The Cannibal Heart

by Margaret Millar

  “Why are you glad it’s real?” he said.

  “I can’t tell you. You might laugh at me.”

  “Is it written into the constitution that no one can laugh at you?”

  She raised her chin. “All right, I’ll tell you. Mr. Roma heard the sea lion, only he thought it was me crying. He thought it was me crying in a dream. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Not very. Why did you believe him?”

  “Because when I woke up I really had been crying.”

  “What about?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  In the intimacy of the fog he felt he could reach over and touch her memory and it would unfold into his hand.

  “Could I have a cigarette?” she said.

  He gave her one and lit it. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “I don’t. Just on special occasions.”

  “Why is this a special occasion?”

  “Oh, the fog, I guess,” she said with a vague gesture. “And being up so early, and—oh, everything.”

  “Am I included in the ‘oh, everything’?”

  She looked directly at him, and the cigarette glowed in her mouth for an instant like a third and fiery eye. “What do you suppose?”

  “I suppose I am. Why did you follow me out here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I heard you come out and I wanted someone to talk to.”

  “Well, start talking,” he said soberly.

  “I’ve—I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”

  “Say anything. I want to hear you talk.”

  She turned away, shaking her head.

  The sea lion began again, and they both looked quickly toward the vanished sea, as if startled but relieved by a sound from the outside world.

  “He’s at it again,” Mark said, the relief evident in his voice. “He might have been injured by a shark.”

  “Oh, no. He’s only playing.”

  “It’s a hell of a time to play.”

  “He doesn’t care. Sea lions are very gay creatures. They like to tease. Once, years ago, John and I tried to catch one, or at least get close to him. He teased us for over an hour, letting us get just so close, and then diving under and coming up a hundred feet away. I could have sworn he was laughing at us. His face didn’t change expression but he seemed to be chuckling inside, like a very old and dignified gentleman at the Yale Club looking at the cartoons in Esquire.”

  “I frequently read Esquire at the Yale Club.”

  “Don’t tell me things like that about yourself.”

  “Aren’t you interested?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to hear them. I don’t like to think of you as having—having another life, belonging to clubs and working in an office and going home in the evenings to a family.”

  “How do you want to think of me?”

  “Just the way you are now, standing here, with no background at all.”

  “I can’t stand here forever.”

  “No. But I wish—I wish you could.”

  He was silent a moment. The fog had begun to lift, and in the east a faint pink glow announced the coming of the sun.

  “I’m beginning to get an idea about you,” he said at last. “It’s not a nice one.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “You’re going to make trouble for me. Trouble is your middle name.”

  Her eyes looked huge in the dim light. She pulled her coat collar high on her throat, as if to make it less naked, less vulnerable. “Why do you say that? Why do you look at me like that?”

  “I’m catching on. You like to own things, don’t you?”

  She seemed relieved at his answer. “Oh. Oh, is that all?”

  “That’s enough. Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Are you?”

  “I like talking to you, out here in the fog like this. It’s much nicer than lying in bed, thinking.”

  “And crying . . .”

  “Sometimes I cry. Not often, anymore. It’s so useless, and afterwards I can’t breathe, and my eyes are swollen.”

  “I hate to think of you crying.”

  “You’re so funny,” she said, smiling. “One minute you’re so cynical and hard, the bris­tling male. And the next minute you’re quite gentle.”

  “Have you never affected other people like that?”

  “No.”

  “Not even your husband?”

  “No. John was always gentle.”

  “Did you own him, too?”

  “What—I don’t understand.”

  “I meant, the way you own Roma and his wife. In a quiet ladylike way, of course—pulling the strings so cautiously the marionettes don’t jump, they waltz.”

  She wasn’t angry. “That’s an absurd idea.”

  “You own Roma, anyway. You even taught him how to talk. Don’t you see how he copies you?”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “Tell me, did he change in the year you were away? Did you find him perhaps a little different?”

  “Why? I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “Mice don’t always play when the cat’s away, but they change. They become a little freer, more relaxed . . .”

  “Please don’t spoil things,” she whispered. “Please, Mark.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, and rubbed the side of his jaw impatiently.

  The rough scratching sound was pleasant to her. She wondered how sharp his whiskers were and whether they would hurt her skin if he kissed her. But it was almost too late now, and too light. The fog still brooded in the treetops, but the sea was visible, flowing silver in the dawn. She would have liked the fog to come down again like a giant cataract growing over the eye of the sun. She wanted a whole new blind day for herself and Mark.

  She stood, shivering. It was almost too late. Mr. Roma would be getting up soon, and Jessie, and Carmelita. Soon every room in the house would be filled with people, or the threat of people. The minutes were bursting like bubbles before her eyes.

  “I’d better go in now,” she said painfully.

  “You’ll miss the sunrise.”

  “I’ve seen others.”

