The Good Old Stuff

Miranda

They put a plate in the back of my head and silver pins in the right thighbone. The arms were in traction longer than the legs. The eye, of course, was something they couldn’t fix.

It was a big, busy place they had there. The way I had come in, I guess, was a sort of challenge to the doctors. A post-graduate course. See, gentlemen, this thing is alive — indubitably alive. Watch, now. We will paste it back together the way God made it. Or almost as good.

My friends came — for a while. For a few months. I wasn’t too cordial. I didn’t need them. It was the same thing every time. How terrible to be all strung with wires and weights! Aren’t you going mad from boredom, George?

I wasn’t going mad from boredom. I learned how to keep my face from laughing, how to laugh on the inside. As if I was sitting back there in my mind, hugging myself, shrieking with laughter, rocking from side to side, laughing and laughing. But nothing but silence on the outside. The faraway dignity of the very sick.

They brought me in and I was dead. That is, for all practical purposes. The heart had no right to keep beating.

But you see, I knew. When you know a thing like that, you can’t die. When you know a thing like that, it is unfinished business.

Poor George. Poor old George.

And me all the time laughing away. It was a joke that I could understand, but nobody else would. The joke goes like this. I’ll tell you and you can laugh with me too. We’ll rock and giggle together. Once upon a time there was a good-natured, broad-shouldered slob named George A. Corliss who lived in an eleven-thousand-dollar frame house in an orderly little suburban community called Joanna Center. He lived at 88 April Lane. He made a hundred and thirty-eight fifty each and every week in a New York publishing house, carried a little more insurance than he should have, loved his dainty, fragile-boned, gray-eyed, silver-blond little wife named Connie very much indeed. In fact this slob had his happiest moments when Connie would give him a speculative look and tell him that he really did look a little like Van Johnson. This George Corliss, he made replicas of early American furniture in a basement workshop, bought a new Plymouth every time he had the old one about paid for, conscientiously read “good books” while commuting, and often brooded about the childlessness of the Corliss household, a thorn in his side.

He drove too fast, smoked too much, knocked off too many cocktails. In all respects a very average guy. But what George didn’t know was that Connie, the little silver-blond wife, feeling the thirties coming on, had acquired an itch for a Latin-type twenty-two-year-old kid, a gas pumper at the local lubritorium, a pinch-waisted kid with melting eyes, muscles, and a fast line of chatter. Since the kid obviously could not support Connie in the style to which George had gradually accustomed her, nothing seemed simpler than to find some nice safe way of knocking George off and glomming onto the fifty-six thousand bucks his demise would bring in.

So one day when George had told Connie in advance that he had to take a run up to a mountain town called Crane, New York, to dicker with a recalcitrant author, Connie took the Plymouth to the garage and the kid, Louie Palmer by name, did a judicious job of diddling with the tie-rod ends with the idea of their parting when a turn was taken at high speed.

So I took a turn at high speed. Rather, I tried to take it. The steering wheel went loose and gummy in my hands. They killed me, all right. They killed George, the slob, all right.

Funny, how it was. Take the moment the car started rolling. I had maybe one second of consciousness left. And in that second a lot of little things added up. I’d had the steering checked in town that week. Connie always buying gas in one-dollar quantities. The funny way she’d said goodbye. At the last minute I wanted her to come along. She was emphatic about saying no. And there was the time I found the initialed cigarette case on the car floor. She took it and I forgot it until I saw that Louie Palmer using it. Then he got all red and bothered and said it had slipped out of his pocket while he was checking the car, maybe when he reached in to yank the gimmick that releases the hood.

And before things went out for me, in a blinding whiteness that reached across the world, I said to myself, almost calmly, “George, you’re not going to let this kill you.”

But it did kill the George I was talking to. The man who came out of the coma eight days later wasn’t the old furniture builder, huckster, and loving husband.

No, he was the new George. The boy who could lie there and laugh inside at his joke. They tried to kill him and they did. And now he was going to kill them. Murder by a corpse. There’s something you can get your teeth into and laugh at. But don’t let it move the face muscles. It might pull out some of the deep stitches.

“You’re the luckiest man in the world,” the young doctor said. Young, with a nose like a bird’s beak and no more hair than a stone.

“Sure,” I said.

“I would have bet ten thousand to one against you.”

“Good thing you didn’t.” I wanted him to go away. I wanted to think about Connie and Louie and just how I would do it to them.

He fingered the wasted arm muscles. “Doing those exercises?”

“Every day, Doc.” I liked to see him wince when I called him Doc.

He clucked and muttered and prodded. “I warned you that you might not ever be able to walk again, the way those nerves were pinched. But the nurse told me you took a few steps today. I don’t understand it.”

I looked him in the eye, with the one I had left. “You see, Doc,” I said, “I’ve got everything to live for.”

The way I said it made him uneasy.

“Mr. Corliss, you’re not going to be exactly as good as new. We can improve that face for you by hooking a plastic eye in those muscles so that the eye will turn in its socket, but the two big scars will still show. You’ll limp for a few years and you will have to be very careful for the rest of your life, protecting that plate in your head from any sudden jars. No sports, you understand. Bridge is going to be your speed.”

“You’ve said this before, Doc.”

“I want to impress it on you. A man can’t go through what you went through and expect—”

“Doc, I don’t expect a thing. I was thrown through a shatter-proof windshield and then the car rolled across me.”

He didn’t like me as a person. He loved me as a case. I made his mouth water. He had showed me to every doctor within a ten-mile radius. He was writing me up for some kind of medical journal. The before-and-after pictures were going to go in his scrapbook. But we always parted with him looking as though he wished I was healthy enough to hit in the mouth.

