Contrary Pleasure (33 page)

He put on nylon shorts, heavy, white wool socks. He went back into the
bathroom and shaved himself with great care, though awkwardly because his right
hand was stiff. His face was not marked. There was a bluish bruise under his
heart, and his right knee was barked, freshly scabbed. He rubbed a lanolin
tonic into his hair and combed it carefully. In the bedroom again he put on
pale-tan slacks, loafers, a lightweight wool shirt, brown-and-white
houndstooth
check.

He went to the bureau for keys and wallet, cigarettes and lighter, pocket
change. He could not find the keys. He stood with his hand poised in the
automatic gesture of picking them up. And saw a brassy arc through the night,
heard a slithering clatter. Something dry turned inside his throat, and a
tremor as of excitement went through his chest. But excitement in which there
was a flutter of terror. And no wallet. There was no memory to fit the loss of
the wallet. No memory of going to bed.

He walked carefully to the kitchen. He wished he did not feel so
grotesquely tall and fragile. As though he should duck for doorways. Yet they
were high enough for him. All the colors of the house seemed richer, more
clearly defined. The corners sharper.

Coffee stood over low blue flame. Note on the table:

There’s lots of juice in the refrigerator. Coffee on the stove. Rolls
in the oven. I’ve taken David to the drive-in church. Back by quarter of
twelve. Hope you don’t feel too bad. B.

He poured a cup of coffee and took it over to the booth, cup jingling in
the saucer as he carried it, coffee slopping into the saucer as he set it down.
He put his elbows on the table, straddling the cup, and pressed the heels of
his hands hard against his eyes. Pressure made green and violet things shimmer
against blackness. “God,” he said aloud. It was a loud word in the stillness of
the house, in the scrubbed and burnished place with its odd littered places
where Bess had projects half-completed.

Memory was a child’s kaleidoscope. You sipped the coffee. Then looked
through the little hole and turned the tube. Sometimes the things would turn
into a meaningful pattern. Most times they were just bits of colored junk.
Hairy hand, cell door, keys in the air, Brock driving, siren, yellow, broken
teeth.

The coffee did not taste right. He poured it into the sink. He opened the
refrigerator and looked at the tall glass of juice. The orange of it seemed
bright enough to hurt his eyes. He shut the door against the color of it.

So you got drunk. So it happens to everybody. So why do you feel you have
come back from some far place. Welcome traveler. Why is your mind all blurred
about the mustache? How many days have you been drunk, you great damn fool? You
schoolboy.

And he suddenly remembered Robbie and his bride. And a great wave of
crimson shame suffused his face, beading his forehead with sweat. He went
outdoors. The world was washed and new. It smelled fine. His lips felt heavy
and chapped.

Where the hell did you go? Who did you fight with?

He stood there, hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking down at the
vivid green of the grass. He wondered if he had made a damn fool of himself
with Bonny.

BONNY!

red doll rolling, red, dead, ragged, rolling.

Stood there in the terrible out-of-doors, in light of the frightful sun,
stood small on the outer skin of the
daylit
world
under the god eyes, figure at the wrong end of the lens, and the focus of that
lens bubbled the gray brain fat under the bone sheath, under the animal pelt
trimmed to fashion.

There are the troublesome mornings-after. When in the head are jumbled
the unstitched pieces of long conversation, intermingled with corrupt bits of
the night’s dark dreams so that reality cannot be truly sieved from all the rest
of it, and the day is spent in half remembering, half disbelieving, walking
about full of a wary conjecture.

And he had reached down into the cooling pot and brought up this clear
fragment, true and undeniable and horrid. He looked down at his right hand. It
seemed far away from his eyes. The knuckles were puffed and sore. Right hand
made sore by the girl-bones, by the girl-face, by the temple structure under
that slightly coarsened skin across her cheeks. Girl who kept hurt things in
boxes. Girl with a body-shyness, whose very fierceness had a timidity.

