The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

LIE STILL, SNOW WHITE

I tiptoed into Vivian's bedroom and softly closed the door behind me. She was lying outside the covers, wrapped in a white silk kimono. She had a little sleeping mask on—a narrow black oval without eye holes, but it had sequin eyes stitched on it with black velvet pupils staring at the ceiling.

Her legs were stretched out straight and close together, her arms were at her side, her head was thrown back on a little silk pillow, emphasizing her cameo-perfect profile and the long swan-line of her throat.

The moon was chilly and the blue lights were all on, making the white coverlet and the kimono and Vivian's flesh one pale blue marble. It would only have taken a sleeping wolfhound at her feet, his back against their soles, to have perfected the illusion of a medieval tomb statue.

“Lie still, my darling,” I called gently on a sudden impulse. “I'll be with you in a moment. Don't say a word. You're so beautiful just as you are."

I am a man of very odd impulses. But following all faint cues from the unknown is the only way I know of wresting a little beauty from life. And beauty is everything.

I have a great instinct for beauty. I can see subtle possibilities for it where the average intelligent person beholds a blank. For instance, I don't think I'd have gotten the inspiration for this midnight rendezvous if it hadn't been for Vivian's strange penchant for blue-tinted electric light bulbs—a penchant which she told me annoyed her female friends quite a bit. Vivian has always been most imaginative, but sly with it.

True, blue light is cold and does disastrous things to a normal complexion or makeup job. But it can cover up things too. By turning everything blue, it can disguise a blue skin. There are persons with blue skin, you know. Some of them got that way by taking patent medicines containing silver nitrate. The chemical circulates through the body and sunlight striking it breaks it up and precipitates the silver as a fine powder throughout the cells just under the skin. Harmless, but the person turns a slate blue color if he keeps it up. Most such blue people got that way fifty years ago, when patent medicines were uncontrolled. There also was almost no sunbathing then, so I suppose such oldsters are only blue on their faces, throats and arms, though I really don't know. But now, especially with sunlamps, a person can easily be blue all over from silver nitrate.

Then there are the ancient Britons with their woad, though you don't see any of those these days—at least I never have.

And then there are heart conditions that give a person a blue tinge. And there are other reasons—or perhaps I'm only thinking of extreme heart conditions.

My dear Vivian, I knew, had a bluish skin, but the blue light disguised, or shall I say tempered the fact, harmonized it with the background.

The blue light also gave an uncanny, enchanted underwater feeling to the bedroom as I slowly circled around to the bedside table. I didn't look at Vivian steadily but only stole glances at her from time to time. It seemed more fun that way, more of a game, and perhaps I was still suffering a little from my old shyness—the terrified, guilty shyness that always locks me up tight as soon as I get within kissing distance of a woman or just alone in the same room or landscape with her.

“Don't take any notice of me, dear Sleeping Beauty,” I said with a tender chuckle. “It's just me, just Arch the Warch, the distinguished-looking but harmless gaffer who's your older friend and who talks insightful-sympathetic with you, especially about your problems with younger men, and who takes you to museums and parks and restaurants and theaters and does half your office work and helps you work off your head of imaginative steam for you—and who gets tongue-tied and involuntarily jerks back whenever you give him that speculative smile.

“Don't let Arch disturb you. Please just lie there and go on dreaming or meditating or uniting with the cosmic all or savoring the delights of Heaven or suffering the pains of Hell, or whatever it is you're doing now."

You know, it's a funny thing. I hadn't intended to say a word when I came into the bedroom, but here I was talking and talking. I guess that sex or the sure prospect of sex opens a man up. I decided to experiment a little more.

“The trouble with everything is sex repression,” I hadn't known I was going to say all that, or so loudly. “I know this is supposed to be an age of sexual freedom,” I continued, “but that's a big lie. How can sex be free if they still bend every effort to make you scared of it? How can it be free if it's still surrounded with taboos and crazy complexes and awful warnings and the dread of ridicule and disapproval and even legal penalties and all sorts of other stop signs?

“How can sex be free if they make as much a secret and a shame of it as they do of death these aseptic days?—rating the goat-odor as vile as the corpse-odor.

“How can sex be free if the priests still want the privilege of doling it out like medicine, happy if they convince you it tastes nasty? And if the social workers and counselors give it to you like a wonder drug that must only be taken under their supervision, according to their rules. As if your sex urge didn't belong to you, but to society—meaning whoever currently rules society.

