I was shaken. Like the spectator at an accident I wanted to talk, but Guinevere gave me small opportunity. “Whew,” she said, “I never saw her that way before.” She leaned an elbow on the table, and munched a crust of bread. And whatever she might have revealed with Monina was not to be revealed again. “Lordy, that was something. I don’t understand the kid,” she said in an offhand tone.
She had acted somewhat differently the moment Monina had begun to cry. Then she had started from the chair, picked the child up, and spanked her once with fury across the bottom. “How long was she doing that?” Guinevere had shrieked at me. When I stammered that Monina had been in the room for several minutes, Guinevere scorched me with fury. “Why you lousy no-good son of a bitch,” she screamed in her harsh voice, “why didn’t you do something?” She had clapped her forehead. “Oh, my God, I’ll go crazy.”
It was not an appetizing scene. While Monina sobbed and wailed, her body trembling, Guinevere abused me for over a minute in a more formidable rage than I had believed she could muster. And conscious that I had allowed Monina to continue, I stomached her outburst, humiliated, yet too shamed to make any response.
Guinevere collected herself finally, and carried the child into the bedroom. Now, half an hour later, she revealed no dregs of her tantrum. “Honest, Lovett,” she said, “it’s hell bringing up a kid,” speaking in a conventional voice which might have belonged to any housewife on the street. She seemed almost in a good humor.
“Here, I’ll make some more coffee for us,” she offered.
“I’ve had enough, thank you.”
“Oh, I haven’t. I could drink it all day long.”
We chatted at random for several minutes, or more exactly Guinevere talked. I listened indifferently, my attention wandering. As I nodded my head, she told story after story about this man and that lover, about presents she had accepted and presents spurned, of drinking bouts and happy license, and then occasionally if she sensed my belief flagging or my detachment growing, she would parade a special attraction and describe with relish the baubles of a particular lover. “I been every kind of woman you’d want, Lovett. There isn’t anything I haven’t done. But times change. I can tell you it’s a damn shame you didn’t know me a couple of years ago. Why we’d a been together after two hours or two minutes, but now you know I’m different. There’s the child to think about,” she said smugly.
“And then,” I suggested on an impulse, “you’re religious now, too.”
For an instant I could have sworn Guinevere looked at me in perplexity. She shrugged dubiously. “Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I’m religious.” For conversation like this, her footing was always stable. She might have stumbled, but without visible effort she drew to a gallop, and spoke once more of the Witnesses. “And you know, it was my husband who first converted me. He’s a religious man, religious as they come.” She bent forward and chuckled. “When I think about him in private, I call him the deacon. If you ever met him you’d be amazed I married a man like that, but then opposites attract, you know there’s some truth in that.”
“He’s Monina’s father, isn’t he?”
She nodded carefully as though debating her next words. “Lovett, I’ll tell you something. I don’t know.” She held up her hand. “Not that I was fooling around with anybody else at the time, but I could swear it wasn’t him. She don’t look like him, she looks exactly like me, and she ain’t got any of his temperament.” Her voice lowered; this, the deepest of secrets, to be revealed, she bent forward again, confiding. “Now, you know I ain’t a Catholic, but there’s times when I think they got something, like with Mary. I’m not saying Monina was born the same way they claim for Jesus, but you know it might have been a similar kind of thing, the doctors are always discovering new secrets, and who’s to say?” Reflectively, sensuously, she caressed her arm, her large blue eyes staring at me in calculated innocence.
I offered my small fagot. “Lots of odd things happen.”
“That’s what I think. There’s always something fishy going on. If I was to tell you some of the things that happened in this house. You know I just can’t keep up with it all, and I’m supposed to keep a lookout.”
“Well, what do you care?”
She snorted. “I got a pretty good setup here. We get our rent for nothing, and I don’t want to lose it.” Guinevere lit a cigarette with great deliberation. “Now, I don’t know what’s going on upstairs, but you’re three single men up there, and who knows what kind of floosies you guys are bringing in.”
