The Pillow Friend (35 page)

Her leg grazed a cardboard box and she crouched cautiously to open it. The cardboard, in the process of disintegration, felt like a cold flap of skin. It was a box full of bottles—she extracted one, holding it to the light—a case of French wine—twenty-year-old Bordeaux! She gave a little groan of rueful amazement and wished she had someone with her to share the treasure.

Encouraged by this discovery, she became bolder, examining everything around her with increased interest. Wooden chairs, a table with a chipped, laminated top, rusting oil cans and bedsprings, an old, foot-operated sewing machine. Other boxes contained clothes, curtains, bed linens, all reeking of mold and mildew; stacks of twenty- or thirty-year-old magazines with titles like
Gent
and
Dude
;
coffee cans full of nails, screws and pieces of wire; old shoes; cheap crockery—all the household detritus you might find in any cellar or attic; stuff that should have been thrown away, kept until whatever minimal usefulness it had once possessed had been eroded by time, insects or water. She grew bored. Her fear was forgotten. She straightened up, holding the candle at arm's length, and saw an old white chest freezer against the far wall. She wondered what would be in it: boxes of Fudgsicles and Dreamsicles quiescently frozen twenty years before? Steaks and hamburgers rotting away since the early sixties? Her amusement vanished as she remembered: there was no electricity in this house and never had been. So why a freezer? All at once it stopped being a familiar and mildly amusing household object and became weirdly menacing. She didn't want to look, but had to know what was inside.

By wavering candlelight she picked her way around boxes of junk and made her way to the far wall of the cellar. She wasn't sure she would be able to lift the lid one-handed, but it came up easily and she leaned over it with her candle, breathing through her mouth, braced for the stench of something rotten.

She saw the body of a man, naked, lying on his side with his knees drawn up.

She sucked in air hard but did not pull back. Her grip tightened on her candle and she quickly measured its remaining length with her eyes. She didn't want to be stranded in the dark. In a minute she would run like hell, drive away from this place forever, but now curiosity held her. She wanted to understand what she had found.

Was it a dead body? She had seen only one dead body in her life—her mother's. She still didn't know how dead bodies looked. Whether it was the transformative power of death itself, or the embalming and cosmetic attempts to conceal injuries received, the body of the woman in the funeral parlor looked like nothing which had ever lived.

This thing in the freezer—was it a lifelike, life-size sculpture, or a corpse? She leaned in over the edge, relaxed her breathing, inhaled.

There was no stink, no hint of rot, not inside the freezer. What she inhaled carried the smell of live male flesh, a whiff of perspiration, the tang of salt and yeast. The unexpected, terrible, familiar intimacy of it made her shiver. In her hand the candle dipped and dripped. One drop of hot wax fell on the pale flesh below, and she saw the body flinch and quiver.

She felt as if the air had been vacuumed out of her lungs. Alive! Yet though she watched and waited for it, gripped by fear and fascination, there was no further movement. It did not turn or sit up. The eyes did not open.

“Come out of there,” she said in a voice that scarcely carried. “I know you're alive. Get up.”

The effect of her words was like a current run through the body. She could see all the muscles becoming galvanized, like a flickering beneath the skin. Or was that the wavering of the candle? Before she could doubt her eyes, he sat up.

She stepped back, out of reach, and watched the naked man clamber out of the freezer. She gazed at his body, particularly at the genitals which were alternately displayed and concealed by shadows and movement, with as hungry a fascination as if she had never seen a naked man before. And maybe she hadn't. This creature coming toward her now was a wholly new thing, something dreamed of and desired, yet never before known. She was afraid, yes, but not of him. And the fear she felt was insignificant compared to her curiosity, and her unexpected desire.

He stopped a few feet in front of her, as if she had told him to. She held up the candle and had a good look. She didn't have to say anything: whether he read her mind or the faint motions of her head and hand, he seemed to know what she wanted and moved, posing himself, to give her the best views. She found it most difficult to look at his face. At first because she expected his eyes to open—and hated the thought that he could look back at her while she was looking at him—but then, as she accepted the idea that his eyes would stay closed (or at least until she wished them open), she still did not like to look at his face. Although she had not recognized his features (and could not even call them to mind while staring at his hairless chest or the rounded cheeks of his buttocks) she was apprehensive that she might, if she looked more closely or stared for a longer time, see someone she knew.

Breathing shallowly, she looked around for somewhere to set the candle. She wanted to see, but didn't want to risk setting the place on fire. She looked at the freezer. With the lid closed, she had a flat surface at a reasonable height. She dripped a little wax from the burning candle onto it, and then set the candle on top. She did not realize that the naked man had followed her until she turned around and bumped into him.

She gasped and caught hold of his arms to steady herself. As soon as she touched him, she wanted more. She needed to feel—she began to touch him everywhere with her hands, grabbing at his flesh, kneading it. It was so soft and resilient, so warm, firm, yet giving—it was as if she had never felt another person's flesh. It soon wasn't enough just to touch. She began to tear at her clothes, clumsy in her desperate need. His eyes were still closed; he couldn't see what she did; she could do anything. She pushed and pulled him to the ground. She hugged him and he hugged back. She could do whatever she wanted, and he always responded, he always did just what she most wished him to do, without a word spoken.

The candle had burned down long ago. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could see as much as she wanted to see, but now the daylight that sifted through the open door was thinner, paler, and the shadows of the cellar grew thicker, darker. She felt the beginning of a kind of panic; she could not bear to be here after dark; she must get out before night.

She struggled to disentangle herself from him, to get to her feet. He meanwhile made no move to help or hinder but lay there as if dead. On her way toward the lighter region of the door, stumbling around picking up her clothes and dressing as best she could, she bumped into the case of wine, recognizing it by touch. She abstracted one bottle and carried it, along with her underwear, out of the cellar and into the house.

