“From her actions, Bart. From her attitude lately.”
“And you want to charge mental cruelty, is that it?”
“No, you don’t understand at all.” Marcy sighed.
“I’ll say I don’t. But I might remind you, John, that even in these enlightened times you need stronger grounds for divorce than a simple statement that your wife loves you and you’re sure of it.”
John said, “Don’t clown with me, I’m serious. I tell you I want to divorce Angela.”
“I’m not clowning. But you’ve got to have grounds. Angela’s got plenty — but you haven’t. Understand?” Bartley didn’t wait for an answer. He went on, “Exactly when did you decide you had to divorce Angela? Maybe that’ll help.”
Resignedly John said, “Last night. At the dinner table.”
“What happened?”
“We had a power failure in our neighborhood. The lights went out.”
“Well, well.” Bartley lit a cigarette and examined his client’s glum face with interest. “That certainly explains a lot.”
“It did to me,” John said, “even if you think it’s some sort of joke.”
Exasperated, the lawyer leaned back in his swivel chair. “Nothing about divorce is some sort of joke, as you call it,” he snapped. “So be serious about this, John! Tell me about the lights going out, if you think it’s important.”
“It’s important, all right. The lights were out for only a couple of minutes, but during that brief period of total darkness I suddenly found out Angela’s true feelings for me, Bart.” John was dragging out the words reluctantly. “I’m being honest with you.”
“Good,” Bartley said. “So in the dark you had this great revelation of Angela’s true feelings. What did she do — try to seduce you, or what?”
Marcy shook his head. “I’m sorry to make you pry it out of me like this, Bart,” he apologized. “But I was pretty surprised at the time, and I’m not over my confusion yet.”
“Obviously. But let’s have it. You’re stalling.”
“I suppose I am,” Marcy admitted. He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ve got to get the picture. Angela had just brought in our soup. We were ready to begin eating. And it was at that instant, with our soup plates on the table before us, that the lights went out.”
“All right. What then?”
“Then,” Marcy said, “then I saw that Angela was trying to kill me.”
“Kill you!” Bartley dropped his cigarette on the rug and swore as he stamped it out.
“That’s what I said. Kill me. Poison me. She had poisoned my soup.”
Bartley stared at him, shaking his head. “But in the dark—” he began.
“If the lights hadn’t gone out, I’d be dead. I’d have eaten that damned soup and gone where no waitress or chorus girl could ever give me the come-on again.” For the first time Marcy smiled. “My soup was loaded with yellow phosphorus.”
“How did you know?”
“High school chemistry. When the lights went out, my soup glowed in the dark like a plate of incandescent paint.”
After a dazed moment Bartley managed to whisper, “Attempted murder.”
“Is that grounds for divorce?”
“Should be enough for a starter,” Bartley said, swallowing.
“Angela, poor darling, tried to distract my attention from the soup,” John went on. “She got candles lit as soon as she could, to hide the soup’s phosphorescence.” He paused. Then he said, “Understand, Bart, I’m telling this to nobody but you. If you go to Angela and tell her you know all about her attempt to murder me last night, I think that out of shame she’ll consent to divorce me for the old-fashioned reasons. But I don’t want the police to hear a word about this.”
“Why not?” asked the lawyer. “After all, attempted murder—”
“Because Angela still loves me, as I told you — enough to want to kill me, if that’s the only way she can keep me straight. And in my own stupid way I still love her — now more than ever, perhaps. I don’t want the police hounding her.”
Bartley hunched his shoulders in pure bafflement. He said, “If you and Angela still love each other so much, why not stay together? Why not go on through life hand in hand, as the poet says? Why a divorce?”
John Marcy stood up. He gave the lawyer a crooked grin. “Everybody knows I’m a heel,” he said. “But that’s a little different from being a fool. There might not be a power failure the next time.”
Inside Out
by Barry N. Malzberg
I’ve got to start stacking the corpses in the bedroom now.
The living room, alas, is all filled. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Still, it’s a shock to realize that the day of inevitability has come. There is simply no room any more. Floor to ceiling in four rows the bodies are stacked except for the little space in the corner I’ve left for my chair and footrest. Even the television set is gone. It was hard to sacrifice the television set but business is business. I put it at the foot of my bed, dreading the time when I’d have to start putting the bodies where I slept. But I must face up to reality and the living room is finished. Fini. Kaput. Used up. Cheerlessly I accept my fate. If I am to go on murdering I will have to bring the bodies, as the abbess said to the bishop, into the boudoir. And I am, of course, going to go on murdering.
When I do away with Brown the superintendent tonight, therefore, his corpse will go in the far corner beside the dresser. Virgin territory to be exploited — not that there is any sexual undertone to this matter. None whatsoever. It is what it is. It is not a metaphor. It is not a symbol. It is the pure sad business of murder.
Brown rolls the emptied garbage cans across the lobby, filling my rooms with a sound from hell. He also refuses to clean the steps more than once a week. Time and again I have asked him to desist from the one and do the other, but the man is obdurate. He pretends not to know English. He pretends he doesn’t hear me. He pretends he has other duties. This morning I saw four disgusting orange peels on the third-floor landing, already turning brown. There is no way that a man of my disposition can deal with this any more, but I’m not able to move out. For one thing, what would I do with my bodies? It would be such a job to transport them all.
Therefore Brown, or what is left of him, will repose in the bedroom tonight. Au boudoir.
The murders are Active, of course. I am not actually a mass murderer. These are imaginary murders, imagined corpses that have slowly filled these quarters since I began my difficult adjustment about a year ago. Abusive peddlers, disgusting street persons, noxious fellow employees in the Division. In my mind I act out intricate murders, in my body I pantomime the matter of conveying the corpses here, in my heart all of the dead stay here with me, mild in their state. It is a fantasy that enables me to go on with this disgusting urban existence; if I could not banish those who offend me I would be unable to go on. It is of course a perilous coupling, this fantasy, since I might plunge over the fine line someday and actually believe I’ve done away with these people, but it is the only way I can continue in circumstantial balance.
Giving the fantasy credence, however, demands discipline and a good deal of scut work. It is with regret that I have given up all of my living room except for the chair and footrest, but also out of simple respect for will. If I were not to make reasonable sacrifices in order to propitiate this accord it would be meaningless. One cannot play the violin well without years of painful work with wrists and hands acquiring technique. One cannot be a proper employee of the Division without studying its dismal and boring procedures. One cannot be an imaginary mass murderer without taking responsibility for the imaginary bodies.