Jack and Susan in 1933

by Michael McDowell

Don’t ever leave me, now that you’re here

  Here is where you belong.

  Everything seems so right when you’re near,

  When you’re away, it’s all wrong.

  The suicidal woman began to weep, but not alone.

  I’m so dependent when I need comfort,

  I always run to you,

  Don’t ever leave me! ’Cause if you do,

  I’ll have no one to run to.

  The applause, if such a thing is possible, was both ecstatic and dismal.

  That very night Olita Pocket telephoned Bertha Pocket and told her to tell Susan that she had a job at the Owl Club for the next six weeks, or longer, if she cared to stay in Reno.

  Susan said she’d give her answer tomorrow.

  Left alone, Susan hugged Scotty and Zelda tightly to her. She wondered if she would turn into Bertha Pocket, or Olita Pocket, or any other drunken, lurid, impecunious old woman who’d come to Reno for six weeks and stayed one hundred times that long.

  She half feared she might, but took the job at the Owl Club. It occupied the dusty evenings of Reno. If she was singing on the tiny stage, or sitting with her eyes closed in the dressing room (Scotty and Zelda collapsed across her feet like warm slippers), then she didn’t have to talk to all those dreadful women who’d come to Reno for the same reason she had. Too, it gave her money, and with that money she’d pay Bertha Pocket her weekly rent. She didn’t want to be beholden to Harmon Dodge even for the expenses of the divorce he’d insisted on.

  He was a dream already, after only three days in Reno.

  Of course, so was Jack Beaumont. But a different sort of dream altogether.

  Harmon Dodge was a curious dream of the miserable past.

  Jack Beaumont was a lush dream of the impossible future.

  As it turned out, she liked singing in the Owl Club. Every song, whether happy or sad, or comic or sentimental, seemed to mean something to someone in the packed room. Derisive laughter or uncontrolled sobbing sometimes greeted the same line of the same verse. Susan, after so little time spent in this place, where the unit of temporal measurement was forty-two days, had already begun to feel at home.

  This is what she had done before Harmon Dodge (and Jack Beaumont) had come along, and this is what she was doing now that Harmon Dodge (and Jack Beaumont) had gone away.

  She didn’t have long to lull in this poppied oblivion, however. On the third night of her tenure at the Owl Club, the noxious little boy in the tight red jacket with all the brass buttons stood at the lip of the stage and screamed out at the end of her applause: “Unknown gentleman paging Mrs. Barbara Beaumont! Mrs. Barbara Beaumont!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SUSAN HAD SEVERAL immediate thoughts.

  First, that the unknown gentleman was paging some other Mrs. Barbara Beaumont. But Susan knew enough about the forces of destiny to know that this was the Barbara Beaumont whose intention in life was evidently to make Susan’s as miserable as possible, and who seemed to be succeeding.

  Second, came a happier thought. It wasn’t like Barbara to go so far out of her way—Manhattan to Reno—simply in order to torment Susan. That would have accorded Susan an importance in Barbara’s life that Barbara would have committed ritual suicide rather than admit.

  The only other reason for Barbara Beaumont to be in Reno was to get a divorce from Jack Beaumont.

  Susan decided that she would tie herself to Barbara Beaumont with a three-foot rope for six weeks if that meant that Jack Beaumont would be a free man. So it was with a vast and genuine smile that Susan came down from the stage and looked all around the smoky confines of the Owl Club until she spotted Barbara Beaumont in the farthest corner, seated at a minuscule table with another woman.

  Barbara looked ravishing. Strategically placed beneath a flattering rose light, she wore a salmon-colored gown of shimmering ciré satin. Thrown loosely over her shoulders was a little capelet of Russian ermine that probably cost as much as the entire separation settlements of half the women in the Owl Club that night.

  “Barbara? Barbara, is that you?” cried Susan in affected surprise but unaffected delight.

  Barbara looked up in apparent shock at hearing her name called.

  “It isn’t,” said Barbara. “It isn’t you, is it? Oh, it is you. I can hardly believe it.”

  Susan sighed a theatrical sigh. “It happens to the best of us, Barbara…” In Reno, on first meeting old friends or old enemies, you didn’t say the D word aloud.

