The Butterfly Plague (28 page)

She had to alter her position in order to remove his trousers. She knelt down between his feet. In her hands, his feet were dry and covered with healed sores. She pitied him. She pitied him his commission and the conditions under which he had to commit it. Then, staring down at the golden lengths of his body, she pitied him more—pitied his perfection and the curse it had laid on him. He had to be the messenger of Race: chosen—not choosing.

She crawled around to his side and faced him.

She lay down with him, breast to breast.

She stared into his eyes, and he, unblinking, stared dispassionately back.

“Begin,” she commanded, but her voice was as low and gentle as a mother asking her infant to feed. And just as obedient as a hungry child, the blond head arched inward to her rising breast.

Ruth wanted to breathe him like air into her lungs. She wanted to bleed him instantly into her veins. To absorb him.

His hand fell lightly on her tilted buttock. His knees insinuated themselves between her. Ruth’s pelvis burned forward; she grasped him, held him warmly for a moment in the sheath of her hand, and then she thrust him into the wound prepared for him, impelling her body onto his blade so suddenly their union was completed in a single spasm of alarm.

There was no thought in Ruth’s mind. There could be none. Everything but fulfillment had been driven away. She knew there was life inside her. She knew it as surely as the sky was there and the stars and the moon and the silhouettes of hills and scrub.

She lay there fully an hour, unaware of both sound and silence, unaware of the ghostly holocaust that was whispering around her.

Suddenly waking from whatever it was that had possessed her, Ruth sat up, fully aware. Each sense was alert with panic.

The darkness was awash with orange waves. Fire.

She touched herself. Naked.

She lurched sideways to waken—to save him…

But he was not there. Gone. But when?

There was no time. She rose to her feet, staggering into her clothes, lurching toward the parked, endangered motorcar.

“Where are you?” she started to cry, but the flames would not let her. She breathed in smoke and heat and her throat constricted. She gasped for air.

Ashes and cinders rose up with every step. Embers and sparks set fire to her sleeves, her hair and her eyebrows.

She struggled into the car and rolled up all the windows. Somehow she remembered how to turn the key, how to make the car function, how to accelerate and how to steer. The road was barely visible through smoke and flame. She did not know yet that she, herself, was on fire.

“Alvarez,” she kept saying, but as a question. “Alvarez? Alvarez?”

At last she broke free of the flames and brought the Franklin to a halt just in time to avoid smashing head on into a fire truck that had pulled to a stop on its way up the road to the inferno in the hills.

Hands battered at the windows all around her, but Ruth could not move, for now she knew that she was burning. She began to scream, but was immobilized. At last, one of the firemen broke his way into the car with an ax and lifted her out onto the road and into a blanket—safe and unharmed.

“Are you all right, lady? Are you all right?” he yelled. Everywhere the noise was ear-splitting.

Ruth tried to nod.

“There’s someone,” she gasped, “up there. A man.”

“We’ll find him, don’t you worry,” said the fireman. “You rest here and then we’ll try and get you home. You’re all right now. Only your clothes were on fire. You’re all right.”

He dashed away then, with some others, to haul an ineffectual hose toward the burning hillside. All around them the grass smoke blasted the air with its message of fire and ruin, but Ruth just sat in the middle of the road, covered with dust and ash and told herself over and over again that fire and smoke could never frighten her again. The smell of them was the smell of imperfection burning—of imperfection being burned away forever.

She rested.

There was life inside her. She had put it there.

Or claimed it. She did not know which. Or care.

It was done.

Saturday, November 12th, 1938

Fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills late last evening. Several homes were endangered, including the house of screen star Corinne Castle and her husband, gambler Stoney Blake. Miss Castle and Mr. Blake fled their mansion in night attire (see picture, page 9) but were able to return later when Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills fire brigades brought the blaze under control.

It is thought that the fire was started by a cigarette thrown or dropped from a motorcar. Hollywood’s Fire Chief, Herman Anders, issued a statement in which he warned of the consequences of such carelessness. “Smokers who do not use their ashtrays cause an awful lot of trouble,” he said, and went on to praise the good job of fire fighting done by his men. Miss Castle later entertained the firemen at an impromptu dancing party, which was held until the early hours of the morning, on the lawn of her home. Dressed in a handsome hostess gown, she informed reporters that she hadn’t “had so much fun since playing the role of Lulu Lightbright” in her latest film,
Lulu Lightbright
. Mr. Blake concurred, admitting with a sly grin that Hollywood firemen were excellent poker players and honorable gentlemen when it came to paying up their losses. Music was supplied by Tarn Morgason and his Alhambrans. A good time was had by all.

