Afraid to Death

by Marc Behm

  ‘You’re …’ he was jolted. ‘Iraq! Come on!’

  ‘It’s true. I was thoroughly aroused. That’s when I began looking for you. I was in need of … reassurance.’

  Her clothing dropped away. The feast spread before him once again. He’d thought he’d never see her body again. Now it was undulating wantonly before him, strolling into the bedroom, turning sinously, beckoning.

  He followed the shining ebony flesh through the shadows.

  Thunder woke him. Rain was crashing against the windows, lightning lit up the room.

  He stood at the window, watching the storm. She was out there, he knew it. In the night and the wind, waiting in the rain, smiling at the thunder.

  He prayed. O God, I never thanked you for giving me back my cock. I really appreciate it. Now just keep her away from me. Let me be the only one who doesn’t have to endure the going hence, even as the coming hither.

  Iraq stepped to his side, wrapped her arms around him.

  ‘She’s there,’ he said.

  ‘Certainly she is,’ she stroked him delicately. ‘She’s always there. She always has been and she always will be. What of it? What are we expected to do, hide in a crypt until she finds us? Come back to bed, you dolt. If you have only five minutes to live, take advantage of the reprieve. Besides, I have some good news for you. I’m pregnant.’

  In the morning came the bad news. The mailman told them that their neighbour, Dr. Burk, died yesterday.

  29

  He refused to leave the house. He peered out the windows all day, watching the road and the beach. Every time the doorbell rang, he’d sneak into the pantry and hide in a closet.

  She tried to reason with him. The blonde was gone. Besides, she hadn’t been looking for him but for the doctor.

  ‘She found him and he’s dead. And she left. Why would she stay?’

  ‘She’d stay if she thought I was here.’

  ‘But why would she think that, Joe?’

  ‘Because her radar works too. Just like mine. When one of us is close, we both know it.’

  She realized that arguing with him was pointless. She decided to get him away from Naples. She had a cabin on Gullivan Bay. They could go there for a while, until he got his nerve back.

  She packed some provisions, closed the house and they left that night.

  He insisted on making the trip locked in the Triumph’s trunk.

  She stopped under the setting moon and opened the trunk.

  ‘All clear,’ she said.

  ‘Are we there?’

  ‘Not yet. We just passed Naples Manor.’

  He climbed out to the road, eyeing the darkness.

  ‘She could be parked somewhere,’ he mumbled, ‘watching the road.’

  ‘Never mind her. Tell me what you think of my announcement.’

  They got back into the car, drove on.

  ‘I think it’s sensational, Iraq,’ he was watching the empty highway behind them, ‘except for one thing.’

  ‘Oh? What’s that?’

  ‘I can never be a father or a husband. I can’t possibly live any sort of normal life.’

  ‘Well,’ she squeezed his knee. ‘I can always keep you locked up in the cellar and bring you out just for special occasions. For instance, for parenthood or for fucking every now and then. Is that abnormal enough for you?’

  They both laughed. If he could laugh he was rallying. He made her stop the car again and they made love in a pasture. His craving was so intense and her rasps of pleasure so invigorating that he banished his fright in a maelstrom of pure lust.

  The cabin was on an island two miles offshore. To cross the bay, she kept a motor launch at a wharf in Goodland, a high-powered Cariddi, painted orange and named ‘Mantatisi.’

  The sun was rising as they loaded their packs aboard and cast off.

  It occurred to Joe abruptly that he was ‘at sea’! He’d never been this far out on the water before. The illimited foggy landlessness stunned him. Where was the earth? Where were the trees and lampposts and mailboxes and the boulevards and bridges and …?

  And the haze! It was alive! He saw dragons in the mist, squids and krakens and ethereal goblins. Jesus! This was ghastly!

  At the helm, Iraq pulled on a skipper’s cap. ‘I am the captain of this vessel,’ she cried. ‘And you are my crew! Our course is south-south-west to the Land of Bliss!’

