Black Gondolier and Other Stories (14 page)

“You know, Vivian, I think that if I ever could have really loved a living woman, it would have been you. With you it could have happened, Vivian.

“You know why it never happened, Vivian, why it never had a chance of happening? It was because during those first months I only watched you from a distance—remember how long I was in saying more than two words?—and during that time I built you up into a symbol, I watched you die and I handled your dead body in my fantasies every night, so that by the time I got to know you better the pattern was set and only some impossible explosion of the mind could have changed it. I could only go on seeing as much of you as I dared, enduring the bittersweet torture of your presence, having my fantasies get more complex and unsatisfactory, and imperious every night, feeling the pressure build up, fighting to hold myself in check.

“I've always thought you were at least partly aware of what was going on those two times I almost killed you on impulse. First, there was the night I almost threw you into the lagoon in the park. I was going to go in with you and hold you under. There was a faint blue light around us from the distant boulevard lamps, remember? You always have been my Blue Girl, Vivian, moody and pale, though now you're painted by electricity rather than Gainsborough. Yes, there was a blue light around us and we were talking about suicide and there was nobody near— ”

Again I thought Vivian moved! Just as though she'd shuddered and I'd caught the end of the shudder as my eyes turned to her. I was certain that once again I'd been scaring myself remembering eerie things, but this time I had more difficulty putting what I thought I'd seen out of my mind. I watched her motionless chest for several seconds before I went on.

“The second time was when I almost brained you with the stone ashtray out there in the living room. You suddenly turned round and caught me holding it back over my shoulder and I had to do a ridiculous pirouette to pass it off as a jape. You know why I checked myself that time, Vivian? It was solely because I had thought : ‘I don't want her all bloodied up, I don't want even the back of her skull crushed, I'll do it a better way.'

“Once I'd thought of that I had no choice. It was just a matter of moving efficiently with a minimum waste of time, of stealing the cyanide from the photoengraving department and refilling the two Nembutal capsules, of getting a duplicate set of keys to this apartment the noon you let me come here from the office to fetch the homework you'd forgotten, of waiting for the time in your mood-cycle when you'd make the big complaint about not being able to sleep and, when it came this morning, taking you aside and offering you my two yellow capsules with much insistence that you take them both tonight and with repeated warnings that you tell no one—because, I said, most people these days are so irrationally critical of sleeping pills and especially of anyone not a doctor handing them out.

“I was afraid afterwards that I'd overdone it. You know, Vivian, I've often wondered during this last month of preparation whether you hadn't caught on, at least in some nebulous way, to what I was up to. I've been behaving in such a flighty, abstracted way, or at least it's seemed so to me. I'm no actor, you know. I never could play it cool. My repressions don't make me restrained, only tongue-tied and jumpy. So I've often wondered whether you hadn't caught on as to what I had in mind and were letting me go ahead with it because you yourself wanted it that way. Oh, not that you've asked me to kill you in so many words, but you've liked talking about suicide and you thought the Mexican candy skull I bought you was charming and you've told me how you keep coming back to the line in Keats' ‘Nightingale' about being ‘half in love with easeful death' and after all you are my Blue Girl, my Dancing Skeleton, my Sleeping Beauty, my Snow White, my Little Sister of Death . . .

“Yes, I really thought you knew the cyanide or some swift death was in the capsules when you took them from me. But if you did know that, Vivian, I wonder now if you really had to take them. If you were so much in love with death, I might have been able to love you alive. I'm actually beginning to think I could. My God, Vivian, if that was the way you felt, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you open my eyes blinded by my mania-habits and my fears? Vivian, why— ”

For a third time I thought that Vivian moved! Only this time it was I who shuddered. What if she should get up now, I asked myself, and come at me grinding her teeth and tear off the sleeping mask, and open her eyes to show just the whites and throw her arms around my neck stranglingly? I've never believed in the supernatural, though I've had an aesthetic taste for the weird, but now in that blue-litten room the whole impossible universe of vampires and zombies and werewolves suddenly came alive for me. What if the dead did come back . . . in the body?

