The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  Del said, ‘All the same, man, you ain’t getting near enough bread for this kind of a deal. And that Broderick is loaded. I mean loaded.’

  ‘All I want is what’s coming to me. If I wanted more I would have told him so.’

  ‘Sure enough. But you know how much that Yates said that Belinda boat cost? Forty thousand. And that Caddie of theirs up in Palm Beach. Man, that heap had everything in it but a Coke machine.’

  ‘What about it? All they are is a couple of fat old men with a lot of money. You want to trade around with them, just remember that the fat and the old goes along with the money.’

  Del shook his head. ‘Then it’s no trade, man. What happens after Freeport? You don’t figure to come back with them two, do you?’

  ‘Hell, no. I figure we do some of those islands around there. Then maybe Mexico. Acapulco. How does that grab you?’

  ‘Any place as long as it ain’t Danang or like that grabs me just fine.’ Del looked up over his shoulder. ‘And talking about that—’ The Coast Guard helicopter was in sight again, loudly making its northward run along the coast. ‘Man, it makes me sick to even hear the sound of them things now,’ Del said. ‘I can feel that pack breaking my back all over again.’

  ‘Full field pack,’ Chappie said. ‘Stuffed full of those delicious C-rations.’

  When they pulled alongside Belinda II, Broderick was at the wheel of the cruiser, Yates was at the rail watching them. Yates took the line Chappie handed up to him and made it fast to Belinda II. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘look who’s home again. And with a tale to tell, I’m sure, about what went wrong and why.’

  Chappie disregarded him. He went aboard the cruiser, and Del, after tilting the outboard motor out of the water, followed him. Broderick looked them over.

  ‘Not even breathing hard,’ he said. ‘A couple of real tough ones.’

  Chappie went over to the card table where Broderick and Yates played gin when someone else was at the wheel. He pulled the plastic bag from under his waistband, turned it upside down, and let the knife and the ear fall out on the table. The ear was putty-colored now, its severed edge a gummy red and brown where the ooze of blood had clotted.

  The little smile on Broderick’s face disappeared. He released the wheel and walked over to the table, eyes fixed on it. Del immediately grabbed the wheel and steadied it. He said to Broderick, ‘What the hell you looking so surprised at, man? He told you he could do it, didn’t he? And bring back all the proof you wanted, didn’t he?’

  Broderick stood staring at the table. Then he stared at Chappie the same intent way, wiping a hand slowly back and forth over his mouth. Finally he said in a thick voice, ‘You really killed somebody? I mean, killed him?’

  Chappie nodded at the table. ‘You think he just lay there and asked me to cut that off him?’

  ‘But who was he? My God, you couldn’t even know who he was!’

  ‘I’m in no rush,’ Chappie said. ‘I can wait to find out when we see the papers over in Freeport tomorrow. But I’m not waiting until then for the payoff.’ He held out his hand and wiggled the fingers invitingly. ‘Right now’s the time.’

  ‘Payoff?’

  ‘Man, you said it was your ten dollars to my dime I couldn’t do it. So I did it. Now it’s payoff time.’

  Broderick said in anguish, ‘But I swear to God I never meant you to go through with it. I never expected you to. It was just talk, that’s all. You knew it was just talk. You must have known it.’

  ‘You told him the layout there,’ Del said. ‘You told him where to look for somebody he could waste. You were the one scared about that chopper spotting us coming back here. Man, don’t you start crawfishing now.’

  ‘Now look,’ Broderick said, then stopped short, shaking his head at his own thoughts.

  Yates walked over to him fast, caught hold of his wrist. ‘Listen to me, Brod. I’m talking to you as your lawyer. You give him any money now, you are really in this up to your neck. And you’re not taking them to the Bahamas or anywhere else out of the country. We can make it to Key Largo before dark and they’ll haul out right there.’

  Chappie shrugged. ‘Freeport, Key Largo, whatever makes you happy.’ He picked up the knife from the table, opened its blade, held it up, admiring the way the sunlight ran up and down the blade. Then he levered the knife at Broderick’s belly. ‘But first I collect everything that’s coming to me.’

