The Good Old Stuff (11 page)

“Good morning, nurse. Welcome home, darling! Oh, welcome home!” She came over to the bed. Miranda watched stonily. Connie bent and gave me that quick, hard kiss. I got my hand around the back of her frail neck and prolonged it. When I released her she took a step backwards, her eyes wide, bringing her hand up as though to scrub her lips, not quite daring.

“Well!” she said unevenly.

At the end of the week, I made four full circuits of the room. At the end of two weeks I went downstairs, dressed for the first time. The clothes hung on me. The more independent I grew, the more coldness appeared in Connie’s manner toward Miranda.

At the end of the second week she brought it to a head, in Miranda’s presence.

“George, I think we can get along beautifully now without Nurse Wysner.”

“I’ll leave in the morning,” Miranda said. “I’ll pack tonight. That is, if you really feel you don’t need me, Mr. Corliss.”

I gave the words the proper emphasis. “I can handle everything myself,” I said.

“You mustn’t get too confident,” Miranda said.

“I know my own limitations,” I replied.

“You two talk as if I weren’t here to help,” Connie said with small-girl plaintiveness.

“I’m certain you’ll be a great help, Mrs. Corliss,” Miranda said, starting bluntly, sliding into her odd breathlessness at the end of the sentence.

“Then it’s settled,” Connie said brightly, clapping her hands once, a habit I had at one time found almost unbearably sweet.…

In the middle of the night Miranda’s hand against my cheek awakened me. The bed stirred as she sat on it. The night was as black as a sealed coffin.

Her whisper had the same quality as her speaking voice. “You can’t do it alone, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever it is that you’ve been planning, my darling.”

“May I take this as a declaration of your great and undying passion?”

“See? You can’t hurt me that way. You can’t hurt me by trying to hurt me. That’s a sort of secret we have. We’ve said more things with a look than we can ever say with words.”

“I’m touched, deeply.”

Her nearness was more vital than any caress. “You’ve got to let me help. You’ve got to let me share.”

“Why?”

“Doing something and never having a sharing of it is bad. Then it’s all on the inside. We can talk, you know. Afterward.”

Nurse and patient, probing together a deep and desperate wound.

“But I have a way and you aren’t in it.”

“Then there must be a new way. Two can think better. You might forget something important.”

“You’re accepting the correctness of the decision, then?”

“Only because it’s yours. I don’t matter. I’ve never had any strong feelings about right and wrong.”

“That’s a lie, Miranda.”

Hoarsely: “So it’s a lie! When you’ve seen the evil I’ve seen—”

“I’ll let you help on one condition, Miranda.”

“Anything.”

“We haven’t used the words yet. I want you to say the words
we’ve been skirting so carefully. I want you to say them slowly. All the words. Now, what are you going to do?”

Her hands found my wrist and the moth touch was gone. Her nails dug in with a surprising force. “I am going to help you kill your wife and her lover.”

“Why?”

“Because they hurt you so badly, and it’s something you want to do.”

“But more than that. The other reason.”

“Because after it is done it will be something so strong between us that we’ll never be apart again.”

“Love, then?”

“No. Something stronger than that. Something more exciting.”

“You want half a man?”

“I’m strong enough for two. I knew it would be this way. Ever since that night I kept you from dying. You gave up that night. I sat and whispered in your ear why you had to live. Over and over. And you did.”

“It’s settled, then. Go in the morning. Be patient. I’ll come to you when I can.”

She left quickly, plunging towards the doorway, miraculously finding it in the blackness.

Strength slowly
came back. My clothes began to fit again. Tone came back to the mended muscles. Connie stayed in the guest room. For a long time she seemed to be waiting, and when she saw that there would be no demands on her uxorial capacities, there seemed to be a relief in her. Once, when she was out, I went over her personal checks against the small income from her father. I checked back far enough to find out when it had started. They had been a little careless several months before my accident. Instead of cashing two of the checks, she had turned them over to her friend. The endorsements were a scrawled
L. Palmer
, with a self-conscious flowery squiggle under the name. I took those two checks. They were both for twenty-five.

