He felt a kind of prickling all over his body. “So you ain’t a whore,” he whispered, with a kind of smile. He put his hand on his groin and felt the excitement. After three years of loneliness he’d found a girl he could like. He fell asleep satisfied and in the morning, as soon as he heard Linda leaving for work, a false smile on her thin lips barely touched with rouge, he went to the hardware store and spent a dollar seventy on a gimlet. He came back to the house and made a little hole in wall between his bathroom and Linda’s.
When he saw her come back that evening, he pressed his ear against the living room wall. As soon as he heard her go into the bathroom, he rushed to the hole on tiptoes, and he watched her as she lowered her panties and sat on the toilet. He watched her wipe between her legs with toilet paper, then pull her panties up again. They were thick white cotton. Her stockings and garter belt were white, too. A poor girl’s underthings. Then Linda went out of the bathroom and came back to the living room. Bill returned to his living room, too, and again put his ear to the wall. He heard noises he didn’t recognize. A rustling of paper. She might be reading the want ads or writing a letter to her folks, he thought. Then he heard her in the kitchen, and later, eating. She went back to the bathroom about nine thirty and Bill watched her. The girl took off all her clothes and began to bathe. Bill touched himself. But there wasn’t the slightest trace of the excitement he’d felt the night before. He gave the washbasin a kick. Linda turned towards the noise. She looked lost. Weak. And something tingled between Bill’s legs. But as soon as she went back to washing herself, the tingling stopped.
Bill flung himself onto the bed, in a bad humor. He didn’t pay any attention to the creaking of Linda’s sofa bed when she opened it. It was night now, but he couldn’t sleep. But suddenly he heard a sob. And then another one, a little later. He got out of bed and stood against the wall, listening. Then, between sobs, he could hear Linda crying. Softly, hopelessly. Under his pajama pants he swelled with pleasure.
The next day, while Linda was out, he drilled a hole between their two living rooms. He left for work, endured the bored and hateful looks from that day’s harlot who was allowing herself to be reamed in front of everybody, then hurried back to the Palermo. Linda was already home, eating her dinner. He too fixed himself something to eat, feeling a quiver of happiness throughout his body. He waited to hear the creak of Linda’s sofa bed, not checking on her, but with a vigilant ear.
As soon as he heard Linda’s first sob, he put his eye to the little hole and peered into the darkness. He could see the girl’s shape under the bedcovers. And then Bill put his hand into his pajama pants and slowly began to touch himself, to the accompaniment of Linda’s weeping. When he reached pleasure he whispered her name softly, his lips pressed to the wall that separated them.
Only then, nourished by Linda’s unhappiness, did he begin to savor a bit of the felicity that three years earlier he had thought he could find cheaply in California.
36
Los Angles, 1926
“We’ve got to do something about that horrible hair. You’re not a little girl any more, you’re a woman. Remember that,” her mother said that morning. “I’m taking you to my hairdresser.”
“Yes, Mamma,” said Ruth, sitting by the window in her room, overlooking the pool at their Holmby Hills villa.
“I want you to be perfect,” said her mother.
“Yes, Mamma,” Ruth answered automatically, in a flat little voice, never taking her eyes off the eight statues in neoclassical style that surrounded the swimming pool — three along the sides and one at each of the shorter rounded ends.
“And try to have a smile on your face tonight,” her mother went on. “This is an important night for your father.”
“Yes, Mamma,” Ruth said for the third time. She didn’t move.
Her mother took her by the arm. “What are you waiting for?”
Ruth stood up without saying anything and followed her mother out of the room. She followed her down the broad staircase into the soaring entryway faced in Italian marble and then into the new Hispano-Suiza H6C that had replaced the H6B they’d had in New York. When they arrived at the hair salon, she sat in a chair in a little private cubicle and let a girl with bleached blond hair put her into a smock while her mother and Auguste — the hairdresser with a French name — decided about her hair.
Auguste looked at Ruth’s reflection in the mirror. “You will be very beautiful tonight,” he told her.
