“Just temporarily, Mrs. Marshall.”
She studied me. “Those glasses change you. We look like Walter C. Marshalls, don’t we? Tomorrow I’m going to buy some clothes. Silly, bright, cheap clothes that are too tight for me, the kind I used to wear before I was married. And clattery, jangly junk jewelry. Harry taught me never to wear jewelry, how to dress, how to do my face and hair.”
I unpacked the suitcase I had brought, put the contents in the drawers and closet with the things I had brought over the first time. These were the things I would keep. Now nothing was left in my apartment that I wanted.
She sat on the double bed and watched me. The room seemed to be something to her, seemed to put her beyond my reach. I sat beside her and put my arm around her. She plunged away from me, spun, and faced me. “No,” she whispered.
We walked five blocks to a restaurant, ate like strangers who happened to be seated at the same table. She carried the small suitcase with her. She did not want me to carry it for her. I bought reading material. She wanted a paper. Back in the room she spread the paper across the pillows, lay propped up on her elbows. I sat in a chair and read. From time to time I glanced over at her. She read the paper line by line. Classified ads, local society notes. Everything.
“Don’t you read anything else?” I asked her.
She looked at me for a few moments. “No. Just papers.”
“Funny habit.”
“Why is it? This is real. This is what has happened to people yesterday and today. Who cares about imaginary people? They bore me.”
“You know, I know so little about you. It seems funny. When you’re alone all day, what do you do?”
“Nothing, really. Oh, if I’m bored, I keep putting on different dresses and things, and looking at myself. And every day I exercise a long time.”
“Exercise?”
She rolled over onto her back, her head on the crumpled newspaper. She put her hands on her hips, put her heels together, legs straight, lifted her heels about six inches off the bed, and held them steady. “This is one,” she said.
She held her feet that way for an incredibly long time—until her face at last began to shine with perspiration and she began to tremble with the strain. She lowered her feet to the surface of the bed and exhaled deeply. She slapped herself casually on the flat diaphragm. “That’s how I stay like this.”
“I don’t know what I was trying to ask you, Emily. Maybe I just wanted to know what you think about. I never get much of a clue.”
“Oh, I remember the things Harry gave me, and took back.”
“Do you ever think about me?”
“You’re my luck, aren’t you?”
“I keep wondering if you think I’m a fool, a big damn fool.”
“Sometimes you are. Like wanting to go see that girl’s mother.”
“Were you ever sentimental over anyone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t you want to look up your brothers and sisters someday?”
“For what? Laughs? I know that tribe. They’re like the old man and the old lady. The girls will be dropping brats once a year and the boys will be working in mines and mills and getting tanked every time they get paid.”
“You sound as if they weren’t related to you.”
“All the time I was a little kid I told myself they’d stolen me from rich people when I was a baby, and someday I’d find my real home. With marble and big trees and servants. I guess I never felt like one of the tribe. When I was fifteen I made a man take me away from there. He was a slob, but I made him send me to business school. I thought that maybe in an office I’d meet a bigger man. It worked out that way. I met Harry Shawn. He laughed at all the school business, that night-school stuff at the University of Chicago. Literature, English, sociology, psychology, anthropology, astronomy. Harry had some very fancy friends. None of them were going to look down their noses at Emmy from Carbondale. And after a while, they didn’t.”
“And then you spoiled it for yourself.”
She rolled onto her side, cheek on palm, supported by her elbow. “Harry spoiled it. He was going to New York. The damn flight was canceled for some reason, and instead of calling, he came home. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at Ralph standing there, and then Ralph ran into the bathroom and we could hear him being sick.”
“That made it Harry’s fault.”
“He should have called.”
“Have you seen Beckler again?”
“He phoned me at the bank. I had lunch with him. He told me that my working in a bank was like hiring a cat to work in a mouse farm. He wanted to know the angle. I told him there wasn’t any angle. I was just working for a living. He didn’t believe me.”
“Why did you see him again?”
