by Gil Brewer
“What would you like to read?” Her voice was rusty. That was it.
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “Lots of detective stories.”
“That’s good.” I wasn’t thinking. Not about books.
“Mysteries pass the time.”
“Have you found that?”
“Well, sometimes I read them.” She looked out the window. I saw that her eyelids were heavy. I thought then it was from overwork. It wasn’t. I learned that later. It was natural with her. Her lids were dark. It wasn’t eye shadow, either. It came from something inside her. Those heavy dark lids with the blue eyes were sure something.
Somebody opened the ward door down the hall and the draft caused my door to slam. She said, “Oh,” and looked at the door. “I’m not supposed to be in here.” She said it like she didn’t give a damn.
“Yes.”
There was a long silence. Maybe she was trying to be serious but there was always that twist at the corner of her lips.
“Are you hurt badly?”
“No. Are you a nurse here?”
“I’ve been here since before Korea.”
“Why don’t you sit down?”
“Oh, no.” She had moved a scant inch toward the bed. “I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll think of some books I want.”
“Do that. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
We looked at each other. “Let’s cut this out,” I said. “Let’s relax.”
“It’s been a strain, hasn’t it?”
We told each other our names. She knew mine. “The doctor told me. He also said you’re interested in sculpturing.”
“Yes.” I didn’t like to talk about that with anybody. It was the only thing I had, really. I wanted to keep it my own—all the way.
“Have you done any recently?”
“Hardly.”
“Before you went away?”
“Commercial stuff, mostly. My home’s in Florida. I have a place there where I work.” I thought it over. “You could sit down. I haven’t talked with a woman for a long time.”
“Ah.” She watched the rain out the window. It was darkening in the room now as the late afternoon slowly failed. “My father was an artist,” she said. Her voice was touched with bitterness. “He hung himself. I found him that way, with the light cord twisted around his neck.”
It startled me. They didn’t talk like that around this part of the hospital.
“That why you’re a nurse?”
“No.” She stared at me, her eyes bright. “I planned it. I became a nurse so I could find some rich man, a helpless patient, and make him fall in love with me. Then I’d marry him for his money.”
“Have you found him?”
Her dress hissed as she moved her leg. “No. I guess not.” She told me her hitch would be up in less than a year. After she left I lay in bed and thought about her and knew she was going to get in bed with me. She had the look and that current was there between us. Then I decided I was off my nut and finally I went to sleep.
I awoke in a strait jacket.
It was the dream again. I had Frank up against the wall with one hand driving into his throat. The wooden mallet was in my other hand. I pounded at his head. He kept screaming. I heard him scream and scream as I woke up—only I was screaming.
I was in the hall outside my room. My fist was hurt bad from smacking it on the wall. They were tightening the straps.
“Look,” Leda said one day. “You’ll find out anyway. Dr. Prescott’s made me a kind of special nurse to you. He thought it might do you good.”
“It would.”
She put the books down on the table by the head of the bed and stood there with her hands clasped in front of her. Her breasts thrust large and firm in a white lace brassiere. I glimpsed the shadow of flesh through the nylon uniform. Her eyes were deep blue and the light from the bed lamp shimmered in her hair. “We may as well learn to be frank and open with each other right away.”
“It’s a good way to be.”
She looked at me sharply, then turned and sat in the chair by the window, crossing her legs. They were long gorgeous legs and the low-heeled crepe-soled shoes somehow enhanced them. In high heels her legs would be of the same impossibility of a Petty drawing. Only they’d be real. That would be something and she knew it.
“I know all about you,” she said.
“That’s not so good.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Come and sit beside me on the bed.”
She uncrossed her legs and said, “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Somebody might come.” She made it sound like a caress. It was that unconscious trait of hers. Sometimes when she talked and moved she kissed you with her whole body. Maybe it was the tone of her voice. I wasn’t sure.
“Come on,” I said. “Be frank and open.”
She glanced toward the door. It was very quiet. The staff would be eating and the room was dim, with only the bed light on. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed and said, “There.”
It was suddenly very much more than I’d expected. When she was that near the true feeling of it struck me and I reached for her hand. I made it as much of a gesture of instinct as I could.
We sat there holding hands. It was abruptly ludicrous and I let it go. She moved closer to me and said, “It’s all right. I think I know how you feel.” It was almost a whisper.
Leda was from a good family that had no money. They’d put her through the best schools on their name. She was a wild one and she showed it. A suppressed, combustible wildness. She was the type you might wonder about having a knife sheathed in the rim of her stocking. But you’d want to look, anyway. She seemed greatly interested in art, but had the idea people would kill art. They would kill the artist and he didn’t have a chance. Through ignorance, through wanting something other than what the artist had to offer.
“I don’t like persons like you,” she said. “Because I saw it happen to father. All the fine things he did went into the furnace. They heated the front parlor.”
“Forget it.”
“You’ve got to have money.”
