Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

“To this man?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imagine for a minute that I believe such an absurdity? You’re lying to me. There’s certainly no man at all.”

She said this with such an air of conviction that it was suddenly imperative to Ivy that the existence of Henry Harper be made absolutely clear and unquestioned as a kind of critical truth from which everything else must develop from this point.

“There is,” she said. “His name is Henry Harper, and he lives in two rooms over a bookstore on Market Street. I met him the night I left here. I went home with him, and I’ve been there with him ever since. He’s really very kind, although a little contrary and difficult. He has agreed to let me stay with him until I can make other arrangements.”

“You’re out of your mind. You definitely are. Are you trying deliberately to destroy yourself?”

“Perhaps you think it would be better to remain here and be murdered.”

“Murdered! You must be having delusions. What can you possibly mean?”

“You know very well what I mean.”

“I assure you that I haven’t the slightest notion.”

“Don’t bother to deny it. It won’t do you any good. You gave me too much sleeping medicine and left me to go to sleep and die, but I discovered it before it was too late. I walked and walked for hours and hours, and I’m still alive, as you see, and now I’ve come back to get my things and go away again. Don’t worry about it, however. I don’t wish you any harm, in spite of what you did. I promise that I won’t cause you any trouble.”

Lila was now looking at her with such an expression of incredulous shock on her face that Ivy, for the first time, began uneasily to question her position, and to wonder if, after all, the sedative bottle had been as full as she had remembered. Thinking back, she realized, moreover, that she had never, that night, become very drowsy after leaving the apartment, except naturally, in due time, as a result of her exhaustion from so much walking.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” Lila said. “I understand that now. I had no idea you were in such a critical state of mind.”

She walked over to Ivy and took her hand and began to stroke it, and Ivy was somehow powerless to take the hand away or to halt the disintegration of her conviction and resolution that had begun with the first doubt of Lila’s guilt. She felt a compulsion to turn and leave immediately without any of the possessions she had come to get, to run away while there was still time. But the truth was that the time had already passed, and all she could do was to stand and be stroked and seduced.

“Oh, you are much more clever and talented than I,” she said, “but I know what you did, or tried to do, and there is nothing you can say or do now that will change it or make any difference. I’m going away, whether you want it or not. Please let me get my things and leave.”

Lila kept stroking her hand. Her eyes were soft, and her voice was softer.

“Of course you shall go, if that’s what you want. You are perfectly free to do as you please, but surely it will do no harm to talk with me for a while and try to understand that I never attempted to do such a terrible thing to you. Come into the bedroom and sit down, and we’ll have a quiet talk together, and you will surely see how wrong you are. Do you seriously believe that I could wish to harm you? Do you remember, when you were at ho ne, how we used to sit under the tree in the yard, and walk together in the country, and lie on the beach, and all the things we said to each other, and were to each other, and meant to each other? Do you think, after all this, that I could do you the least harm or wish, you anything but good? Come now. We’ll have a quiet talk, and everything will be as it used to be, and afterward, if you still wish it, you can go wherever you please.”

She began to pull gently, leading Ivy away from the door and across the room, and Ivy followed as she had followed in other places and at other times, knowing that she should not and desperately wishing that she would not, but following, nevertheless, because Lila was Lila, the way and the life. She tried to think of Henry, of his kindness and the hope for which he stood, but Henry was at the moment no more than a rather fantastic creature in an impossible world that she had surely dreamed about in a bad dream in a bad night. Now, after the bad dream, there was no one left in the bright and shattering world as it truly was except her and Lila, ineffable Lila, and the world was all green and blue and glittering crystal, above and beyond an expanse of hot, white sand, and they were lying on the beach in a secluded cove at home, not on this bed where she had almost died to music. That was the way it had been in the beginning and still was and would always be.

Lila was stroking her now, speaking in her ear the softest words. Ivy’s strength — what was left of it — was drawn from her body like fluid by the insidious caress of Lila’s fingers. Then Lila’s soft, moist lips were upon hers, hungry and demanding, and the old, familiar sensations rolled through Ivy in a tempestuous tide.

Lila’s full-breasted body was locked closely to her own aching flesh. Lila’s lips moved from Ivy’s mouth, to her cheek, her throat, the soft valley between her breasts. Lila’s hands and body were vitally, excitingly alive against her and Ivy began to lose all sense of time. For this little while nothing mattered but Lila — the savage pressure of her writhing flesh against her own slender body, the touch of Lila’s sure hands on her breasts and flanks, the sweet and tormenting caress of her feverish mouth.

Then, suddenly, through the seething sea of sensation that enveloped Ivy came a random thrust of fear and with it a fleeting thought of Henry and what Henry could mean to her — if she so willed it. Deep inside her a warning voice — faint but insistent — whispered that if she were to lie any longer in submission to Lila’s calculated seduction she would be forever lost.

With a strangled cry that tore at her throat like a claw, Ivy jerked herself free of Lila’s warm, intoxicating embrace. She rose, staggering, to her feet, her vision blurred, all her senses hammering, and stumbled to the closet. She jerked open the door, swung it back so that it banged against the wall, then began pulling clothing from the rack in a kind of frenzied abandon.

From the back of the closet she took a large bag. Opening the bag on the floor, she began to throw the clothing into it without the least care. Lila, sitting up on the edge of the bed, her features flushed watched her with eyes that were slowly, after a moment of wonder, filled with the venom of hatred and icy rage.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Her voice was like the edge of a razor. She might have been, from the sound of it, speaking to a guest who had been intolerably vulgar.

“You can see what I’m doing,” Ivy said. “I’m taking my things, and I’m going away, as I said I was.”

“Go, then. I thought I could stop you from making an incredible fool of yourself, possibly from destroying yourself, but I see now that I can’t, and I’m not certain, since you have become such a bore, that I even want to, or would if I could. It will be a satisfaction to me to be rid of you.”

Ivy continued her abandoned packing, and Lila continued to sit on the bed and watch. After a while, Lila got up and went over to the dressing table and got an emery board and returned to the bed. She began shaping her fingernails carefully with the emery board, now paying absolutely no attention to Ivy, who had closed the large bag and was filling a smaller one with toilet articles and other small possessions. Lila did not look up from her meticulous work until Ivy had finished at last and was standing erect beside the large bag, the smaller one in her hand, strangely irresolute in the end, as if, now that the time had come to go, she could not quite believe in her ability to take such definitive action.