The Beast (13 page)

Ten more days; but why wait? Why not start now? Right this minute. Why lie down, sweating, waiting for death?

The cat nuzzled up to him, and he pushed her away. Right this minute. He would deal with her. Vicious little monster. A street cat. A whore. Rubbing up against him, pretending that she loved him. She hated him, and he hated her. Jealous, vicious little whore.

He got off the bed and walked across the room to his bathroom; he turned the cold water on in the bath, and then went back to his bed and took the yellow phone book from a small cupboard. He looked under the heading of ‘Impianti per Aria-Condizionamento.’

He dialled a number and asked how long it would take to have air conditioning installed; he was told that
someone
could come the next day to look at the premises, and advise on the best type of installation; then it would take
‘a week to ten days’ before the workmen could come to fix it up. Billy smiled to himself and said ‘fine;’ he made an appointment for the following afternoon.

He returned to the bathroom and sat in a chair until the tub was full. Then he turned off the tap and called the cat.

He tried ‘pssss’ and ‘vieni qua.’ And ‘Hey, bitch, come here.’

But the cat didn’t come, so he went once more into his bedroom and picked her up off his bed, where she was lying. She didn’t bite or scratch, as she would have done normally—she even seemed happy to be picked up.

Billy said to her, ‘You see what happens if you let sex get the better of you.’

The cat purred.

He took her into the bathroom and dropped her into the tub, without looking; then he ran out quickly and closed the door behind him.

He shivered, and left his bedroom; walked down the corridor into the larger of the two living rooms, and poured himself a whisky. It was madness to drink in such heat, it only made one sweat more. But killing a cat, even a loathsome cat, was sort of gruesome.

Next day he went to the hospital at nine, and stayed till two; he told the nurse he would be back around seven, if Edward asked for him. Edward was only very occasionally able to speak, and when he did it was to ask when they were leaving for Capri, to ask Billy whether he had made all the arrangements, to ask what guests were coming, to ask whether he had gotten in touch with the couple who came and cooked and cleaned for them, whether he had checked on this and that; and when Billy gave him answers to his questions, the dreadful shrunken body on the bed closed its eyes as if it knew it was being fooled, and was fooling itself.

He was home by two-thirty; the man for the air
conditioning
came at three, just as Giovanna was leaving. By three-thirty he was alone.

He ate the salad and cheese and fruit Giovanna had left for him, and decided he would rest for a couple of hours, then go out and buy some painting materials. Because in nine days’ time he was going to start painting again; start painting in spite of the sneers of Edward’s friends—and of a voice within himself—who would say he was merely a dilettante, and not serious. He would start painting and go on painting and force himself to paint; he would go back into the ignorance and poverty of his youth and paint from there; he would paint and paint, and ignore the derision of Edward’s friends and of every painter of the past and of himself; and when he started to make progress, as make progress he was determined he would, he would finally be doing something by himself, creating something from himself; something that could not have been done by Edward, or by an imitation of Edward. For Edward had
no creative talent; his talent was for making money, for making friends; for entertaining, cooking, being charming; and for giving financial support to museums and opera houses and orchestras, to homes for the incurably sick and mentally retarded, and to institutes for research into the cause of delinquency, drug-addiction, and cancer.

He would go back into his youth, and paint from there; but he would paint from that age of violence with all the knowledge of form and beauty and mental and physical pleasure he had learned in his years with Edward; and his knowledge would give a tone to his violence, and the ignorant talent of his youth; would enable him to strike, as it were, with a carefully sharpened knife, instead of
battering
with an unwieldly club.

He went into his bedroom, closed the door, undressed, lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

But he didn’t sleep. The cat howled outside his door; howled, and jumped, and scratched his door; screamed and jumped and hooked her paws over the handle of his door, and opened it. She came into the room and jumped up on his bed and nuzzled against him. He pushed her off. She jumped up again, arching her back, rolling over, pressing up against him. He looked down at his leg, and there were cat hairs sticking to it; white and orange hairs among the black hairs of his leg; white and orange hairs sticking to his damp, sweating skin.

