Weep for Me (18 page)

But you grow up and a nightmare becomes your own problem. You must fight away the horrors, unaided.

The dream had been so real. I had been behind the bronze bars, and they had come up to my window. Jo Anne and Kyle Cameron. Jo Anne had laughed at me. And my other self was grinning. “We’re drawing out all our money,” she said. “Give it to us.”

And I had turned to the bin where the sheafs of bills should have been. In each compartment were tiny pallid naked figures, dozens of tiny black-haired Emilys turning and writhing in the compartments, little shrill voices barely audible.

“Count them out,” Jo Anne said.

I picked several of them up. They were like ice as they writhed in my hand. They were perfect in every detail, with infinitely small, dark-tipped breasts. As I tried to count them out under the grill, they fastened tiny teeth in the soft skin between my fingers. I could not pull them free and the blood began to run between my fingers. Others came out of the drawer and patted across to me, swarmed up my shirt front, and began to tear at the flesh of my throat.

“Count them out,” Jo Anne said, laughing.

I tried to tell her that they were hurting me. Jo Anne and the other Kyle didn’t seem to understand.

And then everybody was laughing. Everybody in the
bank, standing where they could see me. Raddmann and Grinter and Limebright and Tom Nairn and Pritch. Laughing so hard they held their bellies and rocked on their heels, their eyes squinted shut, while I stood and pulled helplessly at the icy, writhing figures and tried to tell them that I was being hurt.

When I was shocked out of sleep into the moist, thick Mexican night, I did not at first understand where I was. Slowly it all returned and my breathing slowed down. I was a child again, afraid of the night. She lay with her back to me. I slid close to her and put an arm around her. She muttered and tried to pull away, but did not awaken. I lay there for a long time, with the long silken back against my chest, my knees against the backs of her thighs, trying to take comfort from the mere closeness of another human being. But there was no comfort in her, no closeness.

I moved away from her and listened to the night sounds. The pump had stopped. A heavy truck droned by, heading for the mountains. I could not hear her breathe. A mosquito mourned in a minor key. Palm fronds scratched against the edge of the cabin roof in a moist breeze, and I could hear, not far off, the sound of running water.

In the morning we drove up the incredible slope of the Sierra Madre, the road winding through endless passes, with the steep drop-off first on one side and then the other. Always climbing. Climbing out of heat into an exhilarating coolness. Emily slowly came back to life. She had died long ago, when the heat wave had first struck Thrace. And now life came back to her, quickening her, giving her a kind of gaiety that I had never seen before.

Twice the car overheated and we had to stop. Each time we stopped she got out quickly and stood looking out over the hundreds of peaks that stretched away to the blue distance.

We had an early lunch at a roadside place called Zimapán, and she ate hugely, with a seemingly insatiable
hunger. We climbed over the last high pass and then the road wound down to the great plateau of Mexico. In the late afternoon we were stopped at the outskirts of Mexico City. After inspecting our tourist cards, the official recommended a driver to take us on into the city. The driver handled the car with frightening abandon, avoiding collision by inches, time after time. Emily sat forward on the seat, lips parted, face eager, spots of color in her cheeks.

The driver spoke English. He said, “You have a reservation, a hotel?”

“No,” I said. “We’d like a small hotel, inexpensive.”

“Take us to the best,” Emily said firmly. “The very best.”

“Yes, señora. The best,” he said. “It would be the Reforma, or the Hotel del Prado.”

“I’ve heard about the Del Prado. Take us there.”

I put my mouth close to her ear. “Is that smart?”

“They’ll look in the little hotels first,” she whispered.

“They’ll expect us to do that.”

The driver pulled up in front of the Hotel del Prado. Bellhops came out for the luggage. I paid the driver and tipped him. The doorman said the car would be taken care of. As we went up the wide steps and through the huge glass doors, Emily said, “Get the best suite, the very best.”

I shrugged. It didn’t make much difference at this point. I asked for the best. The amount translated to twenty-five dollars a day. I told the obsequious clerk that I had no idea how long we would stay.

