by Brewer, Gil
I stared at the ceiling over the bed, trying to make it look as if I were doing my job. You think about hanging TV sets on the ceiling, only you just don’t do it.
“I’ll have to check the attic rafters,” I said.
“All right,” she said.
I looked at him again. He didn’t seem too well.
I went over to the bedroom door, and she came along, and we stepped into the living room. The housecoat was coming unbuttoned. She watched my eyes.
“He’s very bad off,” she said.
“How do I get into the attic? You have a flashlight?”
“Yes—”
The sound reached me faintly from the bedroom. A butterfly brushed a broken wing against the silver bell.
“Shir-ley!”
It was Death croaking.
She gave me a quick look and hurried back into the bedroom. I watched her. He writhed on the bed, his mouth open, hands clenching the sheets. He was trying to breathe.
“Would you please help me?” she said.
I went in there.
“Turn that handle wide open. Yes, that’s it.”
She leaned on him, holding one arm down, and mashed the mask over his nose and mouth and I turned it on. It was life pumping through the rubber hose. I looked away and tried to think of something else so I wouldn’t hear him.
In a minute or two she said, “You can turn it off now.”
I turned it off. She came around and draped the black rubber hose over the handle. He lay there with his eyes closed. Sweat had formed in splotches on his face and hands.
“Thanks, baby,” he said. He didn’t open his eyes.
She made a soft purring sound in her throat, and moved to the other side of the bed, straightening the sheet. I watched her and she looked up at me. I caught the expression on her face. It told me a lot.
We watched each other across the bed. She knew I’d seen what she was thinking. It was as if the bed were suddenly empty. He just wasn’t there.
She jerked her gaze away and walked out into the living room. I followed, seeing his feet sticking straight up under the sheet, from the corner of my eye. I’d once done apprentice work for an undertaker and had seen a lot of feet like that.
“Sorry you had to see him that way,” she said.
“Forget it. Glad to help. Where’s that flashlight?”
She went to the kitchen and returned with a five-cell job. I stood on a chair and swung up into the attic through the closet in her bedroom. I checked the rafters. I couldn’t get him out of my head. He was just like a corpse, only he still breathed and he was still king.
I came back down.
“Sure,” I said, handing her the flashlight. “It won’t be too difficult, fastening a TV set to the ceiling.”
“I suppose you’re still concerned about what happened, aren’t you, Mr. Ruxton. I shouldn’t’ve asked you to help. I know how disturbing something like that can be, seeing it for the first time. I just forgot, I’m so used to it.”
I thought, Honey, you’ll never be used to that.
She must have seen something in my eyes. She spoke quickly. “It’s a respiratory ailment. Very complicated. It gets more complicated all the time.” She stared toward his room. “Degeneration,” she said. “He’s been to the finest specialists in the country. Luckily, he’s very wealthy.” She looked at me again. “It’s his lungs, his throat, bronchial tubes—and now, his heart, too. He’s—we, that is, have lived everywhere, but he likes it here best.”
“You’re his nurse, then.”
“He’s my stepfather, Mr. Ruxton. But I suppose you could say I was his nurse. I’ve been taking care of him ever since he sold the business. He manufactured expensive furniture. All kinds. Surely you’ve heard the name Spondell? Very likely some of the television cabinets you sell were designed by Victor.”
His name might as well have been Xshdkgteydh, for all I’d ever heard of him. I said, “Yeah. The name does seem to ring a bell, at that.” She didn’t speak, so I said, “How old are you, anyway?”
She looked at me along her eyes. “Eighteen.” She paused. “He insisted I take care of him—like this.”
“Shouldn’t he be in a hospital?”
She gave a little jerk with her head, and sighed. “That’s just it. The doctors think so. And now Doctor Miraglia claims it’s very important. Victor just tells him ‘Bosh!’ and refuses to go.”
“Who’s this Miraglia?”
“He’s Victor’s doctor now. Victor won’t let anyone else come near him. He thinks Doctor Miraglia’s the finest doctor in the world.” She sighed again. “Everybody thinks Victor should be in the hospital.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“I mean, before we came here.”
“What do you think?”
She smiled. It didn’t mean a thing to me, because she’d pushed the whole business much too far. You get to meet a lot of people, and you know how they react when you first meet them. There was only one reason why she’d tell me all this. Maybe two reasons, but I figured I was crazy, thinking the other one. She said, “Let’s discuss something else. This must be tiresome to you.”
“No relatives?”
“What?”
“Him. Hasn’t he any family of his own? I mean, other than you?”
She turned and moved to a broad cocktail table beside a long, low pale blue couch. She laid the flashlight on the table. “Nope,” she said. “Nobody but me.” She turned and looked at me, smiling.
“Suppose I drop around tomorrow morning?” I said. “I’ll bring some stuff along. We can decide what you want. How’s that?”
“All right. That’s fine.”
“If we started anything tonight, we’d never get finished.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
We walked across the room. I stepped out onto the front porch. I looked back at her through the screen.
“Good night, Miss Angela.”
