Dickie turned his cuffs down, buttoned them, adjusted his tie. ‘Woody said the cops were claiming self-defense,’ he said, pulling a hair off the fly of his pants. He touched the top of his head, took out a comb.
Tania turned off the taps, got slowly to her feet, using the tub for support. ‘Self-defense. Yes … maybe it was …’ Tears filmed her big dark eyes. She’d been with me in the hallway when the two of them arrived tonight, Ros radiant, all smiles, Roger jittery as usual, trying to swallow down his panic as Ros went bouncing off into the living room, hugging everybody – it seemed so long ago! Like some kind of ancient prehistory, utterly remote, lost, an impossible past … ‘He was the most dangerous thing in the world, after all. A child …’
‘Hullo, folks! It’s your ole ticker taker!’ shouted Mr Draper, pushing heavily in, his glittering arms held out like a robot’s. ‘Just pass the time, please, any old time! Yeh heh heh!’
Dickie, carefully combing his fine blond hair back over the thin spot on top, grunted, slipped off his all-gold wristwatch, and, still checking himself in the mirror, held it out to Mr Draper: just then, one of the light bulbs surrounding the mirror sputtered and went out.
‘Hey!’ Dickie exclaimed, his arm outstretched, watch waggling at the end of it as though on the same circuit as the bulb.
‘Everything I’ve painted so far,’ Tania sighed, staring down at her dress, hands clutching her laces, ‘is shit …’
‘Could you slide it on there for me, son? Can’t bend my doggone arms anymore!’
Once, during a thunderstorm, when the lights had gone out suddenly, my son had asked: ‘Which is real, Daddy? The light or the dark?’ ‘The light,’ I’d replied, just as my wife, entering behind me, had said: ‘The dark.’ Then, as now, I’d felt inexplicably guilty of something I couldn’t define. I found a new bulb on the second shelf, then pushed the linen cupboard door shut behind me, leaned against it.
‘Which … if I am what I’ve painted …’
‘My watch was in my shoulderbag,’ said Naomi, sniffling. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘Now, now, child, don’t cry over lost time! When you get as old as me, you’ll – say! looks like you folks need a plumber there!’
‘I’m going to fix it in a minute, Mr Draper.’ He peered at me over his spectacles as though discovering me for the first time. I was thinking about my wife still. What had she said about the TV? I couldn’t remember. But I felt somehow I shouldn’t leave her alone too long. I held up my arm shakily, as Tania, beside me, began undoing the laces of her dress. ‘You’ve already—’
‘Yep, I’ve got yours, son, I know. I may have lost most everything else, but I still got my marbles. And Lloyd’s the name, lad, or is your memory lettin’ you down in your old age?’ He chortled drily and winked, then gazed pensively at Naomi’s backside. ‘Y’know, a curious thing happened to my wife and me in the catacombs of Calcutta—’
‘You can’t have love or art without the imagination, but it’s dangerous,’ Tania murmured, removing her half-lens reading glasses and setting them on the edge of the tub. ‘Roger said that …’ He had also explained to me once that, in the theater, when business was bad it was brutal, and when it was good it was: murder.
Talbot’s wife Wilma came in just then, asking if we had any aspirin. ‘For Talbot,’ she explained, peering at herself in the mirror over Dickie’s shoulder. ‘His ear’s hurting him so much, I’m afraid the dope’s going to drink himself silly, and you all know how, when Talbot’s looped, it’s goodbye – why, hello there, Lloyd! My, you’ve got quite a collection!’
‘Oh, it’s not my collection! No, I’m – heh heh! – I’m not keepin’ time, I’m just, as you might say, hangin’ on to it for the time bein’!’
Dickie, still primping, stepped aside to let me at the medicine cabinet. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored door before I swung it open, and I was shocked at how rumpled and bloody I looked – and how natural it seemed …
‘Oh, Lloyd,’ Wilma was saying, ‘you do pop out with the wittiest things! You ought to be on television! I was just talking to your wife, and she said how you had everybody on the bus out to the pyramids just in stitches about mummies and mommies and—’
‘In stitches, did you say—?’
‘Oh my goodness! It must be catching!’ She fussed at her perm, which had come undone in places, loose curls poking out like released springs.
‘Don’t you mean all wound up? Yeh heh heh!’
