The Shrinking Man (16 page)

And when they’d moved to the lake the suffering was even worse, because then he had to wait for Lou to go to the post office—standing at the front window, hands shaking when he saw her come walking back down the street. He would know she had no letter because she walked so slowly, and yet he would be unable, until she actually said so, to believe that no letter had come.

He pitched over on his stomach and bit into the sponge savagely. It was so horribly true that thought was his undoing. To be unaware; dear God, to be joyously unaware. To be able to rip the tissues of his brain away and let them drip like clouded paste from his fingertips. Why couldn’t—

His breath stopped. He reared up sharply, ignoring the sudden throb of pain in his head.

Music.

“Music?” He murmured faintly. How could there be music in the cellar?

Then he knew; it wasn’t in the cellar, but upstairs. Louise was playing music on the radio: Brahms’ First Symphony. He leaned on his elbows, lips parted, holding his breath and listening to the sturdy beat of the symphony’s opening phrase. It was barely audible, as though he stood in the lobby of a concert hall hearing the orchestra through closed doors.

Breath escaped finally, but he did not move. His face was still, eyes unblinking. It was still the same world, then, and he was still a part of it. The connecting sound of music told him so. Upstairs, gigantically remote, Louise was listening to that music. Below, incredibly minute, he was listening too. And it was music to both of them, and it was beauty.

He remembered how, toward the end of his stay in the house, he had been incapable of listening to music unless it was played so low that Lou couldn’t even hear it. Otherwise the music was magnified into a clubbing noise at his ears, giving him a headache. The clatter of a dish was a knife jab at his brain. The sudden cry or laughter of Beth assailed him like a gun fired beside his ear, making his face contort, making him cover his ears.

Brahms. To lie like a mote, an insignificance in a cellar, listening to Brahms. If life itself were not fantastic, that moment could be labeled so.

The music stopped. His gaze jerked up as if he might see, in the darkness, the reason for its stopping.

He lay there, silent, listening to the muffled voice of the woman who had been his wife. His heart seemed to stop. For a moment he was really part of that old world again.

His lips formed the name Lou.

21″

Because the summer ended, the teen-aged girl who had worked at the lake grocery store had to return to school. The opening had been given to Lou, who had applied for it a month before.

Vaguely she’d thought that Scott would take care of Beth when she got a job. But now it was painfully clear that, barely reaching the height of Beth’s chest, he couldn’t take care of her at all. Moreover, he refused to try. So she made arrangements with a neighborhood girl who had left high school. The girl agreed to take care of Beth while Lou was working.

“Lord knows, we won’t have much money left after paying her,” Lou had said, “but I guess there’s no alternative.”

He’d said nothing. Not even when she told him that, as much as she hated to say it, he’d have to stay in the cellar during the day unless he wanted the girl to know who he was; for, obviously, he couldn’t pass for a child. He’d only shrugged his dainty shoulders and left the room without a word.

Before Lou left for work the first morning, she prepared sandwiches and two thermos bottles—one of coffee, one of water—for Scott. He sat at the kitchen table, propped up on two thick pillows, his pencil-thin fingers partially curled around a mug of steaming coffee, his face giving no indication that he heard a word she was saying to him.

“This should last you easily,” she was saying. “Take a book with you; read. Take naps. It won’t be so bad. I’ll be home early.”

He stared at the circles of cream floating like oil drops on the coffee. He twisted the cup very slowly on its saucer. It made a squeaking sound that he knew irritated Lou.

“Now remember what I told you, Beth,” Lou said. “Don’t say a word about Daddy. Not a
word
. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Beth nodded.

“What did I say?” Lou demanded.

“I don’t say a word about Daddy.”

“About the freako,” Scott mumbled.

“What?” Lou asked, looking at him. He stared into the coffee. She didn’t pursue it; he had fallen into the habit of muttering to himself since they’d moved to the lake.

After breakfast, Lou went down to the cellar with him, carrying one of the lawn chairs for him to sit on. She pulled down her suitcase from a pile of boxes between the fuel tank and the refrigerator and set it on the floor. She put two chair cushions in it.

