After a while he asked her for a glass of wine, which she obligingly got for him, handing him the one little crystal wine glass that she had bought especially for him and then pouring expertly from the bottle. He drank it up rather quickly. He had learned to enjoy alcohol considerably, during his convalescence.
“Well.” he said, as she was pouring the second glass for him, “I expect I’ll be able to move from here next week.”
She hesitated a moment and then finished pouring the wine. Then she said, “What for, Tommy?” She called him Tommy sometimes when she was getting drunk. “There’s no call to hurry.”
8
Lord, he was peculiar. Tall and skinny and wide-eyed like a bird; but he could move around, even with a broken leg, like a cat. He look pills all the time and he never shaved. He didn’t seem to sleep either; she would get up sometimes at night, waking up with the dry throat and spinning head that the gin would give her when she hadn’t watched it too close, and there he’d be in the living room, his leg propped up, reading, or listening to that little gold record player that the fat man had brought him from New York, or just sitting in the chair with his hands under his chin, staring at the wall with his lips tight together and his mind God only could ever know where. She would try to move quietly at times like that, so as not to disturb him; but he always heard her no matter how quiet she was and she could tell he was startled. But he would always smile at her and sometimes say a word or two. Once, during the second week, he had seemed so lost and alone, sitting, staring at the wall as if he was trying to find something there that he could talk to; he looked, with his twisted leg, like some half-broken baby bird that had fallen from a nest. He was so pitiful that she felt like putting her arms around his head and stroking him, mothering him. But she hadn’t done it; she already knew about how he didn’t like to be touched. And he was such a light thing, she might hurt him. She would never forget how light he was when she carried him off that elevator the first time, with the blood on his shirt and his leg twisted like a bent wire.
She finished brushing her hair, and then began putting on lipstick. She used, for the first time, some of the silver lipstick and eye shadow that young girls wore; and when she had finished this she looked at herself in the mirror with some pleasure. For forty she wasn’t bad to look at, if you covered up the tiny-purplish places around her eyes that came from gin and sugar. She was covering them up tonight, with a makeup bought just for that.
After looking at her face for a while she began to dress, putting on the sheer gold panties and brassiere that she’d bought that afternoon, and then the crimson pants and the matching blouse. Garish earrings, and finally the silver flakes in her hair. She looked now like somebody else and, standing before the mirror, she at first felt self-conscious. What kind of foolishness was she up to, dressing like this? But, in the back of her mind, in that vague, seldom-examined registry where bottles of gin were mercilessly numbered and unpleasant recollections of a thankfully dead husband were filed, she knew perfectly well what she was doing this for. But she did not bring it to the surface of her mind to inspect it. She was expert at the technique. In a minute she felt more accustomed to this new, sexy-matron appearance, and, taking her tumbler of gin from the top of the dresser in one hand, smoothing the tight crimson pants with the other, she pushed open the door and walked into the room where Tommy was sitting.
He was on the phone, and she could see the face of that lawyer, Farnsworth, on the little screen. They usually talked three or four times a day, and once Farnsworth had come with a staff of earnest-looking young men, and they had spent the day discussing and arguing in her living room, ignoring her as if she d been a part of the furniture. Except for Tommy, that is, because he had been polite and nice and had thanked her gently when she had brought the men coffee and offered them gin.
She sat on the couch while he talked to Farnsworth and picked up an old comic book and lazily looked over some of the more sexy pages while she finished the drink. But this bored her, and Tommy was still talking about some kind of research project that they were doing in the southern part of the state and about selling shares of this and that. She set the comic book down, finished her drink, picked up one of his books that sat on the end table. He’d had hundreds of books sent to the house, and the room was getting crowded with them. The book turned out to be some kind of poetry and she put it back hastily, picking up another. It was called Thermonuclear Engines and was filled with lines and numbers. She began to feel silly again, dressed in these clothes. She got up and resolutely fixed two drinks of gin, leaving one on top of the television set and taking the other back to the couch with her. Yet, silly as she felt, she found herself automatically taking a seductive, movie-star pose on the couch, and stretching her heavy legs out lazily. She watched him over the top of her glass, saw the glow of the lamplight on his white hair and on his delicate, brownish, almost transparent skin, and then his graceful, womanish hand that lay casually, lightly on the desk. At that moment she began consciously to review what she was up to and, in the soft light, with the gin wanning her stomach, she began to feel a touch of wicked excitement in her from flirting at the edge of the idea of that strange, delicate body against hers. Looking at him and letting her imagination play with the thought, she knew that the particular thrill came from his strangeness—his strange, unmanlike, unsexual nature. Maybe she was like those women who like to make love with freaks and cripples. Well, he was both—and she did not care now, was not ashamed, with the tight pants on and the gin in her. If she could arouse him—if he could be aroused—she would be proud of herself. And if not—he was a dear man anyway and he wouldn’t be offended. She felt her heart go out to him then in quick, warm sentiment; as she finished her drink she felt, for the first time in years, an emotion resembling love, along with the desire that she had been working herself up to all day long—since this morning when she had gone out in her aged print dress and bought panties and earrings, makeup and tights, without admitting to herself the final meaning of the vague plan that had entered her mind.
