Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

The unending, unendable world of love came to an end on the second day of July. I had fallen asleep facing her and the wall beyond her. She awakened me with a frenzied abruptness, making love to me with rapid little violences, biting at my mouth, making an odd little humming sound, digging me with her nails. Her eyes looked around, wild and mad. She laughed in a flat, strange way. Her intensity brought me quickly out of the blur of sleep into an almost immediate response to her. Of all the creatures she had been and had pretended to be, this one was quite new to me. But it was a part of our love, and if she felt like simulating a frenzy close to madness, I would play it her way. She was in such continual writhing motion that it took a surprising amount of strength to catch and cup the frantic chalice of her hips, and pin her long enough to permit a hasty joining.

But the moment I had accomplished that entrapment and that abrupt depth of conquest, I heard directly behind me sounds that seemed to stop my heart. I heard a low ferine grunting, a bestial gasping, a flat, splashing liquidity. I spun away from her to turn and stare at John Pinelli. He was not six feet from me. He held onto the footboard of the other bed. He was doubled over, vomiting on the tile floor. I knew instantly that she had been awake and had seen him come in, and had chosen to use me to hurt him in the most vicious way any man can be hurt. As she had aroused me to her purpose, she had been looking toward him, defying him, flinging him that ultimate challenge. Her frenzy had been built upon hate. It had not been love, but exhibition.

At the moment he was incapable of looking at me, and I knew I could not endure it if he were to look at me. I ran to the chair, took my damp swimming trunks that hung from the back of it, and yanked them on.

“Don’t leave me now, darling!” she called, projecting with full dramatic volume and timbre. “Don’t leave me like this, lover!” And, crouched there on the rumpled bed, her silvery hair in wild disarray, her face venomous, she began to scream with laughter.

As I tried to go by him he straightened up, eyes streaming, and reached a heavy arm toward me. I do not know what he was trying to do or express. In pure panic I swung and hit him, heavily, blindly, I know not where, and heard him fall behind me as I went through the door. Rosalinda was standing at the far end of the corridor, her eyes huge, brown fists pressed to her belly. As I raced by her I saw her cross herself.

There was no place in the world I could go. And I could never go fast enough to run away from memory. In my touching innocence I thought I was the owner of the world’s most vivid and most distressing memory. The world is seldom charitable to fools.

I hesitated, then went out through the front of the house, across the the terrace and down the steps to the beach. The tide was almost high, and there was a medium sea rolling in. I lay on the platform. The sea slid under me and smashed the rocks and threw spray high. I rolled over onto my back and the spray fell onto my face. On my lips it tasted as salty as tears. For a long time I thought I was going to be sick. But the feeling finally went away.

I was eye to eye with a contradiction, one many men have faced. If my love was capable of doing what she had done, then I had never known her at all. If I did not know her at all, then our love had been an indelicate farce. Are not all young men incurably romantic? The world cures the uncurable, however. And so in a lonely way, wrapped in the roar of the sea, I celebrated the death of love, or of illusion. Because I still loved the imaginary woman who could not have used me to strike such a deadly blow at the heart of her husband. But she had never existed.

This, I told myself, was no way for a sophisticate to behave. I ordered myself to put it all into proper perspective. A fading actress had dared play an ingénue role because her audience, her naïve intrigant, had been so very uncritical. I had been handy and healthy when she had desired fun and games. I counted her flaws: the almost invisible crescent scars at her temples from the cosmetic operation that had tautened the skin of her face into a semblance of youth; the beautiful teeth — expensively capped; the hair roots that were causing her much less trouble now that they were growing out gray; the crenelations of the flesh on the insides of her thighs; the deflated sag of her small breasts when she forgot to keep her shoulders well back; the ugly toes, crumpled by years of shoes too small; the peasant thickness and stubbiness of her hands and feet; the frank and blatant indelicacy with which she referred to all matters physiological.

But even her flaws were unbearably precious.

I knew exactly what a true sophisticate would do, and by God, I would do it. I would stay as inconspicuous as possible until they finished their battling and John Pinelli went back to the city. Their fights in the car had ended quickly. Her little hobbies couldn’t actually mean very much to him. So I would stick around and we’d continue the same pleasant routine.

Everything, I told myself, would be exactly as before. And I wondered why I started to feel sick again. She would sparkle for me, and we would divert each other with all our little games and devices and love words and private jokes. There would be but one small difference. This time I would know it didn’t really mean anything — to either of us. I hung my head over the edge of the sun platform and vomited into the sudsy green sea.

When it was over, I wondered how long I had been there. A long time. At least two hours. Possibly more. I squinted at the sun and estimated that it was six of its own diameters above the edge of the sea.

I heard a faint sound over the roaring of the waves. I looked up. A man stood on the cantilevered steps, fifteen feet above the plaform, calling my name. I stared up at him, raising my eyebrows, pointing at myself. He made that strange Mexican beckoning gesture which looks as if they are waving you away rather than summoning you. He stood just beyond the reach of the spray.

I went up the steps to him. He was a big man. He wore a pale silk jacket, sharply tailored, a grey bow tie, a cocoa straw hat with a feather. He looked like Don Ameche a little bit.

“Mr. Kirby Stassen?”

“Yes.”

“I am of the police. Come with me, please.” His English was very clear and deliberate. I followed him up the steps, thinking that John was giving me the roust the hard way. All he had to do was tell me to go.

There were five people in the living room. The three servants were lined up. A fat sleepy-looking policeman in uniform stood behind them. Another big Mexican in a white linen jacket stood facing them. He turned as we came in. He wore a blue shirt and a maroon bow tie, a straw hat just like the one who had come to get me. He looked a little bit like Richard Nixon, but bigger and jowlier. They were two smooth types. They had those police eyes, direct and skeptical.

White Jacket motioned toward me and projected a flood of fast Spanish at Rosalinda. Rosalinda answered. I could not follow the words. But I saw the pantomime that accompanied them. I saw John Pinelli stalking in. I saw the embrace that meant love. I saw myself running out, and going down to the beach. White Jacket tapped his watch and hammered her with short questions. She answered with explosive dignity.

Ameche said to me, choosing his words, “The woman says that you have been down at the beach while this thing has happened.”

“What has happened?”

“You heard no shots?”

“I didn’t hear anything! What happened?”

“Come with us, please,” Ameche said. He gave an order to the uniformed man. I went with White Jacket and Ameche to the master bedroom.