“I’m sure you did,” Carter said.
“He’s easy to get along with—easier than you’ve been lately.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“You’ve had a shot of something tonight, haven’t you? Morphine? I suppose Gawill has everything. Everything slimy.”
“Yes, I had one.”
“You look exactly as you used to in prison sometimes—a kind of phony calmness about you. A quiet drunk.”
“Your tactics tonight,” he said, “seem to be to attack me—to cover up your own activities. You can call Gawill all the names you want, he seems to know more about you than I do. And as for phonyness, I’ve had it up to here with Sullivan. That bastard can save his smiles and his good turns—”
“Like getting you a job? Close the door, Phil.”
The way she said the last words hurt Carter more than anything else she had said. She was in complete possession of herself, and thinking of Timmy’s sleep, of course, thinking of Timmy overhearing some of this. Carter closed the door slowly, resting both hands on the knob, and pondered the terrible efficiency of women: Hazel running the house in Fremont and slaving in a dress shop at the same time, Hazel being quite a good mother to Timmy, Hazel going to school and getting a master’s degree, Hazel keeping Sullivan happy and on the string all this time, Hazel—up to now—keeping him happy, too.
“Thanks.” She glanced at him sharply.
Carter felt then that she actually disliked him, that she disliked the person he had become after prison, perhaps. Certainly she hadn’t disliked him before. He had a feeling of being swept away, annihilated physically. It lasted only a few seconds. He wiped a hand across his forehead and faced her. “I can’t deny that prison changed me. I don’t think it’s made me into a monster. You may not like me. That’s another matter. I trusted you. Apart from the two weeks’ affair you told me about, I thought you were loyal to me. If I—”
“All those fine words and you’re full of morphine this minute?” She took a fresh cigarette and lit it. “All right, Phil, I know a lot of awful things happened to you in prison—and that’s why I haven’t said anything to you about it and never blamed you. I imagine you had to be in a trance or something to stand that filthy place. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d become a real addict. I mean a heavy one.”
Carter opened his hands. “You’re talking as if I’m an addict now. For God’s sake, Hazel, this is the first—the second shot I’ve had since I got out of the clink!”
“Oh, the second. Yes, I think I know when you had the first. Last Thursday when you said you’d been out for a walk.” And for an instant she showed her pretty profile as she looked sideways at the night table.
“You’ve got the usual phobia about dope, about the awful people who take it. What’s so much better about alcohol? Alcohol just happens to be legal in this country, that’s all.”
“Then why isn’t dope legal, too?”
“Maybe because a lot of people are making money on it.”
“You’re defending dope as a social custom—like a drink before dinner?”
“All right, I’m not!”
“The pills you’re taking are full of morphine. I asked Dr. MacKenzie about them. Timmy notices it, too. You can’t even play with him the way you used to, and one would think it’s easier to play with a twelve-year-old than a six-year-old.”
“Not necessarily. And Timmy hasn’t been too easy—you know that—since I was out of prison. I’m not blaming him. It takes time. I realize what he went through at school because of me.”
“And do you realize what I went through, too? Do you think a woman’s proud of having a husband in prison? Do you think it’s easy to keep bolstering a father in a child’s eyes, when he knows the father’s in prison?”
“Darling, I’m aware of all that. What can I say except I’m sorry the whole damned thing happened? You’re skirting around the issue.”
She was silent. She knew the issue.
“Which do you want, Sullivan or me?” Carter asked.
“I miss David. I can’t seem to live without seeing him—talking to him.”
“And sleeping with him?”
She didn’t answer that.
“That’s part of it, isn’t it?”
“It has been. I tried—I mean—sleeping with him isn’t the most important part.”
“Maybe not for you,” Carter put in.
“You can’t understand, I suppose, that it meant—life itself to me to be able to see him now and then just for an hour or less some afternoons, just to talk with him?”
