The Eye of the Beholder

by Marc Behm

  Dear Daddy,

  Thanks for the postcard. I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you. I don’t like to hang around here after school.

  These corridors are haunted by the ghost of a madman who beats on the walls.

  Give my regards to Joanna.

  Sincerely,

  Mag

  The throbbing in his shoulder subsided, and he knew that everything was going to be all right.

  They landed in Savannah at three thirty. Using her Mrs. Mary Linda Hollander identity (blond wig), she cashed Rex’s forty-thousand-dollar check at his bank in Port Wentworth, then, the same night, flew to Miami and checked into a beach-front hotel in Dania, registering as Miss Ada Larkin (pewter wig).

  The Eye moved into a smaller and cheaper place a block from the beach. His wound healed slowly. In March he could bend his arm behind his back without agony and by April was doing five push-ups a day.

  He telephoned his bank and learned that his Watchmen paychecks had stopped coming in on February the twenty-eighth. So he was officially retired – and in Florida already! He prepared a budget and estimated that he could live off his account for at least three years.

  After that – fuck it! He’d see.

  He bought another suit – he now had three – and an old Fiat. He did four or five crossword puzzles a day, and at night he dreamed not only of the corridor but of the rattlesnake and the shark. Sometimes, alone in his room or walking along the beach, he found himself whistling ‘La Paloma.’

  Joanna AKA Ada Larkin gradually became herself again, eating pears, buying clothes, drinking cognac, and reading her horoscope.

  She slept all morning, swam in the afternoon, and gambled every evening. In four weeks she’d almost doubled the forty grand playing roulette. The Eye played for much lower stakes at the blackjack and crap tables, averaging a comfortable profit of about two hundred a night, which paid for his rent and most of his expenses.

  One hot noontime he dropped into a bar for a drink and saw a sign on the wall: TRY PILSEN – The Czechoslavakian Beer. This reminded him that he still hadn’t finished Puzzle Number Seven.

  He went to the public library and spent an hour reading the history of Czechoslovakia in several encyclopedias and almanacs. It was, he discovered, a totalitarian Communist-bloc people’s democracy, but formerly an independent republic, founded after World War I and comprising the former countries of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia, each with a capital – a capital in Czechoslavakia; Prague, Bninn, Breslau, and Bratislava. Six letters, five letters, seven letters, and ten letters. None of them could be squeezed into Capital in Czechoslovakia’s four letters.

  He finally decided to look up the solution in the last pages of the paperback. But he didn’t.

  He went to the beach instead and watched Joanna diving in the surf.

  He began getting restless.

  She kept too much to herself. That was a mistake. A lone female wandering around Miami was a come-on more blatant than skywriting. People were beginning to notice her and gossip – guests at the hotel, croupiers, bartenders, waiters, bellhops.

  I think we have to get moving, Joanna, he warned her.

  Not yet.

  She bought a new wig (auburn). She went to an oculist and had her eyes examined. She visited the animal veldt in Boca Raton. She went to the movies. He made a list of the films she saw.

  (April 15) Klute

  (April 19) I Heard the Owl Call My Name

  (April 20) Jane Eyre

  (April 21) Catholics

  (April 23) Jane Eyre (again)

  (April 25) Dollars

  (April 27) Jane Eyre (again)

  He made a list of the magazines she bought.

  Vogue Newsweek

  Elle The New Yorker

  Time Cosmopolitan

  Glamour Good Housekeeping

  McCall’s Paris-Match

  He made a list of the books she read.

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  War and Peace by Tolstoy

  Nana by Zola

  Moby Dick by Melville

  The End of the Affair by Greene

  Hamlet

  He made a list of her killings.

  Paul Hugo

  Dr. Brice

  Bing Argyle

  Cop in NYC

  Cora Earl

  Jerome Vight

  Rex Hollander

  Seven of them that he was sure of. Four husbands.

  Come on, Joanna, we have to move now!

  Oh. Not yet.