  Broderick looked down at the knife, looked up at Chappie’s face. Behind him at the wheel, Del said, ‘There’s two of us, man,’ and Broderick pulled his wrist free of Yates’ grip on it, shoved his hand into his hip pocket. He came up with a wad of bills in a big gold clip. He drew a ten-dollar bill from the clip and held it out to Chappie. ‘For ten lousy dollars,’ he said unbelievingly.

  Chappie took the bill, studied it front and back as if making sure it was honest money. Then he slowly tore it in half, held the two halves high and released them to the breeze. They fluttered over the jackstaff at the stern of Belinda II and landed in her wake not far behind the trailing dinghy.

  ‘That was the nothing part of the deal,’ Chappie said. ‘Now how about the real payoff?’

  ‘The real payoff?’ Broderick asked.

  ‘Mister, you told me that if I pulled it off you’d come right out and say you didn’t know what it was all about. You told me you’d look me straight in the eye and say there’s just as good men in Nam right now as that chicken company you were with in Korea. Just as good and maybe a lot better. Now say it.’

  Broderick said between his teeth, ‘If your idea of a good man—’

  Chappie reached out, and lightly prodded Broderick’s yachting jacket with the point of the knife. ‘Say it.’

  Broderick said it. Then he suddenly wheeled and lurched into the cabin, Yates close on his heels. Through the open door Chappie watched them pour out oversized drinks.

  ‘Key Largo’s the place,’ he said to Del at the wheel, and as Belinda II swung southward, picking up speed as she went, Chappie stood there, his lip curled, watching the two men in the cabin gulping down their Jim Beam until Yates took notice of him and slammed the cabin door shut as hard as he could.

  The Other Side of the Wall

  ‘So,’ Dr Schwimmer said. ‘So. It comes to this at last. The inevitable. Confrontation, penetration, decision-making, action. Wait.’

  The office door was partly open. Through it could be heard the sound of a typewriter being pecked at slowly and uncertainly. The doctor rose from behind his desk, crossed the room, and closed and locked the door. He returned to the swivel chair behind the desk. The desk was long and wide, a polished slab of walnut mounted on stainless steel legs and without drawers. Arranged on it were a crystal ashtray; a cardboard box of straw-tipped Turkish cigarettes – (‘I don’t even enjoy smoking,’ the doctor remarked, squaring the edge of the box with the edge of the ashtray, ‘but these help the image, you understand. The exotic, somewhat mysterious image I cultivate to impress the impressionable females in my clientele.’); a razor-edged, needle-pointed letter-opener of Turkish design – (‘Also part of the image, naturally. Again the exoticism of the Near East, with its suggestion of the menacingly virile.’); a cigarette lighter; a small brass tube like a lipstick container, which did not contain lipstick but a breath deodorant that left the mouth reeking of peppermint; and a neat little tape recorder, an XJE-IV Memocord, not much larger than the box of Turkish cigarettes.

  ‘So.’ The doctor leaned toward the tape recorder. He hesitated, then sat back in his chair. ‘No. No need to put any of this on tape, Albert.’

  ‘Why, Doctor? Is it too intensely personal to be recorded for posterity?’

  ‘I am a psychotherapist, Albert. All the business transacted in this room is intensely personal.’

  ‘Never to this extent though, is it? And that name Albert. Must you continually address me by it? You know how I detest it.’

  ‘Too bad. But I will address you as Albert. This is necessary. It is a wa
y of establishing identities and relationships. And consider the distinguished men who bore that name. Einstein. Schweitzer. They seemed to survive it reasonably well, didn’t they?’

  ‘I still detest it. There wasn’t even a sensible reason for being saddled with it. No one in the family ever had it. Mother was enamored of the figure on the tins of tobacco Father smoked, that’s all. An incredible woman. Imagine naming one’s firstborn after a pipe tobacco. Or was she so viciously foresighted that she knew this was the perfect name for a child who was doomed to become a bald, potbellied, blobby-nosed little man with weak vision and a perpetually nagging sinus condition?’

  ‘So. Suddenly we are faced with the ghost of the mother?’

  ‘Why not, Doctor? I didn’t manufacture my own ugliness, did I?’

