“You’re with me, then?”
“No, I’m not certain of that. I can’t be with them, but to take you on trust … I can’t do that.”
McLeod massaged his chin. “And rightly so. Look, friend, don’t mistake me, I want you here very much. In a way. There may come a time when I ask you to leave the room.”
“Yes?”
“You have no idea what he whispered to me, and how it’s tempting,” McLeod said suddenly.
“Then why do you want me to be here?” I asked.
He nodded his head to himself, and when he replied I did not understand him.
“Conscience,” McLeod said.
TWENTY-TWO
THAT night the weather became unbearable, and my attic room which had suffered the sun’s glare upon the roof tar was baked again by a land breeze. The pavement turned soft, the air was heavy, and waiting for rain to fall, I lay sweltering on a damp sheet. Outside the leaves stirred sluggishly. A heat lightning had come up in the west, and for a long time I watched it kindle the curling plaster of my ceiling, became absorbed at last in its alternation with a searchlight which flashed a rhythmic beam across my walls. I drowsed to the muffled sound of thunder.
And while I was asleep or perhaps even waking, almost certainly a fantasy and yet I could not disprove it existed, I saw myself in still another barracks. We were one of a hundred buildings, surrounded by wire, and the flooring had holes, the walls had cracks; we slept two hundred of us on planks spread across a trestle. Each morning, and they were winter mornings, we were wakened at five and marched a mile to a long shed where we had bread and hot water if the cooks were kind, and porridge deprived of salt. That done, we marched beyond the enclosure and saw the dawn from down a long road lined with sentries and barbed fence. It was a cruel walk and at the end was a tremendous factory, almost new, but the windows were shattered, the roof of one wing was stripped, and the machinery did not always function. There we worked, hand on a lever to punch and press, and next to us, never meeting, though in the range of our eyes, were other workers with a card, and they lived in a dormitory on the far side of the factory, and were free to walk to town once work was done. We were always promised that we would be allowed to join them if only … if only we would produce more than our fellows.
I had a friend. He was old and emaciated and more than bitter, a worker for sixty years as he would often say. “They made me a slavey as a boy of eight, and I earned two shillings a week, and my sister died of consumption in a dressmaker’s shop, tatting lace for milady’s ball. I was one of the industrial reserve army and almost permanently unemployed. Sixty years, and I am still one of the industrial reserve army and it was better then, for one didn’t march to work, and at the age of twelve I tussled a girl in the shavings on the cutting-room floor.”
Drugged by the morning sun, I could hardly awake. Light glared into my eyes, heat banked itself in the room, and cinder dust eddied over my face. I lay in such stupor that it must have taken me through the forenoon before I thought of quitting my bed.
A fly was circling through the hot moist air, buzzing over my chest, nipping my foot, and then off to explore the cubicle again. Somewhere the fly had lodged on a pin speck of carrion and played with the booty on the floor. I turned on my side and watched the fly even as the fly was revolving its food beneath a foreleg. Minutes elapsed this way, the insect humming against the sound of my breath, the city noise carrying into my window from far away.
I must have fallen asleep for when I opened my eyes the fly was gone and someone was in the act of slipping a piece of paper beneath my door. A corner projected over the sill, and rustled to one side and then the other. I had more than time to get out of bed and look in the hall, but the effort demanding too much of my fuddled senses, I merely gaped at the door while the paper nosed its way to the left and to the right, and finally halted half into my room, half under the wood, while whoever had so placed it could be heard softly descending the stairs.
I shook my head dully and was about to navigate my feet to the floor and the paper to my hand when the note was agitated once more, slipped back over the dust of the sill and was withdrawn. It was only after several seconds that this seemed at all extraordinary, and like a bobbin jogging in the wake of events, I had no sooner decided that the disappearance of the note was even more to be noted than its presence, when to my complete disaster the piece of paper wiggled under the door again, and I could be diverted for a second time to the sound of footsteps moving away.
For such an entrance the message was more than commonplace.
