Mermaids on the Golf Course (3 page)

It was a relief to get out into the cool air, the darkness. Roland lived on East 52nd Street, and he walked east. A pair of young lovers, arms around each other’s waist, strolled slowly towards him, the girl tipped her head back and gave a soft laugh. The boy bent quickly and kissed her lips. They might have been in another world, Roland thought. They were in another world, compared to his. At least these kids were happy and healthy. Well, so had he and Jane been—just like them, Roland realized, just about six years ago! Incredible, it seemed now! What had they done to deserve this? Their fate? What? Nothing that Roland could think of. He was not religiously inclined, and he believed as little in prayer, or an afterworld, as he did in luck. A man made his own destiny. Roland Markow was the grandson of poor immigrants. Even his parents had had no university education. Roland had worked his way through CUNY, living at home.

Roland was walking downtown on First Avenue, walking quickly, hands in the pockets of his raincoat which he had grabbed out of the hall closet, though it wasn’t raining. There were few people on the sidewalk, though the avenue had a stream of taxis and private cars flowing uptown in its wide, one-way artery. Now, out of a corner coffee shop, six or eight adolescents, all looking fourteen or fifteen years old, spilled on to the sidewalk, laughing and chattering, and one boy jumped twice, as if on a pogo stick, rather high in the air before a girl reached for his hand. More health, more youth! Bertie would never jump like that. Bertie would walk, could now in a way, but jump for joy to make a girl smile? Never!

Suddenly Roland burnt with anger. He stopped, pressed his lips together as if he were about to explode, looked behind him the way he had come, vaguely thinking of starting back, but really not caring how late it got. He was not in the least tired, though he was now south of 34th Street. He thought of throttling Bertie, of doing it with his own hands. Bertie wouldn’t even struggle much, Roland knew, wouldn’t realize what was happening, until it was too late. Roland turned and headed uptown, then crossed the avenue eastward at a red light. He didn’t care if he roamed the rest of the night. It was better than lying sleepless at home, alone in that bed.

A rather plump man, shorter than Roland, was walking towards him on the sidewalk. He wore no hat, he had a mustache, and a slightly troubled air. The man gazed down at the sidewalk.

Suddenly Roland leapt for him. Roland was not even aware that he leapt with his hands outstretched for the man’s throat. The suddenness of Roland’s impact sent the man backwards, and Roland fell on top of him. Scrambling a little, grasping the man’s throat ever harder, Roland tugged the man leftward, towards the shadow of the huge, dark apartment building on the left side of the sidewalk. Roland sank his thumbs. There was no sound from the man, whose tongue protruded, Roland could barely see, much like Bertie’s. The man’s thick brows rose, his eyes were wide—grayish eyes, Roland thought. With a heave, Roland moved the fallen figure three or four feet towards a patch of darkness on his left, which Roland imagined was a hole. Not that Roland was thinking, he was simply aware of a column or pit of darkness on his left, and he had a desire to push the man down it, to annihilate him. Panting finally, but with his hands still on the man’s throat, Roland glanced at the darkness and saw that it was an alleyway, very narrow, between two buildings, and that part of the darkness was caused by black iron banisters, with steps of black iron that led downwards. Roland dragged the man just a little farther, until his head and shoulders hung over the steps, then Roland straightened, breathing through his mouth. The man’s head was in darkness, only part of his trousered legs and black shod feet were visible. Roland bent and grabbed the lowest button of the man’s gray plaid jacket and yanked it off. He pocketed this, then turned and walked back the way he had come, still breathing through parted lips. He paid no attention to two men who walked towards him, but he heard some words.

“. . . told her to go to
hell!—
Y’know?” said one.

The other man chuckled. “No kidding!”

At First Avenue, Roland turned uptown. Roland’s next thought, or rather the next thing that he was aware of, was that he stood in front of the mostly glass doors of his apartment building, for which he needed his key, but in his left side trousers pocket he had his keys, as always. He glanced behind him, vaguely thinking that the taxi that had brought him might just be pulling away. But he had walked. Of course, he had gone out for a walk. He remembered that perfectly. He felt pleasantly tired.