  ‘Albert, if I were a Freudian, we could have such a good time with this mother image. We could make it your sacrificial goat, stuff all your problems into it, and slaughter it. So. But luckily for us, I am not a Freudian. Your dead mother deserves better than to be declared guilty of your misfortunes. Consider how she made it her duty to bolster your shaky ego every day of her life. Your academic brilliance, your professional success, your devotion to her – it was like a catechism to her, the recitation of her admiration for you day after day.’

  ‘It was a trap. It was a pit I lived in like a captured tiger, feeding on those greasy chunks of admiration she flung to me.’

  ‘So. Very dramatic. Very colorful. But an evasion, Albert. Only an evasion.’

  ‘Is it? Then what about the father image? The big, handsome, loud-mouthed father. And the two handsome, muscular brothers. The overwhelming males in my home. And me the runt of the litter.’

  ‘You were, Albert. But never overwhelmed. Consider the facts. Your father died when you were a child. His absence may have affected you, but never his presence. And that pair of clods, Albert, those two handsome, muscular brothers, stood in awe of your intellect, were wary of your cold self-restraint, terrified of your unpredictable explosions of temper. They quickly learned not to step over the lines you drew. Do you remember how one earned a broken leg when he was tripped up by you at the head of the staircase for trying a little bullying? How the other found himself playing a game where he was locked in a trunk and almost smothered in payment for a small insult? Yes, yes, a few such episodes and they soon came to understand that one did not carelessly tread on the toes of this small, fat, pale older brother with the thick eyeglasses and the sniffle. They are still afraid of you, Albert. They are two of your very few triumphs. But it is your failure alone that concerns us. Let us get on with it.’

  ‘My failure? Am I the only one in this room stamped with failure? My dear Doctor, what about the way you’ve managed to destroy a splendid practice in a few short months? Eccentricity is one thing, Doctor. Patients like a little eccentricity in their therapists. But they also draw lines. A therapist who lives in a daze, who sits lost to the world when patients are trying to communicate with him, who angrily sends them packing when they resent this – what did you think was bound to happen to this practice in short order? And what course did you think your fellow professionals would take when they observed your grotesque behavior? Did you really expect them to continue to refer patients to you? No, Doctor, there is no need to rush through this consultation. No need to look at clocks and measure out your time in expensive little spoonfuls any longer. The clocks have stopped. We have all the time to ourselves now we can possibly use.’

  ‘Albert, listen to me. This room is not meant to be an arena where we turn our cruelty on each other. We are not antagonists. We will achieve nothing through antagonism.’

  ‘You’re a coward, Doctor.’

  ‘We are both cowards about some things, Albert. Do you think I disparage you when I say you are essentially a creature of emotion? Believe me, I do not.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You’re much too clever with words, Doctor, to be believed in that regard. Creature of emotion. What you mean is incorrigible romantic, don’t you? An ugly little wretch stuffed to the bursting point with romantic visions. Made self-destructive by them. A fifty-year-old man flung back into adolescence and unable to claw his way out of it. Why shouldn’t you disparage him?’

  ‘Because, Albert, you are not play-acting your condition. You are not pretending you face a crisis. The condition is real. The crisis is real. One does not disparage a reality.’

  ‘A reality based on dreams? On sexual fantasies dredged up from my unconscious while I lie snoring in bed?’

  ‘All these are realities, too. Are scientific laws and material objects the only reality? No, no, Albert. Your mistake from the start was in not recognizing the validity of those dreams. Of the situation they depicted.’

  ‘But the situation was all in my own mind.’

  ‘In your emotions. Your emotions, Albert. If tests were made while you were asleep and dreaming of this woman, they would clearly indicate physiological reactions. A quickened breathing, an increase in blood pressure, sexual excitation.’

  ‘Just as I told you. All the symptoms of delayed adolescence. The pimply high school boy’s nightly dreams of his nubile girl friend. The only difference is that in the daylight he joins her in some noisy roost where they happily share a nauseous concoction of ice cream and syrup and hold hands under the table. While all I could do was turn night dreams into day dreams.’