It was from Guinevere. In the neat and miniature handwriting which seemed so at odds with what one might anticipate, she had written in pale-blue ink:
Dear Michael,
Maybe you forgot but we have things to talk about. Come on down. I’m dying to see you.
And with the vulgar gentility she courted, the note was signed, Beverly G. McLeod.
I shrugged, laid the paper on my desk, and half decided not to see her. Still sluggish from the heat, I took a shower, dressed, and then as I was about to go out, some impulse made me put the note in my pocket. I had breakfast, read a paper, and came back to the house with an idea of working. But as I climbed the brownstone stairs, jingling the change in my pocket, I felt her message curled into a ball, and was tickled with the uneasy memory of how the note had circulated over the doorsill.
At that instant, looking up, I saw Lannie staring at me from the second-story hall window. It was only a glimpse, and then I could have sworn she started back, unwilling to let me know that she was watching. The combination determined me. I rang Guinevere’s bell.
For once I was not greeted by a miscellany of lingerie and bathrobe and zippers and flesh. She was dressed for the street and wore a flowered-print chiffon with a cartwheel hat and spiked heels for her tiny feet and a pair of elbow-length net gloves covered her forearms. “Oh, Mikey, you’re sweet,” she said as she let me in, the wide painted mouth curving provocatively. Perfume was strewn lavishly upon her, and she moved in a cloud of musk, the sweet odor heavy on the air. She smelled like a tropical flower with all its sensuous bouquet and its suggestion, troubling and almost fetid, of tropical earth.
“Oh, I’m all up in the air,” Guinevere said.
She paused and, in the interval, folded drama about herself. “Guess where I’m going?”
I asked her.
“You remember that doctor I told you about?”
I trod warily through a junkyard of her discarded tales. “You mean the one in your novel?”
She nodded profoundly. “Yes, that’s the one, although as you’ve probably guessed by now he’s more real than fictional, and he’s blown into town and I’m off to see him.” She cocked her head to one side. “Brother, will I have a time!”
“Don’t you think you’ve got enough to handle right here?”
“Oh you couldn’t understand about this doctor. He’s special.” She tugged lazily at one of her gloves. “What a man. He’s got everything a woman could want.” And she insisted upon specifying so that I was given a small treatise on his physical attributes, his endurance, his fancy projects, his attentiveness; and all the while Guinevere was reciting, her language studded with the imagery of a pornographic ditty, greed and—was it wistfulness?—peeped out of her eyes. She might have been describing the wonders of a house in the suburbs which she had visited. “Green lawn, so green, and a picture window, and all the furniture, modern but so plush, elegant,” I heard her say in my mind’s ear until the doctor was blooming orchids in the rock garden.
“You know what my pet name for him is?” she finished. “Lover-boy, that’s what.” And she inclined her head and touched her cheek with one gloved finger, looking at me sideways from half-veiled eyes.
“What will your husband be doing while you’re gone?”
“Him, he’s asleep,” Guinevere said. “Listen, he’s knocked out. You should have seen him pace the floor last night. I asked him if h
e thought he was in a marathon dance or what.” She sighed. “He took some sedatives, and I gave him a little extra so he’d sleep good, and now he’s been sleeping for sixteen hours, curled up just like a bug.”
“Why did you want to see me today?” I asked.
“Well, now, wait a minute.” An amalgam of slyness and caution directed her next speech. “Maybe I’m not exactly sure. You know there’s lots of things.” In an offhand manner she suggested, “You didn’t tell me yet what happened upstairs in the conference. I mean it could be that, for instance.”
“You know I won’t tell you. Why did you invite me down?”
She sat back in a chair. Her hand fanning the brim of her hat with studied unconcern, she opened her large blue eyes at me. “Oh, brother, I’m looking forward to that doctor.”
A realization stirred in me, became focused almost to clarity, and then slipped away again. “I seem to be holding you up,” I suggested.
She looked at her watch. “No, I’ll tell you when to go.”
