The Horse You Came in On (19 page)

Melrose stopped, sat down on a bench outside an imposing white building, and read:

Sweetie saw Maxim through what seemed a colonnade of doorways, each one opening onto the room beyond, at the end of which was the dining room where Maxim sat at breakfast at the long mahogany table.

She walked through the doors and into the room. She stopped and looked from the table to the bank of high windows to the wide lawns. The fountain was dry; the bronze boy rode the fish through dark-stained cement.

What was going on? It made no sense at all. A dozen pages ago, the gardens beyond the windows had been choked with flowers, absolutely fecund in the warm spring day. The pool had been full of water.

And now Maxim was lying on the dining room floor in a pool of blood. What was going on? Irritated at himself for being caught up in this weird story, he snapped
Windows
shut. But unable to help himself, he reached into his satchel and drew out the chapters Ellen had given him, and started to read:

In the kitchen Sweetie stood with the spatula in her hand poaching an egg and trying to imagine her own death. She watched the transparent white of the egg turn opaque as the envelopes lying beneath the slot. In another pan, sausage fried, spitting up grease. She lifted the egg and drained it and laid it carefully on a piece of toast.

She sat at the table taking small bites of sausage and wondering as she chewed what it felt like to die or to go mad. How did one “go mad”? What could it possibly feel like? Would there be something like a mental eclipse? Her kitchen was in the English basement and through the bars of the window that opened on pavement level sunlight filtered and lay in bands on the white linoleum. Sweetie thought she should go out, go out and walk, get some air, banish these thoughts from her mind but—could she? Would the sunlight dazzle her and herd her back inside?

What other explanation could there be for these letters to Lily except that she was going mad? And yet she felt in the same relationship to the things of this world as she had before. She looked at the little face of her wristwatch and saw that the second hand was proceeding around it with the same stuttering sweep, that the minute hand was bisecting time in as orderly a fashion as always. But how else to explain what was happening? As she spooned sugar from the flowered china bowl she felt comfortable with the familiar belongings of the kitchen. Sugar bowl, white milk jug, teacup. She could name them as easily and familiarly as ever. But what if she forgot? In madness, did one forget the names of ordinary objects?

Carefully, she tore a corner from her napkin, took a pencil from the jelly jar and wrote the word down S U G A R and put the piece of napkin in the bowl. She looked at that and smiled a little and wrote S A L T on another bit of paper and put that under the salt cellar. With her tongue she wet another bit just to dampen it—G L A S S—and this one she pressed to her glass of milk.

The telephone rang.

Sweetie sat perfectly still. She was sure if she picked up the receiver there would be nothing on the line but silence. Or if there was a voice it would say “Hello, hello, hello? Lily?”

On the ninth ring she thought, But it might be for me, it might simply be Bill or Jane or anyone. She went on eating her poached egg, wiping the last corner of toast around in the yolk and listening to the ringing. Thirteen rings. When it stopped she thought it had probably been for her, and if it rang again she would answer it.

It rang again. She didn't.

Here, she said to herself, is what you could do: you can sit in the
sidechair opposite the door and watch the mail slot and when another envelope slides through, open the door quickly. And she did so; she was unaware of the passage of time.

Ultimately, though, she knew this was useless; whoever it was was braced for that and would disappear before she saw him. Him or her. The person would vanish before she could confront him.

There is something else you can do, she told herself then. She pulled an envelope from the paper band, folded a sheet of stationery and slipped it in. She licked the flap and pressed it shut. Then she turned it over and printed on it

M A X I M

Sweetie went to the front door and shoved the envelope through the letter slot. Dark had fallen. After she put her dishes in the sink she went upstairs to bed.

Melrose was slumped down on the bench, the manuscript pages still in hand, thinking these thoughts. Students were coming out of buildings, released for a while from their classes. They all seemed very jolly, flowing back and forth on the path beyond his feet.

“He's dead. He must be dead.” He looked up to see two students staring at him. Probably, they thought he was crazy, babbling away here on a campus bench. The two students smiled uncertainly and gave the bench a wide berth.

