Killing Cousins

Fifteen

Willie, advised to do nothing, was surprised to learn that doing nothing was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Not only was it hard, it was also depressing. Even painting her finger and toe nails didn’t help much. She painted them twice each day, morning and evening, a different color each time, and once she painted each nail a different color from the nail or nails beside it, using five different colors in all, but even this radical experiment in color dynamics did little to lift her depression or lessen her feeling of apprehension. The worst part of doing nothing, she found, was that you were constantly waiting for someone else to do something, and this constant waiting created a kind of tension that grew and grew inside you until you were, after a while, like a child in a dark room at night waiting for something to spring out of a corner.

All day Wednesday, which was the day Gertrude Haversack had threatened to go to the police, she kept waiting and waiting for a policeman to come or call on the telephone, possibly that queer fellow with the queer name, Lieutenant Necessary, but the day passed and no one came or called, and in the evening Gwen Festerwauld came over from next door and had a Martini. Gwen was sober and did not have a hangover for a change and swore to God that she was never going to drink to excess again. She asked if Willie had heard from Howard, and Willie said Yes, she had, that Howard had written from Dallas, Texas, and Gwen said he was probably on his way to Mexico — Tijuana, Acapulco, Mexico City, places like that — and even if Howard eventually came back, which he probably would, Willie might as well kiss that twenty grand goodbye, because the bastard would surely spend it all. Altogether, Gwen was pretty dull, and Willie, who had been happy to see her come, was even happier to see her go.

She ate dinner alone, a lamb chop and green peas and a salad that Mrs. Tweedy fixed before she left, and afterward she put the dirty dishes and silver in the kitchen sink for Mrs. Tweedy to wash when she returned in the morning. She wished that Quincy would come and keep her company, but she knew that it was Quincy’s notion not to make their relationship conspicuous for a while, and so she didn’t expect him to come, and he didn’t. She went into the living room and watched some television, even watching the fights when they came on at eight o’clock because she thought there would be a lot of action to keep her distracted, but as it turned out there were two bums fighting and practically no action at all. After the fight was over, she mixed a shaker of Martinis and turned off the light and went upstairs and undressed and put on a shortie nightgown that made her look like a promiscuous child. She was not sleepy and did not want to read, and so she decided to look at pictures. She got a Harper’s Bazaar and sat down cross-legged on the floor, opening the magazine on the floor in front of her and setting her Martini, which she had poured from the shaker, on the floor beside the magazine. She turned the pages of the magazine slowly, looking carefully at the fashions and deciding that she would like to have this or wouldn’t be caught dead in that, every little while taking up the glass and drinking from it and setting it down again, and in about an hour, around ten o’clock, she had gone entirely through the magazine and three Martinis.

She thought she heard a sound from Howard’s bedroom beyond the bathroom, and she sat very quietly listening for the sound to repeat itself, but it didn’t. Getting up from her cross-legged position without the use of her hands, which was quite a difficult thing to do, she went into the bathroom where she stood for a few minutes bent forward in an attitude of listening, but there was still no sound, of course, for there had been none to start with except in her imagination. Standing there, she had again the feeling that she had only to open the door suddenly to cancel out in an instant everything that had happened since last Friday night and to restore Howard to life, yawning and scratching on his way to bed. She didn’t open the door, however, for it would be a significant concession, a very bad sign, to yield to such fantasies by testing them. Instead, she went back into her bedroom and poured what was left in the Martini shaker into her glass and sat down on the edge of the bed and began to think of Quincy, what a remarkably effective little devil he was in solving problems and making love, and presently she was thinking of him in the latter capacity exclusively, and she wished very much that he was here. As late as it was, it would surely do no harm for him to come, if he was careful, and it would be a comfort and pleasure to her that he surely wouldn’t deny if she were to ask it. Having finished the last Martini, she went out into the hall and dialed his number.

“Quincy,” she said when he answered, “what are you doing?”

“I’m sitting here in my pajamas and reading De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a piece by a man who ate opium.”

“Why are you reading it?”

“Originally I read it to find out what an opium eater had to confess, but now I’m reading it again because it amuses me.”

“It doesn’t sound very amusing, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you, Cousin, but I’m always glad to have your opinion.”

“It would be much more amusing to come over and keep me company.”

“Is that guaranteed?”

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s tempting, I admit, but not very discreet.”

“Please come, Quincy. I’m lonesome and depressed and would be grateful if you would.”

“All right, Cousin. I’ll be there pretty soon.”

“I’ll leave the front door unlocked for you.”

