Weep for Me (11 page)

“Ten checks.”

I whistled softly. “We’ve got a few hours work.”

She looked up at me, the money in her hands. She tilted her head a bit to one side. “Kyle, I was almost certain you wouldn’t do it.”

“I did it.”

“You are a criminal now. Do you feel sorry?”

“I can’t help feeling a little nervous.”

“I said sorry, not nervous.” She moved closer, lifted her mouth hard against mine, set her small even teeth in my lower lip, right on the threshhold of pain.

“Sorry?” she said. Her voice was distorted by what she was doing. I had my arms around her. She held the money to her breast. I could feel the bulk of it, in her clasped hands, against my chest.

“No,” I said. “Not sorry.”

She released my lip. Her eyes were shut. “Tell me what you are. Say it.”

“I am a criminal.”

“Now tell me why you did it. Tell me, Kyle.”

“Because you wanted me to.”

“No, Kyle. Because it’s the only way you could have me.”

S
he had a place all set for it. She had cut a piece of cardboard to fit inside an oval hatbox. She spread the money in the bottom of the hatbox, slid the cardboard down to cover it, put a hat in it, fastened the lid on, and put it on the closet shelf.

“There!” she said.

We ate there. We worked on the checks and the records until after ten. The strain of the day had taken much out of us. I did not touch her. I went slowly down the stairs and went to bed.

Tuesday the checks from Monday arrived at her desk without incident. Tuesday was a slim day, Wednesday not much better. Thursday I switched checks for $5,600. Each night she insisted on counting not just the day’s take, but the total. I sat on the couch and watched her. She sat on the floor counting them into neat piles: $20,500.

She played with the money as a child plays with a fascinating toy. It gave her a hard, brilliant excitement. I went to her, where she was surrounded by her stacks of money, and she responded like flame. And afterward she crouched nude and collected the scattered bills and counted them once more, packed them away before leaving the room. I knew that I would never forget that scene. Lamplight slanting on the lithe marble body. The rustle and slap of the bills. Head bent, strand of black hair reaching down toward the quick fingers. The perfect groove down her back, convex at the shoulders, concave at the small of her back where the waist was slimmest. It was the way I had seen her, crouched at the file cabinet, just three weeks before.

Friday night we packed the total of $23,800 into one of her small suitcases. We took a train to Syracuse, and we did not sit in the same coach. I had the money for the car with me, withdrawn from the joint savings account. When I met her outside the Syracuse station, near the
cabs, I saw that she had changed her make-up and hairdo as before. This time she had reddened her white cheeks with rouge. We got in a cab and went to Warren Street. I introduced her to the landlady as my wife, Mrs. Marshall. When we had closed ourselves in the furnished room, she looked slowly around at the shiny depressing maple, faded chintz, rose-flowered rug, and said, so very softly. “I’ll never live like this. Never, never, never.”

“Just temporarily, Mrs. Marshall.”

She studied me. “Those glasses change you. We look like Walter C. Marshalls, don’t we? Tomorrow I’m going to buy some clothes. Silly, bright, cheap clothes that are too tight for me, the kind I used to wear before I was married. And clattery, jangly junk jewelry. Harry taught me never to wear jewelry, how to dress, how to do my face and hair.”

I unpacked the suitcase I had brought, put the contents in the drawers and closet with the things I had brought over the first time. These were the things I would keep. Now nothing was left in my apartment that I wanted.

She sat on the double bed and watched me. The room seemed to be something to her, seemed to put her beyond my reach. I sat beside her and put my arm around her. She plunged away from me, spun, and faced me. “No,” she whispered.

We walked five blocks to a restaurant, ate like strangers who happened to be seated at the same table. She carried the small suitcase with her. She did not want me to carry it for her. I bought reading material. She wanted a paper. Back in the room she spread the paper across the pillows, lay propped up on her elbows. I sat in a chair and read. From time to time I glanced over at her. She read the paper line by line. Classified ads, local society notes. Everything.

“Don’t you read anything else?” I asked her.

She looked at me for a few moments. “No. Just papers.”

“Funny habit.”

“Why is it? This is real. This is what has happened to
people yesterday and today. Who cares about imaginary people? They bore me.”

