Marie hurriedly finished up so she could return downstairs and steal peeks at the attractive young couple. They didn’t notice her at first, so stealthy was she in her own silence, but the girl gave her a glance. The boy gave her a glance, and a second glance with a smile tossed in. Marie was beautiful—dark-haired, full-lipped, the lips ever sealed into a unit, it seemed, though she could speak in her difficult way when she occasionally chose. Large-breasted, small and slender. God, in His wise-guy’s wisdom, had given her all but the ability to hear. She would have deflated her breasts for that. But then, would Edwin have married her, had she been less attractive, though hearing? She doubted it, these days. Doubted it severely. Simply because his passion for her body was as strong now as it had been five years ago. He held onto her in his private collection for that reason alone.
Maybe he had collected her for that reason alone in the first place, though now he was better able to pare his motivation down to its reality, uncluttered by pretenses of love and affection. Yes—maybe he had never loved her. Watching the couple leave the store, Marie had tears in her eyes. No, he loved me, part of her countered desperately, almost panicking at the thought. But he’s grown more and more bitter with life. He’s close to me, and that’s why he can take it out on me.
Did she believe that? She certainly wanted to. But in recent months, she had come to feel that she had always been just another blue flamingo in Edwin’s collection. A glorified, extra realistic blow-up doll you didn’t need to talk to, who couldn’t voice complaint. A beautiful mannequin, to be put away with the rest of the attic treasures when not in use.
Deaf friends Marie had known in school, but now lost track of, had been feisty, taught to be independent and bold. But in others, the world crushed that, like a tank over a foot soldier. Friday, for instance, Marie had driven to the market to do the weekly grocery shopping. On the way to and from, impatient drivers cut her off, rode her tail, swore at her and thumped their wheels in frustration at her careful driving. In the store, she had to ask the man at the deli counter a question three times in order to read his lips, and she had read at last, “What are you, stupid?” A woman banged Marie’s hip with her cart without apology. Another, whose cart blocked the way, wouldn’t move it when Marie asked, forcing her to move the woman’s cart herself, in a rare act of boldness. Another woman had glared and actually pulled her child away when Marie patted its head. It was all just little things. But so many, and every day. This was common life. They could do this, though they would hate to have it done to them. They simply did not empathize with one-another, so obsessed were they with their own destinations and needs and desires.
Handicaps didn’t bring out the best in other people, either, she had found…but the worst. They activated the pecking order syndrome. The abolition of the weak, the mutant. They couldn’t empathize with that, because they didn’t want to imagine themselves that way. Acknowledge their frailty and mortality. So it was now, also, with the handicap of age. Old things were hip, but old people weren’t. The mutely strutting models on MTV were desirable objects, but not the silent reality. Edwin had once told Marie, when drunk and lofty-mouthed, that Renoir nudes didn’t sweat, didn’t have periods. Marie remembered that now and cemented her conviction once and for all.
Which hurt, because, either out of programmed masochism or simply the need to feel important to at least one person in this world, Marie still loved him.
* * *
It had taken Marie a while to figure out why she had such empathy for the stuffed alligator. Her feelings for the toys and knickknacks made more sense. Maybe because it had once been truly alive. And a baby, too. But there was a stuffed iguana, gray, its mouth filled with red-painted plaster, and some trophy heads of higher animals. It had to be that the thing was so shocking to see, its condition so cruelly unnatural and humiliating.
The alligator was positioned so as to stand on its hind legs and tail, a foot tall that way. In its outstretched arms, like Oliver Twist, it proffered a wooden bowl, presumably as a change holder. Maybe candy, depending on its artist’s perversity. Its hands were fastened to the bowl with nails; reptilian stigmata, a Lizard King of Kings. In its mouth it clamped a red light bulb. It was a table lamp. It was the bizarre and grotesque lengths someone had gone to that so disgusted Marie, and made her hurt for the thing. Like a shrunken head, or a lamp shade made from the skin of a Jew. A blasphemous work of art.
Staring at it, she turned the bulb on. Red light painted her face, and made reflected red pupils in the creature’s ebon eyes. She fantasized about burying the tortured creature.
Looking up, she was startled to see Edwin there smiling at her derisively. He was late back from the auction, and he’d been drinking already. “I’ll cry the day I have to part with that beauty,” he told her, though not in sign language. “I should just take it upstairs.”
“It’s horrible and sick,” Marie signed to him. She hadn’t wanted to use the intimate awkwardness of her voice with him for weeks now.
“I saw you mooning over it. Don’t get disgusted at me; I didn’t kill the thing.” Edwin joined Mrs. Morris behind the counter. “I’ve loved that thing since I saw it,” he told the older woman. “Freaky.”
