Strange Sisters (6 page)

Again she hesitated, and again, for what obscure reason she would never be able to say, she made the concession. And though it seemed afterward to have been a great mistake, the cause of intense suffering, perhaps it was not a mistake after all, but rather a necessary traumatic experience that had to come sooner or later and was better to have come sooner.

"All right," she said, and they walked in silence along the wet street under trees on which there was an early hint of foliage, an almost invisible tinge of emerging chlorophyll. They crossed the western limit of the small town and walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the shoulder of a farm-to-market road. The shoulder was spongy from the rain that had fallen, but it was not muddy, being covered with a mat of heavy brown dead grass left over from the last warm days of the year before. Eventually they left the shoulder and cut at an angle across a pasture toward the long wavering stand of scrub timber that marked the course of West Creek. As they walked, the sun, already far down toward the horizon in its descent of the sky, broke through a cluster of clouds and touched with cold white fire the gray remnants of rain and the drab wet growth of earth. It was all at once an expanded world, still and shimmering and incredibly delicate, and Kathy felt within the close confinement of her ribs a vast swelling of pain and pleasure that she thought must surely burst the slender bones.

She closed her eyes, wanting to cry out in hurting ecstasy, and she wished with all her heart that Stella were here to share the shining world. If only it were Stella beside her instead of this ridiculous, bumbling, offensive boy. By keeping her eyes closed, stepping carefully to avoid stumbling in her self-imposed blindness, she almost managed to convince herself that it was true, that it was indeed Stella beside her and that there was no such person as Kenny Renowski to defile the purity of the new world that the sun had casually created in the last hour before it disappeared.

They crossed the pasture and descended a gentle slope through trees to the bank of the narrow, sluggish creek. And there in the shadows of the trees beside the muddy water, her brief, bright, spun-glass world shattered and fell in silence and lay around her in countless jagged and menacing shards. At first, for a few seconds, she was so frozen, so paralyzed by the violence of her reaction, that she made no protest whatever, and her passivity was mistaken for submission. Then, in an instant, she was a sobbing, clawing fury in fierce and disproportionate retaliation to his mild and harmless aggression. Her vision was impaired by a thick, swirling mist, and the first thing she saw clearly after vision was restored was his clawed, bleeding, terrified face.

Turning, she ran. Wildly, still sobbing, she fled up the slope through the trees and back across the pasture to the road, and though she stopped there on the shoulder to recover her breath and quiet the rampant beating of her heart, she had in a way never stopped at all, had run on and on for a long time over a long way from one bleeding face to another. A long time and a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn.

A
bruptly, she stood up and left the counter. Making her way to the rear of the store, she stood waiting outside the door of an occupied telephone booth, caught fast for a moment between the opposing forces of a suddenly recurring need to contact Jacqueline and an oppressive uncertainty of the wisdom of it. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was after nine o'clock. Jacqueline would have left her apartment long ago, would have completed by this time the trip from the apartment to the downtown department store in which she was employed as a personnel manager. She was at this moment, no doubt, sitting behind the huge blond desk with the ivory-colored telephone on it over which Kathy had first seen her and over which the intangible line of communication and understanding had established itself between them from the first moment as surely as it could have been established by spoken words over the telephone itself.

Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the slightest relief of more vivid colors, which only served to emphasize the preponderance, the bedroom of her apartment was entirely in the pale tone—woodwork and walls and rug and drapes and furniture. Entering it was like walking into a kind of sanctuary, a strange temple in which the decor was possessed of esoteric significance for the instinctively initiate.

Kathy stirred and lit another cigarette, waiting for the occupant of the booth to complete his conversation. She watched him through a narrow glass panel in the door. He sat bending forward from the little swinging seat beneath the instrument, his soft felt hat pushed back on his head, smoke from a cigarette that was pasted with dry saliva to his lower lip swirling around his face and clogging the booth with a thin, blue haze. When he talked, the cigarette bobbled so sharply that it seemed about to shake loose. His voice undulated, rising now and then to the level of intelligibility, a word here and there standing out nakedly. He was apparently trying to persuade someone to meet him at a certain place at a certain time, and it seemed to be very important.

Kathy moved away a few steps to eliminate the sound of his voice. She was all at once unreasonably angry with him for delaying her own call, for being a stupid man with a dull problem that was probably no problem at all.

Trying to eject him from her mind, she began again to think of Jacqueline, following her in imagination through the routine of the day thus far. In the beginning she arose from ivory sheets and stood beside the bed on ivory broadloom, and she was herself ivory, black-and-ivory, tall and superbly proportioned by the standards of classic beauty, as if she had been carved by an ancient Greek artist from a giant tusk. Propelled by Kathy's mind, she moved in a remembered order. First to the kitchen, where coffee was started in the automatic silver percolator. Next to the bathroom for a shower and then back into the bedroom for the swift and simple rites before the mirror of the dressing table. These rites, however simply and quickly done, seemed almost superfluous, because there was about her an appearance of fastidiousness that survived even the usual ravages of a night in bed. Her hair, black and sleek and pulled back to a knot from a center part, looked undisturbed. Her eyes were as bright as if they had been chemically flushed, and the muscles of her face did not sag in tired need of an astringent. Whatever there was in her of deterioration and slow decay existed in secrecy beneath unaffected flesh. This physical impression was supported, was perhaps in some degree established, by a more subtle quality, a kind of emotional purity impervious to violation, and even in passion and the act of passion she seemed to burn with a pure white cauterizing flame.

At the closet, she selected one of the severely tailored suits she invariably wore to work. Which one this morning? The navy pin-stripe? The gray chalk-stripe? The hard brown gabardine? It really didn't matter, because whichever one it was, it was precisely the
right
one. It was the very one for this particular day, and no other one could possibly have been quite so appropriate for what the day would bring or for the places the day would take her. Fully dressed, a black string tie at the collar of a tailored blouse, she returned to the kitchen where the coffee was brewed and hot in the silver percolator.

