Flight to Darkness (4 page)

“
Are you hurt badly?”

“
No. Are you a nurse
here?”

“
I’ve been here since before
Korea.”

“
Why don’t you sit
down?”

“
Oh, no.” She had moved a scant
inch toward the bed. “I’ve got to go.”

“
I’ll think of some books I
want.”

“
Do that. I’ll come back
tomorrow.”

We looked at each other. “Let’s cut this out,”
I said. “Let’s relax.”

“
It’s been a strain, hasn’t
it?”

We told each other our names. She knew mine.
“The doctor told me. He also said you’re interested in
sculpturing.”

“
Yes.” I didn’t like to talk about
that with anybody. It was the only thing I had, really. I wanted to
keep it my own—all the way.

“
Have you done any
recently?”

“
Hardly.”

“
Before you went away?”

“
Commercial stuff, mostly. My
home’s in Florida. I have a place there where I work.” I thought it
over. “You could sit down. I haven’t talked with a woman for a long
time.”

“
Ah.” She watched the rain out the
window. It was darkening in the room now as the late afternoon
slowly failed. “My father was an artist,” she said. Her voice was
touched with bitterness. “He hung himself. I found him that way,
with the light cord twisted around his neck.”

It startled me. They didn’t talk like that
around this part of the hospital.

“
That why you’re a
nurse?”

“
No.” She stared at me, her eyes
bright. “I planned it. I became a nurse so I could find some rich
man, a helpless patient, and make him fall in love with me. Then
I’d marry him for his money.”

“
Have you found him?”

Her dress hissed as she moved her leg. “No. I
guess not.” She told me her hitch would be up in less than a year.
After she left I lay in bed and thought about her and knew she was
going to get in bed with me. She had the look and that current was
there between us. Then I decided I was off my nut and finally I
went to sleep.

I awoke in a strait jacket.

It was the dream again. I had Frank up against
the wall with one hand driving into his throat. The wooden mallet
was in my other hand. I pounded at his head. He kept screaming. I
heard him scream and scream as I woke up—only I was
screaming.

I was in the hall outside my room. My fist was
hurt bad from smacking it on the wall. They were tightening the
straps.

“
Look,” Leda said one day. “You’ll
find out anyway. Dr. Prescott’s made me a kind of special nurse to
you. He thought it might do you good.”

“
It would.”

She put the books down on the table by the
head of the bed and stood there with her hands clasped in front of
her. Her breasts thrust large and firm in a white lace brassiere. I
glimpsed the shadow of flesh through the nylon uniform. Her eyes
were deep blue and the light from the bed lamp shimmered in her
hair. “We may as well learn to be frank and open with each other
right away.”

“
It’s a good way to be.”

She looked at me sharply, then turned and sat
in the chair by the window, crossing her legs. They were long
gorgeous legs and the low-heeled crepe-soled shoes somehow enhanced
them. In high heels her legs would be of the same impossibility of
a Petty drawing. Only they’d be real. That would be something and
she knew it.

“
I know all about you,” she
said.

“
That’s not so good.”

“
Perhaps not.”

“
Come and sit beside me on the
bed.”

She uncrossed her legs and said, “I
can’t.”

“
Why?”

“
Somebody might come.” She made it
sound like a caress. It was that unconscious trait of hers.
Sometimes when she talked and moved she kissed you with her whole
body. Maybe it was the tone of her voice. I wasn’t sure.

“
Come on,” I said. “Be frank and
open.”

She glanced toward the door. It was very
quiet. The staff would be eating and the room was dim, with only
the bed light on. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed and
said, “There.”

It was suddenly very much more than I’d
expected. When she was that near the true feeling of it struck me
and I reached for her hand. I made it as much of a gesture of
instinct as I could.

We sat there holding hands. It was abruptly
ludicrous and I let it go. She moved closer to me and said, “It’s
all right. I think I know how you feel.” It was almost a
whisper.

Leda was from a good family that had no money.
They’d put her through the best schools on their name. She was a
wild one and she showed it. A suppressed, combustible wildness. She
was the type you might wonder about having a knife sheathed in the
rim of her stocking. But you’d want to look, anyway. She seemed
greatly interested in art, but had the idea people would kill art.
They would kill the artist and he didn’t have a chance. Through
ignorance, through wanting something other than what the artist had
to offer.

“
I don’t like persons like you,”
she said. “Because I saw it happen to father. All the fine things
he did went into the furnace. They heated the front
parlor.”

“
Forget it.”

“
You’ve got to have
money.”

Her father had hung himself, and her mother
had gone to Germany before the war and joined the Nazi party for
excitement. She’d been a fancy collaborator and had her own radio
broadcast on a par with Axis Sally. She’d died in the explosion
when the station was bombed. Leda rather lauded her
mother.

“
Really all right,” Leda said.
“Misplaced, that’s all.”

So then she got her ideas about nursing and
here she was, a First Lieutenant in the Army. That was her
story.

“
Help me fix the pillows so I can
sit up.”

“
You feel strong tonight?” God, the
way she said those things.

“
Very.”

She stood beside the bed and leaned over me to
fix the pillows. I put my arms around her and drew her down and
kissed her. I put a lot of pressure into that kiss, holding her
down against me, and she started to let go. I knew that when she
did let go, put herself into the kiss, it was going to be
something. Her lips trembled and her breasts were against me and
her hair formed a kind of tent over my face. We were in the tent
together and it smelled good.

“
Leda.”

