Manhunt. Volume 13, Number 5, September 1965

The Virile Image by Gerald Pearce

She had said, “I can understand what my husband sees in your wife, Mr. Garth, but I can’t understand what she sees in him.”

James Garth removed his wraparound sunglasses and parked them by the drink at his elbow. Earlier the sun had been strong enough to crack the patio tiles, but now it was mid-afternoon; the glare had diminished; the water in the pool looked blue instead of too-bright silver, and he could enjoy the sight of his wife in the water, sleek as a seal and almost as brown.

She disappeared, came to the surface at the pool’s edge beyond the tiled walk, and reached out a slim tanned arm. Her hair was several shades lighter than her skin.

“Toss me my swimsuit, honey.”

Garth grinned. “Which half?”

“Both.”

“Get ’em yourself.”

“What will the neighbors think?”

“If they’re watching, they’ve already seen it all. If they aren’t, they don’t know what they’re missing.”

She made a protesting face that became a grin and climbed out, naked as Venus rising from the sea. And that, Garth thought, is what we can’t show in the domestic version — we have to cut away to a startled parakeet and then come back for a daring shot of the girl’s legs scissoring across the screen. We even have to cheat on the export prints. I ought to get a shot of her just like that, climbing unconcernedly naked out of a sunlit pool and see if— But then he remembered, and cut the thought off.

Her swimsuit was two small wet strips of cotton that lay by the foot of the chaise he was stretched out on. She stooped to pick them up. The corners of her eyes crinkled. “Thank you for the possessive look.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

She flicked the swimsuit at his toes as she went by and started for the house. Garth said casually, “Is that how Tony Trenton looks at you?”

She stopped, turned back to him slowly. She gave him a long cool stare but he could see the flush spreading under her tan. For a second he thought she was going to throw the wet bikini at him. Instead she curled her lip faintly and turned and walked away. Without hurry. Without sudden selfconsciousness.

Lots of poise, he thought, in spite of the blush. Poise and firm flesh and sleek supple lines. Killing her was going to be a crime against beauty.

He picked up his glass, cupped both hands around it to enjoy its pleasant chill, then ran a fingertip around its edge. The finger was long and flat and brown, backed with stiff gray hairs. The hand it belonged to was big and square. A fighter’s hand. But fighters grow old. James Garth was fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight, and embarrassingly rich. Fifty-eight, with the short wide heavily-muscled body beginning irreversibly to slacken, the never handsome but always powerful face growing blurred, its outline lost. Fifty-eight, and planning the murder of his lovely young wife.

He recognized with distant irony that he wasn’t too well equipped for the job.

The man in the street seemed to think that a big movie producer could do anything he wanted — or get it done for him. Like some gang lord of the Twenties. Boys, my wife of three years has become a liability to my self-esteem, get rid of her. Because of the business he was in, and the sometimes unstable people he had to deal with, Garth had long ago established good contacts on both sides of the law. He had only to pick up his phone to retain a pimp, a pusher, or the most discreetly reliable abortionist in the country. But I don’t suppose, he thought calmly, I’d know how to hire a small boy to throw a stone through the window of an empty house, much less someone to commit murder.

But of course that wasn’t the problem, because he had to kill her himself. And she had to realize it. That knowledge, appreciated for a few minutes, or moments, would reveal him to her in a new light. What a pity that he should have to kill her to gain her respect.

“When you’re an old slob of fifty-five like Jim Garth, and you marry a twenty-year-old sexpot, you gotta expect to get cheated on,” Tony Trenton’s voice had said through the louvered window of the men’s room in the Administration Building at the studio. He had an unstagily beautiful voice that carried and was instantly recognizable. Without it he would have stayed in the ranks of the TV series pretty-boys instead of making it to the top in wide screen and color, where he was big business. Women loved him. He loved them back with the forthright ardor of a goat in the spring.

“You just felt her up a little,” another voice said. There came the squak of a tap and the sound of running water. “You talk like you made it already.”

“Gimme a coupla days,” Trenton said. “Hell, it’s not as though it’d be Carol’s first time out...”

And it wasn’t. The first one had been two years ago. At least she had told him it was the first. Garth had heard about it at a cocktail party, one of those noisy professionally anxious affairs where only the waiters were calm and only the few really big men, like Garth, could talk without screaming. He had found himself standing next to Myrna Hartley, over-dressed as usual, her long face awkward and tragic, her large yellow eyes strangely empty. Her husband was a set designer with one Oscar to his credit out of three nominations.

She had said, “I can understand what my husband sees in your wife, Mr. Garth, but I can’t understand what she sees in him.”

Garth smiled. “I’ll ask her, and let you know.”

But the smile and the pose of tolerant humor had been hard to maintain when she went on, “Because he’s really not much good, you know, at that sort of thing,” eyeing him over the rim of her glass with large yellow eyes that were at once pitying and disdainful.