“You like the freaky, Ed,” she replied distractedly, otherwise occupied. Though she didn’t exaggerate her mouth’s movements, Marie could read her lips.
“When I was young you could still go to a carnival and see those deformed babies in bottles they called pickled punks, before somebody made a stink about transporting dead bodies over state lines. If I could find any of them today I’d buy them and put them upstairs for sure. How’s that for freaky?”
“Yuck.”
“Marie.” He looked up at her. “I’m wet; go make me a cup of coffee, will ya?” He was good-naturedly ugly from drinking and from coming back empty-handed from the hunt.
Marie didn’t doubt at this moment that Edwin would also buy a shrunken head or a lamp shade of human skin if he could find them. She shut off the bulb and moved to the stairs.
Freaky, her mind echoed.
* * *
The smell of sex always seemed to repulse Edwin afterwards, so he went to take one of his long, languid baths with a paperback and a scotch Marie brought to him. She left him and went down into the store, to sit by the shelf of old books and read in her own manner…maybe to fill the void of emptiness inside her with something at least dustily alive.
She chose a book she had browsed through repeatedly recently, a volume of poetry by Thomas Hardy. There was a poem she had read last time, and she looked for it again. As she flipped through, she glanced up at the alligator standing on the glass counter beside her. She felt the strange desire to change the red bulb to a normal one, and have the creature light her reading for her. An intimacy rather than an exploitation. She didn’t do it. She had found the poem: The Mongrel.
The rain droned on outside as Marie read. Mrs. Morris had long since gone home, to discover the bodies tomorrow upon her return.
The poem told the story of a man who could no longer afford to keep his dog, and so he threw a stick into the water to trick it into drowning itself. The dog’s naive trust and love showed in its eyes as it bravely tried to paddle back to shore, the stick in its mouth. Finally it succumbed, however, sucked under by a strong current…but in dying, and realizing the treachery of its master in the face of its own unswerving loyalty, a look of contempt for the whole human race came into its eyes. Like a curse, said Hardy.
Marie empathized with the dog.
She shut the book. The salt in her tears burned the vulnerable surfaces of her eyes. She was moments from being swept under. Now she allowed herself to feel the hatred she had been repressing.
It felt like a curse.
Marie rested a hand on her thigh. In Maine as a child, when she was still considered retarded rather than deaf, a baby-sitter had purposely ground her heel into the top of that hand while Marie was playing on the floor…
And the thigh under her hand—Edwin had once kissed it, run his tongue along it. Well, he still did. But he had also crushed that thigh in his hand recently while they were in the car, so upset had he become at her driving. He hadn’t hit her—yet. Marie felt that first blow moving toward her through time. The bruises from his grip had taken days to fade…
Marie rose from the chair, slid the book back into the shelf. At a table close by she stood and gazed down at the unique items spread there. A tarnished pocket watch. Costume jewelry. Several ivory-handled straight razors, the blades old and brittle but still frighteningly sharp…
She sat back down beside the glass counter where the alligator stood, an array of African tribal masks hanging above it like an audience of spirits. Marie didn’t mind their company. They were a comfort, in fact. They could lead her away, if they wanted.
She rolled up the sleeves of her bathrobe, hating the smell of sex on her now also, and anxious to escape it. She wanted to drown like the dog, in salt tears. In blood. She cursed the frail impermanence of humankind, which caused so much greedy fear. She would have plenty of time to let this happen; Edwin would remain in the tub for two hours or more, soaking himself outside and in. She reached out to the alligator…somewhat guiltily…and flicked on its light so as to wash out the vivid color when it came—but it was intimacy, not exploitation.
* * *
Mrs. Morris found Marie, and the horror of it made her scream. Pale as she was, Marie looked like a mannequin propped in her chair. Mrs. Morris cried out for Edwin, and bolted upstairs to wake him…
In the open doorway of the bathroom, Mrs. Morris screamed a second time.
It was a perverse way to kill a man, the police said when they came. As perverse in imagination as the creation of that lamp in the first place.
First they found a wooden bowl in the threshold of the bathroom. Then in the tub they observed the male corpse. He had died by electrocution, the cord of the lamp plugged into an outlet close at hand. But rather than simply toss the alligator lamp in there with him, the woman had gone to the trouble of stabbing the nails which protruded from the creature’s palms into the sides of her husband’s neck, so that the creature appeared to be strangling him.
But the sequence of all this was confusing. There was no great splashing of blood in the bathroom, so she had to have slit her wrists after the electrocution. How, then, or when, had the woman managed that other bizarre flourish…wetting the hind feet of the alligator in her blood, and tracking its prints up two flights of stairs and on into the bathroom?
“Freaky,” the policemen said, in disgust of her.