Ruth didn’t answer.
Auguste, slightly annoyed, turned back towards Ruth’s mother. “What color for her nails, Madame?”
Mrs. Isaacson’s gaze went to Ruth’s missing finger. “She’ll be wearing gloves,” she said coldly. Then she went out.
Ruth sat without moving, as if she didn’t notice anything that was happening around her. If they told her to lift her head she lifted it, if they told her to tilt it to the side, she tilted it. And when they asked her if the water was too cold she answered: No, and when they asked her if it was too hot, she answered: No, in the same flat distracted way. She was there, but she wasn’t there. And she didn’t care. She didn’t feel a thing.
For almost three years now, Ruth had managed not to feel.
It was as if she’d gotten back on that train that was taking her away from New York. As soon as she got to Los Angles, she had waited for Christmas to write her. She had concentrated all her attention, all her thoughts and all her emotions on her former life. She had cultivated the hope that Christmas, the quicksilver boy from the Lower East Side, the boy she’d been ready to kiss on their Central Park bench, would still be part of her past and her future. But Christmas had vanished. Ruth had written him at 320 Monroe Street as soon as she’d gotten to the Beverly Hills Hotel. No answer. She wrote him when they moved to the house in Holm by Hills. No answer. But Ruth had waited. Christmas would never betray her, she told herself. Each day with a little less conviction. Until one morning she woke up and put the horrid red-lacquered heart in the bottom of a drawer.
And then, as she shut the drawer, she’d heard something like a little crank inside her head. A noise that was both imperceptible and very clear.
But still she kept on waiting. Without any hope. And the loss of hope filled her head with thoughts that Christmas’ companionship had kept at bay for a long time. When Ruth realized that she was waiting for Bill to get out of her dreams it was too late. And when she realized that that she had been waiting for the wound left by her grandfather’s death to heal, it was too late. In an instant the waiting had become anxiety. She had no weapons to defend herself from that growing dread. She would suddenly find herself gasping for breath as if she’d been running a race, while she was only sitting at her desk in the private school she attended now. Or she’d discover her eyes starkly open as if she were contemplating some horror, even if she was only looking at the blackboard where her teacher was chalking the outline of a lesson. Or she would feel that her eardrums were bursting from some frightening explosion, when it was only the voice of a classmate inviting her to a party. It was as if the whole world had taken on tastes, odors, and sounds that were simply too violent for her.
She started wearing dark glasses. But the colors were in her mind. At night she held her ears shut under the pillow, but the screams were in her heart. She had almost stopped eating, but the tastes that felt like poison in her mouth were buried inside her. She tried not to touch things or people but it was as though the finger Bill amputated still tingled with every detail of frost and hellfire everywhere in the world.
And then, almost a year since she’d left, one day when she thought she would die, crushed by all the weights pressing down from inside, one day when she thought she couldn’t bear it any longer and thought she would step in front of a Pierce-Arrow that was thundering towards her, that day she’d heard the crank in her brain again.
Louder this time. Clearer.
As the interior echo died away, all the colors and sounds and odors beg
an to die too. Everything had turned gray. And silent. And motionless. The waves of the ocean were quiet and so were the seagulls. And she couldn’t hear Bill’s laughter any more, nor the voice of her grandfather. They’re all dead at last, she’d thought, in a kind of apathy.
That was when she discovered, even though they’d always been there, her “eight sisters.”
And now, after Auguste had been arranging her hair for nearly two hours, Ruth still hadn’t looked at herself in the mirror. Nor at her mother who had come back with a huge dress box from one of the best shops in Los Angeles. Now she was complimenting Auguste on Ruth’s hair as she wrote out an astronomical check.
“Try not to ruin it before tonight,” said Ruth’s mother has they got back in the car.
“All right,” said Ruth. After that she said nothing, all the way back to Holmby Hills. She climbed out of the car, went back to her room, sat in front of the window, and went back to staring at the neoclassical statues at the edge of the pool. Her eight sisters, she called them. Eight sisters without souls or feelings. Cold and mute. She shivered. But she didn’t get up to find a sweater. It wasn’t worth the bother. Like her eight sisters, the cold stayed deep inside her. And no cashmere could warm her.
