Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

Then my mad passed. Just like that. I don’t hold it for very long. And she looked like she might cry, and I didn’t want that, God knows.

“It was your manner,” she said.

I was suddenly contrite. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I guess I was just so enthused about the possibilities, I didn’t realize I was coming on strong.”

“But you understand why I can’t let you do it, don’t you?”

I understood. “Sure. I suppose. You want to do it yourself.”

“I have to. To prove I’m worth it”

I nodded my head, too many times. “Right, right. I understand. I’m not stupid, I understand.”

I walked over to the typing table. “What’re you working on?”

“Short story.”

“What happened to that Cosmo piece? Aren’t you late with it?”

“I’ll finish it. Don’t start prying.”

I gritted my teeth, and picked up the short story. “Mind if I read it?”

“No, I guess not.” She paused. She wanted to say something. I walked over slowly, kissed her lightly, and grinned. “Whose turn is it to put some fresh sheets on the bed?”

She grinned back. At first timorously, then with her comic rendition of naked lust. “Mine.”

She went into the bedroom and I heard her opening drawers. I sat down on Roger and started reading the short story. It was good. Very good.

She came in and started undressing. In front of me. I wanted to read her story. I wanted to be as impressed by her as a talent, as a substance, as I was by her in bed. It was tough concentrating on the story. She peeled down to black bra and red knit panties. Then she peeled out of them, too, and arched her back. I looked up, and smiled.

“Come along to bed, Johnny, like a good boy.”

Something went hard and flat in my gut.

She waltzed into the bedroom. I heard the bed springs creak. I didn’t move. She called. I didn’t answer. She called again, urgently. I tensed my jaw muscles and kept reading. I wasn’t going to let her do it to me. I’d see how good the story was, despite her.

She was silent a moment, then I heard her moving around. She came out bareass, wearing a fur vest. She paraded around in front of me, a voluptuous Raggedy Ann. “Hey, psssst, meester … kinky sex?”

“I’m reading your story,” I said.

She stopped moving and stood there, and I felt heat rising in the room. Then she reached over and grabbed it out of my hands. “Well, stop reading it! I don’t want you to read it. I want you to —”

I stood up and started to put on my jacket. She looked at me. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“I thought you said you understood?”

“I said it and I meant it. I do understand.”

“Then why are you going home? You’re being a bastard!”

I turned around three times, widdershins, like I didn’t know where the hell the wind was blowing from, but cold all the same. Outer dark waited.

“No, baby, I’ll tell you what I’m being. I’m being sick.

“You make me feel like a cock with a mouth at the other end that once in a while says something cute.”

“I —”

“No, fuck it, Holdie! A man likes to do for a woman sometimes, you know. He likes to do for her. That doesn’t make him a sexist or her a piece of property; it’s just a way of caring, you know what I mean? But you won’t give me that. All you can handle is the cheapest thing I’ve got to offer. Now I know what a whore feels like. You reduce me to being a stud. Well, I won’t play that, baby. I’ve got to do some things for myself, too.”

‘That’s not the way it is, at all!”

“Not, huh? Well, then, why is it that all I can think of in this scene is that big body of yours, and getting laid? Politics me? Violence me? Dissent me? What’s the world like me? Not on your life, baby. It’s just come in and stick it in and move it around and leave it behind because I don’t need anything from you but that.”

She dropped her jaw. I hurt inside.

“Well, it’s no price, baby. No price. What I get from you is promises of laughter, just promises, you know. And that ain’t near enough.”

I got out of there, somehow, and got the car started, somehow, and managed not to go off the cliffs on the way home, somehow, and I swore when — if — I made it back to my apartment, somehow, I’d attack that fucking typewriter and write it all out, somehow.

This last will and testament of the man going down for the big third.

No death. Nobody dies of a broken heart. That’s too cheap gothic novel, too cornball. But outer dark awaits. I swore I’d write it all down, Holdie Karp. Write it all down, about nails in the coffin.

And this is it.

A lot of us are reconstructed sexists. We ain’t perfect. Sometimes we call you chicks, and sometimes we call you baby, and there are even some who still slip up once in a while and call a woman a broad.

But we do the best we can.

A lot of us learned the hard way about women, that you aren’t the chattel we thought you were, what we were taught you were through two thousand-plus years of tradition and bad novels by men. But we learned, and we’re still learning. And it isn’t that easy for some of us who were brought up macho.

But we do the best we can, dammit!

And maybe it’s only fitting that some of us, the biggest offenders, get back some of the shit treatment we gave out. And maybe it isn’t.

It was, perhaps, that Hervey Ormond had been a criminal for ten years. And when a man has been a criminal for that long — concealing it as well as Hervey Ormond — the first person to cry “Thief!” at him may well meet with misfortune.

Hervey Ormond shot his secretary three times.

Eleanor Lombarda was not a beautiful girl, a fact so obvious it had caused wonder among the more inquisitive residents of Chambersville. Wonder as to why Ormond — who was known to like his women full and fawning — had hired her. More, they wondered why he had kept her on for six years. Eleanor had been preceded by a string of comely girls, few of whom could actually take shorthand, or find the business end of a dictaphone. So it was with wonder that the residents of Chambersville saw the too-thin, too-nervous girl with the too-red face establish herself in the office of the Ormond Construction Company as Hervey Ormond’s personal secretary — for six years.

They might have been surprised to know that the reason for her stranglehold on the position was simply that she did a marvelous job. She was industrious, interested in the work and kept things in top-drawer shape. She always knew what was going on, precisely.

That was another reason why Hervey Ormond shot her three times.

“I found the reports,” Eleanor said, her face white in the glare of the lone desk lamp. For the first time in her life her face was not florid but a pale and unhealthy white.

“Yes,” Ormond said slowly, thoughtfully, closing the office door, “I know you did.”

He had returned for the dossier left behind that afternoon. He had returned abruptly and without warning, at midnight, to find Eleanor leafing through his hidden file.

Eleanor’s voice was nervously firm. “You aren’t paying me enough, Mr. Ormond. I want a raise … a big raise.”

Hervey Ormond was a fat little man. No more fitting description could be summoned up than that. He was a fat little man, almost the caricature of a butterball. Round of face and form, with rosy cheeks, little squinting eyes of gray paste, execrable taste in clothes and unsavory breath.

Luckily, it had not been his personal appearance that had made him his fortune. Perspicacity and a certain ruthlessness in business had done that.