Eye in the Sky (1957) (20 page)

“It looks like Silky to me.”

“You never saw her before.”

“Thank God,” Marsha said fervently.

A slow, dreadful suspicion began to creep over him.
“You like this,” he said
softly. “You actually
prefer
this.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Marsha said evasively.

“You do! You like these—these
improvements.”

At the kitchen door, Marsha halted, her hands full of spoons and forks.
“I’ve been thinking about it today. In
many ways everything is much cleaner and neater. Not
so messy. Things are—well, so much
simpler. More order
ly.”

“Well, there aren’t so
many
things.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Maybe we’ll turn out to be objectionable elements.
Have you thought about that?”
Gesturing, he continued:
“It’s
not safe. Look at us—we’ve been remolded already.
We’re sexless—do you like that?”
There was no immediate answer.
“You
do”
Hamilton
said, aghast. “You prefer it.”
“Well talk about it later,” Marsha said, going
off with
the silverware.

Grabbing hold of her arm, Hamilton roughly pulled
her back. “Answer me! You like
it her way, don’t you?
You
like the idea of a great, fat, fussy old lady cleaning
sex and nastiness out of the
world.”

“Well,” Marsha said thoughtfully, “I think the world
could use some cleaning up, yes. And
if you men haven’t
been
able to, or don’t
want
to do it
—”

“I’m going to let you in on something,” Hamilton told
her fiercely. “As fast as Edith
Pritchet abolishes cate
gories,
I’m going to restore them. The first category I’m going to restore is sex. As
of tonight, I’m going to rein
troduce sex into this world.”

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? That’s something you
want; that’s something you’ve been
mulling about con
stantly.”

“That girl in there.” Hamilton jerked his head toward
the living room; Silky was happily arranging
napkins
around the dinner
table. “I’m going to haul her down
stairs and go to bed with her.”

“Darling,” Marsha said practically, “you can’t”

“Why not?”

“She’s—” Marsha gestured. “She’s not equipped.”

“Don’t you care a
damn bit?”

“But
it’s absurd. It’s like talking about purple os
triches. There just isn’t any such thing.”

Striding into the living room, Hamilton took firm hold
of Silky’s hand. “Come
along,” he ordered her. “We’re
going down to the audiophile room and listen to Bee
thoven quartets.”

Astonished, Silky came stumbling involuntarily after
him. “But what about
dinner?”

“The hell with dinner,” he answered, pulling open the
door to the stairs. “Let’s get down there before she
abolishes music.”

* * * * *

The basement was cold and damp. Hamilton turned
on the electric heater and pulled down the window
blinds. As the room warmed to cheery friendliness,
he
opened the doors of the record
cabinet and began drag
ging out
armloads of LPs.

“What do you want to hear?” he demanded belliger
ently.

Frightened, Silky lingered by the door. “I want to eat.
And Marsha fixed such a lovely dinner—”

“Only animals eat,” Hamilton muttered. “It’s unpleas
ant Not nice. I’ve abolished
it.”

“I don’t understand,” Silky protested mournfully.

Clicking on his amplifier, Hamilton adjusted the elab
orate network of controls. “What
do you think of my
rig?”
he inquired.

“Very—attractive.”

“Push-pull parallel output. Flat up to thirty thousand
cps. Four fifteen-inch woofers. Eight
theater horns:
tweeters.
Cross-over network at four hundred cps. Trans
formers wound by hand. Diamond styli and gold liquid-
torque cartridge.” As he placed
an LP on the turntable,
he
added, “Motor able to spin a weight of ten tons with
out slowing below thirty-three and a third. Not bad,
eh?”

“W-wonderful.”

The music was
Daphnis and Chlo
e
.
A good half of his
LP
collection was mysteriously absent; mostly modern
atonal and experimental percussive
works. Mrs. Pritchet
preferred the good
standard classics; Beethoven and
Schumann,
the heavy orchestral stuff familiar to the bour
geois concert-goer. Somehow the loss of his precious
Bartok collection drove him into more of a frenzy
than
anything else so far. It had an
intimate quality, a med
dling with
the deepest layers of his personality. There
was no living in Mrs.
Pritchet’s world; she was even
worse than
(Tetragrammaton).

“How’s
that?” he asked automatically, as he turned down the lamp almost to nil.
“Not in your eyes, now,
eh?”

“It never was, Jack,” Silky said, troubled. A dim frag
ment of recollection seeped into her purified mind.
“Golly, I can hardly see my way around …
I’m afraid I’ll
fall.”

“Not very far,” Hamilton retorted sardonically. “What
do you want to drink? It just so happens that I have a
fifth of Scotch somewhere around here.”

Whipping open the liquor cabinet, he groped expertly
inside. His fingers closed around the neck of a bottle;
rapidly drawing it forth, he bent to locate glasses. Oddly, the bottle didn’t
feel right. A closer examination
confirmed
it; he wasn’t holding a fifth of Scotch, after all.

“Let’s
make it creme de menthe,” he corrected, re
signed. In some ways, it was better. “Okay?”

