On Wednesday afternoon I arrived early at the hospital. A sudden black and purple thunderstorm rolled up into the sky from the west as I went. I had to run to keep from getting soaked.
The rain scoured down along the window screens as I came into the ward. Fingers of cooler air trailed temptingly through the room. Ellie was at the far end, dragging the box fan off the windowsill. I looked at the black woman in the bed beside Ruby’s. “‘S okay what she’s doin’,” she croaked. “The motor shorts out if it gets wet.”
“Oh great.” I wiped rain and perspiration from my forehead. Without air circulation the humidity made me want to pant like a dog.
Ellie came back, dusting her hands. “Let me just make a pit stop, Tim.” She scooped up the fringed drawstring sack that passes for a handbag these days, and vanished.
The transistor radio still murmured soul music. Nobody on the ward spoke. Ruby naturally wasn’t talking, and everyone else watched me. Someone must have guessed what sort of “family friend” I was. I assumed a grave but hopeful expression and kept my eyes fixed on the bed. Ruby’s gaze was still empty. Her flabby hands scrabbled weakly on the sheet. Ellie had said she did that a lot. Sometimes she even mumbled a word or two, but never coherently. She smelled old and ill — a hospital smell.
Then the slack mouth quivered and firmed. For one second a real tough cookie glared up at me from the hospital pillow. I almost jumped out of my chair. “Ellie?” I called, not daring to look away. “Ellie!”
“Hush up over there,” a man two beds over snarled. “Some of us are tryin’ to sleep.”
Ruby blinked at me again. “What time is it?” she whispered.
“Ellie!”
“Tim, what is it?” Ellie came running down the ward. “Is something wrong?”
“She’s talking, Ellie! She began to say something!”
“She does that all the time.” But she sat on the edge of the bed and touched Ruby’s sagging cheek. “Mom?”
We watched tensely as Ruby’s face worked. “Ellie?”
Ellie began to sob. All in a minute she was crying so hard she couldn’t talk. I patted her shoulder, but my fingers twitched. Of course she was upset. It was perfectly natural. And when Ellie is upset she cries. But this was no time for waterworks! Ruby might subside into stupor again any minute. Precious time was slipping away, and there were too many questions to ask. I pushed a hanky into Ellie’s hand and leaned forward. “Mrs. Quartern, where did you go after you left Norfolk?”
Slowly Ruby shifted her gaze to me. “Who’re you?”
“A friend of Ellie’s.” I didn’t want to go into a lot of explanations now. “Can you tell me — who was Ellie’s father?”
That just slipped out. Furious with myself, I concentrated on reining in my curiosity. She could see what I wanted, I had to remember that. Suppose she could see my affair with her daughter?
But the bleary brown eyes no longer focused on me. “Tucson,” she murmured. “On location.”
Which question was she answering? I cursed myself for confusing her with two at once. All I could do now was go with it, keep the words coming. “On location,” I repeated. “You mean, TV? A movie?”
Ellie turned to stare at me, her wet eyes wide with alarm. “Tim! What are you doing?”
I patted her back for silence, because Ruby spoke again. “The Last Outpost,” she muttered, almost too low to hear. “A damned cowboy movie ...”
“She must be talking about your father,” I murmured in Ellie’s ear. “That’s not a current film, is it?”
Ellie shook her head. “Never heard of it ... Mom, was my dad in the movies?”
Heavy white lids drooped over the brown eyes, so like and unlike Ellie’s. “A star,” she mumbled. “Cowboys, and that thing with Bonzo.”
“A clown?” Ellie took Ruby’s fingers in her own. “He was in show business — a clown. Is that right, Mom?” I had my notebook out, scribbling down every word. They didn’t make much sense now, but Ellie might want me to dig further some day — if we ever had kids, for instance.
Ruby seemed to be running out of steam fast. She frowned up at Ellie. “Hooking them’s easy, but getting them off, that’s a bitch.”
“A fisherman,” Ellie suggested desperately. “Mom?”
“She’s gone again,” I said.
Ellie didn’t let go her hand. “Thank goodness you talked to her, Tim — kept her going. Maybe this means she’s getting better!”
“It’s possible, sweetheart.” For a second I knew how their gift must feel. Ellie wanted it, so I wanted it too. But only for a second.
The next day I remembered to call the office. “It’s the prodigal son,” Roberta told Ernie.
Ernie picked up. “Tim, where the hell are you? It’s been more than a week!”
“Still in D.C.,” I said.
“You left the Budget Lodge — we couldn’t reach you.”
“It’s a long story. The gist of it is, the job is done.”
“You found the mother? Good man!”
“She’s pretty much a vegetable, after a botched suicide. I’m helping Ellie pull things together.”
“When will you be back?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well, think now. We just got a big job, Tim. This woman, she’s divorcing her husband who’s a Greek tycoon.”
“Not Jackie!”
“Ha ha. No, he’s nothing so rich as Ari, but he does okay. Her lawyers have people looking into his European flings, and we get to pile up the dirt back here.”
Ernie didn’t have to spell it out — a plum like this doesn’t come along often. “But what about Ellie?” I heard myself say. “Her mother might die. She needs me.”
“How long has Mrs. Quartern been sick?”
I didn’t answer. I could argue it myself: if Ruby had lingered since April she might fade in and out for months, years even. How long could I wait? “Okay,” I said at last. “Let me wind things up today, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
The pay phone I used was in Mrs. Greene’s kitchen. I hung up and went upstairs. Ellie was washing her hair; sharing the house bathroom meant it was easier to do stuff like that in the middle of the day. I went into her room and sat on the narrow old-fashioned bed. The springs sagged and twanged so loudly under my weight I got up again. What would she say when I told her? I felt like such a mercenary swine, staying only while the job was on and then vamoosing when trouble hit. By the time she returned I was all set to call Ernie back and tender my resignation.
Her head was wet but combed, and she wore an old T-shirt and shorts. “Well this is a treat,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me. I never visited her room if I could help it, to keep Mrs. Greene happy. “What’s happening?”
“I have to go back to New York tonight. Ernie needs me. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I want to stay.”
“It’s all right, Tim,” she said. “You’ve done so much already, I can manage now.”
“Are you sure? Really?”
She tipped her head sideways to towel her hair. Under the shirt her shoulder blades looked as frail as a bird’s. “I’ll be fine. I’ve taken care of myself for years.”
She spoke so valiantly that without thinking I opened my arms. For the first time in a week we embraced. I stroked her shoulders, tracing the taut sinews with my fingers, and then kissed her mouth. Like high-proof brandy it went straight to my head, and more than my head.
“You can ‘see’ it,” I said hoarsely. “But you don’t have to. Just say so. I could take a cold shower or something ...”
All of itself my hand slid to her breast. Through the cloth I felt the nipple rising between my fingers. “Yes,” she whispered. “Please.”
I locked the door. The noisy bed was obviously impossible, with the kitchen and Mrs. Greene directly beneath the room. The floor however was clean enough to do brain surgery on, no threat to freshly shampooed hair. Our bodies seemed to remember where we left off. I knew when she was about to cry out, and covered her mouth with my own. It was as if I could taste her orgasm, drink it down. Afterwards she fell immediately asleep, pillowed on my chest. So it was safe to say words that otherwise would be unsayable, unfair to burden her with. “I love you, sweetheart. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”
Ellie snored her little pig-like snore. I looked with satisfaction into her sleeping face, all relaxed and unstrung. When I was sure she wouldn’t wake I lifted her into bed and tucked the sheet over.
That evening before I left for the station I said, “Listen, Ellie — will you call me? If you need help, or if you’re feeling down, or just if you want to talk? I won’t be able to reach you here easily, on that pay phone, but you know where I’ll be.”
“I’m not sure, Tim.”
I was thunderstruck. “You’re not sure?”
“I have to get through this by myself, Tim. Please understand.”
I tried. I didn’t think anybody could fathom the link between those two. Mother and daughter had lived too long together, using their gift on each other like swords. I would always be on the outside — foreigners don’t speak the language. All I could do was stick to my feelings. “I won’t crowd you, hon. Whatever you do is okay by me. But if you need me, will you call?”
