Into The Night (22 page)

For her it had to be laid on the line, circle-perfect, rounded out, no gaps left to be filled in.

And it must have been something of this feeling for completion, for symmetry, that lay at the bottom of her compulsion to finish out Starr's life for her. The original guilt complex wasn't solely responsible for it any longer; that would have worn thin by this time.

A modernist would have walked away with a laugh. I should finish up somebody else's life for them? I got my own, and one at a time's enough.

But the nineteenth century would have understood. The nineteenth century with its idealism.

They found a little espresso coffee place, dim as a flickering match flame but a good place to talk in. They sat way over in a corner in the gloom, barely able to see one another's eyes. A girl with her back against the wall lazily picked at a mandolin, but she never seemed to finish more than the first bar of anything she started.

"Tell me about your wife," she said, the way you drop a small pebble into a smooth sleek pool of water and wait to see the ripples slowly widen around it.

But no ripples came; it suddenly solidified, seemed to harden over. The way his eyes did too. And the ease of talk was gone for a moment.

It's too soon, she realized. He won't tell me yet. Maybe he never will.

"Tell you what about her?" he said guardedly.

"I only meant--her looks," she corrected. "It's hard to tell from that picture at the studio, she's so much in shadow."

"Oh," he relented. And he thought for a minute. And he probably saw her face in the flame of the candle she could see him staring at. It reflected itself doubly in his eyes, once in each pupil, like two small tapers shining at an altar of recollection.

"She's stunningly beautiful," he murmured reverently.

Madeline had held her in her arms when she was dying, had looked into her face, had seen it. True, she was in pain, she was in shock, life was flowing out of her. But even with that allowed for, she had not been stunningly beautiful. Attractive, yes; pleasing to look upon; the structure and the proportions of her face did that for her. Above all, youth did that for her. But she had -not- been stunningly beautiful. Yet to him she was, she had been.

Therefore: -He had really loved her-.

No further doubt was needed, no question remained about that. He had loved her with the true eyes of love, which for each man see one thing, one thing only, and pass by all the rest and all the others.

She took that home with her and thought about it. Whatever it was he had done to her, it hadn't been done from lack of love, but in the fullness of love.

Returning home one night after she had been out with him-- their evenings spent together numbered upwards of six or eight by this time--she took off her things, put a wrap over her, and sat down at the desk to think things out, to analyze what she had of him so far.

She knew the externals of his life by now almost as well as one person can ever know those of another. Even had he been her husband. His boyhood hobby with the camera, his early knocking around before he found himself, his final success and fulfillment in his chosen work, he had told her all about that. But the injury to Starr lay somewhere in the inner, private life that he had not told her about.

Whatever it had been, it had been within the framework of his love for her, of that there could be no doubt. It had been an offense, an outrage, of love, and not of hatred or ill-will. This should have simplified it greatly. How innumerable are the harmful acts you can commit against someone you dislike; how few those against someone you love. But it didn't.

She picked up a pencil, finally, and a piece of paper, and tried to draw up a list of possibilities, to help her thinking powers along. She had a great predilection for using a pencil to help crystallize her thinking. She would have made a good draftsman.

-Alcohol-: Completely ruled out. He had none of the telltale signs about him, which are so easy to read. He drank even more slowly than she did herself. He invariably left the bottom of his glass still holding liquor in it. He hadn't attained the status of even moderate social drinking. He was an occasional social drinker, the first stage above complete abstention.

-Narcotics-: There she was on obscure ground. He had none of the traces, but she was no expert at divining them, either. She thought momentarily of the play he had taken her to see. Was there some sort of an inkling there? But then she dismissed it as unfair, it had been simply a coincidence. Or rather, since there was nothing for it to coincide with, a random occurrence. In any case, arguing that he had been an addict himself, what then would have been the attraction in going to see such a play? He would have known the life so well, why go to see a reproduction of it? He would have been more likely to shy away from it, if only to spare his own guilty conscience. Finally, she recalled, he had seemed as unfamiliar with the specialized slang used in the play as she was herself. And there was no reason to think this was an act.

-A criminal record, or some past criminal offense-: This didn't seem to fit him at all. True, she wasn't naive enough to expect criminals or lawbreakers to go around looking like criminals, or to carry a sandwich board on their chests reading: "I am a criminal." And true again, she had heard it said that often as not some of the worst people in this category were, at home with their families, gentle, devoted, considerate, even more so than the average run of husbands and fathers. But when all this had been duly allowed for, the fact remained he didn't fit into the picture at all and the picture didn't fit him.

The simple, tightly knitted little story of his life he had told her need not have been true, of course. He could not have been expected to reveal some serious criminal act or criminal way of life to her on such short notice. But it was so plausible, so artless, so uncontrived from beginning to end that it didn't seem likely he had left anything out. In other words, it was too monotonous to be anything but true. If it had been rigged, it would have at least been more colorful. And there wasn't a chink, a gap in it, in which to insert, to wedge, some major off-law experience. Almost, you might say, there was no room in it. It was as though every day, pretty nearly every minute, had been accounted for in that brief, unmemorable, but somehow simpático saga of his thirty years that he had given her.

She knew this man pretty well by now. There wasn't violence in him or she would already have glimpsed it, no matter how hard he tried to keep it from showing. That is to say, violence on the grand scale, beyond a mere swear word and punch of a fist. He'd never lived by violence, and he'd never done violence. And above all else, he lacked that sharp acuteness that is needful to criminality. He was a simple man. He was good at his work, but personally he was simple, uninvolved, uncomplicated. Just a runof-the-millJoe, with camera fingers, loaded with good nature and goodwill and deathlessly loyal in his love.

That was the way she saw him, and nothing could convince her she was wrong.

