Come Destroy Me (12 page)

“You smile,” she said. “My!”

She sat back down on the red divan and placed the chips on the table. Then she patted the cushion beside her and said, “Come over. Now. Just come over and you may sit right here beside me and enjoy these refreshments.”

Lofton had a queasy feeling as he walked toward her and sat down at the far end of the couch. He watched her pour more gin from the decanter. She said, “It is a shame you do not want something else, Mr. Lofton, as I do not imagine soft drinks are very good for one’s system. Sugary. Very sugary, you know. I once read a survey — ” She stopped and her fingers drummed on her lips as she looked at him. “But of course it would be silly,” she said, “to talk about that silly survey.”

“Tell me about yourself,” Lofton said. He was genuinely curious now.

“You mean why I am not married?”

“Gosh, I didn’t mean
that.”

“Yes, you did…. Didn’t you?”

“No. Land, no. I imagine there are plenty of women your age who are unmarried.”

“That,” Miss Jill Latham seemed to arch her back the way a cat might defend herself, “was extremely unkind.”

“Look, I didn’t mean it that way. I — ”

“Because I could have been married. Oh, my, yes, many times I was asked to be the wife of a lovely man, and it was not easy for me to refuse to pur-sue my studies. But it was a choice I had to make, and when one prefers the finer things — ”

Lofton bit into a potato chip and crunched it in his mouth. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” he said.

“I want to. I want to settle this once and for all, so that it does not emerge as a recurrent theme in the topics of our conversation.”

Lordy, Lordy, listen to the way she goes on.

She leaned forward again and poured more gin into her glass, gulping it hungrily. “Paris,” she said. “Paris…. He was young. Love and marriage are for youth. Oh, now, no, I don’t mean that. You ought to marry again, Mr. Lofton. You ought to find yourself a mature woman and ask her to be your partner along the road. Along the rest of the road.”

Lofton had never heard anything like it. Jimminy, Cork and Elliot wouldn’t
believe
him. He said, “I’m too old.”

“Age. Yes. Age.”

“Look, you’re young.”

“In Paris I was. Oh, my, yes. I was in love with a young scholar in Paris, a terribly intellectual young scholar, Mr. Lofton. It was too bad. It was really too bad.”

“What was?”

She seemed not to hear Lofton and she continued talking, sipping the gin spasmodically, her eyes a gray color now, gray and dull in a fixed stare that looked ahead of her.

“He had a proclivity toward wildness. I knew this. I knew it in little ways he showed it. Oh, my, he was a scholar, let us leave no doubts as to that. He was a scholar. But there was this tendency, as I have mentioned, this tendency to be wild. Wild….” She began to hum. A faint smile moved her lips as she hummed and Lofton felt as though he were watching something he had no right to watch. He wished he could go.

“That song,” she said, stopping the humming sound. “That song was his song. Jazz. Ha. Ha, it is funny when I reflect. Jazz was popular in Paris among the young students. The scholars. He would play that song. He could play the saxophone rather well. It was not his main interest in life, but he could play it. The tenor saxophone. He would play it, and do you know how it would sound?” She turned her head toward Lofton. “Do you know how it would sound?” she said.

Russel Lofton barely whispered. “No.”

“Hot!” she shouted. “Hot! It would sound hot and vulgar and disgusting! Hot!”

Again she tipped the bottle of gin to her glass, fumbled for a cigarette. Lofton struck a match and watched her suck in the smoke. She was weaving, her shoulders were weaving, and she arrested the silence with more words, slowly said, thick-toned. “Those types never make good husbands. Oh, I knew that. I knew that. But I did not know — ” She stopped and held her hand to her head. She started to hum once more, humming and laughing.

Lofton got up quickly. “I ought to go,” he said.

“Don’t go.”

“I ought to.”

“I want you to hear my song. Ha. You see. I call it
mine
now. I have it on my Vic-trola. Now wait. Wait.” She too stood up, lurched forward and grabbed the wall. “I know what you are thinking. Oh, yes, I know.”

