Understudy for Death

by Charles Willeford

  Chuck Russell, the staff photographer, had also made a feeble effort at a human interest photo. A two-column cut, below the flip end of my story, presented a stuffed panda bear and a toy wagon on the Huneker’s front porch to catch the morbid reader’s attention. The overline above the photo asked plaintively in 10-point boldface: “Who Will Play With Us Now?” That was the deft hand of Harris, no doubt of it.

  Beryl came into the kitchen from the back yard, closed the door with her hip, and tossed an empty cardboard box into the utility room. She began to prepare my breakfast.

  “Did you read my story about the suicide?”

  “I heard about it on TV,” she replied. “It was on the eleven-fifteen news.”

  “That’s loyalty for you,” I muttered, and turned apathetically to Drew Pearson.

  Except for two army years at Camp Hood, Texas, I’ve eaten the same breakfast every morning since I was eight years old: two fried eggs, two pieces of crisp bacon, grits and melted butter, and two slices of toast. As Beryl set the plate before me, she spoke again, this time with the familiar, ingratiating, favor-seeking tone of voice. “There are a couple of things I’d like to have you do for me this morning, honey—”

  “What now?” I said sourly, poking the yolks with a fork.

  “Just little things, but I can’t get to all of them by myself. There’re two more loads of wash this morning, and you’ll have to go to the store for me. The list is already made out, and Tide is on sale today. Then if you’ll pick up the dry cleaning and Buddy’s shoes at the repair shop, I’ll be through here in time to take the car down for an oil change. I looked at the little sticker on the door yesterday, and it’s been more than two thousand miles since the oil was changed.”

  “To you,” I said bitterly, “these are just little things, but every damned day it’s some little thing! And that’s exactly why my play isn’t finished. I’ve told you a hundred times, but you can’t seem to get it into your thick skull—the only reason I took the night shift was to have free time during the day to work on my play.”

  “All right. Never mind. I’ll get to everything. Somehow. You go ahead and work on your play.”

  “I don’t want to be unreasonable,” I relented. “I know you’ve got a lot to do. But every single day you manage to involve me in some sort of domestic entanglement. I’ll pick up the shoes and dry cleaning for you, but you can do the shopping later. And the car can go a few more miles without changing the oil. We only drive it around town anyway.”

  “Never mind. Forget it.”

  The washing machine was right across the room from my chair. Beryl started to load it from the huge pile of laundry on the floor. The smell of these dirty clothes didn’t help my appetite in the slightest way. She poured a measure of soap powder on top of the clothes, slammed the lid, and pushed one green button and two red buttons. A noise came up like thunder.

  “I’ll go to the store now,” Beryl said, raising her voice above the noise of the machine. “You can listen to the laundry from your study. If it starts to go bumpety, bumpety, bump, hurry in and turn it off.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s the agitator, I think.”

  “Well, you’d better take care of it. We can’t afford a new one.”

  “On your salary we can’t afford a new anything.”

  A crack like that could really set me off, but this time I let it pass. A single man has bacon and eggs for breakfast; a married man has an argument. Beryl left the kitchen, went into the bedroom, and emerged a couple of minutes later with her purse and a new red mouth.

  “You aren’t going to the store like that?” I said.

  “I am,” she replied calmly, groping through her straw handbag for her keys to the Chevy. “It’s eighty degrees today.”

  Beryl was wearing blue cotton short shorts, and a blue-and-white bandana halter. Her long straight legs were tanned evenly, and her ample breasts strained against the halter; the girl took damned good care of herself. She was a pleasure to look at, in fact to stare at…

  If not the dumbest, Beryl had been the prettiest freshman at the University. And the day she flunked out I felt as if I should drink the tears that washed her pretty face—as my penance. It had been my fault she flunked out, not hers. Through constant practice, I had developed an ability to cram hard for an hour or so before an exam and pass it with comparative ease. Of course, I retained little or nothing about the subject a week later, but knowledge was irrelevant; the main idea was to pass the exam at hand. A man should never let education interfere with the obtaining of his degree. Without a diploma, what is knowledge?

  But Beryl needed no diploma for her beauty. No man can describe his wife accurately. He is bound to be prejudiced one way or the other, and besides, he knows all of her faults too damned well.

  By any standards of beauty, Beryl certainly wasn’t plain, but perhaps she wasn’t gorgeous, either. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a descriptive passage for one of his feminine characters that almost fitted Beryl exactly: “She was a faded but still beautiful woman of twenty-seven.” And Beryl was now twenty-seven. Sometimes she looked about twenty-three, as I remembered her at twenty-three, but there were days when she looked much closer to thirty, trying to pass herself off as twenty-seven. She had long, black hair (I didn’t allow her to cut it), and cerium gray eyes that turned into cobalt blue the moment she stepped outside and the sun fell on her face. She was too old to wear her long hair in a ponytail, confined by a rubber band, but she wore it that way most of the time anyway, out of defiance to me, I supposed, because I refused to let her chop it off. But this morning, all of a sudden, she looked very young and incredibly desirable.