  He looked at her bleakly. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘You’re not paying attention, sailor. Bliss! You’ll spoil everything if you throw up!’

  ‘Yeah right. How long will it take to get there?’

  The deck rocked. He looked over the side. Was that a fin?

  ‘Damn!’ Her cap dropped overboard. She switched off the engine, threw one leg over the gunwale and leaned down to lift it out of the swell.

  Then she was gone!

  The sun broke through the clouds, washing away the livid gloom. He and the ‘Mantatisi’ were alone in the bay.

  ‘Iraq!’

  She wasn’t there!

  Then he saw the fin again. It cut past the bow, sank, reappeared aft, turning sharply.

  Hands reached up out of the water and gripped the edge of the stern. He moved toward them …

  White hands.

  She surfaced just beneath him, glitteringly nude, her dripping blond hair hanging over her purple eyes. The skipper’s cap was tilted on her head, the silver cat pendant was hanging from her lips.

  He backed away from her.

  She smiled, pointed to him.

  His fist struck the throttle. The engine barked, the launch lunged forward.

  He ran to the helm, looked back.

  Far behind him her head looked like a melon floating in the bay.

  30

  He made it to Goodland simply by steering the bow toward the nearest shore. He killed the engine and drifted into the dock, slamming against it, splitting open the hull.

  The Triumph was parked behind a boathouse, its key on a magnet under its fender.

  He drove across the toll bridge to 41.

  He passed the meadow where they’d made love last night. Normal couples called that ‘a quick one.’ It was part of the ordinary pleasures of being like everybody else. Well, no more of that.

  What about her cabin? The Land of Bliss! He’d never see it! What was it like? He was sure it was a perfect place, with bright walls and clean floors and …

  No more of that either.

  He was doing eighty. He slowed to fifty.

  He wouldn’t think about the rest of it. Especially about her … his … their child. A child! God! That was beyond thought, out of reach of misery.

  In fact, he wouldn’t think of anything. That was a faculty that came naturally to him. Far far far down in the bottom of the chasm of cogitation was an even deeper cavity called Lacuna Pit. He’d just store all his inmost ponderings there, with his memories and his longings and his regrets. And shut the lid on them. Oh, they’d pop out every now and then, sure, to try to finish him off. But he could always put them back into their hole again – and again and again – until weariness dulled their sting.

  It was getting hot. Already 80 degrees. A bright and cheerful day. For somebody.

  By ten o’clock he was at the house. He sat in the driveway, wondering why he had come here. Then he remembered. She had a couple of hundred dollars in the drawer of her desk. He’d need that to buy gas.

  The blinds were down, the rooms were already dark tombs. He found the money and went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water. And he saw her, standing in a corner of the hallway.

  It was just a faint trace of her, barely discernible, like a rough sketch drawn on the wall with the faulty nib of a pen.

  She moved into the living room. He followed her. He wasn’t afraid. He tried to take her in his arms. But she eluded him, searching.

  He knew what she was looking for. It was on the mantel. Her witch-stick. He lifted it down, showed it to her.
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br />   She pointed to the fireplace.

  He lit some charcoal on the grate and burned it.

  She went out to the terrace. He watched through the window as she floated across the beach into the sea.

  Later, driving out of Naples, he saw the hick cop standing by his cruiser on the crossroads. They both waved.

  He didn’t reach St. Petersburg until five o’clock. Too late to go to the bank. He checked into a hotel and slept like a log all night and all day, not waking until six in the evening. Too late again. He went to the movies and saw an Italian film, La tragedia di un uome ridicolo. He was in bed by eleven, reading Newsweek. All his griefs were safely stored in the Lacuna. He slept without dreams until dawn. He was at the bank when it opened and emptied his safe-deposit box. The money-belt was intact, stuffed with bills. More than enough to go anywhere and survive for a while.

  Out in the parking lot he met Nellie.

  Nothing ever ruffled her. She just drawled, ‘Oh there you are hi.’

