Ivy Galvin lit another cigarette and closed her eyes and saw herself clearly. She was standing at the glass doers of their bedroom, hers and Lila’s, staring across the small terrace outside and down into the interior court of the apartment building in which they lived, and Lila opened the door behind her and came into the room. Lila was wearing one of her beautiful tailored suits, the silvery-gray one, and she was, in spite of her day’s work, which must have been arduous, as perfectly groomed in detail as she had been when she left in the morning.
“Hello, darling,” Lila said.
“Hello, Cousin Lila.”
Ivy did not turn away from the glass doors. She continued to look out across the terrace into the interior court. Lila, for an instant, looked annoyed, the thinnest shadow of an expression on the smooth cameo of her face. She removed the tailored jacket of her silvery-gray suit and began carefully to remove her wrist watch and the sapphire ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me Cousin. I’ve told you and told you that I dislike it.”
“I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“Considering everything, it’s rather ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it is?”
“Sometimes I think you do it purposely to annoy me.”
“No. I just forget, that’s all. I always called you Cousin at home.”
“Well, you’re no longer home.” Lila stared at Ivy’s back, and now the shadow on the cameo was a suggestion of slyness. “Perhaps you don’t do it purposely. Perhaps it’s an unconscious expression of hostility.”
“I don’t think so. It’s only a habit.”
“Are you feeling hostile, Ivy?”
“What makes you think I am?”
“Never mind. I see we are about to get into a session of answering questions with questions, which will get us nowhere at all. Have you had a good day?”
“It’s been just an ordinary day.”
“Meaning that it has been a bad one. You have many bad days, don’t you, Ivy? I wish I knew what is the matter with you.”
“There’s nothing the matter with me.”
“Obviously there’s something. Do you think you ought to see someone?”
Lila removed her blouse and skirt and sat down on the bed to remove her shoes and stockings. She did not look at Ivy now, but she somehow gave the impression of doing so. In the room, suddenly, there was at atmosphere of urgent waiting.
“What do you mean, someone?” Ivy said.
“A doctor.”
“No. I don’t need a doctor.”
“You needn’t be so intense about it. It was only a suggestion.”
“I don’t want to see one.”
“Don’t, then. It’s entirely up to you. As a matter of fact, I agree that it’s not necessary and possibly wouldn’t be very wise. Haven’t you dressed today?”
“No. I didn’t see any use in it.”
“You should dress and go out more often.”
“There’s no place to go.”
“On the contrary, there are many places to go.”
“Anyhow, there is no place to go that I want to go, and therefore there’s no sense in going.”
“Perhaps if you tried it, you’d think differently. You should develop an interest in something to keep your mind occupied. You never read a book or look at pictures or listen to music or do anything at all that might divert you and give you pleasure.”
“I’m not clever like you. I’m no good at such things.”
“It doesn’t require a very clever person to read and look at pictures and listen to music. At least you’re not illiterate.”
“That’s something, isn’t it? Thanks for reassuring me.”
“Oh, please don’t imagine slights where none was intended, Ivy. I’m only trying to be helpful.”
“I don’t need any help. I only need to be left alone.”
“Pardon me. If that’s what you need, we should be able to arrange it with no difficulty whatever.”
She stood up in her shimmering white slip at the same moment that Ivy turned from the door. Lifting her hands to her head, she began to remove the pins from the black bun on the back of her neck, and the bun became fluid under her fingers and spilled down between her shoulders in a dark stream. In the movements and features of her body there was the hard and disciplined grace of a ballerina. Watching her, Ivy experienced again the intense and tortured reaction of adoration and submission that she had felt almost the first moment of their meeting.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.
“Didn’t you?” How, precisely, did you mean it?”
“I didn’t mean anything precisely. It’s only that I’m always depressed and afraid of something.”
“Afraid? Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid of what may happen to me.”
“Would you like me to tell you what your trouble is?”
“I don’t think so. I’d rather not hear it.”
“Nevertheless, I think I’ll tell you. Your trouble is, darling, that you have neither the courage to be what you are, nor to become what you are not. You would, I think, be better off dead. When you are like this, which is now almost always, you are not tolerable to yourself or to anyone else. I’m really getting rather sick of you. Did you know that? I’m sick of your moods and your whining and your sad, sad face. You are no longer a pleasure to me, and so far as I can see there is no other excuse for your existence, and certainly none for your living here. Why don’t you go home?”
“You know perfectly well that I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“They wouldn’t have me.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure. They might. They could lock you in your room and pretend to everybody that you had a lingering and fatal illness of some sort. And perhaps you have. Anyhow, it would be just like them.”
