Ask for Me Tomorrow

by Margaret Millar

  ASK FOR ME TOMORROW

  To Charles Barton Clapp

  Ask for Me Tomorrow © 1976 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust

  This volume published in 2017 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Distributed by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Ask for Me Tomorrow eISBN: 978-1-68199-005-7

  Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.

  Romeo and Juliet

  Act iii, Scene I

  1

  It was late afternoon. As Marco dozed in his wheelchair the long lazy rays of the sun touched the top of his head and stroked the sparse grey hairs of his good arm and fell among the folds of his lap robe. Gilly stood in the doorway and watched her husband, waiting for some sign that he was aware of her presence.

  “Marco? Can you hear me?”

  Only a few parts of his body were capable of movement and none of them moved. No spasm of the fingers of his right hand which operated the controls of his wheelchair, no twitch of one side of his mouth, no flutter of his right eyelid, which was the one that opened and closed normally. The other eye remained as it always did, the lid half open and half closed, the pupil dead center. Even when he was awake no one could be sure exactly what he was looking at or how much he saw. Sometimes Gilly thought the eye was accusatory, staring directly at her, and sometimes it seemed amused as if it were focused on some wry joke in the past or bit of fun in the future. “It sees nothing,” the doctor had told her. “But I’m sure you’re mistaken, Doctor. It looks at things.” “The eye is dead.”

  The dead eye that saw nothing watched Gilly cross the room. She made no noise. The carpet was silent as grass.

  “You’re pretending to be asleep to get rid of me, aren’t you, Marco? Well, I won’t go. I won’t go, see?”

  See? The dead eye didn’t, the live one stayed hidden under its lid.

  Gilly touched her husband’s forehead. It was scarred with wrinkles as if some cannibal had started to eat the flesh, had dug his nails across it leaving tracks like a fork.

  “It makes me nervous when people pretend,” Gilly said. “I think I’ll scream.”

  She didn’t, though. Whenever she screamed, Marco’s nurse, Reed, came running and the gardener’s Airedale started to howl and Violet Smith, the housekeeper, had a sinking spell. One of Violet Smith’s sinking spells was as memorable as the Titanic’s.

  “Violet Smith says we eat too much meat, so it’s fish again tonight.” That ought to do it. He hated fish. “Marco?”

  Neither the threat of screams nor fish disturbed the rhythm of his breathing.

  Gilly waited. It was hot and she would have liked to sit outside on the patio for a little while to catch the breeze that started blowing in from the ocean nearly every afternoon at this time. But the patio belonged entirely to Marco. Though she was the one who’d had it designed and built, she didn’t feel at ease there. She blamed it on the plants. They were all over the place, growing in stone urns and redwood boxes on the deck, and hanging from the rafters in terra-cotta pots and moss pouches held together by wire and baskets of sea grass and palm fibers.

  Marco could maneuver his wheelchair among them quite easily, but Gilly was always bumping her shins on tubs of fuchsias and getting her hair caught in the tentacles of the spider plant. Marco’s patio was comfortable only for people in wheelchairs, or children or dwarfs. Full-grown upright people found it hazardous. Marco’s nurse, Reed, cursed when he was ambushed by the hidden barbs of the asparagus fern or the vicious spikes of the windmill palm, and even Violet Smith, who never swore, used a borderline phrase when she stepped into the lily pond while trying to avoid the soft seductive ruffles of the polypody.

  For dwarfs, for children, for cripples like himself, Marco’s patio was a place of fun where grownups could be booby-trapped and ordinary people made to look foolish and awkward. No child ever saw it, of course. No dwarf, either. Just Gilly and Reed

  and Violet Smith and occasionally the doctor, who didn’t say or do much because there wasn’t much to say or do once he’d taught Gilly how to give injections. (She had practiced on oranges until it became quite natural for her to plunge the needle into something both soft and resistant. “As the Lord is my Savior,” Violet Smith said, “that is a silly thing to do, wasting valuable oranges when you could just as easy practice on yourself.” “Shut up or I’ll practice on you,” Gilly said.)

  The sliding glass door to the patio was open and there were little rustles and stirrings among the plants as if they were whispering among themselves. They might have been fussing about the smell of fish drifting across the lawn from the kitchen. They were Marco’s plants, maybe they didn’t like fish any more than he did and their protests were as weak and difficult to understand as his. Not that protests would have done much good: Violet Smith had recently joined the Holy Sabbathians and each week she seemed to acquire a new conviction. This week it was fish.

  “She’ll be here with your dinner in a few minutes, Marco.”

  His rate of respiration had increased and she knew for sure now that he was awake and simply didn’t want to be bothered either with food or with her.

  “If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you something else after Violet Smith leaves for her meeting. Are you hungry?”

  One side of his mouth moved and a noise came out. It didn’t sound like an animal or even like one of the plants outside on the patio. It was a vegetable sound coming from a vegetable. “He’s a sorrowful figure,” Violet Smith often said in Marco’s presence as if the stroke that had paralyzed his vocal cords and most of his body had also deafened him. This wasn’t true. He had, as Gilly was well aware, ears like a fox. She and Reed had to be very cautious and time their meetings according to Marco’s pills and injections.

