by James Ellroy
Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of toppling along the room's four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest classics to the most recent bestsellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark titles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O'Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she'd made up and was determined to play to the end. What she offered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded performance of a New York eccentric.
She touched her glass to mine, her eyes very still. "To what we're going to do," she said.
"Are we still talking about committing suicide together?" I scoffed as I lowered my glass without drinking. "What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?"
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
"You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and—"
"I would never live with you," Veronica interrupted.
"That's not my point."
"And I'm not dying," Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her glass onto the small table beside the sofa, then rose, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, and offered her hand to me. "Time for bed" she said.
"Just like that?" my friend asked.
"Just like that."
He looked at me warily. "This is a fantasy, right?" he asked. "This is something you made up."
"What happened next no one could make up."
"And what was that?"
She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. "This side is yours."
"Until Douglas gets back," I said as I drew in beside her.
"Douglas isn't coming back," she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.
"Why not?"
"Because he's dead"' she answered lightly. "He's been dead for three years."
And thus I learned of her husband's slow decline, the cancer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.
"Six months," I said. "That's a long time."
"A dying person is a lot of work," she said.
"Yes, I know," I told her. "I was with my father while he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went."
"Oh, I don't mean that," she said. "The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn't the hard part when it came to Douglas."
"What was?"
"Making him believe I loved him."
"You didn't ?"
"No," she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she'd told me that Douglas was currently selling software.
"Software," I said, drawing my lips from hers. "You said he sold software now."
She nodded. "Yes, he does."
"To other dead people?" I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. "I can't wait for an explanation."
"There is no explanation," she said. "Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he's in the ground or in heaven, I just say he's selling software."
"So you give death a cute name," I said. "And that way you don't have to face it."
"I say he's selling software because I don't want the conversation that would follow if I told you he was dead"' Veronica said sharply. "I hate consolation."
"Then why did you tell me at all?"
"Because you need to know that I'm like you," she answered. "Alone. That no one will mourn."
"So we're back to suicide again," I said. "Do you always circle back to death?"
She smiled. "Do you know what La Rochefoucauld said about death?"
"It's not on the tip of my tongue, no."
"He said that it was like the sun. You couldn't look at it for very long without going blind"' She shrugged. "But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose."
I drew her into my arms. "You're a bit quirky, Veronica," I said playfully.
She shook her head, her voice quite self-assured. "No," she insisted. "I'm the sanest person you've ever met."
"And she was," I told my friend.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean she offered more than anyone I'd ever known."
"What did she offer?"
That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.
We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. "Time to chat," she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two glasses of vodka.
"Time to chat?" I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she'd drawn away from me.
"I don't have all night," she said as she offered me the glass.
I took the drink from her hand. "So we're not going to toast the dawn together?"
She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. "You're glib," she said as she clinked her glass to mine. "So am I" She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. "Here's the deal," she added. "If you're glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That's when you know you've gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk."
"That's rather harsh, don't you think?" I took a sip of vodka. "And besides, what's the alternative to talking?"
"Silence," Veronica answered.
I laughed. "Veronica, you are hardly silent."
"Most of the time, I am"' she said.
"And what does this silence conceal?"
"Anger," she answered without the slightest hesitation. "Fury."
Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.
"Of course you can get to silence in other ways," she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her glass. "Douglas got there, but not by being glib."
"How then?"
"By suffering."
I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn't. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.
"By being terrified"' she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. "The last week he didn't say a word"' she told me. "That's when I knew it was time."
"Time for what?"
"Time for Douglas to get a new job."
I felt my heart stop dead. "In ... software?" I asked.
She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.
"I'd planned to give him these," she said, "but there wasn't time."
"What do you mean, there wasn't time?"
"I saw it in his face," she answered. "He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long."
She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. "It was all I had left to offer him"' she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. "We have so little to offer."
And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her darkness is real; mine is just a pose.
"What did you do?" my friend asked.
"I touched her face."
"And what did she do?"
She pulled my hand away almost violently. "This isn't about me," she said.
"Right now, everything is about you," I told her.
She grimaced. "Bullshit."
"I mean it."
"Which only makes it worse," she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. "This is about you," she said crisply. "And I won't be cheated out of it."
I shrugged. "All life is a cheat, Veronica."
Her eyes tensed. "That isn't true and you know it," she said, her voice almost a hiss. "And because of that you're a liar, and all your books are lies." Her voice was so firm, so hard and unrelenting, I felt it like a wind. "Here's the deal," she said. "If you really felt the way you write, you'd kill yourself. If all that feeling was really in you, down deep in you, you wouldn't be able to live a single day." She dared me to contradict her, and when I didn't, she said, "You see everything but yourself. And here's what you don't see about yourself, Jack. You don't see that you're happy."
