Death Kit (37 page)

“Maybe I am. But sometimes your despair wearies me.”

Diddy stung by the harshness of her rebuke. “My despair!” he murmurs, rolling over on his side next to her, but keeping one bent leg over her thighs. “Why don't we ever talk about
your
despair? You're just as miserable as I am; only you're more stoical. I'm fed up with stoicism. I'm not too proud to complain and curse the people who've betrayed me.”

“And
I
am? Is that it, Dalton? Is that what you're saying?”

“Yes.”

Hester has pulled her body from under Diddy's leg; is sitting (now) on the edge of the bed, her bare feet on the floor. Pulling down her yellow blouse, which hangs more or less permanently on one of the bedposts; putting it on and buttoning it. For just a moment, Diddy isn't thinking of anything other than her breasts, gleaming by the light of the street lamp. Does Diddy know what's happening? Their first full-blooded quarrel, the honeymoon's end.

“You might as well go on. Say what you mean,” the girl says in a rough toneless voice. Then she went into the bathroom for a moment, leaving the door open. Diddy could hear her urinating. Waited, choking on pent-up words; until she came out again and stood at the foot of the bed. Something ugly is beginning. But Diddy's too disappointed at Hester's initial withholding of sympathy for him, and too angry at this novel, unprecedented streak of viciousness she's just disclosed, to stop.

“You know very well what I mean! Don't tell me you haven't suspected that I'd learned from Aunt Jessie about your mother. And about how you became blind.”

“Yes,” Hester said, “I did assume you knew. Aunt Jessie was bound to tell you. So what? I don't understand what you're reproaching me for now.”

Diddy, who knows what he wants to say, says it. “I'm reproaching you for creating a certain kind of atmosphere that's strangling me. I must be just the dope, maybe the only one in the world, who could adapt to it.”

“I still don't understand,” Hester says. “You mean my blindness? That I use my blindness to get you to treat me in a certain way that you wouldn't, if I could see? I make you feel sorry for me? I demand that you coddle me?”

“No! That's exactly what I
don't
mean. If it were that, I could understand and condone and overlook what you do. But you don't play on your blindness. To get sympathy, or special treatment, or anything else. God knows, that would be a very human weakness. What you do is worse.”

“What?” cried the girl, impatiently. “Tell me, Dalton. Have some guts.”

“I will,” Diddy says. “It's what you do about your unhappiness. And I don't think that would necessarily be any different if you could see. You have a line—there's no other word for what you do. And I fell for it. Your unhappiness became something hidden, sacred, unmentionable. While mine was farting and prancing and swooning and howling all over the landscape. Until now, you know, I was never consciously bothered by the difference. If I noticed it, I considered it still more evidence of your superiority. You were too marvelous to be just unhappy, grossly unhappy. Like ordinary people. Like me. And, having fallen for your line, my own freedom of discourse and mood was terribly limited. I could never even let you know that I knew how you became blind. I never wanted to bring it up, because I imagined the subject must be so painful to you. As if you were too elegant to suffer. But I'll be damned if I'll go on tiptoeing around your horrors any longer!”

“Dalton, you're a fool!”

“Good! That's the way I like to hear you talk. Off your pedestal. Just like any other ordinary, ball-breaking American wife. It does my heart good to hear you.”

“Don't protest too much,” said Hester.

“God damn you,” cries Diddy. “I won't let you one-up me or climb back on that pedestal. Why don't you stop acting so goddamned morally superior to me, Hester? Remember how all this started? Do you? I made a simple and, as it happens, entirely justifiable complaint about my brother. To that I added a declaration—I admit it's sentimental, but so what?—of my faith in you. And what do you do? You jump on me, and berate me for being a coward and a cop-out. A life-diminisher, as someone would say.”

“Aren't you?” said Hester, coldly.

Yes, something awful is happening. “Well, if I am,” Diddy yells, “you're no better than I am. I, at least, trust one person—you. Though maybe I should put that in the past tense.… But you don't trust anyone. Certainly not me.”