Sweetie.

She looked at the name, hoping there was a magnetic field around it that would draw other words into its circle. She retyped it in caps: S W E E T I E. Behind her closed eyelids the name pulsed slowly on and off like a neon sign over a diner: EAT—EAT—EAT.

Thinking about a diner was a mistake; it made her hungry. If it hadn't been for the chain, she would have been out of her office in a flash, gonezo up the third floor to sit with a cup of coffee and a sugar doughnut. Even better, to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee in a china cup and a cinnamon pull-apart. But it wasn't time yet; she surely had another good forty-five minutes of writing to do. She looked up at the clock on the wall; that told her nothing, because her scarf hid the face. She always threw something over it; otherwise she'd spend a lot of time looking up there to see how much more tortured time remained. There was the alarm clock, of course; it was inside the filing cabinet, the ticking muted, but the alarm itself was loud enough to shatter glass. It was set for two o'clock.

Jesus Christ, if anyone who read her books could see her now! She formed a mental image of the Writer, or at least what she supposed a reader would think of a writer writing (if readers ever thought of them). What she saw was herself in a book-encrusted den with mahogany wainscoting, random-width pine floors layered with Oriental rugs, windows overlooking misty fields (writers being always up at dawn), ink across a calfskin notebook, forming words from a Mont Blanc pen with the flourish of a calligrapher. To write in longhand with an inkpen (Ellen mused over why pens were called “inkpens”) was breathing the true, rarefied air of the writer; it was getting down to the very bone of writing. It was much more difficult than typing; far, far more difficult than word processing. Word processing was precisely what it sounded like: churning words like butter into some oleaginous mass. The words came out smoothly, having nothing to do with art, and with that magical quality of letters just popping
up almost out of nowhere onto the computer monitor. They looked as if they'd arrived on the screen by way of an extra-human agency.

So Ellen gritted her teeth and wrote with her ballpoint Bic:

SWEet  i  e

Sweetie had been sitting with the box of candy on her lap long enough for dusk to turn to dark
.

Ellen got up and dragged herself over to the window, wondering: who was trying to kill Sweetie?
Was
someone trying to kill her? For it was Lily, not Sweetie, to whom the messages were addressed. It was a mystery. Sometimes an answer would dust Ellen's mind with a mothlike flutter.

The chain pulled at her ankle. In her concern about Sweetie she had wandered from the window to the filing cabinet, and her fingers were feeling across its smooth surface for the key. It had happened before, this all-but-unconscious trek to the cabinet; thus, she had had to put the key to the bicycle chain up on top and out of reach. (The alarm clock was in the bottom drawer, which she could reach, just. She had made the mistake of putting
that
also out of reach, and once, in the ensuing blast, several of the faculty had run out of Gilman crying “Fire!”) At first she had positioned the key at a place on the top of the cabinet that she could still reach if she really stretched and strained. That was no good; she'd made a lunge for it one day and banged her chin on the metal handle. So she would first put it up there out of reach before she shoved the lock through the chain.

It was embarrassing to have to flag someone down at the end of her two-to-three-hour writing stint, and she marvelled that anyone believed that she had “somehow got her foot caught up in the damned bike chain,” or was in the process of playing some wacky game or winning a bet with a colleague.

In a funk she sat back down heavily, wondered if the swivel chair might just be too comfortable for her, might be molded a little too much to the contour of her back. She recalled reading a comment by some writer, probably a sportswriter or someone else who had a column and a deadline: if somebody held a gun to your head, you'd write. Ellen closed her eyes and imagined someone was holding a gun to her head, but it didn't help. Of course, it had to be a real gun, that was all.

