Clemmie (9 page)

“Oh, no. She died. And that was the damnedest thing ever happened to Daddy. He thought you divorced them. It seemed indecent to have one die. He’s alone now, and he keeps making animal sounds about how I should give up my mad, mad life and go out and make like the lady of the house in that redwood stadium of his. I keep telling him to go live at one of his clubs, but he couldn’t bear to part with the three incomparable and loyal servants who give him a screwing on the household bills every month. I’m the only chick he has, but he can’t force me because two years ago, when I turned twenty-one, a lovely little income started coming in. Thank God my grandmother had some sense about money. If old Georgie didn’t want to spend his senility alone, he should have thought twice before sending a lonely kid off to schools on other continents.”

“If it’s a nice income, why this neighborhood?”

“So I won’t have stuffy neighbors. Wait until you see the layout. Here we are. Down this alley.”

“Isn’t this a warehouse?”

“So it is! Imagine that. And all the time I was thinking it was an apartment house.”

“What are you getting so sore about?”

“Every time you open your mouth you lose five yards. This is a warehouse. That is a shed. Inside the shed is my car. This is a door. That is a loading ramp and— Oh, for God’s sake!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Wait right here. Don’t join the group. Be right back.”

She went over toward the loading ramp. A tall figure came out of the shadows. They spoke to each other in tones so low he couldn’t make out a word. The man had a deep rumbling voice. His words had a plaintive begging sound. Her voice had a sharpness, an impatience. Finally he turned and went off into the darkness. She came back to him.

“Who was that?”

“A creep. He depresses me. He hangs around like some kind of kicked dog. He has a big thing about me. He gets so stinking tragic about everything. He’s a writer. Now he says he can’t write anything and he can’t sleep and—the hell with it. Now where is that key?”

She found the key in the left hand pocket of her pants. The metal door was big. It creaked when it swung open. She went inside and turned on a light. There was a staircase with steel treads just to the left of the door. He could make out a freight elevator, and he had the feeling that the blackness around them was vast and empty.

“Three flights, honey,” she said. “If those arthritic old legs can make it.”

“You young people run on ahead.”

The metal made an echoing sound as they climbed. The still air had a smell of dust and oil. “How did you find a place like this?”

“I met the man who owns it. He told me to fix up what I wanted. He got the strange impression that I was fixing up a home away from home. For him. I must act too friendly or something. Here we are.”

There was a huge room. She went around turning on low lamps. The shades were opaque, so that all the light shone down and was absorbed by a black tile floor. There
was one huge window of fixed glass, with big awning windows on either side of it. There were no buildings to obstruct the view. He could see the heart of the city, the turn of the river, the traffic on the bridges, the floodlighted spires of self-important buildings.

“This is really something,” he said.

“I wanted to put a window in the roof, but that was out. So I had this one made high enough. I get good light in here. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I paint. I paint lousy. But I work at it. Nobody will buy them. I make them too damn big.”

She went over to another switch. “I’m nuts for lights,” she said. “High drama, courtesy of T. Edison.” The floodlight struck a painting hung on a vast expanse of wall. For the first time he could see how high the ceiling was. It was at least twenty-five feet above the floor level. The painting was truly enormous. He could only guess at the dimensions. Perhaps eight feet by twelve feet. The colors were vivid. At first it looked to him like a fire, with tall red, yellow and blue flames. And then he saw that the flames were people. Not precisely people. He could make out a thigh, a breast, a suggestion of a tilted face, a curve of back, buttocks. It seemed to be people all writhing together in flame, dance, orgy or panic.

“Don’t try any sage opinions, Fitz. It’s the most recent one. I had a lot of trouble with the son of a gun. I had to rig a scaffold even when it was standing on the floor. The framer had to come up here with his tools to frame it. It made him pretty jumpy, I think.”

“What do you call it?”

“I stink in the title department. I have to lean on my friends.”

“How about, uh … Weenie Roast on the Banks of the River Styx.”

She gasped, ran to him, strained up against him and kissed him heartily. “Fitz, you weather well. I can’t call it that, but by God you’ve come awful close to what I had in mind when I was doing it. Even Dewey couldn’t top—Oh gosh! Dewey.”