  “And to the worst of us as well,” replied Barbara.

  “An unknown gentleman was paging you a moment ago,” said Susan. “Perhaps you didn’t hear.”

  “I don’t respond to unknown gentlemen,” said Barbara.

  Susan realized then that Barbara had initiated the page herself as a means of alerting Susan to her presence in the Owl Club. There was no unknown gentleman at all.

  Barbara didn’t ask Susan to sit.

  “May I sit?” asked Susan, and without waiting for a reply signaled for one of the waiters—half of whom were already riotously in love with her (the other half being in love with those in love with Susan)—to bring over a chair.

  “I’m singing here now,” said Susan, “and it’s ever so much more fun than in New York.” She spoke in the tone a member of the New York deb crowd used when she explained why she’d just taken a job as a fitter on the fifth floor of Macy’s. It was never for the money, of course, only for the novelty and daring of the thing.

  “I thought I heard your voice,” said Barbara, “but I didn’t trust my ears. ‘It couldn’t actually be Susan,’ I said to myself.” Barbara evidently spoke to herself in a fairly loud voice, because as she reproduced the monologue now, it could be heard three tables over. “‘Barbara,’ I said to myself, ‘it can’t be Susan. To parade herself in a nightclub in the middle of the desert would reflect so very badly on Harmon, and I can’t believe that after all she’s done to him, she would now do that as well.’”

  “I’m not very interested any longer on how anything reflects on Harmon,” said Susan.

  “Introduce me, Sugar,” said Barbara’s companion at the table in liquid accents and a baritone voice. She was thirty perhaps, but it appeared that she had crammed every day with the very sorts of experiences that lend your face character. She looked the way Judith Anderson would have liked to look when she played Hamlet. She had short, thick brown hair that might easily have been cut in thirty seconds by someone using a bowl and a pair of hedge clippers. She wore a little black dress, a single string of pearls, and a Daché hat that appeared to have been beaten onto her skull with a mallet. She peered at Susan over the top of a pair of slanting spectacles with blue lenses that probably belonged to a Japanese aviator.

  “Susan, this is the Princess Vinogradov-Kommisarshevskaya.”

  “Call me Vinnie,” said the princess. “I will call you Sugar, because I call everybody Sugar. I narrowly escaped the bullets of the Red Army, but my mother and father were thrown down a well on our estate, and my poor sisters—I had six of them—were taken to the Winter Palace and forced to polish the boots of the soldiers, and all my clever cousins and aunts and uncles and the charming czar and czarina were shot, and I’ve nothing now but my memories and this ring…”

  She showed Susan a rather cheap-looking silver band with some scratches on it.

  “Now I am getting a divorce from Eizo Susumu, the famous Japanese aviator, who flew from Tokyo to Melbourne in nine hours and thirty-five minutes and beat me.”

  “How long did it take you?” Susan asked sweetly.

  “No,” cried the princess, “he beat me. With a whip!”

  “I see,” said Susan.

  “Now I have only three more days, and I will be free to marry again. I will marry Chiao-Yao. You know Chiao-Yao, of course?”

  “Chiao-Yao?” asked Susan. “I don’t believe so.”

  “He is the famous Chinese long-distance swimmer who swam from Chungking to Shanghai in five days, fou
r hours, and twenty-two minutes. He loves me desperately, and he promises me that on our honeymoon we will travel to Moscow and he will shoot Lenin for me.”

  “Very romantic,” said Susan.

  “Tonight I am here to keep Sugar company,” said the princess, laying her ringed hand atop Barbara’s, “so that she does not get lonely and depressed and put a gun into her mouth because of what that terrible man did to her.” The princess smiled at Susan, and Susan saw her face reflected in the blue lenses of the Japanese aviator’s glasses. “If I meet him, I will scratch out his heart with my fingers, and I will tread upon it, and I will feed it to my cats. And if I meet the woman who stole him away from my sweetest Sugar here, and assassinated Sugar’s poor father, I will tear her apart with my bare hands, and there will be nothing left for my cats.”

  Barbara smiled sweetly at Susan.

  “I didn’t tell her your name,” Barbara whispered loudly.