She got still another drink, telling herself that she ought to go easy. But she was getting nervous, waiting. He was talking now about somebody named Bryce and Farnsworth was saying that this Bryce was trying to see him, wanted to come to work for them, but wanted to see Tommy first, and Tommy was saying it was impossible and Farnsworth was saying they needed all the men they could get with Bryce’s training. She began to be impatient. Who cared about this Bryce? But then, abruptly, Tommy ended the conversation, hung up the phone, and after remaining silent for a minute looked over at her, smiling thoughtfully. “My new place is ready, down in the southern part of the state. Would you like to go there with me? As my housekeeper?”
Well that was a shock. She blinked at him. “Housekeeper?”
“Yes. The house will be ready Saturday, but there will be furniture to arrange, things of that sort to take care of. I’ll need someone to help with it all. And,” he smiled, getting up with his cane and limping over toward her, “you know I dislike meeting strangers. You could talk to people for me.” He stood up over her.
She blinked up at him. “I fixed you a drink. On the television.” His offer was hard to believe. She had known about the house from when the real estate people had come by that second week—a huge old mansion that he was buying, and nine hundred acres of land, down east in the mountains.
He picked up the glass, sniffed it, and said, “Gin?”
“I thought you ought to try it,” she said. “It’s pretty good. Sweet.”
“No,” he said. “No. But I’ll be glad to have some wine with you.”
“Sure, Tommy.” She got up, staggering a bit, and went to the kitchen for his bottle of Sauterne and his crystal glass. “You don’t need me,” she called, from the kitchen.
His voice was solemn. “Why yes I do. Betty Jo.”
She came back in, standing close to him as she handed him the glass. He was such a nice man. She felt almost a
shamed of herself wanting to seduce him, as though he were a baby. She could not help being drunkenly amused. He probably didn’t know what it was all about. He was the kind that probably peed in a silver pot when he was little and ran away if a girl tried to touch him. Or maybe he was queer—anybody who sat around reading all the time and looked like he did… But he didn’t talk like a queer. She liked to hear him talk. He looked tired now. But he looked tired all the time.
He sat down, painfully, in the armchair, and set his cane on the floor beside him. She sat on the couch and then lay back on her side, facing him. He was looking at her but he hardly seemed to see her. When he looked that way it made her feel creepy. “I’m wearing new clothes.” she said.
“So you are.”
“Yeah. So I am.” She laughed self-consciously. “The pants was sixty-five and the blouse was fifty, and I bought gold undies and earrings.” She raised a leg to show off the bright-red pants and then scratched her knee through the cloth. “With the money you been giving me I could dress like a movie star if I wanted to. I could get my face fixed, you know, and take off weight and all.” She felt her earrings for a minute, thoughtfully, tugging at them and running her thumbnail across the soft, metallic gold, enjoying the little hints of pain on her earlobes. “But I don’t know. I been sloppy for a long time. Ever since me and Barney went on welfare and Medicare and all I let myself go and, hell, you get so you like it that way.”
He said nothing for a while and they sat in silence while she finished her drink. Finally he said, “Will you come with me to the new house?”
She stretched and yawned, beginning to feel tired. “You sure you really need me?”
For a moment he blinked at her and his face looked a way she had never seen it look before, as if he were pleading with her. “Yes, I do need you,” he said. “I know very few people….”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll come.” She gestured tiredly. “I’d be a damn fool not to, anyway, since I imagine you’ll pay me twice as much as I’m worth.”
“Good.” His face relaxed a little and he settled back in his chair and picked up a book.
Before he could get started in it she recalled her plans, already cool by now, and after a moment of reluctant doubt she made a final try. But she was sleepy and her heart wasn’t in it. “Are you married, Tommy?” she asked. It should have been a pretty obvious question.
If he had any idea of what she was driving at he didn’t show it. “Yes, I’m married,” he said, politely putting his book in his lap and looking over at her.
Embarrassed, she said, “I just wanted to know.” And then, “What does she look like? Your wife?”
“Oh, she resembles me, I imagine. Tall and thin.”
Somehow her embarrassment was turning into irritation. She finished off her drink and said, “I used to be thin,” almost with defiance. Then, tired of it, she stood up and walked over to her bedroom door. The whole thing had been silly anyway. And maybe he was queer—being married didn’t prove anything that way. Anyway he was peculiar. A nice, rich man, but weird as green milk. Still irritated she said, “Good night,” and went into her room and began peeling off her expensive clothes. Then she sat on the edge of the bed a moment, in her nightgown, thinking. She was much more comfortable with the tight clothes off, and when she finally lay down, her mind now blank, she had no difficulty in falling into a deep sleep, pleasantly filled with undisturbing dreams.