  Then in May, three or four limousines drove up to the hotel and a swarm of Arabs took over all the top-floor suites. There was an item about them in the paper that morning: Arab Delegation in Town for Real Estate Talks.

  When the Eye saw them in the lobby, he almost fell through the floor. One of them was Abdel Idfa!

  Jesus Christ!

  For the rest of the afternoon the playful elves of impending doom took over the situation.

  They made Joanna pick that very day of days to change her schedule. Instead of going to the beach she went out to the pool and practiced diving for an hour. Abdel Idfa joined her there, as if by appointment, and lay sprawled in a deck chair sunbathing less than twenty feet away from her.

  Then they both spent a half-hour in the patio cocktail lounge, drinking martinis, entering one behind the other, each sipping two drinks at opposite ends of the bar, then leaving together so simultaneously that they almost collided at the door.

  The Eye went berserk with funk. The crowds saved her! Thank God for all these vacationing walk-ons, these Beautiful Miami People – the athletic Tarzans in Ted Lapidus jockstraps and the innumerable undressed chicks darting around and the purple-haired old women in giant sunglasses and their beefsteak-faced husbands wearing Bermuda shorts! They were everywhere, vast gaggles of them, encompassing everything in moats and ramparts of noise and movement and denseness.

  Then, at two o’clock on the dot, they both had lunch in the hotel dining room, Abdel and several fellow tribesmen at one table, Joanna at another, separated from him only by some potted plants and a few dozen other diners.

  Then she spent two hours reading in her room, and he went off somewhere. But, lo and behold, they both met again in the lobby at four thirty, she coming out of the elevator, he emerging from the barbershop. They passed each other just in front of the desk, a few centimeters apart, she tossing her key into the slot, he asking the clerk for some cablegram blanks.

  The Eye couldn’t take any more.

  He went to a florist shop on Tampa Street and bought two dozen roses to be delivered to her room. He scribbled a card to go with them.

  Dear Miss Larkin,

  I saw you in the swimming pool this

  afternoon and ever since have been

  wondering if you are the same

  young lady I met in Chicago some time

  ago. But whether you are or

  not, can you join me for a drink?

  I am in 196–197.

  Abdel Idfa, Esq.

  She checked out so fast he didn’t even have time to sell his Fiat. He left it in the airport parking lot.

  She put on her new auburn wig, and they flew to Detroit.

  Her name was now Roxane Devorak.

  She spent four months in Michigan, living in Lansing, Grand Rapids, and St. Joseph, just across the lake from the Chicago apartment house where she stabbed Bing Argyle.

  In September she went to Pittsburgh for a month, then spent two months in Buffalo and another month in Tonawanda, near Niagara Falls, gambling every night in a local clip joint. She lost nine thousand dollars. The Eye won eleven thousand.

  One morning he looked out the window and saw that it was snowing.

  It was Christmas Eve. Another year had passed.

  They flew to Philadelphia and landed in a blizzard.

  14

  Wrapped in her mink, Joanna wandered through the streets, window-shopping and listening to the Salvation Army bands playing carols.
On the twenty-fourth her horoscope advised her:

  This is YOUR month and ’tis

  the season to be cheerful, so

  take advantage of the jollity

  and try to enjoy yourself …

  She obeyed the instructions and kept smiling eagerly and fixedly at the passing crowds, as if she were waiting to greet someone amid the merriment. She gave a dollar to a seedy-looking Santa Claus on Market Street. ‘Thanks,’ he said, glancing at her legs. ‘I gotta Xmas present for you too, baby.’ And he reached down and zipped open his red trousers, showing her his cock wrapped in strings of tinsel.

  She went into a department store and roamed up and down the aisles. The loudspeaker was playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.’ Thousands of people swarmed around her. She bought a sweater. She walked through a forest of giant blinking cardboard Christmas trees. There were children everywhere. She saw scores of Jessicas, clinging to their parents’ hands, passing her by, leaving her behind apart from their joy. She was no longer smiling.

