“Are you just going to sit there without speaking?” I waited. All she did was blink. “You’re acting ridiculous, sulking like a little girl.” She didn’t speak. I walked away and stood by the door, looking out at the stairs. “OK,” I said, turning around, “so Stan was here. I didn’t want to tell you about it, because of what happened between him and Pin.” I waited, figuring she had to show some interest now, but she didn’t respond. All she did was continue to sit there, staring out, rigid and silent.
“They had an argument, you see. It all happened while I was away,” I went on, walking back toward her. “Remember, I went shopping … the shoes and stuff?” I was going to sit down beside her, but quickly changed my mind. “No use hiding the truth any longer. Pin never liked Stan. No matter what I said, he found fault with him. He didn’t trust him from the start. You know how Pin is. When he forms an opinion about someone, he’s stubborn and insistent. That’s the way it was with him and Stan. I talked myself silly nights trying to get him to take another point of view. Honest I did, Ursula.” I waited. There was no response. “Damn it, Ursula. Are you just going to sit there without speaking forever?”
I walked back to the door quickly, turned, and then went directly to our adjoining door. I went into my room, put on the lights, and flopped on the bed. I could wait, I thought. I could wait for her to be reasonable. Meanwhile, I thought about the details of what had supposedly happened between Pin and Stan. I was sure she would want to know. I waited and waited, but she never did call to me. It was very unnerving. I assumed she had gone to sleep. At least an hour or so must have passed before I got up and looked in on her again. Would you believe it? She was still sitting there in the same position, staring at the doorway. It really got to me. I became a little nervous; maybe even a little frightened.
“All right,” I said, walking into the room. “This has gone far enough.” I went over to her and shook her, but she didn’t change her expression, nor did she look at me.
“So you want to know about it, so I’ll tell you,” I said. I paced about for a few moments. “When I got home from shopping, Stan was sprawled out across the living-room floor. He had been drinking before he came here. Pin said he started right in on him. He said Pin was ruining our lives; living off us like some sort of a parasite. Pin said he was very uncouth, violent. He wanted Pin to move right out, claiming that you were reluctant to marry him because you were afraid to leave me here alone with Pin. Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous? Pin argued, of course. He’s never been one to stand by and permit himself to be abused by anyone. The argument got worse, heated. Stan actually became violent. He was very drunk by this time, having taken some liquor out of our cabinets too. Pin said they wrestled about for a few moments. Fortunately for him, Stan was too drunk to be effective. He fell backward and hit his head on the fireplace stone.”
I paused to see if she would respond now; perhaps ask questions. But she continued to stare ahead, blinking. I paced about a bit more, wondering if it did any good for me to go on. I planned to go down and tell Pin the story I had concocted just in case Ursula questioned him. He’d go along. He had to, since he had been the cause of her finding things out.
“When I came home, I found him sprawled out, as I said,” I continued, turning back to her. “Naturally, I was very disturbed. It was a great shock. Pin told me what had happened. He was very upset. Even though it really wasn’t his fault, I knew that if we reported it to the police, there would be investigations and many embarrassing questions. So I drove Stan’s car up to the ski lodge and … and I disposed of his body. When I lifted him off the floor to carry him out of the house, his leg came off, probably due to the struggle with Pin. It was Pin’s idea to throw it in the fire,” I said quickly. “I never would have done it if I hadn’t been so distraught. He thought it was the best way.” I waited. She still did not respond.
“You can understand why I had to get rid of his body, can’t you, Ursula? I’m sorry you had to find out the way you did. I was planning on telling you in time, quietly. So you see, there’s really no sense in your continuing to behave like this. I think …”
I stopped talking because I could see tears had come out of Ursula’s eyes. They were traveling with jerky motions over her cheeks and dripping off the sides of her face and the bottom of her chin. However, she didn’t change her position or stop blinking.
