Fletcher Flora - Desperate Asylum

She got out and started to walk toward the front of the car, but when he took a step after her, she stopped and whirled around with that incredible and savage speed, her voice a thin projection of venom that shocked him and made him feel suddenly withered and sick.

“Go away! Go away at once before I kill you!”

Turning, she went on alone around the car and up across the porch and into the front hall. She stood just inside the door and listened to the Caddy’s motor start and diminish and die away, and whatever it was that had been waiting in the house all day and had been waiting when she had left the house at the end of the day was still waiting now that she had returned to the house in the middle of the night. She stood there for a few minutes, wondering where she should go and what she should do, and then she walked into the living room and turned on a light and began walking slowly around the room, stopping and looking at things and picking them up and setting them down again. After a while she came to a console radio-phonograph that was hardly ever used by anyone, and she got down on her knees and began to look through the records in the cabinet, and after she had looked at perhaps a dozen she came to one called Death and Transfiguration . She remained on her knees in a posture of prayer, looking at the label on the record and thinking that she had tried in a way to achieve a transfiguration, and it had not worked, it had only gone from bad to worse to worst, and perhaps after all death was the only transfiguration, the only possible real change, and anyhow this would surely be a solacing record to listen to in the ruins of this worst of all nights. Getting up from her knees, she put the record on the machine and sat down to listen to it, and she found in the music a great and cathedral-like gloom that was tremendously satisfying. When the record was finished, she sat still and permitted the mechanism to start it playing again, and she continued to sit still and listen while the machine repeated the record a number of times, and one of the remarkable things about it was that in all this time, which was considerable, she didn’t even seem to want a drink. Not until the Caddy came back into the drive did she get up and stop the machine and go upstairs. In her room, she took off her dress and her shoes and lay down on the bed in darkness and listened to the small sounds involved in the elimination of time and space between her and Avery, his entrance into the house, his ascent of the stairs, his entrance into the room, his sigh as he sat on the edge of her bed.

“Lisa,” he said.

“Yes?”

“How are you feeling?”

“I am feeling quite well, thank you.”

“Are you? I’m glad that one of us is feeling well, at least, because I am not. I am feeling tired and defeated. I feel as if I had come to the end of things.”

“It’s my fault. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. Once I could have helped it, and I should have done it then, but you can see that now it is much too late.”

“Yes, I can see that. I see it and accept it. Did you mind my asking Em to bring you home?”

“No, I didn’t mind, but it would have been better if you hadn’t. I tried to seduce him and was unsuccessful.”

“Why on earth did you do that? I don’t understand.”

“Because he is a man and I am what I am? The answer is very simple. It wasn’t him at all. It was someone else. Now do you understand?”

“I think that I do. As nearly as it is possible for me to understand.”

“It is certainly devious, isn’t it? Perhaps you think it is unnatural. Do I disgust you?”

“No.”

“Certainly I must disgust you. And you must also certainly hate me. I will feel better about it if you hate me.”

“I told you that I am tired and defeated. I am much too tired to feel disgust or hatred or anything else. I can’t even feel disgust or hatred for myself, which is something that has not been true since I was a small boy.”

He got up slowly from the edge of the bed and went out of the room, and she lay in the silence he left behind and did not move. In time he came back and sat down again on the bed, and something hard lay lightly on the bone above her heart.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

“It feels like a gun.”

“That’s what it is. A gun. Do you know what I am thinking?”

“You are thinking that you will kill me.”

“Would you mind a great deal if I were to kill you?”

“I don’t think so. I have often wanted to die, and once I tried, and I think I would be grateful if you killed me now.”

“Do you remember what I said when you asked me the last time why I wanted you to stay?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“What did I say?”

“That if our marriage was not the beginning of something good, it should at least be the end of everything bad.”

“That’s right. That’s what I said.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about it.”

He thought about it, and she lay with the weight above her heart and listened alone to the dry interior weeping, the vestige of impossible tears.

And it ends, as it began, with Emerson Page, a nice guy who never quite knew what it was all about.

He lay beside Ed, lying very still so as not to disturb her, and he tried to figure it in his mind, how it had started and grown and come at last to the end it had come to, but it made no sense to him whatever, it would never make any sense to him as long as he lived, and what disturbed him profoundly, in addition to the sorrow he felt as a compassionate man, was the thought that he might himself have been in some measure responsible. He knew in his heart that this was not so, that it could not possibly be so, but there was still to remember the horror of last night, her savage attack that seemed now in retrospect to have been a supplication, and the final venomous words that were the last he would ever hear from her and that he now heard like an echo above the breathing of Ed.

He listened to the voice and the breathing, and he was grateful for Ed’s warm body so near him, but for some strange reason he did not want to touch her or have any physical contact with her at all, and this was the first time he had ever felt such a reluctance. It was something that would soon pass, he knew that very well, but at this moment it existed for the first time, and he would not have thought it possible.

He could not sleep, and he wanted a cigarette, and he wondered if he could get up and get one without disturbing Ed. Very carefully, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up on the edge, and he was immediately aware, even before she spoke, that Ed was not asleep and had not been asleep, but had been lying quietly, like him, staring up into the darkness.

“You’re still thinking about it,” she said.

“I know. I can’t help it. Both of them that way. Shooting her and then himself.”

“Darling, you had better forget it.”

“Can you forget it?”

“No, but it would be better if I could.”

“I keep wondering why.”

“Darling, you had better quit wondering.”

“There was something wrong between them, Ed. I keep thinking I might have helped.”

“You know what was wrong between them, and there was no way you could have helped.”

“I guess so. I guess you’re right. Would you care for a cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

He got up and found one for himself and lit it and went out of the bedroom into the living room and across the living room to the front window. He stood there smoking the cigarette and looking down into the street of Corinth, and the street was narrow and lifeless and splotched with dirty light, and he remembered it suddenly as he had seen it three-quarters of a year ago with the snow slanting out of the night and a strong wind blowing between the buildings. It seemed to him that everything had begun that night, the whole sad and confusing business of Avery Lawes and the woman who had become Lisa Lawes briefly and to no good purpose, but he knew that this could not really be true, that nothing actually began and ended in so short a time. All things come from many times and sources, and there is no short and simple chronology to the bad end.