Thunder and Roses (24 page)

She was completely self-sufficient. I had hit the matter squarely when I insisted that she call me before we saw each other again. Her very presence was a compliment. When she was with me, it was, by definition, because that was where she would rather be than any other place on earth. When she was away from me, it was because to be with me at that time would not have been a perfect thing, and in her way she was a perfectionist.

Oh, yes—a perfectionist. I should know!

You ought to know something about me, too, so that you can realize how completely a thing like this is done, and how it is being done to so many of you.

I’m in my twenties and I play guitar for a living. I’ve done a lot of things and I carry around a lot of memories from each of them—things that only I could possibly know. The color of the walls in the rooming house where I stayed when I was “on the beach” in Port Arthur, Texas, when the crew of my ship went out on strike. What kind of flowers that girl was wearing the night she jumped off the cruise ship in Montego Bay, down in Jamaica.

I can remember, hazily, things like my brother’s crying because he was afraid of the vacuum cleaner, when he was four. So I couldn’t have been quite three then. I can remember fighting with a kid called Boaz, when I was seven. I remember Harriet, whom I kissed under a fragrant tulip poplar one summer dusk when I was twelve. I
remember the odd little lick that drummer used to tear off when, and only when he was really riding, while I was playing at the hotel, and the way the trumpet man’s eyes used to close when he heard it. I remember the exact smell of the tiger’s wagon when I was pulling ropes on the Barnes Circus, and the one-armed roustabout who used to chantey us along when we drove the stakes, he swinging a twelve-pound maul with the rest of us—

—he used to cry, with the mauls rat-tatting on the steelbound peg and the peg melting into the ground, and the snubber grunting over his taut half-hitch while the six of us stood in a circle around the peg. And those other hammers, in the blacksmith’s shop in Puerto Rico, with the youngster swinging a sledge in great full circles, clanging on the anvil, while the old smith touched the work almost delicately with his shaping hammer and then tinkled out every syncopation known to man by bouncing it on the anvil’s horn and face between his own strokes and those of the great metronomic sledge. I remember the laboring and servile response of a power shovel under my hands as they shifted from hoist to crowd to swing to rehaul controls, and the tang of burning drum-frictions and hot crater compound. That was at the same quarry where the big Finnish blast foreman was killed by a premature shot. He was out in the open and knew he couldn’t get clear. He stood straight and still and let it come, since it was bound to come, and he raised his right hand to his head. My mechanic said he was trying to protect his face but I thought at the time he was saluting something.

Details; that’s what I’m trying to get over to you. My head was full of details that were intimately my own.

It was a little over two weeks—sixteen days, three hours, and twenty-three minutes, to be exact—before Gloria called. During that time I nearly lost my mind. I was jealous, I was worried, I was frantic. I cursed myself for not having gotten her number—why, I didn’t even know her last name! There were times when I determined to hang
up on her if I heard her voice, I was so sore. There were times when I stopped work—I did a lot of arranging for small orchestras—and sat before the silent phone, begging it to ring. I had a routine worked out: I’d demand a statement as to how she felt about me before I let her say another thing. I’d demand an explanation of her silence. I’d act casual and disinterested. I’d—

The phone did ring, though, and it was Gloria, and the dialogue went like so:

“Hello?”

“Leo.”

“Yes, Gloria!”

“I’m coming up.”

“I’m waiting.”

And that was it. I met her at the door. I had never touched her before, except for that one brief contact of her hands; and yet, with perfect confidence, with no idea of doing anything different, I took her in my arms and kissed her. This whole thing has its terrible aspects, and yet, sometimes I wonder if moments like that don’t justify the horror of it.

I took her hand and led her into the living room. The room wavered like an underwater scene because she was in it. The air tasted different. We sat close together with our hands locked, saying that wordless thing with our eyes. I kissed her again. I didn’t ask her anything at all.

She had the smoothest skin that ever was. She had a skin smoother than a bird’s throat. It was like satin-finished aluminum, but warm and yielding. It was smooth like Gran’ Marnier between your tongue and the roof of your mouth.

