Dead Girl Blues Read online

  In the morning I called a florist and had a dozen red roses delivered. She called to thank me for them, and we agreed she’d call a sitter and we’d have dinner that night. We hurried through dinner, skipped dessert, and went back to my apartment and straight to bed. There was something about the way she was at once properly demure and intensely eager that I found enormously appealing.

  I hadn’t had sex with anyone but myself in ages. And, in the years before Cindy Raschmann, I’d had little enough of it. What came my way was never really satisfying, and was often made tolerable by fantasies that would have appalled my partners.

  I’d never had anything you could call an affair.

  And that was what this seemed to be. We settled into a pattern of sorts, saw each other three or four times a week, and neither of us ever stayed over at the other’s place. Encounters at my apartment were preceded by a meal or a movie, or a meal and a movie. Sometimes she’d have me over for dinner and we’d go upstairs after Alden was asleep; other times we’d dine separately, and I’d drop by after the boy’s bedtime.

  More than once I was at the point of asking her to marry me. It was clear to me that she was waiting for a proposal, and clear too that she was comfortable enough with waiting. The subject never came up.

  What was I waiting for? I’d decided during the rhubarb conversation that this was the woman I would marry. I’d since learned that neither of us bored the other, that our shared silences were as satisfying as our spirited repartee. That I could reveal myself to her—except, of course, for the parts I couldn’t reveal.

  And more. That she looked good in jeans and a sweater or a skirt and a blouse, and even better without clothes on. What she liked to do in bed, and what she liked done to her.

  That one thing she particularly liked about her profession was the fact that bookkeeper was the only word in the English language with three consecutive pairs of letters, two Os and two Ks and two Es.

  “So far as I know,” she said.

  AND ONE NIGHT, after we’d been keeping company for three months or so, I found myself suggesting something new. “There’s something I’d like us to try,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “You lie perfectly still,” I said. “You don’t move.”

  “Like Sleeping Beauty? And you wake me with a kiss?”

  “Oh, I kiss you,” I said. “And I touch you, and I get on top of you and inside of you. But you go on sleeping.”

  “And I can’t move?”

  “No.”

  “Like being tied up,” she said, “but without the rope.”

  “And without awareness,” I said. “You don’t know what’s happening. If you feel anything, you think it’s a dream.”

  “What happens if you make me come?”

  “It’ll be like coming in your sleep.”

  She hesitated, and I realized this might not have been such a good idea. I hadn’t preplanned it, the words that came out of my mouth surprised me almost as much at they surprised her, and—

  I said, “I guess it’s not a great idea. It was just a passing thought.”

  “I want to do it,” she said.

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  “No, I mean it. I want to do it. Not that there’s anything for me to do. I just lie there?”

  I nodded, and she closed her eyes. And waited for me to do whatever I wanted to do.

  AND SO SHE lay still, as still as easeful death, while I had my way with her. My way and her way, because I did all the things I’d learned to do to and for her.

  I was excited at first, excited by her deliberate mimicry of unconsciousness—and her unwitting mimicry of death. But then I felt horribly self-conscious, and realized that this was not going to work, that it would fail and might take our budding relationship down with it. I fancied I could feel her observing me, judging me.

  And then, while I was using my mouth on her, something shifted.

  She was becoming excited.

  I knew this, but knew it in the absence of evidence. She remained still, motionless. Perhaps there was a slight change in her breathing, but perhaps not. It was not her behavior but her energy that changed, and I was aware of it without being able to define it.

  Something let go within me, some knot in some metaphorical muscle found a way to untie itself. A fog lifted, a cloud dispersed. What I was doing took me over utterly.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And now, much to my own surprise, I feel the need to draw a curtain. When I sit down to my task as Recording Devil, the words come in a stream, as if my psyche has had its daily dose of Flo-Max. I’ve been able to write, without much effort and little inhibition, about my deepest and most insupportable secrets, and to do so in unwholesome detail.

  But to describe my adventure with Louella seems beyond me. I’ve been groping for words, stumbling over phrases, and deleting one sentence after another.

  Just write it, I tell myself. Just put the words down. You can come back and fix it later.

  Instead I keep backspacing, erasing, trying again. There would seem to be some realm of privacy, mine or hers, that I am not prepared to invade.

  And, you know, I don’t have forever. Thus the curtain.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “OH MY DARLING. How did you even think of that? And how did you know I would love it?”

  “And did you?”

  “I didn’t even come. Not exactly. It was like coming, but it wasn’t my body that did it. Does that make any sense?”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “And what I think is I would have come if I hadn’t held myself back. This time it was nice letting a part of me just sit in the audience. You know, observing. Next time—oh!”

  “What?”

  “Well, maybe you won’t want to do it like this again. But you enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

  “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “I just wanted to be sure.”

  AND, A DAY or two later: “Oh, I’m just so sleepy. Look at me, I’m yawning, I can’t keep my eyes open. I know it’s early, but would it be all right if I went to bed?”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me.”

  “So tired. I’ll just drop my clothes on the chair here, because I’m too tired to hang them up. I just know I’ll be out cold the second my head hits the pillow.”

