It was fifteen minutes before she heard the jeep coming along the road. All her worry and haste, the gander’s death, the crude burial, had been for nothing. She looked down at the friendly hands that had moved too fast.
It can’t have happened, she thought. When I get back James will be standing under the magnolia tree.
The jeep came around the curve trailing a cloud of dust.
She stood up, conscious suddenly of the way she would look to him—a woman no longer young, her face flushed and moist, her dress snagged, and her white shoes dappled with dirt. Nervously she smoothed her hair back and wiped off her forehead with a handkerchief.
He pulled up alongside the road.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you. I thought I’d—drive into town with you.”
“You think that’s a good idea, do you?”
He was wearing sun glasses, the kind that covered the eyes entirely even at the corners. She couldn’t tell what his expression was, though he sounded cool.
“I couldn’t think of any other way,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“The more we talk, the further in we get.”
“There are some things I’ve got to tell you. If I don’t, Luisa or someone else will, and I’d rather tell you myself so you’ll hear it straight.”
“What if I don’t want to listen?”
“You’ve got to, Mark,” she said helplessly. “You’ve got to.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if they hurt. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you can forget about me.”
“Christ,” he said, and got out of the jeep and came around to her side. “All right. Talk. Tell me.”
“Here, like this? Can’t we even go somewhere and sit down? Look—we could walk over there.” She pointed south, to a field of wild mustard, blazing with yellow blooms. “Isn’t it pretty, Mark?”
“I guess.”
“Oh, it is pretty. I wonder who decides which are weeds and which are flowers. Did you ever see the wild morning glories growing by the shed? They look so delicate, it’s rather a shock when you find out how deep and tough their roots are.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me about, weeds?”
“Give me time.”
They crossed the road, side by side, but a yard apart. The field of wild mustard wasn’t fenced. The blooms came up to their knees.
“It’s not a very good place to sit,” he said. “There are too many bees.”
“Don’t you like bees?”
“Not especially.”
“They don’t sting unless they’re frightened.”
“So I’ve heard.” He had the same feeling that he’d experienced yesterday on the boat, that everything she said was meant to have personal and philosophic implications. Her conversational asides (the dugong and its child, the storm a thousand miles away, the old man who’d planted the trees)—these were not merely observations. They were analogies, perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate. And now there were more of them, the bees that wouldn’t sting unless they were disturbed, and the delicate morning glories with the tough roots. After only three days, even the weather wore her monogram.
He stamped down the mustard with his feet until there was a space big enough for them both to sit down. On a hillside half a mile away, two horses were grazing.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said, watching the horses on the scarred hill. “Someone beat you to it by half an hour.”
“Who?”
“Evelyn.”
“What did she tell you?”
“The straight stuff, I suppose. You had a mentally defective son, and your husband apparently killed himself.”
“Why—why apparently?”
“It was never proved, was it? He could even have been murdered.”
“But there was no one to murder him.”
“Not even you?”
“Why,” she whispered, “why do you say such things to me?”
“They’re what I’m thinking.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Such ugly things. You’ve got no right.”
“The whole business is ugly, including the way you’ve tried to cover up, lie, bribe.”
“I had nothing to cover up. Only my pride.”
“Janet . . .”
“That first night, the way you looked at me—as if I was a real woman, not just the mother of an idiot, the widow of a suicide. I couldn’t bear to have you find out. But you wouldn’t understand. You’re too hard to feel any pity.”
“Am I?” he said bleakly.
“You have no heart. You must always figure things out, put them into words.”
“They have to be put into words. Janet, why did he kill himself?”
She didn’t raise her head. He pulled her hands gently away from her face so that she couldn’t hide, she had to look at him.
“Why?” he repeated.
“I don’t know. He was tired, I guess. You know that deep and terrible tiredness that carries on day after day as if you’ve never been to bed . . .”
“Janet! For God’s sake don’t romanticize it. ‘That deep and terrible tiredness’—that sounds fine, but what in hell does it mean? Come off it. We’re talking about a man now, a real human being. You insult his intelligence, and mine, too, by this pretty violin obbligato about tiredness. Other people get tired. When they do, they yawn, turn off the lights and go to bed. Oh, Christ, what’s the use of talking to you?”
“Don’t talk then, Mark.”
“You’re like all the other romantics, the Shelleyans, the members of the ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep’ school. I don’t care whose brother Death is. I only know it’s something to be avoided as long as possible, not something to dress up fancy and fall in love with, the way you’ve done. It’s an obsession with you, totally unrelated to fact or observation. Now try again, Janet. Why did he kill himself?”
“I told you . . .”
“Sure. He was tired.”
“You’re so cruel. Why do you want to hurt me?”
“I don’t.” A cruising bee grazed his cheek and he slapped at it impatiently. “I’m trying to save myself.”
“What from?”
“You. The branding iron.”
“I hate it when you talk like that. It’s untrue.”
