Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “This is impossible!” cried Betty, ejecting herself from the chair. “Come on,” she said to Alloway. She marched into the east bedroom and slammed the door.

  Alloway was choking on his tongue as he followed her, his knees gone to fluid. He did not look at Arthur, but heard the unconcerned clacking of the silverware.

  Reaching the door, Alloway tapped timorously upon it, opened it, and sidled in. Betty stood by the window but looked at nothing outside. She was trying to recapture her mood. Finally she went to the nearer of the twin beds and half reclined upon it, still wearing her little black hat. Alloway saw no way out of sitting down in the only chair, an overstuffed job upholstered in hotel-green synthetic.

  Betty resumed her narration. “I was the sister more given to intellectual pursuits, though that is not to say Billie was deficient in brainpower. Far from it. She was shrewder than I in her human relationships. I cared for ideas, beauty in the arts, philosophy. Billie was interested in people, men specifically. She had to try and charm every one, and she succeeded with more than you might think, for though Billie was certainly a pretty girl, in all fairness I must admit that my elder sister would probably not be called truly beautiful by the profounder type of mentality.”

  Alloway’s notetaking continued to be very sketchy. There was nothing for his use in Betty’s bitchiness towards her dead sister. Readers did not want to hear of that sort of envy, unless masked by moral disapproval.

  Discreetly, cowardly, he had left the door wide open. Glancing into the living room now to check on Arthur, he saw his own abandoned glass of beer, three-quarters full.

  “Excuse me,” he said, interrupting Betty. “I think I’ll just get my drink before we settle down. Would you like yours?”

  “Really,” she answered. “You’re as bad as Arthur.”

  Alloway however was cheered by this statement, the first evidence that she saw him as a being and not an instrument. He went with a springy step to fetch the potables.

  Arthur was staring miserably at what remained of the steak: bloody T-bone, charred fat. To whom it may have concerned, he announced: “I’m going to bed. I couldn’t sleep all last night. This thing has really hit me.” He rose and plodded to the other bedroom, unfastening his clothes en route. Alloway stood there in awe, watching Arthur disrobe through the open doorway, strip right down to the hairy buff. Then Arthur saw Alloway, narrowed his eyes in indignation, covered his shame with one hand and with the other reached to slam the door. Damn queers, they turned up everywhere. Only two days before, he had noticed a fellow accountant eying him at the office urinal.

  Perhaps some fairy had committed the murders. Who else would do in a woman? With that conviction, which strangely comforted him, Arthur climbed into bed and went instantly to sleep.

  Alloway wandered back to the east bedroom, carrying the glasses, and as he handed the cocktail to Betty said, with an effort towards joviality, “Drink up.”

  She astonished him by impatiently upending the vessel and swallowing three-fifths of a manhattan neat. Alloway sat down with some difficulty, owing to a sudden surge of his anticipation. She would soon be drunk: he could hardly bear it.

  But as the afternoon slunk along towards the early evening of December, Betty’s capacity for strong drink proved as extensive as her narrative. Room service had supplied three or four subsequent rounds, always on Alloway’s suggestion, and whereas he had begun to suffer the effects of beer-bloat, Mrs. Bayson’s fettle was unaltered. In despair Alloway had even finally got around to taking a few genuine notes, though Betty continued to be eloquent in a subtle manner impossible of reproduction. Insisting on her unalloyed affection for Billie, she yet recalled few instances in which her sister had not exemplified meanness or vulgarity.

  And with Betty’s thin skin, Alloway felt he must suppress the advice that you cannot print that sort of stuff about a dead person. You can show her as foolish, as immoral, even as depraved, but such must be portrayed as the result of exaggerated generosity, the wearing of the heart on the sleeve, the too-much-too-soon, the overabundance of everything: beauty, lust, ambition. The onanists who bought the paper must not be disabused by an implication that the murderer had performed a public service.

