Laura (Femmes Fatales) Page 14

I stood with my back to Shelby, looking at the shelf with all my favorite books. “He’s been very kind,” I said—“considering. I think he’s nice. You’d never think of a detective being like that.”

  I felt Shelby’s hands stretching toward me and I moved away. He was quiet. I knew, without turning, how his face would look.

  He picked up the two pills that Mark had left on the table. “Do you think you ought to take these, Laura?”

  I whirled around. “Great God, you don’t think he’s trying to give me poison!”

  “He ought to be hardboiled. You’d expect him to be tougher. I don’t like his trying to act like a gentleman.”

  “Oh, pooh!” I said.

  “You don’t see it. The man’s trying to make you like him so you’ll break down and confess. That’s what he’s been working for all along, a confession. Damned caddish, I’d say.”

  I sat down on the sofa and pounded my fists against a pillow. “I hate that word. Caddish! I’ve begged you a million times to quit using it.”

  Shelby said, “It’s a good English word.”

  “It’s old-fashioned. It’s out of date. People don’t talk about cads any more. It’s Victorian.”

  “A cad is a cad, whether the word is obsolete or not.”

  “Quit being so Southern. Quit being so righteous. You and your damn gallantry.” I was crying. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped off my jaw. My tan dress was all wet with tears.

  “You’re nervous, sweet,” Shelby said. “That damned cad has been working on you subtly, he’s been trying to wear you down.”

  “I told you,” I screamed, “that I wish you’d stop using that word.”

  “It’s a perfectly good English word,” he said.

  “You said that before. You’ve said it a million times.”

  “You’ll find it in Webster,” he said. “And in Funk and Wagnalls.”

  “I’m so tired,” I said. I rubbed my eyes with my fists because I’m never able to find a handkerchief in a crisis.

  “It’s a perfectly good English word,” Shelby said again.

  I jumped up, the pillow in my arms like a shield against him. “A fine one you are to talk about cads, Shelby Carpenter.”

  “I’ve been trying to protect you!”

  When he spoke like that, his voice deep with reproach, I felt as if I had hurt a helpless child. Shelby knew how his voice worked on me; he could color his voice with the precise shade of reproach so that I would hate the heartless bitch, Laura Hunt, and forgive his faults. He remembered as well as I the day we went duck hunting and he bragged and I said I despised him, and he won me again with the tones of his voices; he remembered the fight we had at the office party and the time he kept me waiting two hours in the Paramount lobby, and our terrible quarrel the night he gave me the gun. All of those quarrels rose in our minds now; there were almost two years of quarrels and reproach between us, and two years of love and forgiveness and the little jokes that neither could forget. I hated his voice for reminding me, and I was afraid because I had always been weak with a thirty-two-year-old baby.

  “I’ve been trying to protect you,” Shelby said.

  “Great God, Shelby, we’re right back where we started from. We’ve been saying the same thing over and over again since five o’clock this afternoon.”

  “You’re getting bitter,” he said, “terribly bitter, Laura. Of course, after what’s happened, one can’t completely blame you.”

  “Oh, go away,” I said. “Go home and let me sleep.”

  I took the two white pills and went into the bedroom. I slammed the door hard. After a while I heard Shelby leave. I went to the window. There were two men on the steps. After Shelby had gone a little way, one followed him. The other lit a cigarette. I saw the match flame and die in the misty darkness. The houses opposite mine are rich people’s private houses. Not one of my neighbors stays in town during the summer. There was only a cat, the thin yellow homeless cat that nuzzles against my legs when I come from work at night. The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement. On Friday night when Diane was killed, the street was quiet, too.

  Chapter 2

  Sleep he had said, try to get some sleep. Two pills weren’t enough. When I turned out the lights, the darkness whined around me. The old dead tenants came creeping up the stairs, their footsteps cautious on the tired boards. They sighed and whispered behind doors, they rattled the old latches, they plotted conspiracies. I saw Diane, too, in my aquamarine house coat; I saw her with dark hair flowing about her shoulders, running to answer the doorbell.

