Paula Fox – Desperate Characters (страница 6)

“You aren’t reading the right ones.”

“The new ones are the old ones. That false complexity is just another kind of pencil box.”

“What’s going to happen?” she burst out. “Everything is going to hell—”

“Sit down a minute and shut up! I want to call a doctor or two, see if I can rouse one. It’s a bad night for that.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed, an address book held tightly in one hand, the phone cradled between his neck and shoulder. She heard him speak several times, but she didn’t listen to his words. She was wandering around the room. A green silk dressing gown was flung across a chaise lounge. On the mantelpiece stood a few small pre-Columbian statues, glaring with empty malevolence at the opposite wall, looking, oddly enough, as though they were outside the room but about to enter and sack it.

“There are only answering services,” Mike said, putting the phone down. “There’s not much point in leaving this number. Listen, I want you to go to the hospital. It’s six blocks from here and they have an emergency room that’s not bad. They’ll fix you up and you’ll have a peaceful night.”

“Did you know?” she began, “that Cervantes wanted to come to the New World, to New Spain, and the king wrote across his application, ‘No, tell him to get a job around here’? Isn’t that a funny story?”

He watched her, unmoving, his hands folded lightly, his shoulders hunched—it must be the way he listened to patients, she thought, as though he were about to receive a blow across the back.

“Just a story …”

“What’s the matter?”

“I wish I were Jewish,” she said. “Then when I died, I’d die as a Jew.”

“You’ll die as a Protestant.”

“There aren’t many left.”

“Then as a Gentile. I asked you, what’s the matter? Are you working on anything?”

“I haven’t wanted to work; it seems futile. There are so many who do it better than I do. I was sent a novel to translate but I couldn’t understand it, even in French. It simply irritated me. And I don’t have to work.”

“Tell me a little Baudelaire,” he said.

“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux—”

She broke off, laughing. “Why, you love it! You should see your face! Wait! Here!” and she snatched up a hand mirror from the top of a bureau and held it in front of him. He looked at her over the mirror. “I could smack you,” he said.

“No, no … you don’t understand. I liked the way you looked. That I could just recite a few lines and evoke that look!”

“Helpless bliss,” he said, getting to his feet.

“You know that Charlie and Otto are ending their partnership?”

“Otto doesn’t confide in me.”

“They can’t get along any more,” she said, replacing the mirror and turning back to him. “It’ll change our life, and yet it is as though nothing has happened.”

“It won’t change your life,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Maybe your plans, but not your life. Charlie, as I remember him, which is vaguely, is a bleeding heart, dying to be loved. He has the face of a handsome baby, doesn’t he? Or am I thinking of one of my patients? And Otto is all restraint. So the machine stopped functioning.” He shrugged.

“The truth is—” she began, then paused. He waited. “It wasn’t a machine,” she said quickly. “That’s an appalling view of what happens between people.”

“What did you start to say?”

“But are you saying what went on between them was only a mechanical arrangement of opposites, Mike?”

“All right, then, it wasn’t. The words don’t matter anyhow. Otto didn’t seem distressed.”

“We’d better go down,” she said.

But he had left her and was standing near the window, staring at the floor. As he lifted his head, she saw what he had been looking at. She walked over to him. They both looked at the stone on the floor. There were a few shards of broken glass around it. Mike picked it up. It filled the palm of his hand.

“The drapes must have muffled the sound,” he said. They both looked down at the street; the broken pane where the stone had entered was at the height of Mike’s brow. “It must have been in the last hour,” he said. “I was up an hour ago, getting aspirin for someone, and I stopped by here, I’ve forgotten why, and I know the stone wasn’t here then.”

Someone walked by on the street below, a St. Bernard puppy shambling along beside him. In all the windows of the opposite houses, lights shone. Car hoods glinted. Mike and Sophie silently watched a man investigating the contents of his glove compartment. A news truck rumbled by.

