Simpson’s pasture lay below the house, a meadow brilliant with high November gold and russet grass. At the edge of the pasture there were a gray barn, a pig corral, a fenced-in chicken yard and a smokehouse. It was the smokehouse I slipped into, a black chamber cool on even the hottest summer days. It had a dirt floor and a smoke pit that smelled of hickory cinders and creosote; rows of hams hung from rafters. It was a place I’d always been wary of, but now its darkness seemed sheltering. I fell on the ground, my ribs heaving like the gills of a beach-stranded fish; and I didn’t care that I was demolishing my one nice suit, the one with long trousers, by thrashing about on the floor in a messy mixture of earth and ashes and pork grease.
One thing I knew: I was going to quit that house, that town, that night. Hit the road. Hop a freight and head for California. Make my living shining shoes in Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s shoes. Clark Gable’s. Or—maybe I just might become a movie star myself. Look at Jackie Cooper. Oh, they’d be sorry then. When I was rich and famous and refused to answer their letters and even telegrams, probably.
Suddenly I thought of something that would make them even sorrier. The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.
The only hitch was, I wouldn’t actually be able to see or hear any of this: how could I, being dead? And unless one can observe the guilt and regret of the mourners, surely there is nothing satisfactory about being dead?
Uncle B. must have forbidden Miss Sook to go look for me until the last guest had left the table. It was late afternoon before I heard her voice floating across the pasture; she called my name softly, forlornly as a mourning dove. I stayed where I was and did not answer.
It was Queenie who found me; she came sniffing around the smokehouse and yapped when she caught my scent, then entered and crawled toward me and licked my hand, an ear and a cheek; she knew she had treated me badly.
Presently, the door swung open and the light widened. My friend said, “Come here, Buddy.” And I wanted to go to her. When she saw me, she laughed. “Goodness, boy. You look dipped in tar and all ready for feathering.” But there were no recriminations or references to my ruined suit.
Queenie trotted off to pester some cows; and trailing after her into the pasture, we sat down on a tree stump. “I saved you a drumstick,” she said, handing me a parcel wrapped in waxed paper. “And your favorite piece of turkey. The pulley.”
The hunger that direr sensations had numbed now hit me like a belly-punch. I gnawed the drumstick clean, then stripped the pulley, the sweet part of the turkey around the wishbone.
While I was eating, Miss Sook put her arm around my shoulders. “There’s just this I want to say, Buddy. Two wrongs never made a right. It was wrong of him to take the cameo. But we don’t know why he took it. Maybe he never meant to keep it. Whatever his reason, it can’t have been calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. Do you understand me, Buddy?”
I did, dimly, and time has taught me that she was right. But at that moment I mainly comprehended that because my revenge had failed, my method must have been wrong. Odd Henderson had emerged—how? why?—as someone superior to me, even more honest.
“Do you, Buddy? Understand?”
“Sort of. Pull,” I said, offering her one prong of the wishbone.
We split it; my half was the larger, which entitled me to a wish. She wanted to know what I’d wished.
“That you’re still my friend.”
“Dumbhead,” she said, and hugged me.
“Forever?”
“I won’t be here forever, Buddy. Nor will you.” Her voice sank like the sun on the pasture’s horizon, was silent a second and then climbed with the strength of a new sun. “But yes, forever. The Lord willing, you’ll be here long after I’ve gone. And as long as you remember me, then we’ll always be together.” …
Afterward, Odd Henderson let me alone. He started tussling with a boy his own age, Squirrel McMillan. And the next year, because of Odd’s poor grades and general bad conduct, our school principal wouldn’t allow him to attend classes, so he spent the winter working as a hand on a dairy farm. The last time I saw him was shortly before he hitchhiked to Mobile, joined the Merchant Marine and disappeared. It must have been the year before I was packed off to a miserable fate in a military academy, and two years prior to my friend’s death. That would make it the autumn of 1934.
