‘No, he wasn’t a homosexual, or a gay, or whatever it is you’re supposed to call them these days. He wasn’t sexy for men, but he wasn’t what you could call sexy for women, either. There were two, maybe three times in all the years I did for him when I seen cigarette butts with lipstick on them in the bedroom ashtrays when I cleaned up, and smelled perfume on the pillows.
One of those times I also found an eyeliner pencil in the bathroom — it had rolled under the door and into the corner. I reckon they were call-girls (the pillows never smelled like the kind of perfume decent women wear), but two or three times in all those years isn’t much, is it?’
‘It sure isn’t,’ Darcy said, thinking of all the panties she had pulled out from under beds, all the condoms she had seen floating in unflushed toilets, all the false eyelashes she had found on and under pillows.
Martha sat without speaking for a few moments, lost in thought, then looked up. ‘I tell you what!’ she said. ‘That man was sexy for himself! It sounds crazy but it’s true. There sure wasn’t any shortage of jizz in him — I know that from all the sheets I changed.’
Darcy nodded.
‘And there’d always be a little jar of cold cream in the bathroom, or sometimes on the table by his bed. I think he used it when he pulled off. To keep from getting chapped skin.’
The two women looked at each other and suddenly began giggling hysterically.
‘You sure he wasn’t the other way, honey?’ Darcy asked finally.
‘I said cold cream, not Vaseline,’ Martha said, and that did it; for the next five minutes the two women laughed until they cried.
But it wasn’t really funny, and Darcy knew it. And when Martha went on, she simply listened, hardly believing what she was hearing.
‘It was maybe a week after that time at Mama Delorme’s, or maybe it was two,’ Martha said. ‘I don’t remember. It’s been a long time since it all happened. By then I was pretty sure I was pregnant — I wasn’t throwing up or nothing, but there’s a feeling to it. It don’t come from places you’d think. It’s like your gums and your toenails and the bridge of your nose figure out what’s going on before the rest of you. Or you want something like chop suey at three in the afternoon and you say, “Whoa, now! What’s this?” But you know what it is. I didn’t say a word to Johnny, though — I knew I’d have to, eventually, but I was scared to.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Darcy said.
‘I was in the bedroom of Jefferies’s suite one late morning, and while I did the neatening up I was thinking about Johnny and how I might break the news about the baby to him. Jefferies had gone out someplace — to one of his publishers’ meetings, likely as not. The bed was a double, messed up on both sides, but that didn’t mean nothing; he was just a restless sleeper. Sometimes when I came in the groundsheet would be pulled right out from underneath the mattress.
‘Well, I stripped off the coverlet and the two blankets underneath — he was thin-blooded and always slept under all he could — and then I started to strip the top sheet off backward, and I seen it right away. It was his spend, mostly dried on there.
‘I stood there looking at it for . . . oh, I don’t know how long. It was like I was hypnotized. I saw him, lying there all by himself after his friends had gone home, lying there smelling nothing but the smoke they’d left behind and his own sweat. I saw him lying there on his back and then starting to make love to Mother Thumb and her four daughters. I saw that as clear as I see you now, Darcy; the only thing I didn’t see is what he was thinking about, what sort of pictures he was making in his head . . . and considering the way he talked and how he was when he wasn’t writing his books, I’m glad I didn’t.’
Darcy was looking at her, frozen, saying nothing.
‘Next thing I knew, this . . . this feeling came over me.’ She paused, thinking, then shook her head slowly and deliberately. ‘This compulsion came over me. It was like wanting chop suey at three in the afternoon, or ice cream and pickles at two in the morning, or . . . what did you want, Darcy?’
‘Rind of bacon,’ Darcy said through lips so numb she could hardly feel them. ‘My husband went out and couldn’t find me any, but he brought back a bag of those pork rinds and I just gobbled them.’
Martha nodded and began to speak again. Thirty seconds later Darcy bolted for the bathroom, where she struggled briefly with her gorge and then vomited up all the beer she’d drunk.
Look on the bright side, she thought, fumbling weakly for the flush. No hangover to worry about. And then, on the heels of that: How am I going to look her in the eyes? Just how am I supposed to do that?
It turned out not to be a problem. When she turned around, Martha was standing in the bathroom doorway and looking at her with warm concern.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes.’ Darcy tried a smile, and to her immense relief it felt genuine on her lips. ‘I . . . I just . . . ‘
‘I know,’ Martha said. ‘Believe me, I do. Should I finish, or have you heard enough?’
‘Finish,’ Darcy said decisively, and took her friend by the arm. ‘But in the living room. I don’t even want to look at the refrigerator, let alone open the door.’
‘Amen to that.’
A minute later they were settled on opposite ends of the shabby but comfortable living-room couch.
‘You sure, honey?’
Darcy nodded.
‘All right.’ But Martha sat quiet a moment longer, looking down at the slim hands clasped in her lap, conning the past as a submarine commander might con hostile waters through his periscope. At last she raised her head, turned to Darcy, and resumed her story.
‘I worked the rest of that day in kind of a daze. It was like I was hypnotized. People talked to me, and I answered them, but I seemed to be hearing them through a glass wall and speaking back to them the same way. I’m hypnotized, all right, I remember thinking. She hypnotized me. That old woman. Gave me one of those post-hypnotic suggestions, like when a stage hypnotist says,
‘Someone says the word Chiclets to you, you’re gonna get down on all fours and bark like a dog,’
and the guy who was hypnotized does it even if no one says Chiclets to him for the next ten years.
She put something in that tea and hypnotized me and then told me to do that. That nasty thing.
‘I knew why she would, too — an old woman superstitious enough to believe in stump-water cures, and how you could witch a man into love by putting a little drop of blood from your period onto the heel of his foot while he was sleeping, and cross-tie walkers, and God alone knows what else . . . if a woman like that with a bee in her bonnet about natural fathers could do hypnotism, hypnotizing a woman like me into doing what I did might be just what she would do.
Because she would believe it. And I had named him to her, hadn’t I? Yes indeed.
‘It never occurred to me then that I hadn’t remembered hardly anything at all about going to Mama Delorme’s until after I did what I did in Mr Jefferies’s bedroom. It did that night, though.
‘I got through the day all right. I mean, I didn’t cry or scream or carry on or anything like that.
My sister Kissy acted worse the time she was drawing water from the old well round dusk and a bat flew up from it and got caught in her hair. There was just that feeling that I was behind a wall of glass, and I figured if that was all, I could get along with it.
‘Then, when I got home, I all at once got thirsty. I was thirstier than ever in my life — it felt like a sandstorm was going on in my throat. I started to drink water. It seemed like I just couldn’t drink enough. And I started to spit. I just spit and spit and spit. Then I started to feel sick to my stomach. I ran down to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and stuck out my tongue to see if I could see anything there, any sign of what I’d done, and of course I couldn’t. I thought, There! Do you feel better now?