  They had a drink at Spike’s.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened, Egan,’ she said. ‘Truly I am. I feel so guilty. Alice and I talked it over and we just had to admit that you couldn’t possibly have been in cahoots with that wretched salaud Milch. We even phoned that club of yours in Los Angeles. They told us you were never disbarred for cheating. They said you even had a golden card, whatever that is. So I owe you how much? Do you remember?’

  ‘Sure. Eight thousand. How is the abominable Alice?’

  ‘Oh, she split out. She met some chick and they went off together. I haven’t the faintest idea where she is. That’s what I told the fuzz.’

  ‘The fuzz?’

  ‘She’s been gone for over a year. She’s now a missing person. She abandoned everything. Her clinic, her office, her apartment. She just took off.’

  ‘No kidding!’

  ‘I refuse to miss her. She was turning me into a rampant dyke.’

  ‘Who was the chick?’

  ‘Beats me. Someone insatiable, for sure. Alice could never get enough.’

  He was rattled. A year ago? That would have been just about the time she showed up. ‘How do the police know they left together?’

  ‘They were seen at the airport, both of them, buying two one-way tickets to someplace.’

  Well, he wouldn’t bother to wonder about it. He dropped it into Lacuna Pit with the other incertitudes.

  Before leaving, Nel unscrewed a bulb from the lamp on their table and slipped it into her pocket.

  She drove him back to her loft. He took a last look at the Triumph, sitting forlornly in the bank’s parking lot, then dumped it into the Lacuna too.

  It was obvious enough why she’d brought him home. No sooner were they through the door when she began unzipping. But wasn’t it too soon after … since …? If it had been anyone else beside Nellie, he would have bowed out. But her lilac scent and her cat face had always bewitched him, even when he was impotent.

  ‘Do you want me to keep anything on?’ she asked. ‘Like – oserais-je dire? – my shoes?’

  Iraq had always been indifferent to erotic fantasies.

  She was too straightforward for such things. But he remembered the games he and Ada used to play. This gave him an inspiration. He felt himself stirring even as he thought about it.

  ‘Nel, do you by any chance have a blond wig?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘And black stockings? And a black slip or something?’

  ‘Oh, boy! What am I supposed to be playing? A widow?’

  Already erect, he closed the curtains, undressed, hung his money-belt on an easel. And when she came toward him in the half-light, blond, feline, wearing her inky masquerade, his dismay and desire and mortal panic all conjoined, as they did, brutally, under the marijuana plants, coming together like molten welding.

  31

  He didn’t know exactly what he’d accomplished by playing that charade, but Nellie was impressed. When he tried to say goodbye, she wouldn’t hear of it. She was flying to Buffalo at midnight, she’d only be gone for a week. She wanted him to move into the loft until she returned. Or better still, why not come with her? She’d pay for the trip and deduct it from the money she owed him.

  It sounded like a good idea, so they left together. She spent the whole flight talking about Alice.

  ‘She arranged this exhibit. She owns a piece of the gallery. She’s from Buffalo. Her daddy was a doctor too. He was completely bonkers. It must run in the family. He killed himself in the most atrocious way. He swallowed Nembutal pills then dug a hole in the garden and laid down in it and covered himself with dirt and just fell asleep. By the time they found him he was smothered. Isn’t that baroque? “Doctor, canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow? Ah, therein the patient must minister to himself.” Did you ever memorize Macbeth? You promised me you would, remember? Alice’s problem is …’

  He dozed. When he woke she was still drawling.

  ‘… she’d be outraged if she knew what happened this afternoon. She doesn’t believe in hetero action. She thinks all men are skunks. She … oh, look, there’s Buffalo down there!’

  They checked into the Humbolt Parkside. She was at her gallery most of the day, leaving him free to sit in the park or read in the public library, or to take long walks.

  He avoided Lake Erie. It was too much like the Gulf. Even the smell of it spooked him. He’d never go out on the water again. Never! He’d keep away from boats and even beaches.

