THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction (34 page)

“Yes,” said Hammond. “And we can be thankful for it.”

“Believe me,” I said, “we are. We’re coming more and more to depend on it. Let’s hope that it’s enough but a fortiori we don’t wait too long to embrace it more fully … which, of course, implies all sorts of
changes
many of which we don’t seem to be ready for. But not to get off the subject. The flu exacerbated by her retrovirus condition soon spread to other parts of her body; mainly the lungs which then contacted pneumonia a bacterial condition that can be treated if…”

“If what?” Said a frustrated Hammond.

“If there just weren’t so many other God damned things wrong with her and her body hadn’t responded so negatively to the retrovirus itself. Her condition lasted all of two months before she succumbed. I saw her several times in the interval and just before she passed away in the hospital to which they had moved her.”

“Were you able to do her any good (give her consolation)?”

“I … I don’t honestly know,” I hesitated. “How can one in such a case?”

One only hopes so. For one thing she began whining to see Hartwig. I believe she realized she had a viable substitute in the attorney after all but also that it was too late to become involved with the
new
so she clung to the
old
. Remember how I told you that woman had a one-track mind once she got it set on something. She’d definitely set hers on Hartwig for quite some time and it wasn’t so easy to pry it loose. This seemed to be more and more true as she got closer to the end. Since she didn’t have (belief in) God either, one of hers and Hartwig’s strong points together, she needed someone to cling to, to pass on in that final journey. A strong figure, a male, does the trick for the
closer
we get we realize our compliment is lurking at the back of it all. It’s what makes us one might say, alive. And that’s true of any sort of relation whatsoever. One partner’s always the one thing, the other the other like the yin and the yang.

“Of course,” said Hammond, “if what you say is true I’d think Hartwig was the worst symbol possible for that sort of function. A virtual alienist and a misogynist besides.”

“He certainly would’ve agreed with you,” I said.

The first time I visited him and told him Gloria would like to see him, he said he wouldn’t even consider it. Like his mother’s attitude of forcing something on him, just as she’d censored Sandy for no real reason, he wouldn’t go see Gloria since he didn’t want to see his mother. Then…

“Are you kidding, after what she did to me?” The night she’d driven out to Oceanview with Harper to inform Sandy of his (own) plan and ruined his trip was evidently still fresh in his mind. He … he, it seemed, hated her for that. Then there was one other thing.

“What was that?” said Hammond.

Whether it seemed so at the time he’d been quite disturbed by her having taken up with Barth in the first place. I believe he’d been jealous and in all likelihood if she hadn’t defected in that way he’d been thinking of getting back together with her and following through on his mother’s plans for the couple that they should get married. Then he was angry at her for not staying away from the man as he’d advised her.

“You’re kidding. I thought Hartwig never got jealous. That was just his ego talking.”

“I thought so too but after consulting with him I changed my mind. He somehow took her association with the older man as a pungent form of betrayal even though he knew the newspaper man wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“Which might make sense,” said Hammond, “for the newspaperman simply and explicitly told her what a no good bastard her ex was and Hartwig knew he was right.”

“Maybe an unconscious reason, and, of course, the
give away
was the greatest betrayal of all. He … he just didn’t want any more to do with the girl. This was anger over what he felt she’d done to him.”

“And she was in his mother’s home. In fact dying there if you’re to be believed. An ambivalent predicament to say the least. And what could he say she’d done to him. All the…” Hammond pounded his fist on the side rail. He was at the point he felt so right about Hartwig he didn’t want any more
convincing
or discussion either though that had to continue at least until the story’s end.

The first time I saw Gloria at the old Hartwig mansion she was pretty as a picture. She was sitting up in bed reading a book. The maid, Buelah, who left when I came in, had done her hair up in sort of a beehive affair and helped the girl put on makeup. Atop the hand carved nightstand sat a water bottle cupped by a glass next to the usual pills one takes for an ordinary cold when he’s in bed. As a gift someone’d brought her a large stuffed toy bear which sat next to her. It was dark brown with black marble eyes.

“And if,” she’d said to me that day, “you can’t get Louis to come I’d still like to see Stanley.”

“I don’t see why I can’t manage that,” I told her.

She hadn’t taken the master’s refusal too hard for evidently she felt she’d hurt Hartwig in some way too. People like to think they’ve at least had
some
effect on those who’ve rejected them. Then she still had the DA. But that, of course, was when she was still relatively healthy and before the disease had begun to waste her away. The pneumonia in her case was followed by a violent cough and a high fever accompanied by the sweats. Though some have no cough. The cough overworked her lungs and put a strain on all the muscles in her chest. That was when you began to notice the sinking look in her face. Then the makeup came off for what do you care what you look like then if you’re that sick. Who’re you trying to impress? Some women, I’m sure … but she wasn’t one of those. The next several times I saw her she had her hair down. It wasn’t disheveled, just down. That was before she cut it off.

“Rapunzel, that beautiful hair. She cut it off,” Hammond babbled.

“She still knew she was good-looking. That’s one thing a woman like that knows until the very day she… You can’t take that away from them. Then the hair she donated. You can do that nowadays like your organs. Wig makers vie for natural hair. It also seems to be a phenomenon of ours that can’t be realistically duplicated. At least not yet. Of course with the cough her voice weakened and the intense glare of her dark eyes had a glaze to it almost as though she’d developed cataracts. An absurdity in her state though some AIDS victims eventually contract them because of their weakened immune systems. She just looked that way or rather gave that impression.”

So there I was, running back and forth between the two parties as a go between caught up in musical chairs.

“You were, of course, the chair.”

