He looked up at her out of the car window and said, “The hell of it is, I can want a Mercedes, but not very much. Or a flight to Paris, but not as if I ached for it. I’m in the lousy middle, you know? The world is for people who either ache for the shiny things so bad their teeth hurt, or who don’t want them at all at all. How about us slobs in the middle? Do I sound sorry for myself?”
“Not enough to bother either of us.”
“Before I get really maudlin, farewell.”
“Will you work tomorrow?”
“I’d rather than not.”
“So I’ll see you for the coffee break, Jimmy.”
After he drove away she stood out in the driveway and looked at the sky for a little while. The stars were bright and close. She saw a shooting star, and with the wry habit of this past year, said politely, “No thank you.” They were always giving you free wishes. Lately four-leaf clovers had become easy to find. But no thanks indeed. Not even for a flash of green, sir, if you should give me that notorious rarity. No flash of green, no monkey’s paw, no star light star bright. We tucked another one into the ground today. This one was Jimmy’s. And we’ll take our turns when the time comes. With or without clover.
A car turned into the Estates, and as it went by, under a weak streetlight, she saw that it was Eloise in her little white car, alone.
Kat went back into her house, kissed her sleeping children and went to bed.
Twenty-one
During the first part of the week which remained before the date set for the public hearing, Jimmy Wing was intrigued and sometimes mildly alarmed by an apparently interrelated disruption of both his sense of time and the quality of his capacity to remember.
For a long time he had fitted sensibly into the steady progress of his days and nights, knowing without any effort of consciousness where the minutes belonged on the clock and the days belonged on the calendar. Now the internal time-keeping device had stopped. Three hours could disappear between heartbeats, and ten minutes could appear to last all afternoon. It had the remembered flavor of childhood, when Saturday was always a vast glad surprise, and Monday was a generation away. The segments of each day were protracted and compressed without reason. He would find himself startled by the idea of being late for an appointment only to discover it was still three hours away.
This disassociation seemed linked with a new vividness of memory, of fragments which came into his mind with such a force and color that he seemed to have to squint to look directly at these visions. The outside world was faded by comparison. These were all recent images, and they often had that ominous persuasive weight of dreams rather than reveries. He was absent-minded, forgetful. He sensed that people were being patient with him, and he smiled his gratitude. Sometimes, when his attention was on the person speaking to him, he seemed to hear the other’s words a fraction of a second before the words were said. This was a hypersensitivity which made his brain feel as if it had been stripped raw, made all comprehension an immediate and painful thing. At other times he would see the mouth moving and he would hear nothing. He would search for the range of the person’s voice, like moving a tuning dial, and suddenly he would hear him again.
The hot images in his mind were curiously static. A thing would come into his mind and last and finally fade, and when it was ended, then he would know whether it had been in bright focus for two seconds or an hour. The visions were random. One that came often was the image of Charity’s eye, far brighter than it had been in the motel room, suspended slightly above him, big as a basketball, wet, fixed, anatomically exact, the lashes thick as lead pencils, iris big as a saucer, pupil big as a cup, utterly still. He could not force continuity onto such images, re-creating what had come before or what came after. There were others which recurred. One was the bottom half of Elmo’s face, the hard, chunky, knowing grin. And the motionless tumble of the orange slacks of a dead tourist woman. Aunt Middy Britt’s leathery arthritic claw folded onto the arm of her rocker. Two flies, with the metallic sheenings of hummingbirds, feeding at a droplet of jam. Mitchie’s mouth, wrenched sideways in a frozen sneer of sexual effort. The wrinkled brown nape of Shannard’s neck beneath the feathery whiteness of his hair. The clean slant of Kat’s shoulder, her fair skin oiled and angry red.
He would set out to drive to the courthouse and find himself at the entrance to his driveway. Once he sat on the side of his bed to change his shoes, and found himself in the bathroom, in pajamas, brushing his teeth at three in the afternoon. At times he was amused, but could not sustain amusement. At times he was alarmed. He knew he was doing his work reasonably well, but often when he would read his bylined work, he could not remember having done it. And at all times he felt as if he was braced for some huge horrid unimaginable noise that might come at any time. He had always awakened in the morning remembering dreams. Now there were none, and he was glad there were none because he did not like to think of what they might be like.
Sometimes he thought of talking to Dr. Sloan, but he did not know what he could tell him, nor did he believe it could be of any significance to the man.
On Monday afternoon, two days before the public hearing, he had a phone call from Morton Dermond. Dermond asked him if he could come over to the Art Center right away.
Dermond was in his office. The Center was closed to the public. A good half of the clutter in the office was gone, and most of what remained had been dumped into a huge pile under the windows.
Dermond sat at his desk, the brute in colors gay, all brawn and hair, but without an essential ferocity, like a bulldog with rabbit eyes. He sat tired and remote, with a small self-deprecatory smile, handed Jimmy a fuzzy carbon of a typed statement and said, “Sit down and read it, Jimmy.”
It was a brief, formal resignation as director of the Palm County Art Center, giving health as the reason.
“It has to be in tomorrow morning’s paper, Jimmy,” he said. “Please say that Mr. Oscar Grindle, chairman of the Board of Directors, will handle the Center until a replacement can be located. All activities will continue without interruption.”
Jimmy made a note on his copy of the resignation. “Very sudden, isn’t it?”
“Suddener than anyone could have guessed. My car is all loaded. My landlord has my key. Bobby is driving around doing some last errands. He’ll pick me up here in about twenty minutes. Young Peter Trent is being kind enough to crate the rest of my things and ship them north. Bobby and I should be out of the state tonight.”
“Do I get the news in depth, Mortie? The story behind the story?”
“Just for your own amusement, I guess. You can’t publish it, of course. You see, I knew something like this might happen. When I saw how vicious and unreasonable people were getting, I told Tom I should get out of it. I told the dear man I’d do the group more harm than good. But he made such an appeal to my loyalty, really. You see, Jimmy, we develop a sort of sixth sense about these things. We should never, never, never let ourselves get mixed up in public issues which get terribly emotional. I was lulled into a false sense of security, I guess, because nothing happened two years ago.”
“What happened this time?”
“Tell me something, Jimmy. I want to be sure I haven’t been living in a fool’s paradise. Have I ever been too terribly obvious about my personal private life? Have people been really sure about me?”
“Not completely, Mortie. And I guess most of the people have had no idea at all.”
“I know you have, because you ran into Bobby and me that time in Key West. But I had the idea you didn’t go around smirking and gossiping, really.”