It was the small and dubious miracle of my life to watch such a woman slowly, and then more rapidly, turn all her clocks back to eighteen. It must be remembered, and understood, that in all my life I had never given of myself. I knew nothing of the pattern of giving. Those six weeks are as close as I ever came to love. I felt both humble and exultant. I believe that for those six weeks I was a good man. I struck no poses. I had no devious ideas of gain. I wanted only to love her and watch the continuous blossoming of her, a special gift that intrigued us both.
A warm spell in autumn will trick a flower into bloom. It was that way with my Kathy. Her harshness and her coldness went away. Her eyes were soft for me. The textures of her body changed with the flowering of her heart, silky, scented, poised always for acceptance.
We became fools, as do all true lovers. We had our own language, invented our own ceremonies, created our own jokes—and in this way made our own shining wall against the world. I had never heard her laugh aloud until those six weeks of our love. I learned the meanings of all her kinds of laughter, from paean of joy to bawdy guffaw, to velvety chuckle of pleasure. We bought absurd presents for each other down in the city. She was an actress, and a dozen women, and I knew that should I ever learn all aspects of that dozen, I would find a whole second series beyond that, like those clothing store mirrors, where images stretch off at an angle to infinity.
We swam, and we baked in the sun, and we went to the big hotels and sat at their bars and danced to their music, and we made five hundred plans to go away together, all of them necessary and impractical, and we knew we would not go away together, but it was a reality you could not mention.
She knew how much I enjoyed doing small things for her, and so she helped me think of things I could do. One special time was when I would brush that shining hair, a hundred strokes of the brush while she sat erect at the dressing table like an obedient child, her eyes watching me in the mirror. After the hundred strokes, I would wrap the brush in a nylon stocking and brush her hair thirty times more to bring out a special gloss, and then take the crackling electricity out of it with a tortoise shell comb. I was permitted to paint her toenails with the silver lacquer she used, while she looked down at me. She sent me to the city on personal errands. She was a small precious possession, and I cared for her, and her obvious sparkling happiness made me gloat.
We had one game we played often, and I imagine it is a game played by all lovers with but minor variations. She would announce primly, but with a glint of mischief, that on this day we were going to be “good.” And so we would tantalize ourselves with this false pose of noble self-denial as long as possible. But there would come a moment, inevitably, when our eyes would catch and lock, and I would see her mouth soften and see the pulse in her throat become more prominent, and see her head sag just a little as it would seem to become too heavy for her slender neck to support. And wherever we were then, on the beach, in town, at the table, we would pick the quickest route to the inevitable bed. “We’re horrible types,” she would whisper. “No character at all, my darling. No restraint at all, lover. Thank God.”
In the beginning we made a few weak efforts to hide our infatuation from the servants. But soon we ceased to give a damn what they thought. The institution of the lovely wife with a fat old husband and a muscular young lover is a cliché of the Latin world. John Pinelli had been brusque and rude to all three of them. Their approval of us was expressed in small ways that delighted us. Flowers from Armando on the table where we dined. Very special dishes prepared by Rosalinda. Giggles and blushings from Nadina. They all seemed part of a delicious conspiracy.
The intense affair suffered four interruptions during the six weeks. Perhaps the fourth one cannot legitimately be called an interruption. John flew down four times, once alone, once with Sonninger, twice with Sonninger and Race. On the second visit, he took Kathy back to Mexico City with him for two days. While she was gone I roamed my empty world like an abandoned dog. She flew back alone. When I picked her up at the airport, the expression on her face wiped away those two days as though I had never lived them.
It worried me that John Pinelli would see the change in her and guess the reason for it. I did not see how he could help it. I did not see how he could be in the same room with the two of us and not sense what we had become to each other. But she was indignant at my fears, saying they were a slur on her professional ability. And when John was there, she could turn off all that vibrant joy—almost all of it—and become, in some frightening way, a stranger. His fourth short visit cannot be counted as an interruption to our affair. He came with Sonninger and Race, and they stayed but one night, stayed up late, drank heavily. At dawn she awakened me by coming violently into my bed, chuckling, nestling into my chest and throat, her breath hot, her hair clean-scented, her small body sheathed in whispering silk.