“If I need you,” she promised.
On Friday Roberta greeted me first thing with a pencil and file card. “Gimme her address,” she said.
“Whose address?”
“The Quartern girl of course, in Washington.”
“Roberta, you’re not going to send her a bill now!”
“Sure I am. If the old lady dies she’ll be too busy to pay bills. We have a cash flow to consider, you know.”
“You vulture.” But there’s no percentage in arguing with Roberta. I wrote down the rooming house address and tried to forget it.
The new job was exciting. Mr. Agrapolides was an active gentleman who pursued many interests. Ernie had laid out the more promising lines of exploration with the wife’s lawyers, and was already busy persuading call girls to make depositions. I took up the list of favorite night spots and began phoning. An incriminating photo would do wonders for the property settlement. We’re honest detectives: we’ll expose sins, but we won’t invent them. A week slid by before I could blink.
On Saturday I debated with myself for hours, before phoning the rooming house. Ellie wasn’t there. On Sunday July 20 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I phoned to see if Ellie caught it on TV, but she wasn’t in.
On Monday Roberta opened the mail and proudly displayed a check from Ellie. “Paid in full, you see? That’s what happens when you invoice promptly.”
“I hope it clears,” I said without thinking, remembering that whopping hospital bill.
“Good grief! You think there’ll be a problem?” Roberta reached to click the switch on my phone. “I’m going to the bank right away. You take the phones for a while.”
“There wasn’t a note or anything, was there?” But she was gone, her high heels clicking purposefully down the hall. I had a look in the envelope but it was empty.
The check seemed to clear okay. We continued to excavate Mr. Agrapolides’ sins. Some people take this personally. When Roberta handed Ernie the message slip on Tuesday she said, “I smell a rat here.”
He leaned back and read it aloud. “Watusi a GoGo. Ask for Cindy. Agrapolides.”
He passed it to me and I said, “Did you talk to this Cindy?”
“I talked to some man — no name. He’s got a knife out for our tycoon, though, and he said Cindy has stories to tell.”
“I’ll bet.” Ernie grinned at me. “We must be hitting a nerve, for him to try setting us up.”
“But is it a setup?” Ellie hadn’t called. If someone declared the sky was blue I would have argued. “Watusi a GoGo, it sounds just like him. Probably a strip joint.”
“A little low-end, maybe.”
“Some people like slumming. This Cindy might be all the excuse he needed.”
“When you consider the goods you’ve already got on him, we really don’t need more,” Roberta said. “Is it worth the risk?”
“Oh come on, Ernie,” I coaxed. “Where’s your curiosity? Shouldn’t we explore every angle? Don’t you want to see the Watusi a GoGo before you die?”
He laughed. “You tempt me ... I suppose during the day it’d be safe enough.”
“If you’ve got to risk your neck for nothing at least go together,” Roberta said.
“When the floor show gets to be too much for him I’ll drag him out,” I said, and she scowled at me.
So at lunchtime we left Roberta to hold the fort and walked to the porno district around Times Square. The Watusi a GoGo was everything two single men no longer young could ask for. “This is great! It’s perfect!” I waved my arms to take in the storefront. Above the neon name hung a faded banner that said “Burlesk!” The windows were papered over with posters of strippers, barred in black at the strategic points. “Have you ever seen a more typical specimen? It could be in a museum!”
The shill lounging in the doorway said, “Live show starts in five minutes. What kind o’ specimens you like?”
“We’re cultural anthropologists,” I told him. “Researching tribal rituals.”
Ernie laughed as we went in. “One of these days, Tim, someone with no sense of humor will notice you razzing him.”
The interior was typical too, your basic sleazy bar camouflaged by very low light levels. A haze of stale cigarette smoke hung just above our heads. Two anemic spotlights focused on a tiny stage in the back corner. There were plenty of tables. We sat to one side and ordered beers.
“I’m too old for this,” Ernie said. “I prefer my fun more dignified.”
“It’s pretty depressing,” I agreed. The waitresses wore tiny bikinis in vivid colors. Their figures didn’t do justice to the garments, either. I’ve seen more stimulating tractor exhibits. For a minute I worried I was getting past it myself. Then I realized every woman was second best for me after Ellie, and felt happier.
The waitress brought the beer. “Is there a Cindy working here?” Ernie asked her.
She stared. After careful thought she said, “I don’t know.”
“Could you ask?”
She turned the question over in her mind. “I guess.”
“You were right,” I sighed. “Agrapolides would never patronize a dump like this. All his call girls were witty.”
“As long as we’re here we might as well see Cindy,” Ernie said. “And the show’s starting.”
Up on stage a dancer in a limp baby-doll nightie revolved slowly to the thump of canned music. Her chesty figure looked blowsy and vulgar, compared to Ellie’s long taut body. I leaned my chin on my hands and tried not to yawn. Even having my brain blasted by BluDiamond Ecstasy was better than this.
Ernie nudged me. A woman approached our table. She wore too much makeup and a very tight, very short red dress. When she bent to speak to us the cleavage was remarkable. “You looking for Cindy?”
“Yeah. Are you her?”
I took out my notebook. Cindy grasped her neckline and wrenched the dress open. The thin cloth tore loudly, and she screamed like a steam whistle.
“Holy mackerel,” Ernie said weakly.
Startled, I dropped my notebook, but thanks to my more recent adventures in carnality her boobs didn’t distract me long. “Ernie, it’s a setup!” I snapped. “Move!”
From the bar at the front the bouncers were coming at a run. We got up and retreated the only way we could go, further in. “I’ve seen better,” I told Cindy. She swung at me but missed.
“Hold it!” the bouncer yelled. In the dim light I saw the glint of metal in his hand. Obeying meant getting better acquainted with that metal, I was sure. I pushed Ernie further back.
“The back door,” I said. “Find it!”
“You’re not going to square up to that goon!”
“Who’s going to do it — you with your gall bladder?”
All this time the dismal stripper had kept on going. She was now whirling the nightie over her head. The few other customers ignored us too. The bouncers eyed us, unwilling maybe to disrupt their concentration. “Beside the stage,” Ernie said. “On the right side.”
“Okay. Run for it.”
I scooped up a shot glass and threw it hard and straight. They say a pitched baseball can reach 90 mph. I haven’t pitched in years but the glass made a good clunk against the first bouncer’s forehead. He tripped and fell. Liquor sprayed everywhere, and the owner of the glass said, “Hey! my drink!”
Ernie bolted and I ran after him. We ducked into the stage door like rabbits. The second guy was close behind, swearing. We barreled through several dark dirty rooms and out into the alley beyond. The first bouncer recovered fast and followed, so now we had two of them again.
All our efforts just made it easier for them to work us over. Out here no one would hear the noise. And Ernie couldn’t take it — even after this short scramble he was puffing. What an idiot I was, not to bring the gun! Now was the time for an equalizer if there ever was one.
A barricade of overflowing metal garbage cans blocked the alley. I turned well before Ernie did, so he would be behind me. The guy I had beaned smiled. “Disrupting the show,” he said. “Mauling the girls. Throwing glasses. Very bad, fellas. You’re gonna be sorry.”
Only one hand had a knuckleduster. I slipped past the blow and tackled him. It was like tackling a lamp post. He didn’t stagger until I kneed him. Things were happening so fast that Ernie had to shout. “Tim! Heads up!”
Something cracked loudly behind me. My opponent and I broke apart. “Next one’s for real,” Ernie said cheerfully. I looked over my shoulder and there he was, automatic in hand!
The two bouncers cursed viciously but didn’t move. “Through there,” Ernie said, and we backed cautiously down a narrow side alley that eventually ended at 29th Street.
“What took you so long?” I panted.
“Tim, at my age running is work enough. You shouldn’t have waded in so fast. Now look at you.”
I hadn’t noticed at the time but the knucks must have just caught me. A raw scrape on the side of my neck seeped red onto my jacket front. I took off my tie and crammed a hanky into my collar. Ernie flagged down a cab. “It was pretty smart of you to bring the gun,” I said, settling gratefully into the back seat. “I was going to kick myself for not remembering. After mopping up the floor with those two, of course.”
