“Then that’s an end to it,” I said.
“Perhaps.” He leaned toward me, placing his hands in odd flattened positions in front of himself, reminding me that he was a self-proclaimed karate expert. “And perhaps not,” he said. His eyes glinted, and a muscle inside his left cheek began jumping, like a moth under a sheet.
“Oh!”
A female voice. It startled us both, and I suddenly realized I’d been sitting there like a hypnotist’s subject, staring up at Volpinex open-mouthed, saying nothing, thinking nothing, feeling only a steadily increasing nervousness. My mouth was dry, my shoulders stiff. My heart was pounding.
“Meestair Dahjj. I deed not know you had company.”
It was Nikki, blessed Nikki, in the living room doorway with the telephone in her hand. “Come out, Nikki,” I called, hoarse-voiced, and gestured extravagantly for her to approach. Meanwhile, Volpinex backed away a pace or two, his face as sternly angry as a Mayan stone god.
Nikki came out, tripping in much her usual fashion, but with apprehensive looks toward Volpinex. “Meez Kairnair on the phone for you,” she told me, and put the phone on the table beside me. She was in an uncharacteristic hurry to be off.
I said, “Mr. Volpinex was just leaving, Nikki. Show him to the door, will you?”
Volpinex stood glaring at me from under hooded eyes. I could almost see the gears of his brain ratcheting away in there. Leaning toward him, I said softly, “She’ll remember you were here.” His eyes flickered at that, and I added, “And so will I.”
He expelled air; apparently he’d been holding it for some time. “We’ll … talk again,” he said, nodded curtly at Nikki, and followed her away into the apartment.
I watched them go, then picked up the phone. My hand was shaking so much I could see two receivers. I put them both to my face, where they rattled against my skull, and said, “Betty?”
“I don’t want you to guess,” she said. “About what I’m getting. But I want to know your favorite color.”
“My favorite color.” I reached out for my champagne and orange juice. “Orange,” I said, and drank it down.
LABOR DAY WEEKEND AT Point O’ Woods. Four of the most pleasant and comfortable days of my life. I know that Betty too was having a good time and I’m glad of it, all in all, considering how it ended.
After Blondell’s seafood salad on Friday, we had driven out here with me at the wheel of Betty’s present to me; an orange Thunderbird. Two cars in three days; this was becoming my week.
Except for Volpinex, whom I couldn’t get out of my mind. Had he really come mere to kill me, on that terrace? It didn’t seem possible. Volpinex was dangerous, of course, capable of trying to injure me in that squash court, capable of hiring toughs to drive me out of town or beat me up, but was he really capable of murder? It had all seemed very real at the time, but people don’t actually kill people, and particularly lawyers don’t kill people. As both Volpinex himself and Candy had recently pointed out, lawyers have too many other strings to their bow.
The former wife, dead in Maine.
“Nonsense,” I muttered, and looked over my shoulder.
But once at Point O’ Woods it all faded away. Betty and I were here in this Episcopalian ghetto, and nothing from the real world—or the unreal world of Ernest Volpinex—could possibly get at us. The weather remained perfect: the sun a great dollop of Béarnaise on a sky of shimmering blue china, sand the color of raw silk, ocean the colors of mermaids, air a soft warm beneficent presence sailing up across the world from Brazil. The mosquitoes had all been burned off by the heat of midsummer, nor had any other obnoxious insects taken their place. Beauty, peace, contentment and suntan oil were spread o’er all.
As for Betty, the combination of her expressions of guilt for having betrayed me plus her joy at our reunion combined to make her the finest servant-wife since the last war bride was brought home from Japan. Did I wish to go to bed? Was there a position, a variation, possibly a rumor of an alternative method, which I would like to try? Absolutely, absolutely. Was I hungry? Betty blossomed into a cook before whom Blondell would have shriveled away in shame. Great sunlit breakfasts on the back deck, wonderful cold lunches of dishes like salade Niçoise, dinners so lavish and extensive and delicious that afterward I could barely bring the snifter of Rémy Martin to my lips.