She fixed the pillows. I sat up against
them.

“
Leda.”

“
It was a trick,” she said. “You
shouldn’t have done it.” Her lids were still heavy. But beneath
those lids the blue of her eyes had changed to gray. She walked
over to the door. “Enjoy yourself.”

“
Leda—”

She went out. The door closed quietly and I
heard her crepe-soled shoes whisking down the hall.

I lay there and though about home with Leda
all mixed up in it, her eyes, lips, and body drowning in the
daydream. Because I was afraid of sleep—afraid of the real
dream.

There was Lenny Conn. I wondered if he had
changed; if he was still living on the bayou, fishing, and mowing
lawns. Did he still live in that shack with the pictures on the
walls? And the flat glass cases shelved in the mahogany cabinet
he’d made. Like collecting butterflies. Only they weren’t
butterflies. And I wondered where that subtle perversion of his had
led him. Women. Lenny Conn and his collection about which even the
law could do nothing. Lenny. Not very old and not very smart, of
backwoods heritage—but cruel. Cruel as the person who tears the
wings off flies and watches them squirm is cruel. Lenny Conn, whom
I had known most of my life, who had once been a conductor on a
Pullman train, who loved women in the blind groping darkness of a
fantastic wish, and who mowed our lawn and trimmed our hedges.
Wily, at times inscrutable, clever and secret and laughable. Lenny,
along the shoals in a skiff with a gig in this hand, watching for
flounder. Lenny, who was unable to comprehend why the Garths lived
in a huge old pillared home with live oaks and drives and misery
when he thirsted out his days in a scorpion-infested shack with his
cryptic, startling collection.

Whenever I thought of home I had to push away
the memory of another girl. Norma. My girl. It was like denying
your name. I hadn’t written her and she no longer wrote. I wondered
if she still wanted to open a photography shop, if she still
thought of me, if she would be there, when and if I returned. And
thinking of Norma, the circle would flash around, completing itself
with Leda. Invariably I would compare them—then think of Leda’s
breasts and thighs outlined beneath white nylon, in a savage effort
to forget the girl who’d said she would wait. Because you do those
things. . . .

My light was out and it was past two in the
morning. I heard the door open, the hiss of movement, and I smelled
her bending over me. I felt her breath on my cheek.

“
You’re awake. Don’t trick me
again.”

“
Leda—”

“
I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s
just that they all try. I didn’t want that from you.”

“
I’m special?” I needed her and
knew it. She had become the something I had to have to endure, to
flash back out of the hell I was in.

“
I think you’re special. I’m not
sure yet.”

“
How long will it be before you’re
sure?”

I listened to her breathe and it was dark in
the room. Her breathing was like her voice. It was very still and
lonely and cool in the room with the wind outside the window and
the shadows on the wall and her shadow beside the bed. It was
always like that in the hospital at night; cool and lonely and very
still and the room was longer, high-walled, and sometimes not
secure.

I reached for her hand, found it, and she
moved toward me. We kissed and this time it was all the way with
her giving, then we parted, our breathing warm and nervous and
shaking.

“
Listen,” she said. “We’ll have to
be careful.”

“
Don’t go.” I held her waist, felt
the swell of her breasts, the fine line of her waist. I could see
the outline of her long legs and how her hips flared. She put her
hands over mine, pressing. “Please don’t go, Leda.”

“
Good night.”

“
Leda—”

She went out softly and closed the door. But
it was as if she was still in the room and I was sweating beneath
the dressings.

She came every day then. We would talk and
occasionally she read to me. I didn’t read any of the
books.

“
But it’s all right, darling,” she
said. “I don’t mind bringing you books. Maybe sometime you’ll want
to read them.”

“
With you? Who wants to read if he
has you?”

It was getting so I couldn’t stand it when she
came close, or when we kissed. I needed her around, too, because it
was worse now when she wasn’t with me. I thought too much about
Frank and what was the matter with me. I kept remembering Mother
alone with Frank, unwell and unable. Normally she could handle
Frank, anybody—but with her heart, I didn’t know. And I never heard
from her. I had ceased writing.

“
You’re big enough for a sculptor,
Leda said. “Are you bold?”

“
I don’t know.” Maybe she was the
bold one.

“
Have you ever loved
anyone?”

“
No.” Norma’s bright laughing face
flashed across my mind. Why did I push her out?

“
I’d be a liar if I told you I’d
never loved anyone.” It was in her eyes, like always.

“
How do you feel today?”

“
Mean as a snake.”

“
Any dreams?”

“
Yes,” I said. “You. A bad dream of
you.”

I reached for her and her lips were soft and
warm and my hands were in her hair and it was wild and
hot.

“
You’re not well,” she said,
sitting up.

I pulled her down. “I’m all right.”

“
You’re not sick, or
anything?”

“
No. I’m fine. Don’t go
away.”

“
Eric,” she said. “I love you. I
knew it would happen this way. I didn’t want it to.” The excitement
in her voice was rich and impatient. The rustling of her uniform
was maddened. “I’ll have to be careful of your legs.”

“
Hell with my legs.”

“
Tell me you love me,” she
said.

“
I do. I love you.”

“
Say my name with it.”

“
I love you, Leda.” I could feel it
all welling up inside me like damming the Mississippi
river.

“
Tighter, Eric!” She sat up,
frowned.

God, I thought, I did something
wrong.

She stood, glanced sharply at me, then walked
toward the door. Her crepe soles whisked heartlessly.