John D. MacDonald
Six Golden Pennies
He had talked to her lawyer, and now he drove in a rented car across burned land toward the place where she had waited out her residence. A hot wind dried salt crystals along his hairline, flapped the short sleeve of his sport shirt. The highway shimmered ahead. Blue mountain ranges notched a monotonous cloudless sky. He looked at the shadows with an artist’s eye, wondering at the gaudy, improbable blues and purples in those shadows. Lizard land. Baked rock land.
Devlan, her lawyer, had been cool at first, saying, with a patronizing smile, “After all, Mr. Shelby, to be perhaps too frank, she was divorcing you, and she got drunk and she drowned. It is a tragedy. She was young and seemed to be a nice person, and she had a lot of living ahead of her. But not, may I say, with you. That’s why your visit seems to... baffle me a bit. You ask me how she was acting? Normal, I would say, considering this rather abnormal emotional climate.”
Jay Shelby had said, “Mr. Devlan, I had to come here. I don’t pretend to be able to tell you all the reasons. I don’t know them myself. Our marriage was almost good. So nearly good I kept waiting for her to call this whole thing off, this divorce deal. Maybe I should have called her. Maybe she was waiting for me to call her. But I didn’t. You see, I have to know if... what happened to her bears any relation to what I did or didn’t do. Because I keep thinking about it.”
“It was an accidental death. It was carefully investigated, Mr. Shelby.”
“I know all that, but there is such a thing as a death wish. There is such a thing as putting yourself in a situation where something is likely to happen to you.”
“I don’t want to give you advice. I have certain ethics. I try to talk myself out of a case every time. I talked with your wife. She was sincere and determined about that divorce. You have some need to feel guilt. You want to find some way of punishing yourself. I would say you should go back East and forget it, Mr. Shelby. You save the property settlement that was agreed on. It was a tragedy. Wives die accidentally when marriages are good. So your loss is less, is it not?”
“Put yourself in my place, Mr. Devlan. I want to know how she was up to the time it happened. What she was doing. If she was depressed. All I got was the bald report.”
“And if you find out she was depressed? That there was a death wish, as you called it?”
“Then I know I deserve the guilt I already feel. And if it wasn’t that way, then maybe I can be... free of her.”
Devlan sighed. “I guess I know what you mean. Maybe it’s something you have to do. You must understand it is a strange emotional climate out here. Unreal. Sort of a compressed hysteria. Neon and hunger and gambling... She told me you are an artist.”
“An illustrator. I do magazine work mostly.”
“I know. I’ve seen your name.”
Jay Shelby stood up. “Thanks for the information, Mr. Devlan. The Terrace Inn at Oasis Springs. I don’t think I’ll use my own name there.”
Devlan stared at him. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“I don’t want people to tell me what they think I want to hear. That’s all. I want to get there while there are still a number of guests who were probably friendly with her. She... always made friends easily. It was twelve days ago. I went to the funeral in Burlington last week. Her people acted as though I’d killed her. That was when I knew I had to come out here.”
He thought of Joan during the hot drive to Oasis Springs. An almost good marriage. Maybe that was worse than a completely bad one. Four years of trying to make it work. Maybe, if they’d tried longer, harder. There had always been an electric quality to her that had made him feel dull, plodding, ordinary, even at that first moment he had seen her, in the shabby little straw-hat theatre in Connecticut, coming on in the second act of a dull play, coming on with that taut walk and the alive face, bringing the audience forward out of dullness with her very first line, making the stuffy theatre recede, and turning the play into something that lived.
He had contrived to meet her, had gone after her with the same doggedness he had gone after everything in his life. She had said no three times, and she had sighed at last and put her hands flat against his cheeks and looked for a long time into his eyes and said yes. Even then it seemed too easy. He had wanted to achieve impossible tasks in her name in order to win her, but she had said yes and it had seemed almost too easy. The contrast between them had been flattering to her. She so slim, so quick-moving, with the mobility of face that could change so quickly, with the hair that always made him think of the stuff they sold during the war for decorating Christmas trees, when tin foil was not available, a pale, white sheen. And he, dark, heavy-shouldered, slow-moving, face like a stubborn mask except when he grinned, arms and hands thickened and toughened by the manual labor he had done during the years when he’d been learning his trade, using what he’d saved for the art classes in Chicago.
There was the old saw about opposites being attracted to each other. Perhaps they were, but opposites did not make a marriage. He liked the silences and the times of snow, midnight creak of an old house. While she would wander from room to room, with a nervous listlessness, snapping cigarettes into the fireplace, then picking out records and stacking them on the machine, dancing, humming to herself, snapping her fingers, alive for a little time.
In her world, he found himself standing in corners, the drink growing warm from his hand, nervous and brittle laughter jangling around him, while Joan would be across the room, the center of a group, glowing at the delighted laughter when she used her special and acid knack of mimicry. In some strange way she was even able to do him, changing her face, walk, posture, exaggerating his slow gestures, his faintly pontifical tone of voice. It always irritated him and amused him.
He was concerned with himself, with the why of existence, with philosophical conjecture, and with good friends who also had that turn of mind, he could talk the night away. But there was no subjective thought in her. Her mind was quick, but her talk and her thinking were anecdotal. She was content to exist without questioning what she was or where she was or why she was. Her mind was quick enough, but she had too much hunger for the aspects of living he considered superficial. And he saw she was limited in her profession by that superficiality. She could give a part sparkle, but she could not give it the depth a true actress could.
For a long time it was the physical togetherness that saved them, and then the outside distortions began to spoil that for them, and there was nothing left but habit and a barren quarreling.
She was apart from him when she had a few supporting roles in plays that never became established. And he suspected her hunger for excitement, for joyous living, had led her into unfaithfulness, but he never checked on her because he was afraid of the violence inside him, the violence that might escape if he ever had proof.
Though he had expected it, and he knew she had, the decision still came as a shock. It was a shock to learn he did not want to lose her. And he knew her own tears surprised her. But he agreed to the settlement and she left, and after five weeks and three days of residence, she was dead. Artist’s wife drowned in resort pool four days before decree. He had closed the house and he was in New York in a borrowed studio, finishing off the assignments the agency had gotten for him, thinking ahead to the trip he had promised himself after it was final.
So the first he knew was when he saw it in the paper. He read it, and he could not believe she was dead. That much sparkling energy could not be stilled, not so easily, so quickly. The friends he cared about said all the right things, and the people he did not care about said the wrong things. He wished he had phoned her the night he had ached for her to come back, ached for the chance for them to try again. She made him feel plodding, humorless. He could have tried harder to be gay, tried harder for the light touch. He could have been more patient with her.