Let me say that this adventure did not have a flavor of evil. It was more like a mischievous conspiracy—like children raiding an orchard. In some way we had cleansed ourselves with love. True evil was the incident in the car on the way down into Mexico. Once she spoke of that and said she was sorry in a voice that broke, and wept and was comforted. She wept easily in our days of love.
Sometimes, usually when she was asleep in my arms, I would remember that I had seen this woman on the big screens of movie houses and drive-ins, and on the flat small world of television, and had felt as had all other men watching her, that little twitch of speculation, that recurrent, unavoidable, egocentric daydream of coupling with that electronic projection of desirability. And when the absurdity of your wish becomes apparent to you, the ego protects itself by saying Aw, she’s scrawnier than she looks, and those show biz types are too stuck on themselves to be any damn good in bed, and she’s probably lez anyway.
Then it would seem incredible that I could be so lucky as to hold this almost mythical creature in my arms. I would study her sleeping face, the intricacies of her ear, and of her lips softly parted, study the delicate structuring of nose and brow, the incredibly perfect texture of her skin, the tiny perfect hairs of brow and lashes, like little gilded wires. I would wait in love and patience for her eyes to open, knowing they would be blank, unfocused, uncomprehending as she came out of the private jungles of her sleep, knowing that as they focused upon me a gladness would come into them and the corners of her mouth would lift, knowing she would stretch in supple ways within my arms, give a yawn that would expose the up-curling tongue, and then bring her mouth strongly and greedily against mine, and I would then begin to pleasure her in every way she especially liked.
There is always the perfect confidence of lovers that it will all go on forever. There is a timelessness about such things. The world stood still while I focused my life upon her, totally content. At high noon she loved to lie, Bikini-ed, upon a beach pad on the sun platform down above the beach and have me knead the sun oil into her body until her little moans and sighs of luxury were like the purrings of a cat. When the sting of the sun was too much to endure, we would cool ourselves in the sea, and then go up and have lunch in the shade of the patio. After lunch, before siesta, she relished having me cleanse the last of the sun oil from her body. There was a huge tiled shower stall, and a noisy turbulence of hot water. She would turban her hair in a big towel, and I would scrub her with a large soft brush and the mild musky soap she adored, and as she stood solemn and obedient as a child, I would towel her slenderness and ripeness until she glowed. It was traditional that during these chores I would digress from duty to caresses, and it was a part of our pattern that she would chide me and tell me to keep my mind on my work, please. It was love play, of course, and she enjoyed the pleasure I took in watching her, and it readied us to the point of torment for the love hour in the big bed after which, utterly spent, we would join the siesta sleep of all the rest of the world.
The unending, unendable world of love came to an end on the second day of July. I had fallen asleep facing her and the wall beyond her. She awaken
ed me with a frenzied abruptness, making love to me with rapid little violences, biting at my mouth, making an odd little humming sound, digging me with her nails. Her eyes looked around, wild and mad. She laughed in a flat, strange way. Her intensity brought me quickly out of the blur of sleep into an almost immediate response to her. Of all the creatures she had been and had pretended to be, this one was quite new to me. But it was a part of our love, and if she felt like simulating a frenzy close to madness, I would play it her way. She was in such continual writhing motion that it took a surprising amount of strength to catch and cup the frantic chalice of her hips, and pin her long enough to permit a hasty joining.
But the moment I had accomplished that entrapment and that abrupt depth of conquest, I heard directly behind me sounds that seemed to stop my heart. I heard a low ferine grunting, a bestial gasping, a flat, splashing liquidity. I spun away from her to turn and stare at John Pinelli. He was not six feet from me. He held onto the footboard of the other bed. He was doubled over, vomiting on the tile floor. I knew instantly that she had been awake and had seen him come in, and had chosen to use me to hurt him in the most vicious way any man can be hurt. As she had aroused me to her purpose, she had been looking toward him, defying him, flinging him that ultimate challenge. Her frenzy had been built upon hate. It had not been love, but exhibition.
