by Alfred Hayes
“I don’t want to go to the police station,” she said. “I have to go to Hollywood. Don’t look out of the window. Everybody’s looking up. I have to go to Hollywood. I told Marsha I have to, I have to.”
She sank, trembling, toward the floor.
Again, I went to her. Again, I lifted her as I had lifted her before. Again, I put her on the couch. I bent over her, impotent, stroking her convulsive shoulder. I wasn’t really trying to comfort her. I was partly kneeling on the couch. She was below me. She turned over, staring up at me, staring up into my eyes.
“Who are you?” she said.
She struggled to recognize me. She had a look on her face now that wasn’t pleasant: a cunning, a crafty look. She was finding herself on the couch, in a room where several times I’d made love to her, and there I was, bent over her, a position obscenely familiar, a position which possibly she had, from some equally violent and incoherent daze, emerged in before, in apartments she could only with difficulty remember entering, and had found, as she found now, a man’s face looming over her. She pushed herself erect. I thought at first she had not yet identified me, that I was only as anonymous as any man would have been to her ascending from the darkness and the obliteration of the liquor. But I was wrong. I was apparently recognizable: I was somebody known. She had pierced my identity, and the knowledge was there in the look she gave me, in the expression at once cunning and afraid and defiant. Yes, she was certain now, pushing me away, her eyes bloodshot and cunning, who I was, who I’d always been.
They were clever. They were devious and clever. This time they thought (the mouth slack, and the hair disordered) they’d fool her. This time they thought she would not recognize the one they’d sent.
Yes.
For always before it had been someone in an expensive suit. Or a sailor. Or an actor. Easily identifiable. The disguise penetrable. With their suspect voices, and their transparent propositions, and their weekend invitations to a cottage by the sea.
She knew them all.
She could always tell, whether in the drugstore asking her for a match, or on the street and it was some address they wanted, or in the Cadillac that pulled up, noiselessly, beside the bus sign, and it was a lift home.
Monogrammed lighters betrayed them, and initialed cuff links.
Bedrooms, one glimpse of which and she knew.
She could always tell. They’d known at last, having exhausted all their decoys, that now she was experienced and she could always tell.
So they’d sent me.
For she would not have suspected me.
Who was so unlike all the others; who would not ask for a match or the address in a street that didn’t exist or offer her ever the lift home; who pretended to despise the town and did not talk about the odds he had on a horse at Del Mar or boast about his irresistible connections and what, were she nice to him, he could do for her. Someone who offered her nothing and was a little uneasy with her and seemed unhappy. They had known I would be someone she would never suspect.
Ah, yes: I’d fooled her. I’d go back to them now, at that huge, that mysterious studio where they waited, and I’d tell them all: her last secrets, for I knew everything now. She crouched away from me, gesturing.
Yes, she said, in that crooning and anguished voice, I’d tell them all. For she saw me, the agent reporting to his superiors, filing in that vast repository they kept all the detailed information I now had: how she looked, naked, crossing the narrow hallway to the bathroom; her voice, thinned to a scream, rising from the disordered pillows; the gesture, abandoned, obscene, in the private dark.