“You know, I know so little about you. It seems funny. When you’re alone all day, what do you do?”

“Nothing, really. Oh, if I’m bored, I keep putting on different dresses and things, and looking at myself. And every day I exercise a long time.”

“Exercise?”

She rolled over onto her back, her head on the crumpled newspaper. She put her hands on her hips, put her heels together, legs straight, lifted her heels about six inches off the bed, and held them steady. “This is one,” she said.

She held her feet that way for an incredibly long time—until her face at last began to shine with perspiration and she began to tremble with the strain. She lowered her feet to the surface of the bed and exhaled deeply. She slapped herself casually on the flat diaphragm. “That’s how I stay like this.”

“I don’t know what I was trying to ask you, Emily. Maybe I just wanted to know what you think about. I never get much of a clue.”

“Oh, I remember the things Harry gave me, and took back.”

“Do you ever think about me?”

“You’re my luck, aren’t you?”

“I keep wondering if you think I’m a fool, a big damn fool.”

“Sometimes you are. Like wanting to go see that girl’s mother.”

“Were you ever sentimental over anyone?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you want to look up your brothers and sisters someday?”

“For what? Laughs? I know that tribe. They’re like the old man and the old lady. The girls will be dropping brats once a year and the boys will be working in mines and mills and getting tanked every time they get paid.”

“You sound as if they weren’t related to you.”

“All the time I was a little kid I told myself they’d
stolen me from rich people when I was a baby, and someday I’d find my real home. With marble and big trees and servants. I guess I never felt like one of the tribe. When I was fifteen I made a man take me away from there. He was a slob, but I made him send me to business school. I thought that maybe in an office I’d meet a bigger man. It worked out that way. I met Harry Shawn. He laughed at all the school business, that night-school stuff at the University of Chicago. Literature, English, sociology, psychology, anthropology, astronomy. Harry had some very fancy friends. None of them were going to look down their noses at Emmy from Carbondale. And after a while, they didn’t.”

“And then you spoiled it for yourself.”

She rolled onto her side, cheek on palm, supported by her elbow. “Harry spoiled it. He was going to New York. The damn flight was canceled for some reason, and instead of calling, he came home. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at Ralph standing there, and then Ralph ran into the bathroom and we could hear him being sick.”

“That made it Harry’s fault.”

“He should have called.”

“Have you seen Beckler again?”

“He phoned me at the bank. I had lunch with him. He told me that my working in a bank was like hiring a cat to work in a mouse farm. He wanted to know the angle. I told him there wasn’t any angle. I was just working for a living. He didn’t believe me.”

“Why did you see him again?”

“I could have refused. And then he would have come to the bank. I don’t want that. A man like Ralph, Kyle, you don’t just brush him off. I’m playing for time. That’s all. When we leave he won’t find us any easier than the law will. Why worry about it? I can handle it.”

We went to bed. She said I could have the bed, or she’d take it, but she wouldn’t stand for the two of us sleeping in it. I made a bed on the floor, using the seat cushions from the two chairs and one of the pillows. When the shade was up and the room dark, light from a street lamp came through the window and made a path
across the bed, leaving her face in darkness. I couldn’t sleep. Once I stood by the bed and looked at her. She slept flat on her back, the pillow bunched under her head to raise it, the sheet and light blanket pulled high, her arms outside, straight down by her sides, pinning the coverings tautly across her slim body. I could not hear her breathe. She slept nude. She seemed far away, outside of life, corpselike. I wondered about her dreams. They would have sharp edges, flat colors. She would wander through them, remote, unmoved—an impartial observer of herself.

I was not in love with her. I knew that. I had told her the truth when I had said that I didn’t even like her. She was the alcoholic’s next bottle, the addict’s hidden hypodermic. I wanted to turn and run. It would be like a comic-strip sequence, where the clown runs, but his suspenders are hooked on a nail. He can run for a little way, but not far. And as he gets more weary, he can’t run at all.

Toward dawn I fell asleep. I woke up and watched her without letting her know that I watched her. She stood in the middle of the room, bending, twisting, straining, reaching. She punished herself until her body was covered with the sheen of perspiration. And then she crossed the hall and I heard the roar of water filling the tub. When she came back, dressed, she was vibrantly awake.