There was a phone on a low table. She trotted over and began to look up the number. He stared at the overpowering picture. There was violence in it. Blood and sex
and fury. It seemed curious that all of that could have come from this small erratic person. She did not seem to be the sort of person who could exercise self-discipline and control her energies long enough.

The tall, slow drinks he had taken had an entirely different effect than the numbing impact of the Martinis. Then he had felt dulled, confused. Now it was very late and he knew he should be weary, but instead he felt vivid and alive. He felt as though he could see all physical objects very clearly, as though in form and color they were making a deeper imprint on memory. The great window came to within two feet of the floor. Directly under it was a long couch, an upholstered slab of foam rubber on an austere base, narrow legs. In a far and shadowy corner was a long trestle table littered with the tools and tubes and stenches of the painter. There were two Eames chairs, looking very alone in their individual islands of space.

He turned and looked at the girl. She was at the phone table, standing grotesque as a teen-ager, standing hipshot, bending abruptly forward, elbow on the low table, free forearm resting with double-jointed ease across the small of her back. It was awkward, yet so seemingly suitable for her that it was a strange kind of grace.

Her voice became suddenly, startling imperious. “… I am afraid I am not satisfied with that sort of answer. You cannot? Then connect me with your emergency people, the people who saw him when he came in. I beg your pardon? Young lady, I certainly do not wish to have to disturb Mr. Entwistle at this hour of the morning. He’s the chairman of your hospital board, is he not? Even though he’s a close personal friend, I think he would be displeased. All right. I’ll hold the line. Thank you for your co-operation.” She turned and made a face at Craig and murmured, “Ghastly little bureaucrat. Hello? Doctor who? Lenetti. Sorry to bother you, Doctor, but I must really have some idea of how seriously injured one of your patients is. He was brought in earlier this evening. Mr. Dewey Maloney. What? Oh, no. I have no idea. Was it an auto accident? Someone phoned me. A mutual friend. No! That isn’t like him. What? Doctor, I’m afraid I’m terribly dull about anatomy. Can you tell me in layman’s
language? Yes. I see. Yes. Thank you
so
much. Good night, Doctor.”

She hung up. “Concussion. Broken jaw. Broken cheekbone. Mouth lacerations. Cracked ribs. Possible internal injuries. The police are interested.”

“Do you always get your way like that?”

She looked surprised. “Don’t you?”

“I’m the milk toast type. They give me the song and dance. I hang up.”

“The system is easy, Fitz. You just keep insisting, and sooner or later something gives.”

“Do you really know this Mr. Entwistle?”

“Daddy knows him. He’s always sneaking up obliquely when they have fund drives. Come and see the rest of the nest.” He had wondered what lay behind the three dark red doors so evenly spaced against the off-white wall.

She swung one open, clicked a switch. “Kitchen.” It was a bare room about ten by ten. The height of the ceiling made it grotesque. There was a bank of the most modern equipment. It looked implausible there, as though in storage.

“Bath,” she said, opening the next door. Again the new and expensive equipment had the look of not even being hooked up. The shower stall was very large, with sliding opaque glass doors.

“Cell,” she said, opening the last door. There was a cot, much bright clothing hanging on an exposed pipe that stretched from wall to wall. Under the clothing was a battalion formation of shoes and sandals. One low bureau. One stool. A barred window.

“Why the bars?”

“They were there. One of the original windows. They give me sort of a special feeling. You know. Guilt. Retribution.”

They went out into the huge room. She stood in front of him. There was an intentness about her that made him uneasy.

“And now back to Maura,” she said, “with careful story of how after the lodge meeting, the boys decided to play some cards and you didn’t want to phone because you thought she’d be asleep.”

He looked at the questing girl and knew that out of some curious honesty, or perhaps a desire of experimentation, she had handed the decision over to him. It was unsettling. For a long time he had watched all the young girls. He had seen them on the summer streets, arms locked, giggling, calves ripe as pears, walking close with sweet billow of breast and hip, full of their own promise and their secret lunacy.

There had been the imaginings that stirred him. Such a one, gentle as peaches, a gasp in his arms, turning toward his strength and experience, turning away from her pimpled gallants. These were all the tireless rovings and imaginings of the mature male.

But this was not one of those. This one was odd. In this there could be trouble. In this very way a man might contemplate murder, not only weighing the chances of secrecy, but trying to guess at the eventual effects of his own feeling of guilt.

