Puzzle for Pilgrims (15 page)

The silence came again. It seemed even more delicately balanced.

“So?” I said. “The truth?”

“I did know she was dead. When I came in, I looked everywhere for her. I went out onto the balcony. I saw her—lying down there in the stream bed.”

“I thought so.”

She said passionately,” I knew she was dead, Peter. You could see by looking at her. I knew there was nothing I could do.”

“I know.”

“The music was coming up from the Zocalo. They were playing ‘Begin the Beguine’. Somehow that made it so awful. Music, worn-out juke-box music, the moon, the fights, the Star of Bethlehem, Taxco—and Sally lying there.”

She picked up her drink, looking at her own fingers curling around the glass. “But it wasn’t the way you saw it, Peter,” she whispered. “It was different.”

“Different?”

“The balustrade.” She looked up, her eyes shadowed with fear. “It wasn’t broken.”

I didn’t speak.

She went on,” When I saw her, I—I put my hand on the high balustrade to steady myself. It cracked. I could tell how rotten it was. And suddenly I realized that if… if there’d been an accident… that she couldn’t have fallen
over
the balustrade, not possibly.” Her voice was low, pinched. “I realized that she must have been thrown over.”

“So you broke the balustrade to make it look like an accident?”

“Yes, Peter.”

“Why? Because you knew Martin had been there?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“The ring.”

“Where was it?”

“On the balcony. Right there. I saw it gleaming. I knew he’d had it with him that morning in Acapulco. I knew he had to have been there.”

“Why didn’t you destroy the letter in the typewriter, see the slipper, the overturned vase?”

“I didn’t notice them. I was half sick with fear. I broke the balustrade, sent it falling down. I picked up the ring. I didn’t notice anything else. I thought I was going to faint. I went to the living room. I sat down. And then, almost at once, you were there.”

“Poor kid.”

“You believe me, don’t you?”

“I want to believe you so I believe you.”

She got up. Her black evening gown, cut low over her breasts, rustled like a flurry of dead eucalyptus leaves in the patio outside.

“Martin didn’t do it,” she said quietly. “You can’t live with a man, see him night and day, and not know a thing like that about him.”

“You can’t?”

She turned. Her face was obsessed. “He did go to Sally. He told me. But he didn’t drop the ring. It was a present from her to him when they were married. She asked for it back. That’s why it was there.”

“On the balcony floor?”

“There wasn’t a scene, Peter. She was pleasant. She said she was sorry for all the fuss she caused. She said she’d give him the divorce and go back to the States.”

“And when he left and you arrived, she was dead.”

She flared,” Marietta was there, too.”

“Earlier.”

“She could have come back. Anyone could have come. The servants weren’t there.”

“If Marietta wanted to murder her, why didn’t she murder her the first time? Why should she leave and let Martin come and return?”

“Where was she, then, all that time when Jake was waiting for her?”

“I don’t know.”

She tossed back her hair. “You want to believe Martin did it, don’t you?”

“I do?”

We stood close together, glaring at each other, antagonistic. The white skin of her throat was working. I felt angry too. The dreadful sterility of it all swept over me. The two of us, who had loved each other so much, hating each other. Why? Because of other people, other people’s lives and lusts.

Slowly the anger went out of Iris’s face.

“Peter, what’s the matter with us? What the hell’s the matter with us? Is it Mexico?”

“The altitude?”

“I don’t know. It could be.”

“You don’t fall in love with someone because they’re eight thousand feet above sea level.”

“Then—what is it?”

“Did Martin tell you about his favorite song when he was a kid?”

“No.” The flicker of anxiety that always came when she felt she’d been left out of something that belonged to Martin showed in her eyes. “No, Peter.”

“It’s a hymn. Used to sing it myself. It goes:

He who would valiant be

’Gainst all disaster

Let him in constancy

Follow the Master.

There’s no discouragement

Shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent

To be a pilgrim.”

She watched me curiously. “And so?”

“That’s the trouble. We’re all of us pilgrims, knocking each other down, stamping on each other’s faces, acting like sons of bitches just so we can get to the top of our own little hills. Sally got in the way of one of us. So…”

“God knows what we get at the top of the hill, Peter.”

“God knows.”

Iris sat down on the couch again. “We certainly louse things up, don’t we?”

