A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Eyes wide, he touched his cheek. “Poor old Horace,” he said, chuckling. “Everyone warned him. They told him it wouldn’t last the year. Little did they know just how faithful you’d be.”

  “Get out!” she screamed in a lunge that half-toppled him from the couch and left her trembling on its edge.

  She locked the door and turned off all the lights. She sat back down and finished her drink, holding the glass to her mouth a long time. It seemed vital that she consume every drop, every sound, every smell. She was exhausted, but every nerve tensed with the fear of sleep. This was the last of caution, she thought, her eyes scanning the shadows with mounting dread. Now there was only this room and that wild place she had come from. She had gotten so far on the shortest of tethers. She would die alone, in the dark of this room, alone, if she didn’t get out of here, if she didn’t do something. She ran along the dark hallway to the intercom at the bottom of the back staircase. On the seventh buzz, his staticky voice answered, “What? What is it?”

  “Mack? Mack, are you up? It’s Frances.”

  Every day at noon, they met at the pool, by degrees turning the chaise longues, angling them throughout the afternoon, their long oil-slicked bodies gleaming in line with the sun. The cocktail hour began at five, and then they would sit out there until the sun set. For the last two nights, they had eaten at the club, not getting home until midnight.

  Martha watched them cross the moonlit driveway, their arms around each other’s waists until they came to the narrow stairway up to the garage apartment. Laughing, they stumbled in to one another and then Mack stepped back to let Frances enter first. The lights never came on. For the next few hours, she watched the windows leak a deeper darkness into the night.

  It was finally morning now, and she was listening for the squeak of a door or the sag of a floorboard that would signal Frances’s return. To make sure Frances hadn’t slipped in unheard, she peeked into her room and saw the bed still littered with Frances’s clothes. In the cold morning light, the tangles of bright skirts and shorts and cotton dresses, so heedlessly tossed, were as shocking as if she had come upon her aunt’s naked body.

  “Bitch!” she muttered, grabbing a dress and throwing it across the room. “Bitch … the bitch …” She was flinging the clothes onto the floor.

  “Stop that!” Frances ordered from behind. She reached for Martha’s upraised arm. “Put that down!” She yanked Martha’s hand to her side.

  Frances’s eyes were puffy, the wrinkles around her mouth and nose darkly embedded. “What are you doing?” she demanded, staring at the mess of clothes on the floor.

  “Nothing,” Martha muttered. She began picking up the clothes and putting them back on the bed. Head down, she hurried past Frances into the hallway.

  Throughout the day, she was conscious of their watchfulness. Even now, from her room, she could see them by the pool, looking uneasily toward the house every now and again, their heads turning suddenly, squinting, startled as if the distant boom, the flash of wings, the child’s cry on some errant wind might be her.

  Behind them, the pool shimmered. Frances rolled from her back onto her stomach, then reached across and laid her hand in the small of Mack’s back, her fingertips tucked under the elastic of his swim trunks. Quickly his hand swung back to remove hers. Laughing, Frances slapped his backside. He turned over and sat up, his eyes scanning the house, the way one would a darkening sky.

  She stepped back, suddenly remembering a time when the school nurse had called her father to come and take her home. She had fallen in the schoolyard and skinned both palms and then wouldn’t let the nurse even look at them. Her father’s tall stiff presence coming down the hallway had struck her as that of a stranger. He had seemed totally alien to her. When he stepped into the office, he spoke to the nurse, who kept her back to Martha (… there were things Mr. Horgan should know … not like other children …). She had been afraid of her father that day. His voice was different, his shoulders set too straight, his head caught as if in mid-blow. He was defenseless. In town, as long as he came on Beecham business, he was respected and catered to. But on his own, he was a fragile man, and she was his greatest flaw. Just as she had now become Mack’s.