“Roberta insisted,” Ernie said. “While you were in the john. She just about stuffed the holster up my nose.”
“Flowers,” I suggested.
“Definitely. And lunch. And we’ll take Agrapolides very seriously from now on.”
“From now on,” I said, “I’m going to travel armed.”
On Wednesday I picked up the phone — Ernie had taken Roberta to that lunch. “Depford and Coates.” A sob on the other end, and I knew. “Ellie? Is that you?”
“Tim, she’s gone. She didn’t get better. Oh Tim, can you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
I left a note for Ernie and abandoned the phones to their fate. A taxi, an air shuttle, and I was in Washington in time to beat the rush hour. For this final act of the tragedy the hospital had actually found Ellie some privacy. She waited for me in the nurses’ lounge. It was not air conditioned. When she saw me the tears began to flow. I didn’t try to talk. Instead I sat beside her and hugged her. Her grief was so terrible I felt like crying myself.
We must have made a depressing sight for the nurses tiptoeing in and out. Finally, as evening drew on, one of them whispered to me, “Do you think a sedative would help?”
“I don’t have a prescription.”
“That’s okay.” She slipped me two Valiums. I would have phoned for a cab but Ellie wanted to walk. We clung close through the purple July twilight. Mrs. Greene, that excellent lady, allowed me to dose Ellie and help put her to bed. Then, because my old room had been rented out, she let me crash on her sofa. My last thought before I slept the sleep of the just was that Ellie was free of the past now. And her future looked good.
Ellie didn’t want a funeral. Mrs. Greene’s Methodist connections helped me set up a cremation. It was fast and simple, just a coffin sliding past the curtains into the furnace. I watched it go, a little surprised at my own sorrow. I’d exchanged only a few words with Ruby Quartern. But I knew her. Ellie had cried herself out and went through it like a ghost.
Afterwards I said, “Come on, I’ll help you pack. We’ll go home. Would you feel better if you stayed with me? Or I could stay with you at the Plaza.”
“No,” she said. “I want to be by myself.”
“That’s okay too.” I stuffed her things into the suitcase while she sat on the bed and stared at nothing. While we waited for the cab I watched her anxiously. I didn’t want her to be alone. But if I insisted she might misconstrue my motives. On the plane we didn’t speak, and I talked myself into a more reasonable frame of mind. After I dropped her at the hotel I swore to myself that I’d give her room — let her recover in her own way.
For a long, long time I kept my resolution. I didn’t call and didn’t write. In moments of weakness I did indulge in the occasional Women’s Wear Daily, but without result.
With September over two full months had gone by, and I phoned. The hotel took a message, and I waited two more weeks before calling again. When that didn’t work it began to get on my nerves. I left more messages, lots more, at her agency and the hotel. It was about then that Ernie innocently asked, “Whatever happened to that Quartern girl?” I blew up in his face.
It was getting on for Thanksgiving when I decided today was the day. I quit work early and went to the Plaza. Ellie wasn’t in. I chose a strategic armchair in the lobby behind a big potted plant and waited, barricaded behind the Wall Street Journal.
Time went by, and I worried that I had missed her somehow. I didn’t think a haircut would deceive my eye, but who knew what models did to themselves these days? It would be just like Vogue to decree that a dazzling natural blonde should be dyed, say, red.
Then about 7:30 she came in. The blood seemed to rush away from my head, making me dizzy. Her hair was up in a twist but otherwise she looked exactly the same as in July. She wore a coat and jeans, and headed straight for the elevator.
I waited another fifteen minutes before following. She might of course have switched rooms within the hotel, but I was betting on the old one, the gold and white jewel box I visited at the beginning. I knocked on the door and she opened it.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Ellie,” I said reproachfully. “What if I was a mugger, an ax murderer? When you’re in New York always look through the peephole first — that’s what it’s there for.”
“Tim! What are you doing here?”
“Talking to you.” I stepped in quickly before she could react.
She slammed the door behind me. “I don’t want to see you, Tim.”
“Then close your eyes. How are you, Ellie? I’ve missed you a lot.”
She turned away, but in the mirror I could see her scowling. With her hair pinned up she looked thinner, more mature. She folded her arms as if she were cold, refusing to speak.
I chose a chair without clothing heaped on it and made myself comfortable. “I’m sorry I’m in your black books, sweetheart. How did that happen, could you tell me? The last time you called me I came running.”
Her sulky expression shifted and became sensible and kind. “I’m sorry too, Tim. I should never have let it go so far. It was a mistake, and it’s over. You’re a nice person. I don’t want to hurt you. Can you just accept it, and let it go?”
It sounded so pat, rehearsed even, something out of a heartthrob column. All my coolness scattered like shattering glass. “That won’t do, Ellie! What kind of idiot do you think I am? I think you owe me more than that!”
I was on my feet, hauling her around by the arm so that she had to look at me. It must have hurt. I’m strong enough to fold her in half. Ellie laughed in my face, not frightened at all. “Then what do I owe you, Tim? One more lay? Would that be enough?”
“No!” I jerked back as if she burned me. The angry marks of my fingers showed red on the tender skin of her arm. “Now cut that out!” She was shaking out her hair. The wheaten waterfall tumbled down around her face and shoulders, sexy as a pinup, but it didn’t move me. “That’s not what I want at all! All I want is —”
And then — it was like being shoved off the boat into deep water. I was drowning in passion, tumbling fathoms deep. All my senses seemed to explode outwards towards her. The smell of her hair, the taste of her skin, the feel of her against me — it had to be memory, because we weren’t touching, but it roared over me like a wave. Through a ruddy haze I met her eyes. They had a calm speculative look. She unbuttoned her blouse without haste. With a last tiny scrap of rationality I realized that she was doing this to me somehow, pushing the buttons to get the reaction she wanted. Then even that last fragment dissolved, and I clutched her to me like a drowning man grasping a spar. And she drew me back onto the bed.
When I woke up I hurt. I never spent so active a night before, not even on R and R in Hong Kong. These days I can’t afford to fling caution to the winds, even in bed. Now my back had a red-hot nail in it. I pried myself carefully up and shuffled into the bathroom. Alternating hot and cold water is what they used to prescribe, before neurosurgeons got sophisticated. I stood under the shower for more than half an hour, feebly preoccupied with thoughts of painkillers.
Even when the pain retreated a bit I felt terrible, drained in body and soul. Naked and damp, I lowered myself into a chair and tried to think straight. The bed was empty. Had Ellie said something about working today? I couldn’t remember.
There was something odd about the white and gold vanity table. With a shock I realized it was bare, swept of its usual clutter of bottles and makeup. The closet door stood open. Nothing hung inside but some hangers. Only my own clothes lay on the gold carpet where she (or I?) had flung them last night. Shaking, I picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “Is Miss Eleanor Quartern up yet? She’s in 1012.”
“She checked out this morning, sir.”
In a voice that didn’t sound like mine I asked, “Did she leave a forwarding address? No? Thanks anyway.”
I was shivering all over now, shuddering like a soldier sustaining a major wound. She was gone. What had she done to me? I pressed my fingertips into my eyes, and gritted my teeth, struggling to understand.
I might have died or gone crazy if this were the weekend. Somehow I dragged on my clothes and got to the office, and that saved me. Ernie has sanity enough for two, and I’d back Roberta against the Grim Reaper any day.
I reeled in and collapsed in tiny agonizing installments onto my chair. Roberta was typing. “All this promptness beeswax is over-rated,” she said. “Early to bed, early to rise — holy smokes, Tim! What happened to you?”
I don’t know what I looked like, but it was bad enough to make Ernie drop his phone. “Tim, are you okay?” he demanded. “You’re gray. Should we call a doctor?”
“I’ll be fine,” I whispered. When I got the pill bottle out of the drawer it rattled like a castanet in my hand. Ernie plucked it out from between my fingers and shook out the dose.
“For pete’s sake don’t just gag them down dry like you usually do,” Roberta said. She felt my forehead with a hard competent hand. “Let me get you a glass of water.”
