All These Condemned (13 page)

I was restless. I went to my room again and then I wandered around some more and then there was yelling and people running toward the lake and I heard somebody say something that sounded like “Got her.”

I didn’t want to go down there, but I had to. I’m always doing things like that. I have to see things. Once on Madison Avenue there was a crowd of people looking at something and dumb me, I had to push my way through so I could see too, and what it was was a fat female person who had fallen out of a window. I nearly lost my lunch.

I had to go down and see, but I walked slow. I wasn’t going to run like the rest of them. Even so, I was in plenty of time. They had her in a boat all covered over with a dirty canvas. They lifted her out and they dropped her. I was crying again. I hated to see them drop her. I wished there was some way I could make her come alive again. Some magic words to say, like in the stories.

I thought if I could make her come alive again, I would devote my whole life to her. There would be just the two of us. We would go away somewhere and there would be just the two of us forever and ever. And there wouldn’t be any men around us.

Then I stopped and wondered why on earth I had thought a dumb thing like that. Well, if all the men were like Gil, I certainly wouldn’t want any around. Afterward it was sort of by accident that I saw Steve pull Noel Hess into his room
and shut the door and I heard the lock go click. Still waters certainly run deep, I thought. I had her all figured out for being provincial. It just goes to show you. Never judge a book by its cover. I wanted to listen by the door but I was afraid somebody would catch me.

Then they called us all into the living room again after they had a chance to look the body over or something. We had to sit there while a man named Fish made a speech. Everybody looked solemn. I was crying sort of to myself and I wasn’t even listening very much. Then he said a dreadful thing about her being stuck in the back of the head with something. Killed! Somebody had murdered my Wilma. Just thinking of it made me feel like a tiger or something. I would gouge their eyes right out. I’d jump up and down on them. And we all had to wait around for big shots to come. I kept trying to remember where we’d all been in the water. But that wasn’t any good because we’d been moving around a lot and I didn’t know exactly when it had happened to her. Noel left the room, saying she had a headache. I bet! I waited for Steve to follow her, but he was busy trying to talk them into something about reporters that would be coming.

I just sat there. I stopped crying. I kept thinking about who had murdered her. Judy Jonah was talking to a trooper. She glanced at me and then she sort of frowned at me. Not really at me.…

I wonder what the trouble is. She looks sort of funny. Somebody is behind my chair. There is a hand. Nobody should touch anybody like that, put his darn hand on my breast reaching around from behind me, right out with people looking. If this is Paul’s idea of a joke.…

EVIS HAD PHONED
from the gallery. He wanted to know when he could have more work. He said he could sell it. People were waiting for more to come in. I told him I wouldn’t work for a time, maybe a month, maybe two. He said it might be smart to get some work in before his customers cooled off. I told him I didn’t like the implication. I didn’t like the hint that I was some sort of a fad. He apologized to me. But there was a practiced smoothness about the apology that I didn’t care for. I hung up on him.

The world is full of drab inconsequential people like Evis. Living half lives. Afraid to grasp. The world gives to the ones who take boldly. People like Evis are there to be kicked.

But his manner had bothered me. Even though I knew I shouldn’t let it. I went to see Wilma. It was midafternoon. She let me in and then went back to the phone. She was
talking in Spanish. Finally she hung up. “I was talking to José,” she said. “Telling him how many were invited.”

“To what?”

“Did you forget, dear? This coming week end at the lake.”

“I guess I forgot.”

She sat beside me and took my hand. “What’s the matter?”

“Evis asked for more work. I didn’t like the way he asked me.”

She shook her head, almost sadly. “When will you learn what you really are, Gil? How long is it going to take you? Grimy little people like Evis don’t matter. He’s a parasite, feeding off your strength. Humility doesn’t become you, darling.”

I could feel the strength coming back into me. She is the only one who can do that. Sometimes I feel as though she created me. But that is wrong, of course. She merely brought out what was already there, hidden behind all the weaknesses and uncertainties I used to have.

I had wasted so much time before I met her.