“Poor Ursula,” I said sitting beside her. I put my arm around her, but she didn’t lay her head on my shoulder like she always did. I patted her arm and stood up. “I can understand how you feel, but after you get over the immediate shock, you’ll realize that things wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Not if he behaved the way he did with Pin. We still have each other. We’ll be all right,” I said. I was beginning to hate the sound of my own voice. She still hadn’t said a word. “Want me to get you anything?” I asked. “You could indicate a yes or a no,” I said sharply, but she acted as though she hadn’t heard a word I had said.
I stomped out of the room and went downstairs. Hadn’t I been patient with her? Hadn’t I made an unusual effort? Sure, she was disturbed. She had been through a great deal, but I had only tried to help her. She could have shown some response, some gratitude, but she hadn’t. I wasn’t going to wait around for her to do me the honor of uttering a word. Instead I poured myself a drink and rebuilt the fire. I didn’t invite Pin out either. Alone, I passed a few hours, thinking and drinking. At one point I got up, took the flashlight out of the hall closet and went to the back door. I opened it and searched the new snow to see if my footprints were gone. From what I could tell, they were. At least that part went well, I thought, and started back upstairs again. I had calmed down somewhat.
She was still sitting there on the bed, staring. I walked over and brushed some hair off her forehead. She blinked. Then I thought I noticed a slight rocking motion in her upper body. It grew stronger and stronger. It struck me funny, but I didn’t laugh aloud. She looked like she was sitting on a horse-drawn wagon or in a car going over a bumpy road. I placed my hand on her right shoulder and she stopped rocking.
“Jesus, if you could see how you look,” I said. “You’d feel utterly ridiculous.” Naturally, there was no response. “It’s getting late now, Ursula. You should go to sleep. You’re emotionally exhausted.” All she did was blink.
Ursula was wearing a button-down sweater and a skirt. I knelt down and slipped off her shoes. She was wearing panty hose. Slowly I unbuttoned her sweater. She sat like a baby, limply. I worked the garments off her body carefully. She offered no resistance, but she offered no cooperation either. After I unfastened and removed her bra, I tried to get her to lie back so I could slip off her skirt and panty hose, but she wouldn’t move out of the sitting position. I didn’t want to force her back. Looking down at the whiteness of her breasts, I was taken with the quietness of her body now. There wasn’t so much as a slight quivering. I leaned over and looked into her face. She blinked. An artery on her neck pulsated as her heart forced blood around her body. I touched it with my fingers just to feel the beat of her life. She felt strangely cold and dry.
“You want to go to sleep, don’t you, Ursula?” I waited but there was no indication that she had even heard me. I couldn’t stand being ignored that way. My father used to do it all the time, but he was supposedly always in deep thought about one patient or another. I would just give up talking to him and walk away.
I continued to try to get her attention. “Ursula, Ursula,” I whispered. She seemed to hear nothing. There was an emptiness in her eyes. She had the look of a blind person. I touched her bottom lip, pushing it away from the upper one. Her teeth were clenched together within. When I withdrew my finger, her lips snapped back, sealing her mouth once more.
“You’re being very stubborn,” I said. “Very immature.” Then I stepped away, because she was actually frightening me. “I’m just going to leave you here. Just like this, damnit,” I added. I waited for a moment, and then I turned and went i
nto my room. I got undressed and went to bed. When my eyes got used to the darkness, I looked out through the opened door. Vaguely I could see her still sitting there in the rigid position. “Damnit,” I whispered, and I turned to face the wall.
I fell into a deep and restless sleep. Sometime during the night I awoke because I thought I heard a kind of muffled rapping or tapping sound. I lay there with my eyes opened, staring into the darkness, listening, but I could hear nothing. I concluded that it was just part of my present nervous state and I turned over again to force myself into what I believed was much needed sleep. I was still very tense and I remembered how my father used to say that mental anxiety was more exhausting than physical exertion. My mind was a veritable montage of surrealistic images. I saw Pin’s body with Ursula’s face. I saw Ursula with Stan’s leg. I saw my father down under the ice looking up at me angrily. I know I must have tossed and turned most of the night because I wasn’t rested. Just before early morning I had a final dream. I know it was just before morning because when I woke, the sun was just beginning to invade the darkness.
