Death Wish (6 page)

Someone had slid a note under the door. It lay askew on the carpet. He bent down to pick it up, ready for anger, half expecting it to be a threatening letter from the killers. It was a sympathy card from the Bernsteins next door. He put it together with the stack from his pocket and left the pile on the end-table under the mirror in the foyer.

They had moved into this apartment after Carol had started college and it had become regretfully evident that she was no longer going to live at home with them for any extended periods of time. There was only the living-room, middle-sized, and the large corner bedroom and bath, and the kitchen off the entrance foyer. The building was forty or fifty years old, it had the high ceilings and multitudinous closets of its vintage, the curious moldings that ran around the walls a foot below the ceiling, the Edwardian ceiling-light fixtures. It wasn't quite old enough to have a bathtub on claw feet, but the bathroom had that flavor to it. It was a small apartment but comfortable, it had more than its share of windows and most of them looked down upon the attractive row of converted brownstones on the opposite side of Seventy-first Street.

He kicked the door shut behind him and glanced into the kitchen and walked into the living room. The place had been tidied; everything was neat. Had the police gone to the trouble? It wasn't the cleaning lady, she came on Mondays. He scowled; he had expected to find wreckage, he had occupied himself thinking about cleaning the place up.

The flavor of Esther was in the place but it didn't seem to affect him. He walked through the rooms trying to feel something. It was as if his subconscious was afraid to let him feel anything.

Something unfamiliar caught his eye and it took him a moment to figure out what it was. He had to run his eyes around the living room and study each object. The chairs, the coffee table, the bookcase, the television, the air-conditioner in the window.…

He went back. The television. The killers had stolen the television.

It was a console; it stood in the corner where the old portable had squatted on its table. It looked like a color set—the kind with built-in stereo and AM-FM radio. He crossed the room in four long strides.

There was a note:

Paul—

In hopes this may make it just a

bit more bearable—

Our very deepest condolences
,

—The Guys at the Office

P.S.—We stocked the refrig
.

It broke him down: he wept.

*  *  *

They had never had a color set and he hadn't seen many color programs—only the occasional badly tuned football game above a bar, and once or twice the Academy Awards on some friends' enormous set. He spent twenty minutes fiddling with the thing, tuning in all the channels, trying to find amusement. He was too restless. He switched it off and thought about making a drink, but decided against it.

The phone rang. It was Jack. “Dr. Rosen just left. He's prescribed some stronger sedatives. He's arranging an appointment for her with a shrink Monday morning.”

“Well, I suppose that's the best thing right now.”

“I hope it'll help snap her out of it. I imagine it will. Rosen says he's got a very good man.”

“I imagine he would.”

“It was damned nice of him to come. Where can you find a doctor willing to make house calls on Friday night any more?”

“He's been our family doctor for almost twenty years.”

“Well, I'll let you know if anything changes. Right now she's asleep—doped up. The poor kid. Christ, this is a rotten thing.… How about you? Are you all right up there? You can still come back down and spend the night if you'd feel better. I know it must be miserable up there all alone.”

“I'll have to get used to it sometime. This is as good a time to start as any.”

“There's no need to make it too hard on yourself, Pop.”

“I'll be all right,” he growled. “I'll probably drop by tomorrow to look in on Carol.”

“Fine.”

After he hung up the apartment seemed emptier. He reversed his earlier decision and made a drink. Carried it into the bedroom and sat down, jerked at his tie, bent down and began to unlace his shoes.

He kicked them off and reached for his drink and heard himself cry out.

He couldn't believe it. He had always managed to bottle things up; anything else was weakness. He sat like a stone, writhing inside, experiencing terror from the crazy random impulse to do violence: he wanted to smash out at anything within reach.

Finally he began swinging his fist rhythmically against the side of the mattress. He got down on one knee and swung from the floor. It didn't hurt his fist and it didn't do the mattress any damage and after a little while he knew there wasn't going to be any satisfaction in it. He remembered a kid in high school who'd put his fist through the panel of a door in one of the study halls—all the way through it. He couldn't remember whether the kid had done it on a dare or just out of sheer rage; the kid had been one of the athletes, a bully everyone feared. Paul thought about slugging a door but he was afraid of pain, he didn't want to break his hand.

A hammer, he thought. That would feel good—taking a hammer to something, swinging it as hard as you could.

And do what? Smash up the furniture? The walls?

His brain kept frustrating him.

In the middle of the night he got up and took a shower. Lying on the bed drying off, he wished Esther were there. He would have shouted at her and it would have made him feel better.

Just last week he had noticed how overweight she was getting—the way the flesh of her sapless breasts and her armpits were bunched around the edges of her bra; how thick her hips had become, her waist and thighs, the soft heavy padding of flesh under her chin. Well she was forty-six years old, a year younger than Paul, almost to the day: they were both Aquarians.

Aquarian acquaintances, he thought. All the intense promises when you were youthful; but after marriage they had settled into their lives without any sparks. They had slowly got fat and out of shape. They had both been strangely old before they should have been—as if they had never been young.

In the beginning she had been an attractive girl who moved gracefully and had a soft voice, mercifully lacking in the brass that coated the tongues of most of the city girls he met. He supposed they had liked each other from the outset. They had gone on liking each other. There had been surprisingly few fights; he knew they both had been repressed people who had to build up a head of steam before being able to give vent to their rages, and by the time things became that intense there was usually some outside outlet—the office, the community volunteer groups where Esther worked almost full-time and Paul had contributed as much time as he could spare.

