Come Destroy Me

by Packer, Vin

  He continued to explain, and as he did, he surprised himself too with the simple logic of the situation. Young girls got crushes on older men all the time.

  The first thing Charlie thought when he got home was: Do they know? There was something different in the atmosphere, something concealed. He thought of plenty of wild possibilities. Jill might have told Russel Lofton that he had been drunk the other night at her house, that … Hell, though, she kissed me, Charlie thought again. I didn’t start it all. But what would his mother say if she knew? God, what would she say? Maybe she did know.

  All she had said to him since he walked in the door and put his books on the hall table was: “If you’ve been to the library all afternoon, you won’t need to go tonight, will you, son?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d rather you stayed in tonight.”

  “I was going to,” Charlie said.

  “Evie doesn’t feel well and I’d rather we all went to bed early.”

  “Suits me,” Charlie said. He waited for his mother to say what was wrong with Evie, but she did not, and finally Charlie said, “What’s eating Evie?”

  “Nothing important,” his mother said. “She doesn’t feel well.”

  Oh, Charlie knew all right how Evie moped around after Russel Lofton. He knew how his sister felt about Old Daddy Lofton. Maybe that was it. Maybe Lofton had told her he was in love with Jill. Goddamn his eyes. He could be in love with the lousy owner of the Red Clover Bookshop, for all Charlie cared, and he just hoped Lofton had to sit around and listen to her scratchy record all day, for the love of Peter and Paul.

  He was the knower, all right. Charlie was the knower. If anyone in this whole damn house knew all he knew, they’d die, that’s all. But knowers didn’t fall in love. Ah, no, not knowers. Charlie could feel his eyes sting. It was awful the way his eyes could want to cry over anything at all. If a pin dropped, his eyes would sting. He’d like to put his stinking eyes out with a poker.

  “I’m going to my room,” Charlie told his mother. “What time’s dinner?”

  “I thought we’d have sandwiches. I made a lot of them, chicken and tuna fish. They’re in the kitchen. You can take them in your room if you want. Help yourself, honey.”

  He wanted to say, “Aw, what’s the matter, Mom? Aw, Mom, look, what’s the matter? I’m old enough to understand. If you only knew the things I understand. Let’s sit down and have a long talk.” Then the thought made him cringe inside. He didn’t want to sit around and gush with his mother. Hell, she didn’t even love him! She didn’t love anyone! She was an automaton.

  “I’ll be in my room,” Charlie said. He didn’t know why he had to add, “This house is like a morgue.”

  His mother did not answer him. She merely sat in the living room reading the newspaper without answering. Charlie went by Evie’s door and it was shut.

  “We could start acting like brother and sister instead of archenemies.”

  He ought to open the door and say, “Evie, what’s the matter? Did Russel Lofton hurt you? I know how you feel, sis.”

  Aw, can that noise! She wouldn’t believe he knew how she felt if he told her and she’d probably laugh. All she did all her life was laugh at him, make fun of him. She didn’t love him. Nobody in the whole family loved anyone else. What a bunch! How his mother ever choked out the word “honey” he’d never know. It must hurt her throat to say it.

  But Christmas, it made him nervous. Did they know?

  Charlie stripped down and put a sheet over his naked body after he got in his room and lay on his bed. The rain on the roof sounded like hell. All the poets that said rain on the roof were so damn poetical. Cripes, what was poetical about a lot of water landing on tin?

  Tears began to roll down his cheeks. He let them. A few slid off his nose and dropped on his lips and he tasted the warm salt taste of them and closed his eyes. Oh, God, Jill. Oh, God, this is a terrible thing you’re doing to me.