Pain to the average person is just that. Pain. Nothing else. A mashed finger or a bad headache. But when you have it a long time something else happens to it. It turns into something else. You live with it and get to know it. With me, it was a color. Green. Green is supposed to be restful. I would see it behind my eyes. Eye, I should say. I’d wake up in the night and look at the color. Dull dark green. That was good. That was above standard. That was more than you could expect. But there were the nights in the beginning when it was a hot, bright, harsh green, pulsating like a crazy living plant. That was when the night nurse was always there. During the first weeks she used the needle when it was bad, and later it was pills, which never worked as fast or as well.

One time it was that new green that they say you can see for two miles on a clear day. It stayed that way, they told me later, for four days. Something about those pinched nerves.

And one day I searched and searched and could find no green at all, even the dark, almost pleasant kind. I missed it. Believe me, I missed it.

I didn’t want them coming, and they sensed it and didn’t come any more. But I liked to have Connie come. I liked it when there was traction on the two arms and the leg and both legs felt dead and the bandages on my head covered all but my mouth and my right eye.

She came every day. She wept a little every time she came.

“Don’t cry, Connie.”

“I–I can’t help it, George.”

“I’m getting better, they keep telling me. So why are you crying?”

“It’s so awful to see you there like this.”

“Just think, Connie. I might be dead. Wouldn’t that be worse, Connie? Wouldn’t it? Or maybe you’d like that better.”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?”

“Then there wouldn’t be all this pain and suffering.”

“Oh.”

“What did you think I meant, Connie? What on earth could I have meant except that, dearest? I know that you love me very much. You’ve told me so often.”

“It’s hard to understand you, George, not seeing your face and all. Just your... eye. What you say just comes out... and it’s hard to know what you mean sometimes.” She always worked hard on that explanation. It meant a lot to her to get it right. Her knuckles always had a bone-white look while she talked to her loving husband.

Every time it was a lovely game. And I had all the time in between to plan the next visit.

“Connie, I hope you’re taking good care of the car.”

“But, George! It was a total loss.”

“Sorry, dearest. I keep forgetting. We’ll have to get a new one. But when we do you’ll help me see that it’s well taken care of.”

“Of course, George.”

There was a continuity about it. If I kept after her too hard she’d get suspicious. Then the fear would show in her eyes. I’d let her carry the fear around for a few visits and then I would drive it away.

“I’m so lucky to have a wife like you, Connie.”

“Thank you, George.”

“I know I’ve been acting strangely. But I haven’t the courage to do what I planned. I wanted to estrange you, to drive you away, so that you could find a new life with a whole man, not some smashed item like me.”

“Is that what you were doing?”

“Of course!”

“Oh, George! Darling, I thought—” A very abrupt stop.

“What did you think?”

“Well, that maybe the accident had... well, hurt your head in some way so that you were beginning to think I was to blame for the accident.” Then she laughed to show how silly that idea was. She flushed, too. I imagine she was considering her boldness to be the best defense, in addition to being rather fun because of the risk.

“You? Hey, I was alone in the car, remember?”

“You’ve always driven too fast.”

“Never again.”

At the end of the visiting period she would kiss me and go. Before the bandages came off my face she would press her lips to mine very sweetly. Loving little silver-blond Connie with those enormous gray eyes and that dainty figure.

After the bandages came off and there was just the patch on the eye she kissed hard, but not in passion. As though it was something she had to do hard and quick in order to do it at all.

After her fears had gone away and after, I guessed, she had told Louie that she had been wrong about thinking that I might have guessed, I would slowly bring her suspicions back to a boil.

I was giving Connie and Louie some exciting dates. Giving them something to talk about.

A good thing about carrying too much life insurance is that you sometimes have too much accident insurance along with it. And I had a lot. Complete coverage of all medical expenses plus thirty-five hundred consolation prize for the loss of the eye plus six hundred a month for complete disability until I could get back to my job. They said a full year from the time of discharge from the hospital.

To go home would give me more time for the game I was playing with them. But it was good in the hospital, too. I could lie there at night, and it was as if I had them fastened to a string, two puppets. When I yanked the string they jumped.

The books talk about having to live with guilt and how it can subtly change the relationship of lovers. But I was no body, firmly and safely planted away. I was between them. I wondered if she could taste my lips when she kissed Louie, and if he looked deep into her eyes and saw a hospital bed...

The nurse was something else. A tall, gawky girl, almost grotesquely angular and yet full of a strange grace. Miranda. She charged at the bed looking capable of tripping and falling over it, yet always her hands were light as moths. Her eyes were deep-set, smallish, a brilliant and Technicolor blue. She knew.

I saw it in the strange, wry amusement in her eyes.

Once she told me she knew. She cranked the bed up a little to rest tired muscles. She stood and folded her arms. I heard the starched rustle of the material. Her hair was a soft dusty black under the cap. Her mouth was wide and quite heavy.

“Delirium,” she said in her abrupt voice, “is usually dull.” She had a trick of starting a sentence boldly and then letting it fall away.

“I was delirious, I expect.”

“But not dull, George.” That was the tip. Up until that point it had been a most discreet and proper Mr. Corliss.

“Like living out a soap opera, Miranda?”

She shrugged. It was typical of her to shrug too hard, hiking her wide, thin shoulders almost up to her ears. “But no part in it for me, I would think.”

I watched her. There was nothing awkward in our silence.

“Delirium isn’t much to go on, Miranda. Not when there’s been a brain injury.”

