“I’ve had years of experience being me,” she replied. “It’s like swimming or fucking, you don’t forget how. I’m not trying to be Wonder Woman, Petey. I know I must be weakened physically even if I don’t happen to feel it at the moment. I’m not going to try to do everything at once, but I’m not going to work up to normal life like a paraplegic learning to walk, because I just don’t have to.”
If she was capable of an overnight change, he himself was not. On the contrary, he was very cautious about changing the living pattern he had devised as insurance against her unreliability. He still left Robin at Raparound while he was at the theater. Gretchen knew why he did this; more surprisingly, she took no offense. “I wouldn’t trust me either,” she told him, winking. “I can know damn well I’m all right, but there’s no reason why you should buy the whole trip the first day out of port. I’ll let you believe it a little at a time, baby. No problem.”
He stopped at Raparound to inform Anne the first night he left Robin with Gretchen. The waitress seemed dubious.
“You haven’t seen her,” he insisted. “I can hardly believe it myself, but it’s real.”
“I could go over once or twice and look in on them.”
“She’d know why you were doing it.”
“Maybe I’d better not, then.”
“The thing is, I don’t think she’d mind. She really has herself together.”
Anne laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so happy for you, Pete.”
“Not as happy as I am,” he said.
But was he happy?
There were irritating moments when it seemed to him that he was not. He could not understand these moments, did not know what might be causing them.
And then he dreamed the dream.
It was more perfectly detailed than most of his dreams. In it, he returned home from an evening at the theater with Gretchen. She had come to watch the show while he lit it. They stopped for a bite of food on the way home, then returned to the apartment, dismissed the baby, sitter, and made sure that Robin was sound asleep.
Then he went into the kitchen and picked up a sharp knife. She asked him what the knife was for but he did not answer. Instead he used it to cut a length of cord from the Venetian blinds. She asked him what the cord was for, and again he made no response.
He positioned a chair beneath the lighting fixture and told her to take off all her clothes. She did so, asking him if he was going to make love to her. He did not answer. When she was naked he told her to stand on the chair. She asked why, and again he failed to answer, and she obediently mounted the chair.
As he wrapped the cord first around her neck and then around the fixture, she asked him very reasonably why he was going to kill her this way. This time he tried to answer but could not form the words. He got down from the chair, and she told him that it was all right, that she could understand the way he felt, that he should not feel bad about it. He tugged the chair out from under her and watched in fascination as she danced on air. The twitching of her legs slowed, then stopped. He turned from her, and in the open doorway stood everyone he had ever known in his life. Their fingers pointed at him, and just then the dream ended and he was awake.
The meaning of the dream was too hideously obvious to him. Dreams should form themselves in subtle symbols, he thought, so that one would not have to bear the brunt of their awful truth.
He wanted her dead. He had wanted her dead when she was insane, and now, although she had recovered, he still wished for the liberation her death would bring him. He did not love her, sane or mad; sane or mad he did not want her.
His immediate impulse was to leave. He loved the child, wanted to be close to the child, but with Gretchen sane and functioning as a capable mother he no longer had an overwhelming responsibility to the child. All he had to do was pack up and go, and surely it was a greater kindness to do that than to go on living with a woman you’d rather see dead.
But if he left, Gretchen would probably go mad again. He could not make himself believe otherwise. And so if he left, Robin would be without him and without an adequate mother at the same time, and—
And he realized, now, why it occasionally had seemed to him that he was not happy.
It was hard for him to know just when he began to suspect that she was not sane after all. More than that—it was impossible to know, because when the thoughts began to come, he brushed them impatiently away. Once again, he was sure, the wish had fathered the thought. It was unthinkable that he not love her if she were mentally healthy; therefore, he was attempting to convince himself that she was not.
But gradually the impressions built. He would glance at her and catch the shadow of an expression on her face that did not belong there. He would awaken at night and sense that she was feigning sleep, as she had done during her worst periods. And there were other little particles of inconsistency, none enormously significant in and of itself but all of them combining like dots in a pointillist landscape to present an image of madness.
He played with it and found it made sense to him. Her recovery had been total and instantaneous because it had been no recovery at all. Before she had been mad; now she was a madwoman feigning sanity as she feigned sleep. A true recovery would have had to be halting and tentative, as her attempts had been in the past. But a false recovery was something different. It came naturally to her because she had woven it to mesh with the fabric of her insanity, had made it a part of that insanity.
Or had she?
Or was he the madman, building his own fantasies, to fit the dimensions of his own delusion? How could you tell? How could you possibly tell?
TWENTY-TWO
On the first Thursday after Labor Day, Linda sat at the desk in the Lemon Tree balancing her checkbook. There should have been nothing to it, as she had opened her account at the Solebury National Bank less than a month ago. This was the first statement she had received, and it contained the three checks she had thus far written. According to the bank, she had a balance of $142.58. According to her own records, her balance was $143.28. The ninety-cent difference seemed unimportant enough, but it galled her that she could not see where either she or the bank had gone wrong. She stopped to explain to a tight-faced woman that there was no public rest room, then went back to her calculations. She caught the error at last and of course it was her error and not the bank’s. She had assumed as much from the beginning and now made the appropriate corrections in her checkbook.