Ernie’s mind moves in different channels. “You’ve still got your wallet and your service ring, so it’s not a mugging.” He eased my coat off and threw it at the rack. “Your gun hasn’t been fired ... Tim, it isn’t just the war injury, right? Tell me what happened — maybe we can help.”
“Nobody can help.” He stood right over me, full of concern. I had to tell him something. “I ... I saw Ellie last night.”
He stepped back. “God damn it to hell. I’m sorry, Tim.”
Roberta clattered in holding a paper cup. “Here. Drink it all, that’s right. Do you want to lie down? Should I get you a pillow?”
“I’ll be okay,” I insisted. I closed my eyes and waited for the medication to kick in, listening without interest to the bits of discussion that drifted over from Ernie’s side of the room.
“...that little bitch. After all he’s done for her. I should’ve clawed her eyes out while I had the chance ...”
“...would have been a big help. No, this is my remedy.” A filing-cabinet lock clicked, and glass tinkled as the drawer opened. The liquor, cameras, and petty cash are filed under “Misc. Office.”
“Ernie! Didn’t Marilyn Monroe mix pills and booze when she killed herself? And it isn’t even lunch time ...”
“... don’t think Marilyn was on Percocet, movie stars abuse other drugs ... Order some in, why don’t you. Dollars’ll get you doughnuts he hasn’t had a bite since yesterday ...”
They sat on either side of me and more or less stuffed food and a stiff whiskey down my throat. That and the Percocet allowed me to at least pretend to work in the afternoon. Which meant I stared numbly at one page of transcript without reading a word. My brain had slipped into neutral. I felt like a zombie.
Ernie went in and out to meetings and Roberta pounded away at her typewriter. I could tell they both kept an eye on me. At five o’clock Ernie came up and took the transcript away. Roberta declared, “I’m sick and tired of coping with your checkered love life, Tim. It’s boring. I move we change the subject.” She slapped the ink-stained desk blotter before me with her left hand.
With a tremendous effort I forced my mind to turn over. It felt like molasses pouring from a jug, slow and thick. “You’ve got something new,” I stuttered. “A ring? Holy Jesus!”
“I think Sherlock Holmes here will recover,” she told Ernie.
It was like jump-starting an engine. All of a sudden the right words were in my mouth, the right ideas running, however slowly, in my head. I lurched to my feet and laboriously shook Ernie’s hand. “Congratulations, pal! Took you long enough! Let me see the rock, Roberta. Do I get to kiss the bride?”
I bent, from the knees, and gave her a peck on the cheek. Ernie said, “We haven’t set the date yet. You want to be best man? Give you an excuse to buy a new suit.”
“You bet! Come on, let’s go and toast the engagement.”
We waited out in the hall while Roberta checked the locks on the filing cabinets and doused the lights. Ernie looked at me. “Will you be all right, Tim?”
“Sure,” I said, deliberately dodging the question. “My back has been a lot worse. I’ll bet you this time I don’t even need to call the medics.”
“Okay.” He patted my shoulder, and I knew he wouldn’t push.
For a month or so even though I was functioning I couldn’t think connectedly about her. I suffered passively, unable to do anything about it. Stray images floated in and out of my head without direction. Like for instance Robert B. Candle. The poor devil, had he felt like this? I was sorry I’d laughed at him even to myself. But he had gotten years with Ruby, and I had Ellie so briefly. When I counted the days on my desk calendar I could hardly believe it. We had been intimate for little more than a week.
Then there were the black spells. I suppose women call it heartbreak, but men can’t do that. I almost raved with the pain, pacing around and around my tiny room or bursting out and walking all night through the city. On those occasions I hardly noticed the wind and snow as I flogged myself with memories — Ellie in bed, in a restaurant, in the car. I avoided strenuously all thoughts of that last night. Once, over the Christmas holidays, I couldn’t help it. It came back to me like the recollections of a high fever, vivid lust and terror blended together until I wanted to cut my throat. You can’t love someone who does what she did to me. But I did, and it was tearing me into pieces.
That was the only time I tried to drown my sorrows. It was a mistake because former Baptists don’t handle liquor well. I got angrier and more irrational with every glass. Fortunately for me some punk decided I wouldn’t notice the loss of my wallet. I caught him in the act and threw him across the bar. By the time I broke some ribs for him I felt better. The police, however, didn’t see it my way. As the pickpocket victim I didn’t actually get arrested, but it was too close. I stayed out of bars after that.
The very worst was the dreams. You have no defenses in sleep. They weren’t nice friendly wet dreams either, but full-blown nightmares. Some were fairly straightforward, like the one where I ran through endless corridors of a hellish hospital searching for her.
In another I was in that damned hotel room again, as Ellie shook down her long pale hair. She pushed it back, and uncovered Ruby’s ravaged slack face. And she was naked, and I knew I couldn’t escape making love to her. I woke from that one with the scream still echoing in my ears, tearing at my throat. Gasping, I made double-strength coffee and gulped four cups down fast, so I wouldn’t sleep any more. Then my stomach rebelled and I ran to the bathroom to vomit my heart out.
I went to work that morning looking like I’d been dragged through a knothole. Roberta set a steaming mug in front of me and said, “You should make a New Year’s resolution, Tim. Start the ’70’s on the right foot. At this rate you’ll go right down the drain.”
I shuddered and pushed the cup away. “And what kind of resolution do you advise, Ann Landers?”
“Get out from under this,” she said bluntly. “Forget her, Tim. She’s no good. Meet some other girl.”
“I don’t want to.” And it crystallized instantly. The jagged pieces of myself came together. Words have power. I scribbled them on my pad and before I finished writing my mind was in perfect focus. I didn’t want any other girl — I wanted Ellie. She was gone. All I had to do was find her. And I could do that.
“Roberta, you are my only true love,” I announced. “Alas, that you didn’t have the patience to wait for me! Now you’ve taken up with Ernie, and I’ll have to sail to the South Pacific, or learn bullfighting in Seville.” I dragged out the Yellow Pages and opened it to Hotels and Motels.
“Oh boy.” She pulled off her bifocals. “Which is worse, Ernie — when he’s up or when he’s down?”
“Let me get back to you on that.” Ernie watched, frowning, as I chose a number and dialed.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you have an Eleanor Quartern staying in the hotel?”
Under voluble protest Roberta typed up the list for me. On it was every hotel, motel, and rooming house in the greater metropolitan area. In two days I phoned them all. If Ellie was staying in any of them she was using an alias. Later it might become necessary to stake each one out, but not now.
The agency that handled her work was another obvious hole. Unfortunately agencies know how to protect their models. Mashers petition them all the time for phone numbers and addresses, and get the brush. It might become necessary to assault that fortress too, but there might be a smarter way.
I gave a lot of hard thought to it. From the unlocked cabinets where the back files go I retrieved the transcripts. When I first read them Ruby was in the front of my mind. Now I wanted to go through them from Ellie’s perspective. I also made notes, as complete as I could, of the bits she hadn’t let me tape.
What struck me now was how the gift had distorted her relations with people. All her life she had dealt on an insincere, manipulative level with everybody. Ruby had taught her to live like a rat or a roach, out on the fringe, never relying on anyone but themselves. They had built a tiny flawed universe, just the two of them, in the cracks. Everyone else in the world was an outsider.
My fear now was that Ellie would hide on the fringe again. She might have already done it. I was stalking a wild animal. Her mother had left hardly a trace, passing through small towns like a shadow across water. If Ellie did the same, it might take years to find her.
But I had to gamble that she wouldn’t do that, not yet. She made big money, she enjoyed Saks Fifth Avenue and makeup and hip clothes. How can you keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the bright lights? And if she stayed in modeling she stayed in New York.
Given all this my next move was clear. In the middle of the morning on a bright January day I went down to Soho and rang the downstairs bell at Tangerine Cream. When the door buzzed I climbed up the three flights of dark stairs.
A girl opened the door at the top when I rang. “Hi. I’d like to see Francisco Bohalt.”
She looked at me carefully. She was the tallest thinnest girl I had ever seen, like a pencil, all in black. Her brown hair was clipped shorter than mine. I only knew she was female by the golf-ball breasts. “Does he, like, know you?”
“He hasn’t had the pleasure. Perhaps you could give him my business card.”
