The Stories of Paul Bowles

by Paul Bowles

  (1983)

  Julian Vreden

  ROUGHLY FOUR DECADES AGO New York newspapers carried the report of a domestic tragedy, poignant but unexceptional. A middle-aged husband and wife celebrated New Year’s Eve by remaining quietly at home and joining in a suicide pact. They were found lying side by side on the floor of their living room, each with an empty champagne glass nearby. A partially empty bottle of champagne stood on the sink in the kitchen, along with a small amount of the cyanide which they had dissolved in the wine for their holiday libations. There were no explanatory notes.

  The Vredens were both employees of the New York Board of Education. They had one son, Julian, not yet twenty, who had left Columbia and was now attending a college in Florida. The police must have entertained suspicions from the outset, but they played a slow game. Young Vreden collected the insurance from his father’s policy, at which point he was unwise enough to appear with his friend Mark from Miami in the Park Avenue salesroom of a firm dealing in imported cars. He made a down payment on a particularly flamboyant Aston-Martin. The two young men were by then living in the apartment formerly occupied by the elder Vredens, both of them having dropped out of college, with no apparent intention of continuing their education. The police paid them a visit, and had no difficulty in getting Julian to admit that it was he who had administered the lethal champagne cocktails. Indeed, he made it clear that he considered himself amply justified in his behavior.

  His story, verified by relatives and neighbors (all of whom maintained a wholly unsympathetic attitude toward him) was one of uninterrupted long-term parental persecution. Rather than being pleased that their son should have spent his spare time reading, they were loudly contemptuous of his literary interests. The reason: Julian read poetry. This was unforgivable. The mother had a habit of looking into his room and shouting: “Look at the big sissy with his poetry!” And his father, eyeing him with disgust, would groan: “What a fairy we’ve got for a son!” These constant attacks, year in and year out, had no effect on the boy save to make him increase defiantly the number of volumes of poetry with which he filled his room.

  The shift from Columbia to the Florida college clearly was a desirable one from all points of view. The physical distance between them must have served to mitigate somewhat the permanent state of ill-will between parents and son, otherwise the surprise New Year’s Eve telephone call and subsequent visit would have been unthinkable. Perhaps they thought he had changed, and were heartened by the prospect of a possible armistice.

  Julian arrived at the apartment alone, friend Mark having agreed to wait outside in the corridor until Julian opened the door for him. He had a bottle of Piper Heidsieck with him which he uncorked in the kitchen and shared with them, along with the conventional toasts to their good health during the coming year. Then he took their empty glasses back into the kitchen and refilled them, this time adding the cyanide. When they staggered and dropped to the floor, he opened the service door and let Mark into the kitchen. It was when the elder Vreden looked up and saw the unfamiliar grinning face behind his son that he uttered the only words Julian remembered his father saying during the ordeal: “Oh God, who’s that?”

  When both victims were dead, Julian and Mark pushed the bodies closer to one another, wiped the glasses clean, leaving them on the rug nearby, washed and put away the third glass, and left the apartment to its New Year’s Eve silence. They flew back to Miami immediately.

  The case was not one to attract a great deal of publicity: too much time had elapsed between the murders and the indictment. Julian and Mark were condemned to life imprisonment in a New Jersey hospital for the criminally insane. Criminal?Yes. Insane? Not likely. The desire to avenge acts of injustice committed against one’s person can scarcely be considered a sign of dementia. Julian Vreden’s story is a classical and uniquely American tale of revenge.

  (1985)

  Hugh Harper

  HUGH HARPER COULD HAVE BEEN Dr. Hugh Harper, had he completed his medical training. But somewhere along the way he lost interest. Perhaps it was the realization that he did not need the extra money which might be got from a practice in Harley Street or elsewhere. He saw that he could have a comfortable life without expending all that unnecessary effort.

  Like most hedonists, Harper was eccentric and secretive. In his case the secretiveness is not surprising, since his eccentricity consisted in a taste for human blood. He was in no way ashamed of his unusual predilection since it had no sexual facet; it was purely gastronomical. On the other hand, he saw no reason to extend the circle of those who knew of his fondness for the flavor of blood beyond the group of neighborhood youths who regularly sold him small quantities of it. The difficulty proved to be, as he might have guessed it would, that inevitably the mother of one of the boys learned what was going on. She was thoroughly outraged, of course, and there was the threat of a scandal. The Harper family decided that Hugh must immediately disappear.

  Naïvely, he objected, claiming that what he had been doing was not illegal. His older brother replied that if this was so, it was only because there was no precedent for such behavior in civilized society, and that he himself was putting Hugh on the ferry for Calais that very evening. He accompanied him to Dover and got him onto the ferry; then he heaved a sigh of relief and returned to London. Even though he realized that there were no sexual overtones in the affair, he knew that the indignant mothers, once they got together, would be quick to supply them.

  At Pozzuoli, outside Naples, Hugh Harper installed himself in an apartment and set to work gathering a group of young proletarian blood donors who would not be likely to confide in their mothers (and whose mothers in any case would not have been particularly interested in such information). What did not occur to him was that the Italian police often seem to know about things even before they happen. According to them, here was a foreigner who, not satisfied with supplying drugs to teenagers, insisted upon administering the shots himself. The youths naturally were unanimous in denying this, maintaining with Italian pride that they submitted to the Englishman’s senseless requests solely because they were well paid to do so.

  Very well, no drugs, said the police, but the thing is illegal in any case, because the foreigner has no permit to practice medicine in Italy, and for one person to use a hypodermic needle, no matter for what purpose, on another person, requires a medical certificate.

  To avoid a trial and possible incarceration Harper was obliged to part with several substantial sums of money, after which he was ordered to leave the country and not return.

  It was to be expected that the next place for Hugh Harper to settle in would be Morocco. He rented a small house on the Marshan in Tangier, in whose sala he installed a gigantic refrigerator. Here on the brightly lighted shelves were the small glasses of blood, each bearing a sticker with the name of the donor and the date the liquid had been drawn. The young Moroccans found it perfectly natural that this Englishman should have need of supplementary blood for his health, since it was common knowledge that English blood was thin and cold. The idea that he might want it because he appreciated its flavor would have been inconceivable to them.