Barbary Shore (31 page)

“I thought he’d never leave,” Lannie whispered. “It was terrible. He passed me on the street and he smiled. He knows!”

To draw attention to myself, I tried to clear my throat. But as if this were wholly inadequate, I gave vent instead to a furious spasm of coughing. Each of them started from the embrace.
Lannie stood rigidly, her eyes fastened upon me. “Ohh,” she breathed. “Ohhh, why did you have to be here?”

Guinevere pulled her dressing gown over her halter, and the motion completed, looked at me with a silly expression on her face. She began to snicker. “I forgot you were coming,” she blurted to Lannie, bewildered, I am certain, that she had been rendered so unaware. “Oh, brother,” she offered in diminutive. Yet she could hardly conceal her delight. If the first diversion could not have come at a better moment, the second relieved her entirely. “Brother,” she repeated, and not without gusto.

Hands against her forehead, Lannie dropped into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Despite myself, I began to laugh, and if the coughing had not exhausted me, the laughter would finish me indeed. I roared at Lannie as the duplicate of myself, and at Guinevere who must run all her trains on the same track and cannot remember if the freight has passed and the express is coming. I roared at McLeod who dropped all his bets on a crooked wheel. I roared at ingenuity which filled the same hole necessity has dug, and thought of Lannie who waited outside for hours. And in seeing the two women together I saw myself alone with each of them, and laughed even more.

Lannie was grasping the arms of her chair. “Don’t look like that,” she snapped at Guinevere, whose mouth was open at my reaction. The rebuke effective, Lannie added furiously, “Pay no attention to him. He’s a fool.”

Guinevere’s eyes came up to mine, flinched, and moved away. “Oh, you characters will drive me nuts,” she shouted.

Lannie lit a cigarette, her quivering fingers negotiating the contact between the match and the tip with obvious difficulty. “You must never say that,” she told Guinevere; “you must never try to catch the favor of anyone who is not your equal, for there is no shame equal to that.”

“I don’t know. I’m no different from anybody else,” Guinevere proclaimed. But the smugness with which normally she would have mastered the statement was not quite successful. If she had used this a score of times with that part of her equipment which acted the housewife and had noted it to be a convenient rest in any conversation—yes, we are all alike, we are not fools nor radicals nor thieves nor clowns—where one could nod his head and mutual self-esteem could lap about this bond, she could employ it no longer with complete satisfaction. For the speech Lannie must have made many times had caught her at last in its attractions. She would be a thief or a clown or a radical or a fool and flourish in the novelty. “I’m no different from anybody else,” she said, but offered it as an obvious gambit, panting to be contradicted.

And Lannie satisfied her. “Why must you be so silly? You are different. There is no one else like you, and you are beautiful.” I might not have been there for all the attention paid me. “To think of you years ago,” she said in her husky voice, “and how everyone passed through you and over you, and if you became drunk enough you could think you loved them, but it was never true. You were too beautiful, and what did they know of you, what does a boot know of the ground it soils? You gave yourself to them, and yet you were always free, for you wanted more than they did, you agreed to them and followed their ways, but you were miserable because that could never be for you. How could you love them when it was only yourself that you loved, and you were so right in that because we are born to love ourselves and that is the secret of everything. All your life you searched for a mirror to find your beauty, to see how your skin glows and your body swells in rapture and the hymn that is in you may be sung to yourself.” Caressing, delicate, her voice must seek to create a spell. “But no one could give you even a tarnished dirty picture of yourself, for how may a boot
reflect beauty? And how could they see that you were alive and that your face could shine and there was color in you and such a sweet song, when they didn’t want that, they wanted to swill and grind you into the dirt and tromple tromple. What an island you must have lived in, what a cry there is in you for deliverance. And that is why you love me, for I would be a mirror to you, and we escape only when we follow our mirror and let it lead us out of the forest. I can let you see your beauty, and so you will love me for I adore you and unlike the others want nothing but to lie in your arms, the mirror.”

Guinevere heard this with her lips parted, her eyes far away. Bliss animated every curve in her face. “Yes,” she murmured, “yes,” dropping her voice into a gentle reflective sigh. The nectar she tasted rolled in her mouth until she could have absorbed her tongue in the sentience of the moment. Unconsciously, she clasped her breast. If it had been possible she would have kissed herself upon the throat.