  “Well,” I said grimly, “I’m not going to order you not to wear short shorts, but if you get raped someday, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “That would be better than nothing.” She smiled sweetly, and fluttered her long lashes.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  I cleared my throat. “It’s not my fault. You told me you were off the roof. What do you expect me to do?”

  “That was ten days ago.”

  “That long?” I was truly astonished.

  “That long.” She opened the front door.

  “Wait!” I crossed the room hurriedly, closed the door, and put my back to it. I grinned. “Far be it from me to deny my wife a sexual favor. And there will never be a better time than now.” I reached out toward her, and she stepped back.

  “No,” she snapped. “I’m going to the store.”

  “You can go to the store afterwards.”

  “Go to hell, Richard Hudson! You’ll never see the day when I’ll agree to hinting around for one of your sexual favors!”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” I said smoothly, moving toward her slowly.

  “I mean it,” she said threateningly. “And you can go straight to hell!” Her voice was so serious I had to laugh. But she cut off my laughter by swinging her weighted straw bag by its carrying strap; it was so unexpected I didn’t have time to duck, and the leather bottom of the bag raked across my face. I wasn’t hurt, although my face stung slightly, but the expression on my face must have frightened her.

  “I told you to let me alone,” she said, half-apologetically.

  But by then I was close enough to grab her. I jerked the straw bag out of her hand and tossed it on the couch, and heaved her body over my shoulder. She pounded her fists on my back as I carried her into the bedroom. I dumped her onto the bed, and closed the bedroom door.

  “I said now,” I reminded her.

  “And I said no!” she replied.

  I shrugged, but it was with an indifference I didn’t really feel. The idea that she had put up a little resistance, as ineffectual as it had been, had added a certain element of excitement to an event that was ordinarily a rather routine affair.

  “Okay, sweetie, if that’s the way you want it.” I g
rinned. “I told you you’d get raped one of these days if you wore those short shorts—but I didn’t think it would be me. Take ’em off!”

  “No!” She was really angry now. Her face was flushed, and her eyes glared at me through a moist shine of rage.

  I ripped them off; the big white button on the left side whizzed across the room as I easily tore the cotton material. I flipped her over—she didn’t resist—and unfastened the halter. I rolled her on her back again, and tossed the halter onto the dresser. Her limpness, her silence, made me apprehensive. “Do I have to rip off the panties, too?” I asked.

  There was no reply. She sighed wearily, and stared at the ceiling. I rolled the panties down carefully over her hips, and pulled them from under her buttocks. I got them off, somehow, without tearing them. Her breasts were heaving, and I thought she was going to give me the passive, suffering treatment—just lie there motionless and let me go through the motions. The martyr bit. I was ready now to say the hell with it, but I was as stubborn as she was. I undressed, and the moment my knee touched the bed, she rolled over toward the wall like an otter twisting under water. I went after her, scrambling, not caring now whether I hurt her or not. I caught her by the waist with both hands, and pulled her toward me hard, with a half-crazed desire filling me with lust. I was determined to make her submit to me.

  Suddenly she giggled, twisting sideways, and her hip was between my legs. Again and again I tried to pin her flat, but she twisted and turned, or jerked her knees up hard. Twice she managed to get me right in the pit of the stomach with one of her sharp knees before I finally forced my right leg between her thighs. But it didn’t help me any; she simply locked her legs tightly around my trembling leg so I couldn’t move it. Breathing hard, I tried to relax for a moment, and she bit me on the chest. She raked my back with her sharp nails before I could catch her wrists. Desperate, I held both of her wrists with my left hand, and reached down to where she was vulnerable, gripping her soft thighs hard with my fingers, prying them open brutally. She cried out then, first angrily, and then in pain, sinking her sharp teeth into my shoulder so ferociously that the skin ripped. I could feel and hear it rip—and then her hot tongue lapped at the burning spot on my shoulder and I realized she was licking my blood. I was frantic, frenzied, and forced my way inside. She met me all the way, arching her back, writhing, demanding, mewing deep in her throat until I was spent completely. I rolled to one side, without any strength left at all.

  Not Beryl. She bounced up cheerfully, in a hurry to beat me to the bathroom, as fresh as a May morning.

  “Now, that’s more like it!” she said happily, and a moment later she was singing under the shower.

  * * *

  After the car pulled out of the driveway, I dropped the Venetian blinds in the living room and switched on the television set. I was going to have to make up a sex schedule of some kind—only ten days had gone by, but suppose I had let the whole month pass by? My shoulder was still sore, and burning under the bandaid. But in a way, I was grateful for the way things had worked out. After nine years of marriage, something like that was needed once in a while to break up the routine sameness a married sexual relationship drifts into.…

  The sound blasted away on the set, drowning the rumble of the thundering washing machine in the kitchen, and I turned my attention to the screen. A cowboy, with a rope around his neck, stood on the flat bed of a wagon. There was a fair-sized crowd around the wagon, screaming and yelling. A burly, bearded individual whipped the two horses attached to the wagon and they galloped forward. The man was left hanging by the neck from the limb of the cottonwood tree. Two shots were fired, the rope parted, and the hanging man fell to the ground. The crowd fled, scattering, looking apprehensively over their shoulders, and disappeared from the scene. A cowboy appeared, dressed completely in black, riding a white horse. He holstered his smoking pistol, dismounted, and kneeled beside the man on the ground. The man on the ground sat up and rubbed his sore neck gingerly with the tips of his fingers.