Fifty-eight, he thought now, is not fifty-five, just as fifty-five is not thirty. You would think a man could relax into the milder demands of age instead of fighting them, he was just regretting, in an abstract way, the sad fact that came to the forefront of his mind each time he looked at his wife — who enjoyed him, but also, at least on occasion, others too. The fact: that everyone seemed to think that the years that had slowed him down physically had also unmanned him, making him an object of pity and contempt, a sad old slob lusting with increasing helplessness for young flesh.

That first rime — if it was the first time — after the talk with Myrna Hartley at the cocktail party, he had asked Carol as soon as he got her home. She had been contrite and compassionate, which had taken him aback. She had spoken to him of loneliness and boredom, reminding him of the brutal schedule he had held himself to for the preceding six months, and said that when Jack Hartley started in on her she had welcomed him with something akin to desperation. Because he had actually talked to her. He made love with conversation — about the weather, the Dodgers, Hollywood, politics, gossip, anything — so that when one day he slid a hand up under her skirt it seemed like the pleasant and logical development of a rewarding relationship. He had made himself a real person to her, and therefore, in some way, she had become more of a real person to herself. Was she sorry? Only that she had hurt him, she said, and he didn’t think she was enough of an actress to have faked that kind of candor, regret, and affection. He had had to admit that he had been neglecting her, that he had never imagined that her conversational range went beyond pop music, movies, and local scandal; and then, in the second year of their marriage, he began to discover that she was more than young and lovely to look at and an enthusiastic bed partner. She was a person, and he liked her.

Which was why her second infidelity (if it was only the second) threw him into such a deadly fury. The man was a handsome muscular Adonis who played bit parts when he was lucky and spent most of his time at the beach with the other surfing bums and lived on unemployment compensation and what he could sponge. He had found them together in the back seat of her car, parked in their garage, like a couple of kids. The muscle-boy had started to make a blustering speech, had caught a good look at Garth’s face and run.

“Who is he?”

“A boy I used to know. Before... you know. Before we were married.”

Garth said brutally, “Before you got a contract by satisfying the curious appetites of a casting director named Michael McHenry.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you’ll have a very good explanation this time too.”

“I liked him. I mean I still do. I don’t mean I’m in love with him, I just like him, I just wanted to be nice to him.”

“Your friends are welcome in our house, our pool, even in the back seat of your car. But there are certain privileges, you silly little bitch, that are reserved exclusively for me. I thought I’d made that clear.”

“You knew what I was before you married me. You’d been sleeping with me long enough.”

“You are not what you were before I married you. You are Mrs. James Garth.”

“Yes, Jim.” She looked away. After a while she said slowly, “Do you want me to go away?”

He had said in a different tone, his fury subsiding before a surge of humor as unexpected as it was tolerant, “No, damn it, I want you to behave.” And that had been the end of it.

Except of course — it hadn’t. It had been the beginning, for James Garth, of an uncomfortable train of thought.

What was a man supposed to do in exchange for a romp in the hay? Pay well. Fine, he paid well, and especially well when it was worth it. But that wasn’t enough, was it? Not for the girls who tried the starlet route. They wanted more. A chance to be a star. Stars had been made that way. Or perhaps rent on a pad where, among luxurious gifts showered down by the benefactor, they could entertain younger and more appealing men. Perhaps what Carol get — a husband with more money than her mind could really encompass.

A crook of his finger had been enough to get her away from the casting director, McHenry. After all, Garth was a much bigger wheel, which made him a better investment for her time and energy. He had proposed to her in a moment of whimsy and five minutes later she had come out of what had looked like shock and said yes and married him two days later, in Vegas. What had she been thinking of? Money? Big cars, a big house? A quick divorce and a fat fortune to play with for the rest of her life? But she had stayed. And cheated. And stayed.

And cheated. How many times, really? He didn’t know. Twice admitted, by now presumably a third, most likely somewhere here in his own house; and he would never know if there had been others and what their number was. But twice was enough; the likelihood of the third was acknowledged by her blush and that made it as good as a fact. Because what counted was not how often she lay down for other men but what she thought of him for allowing it, for not preventing it, or perhaps for making it inevitable.

Each time he thought on it his mind went almost blank with stupefaction. How insignificant he must be in her regard if she could so totally ignore his standing in the eyes of everyone involved — his own, hers, and those of her lovers and their endless chains of confidants. That poor old bastard Garth, so hung up on that tramp starlet he married he lets her get away with it right under his own roof. The fact that he could still enjoy her company, and that she could still enjoy him in bed, were irrelevant because unbroadcast and because both were now becoming suspect to him. Perhaps he enjoyed her company because she was young and pretty and played up to him. And if she could enjoy Myrna Hartley’s husband she could probably enjoy anyone, even the unconventional McHenry.

If she had asked for a divorce, he thought, she could have had one without any fuss, taking half he owned plus alimony. Or she could have before the first time. Without argument. After the business with Jack Hartley he would have proved a little harder to deal with but she could still have had her freedom and a substantial settlement without having to get nasty about it. But the afternoon with the over-tanned, over-muscled bit player had moved Garth into a different emotional gear. The affront to his virility had begun to rankle, and he had begun hearing odd words dropped here and there that had not been intended for his ears.