At the moment he was incapable of looking at me, and I knew I could not endure it if he were to look at me. I ran to the chair, took my damp swimming trunks that hung from the back of it, and yanked them on.
“Don’t leave me now, darling!” she called, projecting with full dramatic volume and timbre. “Don’t leave me like this, lover!” And, crouched there on the rumpled bed, her silvery hair in wild disarray, her face venomous, she began to scream with laughter.
As I tried to go by him he straightened up, eyes streaming, and reached a heavy arm toward me. I do not know what he was trying to do or express. In pure panic I swung and hit him, heavily, blindly, I know not where, and heard him fall behind me as I went through the door. Rosalinda was standing at the far end of the corridor, her eyes huge, brown fists pressed to her belly. As I raced by her I saw her cross herself.
There was no place in the world I could go. And I could never go fast enough to run away from memory. In my touching innocence I thought I was the owner of the world’s most vivid and most distressing memory. The world is seldom charitable to fools.
I hesitated, then went out through the front of the house, across the the terrace and down the steps to the beach. The tide was almost high, and there was a medium sea rolling in. I lay on the platform. The sea slid under me and smashed the rocks and threw spray high. I rolled over onto my back and the spray fell onto my face. On my lips it tasted as salty as tears. For a long time I thought I was going to be sick. But the feeling finally went away.
I was eye to eye with a contradiction, one many men have faced. If my love was capable of doing what she had done, then I had never known her at all. If I did not know her at all, then our love had been an indelicate farce. Are not all young men incurably romantic? The world cures the uncurable, however. And so in a lonely way, wrapped in the roar of the sea, I celebrated the death of love, or of illusion. Because I still loved the imaginary woman who could not have used me to strike such a deadly blow at the heart of her husband. But she had never existed.
This, I told myself, was no way for a sophisticate to behave. I ordered myself to put it all into proper perspective. A fading actress had dared play an ingénue role because her audience, her naïve intrigant, had been so very uncritical. I had been handy and healthy when she had desired fun and games. I counted her flaws: the almost invisible crescent scars at her temples from the cosmetic operation that had tautened the skin of her face into a semblance of youth; the beautiful teeth—expensively capped; the hair roots that were causing her much less trouble now that they were growing out gray; the crenelations of the flesh on the insides of her thighs; the deflated sag of her small breasts when she forgot to keep her shoulders well back; the ugly toes, crumpled by years of shoes too small; the peasant thickness and stubbiness of her hands and feet; the frank and blatant indelicacy with which she referred to all matters physiological.
But even her flaws were unbearably precious.
I knew exactly what a true sophisticate would do, and by God, I would do it. I would stay as inconspicuous as possible until they finished their battling and John Pinelli went back to the city. Their fights in the car had ended quickly. Her little hobbies couldn’t actually mean very much to him. So I would stick around and we’d continue the same pleasant routine.
Everything, I told myself, would be exactly as before. And I wondered why I started to feel sick again. She would sparkle for me, and we would divert each other with all our little games and devices and love words and private jokes. There would be but one small difference. This time I would know it didn’t really mean anything—to either of us. I hung my head over the edge of the sun platform and vomited into the sudsy green sea.
When it was over, I wondered how long I had been there. A long time. At least two hours. Possibly more. I squinted at the sun and estimated that it was six of its own diameters above the edge of the sea.
I heard a faint sound over the roaring of the waves. I looked up. A man stood on the cantilevered steps, fifteen feet above the plaform, calling my name. I stared up at him, raising my eyebrows, pointing at myself. He made that strange Mexican beckoning gesture which looks as if they are waving you away rather than summoning you. He stood just beyond the reach of the spray.
