Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (21 page)

Alexis thought
If I could be the person who would want this! Who would be transformed by this . . .

She would buy a present for her sister’s daughter—a little
faux-
denim jacket, maybe—a leather belt with a gold buckle—an absurdly high-priced pullover in a delicate, near-translucent fabric like muslin—except she knew that her sixteen-year-old niece would probably not wear anything Alexis bought for her even once, and wouldn’t be able to return it as she did in the U.S. She allowed herself to be cajoled into trying on one of the shifts, in a striking fuchsia color; it was certainly unlike anything she owned, or had ever worn. “
Bella!”
—the chic-black-clad salesgirls hovered about her, smiling in admiration.

She was thinking of her father, her poor public-school-superintendent father in Ames, Iowa, whom she’d loved so much, who had saved money diligently, as the adults of his generation were conditioned to do; her father’s chronic anxiety about medical and hospital insurance; his plan for long-time health care at home for her mother and for himself, and both had died fairly suddenly—both, in hospitals. Her father’s concern, that had shaped much of his life, had turned out to be for nothing. The money he’d saved he left to Alexis and her sister, who had not needed his hard-earned “estate.” Out of pity for this kindly, over-conscientious man, not wanting to emulate him, Alexis bought the fuchsia shift. She bought a patterned pullover for her niece, and a silk shawl for her sister. Daringly she bought a pair of open-backed leather sandals, salmon-colored, with a two-inch cork heel—she’d been seeing shoes like these on fashionably dressed women in Rome. She thought
Is this my Roman self? Is this me?

She saw with surprise her youthful mirror-reflection, even her windblown ashy-blond hair with its gray streaks looked striking, attractive.

In another yet more elegant and expensive designer shop she made several more purchases, impulsively. A lightweight summer sweater with seed pearls scattered across its front—for herself. And a bizarre near-backless dress, sleek-dark-purple, with a single tight-fitting sleeve—her left arm remained bare. She smiled, the dress was utterly ravishing, very expensive. In a mirror she saw the stylish Italian salesgirls exchanging covert smiles—at the American shopper’s expense? Yet their compliments were lavish, their voices were high-pitched little bird-voices—“
Bella!”

She thought of David. He would be surprised! Maybe, he would be impressed.

She thought of her lost, beloved father, and she thought of David, her husband. She felt a wave of love for the man who was her husband—who seemed to be distracted by something, some secret, he could not share with her, just yet; like a wounded creature that flares up in rage against anyone who comes too near, David would nurse his secret hurt. She would forgive him: she would buy him one of the gorgeous, ridiculously priced Italian neckties. She took some time deciding, before buying him a Dior tie in dark purple silk stripes, to match her Versace dress.

Alexis! Thank you. This is very beautiful . . .

He would look at her in surprise, yet he would be moved, she knew. Though he professed to scorn presents, he was grateful for a particular sort of attention, that suggested his own good taste, his distinction.

Bella!

It was 5:40
P.M.
when she took a taxi to the Piazza del Popolo. Though burdened with packages she meant to walk back to the hotel by way of the block of apartment dwellings that had exerted such a fascination from their balcony—how curious she was, to see these dwellings close-up! She would have an advantage over David, she thought: and maybe she would tell him, what she saw. And maybe, not.

But, amid a deafening din of traffic, on foot, in her new-purchased open-backed sandals, which, in a rash moment she’d decided to wear out of the store, she couldn’t seem to locate the street, nor even the cobblestone passageway behind the hotel. It was as if, as soon as she ventured out of the area of the Bellevesta, and its surrounding glittery stores, she was in an urban no-man’s-land of narrow streets, treacherous motor scooters, delivery trucks exhaling waves of black smoke, littered sidewalks crowded with foreign-looking pedestrians—many of whom were clearly not Italian but Middle Eastern, Indian, African. Several times she was jostled—in a panic she gripped her shoulder bag, that it might not be torn from her. (Of course, their guidebook had warned of the folly of carrying shoulder bags in Rome.) When at last she located an alley between buildings just wide enough for a single vehicle to pass, it was desolate and littered, and smelled of garbage; from the front, the block of buildings was seen to be aged and derelict, abandoned and shuttered—seemingly slated for demolition. No one had lived in these decrepit quarters for some time.

