Barbary Shore (18 page)

Hollingsworth had listened to this without expression, without movement save for his foot which slid back and forth upon the carpet. I heard the story through his ears, and it provided me a portrait of Guinevere, perhaps my own as much as his, face swollen with weeping, her features puffed from the hornet’s nest of discovery which had beset her. Hollingsworth would watch her, eyes blinking to the metronome of his brain, his toe pawing her upon the carpet. She was the turtle tumbled onto her back, even as the dream had in advance prepared her. And slowly he wiggled his toe, debating perhaps, remotely tempted to flip the turtle upright again.

He looked at Monina who was sitting primly on Lannie’s lap, the child at intermission who has forgotten already what is past, and cannot conceive what is to come. Slowly, she wriggled within Lannie’s arms, and revolved her head to stare at Hollingsworth, her mouth sullen again.

“Monina,” he said, “do you think that was a nice thing to give those bugs to your Mommie?” He smiled frostily.

Her reaction was unforeseen. I do not know if his reprimand excited her guilt, if indeed she contained any, or whether it was with a sure grasp that a rebuke from him, from
him
, was
too unjust to bear. In any case she was out of Lannie’s arms and across the room more rapidly than I had believed she could fly. And like a missile whose fuse was her mouth, she buried her teeth into Hollingsworth’s hand, emitting in advance one single shriek which graduated her at a bound from a child to an avenging banshee.

Hollingsworth was caught by surprise. Unguarded, a moan escaped from his mouth, his eyes opened in fright. What nightmares were resurrected? He sat helpless upon the chair, his head thrown back, his limbs rigid, a convict in the deathroom, his body violated in the spasms of the current.

“I’m innocent,” he screamed.

And with the cry, Monina released him, ran weeping out the door and wailing down the stairs.

Doubled with pain, Hollingsworth grunted, his paw held out before him to reveal in bleeding outline the opposed small scimitars of Monina’s teeth. He writhed back and forth upon the chair, and then tentatively his unmarked hand fumbled through his hair. There was no spot shaven, no electrode upon his skull. He groaned, and mother to himself, supported the bleeding hand with the other, kissed it gently, tenderly, through a welter of self-pity and adoration.

We sat transfixed. As his anguish receded, he sat back, arms dangling, his face pale, sweat upon his brow. “Ohhhhh,” he shuddered. Then he drew upright in the chair, his mouth deadly. “When I see that kid again,” he said, “I’ll cut her fucking heart out.”

Lannie stood and made a vague gesture toward him. “Does it hurt?” she asked inanely, her yellow fingers plucking at the corner of her mouth.

He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m going to see a doctor,” he said; “this can be a serious injury.” His voice was recapturing the anonymity with which he cloaked himself. “I must apologize for swearing, being as there were ladies
present.” When Lannie made no response, her fingers only nipping her mouth more fiercely, he continued. “It was such a sudden shock, after all. These things have a way of taking a fellow by surprise.” Deftly, he wrapped the handkerchief about his hand. “Some children are badly brought up, it’s a question of manners I would say.” He stood up, and in the way he grasped his chair for support, I knew that he was still shaken. “One can never tell. A child’s bite can be poisonous, I’ve heard.”

Lannie could restrain herself no longer. Arms at her side, she laughed helplessly, “Oh, what a fool . . I never dreamed,” she gasped. “You’re stupid.”

Hollingsworth suffered through it, fumbling in his shirt pocket to find a cigarette, and managing at last to light it. “Some people have a very unusual sense of humor,” he muttered.

Delighted, I joined her. We laughed at him without pause for almost a minute, while he remained motionless, his face losing at last even its caricature of outraged dignity, so that he seemed to wait, patient and resolved, until the insult had run its course.

“Are you done now?” he asked her coldly, and for its effect upon her he might have pressed a button. Her laughter stopped. She quivered through every inch of her body, and I realized suddenly how close she was to hysteria.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“I suppose I’ll go now,” he said. He started toward the door, and with his hand upon the knob, he sniffed at his bandage, and delivered himself of a speech.