She slid down in the chair and pulled up her heavy Aran sweater, arranged it around her head, and sat thinking about the Man in the Iron Mask. If he had been a writer, what would the conditions have been? What would the poor booby have done if he'd been a nail biter, like she was? In this guise she rose and made her way blindly over to the window,
arms outstretched against obstacles in her path, felt the cold panes beneath her fingers, stood there. Could anyone see her, down there on the walk? She sighed and pulled down the sweater and chewed at the hangnail on her thumb. Then with her back flush up against the wall she pretended she was Fortunato. If Fortunato had been a writer, imagine the sort of arrangement Montresor would try to negotiate with him!
Not a paragraph, Fortunato? What? A sentence, surely! No?
Ellen raised her arm and pulled it back:
thwack!
Another brick splatters home.

She dragged herself back to the chair, sat down in a slouch, and picked up the pen. Put it down again. She was so hungry.

She had tried locking the chain to her ankle in her apartment, but it didn't work because nothing she could find to wrap it around was heavy enough to work as a restraining force. She reminded herself of someone intent on suicide looking for a stout beam or heavy hook to toss the belt or rope across. And she had wound up several times dragging furniture by her foot—the heavy wing chair, even a dark Jacobean chest that she'd been sure would have stopped a mule team in its tracks—to get at the key so she could leave and go to the Horse or the Pizza Palace. Even after she had anchored the chain to the stove, there had been enough play in it to reach the telephone, and she'd got the pizza delivered. And it just barely reached to the door. The delivery kid was fascinated. She'd told him she had the lead in
Les Mis
. He'd believed it.

It wasn't that she couldn't write because she didn't like Sweetie. She loved Sweetie. She liked her plain dresses, her pleated skirts and pastel cardigans, her simple hairdo, her clean face.

Why would anyone want to drive her mad? But Ellen wasn't sure that anyone
did
want to. She bent her head back over the chair, wondering how far she could lean back before she fell.

She stared up at the fluorescent lighting fixture, the shadowy carcasses of dead moths caught within it. Then she leaned forward and wrote:

Sweetie's head was bent over the white candy box.

The trouble was: it was in this second story, the one she was writing now, that
Lily
was receiving letters from someone she didn't know and had even, yesterday, got a box of candy. Ellen closed her eyes. Forget Lily for the moment.

Sweetie didn't know what kind of candy it was.

She was afraid to open the box.

Ellen stopped and leaned back. There was something ominous about the box of candy. She put her head in her hand, rubbed at her temples in a benighted-old-woman gesture that she disliked. No, she decided. The box of candy is just that. What is ominous is the way in which Sweetie sees it.

Poor Sweetie. Ellen bit her lip, put the heels of her palms against her eyes, pressing them into the sockets. Something awful was going to happen, something truly awful.
Had
happened. And was now working itself out. It had happened at the end of
Windows,
but Sweetie did not know what her role was to be.
That
was the source of the dread.

The box was covered in a satiny white paper and tied with purple velvet, a wide, generous band of cloth, not some stingy length of narrow ribbon. Sweetie pulled at the end. The big bow unraveled, almost voluptuously.

Ellen's thumb and forefinger rubbed together, felt air, felt the width of velvet. Red, it should be. Not purple, red. Why? Red, because purple seemed too weighted with meaning and the ribbon means nothing but itself.

She watched as Sweetie removed the lid. Inside were two layers of little fluted cups arranged in neat rows. There was no candy. Sweetie picked up one of the cups and inspected it carefully. Ellen wrote:

There never had been.

She returned the fluted cup to its position and looked at the neat rows, empty of chocolates. Sweetie closed the box and remembered Maxim saying: “They left notes on my plate, by my glass, in the bowl on the table. The notes said: cheese, wine, fruit. It was because I'm a writer and I should have been able to dine on empty air and drink the memory of wine. They thought it was a laugh. They did not know it, but they might well have been right. The material world falls away. Listen: what if what happens is precisely what doesn't happen? For instance: you cut the paper doll from the surrounding paper and there is the empty space, the doll-outline. It is a perfect match—perfect. Then which is which and which is real?”

“Oh, but that's sophistry. I hate talk like that.”

“No. They are not separate. The outline belongs to the doll. The doll only appears to be wrenched from its place. Dress the paper doll in its paper clothes. It makes no difference. It only mimics its
true self; a shabby imitation; a mutilation, a static echo. Do you see?”