No, no, I told myself, it was clearly an illusion born of my nervousness and self-dramatizing. And even if Vivian's body actually had twitched a little, there were natural causes. I mustn't forget rigor mortis—my uncle told me the ususal horrendous stories and I had done enough reading on the subject.

Besides, in all my rather absurd oratory I had lost sight temporarily of my chief purpose in coming here tonight. Thinking of that, I almost laughed. I moved toward the bed. Once again I caught the sweet foul odor of corruption—upsetting but reassuring too. Once again I sprayed the lilac cologne.

And then—you know, it's hard to believe this, but it's true—I discovered that I had lost my desire, or rather the hot, male intensity of it. Either my somewhat ridiculous spouting and melodramatic self-justification had sublimated it, or that moment of supernatural dread had chilled it. At any rate, there was Vivian lying there, more beautiful than I've ever seen her, infinitely desirable, all ready for me, and here I was worse than a eunuch. It was a scene for the gods to snicker at as they watched our painful antics from their lecherous couches on Olympus.

But I wasn't going to be cheated that way, no, I told myself, I'd murdered to get Vivian and I was going to have her. So I rang up the red curtain that had been closed ever since I met Vivian, and my girls came out of the wings and began to put on their thousandth performance, or something like that, of Lesbian Gang, Miss Satan's School, Sisters of the Whip, Hell's Sorority House, and the other little dramas I have concocted over the years. I don't know why it's so exciting to imagine girls torturing girls, but it is for me and I gather from pornographic books and photographs that my taste is not unique.

I must say my girls never seemed such cheap and sleazy creatures as they did tonight, even Miss Satan herself and poor frightened Lovey-Dovey. Or maybe they put on a brilliant performance and it was just me that felt cheap, having to use them that way.

At any rate, they eventually had the desired effect on me. They always do. I turned once more to the bed.

And then—oh, I didn't lose my ardor, quite the contrary, but Vivian looked so very beautiful and lovely and loving, as if she were somehow making an effort to make herself nice for me in death, that I wished her alive with that understanding of me and I felt lonely and sad to my core, though still loving, and I knelt down beside the bed at her feet to kiss, not her icy hand, but the sleeve of her white silk kimono, begging for forgiveness, yearning for her pardon.

As I did so, I noticed that the white bedclothes were wet at that point, so wet that droplets were forming at the hanging edge of the white coverlet and dripping noiselessly onto the thick carpet. The liquid was absolutely colorless and odorless too—I touched my nose to it. And it was very cold.

It had to be ice water—as if a rubber sheet full of ice water under the bedclothes were leaking.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe.

Then I got the odor of corruption, stronger than ever, but clearly
not
from the ice water. I stooped lower then on my knees, still holding the hem of Vivian's kimono to my lips, and looked under the bed.

Not two feet away from me was a dishpan full of garbage. A purple-gray hunk of meat was the main part of it, flanked by crescents of mold-spotted cantaloupe rind, and scattered over with gardenia blossoms. Beyond it was a little, gray, grill-faced microphone lying on its back with thin wires going from it toward the head of the bed.

Still holding the hem of her kimono and kneeling and bending so that my face almost touched the carpet, I followed the inconspicuous wires with my eyes. They traveled around the foot of the baseboard and disappeared under the bathroom door.

I instantly realized exactly what had happened—there was no reasoning to it, no deduction; one moment ten thousand facts and ideas weren't in my head, the next moment they were.

Just as I'd guessed, Vivian had suspected me all along. She'd gone to the police—maybe not for the first time—as soon as I gave her the capsules—during lunch hour, of course. The powder in the capsules had been easily identified as cyanide, but because they only had Vivian's word that I'd given her the capsules and because in any case they wanted to nail me—and because policemen have as hot nasty tastes as other men—they'd laid this little trap for me with Vivian's cooperation. Maybe the blue lights had helped give them the idea, though if the lights hadn't been blue they'd have simply turned them off.

Yes, it must have been the police who had planted this microphone, and maybe the police who had hit on the point about the blue lights, but it must have been Vivian who had thought of concealing her eyes, which no one can keep from blinking, with the black sleeping mask. As for her breathing, she'd have kept it shallow and I hadn't even looked at her five consecutive seconds.

