Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“Who aren’t? Drug-peddlers?”

“Pansies. All pansies are supposed to be weak. Like all bullies are cowards, and all Greeks run restaurants. That isn’t a good example, though. My father was a Greek, at least he was a Cypriot, and, by God, he ran a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. Great oaks from little acorns grow. Miracles of modern science. From a greasy spoon in Newark to wealth and decadence in one easy generation. It’s the new accelerated pace, with automation.”

She looked around the alien room. “He might as well have stayed in Cyprus, for God’s sake. What good did it do me? I ended up in a therapy room making pottery and weaving rugs like a God-damn cottage industry. Except that I pay them. I always do the paying.”

Her contact seemed to be better, which encouraged me to say: “Do you always do the talking, too?”

“Am I talking too much?” She gave me her brilliant, disorganized smile again, as if her mouth could hardly contain her teeth. “Am I making any sense, for God’s sake?”

“From time to time you are, for God’s sake.”

Her smile became slightly less intense and more real. “I’m sorry, I get on a talking jag sometimes and the words come out wrong and they don’t mean what I want them to. Like in James Joyce, only to me it just happens. Did you know his daughter was schizzy?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So sometimes I’m a wit and sometimes I’m a nit-wit, so they tell me.” She extended her bruise-mottled arm: “Sit down and have a drink and tell me who you are.”

“Archer,” she repeated thoughtfully, but she wasn’t interested in me. Memory flared and smoked inside of her like a fire in changing winds: “I’m nobody in particular, either. I used to think I was. My father was Peter Heliopoulos, at least that’s what he called himself, his real name was longer than that and much more complicated. And I was much more complicated, too. I was the crown princess, my father called me Princess. So now–” her voice jangled harshly off-key “–so now a cheap Hollywood drug-peddler can push me around and get away with it. In my father’s day they would have flayed him alive. So what does my husband do? He goes into business with him. They’re palsy-walsies, cerebral palsy- walsies.”

“Do you mean Carl Stern, Mrs. Graff?”

“Who else?”

“What kind of business are they in?”

“Whatever people do in Las Vegas, gambling and belling around. I never go there myself, never go anywhere.”

“How do you know he’s a drug-peddler?”

“I bought drugs from him myself when I ran out of doctors – yellow jackets and demerol and the little kind with the red stripe. I’m off drugs now, however. Back on liquor again. It’s one thing Dr. Frey did for me.” Her eyes focused on my face, and she said impatiently: “You haven’t made yourself a drink. Go ahead and make yourself a drink, and make one for me, too.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea, Isobel?”

“Don’t talk to me as though I were a child. I’m not drunk. I can hold my liquor.” The bright smile gashed her. face. “The only trouble with me is that I am somewhat crazy. But not at the moment. I was upset there for a moment, but you’re very soothing and smoothing, aren’t you? Kind of kind of kind.” She was mimicking herself.

“Any more,” I said.

“Any more. But you won’t make fun of me, will you? I get so mad sometimes – angry-mad, I mean – when people mock my dignity. I may be going into a wind-up, I don’t know, but I haven’t taken off yet. On my trans-polar flight,” she added wryly, “into the wild black yonder.”

“Good for you.”

She nodded in self-congratulation. “That was one of the wit ones, wasn’t it? It isn’t really true, though. When it happens, it isn’t like flying or any sort of arrival or departure. The feel of things changes, that’s all, and I can’t tell the difference between me and other things. Like when Father died and I saw him in the coffin and had my first breakdown. I thought I was in the coffin. I felt dead, my flesh was cold. There was embalming fluid in my veins, and I could smell myself. At the same time I was lying dead in the coffin and sitting in the pew in the Orthodox Church, mourning for my own death. And when they buried him, the earth – I could hear the earth dropping on the coffin and then it smothered me and I was the earth.”

She took hold of my hand and held it, trembling. “Don’t let me talk so much. It does me harm. I almost went, just then.”

“Where did you go?” I said.

“Into my dressing-room.” She dropped her hand and gestured toward one of the louvered doors. “For a second I was in there, watching us through the door and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink. It does me good, honestly. Scotch on the rocks.”

I moved around behind the bar and got ice cubes out of the small beige refrigerator and opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker and made a couple of drinks, medium strength. I felt more comfortable on the wrong side of the bar. The woman disturbed me basically, the way you can be disturbed by starvation in a child, or a wounded bird, or a distempered cat running in yellow circles. She seemed to be teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode. Also, she seemed to know it. I was afraid to say anything that might push her over the edge.

She raised her glass. The steady tremor in her hand made the brown liquor slosh around among the ice cubes. As if to demonstrate her self-control, she barely sipped at it. I sipped at mine, leaned on my elbow across the formica counter in the attitude of a bartender with a willing ear.

“What was the trouble, Isobel?”

“Trouble? You mean with Carl Stern?”

“Yes. He got pretty rough.”

“He hurt me,” she said, without self-pity. A taste of whisky had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper. “Interesting medical facts. I bruise very easily.” She exhibited her arms. “I bet my entire body is covered with bruises.”

“Why would Stern do it to you?”

“People like him are sadists, at least a lot of them are.”

“You know a lot of them?”

“I’ve known my share. I attract them, apparently, I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know why. Women like me, we don’t expect too much. I don’t expect anything.”

“Lance Leonard one of them?”

“How should I know? I guess so. I hardly knew – I hardly knew the little mackerel.”

“He used to be a lifeguard here.”

“I don’t mess with lifeguards,” she said harshly. “What is this? I thought we were going to be friends, I thought we were going to have fun. I never have any fun.”

“Any more.”

She didn’t think it was funny. “They lock me up and punish me, it isn’t fair,” she said. “I did one terrible thing in my life, and now they blame me for everything that happens. Stern’s a filthy liar. I never touched his lover-boy, I didn’t even know that he was dead. Why would I shoot him? I have enough on my conscious – on my conscience.”

“Such as?”

She peered at my face. Hers was as stiff as a board. “Such as, you’re trying to pump me, aren’t you, such as? Trying to dig things out of me?”

“Yes, I am. What terrible thing did you do?”

Something peculiar happened to her face. One of her eyes became narrow and sly, one became hard and wide. On the sly side, her upper lip lifted and her white teeth gleamed under it. She said: “I’m a naughty, naughty, naughty girl. I watched them doing it. I stood behind the door and watched them doing it. Miracles of modern science. And I was in the room and behind the door.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed my mother.”

“How?”

“By wishing,” she said slyly. “I wished my mother to death. Does that take care of your questions, Mr. Questionnaire? Are you a psychiatrist? Did Simon hire you?”