by James, Terry
“Oh, please.”
“No, I swear to God. I lay there reliving every second of them, every taste, every texture, every smell, telling myself that if I didn’t make it at least I would go to my grave having tasted ambrosia.”
“I don’t believe a word of it.”
I gorged until I was stuffed, if only to get the memories of that hospital food out of my mind. A heavy torpor stealing over me from the three glasses of wine, I tossed my napkin onto my plate, conceding defeat.
“I’d love to stay up and keep you company,” I said, “but I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
“Off to bed you go,” she said.
She helped me up the stairs and down the hall. When we reached my door, instead of turning in she tugged me on towards her bedroom, saying, “You take my bed tonight.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s more comfortable.”
“I like my bed.”
“I know you do, but you need more room.”
I was too tired to argue.
“Where are you going to sleep?” I asked her.
“Just relax, Eddie,” she said. “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal.”
We carried on down the hall and into her bedroom.
“Do you need help undressing?” she asked before leaving.
“No. I can manage.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She placed the cover over the bird cage and wished the strawberry finches and I a pleasant night.
It wasn’t yet dark out, the gentle twilight bathing the room blue. I stood for a moment at the foot of the bed, soaking up all the feminine scents and textures. Then I took off my clothes, drew back the bedspread and climbed in. It was like falling through space in slow motion, so exquisitely soft were the mattress and sheets and pillows. I couldn’t help but groan as I sank into them, painfully aware of how stiff I was in comparison. I lay there on my back for a long time, gazing up at the intricate woodwork of the canopy as the last of the evening blue faded to black.
In the morning, when I awoke, she was standing beside the bed, holding a silver tray with breakfast on it, smiling down at me as if she had been gazing at my sleeping face all night. Her hair was loose and still damp from her shower, which in contrast with the golden sunlight streaming around her made it look nearly black. The sweet song of the strawberry finches completed the heavenly vision.
“You had a nice, long sleep,” she said. “Sit up.”
I sat up and she set the tray across my lap. I felt like weeping at how lovely everything looked on it: two perfect eggs on a china plate, sunnyside up, just the way I liked them, the plump yolks as vivid as wet pumpkins in a snowfield, two pieces of toast sliced at the diagonal, thoughtfully wedged against the eggs, two ribbons of crispy bacon, a little glass butter dish with a silver knife resting beside it, a tall glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee with a creamer of steamed milk beside it, three sugar cubes on the brim of the saucer. But what really got to me was the little porcelain vase with one of her irises in it.
“What have I done to deserve this?” I asked.
“More than you can imagine,” she said and turned and left the room.
I ate in a dreamy stupor, savoring every bite, turning it this way and that in my mouth before I swallowed. When she came back half an hour later I was reclining against the pillows, feeling like a king, gazing up at the canopy.
“You spoil me,” I said.
“I haven’t even begun.” She took the tray from my lap and set it on the floor. She then unbuttoned her housecoat, beneath which she was naked, and let it fall to the floor.
For the first five seconds or so I didn’t know what to make of it. I actually thought she must have only meant to remove a layer, using the opportunity of being in her room to change into something else, that she didn’t realize she was naked under her housecoat. And yet, I couldn’t turn my eyes away. Other than occasional inadvertent glimpses of Mom in a state of undress, I had never seen an older woman naked, and I had always assumed, regardless of how trim and elegant they might have appeared in their clothes, that beneath it all they were wrinkled, sagging bags of age-spotted flesh and varicose veins, repulsive to a man accustomed to the vanities of women half their age. I couldn’t believe how smooth and supple and unblemished Imogen’s blindingly white skin was. She was stunning. She may have been a little bony at the hips and shoulders, but her pubic hair was raven black against her milk-white belly. Her face alone betrayed her years, and those marks of wisdom and experience atop so ageless a body only made her all the more ravishing in my eyes.
It wasn’t until she reached over and pulled back the covers and slid in beside me that it became apparent that she knew exactly what she was doing. Irrationally, I opened my mouth to apologize, but her lips were pressed to mine before I could utter a word. Something powerful rolled through me, starting at my toes and flowing directly up to my brain, which suddenly felt twice its normal size. She wrapped her arms around me. Another warm wave swept me, leaving me utterly paralyzed. I was afraid to look her in the eye, afraid that one knowing glance from her would reveal that she was only mocking me.
25
THE NEXT WEEK was nothing short of a honeymoon. Day and night, we were lost in a beautiful dream. We woke up, reached for each other when not already entwined, screwed like it was the end of the world, ate breakfast in bed, lounged around until one of us got horny again, went at it again, in some new position or in some other room, on some other piece of furniture, ate lunch, took a nap, and started all over again. At some point we stopped bothering to get dressed at all. It was our own private bacchanalian orgy, complete with pheasants and cowslip wine. We anointed the sofa, the divans, every ottoman and settee, the Persian carpets, even the dining table. Our crotches were sore and chafed, but nothing could keep us apart. Given the adolescent frenzy of our couplings, to say that we felt like an old married couple wouldn’t be quite right, but in our moments of rest, lying sated side by side, staring contentedly into space, it often felt to me like we had been together all our lives. When I stopped to reflect on the perverse irony of what we were doing, it only incited my lust all the more.
