Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  He loved her so much and he so depended on her. Even in her immediate hysteria after the accident, she recognized that she had to protect Claude. Claude was squeamish in a way a woman never would be. He found earthly things squalid. He read the newspaper for its politics and sports, skipping over headlines of mayhem and crime. Everyday domestic demands puzzled him, laundry, dishes, cleaning. They didn't fit in to the picture he had of life, a kind of impressionistic bliss, removed from drudgery. Really, it was lucky, his father leaving him the shop. Perfume sugarcoated his world, keeping it sweet the way he needed it.

  Unfortunately, Claude was more figurehead than businessman. The shop operated at a loss, and she did all of its business even now, figuring the accounts, writing his letters, signing paperwork in his name, covering his debts. She never publicly acknowledged his failures. In fact, she collaborated with him on his public pose as a success. She didn't mind. She felt useful in this one regard, and it did help keep Claude happy.

  Soon after her injury, after recovering her spirit, she decided to stake out his arrival home from work with unwavering loyalty. She owed him that, even though many days, waiting endless minutes, often in pain, plastering a grin on her face at the sight of him while screeching inside, her daily waits for his return from work had become as much ordeal as tradition. He seemed to love the formal reception, saying once, “I feel so cherished,” and another time, “You are everything to me.”

  Clea appreciated his devotion and knew she needed to show an equal commitment, but she wasn't foolish. They would never regain the closeness they had lost. They weren't two peas in a pod anymore. She lived in one, in an arid, harsh garden. He flourished nearby, in another universe where there was shade and moisture. She depended on him for nourishment, for things as basic as water.

  She depended too much on him. That eroded everything every day. That compromised her love.

  Nowadays the only acting she did was to maintain this sham of a relationship.

  Awful the way things changed…

  Agitated, as she always seemed to be in his presence these days, her heart continuing its erratic flip-flops, Clea could barely catch her breath to speak. “Claude?”

  He nodded, but continued on his way toward the bedroom.

  “I need to tell you something. I've made a decision.”

  “Okay,” he said. His voice muffled as he went into the bathroom. He closed the door. She heard running water.

  She wheeled herself away from the window, where air slipped through cracks and made her shiver, toward the fire. She ran into a plush armchair, one she used to sit in in the evenings, studying her lines and chatting with Claude. Joking, laughing, crying over a lost role, griping about her colleagues. He would sweep her up in his arms, turn on some music, and they would dance… She tried to kick it, but her foot ignored the message of her emotions. She passed by the chair consumed with frustration, settling in as close as she could to the fire without getting burned.

  The nurse, an unkind, competent woman named Lucy, started toward her with a glass cup and a handful of pills. “You need to take these.”

  “Not now,” Clea said.

  “Doctor says,” Lucy began.

  “I don't give a damn what ‘Doctor' says,” Clea said. At that moment, Claude came into the room.

  “What's this? Ignoring Doctor's orders?” he asked, a tease in his voice, a finger lifting a lock of hair out of her eyes.

  “We need to talk,” she said stubbornly, pleadingly. “Those pills knock me out. Claude, I want to talk. I can't stand the way those things make me feel.”

  “Doctor says she needs to take them three times a day.” Sensing an ally, Lucy added, “She already put me off an hour. Plus he's been calling and she won't talk to him.”

  “He checks up on me. He's a diligent guy,” Clea said. “I'm not sure I need that anymore. And you came home later than usual,” Clea told Claude.

  “I'm so sorry, honey,” said Claude. “Today was amazing. I don't think I've had such a major sales day since you were…”

  Something showed in her face because he stopped talking, but her thoughts rolled on: Since you were whole, intact, able. Since you were our model, the symbol of beauty for our product.

  She had been replaced by Lucia, an expensive Italian model. One day the previous week, during a brief business meeting at the house, Clea had intercepted Lucia's come-hither glance at Claude. On the way out, when Lucia bent down to say good-bye to Clea, Clea had whispered, “Go after him and I'll see you dead. I have friends.” She had no friends, but relied on her stereotypes of Italian culture to make her point. She had smiled when Lucia jumped back and flounced out the door without another word. The threat made her feel powerful again. How she missed that feeling.