“Perhaps the delirium is partly due to her. So sweet. She’s all tinkle and ice and teensy little gestures. Oh, she’s a one, that one. What mothers want their daughters to grow up to be — on the outside.”

“And the inside. Will you hazard a guess on the inside, Dr. Miranda?”

No more banter. She looked hard at me, and up through the little blue eyes welled the fanatic light. “Rotten,” she whispered. “Dead, soft rotten.” She turned and walked out with her lunging stride, a whisper of starch.

It made the game better. A new piece on the board, allowing more permutations and combinations.

Later that day I had my arm around her as I walked. She looked as though her back and shoulders would feel hard, slatted. She was a softness and a warmth. I took five steps away from the bed and four back to the wheelchair. Her lip was caught under her teeth and her breath came hard as though it were she who was making the effort.

The next day, dozing on the sun porch, I felt someone staring at me. I looked over and saw Miranda in the doorway. We looked at each other for an impossible time, the white antiseptic walls and the neat floral arrangements tilting and spinning away until we looked across a bottomless void at each other and there was nothing alive in creation except the wild blue of her eyes. When she turned and left, without speaking, the time weave was ripped across with a sound I could almost hear.

The young doctor and the absentminded old one came in one morning and told me that this was the day I would go home, that an ambulance was being provided, that Connie had been informed, that arrangements had been made for Nurse Wysner to live in for a time until Connie became accustomed to the necessary work.

“In a couple of months you’ll be ready for the eye work,” the young doctor said.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “We mustn’t forget that.”

He turned away, looking as though his mouth hurt him.

They didn’t use the siren, and it awakened in me a childish disappointment. It would be fitting to arrive with siren, that sound which in our neat world has replaced the night cough of the unknown beast.

When they rolled me out onto the asphalt of the drive I lifted my head and looked at the house. This was where the big amiable clown who sometimes looked a little like V. Johnson had lived. All the details of it were sharp and it looked unreal, a house seen in a movie. I knew that all things would now look that way. Two eyes give depth perception. One eye gives everything a two-dimensional flatness.

Miranda Wysner, blinding white in the sun, stood tall and straight, with a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. A smile no one else could see.

Connie trotted delicately back and forth between the wheeled cart and the side door, telling everybody to be careful, please, don’t bump him on anything, and her voice was like the mirrored wind chimes in a lost lake house of long ago.

Connie had moved into the guest room across the hall from the bedroom we had shared — or rather the bedroom she had shared with George A. Corliss, who died in such an unfortunate accident. They put me in the big double bed, and the Hollywood frame creaked in a well-remembered way and I was very tired and went to sleep almost immediately.

I dreamed I was laid out in that room with candles at head and feet and the smell of flowers and soft chanting. I awoke in the purple-gray dusk and there were flowers and a distant chanting but no candles. The chanting was a muted newscaster, his Airedale voice tamed by a half twist of the dial. There were the sharp yelps of neighborhood children at play, and for a moment I was a guy who had taken a nap. Just a nap. Get up, go down, kiss Connie, mix the drinks, check the stove to see what dinner might be.

But Miranda came in with her starchy rustle and bent over me and put her hand on my forehead. “Cool,” she said. “Probably a little subnormal.”

“We’re living in a subnormal household. Where are you?”

“The next room. Beyond the bath. With both doors open, I’ll hear you if you cry out in the night.”

Connie smells sweet and dainty and feminine. Miranda had her special scent. Long illness makes the senses acute. Miranda smelled of medicinal alcohol, antiseptic, and, underneath, a deep perfume that throbbed. It was probably against regulations. It had a musky jungle beat.

“Maybe I’ll just whimper.”

“I’ll hear that, too.” There was just enough light so that I could see her teeth flash white. “I told her not to try to talk to you until tomorrow. Excitement, you know.”

“Just like a county fair.”

“I’ll bring your tray.”

When I awoke in the morning, a fat rain, oyster colored, viscid, was coming down in straight lines. I could see it bouncing off the roof peak across the street. The bedside clock said three minutes of six. Hospital habits. In three minutes Miranda came striding in with a basin of warm water, glass of cold, toothbrush, comb.

“I’ve put the coffee on,” she said. I had finished breakfast and was shaving with an electric razor when Connie came in, her pink housecoat belted tightly around her child’s waist, her face all cute and vacant with sleep.

“Goodness, you people get up early!”

Miranda turned from the window. “Good morning, Mrs. Corliss.”

“Good morning, nurse. Welcome home, darling! Oh, welcome home!” She came over to the bed. Miranda watched stonily. Connie bent and gave me that quick, hard kiss. I got my hand around the back of her frail neck and prolonged it. When I released her she took a step backwards, her eyes wide, bringing her hand up as though to scrub her lips, not quite daring.

“Well!” she said unevenly.

At the end of the week, I made four full circuits of the room. At the end of two weeks I went downstairs, dressed for the first time. The clothes hung on me. The more independent I grew, the more coldness appeared in Connie’s manner toward Miranda.

At the end of the second week she brought it to a head, in Miranda’s presence.

“George, I think we can get along beautifully now without Nurse Wysner.”

“I’ll leave in the morning,” Miranda said. “I’ll pack tonight. That is, if you really feel you don’t need me, Mr. Corliss.”

I gave the words the proper emphasis. “I can handle everything myself,” I said.

“You mustn’t get too confident,” Miranda said.

“I know my own limitations,” I replied.

“You two talk as if I weren’t here to help,” Connie said with small-girl plaintiveness.

