Blind Assassin (50 page)

The Top Hat Grill has a neon sign with a red top hat and a blue glove lifting it. Up comes the hat, up it comes again; it never comes down. No head under it though, only one eye, winking. A man’s eye, opening, closing; a conjurer’s eye; a sly, headless joke.

The top hat is the classiest thing about the Top Hat Grill. Still, here they are, sitting at one of its booths, out in public like real people, each with a hot beef sandwich, the meat grey on bread white and soft and flavourless as an angel’s buttock, the brown gravy thick with flour. Canned peas on the side, a delicate greyish green; French fries limp with grease. At the other booths sit lone disconsolate men with the pink, apologetic eyes and the faintly grimy shirts and shiny ties of bookkeepers, and a few battered couples making the most Friday-night whoopee they can afford, and some trios of off-duty whores.

I wonder if he goes with any of the whores, she thinks. When I’m not around. Then: How do I know they’re whores?

It’s the best thing here, he says, for the money. He means the hot beef sandwich.

You’ve tried the other things?

No, but you get an instinct.

It’s quite good really, of its kind.

Spare me the party manners, he says, but not too rudely. His mood isn’t what you’d call genial, but he’s alert. Keyed up about something.

He hadn’t been like that when she’d returned from her travels. He’d been taciturn, and vengeful.

Long time no see. Come for the usual?

The usual what?

The usual wham-bam.

Why do you feel the need to be so crude?

It’s the company I keep.

What she’d like to know at the moment is why they’re eating out. Why they aren’t in his room. Why he’s throwing caution to the winds. Where he got the money.

He answers the last question first, even though she hasn’t asked it.

The beef sandwich you see before you, he says, is courtesy of the Lizard Men of Xenor. Here’s to them, the vile scaly beasts, and to all that sail in them. He lifts his glass of Coca-Cola; he’s spiked it with rum, from his flask. (No cocktails, I’m afraid, he’d said while opening the door for her. This joint’s dry as a witch’s thingamajig.)

She lifts her own glass. The Lizard Men of Xenor? she says. The same ones?

The very same. I committed it to paper, I sent it off two weeks ago, they snapped it up. The cheque came in yesterday.

He must have gone to the P.O. box himself, cashed the cheque too, he’s been doing that lately. He’s had to, she’s been away too much.

You’re happy with it? You seem happy.

Yeah, sure…it’s a masterpiece. Plenty of action, plenty of gore on the floor. Beautiful dames. He grins. Who could resist?

Is it about the Peach Women?

Nope. No Peach Women in this one. It’s a whole other plot.

He thinks: What happens when I tell her? Game over or eternal vows, and which is worse? She’s wearing a scarf, of a wispy, floating material, some sort of pinkish orange.Watermelon is the word for that shade. Sweet crisp liquid flesh. He remembers the first time he saw her. All he could picture inside her dress then was mist.

What’s got into you? she says. You seem very…Have you been drinking?

No. Not much. He pushes the pale-grey peas around on his plate. It’s finally happened, he says. I’m on my way. Passport and all.

Oh, she says. Just like that. She tries to keep the dismay out of her voice.

Just like that, he says. The comrades got in touch. They must’ve decided I’m more use to them over there than back here. Anyway, after that endless beating around the bush, all of a sudden they can’t wait to see the last of me. One more pain out of their ass.

You’ll be safe, travelling? I thought…

Safer than staying here. But the word is nobody’s looking too hard for me any more. I get the feeling the other side wants me to scram as well. Less complicated for them that way. I won’t tell anybody which tram I’ll be on though. I’m not interested in being pushed off it with a hole in my head and a knife in my back.

What about crossing the border? You always said…

The border’s like tissue paper right now, if you’re going out, that is. The customs fellows know what’s going on all right, they know there’s a pipeline straight from here to New York, then across to Paris. It’s all organized, and everyone’s name is Joe. The cops have been given their orders. Look the other way, they’ve been told. They know which side their bread is buttered on. They don’t give a hoot in hell.

I wish I could come with you, she says.

So that’s why the dinner out. He wanted to break it to her some place where she wouldn’t carry on. He’s hoping she won’t make a scene in public. Weeping, wailing, tearing her hair. He’s counting on it.

