The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Old enough in just a couple of years to be Jordan’s father? He’s old enough right now to be Jordan’s and my child. Our child.

  Marilyn could feel tears welling up from some ancient spring; susceptible, she had an unexpected mental glimpse of the upstairs bedroom in her Brookmist townhouse, the bedroom next to hers, the bedroom she had made a sort of shrine. In its corner, a white wicker bassinet . . .

  That’s enough, Odau!

  “That’s enough!” she said aloud, clenching a fist at her throat.

  The curtain drew back, and she was again face to face with Terri Bready. “I’m sorry, Ms. Odau. You talkin’ to me?”

  “No, Terri. To myself.”

  “He’s a neat fella, really. Says he played drums for a rock band in Haight-Ashbury once upon a time. Says he was one of the original hippies. He’s been straight since Nixon resigned, he says—his faith was restored . . . Whyn’t you talk to him, Ms. Odau? Even if you don’t place an order with him, he’s an interesting person to talk to. Really. He says he’s heard good things about you from other managers on the mall. He thinks our place is just the sort of place to handle one of his products.”

  “I bet he does. You certainly got a lot out of him in the short time he’s been here.”

  “Yeah. All my doing, too. I thought maybe, being from Los Angeles, he knew somebody in Hollywood. I sorta told him I was a drama major. You know . . . Let me send him back, okay?”

  “All right. Send him back.”

  Marilyn sat down at her desk. Almost immediately Nicholas Anson came through the curtain with his samples case. They exchanged polite greetings, and she was struck again by his resemblance to Jordan. Seeing him at close range didn’t dispel the illusion of an older Jordan Burk, but intensified it. This was the reverse of the way it usually happened, and when he put his case on her desk, she had to resist a real urge to reach out and touch his hand.

  No wonder Terri had been snowed. Anson’s presence was a mature and amiable one, faintly sexual in its undertones. Haight-Ashbury? No, that was wrong. Marilyn couldn’t imagine this man among Jesus freaks and flower children, begging small change, the ankles of his grubby blue jeans frayed above a pair of falling-to-pieces sandals. Altogether wrong. Thank God, he had found his calling. He seemed born to move gracefully among boutiques and front-line department stores, making recommendations, giving of his smile. Was it possible that he had once turned his gaunt young face upward to the beacon of a strobe and howled his heart out to the rhythms of his own acid drumming? Probably. A great many things had changed since the sixties . . .

  “You’re quite far afield,” Marilyn said, to be saying something. “I’ve never heard of Latter-Day Novelties.”

  “It’s a consortium of independent business people and manufacturers,” Anson responded. “We’re trying to expand our markets, go nationwide. I’m not really used to acting as—what does it say on my card?—a sales representative. My first job—my real love—is being a products consultant. If your company is a novelties company, it has to have novelties, products that are new and appealing and unusual. Prior to coming East on this trip, my principal responsibility was making product suggestions. That seems to be my forte, and that’s what I really like to do.”

  “Well, I think you’ll be an able enough sales representative, too.”

  “Thank you, Miss Odau. Still, I always feel a little hesitation opening this case and going to bat for what it contains. There’s an element of egotism in going out and pushing your own brainchildren on the world.”

  "There’s an element of egotism in almost every human enterprise. I don’t think you need to worry.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Why don’t you show me what you have?”

  Nicholas Anson undid the catches on his case. “I’ve only brought you a single product. It was my judgment you wouldn’t be interested in celebrity T-shirts, cartoon-character paperweights—products of that nature. Have I judged fairly, Miss Odau?”

  “We’ve sold novelty T-shirts and jerseys, Mr. Anson, but the others sound like gift-shop gimcracks and we don’t ordinarily stock that sort of thing. Clothing, cosmetics, toiletries, a few handicraft or decorator items if they correlate well with the Creightons’ image of their franchise.”

  “Okay.” Anson removed a glossy cardboard package from his case and handed it across the desk to Marilyn. The kit was blue and white, with two triangular windows in the cardboard. Elegant longhand lettering on the package spelled out the words Liquid Sheers. Through one of the triangular windows she could see a bottle of mahogany-colored liquid, a small foil tray, and a short-bristled brush with a grip on its back; through the other window was visible an array of colored pencils.