“Far out!” She took it and shut the door on me.
I took off my overcoat and waited in the dark. I knew these converted industrial lofts. The chances were good that this was the only entrance. And I was early enough so that Bohalt would be in, but with luck not so early as to haul him out of bed.
Suddenly the door banged wide open. Light poured into the hall. A little gray-haired man stood trembling in the doorway, a Christmas elf with the DTs. “You!” he squealed.
“Me?” Confused, I pointed at myself. Surely he couldn’t recognize my voice from that one short call last June.
“You are Latimer Coates! The criminal! The brute! The thief!”
“I am? I mean, yes, I am Latimer Coates. How do you do? You must be Francisco Bohalt. You discovered Eléonore.”
I thought he would spit on me. “How dare you soil her name by speaking it, you bloodsucker!”
“Well, I have to speak it, since I want to talk to you about her. Do you want to do it here on the stairs? Or if you don’t want to ask me in I could take you out, maybe buy you a cup of coffee.”
Seething, he stood aside and gestured for me to go in. “Oh wow, Francisco,” the pencil said. “Is he, like, safe?”
“He only battens upon helpless females,” he said icily. “Don’t worry about me.”
It seemed to me that this still left the pencil at terrible risk from my alleged devilry, but I didn’t say so. I followed Bohalt through a huge white sunny space into a smaller room partitioned out of one corner. It was an inside corner so there were no windows. The gray walls were lined with low white document drawers, and photographs were pinned thickly above. Brilliant fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling.
A tall revolving stool stood near the light table, and Bohalt perched on it. I took the only other seat, a frightening contraption of shiny chrome and leather strapping. Very slowly I let it take my weight. If it collapsed I’d be in traction for months. It creaked but held, and I tried to relax. The pencil closed the door reverently upon us.
“What more can you want from Eléonore?” Bohalt demanded. “You seduced her. You made her cry until she wasn’t fit to be photographed. You robbed her and beat her — I saw the marks. You lured her away from me in Greece, by who knows what despicable blackmail. You are bleeding her white even now, as we speak! I should call the police. I should have Louisa throw you down the stairs. I should —” He began to sputter with rage.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” I had never envisioned myself as Snidely Whiplash before, and it was fascinating. “Can we touch base with reality here? First of all, I know about the end of the European tour. Ellie left Athens in May of last year. I first met her on June 6th, here in New York.”
“Liar!”
“At that time she hired me. Were you aware that I’m an investigator? It was on the card.”
“She told me.”
“I hope she also told you that my job was to find her mother. I did. Mrs. Quartern was in a hospital in Washington, where she passed away in July. Ellie undertook to pay off her late mother’s medical bills, which is why she’s been strapped lately.”
He stared at me blankly from those colorless eyes. “I didn’t know that. She didn’t tell us. Poor child, her mother! But — but you cannot deny you are her lover. She told me that. Her debaucher. A user of women, discarding them like trash.”
“Don’t get worked up. I — I do love her. But look at me, Mr. Bohalt. I’m almost forty. I’m twenty pounds overweight. I don’t move in glamorous circles. What do I have to seduce a girl like Ellie with?”
For the first time he really seemed to see me, not the fantastic villain he’d been ranting about. I could tell it was a letdown. “You’re a spy,” he said, hoping against hope. “A secret agent. Like James Bond, or Napoleon Solo.”
“Why do people always think that? Most of my work I do on the telephone.”
“Then — why are you here? What do you want?”
This was the tough part, and not only because I didn’t want to spill Ellie’s secret. “I love her,” I repeated slowly. “We were doing all right. And then she just left. Vanished. And I can’t find her.”
Pain washed through me. I stared blurrily down at my shoes, clenching my teeth. Bohalt didn’t speak, and after a while I looked up. I was startled to see the expression on his pointy little face. It was recognition — and pity.
We sat for a long time looking at each other, not saying anything. We didn’t have a damn thing in common except Ellie, but we had her in spades. I knew, as they say these days, where he was coming from. And he was the only person in the world who knew where I was at. We could start a club, Ellie Desertees.
At last he spoke. “Would you like to see some pictures?”
I was wary. “Pictures of what?”
“Of Eléonore, of course!”
“Oh! Sure, I’d love to.” As a matter of fact I worried about those pictures. Ellie had said she wore clothes in them. But there are clothes and then there are clothes. I didn’t want her starring in, say, a fur-fetishist’s wish book.
But if Bohalt had a fetish it was too subtle for me to see. He hauled out portfolios from the document drawers, dozens of black portfolios. The black and white photos were lovingly organized in series: A hundred shots of Ellie draped in burlap. Fifty tight closeups of her bare neck and spine that looked more like mountains than girl. Studies of her profile against a spruce tree. She looked utterly different for Bohalt than she had for me — it must have been the gift. I didn’t mind at all. I hadn’t seen her in so long, her image made me light-headed, greedy.
We wallowed in pictures of her, a pair of junkies who finally scored. We spread them out on the tables and floor. We discussed aesthetics and found ourselves in surprising accord. I deplored the fat sheaf of fashion shots. “I can’t believe what they’ll do to dress up a pretty face.”
Bohalt agreed. “It’s a living. But it prostitutes the vision. My vision.”
“This one’s very good though, in the coat.”
“Ah! That one ran in Mademoiselle. I did it when I did this group here ...”
Twice the pencil peeked in to see if I had murdered Francisco yet. The third time she murmured, “Francisco? Mr. Geller is here for your lunch appointment.”
“Damn.” Bohalt pouted like a baby.
I stood up. “I shouldn’t take any more of your valuable time, Mr. Bohalt. But I very much appreciate what you’ve shown me. You’re a genius.”
I meant it, too. Bohalt shrugged modestly, and the pencil looked at him in awe. Once again the mighty Francisco had converted the heathen and made the lion eat straw like the ox. “How can I help you?” he asked me.
“Do you still take her picture?”
“Not often enough. Once a month perhaps. Lately I’ve been out of town.”
“If you hear anything about her whereabouts I’d appreciate the information. Here’s my number.” I proffered another card, in case the pencil lost the first one.
“Louisa, put this in my personal book. Do you know you are not the only man who asks me this?”
“I’m not? Ah, let me guess — Father Ike over at Joseph’s House.”
He nodded. “You are knowledgeable.” Another member for the club.
We shook hands and Louisa the pencil showed me to the door. I looked at her long pipestem fingers on the Yale lock. “You couldn’t really throw me down those stairs, now could you?”
“No way. Hey, peace is my bag.”
“Let the sun shine in,” I agreed, and turned away.
I continued to keep tabs on all the hotels and motels. Nothing turned up, but it drove Roberta crazy. Preachers study Bibles. She studied articles from women’s magazines, searching for my salvation. “See? Statistics don’t lie. These May-December relationships are doomed, two out of three.”
“Do women actually read things like this?” I turned back to the title. “Oh, for — this is about Onassis marrying Jackie Kennedy. The cases aren’t parallel at all.”
Then there was the checklist, “Is It Infatuation Or Is It Love?” She worked me through all the questions while I tried to concentrate on paperwork. “It’s infatuation for sure,” she announced in triumph after adding up my score.
“I wouldn’t damn a dog on the testimony of Cosmo magazine.”
Even Ernie grew concerned. He took me out to lunch at Pico’s specifically to discuss it, man to man. “What do you hope to achieve, Tim? What will you do or say when you find her, that you haven’t already done or said?”
“I can’t tell you that, Ernie.” I didn’t know myself. Why hadn’t I forsworn women and joined a monastery? It wouldn’t have been much different from the Marine Corps.
He spread butter on a piece of Italian bread, shaking his head. “You haven’t even considered throwing in your hand, have you? Just forgetting her?”
“No,” I had to say. “It never occurred to me. I guess it’s gone too deep.”
“Too deep, hell!” He pointed his knife at me. “You’ve only known the girl a month all told! Can such a short affair wreck the rest of your life? Snap out of it, boy!”
I leaned my elbows on the red-checked tablecloth and stared into my beer. “Let me give it my best shot, Ernie. I can’t remember the last time I gave a romance a hundred percent. Once I’ve poured everything out, then maybe I’ll find some peace.”