They say older women are the most voracious, but I had never given it much heed. Until now. When it came to unusual positions and practices, Imogen seemed to have no inhibitions whatsoever, so long as they were carried out in a dignified manner. She hated filthy language. To her it was the height of vulgarity. The first time I got carried away and barked out some raving obscenity in the heat of the moment, she turned irate and reprimanded me as if I were a naughty schoolboy. That seemed to enflame something deep inside both of us. We carried on with the act, her scowling and slapping me, me whining and begging for mercy, until both of us exploded with a wicked, searing bliss the likes of which I had never experienced before. After that we rarely missed an opportunity to act out the skit of the mean, repressed termagant scolding the naughty little boy. Occasionally I felt she took it a little too far, cut a little too close to the bone, as when she made me say I was nothing but a frightened little brat hiding away from the big, bad world, at which point I had to remind her in no uncertain terms that I was a free man and could walk out of there any time I chose. These little outbursts of mine usually startled her, and she would bend over backwards to apologize if I had mistaken her playacting for any kind of affront to my manhood or independence. I always felt bad afterwards, pretended it was just part of the act so I could turn the tables and show her who was boss. She liked that too.
Accustomed as I was to banging no-good floozies and jittery whores, none of whom possessed an ounce of class, I always felt obliged to make a supreme effort on Imogen’s behalf. I couldn’t just please myself as I usually did. There were other considerations: our unusual friendship, her bereavement, her idealized conception of me, which I took pains to uphold. All of this helped me slow things down, pace myself, put her pleasure first. When I looke
d at her face, her eyes closed, her mouth open in pained-looking bliss, I felt a lot of things, not all of them charitable. Sometimes I felt sorry for her. She was reeling from her loss, not behaving rationally. At other moments I felt a strange resentment, as if I had been lured to this from the very beginning, from the very first time she opened the door of her house to me. But that crazy thought was usually nullified by how damn good it felt gliding away inside her. She had been dreaming of this for a long time, and I aimed to deliver. It wasn’t only for Walter that she had put all those blue-eyed blondes into the novels. They were for Eddie, too. And for herself. She wanted Eddie to fall for them. Time and again she had dangled them in front of him, but he never fell for the bait. He was always in control. Now she was the blue-eyed blonde, getting what she wanted at last. And I was Eddie King, her Eddie King, the one she had helped create. She had finally broken his will.
Poor old Walter, I couldn’t help but think. A man not as strong as myself would have easily succumbed to complete domination by a woman like Imogen. Is that what had happened? Had she gradually pecked away at his manhood, driving him ever deeper into his fantasies of being a hardened, brooding detective, until he had nothing left of his own? How much of that supposed masterpiece he was working on was just bluster, a last ditch effort to reclaim his dignity? Of course I didn’t voice any of these thoughts. For the most part we kept away from the subject of Walter, but it was always there, just beneath the surface, his spirit nearby, watching us. Not with disapproval, it seemed to me, but with a kind of amazed loneliness.
One morning at breakfast, I noticed she wasn’t eating. She kept staring out the window. I asked her if anything was wrong, but she only shook her head. Eventually she said, almost in a whisper:
“I was out in the garden when it happened.” She was gazing abstractly through the panes. Her eyes were absolutely still. I didn’t press her. It was a good minute or so before she spoke again.
“We had eaten lunch as usual, around noon. Then he had gone back up to his study to do some work. At around a quarter after two, I heard a loud bang inside the house. At first I thought it was just a door slamming. But something about it wasn’t right. It was loud enough to silence the cicadas, which were particularly noisy that day because it was so hot. I got up and made my way in through the conservatory.”
She paused, eyes moving back and forth, reconstructing the scene.
“Our lunch plates were still on the table, right here,” she said. “I had been eager that day to get back out to the garden, so I had left the dishes for later. Passing the table, I looked down at Walter’s plate. I don’t know why. On it was a small crust of bread and a peach pit. Somehow, at that instant, I knew he was dead. I could see every crumb, every fissure of the peach pit, the strands of flesh still clinging to the ridges, a tiny sliver of cheese, the dried red smears where the beets had lain. I could see every leaf and petal in the floral pattern around the rim of the plate. The strange thing is, even as I was rushing past the table, I remember thinking that I should have served pickled onions rather than the beets.”
She turned and looked at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I knew he was dead, but I was thinking about pickled onions.”
I reached out and took her hand in mine.
After that first week our pace slowed. I loved lying in bed in the morning, watching her standing at her dresser picking out her slip for the day, choosing her dress at the closet door, the way she reached around behind herself to do up the buttons, conscious all the while of my gaze on her, holding her hairpins between her teeth while she arranged her hair. I would lie there, watching her, gradually succumbing to an inexplicable fear of losing her. However much I tried to rationalize it, telling myself that she wasn’t going anywhere, the moment she left the room my heart would grow so heavy that I often found myself on the verge of tears, wanting nothing more than to have her back in my arms.