  “Maybe this one will be different.”

  She pulled her coat close around her. “I thought it might be, too, for a while. But it’s the same old one.”

  “Don’t go in,” he said.

  They stood at the rusted railing, side by side, and watched the sun climb slowly up the sky. The sea turned rosy, and the head of the sea lion was a black speck, a quarter-mile from shore. He had stopped barking, silenced by the shift from night to day.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, “and I can’t leave. Do you ever feel like that?”

  “I do at this moment.”

  “It’s silly to say now that I wish I’d never met you. But I do wish it, with all my heart. It was only by the merest fluke that I learned you were alive, and now I can never forget it. I feel that I could—I could almost kill you.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Not for revenge—only so I wouldn’t have to go away from you and keep thinking of you going on as usual without me, reading Esquire at the Yale Club. I don’t want you to be alive without me.”

  “Those are funny love words.”

  “Are they?”

  Her hands gripped the railing; they were quite large, and one of the knuckles on her right hand protruded more than the others, as if it had once been broken and had mended crookedly. He took her hand and held the crooked knuckle against his heart.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” she said, “to walk on a city street and always be expecting to meet you; to look up at a plane and wonder if you’re in it; to watch every window on a passing train. Are those such funny love words?”


  “No.”

  “When I’m gone will you wonder like that about me? Will you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  She tore her hand out of his grasp and backed away from him.

  He said, “If you can’t bear to hear the truth, don’t ask for it.”

  She spat the word back at him. “Truth!”

  “That’s it. I’m trying to be honest with you. What do you want . . . ? A couple of quick seductions good for a few tear drops on the pages of your diary? Or do you want to lock me up in your house? Either way, it’ll be a first-class mess. Wash the dreams out of your eyes and you’ll see it for yourself. I know, I’ve been in a mess like this before,” he said grimly, “and I’ve learned a little. I nearly lost my family for the sake of a woman whose face I can’t even remember anymore.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “I remember she had three kids.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate you!”

  “That’s better than watching train windows,” he said.

  He sounded perfectly under control. But he knew that if she came over and touched him, he would forget his own words and make her forget them, too.

  She went back into the house, shielding her crumpling face with her hand.

  He smoked another cigarette and watched the sunrise and wondered what would happen if he told Evelyn.

  15

  He didn’t tell Evelyn; he didn’t have to. Though she wasn’t aware of what had happened on the sundeck, she had read, surely and expertly, the signs of guilt: too much or too little silence, a forced laugh, a shift of glance, a sudden change in an old habit. The last sign was the most striking—for the first time since they’d come here, Mark had shaved and dressed very carefully before breakfast.

  She kept the knowledge to herself, letting it grow inside like a tumor hidden, temporarily, under a whole and healthy skin.

  During breakfast she was very cheerful, paying special attention to Jessie but not missing a flicker of Mark’s eyelids. Mrs. Wakefield had eaten early and had already gone upstairs with her notebook to finish listing the contents of the bedrooms.

  “Don’t dribble like that, Jessie,” Evelyn said. “We don’t want the place to be swimming in oatmeal.”

  “My manners are better when I’m out.”

  “Well, pretend you’re out then. Pretend you’re at—how about Schrafft’s?”

  Schrafft’s was fine. She pretended that she was dining alone at Schrafft’s on porridge-sherbet; her mother and father were total strangers, and Luisa, coming in with the coffee, was the cross waitress who wouldn’t get a tip.

  “Here’s the coffee,” Luisa announced, as if she had just barely been able to survive the grueling journey from kitchen to dining room. “Mama says it’s terrible this morning because the water’s beginning to smell again. We may not have any water at all pretty soon unless it rains.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Evelyn said. “Let’s hope so.”

  “It never rains here in June. Do you want anything else besides the coffee?”

  “No, thanks, Luisa.”

  The cross waitress disappeared, and the total strangers began to talk.

  “Mark, did you see that necklace Luisa’s wearing?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t notice.”

  “It looks like the same one Mrs. Wakefield had on that first day she came.”

  “Maybe it is. Who cares?”

  “I don’t actually care, darling,” Evelyn said pleasantly, “only it seems odd that she’d let Luisa wear it. It looks rather expensive.”

  “Mrs. Wakefield gave it to her,” Jessie said, forgetting she was at Schrafft’s. “For keeps.”

  “You’re not making that up, angel?”

  Jessie never made anything up, and said as much, with virtuous indignation. “I know for a fact because she almost traded it to me for the watch, only not quite.”

  “In any case,” Mark interrupted, “it’s not your business, Jessie. It’s not ours either, for that matter. Let’s drop the subject.”

  “Well, really,” Evelyn said, widening her eyes. “Surely it’s a perfectly innocent subject—unless you know more about it than I do?”

  “I know nothing about it.”