Miss Sook had summoned me to the garden; she had transplanted a blossoming chrysanthemum bush into a tin washtub and needed help to haul it up the steps onto the front porch, where it would make a fine display. It was heavier than forty fat pirates, and while we were struggling with it ineffectually, Odd Henderson passed along the road. He paused at the garden gate and then opened it, saying, “Let me do that for you, ma’am.” Life on a dairy farm had done him a lot of good; he’d thickened, his arms were sinewy and his red coloring had deepened to a ruddy brown. Airily he lifted the big tub and placed it on the porch.
My friend said, “I’m obliged to you, sir. That was neighborly.”
“Nothing,” he said, still ignoring me.
Miss Sook snapped the stems of her showiest blooms. “Take these to your mother,” she told him, handing him the bouquet. “And give her my love.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I will.”
“Oh, Odd,” she called, after he’d regained the road, “be careful! They’re lions, you know.” But he was already out of hearing. We watched until he turned a bend at the corner, innocent of the menace he carried, the chrysanthemums that burned, that growled and roared against a greenly lowering dusk.
MOJAVE
(1975)
At 5 p.m. that winter afternoon she had an appointment with Dr. Bentsen, formerly her psychoanalyst and currently her lover. When their relationship had changed from the analytical to the emotional, he insisted, on ethical grounds, that she cease to be his patient. Not that it mattered. He had not been of much help as an analyst, and as a lover—well, once she had watched him running to catch a bus, two hundred and twenty pounds of shortish, fiftyish, frizzly-haired, hip-heavy, myopic Manhattan Intellectual, and she had laughed: how was it possible that she could love a man so ill-humored, so ill-favored as Ezra Bentsen? The answer was she didn’t; in fact, she disliked him. But at least she didn’t associate him with resignation and despair. She feared her husband; she was not afraid of Dr. Bentsen. Still, it was her husband she loved.
She was rich; at any rate, had a substantial allowance from her husband, who was rich, and so could afford the studio-apartment hideaway where she met her lover perhaps once a week, sometimes twice, never more. She could also afford gifts he seemed to expect on these occasions. Not that he appreciated their quality: Verdura cuff links, classic Paul Flato cigarette cases, the obligatory Cartier watch, and (more to the point) occasional specific amounts of cash he asked to “borrow.”
He had never given her a single present. Well, one: a mother-of-pearl Spanish dress comb that he claimed was an heirloom, a mother-treasure. Of course, it was nothing she could wear, for she wore her own hair, fluffy and tobacco-colored, like a childish aureole around her deceptively naïve and youthful face. Thanks to dieting, private exercises with Joseph Pilatos, and the dermatological attentions of Dr. Orentreich, she looked in her early twenties; she was thirty-six.
The Spanish comb. Her hair. That reminded her of Jaime Sanchez and something that had happened yesterday. Jaime Sanchez was her hairdresser, and though they
had known each other scarcely a year, they were, in their own way, good friends. She confided in him somewhat; he confided in her considerably more. Until recently she had judged Jaime to be a happy, almost overly blessed young man. He shared an apartment with an attractive lover, a young dentist named Carlos. Jaime and Carlos had been schoolmates in San Juan; they had left Puerto Rico together, settling first in New Orleans, then New York, and it was Jaime, working as a beautician, a talented one, who had put Carlos through dental school. Now Carlos had his own office and a clientele of prosperous Puerto Ricans and blacks.
However, during her last several visits she had noticed that Jaime Sanchez’s usually unclouded eyes were somber, yellowed, as though he had a hangover, and his expertly articulate hands, ordinarily so calm and capable, trembled a little.
Yesterday, while scissor-trimming her hair, he had stopped and stood gasping, gasping—not as though fighting for air, but as if struggling against a scream.
She had said: “What is it? Are you all right?”
“No.”