“I could have refused. And then he would have come to the bank. I don’t want that. A man like Ralph, Kyle, you don’t just brush him off. I’m playing for time. That’s all. When we leave he won’t find us any easier than the law will. Why worry about it? I can handle it.”
We went to bed. She said I could have the bed, or she’d take it, but she wouldn’t stand for the two of us sleeping in it. I made a bed on the floor, using the seat cushions from the two chairs and one of the pillows. When the shade was up and the room dark, light from a street lamp came through the window and made a path across the bed, leaving her face in darkness. I couldn’t sleep. Once I stood by the bed and looked at her. She slept flat on her back, the pillow bunched under her head to raise it, the sheet and light blanket pulled high, her arms outside, straight down by her sides, pinning the coverings tautly across her slim body. I could not hear her breathe. She slept nude. She seemed far away, outside of life, corpselike. I wondered about her dreams. They would have sharp edges, flat colors. She would wander through them, remote, unmoved—an impartial observer of herself.
I was not in love with her. I knew that. I had told her the truth when I had said that I didn’t even like her. She was the alcoholic’s next bottle, the addict’s hidden hypodermic. I wanted to turn and run. It would be like a comic-strip sequence, where the clown runs, but his suspenders are hooked on a nail. He can run for a little way, but not far. And as he gets more weary, he can’t run at all.
Toward dawn I fell asleep. I woke up and watched her without letting her know that I watched her. She stood in the middle of the room, bending, twisting, straining, reaching. She punished herself until her body was covered with the sheen of perspiration. And then she crossed the hall and I heard the roar of water filling the tub. When she came back, dressed, she was vibrantly awake.
After breakfast she went with me to the car lot. She showed no interest in the car. Registration in my name was arranged, and while she bought the cheap, bright clothes she had mentioned, I found a pawnshop and bought a big, scarred leather suitcase. Back in the room she unwrapped the clothes and put them away. We packed the money in the big suitcase and locked it in the trunk compartment of the Chrysler.
We drove through a misty afternoon, through scattered showers, back to Thrace. In the car she restored herself to her usual appearance. I let her out on the edge of town, near a bus stop. The garage I had rented was half a block from the apartment house. I put the car away, snapped the big padlock, went up to my apartment and waited for her. She did not come back until after midnight.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Where have you been?”
“Out.”
“Tell me!”
“I saw a movie. I walked around.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I don’t like hysterical men.”
“I don’t like tramps.”
Her expression of defiance did not change. Her eyes merely narrowed a bit. “That’s one you’ll pay for, Kyle.”
I let my hands drop from her shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t try to see me tomorrow.”
Somehow I had lost the offensive. I said, “Do you blame me? You should have been bac
k by five o’clock anyway.” There was a humiliating pleading tone in my voice.
“I don’t want to see you tomorrow.”
We were talking almost in whispers. She turned away from me to go up the stairs. I caught her wrist. “Emily, I … We shouldn’t quarrel, Emily.”
She stood very still, not pulling against my grasp. “Maybe, if you could understand something.”
“Tell me. I can understand.”
“You don’t own me, Kyle. I go where I please. I do as I please. That’s the basis.”
“I don’t like that basis. We planned to—”
“We planned nothing except what we’re doing. Get it straight, Kyle. My way or no way.”
I tightened my hold on her wrist. “Your way,” I whispered.
She moved closer to me and laughed. It was the first time I had ever heard her laugh. It was like lovely, muted bells. “Come up and I’ll give you my key,” she whispered.
I slept heavily. I woke up to a warm, sunshiny morning. I woke up thinking of Jo Anne. I had dreamed about her. Emily’s key was on the bureau. I stood with the key in my hand, looking up at the ceiling, knowing now how she looked as she slept. I saw, too clearly, what she was doing to me, and what she would continue to do. The money was in the car, every penny we’d taken. Monday I could take it back to the bank. The job would be gone. Emily would be gone. But the nightmare would be over. It was a thing that had to be done. I stood and looked at my face in the mirror, the key still in my hand. I found it oddly difficult to look into my own eyes. My face looked different, somehow. I could imagine a new furtiveness, a new slackness of my lips, a new set to my shoulders.