  “Then why get so touchy? Jessie, sweet, if you’ve finished, you may go now.”

  She hadn’t finished, but she rose anyway, and sped for the door. She knew what was coming. The total strangers weren’t total strangers anymore. They were her mother and father, and they were going to have an argument.

  “All right, let’s have it,” Mark said. “Let the brave front fall and we’ll see what’s behind it.”

  “Not a thing.”

  “That’s the way you’re going to play it, is it?”

  Impulsively she reached out and touched his coat sleeve. “Mark, why do you talk to me lately as if I were your enemy?”

  “If I do, then I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “What good’s an apology? I’d like to know where I stand.”

  “Where you’ve stood for the last twelve years. You’re my wife, and I wouldn’t give you up for all the other women in the country.”

  She turned away, biting her lip. “Those are nice words, but the way you say them makes me want to bawl.”

  “You have no reason to bawl, Evelyn,” he said quietly. “Perhaps I don’t act the dashing lover as well as I did ten years ago, but I do love you. I think you’re sweet and bright and amusing, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else I’d rather see every day.”

  “But . . . Now let’s have the but.”

  “Can’t think of any . . .”

  “I can,” she said. “But along comes a woman like Mrs. Wakefield—or Patty—one of these dreamy June-moon-soon gals who’s made a mess out of her life—and what happens? You want to rescue her or make it all up to her or something. And immediately I begin to look like something that crawled out from under the floorboards.” She hesitated. “Hell, darling, I can be dreamy, too. June, moon, soon, swoon. See?”

  “I’ve never been unfaithful to you.”

  “You’ve come pretty close, though.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Patty and Mrs. Wakefield?”

  “Patty and Mrs. Wakefield. Right.”

  She was silent for a moment before she let out a queer little cry. “What am I sitting here for? Why don’t I do something about it? Could I—no, I don’t suppose I could.”

  “Could what?”

  “Talk you out of it. You know, sort of analyze her so she won’t look quite so good to you.”

  He smiled, very slightly. “She doesn’t look so good to me. You’re a funny girl.”

  “Listen, Mark. Do you really have a crush on her? I mean when you look at her, do you—do you want her?”

  “No.” It was the first lie he told, and he told it as much for her sake as his own.

  “You wouldn’t admit it anyway.”

  “Probably not.”

  She said, after a time, “I wish you weren’t so honest. Sometimes I think that people who bend over backward to be honest only do it to be—to be cruel.”

  “If I lied, though, you’d think up stronger words for me than cruel.”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s a case of hell if I do and hell if I don’t.”

  She poured his coffee and passed it across the table. “I suppose you think I’m unreasonable?”

  “No more than the average woman.”

  “What would you do if the situation was reversed, and some tall dreamy guy with sideburns came along and decided I was pretty cute.”

  “Lots of them have, though I can’t remember any with sideburns.”

  “I asked you a
serious question.”

  “Very well. I’d probably ask him to park elsewhere. And if he didn’t—and if he wasn’t too big—I’d take a poke at him.”

  “The subtle approach, eh? God, men have simple minds.”

  “Can you think of something better?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He looked faintly irritated. “Don’t make a fool of yourself, will you? Don’t—humiliate yourself.”

  “If I don’t do it myself, other people might do it for me.”

  “Listen, Evelyn. Lay off, will you? She’s leaving tomorrow anyway. There’s not a chance in the world that we’ll ever see her again.”

  But, even as he spoke, the words were incredible to him. It seemed utterly impossible that she would not walk into his life again somewhere.

  Evelyn was talking, but the words he heard came from his memory and had been spoken by Mrs. Wakefield: to walk on a city street and always be expecting to meet you; to look up at a plane and wonder if you’re in it; to watch every window on a passing train . . .

  Evelyn found Luisa in the lathhouse beyond the shed. Luisa was sitting on the dusty potting table, singing to herself. Her voice was full and sweet, like a choir boy’s, and when she sang she smiled, pleased at the sound of herself floating out the slatted walls and

  roof. She sang very loud, to cover the crowing of the rooster in the chicken pen and the ceaseless gossip of the old hens.

  In former years the lathhouse had been one of Luisa’s favorite places to sit and dream. Then, the air had been heavy with the smell of damp earth, and filled with the expectancy of growth. Seedlings sprouted everywhere, in flats and coldframes and flower pots; the hose dripped, and the earthen floor was cool and moist.

  The hose hung now on a nail, unused, in a blur of spider webs. Under the folds of Mrs. Wakefield’s old gardening gloves, a black widow slept, in dark innocence. The ground was hard and dry as stone, and the only thing that grew was a stunted pelargonium in a flower pot. Its single bloom matched the color of Luisa’s dark-red lips.

  In the sterile dryness of the lathhouse Luisa sang. She did not stop when she saw Evelyn. She looked away and finished her sad cheap little song.