“I’ll not go back to them. I’ll go away from here, if that’s what you want, but I’ll not go back.”
“You’d never survive on your own. You’re too ineffectual.”
“I could find a job and another place to stay. I may not be so helpless as you imagine.”
“What kind of job? As a waitress? As a clerk in a store? Don’t be absurd. You are incapable of doing anything worthwhile. In the end, you’d have to find someone else to keep you, if you didn’t get yourself into serious trouble first, and where would you be then? Worse off than ever, I imagine. You would go on and on getting worse and worse off, until you had destroyed yourself and possibly others. If you won’t go home, you will have to stay with me, that’s all there is to be said about it.”
Lila walked over to her dressing table and dropped the hairpins from her black bun into a glass tray and went on without stopping into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. After a minute or two the shower began to run behind the door, and Ivy sat down stiffly on a frail brocaded chair and folded her hands’ in her lap and looked steadily at the hands. It was beginning to get dark in the court outside the glass doors, and darker in the room than out. Between five and six, that meant. Closer to six. It was true, she thought, what Lila had said. It was true that she, Ivy, could do nothing worthwhile and would surely come to a bad end if she tried. It was for her, after all was said and done, only a question of which end of possible ends was a little less bad than the others. The truth was, she wished nowadays only to sit quite still, as she now was, and do nothing whatever. The sound of the shower stopped, and she sat and listened to the silence where the sound had been. Pretty soon Lila came back into the room and turned on a light above the mirror of the dressing table and began to make a selection of clothing from drawers and a closet.
“Where are you going?” Ivy asked. H
er attention locked upon Lila’s naked figure—the white, glowing flesh, the smooth curve of breasts that had known the touch of her fingers, the wide sweep of hips, the enticing length of thigh and calf.
“Out,” Lila said, turning to face Ivy so that the lush richness of her breasts were exposed to Ivy’s feverish glance. There was an odd, taunting look in Lila’s knowing eyes which informed Ivy that Lila was completely aware of the effect of her nudity upon her.
“Are you going to dinner?” Ivy asked. Her voice was a hoarse whisper and there was a dryness in her throat that came from the memory of all the times she had been together with Lila. She felt her breathing quicken and had to fight down an urge to run toward Lila and gather her soft, perfumed flesh in her arms. There was an ache deep inside her, an ache of remembrance of things past, a longing for the sure touch of Lila’s fingers on her body, a pulsating wish to lose herself in the perfumed mystery of Lila’s flesh.
“Yes,” Lila answered curtly.
“Who is taking you?”
“A man. Someone at the agency. I’m meeting him at a cocktail lounge.”
“Have you been with him before?” Ivy asked, forcing herself to stare at her hands, hoping in that manner to quiet the emotional disturbance in her.
“Yes. Several times.”
“Why do you go?”
“Because he’s useful to me. He’s been useful before, and he’ll be useful again.”
“I don’t understand how you can do it.”
“I know you don’t. You’d be better off if you did.”
“Is it possible to be two persons?”
“I’m not two persons. I’m one person who can adjust at different times to different conditions.”
“Is it necessary for you to go tonight?”
“Not absolutely. I’m going because I want to.”
“Please don’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because I want you to stay here with me.”
“No, thank you. You’re not very entertaining company these days.”
“I don’t feel like staying alone.”
“Only a little while ago you were saying that it was exactly what you needed.”
“I said I didn’t mean it. Sometimes when I’m alone too long. I begin thinking about killing myself. I’m afraid I might do it.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance.”
While they were talking, Lila was dressing, and now she slipped her dress over her head and stared at Ivy levelly across the distance that separated them. Her face softened, and she seemed suddenly to regret her words.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not so bad as you imagine, and I don’t wish to be cruel. Just zip me up, darling, and I’ll make you comfortable before I leave.”
She walked over to Ivy and turned her back, and Ivy, standing, pulled up the zipper and locked it. Lila’s shoulders above the dress were as smooth and flawless as her cameo face.
“What do you mean?” Ivy said.
“About making you comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll put you to bed and give you a sedative. Something to make you sleep. It will prevent you from dreaming, and you’ll feel better in the morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know. I’ll be home with you all day.”
“I never take sedatives.”
“It won’t hurt you this once. It’s the kind I take all the time. You have the most fantastic ideas about what’s harmful.”