  I’d wondered if novelty had been what made our first game of Sleeping Beauty so thrilling, for her and for me. And that may have engendered some of the excitement, but this second go-round, unburdened by performance anxiety, was in fact everything the first time had been, and more.

  This time I could feel her holding herself in check as she approached orgasm, and I held back myself until I couldn’t. I cried out, and that set her off and let her drop the reins and give her body its reward.

  AFTERWARD, OVER CUPS of decaf, I told her I thought we ought to get married.

  “Oh, my darling,” she said. “I think we already are.”

  AND SO WE lived happily ever after.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It took me forever to type that sentence. Not to hit the right keys in the proper sequence, that was quick and simple enough. But to hear the words in my mind, and see them in my mind’s eye, and finally to will my fingers to tap the keys.

  And, having at last managed to perform the action, I sat for the longest time looking at the seven words upon the screen. Read them over and over.

  Highlighted them, so that I might delete them with a single keystroke. Moved the cursor, clicked, and let them be as they were.

  And shut down the computer for the day.

  It has been my habit, since I began this project-for-which-I-do-not-have-a-name, to sit down daily at the computer and say what I have to say. If I’ve missed my daily stint, it’s been because I simply forgot, or was just too busy to spare the time.

  Now, for the first time, I consciously chose to stay away from my laptop.

  Which is not to say I stopped thinking about it. Quite the
reverse.

  Was my work complete, my prose composition at its natural conclusion? “And so we lived happily ever after”—was that the perfect way to end it? It was, after all, the traditional way one ended a story told to a child.

  Or at least it used to be. But I’m not sure today’s children believe in happy endings.

  No, leaving the laptop unopened didn’t stop the parade of thoughts. For three days they ran in my mind, and now I’m here again, my fingers on the keys.

  Because it’s become all too evident that the only way to clear my mind is to dump its contents on the screen.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  SO: WE LIVED HAPPILY.

  The wedding was small and simple. Some years ago I’d become a congregant at a Presbyterian church, much as I’d joined Rotary and Kiwanis and the Lions. One got along better if one belonged. But I maintained my membership by writing checks a couple of times a year, and that was rather more frequently than I attended a Sunday service.

  Louella had been brought up in a Protestant denomination, I don’t recall which one, but Duane Shipley had been an ex-Catholic turned atheist. He’d become bitterly anticlerical, and she suspected some robed pedophile might have been to blame for his transformation. Whatever its origins, he’d insisted on a nonreligious ceremony at city hall, and that was fine with her.

  After she was widowed, she’d let one or another girlfriend drag her to a Sunday service, but such visits never led anywhere. There was a time when a neighbor with a child Alden’s age asked Louella if she’d allow Alden to visit their Sunday school, and he tagged along dutifully on three successive Sundays.

  She asked if he liked it. “Not much,” he said, and was relieved when she said he didn’t have to go anymore.

  I knew a county judge who would marry us, but I thought I might as well get some return on the checks I’d been writing over the years, and asked Louella if a Presbyterian wedding would suit her. She liked the idea, and we met with the minister and planned a small ceremony.

  The only relative with whom she had any contact was her older sister, Marian, who’d gone to Indiana State University. She’d stayed on after graduation, moved away periodically to Colorado and California, but always sooner or later returned to Terre Haute. The sisters exchanged cards at Christmas, and a couple of times a year Louella would get a middle-of-the-night phone call from Marian.

  I’d been on hand for one. We were in Louella’s bedroom and she’d just turned off the light when the phone rang. I left the room to give her some privacy, and when I came back she said it was Marian, which I’d gathered, and that she sounded like she’d been drinking, which I’d suspected.

  Now it was Louella, who hadn’t been drinking, who called Marian, to invite her to serve as matron of honor. “She was all excited,” she reported, “and quick to correct me. Bridesmaid, not matron of honor, because she’s single again. I wonder what it’ll be like to see her. Terre Haute’s what, a four-hour drive? She drove up for Duane’s funeral, but she hasn’t made the trip since.”

  “And you haven’t been to Terre Haute.”

  “I’ve never been to Terre Haute. The only reason to go there would be to see Marian, and somehow that’s never been enough of a reason. She’s all the family I’ve got, and two or three times a year she has a couple of drinks and picks up the phone, and if she didn’t we’d lose touch altogether. And your family—”

  I’d grown up in foster care, I’d told her, and invented a pair of foster parents who’d been stern and distant. They’d been past fifty when they took me in, I said, and were almost certainly gone by now.

  She looked at me. “We’ll be a family,” she said.

  AND INDEED WE were. After a few months I’d bonded with Alden sufficiently for me to take him aside and ask him how he felt about my adopting him. I told him he could take his time and think about it, and he responded by throwing his arms around me. And so I would become his father, and he would cease to be Alden Shipley, a name of some distinction and one he’d come by honestly, and would replace it with the surname of Thompson, which was neither distinctive nor legitimate.

  “Alden Wade Thompson,” he said, trying the name on his tongue. He nodded solemnly, evidently happy enough with the name, but something in his tone gave me an idea.