“We louse them up.”

I sat down next to her. The silence was different now, an exhausted silence, as if all the emotion in the world had been used up.

She turned to me, her lips half parted in a way that made her look curiously naive.

“I love Martin very much, Peter. It wouldn’t change the way I feel—whatever he’d done.”

“I know that.”

“Peter?”

“Yes.”

“If Marietta had killed Sally, would you…?”

“Iris, let’s not talk about Marietta.”

She shivered. “My love for Martin, it’s—not a pretty love. It’s physical, but it’s never been physical. We never…”

“I know.”

“Sometimes, when I feel shutout, when he goes off into the past, it hurts so that I almost hate him.”

“Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you.”

“Yes. I know. It’s shoddy. But love’s shoddy.”

“Was our love shoddy?”

“I suppose so.” She added suddenly,” No, it wasn’t. Was it, Peter?”

I looked at her. I didn’t just see the desirable mouth, the warm ivory of her skin, the curve of her bare arm, I saw all the things we’d done and said and thought and felt together.

“I didn’t think so,” I said.

This was another kind of silence, reminiscent, rather sad, trembling on the verge of something which neither of us quite wanted.

Iris broke it. She shrugged her smooth white shoulders bleakly. “Then there’s nothing we can do—about Jake?”

“Nothing at the moment, except pay the fifty thousand dollars.”

“And pay on, on, on?”

“That’s for you and Martin to worry about. I’ll be out of it.”

She looked at me quickly. “No, you won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Marietta. You’re in love with Marietta. And she’s as much in this as Martin.”

I don’t know why that took me off my guard, but it did. And by bringing Marietta into my mind, Iris had dispelled the intimacy. We were just two people again, two people hopelessly tied to two other people, with the shadow of murder hanging over us all.

Iris rose and reached for her wrap.

“Time I went back to that dreary hotel.”

I got up too. “You don’t have to leave, you know.”

She turned, the coat dangling from her hand. “I don’t?”

“There’s no law against a wife sleeping in her husband’s apartment.”

Her face lightened. “I’d love to stay, Peter. At the hotel I’d feel shipwrecked. On a raft.” She laughed. It was a sudden, spontaneous laugh, and I realized I hadn’t heard her laugh since we were in Mexico. “But there’s a practically insurmountable problem.”

“Which is?”

“I haven’t got a toothbrush.”

“Yes you have,” I said. “You left one in the bathroom. A pink one.”

“Oh, that divine pink one. I bought it at Liggett’s.”

“Walgreen’s.”

“Liggett’s.” Iris dropped the wrap again.

I said, “About the divorce.”

She swung round. “What about it?”

“Shall I still get things started tomorrow?”

She looked nonplused, a little dazed. “I—well, maybe we should wait, just a while, wait to see what happens with Jake. You never know. It might not…”

“No,” I said, “it might not. Then I’ll hold my horses?”

“I think you’d better.” She moved to me and stood close to me. “Peter, you’ve been so good.”

“Sure.”

She watched me appraisingly. “You look fine. Handsomer every day. What are you thriving on? Love?”

“Disaster,” I said.

“Goodnight, Peter.” She reached up and kissed me on the mouth, a light, cool kiss. I felt an impulse to pull her to me and make it a real kiss, but I resisted. The kiss stayed cool.

“Goodnight, Iris. Remember where everything is? The bathroom, et cetera?”

“Sure thing.”

“When do you want to get up in the morning?”

“Oh, any time. Whenever you do.”

“Goodnight, Iris.”

“Goodnight.” She took the bedroom. Twenty minutes later, as I lay, worn-out and half asleep, on the Profirio Diaz couch, I thought,
Marietta slept here, right here.

I turned over, pressing my face against the musty silk brocade.

I dreamed of Sally.

Next morning I drove Iris to the Guardiola to change her clothes. After breakfast we went to Martin and Marietta’s, not for any specific reason, but because we were inevitably drawn there.

Martin’s apartment was somewhere behind the Bellezas Artes Palace in a district I didn’t know. It was in one of those new, vaguely German, modernistic buildings which are springing up all over Mexico City. The construction could only have been a few months old, but the stucco was already peeling off the walls, and someone had broken a pane in the fancy glass and iron door.

