David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

Some dream. I could hear the bedroom air-conditioning as clearly as I could hear her rustling in the sheets.

“Hold me, Harry,’’ she said. “Oh, my God, hold me!’’

I did not know how long it had been. It might have been two minutes or two hours. I could still see the crack of light through the blind but I could not tell how much it had shifted. I had been asleep deeply enough so that I had not heard her come in. It had been the touch of her flesh that woke me.

Her thighs were pressed tight along my own and her face was against my shoulder. She was staring up at me.

“Estelle, for crying out loud—”

My hand had fallen over the curve of her hip and onto her thigh. Maybe I was still dreaming after all. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn the body was Cathy’s. Everything about its touch was exactly as I remembered it.

“Harry,” she said. “Harry, I need you. I need you so much, so desperately. Hold me, Harry. Oh, God, hold me!”

No dream, Fannin. All very real, oh, yes, oh, yes. But did Fannin dig all this? Fannin was rather confused. He had had a bellyful of lunatic junkies, simpering fags, sour writers, greasy gun-punks. Now he had the frustrated old maid sister. The end of a perfect day.

Her arms had come around my neck, clutching at me, and I could feel the swell of her breasts. Her thighs were heaving. I hadn’t moved.

So talk then, Fannin. Try art maybe, or literature. Try the last quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven. Try your all-time favorite football players. Maybe you can get her distracted and nostalgic over Jay Berwanger, Ace Parker, George Gipp, Whizzer White, Jim Dieckleman, John Kimbrough.

Sure.

“Harry,” she said again. She said it like a cry from down a well, like a wail from a cell in the deathhouse, like a moan from an overturned car in a ditch. Her mouth was chewing my face and her legs were thrashing. Poor goddam Estelle. So you’re tired, Fannin. So Thomas Hobbes says the life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Win one for Hobbes. You can do it, Fannin. Win one for all the loyal alumni, for all our far-flung boys in service, for all those sweet white-haired old ladies who told us they’ll never get off those sickbeds again if we lose, for—

“—Harry!”

It was a high, arching, lazy, end-over-end punt. It hung there, floating, almost suspended. Slowly, very slowly, it drifted down, and I waited for it between the goalposts. Five defense men swam up in front of me as I tucked in the ball and began my return. It was like running under water, and they never touched me.

After the game Knute Rockne himself came down into the locker room to pat me on top of the head.

“Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry, I’ve wanted you so, needed you so. Don’t leave me, don’t go away. Don’t even move now, don t move.”

Her face was turned. There was still sweat. And then she was crying.

“Harry.” Her voice was ragged against the pillow. “I was so frightened. When you didn’t call me back after this morning, I was so worried. I was afraid they… afraid…”

“Estelle?”

“—Afraid they might arrest you when they found the money in your apartment, might think you killed her and—”

She winced, gasping in pain. She had to, because I’d grabbed her so tightly by the shoulders that I felt bone.

My face was no more than four inches above her own. I could feel her hot breath, see the sudden fierce panic in her eyes. My voice belonged to somebody else who was trying to scream with gravel in his throat, and I was the only one in the room who could hear him.

You never told this woman about the money in your pad, Fannin, the voice roared.

I sat there on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor in the unreal light. There were Luckies on a telephone table and I took one. The match flared and died. The smoke turned to steel wool in my mouth.

So Henshaw’s batty clock had been right. She had had time to make another stop. Probably Leeds had not even found out what direction she’d taken when he tried to go after her.

“Here,” I said. “She came here.”

Estelle did not answer and I turned to look at her. The sheet was twisted low across her thighs and her hands lay motionless at either side of her, upturned and curled like dead things in the wake of plague. Her face was turned so that only the plane of her cheek was there. The line of her breasts was lovely, as beautiful as Cathy’s had ever been.

“And it probably didn’t have anything to do with the money then either,” I said.

“No.”

“Tell me, Estelle.”

“Yes.”

I heard the sheets whisper and when I looked again she was sitting with her knees drawn up. Her arms were clasped around her calves and her head was pressed forward, and a Modigliani or a Gauguin could have done something remarkable with her. She sat that way for a long time and when she finally lifted her face she kept it straight ahead, not looking at me. Her voice was muted and hard to hear.

“Two-thirty,” she said, “perhaps a quarter to three. She was… I thought she was drunk. She told me about the robbery, things about Troy and running away from a man — it was difficult to follow. Perhaps I was too sleepy, too annoyed to want to understand. She hadn’t been here in weeks, hadn’t even been to see mother in the hospital. I told her to take back the money to whomever she’d gotten it from and to stop acting like a child….

“She took the phone and dialed a number, then she hung up without saying anything and ran out. That was when I saw it in her face, I think, whatever it was that made me realize she really was in trouble. I wanted to make her explain it more carefully. My summer coat was in the front closet and I pulled it on over my pajamas. I took my pocketbook and ran to the elevator….

“I had to wait for it. There was a small foreign car pulling out across the way when I got down, one of those MG’s, and I saw that Catherine was driving it. I called out but she didn’t hear me. My Plymouth was right out front. I got in and followed her….”

“You didn’t see anyone else? A red-haired man in a Dodge?”

“No.”

“Go on, Estelle.”

“Yes.” She had not moved. “I thought I could pull up next to her, but she was driving too fast. She didn’t stop for lights. I didn’t either, after the first one. When she got over to 68th I remembered that your apartment was there. I realized it was probably you she’d called. I thought she would be all right with you. I was going to turn around and go back home. I…”

Her voice broke. I butted my smoke in the tray, not saying anything. Her eyes were deeply shadowed in the dimness. After a while she went on.

“I don’t know why I stopped. I remember she made her tires screech. I parked behind her and I opened the door to get out, then I changed my mind. I don’t think she’d been aware of me at all, she was in such a peculiar state, but she did look around when I closed the door. She turned back and came over to me….

“My hands were actually shaking, I had been so unnerved by it all. I opened the door again, almost just to have something to do with them. I asked her what was the matter….

“She had stopped next to the door, and she was smiling at me. She said… she said, ‘Oh, I don’t need you anymore, Estelle. I’m going up to see a man, he’ll help me. The kind of mm you wouldn’t know anything about. The kind couldn’t get in your life.’ And then she laughed…

“She laughed. I don’t think she meant to be cruel, she was simply upset. But to say that to me, after all those years…”

Estelle stopped. She sat there. I waited. “Nineteen,” she said then. “I was nineteen when our father died, and Catherine was seven. Even then mother was deaf, capable of almost nothing. All those years when Catherine was a child I supported us. I brought her up. I never asked her to be grateful. But what time did I have for anything else — for men? What man would have married me anyhow, with two other people to support?