To Marry Medusa Read online

  Caroline said something—I love (or loved) him so, or some such. Dimity sniffed. “Love, Caroline, isn’t ... that. Love is everything else that can be between a man and a woman, without that.”

  Caroline sobbed.

  “That’s your test, you see,” explained Dimity Carmichael. “We are human beings because there are communions between us which are not experienced by—by rabbits, we’ll say. If a man is willing to make some great sacrifice for a woman, it might be a proof of love. Considerateness, chivalry, kindness, patience, the sharing of great books and fine music— these are the things that prove a man. It is hardly a demonstration of manhood for a man to prove that he wants what a rabbit wants as badly as a rabbit wants it.”

  Caroline shuddered. Dimity Carmichael smiled tightly. Caroline spoke.

  “What? What’s that?”

  Caroline turned her cheek to rest it in her clenching hand. Her eyes were squeezed closed. “I said ... I just can’t see it the way you do. I can’t.”

  “You’d be a lot happier if you did.”

  “I know, I know ...” Caroline sobbed.

  Dimity Carmichael leaned forward. “You can, if you like. Even after the kind of life you’ve lived—oh, I know how you were playing with the boys from the time you were twelve years old—but that can all be wiped away, and this will never bother you again. If you’ll let me help you.”

  Caroline shook her head exhaustedly. It was not a refusal, but instead, doubt, despair.

  “Of course I can,” said Dimity, as if Caroline had spoken her doubts aloud. “You just do as I say.” She waited until the girl’s shoulders were still, and until she lifted her head away from the couch, turned to sit on her calves, look sideways up at Dimity from the corners of her long eyes.

  “Do what?” Caroline asked forlornly.

  “Tell me what happened—everything.”

  “You know what happened.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t mean this afternoon—that was a consequence, and we needn’t dwell on it. I want the cause. I want to know exactly what happened to get you into this.”

  “I won’t tell you his name,” she said sullenly.

  “His name,” said Dimity Carmichael, “is legion, from what I’ve heard. I don’t care about that. What I want you to do is to describe to me exactly what happened, in every last detail, to bring you to this,” and she waved a hand at the girl, and her “dentist,” and all the parts of her predicament.

  “Oh,” said Caroline faintly. Suddenly she blushed. “I—I can’t be sure just wh-which time it was,” she whispered.

  “That doesn’t matter either,” said Dimity flatly. “Pick your own. For example the first time with this latest one. All right? Now tell me what happened—every last little detail, from second to second.” Caroline turned her face into the upholstery again. “Oh, why?”

  “You’ll see.” She waited for a time, and then said, “Well?” and again, “Look, Caroline; we’ll peel away the sentiment, the bad judgment, the illusions and delusions and leave you free. As I am free. You will see for yourself what it is to be that free.”

  Caroline closed her eyes, making two red welts where the lids met. “I don’t know where to begin ...”

  “At the beginning. You had been somewhere—a dance, a club ...?”

  “A ... a drive-in.”

  “And then he took you ...”

  “Home. His house.”

  “Go on.”

  “We got there and had another drink, and—and it happened, that’s all.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I can’t, I can’t talk about it! Not to you! Don’t you see?”

  “I don’t see. This is an emergency, Caroline. You do as I tell you. Forget I’m me. just talk.” She paused and then said quietly, “You got to his house.” The girl looked up at her with one searching, pleading look, and staring down at her hands, began speaking rapidly. Dimity Carmichael bent close to listen, and let her go on for a minute, then stopped her. “You have to say exactly how it was. Now—this was in the parlor.”

  “L-Living room.”

  “Living room. You have to see it all again—drapes, pictures, everything. The sofa was in front of the fireplace, is that right?”

  Caroline haltingly described the room, with Dimity repeating, expanding, insisting. Sofa here, fireplace there, table with drinks, window, door, easy-chair. How warm, how large, what do you mean red, what red were the drapes? “Begin again so I can see it.”

  More swift and soft speech, more interruption. “You wore what?”

  “The black faille, with the velvet trim and that neckline, you know ...”

  “Which has the zipper—”

  “In the back.”