  For the third time Alloway excused himself to go to the toilet. A bathroom accompanied each bedchamber, but modesty forbade using the facility the entrance to which lay five feet beyond the bed occupied by Betty. He frequented Arthur’s, which, the suite not being symmetrical, could be entered from the living room. Another door connected it with the west bedroom, and it was through this portal that Arthur now roamed, blinking, rubbing the sandman’s sprinkle from his eyes, dressed in shrunken underwear.

  Unfortunately, Alloway was yet some distance from the can and actually facing Arthur’s door. He always prepared himself en route, rather than spend undue time hovering over the water closet, which was usually either repellent or dull of aspect. One hand to his fly, seeing Arthur he smiled wretchedly, guiltily, as was his habit with a man he wished to cuckold.

  Arthur’s features blurred in disgust; he stalked back into his room and across to Betty’s.

  “That fellow,” he stated, “is really a pervert.”

  Betty inspected his attire, curled her nose, and said: “Who?”

  “The reporter. He was obscene just now, over in the other john.”

  Betty’s laugh was coarse. “You mean, playing with himself?”

  Arthur abhorred that sort of loose talk. “No,” he frigidly announced. “He’s trying to—well, he was gesturing at me, you know. He’s apparently queer.”

  “They make some of the best writers.”

  “Aw, Betty,” Arthur said sorrowfully. He padded back and noisily locked his private door to the toilet. At the same time, however, Alloway left by the other door, came around and stood in the entrance to the bedroom. He had mistaken Arthur’s expression. Alloway narcissistically believed himself a massive threat to the institution of marriage. He was sure that Arthur seethed with jealousy, and he intended to try to mollify him.

  Standing before the dresser, Arthur spotted in the looking glass what he understood as Alloway’s beastly attempt to steal up on him from behind.

  Furiously he turned and said—trouble was, he could think of nothing to say that would not compromise himself. To acknowledge a pervert as a threat was to play into his hands. Arthur knew that above all these gentry seek a positive response; had heard of a type who, peculiarly gratified by abuse, would accost with an indecent proposal a normal man in broad daylight on a crowded thoroughfare. Arthur had no impulse to punch Alloway. Not that he dreaded violence: it was simply a mystery to him. Reason held that balling the hand and thrusting it against such an obdurate surface as that of the human jawbone would result primarily in broken fingers.

  Within three seconds Arthur arrived at the shrewd decision to carry it off, rising above squalor. The right and the power were on his side. It was Alloway, not he, who had to measure up to one standard or fall to another.

  “Yes?” he asked, loftily prolonging the sibilant.

  “We have been hard at work all afternoon,” Alloway stated uneasily. “We have really made some progress.”

  “Splendid,” said Arthur.

  Alloway added: “I think we’re getting there.”

  “Good,” said Arthur. Believing that that ended his responsibility, he looked at the ceiling.

  Betty, however, gave Alloway a strange, penetrating, yet amused look when he arrived in the east bedroom.

  She had earlier been speaking of Billie’s attitude towards men, how her sister rather cruelly toyed with the affections of decent types while invariably falling victim to the destructive charm of bad actors. For example: “One Bobby Cox, a salesman of some kind, we never learned of what. He was a crook if you ask me, and you can print that. Cheap, and I mean also in spirit. Was what people of ordinary taste would call good-looking. Billie thought he was heavenly. He admitted he was married but claimed to be separated fr
om his wife, waiting for the divorce. Which turned out to be a lie. He lived in wedded bliss somewhere and had three kids to whom he was a devoted father when home.

  “My sister was helpless against his wiles. He treated her badly, you see, and she never could resist that technique. Stood her up again and again, I guess when he couldn’t get out of the house or maybe he also had other girls. Billie finally confronted Bobby with the facts, and he turned livid with rage, stopped the car on a parkway and made her get out on the center island and drove away.”

  Alloway looked at his watch. He had about an hour and a half to get back to the paper and write the initial installment of Betty’s narrative.