It was pleasant having a bank account. The convenience, so widely heralded in bank advertising, was not what pleased her most; it had been convenient enough for her to settle her accounts in cash, and postal money orders were easily obtained if she needed to send money through the mails. But the simple possession of a checkbook gave her a feeling of substance, as insubstantial as her own balance might be. More, it gave her a feeling of belonging to the community, a feeling that had grown over the recent months. Now the building on the northeast corner of Bridge and Main was not merely the bank. It was her bank.
She glanced at her watch. It was just past six and Olive McIntyre had not yet arrived. Olive had been due at six, and Linda could not remember the woman having been late more than half a dozen times, and never by more than a handful of minutes. Olive was almost invariably early, and often by as much as an hour. She would always offer to take over upon her arrival, and more often than not Linda would stay to keep her company. They both enjoyed the easy conversation that passed during their moments together at the shop.
She wondered how long Olive would be able to her working full time. Labor Day weekend, a maddeningly hectic four days, had come and gone, and with its passing the heaviest of the summer traffic was over for another year. According to Olive, the greatest reduction would be in human volume rather than dollar volume. Serious customers would be as numerous as ever during the fall months, while the number of casual browsers would drop sharply.
“How you do in the fall depends on the sort of business you’re in,” O
live had told her. “The ice-cream shop has a big decline in sales because their volume is tied directly to the number of clowns wandering the streets, not to mention that ice cream has less appeal in colder weather. The art galleries and antique shops drop on the ground and thank the Lord when Labor Day is over and done with. Once the gawkers are out of the way they have time to take care of their serious customers. We’re somewhere in the middle. We’ll sell fewer dollar and two-dollar items with less tourists to sell them to, but the big-ticket sales will stay about the same. And for a month before Christmas we’ll do our best business in the items running from ten dollars on up. Of course for three months after Christmas you can go all day without seeing anything but a stray dog on the streets.”
The phone rang. She picked it up, said, “Good evening, Lemon Tree.”
“Linda?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Olive, Linda.”
“Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice.” There was a pause, and she said, “Is everything all right?”
“No, everything’s not.” A pause. “It’s Clem. I’m calling from Doylestown General. The hospital.”
“He’s not—”
“No, he’s not.” Another pause, and a sigh. “He started hemorrhaging a little after eleven this morning. It’s his liver, of course. He’s all right now. He’s had transfusions all day, God knows how many pints of blood. He’s unconscious and he looks like pure hell but he’s going to make it.”
“Thank God.”
“I’ve been alternately thanking and cursing Him all afternoon. Clem will be staying in the hospital for at least another week, possibly as much as two weeks. They’re putting a second bed in his room and I’m staying with him.” She snorted. “They tried to tell me that would be against the rules. It’s nothing short of amazing the variety of horse manure people think they can get away with. I told them just what I would do and who I would call and they went into a huddle and decided the rule never existed in the first place. They told me they would have to charge me the same rates as if I were a patient. I said that was perfectly all right, that I would simply deduct the sum from my annual contribution. And I suggested they might like to look up my annual contribution just to put things in perspective. They’ve been so sweet ever since that I may vomit. Well, let me get to the point. I obviously won’t be around for at least a week. Just put all the mail somewhere in the back and ignore it. If anything comes up that needs handling, use your own judgment. It’s sure to be more reliable than mine for the time being. Work whatever hours you want, your regular hours and as much of mine as you feel like. Just keep a record so that you’ll know how much money you have coming to you. Are you short on money?”
“No.”
“You may be by the time I get around to writing you a check. If that happens, just pay yourself out of the cash drawer and leave a memo of what you took. I’ll be in touch when I can. I don’t have your home phone number with me—could you let me have it?”
She gave her number.
“Fine. Don’t feel you have to put in more hours than you want, Linda. I really don’t give an earthly damn how business goes just now. Arrange your hours to suit yourself. I meant to call you earlier today. I hope I didn’t keep you from an appointment?”
“Oh, no.”
“You can close up now if you want.”
“No, I think I’ll stay around for an hour or so.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Olive? I hope everything’s all right.”
“Well, George Perlmutter’s been around and says he’s out of the woods now. The other clowns say the same thing, but I wouldn’t trust them for a minute. I know George too well for him to lie to me. All Clem has to do is stop drinking for the rest of his life and he’s got nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“And all I have to do is grow wings and I can fly like an eagle. I have to go now, Linda. ’Bye.”