I went up the steps to him. He was a big man. He wore a pale silk jacket, sharply tailored, a grey bow tie, a cocoa straw hat with a feather. He looked like Don Ameche a little bit.
“Mr. Kirby Stassen?”
“Yes.”
“I am of the police. Come with me, please.” His English was very clear and deliberate. I followed him up the steps, thinking that John was giving me the roust the hard way. All he had to do was tell me to go.
There were five people in the living room. The three servants were lined up. A fat sleepy-looking policeman in uniform stood behind them. Another big Mexican in a white linen jacket stood facing them. He turned as we came in. He wore a blue shirt and a maroon bow tie, a straw hat just like the one who had come to get me. He looked a little bit like Richard Nixon, but bigger and jowlier. They were two smooth types. They had those police eyes, direct and skeptical.
White Jacket motioned toward me and projected a flood of fast Spanish at Rosalinda. Rosalinda answered. I could not follow the words. But I saw the pantomime that accompanied them. I saw John Pinelli stalking in. I saw the embrace that meant love. I saw myself running out, and going down to the beach. White Jacket tapped his watch and hammered her with short questions. She answered with explosive dignity.
Ameche said to me, choosing his words, “The woman says that you have been down at the beach while this thing has happened.”
“What has happened?”
“You heard no shots?”
“I didn’t hear anything! What happened?”
“Come with us, please,” Ameche said. He gave an order to the uniformed man. I went with White Jacket and Ameche to the master bedroom.
At the doorway, Ameche said, “Kindly do not step into the blood, Mr. Stassen.”
I had no intention of so doing. There was a Fourth of July smell of cordite in the room, and the bland sick smell of blood, and the sharpness of vomit. John Pinelli lay face down on the floor by the foot of the bed where his wife and I had made love. He lay in an ocean of blood. A partial dental bridge lay three feet from his head, a small ship making sail across the sea.
I gagged. I looked for Kathy. I did not see her.
Ameche showed me a gun. I had not seen him pick it up. He held it by a yellow pencil he had inserted in the barrel. It was a hell of a big gun, a Colt .45-caliber revolver with walnut grips. He held it so I could read the silver plates set into each grip,
first on one side and then on the other.
One side said, “The John P., fastest gun on location.”
The other side said, “From Wade, Joan and Sonny—‘Action at Box Canyon.’ ”
I remembered seeing the movie a few years ago, a pretty good Western. I had not known Pinelli was connected with it in any way.
“Are you familiar with this firearm?” Ameche asked me.
“I’ve never seen it before.”
He laid the gun on the bed, retrieved his pencil. “I shall make a reconstruction for you, Mr. Stassen.” He walked to the wall, skirting the blood. He pointed out four widely spaced scars in the plaster, each about four feet off the floor.
“He stood about where my associate is standing, and he fired these four shots at the woman. She was dodging back and forth, screaming. One of them caused the wound upon her arm, here.” He touched his left arm just below the shoulder. “This spray of blood is from that minor wound. It is believed that she then sought refuge under the bed, still screaming. He knelt and crawled after her and placed the muzzle of the gun against her body, here.” He pressed his finger down against the top of his shoulder, near his neck. “The large slug ranged downward through her body, killing her. The impact slid her halfway out from under the bed. He stood up, walked around the bed, and turned her over onto her back and fired once again into the center of the stomach. He pulled her out from under the bed all the way to look at her face and be sure she was dead. The gun was men empty. He walked to the bureau there and took one more shell. He walked back and stood where he could see her, and shot himself in the throat and fell where you now see him.”
Yes, I could see John Pinelli. But as he had explained how it happened, I had grown more and more conscious of what I couldn’t see, what I didn’t want to see. I knew where it was. I took four slow steps. And I could see her. There had been much blood in her too. She lay naked on the tile, tiny and gray and shrunken, her hair lifeless, her cheeks sucked in, her eyes turned up out of sight, her small teeth showing. Her breasts had sagged flat. She looked like an old, old woman.
The End of the Night Page 11