During all the years of marriage Maura had been enough. Not enough to quell the imaginings, yet enough to make any overt act of infidelity worth less than the risk. And so, during all the marriage, he had not strayed. But he did not pride himself on that. He knew, objectively, that there had been but very limited opportunity.

She faced him boldly in the light, arms crossed under her breasts, putting it squarely up to him. He felt that he had taken no initiative this night. He felt that had she wished it, she could have maneuvered him into her bed without it ever reaching a point of decision. It would just happen, as the conversation had just happened. Maura was a doll figure in a dim room in the back of his mind, her back turned to him. But Clemmie stood waiting and watching, facing him, her face a speculative mask.

He hesitated a moment, licking his lips. “I thought I told you about Maura, darling. They tell me she’s happy now.”

And the face of Clemmie came alive, piquant. “There
is
a last ember left, my dearest. We can find each other again. All is not dead between us.” She drifted into his arms, and it was the first time he had held her. He had expected to feel a slender fragility. She was lithe enough and slender enough, but hard warm muscles slid under his hands as he held them to her back, as she raised her arms to hold him more tightly.

She backed away from him suddenly, moved quickly around the room and turned off every light except the high spot that brought the huge painting alive and made a reflected glow in the room. The night outside was more vivid, with the moving distant lights of traffic, and the neon-misted stars of July. She stood apart from him, tugged the ribbon from her hair and it fell straight and glossy, the heavy bangs giving her the look of a carving on an Egyptian tomb.

“Remember?” she said softly.

“The way you used to wear it,” he said, knowing his voice was thickened and husky.

She crossed her arms, taking hold of the Basque shirt at either side. With an abrupt gesture she stripped it off over her head, rumpling the black hair; she dropped it, stood before him naked to the waist. Her breasts were boldly tilted. Reflected light touched her torso from the side, making soft highlights on the curves and the swells of her body. She looked like the women of Egypt in the ancient friezes, with their faces small and cold and cruel under the black hair, the women for whom special burial jewelry was made, the dancers who were buried with tiny pet antelopes.

“Remember?” she said.

“Yes.”

They made their love on the coldly modern couch under the great window. She was sinewy, supple, taut with her eagerness. The only suggestions of softness were in lips, breasts, and hips. It seemed more combat than love, and upon his symbolic victory she gave a long cry of anguish as though he had thrust a dagger to her heart.

There was a time when he looked up through the window at the stars. They seemed directly overhead. He sensed that she slept beside him, that all of this made no difference to the stars.

And another time he knew she was up. She brought a pillow for him, spread a sheet over him.

He awoke again before sunup. She was not beside him. When he turned he could see the top of her dark head. He rolled to that side of the couch and saw that she sat naked, cross-legged, on the floor, carefully taking the cards and identifications out of his wallet. He watched her, puzzled, too sleepy to be angry. He imagined that she did not know he was awake, yet when she came to the picture of Maura, the one taken on the beach in Scotland, she said, without looking up, in a conversational tone, “She
is
pretty, Craig. Is she this young?”

“That picture is—twelve years old. We were on our honeymoon.”

“Has she gotten a lot heavier?”

“A little. Not very much.”

“She looks the type who might.” She looked up at him. “Do you two get along?”

“Yes. It’s a good marriage.”

“Then where do you and I fit, darling?”

He felt a quick alarm that destroyed the last dullness of sleep. “Do we have to fit somewhere?” he asked, hoping he sounded casual.

She laughed at him, then said, “Poor Craig. I wanted to see you flinch, dear. And you did, nicely,” She sobered. “I don’t fit anywhere. I never will. I used to think I might, but I got over that. Everything is so neat and orderly for dear Maura, it makes me hate her. She found herself such a nice dependable man. I found mine early, you know. Sometime maybe I’ll tell you. I found him eight years ago.” Her face hardened in a suprising way. “Oh, the tender mystery of a first love. The love of a young girl for a brave and gallant man. My little heart went pitty-pat, pitty-pat. He liked to be amused, you know. And after he’s exhausted every method he could think of of amusing himself with the little love-struck fifteen-year-old girl, he got his kicks by getting her blind on brandy and loaning her out to his friends. And he had a lot of friends. And they had friends. But somebody had the sense to pry me loose and pop me into a rest home. I recovered. Completely.”