I dreamt that Ursula got up from the bed and, half naked, walked out the back door of the house. Without shoes, she trudged through the new snow, sinking almost as far down as her knees at times, and made her way through the woods. She walked in a trance, pulled by some great magnetic force that kept her from feeling the intense cold. Snowflakes melted on her breasts. Little streaks of water, like thick tears, wrote cold lines all over her exposed body. When she got to the pond, she stopped and looked out toward the opening I had made in the ice. Gradually, she focused on it. She saw Stan’s head bobbing in the water. His eyes were frozen closed. She saw it and then she began to scream and scream and scream, bringing her hands up to her ears to shut out the horrible screech of her own voice. That’s when I woke up and sat up quickly.
It took a moment for me to realize it had only been a dream. I rubbed my eyes and then remembered how I had left Ursula. I studied the darkness between us. There was just enough light now to give me a vague visual awareness. She wasn’t there.
My heart began to beat faster. A wild fear shot through me. My dream, could it be real? Was she out there in the snow? I panicked like an idiot, and I ran to my parents’ room to get a view of the backyard. I stood there struggling to see through the thinning darkness, searching the snow for signs of fresh footprints. Then, still not realizing how ridiculous I was, I ran downstairs, got the flashlight again, and went directly to the back door. I opened it, and, standing there in my underwear, I faced the bitter cold and searched the snow for signs of Ursula. I guess the cold air brought me to my senses, and I shut the door and turned off the flashlight. Where was she?
I stood there for a moment trying to gather my thoughts and get better control of myself. There was something trying to force its way up into my consciousness. It was something that had happened during the night. But my mind was confused by all the nightmare images that had passed through it. I couldn’t think straight. I went over to the sink to wash my face in the cold water. Just as I dried it with a dish towel, I heard her shrill, piercing scream.
Chapter 20
FOR A FEW MOMENTS, I COULDN’T LOCATE HIM IN THE room. Ursula, still half naked, was sitting on his bed, her hands clutching at her ears as if to close out all sound. Her eyes were big and her face looked distorted—her mouth twisted to one side, her teeth pressing down on her lower lip.
My eyes moved to the ax on the floor. Then I looked up slowly to where I had left Pin sitting. I wanted to speak, to utter some sound, but my jaw wouldn’t move. I moved in closer to look.
The ax had sliced clear through his upper torso. There were parts of him scattered all around the room. The right arm remained dangling from a part of the shoulder. There was no left arm, but the arteries and the tendons hung ripped from the stub. The right leg had been severed at the knee. The left leg was apparently untouched. The head and neck were shattered all over. I saw an eye looking up at me from the foot of the chair. Parts of his teeth and gums lay by the wall to the right.
I tried to step back, but I couldn’t move. The numbness that I had known in spasms all these years came rushing over me. I sank into the same ice water in which I had deposited Stanley’s body. Ursula was looking at me, but the expression on her face began to change from a look of distortion to a look of amazement. In a moment, though, she was only in my peripheral vision, because I couldn’t move my eyes. I was able only to look straight ahead.
I heard Ursula move forward on the bed until she was directly in my vision. Then she stood up and brushed her hair away from her face. Her face was streaked by dried streams of tears. She rubbed at them and licked at her lips until the dryness disappeared from them.
“Leon?” she said, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t even attempt to respond. I thought she was looking at me when she said, “Leon,” but I couldn’t understand why.
She turned and looked at the destruction around her and then back at me. I hoped she didn’t expect me to put him back together again. I laughed to myself, although I couldn’t feel my face move with the laugh. She was always like that—coming to me after she broke things. “Mend my doll. Fix my baby’s hand.”