“I’m certain you’ll be a great help, Mrs. Corliss,” Miranda said, starting bluntly, sliding into her odd breathlessness at the end of the sentence.

“Then it’s settled,” Connie said brightly, clapping her hands once, a habit I had at one time found almost unbearably sweet...

In the middle of the night Miranda’s hand against my cheek awakened me. The bed stirred as she sat on it. The night was as black as a sealed coffin.

Her whisper had the same quality as her speaking voice. “You can’t do it alone, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever it is that you’ve been planning, my darling.”

“May I take this as a declaration of your great and undying passion?”

“See? You can’t hurt me that way. You can’t hurt me by trying to hurt me. That’s a sort of secret we have. We’ve said more things with a look than we can ever say with words.”

“I’m touched, deeply.”

Her nearness was more vital than any caress. “You’ve got to let me help. You’ve got to let me share.”

“Why?”

“Doing something and never having a sharing of it is bad. Then it’s all on the inside. We can talk, you know. Afterward.”

Nurse and patient, probing together a deep and desperate wound.

“But I have a way and you aren’t in it.”

“Then there must be a new way. Two can think better. You might forget something important.”

“You’re accepting the correctness of the decision, then?”

“Only because it’s yours. I don’t matter. I’ve never had any strong feelings about right and wrong.”

“That’s a lie, Miranda.”

Hoarsely: “So it’s a lie! When you’ve seen the evil I’ve seen—”

“I’ll let you help on one condition, Miranda.”

“Anything.”

“We haven’t used the words yet. I want you to say the words we’ve been skirting so carefully. I want you to say them slowly. All the words. Now, what are you going to do?”

Her hands found my wrist and the moth touch was gone. Her nails dug in with a surprising force. “I am going to help you kill your wife and her lover.”

“Why?”

“Because they hurt you so badly, and it’s something you want to do.”

“But more than that. The other reason.”

“Because after it is done it will be something so strong between us that we’ll never be apart again.”

“Love, then?”

“No. Something stronger than that. Something more exciting.”

“You want half a man?”

“I’m strong enough for two. I knew it would be this way. Ever since that night I kept you from dying. You gave up that night. I sat and whispered in your ear why you had to live. Over and over. And you did.”

“It’s settled, then. Go in the morning. Be patient. I’ll come to you when I can.”

She left quickly, plunging towards the doorway, miraculously finding it in the blackness.

Strength slowly came back. My clothes began to fit again. Tone came back to the mended muscles. Connie stayed in the guest room. For a long time she seemed to be waiting, and when she saw that there would be no demands on her uxorial capacities, there seemed to be a relief in her. Once, when she was out, I went over her personal checks against the small income from her father. I checked back far enough to find out when it had started. They had been a little careless several months before my accident. Instead of cashing two of the checks, she had turned them over to her friend. The endorsements were a scrawled L. Palmer, with a self-conscious flowery squiggle under the name. I took those two checks. They were both for twenty-five.

I didn’t hate either of them. I was cold — cold as any self-respecting corpse should be.

With the proceeds of the collision insurance I bought a good used car. I wasn’t cold about that. It frightened me. That was unexpected. I sat behind the wheel, and when I shut my eyes I could feel the car rolling, first sideways and then end over end. I opened my eyes quickly and the world returned to sanity. The first time I drove to the city, the sweat ran down from my armpits, soaking my shirt. I had the checks photostated on that first trip, front and back. I returned them to her file.

That night, at dinner, I put the next brick in the foundation. I looked across at Connie. “You’re mine, you know,” I said.

Little puzzled wrinkles appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Of course, dear. What brought that on?”

“I just was thinking. You know how you imagine things. I was imagining how I would react if you ever wanted to leave me. The answer is very simple. I’d never, never let you go.”

She smothered the quick alarm. “Why think of such a thing, George? Such an impossible thing!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Say, the new car holds sixteen gallons of gas.”

The fork trembled in her hand. “What’s that got to do with—”

“Nothing, Connie. Don’t be so silly. I saw the conversation disturbed you, so in my own feeble way I was changing the subject.”

“Oh!”

“The steering seems pretty sound. I had it checked at the station. That Palmer boy seems to know his business.”

Vacant stare. “Palmer? Oh, Louie, the dark one.”

She was getting better at it. That was really a good effort. I thought it was too bad I couldn’t tell her just how good an effort it was. Then she spoiled it by being unable to finish the dinner she was eating with such appetite. That’s one thing about her that always amazed me. A tiny girl, yet almost rapacious about her food. Red lips eager and white teeth tearing and champing. Once upon a time it had been cute. Funny how little you can learn about a woman in seven years of marriage.

I had to make her see Louie. I had to give her a reason.

Over coffee I said, “I’ve been asking around.”

“About what, darling?” A shade too much casualness and disinterest.

“We could make a good deal on this house right now.”

The petulance showed immediately. “But, George! I love this house and this neighborhood. I don’t want to move.”

“I stopped in at the office. I told Mallory how the docs recommend I keep out in the air as much as possible. He hinted that they might be able to give me a traveling job, based in California. I’d cover eleven Western states, part promotion work, part digging up new talent for the list. I’d also do some coordination work with the movie agents. I’m to let him know.”

She looked as if somebody had hit her in the stomach. “But isn’t the job you had a better one? I mean, we could see that you got plenty of fresh air.”

“I don’t know if I’m too anxious to pick up this commuting treadmill again. I’m going to give it a lot of thought. We’d make a profit on the house. In the new job my trips would be so long that you would travel with me, naturally.”

“I do get a little carsick,” she said, the dread showing.

