Strange Wine (9 page)

I once visited the Olympic peninsula of Washington state. I thought it was very beautiful, very peaceful. Up beyond the Seattle-Tacoma vicinity. Virgin wilderness. Douglas fir and alder with whitish bark and brownish-red at the tops of the leaves. It’s flat, but you can see the Olympic range and the Cascades and Mt. Rainier when the mist and fog and rain aren’t obscuring the view. And even the mist and fog and rain seem peaceful, comfortable; cold, but somehow sanctified. A person could live there, fast and hard away from Los Angeles and the freeway stranglehold. But there was no $50,000 plateau on the Olympic peninsula.

I couldn’t accept it. I don’t think I even broke stride. I just walked past, well down the corridor, leaned against the wall for a moment, and breathed deeply. Staff walked past and Nisbett stopped to ask me if I was all right; I said I was fine, just heartburn, and he said, “Ain’t it the truth,” and he walked away. I could feel my heart turning to anthracite in my chest. I thought I would die. And then I realized I’d been hallucinating, projecting my guilt, having a delayed reaction to what had happened the night before, to what lay huddled in that clothes closet till I could figure out how to dispose of it.

I got myself under control, swallowing several times to force down the lump, breathing through my mouth to clear the dark fog that had begun to swirl in like the fog of the Olympic peninsula.

And then I turned back, walked slowly to Netta’s office, and looked through the window-wall. She was talking to one of her assistants, a young woman who had worked with Madeline Hunter at UCLA, or had it been Iris Mink at UCLA Neuropsychiatric…
what the hell was I thinking!

I had killed Bernstein the night before, had seen her eyes start from her head and her tongue go fat in her mouth and her skin turn dark blue with cyanosis when the strangling failed and the suffocation succeeded. She was meat, dead meat, lying under a pile of coat hangers. She could not possibly be in there talking to her assistant.

I opened the door and walked in.

They both looked up and the assistant stopped talking. Netta looked at me with annoyance and said, “Yes?”

“I, uh, the report, I, uh…”

She waited. They both waited. I moved my hands in random patterns. The assistant said, “I’ll check it again, Netta, and show it to you after lunch; will that be all right?”

Netta Bernstein nodded it would be all right, and the assistant took the graph and slipped past me, giving me a security guard’s look; when was the last time I’d seen a look like that?

When she was gone, Netta turned to me and said, “Well, what is it, Duncaster?”

Netta Bernstein was thirty-seven. I had checked. Her dossier in personnel said she had attended the University of Washington, had obtained her degree in psychology, and had majored in child therapy. She had been married at the age of eighteen, while still an undergraduate to one of her professors, who had soon after their marriage left the academy for a job with Merck Sharp & Dohme, the drug company, in New Jersey. She had remained with him until he had received a federal grant for a research project (unspecified, probably defense-oriented), and they had moved to a remote part of the Olympic peninsula of Washington state, where they had remained for the next sixteen years. Grays Harbor County. The husband had died three years before, and Netta Bernstein had gone to work in Houston, at the Baylor Medical School, department of biochemistry. Research on the RNA messenger molecules; something related to autistic children. She had left Baylor and come to MyToy, for a startling salary, only thirteen months before. She was beautiful, with thick auburn hair and the most penetrating cobalt-colored eyes I had ever seen. Eyes that were wide and dead in a clothes closet near the marina. Before I had killed her, she looked no more than nineteen years old, still as young and beautiful as she must have been when she was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. When I left her she looked like nothing human, certainly nothing living.

I stared at her. She looked nineteen again. There were no black bruises on her throat, her color was fresh and youthful, her cobalt-colored eyes staring at me.

“
Well
, Duncaster?”