“Gawill believes it. He’s got snapshots of you going into Sullivan’s house. Recent ones.”
“All right, so now you know. I hope it’ll take the wind out of Gawill’s sails—if he’s got any sails.”
“If it means life to you, you’re not going to give it up, are you?” Carter asked. “Or were you possibly using the past tense?”
“You don’t understand women. Or me. You never did.”
Carter mashed his cigarette out. “Stop talking in clichés. I can understand your liking to talk to Sullivan, I can understand friendship. Unfortunately, I can understand a woman’s inclination to add a little icing to the cake by sleeping with a good friend if he asks for it. I can certainly understand Sullivan’s asking for it. What man wouldn’t? Can you understand that you’re married to me? Is that too difficult?”
“This happened while you were in prison. Were you so innocent in prison, I wonder? I never asked you any questions about that, did I?”
Carter smiled. “There aren’t any partners in prison. Unless you want another man, of course. Plenty of those.”
“You and Max?”
“What about Max?”
“What about Max?”
Carter felt the blood in his cheeks. “I liked him, yes, but not the way you’re talking about.”
“Never even thought of it?”
Carter’s eyes narrowed and he hated her then. This was picking, petty, nasty, bitchy. “I’m not even going to answer that.”
“Maybe that’s answer enough. Anyway, Max died too soon, perhaps.”
“Cut it out, Haze, you’re making things worse.”
“Oh, I’m making things worse.”
“You want to punish me—light into me about thinking? Sure it crossed my mind, maybe Max’s, too. Do you want me to make some trite statement about things like that happening in prison all the time because there’s nothing else? I’m not going to make it. How can you compare Max with Sullivan? Max was the pleasantest thing I had in that stinking place, nicer and better than thinking of you sleeping with Sullivan or wondering if you were. I gave you the benefit of the doubt in those days. To tell you the truth, I doped myself so I wouldn’t think about you with Sullivan at all. So I wouldn’t admit to myself you were sleeping with him all those years—because it might have finished me.”
“You doped yourself, all right.”
Hazel’s intensity reminded him of her jealousy of Max when Carter had first told her about him. She had intuitively grasped Max’s importance to him—and so, of course, had he. But Max was gone, and Carter could not remember a single physical touch of him, except the afternoon Max had pushed him in the shoulder to make him lie down on his bunk. Carter had never thought, I love Max, and yet for a while he had been as dependent emotionally on him as on Hazel, simply because he was there. It was at once simple and complex. Carter blinked and stared at her.
“What are you thinking?” Now her beautiful face looked merely beautiful, and quite empty, like a dry field waiting for the rain of his thoughts.
“I’m thinking that all the words you used tonight—everything you’ve said—in such bitterness—is part of your fighting for David. You’re not going to give him up, are yo
u?”
She lay back deeper in her pillow, squirming uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”
He took a step toward her. “I’d appreciate a little honesty. Say yes or no.”
“I can’t.” Her eyes were closed.
“I want you, Hazel. I want you back.”
“I can’t talk anymore tonight about it.”
Carter felt baffled. “Sullivan— He had me up in his apartment to tell me also it was two weeks and four days. Well rehearsed. He hadn’t even the guts to admit the truth. Do you like men without guts?”
“All right, he’s weak. I know it.”
“He’s cowardly,” Carter said. “It’s still going on, isn’t it?”
“Not really, not really. Let me sleep,” Hazel said, her eyes still closed, her brows frowning.
Carter gave it up for the night. He wasn’t hooked on morphine, he was hooked on Hazel, he thought with a detached amusement. He hadn’t presented her with any ultimatum, he realized, no “give him up or else, or else I’ll do this or that.” He hadn’t thought Hazel would need an ultimatum. Carter turned from the closet, where he had just hung his robe, and looked at her. Her face was turned toward the edge of the bed, her eyes closed.
21
“Hello, Phil. Greg,” Gawill’s voice said. “How are things?”