We played records—Django Reinhardt and The New Friends of Rhythm, and Bach’s
Passacaglia and Fugue
and
Tubby the Tuba
. I showed her the Smith illustrations from
Fantazius Mallare
and my folio of Ed Weston prints. I saw things and heard things in them all that I had never known before, though they were things I loved.

Not one of them—not a book, nor a record, nor a picture, was new to her. By some alchemy, she had culled the random flood of esthetic expression that had come her way, and had her choices; and
her choices were these things that I loved, but loved in a way exclusively hers, a way in which I could share.

We talked about books and places, ideas and people. In her way, she was something of a mystic. “I believe that there is something behind the old superstitions about calling up demons and materializations of departed spirits,” she said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think it was ever done with mumbo-jumbo—witches’ brew and pentagrams and toads’ skins stuffed with human hair buried at the crossroads on a May midnight, unless these rituals were part of a much larger thing—a purely psychic and un-ghostly force coming from the ‘wizard’ himself.”

“I never thought much about it,” I said, stroking her hair. It is the only hair that was not fine that I have ever touched with pleasure. Like everything else about her, it was strong and controlled and glowing. “Have you ever tried anything like that? You’re some sort of a sorceress. I know when I’m enchanted at any rate.”

“You’re not enchanted,” she said gravely. “You’re not a thing with magic on it. You’re a real magic all by yourself.”

“You’re a darling,” I said. “Mine.”

“I’m not!” she answered, in that odd way she had of turning aside fantasy for fact. “I don’t belong to you. I belong to
me!
”

I must have looked rather stricken, for she laughed suddenly and kissed my hand. “What belongs to you is only a large part of ‘us,’ ” she explained carefully. “Otherwise you belong to you and I belong to me. Do you see?”

“I think I do,” I said slowly. “I said I wanted us to be together because we were both travelling together under our own power. I—didn’t know it was going to be so true, that’s all.”

“Don’t try to make it any different, Leo. Don’t
ever
. If I started to really belong to you, I wouldn’t be
me
any more, and then you wouldn’t have anything at all.”

“You seem so sure of these hazy things.”

“They aren’t hazy things! They’re important. If it weren’t for these things, I’d have to stop seeing you. I
—would
stop seeing you.”

I put my arms tight around her. “Don’t talk about that,” I
whispered, more frightened than I have ever been in my life before. “Talk about something else. Finish what you were saying about pentagrams and spirits.”

She was still a moment. I think her heart was pounding the way mine was, and I think she was frightened too.

“I spend a lot of time reading and mulling over those things,” she said after a quiet time. “I don’t know why. I find them fascinating. You know what, Leo? I think too much has been written about manifestations of evil. I think it’s true that good is more powerful than evil. And I think that far too much has been written and said about ghosties an’ ghoulies an’ things that go ‘boomp’ i’ th’ nicht, as the old Scottish prayer has it. I think those things have been too underlined. They’re remarkable enough, but have you ever realized that things that are remarkable are, by definition, rare?”

“If the cloven-hoofed horrors and the wailing banshees are remarkable—which they are—then what’s commonplace?”

She spread her hands—square, quite large hands, capable and beautifully kept. “The manifestations of good, of course. I believe that they’re much easier to call up. I believe they happen all the time. An evil mind has to be very evil before it can project itself into a new thing with a life of its own. From all accounts I have read, it takes a tremendously powerful mind to call up even a little demon. Good things must be much easier to materialize, because they fall in the pattern of good living. More people live good lives than such thoroughly bad ones that they can materialize evil things.”

“Well then, why don’t more people bring more good things from behind this mystic curtain?”

“But they do!” she cried. “They must! The world is so full of good things! Why do you suppose they’re so good? What put the innate goodness into Bach and the Victoria Falls and the color of your hair and Negro laughter and the way ginger ale tickles your nostrils?”