Roland took the elevator, then entered the apartment quietly. Jane was still asleep on the sofa, and she stirred as he crossed the living room, but did not wake up. Roland tiptoed as before. The lamp was still on, on his worktable. Roland undressed, washed quietly in the bathroom, and got into bed. He had killed a man. Roland could still feel the slight pain in his thumbs from the strain of his muscles there. That man was dead. One human being dead, in place of Bertie. That was the way he saw it, now. It was a kind of vengeance, or revenge, on his part. Wasn’t it? What had he and Jane done to deserve Bertie? What had all the healthy, normal people walking around on the earth, what had
they
done to deserve their happy state? Nothing. They’d simply been born. Roland slept.

When Jane brought him a cup of coffee in bed at half past seven, Roland felt especially well. He thanked her with a smile.

“Thought I’d let you sleep this morning no matter what,” Jane said cheerfully. “No tax returns are worth your
health,
Rollie dear.” She was already dressed in one of her peasant skirts that concealed the bulk of her hips and thighs, a blue shirt which she had not bothered to tuck into the skirt top, her old pale blue espadrilles. “Now what for breakfast? Pancakes sound nice? Batter’s all made, because Bertie likes them so much, you know. Or—bacon and eggs?”

Roland sipped his coffee. “Pancakes sound great. With bacon too, I hope.”

“You bet, with bacon! Ten minutes.” Jane went off to the kitchen.

Roland felt in good spirits the entire day. Jane remarked on it before he left the apartment that morning, and Greg at the office said: “Miracle man! Did you win on the horses or something? Did you see that pile of stuff on your desk?”

Roland had, and he had expected it. Greg had worked till two-thirty in the morning, he said, and he looked it. The telephones, four of them, rang all day, clients calling back after having had questions put to them by Roland or Greg by telephone or by letter. Roland did not feel so much cheerful as confident that day. He felt calm, really, and if he looked consequently cheerful, that was an accident. He could remind himself that the office had gone through last year’s deadline, and the year’s before that, in the same state of nerves and overwork, and they’d always made it, somehow.

Roland wore the same trousers, and the button was in the right-hand pocket. He pulled it out in a moment when he was alone in his office and looked at it in the light that came through his office window. It was grayish brown, with holes in which some gray thread remained. Roland pulled the thread out and dropped the bits into his wastebasket. Had he really throttled a man? The idea seemed impossible at ten past four that afternoon, as he stood in his pleasant office with its green carpet, pale green curtains and white walls lined with familiar books and files. The button could have come from anywhere, Roland was thinking. It could have fallen off one of his own jackets, he could have shoved it into his pocket with an idea of asking Jane to sew it on, when she found the time.

It did cross Roland’s mind just after five o’clock (the office, including the two secretaries, was working till seven) to look at the
Post
tonight for the discovery of a body on—what street? A man of forty or so with mustache, named—Strangled. But Roland’s mind just as quickly shied away from this idea. Why should he look in the newspapers? What had it got to do with him? There wouldn’t be a clue, as they said in mystery novels. Sheer fantasy! All of it. A corpse lying on East 40th Street or 45th Street or wherever it had been? Not very likely.

In four days, the office work had greatly let up. Some clients were going to be a little late (their own fault for not having their data all together), and would have to pay small fines, but so be it. Fines weren’t life or death. Roland ate better. Jane was pleased. Roland showed more patience with Bertie, and he could laugh with the child now and then. He sat on the floor and played with him for fifteen and twenty minutes at a time.

“That’ll help him, you know, Rollie?” said Jane, watching them arrange a row of soft plastic blocks. Jane spoke as if Bertie couldn’t understand a word, which was more or less true.

“Yep,” said Roland. The row of blocks had a space between each block and the next and Roland began setting more blocks on these gaps with the objective of building a pyramid. “Why don’t we ask the Jacksons over soon?” He looked up at Jane. “For dinner.”

“Margie and Tom! I’d love to, Rollie!” Jane was beaming, and she brought her hands down on her thighs for emphasis. “I’ll phone them tonight. It was always you who didn’t want them, you know, Rollie.
They
didn’t mind. I mean—about Bertie. Bertie was always locked up in his room, anyway!” Jane laughed, happy at the idea of inviting the Jacksons. “It was always you who thought Bertie bothered
them,
or they didn’t like Bertie. Something like that.”