“How strange! This is wrong . . .”

Fearful of getting lost, Alexis retracted her steps. Once on the busy Via di Ripetta she located the Hotel Bellevesta with no difficulty—its shining stained glass, stone and stucco facade was dazzlingly conspicuous. But she couldn’t circle the hotel, of course—the way was blocked by a high wall; and when she made her way to what she believed might be the rear of the hotel, in a littered and foul-smelling alley near a Dumpster, she saw nothing familiar. In a doorway at the rear two hotel workers lounged smoking, and staring at her—dark-eyed, very foreign-looking, unsmiling. Alexis smiled nervously at them and backed away. She’d had no luck trying to determine where their beautiful hotel room was—on this side of the hotel, or another? In the enervating heat of late afternoon she was beginning to feel light-headed but she didn’t want to give up the search for the mysterious block of apartment dwellings which she yearned desperately to see—but after another twenty minutes she found herself wandering aimlessly on a traffic-wracked street she was sure she’d never seen before—Via di Tiberio—and felt again a sensation of panic, that she was lost, or near-lost, in the very vicinity of her hotel. And it was strange to her, and unnerving, to be alone in this foreign place.

Crossing a particularly uneven cobblestone street, narrowly avoiding being struck by dark-helmeted motorcyclists rushing two abreast, Alexis lost her balance and tripped in her elegant new sandals—she turned her ankle, winced with pain—“Oh! Oh help me”—these words of childish appeal came unbidden—but luckily she hadn’t sprained the ankle. Her heart beat as if she were in the presence of danger and her face smarted with perspiration. She thought
This is my punishment now. For who I am. But I won’t give up!

For another half hour in the fetid heat she continued her quixotic search—she was dogged, desperate—limping—but could not find, in these mostly commercial backstreets intersecting with the Via di Ripetta, anything resembling the block of apartment buildings with the wonderful jumble of rooftops and the quaint faded colors like peeling walls in Venice, that she and David had seen from their balcony. Another time she stumbled upon the first row of buildings she’d seen—on a nameless little street—an entire block of abandoned and shuttered dwellings, clearly slated for demolition. The dark-skinned man so slowly eating dinner, the disheveled woman sprawled on her sofa watching TV, the seductive girl with the waist-long scintillate-black hair—where were they?

“There has to be some explanation . . .”

She shivered, she was feeling sick. Seeing now to her dismay: she was carrying only three articles—her handbag, and two shopping bags. She must have left the third bag in the taxi, containing the Dior necktie. It had cost 190 euros . . .

Shaken and exhausted she returned limping to the hotel just before 7
P.M.
The sky was bright as daylight though partly massed with malevolent-looking storm clouds. In the hotel courtyard café there was no one but a middle-aged German couple and, flirting awkwardly with a young waitress who was clearly trying to humor him, a stocky slump-shouldered older man in a blue-striped sport shirt—he turned, and it was David.

“Alexis. Back so soon.”

Spotted Hyenas: A Romance

H
ello? Is someone—there?”

Her voice quavered like a cello that has been crudely, clumsily struck. She was upstairs in the bedroom and gripping something—the back of an upholstered chair—tight. Through the doorway about fifteen feet away, in a mesh of light and shadow, a figure appeared to be standing, hesitantly—in a sort of crouch—not her husband, who wasn’t home yet—(she’d just glanced down into the driveway, and her husband’s car wasn’t there)—but a less stolidly-built man, with an oddly-shaped angular head, and sandy-silvery hair bristling at the nape of his neck. The stranger’s face was shadowed but his eyes gleamed like small bits of mica. In the shock of the moment Mariana had the impression that his legs were slightly stunted—just perceptibly short for the rest of his body.