  “How would you like to eat in your Ferrari tonight?” Gilly always referred to the wheelchair as some kind of sports car. It was intended partly to amuse him and partly to soften, for her, the constant and imposing reality of it. Reed supplied her with names, most of which were unfamiliar to her—Maserati, Lotus Europa, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Jensen-Healey.

  He opened his right eye slowly and with difficulty, as if the lid had been glued shut during his afternoon sleep. It was impossible to tell from the eye’s expression whether he was amused or not. Probably not. It was a very small joke and he was a very sick man. But Gilly could not help trying. Trying was part of her nature, just as giving up was part of Marco’s. He had given up long before the stroke. It was merely a punctuation mark, a period at the end of a sentence.

  “Okay, so it’s the Ferrari. The Lamborghini’s in the garage, anyway, having a tune-up . . . Eat a little fish to keep your strength up . . . Do you have to go to the john?”

  The fingers of his right hand dismissed the idea.

  “The doctor thinks you should drink more water if you can.”

  He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He had given up. His hunger was only for pills, his thirst only for the fluid in the hypodermic needle.

  Violet Smith came into the room with the tray, using her bony butt to close the door behind her. She was a tall, light-skinned Indian from South Dakota, Oklahoma, Michigan, Arizona, depending on her mood and whichever state happened to be in the headlines at the time. A severe tornado in Oklahoma was likely to elicit stories of a childh
ood spent in constant danger darting from storm cellar to storm cellar. At these times her dull brown eyes would start gleaming like polished bronze and her smooth solemn face would crack up with excitement. She forgot all about the forms she’d filled out at the employment agency which had sent her out to Gilly less than a year ago. The information was simple: Violet Smith, now forty-two, had been born and raised, educated and employed, in Los Angeles. Gilly suspected that she’d never been east of Disneyland or north of right where she was now, Santa Felicia.

  “I bought this red snapper out on the wharf this morning, fresh caught.” Violet Smith held the silver-lidded tray in front of her like a shield, half proudly, half defensively. “We should eat what the Lord provides for us in His seas and rivers instead of deliberately raising a bunch of cows and pigs and then slaughtering them.”

  “Don’t proselytize,” Gilly said.

  “I can’t do it if I don’t know what it means.”

  “The hell you can’t.”

  “Was I doing that what she said, Mr. Decker? Was I? . . . No? No. Mr. Decker says I wasn’t doing it. He shows good judgment. What a pity he can’t read. It diminishes a man not to be able to read his Bible.”

  “He doesn’t own one.”

  “It’s not too late. He could be saved in the nick of time like I was, Jesus be praised.”

  “Just put the tray down and shut up.”

  “I think he could be saved.”

  “All right, work on it tonight at church. But kindly don’t use our real name. I won’t have a bunch of lunatics raving and ranting in public about us needing to be saved for committing God knows what sins. People might think this is a house full of thieves, crooks, murderers.”

  “We are all flawed,” Violet Smith said coldly. “Just look who’s prosetizing now.”

  “Proselytizing. And that’s not what it means.”

  “Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I think you were doing what you thought I was doing. Isn’t that right, Mr. Decker? Yes? He says yes.”

  “Hurry up, you’ll be late for your meeting.”

  Gilly looked at her wristwatch, noting with surprise how thin and wrinkled her arms were getting, as if her body were shrinking and aging in sympathy with Marco’s no matter how much food she ate or how many times Reed assured her she was still young. “You don’t look a day over forty,” Reed would say. “That’s because I’m not a day over forty, I’m ten years over forty.” “Oh, can that crap. Who counts, anyway?” She counted. He counted. Everybody counted, whether they admitted it or not. Age was the second thing a child learned. What’s your name, little girl? How old are you? . . . Gilda Grace Decker. I’m fifty.

  Violet Smith put the tray on the adjustable metal table beside Marco’s chair and cranked the table to the correct height. “I forgot to give you Mr. Smedler’s message. He said eleven o’clock tomorrow morning in his office will be okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Some of these lawyers’ secretaries can be very snippy.”

  “Yes, they can. Good night, Violet Smith.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Decker. And you, too, Mr. Decker. I’ll be praying for you both.”

  Gilly waited until the door closed behind her. Then she said to Marco, trying to sound quite casual, “It’s nothing for you to worry about, dear. I have to talk to Smedler about stocks, bonds, trusts, that sort of thing. Very dull, lawyerish stuff.”

  It wasn’t dull, it wasn’t lawyerish, but this was not the time to tell her husband. He had to be told gradually and gently so he would understand that it wasn’t just a whim on her part. She had been thinking about it, no, planning it, for several months now. Each day it seemed more and more the right thing to do until now it was more than right. It was inevitable.

  2

  The wind had come up during the night, a Santa Ana that brought with it sand and dust from the desert on the other side of the mountain. By midmorning the city was stalled as if by a blizzard. People huddled in doorways shielding their faces with scarves and handkerchiefs. Cars were abandoned in parking lots, and here and there news racks had overturned and broken and their contents were blowing down the street, rising and falling like battered white birds.

