her legs froze up and wouldn't move. They warmed her up and shot again.
And then he announced a final take. The last take, he swore it. The light was fading. The shot looked beautiful, though. They had to get down the hill before dark. He called for action.
She ran into the creek, crying. She turned, shouting at Evan. He chased into the water after her. She stepped back, stumbled, and fell one hundred feet.
When she woke up, she had tubes in her nose and a room full of flowers. The doctors told her how lucky she was that two men on the crew were experienced climbers, and somehow managed to get her out of the pool she fell into. As mindful of her injuries as they could be under the circumstances, aware of the grave risks her battered body faced, they lashed her to a makeshift gurney and rushed her back to the lodge.
“They did everything they could do. You could have died.”
She wished, then, that she had died.
Claude came and cried with her, and begged her to live, not to leave him.
When, at last, the cast came off, they had all hoped so much… the surgeon's face had told her right away. As each instruction he made to her failed to elicit the proper action, the corners of his mouth dipped and solidified a little more. The look on Claude's face when she could not move her body from the waist down had crushed her.
Now, observant but druggily detached, she watched as Claude pulled the cover up to her chin, and kissed her cheek warmly. “Love you forever and forever,” he said, as he always said.
“It's been so hard for you,” she said, only the words slurred.
“Go to sleep,” Claude soothed.
She saw her early past, her first high school part in
Claude got up and the bed moved as he rose. She awoke and opened her eyes. “Comfy?” he asked her. “I'll turn off the light.”
“Lonely,” she said, “don't go. I have to tell you something…” She realized she had forgotten what. What was it she needed to tell him, something important? She tried to apply her mind to the problem, but the problem slipped away with Claude, on tiptoes. The light went off and she returned to her dreams.
Lucy left at nine. She had a family and didn't like staying so late, but she had a stolid sense of obligation. She was a saint, unlike Claude, who closed the door behind her, sighing with pleasure at a moment's solitude.
He drank a strong whiskey with ice and poked at the fire. In a flash, like the flash of a dry ember igniting, he realized he had already made his decision, and that it was the right one.
Clea should die.
She should die knowing she was loved. The falsity of his feeling would never get strong enough to penetrate the soft cloud of her belief in him.
The decision fell over him as gently and moodily as rain. He knew it was the proper choice under the circumstances. Clea would want him to have a happy life. Her love was unselfish and pure, unlike his. If only the full picture of the situation would not cause her such emotional harm, she would concur, he was certain.
The only question left was how?
He pondered alternatives. Suicide-there was plenty of evidence that Clea had been suicidal in the past, so why shouldn't she be suicidal again? Their neighbor Mrs. Winters had helped him get Clea fixed up after she had tried to drown herself when the nurse was out to lunch. She could testify. Lucy would, too. She didn't like Clea, he suspected, but it would have to happen off her watch so that she didn't look bad. Maybe Clea stockpiled pills? He liked the peacefulness of pills. She would go quietly, kissed on the forehead by him, loved to the end. But sometimes people threw them up, didn't they? Sordid thought.
A knife? During those early scenes, right after she got out of the cast and into the chair, they had taken pains to keep knives out of her reach. Since then, they had relaxed vigilance. A large knife like one used to slice a melon? Something with a sharp tip.
Ugh. He didn't think he could stab her, not even if he put her to sleep first. The police would be very suspicious with a stabbing.
Hanging? He got out of his chair and wandered around the entire downstairs. Hanging was out. She couldn't reach anything high enough that would hold her. A doorknob? No.
He had a baseball bat, and had played in high school. He knew one fell swoop could deck her. Then, push the wheelchair down the stairs. But she didn't go upstairs anymore, everyone knew that, and those clever forensics people might be able to identify a bat indentation or something.
Okay, asphyxiation. Didn't people tie plastic bags over their heads or something when they wanted to self-asphyxiate? Clea had the ability to do that.
But it was so ugly!
Yet this idea drifted like feathers into something better. Yes, he thought, suffocating her would solve a number of problems. With her asthma, the doctor would have no trouble assuming a natural death. Her memory wouldn't be sullied by suicide, and he could grieve normally, a real widower.
She would die believing in the integrity of their love. Didn't this ending do proper justice to their incredible romance?
Excited, he decided it would. He would serve up a lovely dinner, then death. Something elegant was at work, something which would move the poets and playwrights she worshipped.