Joy. Joy undiminished. Will I ever find its like again? No, not ever.
Partly, of course, it was my own doing that it all came to an end. Peace and joy bore me after a while, and I found myself itching again to do something. Something. So partly I do have myself to blame for what happened next.
But only partly. The rest of the blame goes to Volpinex, a sneak and a bastard and a poor sport if there ever lived one.
But first my own contribution to the acceleration of events. It was ten o’clock Monday evening, and we were both in bed, Betty and I, having repaired there for after-dinner calisthenics and having both fallen promptly to sleep. I was the first to awaken, finding myself semi-imprisoned by a Betty-arm and a Betty-leg flung across me. We were on Father’s bed, as usual, and one lamp glowed on the night table. I lay on my back, studying the bedroom ceiling, aware of the summer house around me, the summer community, the summer island, and increasingly aware of the end of summer. One way and another, it was all coming to an end.
I tried to see through that ceiling and into the future, but it remained hazy. Who would I be in September? Betty’s husband, true-blue Bart, respectable businessman, manager of his wife’s vast business empire? Or Art, with his freedom and his Alfa and his little card business and his little marriage business with Liz? It couldn’t be both, not any more.
Never make a business out of your hobby, you’ll take all the fun out of it. Insult cards had been my business and fornication my hobby, and I’d been reasonably content. Now the card business was on the verge of being scrapped, I was on the threshold of making millions out of fornication, and look at me: staring at the ceiling, worrying about my future.
“Oh, fuck it!” I suddenly said, and pushed Betty’s limbs out of the way so I could get out of bed.
She half woke up. “Swee-hart? Goin’?”
“For a walk on the beach,” I told her. I patted her cheek, and then her other cheek. “Have a nice nap, I’ll be back in a little while.”
She moaned and smiled and rolled over, and I put on slacks, sneakers and a T-shirt, and out I went.
I walked aimlessly for ten minutes or so, brooding, and then I passed the phone booth. And I stopped and looked at the phone booth, and a thought entered my mind.
Just how reliable was Betty? If I was going to be faithful Bart, what about her?
There was a dime in my pocket.
She must have fallen asleep again; it was six rings before she answered, and then her voice sounded blowsy with unconsciousness. I said, “Hi, there, honey. Guess who this is?”
“Hello?”
“You know who it is, Betty.”
“Art? Is that you?”
My heart was pounding; it surprised me. “That’s right,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“Where are you? What time is it?”
“Early. I’m in Ocean Beach, I’m staying with friends. I could be there in half an hour.”
“Oh, no!” She sounded truly shocked.
“No? Why not, honey?”
“Well … Bart’s here.”
“I don’t believe it. Put him on.”
“He—he just went for a walk. On the beach.”
“Come on, Betty, don’t leave me hanging here like this.”
“He’ll be back pretty soon,” she said, and suddenly she was pitching her voice lower, as though afraid she’d be overheard. “He really will.”
“Then you come out.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well, your brother … He’s staying here with me.”
“You can still go out for a while. He’s taking a walk, isn’t he?�
�
“Oh, Art, this isn’t right.”
I didn’t have to go on with it. I’ve had this conversation often enough with other women, I know when the argument is won and there’s nothing left but the extra verbiage to help the woman feel she was overpowered; but there was a certain satisfaction in running the ritual right through to the end. “Of course it’s right,” I told her. “Anything that feels good is right, you know that.”
“Art, you’re terrible, you really are.”
“I’ll meet you at the beach end of the fence.”
“I might not be there, Art.”
“I’ll wait for you,” I said, and hung up, and left the phone booth, and went for a walk on the beach.
I WAS LYING AGAIN ON FAther’S bed, hands behind my head as I brooded at the ceiling, when I heard her come in. The door opened and closed, she moved about down there, and then there was silence. Sitting up, I called, “I’m up here,” and heard her start up the stairs.