  “ ‘Liquid Sheers’?"

  “Yes, ma’am. The idea struck me only about a month ago, I drew up a marketing prospectus, and the Latter-Day consortium rushed the concept into production so quickly that the product’s already selling quite well in a number of West Coast boutiques. Speed is one of the keynotes of our company’s early success. By cutting down the elapsed time between concept visualization and actual manufacture of the product, we’ve been able to stay ahead of most of our California competitors . . . If you like Liquid Sheers, we have the means to keep you in a good supply.”

  Marilyn was reading the instructions on the kit. Her attention refused to stay fixed on the words and they kept slipping away from her. Anson’s matter-of-fact monologue about his company’s business practices didn’t help her concentration. She gave up and set the package down.

  “But what are? These Liquid Sheers?”

  “They’re a novel substitute—a decorator substitute—for pantyhose or nylons, Miss Odau. A woman mixes a small amount of the Liquid Sheer solution with water and rubs or paints it on her legs. The pencils can be used to draw on seams or color in some of the applicator designs we’ve included with the kit—butterflies, flowers, that sort of thing. Placement’s up to the individual . . .We have kits for dark- as well as light-complexioned women, and the application process takes much less time than you might expect. It’s fun, too, some of our products-testers have told us. Several boutiques have even reported increased sales of shorts, abbreviated skirts, and short culotte outfits once they began stocking Liquid Sheers. This, I ought to add, right here at the beginning of winter.” Anson stopped, his spiel dutifully completed and his smile expectant.

  “They’re bottled stockings,” Marilyn said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I suppose you could phrase it that way.”

  “We sold something very like this at Satterwhite’s during the war,” Marilyn went on, careful not to look at Anson. “Without the design doodads and the different colored pencils, at any rate. Women painted on their stockings and set the seams with mascara pencils.”

  Anson laughed. “To tell you the truth, Miss Odau, that’s where I got part of my original idea. I rummage old mail-order catalogues and the ads in old magazines. Of course, Liquid Sheers also derive a little from the body-painting fad of the sixties—but in our advertising we plan to lay heavy stress on their affinity to the World War II era.”

  “Why?”

  “Nostalgia sells. Girls who don’t know World War II from the Peloponnesian War—girls who’ve worn seamless stockings all their lives, if they’ve worn stockings at all—are painting on Liquid Sheers and setting grease-pencil seams because they’ve seen Lauren Bacall and Ann Sheridan in Bogart film revivals and it makes them feel vaguely heroic. It’s amazing, Miss Odau. In the last few years we’ve had sales and entertainment booms featuring nostalgia for the twenties, the thirties, the fifties, and the sixties. The forties—if you except Bogart—have been pretty much bypassed, and Liquid Sheers purposely play to that era while recalling some of the art-deco creations of the Beatles period, too.”

  Marilyn met Anson’s gaze and refused to fall back from it. “Maybe the forties have been 'pretty much bypassed’ because it’s hard to recall World War II with unfettered joy.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t really buy that,” Anson replied, earnest and undismayed. “The twenties gave us Harding and Coolidge, the thirties the Great Depression, the fifties the Cold War, and the sixties Vietnam. There's no accounting for what people are going to remember with fondness—but I can assure you that Liquid Sheers are doing well in California.”

  Marilyn pushed her chair back on its coasters and stood up. “I sold bottled stockings, Mr. Anson. I painted them on my legs. You couldn’t pay me to use a product like that again—even with colored pencils and butterflies thrown in gratis.”

  Seemingly out of deference to her Anson also stood. “Oh, no, Miss Odau—I wouldn’t expect you to. This is a product aimed at adolescent girls and post-adolescent young women. We fully realize it’s a fad product. We expect booming sales for a year and then a rapid tapering off. But it won’t matter—our overhead on Liquid Sheers is low and when sales have bottomed out we’ll drop ’em and move on to something else. You understand the transience of items like this.”