There were no clocks in the house, and she didn't know where her watch was. There was probably a clock in the rental car, but it didn't seem worth the bother of going out again to look. She guessed from the angle of light that it was after five, maybe as late as six. A reasonable time to have a drink. She found a corkscrew in the kitchen, and a wineglass she was sure she remembered seeing Marjorie use. She opened the wine and poured out a glass, then held it up to the kitchen window to admire the dark red gleam before raising it to her lips.

It was an exceptionally good wine. She was no oenologist, but one sip was enough to inform her that this was a very much better wine than she was used to. Awed by her luck, she carried glass and bottle into the living room and settled herself in the only comfortable chair.

Occasionally a purely sensual memory passed through her body like a shudder, but she kept her mind as blank as she could, determinedly neither remembering nor planning, justifying nor questioning, just living in the moment, putting back the wine and watching the familiar room grow crepuscular. She felt the wine wrapping itself around her in a warm, comfortable haze, and reached out for the bottle to refill her glass.

The second glass was not as good as the first had been, and by the time she reached the third she had the definite impression that her once-fine wine was turning to vinegar in the glass. She drank it down grimly, anyway, and then, fearing that she was about to pass out, staggered off first to the bathroom and then to bed in what had been Marjorie's bedroom. The bed linen smelled powerfully of mildew, but fortunately it was warm enough to sleep without covers, and she used a couple of her own T-shirts rolled up as a substitute for a pillow. She thought for a minute that she would be sick, but before she could try to do anything about it she was asleep.

She woke up ravenous, dry-mouthed and with a pounding headache sometime the next day. In the kitchen she drank two glasses of water and swallowed a couple of aspirins she found in her purse, then made a breakfast from the Ritz crackers and a can of barbecued beans. She'd always preferred them unheated. She longed for a cup of tea or coffee, but there was none, so she went to take a shower. There wasn't any hot water and she didn't enjoy it, but afterward she felt better. The aspirin had started to work.

She dressed in a clean T-shirt, a cotton skirt and sandals and stuffed yesterday's clothes into her suitcase without examination, half holding her breath. She had the idea that they smelled, and she didn't want to think about why or of what. Along with the few things she had to repack she added the notes and manuscripts she had found in Marjorie's desk and the copy of
Agnes Grey
. She wondered if there was anything else she was forgetting, and noticed the ring on her middle finger.

By association she thought of the key she had found with the ring, and her skin crawled. She had managed to keep the memories at bay, to convince herself that it had been a dream, and yet—now she doubted. It could not all have been a dream; she must have been down to the cellar to get the wine, and besides that, where was the key now?

She wandered around the house rather aimlessly looking for it, although she suspected that if she had not dropped it in the cellar she would find it still inserted in the padlock outside, hanging on the propped-open door. Her heart was beating like something trapped, she couldn't catch her breath, and she was sweating. She didn't want to go down there again; she wouldn't even let herself think why. What a pathetic attempt she had made to forget, to fool herself with the notion that it was only a boozy dream—there was something down there, something horrible waiting for her in the cellar, so horrible that she was incapable of letting herself remember the details. Around and around she went, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen, bedroom, around and around like a mouse in a cage, and she knew that the cellar door was open. There was no safety in this house. But to go out, when the cellar door was open—

Around and around.

Finally she broke and made for the door. Outside on the porch it was as hot as inside, not a breath of wind stirred the needles of the surrounding pines, but at least she could look down and see the rented car parked only a few feet from the front steps. Her breath came more easily, with escape in view. She wouldn't even have to go past the cellar door. And yet, now she knew she didn't have to, she decided that she would go and lock it. Unable to remember what she was afraid of, she chose just then to believe that it was nothing. There could be nothing real in the cellar to threaten her; only ancient, childish terrors. “A dagger of the mind.” She would go down now and lock the cellar door.

But there was no key in the padlock. She must have taken it into the cellar and lost it; probably she had dropped it on the floor. She took just one step across the threshold, hesitating, remembering she had brought no light, starting to turn back before she'd truly entered; just one step, and she was lost.

The cellar smelled like him. That one step took her into his embrace; she inhaled and was enfolded. She stepped forward, blindly, reaching out, and met his outstretched arms. She began to gasp with desire now, not fear, as the memories she had earlier refused came flooding back. She fell against him and he caught her; she fell back into the dream.

It was nearly dark when she emerged from the cellar. She went straight to the kitchen and gobbled down the remainder of the Ritz crackers and drank glass after glass of water. The other can in the cupboard was a small one of sliced peaches. She opened it and ate them, and was still hungry, but also trembling with exhaustion. She made her way back to the bedroom and fell into bed without even noticing the smell of the bedclothes.

When she woke the room was full of daylight, and her husband lay sleeping beside her on the bed. She stared at him in bewildered joy, wondering how he had managed to find her, grateful for this miracle. It was only as, his eyes still closed, he began to make love to her, that she knew it wasn't really Gray. But it didn't matter who he was, because he was everything she had ever wanted. She would probably never see Gray again; she might never leave this house.

He had brought the wine up from the cellar, and from time to time they paused in their sexual activities to open another bottle and drink it. It had to be drunk quickly, for the years below the house, largely unprotected from the violent temperature shifts of the Texas climate, had taken their toll. As soon as the bottle was open, oxidation began, and a fine wine began to turn to vinegar.

Another night, another day. She could not keep track of time. She left the bed only for brief visits to the bathroom. After she had discovered the roll of Polo mints in her purse there was nothing more to eat. Sex had been a distraction, but now hunger dominated everything. Life had been reduced to the simply physical, and she had become simple, too, more helpless than a child in her inability to see any way out. Her thoughts could not penetrate the walls that held her. She was hungry but there was no food.