She was too surprised to be frightened—she was too surprised to think
But this is not possible! No one is upstairs in this house except me.

Though keenly aware of each other neither Mariana nor the intruder moved.

How many seconds, or minutes—Mariana would not afterward know.

In time, there are curious interludes of
pause
—an eerie suspension of the normal flow of clock-time—during which one is struck dumb, breathless and paralyzed—awaiting release.

When Mariana drew breath to speak again—
Excuse me? Who are you?
—the words choked in her throat. For now she was beginning to be frightened. She was alone in the house—her husband had not yet returned home from work. She was a small-boned woman, of forty-three—not strong, and not very aggressive. She’d been a high-school athlete but her days of competitive physical exertion, the contention of one body against others in the exigency of the moment, had long since ceased. Apart from her husband she had very little physical contact with anyone any longer—and her contact with her husband was likely to be routine, predictable, and brief.

If she could move fast enough she could—maybe—slam the bedroom door—this was a door with a lock—(she thought: she’d never tried to lock it)—to keep out the intruder; or, she could run into the bathroom that opened off the bedroom—(which certainly had a door with a lock)—but then, she’d be trapped in the bathroom—(but if she remained in the bedroom, where she was now, she would be trapped also). But—could she force herself to step forward, in the direction of the intruder, and seize the doorknob to shut the door? And—if the intruder grabbed the door, to prevent her? Or—grabbed her? Swiftly her brain was working with the desperation of a brain whose oxygen is being depleted; but she could not move—she could not breathe. As in the corridor so intimately close the shadowy male figure stood also unmoving—poised as if about to leap—his head turned to the side as if he were
listening at
her—
sniffing
her—though not yet confronting her. He appeared to be waiting—for what? Mariana’s voice? Mariana’s scream?

She couldn’t see his face but she was beginning to be aware of his quickened breath—a harsh animal-panting.

And she could smell him—an acrid animal-smell, that made her feel faint.

This is no accident. He has come for me. But—who is he . . .

Outside, a vehicle approached the house—a flare of headlights lifted to the bedroom windows—for suddenly it was dusk. There came Mariana’s husband in his steel-colored Land Rover elevated from the pavement like a military vehicle. In that instant, as if released from a spell, now alert and alarmed, the male figure in the corridor turned and hurried away—limping? The clear, curious thought came to Mariana—
Oh! something is wrong with his hind leg
.

Downstairs, her husband called to her—“Hello! I’m home.”

It was a familiar pronouncement, and did not inevitably require a reply. Though often Mariana called down—“Hello!”—or, in a tone of wifely welcome—“Hi! I’ll be right down.” By the time Mariana descended the stairs, and entered the kitchen, Pearce might have left the room for another part of the house and on a bench by the side door his overcoat would have been flung, for Mariana to pick up and hang in the hall closet.

They had been married for nineteen years. Marital customs spontaneously created at the outset of the marriage prevailed in somewhat attenuated if not useless forms. In a voice of forced casualness Mariana said, “Pearce—did you see anyone outside? Leaving our house? In the driveway?”

“Who?”

Pearce was frowning at Mariana as if she’d interrupted his line of thinking. In his hands was the Italian leather attaché case she’d bought for him, for a recent birthday, to replace an identical attaché case she’d bought for him years before.

“Someone—a person—a stranger—no one we know . . . He was just . . . I didn’t . . .” Mariana paused, trying to catch her breath. By nature she was not an excitable woman, still less was she a woman inclined to hysteria; she did not imagine things, and took some pride, as a woman, in resisting extremes of emotion. Had she had a genuinely upsetting experience just a few minutes ago, or had it been wholly—imagined?

For now it seemed to her in the cheerily-lit kitchen that was like a glossy photograph of a kitchen, among pale-peach-colored counters, a dark-orange floor of Mexican tiles, a massive cook’s stove and a massive Sub-Zero unit with
faux-
cherrywood doors, that she’d probably just imagined the intruder upstairs. Some trick of the meshed shadow and sunlight just outside the bedroom. Whatever the figure had been, it had vanished with no sound like a dream rudely awakened by a slamming door. The new, curious thought came to Mariana
The territory isn’t large enough for two males of the identical sub-species.