  “Mr. Anson, do you know why bottled stockings existed at all during the Second World War?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There was a nylon shortage.”

  “The nylon went into the war effort—parachutes, I don’t know what else.” She shook her head, trying to remember. “All I know is that you didn’t see them as often as you’d been used to. They were an important commodity on the domestic black market, just like alcohol and gasoline and shoes.”

  Anson’s smile was sympathetic, but he seemed to know he was defeated. “I guess you’re not interested in Liquid Sheers?”

  “I don’t see how I could have them on my shelves, Mr. Anson.”

  He reached across her desk, picked up the kit he had given her, and dropped it in his samples case. When he snapped its lid down, the reports of the catches were like distant gunshots. “Maybe you’ll let me try you with something else, another time.”

  “You don’t have anything else with you?”

  “To tell you the truth, I was so certain you’d like these I didn’t bring another product along. I’ve placed Liquid Sheers with another boutique on the first level, though, and sold a few things to gift and novelty stores. Not a complete loss, this trip.” He paused at the curtain. “Nice doing business with you, Miss Odau.”

  “I’ll walk you to the front.”

  Together they strolled through an aisleway of clothes racks and toiletry shelves over a mulberry carpet. Jane and Terri were busy with customers . . . Why am I being so solicitous? Marilyn asked herself. Anson didn’t look a bit broken by her refusal, and Liquid Sheers were definitely offensive to her—she wanted nothing to do with them. Still, any rejection was an intimation of failure, and Marilyn knew how this young man must feel. It was a shame her visitor would have to plunge himself back into the mail’s motivelessly surging bodies on a note, however small, of defeat. He would be lost to her, borne to oblivion on the tide . . .

  “I’m sorry, Jordan,” she said. “Please do try us again with something else.”

  The man beside her flinched and cocked his head. “You called me Jordan, Miss Odau.”

  Marilyn covered the lower portion of her face with her hand. She spread her fingers and spoke through them. “Forgive me.” She dropped her hand. “Actually, I’m surprised it didn’t happen before now. You look very much like someone I once knew. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “You did say Jordan, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess I did—that was his name.”

  “Ah.” Anson seemed on the verge of some further comment but all he came out with was, “Good-bye, Miss Odau. Hope you have a good Christmas season,” after which he set himself adrift and disappeared in the crowd.

  The tinfoil decorations in the mail’s central shaft were like columns of a strange scarlet coral, and Marilyn studied them intently until Terri Bready spoke her name and returned her to the present. She didn’t leave the boutique until ten that evening.

  Tuesday, ten minutes before noon.

  He wore the same navy-blue leisure jacket, with an open collar shirt of gentle beige and bold indigo. He carried no samples case, and speaking with Cissy Campbell and then Terri, he seemed from the vantage of Marilyn’s office, her curtain partially drawn back, less certain of his ground. Marilyn knew a similar uncertainty—Anson’s presence seemed ominous, a challenge. She put a hand to her hair, then rose and went through the shop to meet him.

  “You didn’t bring me something else to look at, did you?”

  “No; no, I didn’t.” He revealed his empty hands. “I didn’t come on business at all . . . unless . . .” He let his voice trail away. “You haven’t changed your mind about Liquid Sheers, have you?”

  This surprised her. Marilyn could hear the stiffness in her voice. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  Anson waved a hand. “Please forget that. I shouldn’t have brought it up—because I didn’t come on business.” He raised his palm, like a Boy Scout pledging his honor. “I was hoping you’d have lunch with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem simpatico—that’s the Spanish word for the quality you have. And it would be nice to sit down and talk with someone congenial about something other than Latter-Day Novelties. I’ve been on the road a week.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Terri Bready straining to interpret her response to this proposal. Cissy Campbell, Marilyn’s black clerk, had stopped racking a new supply of puff-sleeved blouses, and Marilyn had a glimpse of orange eyeliner and iridescent lipstick—the girl’s face was that of an alert and self-confident panther.

  “I don’t usually eat lunch, Mr. Anson.”

  “Make an exception today. Not a word about business, I promise you.”

