“Thirty pounds a month,” he said.
“All right,” I said. I was still a bit dazed.
He smiled and then set his mouth. I realised he would have gone more but I was not greedy about money. With me it was but a means to an end.
“You will let me have a painting for each cheque and just to be business-like, give me a receipt.” He went over to the whisky and poured a drink for each of us.
“To our partnership,” he said. “And before you go I must pay you for your first picture.”
He was himself now and, no doubt, telling himself he had made a good bargain.
“Now write me out a receipt,” he said later, holding the check out and blowing on it. “You can leave the painting with Rodgers.”
Rodgers was his driver-valet.
For three months he paid me my money. I had no scruples about it. The world, I’d learned, was dog eat dog. I happened to be a genius and Parker wasn’t. I knew no laws as ordinary men know them. Oh, I’d give the world good value. I worked hard and slept easily.
With leisure my art grew and developed. I could sense a new maturity in it, a surety, a heady delight in my released powers.
Then suddenly I started to worry about Parker. I called on him.
“Materials have gone up and also I must have a few more creature comforts,” I said. “You must pay me five hundred a month.”
“Your paintings are going up in value,” he said, smiling.
He paid, of course. I lived as soberly as before. The extra two hundred a month I used to pay a private detective to watch Parker. Put it down to my intuition, but I was suddenly suspicious of what he might be planning. The detective discovered nothing.
After seven weeks he demanded more money and I agreed. It was not my money, so why should I lose his services? Parker agreed readily to pay more. The detective deceived me for four months before I realised that he was working for Parker:
“Two can play at this game,” I told myself and kept the detective on — and employed another.
Parker bought him too.
My relations with Parker remained cordial but distant. He posted me a check each month; I wrote him a receipt; and delivered a painting to Rodgers. I thought once or twice of cutting out this hypocrisy, but I had a stack of old canvases, worthless things that I despised. I know now why Parker wanted the receipts.
I met Parker occasionally. We spoke no more than “Good day” to each other.
Three months ago I started my masterpiece. It is a large allegorical painting to show the dichotomy in human nature, in Life itself. In the gross flesh of my sensual beings lurked the soul, in the sensitive eyes and the mysterious corners of the mouth.
But I put it badly. My vision was compelling and from deep inside me. For weeks I worked as in a dream, scarcely stopping except to snatch some food and a few begrudged hours of sleep. My dream began to take shape, to be frozen on the canvas. With my goal in sight at the end of last week, I eased up a little to gain strength for the last surge.
I had taken no notice of Parker or anything else for that matter. But now I observed that he went away for the weekend. During Saturday afternoon I found myself staring at the windows of his house and I knew suddenly what I had to do. I had to break in. I watched until I saw the housekeeper go off to the local at seven o’clock and an hour later when it was dark I burgled my way in. It was simple enough. I found a window unlocked, almost as though it had been left for me. I think now it had.
I had a small hand torch and I muffled its light in my handkerchief. I went to his study first. I found them in the first drawer of the desk I pulled back. It was the top right-hand one and unlocked, almost as though I was intended to find what was there. In a manilla folder were some sheets of paper covered with a hand-writing that seemed familiar. It wasn’t Parker’s. I read the top one:
I cannot go on any longer. My nerves have gone in the struggle. I had genius but because I was born a poor man it has been stillborn. Because one must eat, so much of my energies have been dissipated on hack work. Yet I know I could have reached the heights. I have had a generous patron but he cannot help me any longer...
I felt the back of my neck going cold and the hair stiffening. It was my writing! Or, rather, Parker’s imitation of it and a diabolically good one, too. And there was my “signature” — my bank would have paid on it.
On impulse I took one of the notes — all were phrased much the same, and in some my “handwriting” was better, if possible — and stole back to my cottage. I had no conscious reason in taking the forged note and its theft has undoubtedly made my death even more inevitable. Parker will not spare me now.
On the Monday another check was due from Parker. Instead I received an unctuous note regretting that he could no longer buy my paintings. I knew then that the blow would come swiftly. But from whence?
That was yesterday. I thought of going to the police, in my first moments of panic. Then I realised that in the eyes of the law a blackmailer is little better than a murderer, whatever his motives. If I went to the police I should never finish my great picture. I should spend years of cruel, frustration in jail that would erode my talent.
Since I made the decision I have worked frenziedly on my masterpiece. In it lies my immortality. A few hours and it will be finished.
The rat scampers in the ceiling. Today I posted a letter to my solicitor, to be opened after my death. It contains an account of all this and the forged note I stole from Parker. It is enough to hang him.
Disorderly
by Barry N. Malzberg
In life she had been untidy. But the way she died seemed too neat to be real.
Henry Wilson came home at six to find his wife Flora lying quite dead on the sofa, an open bottle of barbiturates clenched in her left hand, a suicide note draped across her chest.
Carefully putting down his briefcase and washing his hands from knuckle to elbow, Henry straightened out the house, closed the window shades and then picked up the note and read it.
Dear Henry: I am sorry to do this but it is the only way for both of us. You have made your life intolerable and now you have done the same to me. I can no longer live in a house like a glass cage and I cannot leave because — and this is the truth — there is no other way of life for me. So I leave you and I hope that things will be better for you and for me. I hope too that you learn something. Your wife, Flora.
The note was typed and she had not signed it.
Henry looked at it and his wife’s body for a very long time; then he straightened out the house a bit, getting the furniture back in place and raising Flora’s corpse so that he could take some of the minute dust off the couch. He flicked the shades a few times, put the desk in order — Flora had left the typewriter uncovered — and then, when he was sure that everything was in place, he picked up the phone and called the police.
“My wife has killed herself,” he said. “I came home to find her on the couch. It was an overdose of (Sleeping pills. No, she’s dead; I checked her breathing. I live at sixteen West Street on the ground floor. My apartment has a white door. I just painted it last week.”
“Hold on,” said a competent voice, “and we’ll be right out.”
“She’s dead,” Henry repeated and hung up.
In the few minutes before the police came there were still things which Henry saw he had to do, now that he had a chance to look the apartment over carefully. He closed the cabinet of the television set. He took a broom and flicked some grains of bread off the kitchen floor. He checked the bedroom to make sure that the bed he had made that morning was not rumpled. He changed the pillow case — there were a few tear drops on it and they had stained. He made up the garbage and disposed of it.