“I have a great deal of interest in all my friends, and so after I left that girl Alice with whom I spent an interesting few hours, if you know what I mean, even though she was what I would call a coarse girl of low upbringing, the passion’s creature sort of thing that one reads about in the newspapers …” The statement had become unwieldly, and he let it lapse to smile pleasantly at us, his youthful face without guile, his yellow
hair blending pleasantly with his blue eyes. “In any case, upon my return, I happened to pass this room, and you know there were a few sounds of the sort a fellow can hear very often in New York around four in the morning if he keeps his ears open.”

“Oh,” Lannie said, “oh, you misunderstand; you do.”

“Yes, I hope so,” he said modestly, “but I think, Miss Madison, that between you and Mr. Lovett there’s certain kinds of … intimate exchange.”

“Now, do you want to get out of here?” I asked. A murderous discharge of feeling left my limbs powerless.

“Leave him alone!” Lannie cried out to me.

“Oh, I’m going,” Hollingsworth said. He was alert, his weight balanced to parry attack.

“You’re scum,” I told him.

“No.” An expression of wistfulness set his features in unaccustomed patterns. “No, I don’t do this to be a mean fellow. I have to do it. You see that’s the only way I’m safe.” And with a curt nod, much as though he regretted what he had just said, he passed through the door.

Lannie, standing motionless, her arms rigid, her face white, sang after him, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

N
O
sooner had the door closed and the sound of his steps disappeared, than Lannie began in the same breath to laugh and to weep. “Terrible. It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,” she kept repeating in a monotonous voice.

What was terrible I could hardly have said. I followed her mechanically across the room, trying once to encircle her waist with my arm but she flung it off. And each time I attempted to soothe her, she appeared not to have heard me. “Oh, it’s terrible,” she kept saying.

“What, Lannie?”

“Ohh.” She dropped into a chair, started to light a cigarette with her trembling hands, and when this proved impossible, threw it to the floor. I brought her a glass of water, and she gulped it with disproportionate effort as though her throat refused to swallow.

I allowed a few minutes to go by without saying anything, and slowly, measure by measure, she grew calm again. A tired smile widened her mouth. Limp and pale, she remained in her seat, her fingers still shaking. “We should never have treated him that way,” she said at last.

“Why not?”

“Oh, Mikey, you could never understand him because he’s
different, and do you know how rare that is?” She shook her head, watching with an abstract curiosity the quiver of her fingers. “You see he’s consecrated, and we just wander, and every day is new to us and ends by being silly, but he has a purpose and so he’s fortunate.” This time she succeeded in applying a match to her cigarette. “He doesn’t know what he possesses, and I could show it to him.”

“Then why did you laugh?” I asked.

“Yes, why?” I thought she was going to answer me; perhaps she even searched a moment for the reply. “Oh, it’s beyond you,” she said finally.

Yet my question must have had its effect for Lannie became silent again. As the minutes passed without either of us furnishing a word, I sensed melancholy settling upon her. She smoked the cigarette dreamily, her head back, her eyes following the passage of the smoke toward the ceiling. Once or twice she sighed. “There’s no rest,” she muttered. And the smoke curled from her limp hand and clung to her sleeve before drifting upward.

“Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about?”

Lannie stood up and walked to the window. Her back to me, she stared through the dirty pane. “When night comes, I’ll be able to see the courtyard better. There’s a pool at the bottom, and I float in the middle with lily pads about my hair, and a bird calls for me. I can hear that clearly.”

“What are you talking about?” I snapped.

“I don’t know,” she went on, “who comes before Mr. Ter-Prossamenianvili, and that isn’t even his name. If I could find a record of myself I would tell you.” She perched herself on the window sill, and held out her hand as if to capture the sunlight. “You see, Mikey, they were always putting me on a bed, and then there were hands and the shock. I know what they were doing because each time they gave me the shock it would leave a little less of my brain, and they wanted to render me stupid
as others render fat. They hated me, and they made a record of everything they took from my brain, and there was the girl in the corner with the eyeglasses who kept writing everything on the pad, and now it’s in some green filing cabinet. They hated me, and I loved them for their sins.”