In the cabinet, my wife’s manicure set lay scattered on the bottom shelf. The tiny curved scissors were gone. The tweezers, too, for that matter. And was that a bloody hair – ? No … no, a piece of red thread. I was overwrought. Dickie puffed his chest and smoothed down his vest, then reached for his plaid jacket.
‘I’ve lost touch,’ Tania muttered. She gazed sorrowfully down at Naomi straddling the toilet and pursed her lips. ‘I’ve got to get back to landscapes again …’
‘You know, by coincidence Talbot and I were just discussing yesterday, Lloyd, the idea of touring the – just give me the whole bottle, Gerry. If I can tranquillize the jerk maybe I’ll have a little fun myself for a change – we were just saying we maybe ought to visit Africa and the Middle East next year, so we must get together! You and Iris can tell us what to take, the good places to eat, nightclubs – Dickie, where are you going? I didn’t mean to chase you out!’
‘Don’t leave me, Dickie!’ Naomi begged.
‘The most important thing about Africa and the Middle East,’ Lloyd Draper was saying, ‘is that they’re two different places …’
‘Dickie, please! What am I going to wear?’
‘Go as you are, Nay, you’ll have them rolling at your feet!’
‘And of course it depends on what you’re keen on. Some folks like the cities, some the countryside, some the resorts.’
‘But what if it all starts up again—!’
‘Didn’t I see some disposable underthings in your shoulderbag, dear?’ Wilma asked.
‘I’m a temples-and-tombs man myself, though Iris goes more for the arts and crafts.’
‘Were there?’
‘Paper panties, Dickie, a package of them,’ I called, unscrewing the dead bulb. ‘You can’t miss them, they’re all chalked out—’
‘You can send Howard up with them, Dickie,’ Tania shouted. In the mirror, I saw her, her laces loosened, emptying her pockets onto the bathtub ledge. ‘I have to talk to him anyway!’
‘All wound up! Lloyd, however do you do it? Say, wasn’t that absolutely horrid about poor Roger! I just heard about it on the way up!’ I unwrapped the new bulb and screwed it in, feeling it pop alight under my fingertips. That hole in Tania’s painting. All along I’d been supposing Roger might have done it. Now I didn’t think so. ‘They say he was very brave, but as I told Talbot, such bravery, Talbot, we can do without! If they want to ask you anything, you just – but then there’s nothing to worry about really, Talbot always makes a good impression in interviews, heaven knows he’s had enough practice! Are you leaving us, Lloyd?’
‘Yes, eh, I’m afraid I mustn’t take any more time – or rather, I must!’ He chuckled, but his heart wasn’t in it. His arms and pants as he lumbered out seemed suddenly to be hanging a couple of inches lower.
‘Dear me, it seems I’m chasing everybody away tonight!’ I took the towel off Naomi’s back, hung it on the rod by the basin, tossed all the other towels into the clothes hamper. ‘Close the door, please,’ she begged, ‘it’s bad enough without everybody—’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear. My, you’re the very model of patience!’
‘With Dickie, you have to be.’
Wilma checked herself quickly in the mirror, turned away in disappointment, fumbling in her handbag for makeup. ‘Do you think those policemen down there know what they’re doing?’ she asked idly, uncapping a tube of lipstick. ‘Well, I suppose they do.’ One night I was backstage talking with Ros in front of her mirror (she liked it best when she could do her lips in
a cherry red), when an actor came rushing in, leaned over her shoulder, popped her breasts out of her costume, and kissed them with loud sucking smacks, crying: ‘Yum! I just love them!’ – then dashed out again, shouting: ‘Two minutes, sweetheart!’ She reached over, flushed with excitement, took my face in both her hands, and whispered: ‘Wait for me, Gerry!’ – then gave me her breasts to kiss, tucked them in, and rustled out. But she never came back. Not that night. It was a long way from the stage to her dressing room and, as often happened, she just didn’t get that far.
‘Before you start that, Gerry,’ Tania grunted, ‘could you help me off with this damned dirndl? It’s a bit tight through the middle.’
Of course, if I’d been more patient …
‘Still, poor Roger! Wasn’t it frightful, I still can’t get over it!’
… But in those days I believed in energy and ingenuity: that there was nothing beautiful in the world but what you worked for.