Now with hindsight he was unhappy with the feeling that they had both played life too carefully. Was he sad now because he had loved her, or because he was guilty that he hadn't loved her? Nothing left now but a fistful of lost dreams—but then they were dreams that had been lost long ago; her death perhaps was nothing more than a punctuation mark. It had been, most of the time, a good quiet friendship—not what they had dreamed of in the early days, but perhaps the highest possibility either of them was capable of attaining. They did not blame each other for things; yet when he saw friends and acquaintances who adored their husbands or wives, he remembered his envy.

Now what would he do with himself on the weekends?

It hadn't been a Technicolor marriage but she had become a condition of his life. It was important to have someone. He began to understand what his father, who had lived alone a good part of his life, had endured.

It came again: a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded all the tissues of his body.

He disentangled himself clumsily from the twisted sheets and went into the bathroom, switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. His ginger hair was getting very thin on top. The freckles that covered his cheeks and hands seemed to have multiplied and intensified to the texture of knockwurst. His eyes were in red pouches; he saw the flabby lines in his face and throat, the beginnings of a sagging pot in his belly that pulled creases into his sides along the ribs. A washed-up, used-up carcass. He walked into the kitchen, moving nothing but his legs; poured a new martini ten-to-one, not bothering with ice, and padded back into the living room. When he sat down he realized it was the first time he had moved naked through the apartment in years. They had both failed to overturn their pristine and modest backgrounds; they always changed clothes in the bedroom, they never walked naked through the living room and kitchen.

Chills swept him furiously. He took the top magazine off the unread pile beside the couch; opened it at random and read a long paragraph and went back to start it again, realizing he had not paid attention to the meaning of the words. After the second try he gave it up and closed the magazine.

This wouldn't do. He had to
do
something; he had to start making some sort of plans.

He decided he would call the police in the morning. Maybe they had to be needled.

He swallowed half the martini and looked around the room with a different glance: trying to picture how it had happened. Where had they done it? On the carpet? Right here on this couch? He tried to visualize it.

It was hard to form a picture. He had never seen real violence except on television or in the movies. Until this had happened, he had been secretly convinced that a good part of it was fictitious—part of the spurious hearty masculine myths that city men constructed to reassure themselves of their
machismo
and the toughness of the world they inhabited. Intellectually he knew better but in his private emotions and fantasies he did not really believe, in a personal way, that hoodlums and killers existed. He had lived his entire life in the Sin Capital of the world, except for the two years they had lived within commuting distance of it, yet never with his own eyes had he seen any vice or corruption, or any violence beyond the occasional arbitrary explosion of a motorist or pedestrian so overcome by inarticulate rage that he began to shout at taxi drivers and beat their fenders with fists. He had never seen a bookie, never known a gangster. He knew drugs were pushed in the neighborhood: one block east was Needle Park, and he had seen the faces full of listless ennui which he understood belonged to addicts, but he had never seen drugs change hands, never seen a hypodermic needle outside a doctor's office. Sometimes he had been frightened by the harsh laughing packs of teenagers who roamed through subway trains and stood in knots on street corners, but he had never actually seen them commit acts of violence. Sometimes it was hard to escape the feeling that the pages of the
Daily News
and the
Mirror
were filled not with fact-news but with the lurid fantasies of pulp-fiction writers.

He knew plenty of people whose apartments had been burglarized. Once, three or four years ago, Carol's purse had been snatched by a quick nimble arm darting through a closing subway door. Those things happened but they happened anonymously; there was no real feeling of personal human violence to them.

Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality.

6

There was a crime story in the Sunday
Times Magazine
and Esther's name was in it. Sam Kreutzer called at ten that morning to tell him about it. “How are you getting along?”

“I'm all right.”

“It's a rotten time. Is there anything at all we can do, Paul?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Maybe you'd like to come over and have dinner with us one night this week.”

“Can I let you know later on in the week, Sam? Right now I don't much want to see anybody.” He wanted to evade the kindnesses of friends. It hadn't happened to
them
; it was secondhand to them. You only bled from your own wounds. There was a saccharine quality to people's sympathy, they couldn't help it, and pity was a cruel emotion at best.

He called Jack. Carol was still asleep. Paul said he'd telephone again later; he probably wouldn't come there to eat unless she was feeling much better—otherwise a raincheck?

He went out to buy the
Times
. Walked up the avenue to Seventy-second and over to the newsstand by the subway station on Broadway. It was quite warm. He narrowly watched the flow of people on the streets, wondering for the first time in his life which of them were killers, which were addicts, which were the innocent. Never before had he felt acutely physically afraid of walking on the streets; he had always been prudent, used taxis late at night, never walked dark streets or ventured alone into uninhabited neighborhoods; but that had been a kind of automatic habit. Now he found himself searching every face for signs of violence.

He carried the
Times
back along Seventy-second Street, walking slowly, consciously looking at things he had spent years taking for granted: the filth, the gray hurrying faces, the brittle skinny girls who stood under the awning in midblock. There wasn't much traffic—on these last warm Sundays after Labor Day everyone fled the city, seeking to prolong the summer as much as they could by soaking up sunshine in the country or at the crowded beaches.