He had stepped to a washbasin and splashed his face with cold water. While drying himself, he said: “I’m going to kill Carlos.” He waited, as if expecting her to ask him why; when she merely stared, he continued: “There’s no use talking anymore. He understands nothing. My words mean nothing. The only way I can communicate with him is to kill him. Then he will understand.”
“I’m not sure that I do, Jaime.”
“Have I ever mentioned to you Angelita? My cousin Angelita? She came here six months ago. She has always been in love with Carlos. Since she was, oh, twelve years old. And now Carlos is in love with her. He wants to marry her and have a household of children.”
She felt so awkward that all she could think to ask was: “Is she a nice girl?”
“Too nice.” He had seized the scissors and resumed clipping. “No, I mean that. She is an excellent girl, very petite, like a pretty parrot, and much too nice; her kindness becomes cruel. Though she doesn’t understand that she is being cruel. For example …” She glanced at Jaime’s face moving in the mirror above the washbasin; it was not the merry face that had often beguiled her, but pain and perplexity exactly reflected. “Angelita and Carlos want me to live with them after they are married, all of us together in one apartment. It was her idea, but Carlos says yes! yes! we must all stay together and from now on he and I will live like brothers. That is the reason I have to kill him. He could never have loved me, not if he could ignore my enduring such hell. He says, ‘Yes, I love you, Jaime; but Angelita—this is different.’ There is no difference. You love or you do not. You destroy or you do not. But Carlos will never understand that. Nothing reaches him, nothing can—only a bullet or a razor.”
She wanted to laugh; at the same time she couldn’t because she realized he was serious and also because she well knew how true it was that certain persons could only be made to recognize the truth, be made to understand, by subjecting them to extreme punishment.
Nevertheless, she did laugh, but in a manner that Jaime would not interpret as genuine laughter. It was something comparable to a sympathetic shrug. “You could never kill anyone, Jaime.”
He began to comb her hair; the tugs were not gentle, but she knew the anger implied was against himself, not her. “Shit!” Then: “No. And that’s the reason for most suicides. Someone is torturing you. You want to kill them, but you can’t. All that pain is because you love them, and you can’t kill them because you love them. So you kill yourself instead.”
Leaving, she considered kissing him on the cheek, but settled for shaking his hand. “I know how trite this is, Jaime. And for the moment certainly no help at all. But remember—there’s always somebody else. Just don’t look for the same person, that’s all.”
The rendezvous apartment was on East Sixty-fifth Street; today she walked to it from her home, a small town house on Beekman Place. It was windy, there was leftover snow on the sidewalk and a promise of more in the air, but she was snug enough in the coat her husband had given her for Christmas—a sable-colored suede coat that was lined with sable.
A cousin had rented the apartment for her in his own name. The cousin, who was married to a harridan and lived in Greenwich, sometimes visited the apartment with his secretary, a fat Japanese woman who drenched herself in nose-boggling amounts of Mitsouko. This afternoon the apartment reeked of the lady’s perfume, from which she deduced that her cousin had lately been dallying here. That meant she would have to change the sheets.
She did so, then prepared herself. On a table beside the bed she placed a small box wrapped in shiny cerulean paper; it contained a gold toothpick she had bought at Tiffany, a gift for Dr. Bentsen, for one of his unpleasing habits was constantly picking his teeth, and, moreover, picking them with an endless series of paper matches. She had thought the gold pick might make the whole process a little less disagreeable. She put a stack of Lee Wiley and Fred Astaire records on a phonograph, poured herself a glass of cold white wine, undressed entirely, lubricated herself and stretched out on the bed, humming, singing along with the divine Fred and listening for the scratch of her lover’s key at the door.
To judge from appearances, orgasms were agonizing events in the life of Ezra Bentsen: he grimaced, he ground his dentures, he whimpered like a frightened mutt. Of course, she was always relieved when she heard the whimper; it meant that soon his lathered carcass would roll off her, for he was not one to linger, whispering tender compliments: he just rolled right off. And today, having done so, he greedily reached for the blue box, knowing it was a present for him. After opening it, he grunted.
