“I so need a friend now. It’s the end of things,” she said in a little, faint voice. “Come in here and sit. There’s a curtain between us. Oh!” I thought she gasped and I hurried in, face blushing and dying to help. The curtain was closed, all right, the brown shadow of her behind it sitting in the water. “Oh!” I thought she said again.
Around the front gathered edge of the curtain near the faucets the dog chain lay out on the floor with one of its bracelets open, the rest of the chain in the tub with Felice.
“Put it on your wrist, my pal,” she said tinnily, almost sighing it.
So I did and snapped it on. I would be a gypsy too. I’d be the panting boy in the wings, waiting until her act was over and the others had had their fill of her. Until we made our move. This charity and long-suffering had never even nearly come near me before. I’m just sailing along the current in the rain gutter, a piece of nothing, nobody can touch me without drowning. The steel of the cuff was very serious and required a key for release, I noticed.
“You will be with me down down down oh! There’s a way to do it in the liver they said brings it there quick but oh! no no no.” This was all so faint and not recollected until a long while afterwards.
“Felice! Are you okay? I’m buckled on the chain with you.”
“Something’s not right, and I’ve used the last one.” Her voice was faint, dimming like a small girl going to sleep, her breath wet on the pillow.
“Everything will be all right. Everything. I know you’re under horrible pressure. I’m reading Proust, drawing closer to your world. The French Proust.”
There would be no way for me not to view a lot of her with the chain binding us, I reckoned. This would be an unearthly familiarity. The die would be cast. The new world would begin right then, and I felt actual waves of a kind of happy nausea.
“Oh oh oh oh ohh! Not right.”
This voice did not rise in friendship or passion. She was very sick and I knew something was wrong, unpretended and real.
“I’m not dying the right way, George.”
I got up, thinking, and pulled the chain to the door. I couldn’t look at what I wanted without pulling her a little, with a splash from the tub. I finally had my eyes just past the jamb and looked on the dresser. The paregoric bottles were there, three empty, but where the long acupuncture needles always were was empty space. It was too catastrophic a thing to even consider; but I knew she had them.
“Felice, I’m opening the curtain!”
She was lying over with her head forward, drugged, on the shower plunger between the faucets. Her hands were down on her stomach. The tub water was pink around it with three streams of blood. She’d pushed them in the right side where the liver was, I found out. Oriental, Oriental, I remember thinking over and over, trying to call the dread something.
I got in the tub with her and lifted her. You think you are one muscled champion until you try to lift a wet naked woman dead-haul. It can barely be done, and I thought she was already dead, so that in this fear I finally did it and we both fell over together, confused in the chain, off the tiles into the carpet of the room. My nose was flat in it and it smelled like the dusty feet of a horde. She was whimpering. When I saw the heads of the needles, puffed out with blue and darker skin, with a near-black blood dripping out like spread fingers, I almost went under.
I looked for a phone, but we had no phone in these rooms. Her legs began moving although her face looked dead. I drew up and whirled my head around looking. I reached the robe on the hanger and dragged it off, then threw it over her and put my arms under hers, tugging and pleading with her.
With as much ease as I could I got her out on the stoop and she began walking a little, saying oh oh oh. We went down the stairs very slowly. When we got toward the bottom, I raised up and there Albert was staring at us from his black suit, his eyes seeming beyond a known emotion. I gasped at him to phone help, she was dying. Some others behind Albert stood there, but I barely noticed even their shoes. I settled her on the last stair then sat myself, unwrapping the chain around us both and getting some free length to my wrist. Then I saw she was revealed and I pulled the robe together on her.
She had a great deal of blood in her lap and on the side of the robe, up level with the circled cross of the Klan.
“This is my affair,” said Albert. “Let her go.”
“It is not. I’m with her now. Can’t you see? I’m her future now!”
“No you ain’t, son,” said my father, who’d come up with Horace, the both of them in suits.
He’d come up to bring us some treats from Mother and had intercepted Horace coming in from church. My father had a cigarette in his mouth, but it had almost fallen out of his sidelips and hung there while he stared with an open mouth at the bloody woman in the Klan robe. He looked so damned distinguished and in charge I felt dimmed out and pushed back to about age ten, staring at the handcuff of the dog chain on my wrist. Horace was holding the sack of goodies and seemed exactly the son he deserved.
I didn’t see Harold again until almost twenty years later. I was in a very bad band playing at cocktail hour for peanuts and for a convention of educators in San Antonio, Texas. I had been fired from my regular job for drinking, and before that I had been jailed and nuthoused for setting fire to my estranged wife’s lawn, which blew up her lawn mower. In the band I was desperate and would have been throbbing in shame but I was still drunk enough to ignore it and was majoring on the theme Whim of Fortune, and I believe trying to attach myself to a woman of such low estate that the two of us would destroy ourselves in spontaneous combustion at an impossible diving speed. But I had clarity enough to see Harold walk out of the milling pack of cocktailers in the ballroom and come right up to the bandstand, natty in a good slim blazer, and stare at me with an even brotherly smile.
He had heard about my troubles, and commiserated, seeming the picture of sobriety and successful wisdom to me. His hair was all gray, but his posture had improved, and his baldness was distinguished, even at the ears all around. Something terribly healthy was going on in his life and I envied him. I hadn’t felt decent in three years.
“Oh, no. I’m not nice, my friend, not at all. I’m just ordinary as potatoes.”
“Aw Harold. I doubt it.”
“That was the last gasp of riot, in school when you knew me. That was the whole wad.”
“You didn’t reach your juicy scandal, the great one?”
“Never. My head simply turned around and I got old. I just wasn’t even looking that way anymore. All I had was divorce — very usual — and my memories. It’s like I knew you’d be here. C’mon up to the room. I’ll show you something. Pathetic, and I can’t leave it alone.”
“Telepathy, Harold. Remember?”
I dragged my horn case along with him to the elevator. Harold began attacking the stupefying hopelessness of his students. I had grown enough to know only a good teacher could assault them this meticulously, and that he adored them. He was reading a paper on mild innovations in the classroom here at the convention. Many of his students had won national honors. He was still at the same obscure little school.
In the room he pulled out his albums — the one with the Asian women, and then another one with photographs of all his college girls in total surrender, bare, and all of them very happy about it, Harold beaming among them. The effect was more of an arcane archaeological find where a race of drab and ungainly women were frozen in postures of ritual fulfillment. How could he get them to be so glad about it, all of them? I wondered. Only the last album was very sexy. There were pictures of that big woman he married, from clothed to very unclothed, to inside her, many angles. In these the woman seemed cruel and proud, with threatening smiles, dominating the photographer himself, and triumphant in a near-fascist way.