  “Go on.”

  She went on. After a time Dimity stopped her with a hand on her back. “Get up off the floor. I can’t hear you. Get up, girl.” Caroline rose and sat on the couch. “No, no; Lie down. Lie down,” Dimity whispered.

  Caroline lay down and put her forearms across her eyes. It took a while to get started again, but at last she did. Dimity drew up an ottoman and sat on it, close, watching the girl’s mouth.

  “Don’t say it,” she said at one point. “There are names for these things. Use them.”

  “Oh, I ... just couldn’t.”

  “Use them.”

  Caroline used them. Dimity listened.

  “But what were you feeling all this time?”

  “F-Feeling?”

  “Exactly.”

  Caroline tried.

  “And did you say anything while this was going on?”

  “No, nothing. Except—”

  “Well?”

  “Just at first,” whispered the girl. She moved and was still again, and her concealing arms clamped visibly tighter against her eyes. “I think I went ...” and her teeth met, her lips curled back, her breath hissed in sharply.

  Dimity Carmichael’s lips curled back and she clenched her teeth and sharply drew in her breath. “Like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on. Did he say anything?”

  “No. Yes. Yes, he said, ‘Caroline. Caroline. Caroline,’ “ she crooned softly.

  “Go on.”

  She went on. Dimity listened, watching. She saw the girl smiling and the tears that pressed out through the juncture of forearm and cheek. She watched the feint flickering of white-edged nostrils. She watched the breast in its rapid motion, not quite like that which would result from running up stairs, because of the shallow shiver each long inhalation carried, the second’s catch and hold, the gasping release. “Ah-h-h-h!” Caroline screamed suddenly, softly. “Ahh ... I thought he loved me, I did think he loved me!” She wept, and then said, “That’s all.”

  “No, it isn’t. You had to leave. Get ready. Hm? What did he say? What did you say?”

  Finally, when Caroline said, “... and that’s all,” there were no questions to ask. Dimity Carmichael rose and picked up the ottoman and placed it carefully where it belonged by the easy-chair, and sat down. The girl had not moved.

  “Now how do you feel?”

  Slowly the girl took down her arms and lay looking at the ceiling. She wet her lips and let her head fall to the side so she could look at Dimity Carmichael, composed in the easy-chair—a chair not too easy, but comfortable for one who liked a flat seat and a straight back. The girl searched Dimity Carmichael’s face, looking apparently for shock, confusion, anger, disgust. She found none of these, nothing but thin lips, dry skin, cool eyes. Answering at last, she said, “I feel... awful.” She waited, but Dimity Carmichael had nothing to say. She sat up painfully and covered her face with her hands. She said, “Telling it was making it happen all over again, almost real. But—” Again a silence.

  “—but it was like ... doing it in front of somebody else. In front of—”

  “In front of me?”

  “Yes, but not exactly.”

  “I can explain that,” said Dimity. “You did it in front of
someone—yourself. You were watched. After this, every time, every single time, Caroline, you will always be watched. You will never be in such a situation again,” she intoned, her voice returning and returning to the same note like some soft insistent buzzer, “without hearing yourself tell it, every detail, every sight and sound of it, to someone else. Except that the happening and the telling won’t be weeks apart, like this time. They’ll be simultaneous.”

  “But the telling makes it all so ... cheap, almost ... funny!”

  “It isn’t the telling that makes it that way. The act is itself ridiculous, ungraceful, and altogether too trivial for the terrible price one pays for it. Now you can see it as I see it; now you will be unable to see it any other way. Go wash your face.”

  She did, and came back looking much better, with her hair combed and the furrows gone from her brows and the corners of her long eyes. With the last of her makeup gone, she looked even younger than usual; to think she was actually two years older than Dimity Carmichael was incredible, incredible.... She slipped on her jacket and took up her top coat and handbag. “I’m going. I ... feel a lot better. I mean about ... things.”

  “It’s just that you’re beginning to feel as I do about ... things.”

  “Oh!” Caroline cried from the door, from the depths of her troubles, her physical and mental agonies, the hopeless complexity of simply trying to live through what life presented. “Oh,” she cried, “I wish I were like you. I wish I’d always been like you!” And she went out.