At the apartment Marietta opened the door to us. She was wearing an apron. I had never thought of her in a domestic role. It didn’t go with her. It wasn’t believable.

She greeted us casually. She was in one of her abstracted moods which were so exasperating for me because they made her as inaccessible as the peak of Popocatepetl. She seemed perfectly serene, almost bored.

“Come in. Jake’s in bed. Martin’s out.”

She led us into the little living room. It was shoddy enough, a few wispy geraniums on the broad window sill, some cheap modern Mexican tape chairs and a red and white striped studio couch. The sheets, resting on it in a neatly folded pile, showed that Marietta, the inveterate couch-sleeper, had spent the night there.

A little kitchen stretched to the left. In the rear wall was a door which led presumably to the bedroom.

Marietta said, “I’d better look at the coffee,” and went into the kitchen.

Jake’s voice sounded boomingly from the bedroom. “Do I hear visitors? Come on in and say good morning to Jake.”

The sleazy intimacy of it all was horrible, Marietta in an apron fixing coffee in the kitchen and Jake’s voice drawling from the bedroom.

Iris and I went into the bedroom. There was nothing much there except a chest of drawers, a built-in closet, and the bed, large and low with a yellow tufted spread.

Jake, bare to the waist, was lounging in the bed, propped against the pillows. A breakfast tray was balanced on his lap. He was smoking a cigarette, dragging at it with his big arm crooked at the elbow. He stretched voluptuously, making the tray wobble, and grinned at us.

“Hey, Iris. Hey, Peter. This is the life. Wonderful little cook, Marietta.”

We didn’t say anything.

“Happen to have a morning newspaper, Pete?”

“No,” I said.

“Feel like running out to the corner and getting me one?”

“No,” I said.

He looked reproving. “Now, now, temper.”

Iris said, “Where’s Martin?”

“Martin?” The blue eyes fixed her face. “Never sleep with that guy. He hogs the sheets. I sent him out to see the lawyer. Gotta pester lawyers or they never come out from under their cobwebs.”

He twisted around, humping the bedclothes with his hip and yelled, “Hey, Marietta, how’s that second cup of coffee coming along?”

Marietta appeared with a cup of coffee. She took the dirty cup off the tray and put the fresh one down.

Jake clamped his brown fingers around her wrist and grinned up at her. “Hey, what about cream? You know I take cream in my coffee, beautiful.” Marietta pulled her arm away. She went out and came back with a pitcher of cream. She put it on the tray. She looked at him with a long, steady, green look.

“Cream,” she said.

Jake poured the cream into the coffee, ladled in sugar, and started to drink it. He slapped his lips over it like a man in a coffee ad relishing the rich, toasted flavor to the last drop.

“Good,” he said. He turned to Marietta. “Cleaners bring my suit back?”

“It’s over there on the chair.”

“Fine.” He put the cup down and made shooing gestures at us with his big hands. “Now, skat, all of you. How’s Uncle Jake going to dress with a bunch of beautiful dames kibitzing?”

Marietta picked up the tray. Iris and I went out of the room. Marietta passed us and went into the kitchen. We could hear the clatter of the dishes being washed. Even there in the living room the atmosphere of Jake stretched out to us. His huge, sun-tanned body seemed to be everywhere, at your side, behind you, under your feet. It was only then, in that cramped little apartment, that I felt the completeness of his control. There was nothing that could be done with him. We were tied to him as tightly as two Roman gladiators tied together with knives to fight to the death.

In the bedroom he was whistling jauntily. I could imagine his hands stuffing the shirttails into his pants, flicking the necktie over into a knot. I could feel my loathing of him in my skin. If I’d been on my own, I’d have gone into the bedroom and beaten him, really beaten him up in judo-style. My fist felt itself crushing into his teeth. My arm was choking his neck back. My foot was kicking him in the groin.

But I couldn’t do anything, of course, because I wasn’t on my own. I wasn’t in his power. Martin was, and Iris and Marietta.

The front door opened and Martin came in. Iris jumped up. He saw her and smiled. It was the same smile liquid as quicksilver. His fair hair seemed to have brought in the sunlight. Martin wasn’t crumpling under disaster the way I had somehow expected him to. He was still the golden boy, but now he was the golden boy roused. The muscles of his compact body seemed to have tightened. There was danger in his calm. His pilgrimage was being threatened.