The Deceivers (25 page)

“Feel better?” Kacharian asked.

“Much,” he said thickly. “Whad you give me?”

“Oral demerol. Open wide and let me get that gauze.”

After the gauze was gone his mouth felt as if it were still there. “What time is it?”

“Nearly five.”

He sat up slowly. “My wife will …”

“I took the liberty of phoning the floor nurse and telling her to tell Mrs. Garrett that you wouldn’t be in, that you were unavoidably detained and there was nothing to worry about.”

He felt his eyes fill with tears of weakness and gratitude. His emotions seemed dangerously close to the surface. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Any headache?”

“No. My face throbs and my lips feel as if they don’t belong to me.”

“Take a deep breath and tell me how those ribs feel.”

He winced. “I get a sharp twinge.”

“No feeling of anything rubbing?”

“No.”

“You’ll want to clean yourself up. Bonny did as well as she could with your slacks, but the shirt was ruined and she
threw it away. Come along and I’ll show you where you can clean up.”

He took him to a bathroom in the main house. Kacharian said, “That old shirt of mine ought to do long enough to get you home. Don’t think of returning it. It’s ready to be scrapped.”

When the door was closed Carl hung onto the sink and looked at his face in the mirror. The socket of the closed left eye was swollen fat with purple-black flesh. The tape across his nose was a gleaming white. His lips were puffed and irregular. He had a dark shadow of beard and tousled hair. He would not have recognized himself. After he had washed in a gingerly way and combed his hair and put on the clothing that had been placed in the bathroom for him, he looked very little better. The swollen lips and puffed face gave him an unexpected look of brutality and stupidity. His expression seemed to be a dull and somewhat sinister sneer, and he could not alter it.

He walked back down the stairs and out through the dining room to the kitchen. The doctor was at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. His wife was feeding a very fat and very redheaded baby in a high-chair, spooning pablum into him between gurgles and crowing noises.

“Coffee?” Kacharian asked.

“Is it permitted?”

“Sure. But stick to soft foods for a few days. Soup, milk toast. Sit down right there.”

Kacharian found a cup and saucer, filled it from the pot on the stove and brought it over. “Cream and sugar?”

“Black, thanks. Wonder where that character got the red hair?”

“That’s Terrance O’Rourk Kacharian. That should confound future genealogists.”

“Pay a little more attention, please, sir, Mr. Terrance O’Rourk Kacharian,” Bonny said severely. “And down it goes. You know, Mr. Garrett, he enjoys eating because it’s a social situation.”

Carl sipped the coffee. It tasted very good. “Kids are odd. It didn’t seem as if we could get enough down my boy, Kip, to keep a fly alive. But his sister Nancy ate like a wolf.”

“How old are they?” the doctor asked.

“Fifteen and thirteen. They’re off at summer camp. My wife’s operation wasn’t something that had to be done immediately,
so we had Dr. Madden schedule it when the kids would be away.”

“Bernie Madden? Damn good man.”

In the silence that followed Carl realized that he had forgotten for a moment the reason why he was in this kitchen drinking Kacharian’s coffee. It made the silence more awkward.

“I … I’ve never been in this kind of a jam before,” he said, and wished he hadn’t brought it up. He saw the quick glance Bonny gave him, and sensed both her contempt for him and a degree of satisfaction in his predicament, and knew that her husband had told her what had happened. And he knew that if he had read about it in the newspaper he would have dismissed it as a sordid interlude, a typical scruffy adventure. Betrayed hubby batters wife’s lover in motel rendezvous. Suburban resident, local industrial executive, beaten up when caught with salesman’s wife, mother of two.

“It happens,” Kacharian said.

“My wife comes home tomorrow.”

“Major operation?”

“Abdominal.”

“Hysterectomy?”

“No.”

“That’s good because she won’t be as emotionally disturbed as if she’d had one. But she’ll be pretty vulnerable. I don’t want to alarm you, but a mess like this might throw her into a hell of a depression that she’d be a long time getting over.”

“Maybe he should have thought of that,” Bonny said bitterly.

“Hush, girl. We’re not sitting in judgment. Garrett, the state cops won’t follow through. There won’t be anything in the papers. What’s the chance of keeping it from your wife, at least for a week or two?”