  Dimity Carmichael sat for a long time in the not-quite-easy chair with her eyes closed. Then she rose and went into the bedroom and began to take off her clothes. She needed a bath; she felt proud. She had a sudden recollection of her father’s face showing a pride like this. He had gone down into the cesspool to remove a blockage when nobody else would do it.

  It had made him quite sick, but when he came up, unspeakably filthy and every nerve screaming for a scalding bath, it had been with that kind of pride. Mama had not understood that nor liked it. She would have borne the unmentionable discomforts of the blocked sewer indefinitely rather than have it known even within the family that Daddy had been so soiled. Well, that’s the way Daddy was. That’s the way Mama was. The episode somehow crystallized the great difference between them, and why Mama had been so glad when he died, and how it was that Dimity’s given name—given by him—was one which reflected all the luminance of wickedness and sin, and why Salomé Carmichael came to be known as Dimity from the day he died. No cesspools for her. Clean, cute, crisp was little Dimity, decent, pleated, skirted and cosy all her life.

  To get from her bedroom into the adjoining bath— seven steps—she bundled up in the long robe. Once the shower was adjusted to her liking, she hung up the robe and stepped under the cleansing flood. She kept her gaze, like her thoughts, directed upward as she soaped. The detailed revelation she had extracted from Caroline flashed through her mind, all of it, in a second, but with no detail missing. She smiled at the whole disgusting affair with a cool detachment. In the glass door of the shower-stall she saw the ghost-reflection of her face, the coarse-fleshed, broad nose, the heavy chin with its random scattering of thick curled hairs, the strong square clean yellow teeth. I wish I were like you, I wish I’d always been like you! Caroline had said that, slim-waisted, full-breasted Caroline, Caroline with the mouth which, in relaxation, pouted to kiss me, Caroline with the skin of a peach, whose eyes were long jewels of a rare cut, whose hair was fine and glossy and inwardly ember-radiant. I wish I were like you ... Could Caroline have known that Dimity Carmichael had yearned all her life for those words spoken that way by Caroline’s kind of woman? For were they not the words Dimity herself repressed as she turned the pages of magazines, watched the phantoms on the stereophonic, technicolored, wide deep unbearable screen?

  It was time now for the best part of the shower, the part Dimity looked forward to most. She put her hand on the control and let it rest there, ecstatically delaying the transcendent moment.

  ... Be like you ... perhaps Caroline would, one day, with luck. How good not to need all that, how fine and clear everything was without it! How laughingly revolting, to have a man prove the power of a rabbit’s preoccupations with his animal strugglings and his breathy croonings of one’s name, “Salomé, Salomé, Salomé ...” (I mean, she corrected herself suddenly and with a shade of panic, “Caroline-Caroline-Caroline.”)

  In part because it was time, and partly because of a swift suspicion that her thoughts were gaining a momentum beyond her control and a direction past her choice, she threw the control hard over to Cold, and braced her whole mind and body for that clean (surely sexless) moment of total sensation by which she punctuated her entire inner existence.

  As the liquid fire of cold enveloped her, the lips of Dimity Carmichael turned back, the teeth met, the breath was drawn in with a sharp, explosive sibilance.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gurlick sank his chin into his collarbones, hunched his shoulders, and shuffled. “I’ll find out,” he promised, muttering. “You jus’ let me know what you want, I’ll find out f’ya. Then, boy, look out.”

  At the corner, sprawled out on the steps of an abandoned candy store, he encountered what at first glance seemed to be an odorous bundle of rags. He was about to pass it when he stopped. Or was stopped.

  “It’s on’y Freddy,” he said disgustedly. “He don’t know nothin’ hardly.”

  “Gah dime, bo?” asked the bundle, stirring feebly, and extending a filthy hand which flowered on the stem of an impossibly thin wrist.

  “Well, sure I said somebody oughta know,” growled Gurlick, “but not him, f’godsakes.”

  “Gah dime, bo? Oh ... it’s Danny. Got a dime on ya, Danny?”