  After Lucia's brusque departure, Claude wheeled Clea into his study and took her on his lap. “You're my dream of a woman. No one can replace you,” he said. Had he seen the look? Had he heard the whisper? If he knew anything, he had had the grace to ignore it.

  “Tell you what,” Claude said now, apparently rushing to change the subject. Any mention of her past life was tricky and she guessed he didn't want to set her off. “Take your pills like a good girl. Have a good nap. We'll talk before bed.”

  “But…”

  He whispered in her ear. “Remember that summer night when you lit all the candles and we went out onto the deck with our champagne glasses? Hmm? Remember what we said? We will take care of each other and now I'm taking care of you, like I always do…”

  His chant had the desired effect. She felt less urgent. Still, they had to talk. She didn't want to continue like this. She had made up her mind. They had had their six good years, a sweet feast of love. Now, in utter rationality, she was ready to say good-bye to Claude and salvage the clean memory of what they had shared before the present ruined it.

  She wanted to tell him she could survive alone, now, even in the face of continuing deterioration. She had accepted her disability in a way he never could. In a surprising way, she welcomed the woman she had become, relishing her new self, this mature version of the silly girl she had been. The challenge had been awesome, but she had risen to it, and she was proud. He would never understand this. She didn't expect it. Maybe she didn't want it. He was no longer the man for her. Whatever time she had left, whatever quality of life, she needed to experience it without him.

  Such poignant truths, but she was scared to death to tell him. She did not want to puncture the illusions that kept him going.

  She opened her mouth to speak but he and Lucy were intent upon their task. A red pill made its way toward her, onto her tongue and down her throat, to be followed by a blue one, a green one, etc. She closed her mouth obediently upon each pill, swallowing, her gums shriveling from the sour flavors.

  Before she passed out completely, they lifted her onto her bed. Claude left for a moment to find her hairbrush, and Lucy, ever ready to undertake the chores Claude could not face, rose to the task, gently changing Clea into a fresh knit gown.

  Clea entered a new state, close to sleep but not quite there. The drugs ripped crudely through her body like tiny dynamites. They hurt her all over in order to help her, or so “Doctor” explained.

  “A broken back is cataclysmic,” he had said. And so it was.

  For the first several months, they had encased her in a body cast. During that enforced rigidity, she explored in excruciating detail the moment when her whole life went bad. Her anguished regrets were equal to her pain, and could not be anesthetized. They woke up with her. They sang her to sleep at night.

  Why? Why had she done it?

  The answer wasn't hard. She had it the instant she posed the question. Hadn't she acted a dozen roles where the outcome of the story hinged on this very same tragic character flaw?

  She fell victim to hubris and ruined a beautiful happiness.

  She had been such an athlete when she was young, fleet of foot, coordinated, and although her schedule eliminated many opport
unities for her to maintain that toned physique and physical grace, she hung on to an athlete's most useful trait too long: physical risks did not scare her. She was fearless.

  That May, the whole crew spent a week up at Strawberry Lodge, many complaining about the empty swimming pool and noise from the traffic. Others loved the area and went for hikes when they had precious time off. Claude had stayed behind in the city. Her room had yellow walls and a view of trees and a creek in back, and she called him every night to talk for an hour, missing him.

  The scene on that Wednesday morning was set for Pyramid Creek. The crew hiked up single file, most still sleepy-eyed, quiet, but everyone in a fine mood in spite of the heavy equipment they were packing. This beat the studio, they all agreed. While the crew set up the camera and sound, and quickly storyboarded revised camera angles based on the stark sun and shadows, she had drunk coffee from a silver thermos, sitting on a rock, swathed in down. Because this was spring, a few hardy high-altitude flowers were struggling up. She picked a purple lupine still glittering with melted snow.