The Chronicle
of Naomi Nola

Sunday, November 13th, 1938:

Topanga Beach

6:30 a.m.

Though the ocean was attempting silence, Naomi heard it. She awoke now, automatically, half an hour prior to every shot.

Morphine.

Miss Bonkers.

7:00 a.m.

It was only 6:30. Naomi wondered how she felt. If she lay still enough, she remained numb, but if she moved so much as a finger, body-consciousness was restored. She had developed a theory that pain had to do with the flow of blood. If you lay quiet, nothing happened, but if you even thought profoundly the blood flowed and caused pain.

There was some light now, beyond the curtains. Not true light, but the beginning of it. She was practiced at watching the sun set at sea. But she had never seen it rise. To see that, she would have to move three thousand miles to the other coast. Too late for that.

This thought made her laugh.

Pain.

Damn. I’m alive.

6:35.

Wouldn’t Miss Bonkers get up soon?

Didn’t she make coffee around now? And sterilize the needles? And get out the phials? Little packages of sleep in white paper. Rolled in gauze, slipped into envelopes, locked in cabinets.

Naomi never asked about the keys. Suicide had not occurred to her. It wouldn’t.

A dreadful hunger persisted, but she was unable to eat. Nothing would stay down. Even tea and coffee, even milk, twisted back up to her mouth as though they were afraid to venture farther than her throat.

They had offered her a room at the hospital, but she was adamant. She was going to die here. In this place.

Miss Bonkers was rattling in the kitchen.

“Miss Bonkers,” Naomi called. “I need my needle.”

“Coming soon,” Miss Bonkers answered sleepily (but pleasantly). Naomi could hear the slap of her book as she placed it on the counter and opened it to read. Every waking moment, it seemed, that woman was reading. She’d gone through every book in the house and was buying more every week. This pleased Naomi. Somehow, silently as the words themselves, restive but quiet on their pages, the thoughts and ideas in Miss Bonkers’s head were altering and changing page by page, volume by volume, as she read. The grim-eyed caretaker who had come on duty all those months ago was slowly but surely turning into a gray-eyed Nanny with alerted sympathies and more considerate fingers.

Nanny.

Yes. It was quite true, Naomi thought. She herself had become childishly dependent and felt at all times as though this room she lay in was, indeed, more nursery than boudoir. And Miss Bonkers did things, more and more, as though they were being done for a child—a child who became progressively younger until, at last (and Naomi knew this) she would be little more than a babe-in-arms, lifted, petted, soothed, and changed. Sleep was everything, the great safety, the purger of fear, the keeper of the gates to death, the slayer of pain. Miss Bonkers was its guardian, purveying sleep like pills and potions. Naomi welcomed it, resented it, feared its permanence and then, slowly, came out the other side, begging her nurse for more. They formed a strange triumvirate: Miss Bonkers, Naomi, and Sleep.

At last she came.

“Good morning, Mrs. Damarosch. What can I offer you?”

“A shot,” said Naomi.

“Almost time,” said Bonkers. “Don’t you want the pot?”

“I’m afraid to move,” said Naomi. “Maybe I’d better wait until I’ve had morphine.”

Miss Bonkers slipper-slappered over to the curtains and drew them open.

She wore a mauve-colored robe over a voluminous nightdress, the collar of which was so high it made her hold her head out like a turtle. She smoothed the drapery with her square little hands, the color and texture of inferior mother-of-pearl. Her fingers seemed to have been chopped off, they were so short, and it was always a shock to Naomi to perceive that there were nails there, beautifully formed and manicured.

“Going to be another scorcher,” Miss Bonkers said, looking out at the sky. “And here it is November.”

They looked at the day, the one from the bed, the other from beside the curtains. Miss Bonkers’s round pudge face was decorated with glasses. She began to be awake and to look like herself.

“Anyone out on the sand yet?” Naomi asked, each word pinched by her teeth.

Miss Bonkers looked along the beach. “No one but that dog, Mrs. D. My, what a pretty dog that is.”