  It was time, he knew, to think about what he had thought about all afternoon at the library. For God’s sake, he knew the facts of life. Don’t ask him how, nobody had ever told him, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t have any Andy Hardy heart-to-heart talks with his old man, because his old man was dead and he had never had an old man, but he had picked up the dope on the birds and bees, O.K. Kids at school — and never underestimate Evie’s influence either, he thought. Evie was always waving clues in front of him like someone waving a dirty towel. He’d read about it, too. He remembered a line from a poem by Oscar Wilde. “He saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed her pale and argent body undisturbed, and paddled with the polished breast …”

  “Paddled with the polished breast.” It gave him the creeps. Why “paddled”?

  Charlie reached for a tissue and blew his nose, keeping the sheet around his body as he leaned over to the desk and then fell back on the bed. He was through with bawling!

  He began to think about what he had seen last night. Jill Latham and Old Daddy Lofton. He wished he had stayed and seen the rest; he could just imagine. He did. The rain kept coming down. Beating down. The rain, the rain, the rain, the rain.

  Finally Charlie fell asleep. He had a crazy dream. He dreamed that Russel Lofton was on Jill Latham’s red couch making love to Charlie’s mother. Lofton said, “I don’t care if you are too old. Hold still, damn you.” Charlie was hiding behind a curtain. He knew he had to prevent Lofton from doing this thing. Charlie had a gun. He jumped out from behind the curtain and said, “I’ll kill you. I have a gun,” and he pointed it at Lofton. Lofton began to walk toward him and Charlie kept holding the gun in front of him. Charlie just kept telling Lofton he would kill him, he would use his gun, but he knew he wouldn’t. He couldn’t shoot his gun. He knew that. He had fired his only bullet when he was target-practicing in the back yard a few hours before.

  At eight o’clock Charlie woke up. He thought of the dream and it made him depressed and sick of himself. He put his pants on and went barefoot to the kitchen for the sandwiches. He could hear a radio going in the living room and he knew his mother was in there, but Evie’s door was still shut. Well, if they wanted to have a goddamn mystery in the house, what the hell did he care? He was going to do something worth while, read a play by Shakespeare or something. He wasn’t going to waste his whole life.

  He wolfed three sandwiches down and drank so much milk it made his stomach bloated and heavy. When he got back to his room, he couldn’t read. He cut his toenails and thought about the name Jill. He even knew what the name meant. It was Old English. He had looked it up that afternoon at the library in a book that told what names meant. Jill meant “girl” or “sweetheart.” Again Charlie’s eyes filled.

  Then he had an idea. The phone was in the hall. He could shut the door between the kitchen and his bedroom and he could make a phone call without being overheard. Once his mother got listening to those stinking radio plays, she didn’t pay any attention to anyone. He could find out that way. He could call Jill and he could tell by the tone of her voice if she still loved him.

  What the hell do you mean, if she still LOVES you?

  Don’t jump down my neck so much. I’m just going to call her. I don’t give a damn if she loves me or not!

  Charlie crept into the hall and grabbed the telephone book, brought it back into his room, and looked up the number.

  For a while he sat on the bed and thought of what he would say to her. God, he was scared to call her. What if she wasn’t home. What if Lofton was there and they were doing something, and he called right in the middle of it? What if there were people there and she held the arm of the phone out so everyone in the room could hear what he said to her? Cripes, he wasn’t going to make a proposal of marriage, for the love of Mike. Let them all listen. The whole world could tune in on his sappy old conversation with the lousy owner of the Red Clover Bookshop. He wasn’t going to make history! He was just going to make a blasted bloody phone call!

  She would say, “Hello,” and what would her
voice be like? Maybe he wouldn’t like her voice on the telephone. Maybe she’d sound just like hell.

  Probably she would wish it were someone else calling. She would think, Oh, God, it’s that creep. No, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t think that at all. She would be mighty glad she was so lucky. She had probably waited all day for Charlie to call. No doubt she hadn’t slept very well last night, worrying whether he would call.

  Charlie’s knees were liquid and he had to go down to the bathroom three times. What if he dialed the wrong number and someone who recognized his voice heard him asking for her? They would think, What’s that little pipsqueak calling up someone like Jill Latham for?

