILLIE
They had moved from cats to accidents to murder. Their conversation had. In this case it was not an inappropriate progression.
Billie thought that Dodgson was handsome and rather nice too and might have been wholly glad that Danny’d found her on the beach and introduced her to his friend were he not so obviously a previously claimed territory. But of course he was and that was that. She had no intention of moving in on someone else’s man. It was not her style at all.
She wished someone would tell that to Lelia.
If looks could kill… she thought.
But she also had to wonder why he was there with her. The woman was beautiful, certainly. But such possessiveness! Such high-handedness! The woman had been jealous as a cat the moment she sat down.
He didn’t seem the sort to put up with it.
And perhaps he wasn’t.
Their talk had taken a fairly unpleasant turn at the moment and Dodgson was looking at her with less than indulgence.
“Manson didn’t kill anyone,” Lelia was saying. “All he did was move others to kill. And that’s their problem, isn’t it? Their weakness?”
“Weakness isn’t the point,” said Michelle. “Responsibility is. If I am a general and I lose the battle, this is my responsibility, correct? Not only the soldiers’.”
“Yes. But Charles Manson isn’t a general. He’s a private citizen the same as you and I. If I tell you, or Danny tells you, to jump out a window, do you jump?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not. Because he holds no power over you. He’s not a god, he’s not a general, he’s a man. He holds no authority at all.”
“Authority can be delegated.”
“Who’d accept authority from Charlie fucking Manson?” Danny said. “Some asshole desert rat with dirty hair and a couple old Beatles records.”
“They did,” said Michelle.
Lelia settled back in her chair and looked at Dodgson, spoke directly to him. “He had very good eyes.” she said dreamily. “Very sexy, I thought. I might have considered him.”
For a moment everybody just sat there.
“Oh, right,” said Danny. “Good point there. I kinda like Nixon’s chin but then I’m a pervert.”
The German girls laughed.
***
But it was meant as a goad to Dodgson and it was clear to Billie that he got the message, because the silence lengthened while they just stared at one another and Michelle moved some food around on her plate in an embarrassed kind of way and then he said “Excuse me” and quietly left the table, walking toward the WC.
She liked his control.
Lelia and the others turned to their dinners in silence as she watched him walk away.
It was really too bad, she thought, that she was
leaving tomorrow. Because while it was a rule of hers not to move on another woman’s man she had no such scruples governing her behavior once a relationship was over. She couldn’t see this lasting much longer between them.
Forget it, she thought. You are a waitress in a pub on a two-week vacation-no-you are a painter, aspiring to that anyway on a two-week vacation and the point is to study and paint what you see. He on the other hand is a published novelist and she is probably a model, and who knows how such people think. For all you know it will get uglier before it’s over, much uglier and you don’t need to be around to see it. Go study. Go off and lie in the sun. Either or both. Alone.
Because you don’t want to start with a man now anyway. Not yet.
And for a moment she saw the doctor’s hands on her through the thick haze of fever, dark hands against her pale naked thighs. She smelled the stink of her own illness in her mouth and the hospital smells and the cigarettes on his breath as he leaned over, as the oily hands moved up and up…
No, she thought. Not yet by a long shot.
So which will it be? Mykonos or Santorini?
Dodgson returned to the table and she watched him and Lelia finish their dinners in hostile silence. Danny was talking with Michelle and the German girls, all of whom seemed very nice. She tried to pick up the conversation, something about a pharmaceutical company back in the United States. But Dodgson and Lelia continued to distract her.
She felt something brush her leg.
Damn these cats! she thought.
They’ll be the death of me.
DODGSON
“I just want to know one thing,” she said, leaning toward him, whispering. “Which of us are you going home with tonight?”
"What?"
The question came right out of nowhere. He’d made no moves on the British girl at all. None. In fact he’d arranged with Andreas at the Romantica to get a second room there just to be alone with Lelia. But she was serious. Her voice like a nice quiet bludgeon.
“Lelia…”
“I just want to know.”
“Lelia, I just met her. She’s Danny’s friend.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You all share a room together. Don’t tell me you haven’t fucked Michelle. How is she, by the way? Is she good? Is she as good as Danny seems to think she is?”
“Cut it out, Lelia.”
“Maybe I should fuck her myself and see.”
It was all he could do to hold onto the whisper through the rising anger. Games again. He saw Billie watching. The last thing he wanted was some childish scene but she seemed bent on that.
“I don’t give a damn what you do with them, really,” she said. “I just want to know who you intend to take home tonight. Presuming you’ve made up your mind.”
He’d had enough.
“Look, I'll answer your question for you. The room is waiting. It seemed a good idea at the time for us to be together. Now I’m not so sure. You keep this up and you can take a walk on the beach, you understand me?”
She started to say something but he cut her off.
“No. You understand me? Just shut the hell up, all right?’
And she did.
He didn’t need it. She was beautiful, intelligent and as sensual a woman as he’d ever met. But mostly she was maddening. And he didn’t need it He didn’t need the mind-fucking, not last night, not this afternoon and not now.
Good god. Charles Manson.
He found himself wondering the best way to leave her.
He had the feeling it wasn’t going to be easy.
DODGSON
Dodgson, Lelia, Danny and Michelle were the last to leave. Billie and the German girls had been as graceful as possible about it, given the lethal silences.