I laughed. “Say, remember in the hospital when I told you I was going to drive slow from then on?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Found out today I’ve got my nerve back. I kicked it up to seventy-five on Route Twenty-eight. The old reflexes seem pretty good.”

I watched and saw the speculative look dawn. She covered it by getting up to bring more coffee. But when she poured it into my cup, she spilled some in the saucer and didn’t seem to notice.

At a quarter to nine she said she was going for a walk. I knew that the station closed at nine. I yawned and said I might go to bed. She left. I waited five minutes and backed the car out. The station was six blocks away. I was curious to see how it was done. I took the parallel road, then turned left after six blocks and parked in the tree shadows. I could see the station. Connie walked by it, very slowly, silhouetted against the station floodlights. She continued on down the street. I turned around in a driveway, went back to the parallel road, sped down three blocks, and parked as before. Soon Connie went by, walking quickly now, high heels twinkling. I eased out after her.

Thirteen blocks from our house on April Lane she turned left. It was a cheap neighborhood. Midway in the second block was a green neon sign against a pale brick front: UNICORN — BAR AND GRILL. Beyond it was another sign, Ladies’ Entrance. She darted in there, reluctant to linger under the harsh green light. I could remember the exact stage of pain that green light represented. Not the worst, but bad.

I went down the street, turned around, parked on the same side as the Unicorn, facing toward it. I was barely in time. A ’40 Ford convertible parked across the street and Louie Palmer in jacket, open sports collar, hatless, walked across the street. He stopped in the full glare of green and lit a cigarette. He handled it in a thoroughly Bogart fashion, hand cupped completely around it, lowering it with calculated slowness after each drag. He looked up and down the street. He flipped it away, squared his shoulders, and went inside. After all, he was a desperate character. A real killer. The murder didn’t quite pan out, but what the hell. The intent was there. Louie was a real sharp apple, all wound up in a capital A affair, just like out of James M. Cain.

It would be nice to tell him that he was a sniveling little grease monkey preening himself over a tramp wife, a hired banty rooster with grease in his hair. But that was a pleasure I would have to forego.

I was in bed when she got home an hour later. I heard her in the bathroom. I wondered how radiant she looked.

Miranda lived alone in an efficiency apartment crowded into what had apparently been one of the bedrooms of a vast old Victorian house. To the left of the house was the parking lot for a supermarket. The street had been widened until the bottom step of the porch was a yard from the sidewalk.

She came down the street from the bus stop, lean legs in the white cotton stockings scissoring below the hem of the cheap coat.

She watched the sidewalk ahead of her and suddenly looked across the street directly into my eyes and stopped. It did not seem strange that she should have that utter awareness.

She waited and I walked across to her. The small blue eyes narrowed just a bit. Her heavy lips were laid evenly together. She wore no lipstick, and the strange thinness of the skin of her lips made them look peeled, raw.

We did not speak to each other until she had shut the apartment door behind us. “You should take stairs more slowly,” she said.

“Showing off, I guess.”

“You look better, George. Give me your coat.”

The apartment was absolutely characterless at first glance. Then the signs of her presence intruded. An ashtray squared precisely to the edge of a table. Three birch logs, so perfect as to look artificial, stacked in the shallow, ashless fireplace. Shades all pulled to exactly the same level. She plunged back and forth through the room, physically threatening to derange all its neatness, but her touch on each object was light and precise. She pulled a glass-topped table closer to the armchair where I sat. From the kitchenette alcove she brought bottle, glass, small bowl of ice cubes, new bottle of soda. She set them down with evenly spaced clicks against the glass top. She made the drink deftly and said, “With you in a moment,” and shut herself into the tiny bath.

She came out with her hair fluffed out of its rigid nurse’s style, and she wore a turtle-necked gray sweater and a harsh tweed skirt in a discomfiting orange shade. No stockings. Ancient loafers. She fell toward a chair, sat lightly in it. The bones of her wrists and hips were sharp. She looked harsh, brittle, angular. I thought irrelevantly that she was a woman made for a blind man. To his touch she would have the remembered softness and warmth.

I put the drink down. “How do we start?”

“Tell me how we’re going to do it.” The sentence faded away. Each of her sentences brought silence after it, so that forever we spoke across silence more clearly than with words. Her eyes were dedicated blue flames.

“Not that fast. I want to know if you still insist on sharing this thing. Without knowing when or how we’re to do it.”

“I insist.”

I studied her “Have you ever wondered about your own sanity, Miranda?”

“Of course. Everyone does. They say that to wonder means that you are really quite all right.”

“Odd that you’re a nurse.”

“Is it? People fighting, dying. I’m there. I can watch and decide about them. Oh, you don’t have to do anything crude, like the wrong medicines. I like them caught between living and dying. Like you were. Then you can do it with words. You can decide, and it always comes out the way you say. It makes you strong to think about it.”

I smiled, and my lips felt stiff. “Have you decided against anyone lately?”

“Oh, yes. This past week. An old man. They wanted him alive because, you see, he was a great-grandfather and in another month he’d be a great-great-grandfather and it was all a matter of pride with him and with them. To have all those generations living at once. He fought, that one, to keep living just for the sake of living, which is never any good. I whispered in his ear. ‘Give up,’ I said. ‘Let it go. Stop fighting. Give up.’ They say they can’t hear you, but they can. They always can. He finally gave a great sigh and died. They couldn’t understand why he died. But, of course, I couldn’t tell them.”

“You like doing that?”

“You kill the rotten ones and keep the good ones. Like sorting things. Like being neat about yourself.”

