Fletcher Flora - Desperate Asylum

She removed her robe and gown and stood looking at herself in the full length mirror of her dressing table. It was very strange how she felt about her own body, fiercely possessive with a kind of wild and terrible sadness, as if it were something apart that had been assigned to her custody for the care and protection she could not provide. It was like a child, her own child, and she had somehow failed it. Sometimes, looking at it, she would stroke it and croon to it and feel like crying because it was not stronger and lovelier and more like other bodies she had known. But now she saw it and felt only despair and wished never to see it again. Going into the bathroom, she had the shower and then returned a few minutes later to the bedroom and covered the body with clothing without looking at it again, except partially and quickly as was necessary in dressing.

In the hall below, she stood at the foot of the stairs and wondered what it was she had come down for. She had come for a specific reason, she remembered, but she could not remember what it was, and now that the dizziness had passed and she had been a little revived by the shower, she had completely forgotten about not having eaten and the necessity for food. She was only aware that whatever had followed her from sleeping to waking had also followed her from the bedroom to here and would follow her wherever she went in the house, and that it was therefore necessary to get out of the house at once. She went out the front door and around the house into the back yard and down all the way to the swing near the edge of the bluff overlooking the river valley. A few nights ago, she recalled, she had sat here and told Avery the truth about herself. There had been a kind of satisfaction in it at the time, but it had not come to anything, apparently, and in fact nothing had been said about it since, and she suspected that this was another example of his God-damn depressing kindness that was always placing her under some sort of moral obligation. The yardman, she noticed, was no place to be seen or heard. No doubt he had found it too hot to work, and it was indeed excessively hot. It was dry and blistering heat, destructive heat, the kind that could easily kill you if you weren’t careful. It was, as a matter of fact, far too hot to be sitting in the swing, it was already getting unbearable, and the only thing to do was to go back into the house in spite of whatever was waiting there. In the house she could probably find some gin and soda and lemon juice and make a tall Tom Collins and drink it slowly in the living room, which was air-conditioned. In this way, it would be possible to wear out the time until Avery came home to take her to the party she wasn’t going to, and maybe tomorrow would be a better day, but this was hardly likely.

She got up and went back into the house and found the ingredients for the Tom Collins and made it. In the living room, she sat in a large chair and looked out through a window into the bright still day and sipped the cold drink slowly, and by sitting quietly and thinking as little as possible she was able to induce a kind of semi-trance through which the remainder of the afternoon slipped silently in an illusion of peace. The only time she moved from the chair was when she became aware that her glass was empty and got up to fill it. She returned at once and was still there when the light outside had lost its brightness and Avery came home.

He came into the living room and said, “Hello, Lisa.”

“Hello,” she said.

“How was your day?”

“Rotten. My day was rotten.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Please don’t be sorry. I’m sick of people being sorry about things.”

“Perhaps the party will cheer you up. You need to get out more.”

“Do I? Is that what I need? It’s very comforting to know that there is someone around who knows immediately just exactly what it is that I need.”

“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Lisa. Are you drinking a Tom Collins?”

“Yes. That’s what it is. It’s my second one, and earlier I had two straight whiskeys, or maybe three.”

“I wouldn’t drink too much before the party if I were you.”

“I know you wouldn’t. That’s because you are a stronger character than I. You are not I, however, which is your good luck, and it doesn’t matter about the party, anyhow, because I have decided not to go.”

“Not go to the party? Why?”

“Must I have a reason? Very well. I’ll give you several and you can take your pick. I hate the club. I hate your sickening friends. I hate dull parties. I just prefer to stay at home. Is any of those satisfactory?”

“I think you are being unreasonable.”

“Do you? No doubt I am.”

“It would be different if you were ill.”

“Is that what you want me to say? All right, I’m ill. I’m ill and can’t go to the party. That’s what I had planned to tell you, anyhow, and it would have been simpler if I had done it to begin with.”

He was silent for so long a time that she turned her head and looked at him, and she was surprised to see that his face was deathly white with the mouth so distorted that it looked like an ugly, ragged wound. She realized that he was very angry and was controlling himself by a monstrous exertion of will. She had never seen him angry before, and she felt suddenly a stirring of excitement, almost a sense of exhilaration. After a moment, he stepped forward deliberately and slapped her across the face. It was a strong blow that knocked her head around and would have sent her sprawling from the chair if the arm had not prevented it. Her glass dropped from her hand and rolled across the carpet, leaving a trail of wetness and spread slowly through the pile.

“I will tell you something,” he said. “You will go to the party tonight.”

The blow struck, the excitement was gone. In its place was utter acceptance of the inevitable in the belief that nothing could ever have been different from what it had been and nothing could be changed from what it was bound to be. She was a fool ever to have thought otherwise. The bad day was going and the worse night was coming, and she had survived the one in order to fulfill her commitment to the other. So much was quite simple and quite true. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes.

“All right,” she said. “If you want me to go, I will go.”

The Corinth Country Club hired a live orchestra every Saturday night. Once in a while, for something special, it was an orchestra from Midland City, and sometimes it was even one of the name bands you had probably heard on radio or had at home on platters, but usually it was the Corinth High Flyers, which it was tonight. Besides the piano, there were six instruments in the orchestra, seven if you counted both the saxophone and the clarinet, which were played at different times by the same Flyer, and people were always saying that it didn’t make much sense to lay out all that money for an outside organization when you had something just as good or better right at home. The girl vocalist was good too, a damn sight better than most of the girls up in big time, and it was just one of those things that she wasn’t up there herself, but of course everyone knew that the breaks made all the difference in that sort of success, and for each one who made it there were at least a dozen just as good who didn’t. The vocalist was billed as Flame Farrell, a platinum blonde whose name alluded to temperament and not pigmentation. According to Merlin Collins, who claimed to have learned from experience, her temperament could be incited to fever heat by the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.

In Merlin Collins’ opinion, virility was an obligation. His own was uncertain, as a matter of fact, and he was therefore constantly trying to prove that it wasn’t by attempting to seduce as many women as possible, preferably the wives of his friends in order to give them an idea of what they were missing in their routine engagements. It was part of his technique to call all women baby. Take the average woman at the right time, he always said, you could do almost anything with her if you called her baby. They all liked it, every damn one of them, even the ones who pretended they didn’t, and the ones who liked it most were the ones who were getting a little older than they liked to admit. Like the one old Avery Lawes had picked up in Miami, for instance. Chances were she was pushing thirty, and she tried to act like she was in cold storage or something, but, by God, she was a damn attractive woman in a snotty kind of way, and that was the kind that surprised you. The reserved ones, that was. It was really something to see the way the reserved ones fell apart in the end, all of a sudden with a God-damn bang, and there was always a fire inside. That was why they always acted so cold and snotty, of course, because they knew the fire was there and had to be watched all the time to keep it from getting out of control.