  She remembered the sudden terror that had risen in her skull, and the cold air meeting the gravel-studded flesh of her palms as her father offered them up to the nurse, and the look that had passed between them, father and daughter, the cold unyielding acknowledgment that there, out there, the world was dangerous, and that survival depended upon acquiescence. There, her father would not tolerate strangeness. It was only at home that he left her alone to flourish in her abundance of quirks and terrors.

  She watched from the side of the shade. Frances was reading beneath the brim of a floppy straw hat. Mack sat on the side of the chaise, facing her. He leaned forward expectantly. When Frances finished reading, she looked up and said something. He smiled, nodding as she spoke, and then she handed back the sheaf of papers. Martha realized that it must have been something Mack had written. Her hand hit the window shade and it snapped up. Every time she pulled down the shade, it snapped back up against the roller. Finally, with the two of them staring up at her, she got the shade down.

  Eighteen

  Mack sliced a cucumber and shredded half a head of lettuce. Next he sliced a carrot, dropping it unpeeled into the bowl.

  “Reminds me of my old short-order days,” he said.

  Martha kept stirring the onions and peppers round and round in the sizzling butter. She made a hamburg patty, and the slap of her hands on the cold raw meat came like a throb, a painful nakedness, an intimacy so acute it disoriented her that he stood so far apart. She turned dizzily toward the stove.

  “I’m on a new regimen,” he was saying. “Good food, fresh mountain air, and no booze!” He sat at the glass table, facing her. “I feel great,” he said, starting to eat. “I can think straight, which for most people isn’t any big deal, being able to think straight—but for me, it’s a tremendous shock. I’ve been so used to this mush brain, I forgot what it’s like to go from point A to point D or G or whatever, in a straight line.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Well, anyway.” He sighed. “It feels good.”

  She stood with her back to him while her hamburg fried. The grease splatters rained onto the stove top. She flipped the hamburg and it sizzled in the grease. She turned, oblivious to the spatula dripping grease down the front of her shirt. “Did you tell her?” she asked.

  “Tell? Did I tell …” His face paled. “No! Of course I didn’t! I wouldn’t. No!” he said, coming closer. “And you mustn’t either!”

  “I know what’s going on, you know. Don’t think I don’t!”

  “Nothing’s going on. Frances and I have become good friends. Martha, she says I can stay here as long as I want. You don’t know what that means to me, what that’s worth. This is the end of the line for me, the last stop. You know when I knocked on your door that first night?”

  She nodded.

  “I had no place to go and not a friend left on the face of the earth, but the worst of it was, I didn’t even care. I haven’t cared for a long time about anything. And now there’s so much to care about. I care about you and I care about this place and I care about Frances; I like her. But I’ll be honest. What I care about more than anything else is my writing. It’s going almost too well. I wake up every morning now panicky. I keep thinking it’s no good, that it must be lousy if it’s so easy. And then I read it and I swear to God it seems like somebody else wrote it. There’ll be certain phrases or even whole sentences I won’t remember writing. And you see … what I’m trying to say … in a way, it’s … it’s like what happened …” he said, his face moving closer in his hungry, draining way. “The things I did … Jesus, they were brutal. It’s like the same thing—the dark side of it—only it’s disgusting. It’s so disgusting. It’s like … like fouling yourself in your sleep!” His eyes were bright and his face s
trained with the force of some vile expulsion.

  The back door creaked open onto Julia Prine, and Mack hurried out of the room.

  “Martha,” she said calmly, though her cheeks flushed with alarm. “You’ve gotten grease all over yourself.” She wet a dish towel and from under the sink took a bottle of pine-scented cleanser and began to scrub at the spots on Martha’s shirt front. “Are you all Tight?” she asked.

  Martha nodded, her eyes thick with tears.

  “What did he say to you?” Julia demanded. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing,” Martha insisted.

  That night Steve called. His voice was low and indistinct, as if he had to muffle it at his end. Martha carried the phone into the study, where Frances sat reading a book Mack had chosen for her.

