20
The room was a still life. It might have been something painted on a canvas, that was then stood upright to dry; life-size, identical to life in every shading and every trifling detail, yet an artful simulation and not the original itself.
A window haloed by setting sunlight, as if there were a brush fire burning just outside of it, kindling, with its glare, the ceiling and the opposite wall. The carpeting on the floor undulant and ridged in places, as if misplaced by someone's lurching footsteps, or even an actual bodily fall or two, and then allowed to remain that way thereafter. A dark stain, crab-shaped, marring it in one spot, as if a considerable quantity of some heavy-bodied liquid had been overturned upon it.
Dank bed, that had once made a bridegroom blush; that would have made any fastidious person blush now, looking as if it had been untended for days. Graying linen receding from its skeleton on one side, overhanging it to trail the floor on the other. A single shoe, man's shoe, abandoned there beside it; as though the original impulse that had caused it to be removed, or else had caused its mate to be donned, had ebbed and faded before it could be carried to completion.
Forget-me-nots on pink wallpaper; wallpaper that had come from New York, wallpaper that had been asked for in a letter; "not too pink." There was a place where the plaster backing showed through in rabid scars; as if someone had taken a pair of shears and gouged at them in a rage, trying to obliterate as many as possible.
In the center of the still life a table. And on the table three immobile things. A reeking tumbler, mucous with endless refilling, and a bottle of brandy, and an inert head, crown-side up, matted hair bristling from it. Its nerveless body on an off-balance chair at tableside, one hand gripping the neck of the bottle in relentless possessiveness.
A tap at the door, but with no accompanying sound of approach, as though someone had been standing there for a long time, listening, trying to gain courage.
No answer, nothing moved.
Again a tap. A voice added to it this time.
"Mr. Lou. Mr. Lou, turn the key."
No answer. The head rolled a little, exposing a jawline pricked with bluish hair follicles.
Once more a tap.
"Mr. Lou, turn the key. It's been two days now."
The head broke contact with the table top, elevated itself a little, eyes still closed. "What are days ?" it said blurredly. "I've forgotten. Oh--those things that come between the nights. Those empty things."
The knob on the door turned sterilely. "Lemme in. Lemme just fraishen up your bed."
"It's just for me alone now. Let it be."
"Don't you want a light, at least? It getting dark. Lemme change the lamp in there for you."
"What can it show me? What's there to see? There's only me in here now. Me, and--"
He tilted the brandy bottle over the tumbler. Nothing came out. He held it perpendicular. Nothing still.
He rose from his chair, swung the bottle back to launch it at the wall. Then he stayed his arm, lowered it, shuffled to the door on one shoe, turned the key at last.
He thrust the bottle at her.
"Get me another of these," he barked. "That's all I want. That's the best the world can do for me now. I don't want your lamps and your broths and your tidying of beds."
But she was brave in the cause of housekeeping cleanliness, this old, spare, colored woman. She sidled in past him before he could stop her, put down the fresh lamp beside the one that had exhausted its fuel, in a moment was pulling and tucking at the bedraggled bed linen, casting an occasional furtive glance toward him, to see if he meant to stop her or not.
She finished, made haste to get out of the room again, coursing the long way around, by the wall, in order not to come too close to him. The door safely in her hand again, she turned and looked at him, where he stood, bottle neck riveted to hand.
And he looked at her.
Suddenly a tremor of unutterable longing seemed to course through him. His rasping bitter voice of a moment ago became gentle. He put out his hand toward her, as if pleading with her to stay, now, to listen to him speak of her, the absent. To speak of her with him.
"Do you remember how she used to sit there cleaning her nails, with a stick tipped with cotton? I can see her now," he said brokenly. "And then she would hold her fingers up, like this, all spread out, and quirk her head, to one side and to the other, looking at them to see if they would do."
Aunt Sarah didn't answer.
"Do you remember her in that green dress, with stripes of lavender? I can see her now, with the sunlight coming from behind her, breeze stirring her gown, standing there on the Canal Street dock. A little wispy parasol open over her."
Aunt Sarah made no reply.
"Do you remember that way she had, of turning in the doorway, each time she was about to leave, and bending her fingers backward, as if she were calling you to her, and saying 'Ta ta!'?"
The old woman's taciturnity burst its floodgates at last, as if she were unable to endure hearing any more. The whites of her eyes dilated righteously and her withered lips drew back from her teeth. She flung up her hand at him, as if enjoining him to silence.
"God must have been angry with you the day He first let you look into that woman's face!"
He stumbled over to the wall, pressed his face against it, arms straight up over his head as if he were trying to claw his way upward toward the ceiling. His voice seemed to come from his stomach, through rolling drums of smothered agony--that were the weeping of a grown man.
"I want her back again. I want her back. I'll never rest until I find her."
"What you want her back again for?" she demanded.
He turned slowly.
"To kill her," he said through his clenched teeth.
He pushed away from the wall, and lurched soddenly to the bed. He overturned an edge of the mattress, and reached below it, and drew something out. Then he slowly raised it, held it in strangulated grip to show her; a bone-handled, steel-barreled pistol.
"With this," he whispered.
21
The audience was streaming out of the Tivoli Theatre, on Royal Street. Gas flames in the jets on the foyer walls and in the ceiling overhead flickered fitfully with the swirl of its crowded passage. The play had been most enjoyable, an adaptation from the French called Papa's Little Mischief, and every animated conversation bore evidence to that.
Once on the sidewalk, the solid mass of people began to disintegrate: the balcony-sitters to walk off in varying directions, the boxholders and orchestra occupants to clamber by twos, and sometimes fours, into successive carriages as they drew up in turn before the theatre entrance, summoned by the colored doorman.
The man lurking back from sight against the shadowy wall, where the brightness failed to reach, was unnoticed, though many passed close enough to touch him.
The crowd drained off at last. The brightness dimmed, as an attendant began to put out the gaslights one by one, with a long, upward-reaching stick that turned their keys.
Only a few laggards were left now, still awaiting their turn at carriage stop. There was no haste, and politeness and deference were the rule.
"After you."
"No, after you, sir. Yours is the next."
And then at last one final couple remain, and are about to enter their carriage. The woman short, and in a lace head-scarf that, drawn close against the insalubrious night air, effectively mists her head and mouth and chin.
Her escort leaves her side for a moment, to see what the delay is in locating their carriage, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, a man is beside her, peering at her closely. She turns her head away, draws the scarf even closer, and edges a step or two aside in trepidation.
He is bending forward now, craning openly, so that he is all but crouched under her lace-blurred face, staring intently up into it..