She turned, walked away, whirled back again.
“I want to go, Eric. Baby’s been standing still too long.” Her
eyelids closed. “Can’t explain it. I just want to go.”
“
Well, okay.” I took her in my
arms. “You nervous or something?”
“
No. I want to be with you—just
with you.” Her voice was way down in her throat someplace, almost a
whisper. “If we stay here, we’ll never get away. We’ll stay and
stay. You know we will.”
“
I see what you mean.”
“
Then we’ll leave tonight.” She
smiled and I began to wonder if she had something on her mind.
Something might be bothering her. Sometimes a woman will go so far
with a fetching idea, then scare herself off. It’s called seeing
the light. They seldom realize they mentally manufacture that light
themselves.
Leda hadn’t been like that. She wasn’t the
kind to scare easily. She lounged on the arm of a chair and
wrinkled up the corners of her eyes. “Did he scare you? Prescott, I
mean?”
“
No.” I slumped in the chair and
pulled her onto my lap. The robe fell apart over her long thighs.
It hit me like always, that white flesh. The smell of her, the feel
of her, full and urgent. She wriggled in my lap, fumbled the robe
together.
“
Prescott does that sometimes,” she
said. “When a man leaves the hospital. He think they’ll remember
better if they’re scared.”
“
I doubt it.” Her hair smelled
good. I buried my face in it, kissed her throat. She made a noise
of content, but her voice was a shade too loud.
“
You aren’t scared, are you,
Eric?”
“
About what?”
“
I mean about—yourself.”
Outside a car hissed up the gravel drive and
white light reflected in diminishing convolutions through the
heavily draped Venetian blinds.
“
No.”
“
Doesn’t it frighten you at all
that you’re going to see your brother? That you’re free and on the
outside again? Did you feel all right driving over here from the
hospital?”
I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t hate
her for asking these things, yet something twisted tightly inside
me. It had always been that way with Leda. Drawn, yet repelled. I
loved her. Yet in some ways I hated her. I hated her possibly for
the same reasons I loved her. Something inside both of us met with
sharp necessity, yet clashed. I wanted to tell her how crazy it all
was. That I was as free of any cracked obsessions as
she.
I could never actually hurt her physically,
though sometimes it came close to that. But sometimes I was
compelled to hurt her with words. I knew she wanted to marry, but I
had to put it off until I was sure of myself. And once more I
thought, We’re a damned odd pair.
“
That why you want to leave?
Frightened of me?”
“
Pooh!”
“
Yeah. What’s that supposed to
mean?”
“
I was wondering, that’s
all.”
“
Quit wondering.”
It was funny. Things like that came out, and I
knew that sometimes I hurt her—just with words.
She took my face in both her hands and blinked
at me. Her eyes were very large, concerned, her mouth slightly
open. Her chin bunched. “Don’t let’s fight.”
“
Think I’m going to crown
you?”
“
With a wooden mallet?” She
smiled.
“
You’ve been talking with
Prescott.”
I was disgusted with myself for doing this,
but I couldn’t stop. I was worried, plenty, and everything was
jumbled in my mind.
“
You told me all this,
Eric.”
“
Did you talk with Prescott?” I
heard the anger in my voice. I was ashamed of it, but it was there.
It was what I felt. I couldn’t rid myself of it. It would take
time, like Prescott said. Only I half believed he had suggested
eight-tenths of my worry to me. It was up to me to rid myself of
it. Let it wear itself out. Or become conscious that it was never
there in the first place. “Did you?”
“
He called me in. Yes.”
“
Great. What’d he tell you to do?”
I stood, dragged her up with me. I walked across the room, sat on
the divan in front of the fireplace.
Somehow, touching her, being close to her, it
was impossible to talk. She hadn’t moved. She stood with her back
to me, the long lines of her body showing even through the robe,
somehow dissolving the cloth; the supple waist, the flare of the
hip, the broad curve of shoulder.
“
He tell you to watch out?” I said.
I realized what I was saying and I didn’t like it. My voice went on
just the same—harsh, filled with bitterness. “He tell you to get
hold of him if I acted funny? Did he?”
She shook her head, not moving, with her back
still toward me.
“
He tell you I was dangerous, apt
to do wild things? He warn you to stay away from me—or
what?”
She whirled, came across the room, sat down
beside me. I got a crazy thought. Maybe she was being paid to do
this—part of her job. Maybe she was just seeing me home. . .
.
Excitement was in her voice. “No, Eric. Please
don’t. You’re hurting me and you’re hurting yourself. I simply
talked with Prescott. He wanted to know more about your plans, our
plans. You’re so closemouthed.”
“
It’s no business of
his.”
“
He’s concerned, Eric.”
I nodded. “Concerned. Thinks I’ll do some damn
fool thing.”
“
You’re acting like a
child.”
I kept silent.
“
He has a right. So’ve I. We want
you well.”
“
I am well.”
“
But, darling, you still dream
those horrible dreams. Now, listen. We’ll be married soon, and you
know I love you.”
“
You want to be sure I won’t kill
my brother when I see him, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to be
hooked up with a murderer. Damn it, Leda. Nothing’s wrong with
me.”
“
All right, darling.” She came
against me like a flame draws to your hand. “Now I’m going to
dress. You’re going to sit here and think. We’re not going to be
like this anymore.”
She rose, swung into her bedroom. She blew me
a kiss as she closed the door. It was like she’d swung her hip
against me. I heard her humming in there and I sat on the couch and
knew how wrong I was to take off like that, blow up
inside.