  “I’m busy tonight,” Frances said to him. “There’s nothing to discuss.… You already did.… You made yourself perfectly clear the last time you were here.” She hung up and sat for a few minutes before she crossed the driveway and went up to see Mack. His typewriter had been going all night. It stopped, but then, a few minutes later, Martha was relieved to hear the typing start, and then she saw Frances come down the stairs and return to the house.

  It was long past midnight when Martha raised herself on one elbow, her hand at her mouth, her eyes wide. She crept out of bed and listened at her closed door. When the footsteps passed, she turned her knob, and held it from clicking, while she opened the door a crack. At the end of the dark hallway, Mack was closing Frances’s door softly behind him. She tiptoed down the hallway to the linen closet, where she huddled in the deep alcove, and listened to them groaning, each panting the other’s name. She covered her ears, imploring them to stop … stop … stop.… “Stop it!”

  “Stop that!” Frances cried, pulling her from the dark doorway. “What’s wrong? What’re you doing in here?” Her free hand clutched the front of her robe closed.

  “It must have been a nightmare,” Mack said, trying to catch his breath. Wrapped in a sheet, he stood behind Frances with sweat dripping from his nose and chin. “Martha, you were having a nightmare, weren’t you?”

  “You’re all right. Everything’s all right. Just go back to bed now and everything will be all right,” they coaxed her back down the hall, their raw voices writhing together, each reeking of the other.

  All week long, she had stayed out of their way. If they came into the kitchen, she fled into the study. Since the last few days had been overcast, neither one of them had gone out to the pool. So she did, in pants and an old shirt of her father’s. She brought out a magazine, which she glanced at from time to time to keep from staring at the house. She saw the light in Frances’s bathroom go on, then a few minutes later watched Mack come out and hurry over to the apartment, his eyes downcast as if he had no idea she was there. Closing the magazine, she curled up on her side against the bite of the wind through the trees.

  On Wednesday, Julia drove up and found her like this. “Martha? Martha?” She kept prodding her shoulder. “Are you all right? Martha!”

  She feigned a deep sleep until Julia finally went inside, and then she ran around the back of the house and tiptoed up the dim rear staircase to her room. She could hear the two women’s voices down in the kitchen; at times Frances’s voice rose shrilly. After Julia left, Frances banged on her door. “Why are you doing this?” Frances demanded, rattling the knob. And when she didn’t respond, there was a moment of quiet, and then Frances said, so close against the door that there seemed to be a stir of air in the stale gray room, “Go, then! Why don’t you just go and let me be!”

  At night, she was awakened by the briefest sounds, an owl’s sudden hoot, a tree branch lashing the brick, the curtains gasping in and out over the sill. Fists clenched, she trembled with every murmur, every creak of the sagging springs, until finally, inevitably, it began again, the dull rhythmic rub of the bed frame under their pummeling wet bellies. Turning, she spread herself hungrily to the black damp chill and started the cold snap of her flanks up and down, up and down, all the while thinking of him. The next morning, she dragged out of bed, as weakened by their lovemaking as they were, the three of them limp and disheveled.

  The calls had come to seem like rituals in a ceremony that had to be performed a certain number of times before Birdy would come to her. First she would call her at home and listen to the recording, which she now found strangely soothing. Next she would call the Cleaners. As soon as one of the women answered, she would hang up, wait a while, then try again. The space between calls was growing shorter and shorter. One of these times Birdy was bound to answer. She longed for someone to talk to, so she could understand what was happening here. On her last call to the Cleaners this morning, John had screamed her name into the phone, so she had forced herself to wait two hours before making this one. She had just picked up the phone when she heard a woman’s voice on the line, answering, “Sheffield Publishing.”

  “Mr. Burke, please,” Mack said. She could tell by the static that he was using the phone in the apartment.

  “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  There was a pause. “Uh, Colin Mackey. I’m one of his authors!” he added in a rush, as if to get that in before she could hang up. “He’s my editor!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mackey, but Mr. Burke isn’t in right now. Could I take your number and have him call you back?”