She had her own apathy to protect her, too. It gave her heavy, dark, black sleep without dreams or thoughts. Silent and dense. A total absence. Like death. A sleep with little intervals of waking that by now it was easy for her to oppose. A sleep that brought with it only a subtle ill humor, hardly more than a slight annoyance. A heaviness in her head, a slowness, a weariness than soon yielded to the charm of a new slumber, a new absence. And Ruth could disappear again, where no one could find her. Not even herself. This lethargy she’d accepted went with her to school, hovered around her at meals with her parents, concealed from her the horrors of the night and the brutal shamelessness of day.
Sitting at the window, she fell asleep. Then she woke up. She napped again; opened her eyes again, closed them. And every time she opened her eyes she saw a new tent being set up beside the pool. For the party. As more tents were erected for the buffet, the eight sisters were hidden from her. But Ruth knew they were there. And she didn’t stop looking at them without a single thought or emotion in her head. It was thoughts and emotions that had enfolded her in a coldness that not even the California sun could melt. That coldness she had first felt when her grandfather died. A cold for which there was no remedy. And so she did nothing. Not even then. She only watched — or imagined — her eight sisters without being distracted by the flock of waiters and waitresses hurrying out from the kitchen, setting up the huge tables for the buffet. She paid no attention to the orchestra tuning up, playing snatches of popular songs; she was deaf to her mother’s cool voice, reproving Ruth’s father for being spineless, a failure, the shadow of Saul Isaacson; deaf to her father’s weak and hysterical voice telling his wife that she was spoiled, incapable of loyalty. Ruth was blind to the dying daylight. She had closed her eyes too long ago and abandoned herself to the dark. To silence. To the cold.
“You’re still not dressed?” shrilled her mother as she came into the room. Outside, the eight sisters seemed to come to life in the flickering torchlight at the edge of the pool and along the paths.
Ruth turned slowly.
Her mother was pointing to something on the bed.
Ruth looked at it indifferently. A silk dress. Ruby red. Low-cut and sleeveless. Beside the dress, long gloves, the same red. And on the Beauvais carpet, satin shoes with high heels and two narrow straps. Red.
“For the stockings, either black or smoky gray,” said her mother. Then she closed her eyes as if to imagine the effect, and when she opened them she shook her head. “No, smoke is better,” she decreed. She pulled open a drawer, chose the stockings, too, and spread them across the dress. She opened another drawer and rummaged among the garter belts. “When are you going to decide to grow up?” she grumbled, not finding what she wanted. She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a pearl gray garter belt in her hand. “Here,” she said. “When you wear a silk dress, your garter belt has to be light as a lover’s caress.”
Ruth hadn’t taken her eyes off the dress on the bed.
“When you’re dressed, go to my bathroom and put a little lipstick on. Number seven,” her mother went on. “I’ll leave it open, so you won’t use the wrong one.”
Ruth didn’t move.
“Did you understand what I said?” asked her mother.
“Yes, Mamma.”
Her mother lingered for a moment, looking at her. She smoothed a lock of her hair. “Do you want to wear a necklace?” she asked her.
“Whatever you want,” said Ruth.
Her mother studied her critically. “Better not,” she decided. “Do I have to remind you again how important this evening is for your father?”
Ruth managed to lift her eyes from the bed and look at her mother. She wanted to tell her she hated that red dress. But she didn’t know why.
Crack.
“Ruth, what are you thinking?” her mother asked crossly.
“Nothing, Mamma,” said Ruth. Nothing, she thought again, as if she were giving herself an order. Nothing.
“Just smile and be pleasant to everyone.”
Ruth nodded.
“What a tiresome child,” grumbled her mother as she left the room. “Come down once everyone’s here. At eight-thirty,” she said, gliding along the hallway.