  What if he couldn’t control himself and instead of saying hello he said a dirty word?

  When he said the number he said it so faintly he had to repeat it to the operator. Then he wanted to hang up. Hang up and she’ll never know it was you, Charlie. Listen to her voice once and then hang up fast.

  She might trace the call. His mother would answer the phone and know he had called her. He had to talk. Ah, God, this is a very important moment.

  He heard her say, “Hello?” She did sound funny. She sounded like someone was holding a gun in her back and making her say hello. She sounded artificial. Creepy.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  Charlie said, “How do you like this rain?”

  She didn’t recognize his voice. She said, “Who’s calling?”

  “Charlie Wright.”

  “Oh, my, yes. Charles Wright.”

  “I’m fine,” he said stupidly. She hadn’t asked him how he was.

  “Are you busy?” he said.

  “I have been listening to the rain.”

  Charlie said, “It sounds swell on a tin roof, doesn’t it?”

  She said, “Oh, my, yes.” She was a damn fool. He really hated her, she was such a damn fool.

  Quickly Charlie said, “Can I come and see you tomorrow?” He didn’t want to see her. He could rip her clothes off when he did and beat her with a belt, fall to his knees and beg her to forgive him. Jill, Jill, I didn’t mean it. I love you so. I do.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “We will have a conversation.”

  Charlie said fine, he would see her then, and he hung up fast. God!

  He went back to his bedroom. He whistled a tune and winked at himself in the mirror. He straddled a chair and said, “Everything is copacetic, fellow.” He was hungry again. He’d go to the kitchen and get a sandwich.

  Whatever Russel Lofton was doing on that floor with her, he didn’t give a damn, because it wasn’t true. He was better than Russel Lofton, and he wasn’t a million years old, for the love of Pete!

  He’d eat a tuna-fish sandwich and drink a quart of milk. God, he was a big fellow. Big and strong. He had a real male appetite!

  Charlie stood up. As he passed his bed he picked up the pillow and socked it through the air with his fist.

  If he felt like it, he would neck with her. Ah, God, he would kiss her so very, very gently.

  Chapter Twelve

  Time is running out now,

  I don’t count the days no more.

  Got no blinds on my windows,

  No lock on my door.

  Gonna sit and wait now,

  Because it’s very late now.

  — Fatal Blues

  JILL LATHAM woke up that Saturday morning crying. She could not remember the dream.

  There was a foul rotten taste in her mouth and a thing like a wheel grinding in her stomach. She sat up in bed and put her feet to the floor, then sagged to her knees at the side of the bed and let her head rest again on the edge. She cried, a wave of self-pity overcoming her, and she remembered whom she had dreamed about, even though she could not remember any more than that.

  She had dreamed about Lake Stefferud.

  It was strange the way the dream had brought him so close to her, as though he had just walked out of the room. As though if she had stood and looked out of the window she would see the short thin figure of Lake as he went down Deel Street. Probably whistling. Probably whistling one of those crazy jazz tunes, his lips puckered and his narrow cheeks drawn in, his green eyes sparkling.

  It was strange too that she could dream of a man she had not seen, not even heard from remotely, in ten years. She could and did dream of him many times, and though she knew it was strange, she knew it would have been much stranger without the dream. It would have been empty.

  There was nothing else. Never had been.

  She herself believed now all that she had invented about that year in Paris when she knew Lake. She believed now that they had been in love, that she had been in love with him too. She repressed the real memories.

  One she repressed was the one that really explained why everything had ended between herself and Lake. It had taken her a long time to forget it completely, the memory of how she felt most of the time when she was with Lake.

  She felt the way her mother looked when her mother talked about men. Her mother scorned them. She could still see her mother’s pasty white face, the large porous nose stretching out above the thin, colorless pursed lips, and the wild, woolly white hair. She could still hear her mother say, “Oh, my, how they just love to maul a woman. Maul, maul, maul. But you remember, Jill, a wise woman teaches a man his place. Self-control is the keynote.” Her mother’s head would nod vigorously. “Self-control is the keynote of refinement.”