And I was somehow certain that it was Vivian who had thought of the rubber sheet full of ice cubes and the dishpan full of garbage. I could imagine the police chuckling enthusiastically as she suggested those items. The police are our guardians, but they like their pornography as much as the next chap.

Yes, I was curiously sure they'd enjoyed my little performance, even been thrilled by it, both Vivian and the police—and I rather wished I'd gotten the bit about Miss Satan's School on the tape, and Lovey-Dovey's last torments.

Yes, Archie, I told myself, Vivian will have nightmares about it, or maybe pleasant dreams, all the rest of her life. And those crooked-brained, blue-coated voyeurs will keep the tape in their secret black museum and play it for kicks for the next fifty years. But after all, you did put the cyanide in those capsules, Archie old boy, and for killing the thing you love there's no pardon to the end of time, or at least until the end of you.

I knew exactly what was going to happen next, but just the same I stood up and quietly started for the door to the living room.

Before I was halfway there it began to open. I stopped where I was.

Vivian sat up in bed with a jerk. Jill-in-the-box. The mask stared at me.

Through both doors the cops came into the bedroom. One of them switched on the big yellow ceiling light. Under it, Vivian's skin was pinkly flushed.

The cops came toward me, but I stood there aloof, looking at Vivian. Now I could see her eyes through the mask.

She jerked the sheet up to her neck, but kept staring at me.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me one way, but almost immediately another hand jerked me the other. My coat tore. It was comic. I pretended not to notice, and really I hardly did.

Vivian's face was contorted with fury, but whether at me—and why—or at the cops—and why—I couldn't tell. Maybe if she'd taken the mask off, baring all her expression, I'd have been able to. For instance, was the flush merely anger?

It was an interesting problem. I still ponder it when the bare globe turns out in the concrete ceiling overhead and I wait for sleep.

MR. BAUER AND THE ATOMS

DR. JACOBSON BEAMED at him through the thick glasses. “I'm happy to tell you there is no sign whatever of cancer.”

Mr. Bauer nodded thoughtfully. “Then I won't need any of those radium treatments?”

“Absolutely not.” Dr. Jacobson removed his glasses, wiped them with a bit of rice paper, then mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. Mr. Bauer lingered.

He looked at the X-ray machine bolted down by the window. It still looked as solid and mysterious as when he had first glimpsed a corner of it from Myna's bedroom. He hadn't gotten any farther.

Dr. Jacobson replaced his glasses.

“It's funny, you know, but I've been thinking . . .” Mr. Bauer plunged.

“Yes?”

“I guess all this atomic stuff got me started, but I've been thinking about all the energy that's in the atoms of my body. When you start to figure it out on paper—well, two hundred million electron volts, they say, from just splitting one atom, and that's only a tiny part of it.” He grinned. “Enough energy in my body, I guess, to blow up, maybe . . . the world.”

Dr. Jacobson nodded. “Almost. But all safely locked up.”

Mr. Bauer nodded. “They're finding out how to unlock it.”

Dr. Jacobson smiled. “Only in the case of two rare radioactive elements.”

Mr. Bauer agreed, then gathered all his courage. “I've been wondering about that too,” he said. “Whether a person could somehow make himself . . . I mean, become . . . radioactive?”

Dr. Jacobson chuckled in the friendliest way. “See that box at your elbow?” He reached out and turned something on it. The box ticked. Mr. Bauer jerked.

“That's a Geiger-Müller counter,” Dr. Jacobson explained. “Notice how the ticks come every second or so? Each tick indicates a high-frequency wave. If you were radioactive, it would tick a lot oftener.”

Mr. Bauer laughed. “Interesting.” He got up. “Well, thanks about the cancer.”

Dr. Jacobson watched him fumble for his panama hat and duck out. So that was it. He'd sensed all along something peculiar about Bauer. He'd even felt it while looking over the X-ray and lab reports—something intangibly wrong. Though he hadn't thought until now of paranoia, or, for that matter, any other mental ailment, beyond the almost normal cancer-fear of a man in his fifties.