  The Eye, too, saw his daughter wherever he looked. She was with her real fathers: harried, happy, capable men who held her tightly and gently so she wouldn’t go astray in the tumult, and who would guide her home tonight to the warm rooms of comfortable houses with holly on the windows.

  He lost sight of Joanna. When he found her again there was a man with her.

  He never learned his name, it was all over and done with so quickly.

  They wandered along the street and into a cocktail lounge, where they sat together drinking grogs for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been dashing all over the country,’ she said, ‘for months and months.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be able to travel,’ the man replied. ‘I just don’t have the time.’ He was in his fifties, calm and serious. A good man, obviously, someone who was never cruel or shy.

  ‘But I’d like to rest for a while now.’ She lit a Gitane, leaned back, looked around the dim room. ‘Here.’

  ‘Why not? Philly’s a nice town. I think you’d like it.’

  ‘Rent a house and just sleep and …’ She touched her silver disc. ‘I’m so weary.’

  ‘I could help you to find a house. That’s no problem.’

  ‘That’s no problem, no.’ she laughed. ‘The problem is –’

  ‘What?’

  Standing just beyond their table was a small Christmas tree. Joanna stared at it. In a corner of the lounge a pianist was playing ‘Jingle Bells.’ Frost covered the windows, clouding the light with snowy cumulonimbus grayness.

  ‘The problem is,’ she said, ‘what will I do tomorrow? Or the day after that. Or next Christmas.’ She had begun probably with the intention of telling him some story. But she was meandering now, speaking almost to herself. ‘How long can I rest? Time passes so quickly. And it’s so expensive. It costs a fortune to buy a day or a year from life. We have to pay rent to live in the world. Every time the earth turns the landlord wants his money. And my purse is always empty – I spend all my time and all my money – and I have nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing. All I possess is a sense of loss. I’ve lost everything.’

  ‘What have you lost?’

  They stared at each other. She smiled at him. ‘Are you a banker?’

  ‘No. What makes you think that?’

  ‘You look like one of those people ...’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘In a bank, sitting at a desk in a roped-off cubbyhole. Every time I try to cash a check the girl behind the counter goes over and whispers to you and you both look at me. And you pick up a phone and call somebody in another cubbyhole and finally the girl comes back and says, ‘Do you have any identification, please?’

  ‘I’m in advertising.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No you’re not, you’re a banker asking me why I have a debit.’

  ‘I simply asked you what you lost.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I lost my childhood and my youth. My father and husband. My daughter. And my mind – that’s going too now, my memory keeps playing tricks on me. All my thoughts are muddy. And my eyes –’ she squinted at him. ‘I’m becoming myopic. Everything’s a blur. I need glasses. What will I do when I’m old and broke and blind and out of my head?’

  The pianist was playing ‘La Paloma.’ The waiter brought them two more drinks.

  ‘Who requested that number?’ she asked him.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said morosely.

  ‘La Paloma,’ she grimaced. ‘They were playing that the night Daddy left New York. We saw Hamlet with Richard Burton. Before that we went – we went ice skating all morning. And in the afternoon we walked up Riverside Drive to Grant’s Tomb – a magnificent day. There were huge gray ships with orange smokestacks in the Hudson. The sun was shining. There were lilacs in the park. Who was it who said “The Earth cannot answer”? It’s not true! The Earth can speak. It can sing to you. Trees and streets and lilacs can play music in your eyes, if you listen, and if you’re a smart young girl, walking along Riverside Drive with your father. After the theater we went to a party somewhere on the East Side, I think. Everybody thought I was his girlfriend, or pretended they did – “I picked her up on Forty-second Street,” he’d say when they kidded him. Then we went to Kennedy and he caught his plane. It had been such a long day, all morning, afternoon, and evening; and we were together every single minute. But it was the last day and the last night. I never saw him again.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He just flew away. He bought me a sweater. It didn’t fit. A red sweater. And the loudspeaker was playing “La Paloma.” They said he had a heart attack. Now, whenever I come out of a bank I pretend he’s waiting for me on the comer. But he doesn’t need money anymore – it’s a shame, because it would be nice to buy things for him. I’d like him to meet my daughter, too. He doesn’t even know he’s a grandfather. We could all live together in that house you’re going to find for me. But of course we can’t. They’re both dead and I’m getting drunk.’