  In the beginning, Lake had laughed.

  “Hey, cool down, baby. Hey — baby, listen.” And he would lean toward her and tell her with his mouth until a growing revulsion at his — vulgarity, she had decided it was vulgarity — made her shrink from him and feel sick.

  They were both studying at the Sorbonne on scholarships. Lake was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the beginning they had both laughed at the fact that they were two small-town kids in the most cosmopolitan city in the world. “And in love,” Lake would add. “Baby, in love!”

  From the beginning Mrs. Latham had described Lake with one unshakable, flat, adamant word: “Common.”

  Lake had retaliated with an equally condemning term for Mrs. Latham: “Square.”

  She had never been in love with him. Only at those times when she saw him as a fine, studious, serious, and idealistic young man had she even come close to loving him. Her feeling for him then was striped with a fervent desire to nurse his intellectual ambitions, and to make him forget his spontaneous gaiety and passion.

  The saxophone. The songs. The whispered words. The rough hand. The smell of cheap bistro beer.

  In her mind, the two did not go together.

  Lake Stefferud had wanted her and he had loved her. She could neither eliminate his desire for her nor reciprocate his love, and she had had a feeling that it was all for the best when she left Paris in the stolid company of her mother and went to southern France to live until her mother’s death, two years ago.

  Then she had begun to know that she was old. She had begun to suspect that she had been cheated. She had begun to yearn for youth and for that something she had never had, the something she might have had with Lake.

  It was with considerable self-revelation that Jill Latham faced that Saturday morning, crying. It was as though the hands of the clock were halted, time suspended, and past, present, and future crystallized.

  She was thirty-four and she had never loved anyone. She had no one. No one. She had existed on false memories of a past lover she had never had, but what was far worse, there was no one who cared about the false memories. It was as though she had written, produced, directed, and acted out a play with only herself for the audience. She was like an old woman who lived in a shabby dank cellar and saved colored rags that were worthless to everyone but the old woman.

  Jill Latham pulled herself up on the bed and sat with her eyes fixed on the floor. She wore no clothes. She had been barely able to disrobe last evening, and there was a bluish bruise on her thigh where she had knocked agains
t the table. Of course she had been alone. Drinking.

  She had played the record, too. How she hated that record! It meant nothing, even though it had been Lake’s favorite song. It meant nothing more than all the senseless make-believe she acted out for herself about the lover she had once had. Her dream. The thread by which her self-respect hung.

  She looked at the tin alarm clock on the dresser and saw that it was noon. Charles Wright was coming to call in the afternoon. Oh, my, yes, she knew what she was trying to do to him, but it was not because she was afraid of him! He was no more than Lake had been — young and soft. She was stronger! She laughed and thought again that she was stronger. She certainly was.

  Jill Latham stood up and crossed the room. The gin bottle was on the dresser and she took a drink from the neck of the bottle.

  She said the words to the song she hated. She did not sing them. She said them. “I’m gonna die with these blues, and the way these blues die is long. I’m gonna cruise with these blues till I reach the end of my song. Yes,” she said. “Ha!”

  Her body was beautiful. She observed that it was full and ripe, and the word “ripe” occurring to her then made her swallow more of the gin. Ripe at thirty-four. “Oh, my, Jill. Ha!”

  For a while she just walked around the room, carrying the gin bottle by the neck. She wondered what other women did on a Saturday morning, and she remembered a rhyme she had said when she was a child. Something about washing on Monday and ironing on Tuesday. Then another rhyme came to her mind. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”

  Wasn’t she lucky to have a house? Her father’s house. She could remember him only vaguely. One picture of him stood out in her mind. She could have been only five or six at the time. Five or six or four. Her mother had sat on the red sofa in the living room and her father had reached over to pat her knee. Her mother had said he was nasty and her father’s face had curled with contempt and he had said, “Goddamn you!”