Walter C. Marshall was someone Kyle Cameron would not have cared for.
After dressing hurriedly, I went quietly up the stairs, put the key in her lock, turning it with infinite care. Then I took the key out of the lock and slid it under the door. I walked down and out into the Sunday-morning sunshine. A great dark weight had slid from my shoulders.
I got off the bus at the Clark Street corner and walked down to Jo Anne’s house. Ed was on the porch. He had been a round, young, cheerful fifty-five. Now his cheeks sagged in folds, and both eyes and voice were dull.
“Nice of you to stop around, Kyle.”
“How is she?”
“About the same. But it’s worse for her. Those drugs, they don’t work so good any more. She’s developing a … tolerance. That’s what the doc called it. Why don’t you go right up? Jo Anne’s with her.”
I went up. There was a smell of sickness in the upstairs hall. It was stronger in the front bedroom. Jo Anne’s eyes lighted up. I kissed her cheek, then bent over the bed and kissed Mom’s forehead.
“I’ve been neglecting you,” I said, trying to keep it light.
The sharp bones jutted against the lifeless skin. Her voice was weak. “Kyle, you talk some sense into Jo Anne. Such a stubborn girl! I don’t want an old-maid daughter. She’s trying to be a martyr, Kyle.”
Jo Anne turned away from me. I was trying to think of what to say. Suddenly Mrs. Lane turned her head away, pressing her sharp chin to her shoulder. Her body tightened and she made a hard, thin sound of pain. Tears stood in Jo Anne’s eyes.
“You better go,” she whispered.
The woman on the bed had gone far away from both of us, gone off into some secret place where she fought with all her wasted strength against a force that could win with malignant, contemptuous ease.
I could not speak. I went down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The sunlight was not the same. I had tried to find the strength I needed, and I could not find it there. I went to my father’s house. I had not visited there in so long that we were ill at ease. His plump, pretty, dark-haired wife was a stranger. She was pregnant again. The house seemed to wear a look of battered resignation, as though the small children had been too much for it. I made myself stay a decent interval, and tried not to see the look of relief on her face when I said I couldn’t stay for dinner.
There didn’t seem to be anyplace to go any more. I had the crazy idea of going to Tom Nairn’s house and telling him the whole thing. I even walked to within two blocks of his neat little red brick house. Tom would be working in the yard, maybe standing with the hose. Go up to him and say, “Mr. Nairn, I stole over twenty thousands dollars last week.”
I walked rapidly away from there. I sat on a bench in a small dusty park. Two old men were staring fixedly at a pocket-size chess board. Children rode bikes along the paths. Two young Italian girls came swinging down the walk. Lilt and tilt of hip, jounce and bounce of breast under the sheer Sunday fabric of blouse. Ungirdled haunches flexing, round brown arms swinging. Red, red lips and dark, dark eyes, and nighttime hair. Young girls on the prowl, giggling at the boys who turned to walk behind them with cool, judicial eyes weighing them, point for point.
I felt the wanting start. When I was a kid I used to stick kitchen matches in the dirt, to make little logcabin villages. Then you light a match and touch them off. In the sunlight, you can’t see the flames. You see the matches twisting, blackening, writhing. The wanting was like that. A destructive, twisting thing.
The bus wouldn’t go fast enough. I sat on the edge of the seat and mentally cursed every stop. I walked fast to the door, ran up two stairs at a time. My voice shook as I knocked at her door and called her name.
“Come in, Kyle,” she called. My palm slipped wetly on the knob. She faced me across the darkened room, and in the back of my mind the little matchstick cabins kept twisting, burning, blackening.