Her father had hung himself, and her mother had gone to Germany before the war and joined the Nazi party for excitement. She’d been a fancy collaborator and had her own radio broadcast on a par with Axis Sally. She’d died in the explosion when the station was bombed. Leda rather lauded her mother.
“Really all right,” Leda said. “Misplaced, that’s all.”
So then she got her ideas about nursing and here she was, a First Lieutenant in the Army. That was her story.
“Help me fix the pillows so I can sit up.”
“You feel strong tonight?” God, the way she said those things.
“Very.”
She stood beside the bed and leaned over me to fix the pillows. I put my arms around her and drew her down and kissed her. I put a lot of pressure into that kiss, holding her down against me, and she started to let go. I knew that when she did let go, put herself into the kiss, it was going to be something. Her lips trembled and her breasts were against me and her hair formed a kind of tent over my face. We were in the tent together and it smelled good.
“Leda.”
She fixed the pillows. I sat up against them.
“Leda.”
“It was a trick,” she said. “You shouldn’t have done it.” Her lids were still heavy. But beneath those lids the blue of her eyes had changed to gray. She walked over to the door. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Leda—”
She went out. The door closed quietly and I heard her crepe-soled shoes whisking down the hall.
I lay there and though about home with Leda all mixed up in it, her eyes, lips, and body drowning in the daydream. Because I was afraid of sleep—afraid of the real dream.
There was Lenny Conn. I wondered if he had changed; if he was still living on the bayou, fishing, and mowing lawns. Did he still live in that shack wit
h the pictures on the walls? And the flat glass cases shelved in the mahogany cabinet he’d made. Like collecting butterflies. Only they weren’t butterflies. And I wondered where that subtle perversion of his had led him. Women. Lenny Conn and his collection about which even the law could do nothing. Lenny. Not very old and not very smart, of backwoods heritage—but cruel. Cruel as the person who tears the wings off flies and watches them squirm is cruel. Lenny Conn, whom I had known most of my life, who had once been a conductor on a Pullman train, who loved women in the blind groping darkness of a fantastic wish, and who mowed our lawn and trimmed our hedges. Wily, at times inscrutable, clever and secret and laughable. Lenny, along the shoals in a skiff with a gig in this hand, watching for flounder. Lenny, who was unable to comprehend why the Garths lived in a huge old pillared home with live oaks and drives and misery when he thirsted out his days in a scorpion-infested shack with his cryptic, startling collection.
Whenever I thought of home I had to push away the memory of another girl. Norma. My girl. It was like denying your name. I hadn’t written her and she no longer wrote. I wondered if she still wanted to open a photography shop, if she still thought of me, if she would be there, when and if I returned. And thinking of Norma, the circle would flash around, completing itself with Leda. Invariably I would compare them—then think of Leda’s breasts and thighs outlined beneath white nylon, in a savage effort to forget the girl who’d said she would wait. Because you do those things. . . .
My light was out and it was past two in the morning. I heard the door open, the hiss of movement, and I smelled her bending over me. I felt her breath on my cheek.
“You’re awake. Don’t trick me again.”
“Leda—”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s just that they all try. I didn’t want that from you.”
“I’m special?” I needed her and knew it. She had become the something I had to have to endure, to flash back out of the hell I was in.
“I think you’re special. I’m not sure yet.”
“How long will it be before you’re sure?”
I listened to her breathe and it was dark in the room. Her breathing was like her voice. It was very still and lonely and cool in the room with the wind outside the window and the shadows on the wall and her shadow beside the bed. It was always like that in the hospital at night; cool and lonely and very still and the room was longer, high-walled, and sometimes not secure.
I reached for her hand, found it, and she moved toward me. We kissed and this time it was all the way with her giving, then we parted, our breathing warm and nervous and shaking.
“Listen,” she said. “We’ll have to be careful.”
“Don’t go.” I held her waist, felt the swell of her breasts, the fine line of her waist. I could see the outline of her long legs and how her hips flared. She put her hands over mine, pressing. “Please don’t go, Leda.”
“Good night.”
“Leda—”
She went out softly and closed the door. But it was as if she was still in the room and I was sweating beneath the dressings.
She came every day then. We would talk and occasionally she read to me. I didn’t read any of the books.
“But it’s all right, darling,” she said. “I don’t mind bringing you books. Maybe sometime you’ll want to read them.”
“With you? Who wants to read if he has you?”
It was getting so I couldn’t stand it when she came close, or when we kissed. I needed her around, too, because it was worse now when she wasn’t with me. I thought too much about Frank and what was the matter with me. I kept remembering Mother alone with Frank, unwell and unable. Normally she could handle Frank, anybody—but with her heart, I didn’t know. And I never heard from her. I had ceased writing.
“You’re big enough for a sculptor, Leda said. “Are you bold?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe she was the bold one.
“Have you ever loved anyone?”
“No.” Norma’s bright laughing face flashed across my mind. Why did I push her out?