Clea awoke at eleven, a terrible time. If you had nightmares, eleven was too early to provide a useful buffer from a night of misery, and too late to promise simple sleep. Lucy was gone. She tried to maneuver herself into her chair, a daunting, if not impossible, proposition. She could not turn over at night, worrying that she might end up facedown on a pillow and unable to shift, but sometimes she could find the strength to haul herself out of bed. Moving the covers off her body, she scrutinized her lower legs, wasted-looking, and dragged herself into the chair. The effort took several minutes, in darkness, without support. She wheeled herself into the bathroom and applied the unusual blackberry-colored lipstick and blush he had brought her recently while on a business trip to France. She needed to look her best for tonight. She required feminine courage. She listened for something from the study but if Claude was in there, he was very quiet.
Primed, minutes later, she appeared in the study.
“Hi, you,” Claude said.
“Hi, you, too.” Somehow, he didn't notice she had put herself into her chair. He missed seeing what strength she had, and that, more than anything, had finally decided her. He saw her as weak and helpless and he seemed to love her more daily. She was his weakling patient, his darling small child, vulnerable being.
She had to put a stop to all this… nonsense, even if it broke his heart.
She settled near the fire. She felt tuned. Once, years ago, she had taken speed with an aspiring actor and stayed up all night, clearheaded, doped to the gills, unreal but blazing with sensation. That was how she felt now. The only uncontrollable thing was the way her heart shuddered in Claude's presence these days, never relaxed or steady, ever alert to the tiniest change in the size of his pupils, or the distance between his brows. She didn't know when that had started, but it affected every thing about every day. He came into her placid pond and stirred up a swirling maelstrom.
“Clea,” he said.
Preamble to what? She didn't want to deflect herself from her own thoughts by reading something into his tone. “Um,” she said. “Got any whiskey?”
“Is it okay for you to drink?”
He poured her a minuscule whiskey.
“More.”
He poured another dollop.
She picked it up and drank. “Ah, now that's a drink.”
He cleared his throat raucously, something he did more often now, kind of like her old grandpa used to do. Living with her was aging him prematurely. He didn't deserve that.
An image of herself in black stockings and nothing else, Claude astride her, both of them drunk as skunks, music loud, bed rolling on castors across the floor, assaulted her. They hadn't made love properly since before the accident. When she tried to talk about it, he sloughed her off. “I love cuddling,” he would say, his eyes guileless. “It's enough for me.” She didn't know if he believed the kind white lies or merely wanted her to believe them.
She drank some more, letting the liquid ooze down her pipes, heating her insides. “So, you had a good day.”
“Yes.”
He sounded surprised. She didn't know how to get to the topic at hand. Sober and not seriously doped-up at this point, she entertained the brief delusion that he would understand and accept her decision without argument.
“These ladies from Taipei,” he said. “Shit. They do spend. Coming back later in the week, too. They want something exotic. Challenging. I told them I have a new shipment coming in. You have such a nose, Clea. Any suggestions about what might arouse them?”
She wanted to say, we have enough money. You don't have to kowtow to anybody, but the words stuck in her throat. The money was hers. Naturally, he took pride in what little the shop contributed. She put excitement in her voice for his benefit. “Big money?”
“Ummm,” he said, as if savoring a particularly delicious slow-melting chocolate.
The sound unaccountably brought up a moment from the first night they had shared. Confessing to a failed relationship, he had kissed her on the nose. She had wondered what the hell. Why her nose? Endearing, she had decided. A small, touching gesture that reached into her in a way a more expansive move would have pushed her away. Only later did she realize the fundamental nature of the nose in Claude's world, and only now did she see that kiss for what it was, sensorial, not sensual, as mindful as his reaching down to pet a cat.
“Claude?”
“You know what I would like,” he said, reaching over to hold her hand.
“What?”
“Simplicity.”
Before she could react to that mysterious sidetrack, the phone rang.
Claude picked up the phone and looked at the display. “Your doctor.” He pushed the button. “Hello?”
She rolled over and pushed the button down.
“Why'd you do that?”
“Because… I want to talk to you. Right now.”
He put the phone down, looking puzzled but patient.
“Do you remember?” Clea said, getting ready for the next line, which would tell him something was happening, and he didn't know what it was.
Did he, Mr. Claude.
He pulled the lines of his mouth up into a sort of smile. “I remember. All of it.”
