John Gardner - October Light

“Suit yourself,” the state policeman said.

The younger one was writing with a ball-point pen. What he was writing on had pages and pages, an inch or more of them clamped together by a black binder.

The Mexican leaned toward the window, trying to see. “That some kind of a report?” he asked.

The older policeman grinned. “Naw,” he said. “Damn kid’s workin on a book.”

Sally, up in her room, read:

12

THE PRICE OF PEARL

On the second day after she’d lost track of him, Pearl Wilson slipped her key into Dr. Alkahest’s apartment door as she’d done a hundred times before that (the elevator stood open behind her, the grated, shuffling little room peculiarly humble in the presence of the entryhall’s cool white walls, the cobalt blue curtains; it had the look of a servant waiting politely, secretly scornful), and as soon as she’d pressed the apartment door open half an inch she knew there was something terrible inside. She hesitated, half expecting the door to be snatched out of her hands and the thing inside, whatever it was, to snatch her wrist and jerk her inward. Nothing happened. The rational part of her mind moved over the question with careful antennae while the rest conjured demons: Sundayschool horrors and newspaper horrors (she had read last night of a rape that had happened in one of the federal office buildings, and she had suffered then, as she suffered now, in the jungle-shadowy back of her mind, the flame of the intruder’s breath, the blue-white fire of his nails and teeth).

She closed her eyes, took a breath. If anything terrible was waiting in the room it would be a man in a suit, legs crossed at the knee, a notebook, a gold ball-point pen. That was the shape things ominous took in apartments like this one.

All this time Pearl stood erect, prim — except for the closed eyes, the intake of breath, no sign of her panic on her face: a lovely young black, perhaps twenty-seven, in a fine, moderately expensive brown coat from Macy’s, loosely belted, a discreet brown hat with a vermilion feather three inches long, brown stockings, brown, Italian shoes that perfectly matched her purse, her hat, her gloves. Her form was magnificent, her face like a carving, not soft and pliable but elegant, poised. Her lips were full and sharply lined, undecorated. Her lashes, natural, were finer and darker than Japanese black silk. One might have wondered, peeking out at her in what she took for the empty entryhall, “Where does such a creature belong?” In some university, perhaps, regally poised at her student desk in a red dress open at the neck, narrow V’d, taking notes in her round hand on history or literature or microbes; but Pearl had done badly at

State and had quit — though her speech was faultless and she liked to read, she’d gotten C’s in English, even worse in math — and she never wore red. In some shop then? Some nifty gentlewomen’s shoppe like the ones where she bought her shoes, her brown silk scarf? But Pearl had tried that. Her mind would click off while the supervisor was speaking with her, and in a moment she would see, as if from infinitely far away, the fat little woman’s lips shaking, her tiny blue eyes unnaturally light, one fat pink hand pressed to her heart. “Girl, why you got to be so uppidy?” her mother used to wail when she was still alive. Pearl would walk away. She wasn’t uppity. She knew what was deserved and what was not — knew, exactly to the penny, her worth.

So she cleaned house like a Nubian slave, though a born princess, because the money was good, so that she could live in approximately the way she wished — could buy records and books, new clothes for church, an occasional lithograph, reproductions of paintings — could keep up the noble old traditions she in fact had never known. If traditions made you safe, gave stability, identity — or at least the illusion of secure identity — she would be safe, though she knew there was no safety, finally. She’d had a friend once, a young minister. He had taken his religion seriously — had taken it to the streets, to the druggies, the drunks and small-time thieves. But it was expensive and, besides, unseemly, taking religion to the ugly and fierce; religion was community, and they preyed on community. Soon he’d found he had behind him only his beliefs, no church. His beliefs had changed. He had seemed to her once beautiful and vulnerable, the two inextricable in his character, or perhaps the beauty was the vulnerability. If she were to meet him now, she knew, she would be afraid of him.

Still there had come no sound from the room. Strong as it was, she dismissed the intuition and opened the apartment door wide. Nothing was changed. If he’d been back while she was away, he’d left no sign. The gray-white monkscloth curtains were drawn, making the place a crypt. She opened them, then opened the window a crack to get rid of the scent of — what? Without removing her coat, as if the intuition she’d dismissed was still with her, she walked through the never-used dining room to the kitchen. There was nothing changed there either: no sign that he’d eaten or even entered the place. Yet she hesitated, troubled by an inexplicable sense that, once again, the jungle had inched closer. She caught that smell again, like escaping gas, and knew even before she checked the range that that was not where it came from. Moving quickly all at once, she went back into the dining room and opened the bathroom door. She caught her breath. On the white sink, the white Formica top beside it, there were black handprints. She shot a look behind her, but the dining room was empty. “Jesus,” Pearl whispered. There was a towel on the floor, black and horrible, and the room was full of a smell like rottenness. Worse. There were smudges of filth on the floor too, and on the bathtub and toilet. She knew now what the black stuff was, though the word escaped her. Was the creature still here. Her roommate would be at work, not reachable till five. She remembered then the telephone number in her purse. Leonard had insisted that she take it, his neighbor’s number; they knew where to get him if she needed him. “Phone up, now,” he’d said, urgent yet casual, like the boyfriend in one of those sunlit, big-city horror films. “No jive, baby. Phone up.” She felt better, as if the phone number were Leonard himself, curled up snug in her purse ready to leap out into the room with a howl of Banzai! to defend her.

Because of the confidence the number gave her, she hurried to the bedroom, where a worse surprise awaited her. The bed, not slept in, had black stains on it, and on the carpet beside it lay a black pile of clothes. She only looked at first, steadying herself on the doorframe. Then she bent down to touch the mess, and the word suddenly popped into her mind: sewer. He’d fallen in the sewer, or someone had thrown him there, then brought him back, for some reason, and changed his clothes, or else he’d crawled back himself — or, no, hired someone to carry him — and he’d changed and returned to — wherever — without a word. Before she knew she’d do it she had slipped her gloves off and was going through his pockets, gritty outside, slimy inside. Everything was gone but a few slips of dirt blackened paper. She took them to the bathroom and held them, one by one, under the faucet. The first was a note in ink, and whatever it said went down the pipes to the darkness it came from. The second was a note in pencil. She set it on the windowledge to dry a little. The third was a sales receipt which she didn’t even finish cleaning when she saw that it was nothing. She looked again at the pencil note. The Indom (something) off mexico lost souls r.

In the elevator she suddenly changed her mind and pressed the button that would take her up, not down. She felt unreal, a little wild, like the heroine in a scary movie. The door closed and she felt the sudden lift that would take her to the tower. The first thing she saw when the elevator opened was that the gin cupboard was ajar. It was someone else, then, she thought, and they had robbed him. Her skin prickled as it always did when she was reminded of the intruder, and she clenched her fists.