He turned and looked at the house behind him with faint surprise that it
should be there, unchanged, that it had not become a Disney house for witches,
dark windows for eyes and picket-fence teeth. He went in and the house was gay
and bright and sharp and clear inside. It was a stage setting. They had been
very clever about the lighting, using offstage floods that really looked like
sunlight. And things were just enough worn, just far enough off the edge of
shopwindow
newness so you would swear it was a house where
people had lived. But, of course, the play had not started. So he could walk
through it inspecting it to make certain it would be satisfactory for the
players. Stand here for this line, and then walk to there, and stop and turn
and wait just long enough, and then say that dramatic thing, that line he could
not remember but which was so suitable.

Didn’t they usually wear their hats in the house? Identifiable
typecasting. Or was it now polite young men who could be lawyers or insurance
people or practically anything, asking permission to smoke and using the
ashtrays properly.

Did you know a young woman named Bonita Doyle, an employee of the
Stockton Knitting Company?

With the catch, of course, being the use of the past tense.
Yes, I
knew her,
you might say.

We’ve lifted your prints from all over her apartment. Lifted? Why was it
lifted? Don’t they dust and photograph? Sorry, you’ll have to come with us, Mr.
Delevan. Or plain Delevan. Or nothing. Just come with us. For a silent, nervous
ride.

Hurt your hand, I see.

Drunk, weren’t you?

How long you been keeping her, mister?

EXECUTIVE INDICTED IN LOVE NEST SLAYING. Too long. They usually had ways
of saying it in a shorter fashion.

BOSS SLAYS PLAYMATE.

The house sat still in the washed morning, the world hung out to dry,
bright in morning sun. The house was still. He walked through the rooms and he
was tall and made of glass. He went into his study and sat at the impressive
and ornate desk. Gift from Bess. Split-calf accessories. Gifts from Bess. Brass
student lamp. Gift from Bess. A leather file with nothing in it, and drawers
full of junk. He opened one and looked in. Medicated, fancy-filtered cigarette
holders he had used for a week or two and tossed in the drawer. Lighters that
no longer lighted. A small stapler that no longer stapled. And the almost new
impedimenta of some half dozen attempts to switch to a pipe. Some dark pennies
and a corroded nickel. Packet of colored rubber bands.

When they went through his effects they found…

Effects. An effect is something that is produced, is it not? The result
of something. So these drawers of junk were the produced results of his life,
and thus they were his effects. Along with house, cars, land, some savings,
some old pictures, a closet packed with clothes. Didn’t they give away clothes?
Salvation Army or something. And did the ones who put on the used clothes
wonder for a moment or two about the man who had worn them? The gray flannel
was new. Worn twice. Why would a guy give this away? Maybe he dropped dead, you
dope.

And, as he had known he would, known it from the very moment of standing
out there in the sun, he opened the bottom drawer. Took out the shallow, heavy
box. Opened the cardboard lid. Colt Woodsman Automatic with target barrel. Long
rifle. Joint gift from Bess and David last year. He and George had tied cans to
strings and tied the strings to limbs and set the cans swinging and walked back
from the edge of the woods and turned and took turns firing and found that it
was dismayingly difficult.

He hefted the three gay little yellow-and-red boxes of the Western
Super-X .22 caliber ammunition and found the one that was half empty. He felt
far away from himself. His hands worked, busy and remote from him, on clumsy
duty of their own assigning while he sat tall above his hands and waited for
them to finish. They loaded a clip and pushed it up into the grip and it
clicked into place. One held the grip and the other worked the slide and it was
ready. He stood up with it and looked around the room and then, wary of his own
fragility, of his brittle tallness, his
farawayness
,
he walked to the couch and stretched out on it, knees bent high, feet braced on
leather, wrists braced against his canted thighs, one thumb inside the trigger
guard. He could see a little way down the barrel. The hole would look big and
then little, big and then little, seeming to pulsate in the slow rhythm of his
breathing, hypnotic, like standing on a high ledge over the beetle traffic on
asphalt ribbon below.

He exerted a gentle pressure with his thumb, held the pressure and could
not increase it.

It was too far away.

He got up and went over to the desk, feeling suddenly competent and
rather official about it all. He took paper from the leather rack and wrote a
quick note to Ben, giving her name and address and stating that he had beaten
her to death and nothing more. When he attempted to lick the flap of the
envelope, he was surprised to find his mouth too dry. He nibbled at the tip of
his tongue until saliva flowed and licked the envelope and sealed it and
scrawled Ben on the outside.