“Don’t mention it to Flo. I’ll clean it up. Who could have done it? What am I supposed to do?” Then he shook his head. “Oh, well, it’s nothing.” He smiled at her and patted her arm. “Sophie, would you like me to send you to a friend of mine? A friend I think highly of? A first-rate man? Member of the Institute?” He hefted the stone, looked back out the window.

“Thanks, Mike, but no.”

“But at least go to the hospital,” he said, without looking at her at all. She stared at him a moment, then left the room. Otto was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, a glass in his hand. He held it out as she neared the bottom.

“Ginger ale,” he said.

THREE

“I’m tired of parties,” Otto said in the taxi. “I get so bored. Movie talk bores me. I don’t care about Fred Astaire, and he doesn’t care about me. I care even less about Fellini. Flo is self-important simply because she knows actors.”

“Why did you say you hadn’t seen Death Takes a Holiday? I know you saw it because we saw it together. And you were crazy about Evelyn Venable. You talked about her for weeks … those bones, that fluty voice, you said she looked the way Emily Dickinson should have looked … don’t you remember?”

“My God!”

“And Fredric March, you said, was a perfect expression of an American idea of death, a dissipated toff in a black cape.”

“You stored all that away?” he asked wonderingly.

“You fell asleep and everyone knew you were asleep. Mike poked me and told me to take you home.”

“They were all trying to out-memory each other. It just proved how old we all are.”

“You have to make an effort.”

“What were you doing upstairs with Mike?”

“He called some doctors about the cat bite.”

“He thinks you ought to see someone?” he asked, alarmed.

She held up her hand. “Look how swollen it is!” she said. She flexed her fingers and groaned. “Perhaps if I soak it, the swelling will go down.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Nobody was in. Don’t you know you can’t get a doctor any more? Don’t you know this country is falling apart?”

“Just because you can’t get a doctor on Friday evening does not mean the country is falling apart.”

“Oh, yes it does. There was a stone in their bedroom. Someone had thrown a stone through the window. It must have happened just before we arrived. Picked up a stone from somewhere and tossed it through the window!” As she was speaking, she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

“That’s awful,” he said. The taxi was idling. Otto saw they were home. He paid the driver. Sophie, suddenly animated by a murky but powerful conviction that she knew what was wrong with everything, ran up the steps. But she had to wait for Otto; she didn’t have her keys. He climbed the steps slowly, looking at the change in his hand. Sophie’s access of energy, so startling as to verge on pain, died at once. As they walked into the dark hall, the telephone rang.

“Who …?” he began. “At this time of night,” she said, as Otto went to the phone. But he didn’t touch it. It rang three more times, then Sophie pushed past him and grabbed the receiver. Otto went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Yes?” he heard her say. “Hello, hello, hello?”

No one answered, but there was a faint throb as though darkness had a voice which thumped along the wire. Then she heard an exhalation of breath.

“It’s some degenerate,” she said loudly. Otto, a piece of cheese in one hand, gestured to her with the other. “Hang up! For God’s sake, hang up!”

“A degenerate,” she said into the mouthpiece. “An American cretin.” Otto stuffed the cheese in his mouth, then snatched the phone from her hand and replaced it with a bang in its cradle. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you!” he cried.

“You could ask,” she said, and began to cry. “I’ve been poisoned by that cat.” They turned to look at the back door.

“My God! It’s back!” she exclaimed.

A gray shape was huddled against the bottom of the door, toward which Otto ran, waving his hands and shouting, “Get out!” The cat slowly raised its head and blinked. Sophie shuddered. “I’ll call the A.S.P.C.A. tomorrow,” Otto said. The cat got up and stretched. They saw its mouth open as it looked up at them hopefully. “We can’t have this,” Otto muttered. He looked reproachfully at her.

“If I don’t feed it, it’ll give up,” she said mildly.

“If you allow it to …” He turned off the living room lamp.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she flung back at him as they went up the stairs. “You’re becoming an eccentric, like Tanya.”