“But, good god! How much more can you give? You’ve already found the girl’s mother, held her hand in the hospital, arranged the funeral. You’ve lost sleep, health, not to mention time and energy. When will it be enough, Tim?”
I couldn’t answer for a second. For some reason the gun weighed heavily on my shoulder, hanging unseen in its holster under my jacket. Agrapolides hadn’t tried any more stunts but you never knew. I shook the distraction off. “I’ll know when I get there, Ernie.”
We slurped our spaghetti for a little while in silence. Then Ernie glared at me from under his thick gray eyebrows. “All right then. Chase her. Woo her, and win her if you can. But try to hang on to your dignity, okay?”
“For the honor of the male sex,” I promised, raising my right hand.
“And stay legal. If you harass her she might go to court on you.”
“Oh come on, surely not.” I couldn’t imagine Ellie voluntarily entering the legal system.
“Think about how it looks, Tim. You meet her over a job. You’re twice her age. You flip. You chase her all over town with your tongue hanging out, even when she sends you packing. How old is she?”
“Seventeen,” I admitted.
“Oh great, a minor. Humbert Humbert doesn’t have a thing on you.”
“That was a disgusting book,” I said, stung by the comparison.
Ernie refused to be distracted. “Any judge in town would slap a restraining order on you in a minute, if she complained of harassment. You might even face criminal charges — I don’t know what the cutoff age is for statutory rape in New York. Just because they hardly ever go to prosecution doesn’t mean they never will in future.”
“Okay, okay. You’ve made your point. I’ll be nice,” I said bitterly. “She always said I was nice.”
The other bad thing about seizing the initiative was that I worried more. Crazy possibilities sprang up in my head, frustrating ideas that no one with sense would consider. For instance, Woodstock had been big in the papers last summer. I spent one sleepless night tormented with the idea of Ellie traveling west in a Volkswagen bus painted with psychedelic peace symbols. If she tuned in, turned on and dropped out, how could I even begin to look? Run an ad in Rolling Stone? I got up and rooted through my dusty stacks of papers until I found Life magazine, the issue with the photographs of nude hippies paddling in the muddy creek. Naturally her face wasn’t there.
Another loony idea was that she might join an Eastern cult, like John Lennon with his guru. I actually caught myself looking up the number of the Indian consulate in New York, all set to ask if they had a directory of spiritual teachers. I slammed the phone down — I was at the office — and Roberta said, “You break it, you bought it, buster.”
It was in that spirit of self-contempt that I phoned Joseph’s House. I knew it was futile. Ellie would never go back there. But I persuaded myself that she might keep up with some of the staff. They might even have an address on file. So I dialed. “Hello, I’m trying to reach Eleanor Quartern. I understand she used to live here.”
“Yes, but not recently,” the woman said. “Have you tried the Rogier Agency?” I explained that I wanted a real address. “Could you hold a minute?”
“I’m an expert at it.” I held so long, hanging up and starting over loomed as a real possibility in my mind. At last she came back. “Would you mind speaking to Father Ike? I’ll put him on.”
In fact I did mind. I remembered Ellie’s description of his listening. I didn’t want to speak to a good listener. There were too many things I might find myself saying. But before I could object he was on. “Hello? You’re trying to get in touch with Ellie? I have a number.”
“You do?” It came out in a croak. The gray ranks of locked filing cabinets seemed to swim close, crowding to hear better. He recited a number and I recognized it — it was Tangerine Cream’s. The disappointment was so acute I couldn’t speak.
“Did you get that?” Father Ike asked. “Hello? Are you there?”
I should have hung up right then. Instead I muttered, “Yeah.”
“Would your name by any chance be Tim Coates?”
Astounded, I said, “Yes. How’d you do that? No — never mind.” That gossipy little weasel Bohalt — Ellie had mentioned they were friendly.
“I haven’t seen Ellie in a year or so, but I try to keep up with her doings. I feel some responsibility.”
“What an ungrateful little brat she is,” I said. “At least she could phone.”
“You mustn’t blame her. She’s always coped with problems by running away. And sometimes it’s very hard to receive a gift. After all, giving is so much more fun.”
“That’s true.” In my hypersensitive frame of mind everything we said began to resonate with double meaning.
“Have you found it so? Then would you mind doing me a favor?”
“Look, I ...” But I couldn’t brush him off — he knew too much. He was a member of the club.
“Give some serious thought to letting her go.”
“Let her go? But — but I love her!”
“Does she love you?”
I should have lied, made up a barefaced yarn to throw him off. But all my telephone glibness deserted me. Ellie was honest — she had never said it. If only she had, I was sure everything would be different.
“If you love her, you want her to be happy,” Father Ike was saying gently and reasonably. “Love doesn’t hang chains on the beloved. She has to choose freely.”
I felt like a boxer in a blindfold. He hit home and I kept missing. “I do want her to be happy, she knows that. She knows I love her.”
“The very fact that’s she’s run away shows there’s something wrong. Are you right to insist? We call it love, but it can become a complicated form of hatred.”
I lost my temper and felt much the better for it. “Look, I hear what you’re saying. I appreciate your concern. Now bug off, okay?”
He sighed. “I apologize, Tim. My concern for Ellie ran away with me. She’s an easy girl to love.”
I remembered he knew a lot, more than Bohalt. But I knew her better. “I plan to take good care of her, Father. You’ve been very helpful. Now you’ll have to excuse me. Good-bye.”
I hung up and leaned back, breathing hard through my nose. My sense of the ridiculous was pretty bent these days. But after a while the image flashed through my head of what the club meetings would be like, with the current membership roster.
Finally at the beginning of February it came. Ernie and I returned from a long irritating meeting with a client who insisted his wife was cheating on him, in spite of everything we amassed to the contrary. The problem was, you can’t prove a negative. I picked up the pink message slip on my desk. “I could use a beer,” Ernie said. He hung his coat on the coat-rack. “Get the taste out of my mouth.”
“You and me both. That guy’s got a bee in his bonnet.” Then I looked at the message. It was from Bohalt, and said simply, “St. Thomas. February 2 to 10.” And today was the fifth. I felt myself turning pale. “Oh Jesus. Ernie, I need the rest of the week off. Roberta, where is St. Thomas? Who’s that travel agent you use?”
“Already called her,” she said. “It’s one of the Virgin Islands, not to be ironic or anything. Your flight leaves at seven tomorrow morning. You can pick up the ticket at the airport.”
“Roberta! Are you going to become — what did Ladies Home Journal call it — an enabler?”
“Put a cork in it. Can’t I be romantic just this once?”
Ernie was more serious. “Be careful, Tim, you hear? Come back safe.”
I rummaged in the desk drawer for my checkbook. “I’m leaving in a minute, I’ve got to get to the bank ... What do you mean, safe? St. Thomas isn’t Hanoi.”
“I don’t know.” He brushed the words away. “Good luck, okay? Happy hunting.”
“And pack your swim suit,” Roberta added. “St. Thomas in February. Boy, some people have all the luck.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. But it didn’t matter, since I had to get up so early to make my flight. After the plane took off I leaned my seat all the way back and tried to doze. In spite of my exhaustion I didn’t sleep very well. I skimmed the surface, coming up whenever the stewardess made an announcement.
And I began to dream. I was dancing with Ellie. We were dressed like movie stars, I in a curiously comfortable tail coat and she in white ruffles. The ballroom had Art Deco trees painted on the walls and twinkly ceiling lights. I was so lightly asleep that my waking self recognized the scene immediately: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Then the painted trees arched higher and darker, growing into a real forest. Ellie pushed me away. I hung on, and she changed. She turned into an oak sapling, and then into a flame.
I hung on. I remembered the story perfectly well, when Hercules or whoever it was tried to catch a nymph who changed shape. I never understood why she didn’t turn into a gallon of water, and let him use his muscles on that. I could even guess the end of the dream. She’ll turn into Ruby, I told myself, and I’ll wake up. After so many savage nightmares I really had a handle on my subconscious.
She turned into a young deer. “Stop that, Mikey!” the deer said.
