The Man Who Lost the Sea (41 page)

Then Hubert tried to kill her again. She saw it coming right from the very first, and just watched it come, wondering what on earth he was up to. He was sneaking into her room when she was in the bathroom, doing something, sneaking out. She soon found out what it was. He was loosening the screws in the back of the TV.

It took days. He seemed to be operating on four across the top, three down the side. She said nothing to him about it. He did nothing else differently. He sat and was read to and cut his thumb on a spokeshave, making her laugh, and later, when she came out of the bathroom on her wheelchair—it was more table than chair, for it hurt her to sit up, and she hated it—she would stop and check, and sure enough, he’d slipped in and loosened them a bit more.

She could have stopped him in a second, with a word, but she was fascinated. It went on for five days; on the morning of the sixth, after he had gone to work, she got settled for her morning of TV and found the set wouldn’t work. With her ring-on-a-rope holding her up, she reached for the set and swiveled it around on its lazy-susan base. She pulled out three of the loose screws and was able to bend the hardboard back plate far enough to peer inside.

Tubes were gone.

She lay and pondered that. Was he (tender gesture) trying masterfully to help her cut down on her excessive viewing? Or was this just a childish and spiteful annoyance? Surely even Hubert knew better than that! Why, for that he’d pay … oh Lord, for years he’d pay!

No, it was more than that. He was doing something in his bumbling way. Only there had to be more to it.

“Hubert,” she said that evening after she had summoned him (she would not permit him to eat with her), “something’s wrong with the TV.”

He did not act surprised or try any play-acting, beyond saying with a rehearsed kind of promptness, “All right I’ll take it down to be fixed tomorrow,” all in a flat uninflected voice; then he sat down where she told him to. She talked to him and read to him; but there was a welcome difference in the air; why, almost half the time she actually realized he was there.

In the morning he grunted and bumped it downstairs, and in the afternoon came bumping and grunting, a colored man helping him, with a new set. A new grey modern streamlined set with a bigger screen than the old one, and a smaller case rather unaccountably designed to offer the least possible resistance to wind. “What on earth is that?”

“The other one is shot,” Hubert informed her. “The man said so. I bought this one.”

“It’s horrible.”

“I already bought it,” said Hubert with a kind of faint doggedness.

She snorted and told him how to attach two wires to the back and how to stick the plug in the socket. It had a very nice remote control on it, with a station selector as well as volume, and on-off. She was mollified as far as the set was concerned; but what on earth was his play?

She found out the next afternoon when Mrs. Carstairs hobbled up with her arthritis and the mail. Alone with it, she found tucked among the ads and the bills and the magazines, a periodical which she knew, the instant she saw it, was late, though she had not missed it until now. It was a consumer’s magazine—one of those outfits which tests goods bought on the open market. The old lady always read the very print off it; she spent her money, she used to say, she didn’t throw it away.

Why late? And why had the little semicircular seal that kept it closed in the mail been slit?

Hubert? Had he picked it up, kept it a while, then dropped it in the mailbox on his way to work?
Why?

She riffled the pages. Soaps, hand-held can openers, table-model TV’s, an Italian vs. a French miniature car.…
Table-model TV!
Oh,
that was all. He just wanted to be sure and get one that was recommended.

She looked at the listing. It was there, all right. There was even a picture of it. As to the recommendation—it was heartily, earnestly, explicitly
not
. For this was the make and model, even (she checked this laboriously, swinging perilously at the edge of the bed by her strong right hand holding the ring from the ceiling) within a dozen digits of the serial number—the very same lethal contraption which, ungrounded and suffering slight damage from the overtightening of one hold-down screw between chassis and the metal case, had already killed a man and a boy.

She looked at the picture and the diagrams, and then at the set: “Oh!” she cried in sheerest delight, throwing the magazine high in the air, “How cute!”

Poor precious Hubert, nursing the place inside him where most people keep the embers of hate, but which, in him, must certainly be a clean little barely warm pot of pasteurized mush; oh, how cute! numbly associating her with TV, TV with her, until one day—when was it? four, five months ago, he heard about this set in the news; oh how he must have mumbled and gnashed on the idea; how long must it have taken him to find one? How hard did he have to think before he plotted out the fiendishly clever idea of getting tubes out of her old set and claiming it was finished? Oh, she thought, the little darling. He’s really trying.