He looked angry, but in a kind of melancholy way, as if the anger was only a surface substitute for another emotion. “Your memory’s short. Don’t you remember what you said to me this morning—that you’d rather kill me than go away from here and leave me with my family?”
“I didn’t really mean it.”
“Didn’t you? It fits in nicely. You’d like to see me dead. Not a mangled corpse, of course. That might cramp your obsession. But something neatly preserved, like the starfish you fixed for Jessie yesterday. You’d have a whale of a time in Madame Tussaud’s, Janet. All the pretty corpses with wax guts and wax blood.”
An airplane flew overhead, a swift silver fish in the sea of sky.
“I thought you liked me,” she said, incredulous. “I didn’t know you were thinking such terrible things about me. I wouldn’t have come here. I wouldn’t have—” thrown the stone that killed the gander, dead under the eucalyptus tree.
He said with an ugly smile, “Tell me, how did he kill himself?”
“He fell over the cliff.”
“He flung himself over, you mean?”
“I don’t know which. I wasn’t there. How could I know? He just went out one night and didn’t come back.”
“Didn’t you suspect his intention?”
“I—yes. He had tried once before.”
“What did you do about it?”
&n
bsp; “Nothing. There wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to.” He was appalled by his own sadism, but he couldn’t hold the words back. They were a defense, his only defense against the knowledge that he had fallen in love with her. “Tell me, what was your reaction when you found out he was dead? That he was better off, out of this cold cruel world? How many euphemisms occurred to your Shelleyan mind?”
“Stop it,” she cried. “You’ve got no right to mock me like this and pry into my affairs.”
“I have a right to know what happened to your husband and why. You gave it to me by nominating me to take his place.”
“You make everything sound dirty and cheap.”
“I have to. You’ve been gorging yourself on euphemisms so long, you need an emetic. The main trouble with euphemism is that it’s habit-forming. You get so accustomed to disguising things that you lose track of what’s under which disguise.”
“I don’t understand some of the things you’re saying. I only know you hate me—you hate me . . .”
She flung herself down in the weeds, beating the ground with her fists.
“Janet, stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I don’t care!”
He reached over and held her wrists together. “Stop now. Everything’s all right.”
With a little cry she turned and pressed her mouth against the back of his hand. “Mark—say you didn’t mean any of it.”
“I didn’t mean any of it.”
“I’ve never loved anyone before like this.”
“Don’t talk, darling.”
The wind had risen, and the wild mustard bobbed and curtsied as it passed. In the east, beyond the hill where the two horses were grazing, a bank of clouds had formed.
Her hair, blowing against his cheek, smelled of sun and brine.
“Everything looks beautiful to me now,” she said. “Does it to you, too, Mark?”
“Even the ants?” he said, brushing one from her temple.
“Even the ants. Everything.”
She had taken off her shoes. Her feet were large but perfect, the skin smooth all over, as if it had never felt the pressure of a shoe.
He spanned her ankle with one hand. “You have big feet.”
“Haven’t I though? Swimmer’s feet.”
“You like the water, don’t you?”
“Especially the sea. Do you know, I never saw the sea until I was grown up, and yet, when I saw it for the first time, I felt that I must have been born beside it. I recognized it—isn’t that odd?—I recognized it the way people sometimes recognize a house they lived in when they were children. It was more than recognition, though. I felt a sense of destiny. I remember thinking, here is my fate, here is the explanation, this is where I was born.”
The return of the amphibians, he thought again, the inverse evolution, the slow way to extinction. He said, “You’re a throwback, Janet. A mutation. What does the sea explain to you?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything but love. The whole hideous and intricate scheme of life and death is in the sea, but not love.”
He glanced down at her and thought, fleetingly, that there was some wild justice in the fact that she had borne a child who was a mutation. He wondered how many Billys would follow the atomic war. The bomb had heralded the era of outrage, and perhaps the whole human race had already started its slow migration back to the sea. She was, then, not a throwback but a forerunner, carrying in her womb the maculate egg, the imperfect gene that doomed the world.
She sensed his withdrawal, and tried to call him back. “Don’t start thinking again, will you? Don’t start trying to talk me out of your life. I’m in it. You can’t evict me with words.” She clung to his arm, as if he had made an almost imperceptible motion to rise and walk away. “I’ll tell you everything, Mark, everything you want to know about me. After what’s happened I couldn’t have any secrets from you. I want to open my whole life to you.”
“Better not. You feel a little submissive now, but it won’t last.” He took her hand, and closing the fingers one by one, made it into a fist. “Hang onto your secrets. Keep them all cozy in here for another twenty-four hours and you’ll be safe. Maybe no one else will ever come so close to figuring you out.”
“You’re awfully vain.”
“You intend to destroy me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more certain of it if you had a gun in your hand.”
“Why don’t you run away, then?”
“I can’t. I’m stuck, like the remora, the fish that lives by attaching itself to the belly of a shark. You like analogies. How do you like that one?”
“It’s very interesting.”