“Latimer,” I corrected it. “Tim for short.” I clasped its neck and it twisted in panic. The hard sharp hooves slashed at my chest. I’ve hunted deer — they’re big animals. I realized this one was strong enough to kill me. And not only myself. A deer will run until it collapses if it’s scared enough. They don’t have much sense. What if I frightened her to death?
Then with a horrible jerk I was awake. A little boy about three years old was pounding on my chest. The mother reached over the seat back in front of me and hauled him away by the slack of his romper. “Sorry about that, mister,” she said. “Mikey, you just wait until I tell your father!”
Sweating, I straightened my seat.
I walked from the hotel past the pool to the sea wall. Below was the private beach. The white sand stretched empty to the ocean. Far out near the surf line were a dozen lounge chairs, all empty but one. A blonde girl lay there in a black swim suit.
I made my way down the steps and across the sand. The afternoon sun hung low in the sky, but its heat still burned into my face. I had to keep my jacket, which meant long trousers as well. I didn’t fit in with the resort at all.
At last I stood behind her chair, looking down at the top of her head. It seemed to me that she ought to sense my presence, lowering behind her like a storm, but she didn’t turn. Finally I said, “Ellie.”
She jumped, and turned in her chair. “Tim! My god!”
Under the blonde fringe big sunglasses hid her eyes, so I couldn’t read them. Alarm prickled all down my spine, and I said quickly, “I only want to talk, okay? So don’t push my buttons, please.”
“Tim, what are you doing here?”
“I brought you a present, and I want to talk. Which would you like first?”
“Oh!” She pushed the sunglasses up into her hair. How young she was! Young enough for me to know what she would say. “Oh — it’s not fair. I can’t resist presents.”
“All right.” I took the box out of my pocket and slid to one knee in the sand. “Ellie, will you marry me?”
She recoiled from the ring as if it were poison. “Tim — you’ve lost your mind!”
“You’re not the first one to say that. But if you’re not going to accept right off, let me sit down. Kneeling like this gives me jip.” I pulled a chair up beside hers and leaned back. The afternoon was declining towards a magnificent scarlet sunset. Two yards away the waves tumbled and hissed on the clean smooth sand. A waiter came by with frosty glasses of planters punch. “Very decadent,” I said, sipping.
“Tim, you comedian.” Tears and laughter trembled in her voice. I carefully didn’t look at her. “I don’t see how you can joke about it. You can’t possibly want to marry me. Not after —”
I waited. When she didn’t go on I said, “After what you’ve done to me, you mean. How did that begin, sweetheart? Did you start that very first day at the office?”
A pause. “I don’t like to look back.”
“You should be used to it now, telling me stuff. And I want you to, sweetheart. I want to know. I have a deep and profound lust for the how and the why.”
“Damn it! Don’t do that!”
Her cry made me start, but I didn’t let up. Father Ike was right — there’s a spice of hatred in love, maybe more than a spice. I deliberately inflamed it, my personal kink, that insatiable greed for knowledge. “If it kills us both, Ellie, I mean to finish this. It’s up to you how hard you want to make it.”
“Damn you. All right.” Her voice wavered and broke. “I never set out to manipulate you, Tim. Really I didn’t. It was just that I was so desperate to find Mom. And to get help I knew I’d have to tell a lot. So I tried to — to insure myself. And there aren’t a lot of ways to do that.”
“You opened my door and there I was, begging for it.”
A sharp indrawn breath. “You began, Tim. You know it’s true. You fell in love the moment I sat down. I saw it.”
“I must be emotionally vulnerable,” I reflected. “Been that way for years — Roberta had me do a questionnaire.”
“You didn’t make it hard for me. You’re such a romantic, Tim. Everything I did was what you wanted me to do — didn’t I? Think back. Can you deny it?”
I couldn’t. The memories made me writhe. With all my notes and questions I never knew her. She was an entirely different person, water slipping through my fingers. I had flattered myself, comparing myself to Candle. I was Richie Pavel, following a gorgeous unreality out into traffic. Saying it was like tearing hooks out of my flesh. “Yeah,” I muttered. “God help me. You were perfect.”
“And it worked, sort of.”
“It did,” I said. “I found Ruby for you. And I didn’t sell your secret to the National Enquirer, or the CIA. What’ll you do about Ernie and Roberta? You don’t have them by the balls.”
“Please, Tim ... I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be all right. I’ll take it as it comes. I had to because of Mom, do you understand, Tim? They were her secrets more than anybody’s. I had to cover us. She would have wanted it. Now she’s gone, it’s — I don’t know.”
From the side of my eye I caught her little gesture of surrender. With a vast anguish I kept my eyes front. “And what about in bed? Was that all fake, too?”
She was silent for what seemed like a year. Then I heard a smothered sob, and risked a quick look. She wept into her hands almost silently, as if she couldn’t bear to share her unhappiness. Automatically I took out a clean hanky and passed it over. “It’s not such a big deal,” I said gruffly. “What difference does it make? Forget it.”
“No!” She gulped. “No, I owe you the truth on this, Tim. It was wonderful.”
“Oh god.” The shame was so crushing I had to stand up. “Then that last night, in the hotel — oh god.”
“But — I know you enjoyed it, Tim ...”
Her words failed as I glared down at her. “You! You of all people — you can’t pretend not to know what I wanted! I never meant to go to bed with you that night. You made me do it. Because you wanted a little fun. Pushing the buttons —”
She was shouting too. “That’s not fair, Tim! You make it sound like it was all me. And it’s not, it’s not! I didn’t go in with sex in mind at all. It was all supposed to be very romantic and pure. You were the one with the raging hormones! And what about in the rooming house that time, who was emotionally vulnerable then?”
“But I asked you! I told you to say no if you didn’t want it! I knew it might be a bad moment — I didn’t push you at all!” Or had I? Suddenly I remembered her little breast under my hand through the T-shirt. The tangled webs of motive and desire seemed to go down and down, however deep I looked.
“You did, you were very persuasive. Oh god, I don’t know. I wanted to, but you made me want it. Don’t you understand? I can never be sure why things are happening, Tim, why I do what I do. What you want, what I want — after a while it’s not separate any more, it gets all mixed up. The only way I can keep clear of it all is — is to do things I don’t care one way or the other about, with people that don’t matter a damn.”
My fury chilled instantly. “You couldn’t write a better epitaph for Ruby Quartern if you worked at it. You can’t do that, Ellie. Look how it worked for her.”
She grew still. “Tim — have you been terribly unhappy?” I wouldn’t meet her eye. I retreated to my seat and picked up my empty glass. “Tim, please tell me. I’ve told you everything, haven’t I?” She sat on the end of my chair, taking up all the room, and bent to peer into my face.
“It’s been hell,” I said, defeated. “God knows I would’ve let it go if I could. Your mom said it — it’s easy to hook ’em, but it’s the devil getting them off the line. You don’t know the hold you have on me, Ellie. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”
“Don’t.” A fresh tear rolled down and she blotted it with the sodden hanky. “Tim, I never meant it to hit this hard. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I want you always to be busy, and funny, and full of ideas — the way you were before.”
“Sweetheart, don’t cry. Here, give that back. Use your beach towel — at least it’s dry.” I hadn’t come out with much of an agenda, but I had made one vow: I wouldn’t touch her this time. But the sight of her sobbing into a towel — over me, too! — was so gratingly wrong that my resolution crumbled. After I rearranged matters she leaned comfortably in my arms, sniffling into the accustomed shoulder. I had forgotten how warm she was to hold, how the aliveness of her soaked through into me. There was plenty of room in the lounge chair for lap sitting — these resorts get more unvirtuous every year. The waiter brought more punches and didn’t even blink. When she was calmer I asked, “Ellie, why did your mom move around so much?”
“What do you mean? She was a murderer!”
“I know, but she couldn’t have wiped someone out every time you moved. People would notice. And you hopped around a lot. Besides, Robert Candle is still alive.”
“Who is Robert Candle?”
“The guy at the Sunoco station.” The gears were clicking around in my head so fast I shifted her weight to the chair again. “Listen to me, Ellie. You just said that you can’t get close to people, that you start getting mixed up. Right?”
