From time to time we heard loud happy Italian passing by in the corridor and on deck. The cleanup squads. She had wiped her mouth clean of the pinkness.
She turned my wrist and looked at my watch. “I’m lost without my little heart watch. I keep looking at my empty wrist all the time. It kept wonderful time. I got it at a discount place. Ninety bucks. It retails for a hundred and seventy-five.” She leaned and stroked my arm, widened her big green eyes at me. “Gee, what a break you’re getting, huh? Just me in these dumpy clothes, and not even a penny in my purse for luck. Poor McGee. And I’ve got whole racks and drawers full of the most darling clothes, and anyway forty pairs of shoes–that’s my vice, buying shoes–and more perfume than a store, and I can’t go near it. I suppose Ans’ll sell it. Or go try to recruit a girl my size. Oh, I forgot for a minute. You said they’ll probably knock him off too, and Frankie Loyal.” She closed her eyes, shook her head, tapped her temple with a stubby forefinger. “I must be losing my mind! When the cops get that letter, nobody is going to have time to do anything. It’s weird, you know, thinking I’ll be the only one that got away. Just on account of you’re so terribly smart, T… T…. Darling, would you forgive me? It’s kind of insulting. I know, but you told me your front name and I know it starts with a T but I can’t seem to remember it.”
“Travis. Trav.”
“Okay, I’ll never forget again. Travis like travel. Because we’re going to travel, baby. Far and wide. Do you know how good for you I’m going to be? You don’t even know the half t. What kind of a place do you hide me out in in Lauderdale? Cute, maybe? I don’t really care if it’s a shack or a car or something. You know something, honey? I feel like kid when summer vacation starts. I got to have a new me. But you have to like it or I won’t use it. I was thinking of one. I want to see if you like it What I was thinking, first name should have like the same sound I’m used to. You know, so I’ll answer. So I thought Nel. There aren’t many Nels around, and it is kinda quaint. Then for a last name I thought of the store names along Bay Street because we met there. And how about one of those with a hyphen in the middle? That hyphen stuff has always churned me up. So tell me if you like this. Miss Nel Cole-Thompson.”
“Just great,” I said. I divided the last of the coffee. She wanted just a touch of brandy and I took the rest.
She came around behind me, and dug her fingers into the muscles near the nape of my neck. “Trav, dear, you’re just all knotted up. It’s all this tension that’s making you seem so cross. Let your head hang loose. Breathe deep and let’s see.”
She struggled diligently, digging and prodding and rubbing.
“No use,” she said finally. She came around me, slid onto my lap, arm around my neck. She kissed my ear, huffed a little blast of warm breath into it. “What we’re going to do, we got plenty of time. Del… I mean Nel is going to relax you her way. All you do, is you just lie down and close your eyes tight.”
“Too much chance of Arturo not being able to make his arrangements stick.”
She shrugged, sighed, got up. “Okay. But when we get where we’re going, sweetheart, we’re going to have us what they call acres of afternoon, and you can believe it. You’re going to get so relaxed you won’t know or care who you are any more. Me too.”
She paced for a little while, looked at my watch again, then curled up on the bed, propped on the pillows, and prattled on and on about her childhood in Austin, Minnesota.
As I listened, I could not help relating her to the theory Meyer had propounded in the small hours. She could blithely accept the abrupt disappearance of Ans Terry from her life forever after seven years of his ownership because she was the “I” and Ans was the “Not-I,” hence merely an object, and when any object lost its utility to the “I,” it could be discarded without a backward glance. Of late he had lost his utility as a pleasure object, and I had moved in to fill the void. The fourteen victims were forgotten the moment she felt assured she could escape punishment. Her tears for Vangie had also been without concession to the tradition of mourning a friend, because Tamie too had been an object, something that had hung on a wall of one of the rooms of her life, and were life to take her back into that room, she would miss Vangie the way one might miss a mirror that had always hung in a certain spot. If one became associated with an object that could inflict pain when displeased, one merely took the precaution of pleasing the object.