“There’s an orgy going on every night.”
She shook her head. “Listen, you’re all right, Lovett. It’s not you I’m thinking about. I can see you’re a man of honor, and anyway you go for me so you’re accounted for. It’s those other two jokers. McLeod’s a queer fish, and Hollingsworth, although he seems okay, could have an ace or two up his sleeve. He’s still waters.” With her hand she molded a curl in her red hair. “Now, what I was thinking is maybe you’d care to keep an eye out on them, and let me know about it.” She was casual, deliberately casual; she yawned as she finished.
I had the impression that this finally was the purpose, if there were a single purpose, behind her note. “In other words,” I said, “you want me to spy on them.”
She shrugged. “What’s wrong with that? Everybody does it all the time anyway.”
“Well, I don’t care to assume the role.”
Her manner altered. “I’m just asking you to let me know what’s going on.” Cunningly she added, “You mean you wouldn’t do me a favor?”
“Not one like that.”
Guinevere put her hand over mine and squeezed it. “I thought there wasn’t anything you wouldn’t do for me.” She sighed. “Well, let’s forget about it. I’ll lose my job when the cops come in some night and find out what’s going on, but that’s none of your affair.”
I grinned. “You can always go back on the stage.”
“I’m too fat now.”
“You’re incredible,” I said.
I have no idea what passed through her mind. Conflicting expressions molded her mouth and eyes. “Aaah, you stink, Lovett,” she said at last. “Why do you think I wrote you that note?”
“So I’d look after your boy-friend, Hollingsworth.”
She started. “What do you mean by that? You know a lot of people talk about me, but that don’t mean nothing.” She crushed my empty cigarette pack and tossed it on the floor. “I’ll tell you something, something a woman should never tell a man. I wrote that note cause I wanted to see you again, and this time I intended to surrender. I was going to break all my resolutions. I really had it for you, and I was going to slip.”
“Sure.”
“But, now, it’s impossible. You hurt something in me. A woman’s not a machine. Why I could no more look at you now than if you were a cripple.” She spoke the word with venom.
From a depth in me, fatuous and self-pitying, I heard myself say, “I am a cripple.” Anger followed. My voice quivered. “And you, why don’t you stop playing Mata Hari? You’re very bad at it.”
I might have lashed her across the face. Her eyes contracted. “You can get out of here, Lovett. I didn’t invite you down to insult me.” Her voice became strident. “Get out, get out, you son of a bitch.”
“Oh, I’m going. And you can come upstairs next time.”
“Get out!” she screamed.
So, once again, completely bewildered, I climbed to my room and re-enacted our little drama to exhaustion. And if our fight had been serious—for I hardly understood it—then I was still without Guinevere for my bed, the two of us locked in hothouse warmth. When noontime came I would go down the street to the lunch wagon, eat, and return here. Outside, the heat of summer afternoon would bake the roof. Thus suspended, my mind dallying with the empty hour to follow, I sloughed through empty hours of the past.
I could almost remember another summer when I had lived in a hotel converted to a hospital. Had it
been Paris? And was it the summer of victory? There, too, I would have lain on a cot through hot afternoons, staring at the ceiling, while about me in that, the summer of victory, soldiers ate at a groaning board of black-market treasure and women in profusion, and in the limitless appetite of those days everybody was making a deal or setting up a household, establishing contacts, seducing actresses, losing or winning a half-year’s wages in the nightly poker games. For those few months heat rose from the silenced machines, and if like shavings, men were blown about, one could easily mistake it for a dance.
While it lasted, I was virtually inactive. I see myself in that period as moving about, even capable of leaving the hospital for a few hours, but I did nothing. I read only the newspapers, I ate the food which was served me, I never approached the black market. Once a month went by in which I did not stir from my cot.
Occasionally there were eruptions. I must have gone out with most of my face bandaged, and I think I was drunk in one of the bars of Pigalle. I spent fifty dollars that night, and there were soldiers yelling in my ear, and I can almost recall the words from the song of a chanteuse, can almost touch the drowsy whore who scratched herself before she began to dress. Or did I only languish in the summer heat of Paris, my mind inert, my body in torpor?