That night, for the first time in years, his numbed shiny face seemed to move a little from inside, as if some good fluid were soaking the parched places under the moist skin; for she was kind to him. She was unquestionably laughing at him, but she was kind to him.

The next day, after Mrs. Carstairs had cleaned up, Hubert’s aunt fumbled through her workbench and tools, and found a lamp socket and some heavy wire. She connected two foot-long leads and screwed, in a bulb after testing it. She chuckled the whole time, even when she underwent the pain of bringing her wheelchair alongside and agonizingly rolling into it. Grunting with pain and chuckling with laughter, she got to the corner and put one wire against the steam pipe and the other against the metal side of the new set.

Nothing.

Using the remote control, she clicked the set on. Again she touched one wire to the set, the other to the pipe.

Still the bulb did not light. There was nothing wrong with this set.

Hubert … poor, poor old Hubert.

For a limp moment she ignored the pain and lay in the chair, wagging her head from side to side in wordless pity.

This was as far as the poor addlehead could think. Get a set like the one that had killed some people. Get it next to her.… What passed next, in his fogbound mind could only have been, “… and then maybe some way she …”

She could shake him, the poor darling! Didn’t he know that to be electrocuted by house current, the electricity had to flow through the body? Stand in a puddle, preferably with a good iron drain in it, and stick your hand in a fuse box; then maybe. Or hold a water pipe and put a wet thumb in a socket—then perhaps. But he must, with millions of other people, share the notion that you could be killed by, for example, current running from one side of your fingertip to the other side of the same finger … or maybe the poor thing just didn’t have a notion at all.

Back in bed at last, and rested, she began to think of Hubert with pity and tenderness. He’d worked so hard … and she wasn’t thinking of lugging TV sets up and down stairs, either.

And such a clever idea, too, in its way. If he only knew what he was doing.

She thought about it, and about him, all day long; and when at last she knew what she was going to do, it was as if all the clocks in the world had stopped; oh, how she ached for him to be here; oh, how she wanted him near. Suddenly the world was bright again for her who had not realized how dark it had become; here out of the gloom had come the loveliest … oh, the most wonderful thing to plan, to work on.

Hubert needed help.

He couldn’t possibly do this by himself. He had to learn, to plan, to fix, to arrange. And above all he had to feel he was doing it by
himself, because he wanted it so; anyone who worked so hard had to want it very much. But it would be no good unless he was sure, all along the line, that it in all its parts was his own doing.

So when he came upstairs that evening, and when she had portrayed enough surliness with him to make him unsuspicious, she began.

“Hubert!”
It was said with a slightly rising inflection; in the spectrum of her summonses, this one stood on the line that said, “Get to work.” He started uneasily.

“My ring,” she said, pointing to her leather-handled, rope-dangled helper. “”That rope stretches all the time.”

He looked at it with dim eyes. “Looks okay.”

“Well, you don’t have to use it. I want you to put up something that won’t stretch.”

He tried hard. She could see him at it, like a toothless man gumming a steak. “Chain,” he said at last.

She argued with him scornfully. Chain was pinchy and noisy. Wire rope would fray after a time, sharp and splintery. And at last she had led him to braided copper cable, which would be handsome, and though it would stretch, it would stretch just so much and no more; and then she led him like Socrates, asking demanding and argumentative question after question, until he had no choice but to devise a big wide ring in the beam above, a second ring in the beam in the corner, and anchorage to something solid there, thus the cable could be taken up as it stretched, until it would stretch no more. Laboriously he wrote down his shopping list, and she spent a delicious night and day anticipating, and two more happy evenings hammering at him until he had it just right. And all the while she savored the delightful, and quite correct, thought that he still did not realize how very beautifully that new cable would fit into “his” sweet little plan. Oh, how she anticipated the moment of revelation! How proud he would be, and hopeful. This, she thought, is living. Where’s the woman, she thought (she often compared herself with, categorically, “women”) who with all her so-called wiles, who knows what this is like, to lead a poor dear man step by step—no; inch by inch—down the very path you planned for him, and all the while let him think he’s the one, he’s the one?