For the fifteen minutes following Olive’s call she sat in the little shop and thought about death. The hour from six to seven was always quiet. Most of the shops on the mall closed for dinner, so even if one stayed open, passersby were not likely to drop in. Olive normally devoted that hour to paper work and dusting. There was no paper work for Linda to do but there was always dusting. Instead she stayed seated and thought of death.
Clem would die. That seemed to be what Olive had been saying at the end. He had nothing to worry about if he stopped drinking for the rest of his life, but Olive would not grow wings like an eagle and Clement McIntyre would not stop drinking, and so he would die.
She thought back to the first time she had genuinely realized that she herself would someday die. It seemed incomprehensible in retrospect. She had known since childhood that everyone died sooner or later, but until not too many years ago this knowledge had held no personal meaning for her. Death was always something that happened to other people. Occasional family deaths—her grandparents, an uncle, a friend of her father’s—had left her untouched. And then one spring morning a donkey walked across her grave, and the shivers stayed with her for a full week.
She had been married then. Married to Alan, and although she could not recall the year she knew it must have been late in their brief marriage because they would not otherwise have bought the gerbils. Neither of them had quite voiced the thought, but they had bought the little rodents to hold their marriage together. It was starting to come unglued, starting to reveal itself as having been a gross error from the beginning, but had not yet reached the point where they could face the fact that there was nothing there worth saving. It had seemed a little extreme to have a child to save the marriage. Gerbils, allegedly silent and odorless and able to thrive on an occasional handful of sunflower seeds, seemed a more moderate and equally feasible solution.
They had purchased a male and female gerbil, and the gerbils had done what she and Alan had virtually ceased to do, and had done so without benefit of birth control. The female gerbil grew fatter than seemed possible ultimately producing a litter of five hairless and blind little creatures. The thrill of the birth had quite overwhelmed Linda, and for the next few days it seemed to her that she and Alan truly loved each other.
Then one day the mother gerbil died. They never learned how or why. The babies were about a week old; two had their eyes open already. They were a week old, and their mother was dead, and Alan ran around to veterinarians trying to get a formula for a gerbil milk substitute, then tried pet shops in the hope that a gerbil mother who had lost her young might be enlisted to wet-nurse the little things. In the end they warmed Similac to body temperature and tried to feed it to the babies with a tiny eyedropper from a child’s nurse kit. One by one the baby gerbils went cold and stiff. The first one died six hours after they found the mother dead. The fifth and last died around dawn the next day.
She and Alan had an apartment. There was no yard, so she took the little corpses to Central Park and buried them, digging tiny graves with a soup spoon. She wept over their graves as she had never wept in her life.
The next day Alan wanted to buy another female gerbil. “Oh, no,” she cried. “Never.”
“But Eddie will be lonely now,” Alan had said. They’d named the gerbils Eddie and Wallie, for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “The poor old guy can’t just sit alone for the rest of his life.”
And then it hit her—the realization that everything died, that everyone died, that she would die. It was a realization that had to come to everyone sooner or later, and that everyone got over, as she in time got over it herself. But from that moment on her marriage was finished. It would have been finished anyway, would have ended even if they had been up to their necks in thriving hopping odorless gerbils, but that was the point where she herself knew that she had to leave him. She did not do so at once. She waited for quite awhile, but waited with no hope whatsoever.
Eddie remained with Alan when she left. She wondered what had become of him. He had almost certainly di
ed by now, she thought. Gerbils didn’t live very long.
She went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, picked up a magazine, and was back at the desk by seven. A few minutes before eight a voice spoke her name. She looked up from her magazine at Karen Markarian.
“I hope I’m not bugging you,” Karen said. “I was in town with nothing to do and I thought maybe you’d like company.”
“I’m glad you did.” She closed the magazine and put it aside. “There’s never anything to read in this anyway. I don’t know why I bought it. I was just looking at the ads.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“Of course I’m sure. Pull up a chair. There’s one over there."
“It’s all right to move the chair?”
“Well, sure.”
Karen brought the chair over and sat down alongside the desk. “I went to your apartment first,” she said. “Then when you weren’t there I thought maybe you were finishing up over here. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“There’s hardly any work to interrupt. Olive couldn’t come in this evening and I had no place better to go so I thought I’d stay open. Cigarette?”
“Thanks.” She inhaled deeply, blew out smoke. “Hugh’s working tonight. I didn’t feel like sitting around alone and I couldn’t think of anyone in town I wanted to see. And then I thought of you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“He’s really spending tons of time in front of that typewriter. Sometimes I’ll just stand outside his door and listen. He’ll go full blast for like fifteen minutes at a clip, just stopping to change pages, and then other times he’ll sit there without a sound for an hour at a time.”
“It must be very difficult.”
“I don’t know how he does it.”
“Neither do I.”
“I really mean it. When I grew up, you know, he was a writer, but a kid doesn’t think anything about that. He went into a room and made noises on a machine, you know, so big deal. I mean, I don’t know, when you’re a kid you don’t see anything special about it.”