He didn't know why he was going on; in some vague way he supposed it might set her at ease if he did. But now, in the light from the hall and the dimmer light from the wrought-iron yard lamp, he saw the bright track of a single tear running from her right eye almost to the corner of her mouth. And the arc below her left eye glimmered. As he watched, his words tangling in each other and coming to a confused stop, she blinked twice, rapidly, and the tear overflowed. A second bright track appeared on her left cheek.
'Go away,' she said. 'Just go away, Billy, all right? Don't ask questions. I don't want to answer them.'
Halleck looked at her, and saw a certain implacability in her eyes, just below the swimming tears. She had no intention of telling him where Cary was. And on an impulse he didn't understand either then or later, with absolutely no forethought or idea of gain, he pulled down the zipper of his jacket and held it open, as if flashing her. He heard her gasp of surprise.
'Look at me, Leda,' he said. 'I've lost seventy pounds. Do you hear me? Seventy pounds!'
'That doesn't have anything to do with me!' she cried in a low, harsh voice. Her complexion had gone a sick clay color; spots of rouge stood out on her face like the spots of color on a clown's cheeks. Her eyes looked raw. Her lips had drawn back from her perfectly capped teeth in a terrorized snarl.
'No, but I need to talk to Cary,' Halleck persisted. He came up the first step of the porch, still holding his jacket open. And I do, he thought. I wasn't sure before, but I am now. 'Please tell me where he is, Leda. Is he here?'
Her reply was a question, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. He groped for the porch rail with one numb hand.
'Was it the Gypsies, Billy?'
At last he was able to pull breath into his locked lungs. It came in a soft whoop.
'Where is he, Leda?'
'Answer my question first. Was it the Gypsies?'
Now that it was here – a chance to actually say it out loud -he found he had to struggle to do so. He swallowed -swallowed hard – and nodded. 'Yes. I think so. A curse. Something like a curse.', He paused. 'No, not something like. That's bullshit equivocation. I think I've had a Gypsy curse laid on me.'
He waited for her to shriek derisive laughter – he had heard that reaction so often in his dreams and in his conjectures – but her shoulders only slumped and her head bowed. She was such a picture of dejection and sorrow that in spite of his fresh terror, Halleck felt poignant, almost painful empathy for her – her confusion and her terror. He climbed the second and third porch steps, touched her arm gently … and was shocked by the bright hate on her face when she raised her head. He stepped back suddenly, blinking … and then had to grab for the porch railing to keep from tumbling off the steps and landing on his pratt. Her expression was a perfect reflection of the way he had momentarily felt about Heidi the other night. That such an expression should be directed against him he found both inexplicable and frightening.
'It's your fault!' she hissed at him. 'All your fault! Why did you have to hit that stupid Gypsy cunt with your car? It's all your fault!'
He looked at her, incapable of speaking. Cunt? He thought confusedly. Did I hear Leda Rossington say 'cunt'? Who would have believed she even knew such a word? His second thought was: You've got it all wrong, Leda, it was Heidi, not me … and she's just great. In the pink. Feeling her oats. Hitting on all cylinders. Kicking up dickens. Taking …
Then Leda's face changed: she looked at Halleck with a calmly polite expressionlessness.
'Come in,' she said.
She brought him the martini he'd asked for in an oversize glass -two olives and two tiny onions were impaled on the swizzle stick, which was a tiny gold-plated sword. Or maybe it was solid gold. The martini was very strong, which Halleck did not mind at all … although he knew from the drinking he'd done over the last three weeks that he'd be on his ass unless he went slow; his capacity for booze had shrunk along with his weight.
Still, he took a big gulp to start with and closed his eyes with gratitude as the booze exploded warmth out from his stomach. Gin, wonderful high-calorie gin, he thought.
'He is in Minnesota,' she said dully, sitting down with her own martini. It was, if anything, bigger than the one she had given to Billy. 'But not visiting relatives. He's at the Mayo Clinic.'
'The Mayo -'
'He's convinced it's cancer,' she went on. 'Mike Houston couldn't find anything wrong, and neither could the dermatologists he went to in the city, but he's still convinced it's cancer. Do you know that he thought it was herpes at first? He thought I'd caught herpes from someone.'
Billy looked down, embarrassed, but he needn't have done so. Leda was looking over his right shoulder, as if reciting her tale to the wall. She took frequent birdlike sips at her drink. Its level sank slowly but steadily.
'I laughed at him when he finally brought it out. I laughed and said, “Cary, if you think that is herpes, then you know less about venereal diseases than I do about thermodynamics.” I shouldn't have laughed, but it was a way to … to relieve the pressure, you know. The pressure and the anxiety. Anxiety? The terror.'
'Mike Houston gave him creams that didn't work, and the dermatologists gave him creams that didn't work, and then they gave him shots that didn't work. I was the one that remembered the old Gypsy, the one with the half-eaten nose, and the way he came out of the crowd at the flea market in Raintree the weekend after your hearing, Billy. He came out of the crowd and touched him … he touched Cary. He put his hand on Cary's face and said something. I asked Cary then, and I asked him later, after it had begun to spread, and he wouldn't tell me. He just shook his head.'
Halleck took a second gulp of his drink just as Leda set her glass, empty, on the table beside her.
'Skin cancer,' she said. 'He's convinced that's what it is because skin cancer can be cured ninety percent of the time. I know the way his mind works – it would be funny if I didn't, wouldn't it, after living with him for twenty-five years, watching him sit on the bench and make real-estate deals and drink and make real-estate deals and chase other men's wives and make real-estate deals and … Oh, shit, I sit here and wonder what I would say at his funeral if someone gave me a dose of Pentothal an hour before the services. I guess it would come out something like – He bought a lot of Connecticut land which is now shopping centers and snapped a lot of bras and drank a lot of Wild Turkey and left me a rich widow and I lived with him through the best years of my life and I've had more fucking Blackglama mink coats than I ever had orgasms, so let's all get out of here and go to a roadhouse somewhere and dance and after a while maybe somebody will get drunk enough to forget I've had my fucking chin tied up behind my fucking ears three fucking times, twice in fucking Mexico City and once in fucking Germany and snap my fucking bra." Oh, fuck it. Why am I telling you all this?'
'The only things men like you understand are humping, plea-bargaining, and how to bet on pro-football games.'
She was crying again. Billy Halleck, who now understood the drink she had now almost finished was far from her first of the evening, shifted uncomfortably in his chair and took a big gulp of his own, drink. It banged into his stomach with untrustworthy warmth.
'He's convinced it's skin cancer because he can't let himself believe in anything as ridiculously old-world, as superstitious, as penny-dreadful-novel as Gypsy curses. But I saw something deep down in his eyes, Billy. I saw it a lot over the last month or so. Especially at night. A little more clearly every night. I think that's one of the reasons he left, you know. Because he saw me seeing it.
'Refill?'
Billy shook his head numbly and watched her go to the bar and mix herself a fresh martini. She made extremely simple martinis, he saw; you simply filled a glass with gin and tumbled in a couple of olives. They left twin trails of bubbles as they sank to the bottom. Even from where he was sitting, all the way across the room, he could smell the gin.