She drank the coffee black and unsweetened, and then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her and going down in the elevator to the lobby and through the lobby to the street, and now she was behind the blond desk with the ivory telephone that would be ringing in desperate supplication just as soon as this man, this Goddamn vindictive, deliberately perverse man, got through with his stupid conversation in the drug store booth.

And he was through. He had finished and gone while Kathy wasn't looking. The jointed door was folded back, and the thin smoke of his cigarette drifted out. Acting quickly, before she had time to reconsider in fear of Jacqueline's reaction, she slipped into the booth and closed the door and dialed the remembered number. She got a central switch board, of course, and had to wait for a connection. After a bit, she got it, and Jacqueline's voice, a cool, measured modulation, was saying, "Miss Wieland speaking."

Kathy answered with a rush. "Jacqueline? This is Kathy, Jacqueline."

There was a pause in which something grew, and Jacqueline's voice, when it came back on, had subtle undertones, like the voice of a woman speaking casually to her lover when her husband was present. "Oh, hello, Kathy. How are you this morning?"

"I want to see you. I went to your place last night, but you weren't home."

"I had an engagement, I'm afraid. Sorry you made the trip for nothing."

"I
must
see you, Jacqueline."

"Well, I have a rather full schedule today. I'm not even having lunch out."

"Please, Jacqueline."

The pause again, a slight alteration in the undertone. A kind of soft wariness. "You sound urgent, Kathy. Is something wrong?"

"Yes. I can't tell you about it now. Not over the telephone."

"Very well. I'll leave here about five o'clock. Meet me in the Bronze Lounge, and you can tell me over a cocktail. I'm sure it can't be too serious."

The line went dead, and Kathy sagged against the side of the booth, fighting again the dark compulsion to hysterical laughter. Not serious, Jacqueline had said. Not too serious. Just the bad end of a good idea.

Outside the booth, she looked again at her watch and was astonished to see how few degrees the minute hand had progressed. Five o'clock seemed remote in time, an improbable prospect in her own life. It was not yet ten. Over seven hours before five. She wondered how she could ever get through them to the Bronze Lounge and Jacqueline, and the appointment, now that it had been made, had assumed in her mind the character of a goal to be reached at any cost, a kind of terminal point of danger, beyond which she would be once more quite secure. She understood, actually, that there was no good reason for this, no reason at all to think that anything would be better after she had seen Jacqueline, but that there was, on the other hand, a good possibility that everything would be worse, depending upon Jacqueline's response. But though she understood this very well, it would have been ruinous to acknowledge it, and so she continued to think of the hour of five as an established haven toward which the hands of her watch crept with unnatural slowness. It was only necessary to survive, somehow, the intervening time.

If only she could sleep. If she could sleep away the time, waking just soon enough to keep the appointment, all her trouble would be resolved. But she would never be able to sleep. If she tried, she would lie staring with hot, dry eyes into a past that offered no consolation and a future that offered no hope, and this was something to be avoided beyond all else. But there were inducements to sleep. What about a sedative? A barbiturate of some kind. Perhaps it would be possible to take just enough of something to let her sleep five or six hours, but not enough to prevent her keeping the appointment with Jacqueline. It would be a risky business, and she would have to be very cautious in the amount she took, rather too little than too much, for it would be the culminating disaster if she failed to be in the Bronze Lounge at the stipulated time. She held desperately to the blind, irrational conviction that Jacqueline would somehow have the solution to her problem that her ills could be cured over a cocktail.

Turning with a jerk, she walked over to the prescription counter and stood drumming with her fingers until a bale man in a tan linen jacket came up from the rear and asked her what she wanted.

"I'd like some sleeping medicine," she said, and added redundantly because her nerves were taut: "Something to make me sleep."

The pharmacist looked at her, lifting his eyes from her drumming fingers to her face. "Have you a prescription?"

"No. I... I didn't realize that it was necessary to have a prescription. Can't you sell me something without one? Surely there's some kind that doesn't require a prescription."

He shook his head. "Sorry, lady. Law's pretty strict about it. You go see a doctor, get a prescription and come back. I'll be glad to serve you if you get a prescription."

"Yes. I guess I’ll have to. Thanks very much."

She turned and walked rapidly up the aisle between counters and out onto the sidewalk. She had the feeling all the way that the bald pharmacist was watching her suspiciously from behind his counter, that she had in some way given him a clue to her guilt simply by asking for sleeping medicine. It required a tremendous exertion of will to keep from running, and she felt icy sweat gather in her arm pits and trickle in thin lines down across her ribs. Turning left on the sidewalk, she walked for several blocks with the same accelerated pace with which she'd left the drug store. After a while, she saw a small park on the opposite side of the street, just one square block with trees and shrubs and scattered benches and the cast-iron figure of a man with an axe in his hands. Crossing the street, she went into the park and sat down on a bench, staring straight ahead past the cast-iron man and breathing deeply with a slow, measured rhythm.

Most doctors are men,
she thought. This in itself was insignificant, but she was disturbed by the probability that no doctor would give her a prescription for what she wanted just because she asked
him
for it. He would want to know why. He would ask her questions. He would want to assure himself by his own diagnosis that the medicine was proper and necessary. He would want to examine her, and though she might suffer all the other elements of a consultation, this she certainly couldn't. She might find a woman doctor, of course. But they were fewer than men and would be more difficult to locate. She would probably have to travel quite a distance to reach the office of one, and even after she had gone to so much trouble, she couldn't be sure that she would get what she wanted. Trouble and the chance of failure combined to weigh heavily against the effort.