  “That’s what they said yesterday, and the day before, and he still hasn’t called me,” Mack said.

  “I’ll give him your number, sir, if …”

  “He’s already got the goddamn number. Go look on his desk. There must be thirty little pink slips there that say Colin Mackey! Colin Mackey! Colin Mackey! Goddamn it, I have to talk to him! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mackey, I’ll tell him you’ve called and that you’re very anxious to speak to him.”

  Mack groaned. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I apologize for that.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. I’ll give him …”

  “Miss! You see, I’m starting to feel a little desperate here.” His voice cracked. “Look, between you and me, I know what the problem is. I know why he won’t call me. But would you tell him—would you write this down, please?—that I’m going to pay back every cent, every penny I owe him. All I ask is that he just listen to what I’m doing. That’s all I ask.”

  “I have that, sir. And I have a lot of calls coming in right now. So I’ll give him that message. Thank you.” The woman hung up.

  His bitter laugh sent a chill through Martha. “Yah, okay. Thank you. And thank him, the son of a bitch, the fucking no good faggot.” He banged down the phone.

  Later that afternoon, Mack told Frances that Leland Burke had finally called him back. Martha’s head shot up at the obvious lie. The phone had rung only once all day, and that had been a wrong number. She tiptoed out of the study and stood near the living-room door. He lay on the sofa with his head in Frances’s lap. She was running her fingers through his hair.

  “It’s the dialogue he wants me to be tough on. He reminded me how much I do of it. Too much.” He raised his head. “He’s right. I just go on and on with it.”

  “Does he want to see it? Have you sent him any of it yet?” Frances asked, her voice catching with this girlish apprehension it took on lately whenever they discussed his book.

  “He’s good. He’ll listen. He’ll give his writers all the time they need, but he wants the whole thing.”

  “But what if you finish it and he hates it?”

  “He won’t hate it! How can he hate it? He knows how it’s going. This morning he made me read him half a chapter.”

  “What did he say?”

  “After I finished, there was this quiet, you know. This silence. And I thought I was going to be sick, and then he said that’s what he’s been waiting for all these years. My big book, he said. He blew my mind.”

  “Oh my God, Mack, I’m so happy for you!”

  Martha tiptoed down th
e hallway, and suddenly Frances was behind her.

  “You’re doing it again! You’ve got to stop this lurking!” she called as Martha ran up to her room. “It’s driving me crazy! Or is that what you want? I think it is!”

  As soon as Frances left for the club, Martha hurried across the driveway and up the stairs to the garage apartment. She had to knock for quite a few minutes before Mack finally opened the door.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, looking past her to the house. “Something wrong?”

  She held the heavy flannel shirt closed at her throat. All the day’s rawness had lodged in her bones. “I want to talk with you.”

  “You caught me at a bad time.”

  “I always catch you at a bad time.”

  “I’m working, that’s all I meant, Martha.”

  “I can wait. I’ll be quiet. I won’t say a word.” She’d love to sit in here and watch him write.

  He had been shaking his head. “Besides,” he said, “Frances will be back any time.”

  “So?” she said, her gaze so unwavering that he looked away. “What’s wrong with me being here? This is where I lived my whole life.”

  “You know what I mean, Martha. You know what she thinks.” He looked at her fearfully.

  “She thinks I stare at you and I follow you and I eavesdrop on all your conversations.”

  He winced with each declaration, and when she stopped he looked surprised.

  “But I don’t do it on purpose. Sometimes I look up and I see you looking at me. Why do you do that?” She tried to make it sound like a reasonable enough question. She forced a weak smile.

  He shrugged. “I’m just looking. It’s a normal reaction. Two or three people in a room, you look at them.”

  “That’s right. And it doesn’t mean you’re staring, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And when I say something and you hear me, it doesn’t mean you’re eavesdropping. You couldn’t help it. You just heard it, right?”