He climbed off his bed and walked down to the kitchen and took a carving knife from a drawer and went back to his bedroom and grabbed the cat with his right hand and closed his eyes and lunged at her with the knife; but perhaps because his hand was slippery with sweat, or perhaps because he was holding the knife in his left hand, or perhaps because the cat was quicker than him and
managed, somehow, to slip out of his grasp, the knife didn’t touch her; instead it ripped through the sheets and went into the mattress; and when he looked he saw that he had cut his hand. Just a tiny cut, which didn’t hurt at all; but there was blood on the ripped sheets; blood, and orange and black hairs. He shook his head and wiped his forehead with his arm, but there were cat-hairs in his arm and they stuck to his wet forehead, and he cursed and walked across the room to his bathroom and threw the knife on the floor and turned on the tap in the basin and washed his face and his hand. He put a strip of band-aid over the small cut, and bent down to pick up the knife from the floor. There was a blood-stain on the white carpet.

He cursed and took the knife back to the kitchen. He washed it and replaced it in the drawer, and returned to his bedroom. The cat was rolling on her back, moaning; one of her paws was in the cut he had made in the sheet, and as she rolled the inch long cut became a rip ten inches long. He watched her rolling on his bloody torn sheets, and looked at his watch. It was no use. He couldn’t go out now and buy his painting materials; the shops didn’t open till five. Besides it was too hot to go out into the streets. It was too hot to do anything.

He said to the cat ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you. I’ll kill you somehow. Goddam monster.’

He went into Edward’s bedroom and locked the door and lay down on Edward’s hard bed. He smiled. The first six years they had been together they had slept in the same bed; but Edward liked to have a bed so hard it felt like a board. He said it was bad to sleep on a soft mattress—it deformed the body.

Billy had said ‘I guess you think it’s unnatural.’

Edward had smiled gently. ‘No. Not unnatural. Just uncomfortable.’

‘Well, I had fifteen years of sleeping on a lumpy mattress on the floor and I prefer something three feet thick that sags in the middle, it’s so soft.’

Eventually he had had his way; one of the guest rooms was redecorated, a new bed was bought; and they had separate rooms.

Once or twice a week Billy went from his comfortable bed to sleep with Edward on his hard healthy mattress; but Edward never, in all those years, slept in Billy’s bed, or even lay down on his mattress.

Only in the last six months had they not slept together; not once since Edward had started complaining of pains in his stomach—around the beginning of January—and Billy had noticed that the older man had a strange smell. He didn’t, at the beginning, know what the smell was; he even thought he must be imagining things because Edward was so careful about washing, keeping clean, brushing his teeth; but as the days passed it was impossible not to notice that there was, through the smell of soap, some other unknown smell—and strangely, though Billy didn’t associate the pains and the smell, he didn’t mention it to Edward, because there was something rotten and
frightening
about it. He didn’t, couldn’t make a joke of it, say ‘Edward, are you being careful enough about
personal
freshness?’ He wasn’t sure whether Edward himself was aware of it—but he thought not.

When, after the third visit to the specialist, cancer of the stomach was diagnosed, he realized that Edward’s smell was the smell of death.

He wondered what he would do about Edward’s room. Have it re-decorated, probably. And buy a new mattress.
Make it into another guest room. Although there wasn’t much point in doing that if he wasn’t going to have any guests in future. No. Perhaps it would be better to have all the furniture removed, have the carpet taken up and replaced with linoleum, and use the room as a studio. Yes. It was big, and light. It would make a good studio. He lay on Edward’s hard bed and made a mental note of something else that had to be done when Edward was dead.

At six he changed the sheets on his bed, dressed, went out, and bought some pencils, charcoal, sketching pads, brushes, turpentine, oil, and canvases.