  “You know,” I said, “your first father was a good man, and he had a good name. Maybe you’d want to keep it as a middle name.”

  “And get rid of Wade?”

  “There’s no reason why a man can’t have more than one middle name. Do you remember who invented the telegraph?”

  He supplied the answer-question we’d heard just days ago on Jeopardy: “ ‘Who was Samuel F.B. Morse?’ What do the F and B stand for?”

  Google answered the question for him.

  “Samuel Finley Breese Morse,” he reported. “Alden Wade Shipley Thompson. Wade Shipley? Or Shipley Wade?”

  “I think Wade Shipley.”

  “Alden Wade Shipley Thompson,” he said, and at the dinner table that evening he said it again, and met his mother’s eyes. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a shame somebody already invented the telegraph,” she said, “but I’m sure you’ll find an even more impressive way to bring honor to your name.”

  “By inventing something?” He thought about it. “You know what would be great? A fax machine for people. You get in the chamber and throw a switch and the next thing you know you’re in Cincinnati.”

  HE SEEMED HAPPY to have a father. Even as I found myself happy to have a son.

  And, not quite two years later, a daughter.

  “A girl,” Louella said, when the ultrasound had so informed us. “A baby sister for Alden. A daughter for you.”

  “And for you.”

  “Yes, for me. You know I’d have been happy enough with another boy. A blessing is a blessing. But oh, won’t it be wonderful to have a little girl?”

  And, almost in the next breath: “But all of a sudden I’m so tired, darling. I should be ashamed of myself, but I can’t keep my eyes open. How awful would it be if I took off all these clothes and just dropped off into a deep sleep?”

  SO THERE WERE four of us, Louella and Alden and Kristin and I. By then we were in a four-bedroom older home on a good street. It was convenient to Alden’s school and almost as close to what would be his high school, and no more than a twenty-minute walk from the store.

  Thompson Dawes Hardware. I’d kept Porter Dawes’s name on the business after his death, as much out of inertia as respect, and it wasn’t until Louella and I were keeping company that I added my own. She’d begun serving as my bookkeeper—two o’s, two k’s, two e’s—and wondered why I didn’t have my own name on the store.

  I said that everybody knew Dawes Hardware, and she said most of them knew John Thompson owned and operated it, and for the price of a new sign I could share the glory with the late Mr. Dawes. And it would be a good excuse for a sale, and that would more than cover the signage expense.

  “And Porter Dawes doesn’t mean anything to anybody in Penderville, and calling the new store Dawes Hardware would just have them scratching their heads. Which is probably the local sport anyway in Penderville, but never mind. But if you called both stores Thompson Dawes Hardware—”

  “Home Depot would be green with envy,” I said. “Thompson & Dawes?”

  “I think just Thompson Dawes. But with or without a hyphen?” She picked up a pencil, wrote down both versions. “I think no hyphen,” she said.

  The original store was not quite a mile from the new house, and on nice days I walked there more often than not. The Penderville store proved profitable from the start, and as part of his silent partnership, Ewell Kennerly had recommended a Penderville nephew of his as manager. I suppose that fit the dictionary definition of nepotism, but in this instance it proved good policy, and the new store pretty much ran itself. I drove over there once a week, had a proprietary look around, enjoyed coffee and conversation with Ewell’s nephew, m
ade whatever executive decisions I was called upon to make, and resisted the temptation to look for other opportunities to expand. I was happy with the second store, but that was plenty.

  Happy with the house, too. It suited us from the day we moved in, and didn’t require much in the way of improvements. A new kitchen, some remodeling in two of the bathrooms. The backyard garden had well-established shrubs and perennials, and required nothing more than weeding and pruning.

  Thompson Dawes supplied what tools we needed. And the paint, when we spruced up the front porch. And whatever else was required when, not long after his fourteenth birthday, Alden suggested we finish the third-floor attic. Insulation would pay for itself by cutting heating costs, he pointed out, and if we carved out a bedroom for him up there he could play his music without disturbing the rest of us.

  “And my old room could be a second home office,” he said, “or, I don’t know, a TV room or something? And, you know, if we did the work upstairs ourselves—”

  “It might be fun?”

  “Plus we’d develop new skills we could use later on.”

  I’m not sure what new skills we developed, or how likely it was that we’d find further use for them. But it was indeed enjoyable, although it turned out to be more work than we’d anticipated. Alden’s initial proposal hadn’t included a third-floor bathroom, but Louella pointed out the wisdom of adding one, and that meant bringing in a plumber and getting some professional help with designing the addition.

  “Everything is more work than you think,” I told Alden, “and takes longer than planned, and costs more than you estimated.”

  He nodded, and I could see him filing the statement away as something to be remembered.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It’s one day short of a week since I got anything written. I found reasons to take two days off. Then I came in here, sat down, opened the file, and immediately thought of a question Google could answer for me. I bounced around the internet for an hour or two, fascinated by subjects that would have been far less fascinating on another day, then logged off and closed the laptop’s lid.