She came out with her hair fluffed out of its rigid nurse’s style, and she wore a turtle-necked gray sweater and a harsh tweed skirt in a discomfiting orange shade. No stockings. Ancient loafers. She fell toward a chair, sat lightly in it. The bones of her wrists and hips were sharp. She looked harsh, brittle, angular. I thought irrelevantly that she was a woman made for a blind man. To his touch she would have the remembered softness and warmth.
I put the drink down. “How do we start?”
“Tell me how we’re going to do it.” The sentence faded away. Each of her sentences brought silence after it, so that forever we spoke across silence more clearly than with words. Her eyes were dedicated blue flames.
“Not that fast. I want to know if you still insist on sharing this thing. Without knowing when or how we’re to do it.”
“I insist.”
I studied her “Have you ever wondered about your own sanity, Miranda?”
“Of course. Everyone does. They say that to wonder means that you are really quite all right.”
“Odd that you’re a nurse.”
“Is it? People fighting, dying. I’m there. I can watch and decide about them. Oh, you don’t have to do anything crude, like the wrong medicines. I like them caught between living and dying. Like you were. Then you can do it with words. You can decide, and it always comes out the way you say. It makes you strong to think about it.”
I smiled, and my lips felt stiff. “Have you decided against anyone lately?”
“Oh, yes. This past week. An old man. They wanted him alive because, you see, he was a great-grandfather and in another month he’d be a great-great-grandfather and it was all a matter of pride with him and with them. To have all those generations living at once. He fought, that one, to keep living just for the sake of living, which is never any good. I whispered in his ear. ‘Give up,’ I said. ‘Let it go. Stop fighting. Give up.’ They say they can’t hear you, but they can. They always can. He finally gave a great sigh and died. They couldn’t understand why he died. But, of course, I couldn’t tell them.”
“You like doing that?”
“You kill the rotten ones and keep the good ones. Like sorting things. Like being neat about yourself.”
“I’m one of the good ones?”
She shook her head, as though puzzled. “No, and yet I kept you. I keep wondering why.”
My glass was empty. She sprang toward me, and had I not learned about her I would have flinched away. But she stopped in time and the new drink was made.
I caught her wrist and pulled her onto my lap. Oddly, she seemed lighter than Connie, though she was much heavier, I knew. The calm lips folded against mine. But there was nothing there. It was holding a senseless pose, like a charade that no one can guess. She went back to her chair.
“I expected anything but that,” I said.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait until afterwards. There isn’t enough togetherness yet. Afterwards the thing shared will make it right.”
“Maybe I died,” I said. “Maybe this is a fancy-type hell, like the mythological one where the sinner is chained for eternity just out of reach of food and drink.”
“Am I food and drink?” She showed, for the first time, a trace of coyness. Like a child’s rattle placed atop a small white coffin.
“Maybe not that. But necessary. In an odd way. Essential.”
“That’s because I know more about these things. I’m like a guide. You’re just learning.”
“Is it a taste you can acquire?”
“That you can’t help acquiring.”
“But when there’s no one left to kill?”
“Then we’ll help each other find someone else. And do it in a better way than words.”
I stood up. “I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
On the way home I could feel the clear imprint of the plate inlaid in my skull, the perfect outline of it, as though gentle fingers were pressing it against the jelly of my brain.
I went into the cellar and fitted a length of soft white pine into the lathe. I let my hands work the way they wanted to work, without direction. The cutting tool ate away the wood, turning angles into curves. I took it off the lathe and turned on the sander. I held it one way, then another way, rounding it the way my hands said. It turned into the crude elongated torso of a woman, a woman as thin as Miranda. Then I put it back into the lathe and cut it down to a round rod, shaving away the woman form.
The pressure against the plate had turned into an ache, the beginning of green behind my eyes. I broke the rod over my knee.
I went up to Connie and said, “Rub the back of my neck.”
I stretched out on the couch. She was awkward about it, lacking the skill of Miranda. I turned and held her close, telling myself she was precious. I kissed her. I saw surprise in her eyes and then a most patient resignation. I sat beside her on the couch and took the patch off the empty socket. She shut her eyes hard. Her small fists were clenched. I tiptoed away from her and up the stairs and shut myself in my room. I heard her go out. I lay in the livid green and the world was green neon and the outline of the plate changed slowly, forming letters, pressing the word UNICORN deep into the gray-green brain, deep into the softnesses in which forever a car rolled and leaped and bounded like a child’s toy thrown aside in petty rage.
“You won’t be needing the car, will you?” I asked Connie.
She gave me her prettiest frown. “Gosh, I don’t think so. How long will you have it?”
“Overnight.”
“Where on earth are you going?”
“I went in and talked to Mallory yesterday. We decided I’d start to take on a few odd jobs, just to get my hand in. That splendid creative artist up in Crane is yammering at his agent to arrange a switch of publishers again.”
“But that is where you were going when—”
“Correct. Sort of like a movie. This is when I came in.”
“When are you leaving?”
“He keeps crazy hours. Starts writing after a midnight breakfast. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I’ll leave tonight after dark, and after I see him I’ll hole up somewhere and come back down tomorrow. No point in getting too tired at this stage of the game.”
The upper surfaces of her rounded arms had the faint tan that she never seems to lose, even in the dead of winter. I held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. She was facing the light. I saw then, and for the first time, the slight yellowness of the whites of her eyes. Once they had been that bluey white that only children seem to have. The pores of her snub nose and on her rounded cheeks were faintly enlarged, and everywhere, eye corners, around her mouth, across her forehead, I could see the spreading inevitable network of wrinkles, cobwebby against the skin. Enlarge those wrinkles to the maximum, and she would have the face of a withered monkey, out of which the gray eyes would still stare, acquiring through that contrast the knowledge of evil which had always been there but which I had never been able to see or understand.
She moved uncomfortably in my grasp. “What are you staring at?”
“My fine true wife, my loyal little Connie. Darling, what did I do to deserve you?”
She had the grace to blush. “Oh, come now.”