I want to laugh when I think of the pathetic thing I was. She saw what was there.

I’ve never made friends. You do or you don’t. It seems that easy. I never knew why. She told me why. The less gifted always sense the difference. That’s easy to understand, isn’t it? She talks about mutations. The inevitable change in humanity. To become bigger, stronger, quicker, more ruthless. A survival thing, she has told me.

And I used to crawl and beg. Oh, not obviously. But thankful for the little jobs. Lifeguard, counter boy, usher,
dance instructor, model. Little people throwing scraps to me, and hating me because they could sense that I was better. Women were easy. They have always been easy. Wilma says that is a clue. I should have been able to read it. They are easy and meaningless. Except Wilma. Because of what she has done.

It was always a dream. From the time, I guess, that Sister Elizabeth, in the Home, said I could draw. She put that picture on the cork board in the big hall. Of trees. I drew every leaf. She told me what I had to do. Study, work, study, work. She should have known better. Where is there time for that? They let you go when you are old enough. When I was little they thought I would be adopted. I was out three times. But I was sent back. They wanted kissings. I could not do it. I stood and looked at them. Unresponsive, they said. They let me go when I was old enough and they found me the job and the place to live. How can you study and work to be an artist? The books were too hard. I learned the words so I could say them. And lessons are expensive. I would take some and then I would quit because they would not let me do what I wanted to do. Sit here, they said. Draw this pot. Draw that apple. You could go on for years drawing the dull things they put in front of you. That is not being an artist. I took them the things I did myself. All the colors swirled together. They always laughed and pursed up their mouths and tilted their heads on the side and used the words I had learned. Little people, refusing to see what was better. Hating me.

So I did very little of it. And I didn’t show it to anyone any more. But on Sundays I would put on my good clothes and walk where there were the best-dressed people and
walk among them and pretend all the time that I was an artist, a very good one. And on those Sundays I would usually find a girl. That was never very hard. As Wilma says, that should have been a clue.

I am ashamed of the way she found me. It was a job for Gherke. Sometimes he would use me. Not often and not for much money. I would have to lean, sweating, over some meatless girl, trying to look charmed and devoted to her, while Gherke fussed with hot lights and camera angles, always complaining about my wooden expression. The ad she saw was for Ferris perfume. She asked at the agency and the agency sent her to Gherke and Gherke told her where to find me. She sat at a stool. I had to wear that monkey hat behind that counter. Ridiculous. She knew my name. She waited until I was off. I thought it was just more of the same. I did not care. She was older, but not too old, I thought.

That night was what made everything different. It was not what I thought. It was at first, but not later. Not with those lights low and with her asking me the questions about myself. She knew when I was lying. I have always lied. Usually I say things like coming from a rich family and my people killed in a plane or something. But she kept asking and after a little bit I found I was telling her everything. Sister Elizabeth, drawing every leaf, how it was easy with girls, everything, and after a while I was crying. I couldn’t remember crying before. She told me later it was like psychoanalysis. Releasing tension. It all took a long time, because I could not express myself well. It was dawn when it was over and I felt as if I had run as fast as I could all night long.

Then she told me what I was. I had never known it before.
She told me how the world always tries to suppress the best.

That was the beginning. After that came the clothes, and how to treat people, and getting the studio apartment for me, and her there all the time while I painted, doing pictures very quickly, and Wilma telling me all the time to be bold about what I was doing. Not to try to paint something, but to paint a feeling. With big sweeps of color and spatters of paint.

She introduced me to Steve, and it didn’t matter to me that he didn’t like me. She said he had his job to do and he would do it. We went to good places and were seen there and after a while I was in the columns and then that man did the article on my work and then the gallery took me, and then there were all those arguments in the art sections of the papers and people began to buy the paintings and talk about me.

But she had taught me how to act. To always remember that I am better. That they are all slobs. Treat them as such. They like it, she said. They come back for more. It is really very easy to do. I had always acted sort of that way, but it was an unnatural shyness. I mean it just looked like arrogance.