Pearce was regarding her with a commingled expression of concern and impatience.

“What do you mean—did I ‘see’ someone? Was someone here? At the door? I didn’t see any car leave, if that’s what you mean.” Pearce paused in the smiling way of a seasoned lawyer about to deliver a
coup de grâce.
“Who did you expect me to see?”

Pearce was a lawyer by nature as well as by training: he carried with him a cloud of excited contentiousness like a concentration of stinging gnats. As a young man he’d been very attractive, with a sort of blond-Viking swagger—at least, Mariana seemed to recall being attracted to Pearce Shutt as a young man; now, in his early fifties, Pearce had become heavy-set, pear-shaped, with a sulky jowly face like a late Roman emperor and glaring deep-set eyes in which there gleamed a remnant of his boyish self, as in a slow-fading TV face. Pearce had been a competitive tennis player not so long ago—a trophy winner in the annual Crescent Lake Country Club tournament—an enthusiastic “sportsman”—deer-hunting in Michigan, trout-fishing in Colorado and bone-fishing in the Florida keys. After thirteen years at Extol Pharmaceuticals he’d recently been promoted to chief legal counsel—Pearce’s particular expertise was defending the corporation against a flood of lawsuits involving the prescription antidepressant Excelsior, now the preeminent psychotropic drug on the American market.

Pearce’s argument was that a certain percentage of depressed individuals will commit suicide whether they take medication or not. In courtrooms across the country he argued with faultless logic that deceased users of Excelsior were suicidal before beginning medication—otherwise, the medication would not have been prescribed for them.
Depressed individuals are by definition at risk for suicide, and only depressed individuals commit suicide; therefore, if Excelsior is prescribed for individuals who are severely depressed, and at risk for suicide, these individuals may commit suicide. But Excelsior is not the cause of the suicide, and Extol Pharmaceuticals cannot be liable.

“Well? Who did you expect to see?”

Mariana had no idea what her husband was asking her. Her heart was beating quickly and her sensitive nostrils were still pinched from the harsh acrid animal-smell of the shadowy stranger in the upstairs hall. Stammering she said:

“I don’t—didn’t—expect to see anyone . . . I think it must have been a mistake. He’d come to the wrong address with some sort of”—Mariana’s almond eyes widened with a sort of reckless innocence like the eyes of a child who has just discovered the possibility of inventing “truth”—“package like UPS. But not UPS—some other service.”

“Yes? What other ‘service’?”

“I—I don’t know . . .”

“But he didn’t ‘deliver’ anything, did he? Where is the package?”

“Package?”

Abruptly then as often he did, Pearce lost interest in interrogating Mariana, as a predator loses interest in pursuing prey because the prey is revealed to be scrawny, elderly, or diseased, or because the predator isn’t really hungry. With a mirthful knowing laugh—(but what was it that Pearce
knew,
Mariana wondered, that so unnerved her?—this was one of Pearce Shutt’s mannerisms)—he brushed past her to the glass-front cupboard where liquor was kept. It was 7:28
P.M
.: Pearce’s first meeting at corporate headquarters in East Orange, New Jersey, had been at 7:45
A.M
.; he would pour himself a glass of his favorite bourbon, seize a handful of Brazil nuts, and settle into his black leather La-Z-Boy chair in the TV room to watch news on three channels simultaneously until Mariana summoned him to dinner at which time Pearce would rub his hands zestfully together and mutter, with an air of just barely concealed impatience, yet boyishly, cheerily: “Well! Good!
I’m
starving.”

Upstairs in the large house the rooms were empty—emptier than usual it seemed—no intruder. Of course, there could not have been an intruder. Mariana knew.