  When they were ready for her, she stripped down to shorts and a T-shirt. Suddenly, through the magic of film, it was summer and the cold breeze was a hot one, and the long slanting sunlight harbored scorching heat. Her skin did not know this, however. The director decided to make the longest shot fairly wide to include them both, fortunately. The goose bumps on her arms would not show then, or later when they moved on to close-ups on her face.

  She knew her lines. Her “husband” was rocky, however, so they did several takes of the violent argument that took place at the end of the trail. Evan, her costar, had smiled and thanked her for her patience. “My wife's pregnant and nervous. It's our first child. She kept me up all night last night on the phone.”

  Evan was strong and handsome in his hiking boots and khakis, and was also one of the least self-conscious actors she knew. He treated his looks as a joke and the adoration of the press as aberrant. She remembered thinking, someday Claude and I will have a baby, too. I will keep him awake all night and he will calm my fears.

  Their argument scene took all morning, and at one point, when Evan pushed a little too hard, she ended up puncturing her shorts on a sharp boulder. She changed into another pair, and then they ate chicken sandwiches with avocado and tomato and drank lemonade for lunch. The sun rose in the sky, warming the day slightly. After lunch, they would film action to follow the argument. She would run into the creek, crying, stumbling. She would turn and shout at her husband, who would notice that, in her rage, she had gotten too close to Horsetail Falls. He would swoop down, intending to rescue her, but his sudden movement, her suspicion of his motives, and their unresolved argument would inspire her to step back even farther. Then, the script read, Evan would reach her and rescue her. They would reconcile, all the discord of the past erased in their shared recognition of this nearly fatal moment.

  The camera crew set up the shot, and everyone took their positions. And the stuntwoman who was due to replace her after her first rush into the stream started throwing up.

  “I can't breathe up here. It's like there's no air,” she said, crying.

  The director stomped over, talked with her, found her a drink of water, waited for her to recover. She threw up again. The director said she had better get down to the lodge. One of the crew offered to accompany her, and the director, by now unable to speak directly to the stuntwoman, nodded, his face purple.

  As she stuffed a small bag with water and a snack bar, everyone sympathized. They agreed it was the altitude and dehydration. Once she was safely out of sight down the trail, they grumbled about the amount of wine she had consumed the night before.

  The director, able to talk again, pitched a fit. He had funding problems, timeline problems. They were wimps, shits, losers. They now had a full crew and no shot, and did they have any idea the cost of this setup, this day? He was so screwed.

  So she had stepped forward to save the day. A hero.

  An idiot.

  She ran into the creek once, twice, three times. They shot again and again. The director stroked his chin, shaded his eyes, suggested some minor adjustments in the camera angle. They shot until her legs froze up and wouldn't move. They warmed her up and shot again.

  And then he announced a final take. The last take, he swore it. The light was fading. The shot looked beautiful, though. They had to get down the hill before dark. He called for action.

  She ran into the creek, crying. She turned, shouting at Evan. He chased into the water after her. She stepped back, stumbled, and fell one hundred feet.

  ***

  When she woke up, she had tubes in her nose and a room full of flowers. The doctors told her how lucky she was that two men on the crew were experienced climbers, and somehow managed to get her out of the pool she fell into. As mindful of her injuries as they could be under the circumstances, aware of the grave risks her battered body faced, they lashed her to a makeshift gurney and rushed her back to the lodge.

  “They did everything they could do. You could have died.”

  She wished, then, that she had died.

  Claude came and cried with her, and begged her to live, not to leave him.

  When, at last, the cast came off, they had all hoped so much… the surgeon's face had told her right away. As each instruction he made to her failed to elicit the proper action, the corners of his mouth dipped and solidified a little more. The look on Claude's face when she could not move her body from the waist down had crushed her.

  Now, observant but druggily detached, she watched as Claude pulled the cover up to her chin, and kissed her cheek warmly. “Love you forever and forever,” he said, as he always said.

  “It's been so hard for you,” she said, only the words slurred.

  “Go to sleep,” Claude soothed.

