Росс Макдональд - Blue City

“I know how you feel,” I said, but I wasn’t thinking of her. The old hall tree was gone, and the moose head was missing from over the door. The floor had been refinished, and there was a new pastel rug on it. Ivory enamel made the staircase look unreal. Everything was too pale and neat.

“You used to live in this house, didn’t you?” she said.

“I was just thinking of that. It’s different.”

“I hope you approve of the changes.” Her tone was a subtle blend of arrogance and feminine cajolery.

Her voice interested me. It was a good voice, low, rich, and complex, with a more frankly female quality than perfect ladies allow themselves. I looked into her face and said: “There have been too many changes to generalize about, haven’t there? Not that my opinion matters one way or the other.”

She turned on her heel and walked to the door of the living-room. “Won’t you come in and sit down and have a drink? We must have things to talk about.”

I said: “Thank you,” and followed her. If her breasts and her hips were her own, her figure was very handsome. Even if they weren’t, she had her legs, and the way she moved her body. In her dark silk dress she moved with the free, shining fullness and flow of a seal in water.

The face she leaned towards me, as we sat down facing each other, was in contrast to her body. It had a bloodless kind of beauty, emphasized by her scarlet mouth, but it was thin and worried-looking. Her wide, dark eyes seemed to have drawn out and to hold all the life and energy of her face. Her bright hair stood above her pale face and neck like a curled red flower on a stalk that the sun had missed.

She smiled nervously under my stare. “Do you think you’ve got my Bertillon measurements by now?”

“Excuse me. I’m naturally interested in my father’s last wife.”

“That’s not a very chivalrous thing to say.”

“My chivalry is my weakest point.”

“That’s true of your whole generation, isn’t it? Or maybe you’ve been reading Hemingway or something.”

“Don’t start talking down like a stepmother. You haven’t got much of a drop on me where age is concerned.”

Her laugh came strangely out of her unmoving face. “Maybe I was wrong about your chivalry. But don’t kid yourself. I belong to the lost generation. Which reminds me, I promised you a drink.”

I said: “Who’s been reading Hemingway now?” and looked around the room while she went to the bar in the corner. The bar had been J.D.’s idea, but the rest of the room had been remade. Thick, bright curtains at the windows, low, square-cut furniture placed in complicated geometric patterns on a desert expanse of polished floor, chaste walls and soft indirect lighting, which made the ceiling seem high and airy. The only old-fashioned survival was the pair of sliding doors which closed off the dining room. It was a beautiful room but it lacked life. Time and change had tiptoed away and left it breathless and still. I wondered if the rich, widowed body of the woman who had invented the room spent lonely nights.

She gave me a bourbon with a little soda and a lot of ice. Then she raised her glass and said: “Here’s to chivalry.” Her hands were white and well kept, but there was a little gathering and puckering of the flesh at the wrist. Perhaps I had been wrong about her age, but it couldn’t be more than thirty-five.

“Here’s to women that aren’t dependent on it.”

She looked at me for a moment and said slowly: “You’re rather a nice boy.”

“You’re not exactly a typical stepmother. Or did I read too much Grimm in my formative years?”

“I doubt it. What are your plans, John?”

“It’s a funny thing. I came here with the idea of asking J.D. for a job. I’ve been at a loose end since I got out of the army–”

“Didn’t you know he was dead?”

“Not until today. You see, after my mother left him we never heard from him. I almost forgot I had a father. But I’ve been thinking about him the last couple of years in the army. I didn’t try to get in touch with him, but I thought about him. So I finally decided to come and see him. I was a little late.”

“You should have come before.” She leaned forward to touch my knee, and I could see the single young line made by the separation of her breasts in the V of her neckline. “He often talked about you. You should have written, anyway.”

“What did he say about me?”

She made the removal of her hand from my knee as definite a gesture as placing it there. “He loved you, and he wondered what had happened to you. He was afraid your mother would teach you to hate him.”

“She did her best, but in the long run it didn’t take. I can’t say I blame her entirely.”

“Don’t you, really?”

“Why should I? He hated her for leaving him. He never tried to get in touch with us.”

“Why did she leave him, Johnny?” Her way of speaking to me was moving through gradual stages of intimacy, and I felt a little crowded. “He never told me,” she said.

So far, the conversation had gone all her way, and she had chosen the reminiscent and sentimental vein. I chose another: “Because he couldn’t keep his hands off women.”

She seemed neither shocked nor displeased. She leaned back in her low chair and stretched her arms over her head. Her live, stirring body in that still room was like a snake in a sealed tomb, fed by unhealthy meat. She said in a soft and questioning voice: “You must have known your way around when you were twelve.”

She leaned her head against the back of the chair and looked at the ceiling. Her body, stretched out before me, seemed lost in a dream of its own power and beauty. I could have reached out and taken it, I thought, like a ripe fruit from a tree. But then she was my stepmother and that would be incestuous. Besides, I hated her guts.

I said as casually as I could: “Just what happened to J.D.?”

Her head came erect and her dark emotional eyes looked at me. “He was shot down on the street. Nobody knows who did it. It was a hideous thing. I’m not sure I can talk about it – even yet.” Her voice broke.

“You must have loved him very much.”

“I was mad about him,” she said throatily. “He was the man in my life.” She was sitting straight up now. Her white hands on the arms of the chair and her crowning hair made her look like a tragic queen.

“Wasn’t he a little old for you?”

She watched me for a moment and decided that I meant nothing by it. “Some people thought so,” she said defiantly, “but I never did. Jerry had the secret of eternal youth.”

“If not eternal life. Property lasts, though. He left a good deal of property, didn’t he?”

I hadn’t been feeding her the right lines and she seemed a little confused. “What do you mean? He left me well provided for, of course.”

“That’s fine. It must be almost as fine for you as if he’d gone on living.”

She regrouped her forces and fell back to her original lines of defense: “Johnny, you don’t hate me, do you? I hadn’t even the slightest idea what was in his will before he died. I know it’s rough on you.”

“He didn’t die. He was shot. It was rough on him. Have you an idea who shot him?”

“How should I know?” She made a face like a little girl, pursing her lips in an artificial rosebud. “He must have had enemies, Johnny. He had so many different business interests.”

“You think it was assassination for business reasons, then? Who do you have in mind?”

The question frightened her. Her white face remained composed, but her whole body stiffened. “Why, nobody. I know so little about his business.”

“Did you post a reward for the murderer?”