Carter glanced around automatically in the empty living room, though he knew Timmy was in his own room, probably with the door closed. “Things are all right,” Carter said.
“I thought you might have had a talk with your wife—that night.”
“Nope.” Carter drew on his half-finished cigarette.
“Ah, come on, Phil. You can talk to me. There’s nobody there, is there? Maybe the kid?”
“Nope,” Carter repeated.
“I know Hazel’s not,” Gawill drawled in his baritone voice, Gawill the omniscient.
Hazel was a bit late tonight, but she might come in the door any minute, Carter thought. But obviously, Gawill had someone watching the house now. Carter had just come in himself. “What’s on your mind, Greg?” Carter asked.
“Is your wife going to keep on seeing that jerk? Did she make you any promises?”
Carter wanted to bang the telephone down. He only squeezed it in his left hand, wordless and angry.
“I don’t know why you don’t talk to me, Phil.”
“Because I really have nothing to say. Sorry.” He put the telephone down.
Then he went into the kitchen and poured a drink of scotch, which he sipped straight. Things hadn’t progressed a jot since he’d had the talk with Hazel Tuesday night. Today was Thursday. There was an atmosphere of quiet enmity between them, which Carter wondered if Timmy had noticed, and thought probably that he had. Carter was really waiting for Hazel to say something, and Hazel wasn’t saying anything more. It’d be a matter of a week, maybe a little more, until another phony engagement turned up—an evening with Phyllis Millen, or with one of the office workers going over the caseloads, something—and she’d spend another evening with Sullivan. Maybe she was with him now, a bit late after one of their heures bleues that had begun before 5 this afternoon. Well, Hazel had delivered her answer, really: she was going to keep on seeing Sullivan and sleeping with him. If she had any serious intentions to the contrary, she would have said so by now. Hazel figured he loved her so much, he’d put up with it. That was what it amounted to.
Carter was jolted a little closer to doing what he had been thinking of doing since the Tuesday night conversation. He would talk to Sullivan. Ask him to stop seeing her, or— Or what? The law could scarcely step in and protect his rights here, throw a guard around Hazel. Carter smiled. All he had was good grounds for divorce. But he didn’t have Hazel. It was a funny world.
Hazel came in, glanced at the drink in his hand and said, “Good evening.”
“Evening. Fix you a drink?”
“Just had one, thanks. Our sociologist-at-large Mr. Piers blew in today and insisted on taking me out for a drink. He gave me another sixty-page thing to get through tonight.” She slapped a stapled, mimeographed manuscript down on the coffeetable, then straightened and stretched, smiling. “Sorry. I’m stiff. Can we go out to that Chinese place tonight for dinner? Timmy likes it. I don’t feel like cooking if I’ve got all that tonight.”
“Okay. Sure.” And Carter went in to tell the nice news to Timmy. A Chinese dinner.
But all in all, he felt a trifle better that evening than the two previous evenings, because he had come to a decision. Futile and absurd as it might be, he would ask Sullivan to stop sleeping with his wife. He’d at least get some kind of answer from Sullivan, a promise that he would, a half promise, or a “go to hell.” He debated telephoning Sullivan to make a definite date, and decided not to for the simple reason that Sullivan might duck it or postpone it: Carter had no doubt that Hazel had told him about their conversation of Tuesday night.
On Friday, Carter went directly from his office to Sullivan’s, on the Second Avenue bus. It was raining slightly, and there was a balmy note of spring in the cool air. Carter pressed Sullivan’s bell, then looked at his wristwatch: seventeen minutes to 6. He might even be too early. Or Hazel might be with him, Carter thought, and gave a grimace of a smile. He heard the release bell. Carter took the stairs instead of the small slow elevator, and at Sullivan’s third floor he was nearly knocked down by a man running down the steps. The rude bump brought Carter’s anger to the surface. No murmur of apology from the fellow. He went on down the steps, coattails flying. The door below banged.