Yeah. I wish you could too, he says. But you can’t. It’s rough over there. He hums in his head:

Stormy weather,

Don’t know why, got no buttons on my fly,

Got a zipper…

Get a grip, he tells himself. He feels an effervescence in his head, like ginger ale. Sparkling blood. It’s as if he’s flying—looking down at her from the air. Her lovely distressed face wavers like a reflection in a troubled pool; already dissolving, and soon it will be into tears. But despite her sorrow, she’s never been so luscious. A soft and milky glow surrounds her; the flesh of her arm, where he’s held it, is firm and plumped. He’d like to grab hold of her, haul her up to his room, fuck her six ways to Sunday. As if that would fix her in place.

I’ll wait for you, she says. When you come back I’ll just walk out the front door, and then we can go away together.

Would you really leave? Would you leave him?

Yes. For you, I would. If you wanted. I’d leave everything.

Slivers of neon light come in through the window above them, red, blue, red. She imagines him wounded; it would be one way of making him stay put. She’d like him locked up, tied down, kept for her alone.

Leave him now, he says.

Now? Her eyes widen. Right now? Why?

Because I can’t stand you being with him. I can’t stand the idea of it.

It doesn’t mean anything to me, she says.

It does to me. Especially after I’m gone, when I can’t see you. It’ll drive me crazy—thinking about it will.

But I wouldn’t have any money, she says in a wondering voice. Where would I live? In some rented room, all by myself? Like you, she thinks. What would I live on?

You could get a job, he says helplessly. I could send you some money.

You don’t have any money, none to speak of. And I can’tdo anything. I can’t sew, I can’t type. There’s another reason too, she thinks, but I can’t tell him that.

There must be some way. But he doesn’t urge her. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bright idea, her out on her own. Out there in the big bad world, where every guy from here to China could take a crack at her. If anything went wrong, he’d have only himself to blame.

I think I’d better stay put, don’t you? That’s the best thing. Until you come back. You will come back, won’t you? You’ll come back safe and sound?

Sure, he says.

Because if you don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. If you got yourself killed or anything I’d go completely to pieces. She thinks: I’m talking like a movie. But how else can I talk? We’ve forgotten how else.

Shit, he thinks. She’s working herself up. Now she’ll cry. She’ll cry and I’ll sit here like a lump, and once women start crying there’s no way to make them stop.

Come on, I’ll get your coat, he says grimly. This is no fun. We don’t have much time. Let’s go back to the room.

March at last, and a few grudging intimations of spring. The trees are still bare, the buds still hard, cocooned, but in places where the sun hits there’s meltdown. Dog doings unfreeze, then wane, their icy lacework sallow with wornout pee. Slabs of lawn come to light, sludgy and bestrewn. Limbo must look like this.

Today I had something different for breakfast. Some new kind of cereal flake, brought over by Myra to pep me up: she’s a sucker for the writing on the backs of packages. These flakes, it says in candid lettering the colours of lollipops, of fleecy cotton jogging suits, are not made from corrupt, overly commercial corn and wheat, but from little-known grains with hard-to-pronounce names—archaic, mystical. The seeds of them have been rediscovered in pre-Columbian tombs and in Egyptian pyramids; an authenticating detail, though not, when you come to think of it, all that reassuring. Not only will these flakes whisk you out like a pot scrubber, they murmur of renewed vitality, of endless youth, of immortality. The back of the box is festooned with a limber pink intestine; on the front is an eyeless jade mosaic face, which those in charge of publicity have surely not realized is an Aztec burial mask.

In honour of this new cereal I forced myself to sit down properly at the kitchen table, with place setting and paper napkin complete. Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there’s no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Yesterday I decided to do the laundry, to thumb my nose at God by working on a Sunday. Not that he gives two hoots what day of the week it is: in Heaven, as in the subconscious—or so we’re told—there is no time. But really it was to thumb my nose at Myra. I shouldn’t be making the bed, says Myra; I shouldn’t be carrying heavy baskets of soiled clothing down the rickety steps to the cellar, where the ancient, frantic washing machine is located.

Who does the laundry? Myra, by default.While I’m here I might as well just pop in a load, she’ll say. Then we both pretend she hasn’t done it. We conspire in the fiction—or what is rapidly becoming the fiction—that I can fend for myself. But the strain of make-believe is beginning to tell on her.

Also she’s getting a bad back. She wants to arrange for a woman, some nosy hired stranger, to come in and do all that. Her excuse is my heart. She has somehow found out about it, about the doctor and his nostrums and his prophecies—I suppose from his nurse, a chemical redhead with a mouth that flaps at both ends. This town is a sieve.