‘Do you think the visit of that old witch had anything to do with it?’
‘What witch?’
Which was a long time ago …
‘I think it’s snagged on my bra!’ Tania called from inside her skirts, as I tugged on them. I could almost hear Ros giggling under there, trying to guess who was behind her by feeling between his legs. Ah, Ros … I was beginning to choke up again. ‘At the back!’ I pushed my hand up under the heavy material and unhooked the bra clasp: her full black-nippled breasts tumbled out of their straitjacket like a landslide and Tania was free. ‘Thanks, Gerry!’ she gasped, and shook the dress out. ‘This damn thing’s worse than a corset!’
‘It’s beautiful, though,’ sighed Wilma. ‘Wherever did you get it, Tania? No, don’t tell me! I’d look as plain in something like that as I do in this. Why is it that no matter how much I spend I always come out looking like a hostess for a ladies’ club?’
Tania fastened her bra back on, hiking her heavy breasts into the cups, then knelt to spread her dress into the soapy water. I was struck by all the color on her face and down into her neck, against the sudden vulnerable milkiness of her naked back, its soft flesh (I was thinking of age, time, loss – Ros’s giggle like a hollow terrifying echo now – and the fruitless efforts to rise above them) deeply imprinted by the checks and crosses of the waistband and bra straps. I unrolled some toilet paper, took a preliminary swipe at Naomi’s behind as though to fight back. ‘I feel so ashamed,’ she said. ‘Dickie shouldn’t have left you to do this—’
‘No, it’s all right.’
‘It’s a crime,’ complained Wilma, patting at her hairdo. ‘Even this movie star mirror doesn’t help!’
There was a sharp knock at the door and I opened it, the pad of soiled toilet paper in my hand. It was my wife’s mother. ‘Mark needs to use the bathroom,’ she said testily.
‘Sure. Tell him to come on in.’
‘Not while you’re in there!’ She glared angrily past my shoulder at the three women.
‘Then why don’t you take him downstairs?’
‘Can’t do that. There’s a dead person down there.’
‘Ah, you … you know, then. I’m sorry …’ She stood there, rigid in her implacable distrust and isolation. I knew it was hard for her here, I wanted to reach out to her, make her feel at home, but she shrank from all such gestures as though to avoid defilement. ‘All right then. Just a minute.’
‘Hurry, Daddy! I can’t wait!’ my son called from behind her.
‘I’m just going anyway,’ said Wilma, squeezing past us. She rattled the aspirin bottle: ‘Gotta give Talbot his fix. Hello there, Mark – say, that’s a handsome sweatshirt! You look like Little Boy Blue! Remember me? Auntie Wilma? No?’
‘What am I going to do?’ Naomi whimpered. ‘I can’t go out there like this! And if I let my skirt down it’ll get all dirty—!’
Tania dried her hands on a large bathtowel, then wrapped it around herself like an Indian blanket. I retrieved the used handtowel from the clothes hamper. ‘Here, put this between your legs, Naomi – I’ll hold it for you, just let your skirt fall over it …’ She straightened up, towering over me as I crouched to hold the towel in place: a big girl.
‘Can I come in now?’
‘Not yet!’ said my mother-in-law as the skirt fell.
‘That’s it – now hold on to it, both sides … !’ She clapped her hands front and back and I came out from under the skirt. Even standing, I had to look up to her.
‘Please tell him not to take too long,’ Naomi pleaded softly as we stepped out, Tania wrapped in her towel, Naomi strutting stiff-legged, feet wide apart like a mechanical soldier, holding her tummy and behind. ‘I feel so stupid … !’
My son rushed past us, one hand inside his pajama pants, followed by my mother-in-law, straight-backed and icily silent. ‘Don’t flush it! It’s all stopped up—!’ The door slammed shut on my warning, and I could hear her snapping the lock into place. At the same moment, across the hall, the door to her room snapped open, and Woody’s cousin Noble came out, tie loose around his neck, buttoning his shirtcuffs, heading for the bathroom. ‘It’s busy,’ I said, and Noble, looking somewhat distant, his good eye as dull as his bad one, nodded and moved on downstairs.