  “Go with him,” Terri urged from the cash computer. “Cissy and I can take care of things here, Miss Odau.” Then she chuckled.

  “Excellent advice,” Anson said. “If I were you, I’d take it.”

  “Okay,” Marilyn agreed. “So long as we don’t leave Summerstone and don’t stay gone too long. Let me get my bag.”

  Inevitably, they ended up at the McDonald’s downstairs—yellow and orange wall paneling, trash bins covered with wood-grained contact paper, rows of people six and seven deep at the shiny metal counters. Marilyn found a two-person table and eased herself into one of the attached, scoop-shaped plastic chairs. It took Anson almost fifteen minutes to return with two cheeseburgers and a couple of soft drinks, which he nearly spilled squeezing his way out of the crowd to their tiny table.

  “Thank God for plastic tops. Is it always like this?”

  “Worse at Christmas. Aren’t there any McDonalds in Los Angeles?”

  “Nothing but. But it’s three whole weeks till Christmas. Have these people no piety?”

  “None.”

  “It’s the same in Los Angeles.”

  They ate. While they were eating, Anson asked that she use his first name and she in turn felt obligated to tell him hers. Now they were Marilyn and Nicholas, mother and son on an outing to McDonald’s. Except that his attention to her wasn’t filial—it was warm and direct, with a wooer’s deliberately restrained urgency. His manner reminded her again of Jordan Burk, and at one point she realized that she had heard nothing at all he’d said for the last several minutes. Listen to this man, she cautioned herself. Come back to the Here and Now. After that, she managed better.

  He told her that he’d been born in the East, raised single-handedly by his mother until her remarriage in the late forties, and, after his new family’s removal to Encino, educated entirely on the West Coast. He told her of his abortive career as a rock drummer, his early resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, and his difficulties with the United States military.

  “I had no direction at all until my thirty-second birthday, Marilyn. Then I discovered where my talent lay and I haven’t looked back since. I tell you, if I had the sixties to do over again—well, I’d gladly do them. I’d finagle myself a place in an Army Reserve unit, be
a weekend soldier, and get right down to products-consulting on a full-time basis. If I’d done that in ’65, I’d probably be retired by now.”

  “You have plenty of time. You’re still young.”

  “I’ve just turned thirty-six.”

  “You look less.”

  “But not much. Thanks anyway, though—it’s nice to hear.”

  “Did you fight in Vietnam?” Marilyn asked on impulse.

  “I went there in ’68. I don’t think you could say I fought. I was one of the oldest enlisted men in my unit, with a history of antiwar activity and draft-card burning. I’m going to tell you something, though—once I got home and turned myself around, I wept when Saigon fell. That’s the truth—I wept. Saigon was some city, if you looked at it right.”

  Mentally counting back, Marilyn realized that Nicholas was the right age to be her and Jordan’s child. Exactly. In early December, 1942, she and Jordan had made their last farewells in the little house on Greenbriar Street . . . She attached no shame to this memory, had no regrets about it. The shame had come twenty-six years later—the same year, strangely enough, that Nicholas Anson was reluctantly pulling a tour of duty in Vietnam. The white wicker bassinet in her upstairs shrine was a perpetual reminder of this shame, of her secret monstrousness, and yet she could not dispose of the evidence branding her a freak, if only to herself, for the simple reason that she loved it. She loved it because she had once loved Jordan Burk . . . Marilyn put her cheeseburger down. There was no way—no way at all—that she was going to be able to finish eating.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I need to get back to the boutique.”

  “Let me take you out to dinner this evening. You can hardly call this a relaxed and unhurried get-together. I’d like to take you somewhere nice. I’d like to buy you a snifter of brandy and a nice rare cut of prime rib.”

  “Why?”

  “You use that word like a stiletto, Marilyn. Why not?”

  “Because I don’t go out. My work keeps me busy. And there’s a discrepancy in our ages that embarrasses me. I don’t know whether your motives are commercial, innocently social, or . . .Go ahead, then—laugh.” She was wadding up the wrapper from her cheeseburger, squeezing the paper tighter and tighter, and she could tell that her face was crimsoning.