“How can a thing be free if nine-tenths of the people are really against itfor anyone else and self-appoint themselves a secret police and spy constantly to make sure that nobody gets more than the legal maximum, which is a stale and uncertain minimum at best and sometimes completely unavailable. They say out of one side of their mouths that sex is okay and beautiful, but out of the other side they say that any real enthusiasm for sex is a sign of immaturity, Don Juanism, nymphomania, satyriasis, and social irresponsibility.

“Go ahead and enjoy sex, they say, if you're willing to make everybody else murderously jealous and maybe drive them crazy and if you're willing to degrade the girl and deal with the leering motel proprietress and the abortionist and the police. Go ahead and enjoy it, and then boast about it and snicker and sneer at it for the dirty thing it is. (They lie when they say it's beautiful, though not I.) Go ahead and enjoy it, they say, if you're willing to pay the price. But remember there's always a price. My God, the price you sometimes have to pay!"

I shut my mouth. The breath whistled through my nose for a while. I was standing by the bedside table now. The drinking glass had a half inch of water left in it and a lipstick print that looked purple in the blue light. The pillbox I'd given Vivian that morning was sitting beside it, open and empty. I was glad of that because I'd been afraid all along she might have taken only one of the two capsules and one might not have worked so completely or so cleanly.

I let myself look at Vivian now for several seconds. She hadn't vomited at all or been sick in any way that I could see. I'd somehow guessed all along that the effects of the cyanide wouldn't be as unpleasantly violent as the books described—they always exaggerate those things and try to throw an extra scare into you, about death as well as sex!—though I had been prepared to clean Vivian up if that had been necessary, clean her up in all tenderness and reverence.

I lightly touched the hand nearest me. It rocked a little, as though there were something under it liquid and gurgling. And it was icy cold.

Somehow the fact that her hand was cold shocked me and I quicky drew back my fingers. Naive of me, I suppose, but really except for her pale blue complexion, which was justified by the blue light, and the cold of her hand, and of course the empty pillbox, there was no way of knowing she was dead.

Then, gaining in boldness, I leaned closer to her and for the first time I caught the sweet musky rotten odor of corruption.

That jarred, I didn't want it, and I started for the bathroom, but before I got there I saw the slim fanciful bottles on her dressing table. I selected a lilac spray cologne and passed it back and forth at arm's length above her, from feet to head, several times.

Then, as the floral alcoholic mist settled, I plunged my hands through it and reverently parted the white silk kimono above her waist and drew back a little and looked at her breasts.

At that moment I experienced ecstasy, awe, and a kind of stubborn astonishment. Why, why, is it that two curving cones of flesh should exercise such a fiendish hold on man's imagination? They must mean something, be something; they can't be just a meaningless arbitrary target for man's fixation. I do not buy that theory about remembering mother's good milk and being cuddled into mother's warm protective bosom. Grown men aren't milk maniacs. Surely giving milk and pillowing a squirming brat are only subordinate functions of a woman's breasts, the sort of work they can do when they're broken down and good for nothing else. No, a woman's breasts must be designed for something fundamentally much more important. They're organs for voiceless communication, dear helpless hands, lovely mouthless snouts. They're trying to say or do something. They're like soft-nosed velvet creatures pushing out of a woman's body, wanting to feel and sense intensely—maybe Shelley was getting at something deep when he thought of a woman's breasts with each nipple replaced by a peering eye. Breasts are sacraments—an outward sign of some mysterious hidden glory. They're beautiful, beautiful, beautiful—and I don't understand it at all.

Once I saw some pornographic movies of what I suppose are the ordinary sort—at any rate, men and live women doing it together—and after the first second or so I didn't feel any of the ususal delightful hot excitement (such as comes to me when I have someone undress a woman in my imagination or as used to come to me at burlesque shows) but only a cold intense awe like watching live birth or death might awaken or observing some completely inorganic phenomenon on a grand scale, such as the creep of a glacier or the surging of the sea in storm or the implacable rush and leap of a forest fire and the flight of large animals before it, or the slow wheeling of the stars.

“No, Vivian, I don't understand it at all,” I heard myself say, quite loudly. It hit me that I could freely talk to Vivian now, talk to her about all the things I'd never been able to hint at before, talk to her about the things beyond those things—the things you couldn't even think of until you'd talked about the others first—why, there was no end to it.. What's more, I realized I wouldn't have minded if Vivian had been able to listen to me, yes, and answer me too, comment on what I said, show me her view of things and maybe bring new light into my own brain that way; in fact, I even wished she would.