“I’m one of the good ones?”

She shook her head, as though puzzled. “No, and yet I kept you. I keep wondering why.”

My glass was empty. She sprang toward me, and had I not learned about her I would have flinched away. But she stopped in time and the new drink was made.

I caught her wrist and pulled her onto my lap. Oddly, she seemed lighter than Connie, though she was much heavier, I knew. The calm lips folded against mine. But there was nothing there. It was holding a senseless pose, like a charade that no one can guess. She went back to her chair.

“I expected anything but that,” I said.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until afterwards. There isn’t enough togetherness yet. Afterwards the thing shared will make it right.”

“Maybe I died,” I said. “Maybe this is a fancy-type hell, like the mythological one where the sinner is chained for eternity just out of reach of food and drink.”

“Am I food and drink?” She showed, for the first time, a trace of coyness. Like a child’s rattle placed atop a small white coffin.

“Maybe not that. But necessary. In an odd way. Essential.”

“That’s because I know more about these things. I’m like a guide. You’re just learning.”

“Is it a taste you can acquire?”

“That you can’t help acquiring.”

“But when there’s no one left to kill?”

“Then we’ll help each other find someone else. And do it in a better way than words.”

I stood up. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

On the way home I could feel the clear imprint of the plate inlaid in my skull, the perfect outline of it, as though gentle fingers were pressing it against the jelly of my brain.

I went into the cellar and fitted a length of soft white pine into the lathe. I let my hands work the way they wanted to work, without direction. The cutting tool ate away the wood, turning angles into curves. I took it off the lathe and turned on the sander. I held it one way, then another way, rounding it the way my hands said. It turned into the crude elongated torso of a woman, a woman as thin as Miranda. Then I put it back into the lathe and cut it down to a round rod, shaving away the woman form.

The pressure against the plate had turned into an ache, the beginning of green behind my eyes. I broke the rod over my knee.

I went up to Connie and said, “Rub the back of my neck.”

I stretched out on the couch. She was awkward about it, lacking the skill of Miranda. I turned and held her close, telling myself she was precious. I kissed her. I saw surprise in her eyes and then a most patient resignation. I sat beside her on the couch and took the patch off the empty socket. She shut her eyes hard. Her small fists were clenched. I tiptoed away from her and up the stairs and shut myself in my room. I heard her go out. I lay in the livid green and the world was green neon and the outline of the plate changed slowly, forming letters, pressing the word UNICORN deep into the gray-green brain, deep into the softnesses in which forever a car rolled and leaped and bounded like a child’s toy thrown aside in petty rage.

“You won’t be needing the car, will you?” I asked Connie.

She gave me her prettiest frown. “Gosh, I don’t think so. How long will you have it?”

“Overnight.”

“Where on earth are you going?”

“I went in and talked to Mallory yesterday. We decided I’d start to take on a few odd jobs, just to get my hand in. That splendid creative artist up in Crane is yammering at his agent to arrange a switch of publishers again.”

“But that is where you were going when—”

“Correct. Sort of like a movie. This is when I came in.”

“When are you leaving?”

“He keeps crazy hours. Starts writing after a midnight breakfast. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I’ll leave tonight after dark, and after I see him I’ll hole up somewhere and come back down tomorrow. No point in getting too tired at this stage of the game.”

The upper surfaces of her rounded arms had the faint tan that she never seems to lose, even in the dead of winter. I held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. She was facing the light. I saw then, and for the first time, the slight yellowness of the whites of her eyes. Once they had been that bluey white that only children seem to have. The pores of her snub nose and on her rounded cheeks were faintly enlarged, and everywhere, eye corners, around her mouth, across her forehead, I could see the spreading inevitable network of wrinkles, cobwebby against the skin. Enlarge those wrinkles to the maximum, and she would have the face of a withered monkey, out of which the gray eyes would still stare, acquiring through that contrast the knowledge of evil which had always been there but which I had never been able to see or understand.

She moved uncomfortably in my grasp. “What are you staring at?”

“My fine true wife, my loyal little Connie. Darling, what did I do to deserve you?”

She had the grace to blush. “Oh, come now.”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Why, any other woman would be scheming and planning how to get rid of me. But not you, Connie. Not you. Love is bigger than expediency, isn’t it?”

“If you say so, George.”

“Read any good books lately?”

“George, right now you seem... more like yourself. You’ve been so odd, you know.”

“I’ll be my very own true self very soon now.”

“Are we going to move away from here?”

“I think so.”

Her voice became wheedling. “Darling, before you make up your mind for sure, let’s go up to the cabin for a long week. Just the two of us. There won’t be anybody around at this time of year. We can walk in the woods. Oh, we’ll have a wonderful time.”

“Just the two of us?”

Her eyes grew as opaque as gray glass. “Call it a second honeymoon,” she breathed.

That would be ideal for them. Not difficult to arrange at all. So many ways to do it up there. I could almost see Louie Palmer pushing me off the high front porch onto the lake-front rocks and then lighting a cigarette in his Bogart way, saying, “I’ll run along. You drive out and make the phone call. Remember, he complained about feeling dizzy and you told him not to go near the steps.”

There would be a deep satisfaction in that for them. An end of tension. It had failed the first time. Their frozen world would begin to revolve again.

“A second honeymoon,” I said...

In the late afternoon I took the car down to the station. Conner, the owner, was there as well as Louie Palmer. Louie was in his coveralls, his sleeves rolled up over muscular fore-arms, a smear of grease on his chin near the corner of his mouth, a lank end of black hair curling down across his forehead to the black eyebrow. He avoided meeting my eye.