She had not felt like this in years. She had never felt like this. She liked it. She liked it so much she let the whole thing rest for two days, while happily she planned the next step the all-powerful male must take.

“Oh … 
Hubert!
” This in descending tones; this was the disappointment, the “how
could
you!” salutation.

“Whuh? Whuh?” he said rapidly, worriedly.

She held up the consumer’s magazine. “Of all the TV sets in the whole wide world, why did you buy this one?”

He wet his lips. “Seems pretty okay.”

“Here!” she snapped. (Not even “come here.”) He rolled to his feet and came, peering at the magazine. She demanded, “What are you trying to do—kill me?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, lifted his hands and let them fall. Finally he said, “Well, I got it awful cheap.”

Aloud, she read the account of the deaths. “I don’t doubt you got it cheap,” she snorted, then looked up. “How cheap?”

He said, “A hundred and twenty off list.”

“Oh, well,” she said; and inside she hugged herself: oh, what fun!

She changed the subject. She said the rawhide on the brass handle hurt her hand, and she made him find her utility knife and cut it away. While he nicked and picked at it, she read aloud the other part of the article, where it said that the set was otherwise very fine. She sounded almost as if she forgave him. Anyway she let up on him, and with her remote unit, turned the set on and they watched a crime show. Or he did. She watched him. At the part in the TV play where the murderer accomplished his evil deed—and it happened to be an old woman—she could have sworn his dull eyes acquired a dim shine. He even stopped picking away at the rawhide and sat down to watch absorbedly. For once she let him, and it was all right; of his own accord he went back to it after the show and finished the job. Oh you sweet boy, she thought, almost fondly, for once in your sloppy life you’re altogether something; why you dear, you’re just full of this thing.

She turned off the sound—but left the set on—with her control,
thereby wrenching him out of the Western which succeeded the murder play. Perforce, he gaped at her. “You
could
have killed me,” she said accusingly.

“There has to be something wrong with the set first,” he said doggedly. “The set’s all right, I tell you.”

“That may be,” she said. “But look.” She reached for the brass handle above the bed and tugged at it. “Look, I’m grounded.”

He shook his head, mystified.

“The radiator!” she yelped at him. “Why did you have to anchor the cable to the radiator?”

He scanned the cable, up from her hand, across from one beam to the next, down to the radiator in the corner, behind the TV set. He shrugged, not understanding. “You said anchor it to something solid.”

She had said to anchor it to the radiator, but she didn’t give him a chance to remember that. “Don’t you see?” she shrilled. “Suppose there was a short circuit to the TV case, the way it tells about in the magazine, and suppose I had to touch it, like turn it toward the bed. Don’t you see I’d be holding one with the other? Don’t you understand
anything?
” She let him watch her cloudily, saw him swing his gaze from her to the cable, the TV set, back to her; saw the stirrings of that moment of revelation she had anticipated so much. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” she shrilled, “
this
is what I mean!” and she flung her weight on the handle and reached out for the TV set. “See?” she said, slapping it. “See?” she said, turning it on its swivel. She regained the bed.

How shiny his face was. Suddenly she wanted to mop up that dull excitement she could see moistening his parched core. She said coldly, “Well anyway, I guess that proves the set’s safe for now.”

Through her lashes she watched him. For a split second she thought he was going to cry. Then he slumped dejectedly and stared at the set. She knew what he was thinking as well as if his moist brow had been equipped with one of those electric signs with the moving letters. She knew he was thinking how close he had come, and how never in a thousand years would he be able to figure out the difference between this harmless object and the one he had hoped
it would be. She imagined further thoughts—old familiar ones, doubtless, their path trodden smooth by his years of plodding hatred: So bash her head in (but Mrs. Carstairs, downstairs all the time …). Feed her a glass of warm milk with—(but he never brought her milk, and she certainly wouldn’t touch it if he did).