  ‘Slowly, Albert. Confrontation, penetration, decision-making, action. Each in its turn. So far we have barely begun the penetration. We have merely put aside the cliches of the possessive mother and bullying siblings and turned to the image of the dream woman herself. We have a distance to go before the decision-making.’

  ‘Girl, Doctor. Maiden, if you will. Not woman.’

  ‘So? Is it important that she has not reached full womanhood?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like women. Something happens to a girl the instant she becomes one. In that instant she becomes too knowing, too wise, too self-sufficient to provide happiness for any man.’

  ‘Not any man. Perhaps only men who are afraid they don’t measure up. Tell me, Albert. What kind of man were you in your first dreams of this girl? Still the small, fat, fifty-year-old lump of self-hatred? Or heroic in dimensions?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to remember.’

  ‘Think. Penetrate.’

  ‘I’m trying to. Not heroic. That much I’m sure of. Beyond that, I still don’t know. I wasn’t aware of my body, my appearance, my deficiencies. Only of my sensations when I saw her there. Ecstatic recognition. Passionate desire for her. And I remember my own astonishment that I should feel this. I hadn’t even known I was capable of such feelings. All my life I’ve paid for my female companionship. Paid to satisfy my physical needs. There was never a suggestion of emotional involvement in the transactions. Now here I was, being drowned in emotionalism. I woke up suffocating with it.’

  ‘So. And you knew on waking that this dream girl was based on an actuality? That she had a flesh-and-blood counterpart?’

  ‘Not then. Not the first time. Only later when I realized the dream was recurrent. And then only when in one of the later dreams I realized that I knew her name. Sophia. When I woke that morning it struck me that of course she was the counterpart of a real Sophia. The inept child I had recently hired as my receptionist.’

  ‘She resembled her?’

  ‘More and more, once I knew her name. At first she was shadowy. She was only the suggestion of a beautiful Greek maiden. After I knew her name she took on clearer and clearer definition. Still shadowy, because we always met at night in dim lighting, but now as if a veil had been removed from her face. No more chiaroscuro, but every delicate curve of feature revealed. Sophia. I can even remember the idiotic imagery, the coinage of every bad poet, that crossed my mind in that dream when I stood there looking at her in full recognition for the first time. Doe-eyed, raven-haired, swan-necked. My God, I didn’t even blush at my own puerile poeticizing of her. I
rejoiced in it.’

  ‘You think this girl in the dream was aware of your feelings?’

  ‘She must have been. How could she help it? I tell you, Doctor, I yearned toward her with such intensity that she must have felt the current surging from me. This was before I even recognized her identity. I walked into this room, a bedroom lit by a small lamp somewhere, and she stood silent and unmoving in the middle of the room dressed in a white gown – the classically simple Greek gown – and with what seemed like an almost transparent veil covering her hair and face. A tender, living goddess. I was stricken by the sight of her. The emptiness in me, my lifetime of emptiness, was suddenly filled with a white-hot lava of emotion. You see? Again I am poeticizing like a fool, but what other way is there to describe it? In psychologic jargon? In those deadly words: I fell in love? Although, believe me, Doctor, coming from me, those words mean infinitely more than they would coming from the ordinary man.’

  ‘I do believe you, Albert. But are you sure you never knew such an emotion before?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Think, Albert. You were not born middle-aged. In your youth there must have been some woman – girl – who excited this emotion in you.’

  ‘Never. I never permitted myself to feel anything like this. I knew the response my size, my ugliness, my sweaty, tongue-tied ineptitude in conversation would draw from any girl I thought desirable. Why invite disaster? Better to freeze the heart into a block of ice than have it torn to pieces.’

  ‘And you did not experience any of this when you confronted the dream Sophia? When you let her feel the current of emotion surging from you?’

  ‘No. I seemed to have no room in me for anything but that aching desire.’

  ‘Sexual desire?’

  ‘That would have been later. In the early dream, all I wanted to do was touch her. Just touch her shoulder gently with my fingertips. To reassure her, perhaps. Or myself. I moved toward her with my hand outstretched, and she moved away a little, barely out of my reach. Then suddenly we were someplace else. I recognized where at once. The hallway outside the room. The hallway of my brownstone house.’