9
They flew over the mountains, but the little plane was so stable, the pilot so expert, that there was no pitching, almost no sensation of movement. They flew over Harlan, Kentucky, a drab city sprawled loosely in the foothills, and then over vast, barren fields and down into a valley. Bryce, a glass of whiskey in his hand, saw the distant gleam of a lake, its static surface shining like a new and rich coin; and then they dipped lower, losing sight of the lake, and landed on a broad, new strip of concrete that sat at the flat bottom of the valley, amid broom straw and upturned red clay, like a wild Euclidian diagram drawn there with gray chalk by some geometrically minded god.
Bryce stepped from the plane into the thumping din of earthmoving machinery, the confusion of khaki-shirted men, red-faced in the summer heat, shouting hoarsely at one another, in the process of building unidentifiable buildings. There were machinery sheds, some kind of huge concrete platform, a row of barracks. For a moment, having left the quiet and coolness of the smooth, air-conditioned plane—Thomas Jerome Newton’s personal plane, sent to Louisville for him—he was bewildered, made dizzy by heat and noise, by all this feverish and unexplained activity.
A young man, rugged looking as a cigarette advertisement, stepped up to him. The man wore a pith helmet; his rolled-up sleeves displayed an abundance of tanned, youthful muscle; he looked exactly like a hero of one of those half-forgotten boys’ novels that had, at a dimly remembered time of aspiring adolescence, made him, Bryce, dedicated to becoming an engineer—a chemical engineer, a man of science and of action. He did not smile at the young man, thinking of his own paunch, his graying hair, and the taste of whiskey in his mouth; but he nodded his head in recognition.
The man held out a hand. “You’re Professor Bryce?”
He took the hand, expecting an affectedly firm grip, pleased to receive a gentle one. “Professor no more,” he said, “but I’m Bryce.”
“Good. Good. I’m Hopkins. Foreman.” The man’s friendliness seemed doglike, as if he were pleading for approval. “What do you think of it all, Doctor Bryce?” He gestured toward the rows of buildings going up. Just beyond them was a tall tower, apparently a broadcasting antenna of some kind.
Bryce cleared his throat. “I don’t know.” He started to ask what they were making here, but decided that his ignorance would be embarrassing. Why hadn’t that fat buffoon, Farnsworth, told him what he was being hired for? “Is Mr. Newton expecting me?” he said aloud, not looking at the man.
“Sure. Sure.” Suddenly showing efficiency, the young man hustled him around to the other side of the plane, where a small monorail car, obscured before, sat atop a dully gleaming track that snaked away into the hills at the side of the valley like a thin, silvery pencil line. Hopkins slid the door back, revealing polished leather upholstery and a satisfyingly dark interior. “This’ll have you up at the house in five minutes.”
“The house? How far is it?”
“About four miles. I’ll call ahead and Brinnarde’ll meet you. Brinnarde’s Mr. Newton’s secretary; he’ll probably do the interviewing”
Bryce hesitated before getting into the car. “Won’t I meet Mr. Newton?” The thought upset him; after these two years, not to meet the man who invented Worldcolor, who operated the biggest oil refineries in Texas, who had developed three-D television, reusable photo negatives, the ATF process in dye-transfer—the man who was either the world’s most original inventive genius, or an extraterrestrial.
The young man frowned. “I doubt it. I’ve been here six months and I’ve never seen him, except from behind the window of that car you’re getting into. About once a week he comes down here in it, to look things over, I guess. But he never gets out, and it’s so dark inside that you can’t see his face, only the shadow of it, looking out.”
Bryce settled himself into the car. “Doesn’t he ever get out?” He nodded toward the plane, where a group of mechanics, seeming to have come from nowhere, were beginning to go over the jets. “To fly… places?”
Hopkins grinned, inanely, it seemed to Bryce. “Only at night, and you can’t see him then. He’s a tall man, though, and thin. The pilot’s told me that; but that’s about all. The pilot isn’t much of a talker.”
“I see.” He touched the door button and the door slid back, noiselessly. As it was shutting, Hopkins said, “Good luck!” and he replied quickly, “Thank you,” but was not sure whether or not his voice had been cut off by the door.
Like the plane, the car was soundproof and very cool. Also like the plane, it began moving with almost imperceptible
acceleration, gathering speed so smoothly that there was little sensation of motion. He lightened the transparency of the windows by turning the little silver knob that was obviously for that purpose, and watched the frail-looking aluminum construction sheds, and the groups of working men—an unusual and, he felt, satisfactory sight, in these days of automatic factories and six-hour working days. The men seemed eager, working heartily, sweating under the Kentucky sun. It occurred to him that they must be very we’ll paid to have come to this barren place, so far from golf courses, municipal gambling halls, and other consolations of the working man. He saw one young man—so many of them seemed young—sitting atop a huge earthmover, grinning with the pleasure of pushing great quantities of mud; for a moment Bryce envied him his work and his young, unquestioning confidence, easy under the hot sun.