At times I am certain I used to lie on the bunk and stare at a photo of myself taken in England or was it in Africa? I would examine the face which the doctors assured me would be almost duplicated. Yet I must imagine this, for of all the hours I looked at the snapshot I cannot remember that face at all, and I do not know if I think of it now or whether, lying in that cot, I saw all the endless children who waited for our leavings on garbage lines, all the whores we abused, the peasants we cursed because they could not understand us and we were drunk. It almost comes back, the diarrhea, the trench foot, the boots we polished, the men who got killed. The machine stopped at last, but I stopped first, and lay on my cot that summer in a Paris which might be mythical, and counted the cracks in the wall. Empires had fallen, kingdoms been reshuffled, but that was over the horizon. I played a closet drama in which the machine would let me go … go where?
Here I lay upon another cot, drowsing through a hot forenoon, while outside upon the city streets men came and passed, errands were completed and work begun. I went down for lunch and came back to sit at my desk, driving myself dully through the hours which passed. I felt at a crisis in my work, impulses so contradictory, understanding so scattered, that an hour could go by and I would produce no more than a line or two and then discard it. By evening I felt the need to talk to McLeod.
NINE
CHARACTERISTICALLY, he sat upright on his hard chair, arms folded upon his chest, his knees crossed, his eyes boring into me from behind his silver-rimmed spectacles. Once or twice, in an unconscious gesture, his fingers would sharpen the crease of his trousers, and he would nod his head as if he had heard what I said many times.
I was talking about Guinevere, recounting in detail everything which passed between us. McLeod listened, a small smile upon his lips, chuckling from time to time in a manner I found disconcerting. Only once did he make a comment.
“What’s this about Jehovah’s Witnesses?” he asked.
I repeated some of the gospel she had preached, and McLeod shook his head. “She was making it up,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“She was.” He fingered his lean jaw for an instant. “I’ve known her for some time, and I’ve never heard her speak about them. It’s inconceivable. She probably read something in a magazine, and then fed it back to you.”
“Well, what about her husband?” I protested. “She says he’s religious.”
McLeod chuckled again. “I don’t believe I’ve met the gentleman,” he said lazily.
I went on with my story, and under McLeod’s scrutiny, so dispassionate, so balanced, I found myself admitting details which normally I would have found distasteful. In his presence I could find enthusiasm for the balm of confession as if nothing I might relate would ever provoke a dishonest reaction. The story launched upon the ways, I searched out facets I had almost forgotten, recalled conversations with an accuracy which startled me.
McLeod listened, soberly and quietly, a tight smile pinching his thin lips. When I had finished, he removed his eyeglasses, wiped them carefully, took out a comb and smoothed his straight hair. “Well,” he murmured. Abruptly, he began to shake with laughter. He controlled himself by an effort and murmured in a slow unsteady voice, “So you’re finding it hard to work, eh?”
This tipped his mirth again. Jeering at me, he continued to laugh. “What a woman she is,” he said at last, and then with a look at me, “What a duet.” He replaced his eyeglasses, stared through them at me. “The fat ghost and the pale ghost,” he stated. “Tell me, Lovett, do you think she’ll bestow the ultimate pleasure upon you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “And by now I don’t think I care.
“Oh, you’ll care again. She’ll expire before she’ll let you get indifferent. She needs a spy.” With a transparent pleasure, he paused before he spoke again, his finger uplifted. “Tell me, Lovett, will you go and report our conversation to her? That’ll round out the picture, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shrugged, his face impassive. “It’s conceivable, it’s conceivable.”
I disregarded what he had said; other questions pressed upon me more. “Look, what do you make of her?” I asked.
“Lovett, I’ll give you some of my wisdom,” McLeod drawled. “You’ll have to find out for yourself. Not everything can be learned by taking a pill.”
“Well, thanks.”