“I … I don’t know. The … the other couple live next door. We’ve been … good friends.”

Kacharian sipped his coffee, frowning. “I can understand that the friendship is over, all right. But is there enough afterglow so you could ask them to … well, to play along with any reasonable excuse you can come up with for your condition?”

“I can’t think of anything reasonable.”

“You fell.”

Terrance O’Rourk Kacharian shut his mouth implacably against the next offering, and glared at his mother.

“Okay,” she said. “The bottomless pit is filled.” She wiped off his face, turned the tray back and hoisted him up onto her hip and carried him out of the kitchen.

“Don’t be upset about Bonny,” Kacharian said. “All wives belong to one big club dedicated to stamping out infidelity.”

“You know what’s so stupid about this whole thing?” Carl said. “You don’t have to try to believe me, of course. But this was the second damn time in seventeen years that I ever stepped out of line.”

Kacharian stared at him, and then shook his head in pity. “Good Lord on high! What a streak of luck.”

“For the first time in my life I feel as if maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist. I never had a compulsion that got out of control before. I guess the woman and I are equally to blame.”

Kacharian took his cup to the sink and rinsed it. “You and the woman and your age bracket and all the curious mores of current western civilization. Something has happened to satisfactions. People don’t seem to be getting as much as they deserve out of this ruller, richer life. I like what I’m doing so damn much that I often feel guilty when I treat people for physical ailments that are purely and simply the result of the emotional strain of working year after year at pointless, empty jobs. I beg your pardon. Speechmaking is one of my social afflictions. Bonny’s endured this opus many times.”

“If there’s more, I’d like to hear it.”

“Is your job a challenge to you, Mr. Garrett, Carl? Call me Kach, by the way.”

“It’s all right, I guess. No. I’ll do better than that. It’s pretty damn dull. And there’s a lot of years of it left. And I’ve even been making it duller than it should be. Masochism, I guess.”

“Okay. So how does modern man arrange to rebel against a barren use of his years and his life, rebel against all the wastage of the big dreams he had about himself when he was young? Our civilization is so compartmentalized that the little guy can’t see the relationship of his efforts to the whole. So his work is unreal to him, and hence meaningless. The artisan is pretty damn rare. So we get into psychosomatics. A woman spends four years soldering wire A to terminals B and C, and gets an arthritic condition of the hands that
gets her out of the trap. Safety engineers put every known safety device on a punch press, but a man will work on it for five years and then manage to get his hand into it, even if he has to push the release with his nose. A meat cutter in a packing house will become an alcoholic. A truck driver will acquire a classic ulcer. But some of them will react in other ways. After eight years of running the same piece of IBM office equipment, the once decent girl will become an after hours pushover. Or the lathe operator will take to beating his wife up. Or killing his entire family and himself. People with the dull little jobs become maniacs on the highway, or turn accident prone in all manner of ways, or just get sick. Or a man like you expresses his rebellion by indulging himself in an affair. I tell you, Carl, nobody will ever be able to measure all the human misery that is the indirect result of the inescapable boredom and sense of purposelessness that derives from a civilization so mechanized and complicated that a man can no longer take pride and satisfaction in the one little fragment that is his part of the whole ball of wax.”

Carl tried to smile, but it hurt his mouth. “You give me a nice tidy little rationalization, Kach.”

“But it won’t be good enough, will it?”

“I don’t guess it will.”

“You ready to take off?”

“Any time.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Let’s call it fifty dollars.”

“I can mail you a check. I wish I could get my car.”

“I think we can fix that. I’ll take you to the motel. I’m supposedly the doctor for the motel, and he’ll take my check for what he thinks you owe him, and then you can mail that to me too.”

After they left the house, Carl said, “Aren’t you going the wrong way?”

“I’m a conspirator at heart. I want to show you something.” He turned right in the middle of the village and drove out to a small roadside park with picnic tables. He parked and Carl followed him to the edge of a ravine at the rear of the park. There was a narrow footbridge across the ravine and most of the railing had rotted away.