I ran away. I hid in my office, waiting for the cops to come. But they never did. I went crazy, waiting. I had all the terrors and the guilt of knowing she would turn me in, that she was playing cobra-at-the-mongoose-rally with me. She hadn’t died. Somehow she had still been breathing. I’d
thought
she was dead, but she wasn’t dead; she was alive. Down the hall, waiting for me to throw myself out a window or run shrieking through the corridors screaming my confession. Well, I wouldn’t do it! I’d outsmart her, I’d make sure she never told anyone about the night before.

I left the building by the service elevator, went to her apartment, and used the key I’d stolen the night before in anticipation of returning to dispose of the body. The first thing I did was check the clothes closet.

It was empty. The clothes were hung neatly. The dress with the plastic clothing bag from the dry cleaner was hanging among the others. There was no sign I’d even been there, that we had had dinner together, that we’d made love, that we’d argued over her performance in the conference room, that she’d denied meaning me any harm, that she had professed her love…and no sign I had killed her.

The apartment was silent and had never been the scene of a battlefield engagement for possession of the $50,000 plateau. I thought I might, indeed, be going crazy.

But when she got home, I killed Bernstein. Again.

I used a wooden cooking mallet intended to soften meat. I crushed her skull and wrapped her in the shower curtain and tied up her feet and torso with baling twine from under the sink. I attached a typewriter to the end of the cord, an IBM Selectric, and I carried her out to the marina at three a.m. and threw her in.

And the next day, Netta Bernstein was in her office, and she paid no attention to me, and I thought I’d go crazy, perhaps I’d
already
gone crazy. And that night I killed her with a tire iron and buried her body in the remotest part of Topanga Canyon. And the next day…

She didn’t come to work.

They told me she had taken a leave of absence, had gone to Washington state on family business.

I ransacked the dossier and found the location. I flew up from LA International to the Sea-Tac Airport and rented a car. West from Olympia toward Aberdeen. North on Highway 101. Twenty miles north. I turned west and drove for fifteen miles, and came to the high wire fence.

I could see the long, low structure of the research facility where Netta Bernstein had lived with her husband for sixteen years. I got in. I don’t remember how. I got in, that’s all.

I circled the building, looking for a way inside, and when a crack of lightning flashed down the slate of the sky I saw my reflection in a window, wild-eyed and more than a little crazy. It was terribly cold, and I could smell the rain coming.

I found a set of doors and they were open. I went into the building. I went looking, wanting only one thing: to find Netta Bernstein, to kill her once again, finally, completely, thoroughly, without room for argument or return.

There was music coming from somewhere far off in the building. Electronic music. I followed the sound and passed through research facilities, laboratories whose purpose I could not identify, and came, at last, to the living quarters at the rear of the building.

They were waiting for me.

Seven of them.

Netta times seven.

The husband had been a geneticist. Fallen in love with an eighteen-year-old, auburn-haired, cobalt-colored-eyed undergraduate he met at a lecture. He had cloned her. Had taken the cutting and run off nine copies that had been raised from infancy, that had grown up quickly as she aged so slowly, so beautifully. Netta times ten. And when they had raised their children, there, far away from all eyes and all interference, he had died and left the mother with her offspring; left the woman with her sisters; left the thirty-four-year-old original with her sixteen-year-old duplicates. And Netta had had to go out into the world to make a living, to the drug company, to Baylor, to MyToy.

But when she wanted to return to see herself in the mirrors of their lives, she would call one or two or another of the Nettas to come do her work at MyToy.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

Killing Bernstein was impossible. Killing Netta, because love had made me crazy, was beyond anyone’s power, beyond even madness and hatred.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

I sat down and they watched me. They had removed the body of their sister from the closet, and they had brought her back home for burial. And soon they would return to Los Angeles and drive up into wild Topanga Canyon and dig up another. And the third they would never see again.

And one of them had fallen in love with me.

Here on the Olympic peninsula, the fog and the mist and the rain are cool and almost sanctified. There is music, and they don’t harm me, and some day they may let me leave. They don’t bind me, they don’t keep me from going out into the night; but this is where I’ll stay.

