“Well, it
“No, I guess not,” said Marian. She was beginning to feel homeless and dispossessed. “I just don’t like the thought of stumbling into my bed and finding that there are people in it already.”
“Tell you what,” said Ainsley, “if we do happen to end up in your room I’ll hang a tie on the doorknob, okay?”
“Whose tie?” Marian asked. She knew Ainsley collected things – among the objects covering the floor of her room were several photographs, some letters, and a half-dozen dried out flowers – but didn’t know she had collected any ties.
“Why his, of course,” said Ainsley.
Marian had a disturbing vision of a trophy room with stuffed and antlered heads nailed to the walls. “Why not just use his scalp?” she asked. Leonard, after all, was supposed to be her friend.
She pondered the situation while she ate her T. V. dinner and drank her tea in solitude, Ainsley having departed, and while she dawdled around the apartment waiting for it to be the right time for the late show. All the way to the nearest movie-theatre district she was still pondering it. She had felt for some time, in one of the smaller and more obscure crevices of her mind, that she ought to do something to warn Len, but she didn’t know what, or, more importantly, why. She knew he would not readily believe that Ainsley, who seemed as young and inexperienced as a button mushroom, was in reality a scheming superfemale carrying out a foul plot against him, using him in effect as an inexpensive substitute for artificial insemination with a devastating lack of concern for his individuality. And there was no convincing evidence as yet; Ainsley had been most discreet. Marian had thought several times of calling him up in the middle of the night with a nylon stocking over the telephone mouthpiece and whispering “Beware!”; but that would do no good. He would never guess what he was supposed to beware of. Anony mous letters… he’d think it was some crank; or a jealous former girlfriend trying to foil his own fiendish plans, which would only make his pursuit more eager. Besides, ever since she had become engaged there had been a tacit agreement with Ainsley: neither was to interfere with the other’s strategy, though it was apparent that each disapproved of the other’s course of action on moral grounds. If she said anything to Len she knew that Ainsley would be perfectly capable of carrying out a successful, or at any rate an unsettling, counter-attack. No, Len must be abandoned to his fate, which he would no doubt embrace with glee. Marian was further confused by the fact that she didn’t exactly know whether an early Christian was being thrown to the lions, or an early lion to the Christians. Was she, as Ainsley had asked her during one of their Sunday discussions, on the side of the Creative Life Force, or wasn’t she?
There was also the lady down below to be considered. Even if she wasn’t peering out a window or standing in ambush behind one of the velvet curtains when Leonard arrived, she would almost certainly be aware that a pair of masculine feet had ascended the stairs; and in her mind, that despotic empire where the proprieties had the rigidity and force of the law of gravity, what went up must come down, preferably before eleven-thirty at night. Though she had never said so: it was merely something one took into account. Marian hoped Ainsley would have the sense either to get him over with and get him out before twelve at the latest, or, if the worse came to the worst, to keep him there, and keep him quiet, all night; what they would do with him the next morning, in that case, she was not sure. He would probably have to be smuggled out in the laundry bag. Even if he was in any condition to walk by himself. Oh, well; they could always find another apartment. But she hated scenes.
Marian got off the subway at the station near the laundromat. There were two movie theatres close by, across the street from each other. She inspected them. One was offering a foreign film with subtitles, advertised outside by black-and-white fuzzy reproductions of ecstatic newspaper reviews and much use of the words “adult” and “mature.” It had won several awards. The other had a low-budget American Western and technicolour posters of horsemen and dying Indians. In her present state she did not feel like writhing through intensities and pauses and long artistic closeups of expressively twitched skin pores. She was looking only for warmth, shelter, and something resembling oblivion, so she chose the Western. When she groped her way to a seat in the half-empty theatre the movie had already begun.
She slouched her body down, resting her head on the back of the seat and her knees against the seat in front and half-closing her eyes. Not a ladylike position, but nobody could see in the dark; and the seats on either side of her were empty. She had made sure of that: she didn’t want any trouble with furtive old men. She recalled such encounters from early school days, before she had learned about movie theatres. Hands squeezing against knees and similar bits of shuffling pathos, although not frightening (one should just move quietly away), were painfully embarrassing to her simply because they were sincere. The attempt at contact, even slight contact, was crucial for the fumblers in the dark.
The coloured pictures succeeded each other in front of her: gigantic Stetsoned men stretched across the screen on their even more gigantic horses, trees and cactus plants rose in the foreground or faded in the background as the landscape flowed along; smoke and dust and galloping. She didn’t attempt to decide what the cryptic speeches meant or to follow the plot. She knew there must be bad people who were trying to do something evil and good people who were trying to stop them, probably by getting to the money first (as well as Indians who were numerous as buffalo and fair game for everyone), but it didn’t matter to her which of these moral qualities was incarnate in any given figure presented to her. At least it wasn’t one of the new Westerns in which people had psychoses. She amused herself by concentrating on the secondary actors, the bit players, wondering what they did in their no doubt copious spare time and whether any of them still had illusions of future stardom.
It was night, the purplish-blue translucent night that descends only on the technicolour screen. Someone was sneaking through a meadow towards someone else; all was quiet except for the rustling of the grass and the chirping of several mechanical crickets. Close beside her, to the left, she heard a small cracking noise, then the sound of something hard hitting the floor. A gun went off, there was a struggle, and it was day. She heard the cracking noise again.
She turned her head to the left. In the faint reflection from the glare of sunlight on the screen she could barely make out who was sitting beside her, two places away. It was the man from the laundromat. He was slumped in the seat, staring glassily in front of him. Every half-minute or so he would lift his hand to his mouth from a bag he was holding in his other hand, and there would be the small crack and then the sound from the floor. He must be eating something with shells, but they weren’t peanuts. That would make a softer noise. She studied his dim profile, the nose and one eye and the shadowed hunch of one shoulder.
She turned her head to the front again and tried to concentrate all her attention on the screen. Although she found herself being glad that he had suddenly materialized in that seat, it was an irrational gladness: she didn’t intend to speak to him, in fact she was hoping very much that he had not seen her, would not see her sitting alone there in the movie theatre. He seemed entranced by the screen, almost totally absorbed in it, and in whatever he was eating – what could possibly make that exasperating thin cracking sound? – and he might not notice her if she kept quite still. But she had the disquieting sense that he knew perfectly well who she was and had been aware of her presence for some time before she had recognized his. She gazed at the vast featureless expanse of prairie before her. At her side the cracking went on, irritatingly regular.
They were fording a river, men and horses together and one blonde woman in a dishevelled dress, when she noticed a peculiar sensation in her left hand. It wanted to reach across and touch him on the shoulder. Its will seemed independent of her own: surely she herself wanted nothing of the kind. She made its fingers grip the arm of her seat. “That would never do,” she admonished it silently, “he might scream.” But she was also afraid, now that she wasn’t looking at him any more, that if she did reach across, her hand would encounter only darkness and emptiness or the plush surface of movie-theatre upholstery.
The soundtrack exploded, spattering the air with yelps and whoops, as a band of Indians swept from their hiding place for the attack. After they had been demolished and listening was possible again she could no longer hear the small clock-like sound he had been making. She jerked her head round to the side: nobody. Well, he had gone then, or perhaps he had never been there in the first place; or maybe it had been somebody else.
On the screen a gargantuan cowboy was pressing his lips chastely to those of the blonde woman. “Hank, does this mean…?” she was whispering. Shortly there would be a sunset.
Then, so close to her ear that she could feel the breath stirring her hair, a voice spoke. “Pumpkin seeds,” it said.
Her mind accepted the information calmly. “Pumpkin seeds,” it replied in silence, “of course, why not?” But her