“The yellow one?”

“Yes. Miss Ruth’s friend.”

Is she awake yet?”

“No, ma’am.”

Miss Bonkers came over and rearranged the things at Naomi’s bedside.

“What do you make of her behavior yesterday?”

“Oh. Normal. Normal. I mean, for someone who got caught in a fire—normal. Sort of stunned is what I’d call it. But she’s all right.”

“Yes. That’s what I thought. But I thought something else, too. And I wondered if you’d noticed it.”

Miss Bonkers considered for a moment and then spoke reflectively. “You mean happier? She’s happier and more relaxed.”

Naomi sighed. It hadn’t been her imagination. Miss Bonkers had thought so, too.

“Yes. That’s it exactly. Happier. Relaxed…and…”

“And what?”

“And something else. I don’t know what.”

Miss Bonkers smiled. “You’re sure it doesn’t begin with an ‘M,’” she said.

“An ’M.”’

“A man,” Miss Bonkers said.

Naomi thought about this. She hadn’t previously. It hadn’t even crossed her mind. Ruth was having an affair.

“She was married, you know,” said Miss Bonkers, pottering farther into the room. “And she’s young, yet.”

“All this driving around in the motorcar,” said Naomi, imagining things. “Oh, dear! I hope not.”

Miss Bonkers sighed and nodded and sighed again, not noticing that Naomi was beginning to knead the bedclothes with her hands.

“We live in different times, Mrs. Damarosch. Different times, indeed. You don’t know what to think in times like these. Except,” she reflected, beginning to make her way out of the room, “except it seems a shame that all those young men died in that Great War of theirs, for a world that doesn’t exist any more, and a bunch of moral behavior people just laugh at now. It’s like I always say, though. Nothing beats a lost cause. I mean, there isn’t anything the whole world over that’ll beat your lost cause for frustration.”

“Isn’t it seven o’clock yet?” said Naomi suddenly.

“Yes. Just. Are you ready?”

“Of course I’m ready. Get it quickly.”

The pain made a leap high up into Naomi’s womb. It seemed to be clawing at her with hot knives.

“Oh, hurry, Miss Bonkers.
Hurry!!
”

Miss Bonkers called out, “Yes. Yes. Coming. Coming.”

“At once. At once. Oh, please, at once!”

Ruth heard this last cry and came sharply awake.

“Now! Now! Now!” Naomi began to chant, battering the headboard behind her with her fists.

Ruth came running from her room. “What? What?” she said.

“It’s worse,” said Miss Bonkers. “Every time now, it’s worse. And always so suddenly.”

“Help me,” Naomi cried.

“Stand aside, Miss Ruth. Keep out of my way. I wouldn’t want to drop this now.”

Ruth stood away and then followed Miss Bonkers to the door of her mother’s room.

Both Miss Bonkers and Naomi had to struggle to loosen Naomi’s grip from the headboard, and finally Ruth had to go to their assistance.

“There. There now. There,” said Miss Bonkers, withdrawing the needle from its place. “Let’s all count together,” she said. “Everybody count.”

“One,” said Ruth.

“Two,” said Miss Bonkers.

“Three,” struggled Naomi.

“Four,” said Ruth.

“Five,” said Miss Bonkers.

“Oh,” said Naomi.

“Seven,” said Ruth.

“Eight.”

“Niii…ne.”

“Ten.” They all spoke together.

“There. There. There,” said Ruth.

“There,” said Naomi. “Much, much better.”

They all smiled and patted each other’s hands with pleasure and relief.

“So. So. So. So. So.”

In the kitchen, four minutes later, Miss Bonkers handed Ruth a cup of coffee, turned her back on her, and said distinctly, indistinctly, “Four or five more days, Miss Ruth. Only four or five more days.”

Then, not knowing why she did it, not anywhere, at any time prior to the moment it happened knowing or sensing it was going to happen, Miss Bonkers put her face into her hands and wept.

Monday, November 14th, 1938:

2:30 p.m.

“What is your friend’s name?” Ruth asked.

And Charity said, “Eugene.”

“That’s a very grownup name for a friend, isn’t it?” Ruth asked.

“He is a grownup,” said Charity.

“Oh.”

They were sitting on the sand in front of the Trelfords’ house—Charity, the dog, and Ruth.