  “That’s a mighty nasty rope burn you got there, pardner,” the black-clad rescuer remarked sympathetically. “What you need is Riche’s Oil! Good for all types of burns!” He reached inside his black shirt and pulled out a bottle of Riche’s Oil.

  All during the subsequent selling spiel, concerning the virtues of Riche’s Oil, the rescued cowboy kept reaching for the oil, but the rescuer held it away from him, claiming additional uses for the product.

  No comment. I turned off the set, raised the Venetian blinds, and went into my study. I closed and locked the door, sat down at my battered desk inherited from my father. Every man needs a place to go, a place where he won’t be bothered by anybody. The study was my place.

  There were a couple of hundred books—all plays—in the unpainted, floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookcase. But I kept the one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s complete plays, along with a dictionary and a thesaurus, on my desk at all times. From a blurb on the front cover of a John D. MacDonald paperback, I had clipped a quotation and scotchtaped it across the face of my Shakespeare:

  “I wish I had written this book!”

  Mickey Spillane

  This had seemed funny at the time I did it, but it was funny no longer. The unfinished manuscript of the play I had been working on for three years mocked me every day. After three years of almost daily work, I had completed only thirty-five pages. And yet I stuck with it, because there was only one way I could escape my current plight and job in Lake Springs: write and have produced a successful Broadway play. In addition to becoming rich from my play, I also wanted fame. An idle dream? Perhaps. But this was my dream, and I was stuck with it for lack of a better one.

  The theme of the play was quite simple, like all great plays, but it was also intricately complicated because of all the thought and time I had put into it every day. The thirty-five complete pages were written in blank verse. A dozen earlier versions of the play had been written and destroyed before I had decided to write the play in verse form.

  Briefly, very briefly, my play, which I had entitled The Understudy, was four little plays within the framework of a larger play. The plot, quite simply, concerned a gifted amateur actor, who was employed as a dishwasher. During a season of community theater plays, the dishwasher-actor conspired and plotted to steal the job of the well-educated community theater director. He did this by aping the mannerisms and skills of the director and in the end succeeded in his plans. The final lines before the last act curtain were these:

  DIRECTOR

  (Bewilderedly) Why, why did you do this to me?

  DISHWASHER

  Incentive, O disposed one.

  A dishwasher has no future.

  But if you, too, require incentive

  To equal my hard-earned success—

  I know where a dishwashing job is open…

  (Final Curtain)

  After three years, however, this idea, which had seemed fresh and original in the beginning, now seemed trite and dull, which, perhaps it had been all along. Starting over in blank verse had given me new inspiration, and the deeper meanings, shades, and nuances of thought that had been beyond my grasp in straight prose and dialogue, were beginning to fall murkily into place. The nebulous verse images I sweated over appeared to put across the essential meanings I didn’t quite understand myself.

  In an autobiographical way, I was both director and dishwasher, player and understudy. I had majored in speech and theater arts at college, although I had never staged a play. I had always aspired to writing plays, not acting or directing, and had received straight A’s in college playwriting classes. Three of my one-act plays had been produced by student-actors, and my best one-acter, The Senile Delinquent, had won the Mrs. Cora Lowey Averell Award—a check for $100 and a college production.

  Bolstered, if not inflated, by these schoolboy successes, I had expected to have at least one play running on Broadway within a year after graduation. But as a married man and a father, I had been
forced to get a job of some kind, and because my father had left me his house in Lake Springs when he died, I had gone home again, taking Beryl and Buddy with me.

  My father had been a retired Lake Springs policeman, a sergeant in charge of the Traffic Division, and well known around town. If the News-Press hadn’t hired me, I would have found something else to do easily enough. The old man had been the responsible type, and I had tried to live up to his example. My mother had divorced him when I was only nine years old, and had moved back to New Jersey. But when Dad died I had written her a letter telling her that she was welcome to come and live with Beryl and me if she so desired. The letter had not been acknowledged, but I had considered this the right thing to do, and I had felt quite self-satisfied with myself for a few days for making the attempt.

  In addition to having the qualifications of the Director in my play, my dead-end job on the News-Press gave me equal billing with the Dishwasher. Certainly no would-be playwright had greater incentive than I to escape from a miserable situation and to gain success in his chosen field. I considered news-writing not only a poor form of writing, but a ridiculous type of writing—dull, factual, prosaic, transitory, ritualistic, formulaized, and unrewarding in every respect.

  At twenty-five I had deliberately gone after the reporting job because of the incentive it would give me to write my first play—but somewhere along the line something had gone wrong. Now I was thirty, and I hadn’t written my play yet, I was in a deep but comfortable rut, and it was rather pleasant. I no longer detested my job; in many ways I rather enjoyed it, working at night in particular.

  Why? Who? When? Where? What? And sometimes How? These were a newspaperman’s questions, not a playwright’s.