  Betty said: “You know what I think? I don’t say it lightly, and I did not mention it to the detectives. But I seriously believe now that Bobby Cox might have killed my mother and sister. He certainly is capable of violence—to put a girl out onto a crowded highway. A man who would do that would not shrink from murder.”

  Alloway stood up and put away his notebook. He said: “You have the theater tickets. And all the meals you take at the hotel will go on the tab that the paper will pick up. I’ll be back tomorrow morning at eleven or thereabouts.”

  “You’re not interested in my theory about the murders?” Betty asked with ill will.

  Alloway said: “I’m not a policeman, Mrs. Bayson. It doesn’t matter what I think.” He suddenly felt very sorry for himself. He would have liked to lie down with his head in her lap. Murder seemed to him not nearly so terrible as the hopeless procession of moments called daily life. He had to go now and at top speed write page on page of futility, and in one day the story would be obsolete. In two days Betty would return to the suburbs, unravished by him.

  The surprising thing was that all at once, in the midst of her annoyance, Betty found herself sympathetic to Alloway: she had detected the sadness in his heart.

  She said: “What you think matters to me.” Though seldom exercised, Betty’s generosity was authentic when it came into play, no counterfeit, not in the least sentimental. Her voice now was neither warm nor soft. Alloway could take or leave the statement that she valued his judgment, man to man.

  Alloway felt worse: he wanted pity, not respect. He wished he could get that over to Betty, but she came up to him now, looked him in the eye fair and square, and gave him a ward politician’s handshake. She strongly suspected he was a fairy. Arthur was superficially stupid but had reliable instincts, especially when it came to sex.

  As soon as Alloway slunk out the door, Arthur appeared in Betty’s room, still in his underwear.

  “What should I wear tonight?” he asked.

  He had really come over to watch her undress. Betty loved Arthur for such attentions. She pretended to ignore him, to be businesslike. She and Arthur had never had intimate relations until they were formally engaged. Because of her sister’s example, Betty had long remained a virgin, though she would neck and pet with anybody on a first date, and often took the initiative from the boy. She could be bold because she maintained an absolute command over herself.

  Once at the age of fifteen she found herself seated in a movie theater next to a dignified, gray-haired gentleman who smelled of expensive shaving lotion. On a whim Betty let her foot steal across until it touched his oxford. He moved his shoe away, but from the corner of her eye she saw a flicker in the white of his. She sat loosely, right leg at a thirty-degree angle from the left, body softly slumped though standing she was very firm in those days. At last the man’s long thigh began to incline towards her knee, touched it lightly, withdrew. She sighed and lowered her head as if falling asleep; her plaid skirt rode three inches higher.

  Then a terrible thing happened: the man rose from his seat and walked up the aisle, leaving Betty alone with his clinging scent and a nightmarish suspicion that he had gone to report her to an usher, though she was guilty of nothing. But then her cold fingers, dangling over the armrest, in fright opening and closing like the pincers of a beached and overturned crab, touched wadded fabric. He had left his coat behind. She thought he would not have done that had he gone for authority: the girl who made advances might also steal. It was expensive material, a heavy, silken gabardine. She was still stroking it when he returned from the men’s room or wherever. She pulled back, yet he must have seen her white wrist.

  He settled in, the coat upon his lap. The picture concerned war; a cannonade was in progress. Betty felt unbearably warm as she watched a nurse move calmly about a field hospital though it was under fire. The thin, cool hand resting on the inside of her thigh felt refreshing. She had no idea of how it got there; the man sat farther away from her than he had previously, seemed remote and rigid. A precise finger began to trace the hem of her pants, climbed to the softness of her lower abdomen and traced a circle, around and around. It was soothing to Betty, who had not known what she wanted, but when nothing further happened for an infinity, she grew bored, even watched the picture, wherein the soldiers had captured a store of enemy wine and sausage and were partaking of it with ingratiating gluttony.

  Unobtrusively the man had withdrawn his cool fingers. Betty peeped at his unwavering, aristocratic profile, in the reflected candlelight from the simulated rathskeller. Suddenly his head moved close to her ear.