“Oh, Phil! Phil!” Sullivan gasped. He was standing in his open doorway, wilting against the door he was clinging to.
Carter frowned. “What happened?” he asked, walking up the rest of the steps.
“Come in.” Sullivan loosened his tie, opened his collar. “Christ. Come in. You saved my life.— Here, let’s have a drink.” He started toward the bar cart in the corner of his living room.
Carter closed the door behind himself. “Saved your life?”
“Sorry, I need this.” Sullivan was lifting a glass of straight scotch to his lips. “That guy— You saw that fellow running down?”
“Yes.”
“One of Gawill’s friends. He rang the doorbell. I didn’t know who it was. I let him in. He said he came to see me about my insurance—or something.” Sullivan licked his lips. Even his lips looked white, and his face looked like death, like a man drained of blood. “Pulled out a knife and started after me. Had me by the shirtfront.”
Carter saw that a button dangled on Sullivan’s jacket, that his shirtfront was crumpled.
“If he hadn’t heard your ring,” Sullivan said, “I’d have been done for.”
Sullivan looked contemptible. This is the lily-livered swine that sleeps with Hazel, Carter thought in a flash, and walked toward Sullivan. Sullivan didn’t know his intentions until Carter was right on him, and then Carter hit him a blow in the side of the neck with his hand. It staggered Sullivan badly. Then Carter blacked out, as he had in his rage in prison after finding Max dead, though he did not think of Max now or of anything. Only when Sullivan was lying on the floor, twisted, gripping his stomach as if hurt, yet not moving, did Carter really see him, and stop. Carter stood for a couple of seconds, getting his breath back, and then he spat at Sullivan, and gave him a kick that missed.
Carter went to the door and turned. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Sullivan was dead. Now Carter saw in the seat of the armchair near Sullivan one of the Greek marble feet. He noticed it only because it didn’t belong there. Then he closed the door and went down the steps. He went down at a normal rate, and was aware that his speed was normal. Who was Gawill’s man, he wondered. The same brawny fellow he’d seen at Gawill’s with the blonde?
On the sidewalk, he felt slightly faint for a moment, and stood an
d took some breaths of air. Don’t think, for Christ’s sake, he told himself. Don’t think about what you’ve done. Carry it off. He thought the words, carry it off, but without attaching a meaning or any line of planning to them. He lifted his head and walked on to the corner and turned north. It was only a ten-block walk home, and he felt like walking. At a bar, he stopped and had a quick scotch and water.
“Hel-lo, Phil,” Hazel said cheerily when he came in the door. “Do you know what happened today? Something unbelievable.”
“What?” He tossed the World-Telegram, which he had just bought, down on the sofa.
“I got a raise.”
“Oh. Congratulations.”
She glanced at him, still smiling. “And in celebration, I bought us some squabs. Saw them in a window and couldn’t resist. Can you manage a squab?”
“I think so. Could you manage a drink?”
“Yes, definitely.”
And everything went quite smoothly, quite pleasantly, until just before 9 o’clock, when the telephone rang.
“Mrs. Carter there, please?” asked a man’s voice.
“Yes, just a minute,” Carter said. “For you, Haze.”
Hazel came in from the kitchen, where she had been stacking the dishes, and took the telephone.
Carter lit a cigarette. He knew what it was.
“My God!” Hazel said. “No . . . No . . . Certainly not . . . No, I haven’t.” She looked at Carter, who returned her look quizzically. “I think three days ago, maybe four days, but I spoke to him just this morning . . . Oh—” She sat down on the edge of the armchair seat. “All right . . . All right, of course. Thank you.” She put the telephone down, dropped it off the cradle with a clatter, then put it in the cradle correctly.
“What is it?” Carter asked.
“Mommy, what’s the matter?” Timmy got up from the floor, leaving his books, and walked toward her.
“David’s been killed.”