We stared at one another in an unpleasant silence. I stood up at last and began to pace about the room.
“Why don’t you sit still?” she snapped at me.
“Are you nervous?” I parried.
“Who’s nervous?”
I stopped and looked at her. “The doctor just blew into town, is that it?”
She nodded warily.
“I don’t believe he’s real.”
Guinevere shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Yet she watched my movements with great alertness, her eyes, perhaps against her will, following me as I walked back and forth, until it became at last a game children might play, and in the total of her expressions and the small agitation of her limbs, she could have been saying, “Now you’re hot; and now you’re cold.”
I happened to glance behind the living-room door. There, tucked into the angle it made with the wall, was a suitcase resting on the floor. I picked it up, and extended it to her. “Quite heavy,” I told her flatly. “You may need help.” The bag had been packed only too hastily; a snip of lingerie protruded past the hinge.
As though the issue were now decided, Guinevere removed her hat. “I knew you’d do that,” she murmured. “You’re smart, Lovett.” She said this with a certain calm, but her mouth trembled.
“Do you intend to come back?” I asked quietly.
It was just the question she had wanted. “Oh, of course. Oh, listen, I wasn’t going away. I mean I’m just going to be gone for a couple of hours. The bag …”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Well, you see, that’s sort of a … sort of a dress rehearsal,” she finished broadly. “I mean I wanted to see what it felt like to pack.”
This completed my exasperation, “You’re going away with a mythical doctor and you stuff a suitcase, and you drug your husband, and then to make certain that everything is kept secret, you invite me to discover all this. What in the name of heaven do you want, Guinevere?”
Her vexation was only too patent. Tears filled her eyes. “Why don’t you leave me alone, Lovett?”
“Then why don’t you go? Everything is ready.”
“You’re ruining my life,” she shrieked.
“It’s because you don’t really want to go.”
Her hand drooped from the chair and fluttered at her side. “Why do I always have to make up my mind?” she said in a voice which was close to weeping, her face puckered like a child.
“You never make up your mind. You want everyone else to do it for you.”
She looked about her helplessly. “Leave me alone, just leave me alone.”
But Guinevere had her reprieve. There was a knock on the door. Now anything which had been smashed could be restored again. “Oh, my aching back,” she cursed in a whisper, “that’s him, that’s him.” She looked about wildlly, but it was counterfeit. “Oh, here, what’ll I do? You’ve got to hide, you just got to hide.”
“I won’t hide,” I told her, and in saying it admitted I would, for I was whispering too.
“Mikey, don’t argue! Get behind the door.”
Sweet farce. She left the bag in the middle of the floor, and myself where the bag had been, moving to the hall entrance in the gait of a hostess, adjusting her hair with one hand, while with the other she was free to nudge a chair and turn a lamp-shade to another angle. “Oh, kill me,” she groaned, kicking out a wrinkle in the rug, “why do they always catch me like this?” And the knocking repeated, she shouted, “Hold your horses, I’m coming,” yet pausing long enough to admonish me in yet another whisper, “You stay there now, damn you, you’ve got to.”
If I did not, she was lost. She could sally forth to battle, her breasts charging like cavalry, but she would have been helpless without guerrillas in the forest. So I waited, and she threw open the door to Hollingsworth.
Guinevere would play this extravagantly. He had hardly entered before she declaimed, “Oh, lover-boy, how long you have kept me waiting.”
I heard him walk to the center of the room, and I imagined him turning around slowly, staring at her.
“Do you still love me?” she asked theatrically.
I was to hear another Hollingsworth. “Yes, I love you,” he said, his delivery pitched in novel tones for me. As though language were a catapult he proceeded to tell her how he loved her, his speech containing more obscenity than I had ever heard in so short a space, and in rapid succession with a gusto which could have matched Guinevere’s description of the doctor, he named various parts of her body and described what he would do to them, how he would tear this and squeeze that, eat here and spit there, butcher rough and slice fine, slash, macerate, pillage, all in an unrecognizable voice which must have issued between clenched teeth, until his appetite satisfied, I could see him squatting beside the carcass, his mouth wiped carefully with the back of his hand. With that, he sighed, as much as to say, “A good piece of ass, by God.”