I didn’t hate either of them. I was cold—cold as any self-respecting corpse should be.

With the proceeds of the collision insurance I bought a good used car. I wasn’t cold about that. It frightened me. That was unexpected. I sat behind the wheel, and when I shut my eyes I could feel the car rolling, first sideways and then end over end. I opened my eyes quickly and the world returned to sanity. The first time I drove to the city, the sweat ran down from my armpits, soaking my shirt. I had the checks photostated on that first trip, front and back. I returned them to her file.

That night, at dinner, I put the next brick in the foundation. I looked across at Connie. “You’re mine, you know,” I said.

Little puzzled wrinkles appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Of course, dear. What brought that on?”

“I just was thinking. You know how you imagine things. I was imagining how I would react if you ever wanted to leave me. The answer is very simple. I’d never, never let you go.”

She smothered the quick alarm. “Why think of such a thing, George? Such an impossible thing!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Say, the new car holds sixteen gallons of gas.”

The fork trembled in her hand. “What’s that got to do with—”

“Nothing, Connie. Don’t be so silly. I saw the conversation disturbed you, so in my own feeble way I was changing the subject.”

“Oh!”

“The steering seems pretty sound. I had it checked at the station. That Palmer boy seems to know his business.”

Vacant stare. “Palmer? Oh, Louie, the dark one.”

She was getting better at it. That was really a good effort. I thought it was too bad I couldn’t tell her just how good an effort it was. Then she spoiled it by being unable to finish the dinner she was eating with such appetite. That’s one thing about her that always amazed me. A tiny girl, yet almost rapacious about her food. Red lips eager and white teeth tearing and champing. Once upon a time it had been cute. Funny how little you can learn about a woman in seven years of marriage.

I had to make her see Louie. I had to give her a reason.

Over coffee I said, “I’ve been asking around.”

“About what, darling?” A shade too much casualness and disinterest.

“We could make a good deal on this house right now.”

The petulance showed immediately. “But, George! I love this house and this neighborhood. I don’t want to move.”

“I stopped in at the office. I told Mallory how the docs recommend I keep out in the air as much as possible. He hinted that they might be able to give me a traveling job, based in California. I’d cover eleven Western states, part promotion work, part digging up new talent for the list. I’d also do some coordination work with the movie agents. I’m to let him know.”

She looked as if somebody had hit her in the stomach. “But isn’t the job you had a better one? I mean, we could see that you got plenty of fresh air.”

“I don’t know if I’m too anxious to pick up this commuting treadmill again. I’m going to give it a lot of thought. We’d make a profit on the house. In the new job my trips would be so long that you would travel with me, naturally.”

“I do get a little carsick,” she said, the dread showing.

I laughed. “Say, remember in the hospital when I told you I was going to drive slow from then on?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Found out today I’ve got my nerve back. I kicked it up to seventy-five on Route Twenty-eight. The old reflexes seem pretty good.”

I watched and saw the speculative look dawn. She covered it by getting up to bring more coffee. But when she poured it into my cup, she spilled some in the saucer and didn’t seem to notice.

At a quarter to nine she said she was going for a walk. I knew that the station closed at nine. I yawned and said I might go to bed. She left. I waited five minutes and backed the car out. The station was six blocks away. I was curious to see how it was done. I took the parallel road, then turned left after six blocks and parked in the tree shadows. I could see the station. Connie walked by it, very slowly, silhouetted against the station floodlights. She continued on down the street. I turned around in a driveway, went back to the parallel road, sped down three
blocks, and parked as before. Soon Connie went by, walking quickly now, high heels twinkling. I eased out after her.

Thirteen blocks from our house on April Lane she turned left. It was a cheap neighborhood. Midway in the second block was a green neon sign against a pale brick front: U
NICORN
—B
AR AND
G
RILL
. Beyond it was another sign,
Ladies’ Entrance
. She darted in there, reluctant to linger under the harsh green light. I could remember the exact stage of pain that green light represented. Not the worst, but bad.