  Smedler’s office was in a narrow three-story building in the center of the city a block from the courthouse. The lesser members of the firm shared the two bottom floors. Smedler, who owned the building, kept the third floor for himself. After an earthquake a few years ago he’d remodeled it so that the only inside access to his office was by a grille-fronted elevator. The arrangement gave Smedler a great deal of privacy and power, since the circuit breaker that controlled the electric current was beside his desk. If an overwrought or otherwise undesirable client was on the way up, Smedler could, by the mere thrust of a handle, cut off the electricity and allow the client time to acquire new insights on the situation while trapped between floors.

  Gilly knew nothing about the circuit breaker but she had a morbid fear of elevators, which seemed to her like little prisons going up and down. Instead she used the outside entrance, a very steep narrow staircase installed as a fire escape to appease the building-code inspector. The door at the top was locked and Gilly had to wait for Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson, to open it.

  Charity made much the same use of the bolt as Smedler did of the current breaker. “Who’s there?”

  “Mrs. Decker.”

  “Who?”

  “Decker. Decker.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Smedler at eleven o’clock.”

  “Why didn’t you use the elevator?”

  “I don’t like elevators.”

  “Well, I don’t like taxes but I pay them.”

  Charity unlocked the door. She was a short wiry woman past sixty with thick grey eyebrows so lively compared to the rest of her face that they seemed controlled by some outside force. She wore a pumpkin-colored wig, not for the purpose of fooling anyone—she frequently removed it if her scalp itched or if the weather turned warm or if she was especially busy—but because orange was her favorite color. She had been with Smedler for thirty years through five marriages, two of her own, three of his.

  “Really, Mrs. Decker, I wish you’d use the elevator like everyone else. It would save me getting up from my desk, walking all the way across the room to unlock the door and then walking all the way back to my desk.”

  “Sorry I inconvenienced you.”

  “It’s such a lovely little elevator and it would save you all that huffing and puffing. I bet you’re a heavy smoker, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Just out of shape, eh? You should try jogging.”

  “Karate appeals to me more at the moment,” Gilly said.

  She wondered why so many employees these days acted as though they worked for the government and were not obliged to show respect to anyone. Charity’s general attitude indicated that she was in the pay of the IRS, CIA and FBI and possibly God, in addition to Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, MacFee and Powell.

  “Smedler’s waiting for you in his office.” Charity pressed a buzzer. “And Aragon will be up in a few minutes.”

  “Who’s Aragon?”

  “He’s your boy. You did specify a bilingual. N’est-ce pas?”

  “N’est-ce pas. In a private, personal call to Mr. Smedler.”

  “All of Smedler’s calls go through me. I am his confidential secretary.”

  “You’re also a smart-ass. N’est-ce pas?”

  Charity’s bushy eyebrows scurried up into her wig and hid for a moment under the orange curls like startled mice. When they reappeared they looked smaller, as if stunted by the experience. “Crude.”

  “Effective, though.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Gilly went into Smedler’s office. He rose from behind his d
esk and came to greet her, a tall handsome man in his late fifties. He had known Gilly for thirteen years, since the day she married B. J. Lockwood. An old school chum of B. J.’s, Smedler had been an usher at both of his weddings. He could barely recall the first—to a socialite named Ethel—but he often thought of the second with a considerable degree of amazement. Gilly wasn’t young or especially pretty, but on that day, in her long white lace gown and veil, she’d looked radiant. She was madly in love. B. J. was short and fat and freckled and nobody had ever taken him seriously before. Yet there was Gilly, well over thirty and certainly old enough to know better, iridescing like a hummingbird whenever she looked at him. Smedler decided later that her appearance was, had to be, simply a matter of make-up, a dash of pink here, a silver gleam there, French drops to intensify the blue of her eyes. (He was frequently heard to remark during the next dozen years that it was not politics which made strange bedfellows, it was marriage.)

  Except for an occasional business meeting or football game, Smedler saw very little of Gilly and B. J. after the marriage. The divorce eight years ago had been handled by an out-of-town firm, and the only inside story on it had come to Smedler from Charity: B. J. had run away with a young girl. Gilly was rumored to have taken the divorce very hard, though not all the effects were on the bad side. B. J., evidently suffering from guilt as well as his usual poor business judgment, had been very generous in dividing the community property.

  “Sit down, my dear, sit down. Here, you’ll be more comfortable in the striped chair.”

  He told her she looked lovely (false), that her beige silk and linen suit was very chic (true) and that he was happy to see her (a little of both).

  He was, in fact, more puzzled than either happy or unhappy. Her phone call the day before had provided few details: she wanted to hire a young man who could speak Spanish and was trustworthy, to do a job for her, probably in Mexico. Why probably? Smedler wondered. And what kind of job? She had no business interests south of the border or even outside the country, except for a small money-hungry gold mine in northern Canada. But he had been a lawyer too long to go directly to the point.