“Take it easy,” Lofton said. He started to help her back to the couch, but, holding the walls, she moved forward toward the kitchen. She said, “My atomizer. It takes the smell away. It’s lilac.” She stopped then and turned back, staring at Lofton. Her voice had a singsong quality, like a child’s voice reciting to herself alone somewhere, a silly little recitation. She said, “Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time.”

Instantly she fell to her knees. Lofton rushed forward. His arms held her and she smiled a little at him, her eyes drooping dazedly. She whispered, “From — ’The Barrel-Organ,’ by Alfred Noyes.” She slumped forward into his arms. “Lilac-time,” she repeated, and then she passed out.

Russel Lofton lifted her. She was heavy. He hurried, and in his rush, her limp arm knocked against the bowl lamp next to the couch. It fell to the floor without breaking. He laid her on the couch, propped her feet up, and picked up the lamp, setting it back on the table. His Panama hat was on the rocker across the room, and frantically he grabbed it and left the house without looking back at Jill Latham. Jumping geehosopher!

• • •

Charlie Wright sat on his haunches in the bushes near the Bartell’s house on Deel Street. He did not know why exactly he was back there, back where he had vomited the other night. He knew only that he had come there automatically, like a punch-drunk prize fighter finding his way back to his corner, and now that he was there he felt safe. He felt as though he belonged there.

Charlie thought about what he had seen. When he first reached Deel Street and walked down toward her house, he had seen the car. He would know Russel Lofton’s car anywhere. When he saw it parked in front of Jill Latham’s, he was shocked. Not angry. Shocked. He stopped dead in his tracks and he thought, Oh, for God’s sake, go to a movie. He spat on the grass and jammed his hands in his pockets and said to himself, I can walk on any street in the city of Azrael. I am the knower of this town. He grinned and said aloud, “So what? So he has his big fat car parked in front of her house and he’s in there doing dirty things, so what?” Then he bit the flesh inside his cheek so hard that it was still sore and he began to walk along, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk. There was an old game about stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back.

He picked a green leaf off a bush and chewed it, swallowed it. He was coming closer and closer. He sang “Old Black Joe” to himself and thought, I can’t make it, I can’t make it, I can’t keep on walking. I’m afraid.

His chest and his stomach and his bowels seemed to go weak on him. He knew he did not have to walk to her house and look in the window, but he did have to, too, because he was doing it and he couldn’t stop. He wasn’t even in love with her. What did he care? The other night
she
kissed
him
and he didn’t give a hang.
She
kissed
him.
He didn’t ask for it, for the love of Pete. It was all her idea.

He thought, Oh, you poor kid, Charlie. You’re too nice. Too nice a kid to have it happening this way. It ought to happen better for you. You made straight A’s and said your prayers when you were a kid, remembered Mother’s Day and stood up when old ladies came in a room.

It was dark. He had been walking for hours before he came to this street. It seemed like hours. Hours during which he told himself if there was one street he wasn’t going down that street was Deel Street. Then he was there. Then he was in front of her house. Then he was walking across her lawn, stealing across the grass and crouching at the window. For a moment the room looked empty and then he looked at the floor and saw them there. Lofton’s back was to him and her arms were around his neck. That was what he saw.

He did not stay. He wanted to, but he was frightened because he did not understand. It had been a very long time since he had known that really there was no one, he was alone on this hellhole earth and there was no one for him. He did not even have the freedom to imagine there was, because the stark realization of his plight hung on his brain like a ball and chain. This was it! This was living! If the world would stop, he’d get off. No one would miss him for more than ten minutes. Not really, for God’s sake.
Whatever happened to old Charlie Wright? He was a creep! Dead? No kidding? Charlie Wright dead!
That’s all it would amount to.

Look, Charlie boy. This girl never said she was
your
girl. She’s an old woman, son. Just as old as Old Daddy Lofton.

Listen, damnit. No matter what I say. From now on, no matter what I say, I don’t give two cents for her!
That’s the spirit.

See, I’m surprised to see him there. Lofton. But gee —

Gee, sure.