“Taking a little trip,” I said heartily to Conner. “First one since my accident. Have Louie check the tires, steering arms, kingpin, front wheel bushings, please.”

“Put it on the rack, kid,” Conner said in his husky, domineering voice. I wondered how much Conner’s constant scorn was a factor in Louie’s bold play for big money. I watched the coveralls tighten across Louie’s broad shoulders as he ducked under the car. How had it started? A few sidelong glances? The realization that the Corliss woman was coming around oftener than strictly necessary? Then, probably, “I guess we better road-test it, Mrs. Corliss. Just move over and I’ll take the wheel.”

How does it start?

“Change the oil, sir?” Louie asked.

“No thanks, kid,” I said. I rasped that “kid” across him, saw the color creep up the back of his neck.

I waited, and when he was through I tipped him a quarter. He looked as if he might throw it in my face. “Buy yourself a beer,” I said. “Try the Unicorn. I hear that’s a good bar.”

His mouth sagged a little, and the color left him. I grinned into his face and turned away. Louie was jumpy.

“Take it easy, Mr. Corliss,” Conner advised.

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Made myself a promise that I’ll never drive over forty-five again, and I’m sticking to it.”

Beyond Conner I saw a puzzled look on Louie’s lean white face.

I went over right after dinner. Miranda was waiting for me. Her eyes seemed deeper in her head, their glow strong and steady. The wide lips were parted a faint fraction of an inch. It added to the breathlessness of her words. The spring within her was wound as tightly as the key could be turned. A deb waiting for the grand march. A horse player waiting for the sixth race. An animal watching, from a limb, the trail beneath.

She shut the door and leaned against it. “Tonight?”

“Yes, tonight.”

She shut her eyes for a moment. With her eyes shut she had a corpse face.

“How? Tell me how. Quickly!”

“They think I’ll be gone. They think I’ll be gone overnight. We’ll come back.”

“They’ll be together?”

“Why not? They have planning to do.”

“But how?”

“Electricity.”

She looked disappointed. “Is — is that a good way?”

“The best. Clean and quick and final.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see a lot of ways how it could be. But I won’t just watch, will I? I’ll be part of it.” You there, little girl! Get into that game of musical chairs with the other children.

“You’ll be part of it. I promised.”

“Do they have a good chance of catching us, blaming us?”

“Not a chance in the world.”

“Oh, good! And later... we’ll go away.”

“Far away.”

“How much time is there?”

“Three hours. Four.”

“Long hours to wait, George.”

“We’ll take a ride. That’ll kill time. Come along.”

She had not sat beside me in a car before. She was unexpectedly feline, a part of her that I had not noticed. She sat with her legs curled up under her, partly facing me, and I knew that she watched, not the road, but my face, the glow of the dash lights against it, the pendulum swing of the streetlamps.

“Scared?” I asked.

“No. Something else. Like when you’re a child. You wake up in the morning. Another day. Then you see the snow on the windowsill and it all comes with a great rush. The day after tomorrow is Christmas, you say. One more day gone. Yesterday it was the day after the day after tomorrow. Now it’s getting so close it closes your throat. That’s how I feel. Getting one at last that isn’t a sick one.”

She inched closer so that the hard ball of her knee dug against my thigh. The musky perfume was thick in the car.

Without turning to see, I knew how her eyes would look. “We’ve never had to say much, have we?” she asked.

“Not very much. We knew without saying. A look can say everything.”

“Later we can talk. We can say all the words that ever were. Good words and bad words. I’ve said bad words when I’m alone. I’ve never said them out loud to anybody. And we can say the other words too, and it won’t be like after reading a story.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, murder. Death. Kill. Blood. Bodies. I kill, you kill, we kill. The way you had to learn the Latin words in school.”

“Conjugations, you mean.”

“That’s what I was trying to think of. Miranda Wysner, conjugate the verb to kill. I kill, I shall kill, I killed, I had killed, I should have killed.”

She laughed. Her fingers shut on my arm above the elbow. “Think about it, George. Like swinging a big shining white sword. You swing it at evil and you tell yourself that’s why you do it, but all the time way down inside your heart you know that it isn’t the reason for it, it’s the act itself.”

I was on the road north out of town. She looked out the windows.

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll just go north out of town up into the hills and then swing around and come back.”

She was silent. I drove ever more rapidly. The road climbed and then began to gather unto itself a series of gentle curves that later would grow hard, the shoulders popping and crackling as the car threw itself at them.

I knew the landmarks. At the crest I slowed down, my arms tired from the strain. I started down the other side. The rising whine of the wind grew louder. The needle climbed. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five.

“We’re killing the two of them, you see,” I yelled above the wind. “We can’t make the curve coming up. You wanted a part of it. You’ve got it, baby. You’ve got it. I left a letter with Mallory to open if I should die. It’s all in there. They’ll never worm out of this one. Electricity will kill them, all right. Courtesy of the State of New York, baby.”

I saw the white posts of the curve in the farthest reach of the headlights.

Her scream filled the car, filled my ears, drilled into my soul. “Faster, Georgie! Oh, faster!” Wild ecstasy, beyond the peak of human endurance.

I gave her one quick look. The dash lights hit the white-ridged bone structure of her face so that the shape of the skull was apparent. The mouth was wide-screaming, lip-spread. Her voice told me that she had known.