I told Myra that what I do with my dirty linen is my own business: I will stave off the genericwoman for as long as possible. How much of this is embarrassment, on my part? Quite a lot. I don’t want anyone else poking into my insufficiencies, my stains and smells. It’s all right for Myra to do it, because I know her and she knows me. I am her cross to bear: I am what makes her so good, in the eyes of others. All she has to do is say my name and roll her eyes, and indulgence is extended to her, if not by the angels, at least by the neighbours, who are a damn sight harder to please.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.

Having made my decision—and having anticipated Myra’s bleats of distress upon discovering the stack of washed and folded towels, and my own smug grin of triumph—I set about my laundering escapade. I delved about in the hamper, narrowly saving myself from toppling into it head first, and fished out what I thought I could carry, avoiding nostalgia for the undergarments of yesteryear. (How lovely they were! They don’t make things like that any more, not with self-covered buttons, not hand-stitched. Or perhaps they do, but I never see them, and couldn’t afford them anyway, and wouldn’t fit into them. Such things have waists.)

Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away.

The main floor, so far so good. Along the hall into the kitchen, then on with the cellar light and the jittery plunge into the dank. Almost at once, trepidation set in. Places in this house that I could once negotiate with ease have become treacherous: the sash windows are poised like traps, ready to fall on my hands, the stepstool threatens to collapse, the top shelves of the cupboards are booby-trapped with precarious glassware. Halfway down the cellar stairs I knew I shouldn’t have tried it. The angle was too steep, the shadows too dense, the smell too sinister, like freshly poured cement concealing some deftly poisoned spouse. On the floor at the bottom there was a pool of darkness, deep and shimmering and wet as a real pool. Perhaps it was a real pool; perhaps the river was welling up through the floor, as I have seen happen on the weather channel. Any of the four elements may become displaced at any time: fire may break from the earth, earth liquefy and tumble about your ears, air beat against you like a rock, dashing the roof from over your head. Why not then a flood?

I heard a gurgling, which may or may not have been coming from inside me; I felt my heart gulping in my chest with panic. I knew the water was a quirk, of eye or ear or mind; still, better not to descend. I dropped the laundry on the cellar stairs, abandoning it. Perhaps I might go back and pick it up later, perhaps not. Someone would. Myra would, lips tightening. Now I’d done it, now I would havethe woman foisted on me for sure. I turned, half fell, grasped the banister; then pulled myself back up, one step at a time, to the sane bland daylight of the kitchen.

Outside the window it was grey, a uniform spiritless grey, the sky as well as the porous, aging snow. I plugged in the electric kettle; soon it began its lullaby of steam. Things have gone pretty far when you’ve come to feel that it’s your utensils that are taking care of you and not the other way around. Still, I was comforted.

I made a cup of tea, drank it, then rinsed out the cup. I can still wash my own dishes, at any rate. Then I put the cup away, on the shelf with the other cups, Grandmother Adelia’s hand-painted patterns, lilies with lilies, violets with violets, like patterns matched with like. My cupboards at least have not gone haywire. But the image of the cast-away items of laundry fallen on the cellar steps was bothering me. All those tatters, those crumpled fragments, like shed white skins. Though not entirely white. A testament to something: blank pages my body’s been scrawling on, leaving its cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out.

Perhaps I should make a try at gathering these things up, then stowing them away in their hamper, and none the wiser.None means Myra.

I have been overcome, it seems, by a lust for tidiness.

Better late than never,says Reenie.

Oh Reenie. How I wish you were here. Come back and take care of me!

She won’t, though. I will have to take care of myself. Myself and Laura, as I solemnly promised to do.

Better late than never.

Where am I?It was winter. No, I’ve done that.

It was spring. The spring of 1936. That was the year everything began to fall apart. Continued to fall apart, that is, in a more serious fashion than it was doing already.

King Edward abdicated in that year; he chose love over ambition. No. He chose the Duchess of Windsor’s ambition over his own. That’s the event people remember. And the Civil War began, in Spain. But those things didn’t happen until months later. What was March known for? Something. Richard rattling his paper at the breakfast table, and saying, Sohe’s done it.

There were just the two of us at breakfast, that day. Laura did not eat breakfast with us, except on weekends, and then she avoided it as much as possible by pretending to sleep in. On weekdays she ate by herself in the kitchen, because she had to go to school. Or not by herself: Mrs. Murgatroyd would have been present. Mr. Murgatroyd then drove her to school and picked her up, because Richard didn’t like the idea of her walking. What he really didn’t like was the idea that she might go astray.