  “This is she?!” screamed the princess, rising so precipitously that she knocked over the tiny little table, which fell against another tiny table and spilled as many as a dozen glasses of liquor into the lap of a young divorcée from Atlanta, who jumped up, screaming in hysterics.

  “I didn’t murder Barbara’s father,” Susan remarked to the Russian princess, who was staring at her as if Susan might have been the Red Army soldier who murdered her parents.

  Carefully, Susan had not denied that she had stolen the love of Barbara’s husband. Susan hadn’t dared believe it before, but she liked the thought of it very much. Even if Barbara had only made it up for effect.

  In the meantime, the miserable Georgia woman had rushed from the Owl Room into the desert night, leaving a trail of wonder in her wake. Everyone looked over into that corner, and what they saw was the Russian princess, in a simple black dress and pearls and blue glasses, standing over the club singer in a very threatening manner.

  “Murderess!” screamed the princess. Now, with the entire attention of the Owl Club, she pointed down at Susan. “She seduced Sugar’s father!” She pointed at Barbara, in explanation of who Sugar was. “Then she seduced Sugar’s husband, and then she murdered Sugar’s father, and now she is here, singing songs about love, while Sugar is an orphan and a widow!”

  “Grass widow,” said Susan with a smile of correction to Barbara. “I didn’t murder Jack. I just stole him away from you.”

  “I will kill you!” shrieked Princess Vinogradov-Kommisarshevskaya, and leapt on Susan, so that her chair fell backward onto the floor. The princess’s fingers were embedded deep into Susan’s throat, and Susan felt royal nails puncture her skin.

  “I will strangle this songbird!”

  A half-dozen waiters flew to Susan’s rescue and dragged off the Romanoffs’ cousin. The princess shrieked in frustration.

  “Die! She must die for the sake of Sugar!”

  Barbara, who hadn’t moved during all of this, opened her purse and gave a five-dollar bill to one of the waiters not engaged in holding back enraged royalty. “Call the princess a taxi, if you would. We’re staying at the Waverly.”

  The shrieking princess was dragged to the door. Susan was helped up from the floor, and Olita Pocket came over and examined her neck.

  “I’m sorry for this disturbance,” said Susan, determined, as she had never been before determined in her life, not to allow Barbara Beaumont to get the better of her.

  “Don’t worry,” said Olita. “It’s good for business. Tomorrow night we’ll be turning ’em away at the door.” Olita smiled at Barbara. “You and your friend come back tomorrow night—drinks free.” This embarrassed Barbara as nothing else could have, with her vengeance turned into a carnival act.

  Susan sat down again, in the chair vacated by the princess. Everyone in the room was still looking at Susan and Barbara.

  “Everything’s all right,” Susan announced, “and after I’ve had a little chat with my dear friend Barbara Beaumont here, I’ll be ready to sing for you all again if the princess hasn’t done permanent damage to my throat…” She laughed a gay little laugh, and everyone else in the Owl Club laughed, and then applauded, and then went back to their business.

  “You have nerve,” said Barbara, “I’ll give you that.”

  “You’re divorcing Jack?” said Susan.

  “I certainly didn’t come to Reno to see you,” returned Barbara.

  “I didn’t seduce Jack, you know. Any more than I murdered Marcellus.”

  “It still makes me ill to hear you call my father by his first name,” Barbara remarked parenthetically. Then she said, “But you don’t deny that you’re in love with my husband, or that he has somehow been so stupid, so blind, and so pathetically idiotic that he imagines that he’s in love with you.”

  “I am in love with him,” said Susan, “but if he knows it, he didn’t hear it from me. And though I’d very much like to think he’s in love with me, he’s never told me he is. And most of all, I’d like to think that when I’m divorced from Harmon, and Jack’s divorced from you, he and I will—”

  “I don’t think that will happen,” said Barbara.

  Susan only smiled.

  “There won’t be time,” said Barbara.

  “No?”

  “You’ll be in jail by then.”

  “These accusations are boring, Barbara. You know very well I didn’t kill your father.”

  “Evidence says you did,” said Barbara smugly.

  “What evidence?”

