All These Condemned (16 page)

We talked a bit. I felt her stop resenting me. I put my hand on her shoulder. Casually. She rested her cheek against my hand and then, turning her head, brushed her lips lightly across the back of my hand. She came quickly into my arms as I reached for her.

I remember the first time I ever kissed a girl. I think I was almost thirteen. It was that traditional game. Post office. Her name was Connie and she was on the timid side. Her voice shook when she said she had a special delivery for Paul. I damn near died. Girls! Good Lord! Girls! I was filled with lofty male contempt. But I had to go through with it. I was trapped. The post office was at the dim end of the front hall. She waited there for me. Head bent. I had every intention of one quick harsh peck in the general direction of her face. Remember how it was? The perfume of them? The first awareness? Those lips of that astounding, incredible softness? There was a concept in your head. Girls! Miserable things. And those lips took that bitter concept and flipped it and it landed the other side up and all of a sudden there were a hundred mysteries to be solved. From despicable things they suddenly became the source of all fevers. You are not supposed to relive that first kiss. Ever. But somehow Judy’s lips became the first, turning concepts upside down in the same old way. Blotting out everything known and substituting a full new range of unknowns.

Then she moved and twisted and was gone. Leaving exactly what she was and the hint of what she could be firmly imprinted on my mouth. Indelibly. And I was stupid enough to think that it had been meaningless to her, as meaningless as it was meaningless to me. Too much male
suspicion. Too many times burned, maybe. Not realizing that it must be mutual impact to be any impact at all. And something not too often used, too often given away. A kiss. My God, how many wet and furtive ones are exchanged at the club on any Saturday night? Or in your kitchen the last time you had a party? And how many of them move along from kissing to fondling to motel, culminating in an act that achieves its nastiness merely through its meaninglessness? Old-fashioned? I guess. Practice and familiarity and shallowness dump you off the end of the porch, right into contempt and self-disgust. And if you eat spiced foods, you can drink one hell of a hot cup of coffee.

This was honest, and she put her back against the car door and told me so, and told me it was the end of this particular bus line, and got out and went away from me. But not before I made a feeble comment about canceling out Mavis. Knowing, as I said it, it was too fast and too ridiculous. She looked back once. Pale face turning, light catching it.

I sat alone.

Now be a big boy, Paul. Act like a grownup. You just kissed a famous female. It rocked you both—assuming she wasn’t acting. (I know she wasn’t! I know it!) You’re both upset about this Wilma thing. (No. We’re upset about other things. And we can be the answer for each other because I know we want the same things.) And this is a crazy environment. You do silly things in a setting like this. (But it would have been the same on a ten-cent ferry ride or in a public park or on a picnic or sitting in a balcony. Exactly the same, wiping out everything that has gone on up to now.) And
you’re an incurable romantic, Paul. Always looking for the rope of hair hanging out of the high stone tower, always ready to tie colors to your lance. (But never finding
her
until now. Always looking at the wrong tower windows. Wearing the wrong hues.) And she is a busy gal and next week if she met you on the street she’d look baffled for a moment and then, maybe, remember your name. (It happened to her the way it happened to me.) Anyway, Paul boy, you’re married and that’s something you work at. You don’t give it up all of a sudden because you happened to marry somebody who, at times, manages to be a remarkably silly woman. (Silly, vicious, shallow, and phony. Too selfish for motherhood. Predictably unfaithful, if not already, then soon. Woman who doesn’t give a damn for you except as a meal ticket.) So skip it, Paul. (And what if you can’t? What if it’s something beyond the exercise of will?)

Skip it anyway.

So up came Mavis and she startled me and when I saw who it was I told her I wanted to talk to her. She turned around and walked away. At least she’d stopped blubbering. She walked away. I wanted to jump out and catch her in three strides and see how heavily I could hit her on the back of the neck. Then I wondered how many people go around with crazy thoughts like that popping into their heads. Like, on the way up, when we had quarreled, I kept looking at the front ends of the oncoming trucks. One yank on the wheel. How often does that happen? Car out of control. Wife goes yammer, yammer, yammer. Man sits there, shoulders hunched, hands tight on the wheel. So maybe lots of times the yammer has a chance to turn into half a scream
before the explosive crunch, followed by the long scrapings and tinklings, and they both die mad.