She nodded. “But it’s worse with you than anybody.”
“I’ll bet that’s because I’m the first person who wanted to know you, you yourself, not just your body ... Do you think that when it got too close for Ruby, when her motives got too confusing, that that was when she bailed out? It must have gotten wild and wooly, if all those guys had unusual obsessions — an occupational hazard. She had to work with it but she couldn’t shield herself from the bad vibrations. Like handling nuclear waste.”
My words tumbled over each other, I talked so fast. Ellie stared wide-eyed into my face. “Tim, you might have something there. She warned me once, never to let people load their miseries onto me.”
“I remember ... Do you realize how lucky you are, sweetheart? You stumbled into a profession where you can step back. It doesn’t confuse you when Francisco takes your picture, does it?”
“No — it’s like, it’s not me he’s photographing, not Ellie. Eléonore does all that.”
“And you’ve spent a lot of time with him, had a million pictures taken. You see? You could probably make your living at it forever if you wanted, with no problems.” Another little puzzle piece in place, and I was on top of the world. I held her hands and grinned at her. “And you’re doubly lucky, hon. Instead of a screwball you’ve hooked an ordinary guy who’s into roses and engagement rings, someone who wants you to be happy. You’ve never learned to love anyone properly, Ellie. Let me teach you. There are those who say I’m quite good at it.”
She smiled sadly at my he-man boast. “But why do you want to, Tim? Because I made you want to? Could you live with that? Or would you get mad again at being jerked around?”
“You were right at the beginning, Ellie, and I was wrong. We should never look back. To hell with past motives — let’s go forward instead.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever marry anybody, Tim.” She spoke as if she were a hundred years old. “I would never dare. And I’d never marry anyone I cared about. I would hurt them so dreadfully, like I’ve hurt you.”
My mouth went dry. “Do you care, Ellie? Do you love me?”
Now it was her turn to look away and not answer, but I had tight hold of her hands and she couldn’t turn far. “I’m going to insist on that, hon. How can I marry a girl who doesn’t love me? It’s not respectable. It’s not traditional. They wouldn’t rent me the tux. Besides,” I added more seriously, “it’s the only way we could both be safe, with this gift thing of yours. I had this dream on the plane ...”
“Tim, you have to go away!” She struggled in my grasp. “When you’re so near, sitting right there, I can’t decide what I feel. I —”
The look on her face made my heart turn over. For a moment it didn’t matter whose emotions had struck the spark — we were both aflame. When I loosened my hands she didn’t draw away. Our lips met with equal eagerness, our arms locked in an embrace like steel cables. It was deeper than just sex, deeper even than love. For that one eternal instant our wishes exactly meshed, reinforcing each other, spinning faster and faster.
Then I was myself again, clawing for control. “No!” I wrenched away and shoved her back, leaping to my feet. “Not again. Not that way.”
There didn’t seem to be enough air. She was breathless too, lifting trembling hands to straighten the sunglasses balanced on her hair. “Tim,” she whispered. “Oh Tim. I love you.”
My arms reached for her, but I snatched them back. “Don’t say that,” I panted. “Not yet. We can’t get there like that. Look: I’ve made my offer. The decision is up to you, you yourself, not you and me. When I leave, you consider it with a clean slate — no pressure, no obligations, no history. No nothing. Just the case on its merits. If you want me you know where I’ll be.”
Her face looked like a drowned child’s, overwhelmed by the force of what had roared over it. She had regained her balance on the end of the chair but the long legs still sprawled in a coltish tangle. The garish Caribbean sunset flowered on the horizon, turning the river of her hair into molten copper. It was a beautiful picture, a good one to carry in memory. I turned and walked away across the sand without looking back.
And suddenly I was free. I stepped out of jail into the sunshine. I had given everything I had, poured it all away to force out the magic words. And words have power. When she said them, it was Independence Day. Hugging my liberty, I ran joyfully up the steps. The receipt was still in my coat pocket at home — I could even get the money back on the ring.
Then at the top of the sea wall I heard her voice. “Tim! Wait!”
I turned. She was running across the beach towards me, blonde hair flying. “Oh no,” I breathed.
There are prisons you don’t see from the inside. Now from the outside I saw what she had done to me, only partly knowing she was doing it. She had created this emotional bondage in me out of her own needs, needs she herself was scarcely aware of. It had been the same for Ruby Quartern. One look into the new-born Ellie’s eyes, and she had been caught. Only suicide had released her.
Somehow I had found a hole. If I didn’t escape now I would be devoured, as Ruby herself had been. “Stop, Ellie!” I called, absurdly. “Go back!”
She didn’t slow down. She was almost at the bottom of the steps now, and I could feel it: the suck and draw of that power, that she didn’t know half the strength of. In another second I would be within its influence again, crazy in love, her slave forever. “All right — hold it right there.” And the gun was in my hand.
“Tim, we can’t leave it like this.” She didn’t even notice the weapon for a moment, gazing instead up at my face. Then her smile slipped. “Are you being funny again?”
“I’ve never been more serious, Ellie. Turn around and go back. Now.”
She made a little exasperated sound, between a sigh and a snort, and set her bare foot on the first step. I never have been able to frighten her, even the slightest bit. Only the thinnest barrier separated me now from that other state of mind, where I would embrace my chains and rush to rivet them around my neck. The .38 jerked in my grasp as I fired.
Time seemed to stop with a thump. I hung for a century exactly balanced on the perilous point between two equal and opposite desires. I hoped my shot was true. And I prayed to every god I no longer believed in, that I missed.
Then she fell backwards, sprawling on the sand. The .38 clattered from my hand as I leaped down the steps. “Ellie!” Against the black swim suit the entry wound hardly showed but at her back a widening pool soaked into the sand. The stink of cordite came to me mixed with the smell of her blood.
Horror almost stopped my breath. I didn’t dare clasp her to me, for fear of hurting her. Instead I seized her hand and stared frantically into her eyes. The light was already fading in them. I spoke quickly while there was time: “Ellie, I will love you for the rest of my life.” Her lips moved, saying my name. Then she was gone.
I knelt over her body, stupid with the shock. Guilt and despair seemed to seep up out of the sticky red sand. The person Ruby had warned her about, the wanter who asked for more than Ellie could ever give — all the time, it was me. A tear ran down my face and dropped onto our linked hands. From the top of the steps came a babble of exclamation. The waiter pointed in horror, and a woman guest shrieked.
I snarled up at them, the vultures. And I saw it. Over their heads, against the deep blue evening sky, a faint smear of light showed — the light of desire. She had given it to me. Her gift wasn’t inherited, like her brown eyes. It was like syphilis, transmitted by intimacy. And not just sex either, otherwise Ruby would have infected dozens of men. Intense mental contact must be necessary. I had demanded knowledge, a complete and total baring of mind and body both. And Ellie used her gift on me, gave me what I lusted for. In every sense of the word I had asked for it.
Ernie had wondered about her grandparents. They must be perfectly ordinary folks. With a flash of insight I knew for a certainty that Ruby had caught this gift, this psychic virus, from Ellie’s father. Of course he was a star in Hollywood, with the gift to help him.
The .38 lay where it fell, beside us on the sand. When I reached for it my audience scurried back out of sight, squawking for help. I holstered the gun and loped down the beach towards the palm trees. Under cover of the night, with money for bribes and a gun for persuasion, I could escape the island. A comfortless future unrolled before me: a murderer on the run from town to town, severed from everyone I knew, changing my name, scrounging to scrape a living. Like Ruby. I was inside her little world now, for keeps.
A big bubble of fear expanded in my chest but I forced myself to think positive. After all there were a few bright spots in this howling chaos my life had collapsed into. When I looked into my heart the shackles were gone. I would love Ellie forever, but my head was on straight now.
And I had a few advantages that Ruby Quartern lacked. I could fake papers, create another identity for myself. I wouldn’t have to hide in the cracks. I knew more about the gift than my poor Ellie or Ruby ever did. If I was careful it might not destroy me as it had them. There was no reason I couldn’t settle somewhere far from New York, out west maybe, and build a new life.
Maybe I should run for mayor.