“I think so, too. The remora is, naturally, safe from the shark as long as it’s attached to the belly. On the other hand the shark isn’t always safe from the remora because fishermen use it sometimes for bait. They tie up the remora alive, and throw it overboard, and off it goes looking for a shark’s belly. In spite of its small size the remora applies enough suction to pull in the shark.” He added, “We published a book on fishing once. That’s the only thing I remember about it, because it made me wonder how you go about catching a live and unattached remora. Have you any ideas on the subject?”
“No.”
“You might ask the sea for an explanation.”
“Damn your irony,” she said, “and your two-bit horoscopes. Damn everything about you!”
“With one slight exception which shall remain unnamed?”
“Damn you, damn you.” She hid her face against his shoulder, weeping. But the tears came only from her eyes, they did not moisten her dry heart.
He made no attempt to comfort her. When she finally raised her head she saw that he wasn’t even looking at her. He was watching the horses on the hillside. Excited by the rising wind, they raced downhill and kicked up dust.
Turning, he saw her resentment.
“I like horses,” he said. “Don’t you? Not in the third-at-Pimlico sense, simply to look at.”
“I don’t want to discuss horses.”
“Very well. Anything you say.”
She knew that he was ready to leave. Leaning against his arm she could feel its tenseness.
“Mark, don’t go yet. Please.”
“I have to. There are a few amenities to be observed. I said I was going into town for a haircut. It was the truth, too. I didn’t expect to see you.”
“Are you glad now that you did? You’re glad I came?”
“Glad! Christ!”
“You’re sorry then.”
“Both,” he said. “A bushel of both.”
“Mark. Darling. I’ll see you again, won’t I? Promise me. Say it.”
He shook his head, looking bleakly out toward the sea. “I don’t know.”
She sat where she was, in the trampled weeds, until she heard the jeep go down the road. Then slowly she began putting on her shoes.
The horses had gone back to the top of the hill again. She thought about Mark, and about the man who owned the horses. He was a deputy sheriff named Bracken, and she had first met him a year ago, the night John was found at the bottom of the cliff.
17
He had tried twice. The first time he wrote a note and left it on the drawing board in his study along with the key to his safe deposit box and a copy of his will:
“Janet, I can’t think of any other way but this. Don’t blame yourself. I’ve been getting more and more confused lately. Please destroy this, and notify Roy Standish who will handle everything for you. John.”
He went down the stairs and outside. The night was quiet. The sea roar was muted to a whisper, and even the inexhaustible mockingbirds had been silenced.
He didn’t know what time it was, except that it was after midnight and everyone was asleep. He had always h
ad a strong sense of time; it was one of his vanities that Janet encouraged . . . “No, I won’t need my watch with John along.” . . . “It’s wonderful how John can just look at the sun and tell . . .”
Tonight there was no sun, and the moon cruised behind clouds. He didn’t care about the time anyway. He was stepping beyond it, out of its reach, eluding the innocent trap of the hours.
The air was cold and he was wearing only his pajamas and slippers. He had been lying in bed, not actually thinking about dying at all. He had turned from his right side to his left side and back again perhaps ten times before he thought what a relief it would be not to wake up in the morning. He felt quite sorry while he was writing the note to Janet, sorry in a detached way for the poor foolish fellow who signed his name John, and who had to take such drastic measures because he wasn’t strong enough to compromise.
Poor John, he thought. Poor fellow. It can’t be helped, though.
He crossed the driveway carrying a flashlight but it wasn’t necessary to turn it on yet. His eyes—all his senses—seemed to be alerted, sharpened. Even without his glasses he saw distinctly the golden discs of marigolds beside the garage, and the bristly red pompoms of the castor bean bush. The smell of kelp was overpowering, and to his ears the sound of his feet on gravel was explosive. The pebbles jumped like corn popping.
Though he had made no plans, everything worked out perfectly at the beginning. The garage door was unlocked and slid open without a squeak. The old garden hose was coiled on a nail on the wall. The ceiling light, which had burned out a week ago, had been replaced, and Janet’s keys were in the ignition of the Lincoln.
He cut off a long piece of hose with a hedge clipper, and got down on his back under the rear of the car with the hose lying across his belly like an affectionate snake. He turned on the flashlight and saw that the hose was too narrow to fit over the exhaust pipe. He lay there for quite a while, wondering what he could use to bind the hose and pipe together.
It was rather pleasant lying under the car, smelling the oil and dust and gas, and looking up at the intricate mass of steel, the insides of the sleeping giant. He thought of starting the engine, leaving the throttle open a little, and then coming back to the rear of the car and breathing in the exhaust fumes, holding his mouth right up against the pipe like a child suckling. It would be very quick that way, but he somehow didn’t like the idea of being found on the floor, like a victim. He preferred to be found in the driver’s seat, so that people (except Janet, of course, and Roy Standish, his lawyer) might think his death was an accident, that the wind had blown the garage door shut before he’d had a chance to drive the car out. That was silly, though. The door was too heavy to be blown shut, and anyway he was in his pajamas.
The Cannibal Heart Page 14