All the possibilities she had listed had one thing in common, she couldn't help noting. They were negative offenses. That is, offenses against himself, not against Starr. Any woman, any wife, would have done one of two things in such a case. Either stuck by him and tried to help him, or if she saw that was hopeless, simply washed her hands and walked out on him. But not turn around and want him killed. Even get ready to kill him herself. There wasn't anything in any of those hypothetical malefactions that warranted that.

She found the list had vanished.

She crumpled the little leaf of paper and threw it away. She tugged the chain pull on the hooded desk lamp, and the pool of light in front of her eyes went out.

I can't stand this uncertainty anymore, she thought, raking her fingers through her hair and dragging it down in front of her face. I'll have to be a blind instrument of justice then, in every sense of the word, and do it still without knowing. Anything, anything, to get it over with and get rid of it!

The very next time we're together, I'll do it. I'll have to do it then, or I may never do it at all.

Finally, the day had come. She knew it from the time she first opened her eyes early in the morning. On the one hand, there was no actual reason for it to be that day, and not the one that had just preceded it or the one that would immediately follow it; it was wholly arbitrary. Yet on the other hand, there was every reason. She had nerved herself to a certain pitch which she might not be able to hold longer than for just a few hours, and once lost or even partially relaxed, might never be able to regain. She needed this certain pitch, she could not do the thing without it. For she was not a professional killer nor yet a passionate one. She could kill neither in cold blood nor in hot. Both extremes were foreign to her nature. She could only kill as she was about to kill now: for an ideal, as an obligation, to fulfill a vow. As one lighted a taper at an altar: in expiation.

And only this once, never again.

He was the man. Of that there could be no doubt. He had been married to Starr, Starr had been his wife. He was the one she wanted killed, he and no other. And Starr-Madeline would be the goddess of the machine, who carried it out for her.

Let whatever he had done to her, whatever had made her want him killed, be buried with him, then, go down into the grave with the two of them and never be known. Maybe it was better that way. Who knew what the thing was? Why let it live on, dirtying the world? Why take it with her into some cell and nurse the morbid knowledge of it for the next twenty years or even her whole lifetime? Somehow in all her calculations--no, that wasn't the word, she didn't calculate in this--in all her willingness to accept punishment, to undergo penalty, she had never visualized herself being given a death sentence. Not that this would have deterred her. But it was always a lengthy prison term that she foresaw being meted out to her.

This was the day, then. It had come.

She hadn't even left her bed yet. The slats of the venetian blinds, or rather the interstices between them, drew thin pencil strokes of yellow on the wall opposite the window, and on the floor, and on the counterpane on her bed, and even partly up one of her bare arms. She even had the impression that one of these stripes of light must be lying flat across the bridge of her nose, because of a dazzle effect she got in both eyes. She thought it was charming; like being in a golden cage.

She got up and went over to the blinds and tugged the cord that controlled them. They went up supplely, with only a slight rustling sound, and the day became a full foursquare panel, not just streaked glimmers on a wall. It was surging with sunlight, and in it the city looked like something brand-new, that had just come into being. Every brick spotless, every paving block freshly laid. She leaned out, and a taxi with an orange roof polished as a mirror went scuttling by under her eyes, like some kind of an amiable, off-color beetle scampering for cover.

How strange, she thought, we're both in this city together at this very moment, though at a distance. We're both breathing, we're both looking at things, even though we're apart. Yet, by tonight, or by the early hours of the morning, he'll be dead. Then he won't be in this city anymore, just I will be, alone. Where will his breaths be then, where will they have gone? Where will the sights reflected on the irises of his eyes be then, where will they have gone?

I don't know, for I didn't order death, fashion it. I only know that he'll be gone into it.

She turned away from the window, and as she passed the discomposed bed she'd just now been sleeping in, glanced at it reflectively. Last night, she thought, we both slept, he and I, and our sleeps were alike. Today we both woke up from our sleeps. Tonight we'll both sleep again, he and I, but our sleeps this time will be different. Tomorrow again I'll wake up, as I did today. Tomorrow he won't; for him there'll be no tomorrow.

Sleep, that little bit of death embedded in life. No, she corrected herself. Sleep is not death. Not at all like it. People are wrong when they say or think that. "Dead to the world," meaning a sound sleep. Completely wrong. For the body goes on functioning. It breathes, the blood flows, the heart beats. Sometimes the body even moves, turns itself over. The dreams of the daytime world color sleep; night after night they are there, even though they may not be recalled the next day.

No, the French Revolutionaries who inscribed "Death is eternal sleep" on tombstones were mistaken. There is no point of similarity between the two, not any at all. Even the position of the eyes is different, for in sleep they are closed, but in death, paradoxically, they remain open. It is human hands that have to close them.

No, sleep is not death. Sleep is submerged life.

She shook her head in self-annoyance. Why do I torture myself so? Just do it, and have done with it! Not -think- about it, -think- about it, -think- about it, all the time.

But I have to think about it. The other things I did for her were minor, subsidiary. This is the main thing. This is the important one. This is the one she wanted most.

She took a brief shower, without using soap. She took an average of two a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, and only used soap about every second one; it was actually superfluous more often than that, she was inclined to believe. Possibly even unbeneficial to the skin.

She dressed and made a cup of instant coffee. She told herself unwillingly, I suppose I ought to eat something. She was always telling herself this, in the mornings, and always trying to evade doing so. She finally compelled herself, against her own inclination, to slip a slice of wheat bread into the toaster, and plug it in.

Then she ate standing up, biting at the toast in one hand, taking swallows of the coffee in the other. She put the cup down finally, left part of the rind of the bread, and acted as if she were glad it was over. She was.

The city was awake now. She lit a cigarette and went back to the window and stood there looking out again. The day was so normal, so everyday looking. You couldn't tell it held death in it.