She had lunch at the school, and took flute lessons there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because a musical instrument was mandatory. The piano had been tried, but had come to nothing. Likewise the cello. Laura was averse to practising, we were told, although in the evenings we were sometimes treated to the sorrowful, off-key wailing of her flute. The false notes sounded deliberate.

“I’ll speak to her,” said Richard.

“We can scarcely complain,” I said. “She’s only doing what you require.”

Laura was no longer overtly rude to Richard. But if he entered a room, she would leave it.

Back to the morning paper. Since Richard was holding it up between us, I could read the headline.He was Hitler, who had marched into the Rhineland. He’d broken the rules, he’d crossed the line, he’d done the forbidden thing.Well, said Richard,you could see it coming a mile away, but the rest of them got caught with their pants down. He’s thumbing his nose at them. He’s a smart fellow. Sees a weak point in the fence. Sees a chance and he takes it. You’ve got to hand it to him.

I agreed, but did not listen. Not listening was the only way I had, during those months, of keeping my balance. I had to blot out the ambient noise: like a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls, I could not afford to look around me, for fear of slipping. What else can you do when what you are thinking about every waking moment is so far removed from the life you’re supposedly living? From what’s right there on the table, which that morning was a bud vase with a paper-white narcissus in it, picked from the bowl of forced bulbs sent over by Winifred.So lovely to have at this time of year, she’d said.So fragrant. Like a breath of hope.

Winifred thought I was innocuous. Put another way, she thought I was a fool. Later—ten years into the future—she was to say, over the phone because we no longer met in person, “I used to think you were stupid, but really you’re evil. You’ve always hated us because your father went bankrupt and burned down his own factory, and you held it against us.”

“He didn’t burn it down,” I would say. “Richard did. Or he fixed it.”

“That is a malicious lie. Your father was stony flat broke, and if it wasn’t for the insurance on that building you wouldn’t have had a bean! We pulled the two of you out of the swamp, you and your dopey sister! If it wasn’t for us, you would’ve been out walking the streets instead of sitting around on your bottoms like the silver-plated spoiled brats you were. You always had everything handed to you, you never had to make an effort, you never showed one moment of gratitude to Richard. You didn’t lift one finger to help him out, not once, ever.”

“I did what you wanted. I kept my mouth shut. I smiled. I was the window-dressing. But Laura was going too far. He should have left Laura out of it.”

“All of that was just spite, spite, spite! You owed us everything, and you couldn’t stand it. You had to get back at him! You killed him dead between the two of you, just as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“Who killed Laura, then?”

“Laura killed herself, as you know perfectly well.”

“I could say the same of Richard.”

“That is a slanderous lie. Anyway, Laura was crazy as a coot. I don’t know how you could ever have believed a word she said, about Richard or anything else. Nobody in their right mind would have!”

I couldn’t say another word, and so I hung up on her. But I was powerless against her, because by then she had a hostage. She had Aimee.

In 1936, however, she was still affable enough, and I was still her protegee. She continued to haul me around from function to function—Junior League meetings, political bun-fests, committees for this and that—and to park me on chairs and in corners, while she did the necessary socializing. I could see now that she was for the most part not liked, but merely tolerated, because of her money, and her boundless energy: most of the women in those circles were content to let Winifred do the lion’s share of whatever work might be involved.

Every now and then, one of them would sidle up to me and remark that she had known my grandmother—or, if younger, that she wished she’d known her, back in those golden days before the Great War, when true elegance had still been possible. This was a password: it meant that Winifred was anarriviste —new money, brash and vulgar—and that I should be standing up for some other set of values. I would smile vaguely, and say that my grandmother had died long before I was born. In other words, they couldn’t expect any kind of opposition to Winifred from me.

And how is your clever husband?they would say.When may we expect the big announcement? The big announcement had to do with Richard’s political career, not yet formally begun but considered imminent.

Oh,I would smile,I expect I’ll be the first to know. I did not believe this: I expected to be the last.

Our life—Richard’s and mine—had settled into what I then supposed would be its pattern forever. Or rather there were two lives, a daytime one and a nighttime one: they were distinct, and also invariable. Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor. Every morning I would take a shower, to get rid of the night; to wash off the stuff Richard wore on his hair—some kind of expensive perfumed grease. It rubbed off all over my skin.