He grinned. “I’ll give you a tip to further your scientific inquiries along. If you want to know about her, you’ve got to imagine what her husband is like.”
“But neither of us has ever met him.”
“Nevertheless,” he said, “you have to fabricate a picture of him. When you do that, you’ll be able to see her better.”
I applied myself to the speculation. “He must be a retiring man, overshadowed by her.” But this game was impossible. “He could be just as easily seven feet tall with a big red face, and whip her every night.”
McLeod chuckled with glee. “You know, Lovett, you’re not bad.” He touched his finger tips together. “I’ve constructed a somewhat similar portrait, putting the two together. A man, therefore, who minds his own business, who’s meek. You’d never notice him, but when he’s alone with her, she’s terrified of him.”
“Why?”
“Ah!” He raised his arms and quivered them in a parody of a meek man in a fury. “Because he could murder her when they’re alone.” A moment later he was talking once more in his slow mocking voice. “Now, that was as far as I got for a while, but it don’t satisfy me. Why did the gentleman marry her? Why?”
I shrugged. “He found Guinevere attractive.”
“A profound observation,” McLeod said with a grimace. “He was attracted to her. And you”—his words flicking me—“being also attracted to her find that completely comprehensible.” A pedagogue reaching the climax, his hands went up in the air. “Why are people attracted to each other? Because they fulfill things reciprocally, be they nice things or sentiments which don’t bear examination. Now, I don’t have too much to do. I have my work, and when I get back I do a little reading, or I sit here and think. And one of the subjects which occupies me now and again is why a certain Mr. Guinevere, whose last name nobody has ever discovered, decided to marry her, and then set it up for the kind of relationship it is, one where he is never present, and she is practically a queen bee. What kind of individual do you think he is?”
“I have no idea.”
“He’s almost dead, that’s what he is. Why does he marry her? Because she gives out an emanation, call it what you will, that makes him think he’s close to something alive. He knows he’s frozen, and he wants to be laid against a body that’s nice
and warm. He sees it as an experiment on himself. That’s the kind of man he is, I’m convinced. Only what he doesn’t know is that she’s frozen too.”
“Why did she marry him?” I asked.
“A good question.” He held up his hands again. “Why? That’s a chestnut, isn’t it? Well, maybe she needed security. Economic matters have to be taken into account, foreign as they may be to your way of thinking.” He removed his spectacles again and squinted judiciously. “But that doesn’t account for it all. The mental goes along with the economic, and I keep returning to Mr. Guinevere. A moral man, I’m convinced. He wanted to punish himself, so he married her, and therefore she in turn, we might suppose, wanted to be in a position to punish somebody. And that’s only half of it. I’ll tell you,” he said, virtually talking to himself, “I picture him further as a gentleman who can see through her. He sees through her, and yet he doesn’t. I don’t suppose you could understand how much that means to the lady in question. He keeps her in place, but she can still fool him from time to time.”
“I should think she’d resent him for holding up the mirror.”
“Oh, does she? I should say so. But that’s it. Nothing is perfect. And if she’s afraid of him, that’s fine too. She’s always wanting to be made a woman.”
“Has she ever approached you?” I asked.
He clucked his tongue noncommittally, and grinned. “Now these hypotheses I leave to you, Lovett. You can do what you will with them.”
McLeod started to yawn, but he did not finish.
For someone scratched upon the door.
It was one of the most curious sounds I had ever heard, light, rapid, and with a persistence that spoke of an animal’s claw. McLeod revolved in his chair, his body stiffened, an attitude of intense concentration upon his features. What he expected I could not guess, but his reaction was extreme—all blood left his face. He sat transfixed for many seconds while the scratching repeated.
With what effort he replaced his eyeglasses, adjusted them upon his nose. “It is Hollingsworth then,” he whispered incomprehensibly. And all his will and all his strength apparently necessary for the next action, he straightened himself in the chair, and froze his face into a surface of composure, his lips supporting a mild distaste. “Come on in,” he called suddenly in an even voice.