Now.
There was no note. She could not bear to think of telling him. He would find her. She’d be nude and soiled with the seed of another man. The autopsy would show it. Then he’d know without her having to verbalize it or write it down. He’d know.
George. George.
The basic fear is that of death.
“Once,” he’d said, “you had another fear, the fear of having your chastity taken by force. Since that is no longer possible, your fear must be the basic fear of death.”
But he was wrong. She welcomed death. It crooked a bony finger at her and grinned in welcome. It was cold, blued steel in her mouth, the sharp, hard edges of the trigger on her toe. For she had ruined her life. In all her life she’d never had anyone to love her for herself, had never had anyone to love. Then George had come and it had been incredibly beautiful. Her love for George and his for her had conquered. Together, they’d made her almost human, had killed the darkness in her. No. It hadn’t been killed. It had merely retreated, to creep up on her in a different guise.
“Sorry,” the meter reader had said, halting in mid-stride as he came around the house and, his head level with the balcony, looked up to see a woman in a bikini lying face down on the chaise longue. She had loosened the tie-top. Her breasts were resting on the small scrap of cloth, but the bulging sides were exposed to the sun and to his view. She’d pushed the tiny bottom down until it was a mere string crossing under her buttocks.
“I didn’t know anyone was here,” the meter reader said, backing off.
“Just me,” the girl said, sitting up, holding the halter loosely in front of her breasts, and smiling.
What had happened then was so incredible that it halted her, froze her hand on the shotgun, her mind remembering and being astounded. She had always tried to know herself. She had taken several psychology courses in her search for herself. Now she found that her curiosity was not dead. Death, waiting, folded his arms patiently. He had the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, she questioned the afternoon’s events. Why had they happened?
She had been at one with the world. She was a living entity merged into the whole. She dozed in the sun, her skin oiled. She felt lazy and comfortable. She felt as if she could sleep forever and not dream, and yet she was not asleep. She could hear the wind in the treetops and the far rumble of the heavy equipment. They were digging the canal on the inland side of the waterway. Work continued on the spoil basin as machines pushed up dikes fifteen feet high to hold the mud and living shells and broken grass which would, when the dredges began work, be pumped back across the waterway into the basin. There it would stand, a two-mile-long, fifteen-foot-high mesa of stinking, reeking mud, smelling of ages of rotting vegetation, dead oysters, and salt marsh. But the equipment sounds were distant and familiar. Those sounds acted as a soporific, lulling her into the most delicious state of drowsiness she’d known in weeks. And into that pleasant state came thoughts, feelings, and an awareness which, in retrospect, was druglike. She was on some kind of high. Like most young people, she’d experimented with drugs of the milder variety, grass, once a good grade of hash. And yet the high was not the dulled, stuporous, out-of-it thing which came with drugs. It was a clearheaded realization that she was breathing, living. She felt the flood of blood in her body, and felt the function of her organs. Strange things happened to her ears, without seeming at the time to be strange. She could hear, the sound of the wind and heavy equipment only a background, the warm hum of a bee; she could feel the moisture of the earth, the sweetness of it, the delicate giving of soft particles under bare feet as she walked through newly plowed Illinois loam. She was more aware of the sun; and she could feel its life-giving rays entering her, penetrating warm. There was a sense of timelessness in her awareness. Thoughts moved with pleasing slowness, crawling, possessing her. Every nerve ending was alive, and individual cells pleasured themselves as a hot, spreading sexual awareness crept up and over from her nether regions and engulfed her.
There, just beyond her reach, was the answer. Some magic of mind, some lunacy of brain, had moved her outside of herself, leaving the frailties of Gwen Ferrier behind, and forcing away her natural and induced inhibitions. She stretched languidly, knowing her body as she’d never known it before, ignoring a small, clamorous voice deep inside which questioned, screamed negation of her newness.
He came floating into her awareness as a spore slowly floats on the wind. Fertile, natural, ripe, she sat up, holding the halter in front of her tingling breasts. “Come here,” she said, letting the halter fall. It seemed to take forever for the gaily colored piece of cloth to fall and drape itself over her bare leg.
“Look, lady,” the man said, looking around nervously.
“Don’t talk,” she said, holding out her arms, her breasts aching with ripeness. A bee buzzed and settled into the open petals of a wildflower beside the clear pond. She sensed it, knew it, felt the penetration of its honey-gathering tube, and knew the ripe feeling of merged pollen. She held her arms out, smiling. No question of morality. No right. No wrong. It was the way things were. Fertile, ripe, passive, she accepted him, eased his fevered haste, and bathed him in the sweet juices of her body. Abandoned, wild, silent.
The thing which hurt most was her inability to remember a single time when she’d been so at peace with George. Never, in seven years of marriage to a passionate man, had she known the quiet-thick, pleasure-ripeness of it. Never had she so opened herself, willingly, peacefully, exquisitely ecstatic. Never had her inner tissue drunk so thirstily of male juices.
That she was pregnant was unquestionable. That and that alone could explain the beauty of it.
To release the safety, she had to invert the gun. The small metal button moved with a click. The weapon took on new meaning. Now it was ready to play its role. Deadly, small things inside its blue metal tubing were tense, ready to leap forward, and perform their function.
She was calm. There was no answer. She could live a dozen lifetimes and not know why she’d done it.
She positioned the weapon slowly and carefully. She kissed the cold metal with parted lips, an obscene kiss while death grinned and waited. Her mouth was open, teeth grating on metal. She positioned her foot and wiggled her toe experimentally. She had, according to George, toes like a monkey, movable, small, and thin.
“Please understand,” she thought.
Only an outward push on her right leg held her from death and relief from the unbearable guilt. She tensed, took one last, long, slow breath, and held it. The explosion was not gunpowder and shot but a living thing, a big, long-clawed black housecat named Satan, leaping from the floor, all claws extended, throwing his lithe body through the air to knock the weapon from her hands. It fell, hit the cushions, and slid to the thick carpet with a thud. No explosion. Startled, she looked at a familiar creature changed into a raging beast. The cat had landed on the sofa and regarded her balefully, eyes cold fire, fangs exposed, a rumble coming from its throat.
“Satan?”
Animals feel things. She knew that. It was incredible. He was trying to save her life. “You’re wrong, old fellow,” she said, quite calmly, reaching for the gun. Long marks sprang up on her bare arm. The cat’s movement had been so swift that she saw only the results, blood welling up from deep scratches. She gasped. “Satan?”
There was something familiar about the way the cat was acting. It came to her. Hot August sun. Dusty vegetation drying in the sun. Pushing through uncleared woods and brush to face an opossum. There was the same strange feeling of threat.