“There is no one,” Lannie went on, “who loves you as I and is devoted to your beauty.”

“No one.” Response to the invocation, Guinevere chanted the words.

“Then why oh why,” burst out Lannie with sudden anguish, “do you cheat upon me in a corner until only the worst in Blondie can meet the depraved in you, and both must wallow in stinkheat?”

Marvel of anger, Guinevere’s nose turned red. “Leave me alone,” she said raucously, “I got to think of the future.”

“There is no future,” Lannie told her. She caught Guinevere by the arms. “It is shameful to entice him and worse that he forgets himself.”

“Leave me alone.”

“It can’t be true that you and he really plan …? Oh, but that is impossible!” she cried aloud, hands at her temple. “No,
listen”—and now her hands fluttered to Guinevere’s cheek—“there must be honor in punishing the other. Justice must be done I tell you, and not profit.”

“We’ve got our plans to worry about,” Guinevere muttered.

“Oh, no, the evil state,” Lannie rambled, “has beauty because it is so strong. But my friend must not leave them or it means that he is . . frightened of what is to come, and I was so certain that they were so strong.” She collected herself. “Oh, he will take you away from me, and you don’t care. Not even you will they allow me.”

What Guinevere would do I could hardly imagine. Anger swelled in her face until it bulged her eyes, and yet she might as easily have given herself to Lannie’s arms. “Why don’t any of you ever leave me alone?” she blurted out for still another time.

Monina made the decision. Motionless on the floor since Lannie had entered, her tiny fists frozen at her side, head cocked rigidly in the straining attitude of a foreigner who would overhear a conversation and is baffled by his equipment, she was nonetheless an audience for all that passed. Words may go by and the sense be retained. Though the child remained seated, she was no longer silent.

“Mommie hate you,” she whispered, “Mommie hate you.” And hardly moving, her back curled, her eyes distended, she spat at Lannie with the intense venom of a cat.

“Monina!” Guinevere shrieked.

“You kissed her. You kissed her.” Monina began to cry. And turning on her mother, she struck a blow. “Mommie will die.”

Guinevere blanched at the child’s words. “You keep quiet,” she bawled. But when Lannie attempted to touch her cheek again, Guinevere threw her off with a shudder of revulsion. It must have burned Lannie’s fingers.

“Oh,” Guinevere moaned in her fishwife voice. “Oh, I’ll go nuts.”

“Stop that,” Lannie snapped. We had completed the circle.

If Guinevere muttered, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” it was only to furnish momentum. A second later she turned to Lannie and said, “Look, girlie, you better leave.”

“Leave?” Lannie repeated.

“I don’t know what to do,” Guinevere protested, “I don’t know what to think, maybe it was wrong to do what we did, oh brother, I don’t know if I can get it out of my head. Just go, fellow,” she begged at Lannie. “If we had a good time once, well I can always say I tried everything …” And the last sentence rolled out with a swagger.

Did Lannie bear defeat well, or did she sup on it with nearly all her heart? “All right, I’ll leave,” she said, a faint smile upon her face. She moved toward the door, Monina watching her with intense suspicion. Lannie halted, fumbled through her purse in characteristic distress, and came up at last with her hand crushing a few dollar bills. “Do you know what I shall do with this?” she asked of me.

I made a meaningless motion in answer.

“I’m going out to buy a can of dark dark paint, for there is something I must cover. The little mouse who came to me and said he was Jesus will leave me alone no longer. This morning I found his hole, and once I have the paint I’ll cover it, and he will die.” She said this with resignation. “I had hopes for him, but this”— she waved her hand benignly about the room—“has made me realize that there is small future for such a mouse.” She closed the door carefully behind her.

“Oh, Jesus,” Guinevere declared. But moving about the room to empty an ashtray into a basket, straightening the corner of the rug, she was also settling herself.

“It’s my fault,” she announced with her back to me, and then immediately burst into laughter. “How I can send them away.” The laughter exhausted, she was yanking at her hair
again in distress. “Christmas, you tell me, why did I tell her to go?”

“She frightened you,” I suggested.

I aimed too hard and stabbed the air. Guinevere shrugged and pointed to Monina. “It’s your fault, that’s what it is. Why can’t you give me a moment’s peace?” Monina took it like a puppy, smiling from ear to ear, her eyes shining.