“Good night, Mr. Ruxton.”
Two
I had that feeling you get. Just a little tight in the chest. Not quite enough air. But so far it was one of those things. I thought again how sometimes I looked too hard at people, trying to figure what made them itch the way they did.
I drove past the store. Somebody had locked up, and only the night lights were on, with the two TV sets in the show window grinding away; one a Western, the other the fights. I always figured, you get them looking in from outside, maybe one or two will drift inside, and you’re that much closer to their pocketbooks. I left the sets on all night, because maybe somebody would come back in the morning. Then, sometimes I’d stick around till midnight.
I turned up the alley and drove slowly past the shop. Louis Sneed was at the front bench, working on his hi-fi speaker system, the one he claimed would revolutionize the audio world and cancel out all previous speaker system designs.
I parked the truck in the parking area, lining it up carefully with the other beside me. One truck was out on call, apparently. Twenty-four hour service, that’s what. All this so you could stay comfortably in debt at the end of every week, with money in your pocket that wasn’t yours, because you had to float it big to make it pay off big someday.
I looked across at the back of the building, at the shop. Big my foot. It was penny ante.
Someday, sweetheart.
I went over to my car, walking quietly. It would be just like Grace to hide on the floor by the back seat. It was okay, she wasn’t there. I got in and drove home.
There was no sign of Grace anywhere. I drove once around the block before pulling into the apartment garage, but the streets were quiet. She wasn’t hanging around the front of the building, either.
I went on up and took a shower, then mixed a drink. I kept thinking about this Shirley Angela, and how she looked, and how she’d run off at the mouth.
Young and tender.
I went to bed.
In the middle of the night, the phone kept ringing. I got up. It was
after three. It was Grace. She’d been drinking and she was crying. She wanted to make sure I knew she was crying.
“I’ve got to see you, Jack.”
“No.”
“This isn’t fair. It’s awful, what you’re doing. Don’t treat me this way. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”
“Go sleep it off, Grace.”
“Please, Jack. Let me come up?”
I hung up and went back to bed. I was half nuts for morning to come so I could get out to Shirley Angela’s place again.
Next morning I hung around the store till ten, getting ready. Pete Stallsworth finally helped me load a couple TV sets on the truck; an RCA console, and a Philco table model for hanging over the bed. I worked up some ideas for brackets, and told Pete I was doing something for a good friend and would handle the whole deal myself. I took along a lot of junk—pamphlets, consumers’ reports, pictures, room layouts, good come-on stuff. Why the hell it is, I don’t know, but customers always insist on having a mob of phony literature, all glossed up in technicolor. The set itself doesn’t matter, it’s the folders and pamphlets and crap that really count. Then they hardly look at them.
On the way, I stopped off at Timothy’s Radio Supply and signed for four different kinds of intercom units, and told the guy he’d probably have a nice sale on his hands. I drove past the front of the house slowly. It looked different in daylight. Just a house, with palm trees out front, and St. Augustine grass, and the sloping ramp leading to the front porch.
Well, I could be wrong.
I turned in the drive and parked under a tree. The Australian pine hedge between the drive and the neighboring house ran from out back clear to the street. Everything was quiet. I felt low. I had planned to do this whole job myself. It meant carrying TV sets, putting up an antenna, wiring, the works. It wouldn’t be easy.
“Hello, there.”
“Hi.”
She was on the porch, waving.
It didn’t make me feel any better, seeing her. I couldn’t get it out of my head; something like that, doing what she was doing, prisoned for Christ only knew how long with an old bastard who wouldn’t die.
“Morning,” I said. “How’s everything?”
“Fine.”
She was really a knockout this morning. She had on a pair of black toreador pants, skin tight, with little slits at the calf. On top she had somehow managed to squeeze into a thin white sleeveless sweater, so nobody could possibly miss what she had up there. She had plenty. She wore sandals, and a bright smile. Her hair was auburn, all right, and brushed to a sheen.
She came off the porch and around front and along the drive.
“I was expecting you earlier. I phoned, but they told me you’d left.”
“I wish now I’d come earlier.”
That didn’t get me anywhere.
“I’m very anxious to get started,” she said. “It’s like Christmas—buying all these things.”
I got out of the truck and came around to where she stood. I opened the door and hauled the loose-leaf notebooks and the carton of pamphlets off the seat.
She said, “I suppose I could have come down to the store. Doctor Miraglia comes twice a week. That’s when I go out to shop, and everything.”
“I see.” I didn’t ask her what “everything” was.
“But I like it this way,” she said. “If it’s not too much trouble for you.”
“Well?”
“Well.”
I grinned and nodded toward the house, and she nodded, and started walking that way. I followed her inside. “We can check through this stuff first,” I said as we entered the living room. “You can kind of make up your mind. Then we’ll get down to brass tacks.”
“Swell.”
The bedroom door was closed. But I could see him in there, in my mind’s eye, staring bleakly into the past....
“Good morning, Ruxton.”
