Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

“What a mess!” he said. “God, what a mess! Is Randy carrying on again?”

“He’s still sleeping. I gave him pills. He needs to sleep.”

He had been washing his hands. His sleeves were rolled up. The crisp brown hair on his strong arms was matted and wet where he had dried hastily and imperfectly. He put his hands on my waist and they felt strong. I am glad I am slim for him. I am glad he likes shoe-button eyes, an upper lip that is a little too long, and my flavor of gravity. He pushed his mouth down hard on my lips, taking away my breath and my will.

“This is still the same,” he said against my hair, still holding me.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t the same. It was simple yesterday, wasn’t it? Everything was perfectly dandy.” I began to cry. I hadn’t wanted to cry. We sat on his bed, his arm around me.

“You better tell me what you mean, Noel.”

I had to explain it carefully. “Last night she was there. He had a place to go. Emotionally, I mean. That could be the end of it. With no regrets, because I finally stopped loving him. It took a long time to stop, but I finally stopped. She had become his whole life. And I was just such a little part of it, he would hardly have missed me. But now he needs me, Steve.”

“That’s a trap,” he said. “Females fall into it all the time. Maternal stuff. Poor little man needs you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“She turned him from a man into a flunky. He’s going to need help if he tries to turn back into a man.”

“For richer and for poorer? In sickness and in health?” Steve said bitterly. I did not like the curl of his lip. It was contemptuous of me, of the person I am. And if he loves what I am, what I believe is a part of me... And he should not show contempt.

“I only know what I have to do.”

“Then I’m to consider this the brush-off.”

It was not what I wanted him to say, God knows. I did not want such an easy and empty victory. It was his duty to talk me out of it, to give me all the reasons why I should leave Randy as we had talked about it last night. He should have given me all the reasons why he wanted me to leave the sinking ship that was Randolph Hess.

But that was not the dreadful thing, the most dreadful thing. I am sensitive to people. I see little clues in their faces. And I saw, in Steve’s face, a concealed relief. As though something were going far easier for him than he had anticipated.

I made myself test him. “Really, Steve, after all, haven’t we got just a little bit too serious about all this? I mean it made it more dramatic and all, but... after all, we are a couple of adults, aren’t we?”

He looked at me in a startled way and then he laughed softly. “God, Noel, you’re a package of surprises. You’re right. We are all grown up.”

I smiled. “And it didn’t mean as much as we said it did.”

He ruffled my hair. “I guess not, kitten. But you’ve been awful good for me. I want you to know that. I mean just knowing somebody like you.”

And that was the end of it, of course. I felt more soiled than when I had gone to look at her body. Than when I had sat and looked at the face of my sleeping husband, hating him. More soiled, because at least those emotions had been direct and honest. But this with Steve had been a cheapness. A baseness. Week-end entertainment, married-love variety. I sat and smiled at him and saw how he was. All the pose and the faking. Making his living from poses and fakings and posturings and lies so that there was no longer any Steve Winsan left at all. Maybe there had been such a man once. Now he was an attractive shell stuffed solid with press clippings.

He kissed my ear playfully. It made my ear ring. His hand was on my waist. “Now that we understand each other, kitten, let us do some relaxing. Hell, I think I can steer some people to Randy if he wants to set up an office again. It would be nice to keep you right in New York.”

“That’s sweet of you,” I said.

His square hand left my waist and gently pulled my sweater free of my skirt in back, crept up my spine to the fastening of my bra, and fumbled there a very short time before the fastening was released. It was something he had learned to do very well indeed.

There is something perverse within you. It says that when you have been tricked and humiliated, you must seek further degradation. I sat in numbness, with his hands on me, perfectly willing to respond with completely faked emotions, perfectly willing to accept his meaningless and casual use of me, accepting him as a punishment, as ashes on the head of mourning. There was nothing at all left now, not even a way of escape.

And there was a soft servile tapping at the door and the voice of Amparo, the sturdy and very lovely Mexican maid. “Meester Weensan?”

He ceased his tactile deliberations. “What do you want?”

“The policía , they say come right away, sir, to the beeg room, sir. Everywan.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and shrugged and called to her that he would be right along. We got off the bed. He rolled his sleeves down and put on his jacket while I fastened my bra and tucked my sweater back in. There was a crudeness in being there like that together, with the homely formulae of fixing our clothing — a crudeness and the death of magic.

He opened the door and looked up and down the hallway and then said, “O.K., Noel.” As I started to go by him, out into the hallway, he clapped his square hand against my haunch in what I guessed was supposed to be rude affection and the affirmation of possession.

But I have never liked to be touched except by those I love. I turned sharply and I do not know what my face looked like, but I do know that I made the quick sound of exhalation and warning that a cat will make as I raked at his face. He gasped with pain and jumped back. I went down the hallway alone.

They were in the big living room. The lounge, as Wilma had called it. The big expanse of glass was gray. There was rose color outlining the eastern hills. I realized it was Sunday morning, and there was something shocking in realizing that.

The two troopers, Carran and Maleski, were there, and the bulky officiousness of Deputy Sheriff Fish and the side-burned young coroner, all with the looks of ranks closed against us. José Vega, the butler-bartender-handy man, stood in a corner with the mild docility of the horse he so much resembled. His elder sister, the cook, Rosalita Vega, stood beside him. Amparo Loma, the pretty maid, sat uneasily on a chair as though she had been invited to sit down, had sat down obediently, and suddenly found herself to be the only servant seated and did not know quite how to terminate the embarrassment.

My husband came into the room soon after I did. He was fusty with doped sleep, rumpled and vague-looking, yawning and nervous at the same time. He gave me a nod and sat over beside Judy Jonah and asked, too loudly, “What’s up, anyway?” Nobody answered him.

Gilman Hayes, Wilma’s protégé, sat on the floor near the pale lamp wearing his Basque shirt and ragged shorts, long hard round brown legs crossed. He was looking with contempt at a book of reproductions. Wallace Dorn sat on the couch with the Dockertys. They talked in very low voices. Finally Steve entered the room. He gave me a sharp unpleasant look and sat as far from me as possible. He had two strips of tape on his left cheek. I felt a cold amusement.

“That’s everybody,” Trooper Maleski said. “You want to take it, George?”

Deputy Sheriff Fish looked both pleased and self-important. He took a step forward and cleared his throat. “We... I figured you people better all know the score just as soon as possible. When we got here last night, those of you we talked to give us the pretty clear idea of how it was an accidental drownding. Doc Andros here says she drownded, all right. That was the cause of death, he says. But he didn’t like the look of the pupils of her eyes, he says. So he gave her an extra good looking over and he finds out she was stobbed in the back of the head with something sharp. It punched a hole in her head bone and maybe if she wasn’t in the water she might of died of it eventually. But being in the water and still breathing, she just naturally drownded. We’ve been over that dock and those boats there with fine-tooth combs and there’s nothing she could have fell on to do that.