And perhaps some day, when they clone again, perhaps I’ll get lucky again.

And perhaps one of them will fall in love with me.

Despite the fact that my mother died recently (8 October 76), and that she was on my mind for quite a while before that, and that I wrote this story in the same year (25 February 76), those who seek seminal and germinal influences for my stories will have to look further. My mother did not speak with a Yiddish accent, nor did she ever once in my entire life fix me up with a female, Jewish or Gentile. This is just a story.

How it came to be, however, is pretty strange.

On Saturday 16 August 75, in company with nineteen friends, I sprang for a thirteen-course Szechuan meal at Golden China on Van Nuys Boulevard in the Los Angeles suburb of that name. Van Nuys, that is. Come on, keep up with me.

There we were, all sitting around these round tables, with Gil Lamont trying to prove he wasn’t drunk by making an ass of himself harassing the waitress, with Arthur Byron Cover looking trepidatiously at the kung-poa beef and trying to reconcile it with his limitless capacity for junk food, with Ed Sunden, who had come in from Chicago to bring me a splendid set of tungsten tournament darts, bugging me to write a story in which he was the hero, with David Wise and Kathleen Barnes trying to pour soy sauce on Chick Dowden in an effort to cut off his puns….

And we got into this dumb discussion of ghost stories. And some smartass said, “They’ve all been written. There’re no fresh twists on the ghost story theme.”

Which of course was a gauntlet thrown down for a writer who remembers what Hemingway said in 1936: “There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”

I thought a minute, then said, “How about a Jewish momma’s boy, whose mother has just died, and the ghost comes back to
nuhdz
him?” And everyone broke up.

And I suddenly started screaming, “It’s great, it’s a natural! Gimme a typewriter! Gimme a typewriter!”

So David leaped up and ran off to his van where he had a Remington Selectric (which I tell everyone was but one of sixteen such machines he and Kathleen had ripped off from a federal office building just that afternoon, whether it’s true or not), and he came back and we shoved aside the savaged remains of lemon chicken and pork Lucerne, and I began writing the story you’re about to read. While the nineteen friends watched what they thought was a “party trick.” And the old friends who own the Golden China–Frank and Blossom and Sherri and their children–stared in amazement at the strangely inscrutable Occidental.

And I did the first two pages; and I finished it in the front window of A Change of Hobbit six months later. And eight months later my mother died.

But there’s no connection. Except love.

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.”

–José Ortega y Gasset

In the living room, the family was eating. The card tables had been set up and
tante
Elka had laid out her famous tiny meat knishes, the matzoh meal pancakes, the deli trays of corned beef, pastrami, chopped liver, and potato salad; the lox and cream cheese, cold kippers (boned, for God’s sake, it must have taken an eternity to do it) and smoked whitefish; stacks of corn rye and a nice pumpernickel; cole slaw, chicken salad; and flotillas of cucumber pickles.

In the deserted kitchen, Lance Goldfein sat smoking a cigarette, legs crossed at the ankles, staring out the window at the back porch. He jumped suddenly as a voice spoke directly above him.

“I’m gone fifteen minutes only, and already the stink of cigarettes. Feh.”

He looked around. He was alone in the kitchen.

“It wasn’t altogether the most sensational service I’ve ever attended, if I can be frank with you. Sadie Fertel’s, now
that
was a service.”

He looked around again, more closely this time. He was still alone in the kitchen. There was no one on the back porch. He turned around completely, but the swinging door to the dining room, and the living room beyond, was firmly closed. He was alone in the kitchen. Lance Goldfein had just returned from the funeral of his mother, and he was alone, thinking, brooding, in the kitchen of the house he now owned.

He sighed; he heaved a second sigh; he must have heard a snatch of conversation from one of the relatives in the other room. Clearly. Obviously. Maybe.

“You don’t talk to your own mother when she speaks to you? Out of sight is out of mind, is that correct?”