Read The Twenty-Year Death Online
Authors: Ariel S. Winter
The Twenty-Year Death (45 page)
“It’s a private clinic. You could take her out of it at any time.”
He brought up the flask, but it didn’t make it to his mouth. His face collapsed and a sob escaped him. “She wanted to die. She wanted to leave me.”
“And you didn’t give her any reason.”
The anger took over again. “I was all she had and she was everything to me.”
“You had a funny way of showing it.”
“You don’t let up, do you? The only reason I don’t sock you is that you’re right.” He drank then. “You bastard.” His eyes were red. “You can go in,” he said.
I walked around him and opened the door. She was sitting in a cane rocking chair by the window, looking at the same beautiful view I had admired in the front hall. She didn’t turn when I walked in. She kept her eyes forward. She rocked herself ever so slightly with her slippered foot.
I went around the bed and put myself in front of her, but she didn’t look up. Her eyes were glassy, the reflection from the window casting them white. She was well drugged. They had taken a pretty French girl and put her in the movies to be in all of our dreams. Now she was tucked away in her own dreams. The life in between was nothing but infidelities, lies, heartache, and death. The solution was the same for the victim as it was for the perpetrator. She had just gotten the order reversed: cut her wrists first, and now she was getting high.
I left without speaking. Rosenkrantz was crying into his flask. At the front desk I asked for a pen. I brought out my check from Merton and I wrote it over to Chloë Rose. She must have had money in the bank, but that money would run out with no more coming in. I handed it to the nurse, and told her to credit it to Chloë Rose’s account, and to make sure she wasn’t taken out of there before it ran out.
Outside in the sun, I watched the gardener play with his flowerbed, cutting away dead stalks and weeds. I went to my beaten car and got in, thinking that the casualties are often bigger than could be understood. That’s why the movies never made any sense. The screen’s not big enough to hold everyone in it.
at
the
FUNERAL
in memoriam
J.T.
with apologies
1.
I sat on the edge of the hotel bed trying to convince myself that I didn’t want a drink. The argument that it had been three months since my last drink—and that had only been one Gin Rickey—and almost seven months since my last drunk wasn’t very convincing. I tried the argument that I would be seeing Joe for the first time in four years, and Frank Palmer, Sr., the lawyer, and probably Great Aunt Alice too, so I should be sober when I saw them. But that was the reason I wanted a drink in the first place.
I glared at the mirror attached to the front of the bathroom door. I knew it was me only out of repeated viewing, but now, about to see my son, I saw just how broken I looked. My hair was brittle, more ash-gray than straw, and my face was lined, with crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes, sunken cheeks, and broken blood vessels across the bridge of my nose. I looked worse than my father did when he died, and he was almost ten years older then than I was now.
“You don’t want a drink,” I said to my reflection. Then I watched as I sighed, exhaling through my nose, and my whole body sagged.
Why the hell was I back in Maryland, I asked myself, back in Calvert City?
But I knew why. It was time to pay Clotilde’s private hospital again. And I owed money to Hank Auger. I owed money to Max Pearson. I owed money to Hub Gilplaine. And those were just
the big amounts, the thousands of dollars. There were all kinds of other creditors that wouldn’t be too happy to know I was three thousand miles from S.A. There had to be money for me in Quinn’s will. Otherwise Palmer wouldn’t have called me.
The door from the hall opened in the front room. It crashed shut and Vee appeared in the mirror, framed by the square arch that separated the rooms. “Don’t you just love it?” she said.
She was in a knee-length sable coat with a collar so big it hid her neck. She wasn’t bad to look at normally, deep red hair, unmarked white skin, and what she was missing up top was made up down below. In the fur and heels she looked sumptuous.
“It’s the wrong season for that,” I said.
She came forward. “He’d been saving it.”
“I hope he’s planning to p—to give you more than a fancy coat.”
“He’s paying for the suite.” She opened one side of the coat, holding the other side across her body, hiding herself. But I could see that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath anyway. She slid onto the bed behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders. In the mirror, a line of pale skin cut down her front between the edges of the fur.
“He didn’t wonder why you weren’t staying with him?”
She faked shock, raising a hand to her mouth in the perfect oops pose. “I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, and then she made herself ugly by laughing, and flopped back on the bed, her whole naked body exposed now, her arms outstretched, inviting me to cover her.
“You were just with him,” I said.
“But now I want you. That was just business anyway.”
I shook my head, my back still to her, although I could see her in the mirror.
She dropped her arms. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want a drink,” I said.
“Then have one.”
“I can’t.”
“Forget what the doctors say.” She was losing her patience. “You’d feel a lot better if you took up drinking again instead of always whining about it. Now come here. I demand you take care of me.”
I looked back at her. She should have been enticing, but she was just vulgar. “I’ve got to go.” I stood up.
“Like hell you have to go,” she said, propping herself up. “You bastard. You can’t leave me like this.”
“The will’s being read at noon. As it is I’ll probably be late. That’s what we’re here for in the first place, remember?”
