Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (9 page)

 
          
Somewhere,
a soft breeze was blowing.

 
          
The
hairs along the back of her neck slowly stood upright.

 
          
She
touched them with one pale hand as one touches the nape of a dandelion.

 
          
Outside,
in the plaza, the street lights rocked like crazy flashlights on a wind. Papers
ran through the gutters in sheep flocks. Shadows penciled and slashed under the
bucketing lamps now this way, now that, here a shadow one instant, there a
shadow next, now no shadows, all cold light, now no light, all cold blue-black
shadow. The lamps creaked on their high metal hasps.

 
          
In
the room her hands began to tremble. She saw them tremble. Her body began to
tremble. Under the bright
bright
print of the
brightest, loudest skirt she could find to put on especially for tonight, in
which she had whirled and cavorted feverishly before the coffin-sized mirror,
beneath the rayon skirt the body was all wire and tendon and excitation. Her
teeth chattered and fused and chattered. Her lipstick smeared, one lip crushing
another.

 
          
Joseph
knocked on the door.

 
          
They
got ready for bed. He had returned with the news that something had been done
to the car and it would take time, he’d go watch them tomorrow.

 
          
“But
don’t knock on the door,” she said, standing before the mirror as she
undressed.

 
          
“Leave
it unlocked then,” he said.

 
          
“I
want it locked. But don’t rap.
Call.”

 
          
“What’s
wrong with rapping?” he said.

 
          
“It
sounds funny,” she said.

 
          
“What
do you mean, funny?”

 
          
She
wouldn’t say. She was looking at herself in the mirror and she was naked, with
her hands at her sides, and there were her breasts and her hips and her entire
body, and it moved, it felt the floor under it and the walls and air around it,
and the breasts could know hands if hands were put there, and the stomach would
make no hollow echo if touched.

 
          
“For
God’s sake,” he said, “don’t stand there admiring yourself.” He was in bed.
“What are you doing?” he said. “What’re you putting your hands up that way for,
over your face?”

 
          
He
put the lights out.

 
          
She
could not speak to him for she knew no words that he knew and he said nothing
to her that she understood, and she walked to her bed and slipped into it and
he lay with his back to her in his bed and he was like one of these brown-baked
people of this far-away town upon the moon, and the real earth was off
somewhere where it would take a star-flight to reach it. If only he could speak
with her and she to him tonight, how good the night might be, and how easy to
breathe and how lax the vessels of blood in her ankles and in her wrists and
the under-arms, but there was no speaking and the night was ten thousand
tickings
and ten thousand
twistings
of the blankets, and the pillow was like a tiny white warm stove
undercheek
, and the blackness of the room was a mosquito
netting draped all about so that a turn entangled her in it. If only there was
one word, one word between them. But there was no word and the veins did not
rest easy in the wrists and the heart was a bellows forever blowing upon a
little coal of fear, forever illumining and making it into a cherry light,
again, pulse, and again, an ingrown light which her inner eyes stared upon with
unwanting
fascination. The lungs did not rest but
were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing
artificial respiration to keep the last life going. And all of these things
were lubricated by the sweat of her glowing body, and she was glued fast
between the heavy blankets like something pressed, smashed, redolently moist
between the white pages of a heavy book.

 
          
And
as she lay this way the long hours of
midnight
came when again she was a child. She lay,
now and again thumping her heart in tambourine hysteria, then, quieting, the
slow sad thoughts of bronze childhood when everything was sun on green trees
and sun on water and sun on blond child hair. Faces flowed by on
merry-go-rounds of memory, a face rushing to meet her, facing her, and away to
the right; another, whirling in from the left, a quick fragment of lost
conversation, and out to the right.
Around and round.
Oh, the night was very long. She consoled herself by thinking of the car
starting tomorrow, the throttling sound and the power sound and the road moving
under, and she smiled in the dark with pleasure. But then, suppose the car did
not
start? She crumpled in the dark,
like a burning, withering paper. All the folds and corners of her clenched in
about her and tick
tick
tick
went the wristwatch, tick
tick
tick
and another tick to wither on. . . .

 
          
Morning.
She looked at her husband lying straight and easy
on his bed. She let her hand laze down at the cool space between the beds. All
night her hand had hung in that cold empty interval between. Once she had put
her hand out toward him, stretching, but the space was just a little too long,
she couldn’t reach him. She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn’t heard
the movement of her silent reaching.

 
          
There
he lay now. His eyes gently closed, the lashes softly interlocked like clasped
fingers. Breathing so quietly you could scarce see his ribs move. As usual, by
this time of morning, he had worked out of his pajamas. His naked chest was
revealed from the waist up. The rest of him lay under cover. His head lay on
the pillow, in thoughtful profile.

 
          
There
was
a beard
stubble on his chin.

 
          
The
morning light showed the white of her eyes. They were the only things in the
room in motion, in slow starts and stops, tracing the anatomy of the man across
from her.