This outburst apparently finished, she remained leaning against the window. The afternoon sun had lowered, and the last rays of light shone from outside. The worn gray nap of the furniture was oppressive again, and the dust-laden air shimmered in the bare and empty spaces of her room. Against a wall the sofa still remained as she had left it, facing no one, its monumental back a reminder of how she must sit when she was alone. I could see her in another chair turned to hide in still another room, and she would be watching the glow of embers in a fireplace. The room would be dark and quiet, and as the coal turned to ash, a chill wind would blow about her. The fire would die, and she would sit there in the darkness, her hand extended toward the whitened embers. And behind the chair with the breath of malevolence, another presence would fill the room, and she could only wait, terror-struck.

Tears started in my eyes. I could have wept for her. “Lannie,” I said.

The large brown eyes, liquid and unguarded, looked at me from across the room, and with a pity I offered to her in preference to myself, I heard my voice say, “Don’t you understand? I think I love you.”

I might have given a blow across the brow for she ducked her head and held her nose as if all the grief she were able to contain had lodged suddenly there. She was aware of me now, and for an instant there was a directness in her response which I had rarely seen. “Mikey, you’re good,” she said.

“No, look.” I had crossed the room and was holding her by the waist. “Let me love you,” I pleaded. “I want to, don’t you understand?”

“Oh.” Her mouth was tight. She stared fixedly past my shoulder.

“Don’t hold yourself against me, Lannie.”

She began to cry. I pulled her toward me, and she ceased to resist, and ended with her arms about my neck, the salt of her tears against my mouth. “I want to love you …” She was caught by a new paroxysm of grief. “But I can’t. I can’t love you.” She tried to push me away. “I don’t like you. And you don’t need me.”

“I do.”

She shook her head, tears streaming over her narrow face. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she whispered.

I guided her to the bed and lay myself down beside her.

There is a wager always when we make love, and if I was without passion, I was not without feeling. In the certainty of my own affection I gambled that she would melt.

It was a brave essay I made, but in a lost cause, and I stalked the heels of others and was rutted in the scars they had left. I loved her with as much talent as I could muster, and with more warmth than I had summoned through long months, but she lay beneath me stiffly and suffered it with a smile, her face calm and patient, sweet suffering Jesus upon the cross.

Slowly my confidence faded, and I made love with a sense of dread which slowed my motions and stilled my heat, until at last, the clock run down, and a cold sweat upon my back, I withdrew and lay beside her shuddering.

She was brisk in her motions. She took the sheet and wiped my face, kissed me once remotely upon the nose. “All done now,” she murmured, but whether it were a question or an expression of relief, I hardly knew. After a time I sat up in bed, and each of us in our fashion rearranged our clothing. Lannie stood up finally, lit a cigarette, and stretched her arms. “Well, you got what you came down for,” she said with sudden savagery.

I was too bruised to answer, doubting any reply I could make.

She spread the counterpane and walked to the window, her body erect, her head held high. Disgust on her mouth, she said quietly, “I hate making love in the daytime, it’s always so obscene, and I keep thinking I’m a little girl and I’m peeking through the keyhole to see fat papa on the john.” Lannie was breathing quickly. “You have to peek at me, don’t you? You have to find out what I’m like. There never is anyone who lets me alone. Once I fled with a book, and picked a little green hill that looked down on a little green valley, and all the village oafs came out and jeered at me because I was smarter than them, and how could they bear that?”

“I don’t know whether you’ll believe it or not, Lannie, but I wanted to make you happy.”

She looked as though I were taunting her. “Then why do you bother me? Why did you come near me?”

“I don’t understand you,” I stammered.

“You know I’m not well. What were you trying to do?”

I might have been lashed across the face. I turned away from her and murmured, “Oh, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” but the words lacked assurance. “You can’t be right,” I protested. “I … I think I love you.”

Her mouth curled again. “You can’t love anybody, Mikey, for you’re Narcissus, and the closer you come to the water the more you adore yourself until your nose touches, and then you’re alone again.”

I did not want to believe this. “It’s true,” I said, “but it’s … it’s not true. It’s not all true.” I caught her by the shoulder with enough force to have hurt her. “Don’t you understand? I want to live.” I caught myself on the point of weeping. “It’s not all true,” I heard myself repeating.