She explained: “It’s a gold toothpick.”
He chuckled, an unusual sound coming from him, for his sense of humor was meager. “That’s kind of cute,” he said, and began picking his teeth. “You know what happened last night? I slapped Thelma. But good. And I punched her in the stomach, too.”
Thelma was his wife; she was a child psychiatrist, and by reputation a fine one.
“The trouble with Thelma is you can’t talk to her. She doesn’t understand. Sometimes that’s the only way you can get the message across. Give her a fat lip.”
She thought of Jaime Sanchez.
“Do you know a Mrs. Roger Rhinelander?” Dr. Bentsen said.
“Mary Rhinelander? Her father was my father’s best friend. They owned a racing stable together. One of her horses won the Kentucky Derby. Poor Mary, though. She married a real bastard.”
“So she tells me.”
“Oh? Is Mrs. Rhinelander a new patient?”
“Brand-new. Funny thing. She came to me for more or less the particular reason that brought you; her situation is almost identical.”
The particular reason? Actually, she had a number of problems that had contributed to her eventual seduction on Dr. Bentsen’s couch, the principal one being that she had not been capable of having a sexual relationship with her husband since the birth of their second child. She had married when she was twenty-four; her husband was fifteen years her senior. Though they had fought a lot, and were jealous of each other, the first five years of their marriage remained in her memory as an unblemished vista. The difficulty started when he asked her to have a child; if she hadn’t been so much in love with him, she would never have consented—she had been afraid of children when she herself was a child, and the company of a child still made her uneasy. But she had given him a son, and the experience of pregnancy had traumatized her: when she wasn’t actually suffering, she imagined she was, and after the birth she descended into a depression that continued more than a year. Every day she slept fourteen hours of Seconal sleep; as for the other ten, she kept awake by fueling herself with amphetamines. The second child, another boy, had been a drunken accident—though she suspected that really her husband had tricked her. The instant she knew she was pregnant again she had insisted on having an abortion; he had told her that if she went ahead with it, he would divorce her. Well, he had lived to regret that. The chi
ld had been born two months prematurely, had nearly died, and because of massive internal hemorrhaging, so had she; they had both hovered above an abyss through months of intensive care. Since then, she had never shared a bed with her husband; she wanted to, but she couldn’t, for the naked presence of him, the thought of his body inside hers, summoned intolerable terrors.
Dr. Bentsen wore thick black socks with garters, which he never removed while “making love”; now, as he was sliding his gartered legs into a pair of shiny-seated blue serge trousers, he said: “Let’s see. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Wednesday is our anniversary …”
“Our anniversary?”
“Thelma’s! Our twentieth. I want to take her to … Tell me the best restaurant around now?”
“What does it matter? It’s very small and very smart and the owner would never give you a table.”
His lack of humor asserted itself: “That’s a damn strange thing to say. What do you mean, he wouldn’t give me a table?”
“Just what I said. One look at you and he’d know you had hairy heels. There are some people who won’t serve people with hairy heels. He’s one of them.”
Dr. Bentsen was familiar with her habit of introducing unfamiliar lingo, and he had learned to pretend he knew what it signified; he was as ignorant of her ambience as she was of his, but the shifting instability of his character would not allow him to admit it.
“Well, then,” he said, “is Friday all right? Around five?”
She said: “No, thank you.” He was tying his tie and stopped; she was still lying on the bed, uncovered, naked; Fred was singing “By Myself.” “No, thank you, darling Dr. B. I don’t think we’ll be meeting here anymore.”
She could see he was startled. Of course he would miss her—she was beautiful, she was considerate, it never bothered her when he asked her for money. He knelt beside the bed and fondled her breast. She noticed an icy mustache of sweat on his upper lip. “What is this? Drugs? Drink?”