“Oh,” Guinevere responded, “Oh, brother,” but her voice was reflective. Probably she played for me as well as for him. I could hear her walk a step or two toward the door as if to indicate she knew I was there. Then she turned back to Hollingsworth. “Oh, lover, I’d do anything for you,” she said.
“You would?” His voice purred.
“I’d work for you, I’d slave for you,” she continued to declaim, “I’d get down on my hands and knees and scrub.”
“That’s not necessary.” In offering such submission, she had thrown a switch, and now when he spoke, I had the impression he adjusted his cuffs and wrapped formality about him once more. “Oh, that would hardly be necessary I should think.”
Then he giggled. “I wonder what your husband would say if he ever heard us.”
“Don’t think of that character as my husband,” Guinevere said.
But she would deprive Hollingsworth of something very essential. “Oh, yes, he is your husband, and there’s no getting away from that I would say.” He must have been holding her now. “And you know, he’s an unusual fellow. I can see how a girl would get a crush on him.” His voice throbbed suddenly. “He’s been a big fellow in his time.”
“You can go for him, huh?” Guinevere said crudely.
He disregarded this. “You know I cut a figure with the ladies, so to speak, but it’s different with you.” Much as though he had not told her this all before, he restated the theme in a smaller voice. “I could eat you, every last bit of you.” Passion, retracking its spoor, licked at the edge of his words. What curiosity devoured him. “Why don’t you tell me what it was like with him?” he said huskily.
Guinevere slipped away, out of his arms and across the room. “Ah, you’re always asking that,” she said.
“And you never tell me.”
“Let’s get off the subject,” she bawled.
“You’re his wife.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re his wife,” he repeated, and loaded with this, I could hear him embracing her again, his breath
coming quickly.
“Whoa,” Guinevere said, and now it was she who giggled. “Let’s have a cigarette.”
There was the sound of Hollingsworth’s lighter as he clicked forth the flame to her cigarette and to his. I could picture them sitting back in their chairs, blowing smoke toward one another. And to my relief, Guinevere began a new subject.
“Do you see that? she asked coyly.
“What?”
“Why, the suitcase,” she said sweetly.
“I see it,” he said.
Now she began to deploy her forces. “Suppose I was to ask you to go away with me now. Would you go?”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere. To the ends of the earth. To Barbary—I like the sound of that.”
“I’d take you with me,” he said quietly, “yes, I would.”
“Why don’t we go now?” Guinevere said wistfully.
Hollingsworth cleared his throat. “You know we can’t. I mean a fellow has to finish certain of his obligations.”
“You won’t ever take me,” Guinevere proclaimed sadly. “I know you. You’ve filled me with a siren song.”
“Oh, no, I will take you,” he said with sudden force, “believe me, Jimmy girl. You see, after this, it’s Europe next, and missions of grave importance.”
“They’ll never send you.”
“Oh, they appreciate me,” he said mildly. “I do good work. Only today I finished up the first report.”
“But you won’t send it in?” she said with false confidence.
“I don’t know,” he murmured in a troubled voice. “You see it’s the proper thing to do. And you know what’ll happen otherwise.”
“Listen,” she said, and it was her turn for passion, “this thing is worth a fortune. A fortune.”
“But we don’t know,” Hollingsworth protested.
“I know, I tell you, I know, and I lived next to him all these years, and he had it all the while. It’s a fortune would choke a millionaire. They’d make us royalty.”
“I can’t make up my mind,” he told her. “I know, and you don’t know, what it would be like.” He said this with such conviction that I could feel the weight of her silence. Yet he added angrily, “I’d like to show them.” I could hear him stand up. “It’s late already, and if we are to go to that hotel for this afternoon, I think a couple of fellows like us ought to make a start.”