*

Next day Edward asked him, in a moment of lucidity, what he had done to his hand. Billy started to say that he had cut it opening a tin; but by the time he had said two words Edward had lost interest, and had slipped back into his dense, silent fog of pain and drugs and death. Billy was glad, because he didn’t want to lie, but he couldn’t tell Edward that he had tried to kill the cat.

As Edward lay with his eyes closed Billy crossed the room and looked out of the window. It was strange to think that it was hot out; the brilliant blue sky seemed mere decoration from the cool of the hospital room. Poor Edward. An air-conditioned death. He shook his head. There was a white cabinet in one corner of the room; he went over to it and opened it. There was, among other things, a nearly empty bottle of barbiturates; only three pills remained. Remnants of the time when Edward had been able to shut off his pain and sleep with comparatively little help. Now what was it? Morphine? Heroin?
Something
fatal, in any case.

He put the bottle of barbiturates in his pocket; three
should be enough for the cat. It was careless of the nurse to leave the bottle there, though of course she was rarely out of the room, and Edward wasn’t likely to get up suddenly and swallow everything he could find, so as to end everything quickly. Even if he had been capable of getting up he wouldn’t, ever, have killed himself. He would have said that the show must go on till its natural end, however atrocious that end was.

*

He heard the cat screaming as he stepped out of the elevator at four that afternoon. She was really on heat now. He reasoned that as she suffered so much when she was on heat and couldn’t go out, he would be doing her a good turn, by giving her the pills and putting her out of her misery.

He opened the door and expected her to be waiting for him; but she wasn’t. She was howling at the window of one of the twenty rooms of the apartment, and her cries were echoing through the whole place, and being magnified, so that she sounded as if she were everywhere; a malign, omnipresent spirit.

He wondered, as he paused in the darkness of the hall, whether it was worth transforming Edward’s room into a studio; he wondered whether it wouldn’t be better if he sold the apartment, or let it. He didn’t need twenty rooms. He needed four, or five at most. A living room, a studio, a dining room, a bedroom, and possibly a guest room cum library cum music room—though this last wasn’t really necessary. For the most part his guests would, from now on, be guests only for an hour or two, and in his bed. Any friends of Edward who did want to stay could always be put up somewhere—could sleep on a divan in the living room if necessary. As for the library and music room—
well, the books and the records could be accommodated, like the friends, somewhere; there was no point in making permanent provisions for them.

He wandered along the corridor, kicking off his shoes and taking off his shirt as he went, and wondered whether he wanted to stay in Italy or Europe at all. Why not go back to New York? That was his home. This thirteen-year interlude in Europe had simply been his schooling. If he went back to New York he would have no difficulty
making
new friends, starting a new life. No one would know, there, that he was only an imitation.

Perhaps he would keep the villa in Capri—that would be nice for the summers—but get rid of this place. He sat down on the floor of the corridor, and nodded. That was the best idea he had had so far. He would, when Edward died, see to everything that had to be seen to, start painting anywhere—in Edward’s room, in one of the living rooms—and then, when all the financial matters were settled, when everything was finally his, put the apartment on the market. He would move back to New York. He would live in Manhattan and spend his summers in Capri. He wouldn’t wait to be snubbed by Edward’s friends. He would get out before they had a chance to tell him that it was all the same to them what he did. He had had thirteen years of the rich and famous; it was time he went home, back to the streets; back to the petty criminals who would one day become big-time gangsters and friends of people like Edward; back to the whores who hadn’t yet married or found someone to look after them and make them rich; back to the exploited who were still fighting to become exploiters as well; who were fighting to become famous.

If he was going to return to his youth, to look for
whatever
talent he had had thirteen years ago, it was better to return to the scene of his youth. His education was
complete
. He had graduated; he only had to wait, now, for the piece of paper, the deeds and documents which would transfer Edward’s property into his name, which would be his diploma of success. And while he was waiting he would start making the journey backwards—would start painting here, so that he would have some idea, when he did return to New York, just how much talent remained, and where it needed to be strengthened, nursed, propped up and encouraged.