The Cat's Pajamas (12 page)

Behind Horn is his bodyguard, a young twenty-two-year-old kid from Chicago named Berntz, with a carnation in his black coat lapel and his black hair greased, and his eyes sewed down by little muscles at the corners, so he looks sad.

“Hello, Rob, darling,” says Anne. “How's the book?”

“Fine, fine. I've got a swell new chapter on you, Anne.”

“Thank you, darling.”

“When you going to leave this big heel-headed leprechaun?” you ask her, not looking at Mike.

“After I kill him,” says Anne.

Mike laughs. “That's a good one. Now let's get going, baby. I'm tired of this jerk.”

You upset some cutlery. Somehow a lot of dishes fall. You almost hit Mike. But Berntz and Anne and Jerry gang up on you and so you sit down, the blood banging your ears, and people pick up the cutlery and hand it to you.

“So long,” says Mike.

Anne goes out the door like a pendulum on a clock and you note the time. Mike and Berntz follow.

You look at your salad. You reach for your fork. You pick at the stuff.

You take a forkful.

Jerry stares at you. “For God's sake, Rob, what's wrong?”

You don't speak. You take the fork away from your lips.

“What's wrong, Rob? Spit it out!”

You spit.

Jerry swears under his breath.

Blood.

You and Jerry come down out of the Taft building and you are now talking sign language. A wad of stuff is in your mouth. You smell of antiseptic.

“But I don't see how,” said Jerry. You gesture with your hands. “Yeah, I know, the fight in the Derby. The fork gets knocked on the floor.” You gesture again. Jerry supplies the explanation to the pantomime. “Mike, or Berntz, picks it up, hands it back to you, but instead slips you a fixed, sharpened fork.”

You nod your head, violently, flushing.

“Or maybe it was Anne,” says Jerry.

No, you shake your head. You try to explain in pantomime that if Anne knew about this she'd quit Mike cold. Jerry doesn't get it and peers at you through his thick goggles. You sweat.

A tongue is a bad place for a cut. You knew a guy once who had a cut tongue and the wound never healed, even though it stopped bleeding. And imagine with a hemophiliac!

You gesture now, forcing a smile as you climb into your car. Jerry squints, thinks, gets it. “Oh.” He laughs. “You mean to say, all you need now is a stab in the backside?”

You nod, shake hands, drive off.

Suddenly, life is not so funny anymore. Life is real. Life is stuff that comes out of your veins at the least invitation. Unconsciously, your hand goes again and again to your coat pocket where the tablets are hidden. Good old tablets.

It is about now you notice you are being followed.

You turn left at the next corner and you're thinking fast. An accident. Yourself knocked out and bleeding. Unconscious, you'll never be able to give yourself a dose of those precious little pills you keep in your pocket.

You press the gas pedal. The car thunders ahead and you look back and the other car is still following you, gaining. A tap on the head, the least cut, and you are all done.

You turn right at Wilcox, left again when you reach Melrose, but they are still with you. There is only one thing to do.

You stop the car at the curb, take the keys, climb quietly out and walk up and sit down on somebody's lawn.

As the trailing car passes, you smile and wave at them.

You think you hear curses as the car vanishes.

You walk the rest of the way home. On the way you call a garage and have them pick up your car for you.

Though you've always been alive, you've never been as alive as you are now—you'll live forever. You're smarter than all of them put together. You're watchful. They won't be able to do a thing that you can't see and circumvent one way or another. You have that much faith in yourself. You can't die. Other people die, but not you. You have complete faith in your ability to live. There'll never be a person clever enough to kill you.

You can eat flames, catch cannonballs, kiss women who have torches for lips, chuck gangsters under the chin. Being the way you are, with the kind of blood you have in your body, has made you—a gambler? A taker of chances? There must be some way to explain the morbid craving you have for danger or near danger. Well, explain it this way. You get a terrific ego lift out of coming through each experience safely. Admit it, you're a conceited, self-satisfied person with morbid ideas of self-destruction. Hidden ideas, naturally. No one admits outwardly he wants to die, but it's in there somewhere. Self-preservation and the will to die, tugging back and forth. The urge to die getting you into messes, self-preservation yanking you out again. And you hate and laugh at these people when you see them wince and twist with discomfort when you come out, whole and intact. You feel superior, godlike, immortal. They are inferior, cowardly, common. And you are a little more than irked to think that Anne prefers her narcotics to you. She finds the needle more stimulating. Damn her! And yet—you also find her stimulating—and dangerous. But you'll take a chance with her, anytime, yes, any old time....

It is once again four in the morning. The typewriter is going under your fingers as the doorbell rings. You get up and go to answer in the complete before-dawn quiet.

Far away on the other side of the universe her voice says, “Hello, Rob. Anne. Just get up?”

“Right. This is the first time you've come around in days, Anne.” You open the door and she comes in past you, smelling good.

“I'm tired of Mike. He makes me sick. I need a good dose of Robert Douglas. I'm really tired, Rob.”

“You sound it. My sympathies.”

“Rob—” A pause.

“Yeah?”

A pause. “Rob—could we get away tomorrow? I mean, today—this afternoon. Up the coast somewhere, lie in the sun and just let it burn us? I need it, Rob, badly.”

“Why, I guess so. Sure. Yeah. Hell, yes!”

“I like you, Rob. I only wish you weren't writing that damned novel.”

“If you cleared out of that mob I might quit,” you say. “But I don't like the things they've done to you. Has Mike told you what he's doing to me?”