Yes: she knew who I was, and now, as I came toward her there, as she crouched near the bar, with that anguished and vindictive look in her eyes, and touched her, she clumsily and unexpectedly swung at me. She’d doubled her fist like a vicious boy’s. She caught me on the bridge of the nose, and tears and a sharp pain momentarily blinded me. Her small fist was bony enough, and the blow was unexpected enough; I found that I was standing absolutely still in the room and I was afraid that if I moved at all I’d kill her. Drunk or not, insane or not. She shrank away, now, afraid, so that I could see she wasn’t as unaware of herself as she pretended to be. The cold rage mounted in me. I felt a fool; a complete, a humiliated fool. She cowered away and said, “Don’t hit me” for she’d been hit sometime, somewhere, in the past, and I looked at her: the high cheekbones, the whole disordered expression, the mouth loose and twisted a little, and I hated her, and all those like her, for she seemed at that moment to contain in herself all that I hated and feared in people, the violent follies, the vicious melodramas, the grotesque self-destructiveness. She must have thought that I would hit her after all, as Phillip and the others, if there was a Phillip and the others, had done, and she turned and with a small cry ran past me and out of the room and into the bathroom. I heard the door lock. I heard running water. I heard something break, like a glass. I’d had enough. I’d had all of it I wanted. I’d never struck a drunken girl; I could understand now striking them. I went to the bathroom door. I wanted her out of there, I wanted her out of the house; I didn’t care any longer how she got out, on her own feet or not, ill or not, or where or what she did once she was gone, and I shook the doorknob, leaning against the door, telling her to open it or so help me I’d break it down. Did she hear me? Stupid bitch. Why didn’t she go home; she was the one who ought to go back where she’d come from, San Diego or wherever it was that was unlucky enough to be called home by her. She didn’t answer. Was she going to open the door? I’d give her two minutes to get it unlocked. It was only an immensely complicated act, all of it, the gestures, the tears, the incoherent murmurings. Was she going to open the door? I moved back and hit it with my shoulder.
I heard her in the bathroom now, and I heard the door unlock, and she opened it. She had done two things: she had turned on the water in the sink, and she had broken the glass I kept my toothbrush in. With the broken glass, she had cut jaggedly into her wrists.
I hadn’t expected that: not with the green glass of a tumbler I kept a toothbrush in; and not actual blood. She seemed taller. I don’t know why at that moment she seemed taller, and even somewhat triumphant; triumphant, and taller, in a way I couldn’t explain; as though, finally, she’d outwitted, or spited someone (it could not have been me); she stood there, with an exhausted, but a cunning and a triumphant look on her face, for whomever she’d at last outwitted, and then everything, the bones that held her up, sort of melted, and she fell into the blood that was now all over her dress and all over the tiled bathroom floor.
The experience of horror is an experience of emptiness. I cried out her name; I stooped; I touched her, not knowing how to touch her; and then something froze in me. Something became cold and heavy and immovable in me. It was a sort of weight, the weight in me of someone else’s inconceivable act, a stupid act, an act bloody and irrevocable and stupid.
I went into the bedroom and took two ties from the tie rack and made two clumsy tourniquets. So it had ended like this. I didn’t know what to do, whom to call: a doctor or the police. I knew what it meant to call the police. I knew that, if I called a doctor, the doctor would call the police. I’d thought it would not matter to me whether my wife knew or not; that I would not give a damn any more how much or what she knew; but I didn’t, suddenly, want her or anybody else for that matter to know this. A rented apartment; this town; a girl with her wrists slashed; a girl like this. I didn’t think of anything or feel anything except that I was unaccountably cold. Cold, and my stomach hurt, I seemed to hurt, my stomach, my jaws, behind my eyes I hurt. I couldn’t understand what had happened or why it had happened or how or by what intricate ways I had become involved with her. I had never been involved in anything like this before. It had never before ended in blood. In more than blood: in the inconceivable. There was, in all the town then, nobody to call but Charlie. I couldn’t think of anybody to call but Charlie.
29
I AWOKE him
. The phone was next to the bed; I saw him, on an elbow, dry-mouthed, with the black instrument to his ear, in pajamas that would be striped and silk.
“What’s the matter, kid? What is it?”
“I’m in a jam, Charlie.”
“You?”
He thought, I could see, I’d run short of money somewhere, or there was a car accident, a minor something that I, being what I was, could conceivably get into, and not anything for the phone to ring alarmingly about at one o’clock in the morning, and for his sleep, that inflexible eight hours, to be broken. “What kind of a jam?” For there were, for Charlie, categories; and when I told him what mine was, the phone went silent and I could hear, both near and distant, his breathing. “Christ, how did you get into that?” I wasn’t to touch anything, to say anything, to call anybody. Charlie was coming over.
It would be a half hour. The Lincoln would have to come up the coast highway. Nights like these the coast was foggy. In twenty minutes he would be coming over the mountains. There would be little traffic. The road was dark. In fifteen minutes he would be coming to Brentwood. Brentwood would be dark, too. He could do seventy or eighty miles an hour at this time of night and in a half hour he would be here.