  “A pair of wire cutters found in your bedroom at the Quarry. And a page torn from the car manual—the page showing the location of the brake cables. Oh, they were well hidden, but the police were very thorough. For once.”

  Susan blinked and stared at Barbara.

  “The police are searching for you right now,” said Barbara. “And of course, my civic duty impels me to telephone them instantly and tell them where they can find you. Have you a nickel I can borrow for the phone?”

  Susan said nothing, only stared.

  “No nickel? Oh well, I’ll reverse the charges.” She rose.

  Susan remained seated. “Someone put those things there—the wire cutters and the page from the book. I didn’t—”

  “These denials are very boring, Susan. I’m glad I won’t be forced to listen to them much longer.” Barbara sailed out of the Owl Club in her satin and ermine.

  Susan went to Olita and said that she didn’t think she could sing again that evening after all. Her throat was sore. But she promised she’d return the following night.

  She gathered up Scotty and Zelda and returned to the boardinghouse.

  Bertha Pocket stopped her at the door and gave her a telegram. Susan hurried up to her room and ripped it open. The telegram read:

  IMPERATIVE THAT YOU IMMEDIATELY SEE THE BLOSSOMS IN THE NEVADA DESERT STOP LEAVE NO FORWARDING ADDRESS STOP TELL NO ONE STOP TRUST ME STOP DESTROY THIS STOP

  JAB

  Susan trusted Jack.

  She tore the telegram to shreds and placed the fragments in her pocketbook. She packed her bags and changed her clothes. She put on an old tweed skirt and a sweater that was much too large for her. She picked out a hat with a wide brim and put it on top of her suitcase. Then she turned out the lights in her room, seated herself on the edge of the bed, and waited.

  The house grew quiet. Now and then she’d hear a door slam, or footsteps on the stairs, or the ringing of the telephone in the parlor, or some broken shrill laughter. But finally, about three o’clock, there was only silence.

  Susan waited another half-hour. Then, leaving the rest of the week’s rent in cash on her bed, she took her bags and crept downstairs. Scotty and Zelda followed in meek and careful silence.

  Susan walked to the bus station and sat in the all-night coffee shop for two hours, her face turned away from the window beside her, staring down into a cup of coffee that had long grown cold.

  At six-thirty she took the first bus that was going north.

  Since receiving Jack’s telegram
, she had neither seen nor spoken to anyone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE BUS TOOK Susan as far as Black Springs, a town so small and empty and desolate, she began to think that perhaps Reno wasn’t the most boring place in the world.

  She walked out of the bus station and stood on the dusty, hot street. She asked an old man climbing into the cab of a truck whose doors were hung on with baling wire if he would take her to Pyramid, about twenty miles away, for two dollars.

  He stared at her.

  “Three dollars,” Susan said.

  “Who do I have to kill when we get there?” he asked.

  Three dollars in Black Springs was evidently a greater sum than it was either in Manhattan or Reno.

  The ride was bumpy and hot, and Susan was reluctant to answer the old man’s questions about her identity, her past, or her purpose. He finally concluded, “Well, maybe you’re going to Pyramid to murder somebody.”

  “Please don’t say that,” she sighed.

  Scotty and Zelda ran around in the back of the truck until the heat of the sun exhausted them, and then they burrowed their way into a loose bale of hay there. An hour later the old man pulled the truck up to a small general store in Pyramid—this seemed to be the principal building in the entire place. For a few moments Susan was frantic, thinking the dogs had spilled out of the back. But when she called, they burrowed their way out of the hay again, and hung their heads as if they’d done something terribly wrong.

  “Best-trained dogs I ever saw,” said the old man. Then he turned to Susan. “Sure you don’t need me to take you any farther?”

  Susan declined. He was the curious type, and Susan didn’t want to disclose her destination.

  He drove off. Susan and her two dogs were alone in Pyramid, a town so small and empty and desolate it made Black Springs look as exciting as Reno. It was on the shore of Pyramid Lake, a large body of salty water that looked as if it had no business being in the middle of the desert, and, in compensation for its geographical effrontery, had made itself as unappealing as a lake can be. The water had a faint but distinctly noxious odor, the surface looked black and oily, and no matter where you looked on its surface, something dead and rotted suddenly bobbed to the surface.