Yes, I wanted to talk to her and I was going to talk to her. And she wasn’t going to like what I was going to say. Because, Judy or no Judy, win, lose, draw, or default, I had had enough. Enough of Mavis, Manhattan, Management. I had a Daliesque view of myself. I sat in a big tin tub in the middle of the desert while a big brush scrubbed me clean, inside and out. Then the brain would be taken out of the white suds, rinsed gently in spring water, and popped back into the skull.

The spring was winding up and the wheels were aimed in a new direction. There weren’t any road signs. I spent a long time with myself there. When I got out of the car I felt cramped and stiff, as though I had spent a long time under tension. I was watching the way the mountains were beginning to show in the first gray of Sunday morning when I heard the shouts. All the lights went on again, killing off the look of morning. I hurried down to the water.

They had her. Steve and a trooper lifted her up out of the boat. They had her wrapped in a tarp, but they fumbled it and dropped her, so she rolled naked out of the covering. I looked at that body and decided right there I had no tendency toward necrophilism. Objectively, I suppose it was a fine lush body. But it was very, very dead, and I turned my back and heard Judy yell at them to cover her up. I knew she felt the same way I did about it.

Officialdom took over and shooed us off the dock. The boats began to head for home, toward the women who would indeed cherish this morsel.

I tell you, Helen, I just knew there was a lot of things going on over there. A regular orgy. All those city people, romping around stark nakid. Dope fiends too, I’ll bet you. Well, they say you shouldn’t speak bad things about the dead, but I can tell you, Helen, I’m sure not sorry trash like that isn’t going to be coming up here any more. I hope some real nice people get that house. You know, that Judy Jonah was over there too. If she comes on again in the fall, I’m not going to let the children watch her. I’m going to write to the sponsor. I say if a person don’t live decent, Helen, they’ve got no right to put themselves up in front of the public.

I looked around for Judy but I couldn’t find her. I guessed she had gone to her room. I was heading toward the kitchen, thinking vaguely of hot coffee, and it was some time after the body had been found and the world was full of murky daylight when we were all herded into the vast living room. Mr. Fish had a few words for us.

I guess I was staring at Judy like a lovesick pup. I wanted to check on how she looked in daylight. I wanted to know what she liked for breakfast, how long she’d owned that beat-up sweater, what books she read, what sort of things made her cry, what size shoes she wore.

And I heard Fish saying something crazy. I stared at him and finally caught on. Not an accident. Not just a drowning. Not a fatal combination of alcohol, darkness, and lake water. But a hole in the back of her head.

So instead of a drunken scandal, we had us a nice juicy murder. Brother! I started thinking of a million things all at once, relating it all back to the job I was trying to do. Effect on the market? What approved advertising programs would
be in bad taste now? Who would be running the whole thing now?

We were warned to stick around pending the arrival of more important brass. I surrendered my car keys to a trooper. Noel Hess had walked out on the group. People had begun to mill around. The other trooper was talking to Judy. I was thinking of some good way to break it up and get her off where I could talk to her. Just talk. Just look at her. She made the trooper laugh. Beyond Judy I could see Mavis, not crying, her face unpleasantly bloated with too many tears for too long a time. Mavis looked shocked and angry.

I saw it start to happen and at first I didn’t understand and thought it was some sort of game in poor taste, and then when I did see what was going to happen, saw Judy turning to stare too, there was a moment when I felt as though I stood neck-deep in glue, unable to move or speak. It went on in slow motion. In horrid slow motion, with descending glint of brass, and nothing in the world could stop it. And nothing did.

Then the trooper and I got there at the same moment. Too late.

Too late. I saw the oiled blue arc, heard the bite of impact, the face turned up and still and away for a moment before the falling. And all of us there for a moment, a tableau, stillness, with the memory of a scream clotted against the high walls, so that in turning, so as not to look, I saw Judy’s eyes, saw them on me, clear and real and known, and took a half step toward her.