I hadn’t been surprised to find her gone when I’d come back here, but I had been disappointed, and I’d spent the last hour and a half in a state of general depression. But why? Did I love her, for Christ’s sake? Did I love either of those wretched sisters? In perfect truth I did not, but what I was learning—and this was quite a bit worse—was that I needed someone, someone, anyone, to love me.
(I don’t count Candy. The architect’s plans for my remodeling were already completed in her head, that was how much she loved me.)
But I still didn’t know what to do about anything, and now Betty was back. Sitting up on the bed as I heard her footsteps approaching, I turned toward the door and saw Volpinex just reaching the head of the stairs.
I scrambled off the bed, pointing at him. “You did it!” I shouted. “You really did! And you were going to do it to me!”
I meant the wife in Maine, that Volpinex had murdered her, and that he really had intended to murder me on the terrace last Friday, two insights that had exploded belatedly into my consciousness the instant I saw him in that half-lit hall, rounding the turn at the head of the stairs and walking toward me. That was what I’d meant, but I doubt there was any way he could have understood me from what I’d said. When a man begins a conversation by shouting, “You did it you really did and you were going to do it to me,” it is not unfair to say of mat man that he is speaking gibberish.
Volpinex, in any event, treated my outburst the way a sensible man treats gibberish: he ignored it. He said, “I’m not interested in you, Dodge. I’m looking for Elisabeth.”
“Which one? She’s not here. I mean she’s in the bathroom!” Meaning I didn’t want him to think I was alone in the house.
He paused, glanced at the open bathroom door immediately to his left, and gave me a one-raised-eyebrow stare. “Is that something comical? Another joke?”
“You won’t get away with it,” I warned him, which was absurd. He was between me and the stairs, nobody knew he was here, he was an expert in karate: he would get away with it.
“Your sense of humor continues to elude me,” he said. He had come forward to the bedroom doorway, just close enough to be sure I was alone in this room. “I fail to understand what you’re saying,” he said, and now I saw he was holding a large manila envelope in his left hand. What was in it? Some murder device? Visions of silken twine slithered through my head. Or a slender case of surgical knives, as in Arsenic and Old Lace.
I said, “They’ll suspect you. I left a letter with my lawyer to be opened in case of my death.”
His frown of incomprehension continued a few seconds longer, and then all at once he smiled, broadly and insultingly. For a humorless man he had quite a collection of smiles on tap, none of them pleasant. “So you think I’m here to kill you,” he said.
“You wanted to Friday, on the terrace.”
“Did I?” The smile curled around his face like smoke, and I noticed he didn’t bother with a denial.
“That’s why I left a letter with my lawyer,” I told him.
He shook his head, impatient with me. “You did not,” he said. “Don’t be tedious.”
“You think so?” Raging to cover my fright, I shook my fist at him and yelled, “Just murder me and see what happens!”
He stood there and looked at me, and we both listened to what I’d just said. It hadn’t come out exactly right, had it? Hurrying right along, I said, “You didn’t come here to see Betty, that’s just a story.”
“Oh, but I did.”
“Why? You’re not her lawyer.”
“And you’re not your brother,” he said.
“What?”
“You have no twin brother,” he told me, and the glint in his eye was triumph.
Oh oh.
Brazen it through. You can’t prove a negative, this is a bluff, brazen it through, don’t slip for a second, don’t show him a thing. “Of course I have a twin brother,” I said. “You’ve met him yourself, his name is Arthur.”
“No,” he said. “Your name is Arthur. There never was a Robert or Bart Dodge, no twin brother at all.” He jiggled that manila envelope toward me. “I have the hospital records here, showing that yours was a single birth. I have school records, tax records. I have you cold, Dodge. I told you not to get into a game that was too fast for you, but you wouldn’t listen. And I believe your next step is going to be the state penitentiary.”
“Wait a minute, now,” I said. “Hold on. What do you mean—penitentiary?”
“Your two marriages,” he said. “The first you entered under a false name and with falsified papers. The second was fraudulent because you lied on your application about your current marital status.”