“You pimp. I’m just here to pay for you. I should have stayed with him upstairs. At least he knows he’s a john, you pimp.”
“If I’m a pimp, what’s that make you?”
“I know what I am, you bastard. You’re the one with delusions of grandeur.”
I could have said, that’s not what she thought when she met me, but what would be the point? I left the room, going for the door.
She yelled after me. “You’ll be lucky if I’m here when you get back.”
I went out into the hall. I should have left for the lawyer’s before she got back. I had heard her go through that routine more times than I could count, but it was the last thing I needed this morning. No matter how much she got, she couldn’t get enough. An old man couldn’t satisfy a woman like that. But when I first met her, I hadn’t felt old. She’d made me feel young again, and I hadn’t realized what she was until later. I wasn’t any pimp,
I’ll say that, but a man’s got to eat, and she was the only one of the two of us working.
I took the elevator downstairs to the lobby. Instead of pushing through the revolving doors to the street, I went into the hotel bar. The lights were off since enough sunlight was creeping through the Venetian blinds to strike just the right atmosphere. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. When they had, I saw that I was the only person in the bar other than the bartender, who stood leaning against his counter with his arms crossed looking as though he was angry at the stools. I went up to the bar. “Gin Rickey,” I said.
He pushed himself up, grabbing a glass in the same motion. He made the drink, set it on a paper doily, and stood back as if to see what would happen.
I drank the whole thing in one go. I immediately felt lightheaded, but it was a good feeling, as though all of my tension was floating away. I twirled my finger, and said, “Another one.”
The bartender stood for a moment, looking at me.
“Room 514,” I said. If Vee’s “friend” was paying for the room, he could afford a little tab.
The bartender brought my second drink. “Don’t get many early-morning drinkers,” I said, picking up the glass.
“It’s a bad shift,” he said.
“And let me guess. You worked last night too.”
“Until two ayem.”
I tipped my glass to him and took a drink. He watched me like we were in the desert and I was finishing our last canteen. I set the glass down, careful about the paper doily. “If you came into big money, I mean as much money as you can imagine, what would you do with it?”
He twisted his mouth to the side in thought. Then he said, “I’d buy my own bar.”
“But this was enough money so you didn’t have to work again. You could settle down anywhere, or don’t settle down, travel all over.”
“What would I want to leave Calvert for?”
“Get a new start. You said yourself you were miserable.”
“I said it was a bad shift.”
“Aren’t they all bad? Every last one of them.”
He put his big palms down on the bar and leaned his weight on them. “No, they’re not. Are you finished with that? Do you need another?”
I waved him away. “When you’re a kid, you know how you dream you’ll be a college football star or a fighter pilot? How come you never dream of just being satisfied?”
“I like tending bar.”
“Right.” I drained the last of my drink, and felt composed, at least enough for the reading of the will, even with Joe there.
“Kids don’t know anything anyway,” the bartender said. “What do you do, mister?”
“Nothing anymore. I was a writer.”
“Anything I would have heard of?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“You need another?”
I shook my head. I had a soft buzz on, and it felt good. It felt better than it should have. “Put the tip on the tab,” I said. “Whatever you think’s right.”
“Thanks, mister.”
I shrugged. “I just came into some money.”
“Well, thanks.”
I waved away his gratitude. It was making me feel sick.
I walked out of the bar and pushed my way through the revolving door in the lobby onto Chase Street. The August heat and humidity had me sweating before I got to George and turned south towards downtown. Calvert hadn’t changed much since Quinn and I lived here in 1920. Or was it ’21? The Calvert City Bank Building over on Bright Street that now dominated the skyline hadn’t been there, and there had been more streetcars instead of busses, but overall the short and stocky buildings of the business district were the same. I remembered when those buildings had seemed tall, after
Encolpius
was published and I suddenly had enough money to marry Quinn. Now Quinn was dead and
Encolpius
and all my other books were out of print and even Hollywood had thrown me out and my life would never be as good as that day here in Calvert thirty years ago.
I was one poor bastard. If I had known how much of our married life was going to be screaming at each other and trying to outdo the other with lover after lover, pill after pill, drink after drink, I would have—at least I hope...yeah, I would have called it off. Quinn knew how to make me jealous from across the room. It was only natural when I started stepping out. And there were the two miscarriages and then Quinn started bringing a bottle to bed and finishing it in the morning, so of course I did the same. It got to the point where I couldn’t think without something to get me going. We tried the cure, once in New Mexico, once in upstate New York, but it didn’t last long, and when we got to Paris, we didn’t care anymore, it was all-out war.
And then I met Clotilde. She set Quinn off more than any of the others. And when I began to sober up for her, Quinn left me. She told me I had a kid only after the divorce had gone through. Then Clotilde and I married and we were happy for a
while at least, until we went to Hollywood, or maybe it was still in France... Anyway, she got famous, with thousands of men after her, and the public had forgotten me, so who could blame me when I had a girl or two on the side? No one. But Clotilde ended up in the the madhouse, and I was broke, and I borrowed from everybody who I knew even a little, and now all I had was Vee.