  The doorbell had rung, Shelby told me, and he stayed in the bedroom while she ran to answer it. As soon as she had opened the front door, he heard the shot. Then the door snapped shut. After a time that might have been thirty seconds or thirty years, Shelby said, he had left the bedroom. He tried to speak to her, his lips framed her name, but his voice was dead. The room was dark, the light came in from the street lamp in stripes through the Venetian blinds. He saw the pale silk of my robe spread about her on the floor, but he could not see her face. It seemed gone. When his blood had thawed, Shelby said, he had stopped to feel for the place where her heart should have been. His hand was paralyzed, he felt nothing, he knew she was dead. He went to the telephone, meaning to call the police. When Shelby told me about that part of it, he stretched out his hand as he stretched it toward the telephone, and then he pulled his hand back quickly just as he had done that night. If the police had known he was there in my apartment with Diane, they would have known, too, who had killed her, Shelby said.

  “That was your guilty conscience,” I told him. “Guilty because you were here. In my own house with her. You wanted to believe that, because you were ashamed.”

  “I was trying to protect you,” Shelby said.

  This was early in the evening, after Mark had gone off for dinner with Waldo, and before Mark came back with the cigarette case.

  Auntie Sue told me I was a fool when I bought that cigarette case. I am so gullible that I trust a detective, but Auntie Sue didn’t even trust Uncle Horace to make his will; she sat behind the curtains while he and the lawyer figured out the bequests. Auntie Sue said I’d always regret the cigarette case. I gave it to Shelby because he needed grandeur when he talked to prospective clients or had drinks with men he’d known at college. Shelby had his airs and graces, manner and a name that made him feel superior, but these were things that mattered in Covington, Kentucky, not in New York. Ten years in and out of precarious jobs hadn’t taught him that gestures and phrases were of less importance in our world than aggressiveness and self-interest; and that the gentlemanly arts were not nearly so useful as proficiency in double-dealing, bootlicking, and pushing yourself ahead of the other fellow.

  The tea was pale, pale green with one dark leaf curled in it, when I saw the cigarette case in Diane’s hand. I saw Diane’s pointed magenta nails curving over the edge of the gold case, but I could not look at her face. The tea had a delicate Chinese smell. I did not feel pain or anger, I felt giddy. I said to Diane, “Please, dear, I have a headache, do you mind if I leave now?” It was not like me to be calm. I tell the truth shrilly and then I am sorry. But this was deeper, so deep that I could only watch the leaf floating in the teacup.

  Shelby had given her the cigarette case so that he might feel rich and generous, too. Like a gigolo seeking revenge against a fat old dowager with a jet band binding the wattles under her chin. It was all clear then, as if the tea leaf had been my fortune in the cup, for I knew why Shelby and I had quarreled so that we could go on pretending to love. He not sure of himself; he still needed the help I could give him; but he hated himself for clinging to me, and hated me because I let him cling.

  They had been lovers since April eighteenth. I remember the date because it was Paul
Revere’s ride and Auntie Sue’s birthday. The date smells of cleaning fluid. We were in a taxi on the way to the Coq d’Or where Auntie Sue was having her birthday party. I wore my sixteen-button fawn gloves; they had just come from the cleaner and the smell was stronger than the odor of taxi-leather and tobacco and the Tabu with which I had scented my handkerchief and my hair. That was when Shelby told me about losing the cigarette case. He used the hurt voice and his remorse was so real that I begged him not to feel it too deeply. Shelby said I was a wonderful woman, tolerant and forgiving. Damned patronizing bitch, he must have been thinking as we sat in the taxi, holding hands.

  Lovers since April eighteenth. And this was almost the end of August. Diane and Shelby had been holding hands, too, and laughing behind my back.

