Jim Lewis - The King is Dead

You did what?

Now he was singing, in a hillbilly voice: Just to watch him die….

She started to back toward the car. John.

I’m joking. I’m just joking. Nicole. It’s a song, one of those new songs, he said. I didn’t have to leave. Not like that, like you’re thinking. I wasn’t in trouble. I just had to leave because I didn’t want to be there anymore.

John Brice’s house smelled of the walnut boards they’d used to build it; she noticed that as soon as they walked inside. There were four rooms: kitchen, dining room, sitting room, study. This is my place, he said. The light from the lamps was as dim as an old man’s eyesight, and the pictures on the wall were dark and dignified. It wasn’t the sort of house she expected, and then she remembered that he wasn’t the one who had decorated it; the only sign that it was his at all was a saxophone balanced against a music stand in one corner. The rest was rather gloomy. It needed a lighter touch, something a woman would do, and she allowed herself to imagine for a moment…. There’s a big old cellar that’s empty, he said, and a bedroom tucked up under the eaves, upstairs. You can’t tell it’s there from the outside, in front, but there’s a window in back. She nodded; what was this talk of bedrooms, anyway? He took her jacket and hung it on a peg on the wall.

She looked at the saxophone again. Will you play me something? she said.

Maybe later, he said, taking her by the hand and leading her into the kitchen, where he hugged her so hard she cried out and then laughed. I’ll play you something I wrote for you.

Dinner was good, she didn’t know any boys who could cook, but John Brice got together a meal, broiled some steaks with a dry rub made from his grandfather’s recipe, and made mashed potatoes. Now the wine was done. Standing in the quiet kitchen, the dishes piled in the sink, the only light coming from a fixture over the stove, and she wanted to say something to him about how lovely the evening had been, he was before her, beside her, and—how did it happen?—he was behind her, and there was a hole in the back of her that she couldn’t see and couldn’t close. It ran all the way up to her heart, which was pounding and pounding, in anticipation of being crushed. Shhh, she said, and there was quiet. She didn’t want to miss anything; she wanted to feel every fluttering of experience. Don’t worry, he said, but she wasn’t worrying.

There he was, groom and spouse. Come here, he said, although she was already in his arms. He put his hands under her blouse, resting them gently on the warm flesh of her hip. How close did he mean to come? He kissed her, more than once but less than many times; then he led her by the hand into the living room and laid her on the couch. His hand was on her breast and she tipped her head back a little bit, a reflex; she didn’t know what she wanted. He murmured something, she couldn’t make out what, and she couldn’t tell whether he wasn’t talking or she couldn’t hear. She looked all the way across the room to a window. The moon had risen away, climbing up so far that it had disappeared, there was nothing but blackness where the sky would be, and all she could sense was the smell of John’s arms, the wetness of his tongue, his murmuring beneath the noise she made when the boundary broke, the tears and gore leaking out of her, making a mess, and the wind in the trees outside.

She had helped him rend her from the word Miss. What a good sport: so lovely: what a lustful thing. She wasn’t sorry to see it happen, but she lay awake for some hours afterward, gazing on her rags and tatters, until she roused him from his sleep and insisted he take her home before morning. By the time they got back to her house the sun was nearly up and she was exhausted, really so tired she could barely make it the last few steps to the door.

The next day she found that there was little she remembered about those final aspects of the night before: the smell of walnuts, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, and then taking a cool wet washcloth to her bloody thighs and carefully rinsing it clean in the sink when she was done. He said he had a song for her, but he hadn’t had a chance to play it, had he? She remembered his last kiss of the night, which penetrated past her mouth all the way into her skull.

Emily in the living room of their small apartment on Chapel Street, sipping at a gin and tonic in the dust-amber heat of a Saturday evening. Emily, who worked as an assistant at a furniture importing firm and had lunchtime trysts with the married man who managed the place. She was wearing one of his dress shirts, open to her navel, and she was giggling as Nicole described the night before. Then she resumed her usual air of lassitude. How bad was it?

It wasn’t bad at all, said Nicole. Which is not to say that I actually enjoyed it.

Did he enjoy it?—She took another sip of her drink. As long as he enjoyed it, darling. We do what we can.

Nicole frowned. I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

Oh, I’m sure he enjoyed it, said Emily. They usually do.

Speaking of which, how did you get that shirt? said Nicole. Did you send him back to the office bare-chested?

That’s one of those secret tricks we kept women have. How to build up your wardrobe, without his wife being any the wiser. I wonder if I could write that up for one of the magazines. Tips for a Fallen Angel, by Anonymous. She sipped at her drink again. So. My little Nicole has a lover.

I suppose I do, said Nicole.

Hurrah, said Emily. Another wicked girl.

I suppose I am.

Then we’ll have each other to talk to in hell. Bring along a parasol: I hear it’s hot down there.

Well, I may pay for it on Judgment Day, but I’m going to get as much from him as I can in the meantime.

Nicole! Emily laughed.

Jezebel, if you please. Jezebel, harlot, hussy, trollop, any of those will do.

Slut, said Emily, and was immediately sorry she’d said it.

But no,—Slut, said Nicole emphatically, even as she reddened at the word, and wondered if it was right.

On the way home one night, John Brice confessed to a future he’d obviously worked out in detail, so much so that it was more real to him than the car he was driving and the road it was on. We’re going to go out west, we two, he said. We can go to Los Angeles, get out of here. I’m going to put together a band, get a house gig at a big fancy nightclub. Get rich, live in a house up in the hills, with a hundred rooms and picture windows that look out on the lights. We’ll go to parties every night, drive down Sunset Boulevard in a big silver convertible, we’ll know the names of all the important people, and they’ll know ours.

But the whole of his speech was an opposite to her. Everything he said, when he was in that kind of mood, told her in forfeiting terms that he wasn’t the man she had been waiting for. Because she didn’t want any of that: really, not at all. He frowned a little when she failed to answer, but he didn’t say anything more. What did he care if she was silent? His will was all he needed. How did he do that? she wondered. She sometimes thought that he wanted to kill her, or at the very least, that he didn’t care whether he killed her or not.

Over the course of the following few weeks she spent almost half her nights at his house, conscious each time that she shouldn’t be there, she was opening up for something to go wrong. At first she kept forgetting to plan ahead, and she had to wear the same clothes to Clarkson’s the next day and worry that some busybody matron would notice, and know at once what she’d been doing. Then she wised up and left a dress or two at his house; her wanton clothes, they called them. Gin bottles in the liquor cabinet, red moon in the sky, songs on the radio. She had just started to get used to it, sex and all the setup it required, she had just started to enjoy it, when he tested her reach again.