“You know, all kidding aside,” Guinevere told me, and she would brush it thus away, “that Lannie is quite a character. She’s a very wonderful and strange girl.” Guinevere delivered her last remark as though it were a manufactured article she sold across a counter. “Wonderful and strange,” she repeated.

“Exactly,” I said.

“No, there’s something about her. I’ll tell you the truth, Lovett, she does me good. I don’t know, maybe I am that way … she makes me feel like I haven’t felt in years.” Secure now, Guinevere could become the captive of what she said. “You know, I believe in happy endings. I love her, I guess.” And for the moment she was in love.

“Fine.”

Only for a moment, however. She chuckled. “Boy, I got to admit it, that dame does have a line on her. I used to think I could hold up my end in a conversation, but your friend Miss Madison makes me look tongue-tied.” She tossed this off so casually that I might have wondered if I had ever seen them together.

“My friend?”

“Yeah.” Once again I could be charmed by Guinevere’s powers of recuperation. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s gone on between you and her. From what I heard your ears ought to burn.” She shook her head. “I used to think it was a compliment you went for me, but I should have known. You’d chase anything.” And in a crude burlesque of Lannie, she crooned,
“Oh, I don’t know what I’ll do, I’m sooo wild about you.” In chorus, Monina laughed with her.

“Ah-huh,” Guinevere said, “you like that, don’t you?”

Monina nodded, roaring indecently, her baby cheeks quivering with mirth adequate for a middle-aged woman. “You’re a devil,” Guinevere said to her.

That way I left them.

“A
FELLOW
has to ask it of himself because there are so many problems,” Hollingsworth was saying. “You know, we have courses now, and some of them in very abstruse subjects I can tell you. To be a good man in the organization a knowledge of the psychological is essential.” With that he had finished cutting his nails, the product deposited neatly on the flap of an envelope which he kept to the left of him on the desk as though in opposition to the other envelope to his right, also open, which contained the shavings of three pencils he had carefully sharpened at the beginning of the interview. So he sat, the lamp behind him shining over his head into the eyes of McLeod, the envelopes serving as balance pans for the justice he would dispense.

“I’ve considered your allegations very carefully,” Hollingsworth was continuing, “but one gets to wondering what the psychological part of it is.” In reproduction of a gesture which had once belonged to McLeod, Hollingsworth touched his finger tips together lightly, judiciously. “It’s part of a case I would say,” he offered mildly, and hawked his throat. “I wonder if you would object to my just thinking aloud for a little while?”

Before there could be an answer, Lannie had interrupted. “I have a question,” she said in a low voice.

“Not now,” Hollingsworth snapped.

“No, but I …” she began.

“I said, ‘Not now.’ ” Reaching across the desk he lit a cigarette for McLeod. “Here is the way I put it to myself,” he said thoughtfully. “We have a fellow who one could call intelligent like yourself, and yet I must say it, one can’t help being struck by the idea that he acts like a fool. Now, the last thing I want to do is to be offensive”—Hollingsworth radiated geniality—“but still there’s not an awful lot he does which makes sense.”

“Would you care to specify?” McLeod slumped in his chair, the top of his head barely visible, his long legs propped for support against the table. Arms hanging at his side, his finger tips must have trailed the floor. He might have appeared wholly patient, wholly passive, if it were not so evident that the glare of the lamp had begun to affect him.

“Let’s look at it. It seems to me that for something to make sense, there’s got to be a balance; you know one side has to weigh as much as the other.”

“No balance here?”

Again the finger tips touched. “Not much, a fellow would have to say.” Hollingsworth separated his hands, then pressed them lightly against the table. “In one of the courses we were instructed in, there was a great deal about what we called the psychology of the Bolshevists, and in it we were taught that these fellows thought they could change the history of the world, and naturally like everybody else they thought they were doing it for world betterment. Now, to take the fellow we been talking about all this time, he undoubtedly reasoned that way, and so everything he did there was a purpose to it. And no matter how terrible we might think those things would be, world betterment was the idea. So he could go ahead and do all that.” Abruptly, Hollingsworth chuckled. “Only the poor fellow decided he was wrong, and so he quit them. What is his psychology now?”