Desperate Characters. Paula Fox

her hand against the wall paneling. It looked like a tarantula. Her skin prickled. Rabies … no one ever got rabies, except some Southern country boy.

      “Sophie, come here,” Mike said, and led her upstairs and into a large bedroom. A Greek rug covered the bed; a Mexican ceramic horse stood in front of the fireplace. On one of the bedside tables were piled paperback detective stories in their penny candy wrapper covers.

      “Who reads those? You or Flo?”

      “Me,” he replied, and he sighed and looked winsome. “They’re good for me. They ride roughshod over what I live with. Potent men. Palpitating women … a murderer’s mind laid out like the contents of a child’s pencil box.”

      “You aren’t reading the right ones.”

      “The new ones are the old ones. That false complexity is just another kind of pencil box.”

      “What’s going to happen?” she burst out. “Everything is going to hell—”

      “Sit down a minute and shut up! I want to call a doctor or two, see if I can rouse one. It’s a bad night for that.”

      He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed, an address book held tightly in one hand, the phone cradled between his neck and shoulder. She heard him speak several times, but she didn’t listen to his words. She was wandering around the room. A green silk dressing gown was flung across a chaise lounge. On the mantelpiece stood a few small pre-Columbian statues, glaring with empty malevolence at the opposite wall, looking, oddly enough, as though they were outside the room but about to enter and sack it.

      “There are only answering services,” Mike said, putting the phone down. “There’s not much point in leaving this number. Listen, I want you to go to the hospital. It’s six blocks from here and they have an emergency room that’s not bad. They’ll fix you up and you’ll have a peaceful night.”

      “Did you know?” she began, “that Cervantes wanted to come to the New World, to New Spain, and the king wrote across his application, ‘No, tell him to get a job around here’? Isn’t that a funny story?”

      He watched her, unmoving, his hands folded lightly, his shoulders hunched—it must be the way he listened to patients, she thought, as though he were about to receive a blow across the back.

      “Just a story …”

      “What’s the matter?”

      “I wish I were Jewish,” she said. “Then when I died, I’d die as a Jew.”

      “You’ll die as a Protestant.”

      “There aren’t many left.”

      “Then as a Gentile. I asked you, what’s the matter? Are you working on anything?”

      “I haven’t wanted to work; it seems futile. There are so many who do it better than I do. I was sent a novel to translate but I couldn’t understand it, even in French. It simply irritated me. And I don’t have to work.”

      “Tell me a little Baudelaire,” he said.

      “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,

      Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux—”

      She broke off, laughing. “Why, you love it! You should see your face! Wait! Here!” and she snatched up a hand mirror from the top of a bureau and held it in front of him. He looked at her over the mirror. “I could smack you,” he said.

      “No, no … you don’t understand. I liked the way you looked. That I could just recite a few lines and evoke that look!”

      “Helpless bliss,” he said, getting to his feet.

      “You know that Charlie and Otto are ending their partnership?”

      “Otto doesn’t confide in me.”

      “They can’t get along any more,” she said, replacing the mirror and turning back to him. “It’ll change our life, and yet it is as though nothing has happened.”

      “It won’t change your life,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Maybe your plans, but not your life. Charlie, as I remember him, which is vaguely, is a bleeding heart, dying to be loved. He has the face of a handsome baby, doesn’t he? Or am I thinking of one of my patients? And Otto is all restraint. So the machine stopped functioning.” He shrugged.

      “The truth is—” she began, then paused. He waited. “It wasn’t a machine,” she said quickly. “That’s an appalling view of what happens between people.”

      “What did you start to say?”

      “But are you saying what went on between them was only a mechanical arrangement of opposites, Mike?”

      “All right, then, it wasn’t. The words don’t matter anyhow. Otto didn’t seem distressed.”

      “We’d better go down,” she said.

      But he had left her and was standing near the window, staring at the floor. As he lifted his head, she saw what he had been looking at. She walked over to him. They both looked at the stone on the floor. There were a few shards of broken glass around it. Mike picked it up. It filled the palm of his hand.

      “The drapes must have muffled the sound,” he said. They both looked down at the street; the broken pane where the stone had entered was at the height of Mike’s brow. “It must have been in the last hour,” he said. “I was up an hour ago, getting aspirin for someone, and I stopped by here, I’ve forgotten why, and I know the stone wasn’t here then.”

      Someone walked by on the street below, a St. Bernard puppy shambling along beside him. In all the windows of the opposite houses, lights shone. Car hoods glinted. Mike and Sophie silently watched a man investigating the contents of his glove compartment. A news truck rumbled by.

      “Don’t mention it to Flo. I’ll clean it up. Who could have done it? What am I supposed to do?” Then he shook his head. “Oh, well, it’s nothing.” He smiled at her and patted her arm. “Sophie, would you like me to send you to a friend of mine? A friend I think highly of? A first-rate man? Member of the Institute?” He hefted the stone, looked back out the window.

      “Thanks, Mike, but no.”

      “But at least go to the hospital,” he said, without looking at her at all. She stared at him a moment, then left the room. Otto was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, a glass in his hand. He held it out as she neared the bottom.

      “Ginger ale,” he said.

       THREE

      “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