Hell (28 page)

It is Henry lying massively on his back, his pants off, his legs bare. Anne is crouched beside him, on the far side. She is stripped down to a handkerchief-linen teddy. But in spite of Hatcher’s impulse to expect the worst in this realm, it is instantly clear to him that what’s happening here is not about sex. He draws near and can see that Henry’s massive legs are haphazardly swathed in strips torn from Anne’s tea dress. She is quickly, quakingly wrapping the last bit of it around Henry’s right calf. The pieces of the dress are going dark from a profuse flow of fluid.

Hatcher stops before the two of them. He can see between the bandages that Henry’s legs are a patchwork of ulcerous sores pumping out a thick, striated mixture of blood and pus. Anne is panting and moaning and wrapping, and her hands are smeared with Henry’s fluids and she can’t keep up, this last bit of her dress is in place and his suppuration goes on and on and she cries out and she lifts upright on her knees and she strips off the teddy and she is naked, utterly naked, and she begins tearing at the linen, pulling it into strips and bending down to Henry again and wrapping his legs.

And Henry’s head is to the side, and his eyes are closed, and he is singing, softly but clearly, the song he wrote as a young man, the one Anne thought she heard a few nights ago outside the window. “Pastime with good company, I . . .” and he hums across the word no one can think of in Hell and he sings on “. . . and shall until I die. Company is good and ill, but every man has his free will.”

And Anne is moaning, fumbling with the cloth, unable to go on. Hatcher hesitates. But now he circles Henry’s legs to the other side and goes down on his knees next to Anne. He bends to her ear. “You’ll never keep up,” he says, gently. “It’s Hell, my darling. You’ve done what you can.”

She looks at Hatcher, her eyes wide, restless, uncomprehending. Her hands are trembling furiously, full of the strips of her teddy. Hatcher takes the end of one of the strips and pulls at it. Her hand is clenched tight, and he tugs the cloth firmly and she lets it go. He turns to Henry and finds a patch of his ulcerous flesh, oozing profusely, on the side of his calf. Hatcher lifts the leg and the pus flows over his hands and he lays the strip of cloth on Henry’s leg and he wraps it around and half around once more and that’s as far as it goes, and he eases the leg back down, and Henry sings “Pastime with good company I . . . sway . . . I swoon . . . I swisser my swatter . . .” and Hatcher turns to Anne, who is staring at him, steadily. When his eyes meet hers, she glances at Henry’s legs and back to him. He takes the end of another strip of cloth and pulls gently at it. Anne holds on tight. “I caused this,” she says.

“No you didn’t,” Hatcher says.

“Not in life. Now, I mean,” she says and her voice is steady.

“It’s what we all do,” he says.

“He cut off my head,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full at this and lifts him and he cups her elbow and they stand up together. He strips off his suit coat and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the coat to, buttoning the buttons so it will cover her loins, and she bends into him and they move around Henry, and before they are halfway across the lobby floor, all of Henry’s bodily fluids have lifted away from them and flown back to the former king.

At the Cadillac, Hatcher opens the back door and sees the camcorder lying in the shadows. The pretext that got him here was to do an interview with Henry, and he utterly forgot. With a mind free to think and plan for itself, he realizes this absorption with his own agenda is a grave danger. He reaches in and takes the camera, and he turns to Anne. “I still have this to do,” he says. “I’ll have Dick take you home.”

She nods.

He guides her into the backseat and tucks his suit coat around her.

“Can you do this alone?” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

He moves to the driver window. Inside, Dick Nixon has fallen asleep, his head sharply angled to the side, as if his neck is broken. Hatcher raps at the window. Nixon snaps upright, and he rolls down the window. “I am not a crook,” he says.

“Mr. President. Are you awake?”

“I am not asleep,” he says.

But Hatcher isn’t sure. He waits a few moments while Nixon blinks and looks around and then back to Hatcher.

“Are you ready to go?” Nixon says, clearly focusing now.

Hatcher says, “Take Anne back to the apartment and return here for me.”

Nixon nods and rolls up his window and the motor instantly revs to life and the tires dig wildly and the Cadillac shoots off, leaving Hatcher standing in a cloud of desert dust.

He’s glad Nixon will hurry. He doesn’t look forward to lingering here.

Hatcher turns and goes up onto the veranda and through the doors. Ahead in the foyer, Henry is still on the floor. Hatcher approaches. Sir Francis is holding Henry’s pants and waiting for the king to stand up. But Henry sits, fully reconstituted but unable or unmotivated to rise. This interview doesn’t have to be good. Hatcher just has to have something for the record. He crouches before Henry and looks at the former king through the viewfinder. Henry seems not quite aware of where he is. But Hatcher thinks his state might actually be a good thing for this feature. He starts the camera.

