THERE THEY STOOD, THE one nightmare in a thousand nightmares that I had not had the imagination to dream. The two of them looking outrageously as if they belonged here. At first Max did not see me. He was fussing with some camera equipment. Jewel was dressed all in white, a snow-parody of a bride: white boots, white skirt, white thick-stitched sweater, all under a helmet of yellow hair.
With a touch of the strange on-and-off wisdom she’d always had she read my state at once.
“Take it easy, Wolf,” she said. “We’re here to do a film on the place. That’s all.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You were always quick to think the worst. The mark of Capricorn.”
Her ridiculous astrology! It had followed hypnotism, Marxism and God knows what else before I met her. I’d assumed it was simply the latest of her addictions, before she left me. The coffee table in the living room strewn with twenty-five-cent manuals. They were full of words like propitious …
Do not engage in business dealings today. Stay near home and loved ones. Propitious time for artistic endeavor, as long as Aries is in the ascendancy.
Had one of them sent her here? Today is propitious for final endings. Suicide is indicated for those in intolerable marriages with—
“What sign is Max?” I asked Jewel.
“Pisces.”
—with husbands born under the sign of the fish.
But I believed her. If she said she was here only to make one of Max’s mad films, then she was here for nothing more sinister than that. I had always believed her. It was from my darling Jewel that I’d learned the art of false naïvete. This time I could not even accuse her in the slightest degree. I’d known about the filming for weeks. I had just conveniently buried any memory of her new name: Cardillo.
Naïvete—my God! Once I taught her how to make her own sleeping pills. She was up for a part in some off-Broadway disaster and had the all-night fidgets. I told her you took sugar, water and a little molasses for body—and they were called placebos. She made them, and each night swallowed one, made a beautifully wry face—the face a Ghirlandaio Madonna might have made while taking some equally phony Renaissance medicine—and peacefully slept the night through. Madonna of the Placebos, how was she faring these last few years, having left my subterranean life for one still further underground?