  One afternoon they had lunch in a restaurant in Riverside Park and he couldn’t eat because their window overlooked the Niagara.

  ‘Egan, what ails you precisely?’ she asked.

  ‘I hate landlessness.’

  ‘What in the world is that?’

  ‘Haven’t you ever read Moby Dick?’

  ‘Naturally. I think.’

  ‘Melville says water is terrifying because of its “landlessness.”’

  ‘Oh, stop. There’s land on both sides of the river. You’re just trying to be mystic.’

  At night, in the darkness, she would don her blond hair and mourning veils and they would enact his morbid fantasy. The fierceness of his reaction to the ritual always exhilarated her and she began to refine her performances, playing the flux of his arousal with the skill of instinct, provoking him to passages of excitement that left them both drained.

  ‘What are we up to?’ she asked after one of these wild sessions. ‘I’m not complaining, mind, just curious.’

  What could he tell her? He had to invent a story. ‘Remember Madam Manners, way back when, the General’s widow?’

  ‘Ah hah! Yes I do. A stately woman always in veils. And, cela va sans dire, you were in love with her when you were pubescent.’

  ‘I used to watch her through the window at night,’ he lied (Madam Manners! Jesus! That bat-faced hag!). ‘I’d play with myself and come all over the rose bushes, scratching my dong on the thorns. Especially when she walked around the house bare-assed in her black stockings.’

  ‘How quirky. If she only knew what she was missing. And me?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Poor Nellie.’

  ‘With Madam Manners I’m horny. With you I might feel inadequate.’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you actually believe you’ve been fucking somebody else these last few days?’

  (Somebody else indeed! Could he tell her about the Maiden of Dread? The Shark Goddess? The Angel of Going Hence? The Landlady of the Crypt? He was pointing the burning witch-stick at all of them.)

  ‘“Sometimes,”’ he quoted, ‘“two see a cloud that’s dragonish.”’

  ‘Hamlet.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You can’t out-quote me, I know more Shakespeare than you do. What’s this one? “What thou seest when thou dost wake, do it for thy true-love take.”’

  ‘You got me.’

  ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Was Madam Manners a blonde?’
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br />   She was supposed to go back to Florida at the end of the week. But on Saturday she disappeared.

  He waited for her all night and all day Saturday. There was no way of getting in touch with her, he hadn’t the faintest idea where the gallery was. He searched her luggage for an address. Jotted on the cover of her sketchpad he found a phone number with a Buffalo area code. He dialed it.

  A machine answered.

  ‘I’m out of town for the moment. Leave your number and I’ll call you as soon as I return.’

  It was the same voice that spoke to him – how many long years ago? – on Greenwood Avenue.

  The voice from Somewhere Else.

  32

  This was something he couldn’t dump into Lacuna Pit. It was too weird. So weird, in fact, that his curiosity was stronger than his apprehension. Anyway, if it were her voice, she was out of town, so he could rest easy for a while. He decided not to flee. Not yet.

  He gave the number to the girl at the hotel’s phone desk and asked her to find its listing. He slipped her a hundred dollars.

  A half-hour later she gave him an address on Kensington Avenue.

  It was a house, just across the street from Cleveland Park. A huge place, surrounded by a wall with a locked gate.

  He followed an alley into the back of the property and climbed up on a dumpster. He could see the rear façade of the house from here. All the windows were shuttered. The grass in the yard was knee-deep, the hedges overgrown, paths invaded with weeds.

  He pulled himself over the wall and dropped down to a driveway.

  He moved through the thickets, crossed an eroded flowerbed, passed a tumbledown arbor. The side windows too were covered with shutters. On the terrace were flowerpots filled with dead twigs. The paving everywhere was cracked and smeared. A sundial was heavy with vines.

  He ran across the yard to one of the back windows. Its shutter was ajar. He pulled it open. He looked through the filthy pane and saw a long corridor, an archway at its extremity leading into a bare room.

  The place was vacant, no doubt about it. No one had lived here for years.