John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“What does it feel like?”

“Very... odd. No discomfort at all. All I felt was a kind of flickering in my eyes. Not unpleasant, really. I was trying to fight it. I was telling myself that this certainly wouldn’t put me to sleep. And then there wasn’t the flickering sensation anymore, and kind of... a slow warm delicious feeling all over me, like sinking slowly in a hot sudsy perfumed tub. And I was gone! It is marvelous sleep, really. Deep and sweet and refreshing. Once she’s asleep, you can take them off and the Dormed sleep will just turn into absolutely natural sleep. Or like now, I’m leaving it on at very low strength, and she will sleep on and on until I take them off. You could parade a brass band through here, and she’d sleep like a baby. It’s a marvelous invention. It’s a portable unit, with a neat little gray suitcase thing it fits into, with a place for the salt solution and all.”

“Is there anything I have to do about it while you sleep?”

“Nothing. Well... what I do isn’t necessary. I just come in and look at her and see if that little light is going on and off. It hasn’t ever stopped or anything. And only once did she ever move her head enough to move the headset out of place.”

“But you’d feel better if I did the same thing?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Off with you, then.”

We went into the hall and she pointed out her door. “Just knock until I answer. Don’t settle for a mumble. Get a real answer.” She looked at her watch. “And don’t let me sleep past five o’clock. Okay?”

“Five o’clock.”

“If you get hungry or thirsty or anything—”

“I know where things are. Bug off, Bridget. Sleep tight.”

In thirty minutes the house was filled with that special silence of Sunday sleep. Little relays and servo devices made faint tickings and hummings. Refrigerator, deep freeze, air-conditioning, thermostats, electric clocks. Kids water-skied the lake, outboards droning, a faint sound through the closed windows.

Where do you look when you have no idea what you are looking for? An alcove off the living room apparently served as a small home office for Tom Pike. The top of the antique desk was clean. The drawers were locked, and the locks were splendid modern intricate devices, unpickable, except in television drama. On a hallway phone table I found a black and white photograph in a silver frame. Helena, Maureen, and Bridget on the foredeck of the Likely Lady . Boat clothes, sweaters for cool sailing. Mick Pearson’s girls, all slender, smiling, assured, and with the loving look that could only mean that it had been Mick’s eye at the finder, Mick’s finger on the shutter release.

So roam the silence and up the padded stairs, long slow steps, two at a time. A closed door at the back of the house, unlocked, opening into a master bedroom. Draperied windowwall facing the lake. One end was sitting room, fireplace, bookshelves. An oversized custom bed dominated the other end. It seemed too sybaritic, a bit out of key with the rest of the house. Two baths, two dressing rooms. His and hers. Sunken dark blue tub in hers, square, with clear glass in the shower-stall arrangement. Strategic mirroring there, as on the walls nearest the oversized bed.

The big bed was neatly made, so on Sunday, at least, Biddy was maid, cook, and housekeeper. Maureen’s bath had been cleared of the daily personal things. Winter clothing in her dressing room closets. Bottles of perfume and lotion on her dressing table just a little bit dusty. But he lived here, very neatly. Sport shirts here, dress shirts there. Jackets, slacks on one bar. Suits hanging from another. The shoe-treed shoes on a built-in rack. Silk, cashmere, linen, Irish tweed, English wool, Italian shoes. Labeling from Worth Avenue, New York, St. Thomas, Palm Springs, Montreal. Taste, cost, and quality. Impersonal, remote, correct, and somehow sterile. Apparently no sentiment about an ancient sweater, crumpled old moccasins, baggy elderly slacks, or a gummy old bathrobe. When anything showed enough evident signs of wear, it was eliminated.

I searched for more clues to him. Apparently he did not have anything wrong with him that could not be fixed by an aspirin or an Alka Seltzer. He did not leave random notes to himself in the pockets of his suits and jackets. He did not seem to have a single hobby or a weapon or a book not devoted to economics, law, securities, or real estate.

So I gave up on Tom Pike and walked quietly down the hall and into Maureen’s room. The deep breathing was just the same. She had not moved. The little orange light on the face of the control unit of the Dormed went off and on as before. I went to the side of the bed. Her arms rested at her sides, atop the blanket. I cautiously picked her left hand up. It was warm and dry, and complete relaxation gave it a heaviness, like the hand of a fresh corpse. The back of the hand was scratched, and welted with insect bites. I turned the inside of the wrist toward what light there was and, bending close to it, I could make out the white line of scar tissue across the pattern of the blue veins under the sensitive skin. I placed the hand the way it had been and looked down at her. The heavy glasses made her look as if both eyes had been bandaged. I could see the slow, steady beat of a tiny pulse in her throat. Even welted and mottled, dappled with the dry orange-white spots of lotion, she was a cushioned and luxurious and sweetly sensuous animal.

Sweet outcast. All the lovely, wifely tumbling in that outsized bed, mirrored hoyden, romping in sweet excitements with the lean and beloved husband. But then paradise is warped and the image becomes grotesque. Instead of babies, two sudden agonies, and two little bloody wads of tissue expelled too soon from the warm black safety of the womb. Then a world gone strange, like something half dreamed and soon forgotten. Exchange the springy bed for the sacking on the floor of the little storage room at the truck depot where, booze-blind, lamed, and sprung, you are kept at the rough service of the Telaferro brothers. Excuse me, my dear, while I pry around your outcast room looking for answers to questions I haven’t thought of. Or one I have: Would you really rather be dead?

But there was nothing. There was a steel cabinet in the bathroom, resting on a bench, securely locked. Medicines, no doubt. There seemed to be nothing left in the bedroom or bath that she could hurt herself with. There was a rattling purr at the end of each exhalation. Her diaphragm rose and fell with the deep breathing of deep sleep.

I was glad to leave her room and leave the sound of breathing. Somehow it was like the coma that precedes death. I went down and found a cold beer, turned on the television set with the volume low, and watched twenty-two very large young men knocking one another down while thousands cheered. I watched and yet did not watch. It was merely a busy pattern of color, motion, and sound.

Blue handles of kitchen shears. Helena climbing naked in the red light of the Exuma sun, rising to teeter on the rail, then find her balance, then dive into the black-gray water of the cove at Shroud Cay and then surface, seal-sleek, hair water-pasted flat to the delicate skull contours. Penny Woertz snuggling against me in the night, her back and shoulders moist with exertion, making little umming sounds of content as her breath was slowing. Biddy sobbing aloud as she trotted into my bathroom, her running a humble, awkward, clumsy, bovine, knock-kneed gait. Memory and digital skills. The bleeders don’t jump, and the hangers don’t bleed. Twenty thousand to a tall man. Jake saying “Bon voyage.” The ’Bama Gal erupting into the sunlight after all the weeks on the murky bottom. Tom Pike lifting his face from his hands, eyes streaming. Mick thumping the cabin trim with a solid fist as he showed me the honest way the Likely Lady had been built. Substantial means more than comfortable and less than impressive. Maurie streaking greasy fingers across the rounded, pneumatic, porcelain-gold of her thigh. Rick Holton flexing and rubbing his wrists after I’d unwound the tight bite of the hanger wire. Blue handles of kitchen shears. Penny’s clovery scents. Five dozen silk ties with good labels. Orange light winking. An umber-orange mole, not as big as a dime. Huddled nude in a Gauguin jungle.