I was glad Charlie would be here. I was glad somebody would be here. I saw it as a deliverance. I’d never again despise Charlie or laugh at those expensive ties of his or the suits he wore so micrometrically tailored to him or the lifts on his shoes because he was so short. He’d handle it. Smash-ups; stuff at the studios with girls; drunks; Charlie knew how to handle all that. The quiet settlement, the discreet word slipped in here, the telephone call made there; Charlie’d know. I knew nothing; really nothing. What I knew, the knowledge I had, was nothing. I could see that in the past I’d been supercilious. I’d been a snob. It was men like Charlie you relied on in a crisis. Charlie lived in a world inhabited by genuine policemen, with real arrests in it, and scandals that had punishable consequences. I thought of Charlie at the office window of the branch agency in New York, when I’d first met him, looking down on Madison Avenue, saying: It’s a town for winners. He’d know what measures winners took.
I crouched over her. What department did one call when it was, not the cat, but the cat’s owner? Was she dying? No: she couldn’t possibly be dying. She was breathing shallowly, and the blood welled from the wounds. At least, the apartment was quiet; I’d wanted it quiet, hadn’t I? Her eyelashes, dark, seemed oddly gummed, and she was paler than I remembered. It was as though she were terribly asleep. Had there been pain? There must have been pain. She could not gash herself like that and there have been no pain. I looked down at her with a dulled stupefaction. To have done it; to have smashed a glass; to have taken the jagged thing and to have done it; it was still an inconceivable act. Even with this evidence; even with the torn veins. She was, more than ever, alien. Her skirt huddled up, and I stared at the visible black brassière. How disconnected now she was from any possibility of desire. That breast, known; that thigh, stroked. Between desire and her the jagged glass intervened. She’d come, burdened down with error and stupidity and vanity and suffering. I’d held her; now the cold tiles. And I? Had I been burdened with less? I stared bleakly down as though into a pit. I’d thought it was not a matter of importance where I was employed or what it was I did to earn what I’d thought of as very good money. It had ended like this. I had wanted to avoid torment and isolation and self-doubt. I had wanted something that would not involve a sincerity of any kind, but only a show of skill, a pretense of sincerity. It had ended like this. I had wanted a life less difficult than the life I had had, the life I was afraid of, and it had ended like this.
I heard the Lincoln’s distinguishable motor outside. Charlie closed the door quickly. He had put on I could see the sort of suit he would wear for an occasion like this. He regarded me with a mixture of distaste and concern. Where was the girl? He looked around the apartment: I think he expected gin bottles somewhat scattered, and blood on the walls. The evidences, at least, of a minor orgy. He didn’t quite believe my being asleep, and her apparitional face at the midnight window. He didn’t believe I was quite as innocent as I protested I was. In the bathroom, he stared down at her; but it was not with my look. Had I been in love with her? My God, in love! He’d seen us in Tijuana; how could I possibly be in love with her? Then why had she done it? There was a reason; there had to be a reason.
“Charlotte’s coming in Monday.”
“And you told her?”
“Yes.”
He’d accept that: a broad you got mixed up with, and a wife’s ill-timed arrival. It was the simpler of the explanations. The other, the complex one, the one I thought was the explanation, he’d listen to suspiciously. It wouldn’t be for him an explanation: but my kind of alibi. A pretty girl; she meets someone like me; she’s in love; the wife comes; zip: the wrists. Charlie’d have it that way. I didn’t care.
“What am I going to do, Charlie?”
“Get her out of here.”
“Where?”
“She lives somewhere. Home’s for suicides. Get her out.”