I went down the street, turned around, parked on the same side as the Unicorn, facing toward it. I was barely in time. A ’40 Ford convertible parked across the street and Louie Palmer in jacket, open sports collar, hatless, walked across the street. He stopped in the full glare of green and lit a cigarette. He handled it in a thoroughly Bogart fashion, hand cupped completely around it, lowering it with calculated slowness after each drag. He looked up and down the street. He flipped it away, squared his shoulders, and went inside. After all, he was a desperate character. A real killer. The murder didn’t quite pan out, but what the hell. The intent was there. Louie was a real sharp apple, all wound up in a capital A affair, just like out of James M. Cain.

It would be nice to tell him that he was a sniveling little grease monkey preening himself over a tramp wife, a hired banty rooster with grease in his hair. But that was a pleasure I would have to forego.

I was in bed when she got home an hour later. I heard her in the bathroom. I wondered how radiant she looked.

Miranda lived alone in an efficiency apartment crowded into what had apparently been one of the bedrooms of a vast old Victorian house. To the left of the house was the parking lot for a supermarket. The street had been widened until the bottom step of the porch was a yard from the sidewalk.

She came down the street from the bus stop, lean legs in the white cotton stockings scissoring below the hem of the cheap coat.

She watched the sidewalk ahead of her and suddenly looked
across the street directly into my eyes and stopped. It did not seem strange that she should have that utter awareness.

She waited and I walked across to her. The small blue eyes narrowed just a bit. Her heavy lips were laid evenly together. She wore no lipstick, and the strange thinness of the skin of her lips made them look peeled, raw.

We did not speak to each other until she had shut the apartment door behind us. “You should take stairs more slowly,” she said.

“Showing off, I guess.”

“You look better, George. Give me your coat.”

The apartment was absolutely characterless at first glance. Then the signs of her presence intruded. An ashtray squared precisely to the edge of a table. Three birch logs, so perfect as to look artificial, stacked in the shallow, ashless fireplace. Shades all pulled to exactly the same level. She plunged back and forth through the room, physically threatening to derange all its neatness, but her touch on each object was light and precise. She pulled a glass-topped table closer to the armchair where I sat. From the kitchenette alcove she brought bottle, glass, small bowl of ice cubes, new bottle of soda. She set them down with evenly spaced clicks against the glass top. She made the drink deftly and said, “With you in a moment,” and shut herself into the tiny bath.

She came out with her hair fluffed out of its rigid nurse’s style, and she wore a turtle-necked gray sweater and a harsh tweed skirt in a discomfiting orange shade. No stockings. Ancient loafers. She fell toward a chair, sat lightly in it. The bones of her wrists and hips were sharp. She looked harsh, brittle, angular. I thought irrelevantly that she was a woman made for a blind man. To his touch she would have the remembered softness and warmth.

I put the drink down. “How do we start?”

“Tell me how we’re going to do it.” The sentence faded away. Each of her sentences brought silence after it, so that forever we spoke across silence more clearly than with words. Her eyes were dedicated blue flames.

“Not that fast. I want to know if you still insist on sharing this thing. Without knowing when or how we’re to do it.”

“I insist.”

I studied her “Have you ever wondered about your own sanity, Miranda?”

“Of course. Everyone does. They say that to wonder means that you are really quite all right.”

“Odd that you’re a nurse.”

“Is it? People fighting, dying. I’m there. I can watch and decide about them. Oh, you don’t have to do anything crude, like the wrong medicines. I like them caught between living and dying. Like you were. Then you can do it with words. You can decide, and it always comes out the way you say. It makes you strong to think about it.”

I smiled, and my lips felt stiff. “Have you decided against anyone lately?”

“Oh, yes. This past week. An old man. They wanted him alive because, you see, he was a great-grandfather and in another month he’d be a great-great-grandfather and it was all a matter of pride with him and with them. To have all those generations living at once. He fought, that one, to keep living just for the sake of living, which is never any good. I whispered in his ear. ‘Give up,’ I said. ‘Let it go. Stop fighting. Give up.’ They say they can’t hear you, but they can. They always can. He finally gave a great sigh and died. They couldn’t understand why he died. But, of course, I couldn’t tell them.”