Desperate Characters

“I’m tired of parties,” Otto said in the taxi. “I get so bored. Movie talk bores me. I don’t care about Fred Astaire, and he doesn’t care about me. I care even less about Fellini. Flo is self-important simply because she knows actors.”

“Why did you say you hadn’t seen Death Takes a Holiday? I know you saw it because we saw it together. And you were crazy about Evelyn Venable. You talked about her for weeks … those bones, that fluty voice, you said she looked the way Emily Dickinson should have looked … don’t you remember?”

“My God!”

“And Fredric March, you said, was a perfect expression of an American idea of death, a dissipated toff in a black cape.”

“You stored all that away?” he asked wonderingly.

“You fell asleep and everyone knew you were asleep. Mike poked me and told me to take you home.”

“They were all trying to out-memory each other. It just proved how old we all are.”

“You have to make an effort.”

“What were you doing upstairs with Mike?”

“He called some doctors about the cat bite.”

“He thinks you ought to see someone?” he asked, alarmed.

She held up her hand. “Look how swollen it is!” she said. She flexed her fingers and groaned. “Perhaps if I soak it, the swelling will go down.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Nobody was in. Don’t you know you can’t get a doctor any more? Don’t you know this country is falling apart?”

“Just because you can’t get a doctor on Friday evening does not mean the country is falling apart.”

“Oh, yes it does. There was a stone in their bedroom. Someone had thrown a stone through the window. It must have happened just before we arrived. Picked up a stone from somewhere and tossed it through the window!” As she was speaking, she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

“That’s awful,” he said. The taxi was idling. Otto saw they were home. He paid the driver. Sophie, suddenly animated by a murky but powerful conviction that she knew what was wrong with everything, ran up the steps. But she had to wait for Otto; she didn’t have her keys. He climbed the steps slowly, looking at the change in his hand. Sophie’s access of energy, so startling as to verge on pain, died at once. As they walked into the dark hall, the telephone rang.

“Who …?” he began. “At this time of night,” she said, as Otto went to the phone. But he didn’t touch it. It rang three more times, then Sophie pushed past him and grabbed the receiver. Otto went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Yes?” he heard her say. “Hello, hello, hello?”

No one answered, but there was a faint throb as though darkness had a voice which thumped along the wire. Then she heard an exhalation of breath.

“It’s some degenerate,” she said loudly. Otto, a piece of cheese in one hand, gestured to her with the other. “Hang up! For God’s sake, hang up!”

“A degenerate,” she said into the mouthpiece. “An American cretin.” Otto stuffed the cheese in his mouth, then snatched the phone from her hand and replaced it with a bang in its cradle. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you!” he cried.

“You could ask,” she said, and began to cry. “I’ve been poisoned by that cat.” They turned to look at the back door.

“My God! It’s back!” she exclaimed.

A gray shape was huddled against the bottom of the door, toward which Otto ran, waving his hands and shouting, “Get out!” The cat slowly raised its head and blinked. Sophie shuddered. “I’ll call the A.S.P.C.A. tomorrow,” Otto said. The cat got up and stretched. They saw its mouth open as it looked up at them hopefully. “We can’t have this,” Otto muttered. He looked reproachfully at her.

“If I don’t feed it, it’ll give up,” she said mildly.

“If you allow it to …” He turned off the living room lamp.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she flung back at him as they went up the stairs. “You’re becoming an eccentric, like Tanya.”

“Tanya! I thought Tanya lived her whole life on the phone.”

“She won’t answer it any more unless she’s just broken off a love affair.”

“Love affair,” he snorted, following Sophie down the hall to their bedroom. “Tanya and love!”

“She calls up people, though.”

“I hate Tanya.”

They stood facing each other beside the bed. “You’ve never told me that,” she said. “I’ve never heard you say that you hated anyone.”

“I only just realized it.”

“What about Claire?”

“Claire is all right. What do you care what I think about Tanya? You don’t like her yourself. You hardly ever see her.”

“I hardly ever see anyone.”

“Why do you make me feel it’s my fault?”

“You haven’t explained about not answering the phone,” she said accusingly.

“Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”

They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom. Then he asked her directly why she was angry. She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said wearily.

She gave him an ironic look, which he ignored. She was really wondering what would happen if she told him the telephone call, that sinister breathing, had frightened her. He would have said, “Don’t be foolish!” she concluded. “Stop telling me I’m foolish,” she wanted to shout.

He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. “You ought to throw out the underwear you’re wearing,” she said. “It’s about to fall apart.”

“I like it when they get so soft, after I’ve had them a long time.”

He sounded rather plaintive. She felt kinder toward him. There was something funny about people’s private little preferences and indulgences, something secretive and childlike and silly. She laughed at him and his soft old underwear. He looked down at himself, then at her, as he stripped off the shorts. His expression was complacent. Let him be complacent, she thought. At least, they’d avoided a pointless quarrel. She wondered if Tanya had ever tried to seduce Otto. Then she remembered Tanya’s only visit to Flynders. Otto had been shocked, morally outraged really, when he had accidentally discovered that Tanya had used every drawer in an immense bureau for the few articles she’d brought with her that weekend. “My God! She has a scarf in one drawer, a pair of stockings in another, one girdle in another. What kind of a woman is it who would use all the drawers in a chest just because they’re there?” he had cried to Sophie.

“Tanya is pretty awful,” Sophie said as Otto got into bed next to her. “I bet she’s awful to make love to. I bet she can hardly take her eyes off herself long enough to see who she’s in bed with.”

“Go to sleep,” he pleaded. “You’re going to wake me up.” She subsided without complaint. She wasn’t irritated with him now, and it didn’t seem to matter why she had been. She examined her hand and decided to give it a soaking. It certainly hurt.

When Sophie awoke, it was 3:00 A.M. Her hand, doubled up beneath her, was like an alien object which had somehow attached itself to her body, something that had clamped itself to her. She lay there for a moment, thinking of the cat, how surprised she’d been, seeing it again, when she and Otto had come home. It had looked so ordinary, just another city stray. What had she expected? That it would have been deranged by its attack on her? That it planned to smash and cuff its way into their house and eat them both up? She got up and went into the bathroom. The swelling, which she had managed to reduce earlier by the long soak in hot water, had returned. She filled the basin and immersed her hand. Then, looking at her face in the mirror over the sink—she didn’t want to see what she was doing—she began to press the fingers of her other hand against the swollen mass of skin. When she looked down, the water was clouded. She flexed her fingers, then made a fist.

When she got back into bed, she half threw herself against Otto’s back. He groaned.