John D. MacDonald
The Hands of an Artist
Arthur VanCook Hilson pulled his raincoat collar more tightly against the back of his neck and slowed his pace so he wouldn’t get home too soon. The plan usually took about twenty minutes to think out — twenty minutes to go through every action, every precaution, the police investigation, the funeral and at last the blessed sensation of freedom that glowed far ahead of him like a slow dawn rising behind wooded hills.
It was warm enough so that he felt perspiration glueing his shirt to his lean ribs. It was good to be lean. He took a sideways glance at his tall figure as he passed a shop window and saw his striding figure reflected in the wet glass. Much younger looking than Myra with her sagging stomach and her short-legged waddle, her doughy face.
A young girl came walking briskly out of a doorway. He caught a glimpse of her straight young legs, the free swing of her body. She had dark eyes set wide apart. He stared into them, seeing in their young animal depths a flicker of interest. After she had passed him, he straightened his shoulders and took longer steps. When Myra was gone, there would be a chance to meet young girls like that — to know them well. Young girls with fresh sweet bodies and eyes of the night. After Myra was gone. The phrase beat in his mind like the soft tolling of a hidden bell. Then it changed. After I am free. He glanced down at his hands and saw that they were brown and firm. They swung in the rain, capable and strong. He thought again of the plan. He walked more slowly and the roar of the five o’clock traffic was as the low orchestral accompaniment to the sparkling clarity of his mind.
His car was parked in the driveway and he noticed the shreds of steam blowing across the wet hood, realizing that Myra must have just returned a few minutes before. He walked down the drive and went in the side door. He stripped off his raincoat, got a hanger and placed it neatly on the wall hook on the porch to dry. He shook his soft hat, handling it carefully. He had spent a lot of time in selecting the hat, finding one with the right curl to the brim to bring out the lines he liked in his lean checks.
He walked into the kitchen and stood for a second, a twisted scornful grin on his lean lips. Myra was stooped, peering into the oven. Her heavy broad hips made him think of some kind of ponderous animal. There was no grace in her.
She heard him and straightened up, brushing a wisp of hair off her damp forehead with the back of her hand. Her dark eyes were blank in her broad white face as he stepped over and dutifully pecked at her cheek. She smelled of perfume and dough.
“Everything go allright at the office, Arthur?”
“Same as usual. Did you find a suit for Paul?”
The familiar wrinkles appeared between her eyes and she said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with that boy. He wants to get the most horrible bright things and he won’t look at the clothes I want to get for him. He gets sulky and I hate to have scenes with him in public. I don’t know what to do. I wish you’d say something to him. I can’t do a thing with him and goodness knows he needs a new suit something awful. It seems to me...”
She stopped talking as he turned and walked out of the kitchen. She sighed and stooped to look again into the oven.
Arthur Hilson took the evening paper off the hall table and walked into the living room. Paul was sitting next to the radio, thumping his foot in time to the heavy beat of the music. He nodded and his lips moved. Arthur couldn’t hear him over the thud of the music. He sat in the chair, sighed and looked at Paul over the top of the paper. One by one he picked out the features of Myra in the thick face of the seventeen year old. He wondered vaguely what Paul would have been like if he had been his own son rather than the son of Myra and her first husband. Possibly he would have inherited the lean strength, tall and proud, instead of the heavy sulky body of Myra. He realized that he had always wondered. It was not too late for him to have sons. Sons by some other woman. By the straight slim girl he had seen while walking home.
He shouted, “Turn that thing off! I want to talk to you.”
Paul looked startled and switched it off. The room was full of sudden silence. Paul leaned back in his chair, on his face the look of heavy patience that so infuriated Arthur.
“Your mother tells me that you were difficult about buying a suit.”
“Oh, she wants me to get undertaker clothes. I want to wear what the other guys do. Something sharper.”
“You will go down with her tomorrow and you will get what she wants you to get.”
“Yes, father.” The hidden slur on the word father. The veiled contempt and amusement
“I’m not earning money for you to be a prima donna about spending it on sensible things.”
“Yes, father.”
“As long as I’ve made myself clear, you can turn on that trash again.”
“Yes, father.” The heavy fingers twisted the knob and the music grew back into the long bright room. Arthur turned from habit to the market listings, following the prices of shares which he intended to buy — some day. He glanced over at Paul again, thinking of the day when he could enroll the boy in a private school Myra would not be there to object. It would be like dropping the boy out of his life. He would be free on that score also.
Dinner, as usual, was silent. They ate in the alcove off the kitchen. The dishes rattling in the cupboards as Myra puffed to her feet between courses and padded back and forth. Arthur enjoyed cutting the meat on his plate, watching it curl back from the sharp knife, placing his fork in the exact middle of the geometric figures and rolling the flavor of it across his tongue. He heard Paul eating beside him and knew that it would be best not to shift his eyes so that he could see the heavy hands bent low over the plate as the boy tore the meat apart with his fork and shoved it into his mouth. He knew that it would be best not to look at Myra, sitting with blank face, chewing each mouthful an interminable fifty times as the doctor had told her years before.
He finished and wiped his mouth carefully and pushed his chair back. He glanced at the two of them as he mumbled an excuse and left the table. They didn’t look up. He walked away, thinking the old fiction that he was a king who had fled his own country — who was forced to live with these two sullen creatures who served him until the day when he could rightfully reclaim his throne.
But the days of such games were past. The plan was slowly beginning to stand out in sharp focus in his mind. He had been over it so many times that when the time arrived to use it, each movement could he gone through as though in a dream. A plan that moved from step to step as inevitable as... as death.
He went upstairs to the small study which adjoined his bedroom. For the fiftieth time he took his account book which listed his small holdings, his savings, his current cash. Then he took her insurance money and added it to his assets. He refigured his retirement income. It would be small, retiring ten years before he reached the proper age, but with her insurance money reinvested and with the savings invested in proper stocks it would be enough. Enough to cover the school costs of Paul and enable him to get away and live in freedom. Some small coast town in the islands. The warm brown flesh of the young girls of Ceylon, of Malaya, of Java. He leaned back in the chair and looked at the mirror he had hung opposite his desk. He smiled carefully at himself, noting with detachment how the lines around hit mouth and eyes deepened.
When he finally went back into his own bedroom, he found that Myra had left the bathroom door ajar. It was open a few inches and he could see her moving around in the bright bathroom light. Her wattled flesh sagged and she moved heavily. He tried to see through the curtains of flesh to the trim body of the girl he had married. He realized that he didn’t hate her — that he felt merely a great sense of revulsion, of distaste. There was no joy in the life she wouldn’t miss — after the plan had worked.