After breakfast she went with me to the car lot. She showed no interest in the car. Registration in my name was arranged, and while she bought the cheap, bright clothes she had mentioned, I found a pawnshop and bought a big, scarred leather suitcase. Back in the room she unwrapped the clothes and put them away. We packed the money in the big suitcase and locked it in the trunk compartment of the Chrysler.

We drove through a misty afternoon, through scattered showers, back to Thrace. In the car she restored herself to her usual appearance. I let her out on the edge of town, near a bus stop. The garage I had rented was half a block from the apartment house. I put the car away, snapped the big padlock, went up to my apartment
and waited for her. She did not come back until after midnight.

I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Where have you been?”

“Out.”

“Tell me!”

“I saw a movie. I walked around.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I don’t like hysterical men.”

“I don’t like tramps.”

Her expression of defiance did not change. Her eyes merely narrowed a bit. “That’s one you’ll pay for, Kyle.”

I let my hands drop from her shoulders. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t try to see me tomorrow.”

Somehow I had lost the offensive. I said, “Do you blame me? You should have been back by five o’clock anyway.” There was a humiliating pleading tone in my voice.

“I don’t want to see you tomorrow.”

We were talking almost in whispers. She turned away from me to go up the stairs. I caught her wrist. “Emily, I … We shouldn’t quarrel, Emily.”

She stood very still, not pulling against my grasp. “Maybe, if you could understand something.”

“Tell me. I can understand.”

“You don’t own me, Kyle. I go where I please. I do as I please. That’s the basis.”

“I don’t like that basis. We planned to—”

“We planned nothing except what we’re doing. Get it straight, Kyle. My way or no way.”

I tightened my hold on her wrist. “Your way,” I whispered.

She moved closer to me and laughed. It was the first time I had ever heard her laugh. It was like lovely, muted bells. “Come up and I’ll give you my key,” she whispered.

I slept heavily. I woke up to a warm, sunshiny morning. I woke up thinking of Jo Anne. I had dreamed about her. Emily’s key was on the bureau. I stood with
the key in my hand, looking up at the ceiling, knowing now how she looked as she slept. I saw, too clearly, what she was doing to me, and what she would continue to do. The money was in the car, every penny we’d taken. Monday I could take it back to the bank. The job would be gone. Emily would be gone. But the nightmare would be over. It was a thing that had to be done. I stood and looked at my face in the mirror, the key still in my hand. I found it oddly difficult to look into my own eyes. My face looked different, somehow. I could imagine a new furtiveness, a new slackness of my lips, a new set to my shoulders.

Walter C. Marshall was someone Kyle Cameron would not have cared for.

After dressing hurriedly, I went quietly up the stairs, put the key in her lock, turning it with infinite care. Then I took the key out of the lock and slid it under the door. I walked down and out into the Sunday-morning sunshine. A great dark weight had slid from my shoulders.

I got off the bus at the Clark Street corner and walked down to Jo Anne’s house. Ed was on the porch. He had been a round, young, cheerful fifty-five. Now his cheeks sagged in folds, and both eyes and voice were dull.

“Nice of you to stop around, Kyle.”

“How is she?”

“About the same. But it’s worse for her. Those drugs, they don’t work so good any more. She’s developing a … tolerance. That’s what the doc called it. Why don’t you go right up? Jo Anne’s with her.”

I went up. There was a smell of sickness in the upstairs hall. It was stronger in the front bedroom. Jo Anne’s eyes lighted up. I kissed her cheek, then bent over the bed and kissed Mom’s forehead.

“I’ve been neglecting you,” I said, trying to keep it light.

The sharp bones jutted against the lifeless skin. Her voice was weak. “Kyle, you talk some sense into Jo Anne. Such a stubborn girl! I don’t want an old-maid daughter. She’s trying to be a martyr, Kyle.”

Jo Anne turned away from me. I was trying to think of what to say. Suddenly Mrs. Lane turned her head away, pressing her sharp chin to her shoulder. Her body tightened and she made a hard, thin sound of pain. Tears stood in Jo Anne’s eyes.