‘I suffer no sense of devaluation by using makeup,’ she said crisply. ‘It cheers me up to look nice, and God knows it’s hard enough to be cheerful around you.’
He turned, blinking away the patch of clear sight, considering the blurs of distant foliage. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to maintain anger against her. Almost without his notice, as subtly as the spinning of a web, threads of his anger had been drawn loose and woven into another emotion. Its significance escaped him, but he thought that if he attempted to understand it, he would become more deeply ensnared.
‘I have a confession,’ she said. ‘I read through your notebook this morning. Some of the fragments were lovely…’
‘Why don’t you just look in the toilet after I go…’
‘… and I think you should finish them!’
‘… and see if my shit’s spelling out secret messages!’
‘I’m not trying to pry out your secrets!’ She threw down her magazine. ‘I thought if you had some encouragement, some criticism, you might finish them.’
Halting footsteps scraped on the path behind him, and a scruffy, gassed voice asked, ‘What’s happenin’, man?’
‘Good morning, Mr Richmond,’ said Jocundra with professional sweetness. ‘Donnell? Have you met Mr Richmond?’
Richmond’s head and torso swam into bleared focus. He had a hard-bitten, emaciated face framed in shoulder-length brown hair. Prominent cheekbones, a missing lower tooth. He was leaning on a cane, grinning; his pupils showed against his irises like planets eclipsing green suns.
‘That’s Jack to you, man,’ he said, extending his hand.
The hair’s on Donnell’s neck prickled, and he was tongue-tied, unable to tear his eyes off Richmond. A chill articulated his spine.
‘Another hopeless burn-out,’ said Richmond, his grin growing toothier. ‘What’s the matter, squeeze? You wet yourself?’
A busty, brown-haired woman came up beside him and murmured, ‘Jack,’ but he continued to glare at Donnell, whose apprehension was turning into panic. His muscles had gone flaccid, and unable to run, he shrank within himself.
The brown-haired woman touched Richmond’s arm. ‘Why don’t we finish our walk, Jack?’
Richmond mimicked her in a quavery falsetto. ‘ “Why don’t we finish our walk, Jack!” Shit! Here they go and stock this place with these fine bitches, and they won’t do nothin’ for you ‘cept be polite!’ He bent down, his left eye inches from Donnell’s face, and winked; even when closed, a hint of luminous green penetrated his eyelid. ‘Or don’t you go for the ladies, squeeze? Maybe I’m makin’ you all squirmy inside.’ He hobbled off, laughing, and called back over his shoulder. ‘Keep your fingers crossed, sweetheart. Maybe I’ll come over some night and let you make my eagle big!’
As Richmond receded, his therapist in tow, Donnell’s tension eased. He flicked his eyes to Jocundra who looked quickly away and thumbed through her magazine. He found her lack of comment on his behaviour peculiar and asked her about it.
‘I assumed you were put off by his manner,’ she said.
‘Who the hell is he?’
‘A patient. He belongs to some motorcycle club.’ Her brow knitted. ‘The Hellhounds, I think.’
‘Didn’t you feel…’ He broke off, not wanting to admit the extent of his fright.
‘Feel what?’
‘Nothing.’
Richmond’s voice drifted back from the porch, outraged, and he slashed his cane through the air. The rose-colored bricks shimmered in the background, the faceted dome atop the roof flashed as if its energies were building to the discharge of a lethal ray, and Donnell had a resurgence of crawly animal fear.
After the encounter with Richmond, Donnell stayed closeted in his room for nearly two weeks. Jocundra lambasted him, comparing him to a child who had pulled a sheet over his head, but nothing she said would sway him. His reaction to Richmond must have been due, he decided to a side effect of the bacterial process, but side effect or not, he wanted no repetition of that stricken and helpless feeling: like a rabbit frozen by oncoming headlights. He lay around so much he developed a bedsore, and at this Jocundra threw up her hands.
‘I’m not going to sit here and watch you moulder,’ she said.
‘Then get the fuck out!’ he said; and as she stuffed wallet and compact into a leather purse, he told her that her skin looked like pink paint, that twenty dollars a night was probably too high but she should try for it, and - as she slammed the door - that she could go straight to Hell and give her goddamn disease to the Devil. He wished she would stay gone, but he knew she’d be harassing him again before lunchtime.
His lunch tray, however, was brought by the orderly who sang, and when Donnell asked about Jocundra, he said, ‘Beats me, Jim. I can’t keep track of my own woman.’
Donnell was puzzled but unconcerned. Coldly, he dismissed her. He spent the afternoon exploring the new boundaries of his vision, charting minuscule dents in the wallpaper, composing mosaic landscapes from the reflections glazing the lens of the camera mounted above the door, and - something of a breakthrough - following the flight of a hawk circling the middle distance, bringing it so close he managed to see a scaly patch on its wing and an awful eye the color of dried blood and half filmed over with a crackled white membrane. An old, sick, mad king of the air. The hawk kept soaring out of his range, and he could never obtain a view of its entire body; his control still lacked discretion. It was a pity, he thought, that the visual effects were only temporary, though they did not suffice of themselves to make life interesting. Their novelty quickly wore off.
The orderly who brought his dinner tray was tanned, fortyish, with razor-cut hair combed over a bald spot and silken black hairs matting the backs of his hands. Though he was no more talkative than the singing orderly, Donnell suspected he could be drawn into a conversation. He flounced pillows, preened before the mirror, and took inordinate pleasure in rubbing out Donnell’s neck cramp. Gentle, lissome fingers. On his pinky he wore a diamond ring, an exceptionally large one for a person earning orderly’s wages, and Donnell, seeking to ingratiate himself, to learn about Jocundra, spoke admiringly of it.
‘It belonged to my grandmother,’ said the orderly. ‘The stone, not the setting. I’ve been offered eighteen thousand for it, but I held onto it because you never know when hard times might snap you up.’ He illustrated the snapping of hard times by pinching Donnell’s leg, then launched into an interminable story about his grandmother. ‘She had lovers ‘til she was sixty-seven, the old dear. Heaven knows what she did after that!’ Titter. He put on a dismal face. ‘But it was no picnic being raised by a dirty old woman, let me tell you.’ And he did.
Donnell had been hoping to weasel information about Jocundra during the course of the conversation, but the orderly showed no sign of allowing a conversation, and he was forced to interrupt. The orderly acted betrayed, said he had no idea where she was, and swept from the room with a display of injured dignity that evoked the angry rustle of taffeta.
Then it dawned on Donnell. She wasn’t coming back. She had deserted him. How could she just go without telling him, without arranging a replacement? Panicked, he wheeled out into the hall. As he headed for the foyer, hoping to find Edman, a ripple in the carpet snagged his wheels and canted him into one of the potted ferns; the brass urn toppled and bonged against the floor. The door beside it opened, and a thin blond woman poked out her head. ‘Shh!’ she commanded. She knelt by the fern, her nose wrinkling at having to touch the dirt. She had the kind of brittle prettiness that hardens easily into middle-aged bitchdom, and as if in anticipation of this, her hair was done up into a no-nonsense bun and tied with a dark blue ribbon.