The young doctor knelt. I saw his face when he looked up. It is all the same to them. Always they meet the same
adversary, though he may wear many masks. It’s an adversary that always wins. And the doctors, those fighters of delaying actions, must wear closed faces.

It was ended, of course, and nothing would ever be the same again.

THERE WAS A SPECIAL EXPRESSION
the photographer wanted for the still that would be a part of a testimonial, and after it was over I walked up Madison to Forty-sixth, feeling as if somebody had used a sponge on my face. I told myself it would keep me young—maybe. Muscle tone or something.

Hilda smiled and said Willy was alone and I could go right on in. He got up from behind his gray steel desk and patted my shoulder and looked at me with the concern of a family doctor and patted me into a chair.

“Judy, honest to Gawd, you look nineteen.”

“Good old Willy. Boy of my dreams.” Willy is built close to the floor. He has no hair, a size twenty neck, and a pair of big soft damp brown eyes, like an abused setter’s. Several generations ago he did songs and light chatter and a soft-shoe routine on the Keith circuit. Now he agents. He’s a
fighter and he’s sharp. And he stays as honest as he can and still keep his self-respect.

“This I will get over with quickly, Judy. Carlos and Jane want out. Now understand. They’re good kids. I can keep them tied down. You know that. They’ll stick. But it looks like a break for them.”

“Let ’em go, Willy. No. I’ll talk to them. I’ll do it. They’re good. They ought to have their own show.”

He leaned back and laced fingers across his tummy. “I knew you’d say that, but I sort of wished you wouldn’t. If you were tougher …”

“Tough like you, Willy?”

“The wrong business, kid. Both of us. But if it breaks right, I got people. We can put something together that will knock them dead.”

“It’s been a long time, Willy. I think you better let me have it between the eyes. I think you better stop kidding Judy. I think you owe me that, Willy.”

He fumbled with a yellow pencil. “O.K.” He picked up the pencil. He wrote down five names. He slid the piece of paper across to me. I read the names, nodded. He said, “Big-time they were. In 1951. Their own shows. Nice ratings. Fat. This damn medium, it eats you. It’s like this: Suppose a guy likes pickled beets. So for a year his wife feeds him pickled beets twice a day. Then what? He never wants to see another beet. Radio, you could last. Tough, but you could last, given the writers. But this damn thing, they see you and hear you. Judy-Time has had what? Over a hundred weeks. Better than the ratings is ticket requests for the studio. They go by that. Those five on the list, where are they? One is singing in Paris for peanuts. One is on radio sustaining
out of Chicago. One of them in a casino in Brazil, for God’s sake. And the other two, they could find work, but it isn’t good enough work for them. They think they’re still on top, but they’re dead. This thing, it eats you up, and then it’s a hell of a long drop to the next thing because … right between the eyes like you said … people get damn sick and tired of looking at you. Pickled beets.”

“One more season, Willy?”

He shook his head. “I doubt the hell out of it. You could put a show together. Put it on the market. See who you could get by paying scale, and it would still eat up your bankroll before you could find any kind of sponsor. And the odds are you won’t. The word is out.”

“How about a new kind of show? Situation stuff.”

“I know you could do it. I know it would be good. But it’s a hell of a gamble. Take it this way: Why gamble? You’ve got it made. It’s tucked away. How much living have you done lately?”

“Not much, Willy. Not much at all.”

He made a lunge across the desk and grabbed my hand. It startled me. His voice got hoarse. “Look, Judy. Like an ad. Switch to Willy. Not easy on the eyes, but easy on the nerves. I haven’t got anybody any more. We can get a place maybe in Connecticut. My God, grass. Trees. I can commute. I mean you don’t have to be in love with me. That, maybe, would be a good trick. But we talk the same. We think the same. We could make it work.”

Those brown eyes nearly got me. But he saw the answer on my face. He released my hand. He said spiritlessly, “Well, it was a try.”

“I’m sorry, Willy. I mean that. I wish it could be.”

He smiled. “I guess you do.” He sort of shook himself like a fat dog coming out of the creek. “Now, what’s all this thing with that Ferris woman?”

“She wants me up there. She says it’s purely social. But she let me know Dorn would be there. And the sales manager, Dockerty. And Steve Winsan.”