Tania had meanwhile started telling me about Roger and the bad time she’d had when he found out about Ros posing for her – ‘There were just the two of us women in a closed studio, but he couldn’t bear the thought of other men even seeing Ros’s naked image – when he came storming over, he didn’t even knock, Gerry, he just smashed the door down!’ – but I was only able to follow part of it, my eye caught now by Alison. She was with a group of people down on the landing – her husband, Wilma, Lloyd Draper weighted with watches, Woody, Noble still doing himself up, and a handsome dark-suited woman I didn’t know but remembered from Roger’s rampage (the dignity of her fall, even as her pendant rose to strike her on the nose) – and maybe they’d all been looking at Tania’s painting before, or simply had run into each other there on the landing by chance (her husband shook hands now with Noble), but just as I spied her there, she turned, smiled suddenly at discovering me, and then, watching her husband (he was being introduced to the woman beside her, as Lloyd Draper clumped heavily on down the stairs), tossed me a kiss by kissing her hand, putting it behind her back and flipping it up at me from her rear. ‘As it happened, the day he came to wreck my studio, Ros wasn’t even there. Howard was up on a little pedestal, posing for me in a pink leotard as a privy councilor, and he nearly died of shock and mortification when Roger came crashing in.’
‘I should imagine …’
Woody had something he was showing to everybody, and as they all leaned closer to see it, or perhaps to sniff at it (‘I haven’t been able to get him to pose for me since …’), Alison slipped away and came hurrying up the stairs, her hair flowing, her breasts bouncing gently in their silken pockets. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you!’ she whispered. She took my hand, pulled me urgently into the darkened sewing room doorway (or what we called the sewing room), out of sight from those below, and kissed me. There was an incredible taste of something like herbs and mountain air, and a strange feeling, almost of a lost memory, swept over me – but just for a moment: laughter rattling up from below broke in on us. She glanced back over her shoulder, as I licked my lips. ‘He has a piece of that girl’s underwear.’
‘What?’
‘That man down there. The lawyer? He has a piece from her panties.’
‘Woody?’
‘I saw them cutting them up. I thought the policeman – the main one with the moustache – had something in mind. But apparently he forgot and the pieces started getting passed around. Like souvenirs or something …’
‘Ah, that explains …’
‘I’ve heard a thousand stories about her tonight.’ What I was thinking about was the money. And what Ros once said about time and love. ‘You’re right, you certainly weren’t the only one …’ She turned back and gazed up at me as though pained
by something, then, unfastening a middle button, ran her hand inside my shirt. ‘When it’s like a river,’ Ros had said, ‘it scares me. What I want it to do is just ooze.’ There was a faint rustling in the sewing room darkness beyond us, a couple, perhaps more than one. I saw something red, a dress probably, and a glimmer of flesh. Alison’s mouth opened under mine and I closed my eyes, let my free hand slide down to grip one supple buttock. She kissed me, tonguing my lips apart, murmured into my mouth: ‘They killed her husband, Gerald. It was terrible.’
‘I know. I heard. I’m still not completely over it.’ Behind me, Naomi was telling Tania about her childhood, her mother’s cruelty and the cruelty of all her mother’s lovers.
‘Didn’t you expect it?’ Alison whispered, licking my lips.
‘I guess I did. That’s not what upset me. It was—’
‘Learning something you already knew – you said that during the intermission that night we met.’
I recognized now the source of that feeling I’d had since she came up the stairs. She stroked my chest gently, and I (I peeked past the doorframe – Noble was into another act down there now, making his cigarette vanish, then, with a bulge of his false eye, reappear from inside his mouth, now lit at both ends) pulled her closer to me, curled my hand around both firm cheeks, amazed at the familiarity of them. I disbelieved in fate, hated plays and novels whose plots were governed by it, but now, with Alison’s silky bottom filling my hand like an idea the mind … Naomi was telling Tania about being tied up and locked all day in a closet without a potty, then getting whipped with a belt for wetting on her mother’s pink suede pumps. Alison nibbled at my throat.
‘But it was more than that even,’ I whispered into her ear, a gold loop glinting there like a wish. Or a promise. I heard somebody grunt hoarsely in the sewing room shadows, then a soft stifled whimpering sound. Alison found a nipple, drew a gentle circle around it as though inscribing a target. ‘I think what struck me was not so much learning something I already knew, as the sudden recognition that in fact it had to be learned.’