She stood beside the sink and he stood between her and the doorway, frowning at the label on the bottle. She knew what it said: “Mrs. Willis—one every four hours— Dr. Miller.”
He looked at her, looked at the bottle. “It’s a drugstore in New York,” he said.
“I didn’t want anybody around here to know about it,” she said. It was a relief to be able to show how nervous she was, to use the true nervousness as a verification of the lie she was building.
“Every four hours,” he said, reading the label again. Then, “Hey, this thing’s two months old!”
The date. Down at the bottom of the label were the prescription number and the date; she’d forgotten about that. She stammered as she said, “It’s taking a while to cure it.”
“Cure it?” He frowned at her some more, and she could see him turning it over in his mind, not trusting it, not understanding what she might be up to and yet instinctively not trusting it. I can’t fool him, she thought. And because I tried to, he’ll kill me. She remembered what Parker had said when he’d called, about his friend having died of a painful illness, and all at once she was full of second thoughts. She should have taken Parker’s advice and gone away from here. She shouldn’t have tried this stunt with the medicine. It was going to end very, very badly, and it would be all her fault.
She was blinking again, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and she wished there was some way to make the blinking stop, it would betray her yet.
At last he looked down at the bottle again. “Cure it,” he muttered, and snapped the lid off the bottle, and shook out three or four of the pills into the palm of his hand. They were smallish, round with beveled edges, robin’s-egg blue. He shook the pills in his palm, watching them rock, and then lifted the plastic bottle and sniffed at the open top, like a wine connoisseur smelling the cork.
She watched him, tense and afraid. She knew what she wanted him to think, eventually, getting to the idea himself—but what was he thinking now? What was going on in his mind?
He lowered the bottle again, looked at the label, shook his head, eased all but one of the pills from his palm back into the bottle. Then he said, “Fill that glass with water. No, just half full. Put it on the counter there.”
She put the glass on the glass counter under the medicine chest, and stepped back, and he came forward and dropped the pill into the water. It sank slowly, and they both watched it, and nothing happened.
This is comic, she thought. This is hilarious. We’re looking at a pill do nothing in a glass of water.
She felt she was going to start laughing, and dug her nails into her palms to keep it from happening. Because if she laughed he would be very angry and would do something to her. And because if she started to laugh she wouldn’t be able to stop, and the laughing would become screams, and she wouldn’t ever be able to make it stop.
The pill began very slowly to dissolve, like a fresh hairdo in a breeze, wispy lines of robin’s-egg blue drifting upward.
He picked up the glass, shook it, smelled it, tasted the water very gingerly. Then he frowned, tossed the water into the sink, slapped the glass down on the counter again, went on holding the glass, stared grimly at it, and said, “I want to know what those things are for. I don’t want any more hacking around.”
“I was sick. It’s a prescription for being sick.” She didn’t want to say it to him, she wanted him to get to it himself; he would believe it more easily that way.
He turned his head slowly and looked at her, and for the second time she saw his eyes flat and blank and expressionless. “I’m running out of patience, honey,” he said. “What do you mean, sick?” Then his eyes narrowed and he said, “Wait a minute. You mean the clap?”
Finally he’d come to it. But now there was another problem: the date on the bottle. She didn’t know that much about gonorrhea, but she had the vague idea it didn’t take two months to cure it. She said, tentatively, “Well, something like that. That’s why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Something like that?”
“It takes longer. To be all right again.”
“Christ,” he said. He was disgusted, but her impression was that his disgust was caused by fastidiousness rather than disappointment; once again there was no feeling of any true sexual interest from him.
“That’s why I went to New York,” she said. “Because I didn’t want anybody around here to know.”
“You got it around here,” he said. “How the hell’d you manage that?”
She couldn’t think of an answer right away, and just stood there helplessly.
He shook his head. “Don’t tell me your story, honey, I don’t want to know. Here, take your pill.”
Her hand trembled as she took the bottle from him. She shook out one pill into her other palm, put the bottle away, refilled the glass, took the pill. He stood watching her, and when she put the glass back in its holder, he said, “All right, come on.”
He had her walk ahead of him, and they left the bathroom and went through the kitchen and down the hall. He couldn’t see her face now, and it could relax into whatever expression she wanted, and she was astonished to find that she was smiling.
Smiling? I can handle him, she thought. Managing the stunt with the illness had given her a sudden confidence, had given her back the self-assurance she’d had when she’d talked to Parker last night. These people were strong and mean and deadly and probably armed, but she was cleverer than they. The clever little mouse. She could play the dangerous game, after all, tiptoe between the lines of their understanding and never be seen.
And yet there was another feeling in her, too, stranger than the urge to smile and pat herself on the back. Coming along the hall, she could feel his disapproval as he walked behind her, and even though it was stupid and silly to think this way, she found herself hoping there’d be a chance later on to tell him the truth, that she didn’t really have any kind of venereal disease, that it had only been to keep him from raping her that she had led him to believe it. No matter the situation, no matter the consequences she had escaped or the cleverness she had used, the fact of his disapproval and his belief in the reality of her illness hurt her pride, and she needed to believe she could rectify it later.
They were just entering the living room when the phone rang. At once he grabbed her elbow from behind and said, low-voiced in her ear, the words fast and urgent, “You pick it up after the third ring. Right after the third ring.”
“All right.” His fingers were painfully tight on her arm.
“And don’t say anything stupid. Remember, he’s there and you’re here.”
“I’ll remember.”
He released her elbow and gave her a push into the living room. Without looking back, she knew he’d headed the other way; there was an extension phone in the bedroom, he’d listen there.
The phone rang for the second time as she hurried to the sofa. Was it going to be Parker? If not, would it be Handy McKay or somebody else who knew Parker lived here, and would they say something wrong? And if it was Parker, would be say something wrong?
In the silence between the second and third rings, she sat on the sofa and rubbed her knuckles into her eyes;
the panicky blinking frightened and confused and distracted her.
The third ring. Seeing moons and planets around the periphery of her vision, after the hard rubbing, she rested one shaking hand on the phone and waited for the ring sound to stop. Her confidence had drained away again, all at once, as though it had never been. Her emotions were at the extremes, lunging between high and low, with no calmness at the middle.
Silence. She picked up the phone, said, “Hello?”
Parker: “Hello, it’s me.”