“Sire, I’m here at the request of Beelzebub himself and for the sake of Our Supreme Ruler’s own TV station. I have one question to ask you, and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

In spite of what he has just gone through and his post-reconstitution daze, Henry begins speaking at once. That and the seeming indirection of Henry’s words make Hatcher think that he really hasn’t heard the question, “O meats, my abundant meats, I miss your pleasures deeply in this afterlife, where once, in life, I had faith to believe I would have you yet again, my lamb and ox, my rabbit and deer, my partridge and peacock and pig, my hedgehog and heron and swan, my bustard and black-bird and hart, all of you and more. Those of you who ran free, I hoped to hunt you down, to set a pack of hounds of Heaven or Hell, whichever was my fate, upon a great rangale of red deer, or by my own hand with longbow or crossbow to pierce the heart of a wild boar, and then to sit at table and tear your sweet flesh with my hands and eat. I am ravenous yet for my meats, but I know now that every arrow shot, every dog unleashed, every hawk set forth, every side pierced and throat cut and belly sliced open, I should have done them all in the name of God, I should have made each a sacrifice to the God who was hungrier even than I, and if I had done so, perhaps I would be eating meat now in Heaven instead of starving in this meatless Hell.”

Henry looks straight into the camera and wipes the back of his hand heavily across his mouth. He heard the question. And Hatcher thinks of cheeseburgers, of Bill Clinton winning his presidency by eating cheeseburgers, and how sad a figure he is in Hell without them.

Hatcher finds a far corner of the veranda and puts his back to everyone, wanting to be alone now, making his mind go blank, feeling he knows very little about himself, really, and not expecting to learn much from the one wife left to see. But he will try. He will try. He does not have long to wait before he hears the rush of the Fleetwood and the grinding of its brakes. He goes to the car and gives Dick Nixon Naomi’s address.

Naomi Jean Delancey—later Naomi Jean Rutherford, the not-yet-forty trophy widow of a didn’t-quite-get-to-seventy shipping magnate, and then, three years later, the third and final wife of network anchorman Hatcher McCord—lives in a warren of alleyways next to the Central Power Station, the narrow passages twisting and always dark from the shadow of the buildings and from the vast, lolloping, pitch-black plumes of power station smoke, the natural color of Naomi’s hair in her prime. Hatcher moves along a shabby-carpeted inner corridor redolent of piss, its darkness broken only by three widely spaced bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on fraying cords. As he passes, doors open and women peek out, haggard faces with hair disarranged, but disarranged, Hatcher realizes, from former haute coiffure. He knows this neighborhood. This is the Central Park West of Hell. High society. Naomi adored her Chanel and Dolce&Gabbana and also her Lagerfeld and Westwood and Mugler. She adored the Dakota. She adored Hatcher, mostly, though he came to feel that was largely for the opportunity he gave her to radiate at parties, in her couture, in the presence of Hatcher’s most important news subjects, presidents and ambassadors and movies stars and kings.

He is at her door now. He hesitates. Can she shed any light on his sins? She was no trophy at all to him—he knew she was smart—and she knew he knew it and she clearly appreciated that, but she finally did leave him a couple of years before he died and it wasn’t for another man, but for the death of him he can’t remember why, exactly. They ran down, she didn’t like his cigars, she was too smart, finally, to stay interested in primarily glittering in her clothes. Something. They both had affairs—that may have been it, but it was quietly mutual, and surely that was a symptom, not a cause. She was dating a U.S. Senator when Hatcher’s heart stopped, and he wonders if she came to the funeral—he wonders if any of his wives came to his funeral.

He knocks on the door. There is no answer, but he thinks he hears sounds inside, a vague scuffling. He knocks again. He can hear nothing now. Nevertheless—perhaps this comes with a free mind in Hell—he senses her just on the other side of the door. He could be wrong. He knocks again.

“Naomi?” he says.

Naomi is, indeed, on the other side of the door, terrified, always, about being in Hell, particularly because she is wearing a polka-dot pink summer dress with an elastic waist that would have cost twenty-five bucks out of the Sears catalog in the year she married the anchorman, and she has not been able to take this dress off for many risings and settings of the sun and the pink has turned mostly gray now from the grit which settles through the ceiling and walls from the power station. At the sound of Hatcher’s voice, which she recognizes at once, she lays her forehead quietly against the door:
Not like this. I am not who I am, wearing this. I am not who I am in the company of the person who has just now slipped into the bedroom. But in this dress, in this society, I am this other. And I was another I, once. I chose myself and dressed me in myself and I was I. Though I had to make do at times. My sweet young self, debuting in the Continental Ballroom in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis in a white satin gown that Mama and her Memphis-Main-Street tailor and I figured out, and it had a strapless bodice and a ruched midriff and lace appliques, and I put the me of that dress on and I melted perfectly into the floor in a full court bow before the society of my mama’s boozy peroxide-bleached friends and the U of M’s boozy sun-bleached Sigma Chis and the Citadel boys in their uniforms and buzz cuts, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how not-me I was, though in a way that was me at nineteen, I suppose, but I was more me later, much more, I was me in a power-black Thierry Mugler with wide shoulders and collar points and flame cutouts and a waist corseted down to breathlessness, to breathless dominating otherness, and I was in the society of the people who ran the world. The world. The world that came and went. And now I am I in another world. I am forever a cheap cotton dress the color of Pepto-Bismol.

Hatcher knocks again. “Naomi? It’s Hatcher,” he says.

“I’m not here,” she says.

“Then let me in and I’ll wait for you,” he says.

“I don’t expect to show up ever again,” she says.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?”

“You don’t want to.”

“I do.”

“Believe me, you don’t.”

“It’s your worst about me I’m looking to hear,” he says.

“It’s worse than that,” she says.

“I don’t care,” he says. There is a long pause. “It’s Hell,” he says, trying to put the shrug that just went through his upper body into his voice.