The suite was incredible. After the bellhops had been tipped and had bowed themselves out, Emily went through the big rooms, purring like a cat. Great deep, wide beds, a glass shower stall large enough for a platoon, a deep-green sunken tub at least eight feet long and five feet wide, so deep that three steps led down into it. The windows, with silver-gray draperies, looked out over the high, sunlit city. Indirect lighting and deep piled rugs, and soft perfect colors.

She explored every corner, the way an animal will inspect
a strange house. And then she came back to me and flung her arms around my neck in the first gesture of affection I had seen from her. “We’ll live like this,” she said intensely. “Always.”

“It means a lot to you.”

“This is the way I was meant to live. I’ve known that from the beginning.” She walked away from me and paused in front of a full-length mirror. She looked at her reflection with contempt. In that room the cheap, tight, bright skirt looked completely out of place. She pulled her hair free, arranged it quickly in the way of Emily Rudolph rather than Mrs. Marshall.

“Isn’t it a little early to drop the new identity?”

“I’m sick of it. I’m going to look like myself.”

“We’ve got to go find this Manuel Antonio Flores.”

“Not today. And maybe not tomorrow, Kyle. Give me time to start living again.”

“We shouldn’t waste time here.”

“Last Friday I was a grubby little clerk in Thrace, living in a stinking little apartment. Now I’m a lady in Mexico City. Thrace never existed, Kyle.”

“If we’re taken back there, you’ll find it’s real enough.”

She spun around, her eyes narrow. “Nobody will take me back there. Ever. I’ll never go back there.”

“Then you better agree that we ought to look up Flores tomorrow.”

“The bank probably doesn’t even know yet. What’s the hurry?”

“We’ll look him up tomorrow. There may be a delay after we see him.”

“All right, all
right!
” she said. “But I’m not leaving this suite except to buy clothes in the morning. We’ll eat up here. I’m going to take a bath.”

I paced restlessly around the big living room of the suite, hearing the roar of water rushing into the big tub. After a time I phoned the desk and ordered a pitcher of Martinis. Shortly after I had signed the chit for the drinks, I heard her call me. I went into the bedroom. She was standing by one of the beds, staring at the sleazy clothes she had bought in the cheap store in Syracuse.

“I’m not going to put any of these things on,” she said. “I saw shops below the lobby level in a sort of arcade. Go down and get something that will fit me. You know the sort of thing I like, the sort of thing I used to wear.”

“I don’t think you ought to start wearing—”

“Do as I say!” she yelled. “Do it!”

I tried to face her down. My eyes dropped first. I went down to the shops. For sixty dollars I bought a lightweight wool dress in a gray-green shade, size twelve. It was very severe, very plain. The clerk boxed it and I took it back up. She snatched the box from me, snapped the tape, opened it up. She held the dress up to her and looked in the mirror, then slipped it on over her head, pulling it down, smoothing the skirt down with her palms. She had made up her mouth in the old way, and fixed her hair so that once again it was a soft dark frame for the pale oval of her face with its odd eyes, child’s nose, sensuous mouth. I watched the reflection of her face. There was no visible change of expression.

“Like it?” I asked.

“It’s me again, Kyle. Can’t you see? It’s me again.”

T
he next morning she went shopping. She said she wanted to go alone. I stayed in the suite for a time, and then went out. I found that air editions of U.S. papers were sold in the lobby. There was no Thrace paper, but I found a Tuesday edition of the New York Times. I went into Sanborn’s coffee shop in the basement of the hotel and took a small table, ordered coffee. I went through the paper with great care. There was no mention of any embezzlement at the First Citizens’ National Bank of Thrace.

If it had broken, I was certain the Times would have it. I left the paper on the table and went out onto Juarez, walked down the wide sidewalk. I thought of how she had been the previous evening. Steak and champagne. Bright drunken eyes and more laughter than ever before. Emmy Rudolph from Carbondale, being all the Emmys from all the Carbondales wrapped up in one.

The sparkle had not been for me. It would have been the same for anyone who shared the setting with her. I had begun to sense that there was not even gratitude in her, only her belief that somehow, someone would have provided all this. I had merely happened to be an instrument of her manifest fate.

I had drunk far too much, as it turned out. But one thing kept returning to my mind. At one point during my drinking I had reached a place where there was a kind of warm, crazy joy, rather than regret. It hadn’t lasted long, that particular period, but during it, I had been able to think of Beckler without fear, think of the money with harsh pleasure, look at Emily and believe that the choice had been right.

