I got out the electric bass and played along with Underwood. But I noticed a baleful look from him, something he’d never revealed before. So I quit and turned off the amplifier. I took a hard drink of Scotch in a cup and opened a closet in my study, got in, shut the door, and sat down on all my old school papers and newspaper notices in the cardboard boxes in the corner.
Here was me and the pitch dark, the odor of old paper and some of my outdoor clothes.
How have I offended? I asked. How do I cause depression and edginess? How have I perhaps changed for the bad, as old Mrs. Craft hinted?
By my cigarette lighter I read a few of the newspaper notices on me and my work. I looked at my tough moral face, the spectacles that put me at a sort of intellectual remove, the sensual mouth to balance it, abetted by the curls of my auburn hair. In fact, no man I knew looked nearly anything like me. My wife told me that when we first met at Vanderbilt my looks pure and simple were what attracted her to me. Yet I was not vain. She was a brown-haired comely girl, in looks like many other brown-haired comely girls, and I loved her for her strong cheerful averageness. Salt of the earth. A few minor talents. Sturdy womb for our two children.
It was not her. It was me!
What have I done? I asked myself.
Then I heard heels on the stairs of my study. A pair was coming down, man and woman. They walked into the study and were silent for a while. Then I heard the sucking and the groans. For three or four minutes they must have kissed. Then:
“It’s not any good here.”
“I know. I feel it. Even sex wouldn’t be any good here.”
“You notice how all this good liquor tastes like iodine?”
They moaned and smacked a few more minutes. Then the man said, “Let’s get out of here.”
When they went away, I let myself out of the closet. Underwood was standing at my desk. He looked at me crawling out of the closet. I had nothing to say. Neither did he for a while.
Then he said, “I guess I better not come over anymore.”
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“The crazy. . or off chick that lives upstairs that always comes down and leans on the piano about midnight every night? She’s good-looking, but she sets me off. I get the creeps.”
“Did she come down again? I guess it’s the piano. You ought to be flattered. Most of the time she sits up there in her chair reading.”
“Somebody said it was your sister. I don’t know. She looks like you. Got the same curly auburn hair. It’s like you with tits, if you think about it.”
“Well, of course it is my sister. For a while we had a reason for not telling that around. Trust me.”
“I trust you. But she makes my hair cold.”
“You loved all types back in the time of the beatniks. I always thought of you as a large-hearted person.”
“Something goes cold when she talks. I can’t get with the thing she’s after. For a while I thought she was far-out, some kind of philosopheress. But nothing hangs in in what she says.”
“She can have her moments. Don’t you think she has a certain charm?”
“No doubt on that, with her lungs dripping over her gown. But when she talks, well. .” He closed his eyes in an unsatisfactory dreaming sort of trance.
“Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the charm?” I demanded.
“Whatever, it don’t sweeten me,” he said, setting down his glass.
He went out the study door.
There, leaning on the piano, in her perfect cobalt gown, was Patricia. She was waiting for Underwood. Near her, as I have intimated, I sometimes have no sense of my own petty mobility from one place to another. I appear, I hover, I turn. Her lush curls burned slowly round and round in the fire of the candle of the mantel. A blaze of silver came from her throatpiece, a lash of gemmy light bounced from her earrings.
Not a soul was in the room with her.
“Underwood’s left,” I said.
“Music gone?” she said, holding out her hand and clutching her fingers.
“It would be cooler upstairs with your little window unit. You could read. What were you reading tonight?”
“Heidi. Such a sugar,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Much sugar. The old uncle.”
“Mountain,” she said.
By this time only the priest was left. He was having an almost rabidly sympathetic conversation with my wife. The man was flushed out and well drunk, a ship’s captain crying his full speed ahead in the stern house of a boat rotting to pieces.
I looked over the long table of uneaten fish tasties. The heat had worked on them a couple more hours now and had brought them up to a really unacceptable sort of presence.
“Well. Ho ho. Look at all the stuff. All the cost,” I said.
“Just garbage God knows who, namely me, has to haul off and bury,” said my wife.
“Ah, no madam. I’ll see to all. Trust me. I’m made for it,” swore the priest.
With that he began circling the table, grabbing up the fish dainties and cramming them in his pockets, coat and pants, wadding them into his hat. He spun by me with a high tilt of adieu. But then he bumped into Patricia, who had come in, and spilled some of the muck in his hat on the front of her gown. She didn’t move. Then she looked downward into her bosom to the grease and fish flesh that smeared her gown.
“Fishies,” she said.
“What a blight I am! On this one, on this innocent belle! Strike me down!”
The priest wanted to touch her and clean her off, but could not. His hands trembled before the oil and flakes of fish on her stomach. He uttered a groan and ran from the house.
After he’d gone, the three of us stood there, offering no movement or special expression.
“You ought to go up and clean yourself,” Carolyn said to Patricia.
Patricia put her foot on the first stair and looked at me with an appeal. But then she went rapidly up and we could hear her air-conditioner going when she opened her door and then nothing when she closed it.
We straightened up awhile, but not very thoroughly. Then we got in bed.
“You’ve ruined my life,” said my wife. “This party showed it.”
“What’s wrong? What do you mean?”
“Stop it. What’s to pretend? Your twin goddamned sister. Your wonderful spiritual feeble-minded sister.”
“Not! Not! It’s just not our language she speaks! Don’t say that!”
“You taught her all the goddamned English she knows. Oh, when you explained, when she first came, that she was just silent, different! We went through all that. Then we’ve had her out of pity. . ”
“She doesn’t need anybody’s pity! Shut your mouth!”
There was a long hot silence. Above us we heard rocking sounds.
My wife hissed: “She’s never even cleaned herself up.”
“I’ll see.”
“Oh, yes, you’ll see! Don’t bother to wake me when you come back.”
Carolyn had drunk a lot. I went to brush my teeth and when I came back out she was snoring.
I rose on the stairs.
The cool in Patricia’s room had surpassed what is comfortable. It was almost frigid, and the unit was still heaving more cold into the room. She sat in the rocking chair reading her book. The soiled gown was still on her. She raised her hand as I passed her to turn down the air-conditioning, and I held her hand, coming back to stare over her shoulder.
There was a picture of Heidi and her goat upside down.
“Let’s get you in your little tub,” I said.