  He didn’t laugh or mock her. He didn’t reach across the table and take her hand and say ‘Let’s get out of here and go somewhere else.’ He couldn’t follow all of what she was trying to tell him – or trying to tell herself – but he understood most of it. He opened his wallet and showed her a photo. ‘My little boy,’ he said. ‘He died when he was only three years old.’ He wasn’t being maudlin – there was no mawkishness in him; he was just showing her a picture of the way things were. ‘You’re very fortunate if you think time passes quickly. For me it moves very slowly giving me all the leisure I need to endure my sorrow.’ He smiled. ‘You can grow incredibly old when every hour seems to last forever.’

  And that was that.

  She sat there a moment, smoking her cigarette and listening to the pianist play cadenzas. Then she picked up her mink, her purse, and the package containing the sweater. ‘Excuse me a second,’ she said.

  She never came back. She spared him.

  The Eye followed her. She walked along the pavement, her head bowed, her coat hanging from her shoulder. He moved behind her, almost at her side.

  It was dusk. The street lamps were on; the hurrying streams of shoppers pushed around them. It was cold and wet and slippery, a Christmas-card evening, adorned with colored lights and wreaths, clamoring with bells and car horns, bright with golden shop windows shining on the snow. And she was just in front of him, only inches away, her cheeks glowing, her breath misty, her woolen cagoule sparkling with dots of frost. She pulled on her mink. He reached out, held it by the collar as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. She didn’t notice. She was crying.

  He sent his shepherding love ahead of her, parting the crowd so that she could pass untouched. At the intersections he changed the stoplights from green to red, blocking the traffic so that she could cross the streets in safety.

  He would never forget this particular tw
ilight. Years later, looking back across all their voyages together, this walk along Penn Boulevard would become his fondest memory. He would wake from a deep sleep in the dead of night and remember Philadelphia, Christmas, and the snow. He would hear the far-off carols playing their evensong and taste the winter air they breathed and feel the frozen grief of the solitude that divided them. That was the year I gave her a pear, he would tell the darkness.

  ‘All flights have been cancelled,’ the girl behind the counter said.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Just until the blizzard lets up some. You’ll probably be able to leave tonight, if you don’t mind waiting.’

  Joanna checked her luggage and sat down in the lounge. The airport was jammed with stranded passengers standing at the windows glaring up at the black sky. A charter mob, submerged in baggage, filled one corner of the room in a vast sprawl. A young man behind her was complaining shrilly to two Japanese, ‘Well, if I’m not in D.C. by noon tomorrow, maybe I ought to take a train.’

  She tried to read, then gave it up and just sat back and waited. Her finger was bothering her. She bit it gently, massaged it. A piped choir was singing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’ Then an orchestra played Erich Wolfgang Korngold film scores. ‘I knew coming to Philly was a mistake,’ the young man behind her wailed. Frank Sinatra sang ‘Strangers in the Night.’ ‘It is to be wondered at,’ one of the Japanese said, ‘why snowplows do not unearth the runways.’

  Then the loudspeaker called her name, her real name.

  She lumped up, astonished. She thought she’d dozed off and simply dreamed it. The announcement was repeated. She went over to the information desk. A hostess gave her a small gift-wrapped package. ‘A gentleman left this for you,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Who? Who was it?’

  ‘He didn’t leave his name.’

  Joanna opened it. It contained a large fresh yellow pear in a cellophane bag. Pinned to it was a card. She pulled it off, read it. Printed on it was a handwritten greeting: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  She looked around the lounge, her eyes narrowing. She saw the young man talking to the two Japanese. She saw a Lufthansa steward. She saw a man in a parka, another man bundled in furs like an Eskimo, two boys holding skis, another boy carrying a guitar.