So much of what I thought was Leda could be my
imagination. There was no evil in her. Not the kind of evil you’d
think of, anyway. She was pent up. Her nature was like the heat
that hesitates along the top of a blast furnace. Withering, hot,
molten—anxious to consume. To consume was her nature. It was in her
walk, in the way she moved her lips, in the motions of her hands—in
fact, of her whole body. Yet it seemed unconscious on her part. I
tried to read conscious movement into it. But when I thought about
it, I knew it was nothing but instinct. Perhaps Leda was more like
her mother than she thought.
I wondered plenty about myself, too. What was
going to happen when I returned? There was the loan business my
father had left. Frank was running that now. I wanted to get back
and get some money. I needed money bad. Because with money I could
go on with my sculpturing. That and Leda were the important things
in my life. I wanted to do a nude of Leda in stone. Maybe then I’d
have her—cold and warm at the same time.
And me. What about me? What was going to
happen to me? Because there was always that void between sleep and
waking. For the long moments after I woke up, after dreaming, it
seemed as real—the wooden mallet, Frank, everything—as it seemed
that blood-and-thunder day back in Korea.
Leda and I had met close to a year ago. I was
in bed all the time then, unable to get around. I had a private
room at the far end of the ward and Leda was helping out at the
library. She wheeled the cart of books around, for bed
patients.
There were trees out beyond my window and some
hills, and if I rolled and propped myself on my side I could see
pretty well. The room was small and out there it was small too,
only in a different way. It was a place composed of the region
within my sight. It was good to see it all. The four walls of the
room were bare except for a religious painting at the head of the
bed and that single window with the sky blue, gray, white, pale,
dark with rain or with the unrebellious succession of days, and the
green.
I was in a far wing of the hospital so there
were no buildings in sight, only the voluptuous unreality beyond
the pane of glass: unreal because I wondered then if I would ever
be there again—where it was. A kind of through-the-looking-glass
thing, though not backward. And between the myriad procession of
hospital events, the time-clocked meals, needles, blood-pressure
and pulse counts; “We’ll take off the dressing. There, that wasn’t
so bad, was it?”; nights of dreams; Prescott’s first visits, “You
don’t dream?”, the lies; “Ah, so you do dream?”, the truths at
last, “A wooden mallet!”; the bedpans, the changing of sheets,
shave, wash, brush your teeth, the toenails clipped, scar-tissue,
haircut, the occasional scream of agonized sound purling across the
thick night, and worst of all the first realization that that last
scream was you—during the time between I would look out the window.
It was always fine and better than any movie or play. It never
became monotonous. Once in a while people passed out there, though
seldom, and I speculated as to what they did in life; the fat, the
slim, the quick, the weary. I speculated and dreamed and thought
intensely about my sculpturing and of how much I needed it, how I
wanted to return to it. Because thinking about it grounded you
somehow, made things real again. And I watched the skies change and
the clouds and winds in the trees out the window.
Then one day my door opened.
“
Hi! How’d you like something to
read?”
“
Thanks. Never mind.” I hadn’t
looked. That door had previously brought nothing to me but a minor
or major agony. This could be nothing else.
“
Well, have a look,
anyway.”
I heard the door swing wide and wheels
running—one with a squeak—and crepe-soled shoes and the hiss of a
nylon dress against what I suddenly saw was female flesh. The cart
was piled high with books, with tabs sticking out of them, and
magazines. That’s what she’d meant for me to look at. I looked at
her. She was something to watch.
There she was. My fate stood right there in
the door with the books in the cart and looked at me out of still
blue eyes. A fate that was going to be mixed up with death, murder,
money, and hell. A lush red-lipped fate with thick auburn hair and
long legs in a white dress which seemed to have been spun across
her body.
Maybe I didn’t think anything right then.
Except that she was something real. You didn’t have to look hard to
see it.
“
They say you haven’t had any
books,” she said. “I thought you might like some.” Her voice was
soft, yet there was a rasping quality to it. An exciting voice. Her
eyes were very steady. I raised to my elbows, pushed back against
the pillows. Something tore in my back and hurt like hell, but she
was morphine.
It was a day in May, about three o’clock in
the afternoon, and it began raining when she opened the
door.
I hadn’t said anything and she looked
embarrassed. Her face colored up. When she started to turn the cart
through the door, it caught her skirt.
“
Don’t go,” I said. “I might like
something.”
She was dubious now. But it was easier at that
moment to let me see the books on the cart than to wheel the cart
out the door. She half smiled and pressed her hair away from her
face with both hands. It was a gesture I would often see and
remember for the rest of my life. There was something in that
gesture that made you want to sink your hands into that hair. As
she moved closer to the bed, I realized her eyes had changed from
blue to gray. A cold gray, like wet black slate. Her mouth was
broad, full-lipped, her body long and willowy with deep breasts,
and she was very much alive. The blue returned to her
eyes.
“
What would you like to read?” Her
voice was rusty. That was it.
“
I don’t know.”
She smiled. “Lots of detective
stories.”
“
That’s good.” I wasn’t thinking.
Not about books.
“
Mysteries pass the
time.”
“
Have you found that?”
“
Well, sometimes I read them.” She
looked out the window. I saw that her eyelids were heavy. I thought
then it was from overwork. It wasn’t. I learned that later. It was
natural with her. Her lids were dark. It wasn’t eye shadow, either.
It came from something inside her. Those heavy dark lids with the
blue eyes were sure something.
Somebody opened the ward door down the hall
and the draft caused my door to slam. She said, “Oh,” and looked at
the door. “I’m not supposed to be in here.” She said it like she
didn’t give a damn.
“
Yes.”
There was a long silence. Maybe she was trying
to be serious but there was always that twist at the corner of her
lips.