  His voice was low-pitched but thin. “I’ll give you five dollars for your briefs,” he whispered.

  Betty at first assumed this was some jargon way of saying he wanted carnal knowledge of her, and that of course was horrible and perverse because he was old and she was fifteen though mature for a year and a half. Now it was she who must fetch the usher. However, her natural optimism asserted itself at this point. She would call his bluff. A hand at either thigh, a shift of the hips, and her pants were off, an action so deftly managed that it would have seemed only an adolescent squirming to the casual onlooker. Anyway, five seats to her left were unoccupied.

  He accepted the balled garment and gave her a note that felt like money though folded into a tiny square.

  “O.K.,” she said, “I’m leaving now.” He stuffed the used pants into a pocket of his lovely gabardine topcoat and made no reply. Betty felt curiously linked to him and was reluctant to go.

  She tried again to elicit from him some expression of feeling.

  “Will I ever see you again?”

  “No.” His mouth was stern. She rose and squeezed past his sharp knees.

  The bill proved genuine when she later examined it in the Ladies.

  She cried herself to sleep that night, and for years all she had to do was think of that pathetic incident to achieve a sense of poignancy. The awakening, confused passions of the pubescent girl versus the jaded appetite of the man past his prime: two kinds of appearance and no reality at all. It was pure poetry and the most beautiful experience Betty had ever known.

  She wished she had the nerve to tell Alloway about it, though no doubt such stuff could not be printed. The public had a dirty mind, would accept without protest an account of some loathsome performance on the man’s part but never this graceful, hopeless transaction.

  Throughout these memories Arthur was making love to her. Betty returned to the present as he disengaged and rolled over on his side, stertorously claiming air.

  When Arthur could speak, he asked, wrinkling the little patch of hair which almost joined his eyebrows: “Do you think that’s bad taste?”

  “What?”

  “This, with what happened yesterday.”

  “No,” Betty stated definitely. She left the bed and moved towards the bathroom, collecting from the floor en route the underclothing which, abstracted, she had shed before obliging Arthur. In a surge of self-pity she wondered whether anyone in all the world would now pay five dollars for her pants. She liked being married, but it somehow made her feel obsolescent.

  Chapter 4

  ANOTHER paper contracted with Betty’s father for his life story and assigned two reporters to write it. These men were named, respectively, Roy Dilworth and Harr
y C. Clegg. They installed Starr in a first-class hotel and then took him to lunch downstairs.

  The reporters foolishly allowed Starr to drink three servings of rye with an idea that his tongue would thereby be oiled; but inundating an empty stomach, the spirits rendered him mute. Suddenly the seat of his worn trousers lost its purchase on the banquette, and he slid under the table by three-quarters. In fetching him up, Dill’s elbow caught the tablecloth and pulled some crockery to the floor. Nothing broke on the thick carpet, but gravy, ice water, celery, and black olives spattered abroad. Harry apologized to a woman with befouled ankles, and with Dill got the bastard out to the lobby and into an elevator. Propped against the rear wall, Starr was absolutely silent, with ceramic eyes.

  On the seventh floor they maneuvered him into the room, telephoned for gallons of black coffee, and ran the shower, but Starr refused to strip, threatened to vomit, and then passed out. Harry and Dill drank the coffee when it arrived, and Clegg called his city editor.

  “You schmucks,” he was told. “The competition is already on the street with the first installment of the Bayson woman, by Alloway. Unless we can start ours tomorrow, I’ll dump it and bill you two for the hotel tab. The police think they can make a junkie for the murders.”

  Clegg repeated this intelligence to Dill, then looked at the bundle of refuse upon the bed. “Jesus,” he confessed, “I could beat that pig to death. I wonder if the wife and daughter were anything like him.”

  Dilworth said: “I went out with a girl once who posed for pictures. She was philosophical, full of little sayings like ‘Don’t try to saw sawdust,’ ‘Only a balloon profits by hot air.’ Nobody would have killed her out of passion.”