“Maybe I trust myself,” said Hester slowly. She is standing next to the bed. “And maybe that's enough.”

(Now) she's putting on her skirt; bending over to buckle the straps of her sandals. Why is she doing that? She isn't going to leave, is she?

From the bed Diddy was jabbing his skinny finger in the air inches from her breast, as if she could see his gesture and might involuntarily flinch from it. “I don't believe you. Oh hell, why do you make me say these things?… But you asked for it, Hester … I meant that. I don't believe you. I don't believe you trust yourself. You can't, because you don't know yourself. I'm not saying something inane like ‘I know better than you do.' I don't. But I do know about some things that you
must
be feeling, and don't seem to be aware of at all.”

“For example.”

“For example, you must feel betrayed, unlovable, insubstantial. You must, after what your mother did to you when you were fourteen. And even apart from that unspeakable betrayal, you must. Simply because you're blind. Because, for whatever reason, you can't and never will see yourself or me or other people. You just make up the world as you go along, and you think it's all right. You decide to love your mother, instead of hating her as would any normal victim of such mad cruelty. You agree to come to New York and share my life, when you don't understand me, you don't trust me.…”

“Go on,” said Hester. “Why are you stopping? Don't stop now.”

“I guess I don't want to go on.” Diddy sighing bitterly. “It's all too ugly.”

“Please,” says Hester sarcastically. “Don't stop now.”

“All right, I won't.” New energy. Diddy sits up again in bed, throws the covers down to his knees. “Now, why don't you be honest, damn you? Tell what you really feel about your mother. About being blind. About me.”

“You know, Dalton, you could have asked me all that any time you wanted.”

“Sure, sure. I know,” he says bitterly. “And I've been free all along to ask you how many men you've fucked, too. And if you've slept with anyone since we met.…” Hurried on, because he didn't really want these questions answered. At least, not first. “I could ask you a lot of things. And for answers, you could serve up that gnomic crap I've fallen for. That you have your so-called truth and I have mine.… You're hardly the most confiding or approachable of women, Miss Nayburn. Though I imagine that your unshakable esteem for yourself and your cult of honesty tell you that you are.”

“I'll answer any questions you ask, Dalton.” A dare.

“All right.” Which question? There are so many. Like throbbing boils in Diddy's flesh. Might as well start at the beginning. “Tell me how you feel about your mother.”

“I hate her.”

“Since when?”

“From the time I understood what she'd done.”

Diddy, poised on the verge of a scathing long-winded reply, suddenly took a deep breath. Well, go on. “Is that all?” he says, tauntingly. “Not a big tablespoon of saintly love, forgiveness, and compassion along with it?”

“Dalton, I swear to you that I loathe my mother. Loathing and disgust are all I feel toward her.”

Not what Diddy expected to hear. “All right, I'll believe you for the time being. Now tell me how you feel about being blind.”

“Oh, God! What do you think?” Hester cries. “Idiot!” By light from the window, Diddy can see her face twisting with the effort to hold back tears.

“Hester! Hester, I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. Let's stop.” Reaches out to touch her. She pulls away sharply.

“I don't want to stop,” Hester said shrilly. “You want honesty, you stupid fool. You're going to have it. Don't flinch. I'm doing most of the work. And if I can take it, you can.”

Diddy streaked with pain by her words. “You're damned right I can take it. And I'll ask you again. You can call me idiot, fool, or anything you damn please, but it's true, I
don't
know how you feel about being blind. I mean, you don't seem to hate and feel bitterness when you have the reasons I've always understood make anyone hate and feel bitter. You do something else. You back away. You dissolve. It's as if you don't exist any more. Then you fade in, come back, very serene. But it doesn't seem to have much to do with the other person at all. And each time there's a little less generosity in you, as if that were being used up gradually by whatever you do to yourself inside. I used to love you for that serenity. But now I think there's mostly vanity in it. And all this I connect, though I can't prove it, with your blindness. So much so that I think you almost
like
being blind.”