“I’d be a liar if I told you I’d never loved anyone.” It was in her eyes, like always.
“How do you feel today?”
“Mean as a snake.”
“Any dreams?”
“Yes,” I said. “You. A bad dream of you.”
I reached for her and her lips were soft and warm and my hands were in her hair and it was wild and hot.
“You’re not well,” she said, sitting up.
I pulled her down. “I’m all right.”
“You’re not sick, or anything?”
“No. I’m fine. Don’t go away.”
“Eric,” she said. “I love you. I knew it would happen this way. I didn’t want it to.” The excitement in her voice was rich and impatient. The rustling of her uniform was maddened. “I’ll have to be careful of your legs.”
“Hell with my legs.”
“Tell me you love me,” she said.
“I do. I love you.”
“Say my name with it.”
“I love you, Leda.” I could feel it all welling up inside me like damming the Mississippi river.
“Tighter, Eric!” She sat up, frowned.
God, I thought, I did something wrong.
She stood, glanced sharply at me, then walked toward the door. Her crepe soles whisked heartlessly.
“Leda,” I said. “Don’t go. Where’re you going?”
She didn’t answer. She closed the door and I heard her going down the hall. You damned fool, I told myself. You did something. What the hell did you do? You’ve ruined it. That’s how you ruin it. I cursed and smashed the bed with my fist.
Then suddenly I knew I loved her. I was in love with her. It was no good, but that’s the way it was.
The walls of the room eventually grew smaller with darkness and I fought sleep because to fight sleep was to win out over the dream.
Daily we grew closer and I became stronger, but she wouldn’t come to bed. Because someone might come into the room. I knew I had to get well.
There was little mail from home. None from Mother, and Frank’s letters few and addressed to Prescott. Whatever news they held for me was brusque. He said he had run the loan business into some money. My father’s crazy dream. All I saw was Frank running out of money. Mother was close to death, Frank said. Any light shock could take her away.
Frank ignored my questions. Sometimes I wondered a bit insanely if he was alive, if I hadn’t killed him after all. Maybe that’s why I was in the hospital. At these times I needed Leda.
And all the time, night and day, I fought the dream. I had to leave the hospital, get to work, get back to my sculpturing. I wanted to do Leda in stone. Inch by inch I learned her body by hand. Her mind. She had crawled into my mind. She was insidious and she kept me on a cliff of desire.
Then I was up and around. Stronger. Making my visits to Prescott’s office alone now. I used canes. The dreams were bad and I told Leda all about them.
She spoke of Frank. “I can’t see what you hold against him. Looks to me more like a go-getter than you. Looks like he’ll have plenty of money.”
“Wish you’d get money out of your head, baby.”
“I like money.”
“What else do you like?”
She looked at me. “Not like. Would like.”
It was Sunday afternoon and we had planned to spend it on the hospital grounds together. She met me outside the building. I had looked forward to this for a long time. Being with her, alone, out of sight of people. But I hadn’t looked forward to what I got.
I still used two canes. But I walked all right and felt fine. I felt as if I could tear down a brick wall.
I knew the moment I saw her. . . .
She was wearing a dress. Not a nurse’s uniform. It was a black dress with a zipper all the way down the front in a fold of white. Her eyes were foggy and heavy-lidded and she wore high-heeled shoes and sheer nylons and her hair
was thick and blinding.
“We’ll walk over there,” she said. She was urgent, almost grim.
I couldn’t speak right. My throat was thick. I was all bunged up inside and ready to burst. She brushed against me and we looked at each other. Her eyes were hot and her lips damp. We walked on down across the lawn, the green softness, until we were in a thick copse of fir and the walls of the hospital were shielded from view.
“Leda,” I said. I held her and dropped the canes. She moved her body against me. “Let’s sit down,” I said, and the ground was soft and warm with the sun up there and the shadows.
She was suddenly mute. There was an expression of intense anxiousness on her face. She stood beside me, looked down at me, her eyes burning. She dampened her lips with her tongue, reached for the zipper on her dress. Her hands shook. The zipper screamed and the dress opened as she came down toward me.
There was nothing beneath the dress. She kept staring at me, peeling off the dress, staring with that mute, terrific anxiousness.
I cursed her. She was a complete savage, bursting with passion, lustful, wanton, wild. At first it was like drinking hot red wine. Then the whole world shuddered and rocked, with the trees thick and mingled with her hair and the smell of it with the sunny shade, a dark blinding explosion.
She was absolutely mine. The dream.
“You planned this. Your clothes, everything,” I said finally. I held her close and quiet. She nodded against me.
“Yes. I’ve been crazy inside. You’ve made me crazy. Darling, make me sane again.”
I did.
Prescott, the dream, the attempt to uncover the why of the dream, the mostly failure, the realization at last that the hospital was no more help. Leda and the long waiting and now we were going home. My home. And I would face the dream.
“I’ll be right with you,” Leda told me from the bedroom of the Dark Mesa. “Quit thinking the wrong way.”