  When I walked through the office after lunch, I wondered if all the faces knew and were hiding themselves from my humiliation. My friends said they could understand my having fallen in love impulsively with Shelby, but they did not see how I could go on caring. This would make me angry; I would say they judged unfairly because Shelby was too handsome. It was almost as if Shelby’s looks were a handicap, a sort of deformity that had to be protected.

  Usually I anger quickly. I flame and burn with shrill vehemence and suffer remorse at the spectacle of my petty female spleen. This time my fury had a new pattern. I can feel that frigid fury now as I remember how I counted the months, the weeks, the days since the eighteenth of April. I tried to remember when I had seen Diane alone and what she said to me; and I thought of the three of us together with Diane humbly acknowledging Shelby my lover; and I tried to count the evenings that I had spent alone or with other friends, giving Shelby to her on those evenings. How tolerant we were, how modern, how ridiculous and pitiful! But I had always told Shelby about dining with Waldo and he had never told me that he was seeing Diane.

  Desperate, my mother used to say, I’m desperate, when she locked herself in her bedroom with a sick headache. I always envied her; I wanted to grow up and be desperate too. On Friday afternoon, as I walked up and down my office, I whispered it over and over. Desperate, desperate, at last I’m desperate, I said, as if the word were consummation. I can see the office now, the desk and filing-case and a proof of a Lady Lilith color ad with Diane lying backward on a couch, head thrown back, breasts pointed upward like small hills. I feel, rather than smell, the arid, air-conditioned atmosphere, and I tense my right hand as if the letter-opener were still cutting a ridge across my palm. I was sick, I was desperate, I was afraid. I hid my face in my hands, my forehead against the wood of my desk.

  I telephoned Waldo and told him I had a headache.

  “Don’t be difficult, wench,” Waldo said. “Roberto has scoured the markets for our bachelor dinner.”

  “I’m desperate,” I said.

  Waldo laughed. “Put your headache off until tomorrow. The country is a good place for headaches, that’s all it’s fit for; have your headache among the beetles. What time shall I expect you, angel?”

  I knew that if I dined with Waldo, I should tell him about the cigarette case. He would have been glad to hear that I was done with Shelby, but he would have wrapped his satisfaction elegantly in sympathy. Waldo would never have said, I told you so, Laura, I told you at the start. Not Waldo. He would have opened his best champagne and, holding up his glass, would have said, “And now, Laura, you’ve grown up, let us drink to your coming of age.”

  No, thank you, no urbanity for me tonight, Waldo. I am drunk already.

  When Shelby came to my office at five o’clock, I rode down in the elevator with him, I drank two dry martinis with him, I let him put me into the cab and give Waldo’s address to the driver just as if I had never seen the cigarette case.

  Chapter 3

  On Saturday I thinned my sedum, trans-planted primroses, and started a new iris bed near the brook. On Sunday I moved the peony plants. They were heavy, the roots so long that I had to dig deep holes in the ground. I had to keep myself occupied with hard physical work; the work soothed me and emptied my mind of Friday’s terror.

  When the gardener came on Monday, he said that I had moved the peonies too early, they would surely die now. Twenty times that day I went to look at them. I watered them gently with thin streams of tepid water, but they drooped, and I felt ashamed before the victims of my impatience.

  Before the gardener left on Monday, I told him not to tell Shelby that I had killed the peony plants by moving them too early. Shelby would never have mourned the peonies, but he would have had cause to reproach me for doing a man’s work in the garden instead of waiting until he came. It was curious that I should say this to the gardener because I knew that Shelby would never dig and mow and water my garden again. I was still defiant of Shelby; I was trying to irritate him by absent treatment, and provoke imaginary argument so that I could hurt him with sharp answers. Challenging Shelby, I worked in my house, washing and polishing and scrubbing on my hands and knees. He always said that I shouldn’t do menial work, I could afford to hire servants; he could never know the fulfillment of working with your hands in your own house. My people were plain folk; the women went West with their men and none of them found gold. But Shelby came from “gentle” people; they had slaves to comb their hair and put on their shoes. A gentleman cannot see a lady work like a nigger; a gentleman opens the door and pulls out a lady’s chair and brings a whore into her bedroom.