“Is he doing something, darling?”

“He's trying to bleed me.
Really
bleed me, I mean. You know Mike underneath, don't you, Anne. White-livered and scared. Berntz too, for that matter. I've seen their kind before, acting tough to cover up their lily guts. Mike doesn't want to kill me. He's afraid of killing. He thinks he can scare me out of this. But I'm going ahead because I don't think he'll have enough nerve to finish it. He'd rather take a chance on a narcotics rap than go up for murder. I know Mike.”

“But do you know me, darling?”

“I think I do.”

“Very well?”

“Well enough.”

“I might kill you.”

“You wouldn't dare. You like me.”

“I like myself,” she purrs, “too.”

“You always were a strange one. I never knew, and still don't know, what makes you tick.”

“Self-preservation.”

You offer her a cigarette. She is very near you. You nod wonderingly. “I saw you pull the wings off a fly once.”

“It was interesting.”

“Did you dissect bottled kittens in school?”

“With relish.”

“Do you know what dope does to you?”

“I relish that too.”

“How about this?”

You are near enough so it takes only a move to bring your faces together. The lips are as good as they look. They are warm and moving and soft.

She holds you away a bit. “I relish this also,” she says.

You hold her against you, again the lips meet you and you shut your eyes....

“Dammit,” you say, breaking away.

Her fingernail has bitten into your neck.

“I'm sorry, darling. Hurt you?” she asks.

“Everybody wants to get into the act,” you say. You take out your favorite bottle and tap out a couple pills. “God, lady, what a grip. Treat me kindly from now on. I'm tender.”

“I'm sorry, I forgot myself,” she says.

“That's very flattering. But if
this
is what happens when I kiss you, I'd be a bloody mess if I went any further. Wait.”

More bandages on your neck. Out again to kiss her.

“Easy does it, baby. We'll take in the beach and I'll give you a lecture on the evils of running with Michael Horn.”

“No matter what I say, you're going ahead with the novel, Rob?”

“Mind's made up. Where were we? Oh, yeah.”

Again the lips.

You park the car atop a sun-blazed cliff a little after noon. Anne runs ahead, down the timber stairs, two hundred feet down the cliff. The wind lifts her bronze hair, she looks trim in her blue bathing suit. You follow, thoughtful. You are away from everywhere. Towns are gone, the highway empty. The beach below with the sea folding in on it is wide, barren, with big slabs of granite toppled and washed by breakers. Wading birds squeal. You watch Anne go down ahead of you. What a little fool, you think of her.

You saunter arm in arm and stand letting the sun get into you. You believe everything is clean now, and good, for a while. All life is clean and fresh, even Anne's life. You want to talk, but your voice sounds funny in the salt silence, and anyway your tongue is still sore from that sharp fork.

You wade by the waterline and Anne picks something up.

“A barnacle,” she says. “Remember how you used to go diving with your rubber-rimmed helmet and trident in the good old days?”

“The good old days.” You think of the time past, Anne and yourself and the things that used to work out for you together. Traveling up the coast. Fishing. Diving. But even then she was a weird creature. Didn't mind killing lobsters at all. Took a relish in cleaning them.

“You used to be so foolhardy, Rob. You still are, in fact. Took chances diving for abalones when these barnacles might have cut you, badly. Sharp as razors.”

“I know,” you say.

She gives the barnacle a toss. It lands near your discarded shoes. As you come back up you skirt it, careful not to step on it.

“We could have been happy,” she says.

“It's nice to think so, isn't it?”

“I wish you'd change your mind,” she says.

“Too late,” you say.

She sighs.

A wave comes in on the shore.

You are not afraid of being here with Anne. She can do nothing to you. You can handle her. You are confident of that. No, this will be an easy, lazy day, without event. You are alert, ready for any contingency.

You lie in the sun, and it strikes through your bones and loosens you inside and you mold to the contours of the sand. Anne is beside you, and the sun gilds her tipped nose and glitters across the minute pellets of perspiration on her brow. She talks gay talk and light talk and you are fascinated with her; how she can be so beautiful and like a hunk of serpentine thrown across your path, and be so mean and small somewhere hidden inside where you can't find it?

You lie upon your stomach and the sand is warm. The sun is warm.

“You're going to burn,” she says at last, laughing.

“I suppose I am,” you say. You feel very clever, very immortal.

“Here, let me put some oil on your back,” she said, unfolding the shiny patent leather Chinese jigsaw of her purse. She holds up a bottle of pure yellow oil. “This'll get between you and the sun,” she says. “Okay?”

“Okay,” you say. You are feeling very good, very superior.

She bastes you like a pig on a spit. The bottle is suspended over you and it comes down in a twine of liquid, yellow and glittering and cool to the small hollows of your spine. Her hand spreads it and massages it over your back. You lie, purring, eyes closed, watching the little blue and yellow bubbles dance across your shut eyelids as she pours on more of the liquid and laughs as she massages you.

“I feel cooler already,” you say.

She continues to massage you for a minute or more and then she stops and sits beside you quietly. A long time passes and you lie deep, baked in a sand oven, not wanting to move. The sun suddenly is not so hot.

“Are you ticklish?” asks Anne, behind your back.

“No,” you say, your mouth turning up at the corners.

“You have a lovely back,” she says. “I'd love to tickle it.”

“Tickle away,” you say.

“Are you ticklish here?” she asks.

You feel a distant, sleepy movement on your back.