Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

In the living room, Ray was sitting on the arm of the sofa, hustling a stewardess named Luanne. Beth could tell he was hustling; he was trying to look casual. When he wasn’t hustling, he was always intense, about everything. She decided to ignore it, and wandered around the apartment, sipping at a Tanqueray and tonic.

There were framed prints of abstract shapes clipped from a calendar printed in Germany. They were in metal Bonniers frames.

In the dining room a huge door from a demolished building somewhere in the city had been handsomely stripped, teaked and refinished. It was now the dinner table.

A Lightolier fixture attached to the wall over the bed swung out, levered up and down, tipped, and its burnished globe-head revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

She was standing in the bedroom, looking out the window, when she realized this had been one of the rooms in which light had gone on, gone off; one of the rooms that had contained a silent watcher at the death of Leona Ciarelli.

When she returned to the living room, she looked around more carefully. With only three or four exceptions—the stewardess, a young married couple from the second floor, a stockbroker from Hemphill, Noyes—everyone at the party had been a witness to the slaying.

“I’d like to go,” she told him. “Why, aren’t you having a good time?” asked the stewardess, a mocking smile crossing her perfect little face.

“Like all Bennington ladies,” Ray said, answering for Beth, “she is enjoying herself most by not enjoying herself at all. It’s a trait of the anal retentive. Being here in someone else’s apartment, she can’t empty ashtrays or rewind the toilet paper roll so it doesn’t hang a tongue, and being tightassed, her nature demands we go.

“All right, Beth, let’s say our goodbyes and take off. The Phantom Rectum strikes again.”

She slapped him and the stewardess’s eyes widened. But the smile remained frozen where it had appeared.

He grabbed her wrist before she could do it again. “Garbanzo beans, baby,” he said, holding her wrist tighter than necessary.

They went back to her apartment, and after sparring silently with kitchen cabinet doors slammed and the television being tuned too loud, they got to her bed, and he tried to perpetuate the metaphor by fucking her in the ass. He had her on elbows and knees before she realized what he was doing; she struggled to turn over and he rode her bucking and tossing without a sound. And when it was clear to him that she would never permit it, he grabbed her breast from underneath and squeezed so hard she howled in pain. He dumped her on her back, rubbed himself between her legs a dozen times, and came on her stomach.

Beth lay with her eyes closed and an arm thrown across her face. She wanted to cry, but found she could not. Ray lay on her and said nothing. She wanted to rush to the bathroom and shower, but he did not move, till long after his semen had dried on their bodies.

“Who did you date at college?” he asked.

“I didn’t date anyone very much.” Sullen.

“No heavy makeouts with wealthy lads from Williams and Dartmouth…no Amherst intellectuals begging you to save them from creeping faggotry by permitting them to stick their carrots in your sticky little slit?”

“Stop it!”

“Come on, baby, it couldn’t all have been knee socks and little round circle-pins. You don’t expect me to believe you didn’t get a little mouthful of cock from time to time. It’s only, what? about fifteen miles to Williamstown? I’m sure the Williams werewolves were down burning the highway to your cunt on weekends; you can level with old Uncle Ray….”

“Why are you like this?!” She started to move, to get away from him, and he grabbed her by the shoulder, forced her to lie down again. Then he rose up over her and said, “I’m like this because I’m a New Yorker, baby. Because I live in this fucking city every day. Because I have to play patty-cake with the ministers and other sanctified holy-joe assholes who want their goodness and lightness tracts published by the Blessed Sacrament Publishing and Storm Window Company of 277 Park Avenue, when what I really want to do is toss the stupid psalm-suckers out the thirty-seventh-floor window and listen to them quote chapter-and-worse all the way down. Because I’ve lived in this great big snapping dog of a city all my life and I’m mad as a mudfly, for chrissakes!”

She lay unable to move, breathing shallowly, filled with a sudden pity and affection for him. His face was white and strained, and she knew he was saying things to her that only a bit too much Almaden and exact timing would have let him say.

“What do you expect from me,” he said, his voice softer now, but no less intense, “do you expect kindness and gentility and understanding and a hand on your hand when the smog burns your eyes? I can’t do it, I haven’t got it. No one has it in this cesspool of a city. Look around you; what do you think is happening here? They take rats and they put them in boxes and when there are too many of them, some of the little fuckers go out of their minds and start gnawing the rest to death. It ain’t no different here, baby! It’s rat time for everybody in this madhouse. You can’t expect to jam as many people into this stone thing as we do, with buses and taxis and dogs shitting themselves scrawny and noise night and day and no money and not enough places to live and no place to go to have a decent think…you can’t do it without making the time right for some godforsaken other kind of thing to be born! You can’t hate everyone around you, and kick every beggar and nigger and mestizo shithead, you can’t have cabbies stealing from you and taking tips they don’t deserve, and then cursing you, you can’t walk in the soot till your collar turns black, and your body stinks with the smell of flaking brick and decaying brains, you can’t do it without calling up some kind of awful—”

He stopped.

His face bore the expression of a man who has just received brutal word of the death of a loved one. He suddenly lay down, rolled over, and turned off.

She lay beside him, trembling, trying desperately to remember where she had seen his face before.

He didn’t call her again, after the night of the party. And when they met in the hall, he pointedly turned away, as though he had given her some obscure chance and she had refused to take it. Beth thought she understood: though Ray Gleeson had not been her first affair, he had been the first to reject her so completely. The first to put her not only out of his bed and his life, but even out of his world. It was as though she were invisible, not even beneath contempt, simply not there.

She busied herself with other things.

She took on three new charting jobs for Guzman and a new group that had formed on Staten Island, of all places. She worked furiously and they gave her new assignments; they even paid her.

She tried to decorate the apartment with a less precise touch. Huge poster blowups of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham replaced the Brueghel prints that had reminded her of the view looking down the hill toward Williams. The tiny balcony outside her window, the balcony she had steadfastly refused to stand upon since the night of the slaughter, the night of the fog with eyes, that balcony she swept and set about with little flower boxes in which she planted geraniums, petunias, dwarf zinnias, and other hardy perennials. Then, closing the window, she went to give herself, to involve herself in this city to which she had brought her ordered life.

And the city responded to her overtures:

Seeing off an old friend from Bennington, at Kennedy International, she stopped at the terminal coffee shop to have a sandwich. The counter—like a moat—surrounded a center service island that had huge advertising cubes rising above it on burnished poles. The cubes proclaimed the delights of Fun City. New York Is a Summer Festival. they said, and Joseph Papp Presents Shakespeare in Central Park and Visit the Bronx Zoo and You’ll Adore Our Contentious but Lovable Cabbies. The food emerged from a window far down the service area and moved slowly on a conveyor belt through the hordes of screaming waitresses who slathered the counter with redolent washcloths. The lunchroom had all the charm and dignity of a steel-rolling mill, and approximately the same noise level. Beth ordered a cheeseburger that cost a dollar and a quarter, and a glass of milk.