They walked home through town and into the long wide valley, the limestone cliffs like open shears glowing in the moonlight. The night was clear and there were so many stars in the sky, the breeze felt so good, the stillness was so complete and perfect that it was hard to stay angry at anyone-he felt himself softening toward her, and what remained was disappointment, a sadness.
Another whirlwind romance, he thought. Another bad choice on his part. One of many. He knew that the rest of tonight would be merely saying goodbye to her. Matala was too small a town for them to remain there together without bumping into each other all the time and that was no good, so one or the other of them would be leaving on the bus tomorrow, he was sure of that. And he felt some sympathy toward her now. The woman was troubled.
He tried to explain.
“You just can’t do that,” he said, “not to me and certainly not in front of people. Hell, I wouldn’t do it to you in a million years. It’s too…possessive. We hardly know each other. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a holiday, for god’s sake. We’re supposed to be having a good time here. Nothing happened with that woman but that’s beside the point. The point is you come to a place like this expecting a certain freedom. To be open, relaxed, make friends, be yourself. Without that there’s hardly any reason to be here, is there? A tan? You can get that anywhere.”
"Freedom lies,” she said.
And then they walked in silence.
BILLIE
She was sitting on her terrace when she saw them go by, the floor lamp burning behind her, a glass of red wine in her hand and the heavy paperback art book she’d lugged all the way from London lying open on her lap. She hoped they wouldn’t see her and was glad when they passed by.
He was a nice man. It was too bad.
She’d decided on Mykonos. From there you could get day trips to Delos and the ruins on Delos were supposed to be spectacular, tile floor mosaics in excellent shape and a colonnade of lions leading from the old port to the city-then, high atop the island’s summit, ruins of temples to Apollo and Artemis who, according to myth, were born there. She was looking at one of the mosaics now, from the House of Masks-Dionysos riding an enormous panther, taming her.
She glanced down to the street.
Quite a package, she thought.
They were yards away by now but even at a distance there was something in the way Lelia walked beside him that suggested much- the hands clenched into fists, the precise calculated step, an attitude in the slim boyish body of something held tight and dear that was somehow animal and aggressive and…yes, predatory.
She shuddered.
She looked down at the snarling lioness.
She presumed he would be taking her to bed tonight. She hoped he knew what he was doing.
She sighed, finished the wine and closed the book.
Tomorrow there would be Mykonos.
DODGSON
He glanced at his watch. It was twenty after three in the morning. They sat around a table on the terrace, the brandy nearly gone.
Danny was talking quietly so as not to wake the neighbors and meanwhile they were pushing back the Metaxa, trying to pour something light into the evening. And that was all right because it gave him time to think about Lelia, about what to do with her exactly, about how to let her know that he wasn’t going to sleep with her again-tonight or ever.
Danny was talking about a Fowles book called The Magus. You saw it in all the kiosks here. He hadn’t read it.
“…so this teacher is trespassing and making excuses and this Conchis guy turns to him and says, ‘Hey, cut the shit. You came here to meet me. Please. Life is short.' And it’s supposed to be very mystical because how does Conchis know that-but I’m thinking, wow! what a terrific pickup line. That’s actually what it is! A pickup line. ‘You have come here to meet me. Please. Life is short.’ So I tried it.”
Dodgson drained his glass. “What happened?”
“I scored.” He poured Dodgson some more. “Then I got the clap.” They laughed.
“And life is too fucking short for that, let me tell you.”
There was more laughter and then a silence while Michelle poured out the last of the Metaxa. Dan
ny uncorked the wine and set it on the table. Lelia went for it immediately. There was still some brandy left in her glass. She took a long pull of wine directly from the bottle, swallowed and kept the bottle, holding it in her lap.
“I had that once,” she said.
It was the first she’d spoken since they sat down. Her voice was quiet, casual-sounding. Her eyes pegged a star in the western sky.
It was a moment before she continued. They let her take her time.
“I waited awhile before I went to the doctor. It seemed like an opportunity to me. There was a man I didn’t like. So I waited. And then I went to the doctor.”
She drained her glass and filled it with wine. She put down the bottle. She looked at each of them. Her eyes were hard and narrow.
“Jesus Christ,” said Danny. He shook his head. “You carrying now? I mean, I worry about my friend here.”
“Fuck you,” said Lelia.
And for a moment he thought Danny would hit her. He leaned across the table and his face was white with anger and Dodgson thought, This is enough, this is too damned much.
“Danny.” he said.
“Fuck you, Lelia.”
Michelle put a hand on his arm. “Danny…” He shrugged it off.
“No!” He turned to Dodgson.
“I’m sorry, old buddy,” he said. “But this is one beautiful piece of shit you got here. She’s really fucking gorgeous.”
And Dodgson felt a kind of sickness in the pit of his stomach. Because she’d done this all so neatly. Waited and struck.
Danny was never violent, never angry.
She likes this, he thought. Actually enjoys it. Messing with people’s minds. She’s crazy. I should have known this morning. The business about the beach the night before. You weren’t there.
When are you going to grow up? he thought. How can your judgement always be so miserable?
It all went through his mind in an instant and he was about to reach across the table and say Easy Danny, relax, it doesn’t matter when beside him there was a sudden movement and Lelia was on her feet, face contorted, sneering at both of them, her chair heaved back away from her so hard that it fell and clattered loudly against the wall and then dropped to the concrete floor. She moved fast across the terrace and then flung open the door to Dodgson’s room and slammed it shut. To Dodgson it was like gunshots on the still night air.