Lila went to the dressing table again, where she brushed her hair a few strokes and restored the luxurious, dark bun. Then she fixed her face and moved on into the bathroom. Ivy got into bed, sitting erect with her back against the headboard. She heard water running, and the brittle sound of glass against glass. Lila returned with a crystal tumbler half full of a deep pink liquid.
“Here you are,” Lila said. “It will be a little bitter, but not too bad. Just drink it quickly.”
Ivy drank the liquid and slipped down under the covers with her head on her pillow. The bed and the pillow were wonderfully soft, and it would be, she thought, a kind of minor and healing miracle if she could only sleep deeply and quietly through the night, as Lila had promised, without dreams.
“Will you be late?” she said.
“Probably. I may not be back until morning.”
“If I’m asleep when you come, wake me up.”
“We’ll see. Don’t worry about it.”
Lila got her fur coat from the closet and turned off the light above the mirror. In the total darkness that followed for a few seconds the extinction of the light, she spoke again.
“I’ll put some records on the phonograph in the living room.”
“It doesn’t matter. You needn’t bother with it.”
“No. I’ll put them on. I know you’re indifferent to music, but it will soothe you and help you get to sleep sooner. The phonograph will shut itself off when the records are finished.”
She went past the foot of the bed and across the room in the darkness. In the living room, she turned on a table lamp, and the light of the lamp approached the door between the rooms and entered a little way into the darkness. The phonograph began to play softly, the hall door opened and closed, and Ivy, lying alone and sedated in the suddenly enormous apartment, did not know what the music was, its name or its composer, but she knew that it lifted on strings a little of the weight of the night and what the night held, and that Lila, who had been cruel, had in the end been kind.
She lay utterly motionless, except as she moved to breathe, listening to muted strings from one record to another, and the strings no longer seemed to be in the living room, where they had been in the beginning, but above her in the darkness near the ceiling, and they seemed to keep rising and rising, or she kept sinking and sinking, the distance between her and the receding strings becoming vast and incalculable, like the distance to a star, and then all of a sudden the sound of the strings was gone entirely, leaving a profound and terrifying silence, and someone leaned over the foot of her bed in the darkness and silence and terror and said quite clearly: You would, I think, be better off dead.
Lila had said that. She had said it with calm, unequivocal cruelty, and later she had become inexplicably kind and had mixed a sedative, which Ivy had drunk, and had gone away casually to meet a man for dinner so that Ivy could go quietly to sleep and die sleeping quietly. It was revealed to Ivy in a blinding flash of insight a sudden rising into consciousness of a pattern of truth that had formed and cohered without conscious thinking in a deep and primitive part of her brain. In the morning, after enough time had lapsed, Lila would return and find her dead, or nearly dead, and Lila would tell how she had been depressed, had talked of suicide, and it would all be very logical and acceptable, and there were certain people who would receive the news with relief and thankfulness.
The bottle of sedative was in the bathroom, in the little medicine cabinet above the lavatory. Or the bottle in which the sedative had been. Ivy had seen it there only today, when she had found the initiative, somehow, to go and brush her teeth, and she had noticed specifically that the bottle was nearly full, and had wondered vaguely why Lila used the sedative in liquid form when it would have been so much simpler to take as capsules. Anyhow, it was now imperative to go and look at the bottle, to see if it was still nearly full or not, and Ivy swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. The darkness shifted and swayed treacherously, but at the same time was a kind of fluid and tangible mass that pressed upon her and served to hold her erect. Walking very carefully, with one arm stretched ahead of her to feel the way, she went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the little mirror which was also the door of the medicine cabinet, and the bottle was in the cabinet, and it was empty.
There, there, there. That was the proof
of it. She had taken enough of the sedative to kill her, and if she did not wish to die it was necessary to take some kind of action against it. Her mind, for some reason, in spite of the sedative and unreasonable fear of death, was working quits well. It would never do to call a doctor, and it would do even less to call the police. It would not even do to go for help to another inhabitant of the building. It was perfectly clear, if she was to be helped at all, that she must help herself, and the first thing that must clearly be done was to get rid of the sedative inside her. She had no idea how fast it might work, how quickly be absorbed into her blood where it could not be retrieved, but it was certain that it would work more quickly as a liquid than as a capsule, and even now it might be too late. She went over to the commode and got down onto her knees in front of it and gagged herself with the first two fingers of her right hand, and quite a lot of bitter pink fluid came up through her throat and out her mouth to stain the clear water in the porcelain bowl. She knelt there for two or three minutes, retching, and then she stood up and pressed the fingers of her hands against her temples and tried to think what she should do next, if there was anything at all to be done.
Take Me Home Page 3
