Sleeping Beauty

chapter 3

The woman rode in a silence so complete that I hesitated to break it. I glanced at her face from time to time. Her expression seemed to keep changing, from grief and fear and dismay to cold indifference. I wondered what caused the changes, or if my mind had conspired with the lights to half imagine them.

We left the freeway at my West Los Angeles turnoff.

She spoke in a small, tentative voice: “Where do you live, Mr.–?” She had forgotten my name.

“Archer,” I said. “I have an apartment just a few blocks from here.”

“Would you greatly mind if I phoned my husband from your apartment? He isn’t expecting me. I’ve been staying with relatives.”

I should have asked where her husband lived and driven her there. But I took her home to my place.

She stood barefooted in my living room with my old raincoat hanging on her, and looked around as if she was slumming. Her thoughtlessness of manner made me wonder what her background was. There was probably money there, possibly quite new money.

I showed her the phone on the desk and went into the bedroom to unpack my carry-on bag. When I went back into the living room, she was huddled over the phone. The black receiver was pressed to the side of her head like a surgical device which had drained all the blood from her face.

I didn’t realize that the line was dead until she laid the receiver down, very gently. Then she put her face down on her arms. Her hair fell across my desk like a heavy shadow.

I stood and watched her for a while, unwilling to intrude on her feelings, perhaps unwilling to share them. She was full of trouble. But somehow she looked quite natural in my room.

After a while, she lifted her head. Her face was as calm as a mask. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I have something to be sorry about. Tom won’t come and get me. He has a woman with him. She answered the phone.”

“What about the relatives you’ve been staying with?”

“Nothing about them.”

She looked around the room as if her life had suddenly narrowed down.

“You mentioned you had a family. You said they were in the oil business.”

“You must have misunderstood me. And I’m getting tired of being questioned, if you don’t mind.” Her mood was swinging like an erratic pendulum from being hurt to hurting. “You seem to be mortally afraid of getting stuck with me.”

“On the contrary. You can stay here all night if you want to.”

“With you?”

“You can have the bedroom. This chesterfield opens out into a sleeper.”

“And what would it cost me?”

“Nothing.”

“Do I look like an easy mark?”

She stood up, dropping my raincoat from her shoulders. It was an act of rejection. At the same time she was inadvertently showing me her body. It was deep in the breast, where the bird had left its dark stains on her shirt; narrow in the waist, deep in the hips, full-thighed. There was sand on the rug from her dirty elegant feet.

I caught an oblique glimpse of myself as a middle-aged man on the make. It was true that if she had been old or ugly I wouldn’t have brought her home with me. She was neither. In spite of her discontent and fear, her head had a dark unchanging beauty.

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, asking myself if I was telling her the truth.

“People always want something. Don’t try to fool yourself. I should never have come here with you.” She looked around like a child in a strange place. “I don’t like it here.”

“You’re free to leave, Mrs. Russo.”

She began to cry suddenly. The tears ran down her uncovered face, leaving shiny tracks. Moved by compunction or desire, I reached for her shoulders with my hands. She backed away and stood vibrating.

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

She didn’t believe me. I guessed that she had been badly hurt already, perhaps damaged like the grebe beyond hope of recovery. She touched her grief-smeared face.

“Is there someplace where I can wash?”

I showed her the door to the bathroom. She locked it emphatically behind her. She was in there quite a long time. When she came out, her eyes were brighter and she moved with more confidence, like an alcoholic who has taken a secret drink.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll be on my way.”

“Do you have any money?”

“I don’t need money where I’m going.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

My voice was sharp, and she overreacted to it. “You expect me to pay you for the ride? And here I am breathing your valuable air.”

“You want to pick a fight with someone. Why does it have to be me?”

She chose to take this as a final rejection. She opened the door abruptly and left the apartment. I had an urge to follow her, but I went no farther than the mailbox. I sat at my desk and began to go through the mail that had piled up during my week’s vacation.

Most of it was bills. There was a three-hundred-dollar check from a man whose son I had found living with five other teenagers in an apartment in Isla Vista. I had gone to Mazatlán on the strength of it. There was a laboriously hand-printed letter from an inmate of a maximum security facility in central California. He said he was innocent and wanted me to prove it. He added in a postscript:

Like a long-distance call being placed, my mind made an obscure series of connections. I got up, almost overturning the light chair, and went into the bathroom. The door of the medicine cabinet was partly open. There had been a vial of Nembutal in the cabinet, thirty-five or forty capsules left over from a time when I had forgotten how to sleep, and then had learned again. They weren’t there now.