And I kept remembering that brief interval with a sort of longing. I wanted to return to that frame of mind. I turned left off Juarez and found a small bar. The bartender had very little English, but he understood me when I asked for a Martini. I drank it slowly, and the
next and the next. And then I waited, trying to find out if I had undershot or overshot the mark. I could sense the slow return of that feeling of well-being. And the world became a good place. I was strong, and I had won out. They had tried to trap me behind bronze bars, chain me to a suburban bungalow. But I had won out. I had won a strange, lovely woman, and a fortune, and the strength to murder to keep what I had won. I walked back through the bright noon colors of the streets, setting my heels down firmly, carrying my head high. I was highly conscious of the hips and breasts of women on the streets and I told myself that the whole world is a jungle, and if your fangs are sharp, you can win.

In the lounge of the hotel I had another drink, and then went on up to the suite. Emily was standing in front of the big mirror in a new black dress. I slammed the door behind me and took hold of her roughly.

“You’re drunk,” she said, trying to twist away from me.

“Not drunk, honey.”

“Don’t
you
start calling me that!”

“Not drunk. Just smart. Just smart enough to know what makes the world go round.”

“Don’t be so rough! You’re mussing up this dress.”

“Then take it off.”

“Don’t be such a fool. I’ve got to …”

I hooked my fingers over the front of it. “Take it off, or I will. And my way will surprise you, honey.”

She stared at me. “Your eyes, Kyle. You’re beginning to look funny. Sort of like Ralph.”

“And you told me that Ralph was too much like you.

Now I’m getting like you. Does it make you uncomfortable?”

“You shouldn’t get tight. You’ll get careless and say the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

She was reluctant, and then she responded with a crazed wildness, with a new fury that surpassed anything that had gone before.

When I awakened in the late afternoon with a dull headache, she had left the suite. I showered, dressed, feeling dulled, emotionless, apathetic. My hands trembled.
I knew that I could not live with this frame of mind and so I ordered up drinks and once again achieved that feeling of well-being and confidence.

She came back at dusk, saying that she had been walking. We ate down in the dining room. I was becoming more expert at maintaining the precise degree of drunkenness that I seemed to require. She kept watching me with an odd expression.

We had nothing to say to each other.

Thursday I bought a copy of the New York Times for Wednesday when they came in from the airport at ten o’clock. I took it back up to the suite as soon as I saw the article. We sat side by side on a deep wide couch as we read it together.

From the sedate, sober Times account, you could see how the tabloids would handle it. It had all the ingredients for a tabloid story. Bank teller absconds with quarter million and pretty ex-wife of Chicago manufacturer. She had been working as a bookkeeper in the same bank, and assisted in the deception.

One sentence bothered me. I heard her catch her breath as she read it. “The couple is believed to have fled in a green Chrysler sedan bearing New York plates, 8S81-74, registered in the name of Walter C. Marshall. Police expect an early arrest.”

She stood up, her lips compressed. “We’ll have to check out right away, Kyle.”

“How on earth did they find out about the car?”

“Never mind that. We’ve got to get out of here. Start packing.”

“But the tourist cards. They’re in that name and—”

“We can’t help that. Mexican police will grab us in a minute and ship us back. You were right. We should have gone to Flores right away.”

Fifteen minutes later we were driving down Juarez. We found a parking place near the Hotel Reforma. I locked the car and we went in. The phone book was confusing. At last I found the name and number. I scribbled number and address on a slip of paper and took it to the desk. A young girl with a brilliant smile
took a map of Mexico City, marked the location of the hotel, placed an X at the place of the address, and said, “It is in Chapultepec, sir. You stay on Avenida Reforma most of the way. Not hard, no?”

I tipped her and walked back across the lobby to where Emily stood by the side door. We got into the car and spent almost two hours finding the Chapultepec address. It was disappointing. A high tan ancient wall, crude solid wooden gates. I nosed the car up to the gates, got out, and pushed a bell button set into the gate pillar. After a long time a little square opened in the gate and a bronzed flat face stared out at me.