“There, you can take a nice nap there,” she said.

“Like a dog,” he muttered.

“What?”

He looked at her like a bellicose doll.

“I don’t think the girl will try to come down,” she went on. “Then again, she might be nosy. Maybe I’d better put the lock on the door.”

“No.”

“But what if the girl comes down?”

“I don’t want the door locked!”

“But, Scott, what if—”

“I don’t want the door locked!”

“All right, all right,” she said, “I won’t put the lock on. We’ll just have to hope the girl doesn’t decide she wants to see the cellar.”

He didn’t speak.

While she made sure he had everything he needed, bent far over to give him a dutiful peck on the forehead, went back up the steps and lowered the door into place, Scott stood motionless in the middle of the floor. He watched her walk past the window, the skirt of her dress windblown around her shapely legs.

Then she was gone, but he remained unmoving, staring out the window at the spot where she had passed. His small hands kept flexing slowly against his legs. His eyes were motionless. He seemed engrossed in somber thought, as if he might be contemplating the relative merits of life and death.

At last the expression slipped from his features. He drew in a long breath and looked around. He lifted his palms briefly in a gesture of wry surrender, then let them slap down on his thighs.

“Swell,” he said.

He climbed up on the chair, taking his book with him. He opened the book to the fringe-bottomed leather marker that read, “This Is Where I Fell Asleep,” and started to read.

He read the passage twice. Then the book fell forward in his lap and he thought about Louise, about the impossibility of his touching her in any way. He reached her kneecaps and a little more. Somewhat short of manliness, he thought, teeth gritted. His expression did not change. Casually he shoved the book off the chair arm and heard it slap down loudly on the cement.

Upstairs he heard Lou’s footsteps moving toward the front of the house, then fading. When they returned they were accompanied by
another set of footsteps and he heard the voice of the girl, typically adolescent, thin, fluttery, and superficially confident.

Ten minutes later Lou was gone. In front of the house he’d heard the sputtering cough, the sudden gas-fed roar of the Ford being warmed up. Then, after a few minutes, the gunning sound had gradually disappeared. Now there were only the voices of the girl Catherine and Beth. He listened to the rise and fall of Catherine’s voice, wondering what she was saying and what she looked like.

Bemused, he put the indistinct voice to distinct form. She was five feet six, slim-waisted and long-legged, with young, uptilted breasts nudging out her blouse. Fresh young face, reddish-blonde hair, white teeth. He watched her moving lightly as a bird, her blue eyes bright as polished berries.

He picked up the book and tried to read, but he couldn’t. Sentences ran together like muddy rivulets of prose. The page was obscured with commingling words. He sighed and stirred uncomfortably on the chair. The girl stretched to the urging of his fancy, and her breasts, like firm-skinned oranges, forced out their silken sheathing.

He blew away the picture with an angry breath. Not that, he ordered.

He drew his legs up and wrapped both arms around them, resting his chin on his knees. He sat there like a child musing on the case for Santa Claus.

The girl had half taken off her blouse before he shut the curtain on her forcibly imposed indelicacy. The taut look was on his face again, the look of a man who has found effort unrewarding and has decided on impassivity instead. But, far beneath, like lava threatening in volcanic bellies, the bubbling of desire went on.

When the screen door of the back porch slapped shut and the voices of Beth and the girl floated into the yard, he slid off the chair with sudden excitement and ran to the pile of boxes beside the fuel tank. He stood there for a moment, his heart jolting. Then, when his mind came up with no authoritative resistance, he clambered up the pile and peered through a corner of the cobweb-streaked window.

Lines of pain shriveled in around his eyes.

Five feet six had become five feet three. The slim waist and legs had become chunky muscle and fat; the young, uptilted breasts had vanished in the loose folds of a long-sleeved sweatshirt. The fresh
young face lurked behind grossness and blemishes, the reddish-blonde hair had been dyed to a lackluster chestnut. There were, feebly remaining, white teeth and movements like a bird’s; a rather heavy bird’s. The color of her eyes he couldn’t see.

