In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 20

Except she would never see him again. Except the wife would collect the insurance.

  She does not want to kill him, however. She is not the type to hurt anyone.

  In fact she wants to kill him. She has no choice, he will be leaving her soon. She will never see him again and she will have nothing.

  When she is alone she understands this. Which is why she has hidden the sewing shears beneath the cushion for the final time.

  She will claim that he began to abuse her, he threatened to kill her, closing his fingers around her throat so she had no choice but to grope for the shears and stab him in desperation, repeatedly, unable to breathe and unable to call for help until his heavy body slipped from her twitching and spurting blood, onto the green rectangle of light in the carpet.

  His age is beyond forty-nine, she’s sure.

  Glanced at his I.D. once. Riffling through his wallet while he slept openmouthed, wetly snoring. Sound like a rhinoceros snorting. She’d been stunned to see his young photograph—taken when he’d been younger than she is right now—dark-haired, thick-dark-haired, and eyes boring into the camera, so intense. In his U.S. Army uniform, so handsome!

  She’d thought—Where is this man? I could have loved this man.

  Now when they make love she detaches herself from the situation to imagine him as he’d been, young. Him, she could have felt something for.

  Having to pretend too much. That’s tiring.

  Like the pretense she is happy in her body.

  Like the pretense she is happy when he shows up.

  No other secretary in her office could afford an apartment in this building. True.

  Damn apartment she’d thought was so special at first now she hates. He helps with expenses. Counting out bills like he’s cautious not to be overpaying.

  This should tide you over, sweetheart. Give yourself a treat.

  She thanks him. She is the good girl thanking him.

  Give yourself a treat! With the money he gives her, a few tens, a rare twenty! God, she hates him.

  Her fingers tremble, gripping the shears. Just the feel of the shears.

  Never dared tell him how she has come to hate this apartment. Meeting in the elevators old women, some of them with walkers, eyeing her. Older couples, eyeing her. Unfriendly. Suspicious. How’s a secretary from New Jersey afford The Maguire?

  Dim-lit on the third floor like a low-level region of the soul into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby furniture and mattress already beginning to sag like those bodies in dreams we feel but don’t see. But she keeps the damn bed made every day whether anyone except her sees.

  He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.

  The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.

  Pull the sheets tight. Tuck in corners—tight. No wrinkles! Smooth with the edge of your hand! Again.

  First Lieutenant, he’d been. Rank when discharged. Holds himself like a soldier, stiff backbone like maybe he is feeling pain—arthritis? Shrapnel?

  She has wondered—Has he killed? Shot, bayoneted? With his bare hands?

  What she can’t forgive: the way he detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over.

  Sticky skin, hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest, belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into sleep together but rarely this happens. Hates feeling the nerves twitching in his legs. Hates sensing how he is smelling her. How he’d like to leap from her as soon as he comes, the bastard.

  A man is crazy wanting to make love, then abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head, and she’s inside hers.

  The night before waiting for him to call to explain when he didn’t show up. From eight P.M. until midnight she’d waited rationing whiskey-and-water to calm her nerves. Considering the sharp-tipped shears she might use against herself, one day.

  In those hours sick with hating him and hating herself and yet—the leap of hope when the phone finally rang.

  Unavoidable, crisis at home. Sorry.

  Now it is eleven A.M. Waiting for him to rap on the door.

  She knows he will be late. He is always late.

  She is becoming very agitated. But: too early to drink.

  Even to calm her nerves too early to drink.

  Imagines she hears footsteps. Sound of the elevator door opening, closing. Light rap of his knuckles on the door just before he unlocks it.

  Eagerly he will step inside, come to the door of the bedroom—see her in the chair awaiting him . . .

  The (nude) woman in the window. Awaiting him.

  That look in his face. Though she hates him she craves that look in his face.

  A man’s desire is sincere enough. Can’t be faked. (She wants to think this.) She does not want to think that the man’s desire for her might be as fraudulent as her desire for him but if this is so, why’d he see her at all?

  He does love her. He loves something he sees in her.

  Thirty-one years old, he thinks she is. No—thirty-two.

  And his wife is ten, twelve years older at least. Like Mr. Broderick’s wife, this one is something of an invalid.

  Pretty damned suspicious. Every wife you hear of is an invalid.

  How they avoid sex, she supposes. Once they are married, once they have children that’s enough. Sex is something the man has to do elsewhere.

  What time is it?—eleven A.M.

  He is late. Of course, he is late.

  After the humiliation of last night, when she had not eaten all day anticipating a nice dinner at Delmonico’s. And he never showed up, and his call was a feeble excuse.

  Yet in the past he has behaved unpredictably. She’d thought that he was through with her, she’d seen disgust in his face, nothing so sincere as disgust in a man’s face; and yet—he’d called her, after a week, ten days.

  Or, he’d showed up at the apartment. Knocking on the door before inserting the key.

  And almost, in his face a look of anger, resentment.

  Couldn’t keep away.