Strange, he thought: here, I am, contemplating a status murder. I am going to kill her because she had reduced me in her mind and in the minds of many of my friends, a larger number of my enemies, and a still larger group consisting of people I neither know nor care to know, to a groveling thing without pride. I have to kill her to show her that I am not. To erase the image from all those other minds I would have to make this a public execution with consequent danger to myself. This isn’t necessary. They’ll suspect anyway. So he would let them suspect, according him that much respect at least. And meantime he would be free. Physically free, not having been arrested, tried, and convicted. And most important of all free from the fear of his image in Carol’s mind, which he would once and for all have changed in the process of killing her.

Simple, wasn’t it?

He smiled faintly, wrily, and downed the last of his drink. Now all he needed to do was devise a perfect crime. He did not believe in complicated plots. Something simple. A party, with lots of people to watch her getting high. Then when everyone was gone a fast, efficient “accident” out by the pool. She would be found with a horrible bruise where her head had hit the side in a drunken fall — the precise mechanics shouldn’t be too hard, to arrange — she would have fallen unconscious into the pool and quietly drowned.

He could draw her onto the pato, put his arms around her to complement her on the party, and then explain that he was going to kill her. Since she had to be a bit high for the stage-setting to accomplish anything for him, the assurance would mean little unless it was reinforced by a carefully built up structure of memories, hints, even promises, which she would suddenly, for a few brief satisfying moments, realize were now going to be made good.

Perhaps I should start it right now, he thought, getting up off the chaise. I could go in and say, oh, something like, “Carol, darling, has it ever occurred to you that I might get tired enough of your playing around to decide to kill you?”

Just that. Just the question. And then something unrelated, something friendly and indulgent, turning her response aside. He might make love to her.

He stretched, flexed his big flat fighter’s hands, and prowled barefoot toward the house with the pleasant awareness of power and wellbeing his muscular body still gave him when it was rested and relaxed. French doors admitted him to the hall with its informal lounging furniture. He turned to the left and found her in the master bedroom. The door to the bathroom was open and there was a hint of steam in the air. She had showered to remove the pool’s chlorine from her hair and its odor from her skin. She wore a short terrycloth robe and was toweling her head briskly.

He watched indulgently. She dropped the towel into a laundry hamper, pushed her pale hair back off her face and sat down in front of her dressing table, facing him. Her face was composed and grave. He opened his mouth to speak but she was a beat ahead of him.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy. I want a divorce.”

He was briefly appalled at the way the words took the play away from him. He adjusted without effort, made a non-commital gesture with one hand. This turn might make killing her unnecessary. He would have to think it over.

“I often wonder why you married me,” he said after a moment.

“I liked you. You were very sophisticated and accomplished. I thought you were very exciting. I thought that living with you as your wife would be exciting. I was a greedy little bitch and I thought it would be lovely to have money and a lovely house with a pool and clothes and everything. It made me feel very proud to have someone like you offer them to me.”

“Did you think it would last?”

“I didn’t think about it. Oh, in the back of my head I heard this voice saying Look kid, if you don’t like it, you can always quit. You know? Nobody gets married these days without that. But still I really didn’t think. There was just you and me living in this house and it was all sort of now. There wasn’t any future. That was the future, it had arrived.”

“That was a silly notion, Carol.”

“I guess it was. I’ve... well, grown up in three years. I’m terribly sorry for the things I’ve done wrong. It’s very strange — I don’t know quite how to put this — but I don’t think I made a mistake marrying you, just that it would be a mistake to go on.”

“I see.” His smile took on an ironic twist.

“No matter what I do — or don’t do — you’ll never trust me again. We can’t live like that.”

“Maybe not. I suppose you’ve made out a nice long list of the things you’ll want? This house? Fifty thousand a year? Maybe a—”

“Nothing.”

“—nice big Rolls Royce, with a Mercedes to keep it company.”

“No nothing. I don’t want anything.”

He said after a long moment, “What?”

“I’m sorry. Truly. I don’t want anything. It wouldn’t be fair. I just want out.”

“Out?” He said it again, in mounting incredulity and a sudden cold clutch of fear. “Out?”

She looked down at her hands, saw that her robe had fallen open and tugged it closed in an automatic gesture. Garth remembered his passing thought of love but now it was only an academic fact, a datum of memory. He was vulnerable — suddenly so vulnerable he had no choice, no time for subterfuge, no time for anything but self-preservation.

His right fist caught her on the temple. She fell half stunned to the floor and then for a while pummeled and gouged and scratched ineffectively while his hands around her slim brown neck did what they had to do. How easy it was, really — taking a life. He wondered if she knew why it was happening to her. Probably not. He had never fully realized — not until now — the degree to which he and Carol had been unable to communicate. It was unfortunate that he had to forego the element of comprehension but he could not afford luxuries now — not even the luxury of avoiding the inevitable murder charge. All that mattered now was that no one else would ever hear the voice that Garth could hear in the privacy of his own skull. The voice of Tony Trenton, summarizing Garth’s decline. “She wants out so bad, the poor kid isn’t asking for a cent.”