  “All right, all right, I’ll ast ‘im!” said Gurlick angrily, and at last turned to Freddy. “Shut up, Freddy. You know I ain’t got no dime. Listen, I wanna ast you somethin’. How could we get all put together again?”

  Freddy made an effort which he had apparently not considered worth while until now. He focused his eyes. “Who—you and me? What you mean, put together?”

  “I tole you!” said Gurlick, not speaking to Freddy; then at the mingled pressure of threat and promise, he whimpered in exasperation and said, “Just tell me can we do it or not, Freddy.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Danny?”

  “You gon’ tell me or aincha?”

  Freddy blinked palely and seemed on the verge of making a mental effort. Finally he said, “I’m cold. I been cold for three years. You got a drink on you, Danny?”

  There wasn’t anybody around, so Gurlick kicked him. “Stoopid,” he said, tucked his chin down, and shuffled away. Freddy watched him for a while, until his gritty lids got too heavy to hold up.

  Two blocks farther, Gurlick saw somebody else, and immediately tried to cross the street. He was not permitted to. “No!” he begged. “No, no, no! You can’t ast every single one you see.” Whatever he was told, it was said in no uncertain terms, because he whined, “You gon’ get me in big trouble, jus’ you wait.”

  Ask he must: ask he did. The plumber’s wife, who stood a head taller than he and weighed twice as much, stopped sweeping her stone steps as he shuffled toward her, head still down but eyes up, and obviously not going to scuttle past as he and his kind usually did.

  He stopped before her, looking up. She would tower over him if he stood on a box; as it was, he was on the sidewalk and she on the second step. He regarded her like a country cousin examining a monument. She looked down at him with the nauseated avidity of a witness to an automobile accident.

  He wet his lips, and for a moment the moment held them. Then he put a hand on the side of his head and screwed up his eyes. The hand fell away; he gazed at her and croaked, “How can we get together again?”

  She kept looking at him, expressionless, unmoving. Then, with a movement and a blare of sound abrupt as a film-splice, she threw back her head and laughed. It seemed a lon
g noisy while before the immense capacity of her lungs was exhausted by that first great ring of laughter, but when it was over it brought her face down again, which served only to grant her another glimpse of Gurlick’s anxious filthy race, and caused another paroxysm.

  Gurlick left her laughing and headed for the park. Numbly he cursed the woman and all women, and all their husbands, and all their forebears.

  Into the park, the young spring had brought slim grass, tree buds, dogs, children, old people and a hopeful ice-cream vendor. The peace of these beings was leavened by a scattering of adolescents who had found the park on such a day more attractive than school, and it was three of these who swarmed into Gurlick’s irresolution as he stood just inside the park, trying to find an easy way to still the demand inside his head.

  “Dig the creep,” said the one with Heroes on the back of his jacket, and another: “Or-bit!” and the three began to circle Gurlick, capering like stage Indians, holding fingers out from their heads and shrilling, “Bee-beep! bee-beep” satellite signals.

  Gurlick turned back and forth for a moment like a weathervane in a williwaw, trying to sort them out. “Giddada year,” he growled.

  “Bee-beep!” cried one of the satellites. “Stand by fer re-yentry!’” The capering became a gallop as the orbits closed, swirled around him in a shouting blur, and at the signal, “Burnout!” they stopped abruptly and the one behind Gurlick dropped to his hands and knees while the other two pushed. Gurlick hit the ground with a whoosh, flat on his back with his arms and legs in the air. Around the scene, one woman cried out indignantly, one old man’s mouth popped open with shock, and everyone else, everyone else, laughed and laughed.

  “Giddada year,” gasped Gurlick, trying to roll over and get his knees under him.

  One of the boys solicitously helped him to his feet, saying to another, “Now, Rocky, ya shoonta. Ya shoonta.” When the trembling Gurlick was upright and the second of the trio—the “Hero”—down on his hands and knees behind him again, the solicitous one gave another push and down went Gurlick again. Gurlick, now dropping his muffled pretenses of threat and counterattack, lay whimpering without trying to rise. Everybody laughed and laughed, all but two, and they didn’t do anything. Except move closer, which attracted more laughters.