Chapter Ten
The second full week of operation brought an additional $37,000. Though I had learned to make the switch with the ease of practice, by the end of the week my nerves were going bad. I felt as though Nairn, Grinter, Raddmann, Tatley, even Limebright, were all aware of what I was doing, all watching me.
I had to make a new hole in my belt, and in the strap of the money belt too. I weighed myself and found I was down to one sixty-eight, eight pounds lighter than on the day when I took the first money out of the bank.
Sudden, unexpected noises began to bother me. A car backfiring. A waitress dropping a dish.
And I began to have a recurrent dream. Emily had got into a taxi or a bus, and as I reached for her she slammed the door across my wrists. The vehicle would start up and my feet would be caught somehow. It would draw away and I would be pulled like a wire being drawn. Thinner and thinner and thinner. Knowing that I was going to snap. I would be screaming at Emily and she wouldn’t hear me. Each time, I woke up in that fractional part of a second left before I snapped like a string.
I sensed that Emily was watching me carefully. Just when the shaking of my hands would become almost uncontrollable, when a tic would begin to nibble at the corner of my mouth or eye, she would be at me, digging at me like some sort of burrowing animal, dragging me, with nails and teeth and blinded eyes, up to that final spasmed crack of the wire and velvet whip that left me dulled, slack in every muscle, but blessedly unable to worry, blessedly free for at least another day from that shrillness of nerves, free for one night from the nightmare.
My vacation request was approved, the dates entered opposite my name on the bulletin-board list. The third week was worse. Thursday I switched a very small check, one of the smallest we had, and that was all. I promised her I would do better on Friday. I promised her that I would make up for it. And on Friday I had to confess to her that I had been unable to take any, unable to bring myself to do it.
I had never seen that sort of shine to her eyes. I said, “It’s … finished. I’m through. I can’t do it again. Not another day. Let’s get out of here now. We’ve got enough.”
“What we had, plus the twenty-eight thousand this week, Kyle, makes eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred. It isn’t enough.”
“I can’t do it again.”
“Sit down, Kyle. Sit down and listen for a moment. I’m not settling for that amount. I’d rather have nothing. If you are absolutely
certain you can’t take any more, then you better get in that car and leave right now. Take the money. Maybe you can make it out of the country. I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“Don’t I mean more than that to you?”
“Don’t bleat at me like a sheep. You were my luck. Maybe my luck’s gone bad. Remember, I’m in the clear. I just don’t know that those checks that came to my desk were forgeries. So get in the car and run, Kyle. As fast as you can.”
I could not tell whether or not she was bluffing. She had grown stronger than I. She was the dominant one.
She stood up as though I had ceased to exist for her. She undressed and walked into the bathroom. She took her shower with the bathroom door open. She came out, a towel over her shoulders, and took fresh underthings out of the bureau, put them on, selected a dress. Only when she put on the white knit hat did I realize she was going out.
“Where are you going?”
“Out, Kyle.”
“I’ve tried to explain it to you, Emily. Believe me. Today I tried to do it, and I just couldn’t make my hand pick up the money and …”
“Think it over, Kyle. It’s your choice.”
She picked up her purse. I sat there and heard her going down the stairs. I could still hear her as she reached the lobby floor. The door slammed behind her.
Oh, she had made it beautifully plain. Price—one quarter of a million. Interested in no lower offers. It was odd to be in her place without her. I picked up a bottle of the perfume she used, pulled out the cap, smelled of it. I had watched her put it on, her face almost childishly intent. A few drops between the fingers. Then quick practiced touches. Ear lobes, nipples, navel, and the fingers wiped dry up the long line of the thigh. In the bottle it smelled different. Her body warmth brought out the spiced fragrance. I wondered if Harry had taught her how to wear it.
I wandered into the bathroom and touched the towel on the shower rail, still steamy-damp from her body.
I pulled open bureau drawers, shut my hands on the slippery chill of nylon. In the closet were the burgundy slacks she had been wearing the first time it happened.
Weep for Me Page 9