 
          
Each
little hair was perfect on the chin and cheeks. A tiny hole of sunlight from
the window-shade lay on his chin and picked out, like the spikes of a music-box
cylinder, each little hair on his face.

 
          
His
wrists on either side of him had little curly black hairs, each perfect, each
separate and shiny and glittering.

 
          
The
hair on his head was intact, strand by dark strand, down to the roots. The ears
were beautifully carved. The teeth were intact behind the lips.

 
          
“Joseph!”
she screamed.

 
          
“Joseph!”
she screamed again, flailing up in terror.

 
          
Bong!
Bong! Bong!
went
the bell thunder across the street,
from the great tiled cathedral!

 
          
Pigeons
rose in a papery white whirl, like so many magazines fluttered past the window!
The pigeons circled the plaza, spiraling up. Bong!
went
the bells! Honk went a taxi horn! Far away down an alley a music box played “
Cielito
Lindo
.”

 
          
All
these faded into the dripping of the faucet in the bath sink.

 
          
Joseph
opened his eyes.

 
          
His
wife sat on her bed, staring at him.

 
          
“I
thought—” he said. He blinked. “No.” He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“Just the bells.”
A sigh.
“What
time is it?”

 
          
“I
don’t know. Yes, I do.
Eight o’clock
.”

 
          
“Good
God,” he murmured, turning over. “We can sleep three more hours.”

 
          
“You’ve
got to get up!” she cried.

 
          
“Nobody’s
up. They won’t be to work at the garage until ten, you know that, you can’t
rush these people; keep quiet now.”

 
          
“But
you’ve got to get up,” she said.

 
          
He half-turned.
Sunlight prickled black hairs into bronze on
his upper lip. “
Why
? Why, in Christ’s
name, do I
have
to get up?”

 
          
“You
need a shave!” she almost screamed.

 
          
He
moaned. “So I have to get up and lather myself at eight in the morning because
I need a shave.”

 
          
“Well,
you do need one.”

 
          
“I’m
not shaving again till we reach
Texas
.”

 
          
“You
can’t go around looking like a tramp!”

 
          
“I
can and will. I’ve shaved every morning for thirty goddamn mornings and put on
a tie and had a crease in my pants.
From now on, no pants, no
ties, no shaving, no nothing.”

 
          
He
yanked the covers over his ears so violently that he pulled the blankets off
one of his naked legs.

 
          
The
leg hung upon the rim of the bed, warm white in the sunlight, each little black
hair—perfect.

 
          
Her
eyes widened, focused, stared upon it.

 
          
She
put her hand over her mouth, tight.

 
          
He
went in and out of the hotel all day. He did not shave. He walked along the
plaza tiles below. He walked so slowly she wanted to throw a lightning bolt out
of the window and hit him. He paused and talked to the hotel manager below,
under a drum-cut tree, shifting his shoes on the pale blue plaza tiles. He
looked at birds on trees and saw how the State Theater statues were dressed in
fresh morning gilt, and stood on the corner, watching the traffic carefully.
There was no traffic! He was standing there on purpose, taking his time, not
looking back at her. Why didn’t he run, lope down the alley, down the hill to
the garage, pound on the doors, threaten the mechanics, lift them by their
pants,
shove
them into the car motor! He stood
instead, watching the ridiculous traffic pass.
A hobbled
swine, a man on a bike, a 1927 Ford, and three half-nude children.
Go,
go, go, she screamed silently, and almost smashed the window.

 
          
He
sauntered across the street. He went around the corner. All the way down to the
garage he’d stop at windows, read signs, look at pictures,
handle
pottery. Maybe he’d stop in for a beer.
God, yes, a beer.

 
          
She
walked in the plaza, took the sun, hunted for more magazines. She cleaned her
fingernails, burnished them, took a bath, walked again in the plaza, ate very
little, and returned to the room to feed upon her magazines.

 
          
She
did not lie down. She was afraid to. Each time she did she fell into a
half-dream, half-drowse in which all her childhood was revealed in a helpless
melancholy. Old friends, children she hadn’t seen or thought of in twenty years
filled her mind. And she thought of things she wanted to do and had never done.
She had meant to call Lila
Holdridge
for the past
eight years since college, but somehow she never had. What friends they had
been! Dear Lila! She thought, when lying down, of all the books, the fine new
and old books, she had meant to buy and might never buy now and read. How she
loved books and the smell of books. She thought of a thousand old sad things.
She’d wanted to own the Oz books all her life, yet had never bought them. Why
not
?
while
yet
there was life! The first thing she’d do would be to buy them when she got back
to
New
York
!
And she’d call Lila immediately! And she’d see Bert and Jimmy and Helen and
Louise, and go back to
Illinois
and walk around in her childhood place and see the things to be seen
there.
If she got back to the States.
If.
Her heart beat painfully in her, paused, held on to
itself, and beat again.
If
she ever got back.