When she was asleep, I would lie beside her, gazing at her face, overwhelmed by the thought that somehow the indifferent universe had produced out of inanimate matter this amazing individual, and that I for some inexplicable reason was the one blessed to be with her for this brief moment in time. So many times I wanted to just open up and bare my entire life to her, tell her things I had never told a living soul. I didn’t want any secrets between us. I wanted to know about her childhood, about what she was like when she was a girl. Where had she lived? Who were her parents? Was she good in school? What kinds of games did she play? When was her first crush? But she never wanted to talk about herself. Whenever I asked these kinds of questions she would just smile and say, “Let’s not talk about the past, Eddie.”
At the very least I felt we had to have the Walter issue settled once and for all. Not just full disclosure on how much she had really known about his stealing from me, but, also, the true state of their relationship at the time of his death. If she had still loved him, how could she be sleeping with me so soon after his death? There must have been some trouble in their marriage, which may have contributed to his suicide. But I didn’t want to risk upsetting her by bringing it up. If I had learned one thing about Imogen Morris, it was that she had a wicked temper. As long as we worked it into our charades, we were fine, but I was always afraid of crossing the line, saying something that she could not forgive.
“I can’t help feeling that it was destiny that brought us together,” I said one morning as we lay caressing each other in bed.
“Eddie,” she said in a tone that conveyed her doubts as well as her appreciation of the sentiment.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell I was before this.”
This kind of talk made her uncomfortable, but I had to say it. I was done keeping everything bottled up inside. Where had that ever gotten me but alone? In retrospect I could see that there was more truth to those novels than I had been able to admit. Eddie King was a lonely, cynical, self-obsessed bastard, spending all his time trying to right the world’s wrongs when there was more than enough rot inside himself to keep him busy for the rest of his life.
She didn’t have any use for sentimentality. She recoiled when I expressed my feelings. That wasn’t who Eddie King was. If he did have feelings he kept them to himself. She had lived so long with her husband’s version of me that she couldn’t brook any deviation from it. She wanted me to be that man. As long as I was silent and gruff, she was happy. The moment I started expressing my feelings she cringed. But I knew that beneath that tough, stoical exterior of hers she was a nurturing woman. It was in fact that combination of the hard and the soft, the mean and the sweet, in the same woman, that had me reeling.
26
ONE EVENING AFTER dinner, as we sat enjoying the fire, reading our respective books, I opened the next volume of the Great Books series to where it seemed to want to open, and a business card fell into my lap. It was white, dense stock, quality paper. “Eddie King, Private Investigator,” it read in Helvetica, above the office address. It was one of the older cards. I turned it over. On the back, handwritten in black ink, were the words: Tell him everything.
Imogen must have sensed a perturbation in the atmosphere, for she raised her head and, concern wrinkling her brow, said: “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I lied nonchalantly. “Just a nice poem.”
“Oh?” she said. “Read it to me.”
I looked down at the page and read aloud one of the poems there. I didn’t hear a word of it.
“That was lovely,” she said when I had finished. “Who is it by?”
“Hm?”
“The poem,” she said. “Who is it by?”
“Oh. William Morris.”
A strange, almost mournful expression came over her face as I said that name. It was only there a second. Then she smiled and asked me to read her another one.
The next morning, after breakfast, I told her I needed to go into town to get some paint samples.
“Can I go wi
th you?” she asked, to my surprise. It was the first time since I had met her that she had expressed any desire to leave the house.
It took me a moment to find the right tone: “Actually, I’ve got some other things to do.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll just wait for you.”
I pretended to give it some thought, then replied: “Next time. I promise.”
She smiled enigmatically, as if she had heard that too many times in her life. For good measure I kissed the back of her neck. A lie of a kiss. A kiss whose only purpose was to get me out of there.
Back in my office, I pulled the bottle and glass from the drawer and poured myself a drink. I took a sip and let it swirl around my tongue for a while before swallowing.
On the desk, where Detective Gallo had thoughtfully left it with the two checks he had fished from the trash, lay the old letter from Kathy Jerrell, back in its envelope. I pulled the letter out and read it again.
I read it a third time. I set the letter on the desk and finished my drink. Then I pulled the telephone over and dialed New Mexico directory assistance. I asked for the number of Pastor Glenn Jerrell on Futura Drive, Roswell. The operator gave it to me and put the call through.
A woman answered on the third ring. In the background children were shouting.
“Is this Kathy Jerrell?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. She had a sweet voice, the sort of voice you hate to lie to. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Robert Justice,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”
All I could hear was the children. She covered the mouthpiece and told them to be quiet. They complied for a second or two.
Knowing that her first thought would be that something had happened to one of her kids or her husband, I didn’t hesitate in telling her that Walter Morris, the novelist also known as Baxter Conway, had died last month.
“Oh … my … God,” she gasped. I gave her a few moments.
“The reason I’m calling,” I said, “is that I’ve had an opportunity to read the letters that you and Mr. Morris exchanged over the years, and I just have a few questions. Is this a good time?”