Daphnis
and
Chlo
e
swelled out
luxuriantly into the
darkened room as
Hamilton conveyed Silky to the couch
and sat her down. Obediently, she
accepted her drink and dutifully sipped, a blank and humble expression on her
face. Prowling intently around, Hamilton made the
various fine adjustments of the connoisseur, straightening
a wall print here, turning up the amplifier a
trifle, lower
ing the lamp still
more, fluffing up a pillow on the couch,
assuring himself that the door
to the stairs was closed and locked. Upstairs, he could hear Marsha stirring
around. Well, she had asked for it.

“Just close your eyes and relax,” he ordered wrathfully.

“I’m relaxed.” Silky was still afraid. “Isn’t this
enough?”

“Sure,”
he muttered morbidly. “That’s great. Here’s
an idea—try taking off your shoes and putting your feet
up on
the couch. You get a different impression of Ravel when you do that”

Silky obediently kicked off her white loafers and lifted
her bare feet up and under her. “That’s nice,”
she said
wanly.

“A
lot better, isn’t it?”

“Much.”

All at
once a vast, overwhelming sorrow overcame

Hamilton. “It’s no use,” he said, defeated. “It can’t be
done.”

“What can’t be done, Jack?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

For a time the two of them were silent. Then, slowly,
quietly, Silky reached out and
touched his hand. I’m
sorry.”

“So am I.”

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. In a way. A very diffuse and abstract way.”

After a hesitant pause, Silky asked, “Can—I ask you
something?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“Would—” Her voice was so faint that he could hardly
hear it She was gazing up at him,
eyes large and dark
in
the dim light of the room. “Jack, would you kiss me?
Just once?”

Putting his arms tightly around her, he pulled her to
him and, lifting up her small, sharp
face, kissed her on
the
mouth. She clung to him, fragile and light, and so
terribly, humiliatingly thin. Clutching
her, holding her
with all
his strength, he sat for an endless interval, until
at last she moved away from him, a
tired, forlorn figure,
almost
lost in the murky gloom.

“I feel so darn bad,” she faltered.

“Don’t”

“I feel so—empty. I ache all over.
Why,
Jack? What is
it? Why should I feel so bad?”

“Let it go,” he said tightly.

“I don’t want to feel this way. I want to give you some
thing. But I don’t have anything I can give you.
I’m
nothing
but an emptiness, aren’t I? A sort of vacant
place.”

“Not totally.”

In the darkness there was a flicker of motion. She had gotten to her
feet; now she stood in front of him, blurred
and
indistinct in a sudden rapidness of motion. When he looked again, he found that
she had slid hastily out of her clothing; it was piled up by him in a small,
neat
heap.

“Do you want me?” she asked hesitantly.

“Well, in a sort of theoretical way.”

“You can, you know.”

He smiled ironically. “Can I?”

“You may, then.”

Hamilton
lifted up her bundle of clothes and handed them to her. “Get dressed and
let’s go upstairs. We’re
wasting our time
and dinner’s getting cold.”

“It’s no use?”

“No,” he answered achingly, trying not to see the bar
ren plainness of her body. “No use at all. But you did
your best. You did what you could.”

As soon as she had dressed, he took her hand and led
her to the door. Behind them, the phonograph still blared
out the futile, lush tangle of sound that was
Daphnis and
Chlo
e
.
Neither of them heard it as, unhappily,
they toiled up the stairs.

“I’m sorry I let you down,” Silky said.

“Forget
it”

“Maybe
I can make it up, some way. Maybe I can …”

The girl’s
voice faded out. And in his hand, the presence of her small, dry fingers ebbed
into nothingness.
Shocked, he spun and
squinted down into the darkness.

Silky was
gone. She had dimmed out of existence.

Baffled, incredulous, he was still
standing rooted to the spot when the door above him opened and Marsha appeared
at the top of the stairs. “Oh,” she said, surprised. “There you
are. Come on up—we have company.”

“Company,” he muttered.

“Mrs. Pritchet. And she’s
brought all kinds of people with her—it looks like a regular party. Everybody
laughing and excited.”

In a stupefied haze, Hamilton
climbed the remaining steps and entered the living room. A babble of voices and
motion greeted him. Looming over the group of people stood the great lump of a
woman in her tawdry fur coat, ornate hat flapping its feathered grotesqueness,
peroxide blond hair clinging in metallic piles to her plump neck and cheeks.

“There you are,” Mrs.
Pritchet cried happily, as she caught sight of him. “Surprise!
Surprise!” Lifting up a bulging square pasteboard carton, she confided
loudly, “I brought over the dearest little cakes you ever saw—regular
treasures. And the most wonderful glazed fruit you ever—”

“What did you do with
her?” Hamilton demanded hoarsely, advancing toward the woman. “Where
is she?”

For a moment, Mrs. Pritchet was
perplexed. Then the mottled wads of flesh that were her features relaxed into a
smile of crafty slyness. “Why, I abolished her, dear. I eliminated that
category. Didn’t you know?”

XI

As
hamilton
stood, staring
fixedly at the woman, Mar
sha came quietly over
beside him and grated in his ear,
“Be
careful, Jack.
Be careful.”

He turned
to his wife. “You were in on it?”

“I suppose so.” She shrugged. “Edith asked me where
you were, and I told her. Not the details … just the
general outline.”

“What category did Silky fall into?”

Marsha smiled. “Edith put it very well. Little snit of a
girl, I think she called her.”

“There
must be quite a lot of them,” Hamilton said. “Is it worth it?”