  I saw then, working on my knees, the pattern our marriage would have taken, shoddy and deceitful, taut emotion woven with slack threads of pretense.

  The fault was mine more than Shelby’s. I had used him as women use men to complete the design of a full life, playing at love for the gratification of my vanity, wearing him proudly as a successful prostitute wears her silver foxes to tell the world she owns a man. Going on thirty and unmarried, I had become alarmed. Pretending to love him and playing the mother game, I bought him an extravagant cigarette case, fourteen-karat gold, as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity.

  And now that tragedy has wiped away all the glib excuses, I see that our love was as bare of real passion as the mating of two choice vegetables which are to be combined for the purpose of producing a profitable new item for the markets. It was like love in the movies, contrived and opportune. And now it was over.

  Two strangers sat at opposite ends of the couch. We tried to find words that had the same meaning for both of us. It was still Thursday evening, before dinner, after Mark and Waldo had left. We spoke softly because Bessie was in the kitchen.

  “This will all blow over in a few days,” Shelby said. “If we sit tight and match our stories properly. Who’ll know? That detective is an ass.”

  “Why must you keep calling him that detective? You know his name.”

  “Let’s not be bitter,” Shelby said. “It’ll only make it more difficult for us to go on.”

  “What makes you think I want to go on? I don’t hate you and I’m not bitter, but I couldn’t go on. Not now.”

  “I tell you, Laura, I only came because she begged me so. She begged me to come and say good-bye to her. She was in love with me; I didn’t care two hoots about her, honestly, but she threatened to do something desperate unless I came here on Friday night.”

  I turned my head away.

  “We’ve got to stick together now, Laura. We’re in this thing too deeply to fight each other. And I know you love me. If you hadn’t loved me, you couldn’t have come back here on Friday night and . . .”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” I said.

  “If you weren’t here on Friday night, if you are innocent, then how could you have known about the Bourbon bottle, how could you have responded so instinctively to the need to protect me?”

  “Must we go over it all again, Shelby? Again and again and again?”

  “You lied to protect me just as I lied to protect you.”


  It was all so dreary and so useless. Three Horses had been Shelby’s brand of Bourbon, he had been buying it for himself when he started coming to my house, and then I began buying it so he’d always find a drink when he came. But one day Waldo laughed because I kept such cheap whiskey on my shelves and named a better brand, and I tried to please Shelby with expensive Bourbon. His buying the bottle of Three Horses that night, like his giving Diane the cigarette case, was defiance, Shelby’s defiance of my patronage.

  Bessie announced dinner. We washed our hands, we sat at the table, we spread napkins in our laps, we touched water to our lips, we held knives and forks in our hands for Bessie’s sake. With her coming and going, we couldn’t talk. We sat behind steak and French fries, we dipped our spoons ceremoniously into the rum pudding which Bessie had made, good soul, to celebrate my return from death. After she had brought the coffee to the table before the fire and we had the length of the room between us and the kitchen door, Shelby asked where I had hidden the gun.

  “Gun!”

  “Don’t talk so loud!” He nodded toward the kitchen door. “My mother’s gun; why do you suppose I drove up there last night?”

  “Your mother’s gun is in the walnut chest, just where you saw me put it, Shelby, after we had the fight.”

  The fight had started because I refused the gun. I was not nearly so afraid of staying alone in my little house as of having a gun there. But Shelby had called me a coward and insisted upon my keeping it for protection, had laughed me into learning to use it.

  “The first fight or the second fight?” he asked.

  The second fight had been about his shooting rabbits. I had complained about their eating the iris bulbs and the gladiolus corms, and Shelby had shot a couple of them.

  “Why do you lie to me, darling? You know that I’ll stick with you to the end.”

  I picked up a cigarette. He hurried to light it. “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Why not?”