Roland remembered. The Jacksons, like most people, were disgusted by Bertie, a little afraid of him for all Bertie’s smallness, as normal people were always afraid of idiots, unpredictable things that might do them harm. Now Roland felt that he wouldn’t mind that. He knew he would be able to laugh, make a joke, put the Jacksons at their ease about Bertie, if they went into Bertie’s room “to visit with him” the night they came. They never asked to, but Jane usually proposed it.

The Jackson evening turned out well. Everyone was in a good mood, and Jane didn’t suggest during the pre-dinner drinks time “saying hello to Bertie,” and the Jacksons hadn’t brought a toy for him, as they had a few times in the past—a small plastic beach ball, something inane, for a baby. Jane had made an excellent Hungarian goulash.

Then around ten o’clock, Jane said brightly, “I’ll bring Bertie out to join us for a few minutes. It’ll do him good.”

“Do that,” said Margerie Jackson automatically, politely.

Roland saw Margerie glance at her husband who was standing with his small coffee by a bookcase. Roland had just poured brandies all round into the snifters on the coffee table. Bertie could easily sweep a couple of snifters off the low table with a swing of his hand, Roland was thinking, and he realized that he had grown stiff with apprehension or annoyance.

Bertie was carried in, in Jane’s usual manner, held by the waist, face forward, and rather bumped along against her thighs as she walked. Bertie weighed a lot for a five-year-old, though he wasn’t as tall as a normal child of that age.

“Aaaaagh-wah!” Bertie’s small slant eyes looked the same as they might if he were in his own room, which was to say they showed no interest in or awareness of the change of scene to the living room or of the people in it.

“
There
you are!” Jane announced to Bertie, dumping him down on his diapered rump on the living room carpet.

Bertie wore the top of his pajama suit with its cuffs turned up a couple of times because his arms were so short.

Roland found himself frowning slightly, averting his eyes in a miserable way from the unsightly—or rather, frightening—flatness of Bertie’s undersized head, just as he had always done, but especially in the presence of other people, as if he wished to illustrate his sympathy with people who might be seeing Bertie for the first time. Then Margerie laughed at something Bertie had done. She had given Bertie one of the cheese stick canapés that were still on the coffee table, and he had crushed it into one ear.

Margerie glanced at Roland, still smiling, and Roland found himself smiling back, even grinning. Roland took a sip of his brandy. Bertie was a little clown, after all, and maybe he enjoyed these get-togethers in the living room. Bertie did seem to be smiling now. Occasionally he
did
smile. Little
monster!
But he’d killed a man in return, Roland thought, and stood a bit taller, feeling all his muscles tense. He, Roland, wasn’t entirely helpless in the situation, wasn’t just a puppet of fate to be pushed around by
—everything—
a victim of a wildly odd chance, doomed to eternal shame. Far from it.

Roland found himself joining in a great burst of laughter, not knowing what it was about, till he saw Bertie rolling on his back like a helpless beetle.

“Trying to stand on his
head
!” cried Jane. “Ha-ha! Did you see that, Rollie, dear?”

“Yes,” said Roland. He topped up the brandies for those who wanted it.

When the Jacksons departed around eleven, Jane asked Roland if he didn’t think it had been a successful evening, because she thought it had been. Jane stood proudly in the living room, and opened her arms, smiling.

“Yes, my love. It was.” Roland put his arms around her waist, held her close for a moment, without passion, without any sexual pleasure whatsoever, but with the pleasure of companionship. His embrace was like saying, “Thanks for cooking the dinner and making it a nice evening.”

Bertie was stowed away in his room, in his low bed, Roland was sure, though he hadn’t accompanied Jane when she was trying to settle him for the night. Jane was doing things in the kitchen now. Roland went to a corner of the bedroom where he and Jane stacked old newspapers. Because of Roland’s work, he kept newspapers a long while, in case he had to look for a new tax law, or bond issue, or any of a dozen such bits of news that he or his colleagues might not have cut out. What he was looking for was not old and was rather specific: an item about a man found dead on a sidewalk during the night of April 26–27. In about four minutes, Roland found an item not two inches long in a newspaper one day later than he had thought it might be. man found strangled was the little heading. Francisco Baltar, 46, said the report, had been found strangled on East 47th Street. Robbery had evidently been the motive. Mr. Baltar had been a consulting engineer of Vito, a Spanish agricultural firm, and had been in New York for a short stay on business. Police were questioning suspects, the item concluded.