“The Kerner family wouldn’t want a scandal like that.”
He laughed; oh, he was enjoying himself. “They’d like nothing better,” he said. “If the girls tried to hush it up, the rest of the family wouldn’t let them. And they’ll both, of course, use it in their civil suits against one another. Oh, you’ll be famous, Dodge.”
“That’s not one of my goals,” I said.
“The time for choice is over,” he told me. Turning away, he said, “I’ll wait for Betty downstairs.”
“Wait. Wait a minute.” This was even worse than being murdered. Something like true terror was crawling around on the floor of my stomach. With two quick steps forward, I grasped his arm, saying, “Wait, let’s talk this over.”
He looked at my hand on his arm. “Take your hand away,” he said.
I didn’t. I said, “Look, you’re smart, you’re better off in partnership with me, the two of—”
He moved. First something horrible happened to my left wrist, and then I went sailing backward to crash on the floor and slide along it until my shoulders and head crashed into the night table. The lamp fell over, but stayed lit, and the drawer popped open, dropping itself and a scatter of playing cards, hairpins, and assorted garbage over my face and chest. I batted my way upward through it to a sitting position on the floor, and looked up to see Volpinex leering down at me like something on a cathedral cornice. “I enjoyed that,” he said. “I’d enjoy doing it again.” He kicked me encouragingly on the ankle. “Get up, Dodge.”
“No,” I said. My left wrist stung abominably. I splayed my right hand out behind me, for support, and my fingers bumped into something hard and unyielding.
He kicked me in the same spot, more determinedly. “I said get up.”
My fingers closed on Daddy’s gun, on the floor now amid the wreckage of the night table drawer, and I swung it around at arm’s length. “God damn you!” I shouted, and I shot that grinning gargoyle right in his drain spout.
THEN, OF COURSE, I WAS really terrified.
“No no no no no!” I shouted, but there weren’t enough no’s in the world to overpower that simple yes. But I hadn’t meant it. I’d never meant to kill anybody. Not even to hurt anybody.
Maybe he wasn’t dead. The gun still in my hand, as though glued there, I crawled over on hands and knees
to where he was lying crumpled against the wall next to the door, and I peeked at his face to see if maybe his eyes were open.
Oh, dear. I swallowed a sudden hint of dinner and looked very quickly away again. You don’t have a face like that if you’re alive. That wasn’t something you could take to a fix-it shop, oh, no, that was something broken for good.
Broken for good.
I have known terror before in my life, such as when I’m in the closet and the suspicious husband is tramping around in the bedroom and the wife is making shrill suggestions that they go out to a movie, and I know what such terror feels like. It feels hot and electric and red, full of buzzing and tiny explosions. That was the terror I’d felt most recently when I had my hand on Volpinex’s arm and tried to talk him into making some sort of deal, and until now that was the only kind of terror I’d ever known.
But now I’d met the real thing, the terror below that one, the terror that makes that one seem like a simple case of hypertension. And I’ll tell you what real terror is like. It’s a wet green swamp with no bottom, and the filthy water coming into your nostrils. It’s a small and slimy toad inside your body, eating your bowels and your stomach, leaving a bile-smeared hollow inside you from your brittle ribs to your exposed genitals. It’s not being able to reverse time for even one second, for one tiny miserable second, to undo the unthinkable. It’s Volpinex with a face like a First World War atrocity case and no more life in him than a sausage.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, sunk back on my haunches as I refused to look any more at Volpinex, continuing to hold the gun because it hadn’t yet occurred to me to put it down, but I was finally getting shakily to my feet—with no idea at all what I would do next, how I would get out of this, what the moves were that followed this one—when all at once Betty was standing in the bedroom doorway, staring open-mouthed at me, at the gun, at Volpinex. And then shrieking.
“Betty,” I said, “listen to me.” But even I couldn’t hear my voice in the midst of those shrieks of hers.
Two Much! Page 18