Sure.

Sure.

I’m a liar.

I’ll say you are.

I love her.

Poor guy.

Leave me alone.

O.K., pal. Poor old pal.

Charlie walked off the lawn to the sidewalk, tears blurring his eyes. He wanted to cry, wanted to walk along with the tears streaming down his cheeks, his head held high in the light, he wasn’t ashamed. Hell, no. He was
tough,
he could take it…. He was not. He couldn’t.

In the bushes at the Bartells’ he kept thinking over and over, Why did she do it to me? He felt like an animal taking shelter in the brush. Hiding. When he got home, if his mother asked him where he was, what would she say if he said, “Sitting in the Bartells’ bushes”?

Why did she do it to me?

He thought of something he had not thought of in a long time. All his thoughts were old ones, half forgotten. He remembered this from the time he was a kid. When he got in fights with other kids, when they called him sissy sometimes, he wanted to run home. He wanted to lay his head in his mother’s lap and have her smooth back his hair and wipe the dirt off his cheek and call him “my boy” and tell him he was safe.

Wishful thinking. It wasn’t that way at home. Maybe it was his fault it wasn’t that way, but it wasn’t that way. He could kill Russel Lofton. Kill him and kick him after and laugh up a storm.

Charlie got up off his haunches. He didn’t care who saw him come out of the bushes. He would come out of any damn bushes he felt like coming out of. God, didn’t anyone love him? Didn’t anyone?

Why did she do it to me?

I don’t love her and I don’t give a damn, but why did she do it to me? I’m just a kid!

I
’M TELLING YOU, BABY
, it’s the last time I’m going to call.”

“I don’t care.”

“You mean that? You really mean that?” “Jim Prince, I told you. I told you I never want to see you again.”

“You don’t want to say why?”

“No,” Evie said. “There’s no reason to explain it. You should know why.” “You mean because — ”

“Because I don’t want to see you again,” Evie interrupted. “I’ve changed. I’ve changed a lot.” “I’ll say you have! God!”

“Good-by,” Evie said. She dropped the arm of the phone in its cradle and looked at her watch. It was four-ten in the afternoon. Her mother was upstairs resting and Charlie had gone to the library after work. Evie walked through the rooms of the house in a bored manner, touching the tables with her fingers and scuffing her loafers on the rugs. First she sat in a chair and flicked through the pages of a magazine, and then she walked to the window and stared out at the rain. The earth needed the rain, and for a while Evie watched the water soak into the parched earth and she could imagine how the earth felt, cool, wonderfully relieved. She thought that everything in the world was that way — in need of relief, thirsty for something cool and refreshing. She thought her own heart must look the way the dirt had before the rain came, wizened and rough and hard. It had been a whole day since she had seen Russel Lofton. She wanted to talk to him, to tell him these things she was thinking. She wanted more than that. His presence to tell her she was not useless and frivolous and too young to be important.
He
respected her. He didn’t have to and he did. Why did she want more, and what more? A million times she made up speeches she would say to him about wanting more. They seemed like easy speeches to say, but when she was face to face with him she never said them. They were
not
easy speeches to say.

Evie walked to the hall closet and got her raincoat from the hook. She took a scarf from the shelf and tied it around her hair and then she put her wallet in her pocket and walked out the front door. Actually she knew where she was going, but she would not admit it to herself yet. She walked as though she were not in a hurry and she was in a hurry. At the corner she ran for the bus. She knew he always stayed at his office until five-thirty on Fridays.

What more did she want? She decided it as she rode along on the bus, rain streaking the window out of which she stared. She wanted his love. She had known that for a long time but she had not dared to put the feeling stirring inside of her into a serious thought. Even though that was the way she felt, she had not wanted to admit it honestly because she would have to reject the idea as impossible. She would have to. Words she did not want to come to her head would follow automatically as they were doing now, and she did not want those words on her mind. Infatuation. Crush. Words that ridiculed an emotion that could not stand up to ridicule because it was fragile. Because unless he disproved those words, they would be appropriate and their fitness would make her a fool.