William Lashner - Bitter Truth

It didn’t take me long to figure out how it was that Kendall stayed so thin. The painting she had handed me was a landscape all right, an imaginary view painted right from the instructions on the PBS painting shows, with spindly trees and moss-covered rocks and majestic peaks in the background. It was actually pretty good for what it was and it could have proudly held its own on any Holiday Inn wall. “I like it,” I lied.

“Do you, really?” she shrieked. “That is marvelous, simply marvelous. It’s a gift, from me. I insist. I have others if you want to see them. You must. Believe it or not this isn’t even a real place. I dredged the landscape out of my imagination. It’s so much more psychologically authentic that way, don’t you think?”

Something she had said in that first torrent of words interested me. “You mentioned a Franklin Harrington. Who is he?”

“Oh, Franklin. An old family friend, the family banker now. He was supposed to come tonight but had to cancel. I thought you knew. I was sure you did. He’s Caroline’s fiancé. Oh my, I hope I haven’t spilled anything I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sure you didn’t.” I turned my attention back to the painting, holding it before me as if I were studying it with great seriousness. “You know what this work reminds me of? That special place that Jackie used to talk about, where she would go in her most peaceful meditations.”

“How extraordinary.” Her eyes opened wide. “Maybe Jackie and I were linked in some mystical way.”

“Maybe you were,” I said. “That would be so cool. You know, sometimes people who are connected in mystical ways can feel each other’s emotions. On the night she died, did you feel anything?”

“To tell you the absolute truth, Victor, I did have a premonition. I was in North Carolina, vacationing, when I felt a sense of dread come over me. Actually I thought it was Edward’s plane. He flew back that morning, for business, and on the beach I had this horrible sense that his plane had gone down. I was so relieved to hear from him, you couldn’t imagine. But that was the day that Jackie died. You think I was getting those horrible images of death from her?”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“How marvelously strange.”

“Tell me, Kendall. What was the business your husband flew north for that day?”

“Oh, some real estate thing. Edward dabbles more than anything else. He’s waiting for the inheritance so that he can buy a football team. He’s just a boy like that. And do you want to know something else very interesting about my husband, Victor? But I have to whisper it.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, anxious to hear whatever other incriminating facts she wanted to tell me about Eddie Shaw.

Kendall looked left down the hallway, then right, then she leaned forward until I could smell the Chanel. “My husband,” she whispered, “is fast asleep.”

And then she bit my ear.

When I was alone in my room again, I laid the painting on a tottering old dresser, having successfully avoided laying Kendall Shaw, and once more took my pants off and fell into bed. She had been particularly ardent, Kendall had, which would have been flattering had she not been so obviously hopped up with her diet pills and suffering from some sort of amphetamine psychosis. Upon biting my ear, she performed a talented lunge, kicking the door closed with a practiced side swipe at the same time she threw her arms round my neck, but I fought her off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted – I was actually, I have a thing for women just like Kendall, hyperactive and thin with sharp Waspish features and outdoorsy hair – it was just that it was all so sudden and wrong that I didn’t have time to let my baser instincts kick in before I pulled her off and sent her on her way. I sort of regretted it too, afterward, as I lay in bed alone and waited for my erection to subside. It had been a profitable visit in any event. I had learned Eddie’s whereabouts the night of Jackie’s death, I had gotten a motel-quality painting, and I finally knew exactly who that Harrington was whom I had run into at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. He was Caroline’s fiancé and knowing that made Caroline even more attractive to me in the deep envious reaches of my petty mind, which meant it took longer for me to relax enough to even try once more to sleep. So I lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the blood flow back to my brain and trying to sort it all out in my mind, when I heard still another knock on the door.

“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said Selma Shaw, Caroline’s mother, through the wooden door. “I have something for you.”

I bet you do, I thought, as I slipped out of bed and grappled again with my pants. I opened the door a crack and saw her standing there with a covered plate in her hand.

“I noticed you didn’t eat much of the dinner,” she said, her voice slipping raw and thick out of a throat scarred by too much of something. “I thought you might still be hungry.”

I looked at her smile and then at the plate and then back at her smile and realized that I actually was hungry so I let her in. Selma Shaw was a tall, falsely blonde woman, so thin her joints bulged. Her face was as smooth and as stretched as if she were perpetually in one of those G-force centrifuges they use to train astronauts, and her smile was a strange and wondrous thing, a tight, surgically sharp rictus. She stepped to the bureau to put down the plate and noticed the painting there.

“So Kendall’s been here already,” said Selma, her smile gone.

“She wanted to show me one of her paintings.”

“I assume that was not all. I wish Kendall would be more concerned with taking care of her husband than rushing to the third floor to show visiting artists her trashy little pictures. But,” she said, her voice suddenly brightening, “enough of that dervish.” She spun around almost gaily and smiled once more. “I assumed you were being too polite to eat, worried about the strange surroundings, so I had Consuelo make you up a sandwich.”

“Thank you,” I said, truly grateful. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, Selma was right about that, but it wasn’t out of politeness. We had eaten in the dark, cavernous dining room of Veritas, stared at by stern brown portraits on the walls, the only bit of color the blue-and-white marble of the fireplace that looked to be carved from blue cheese aged too long. The food that Consuelo had served in the dark room had fallen to the far side of vile. A spiky artichoke, a bitter greasy salad, overcooked asparagus, undercooked potatoes, fatty knuckles of mutton with thick stringy veins snapping through the meat like rubber bands. There had been pickles of course, a platter of pickles fresh from the factory, and Dr. Graves, on my right, had advised me that pickles were always served at Veritas. The only light in the dining room had come from candelabras on the table, which, blessedly, were dim enough to make it difficult to see what the muck it was we were eating, but I saw enough to turn my appetite. I tried to look at least interested in the food, pushing it around on my plate, actually swallowing a small spoonful here and there, but when something in the bread pudding crunched between my teeth like a sharp piece of bone I figured I had had enough, spitting my mouthful into my napkin and dropping the napkin over my silver dessert plate in resignation.

“I hope you don’t mind me putting you all the way up here on the third floor,” said Selma Shaw, “but we weren’t expecting so many people to be forced to stay over because of the flood. There are not so many rooms available to visitors anymore. We’ve closed down the east wing to guests because my husband is a troubled sleeper and he finds it difficult to rest with anybody in close proximity to him during the night. Me included.”