“I treated a kid that fell off that thing a couple of weeks ago. It’s only a ten-foot drop, but it’s onto rocks. When your wife is well enough to ride around, bring her out and show her the scene of your misadventure. You went for an aimless
ride and parked and, like a damn fool, fell off the bridge. You’d remembered seeing my sign, so you drove back and I patched you up.”

“You’re being very decent, Kach.”

“Maybe there’s a club of husbands too.”

He drove Carl back to the motel. The no-vacancy sign was lighted. The station wagon was parked in front. Carl remembered that when Bucky had interrupted him, he had left the key in the ignition. The stately manager took them into the back office. The itemized bill for damages to lamp, rug, table, bedding and spread was eighty-five dollars and fifty cents. He agreed to accept Dr. Kacharian’s check, and managed to convey his impression that the doctor was being a gullible fool. He gave Kacharian a receipt, and put the car key on the desk where Carl could pick it up rather than hand it to him.

Carl stood by the car and shook hands with the doctor and thanked him again for all his trouble, and for the unsolicited co-operation. It was twenty of seven when he left the motel and headed west on the turnpike into the sun. He found that it was difficult to judge distance with only one eye, and he drove with care.

The quiet efficiency and uncomplicated friendliness of the young doctor had buoyed him up. But after he had been on the road ten minutes he slipped into black depression. The clumsy lie would never work. His marriage could never be the same. And he could never feel the same about himself. He was traveling in the outside lane at fifty-five. Fast traffic churned by him in the inside lane. He thought of a very simple solution. Just one twist of the wheel. Bring the speed up first, and then merely put the right hand so, at the top of the wheel, and make a quick half turn. The car would plunge across the shoulder and down the slope and into the heavy stand of trees. Insurance in order. A Ballinger pension for the widow. College education for the kids. And no more sickly lies to tell.

A fast-moving car cut in on him carelessly, forcing his right wheels onto the gravel shoulder. He fought it back onto the road and cursed the fool in the yellow Olds, and knew then that though he might indulge himself with self-pitiful and blackly dramatic thoughts of self-imposed oblivion, he could never actually make the final commitment. And had he been able to give the wheel that fatal twist, he would have spent the last three seconds of his life fighting in dreadful
fear and in the sickness of remorse to bring the car under control and thus save himself.

He wondered how many suicides had changed their minds after the irrevocable act that set the chain of death in motion. Did they go out the high windows and, all the way to the pavement, give the great screams of terror and regret? Did they try to crawl toward the phone, panting and fighting against the viscid blackness of the pills?

   It was seven-thirty when he reached his home. When he reached for his suitcase he saw that Cindy’s was in the car too. He hadn’t noticed it when he had gotten into the car at the motel. He took both suitcases into the kitchen, left hers there and took his to the bedroom. He changed his shirt, shaved his tender jaws quickly, and arrived at the hospital at ten of eight.

When he walked into the room he had the feeling that he was crouched and hiding behind the swollen ruin of his face.

Joan sat bolt upright and cried, “Darling! What happened?” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and glanced toward the other bed where the curtains were still drawn.

He pulled his chair close. “It’s a silly story. Did you get the message?”

“Just that you couldn’t come. I didn’t know what in the world could have … I thought maybe it was some sort of unexpected business thing, somebody coming in from New York or something. I told myself that’s what it was.”

“I got a little drunk last night.”

“If you drank any more after I saw you, you certainly were a little drunk. A little more than drunk. Did you get into a fight? I can’t imagine you getting into a fight.”

“No. I got up late. I felt lousy. I decided to go for a ride. I drove out the pike and turned off and drove through Aldermon. You remember that place.”

“Yes. But what happened? Did you wreck the car?”

“No. I stopped at a little roadside park. There is a bridge across a ravine. The railing was rotten. I fell off the damn bridge right onto my face on the rocks.”

“Oh, you poor darling! Oh, that must have hurt!”

“When I could move I climbed out and drove back and found a nice young doctor in the village named Kacharian. He sewed up my mouth and set my nose and taped two cracked ribs. I was a mess. So he gave me a pill and it
knocked me out and I woke up about five. When you can take rides, I’ll drive you out and show you the place. I’ve never felt so foolish in my life.”