I came down hard on the brake. The car went into a long skid toward those posts. I let up on the brake, accelerated it straight, came down on the brake again. This time the skid was the other way so that the car headed toward the brink, still skidding sideways. I could hear only the scream of tortured rubber, then the jolting metallic scraping as tires were rolled right off the rims. I couldn’t bring it out of the second skid. The front right wheel smacked the posts and the car spun so that I lost all sense of direction. For a moment it looked as though the car were spinning in one spot, like a top, completely ringed about with the white posts. Then it hit again and I was thrown toward Miranda. I tried to find her with my arms but I couldn’t.

The crescendo of sound was fading. The car jolted, lurched, stood absolutely still in a world where there was no sound.

I got out. Other cars stopped. I looked for Miranda. I couldn’t find her. The tow truck had a spotlight on it, and so did the trooper car. I made them shine the lights down and search down the slope. They looked and looked. After I told them a little more about her they stopped looking and they were most polite, and they took me to a doctor who gave me white powders.

I was in bed for ten days. I told Connie everything. She was very grave about it all and kept her eyes on my face as I answered every one of her questions.

By the time I was on my feet the car had been repaired. I didn’t care what happened any more. I didn’t protest when she took me to the gas station. Conner acted odd, and the questions seemed to embarrass him. He said, “Why, sure, a few times Mrs. Corliss cashed checks with me, and I guess I turned some of them over to Louie as part of his pay.” Louie came over and shuffled his feet. He looked younger than I’d remembered. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t hold it in his Bogart way.

“Louie,” she said, “have you and I ever had a date?”

He stared at her. “What the hell! What the hell, Miz Corliss!”

“Have we?”

He manufactured a pretty good leer. “Well, now you bring the subject up, if you want a date, I’d—”

“Shut up!” Conner rasped.

“Get behind the wheel, George,” Connie said, “and take me to the Unicorn.”

I found the street. It wasn’t there. I tried two other streets and then went back to the first one. I parked and went in a cigar store and asked what had happened to it. The man told me he’d been there twelve years and there’d never been a place of that name in the neighborhood.

We went home. I sat on the living-room couch. She pulled a small footstool over and sat directly in front of me.

“George, listen to me. I’ve been checking everything. That address you gave me. It’s a parking lot. There aren’t any old Victorian houses on that street made over into apartments. There’s no local record of a nurse named Miranda Wysner. I brought you home from the hospital and took care of you myself. They told me I should put you in a psychiatric nursing home. They thought I was in danger from you. You said some pretty wild things about me in the hospital. I took the risk. For the first two weeks you were home you called me Miranda as often as you called me Connie. It was, I thought, the name of some girl you knew before we were married. Then you stopped doing that and you seemed better. That’s why I thought it was safe to let you drive again. You were almost rational. No, you were rational. If it had been just almost rational, if I had thought that you were in danger, I wouldn’t have permitted it. The steering did break when you had your accident. That’s because the garage you took the car to installed a defective part.”

I said haltingly, “But... you. The way you acted towards me. I know that I’m repulsive to you now. This eye and all—”

She left the room, came back quickly with a mirror. “Take off the patch, George.” I did so. My two eyes, whole again, looked back at me. I touched the one that had been under the patch.

“I don’t understand!” I cried out.

“You were convinced you had lost an eye. They gave up and decided to humor you when you demanded the patch. And as far as my turning away from you in disgust is concerned, that is precisely what you did, George. Not me.”

I sat numbly. Her grave eyes watched me.

“I followed you that night,” I said.

“I went for a walk. I didn’t want you to see my cry again. I’d cried enough in front of you — until I thought that no more tears could come. But there are always more tears. Funny, isn’t it? No matter how many already shed.”

“Why have I done this to you?” I demanded.

“George, darling. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. It was the depressed fracture, the bone chips they pulled out of your brain, the plate they put in.”

“Miranda,” I whispered. “Who is Miranda? Who was Miranda?”

Connie tried to smile. Tears glistened in the gray eyes. “Miranda? Why, darling, she might have been an angel of death.”

“When I nearly died, she was there...”

“I was there,” Connie said, with an upward lift of her chin. “I was there. And I held you and whispered to you how much you had to live for, how much I needed you.”

“She said she whispered to all of them on that borderline.”

“Maybe she does.”

“Take me in your arms, George,” Connie said.

I couldn’t. I could only look at her. She waited a long time and then she went alone up the stairs. I heard her footsteps on the guest-room floor overhead.

We went to the cabin on the lake. I was sunk into the blackest depths of apathy. Once you have learned that no impression can be trusted, no obvious truth forever real, you know an isolation from the world too deep to be shattered.

I remembered the thin pink skin of her wide lips, the lurch of her walk, the unexpected competence of her hands.

I do not know how many days went by. I ate and slept and watched the lake.

And one day I looked up and there was Connie. She stood with the sun behind her and she looked down at me.

The smile came then. I felt it on my lips. I felt it dissolving all the old restraints. I reached for her and pulled her into my arms. The great shuddering sighs of thanksgiving came from her. She was my wife again, and she was in my arms, and everything between us was mended, as shining and new as in the earliest days of our marriage.

She wept and talked and laughed, all at once.

That night a wind was blowing off the lake.

When she slept I left her side and went to the windows. They look out onto the porch.

The old rocking chair creaked. Back and forth. Back and forth.

It was no surprise to me to see her sitting there. In the rocker. There was a wide path of reflected moonlight across the black water, and her underlip was moist enough to pick up the smallest of highlights from the lake.

We smiled at each other the way old friends smile who have at last learned to understand each other.

You see, Miranda knows about the drop from the top steps to the lakeshore rocks.

I turned back to gather up my small and dainty wife in my arms.