Ruth didn’t move for a moment, then she turned to look at the dress on the bed again. She hated it. And that feeling alarmed her. She hadn’t hated anything for almost two years. But what bothered her the most was not knowing why she hated that dress on her bed with such a growing intensity. It spread across her bed like a red stain.
Crack.
Eight sisters, she thought, trying to distract herself from that noise that was suddenly loud in her ears. “And you’re the ninth one,” she told herself. Nine. Nine, like her fingers. “Nothing!” she ordered herself, shutting her eyes hard. “I’m not thinking about anything!” she repeated, trying to convince herself that it was true. “I’m not hearing a thing!”
But even in that artificial darkness she could still see the dress, red as rubies, spreading out on her bed like a red pool of blood.
Crack. Lightly. Like the sound of a dry leaf when it’s stepped on. Crack. Louder. Like the sound of a pruned branch. Crack. Even louder. Like the sound of a finger amputated by garden shears.
Deafening.
She watched them carousing. They were systematically devouring the food and champagne offered by her father. Like locusts, it seemed to her. Dead locusts, still twitching their legs, with their mouths full. Or maybe, she thought, without taking her gaze off the chattering guests, I’m the one that’s dead. With my eyes wide open.
She was very beautiful. She knew it. She had looked in the mirror. She was beautiful. Just the way Bill had seen her. She had applied lipstick — not the delicate number seven her mother had selected, but the fiery number eleven — generously across her lips. On her eyelids, too. Scarlet. Her wide scarlet eyes stared down at the locusts.
Ruth laughed. She came down the first step. She swayed.
She shivered in her new evening dress that left her shoulders and back bare. A ruby red silk dress.
“Red like the blood hiding between my legs, Bill,” she said softly, laughing. “Red like the blood that’s still spurting out of the finger you took away with you, Bill,” and she kept laughing, because everything was funny. So funny she needed to tell the locusts, too. Red Ruth. Ruth the Reddest.
She came down another step. She clung to the handrail. “Those are good pills, Mamma …” she muttered, legs unsteady. But no one heard her yet. The locusts’ mouths were full. And they were laughing. They were laughing, too. “And your Scotch is good, too …” she said, descending one more step. She would make them laugh even harder. Yes, she could make them laugh. Laugh at the blood. “Red as that red heart, Chr
istmas. Red as the kiss I never gave you.” Another step. “I am the priestess of blood,” she laughed. “That’s why my mother gave me this red dress, made out of blood …” Two more steps. Now everything was whirling around her. The ceiling was detaching itself from the walls. The walls were leaving the pavement. And the floor was plunging up and down like the deck of a ship in a storm. “Yes, I’m in the middle of the lake of blood … and I’m sinking. I’m drowning, and … isn’t it funny? You have to laugh at somebody drowning in blood, because … because … it’s so funny, that’s all.” Another three steps, with her knees dissolving. Ruth held even more tightly to the banister and pulled off her shoes. “Red shoes,” she laughed, dropping them to the floor. She looked up again and saw her father in his immaculate white linen suit. With a white face. Tense. “You don’t have any blood left, papa,” she mumbled. “All of your blood … spilled out of me …” she laughed and looked at the hand with the missing finger. “I didn’t wear the gloves … I’m sorry, Mamma … I was afraid I’d get blood on them …” she laughed again, trying to focus on her mutilated hand, at the stub she’d smeared with the same red lipstick as her mouth and eyelids. She looked again at her father, at his weak face, searching the crowd of guests. “They didn’t come, did they, Papa?” She choked back vomit. She put her hand to her mouth. She came down the last step of the staircase. She could see them beyond the marble entryway. The guests were swarming around the buffet tables. Jostling past the eight sisters, who did not deign to speak with them. She tried to focus on them but she couldn’t recognize any of the stars, because on the screen they looked like angels, but in life they were only locusts, with terrible jaws, devouring every dish they were offered. They were actors and actresses, they deserved everything. Or maybe, Ruth thought, they could foresee that they weren’t going to last long. Like her.