  God, I’m crazy for you.

  In the mirror she likes to examine herself if the light isn’t too bright. Mirror to avoid is the bathroom mirror unprotected and raw lit by daylight but the bureau mirror is softer, more forgiving. Bureau mirror is the woman she is.

  Actually she looks (she thinks) younger than thirty-two.

  Much younger than thirty-nine!

  A girl’s pouty face, full lips, red-lipstick lips. Sulky brunette still damned good-looking and he knows it, he has seen men on the street and in restaurants following her with their eyes, undressing her with their eyes, this is exciting to him (she knows) though if she seems to react, if she glances around, he will become angry—at her.

  What a man wants, she thinks, is a woman whom other men want but the woman must not seem to seek out this attention or even be aware of it.

  She would never bleach her hair blond, she exults in her brunette beauty knowing it is more real, earthier. Nothing phony, synthetic, showy about her.

  Next birthday, forty. Maybe she will kill herself.

  Though it’s eleven A.M. he has stopped for a drink at the Shamrock. Vodka on the rocks. Just one.

  Excited thinking about the sulky-faced woman waiting for him: in the blue plush chair, at the window, nude except for high-heeled shoes.

  Full lips, lipstick-red. Heavy-lidded eyes. A head of thick hair, just slightly coarse. And hairs elsewhere on her body that arouse him.

  Slight disgust, yet arousal.

  Yet he’s late, why is that? Something seems to be pulling at him, holding him back. Another vodka?

  Staring at his watch thinking—If I am not with her by eleven-fifteen it will mean it’s over.

  A flood of relief, never having to see her again!

  Never the risk of losing his control with her, hurting her.

  Never the risk she will provoke him into a tussle.

  She’s thinking she will gi
ve the bastard ten more minutes.

  If he arrives after eleven-fifteen it is over between them.

  Her fingers grope for the shears beneath the cushion. There!

  She has no intention of stabbing him—of course. Not here in her room, not where he’d bleed onto the blue-plush chair and the green carpet and she would never be able to remove the stains even if she could argue (she could argue) that he’d tried to kill her, more than once in his strenuous lovemaking he’d closed his fingers around her throat, she’d begun to protest Please don’t, hey you are hurting me but he’d seemed scarcely to hear, in a delirium of sexual rapacity, pounding his heavy body into her like a jackhammer.

  You have no right to treat me like that. I am not a whore, I am not your pathetic wife. If you insult me I will kill you—I will kill you to save my own life.

  Last spring for instance when he’d come to take her out to Delmonico’s but seeing her he’d gotten excited, clumsy bastard knocking over the bedside lamp and in the dim-lit room they’d made love in her bed and never got out until too late for supper and she’d overheard him afterward on the phone explaining—in the bathroom stepping out of the shower she’d listened at the door fascinated, furious—the sound of a man’s voice when he is explaining to a wife is so callow, so craven, she’s sick with contempt recalling.

  Yet he says he has left his family, he loves her.

  Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in the way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t leave me.

  Well, she loves him! She guesses.

  Eleven A.M. He is crossing the street at Ninth and Twenty-fourth. Gusts of wind blow grit into his eyes. The vodka is coursing along his veins.

  Feels determined: if she stares at him with that reproachful pouty expression he will slap her face and if she begins to cry he will close his fingers around her throat and squeeze, squeeze.

  She has not threatened to speak to his wife. As her predecessor had done, to her regret. Yet, he imagines that she is rehearsing such a confrontation.

  Mrs. ___? You don’t know me but I know you. I am the woman your husband loves.

  He has told her it isn’t what she thinks. Isn’t his family that keeps him from loving her all he could love her but his life he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry, in France. What crept like paralysis through him.

  Things that had happened to him, and things that he’d witnessed, and (a few) things that he’d perpetrated himself with his own hands. And if they’d been drinking this look would come into his face of sorrow, horror. A sickness of regret she did not want to understand. And she’d taken his hands that had killed (she supposed) (but only in wartime) and kissed them, and brought them against her breasts that were aching like the breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck, and sustenance.

  And she said No. That is your old life.

  I am your new life.

  He has entered the foyer. At last!

  It is eleven A.M.—he is not late after all. His heart is pounding in his chest.

  Waves of adrenaline as he has not felt since the war.

  On Ninth Avenue he purchased a bottle of whiskey, and from a street vendor he purchased a bouquet of one dozen blood-red roses.

  For the woman in the window. Kill or be killed.

  Soon as he unlocks the door, soon as he sees her, he will know what it is he will do to her.

  Eleven A.M. In the plush-blue chair in the window the woman is waiting nude, except for her high-heeled shoes. Another time she checks the shears hidden beneath the cushion that feel strangely warm to her touch, even damp.

  Stares out the window at a narrow patch of sky. Almost, she is at peace. She is prepared. She waits.