She went downstairs from the telephone and unlocked the front door, and while she was there she thought she might as well mix some more Martinis, but she had left the shaker upstairs. Never mind, however. She could mix them as well in a pitcher. She went into the kitchen and got a pitcher and some ice and carried them into the living room where she’d left the open bottles. After mixing a generous batch of Martinis, she turned out all the downstairs lights, except a dim one at the foot of the stairs in the hall, and went up to her room again, where she set the pitcher on the floor beside her empty glass. She sat down before the glass and the pitcher, as she had sat before the magazine a while ago, and she thought that she would wait for Quincy before having another Martini to drink, but after waiting and waiting for an interminable time, she decided that she had better go ahead and have another to help pass the time until he arrived. She leaned forward without uncrossing her legs to pour it, and she had drunk it all, even though she drank it slowly in sips to make it last, before she heard the door open into the hall below and Quincy’s footsteps ascending the stairs.

“Quincy,” she said when he entered the room, “I thought you were never coming. What on earth kept you?”

“Nothing kept me. It takes a while to walk out here from my place, you know.”

“Did you walk? Why?”

“Well, since it’s already late and will probably be a lot later before I leave, I thought it would be just as well not to have my car parked in the drive for someone to see.”

“Oh. I should have thought of that myself. You’re very clever to always think of these things, Quincy.”

“We had better think of things, Cousin, if we want to stay out of trouble. Why the hell are you sitting on the floor?”

“I like to sit on the floor. It relaxes me. Will you sit beside me and have a Martini?”

“I’ll have a Martini, but I prefer to sit on the bed, if you don’t mind.”

“All right. I’ll sit on the bed with you. There’s another glass on my dressing table there.”

Bending forward, she picked up the pitcher and rose without the use of hands from the floor. At the dressing table after the glass, he watched her in the mirror with admiration that was inspired partly by the trick of getting up that way, but mostly by her appearance in the shortie nightgown.

“How do you do that?” he said.

“What?”

“Get up that way without using your hands.”

“It just comes naturally. I did it the very first time I tried without any practice at all. Some people think it’s difficult.”

“Including me. I’m sure I couldn’t do it if I practiced a year.”

“Of course you could. You could learn in a much shorter time than that. Would you like to have me teach you?”

“No, thanks. I’m thinking of something better we can do that will require no teaching or learning by either of us. That’s a very pretty gown you’re wearing.”

“Do you like it? There’s really very little to it.”

“True enough. In fact, you’re nearly naked.”

“Do you object to my being nearly naked?”

“Not at all. On the contrary, I’m all for it. I won’t object if you decide to go entirely naked.”

“I’ll consider that. In the meanwhile, if you’ll hold out your glass, I’ll pour a Martini for you. Hold my glass too.”

He held his glass and hers while she poured, and then they sat down beside each other on the edge of the bed. She leaned against him and sighed and let her head fall sidewise onto his shoulder, and he put his right arm around her waist with his hand spread against her thigh at the edge of the shortie gown.

“Quincy?” she said.

“Yes, Cousin?”

“Everything will be all right, won’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Will Gertrude Haversack cause me trouble?”

“She may try.”

“Do you think she will succeed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Today was the day she said she’d go to the police.”

“Have you heard from them?”

“No.”

“You see? She may not have gone at all.”

“I was feeling depressed before you came, but now I’m not.”

“It must be the Martini.”

“No. It’s you.”

“Thanks, Cousin.”

“I can’t begin to tell you what a comfort you are to me.”

“I suppose it’s better to be a comfort than nothing.”

“A comfort’s not all. You are a comfort besides.”

“Besides what?”

“Besides an excitement.”

“That’s much better. Are you excited now?”

“I’m beginning to be.”

“Shall I help you?”

“Yes. Please do.”

“Does this help?”

“Oh, yes! Yes, it does! Quincy, darling, you are a comfort and a help and a great excitement!”

He was so clever, with such clever hands, and he must have dropped his glass, as she had hers, for there were two hands free, or perhaps a dozen, inciting her by salacious tenderness to wanton response. His sense of timing, too, was perfect, and at the perfectly right time he got up suddenly and turned off the light, leaving only a pale track across the floor from the bathroom door, like the track of the moon across water, and she could hear him moving in the darkness beyond the track. Just when she thought she could endure it no longer, not another instant of waiting, he was back and ready, and it was a wonderfully ecstatic relief and pleasure, at the end of a bad day, to be fiercely doing something instead of nothing.

She did not know, later, when he left. She had sunk softly on a sense of spurious security into the most delicious sleep, and when she wakened in the early morning hours, long before daylight, he was gone. The vast expanse of bed beside her was terrifyingly empty, and she was lonelier in that instant than she had ever been before. In her loneliness, after a while, she went back to sleep.