"Happy?" I asked.
"You are happy," Veronica insisted. "You won't admit it, but you are. And you should be."
Then she offered the elements of my happiness, the sheer good fortune I had enjoyed, health, adequate money, work I loved, little dollops of achievement.
"Compared to you, Douglas had nothing"' she said.
"He had you," I said cautiously.
Her face soured again. "If you make it about me," she warned, "you'll have to leave."
She was serious, and I knew it. So I said, "What do you want from me, Veronica?"
Without hesitation she said, "I want you to stay."
"Stay?"
"While I take the pills."
I remembered the line she'd said just outside the bar only a few hours before, I could do it with you, you know.
I had taken this to mean that we would do it together, but now I knew that she had never included me. There was no pact. There was only Veronica.
"Will you do it?" she asked somberly.
"When?" I asked quietly.
She took the pills and poured them into her hand. "Now," she said.
"No," I blurted, and started to rise.
She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly determined, so that I knew she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.
"I want out of this noise," she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. "Everything is so loud."
In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repetitions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.
"Will you stay?" she asked quietly.
I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add to the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.
And so I said, "All right."
With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.
"I don't know what to say to you, Veronica," I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.
She curled under my arm. "Say what I said to Douglas," she told me. "In the end it's all anyone can offer."
"What did you say to him?" I asked softly.
"I'm here."
I drew my arm tightly around her. "I'm here," I said.
She snuggled in more closely. "Yes."
"And so you stayed?" my friend asked.
I nodded.
"And she... ?"
"In about an hour," I told him. "Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here."
"So right now she's ...."
"Gone," I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.
"You couldn't stop her?"
"With what?" I asked. "I had nothing to offer." I glanced out the front window of the bar. "And besides," I added, "for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That's what makes her dangerous. At least, to us."
My friend looked at me oddly. "So what are you going to do now?" he asked.
At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman's fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.
"I'm going to keep quiet," I answered. "For a very long time." Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.
It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.
From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.
I know.
HER LORD AND MASTER
2005: Andrew Klavan
ANDREW KLAVAN (1954–) was born in New York City, the son of popular radio disc jockey and talk show host Gene Klavan. He received a business degree from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the New York area to work as a news writer, reporter, book reviewer, and mystery novelist. His first novel, Face of the Earth (1980), was published when he was twenty-six, three years after it was completed. He has gone on to write more than twenty additional novels of mystery, crime, horror (The Uncanny, 1998), psychological suspense (Man and Wife, 2001), and, most recently, international terror (Empire of Lies, 2008). He has been nominated for four Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America, winning twice: for Mrs. White (1983), coauthored with his brother, the novelist and playwright Laurence Klavan, under the pseudonym Margaret Tracy; and The Rain (1988), under the pseudonym Keith Peterson. He was also nominated for Best Novel for Don't Say a Word (1991) and for Best Short Story for "Her Lord and Master" (2005). Stephen King once described him as "the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich." Klavan adapted his novel True Crime (1995) for a film of the same title that starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood in 1999. Two years later he wrote the screenplay for Don't Say a Word, which starred Michael Douglas. He also wrote the screenplay for Simon Brett's A Shock to the System (1990).
"Her Lord and Master" was written many years before it was published, his agent refusing to submit it because of its controversial subject matter. It was first published in the anthology Dangerous Women (New York: Mysterious Press, 2005), and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2006.
***
IT WAS OBVIOUS she'd killed him, but only I knew why. I'd been Jim's friend, and he'd told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I'd felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a "stirring in the loins." Nowadays, of course, we're supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter "the last taboo" that you'd think we were in danger of running out of them.
Well, let's see. Let's just see.
Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relationship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks. "I don't know what my job is," he used to say, "but by gum I must be doing it." Susan was an Assistant Manager in Personnel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of scheduling.
Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron he had was engaged in whatever tedious matter yo
u'd brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.
Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully, meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a certain defensiveness about her Queens background, her education, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or drawing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological debates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their various female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you'd like to shove against the watercooler and take standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.
So at a party one February at which we celebrated the launch and certain failure of some new moronic management scheme or other, we watched with glee and envy as Jim and Susan stood together, talked together, and eventually left together. And eventually slept together. We didn't watch that part, but I heard all about it later.
I'm a news editor, thirty-eight, once divorced, seven years, two months, and sixteen days ago. Sexually, I think I've pretty much been around the block. But we've all pretty much been around the block these days. They probably ought to widen the lanes around the block to ease the traffic. So, at first, what Jim was telling me brought no more than a mild glaze of lust to my eyes, not to mention the thin line of drool running unattended from the corner of my mouth.