I shook my head slowly. “I think that’s lovely, and I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

I looked at her. She was wearing a wine-colored suit and a marigold silken kerchief tucked into the throat. It reflected on the
warm olive of her chin. It reminded me of my grandmother’s saying when I was very small. “Let’s see if you like butter,” as she held a buttercup under my chin to see how much yellow it reflected. “You are good,” I said slowly, searching hard for the words. “You are about the—the goodest thing that ever happened. If what you say is really true, then you might be just a shadow, a dream, a glorious thought that someone had.”

“Oh, you idiot,” she said, with sudden tears in her eyes. “You big, beautiful hunk of idiot!” She pressed me close and bit my cheek so hard that I yelped. “Is that real?”

“If it isn’t,” I said, shaken, “I’ll be happy to go on dreaming.”

She stayed another hour—as if there were such a thing as time when we were together—and then she left. I had her phone number by then. A hotel. And after she was gone, I wandered around my apartment, looking at the small wrinkles in the couch-cover where she had sat, touching the cup she had held, staring at the bland black surface of a record, marvelling at the way its grooves had unwound the
Passacaglia
for her. Most wonderful of all was a special way I discovered to turn my head as I moved. Her fragrance clung to my cheek, and if I turned my face just so, I could sense it. I thought about every one of those many minutes with her, each by itself, and the things we had done. I thought, too, about the things we had not done—I know you wondered—and I gloried in them. For, without a word spoken, we had agreed that a thing worth having was a thing worth awaiting and that where faith is complete, exploration is uncalled for.

She came back next day, and the day after. The first of these two visits was wonderful. We sang, mostly. I seemed to know all her very favorite songs. And by a happy accident, my pet key on the guitar—B flat—was exactly within her lovely contralto range. Though I say it as shouldn’t, I played some marvellous guitar behind and around what she sang. We laughed a lot, largely at things that were secret between us—is there a love anywhere without its own new language?—and we talked for a long time about a book called
The Fountainhead
which seemed to have had the same extraordinary effect on her that it had on me; but then, it’s an extraordinary book.

It was after she left that day that the strangeness began—the strangeness that turned into such utter horror. She hadn’t been gone more than an hour when I heard the frightened scramble of tiny claws in the front room. I was poring over the string-bass part of a trio arrangement I was doing (and not seeing it for my Gloria-flavored thoughts) and I raised my head and listened. It was the most panic-struck scurrying imaginable, as if a regiment of newts and salamanders had broken ranks in a wild retreat. I remember clearly that the little claw susurrus did not disturb me at all, but the terror behind the movement startled me in ways that were not pleasant.

What were they running from?
was infinitely more important than
What were they?

Slowly I put down the manuscript and stood up. I went to the wall and along it to the archway, not so much to keep out of sight as to surprise the
thing
that had so terrorized the possessors of those small frightened feet.

And that was the first time I have ever been able to smile while the hackles on the back of my neck were one great crawling prickle. For there was nothing there at all; nothing to glow in the dark before I switched on the overhead light, nothing to show afterward. But the little feet scurried away faster—there must have been hundreds of them—tapping and scrabbling out a perfect crescendo of horrified escape. That was what made my hackles rise. What made me smile—

The sounds radiated from
my
feet!

I stood there in the archway, my eyeballs throbbing with the effort to see this invisible rout; and from the threshold, to right and left and away into the far corners of the front room, ran the sounds of the little paws and tiny scratching claws. It was as if they were being generated under my soles, and then fleeing madly. None ran behind me. There seemed to be something keeping them from the living room. I took a cautious step further into the front room, and now they did run behind me, but only as far as the archway. I could hear them reach it and scuttle off to the side walls. You see what made me smile?

I
was the horror that frightened them so!

The sound gradually lessened. It was not that it lessened in overall intensity. It was just there were fewer and fewer creatures running away. It diminished rapidly, and in about ninety seconds it had reduced to an occasional single scampering. One invisible creature ran around and around me, as if all the unseen holes in the walls had been stopped up and it was frantically looking for one. It found one, too, and was gone.