Yet the faint acrid sweat-smell of—someone, something—a male body at the height of arousal—remained in the corridor outside the bedroom . . . Pearce took not the slightest notice of it and so Mariana was left to conclude that she was imagining it, too.

A weekday evening like any other, Mariana thought.

So lonely!

*

And then, in the early evening of the following day, when Mariana was returning home from grocery shopping, she saw something moving in the dense shrubbery beside the driveway—a deer? a large dog? In the headlights of her car there was a flash of glaring eyes and swiftly then the creature turned, and was gone.

“Oh! God . . .”

Mariana would have liked to think it had been a deer—just a white-tailed deer—there were many deer in Crescent Lake Woods . . . Mariana didn’t want to think that a creature of that size might be a neighbor’s dog, or a stray dog, wandering on their property.

Possibly, the creature could be a coyote. There were coyotes in this part of northern New Jersey. Less likely, a wolf.

Only the rear of the Shutts’ three-acre property was fenced. The front was open to the road, though the house itself was some distance from the road, at the end of a long circular driveway and near-invisible from the mailbox.

And the house was dark!—darkened. Another time, Mariana had driven away without having left even a single light on, as she’d driven away without turning on the elaborate and expensive “security” system that Pearce had had installed. If Pearce knew, he’d have reprimanded her.
If the house is broken into, if valuable things are stolen, and the security hadn’t been turned on, the insurance company will refuse to pay us. Do you realize what this could cost us . . .

Mariana continued along the driveway. The headlights of her car illuminated the most harmless and familiar sights—the desiccated remnants of flowerbeds, skeletal rosebushes, several leafless birch trees and a swath of evergreens—whatever the creature was, it had vanished—but no—there it was!—in the shrubbery at the garage—another time came a flash of glassy-glaring eyes, predator-eyes, as the creature vanished into the shadows behind the garage.

Mariana wondered if it was frightened by the car, or—wanting to hide from her, to prepare for an attack.

A dog-like creature, of the size of a German shepherd—its fur seemed to be sand-colored, dark-mottled as if soiled—its ears pricked up though oddly rounded, unlike a dog’s ears. Mariana had the impression that the creature was oddly
hunched-over
—a primate of some sort—like a baboon . . .

Panicked she thought
How will I get out of the car!

She didn’t want to turn the car around and flee—take refuge in a neighbor’s house—like a silly, hysterical woman. Still less did she want to drive back into town where she had women friends, or call Pearce on her cell phone and arrange to meet him somewhere—these possibilities seemed excessive, unwarranted.

Pearce would have said
Call the police! 911! If anyone tries to break in or threatens you.

“No one is threatening me. I am all right.”

Adrenaline flooded her veins. All of her senses were aroused, alert to the point of pain. She knew herself observed from the dense tangled shrubbery at the side of the garage though she couldn’t see the creature’s eyes.

Tawny-golden eyes, they’d been. Not-human eyes.

For eleven of the nineteen years of their marriage Mariana and Pearce Shutt had lived in this large attractive pale-gray stone-and-stucco house—described by the architect as
French Provincial/contemporary
—set back from Crescent Lake Drive in a cul-de-sac, with frontage on Crescent Lake. It was the sort of house that corporation lawyers like Pearce Shutt lived in, as the truly large custom-designed “estates” in this affluent area of rural/suburban New Jersey were owned by corporation executives. They had no children—there hadn’t been a time Pearce judged to be the absolutely right time in his career for the distraction of children—and so the house seemed to Mariana disproportionately large like a house in a malevolent fairy tale, subtly taunting, mocking its inhabitants.

At the sides and the rear of the house were many shrubs and tall trees and weather-ravaged flowerbeds—at the edge of the property, a deciduous woods bordering the lake—the creature could be lurking in any number of places, invisible. His—its—coat was spotted, soiled-looking—perfect camouflage. The property was fenced off at the rear to keep out marauding deer but frequently it happened that deer were sighted grazing on the lawn, having found a way through the fence, so the rear of the house certainly wasn’t protected from intruders.