And one to Bess. It was hard to compose. It had to have a certain
dignity. Darling—Forgive me for what I am about to do. Try to understand. It
was the only course open to me. It was a decision I had to make. With love and
regret. Quinn. He read it over twice. It seemed all right. Serious. Competent.
Even efficient. And sealed it and wrote her name on the outside of the envelope
and put the two of them side by side on the blotter and picked up the gun
again. It felt vastly lighter than it had before.

He put the muzzle in his mouth. It had an oily taste. The metal touched
his teeth. It gave him a crawling feeling, the same feeling that certain sounds
gave him, such as a knife scraping along a chipped place on the edge of a
plate.

He felt irritated. Indignant. He stood up very quickly and jammed the
muzzle against the side of his head above his ear and pulled the trigger. The
sound of the shot astonished him. In the open, shooting at cans, it had been a
snapping sound, a flat crack. Here in the room it was a vast resounding
bam
that filled his right ear with a great, dulled ringing. His head felt seared
and he smelled burned hair. He wondered why he was standing. He fingered his
head, turned and looked to his left and high and saw the torn mark, a pale mark
torn into the paneling close to the ceiling where the slug had gone.

He heard the rumble and pop of the tires on the gravel and the car
stopping and the shutting of car doors and Bess talking to David in that
special voice she used for him. The way nurses talk to you in the hospital.

He put the gun up quickly again and yanked on the trigger again. The
noise did not seem as loud. He guessed that was because he was partially
deafened from the first shot. There was a silence outside. Bess called to him.
The burn had hurt his head again. He looked for the slug. It had gone into the
ceiling this time.

He heard Bess running into the house.

He went over quickly and sat on the couch. “You can’t even do this,” he
told himself hopelessly. “Not even this.”

And he thought of the way all inanimate things seemed to have always
banded themselves together in conspiracy against him—nails bent, pliers
slipped, knives wouldn’t cut, cars wouldn’t start. She was coming quickly,
calling to him.

If the damn thing kept flinching up so that you kept missing, then find
some way to steady it. He
socketed
the muzzle in his
deafened ear, pushing it tightly against his ear, the front sight gouging him a
bit, and he pulled the trigger carefully.

A great blinding sheet of purest white filled the whole world. He had a
fraction of a fraction of a second in which to feel satisfaction that he had
been able to do it, after all. The sort of satisfaction you feel when the
starter on the car, after grinding dismally and too long, makes the motor catch
and roar. And just as the feeling of satisfaction began, by micro seconds, to
change into something else entirely, to change into a dreadful regret, he became
nothing.

Ben turned into his drive, heavy
and quiet with the feeling of Sunday, hunger turning slowly in his belly,
sonorities of the morning sermon fading in his ears. As he got out of the car,
he heard the screaming. He turned and looked at Wilma. Her lips were pulled
back tightly against her teeth, flattened against them in the effort of
listening and understanding. “Bess!” she said. And he went, running, wishing
fleetness, conscious of the thickened slowness of his running, aware that Brock
was coming along behind him, gaining on him.

The screams were short and sharp and piercing, coming with each drawn
breath, and all Ben could think of was that she was on fire and he remembered
you had to roll them in something. A rug, a blanket.

He stopped in the kitchen, breathing hard, orienting the direction of the
sound. “Study,” he gasped and hurried on.

He went through the door and stopped and saw it then, saw in a half
second exactly what it was. Quinn toppled on the couch, with the death-slack
face, the gun between slack thighs, pointing at his crotch, a smell of powder
and burning in the room. Bess stood with her back turned toward the body, eyes
squeezed tightly shut, fists tightly shut, arms a bit out from her side as
though she balanced on a wire, legs spread, feet planted, screaming with each
breath. He reached her in two long steps and, in his nervousness, slapped her
much harder than he intended, slapped her so strongly that she toppled back and
would have fallen onto the body had he not snatched at her wrist, caught it,
pulled her away. The screams stopped with the slap and her eyes were wide and
dazed with shock. David stood silent and goggling, his face gray and his
underlip
falling loose away from his large, yellowish
teeth.