Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I saw her pull it more closely closed across her when she looked at me. It couldn’t have been modesty. We’d been married. It must have been apprehension. Must have been apprehension; she sensed.

“What’d you come back for?” she said. “You said you never were, you never would.”

“For this,” I said. I took out the gun. “I came back for this.”

She stared at it with an odd look of fascination, as though she’d never seen one before. I knew that wasn’t it, I knew that was a misreading. It was fear, but it looked like hypnotic fascination.

“Will that,” she asked me vaguely, the pupils of her eyes a thousand miles away, on the gun, “undo anything that’s been done? Will that rub out the past?”

“It’ll rub out the future,” I said, “and that’s even better.”

“There is no future,” she said. “It doesn’t need a gun to tell us both that.”

“No, but it says it awful well.”

“You’re like all men,” she said. “Like they always have been. Like they always will be. Kill, when you’re hurt. Kill. Hurt someone else when you’re hurt. Two hurts are better than one. Two hurts hurt more than one hurt.”

She crossed her arms in front of her breast (with an odd suggestion of chastity, I don’t know where I got it from) and lowered her head, waiting.

“Go ahead, kill,” she said.

“Look at me then. Look up at me. I want to see your eyes.”

She lifted her face. “Here are my eyes,” she said.

“Traitor’s eyes,” I hissed, “that looked at someone else. Softened then closed, for someone else.”

“Time never ended, you never came back. Then he came. You told me he would, you wrote me to look for him. He came from Saigon, and brought me love from you. He brought me messages. He brought me little snapshots, of a grubby face, unshaven beard, unkempt fatigues, that Filled my heart with heaven and filled my eyes with tears. You’d eaten together side by side, drunk together side by side, fought together side by side and almost died together side by side. It was the closest I could get to you. It was as much of you as I could have or hope for. He was your proxy. The kiss was still your kiss, though it came from someone else. The hug was still your hug, though it came from someone else. The possession was still your possession, though it came from someone else. How can you explain these things? I was faithful to you, to only you and only you, through someone else’s body.

“It wasn’t not-enough love for you that betrayed me, it was too much love for you. That one night, the only night there ever was, ask him, ask him if you ever see him again, ask him whose name he heard me whisper in the night.”

“Another man’s son,” I said bitterly. “Not mine, but another man’s. Out of my wife’s body, but another man’s. Another! Another! Another man’s!

“I wanted to dangle him on my knee when he was five. I wanted to play baseball with him when he was fifteen. I wanted to stand beside him and drink with him when he was twenty-five and married his girl.

“Gone now, all that gone now. Another man’s eyes, looking out at me from his little-boy’s face. Another man’s hand, holding mine when he trots along beside me. Another man’s tears, when he falls and barks his knee. Another man’s blood, peering through the scrape.

“And when I die, and find out all the answers that I missed along the way, another man’s son will stand by the grave with his head bowed down. Another man’s, not my own.”

My voice cracked, forlornly.

“Thief. Give me back the son you gypped me out of. You robbed me of my little hunk of eternity. It’s like dying twice and dying for good, when you die without leaving a son.”

She kept looking at me, like I’d told her to. She kept letting me see her eyes, like I’d told her to. Her eyelids flickered, though; they kept wanting to blink, and her eyes to shrink away from me. She wasn’t brave. Her skin was whiter than the paper you write on. But, here are my eyes, she’d said. She kept letting me see them. She kept holding them as steady as she could. So she was brave, after all.

“I walked up the aisle with you,” I remembered in a revery. “Away from the altar and away from the priest in his lace surplice. Your wedding-veil folded back clear of your face. The marriage-kiss from me still freshly pledged on your cheek, orange-blossoms, lilies-of-the-valley spraying in your arms.”

A sob that I hadn’t known was there blurted in my throat.

“No, I can’t kill you, I can’t shoot to kill you. No matter what you’ve done to me, you were the girl in my marriage-bed.”

I looked down at the outpointed gun as my mind told my fingers to lower it, but my heart already had, and it was down.

“When we first opened our eyes and looked at each other. The self-consciousness, the concern. That first searchingly shy look. (Did I do everything right? Was I the man for her?)”

She supplemented: “(Was he disappointed in me? I wasn’t too scared, I wasn’t too dainty?)”

“I wanted you to go to the bathroom first, you wanted me to go first. In the end we compromised. Neither of us went. Neither of us spoke, because neither of us knew what way to put it in.

“I went down to a public pay-place in the lobby, when I ‘stepped out a minute to get cigarettes.’ Where you went, I don’t know—

“Then the coffee came we’d asked them to send up. Remember that first coffee together, looking at each other over the tops of our cups? Couldn’t even take our eyes off long enough to swallow. Everything was so new, so first, so just-starting. Everything was ahead, nothing behind. Even the sun didn’t cast us any shadows in back when we walked.

“Children, making believe they’re grown-ups. Grown-ups, acting like the children they are and always will be. Children of God. Poor us.”

I swung from the shoulder and flung the gun with all the force that I had in me, against the wall over to the side and back of me. It struck with such violence the impact alone should have been enough to detonate it. I don’t know why it didn’t. The guard must have still been on. It fell down there in the corner, black and bulky and boding ill, its ugly intention inhibited.

She walked slowly and spent toward a small table there was against the wall, and first leaned over it pressing her hands down on it as though she weighed more than she could hold up. Then sank down upon a chair beside it and let her head roll on the table and clutched her arms around it.

She didn’t make much sound. Only the shaking told what it was. But how she shook. As if every hope and every happiness were coming loose.

I looked at her. What was there to say? What do you say, what can you say?

“Cry,” I said with sad accord. “Cry for you, for me, for the two of us.”

“Cry,” she agreed in a smothered voice, “for the whole world, and everyone that’s in it.”

“Cry and good-bye.” I turned slowly and went to the door. There wasn’t hate in my heart anymore, there wasn’t wanting to get even, there wasn’t will to kill.

“Good-bye,” she echoed faintly after me. And she said my name, and put that with it. My private name, my given name, my first name. Never mind what it was. It was still her right to use it, only she and no one else.

I opened the door with a strange sort of care, as when you don’t want to disturb someone, and let myself out. Then I closed it and looked at it from there.

Once I’d said, this is the door that love has come away from. Once I’d said, just a little while ago, this is the door I’m bringing death into. Now death had been there and had come away again without striking. A door that doesn’t hold love, and doesn’t hold death either. Oh what an aching empty barren place lies behind there.