Something stopped ticking inside me for a second, then started again. It was Spondell. He stood in the dinette, staring at me with those eagle’s eyes. He had on a blue corduroy bathrobe and slippers, and his hair was combed. He held a cup of coffee.
“Well,” I said. “Glad you’re feeling better.”
He started to say something, but she jumped in fast with the lifeline. “Victor, you’d better toddle back to bed, now. You’ve been up over a half hour. You know what Doctor Miraglia said.”
“The hell with him.”
“Now, Victor.”
“All right, baby.” He grinned. “Glad to see you, Ruxton—you old son of a bitch.”
“Victor!”
He had already turned away. He set the coffee cup on the dinette table and walked on through the room to the bedroom door without looking at us. He opened the door and went through and closed it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I went over to the couch and sat down, and put the carton and the loose-leaf notebooks on the floor.
“He says things like that to everybody,” she said. “He seems to think it’s funny.”
“Gave me a jolt, seeing him.”
She came over by the couch, speaking quietly. “I think he tries to prove he’s strong by talking like that. He hasn’t been quite right—mentally—for some time. I hate to say it, but I think he’s getting worse. He was always very sharp. He still is, but he says and does crazy things, sometimes. It worries me.”
She was at it again. Telling me her business. I decided to go along with it. “You told his doctor?”
“No.” She hesitated. “He’ll pay for staying up on his feet, like that. He shouldn’t be up at all. But the doctor lets him stay up for ten minutes at a time.”
She wanted me to feel sorry for her. “He’ll get well.”
“No.” She was firm. “He’ll only get worse and worse.”
“Until he dies.”
She nodded.
“How long?” I said.
“Hard to tell. It could go on and on.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. She looked sad and tired, and she wanted me to know it.
“Sit down,” I said. “We’ll have a look at this stuff.”
Her voice was flat. “It would be a terrible expense if he were in a hospital.”
“Thought you said he was wealthy.”
“Oh, yes—he is. Very.”
“Why would it matter to him, then?”
“It wouldn’t matter to him.” She paused, then added quickly, “I mean, the expense wouldn’t matter. He could practically buy the darned hospital. But he just won’t go to a hospital. Not him.”
“I see. Well—here’s some things I’d like you to look at.”
She didn’t sit on the couch. She went over and dragged up a low chair, placing it at the corner of the couch where I sat. I put the box of literature and junk on the cocktail table. She kept watching me. She didn’t give a good goddamn about that literature.
“I was thinking,” she said. “You’ll need some sort of remote control. One of those cords, with the gadget on it. So he can work the TV from bed.”
“Thought of that.”
“Oh. Swell.”
“I brought along a couple of TV sets. But first, I’d like you to glance through these folders—ask any questions you want. Oh, by the way, I can give you a good allowance on your old set.”
“I thought I’d just stick that in the kitchen.”
“I see. A set in every room, to keep you occupied.”
“That’s what I thought. It gets so—” She shrugged.
She cupped one hand over her brow, looking down at a colorful folder in her lap. I couldn’t see her eyes. She didn’t say anything, staring down at the folder. Then I saw something. It jarred me. She was only pretending to look. It was a Westinghouse electric kitchen range showing on the folder. The TV blurbs were on the other side.
“That one’s a real hot seller,” I said. “We call it our oven-grille special.”
She didn’t move. Then, slowly, she turned th
e folder over and looked at the other side. She kept the hand cupped over her brow. I still couldn’t see her eyes. It was playing it close, but she wasn’t fighting it worth a damn. Eighteen years old, I thought. The nipples of her breasts showed through the thin white sweater.
I looked across at the bedroom door. It was closed but it was still nearby. Too near. I wondered what he was doing in there? Maybe playing leap-frog with his oxygen tanks.
“Wonder if I could have a glass of water?” I said.
She stood up fast. The folder fell to the floor.
“I’m sorry. I should have offered you a drink. I hardly ever drink, you see. It always makes me crazy. I do crazy things. I always seem to lose my head.”
“Water will be fine.”
Her eyes looked different from the way they had looked a moment before. Something passed between us—something direct and hot.
She turned and walked toward the kitchen, not making a sound, and I watched the way she moved, liking every bit of it. I picked up the folder and dropped it on the table and went out there.
I could walk softly, too. But not that softly. She made as if she didn’t hear me. She had the refrigerator door open. I went over beside her and looked at her and she stood there, holding the door, with one hand moving slowly in toward the water bottle. I caught the hand and it crawled up my arm. I put my other arm around her, and she came up against me, watching me with big round eyes, and I kissed her.
She made a small sound and said, “No.”
“What the hell do you want?” I said.
Then I thought for a second she was crying. She couldn’t be crying. I kissed her again.
I went nuts for her. Her lips were hot. Her mouth opened, full of tongue. She wormed her body against me, working her hips hard and fast, and began making little frantic sounds in her throat. I’d been right, there was nothing under the white sweater.
She drew her face away. Her eyes were clenched shut. Her lips were stretched back across her teeth with what looked like pain.
“Hold me harder.”
If I did that I’d snap her back.