  She saw her early past, her first high school part in The Importance of Being Earnest. She had flubbed her lines, but got laughs in the right places. Arsenic and Old Lace, off-Broadway, she played one of the elderly aunts in a wig that itched. She took her clothes off for a revival of Hair and sang in Les Mis. She ran through her lines, reinterpreting.

  Claude got up and the bed moved as he rose. She awoke and opened her eyes. “Comfy?” he asked her. “I'll turn off the light.”

  “Lonely,” she said, “don't go. I have to tell you something…” She realized she had forgotten what. What was it she needed to tell him, something important? She tried to apply her mind to the problem, but the problem slipped away with Claude, on tiptoes. The light went off and she returned to her dreams.

  Lucy left at nine. She had a family and didn't like staying so late, but she had a stolid sense of obligation. She was a saint, unlike Claude, who closed the door behind her, sighing with pleasure at a moment's solitude.

  He drank a strong whiskey with ice and poked at the fire. In a flash, like the flash of a dry ember igniting, he realized he had already made his decision, and that it was the right one.

  Clea should die.

  She should die knowing she was loved. The falsity of his feeling would never get strong enough to penetrate the soft cloud of her belief in him.

  The decision fell over him as gently and moodily as rain. He knew it was the proper choice under the circumstances. Clea would want him to have a happy life. Her love was unselfish and pure, unlike his. If only the full picture of the situation would not cause her such emotional harm, she would concur, he was certain.

  The only question left was how?

  He pondered alternatives. Suicide-there was plenty of evidence that Clea had been suicidal in the past, so why shouldn't she be suicidal again? Their neighbor Mrs. Winters had helped him get Clea fixed up after she had tried to drown herself when the nurse was out to lunch. She could testify. Lucy would, too. She didn't like Clea, he suspected, but it would have to happen off her watch so that she didn't look bad. Maybe Clea stockpiled pills? He liked the peacefulness of pills. She would go quietly, kissed on the forehead b
y him, loved to the end. But sometimes people threw them up, didn't they? Sordid thought.

  A knife? During those early scenes, right after she got out of the cast and into the chair, they had taken pains to keep knives out of her reach. Since then, they had relaxed vigilance. A large knife like one used to slice a melon? Something with a sharp tip.

  Ugh. He didn't think he could stab her, not even if he put her to sleep first. The police would be very suspicious with a stabbing.

  Hanging? He got out of his chair and wandered around the entire downstairs. Hanging was out. She couldn't reach anything high enough that would hold her. A doorknob? No.

  He had a baseball bat, and had played in high school. He knew one fell swoop could deck her. Then, push the wheelchair down the stairs. But she didn't go upstairs anymore, everyone knew that, and those clever forensics people might be able to identify a bat indentation or something.

  Okay, asphyxiation. Didn't people tie plastic bags over their heads or something when they wanted to self-asphyxiate? Clea had the ability to do that.

  But it was so ugly!

  Yet this idea drifted like feathers into something better. Yes, he thought, suffocating her would solve a number of problems. With her asthma, the doctor would have no trouble assuming a natural death. Her memory wouldn't be sullied by suicide, and he could grieve normally, a real widower.

  She would die believing in the integrity of their love. Didn't this ending do proper justice to their incredible romance?

  Excited, he decided it would. He would serve up a lovely dinner, then death. Something elegant was at work, something which would move the poets and playwrights she worshipped.

  Clea awoke at eleven, a terrible time. If you had nightmares, eleven was too early to provide a useful buffer from a night of misery, and too late to promise simple sleep. Lucy was gone. She tried to maneuver herself into her chair, a daunting, if not impossible, proposition. She could not turn over at night, worrying that she might end up facedown on a pillow and unable to shift, but sometimes she could find the strength to haul herself out of bed. Moving the covers off her body, she scrutinized her lower legs, wasted-looking, and dragged herself into the chair. The effort took several minutes, in darkness, without support. She wheeled herself into the bathroom and applied the unusual blackberry-colored lipstick and blush he had brought her recently while on a business trip to France. She needed to look her best for tonight. She required feminine courage. She listened for something from the study but if Claude was in there, he was very quiet.