Лоуренс Блок - Ariel

How long could they go on this way? Hurrying off to motels, shutting out the world for an hour or two, rolling together in fitful passion, then washing each other off beneath the shower and slipping back into their separate lives. Sex had always had an electric intensity for the two of them, and now it seemed to possess a special urgency, as if they were calling upon the flesh to solve problems of the spirit. They could shut out the world by locking themselves in a room at the Days Inn or the Ramada; they could shut out their own thoughts by locking themselves into one another.

But they couldn’t have sex all the time, nor could they spend eternity behind closed doors. Most of the time they were apart. And most of the time Jeff had his thoughts for company.

More and more, lately, they troubled him.

How could the whole thing resolve itself? Could he leave Elaine for Roberta? He looked at his wife and doubted it. She was as attractive as Roberta, and as bright. She was also rather easy to live with, and it had struck him more than once that Roberta would be hell to live with. Roberta was exciting, but the quality that excited him was bearable only in small doses. He couldn’t take her twenty-four hours a day.

Another thing that had struck him was that Roberta wasn’t all that tightly wrapped. From what she’d said, he gathered that David wanted her to resume visits to her psychiatrist. Jeff had a fundamental bias against psychiatrists, thought they were rarely much more than witch doctors, but he wasn’t sure in this case that David was very far off the mark. Because there was something a bit more than slightly crazy about Roberta, and it often bothered him to face this fact.

Was it also this quality that excited him? He didn’t like to think so, and ”crazy” might be too strong a term for Roberta’s emotional eccentricity, but he couldn’t deny that something deep within him responded to that quality in her. Perhaps he wasn’t all that tightly wrapped himself, and perhaps her nuttiness touched off a sympathetic vibration in his own psyche. Wasn’t there a French phrase for that kind of shared lunacy? Folie à deux? Something like that?

On the other hand, just how crazy was Roberta? It might help to know where reality left off and her imagination took over. There was no way he could tell what she had or hadn’t seen lurking in the corner of her bedroom the three nights before Caleb died. But what about Ariel? Was she some sort of twisted child, some kind of evil creature? Or was she just an ordinary little girl hovering on the brink of puberty, and no doubt being driven slightly whacky by her mother’s attitude toward her?

Maybe it would help if he could answer some of those questions. He’d seen Ariel several times lately, but always from a distance and never for any length of time. Once, after he dropped Roberta, he caught a passing glimpse of the child at the street corner. Another time, on an afternoon when he and Roberta had not been together, he’d left the office and walked over to Ariel’s school. He sat on a bench at a bus stop, a newspaper on his lap, and watched the children leaving school and heading homeward, trying not to be obvious about it lest the police pick him up as a potential child molestor. And he’d seen Ariel then, walking briskly down the street with a boy considerably shorter than herself. Probably the odd-looking little fellow Roberta had mentioned, the one who appeared to be Ariel’s only friend.

A third time he’d deliberately parked his car on the route Ariel took to get to school in the morning. He sat behind the wheel, waiting, and felt quite foolish about what he was doing. All the same, something compelled him to wait until the child appeared, wearing a loden jacket over corduroy pants, her bookbag over one shoulder. She walked right past the car and never glanced in his direction, while he studied her and tried to read something in the shape of her face and the way she walked.

Her appearance was unusual, certainly, with her long pale face. But he by no means disliked the way she looked. While no one would be likely to call her pretty, he sensed a quality about her which might well ripen into beauty. He would have liked a longer look at her, but in a matter of seconds she was past him and on her way.

How could she have killed Caleb?

A few days later he and Roberta were in another room at the same Days Inn. This time their coupling, though intense and almost desperate, seemed somehow perfunctory, as though it was something they had to get out of the way, some essential prelude to conversation. Although his climax was as powerful as it had ever been, it left him vaguely unsatisfied, like an orgasm reached by masturbation.

This time sex didn’t make him sleepy. He sat up in bed and kept changing position, trying to get comfortable. Roberta once again sat on a chair, her body arranged in a collection of acute angles, smoking one cigarette after the other and displaying her collection of minor irritations.

The pilot lights on the stove kept going out. He told her, as he’d told her often enough already, to call yet another repairman and have it seen to. She insisted that was pointless. He suggested she get another stove, an electric range, for example. But she liked to cook on a gas flame, she told him, and it was a fine stove, a wonderful stove, and the only thing wrong with it was that the pilot lights kept going out.

And something new to whine about — she was convinced someone was going into Cale’s room and moving things around. In the first place, he couldn’t understand why this bothered her. While he wasn’t prepared to say as much to her, there was something unhealthily morbid in her whole attitude toward the baby’s room. And suppose Ariel did go there, or David, just out of a desire to feel close to Caleb? What was wrong with that?

“But I don’t want them in there,” she explained, without troubling to say why.

He asked how she knew they went in there. Because the position of certain objects seemed to change from one day to the next. But how come she noticed this? How did she happen to visit the room so frequently herself?

“I’m drawn there,” she told him. “The other night — I couldn’t sleep, I got up to go to the bathroom, and on my way back I just found myself in Caleb’s room. I wasn’t even aware of it until I was suddenly standing there with my hand on the light switch. I suppose I was half asleep at the time.”

“Do you go there during the day?”

“Of course. I have to dust.”

“How often?”

She ignored the question. “I go there sometimes. Why shouldn’t I? I’m his mother.”

And Ariel was upsetting her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the child was sneaking around the house, skulking on the staircase, spying on her. “The only time I can relax is when she’s playing her flute,” she said, ”because then I know where she is. But how can I relax with that damned music going on?”

“Maybe it’s the flute.”

“You don’t mean that it’s enchanted, I hope?”

“You described it as some sort of semi-toy. Maybe the sound of a regular orchestral flute would be less likely to give you chills.”

“I think it’s what she plays more than the instrument. But I suppose it’s possible.”

“Suppose she took lessons.”

“I’ve suggested it. Maybe I could suggest it again.”

But nothing he suggested seemed to have much effect on her, and he came to realize she didn’t want to hear his suggestions. She merely wanted to voice her discontent. He felt himself growing increasingly irritated with her, and in a sort of desperation he wound up dragging her back to bed. He was fiercely potent, thrusting at her as if to hurt her, to punish her, to pierce her with his angry penis. But there was no pleasure in the thrusting, and he could neither reach a climax nor lose his erection, and when at last she pushed him away he felt angry with her and with himself.