Had I thought once there were acts of which I was incapable? I knew now that Charlie would persuade me I was capable of them. I might have been, once, contemptuous of a man of whom I’d heard a story resembling the story which, possibly, Charlie would one day, at lunch, in a studio commissary, tell of me. I wasn’t contemptuous now; or perhaps I was; and yet I knew that I would allow Charlie to persuade me. My protests, like a blonde’s, could be circumvented; my virtue, with a little patience, was assailable. The guilt I experienced was of no importance; it would not change anything, or deter Charlie, moving so efficiently about the living room. He said to me: “Forget it; you aren’t the first, you won’t be the last. A warm wind blows from the south and they automatically uncross their legs.” He was, of course, right; they were none of them virgins. It was unavoidable that one had to take a blanket from the bed to wrap her in; unavoidable that he should ask me if there were any clothes of hers here in the house; unavoidable that the lights should be carefully extinguished and the door cautiously opened. Charlie was only doing, in the circumstance, what in his own lexicon had to be done. He was rendering me a service in the only way he knew. Yet it was a service that would bind me, wouldn’t it? I’d be, where I had not been before, or thought I was not before, in his debt, in Charlie’s debt, and by extension in debt to all of them. I had only to call the police and there would be no debt, and yet I knew that I couldn’t call the police. I did not have to stoop to lift her and carry her, an oddly shameful weight, out of the darkened house, as Charlie held the door open; I did not have to, awkwardly, in the empty street, put her into the luxurious Lincoln parked there. It need not have been done, any of it. Yet I did it. It was useless to think it was someone who was not me doing it: the discovery was that it was I who was doing it. I, holding her so that the inert body might not slump; I, pretending that the motorist or the pedestrian, if we should encounter a motorist or a pedestrian, who might glance into the car, would think only she was a girl drunk; I, who, while Charlie opened the door with the keys found in her littered purse, put her there on the familiar studio bed against the wall under the picture of the two girls and no cat there now as there had been once when innocent still I first knocked on her door thinking that all I’d come for was to take her to dinner, to dinner, because after all she’d been a girl I’d, oddly enough, saved.
30
I CALLED Dr. Ritter. It was all I could think of doing, and Charlie had not wanted me to do that. It was, possibly, not wise. I had been, on the phone, an anonymous voice. Now, I compelled Charlie to wait in the parked car down the street. Only until the doctor came; only to be sure the doctor came.
We sat there, in the darkness. I had become painfully aware who I really was. I stared at the transfigured street through the windshield. There were the palm trees; the houses boxlike or gabled; the family garages; the provincial silence.
“How
did it happen?” Charlie asked again. He felt no complicity: no ambiguous guilt. He was attached to it by only a telephone call at one o’clock in the morning.
“I don’t know. I’ve no experience with suicides.”
“At the beach, and now here.”
“Yes,” I said. “At the beach and now here.”
“She has parents?”
“Somewhere down in San Diego. An alcoholic father; a mother who tells the neighbors she’s in the movies. I suppose the doctor will wire them.”
Charlie stared out at the street, too. I didn’t know what shape it had for him; what the street lamps translated themselves into. “At the beach,” he said, frowning, “she didn’t know you. So it couldn’t have been you.”
“No, at the beach she didn’t know me. But she knew you. So it couldn’t have been you.”
“What?”
“They sent me. The perfect agent. From the studio.”
“What studio?”
“Any. Transcendental Pictures. The biggest lot in town.”
Everywhere, now, those who hadn’t yet, or saw no reason yet to reach for the glass one left a toothbrush in, or for the Veronal left over in the medicine cabinet and forgotten about, or who hadn’t ever yet been accosted or visited by and gone to bed with the ultimate spy, slept. It was the hour for the late radio show, the hour the small bands got hot. I remembered her at Tijuana: she’d sparkled so. She came alive at night, she said. Like a cat, when the sun went down. But she hadn’t any cat now. She hadn’t anything now. He would find on her arms, the good doctor, the two ties with which I had so clumsily bound her, the inexpert tourniquets. Suppose she died? What would I confront in the morning if she should die? She had come to town after whatever it was had happened with the girl Marsha, if there’d ever been a Marsha. I wouldn’t really ever know. She’d inhabited for a while these streets; her high heels had sounded on these pavements passing the cactus gardens and the orange trees. Her smile, a bit too anxious, a bit too placating, had floated above the polished bars. She had murmured for a while in all the telephone booths; I saw the names vanishing from all the address books she had ever kept.