“Maybe that's how you'd be,” says Hester coldly, “if you were blind. Speak for yourself.”

“Hester, tell me straight out what you feel. About being blind.”

“I hate being blind so much that most of my waking hours I wish I were dead.”

Move quickly. “And about me?” Diddy delivers the words so fast he hardly had time to envisage the blunt, agonizing blow he was inviting.

“It's so complicated.… At times, I love you deeply. I hate you sometimes; maybe most of the time. And then I pity you, and I'd like to help you. But whenever I think of what it would mean to help you, I become frightened. You have a powerful desire to destroy yourself. I'm afraid that if I really held out my hand to you, you'd pull me under, too.”

Diddy shocked. But quite unwilling altogether to let what had been an exposure of Hester turn upon him (now). “Okay, you've leveled with me. I'm grateful. But let's not change the subject. We were talking about you, Hester. What about
your
destructive needs?”

The girl didn't answer for a moment. A sigh? Then she sat down in the wicker rocking chair near the window. “My destructive needs?… Believe me, Dalton, I don't want to evade your question. It's just that it's hard to answer, since I'm not sure I've even begun to express those needs. But I'm not trying to suggest they don't exist, or that they're only puny desires that are largely dormant. I don't know what their size is. The only thing I'm fairly certain of is their direction.… It would be to destroy someone else, rather than myself.”

“Logged any victims yet?” Diddy says bitterly. The energy for quarreling beginning to fade. Hester had returned to the bed (now); if only to sit on it. The heat and moist odors flowing off her body had begun to suffuse Diddy's mind, blurring his thoughts, interposing a dense vapor between his ability to reason and the crystalline word-blocks stacked in his mouth and ready to be fired off. “Who have you done in so far?”

“You … maybe.”

“Me?” Diddy's voice becoming hoarse. “Don't flatter yourself, baby. I'm perfectly capable of destroying myself without your subtle assistance. All by myself.”

“Maybe you're right.”

“Are you being sarcastic now?” Diddy says scornfully.

“No. I'm thinking. Wondering whether what you said is really true.… Listen, Dalton, however much you hate me right now, or think I hate you, you must believe that I don't
want
you to go under. And whatever you're bent on doing,
I
don't want to be the means of destroying you. And maybe I'm not. And couldn't be. Maybe you're doing it all by yourself, as you just said. God, how I'd like to believe I'm not part of it!… But I can't. What I think is that you do want to be destroyed, but aren't strong enough to do it. You
do
need me to help you. And I don't want to—at least I think I don't.…”

“Hester—”

“Yes, maybe I do. I'm not a saint. And you're tempting me, Dalton, it's the most depraved kind of seduction. I don't want to destroy you. But deep down I feel that's just what you're begging me to do.”

Could Hester be right? Suddenly, for a brief flash of light, Diddy the Deceived saw the truth illuminated. Saw the vast extent of the dark, fatal labyrinth in which he was toiling. Perceived how alone in it he was. Either there was no one to lead him out, or Diddy's false Ariadne had dropped the thread.

But maybe matters aren't that hopeless. Maybe their pain could be explained in terms less absolute. A psychological explanation, if you will. Diddy, not really alive, had a life. An unfortunate example for a person like Hester, someone younger and essentially innocent. She (now) was beginning to see the monsters, half brute and half human, that Diddy saw. Perhaps being blind, without literal vision of her own, makes her even more susceptible to his black visions. His commitment to suffering was infecting Hester. Her own precious ration of vitality, preserved through such excruciating trials, leaking away. Once Hester, really alive, was her life. Didn't merely have a life. Sharing Diddy's provisional existence was adulterating her vitality. The longer she lived with him, the more fully she partook of his suffering and morbidity.

Hence, her tirade tonight.

“I'm going to think long and hard about what you've said,” Diddy murmured. “I think it's all wrong, absolutely crazy.
I
know what the trouble is.”

“Do you?”

No, to tell the truth, Diddy doesn't. And Diddy the Truth-teller says so. “Okay, maybe there is something right in what you're saying, too.”