Destructive, destructive. “You know there are things a doctor can’t fix,” I’d say. “Even me.”
I wasn’t about to play these dumb fantasy games and put a doll’s broken arm in a cast. She’d have to face reality. The sooner that happened, the better it would be for her. Sure I’m cold; sure I’m hard, but it’s for the best. It takes strength to be this way, strength. The world is divided up into two parts: success and failure. Success comes to those who face reality head-on. It’s as simple as that.
Now Ursula kicked broken parts of him away from her feet. She looked back at me with what I thought was a smile. Why was she smiling? What’s so funny about destruction? She took hold of the front of his pants and pulled him right out of the wheelchair. Then she flung him into the far corner of the room. More pieces separated. She brushed the chair off.
“Each of us has killed someone we love, haven’t we, Leon?” she said with such bitterness.
“Leon?”
“Oh, you’re not going to talk; you’re not going to move. You’re going to be Pin? Is that your way of punishing me for what I’ve done to you? What have you done to me? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?” she screamed.
I couldn’t recall seeing her in such a state ever before. She was obviously in need of a tranquilizer or some sedation. I began to consider what I would prescribe. As a rule I’m not very fond of prescribing mood-control pills. I would rather see people work out their problems consciously. I believe pills are only a temporary solution. They don’t get at the causes, only the symptoms. However, Ursula was acting so unusual….
She rushed to the closet and pulled out a shirt and a tweed suit. She handled everything roughly and frantically. I wanted to tell her that the tweed could use some pressing, but in the state she was in I didn’t think she’d care. She went to the dresser drawer and took out a pair of knee-high socks and then went back to the closet to get a pair of black shoes. At least they had been recently polished, I thought.
“Oh, we’ll play your game, we’ll play your game,” she said. She was chanting more than talking. “You’re the one who couldn’t face death. You’re the one who was weak, who created ways to avoid reality. You, not me. OK, OK, don’t let Pin die; don’t let the doctor die. Let Leon die. LET HIM,” she screamed. I felt so sorry for her. She came very close to my face. I could see the tiny red veins in her eyes. “I want him to die,” she said slowly, pronouncing each word with separate and distinct emphasis.
She took the shirt off the hanger and began putting it on me. It was still nicely starched and clean. I welcomed the feel of it. She pulled it around roughly, though, and buttoned it quickly. I wanted to complain about that, but I figured she was just too disturbed to appreciate what I would say.
She went back to the closet and picked ou
t a tie. I didn’t care all that much for her choice, but as with the shirt, I kept it to myself. As she tied the tie, I saw the smile on her face spreading. Her eyes were dancing with light. She had the gleefulness of a little girl. Every once in a while she would laugh. Yet tears were coming from the sides of her eyes. She’d wipe them away and laugh and smile and work diligently on the knot of the tie until she had it perfect. At least she adhered to that. I always demanded perfect tie knots.
Then she smoothed the front of my shirt down against my chest and stepped back to consider me.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She took the pants off the bed, and she moved me to the spot. I was happy to sit down. It took awhile for her to work the pants up my legs. Afterward, she stood me up, grunting, struggling, but still uttering a small laugh here and there. She buckled my pants and put on the suit jacket. When I was all dressed, socks, shoes and all, she stood back and admired me, nodding her head, still breathing heavily from the effort. I thought I might say something about one of my cuffs, but I didn’t want to do any damage to her self-satisfaction.
“And now,” she said, “we’ll put you where you belong, won’t we?”
She brought the wheelchair forward and backed me into it. Then she wheeled me out to the living room.
“Now just let me get dressed and then we’ll have tea, won’t we? We’ll have tea, tea.” Her breasts quivered as she said the word. “Don’t go away,” she added and laughed again.
I was feeling so sorry for her. Such a state of mind, such a state. I sat there reviewing some similar cases I had known. I wondered what had put her in such a state. You can never tell what it is with women, I thought. Small things can do it almost as much as big things sometimes.
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