  Multiple award-winning author KRIS NELSCOTT is best known for her Smokey Dalton mystery series. The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year. Both Days of Rage and the most recent Smokey Dalton novel, Street Justice, have been nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Novel of the Year. Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and Salon.com says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”

  Nelscott’s next novel A Gym of Her Own features a side character from the Smokey Dalton series, and will appear in spring of 2017. The character in this story comes from an as-yet-untitled project that she’s developing. Stories about Lurleen have also appeared in the anthology series Fiction River.

  Nelscott also has her own secret identity: she’s one of several pen names for bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. To find out more about Nelscott or sign up for her newsletter, go to krisnelscott.com. To find out about everything she writes, go to kriswrites.com.

  Hotel Room, 1931

  60 × 65¼ in. (152.4 × 165.7 cm). Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Inv. N.: 1977110.

  © 2016 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence

  STILL LIFE 1931

  BY KRIS NELSCOTT

  She first noticed outside Memphis: they didn’t ride segregated in the box cars. At the time, she was standing outside yet another closed bank. The line of aggrieved customers wrapped around the block—men in their dusty pants, stained workshirts, caps on their heads; women wearing low heels, day dresses, and battered hats.

  Lurleen looked just different enough to attract attention. Her green cloche hat was a bit too new, her coat a little too heavy. Her shoes were scuffed just like everyone else’s, but hers were scuffed from too much travel, not age and wear.

  She clutched the double handles of her brown duffel, and stared at the missed opportunity. The sign in the window had a desperate scrawl: Out Of Cash. Come Back Tomorrow. There was no date and no signature. She couldn’t tell if “tomorrow” was yesterday, three days ago, or truly, the next day.

  And she didn’t want to ask the dusty, discouraged folks who stood in line like there was a chance there would be cash. She’d seen this in six other towns in the past two months, and each time, she was startled they weren’t smashing the glass windows, opening the doors themselves and taking what was left.

  Maybe everyone in the crowd knew there was nothing left. Nothing left at all.

  She sighed, wrapping her gloved fingers tight around the duffel’s thick handles, trying to act like the duffel was empty, waiting for cash instead of lined with it. She knew better than to travel with so much money, but she had no choice now.

  She wasn’t sure which banks to trust, considering how many she’d seen shuttered and forlorn on her trip here. She worried that if she trusted all of her savings to one of these institutions, she’d never see another dime.

  She understood why people were buying safes and putting them in their homes.

  But she no longer had a home. Not any more.

  She hadn’t sold the house. In the end, she’d seen no point. It had become little more than a shack. On bad days, wind blew through the cracks in the wall, filling the four rooms with more dirt than she could clean off in an afternoon.

  By the time Frank had passed, she’d had enough of that place. After she’d buried him in the family plot, she packed up using the two bags from her travels before Frank, still clean and sturdy like they’d been used just the week before.

  She’d taken undergarments, and one clean dress, choosing to buy new as she went along. She’d taken the money Frank had left her—all $200 of it, planning to retrieve her own money, along the way.

  She’d made a mistake for love.

  Women did that. They forgot themselves somewhere in the brown eyes and warm smiles, in the last chance for babies that never did arrive, and a future that promised some kind of comfort—which never did
arrive either.

  Before she’d met Frank, she’d been a solitary woman on a solitary road, doing good works as only she’d known how.

  She’d been younger, more resilient, believing in human kindness, despite all she’d seen.

  Until . . .

  She squinted at the line, unmoving around that closed bank. She shook her head slightly. It would take only one sentence to turn that despairing crowd into a mob—venting its anger in the exact wrong direction, screaming blue murder.

  One sentence, and its vile variations.

  One sentence that she hoped she’d never hear again.

  “He done it!”

  They ran past her, screaming, fists raised, faces red. Lurleen pressed herself against the post near the general store, her dolly clutched in one hand. Her mama stood just inside the door, holding her sister Noreen’s arm. Noreen twisted away, trying to free herself, but she couldn’t.

  Daddy wasn’t here. He was in Atlanta buying supplies for the store. Mama spent money on a telegram, but she didn’t hear back. And so Mama had to handle it, and Noreen lied.

  Two nights ago, Noreen had been clutching and clawing with George Tarlin, telling Lurleen to stop watching because that was grown-up business. Lurleen tried to tell Mama it was George Tarlin, not that nice boy who sat near the tree on the bad side of town, reading books and asking after Lurleen’s dolly.

  But Noreen, she said it was the nice boy. It’d always been the nice boy. And he’d been the one what hurt her. Not George Tarlin who slapped her across the face yesterday morning when she told him he couldn’t marry her without Daddy’s permission. No, she’d said that bruise was the nice boy.

  Rumors spread like crazy and now everyone knew that Noreen was “soiled” and the nice boy done it and he was gonna pay.

  He done it, they said. And he did pay.

  He was the first one Lurleen saw, hanging from a tree outside of town. Eyes gone by the time she saw him, face half ripped off, clothes torn and covered in blood. After Daddy’d come home, she’d gone with him over Mama’s objections. Weak objections.