“Not very funny. No one was the chair. There were no more chairs. No places to sit down, rest, and moreover no one to sit in them, just like our world. Hartwig didn’t want to give the dog over either. When I asked him why he’d refused at least that to a dying woman know what he’d told me?”

“No.”

“That she’d just use it as an assurance that he loved her and so develop, even die on that false hope that he did. Can you believe it? Whatever he was doing he wasn’t adding to someone else’s lie, sick, healthy or otherwise.”

“Yes,” I can believe that of him,” said Hammond, “the cold hearted bastard.”

After some convincing he at least let me take it. Matter of fact, I walked it on leash down past the park and up the several blocks to the residence. Now Gloria’s residence, at least her residence of illness. Her mother’d been up from Santa Cruz several times to see her and had offered to take the girl home. She, of course, had adamantly refused and by the time she might’ve gone she was too ill to go anywhere but down the street to the hospital.

Sylvia and the mother had several
good
talks and had come to know one another to their mutual satisfactions. The two’d never met before and when Gloria heard them conversing like
old hat
she was at once pleased and depressed. Depressed, of course, as to what might’ve been but in all probability still couldn’t be.

The maid let us in. Buelah had known me and my family for as long as she’d been with the Hartwigs and that’d been many years. She, matter of fact, had her own relations down in the Fillmore district where in the ghetto she’d been able to buy a home with the help of Hartwig’s father. And she still commuted to work as she had all those years in neglect of her own family, which incidentally by that time had pretty much moved on, though her two sisters and several of their children were still living with her. They, it seems, hadn’t been lucky enough to afford homes even in that run down area.

“Mr. Pearson,” she called me as I and the dog with padded feet and scratchy nails made our ways to the top floor. Not having been in the house for some time, Stanley had to sniff everything and I had to prod him along. There she was lying in her bed, two vases of flowers on either side, one white roses, the other pink. She tried to sit up but it was pathetic as she squiggled around. Her abdominals had also been weakened. I picked the dog up and believe it or not, now he seemed to know where he was and who was on the bed.

“Stanley,” she said weakly as her bare arms reached out to embrace it. “At least I have you.”

And from that exclamation I thought perhaps Hartwig was right after all. He shouldn’t’ve gone to see her. She’d’ve taken it as a confirmation of something that wasn’t there. The dog stood astride her licking her face and the perspiration off her forehead. Then he nuzzled the teddy bear and barked at it a little. Maybe he thought it was competition. He must’ve known that room well I imagined, for he’d been there before with the
two
of them in better days. And he could sense how sick the girl was. His whines told me that.

“You should have seen him sniff Balboa, the suit of armor at the bottom of the stairs,” I said in an attempt to cheer her up. “It was as though there’d really been someone alive in there and he tried to attack it.”

“Ee’s a sniffing dog, aren’t you Stanley?” She looked spacey and tried to be humorous but the very notion of it seemed to’ve passed her by. “He sniffs everything.”

And you know it’s not only the body that goes, for remember the old saying: where the body goes, so goes the mind. That was so here. She … she just wasn’t her sharp-witted old self anymore. The worry, the confusion, the constant fight for your health depresses the body as well as the mind. Morbidity does that though, of course, it is the person who becomes morbid. The abstraction doesn’t cause it. Or is there a sense in which it does? You know she had about a one-sixty IQ, didn’t you?

“No, I didn’t,” said Hammond, “but it’s certainly more than mine.”

I must say this Gloria still had her dreams (literal), one in particular that was recurrent. In it she found herself in a large dance parlor like you’d see in a manor house at the turn of the century. The floors were parquet, the walls ornately molded and the ceilings composed of relieved sections. Curtains draped the large French windows. A quartet was playing dance music by Mozart. The women’s full dresses rustled as their tightly suited partners in black whirled them about in time to the music. She said, in fact, she’d never heard any music more clearly nor enjoyed any dance more thoroughly. The dance seemed endless and she never wanted it to end, except…

“Yes,” Hammond drawled out sluggishly.

Every time she looked into her partner’s face she found it featureless and had to turn away. This blank left her retreating to the sidelines in utter confusion and disgust but she never saw the
face
. Like the curve of space it was featureless. She’d sit, vowing to dance no more that evening and I believe she wouldn’t have except every time the music began the same suitor rushed over to pick her and she didn’t refuse. She found herself accepting.

“Sounds to me like Sisyphus,” said Hammond, “exactly like Sisyphus, the myth. The very symbol of man’s futile attempt to fulfill a task that can’t be fulfilled or satisfy a longing that’s impossible. What on earth brought that on in her condition now? Was there anything in her actual life that might’ve suggested it?”

“Funny you’d say that,” I said. “I really can’t think of anything unless it was the ball she went to.”

“The ball? Come on they don’t have those nowadays. They’re extinct like half the earth’s species.”

“No,” I slapped my knees. “The ball she went to. The night in old Vienna spectacle I told you about remember?”

“Certainly I remember that,” said Hammond. “Hartwig who was supposed to take Gloria on his mother’s tickets didn’t. He took Sandy instead Gloria didn’t even go. And moreover he didn’t apologize to her for not …”

“But,” I said, “she did. She did go. She must’ve. Not believing Hartwig was going to attend at all, let alone with someone else, she bought her own ticket and had arrived alone. For I imagine she’d just sincerely wanted to see it with or without Hartwig. She loves that sort of music as well as the atmosphere. Then who was she going to take, Johansson, the obsessed, or Barth the sick old man? That’d be a good one. Her ticket wasn’t exactly in the choicest section, third balcony or so, but she saw everything including
those two
as they danced on stage. They didn’t see her, obviously. At that point neither, it seems, knew of her existence. So…”

“Hartwig loved the socialite after all. That’s why he was so angry with Gloria for breaking them up. This story really has me confused.”