He watched Catherine move around the yard, her broad buttocks cased in faded dungarees, her bare feet stuck in loafers. He listened to her voice.

“Oh, you have a cellar,” she said.

He saw the look on Beth’s face change obviously and felt his muscles tightening.

“Yes, but it’s just empty,” Beth said hastily. “Nobody lives there.”

Catherine laughed unsuspiciously.

“Well, I hope not,” she said, looking toward the window. He shrank back, then realized that the cellar could not be seen through any of the windows because of the glare of light on them.

He watched them until they disappeared around the back end of the house. His eyes caught the fleeting sight of them as they moved past the window over the log pile. Then they were gone. Grunting, he climbed back down the pile of boxes and went back to the chair. He put one of the thermos bottles on the arm of the chair and retrieved the book. Then, sitting down, he poured smoking coffee into the red plastic cap and sat there, the book open and unread on his lap, sipping slowly.

I wonder how old she is, he thought.

He started up on the chair cushion, eyes jerking open.

Someone was lifting the cellar door.

With a gasp, he flung his legs over the edge of the suitcase just as the person’s hold slipped and the door crashed down. He struggled to his feet, looking frantically toward the steps. The door started to rise again; a spear of light shot across the floor, widening.

With two distinct lunges, Scott grabbed the coffee thermos and the book and almost dived under the fuel tank. As the opened door slammed down, he slid himself behind the big carton of clothes. He clutched the book and thermos bottle to his chest, feeling sick. Why did he have to be so vitriolically stubborn about having the lock put
on the door? Yes, it was the idea of being imprisoned that he hadn’t liked. But at least in prison, others could not come in.

He heard the cautious descent on the stairs, the clicking of loafers, and he tried to stop breathing. As the girl entered he shrank back into the shadows.

“Hmm,” the girl said. She moved around the floor. He heard her kick the chair experimentally. Would she wonder why it was there? Wasn’t it an odd place for a chair, right in the middle of a cellar floor? He swallowed dryly. And what about the suitcase with the pillows in it? Well, that might be where the cat slept.

“Jesus, what a mess,” said the girl, her shoes scuffing over the cement. For a moment he saw her thick calves as she stood by the water heater. He heard her fingernails tapping on the enameled metal.

“Water heater,” she said to herself. “Uh-huh.”

She yawned. He heard the straining sound in her throat that accompanied tense stretching. It broke off with a loud grunt. “Boop-dee-doodle-oodle,” said the girl.

She moved around some more. Oh, my God, the sandwiches and the other thermos, he thought. Damn nosy bitch! his mind snapped. Catherine said, “Hmm. Croquet.”

Then, in a few minutes, she said, “Oh, well,” and went back up the steps and the cellar shook with the crash of the dropped door. If Beth were taking a nap, that would end it.

As Scott crawled out from under the fuel tank, he heard the back screen door slam shut and Catherine’s footsteps overhead. He got up and put the thermos bottle back on the chair arm. Now he’d have to let Lou put the lock on the door.

“Damn the stupid little…”

He paced the floor like a caged animal. Nosy bitch! You couldn’t trust one of them. First damn day and she had to see the whole house. She’d probably gone through every bureau, cabinet, and closet in the house.

What had she thought about seeing male clothing? What lie might Lou have to tell—or already told? He knew that she’d given Catherine a false last name. Since no mail was delivered to the house, there was not too much danger of the girl’s discovering the lie.

The only danger was that Catherine might have read those articles
in the
Globe-Post
and seen the pictures. Yet if that were so, surely she already suspected that he must be hiding in the cellar and would have searched more carefully. Or
had
she been searching?

It was ten minutes later when he decided to have a second sandwich and discovered that the girl had taken them.

“Oh,
Christ!”
He slammed an infuriated fist on the arm of the chair and almost wished she’d hear him and would come down so he could berate her for a stupid pryer.

He sank back on the chair and shoved the book off the arm again. It slapped loudly on the floor. The hell with it, he thought.

He drank all the coffee and sat there, sweating, glaring straight ahead. Upstairs, the girl walked around and around.

Fat slob, he called her in the jaded smallness of his head.