Wilma made everything come true, but I know now that even without her it would have happened anyway. It might have taken longer. That is all.

There is still a weakness in me. Like when Evis acted that way. I had to go to her again because she could make me feel strong and whole again. But I am going to get over that. So nothing can disturb me. I am, as she has explained, a mutation. What the race of men will one day become. She is a
little bit that way, but not so much. The ones who are that way, they are big and strong and quick. I have always been bigger and stronger and quicker than the others. I can walk down any street and look at men and know I can knock them down. And look at women and know I can have them. That is the way I look at them. So that they know it. They have always hated me anyway. They have always rejected me. So it makes no difference if I give them more cause, does it?

At first Wilma bullied her friends into buying my work. She knew it was good. And then strangers started buying it. At first I would read something. It would say, “Weak, amateurish, exhibitionistic. A monstrous joke. A triumph of press agentry.” It would make me uncertain.

But she would have another clipping. It would say, “Gilman Hayes exhibits a truly startling growth in his latest work. His dynamic approach to space relationships, his iconoclastic attitude toward traditional concepts of design, his daring use of color have burst open new frontiers in subjective art. We predict that …”

I keep the good ones in a scrapbook.

I go to be with Wilma, and in that she is very demanding, but for me it is not like the others. It is like a comforting. Like being protected from outside things that want to hurt you with sharp edges. A warmth around you. Sometimes we laugh together at Hess. He is such a ridiculous man. So helpless. So futile. I think of how insignificant he is and how strong I am and I want to put my fist through his skull. I know I could do it. It would be like tearing brittle paper. As if he were not really there. As if he were not really alive. The way I am. The way Wilma is. I am strong enough
to put my fist through the world. It would tear like paper, too. As easily subdued as that Mavis was, walking around trying to be Wilma. And can never be.

Once I remembered the party at the lake, I was glad. I like it up there. I remembered Amparo Loma. Perhaps this time.

Wilma and I left very early on Friday morning. Her driving frightens me. I do not let her see that it does. She was quiet on the way up, intent on her driving. On one straight stretch she made the little car do 110. It will go faster. She laughed when we were going the fastest. I could not hear her. I saw her mouth and knew she was laughing. She has done a lot of living. She is older. She can go fast. I have a lot left to do. I thought of the car overturning, and of my skin and muscle and bone sliding and grinding over concrete. It made me feel pale. But I could not let her see it.

It made me feel pale like that time in the Home. There was a concrete fire escape. It had an iron railing. I was small. One of the big boys took me out on the top landing. He held me over the railing. I could not even scream. I saw the bricks down there. There was nobody to help me. He brought me back over the railing and dropped me. It hurt my head. I started to cry. He slapped me. Then he turned his back. He leaned on the railing. He ignored me. I wasn’t there any more.

We got to the lake at two o’clock. There was nothing there but the old station wagon José uses. She walked in and checked everything and gave orders. What to serve. Where to put people. She sent José to the village for more things. I swam and rested on the dock in the sun. I let the sun unwind my nerves. I could hear her yelling at them in the
house. In Spanish. She treats them like dogs. They don’t seem to care. I guess it is because of the money.

The others came. Randy and Noel Hess. Judy Jonah. Steve Winsan. The Dockertys. Wallace Dorn last of all. They all drink too much. I have never enjoyed drinking. It dulls things. It spoils things. I make a drink last a long time. I did not pay much attention to them. I almost laughed at myself. Once upon a time I would have thought this was the greatest thing in the world. You get used to nice things quickly. I have always liked nice things. Clean smells. The feel of silk. Long showers. Now I had them, and would always have them, and I knew it was meant that way from the beginning.

I sat with them and listened to the foolish talk they made. I played a game. This was my place. I was a baron. Wilma was my aging lady. Soon I could be rid of her. And rid of her empty friends. And I could live here alone, with the brown Amparo. And beat her severely when she displeased me. When I had a party, it would not be these people. It would be people who depended on me, who needed my strength. I would tell them what to do. And when.