“What are you going to do, Charlie?” Rector said.
“After a while, when I’ve finished listening and smelling, I’m going inside and shoot myself.”
“You think, when it comes to it, you’ll have the nerve?”
“Oh, yes. I’ll have the nerve, all right. It won’t take much with things as they are.”
Rector sighed and stood up, remembering to retrieve the empty beer can.
“Well,” he said, “you can probably do a better job of listening and smelling if you’re alone, and so I’ll go on back home.”
“You won’t call the police or anything, will you, Rector?”
“I couldn’t get around to calling them before morning at the earliest,” Rector said.
He went back across the yards to his own house. He didn’t feel like sitting on the steps any longer, what with old Charlie sitting there listening and smelling so close at hand, and so he went inside to the bedroom and undressed and lay down on the bed in his shorts. He was pretty sweaty from the mowing, and he badly needed a shower, but he simply didn’t have the heart for one. He lay quietly on the bed, smelling himself, until Gladys got home in prickly heat from having seen Sinatra.
“You asleep, Rector?” Gladys said.
“No.”
“You should have seen the movie. That Sinatra’s something.”
Rector didn’t answer, thinking instead with a kind of deadly domestic despair: Will you, please, for Christ’s sake, shut up? I’m sick of Sinatra and sick of myself and most of all, dear heart, I’m sick of you. All l want to know, if there is anyone to tell me, is why everything must go sour that started sweet, and why a man must be driven in the end to a ruin that seems preferable, at least for a little while, to things as they were.
Gladys went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the lavatory. Rector could hear her washing and brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. Pretty soon she came back into the bedroom in her nightgown and sat down on the edge of the bed across from Rector.
“What in the world’s got into that crazy Charlie Treadwell?” she said. “He’s still sitting out there on his front steps like a stump.”
“I told you. He had a fight with Fanny, and Fanny’s gone.”
“That’s no reason to sit on the front steps all night.”
“He’s listening and smelling for the last time. After a while, he’s going inside and shoot himself.”
“Oh, don’t try to be funny, Rector. How many beers did you have?”
“Never mind. Lie down and forget it. Think about Sinatra.”
Gladys lay down on top of the covers, it being a warm night, and Rector laced his fingers under his head and continued to lie there quietly, on his back, smelling himself and listening for the sound of a shot next door.
A COOL SWIM ON A HOT DAY
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1961.
Suddenly awake, he opened his eyes in a glare of morning sun. The glare was blinding and painful, and so he closed his eyes again quickly and lay without moving in the soft shadows behind his lids. He could hear a clock ticking in the room. He could hear a cardinal singing in the white light outside. Something seemed to be scratching at his brain. The remembrance of something.
And then he remembered. He remembered the night and the night’s shame. The focus of the night was Ellen’s face. The sound of the night was Ellen’s voice. The face was cold and scornful, remote and strange. The clear and precise articulation of the voice was more appropriate to proud defiance than to a confession. Lying and remembering, fixed in despair, he held to the slender hope that he remembered a dream.
After a few minutes, needing to know, he got up and walked across the room and into a bathroom and through the bathroom into a room beyond. Ellen was lying on her bed in a gold sheath. He had put her there himself, he remembered, after shooting her. Ankles neatly together and one hand folded upon the other below her breasts. The hands covered with a definitive gesture of modesty, as if it were something intimate or obscene, the small hole through which her life had slipped out and away between her fingers. He had removed her shoes.
So it was not a dream. He had killed her indeed in the shameful night, and there on the floor where he had dropped it was the gun he had killed her with. He looked at the gun and back at her. Oh, golden wanton. Oh, sweet and tender harlot wife. Having killed her, having laid her out neatly on a quilted satin cover, he had gone to sleep in his clothes in his own room. But this was an oversimplification and therefore a distortion. He had not merely gone to sleep. He had withdrawn, rather, into a deep and comforting darkness in which, if nothing was solved or made better, everything was at least suspended and grew no worse. He had slept soundly.
Now, of course, he was awake and faced with the necessity of doing something, and what he must do was perfectly apparent The loaded gun was there, and he was there, and he had now, since last night, not only the negative motivation of not wanting particularly to live, but also the positive one of wanting and needing to die. But there was no urgency in it. He felt a kind of indolence in his bones, a remarkable lassitude. Walking over to the gun on the floor, he bent and picked it up and put it in a side pocket of his jacket, in which he had slept. He stood quietly, with an air of abstraction, watching Ellen on the bed in his heart was a movement of
