Girl Out Back
by
Charles Williams
1958
One
“Barney.”
Maybe if I pretended to be asleep she’d stop. She didn’t.
“Barney?”
“What?” I asked.
My name is Barney Godwin. I’ve been around for thirty years, one day at a time. I have an utterly useless education, a happy and industrious set of endocrine glands, good reflexes, and a wife who’s worth two hundred thousand dollars. It’s a living.
“I just wondered if you were asleep,” she said.
Her name is Jessica Roberts McCarran Godwin. She is thirty-four years old and is a prime mover in the Wardlow Women’s Club, Save-the-Trees-on-Minden-Street Division. She is currently an ash blonde, has very lovely, big, blue eyes, and her figure hovers somewhere between voluptuous and overblown, though she can still make voluptuous in ten days on Ry-Krisp and lettuce when she wants. She wears a thin gold chain around her left ankle. This may not blend too well with that Save-the-Trees kick, but it does have an exciting look under sheer nylon.
“Have you cleared it up?” I asked.
“What up?”
“Whether I’m asleep or not.”
“Well! You don’t have to get nasty about it.”
I didn’t say anything. She was probably right; I didn’t have to get nasty about it. I was on the payroll, wasn’t I?
“Isn’t the moonlight pretty?” she asked.
Moonlight slanted in under the honeysuckle about the second floor bedroom window and fell across her bare left leg from pelvis to toe as she elevated it slightly and rotated the ankle into the high-heeled-shoe position or the position-for-taking-cheesecake-photographs. The chain was a thin tracery of gold against gleaming silver. Not bad, I thought. This was Percy Bysshe Godwin, drunk with beauty.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
I told her, in my best drunk-with-beauty manner, what I was thinking about. You don’t have to keep hitting Godwin with the cue.
Violence was gone from the night. She lay with her cheek against the pillow watching me with the languorous well-being of a relaxed cat. Her eyes were quite soft and dreamy in the shadow.
Then she laughed.
“Who do you think you’re kidding?” she asked.
“Kidding?” I reached out on the night table beside the bed for a cigarette.
“You and that little priss.”
So we were going to have one of those what-movie-were-you-seeing? routines. I lighted the cigarette and dropped the match in the tray.
“What little priss?”
“You know who I mean.”
“No,” I said. “But don’t tell me. Let me guess. Maxine? Francine? Maurine? Corinne?”
“You make me sick.”
“Chlorine? Fluorine? Gangrene?”
“Aren’t we cute? A rhyming tom-cat.”
Sometimes a change-up pitch will work. “Shove it,” I said. I’d like to get some sleep.”
“Well . . . !”
“In case it’s escaped your attention I go to work in the mornings. You can lie around in the nest till noon if you want to.”
“Fat chance. That cotton-pickin’ Reba comes tomorrow. She can make more noise . . .”
“Well, cheer up. Everybody has a certain amount of tragedy in his life.”
”Let’s don’t get sarcastic”
“Fine with me. Let’s just log a little sack time.”
“You weren’t really thinking about her, were you?
I sighed. “Who?”
“That angel-faced little hypocrite. I know the type; if she thinks she . . .”
“I knew I’d guess it in a minute,” I said. “Just give me a few clues, that’s all. You mean Barbara Renfrew. Am I right?”
“You’re damn right you are.”
“Knock it off, will you?” I said. “You should know, if anybody does, that she’s not even there any more. You made it so tough for her she finally quit and went to work in the bank. Or don’t you remember?”
“And isn’t that too bad? So now you never see her more than three or four times a day.”
“Twice,” I said. “That’s as often as they’ll rent us the vault. You should see the way they fixed it up, though. Mirrors, and black sheets . . .”
“Oh, shut up!”
“They just have to be careful, that’s all. Banking is a very sensitive business, and just one hint of commercialized vice. . .”
“Will you, for the love of God, stop it?”
“Why?” I asked. “I thought you wanted to talk about Barbara Renfrew. I’ll tell you what—let’s barbecue some spare-ribs and bring ‘em up here to bed with us and have a picnic while we kick it around for the rest of the night. Would you say her eyes were really blue, or violet?”
“You think it’s funny, do you?”
“No,” I said. At two o”clock in the morning when I was trying to sleep I didn’t think anything was funny.
“Well, no cheap tom-cat is going to make a fool of me in this town. If you think I’m going to have people laughing at me behind my back . . .”
“Show ‘em your real estate,” I said. “Nobody ever laughs at real estate.”
“Laugh! Go ahead! Why don’t you just admit you have nothing but contempt for me? Tell me I’m older than you are, and that I’m fat and stupid . . .”
I was tired of it. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up and go to sleep.”
“Don’t you talk to me that way!”
“Well, stop talking like a fool.”
“A fool, am I? Well, maybe you’re right, at that. I didn’t have any better sense than to marry a cheap tom-cat that was just out for what he could get. . . .”
“All right,” I said. “So you did. So what are you crying about?”
“Oh! So you admit it?”
At that stage of the brain-washing I would have admitted to being a coloratura soprano for an hour’s sleep. “Yes. Just type out the confession and I’ll sign it.”
“You hate me, don’t you?
“If you say so.”
“No! I want to hear what you think.”
“I’m not paid to think,” I said. “I’m a gadget. I’m the Little Gem Home Companion, the do-it-himself household appliance with ears. It makes love, and listens to seven hours of crap without rewinding. . . .”
She sat up in fury and swung a hand at my face. I caught her wrist and held it while she struggled, her body a futile writhing of silver and velvet shadow in the moonlight. We’re probably an inspiring sight, I thought. I put my feet on the floor and stood up, pushing her back and away from me. She sprawled on the bed with her face down in the pillow. Neither of us had uttered a word. I stood for a moment feeling the difficulty in breathing because of the tight band across my chest, and then I turned and went out and down the stairs.
I padded barefoot through the hot darkness of the living-room. Going on back to the kitchen, I yanked open the door of the refrigerator, feeling the cold air pour out against my legs and feet as I took out a can of beer. I was dressed only in pajama bottoms, and in the light from the refrigerator I could see the shine of sweat on my arms and torso. The hell with her. She could take her jealous tantrums and her gourd-headed suspicions and erratic emotional pattern and her satin-upholstered bedroom talents and her late husband’s real estate and nuke a package of them. . . .
I slammed the fridge door shut and hit the kitchen light switch to locate the beer opener, savagely punched the can, took a drink of the beer, and then carried it down the short stairway at the back of the room beside the washing machine.
The big basement room, a sort of combination workshop and study, was mine; she rarely came near it except once or twice a month to supervise Reba’s cavalry-charge version of sweeping and tidying up. I clicked on the light. The room ran the full length of the basement. This end was finished in natural mahogany paneling I had put up myself; on the left were the recessed bookshelves with their rows of books, while the two glass-fronted cases on the right held the fly-rods and the three shotguns I owned. A heavy, leather-upholstered chair stood under a reading lamp near the bookshelves, and beyond it was an old couch retired from the living-room during the last redecorating cataclysm.