It hit me hard, let me tell you, it struck me all in a heap as our country cousins say, to realize that in one way I was sorry now I had killed Vivian. I decided that I would have to get this thing straightened out, I would have to explain myself to myself, before I did anything else.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't want to go back and change what I'd done. I was still delighted that I had Vivian in a situation where I could enjoy her just as I wanted to. My gaze kept licking back every few seconds to her naked breasts and every time it did I re-experienced that same mixed ecstasy. But I was secure in the knowledge that I could find fulfillment with Vivian whenever I wanted: I had all the night ahead of me. It was just that it was beginning to seem a necessary or at least a desirable part of my fulfillment that I explain myself first. And if I talked to Vivian while doing it, that wasn't because I really wanted her alive or had any superstitious notions about a listening spirit, but just because it made the words come out of me easier. It was for the same general reason that I didn't take off, though I'd been going to, her black sleeping mask with its velvet-pupiled sequin eyes staring at the ceiling. It was easier for me to talk to her with her real eyes covered, whether they were open or closed underneath. (And the mask did add to my excitement.)

“I had to kill you, Vivian, didn't you see?” I began. “I've fought against this warped and cowardly urge of mine most of my life, and I was beginning to think I had it licked, that the delights of art and knowledge would be enough for me as I grew older and finally faded away. But then you came along, Vivian, and you fascinated me so, you were so fearfully lovely and dreadfully desirable, and you had an imagination that innocently teetered so close to the verge of my dirtiest most delightful inner pits—like the night you wondered what Persephone thought when she was stolen by Hades—that all my old dreams reawakened and I simply had to possess you. And the only way I could possess you was to kill you. Each man kills the thing he loves—a great poet said that, Vivian, Oscar Wilde. Man has always killed his gods—the least study of anthropology shows you that, Vivian. The god has to be sacrificed so that there can be that great release, that great fulfillment. And the same is true of the goddess.

“It's not altogether my fault I'm the way I am, though I do like to take a little credit for the things I do,” I continued. I had begun to pace now, back and forth past the foot of the bed, glancing at Vivian at the turns. “But I have to admit that my family background and some chance circumstances were largely responsible. I was a lonely and yearning child and pretty much unloved. I had a couple of parents who were very severe with me and with themselves, but who also drank too much. You know, Vivian, I sometimes think America is inhabited solely by a race of puritanical drunks—some of whom admittedly never take a drink all their lives. I also had a sister two years older named Beatrice.

“I've told you about Beatrice, Vivian, and especially about her tragic death from flu when I was only thirteen, how she died while I was alone in the house with her, my mother being alcoholically occupied. I often tell that anecdote to get a little sympathy. What I never tell was that Beatrice was a big prig and a tattletale and a tease—I call her big because she was two years older than me. As soon as she realized that I, her brother, was curious about her body, she started to make a great show of modesty and propriety. ‘Ma, Archie tried to come into the bathroom while I was taking my bath;’ ‘Ma, Archie climbed on the top of the porch and peeked in my bedroom’—that sort of thing. Naturally it made my curiosity wilder. She also deliberately created situations to tease and frustrate and shame me and get me punished. One hot summer afternoon she pretended to be taking a nap—I swear she was just pretending —and her door was open and I couldn't help myself, I just had to tiptoe in and slowly, very slowly, frightened half to death, draw back the sheet. I was just starting to ease open the buttons of her pyjamas when she jerked up and let off an awful scream. I said I had just been going to tickle her, but it was no good; I got a severe whipping, an unnecessarily severe one by any standards, but then Beatrice was just an age for my father to be deeply in love with her—unconsciously, no doubt!—in that disgustingly pontifical, possessive, sentimental, self-satisfied way that hairy-chested fathers always seem to feel about their nubile daughters.

“After that I stayed strictly away from Beatrice and wouldn't bite on any of her traps—until the afternoon I came home from school and found mother snoring on the floor in the living room and Beatrice dead in bed upstairs. I satisfied my curiosity then—oh, I knew she was my sister and in a way I sincerely loved and respected her, and I knew what incest meant and that it was supposed to be very terrible, and I was very frightened of death and the dead and I was really scared of catching the flu, but I simply had to. Or maybe I wasn't entirely frightened of death. I mean, maybe I was frightened of death in the same way I was of sex—because they'd both been made horror-mysteries for me—and maybe I wanted to penetrate both mysteries at the same time.

“Anyway, I satisfied my curiosity, and it went further than that, further than I'd expected.

“You know, sex is a funny thing, Vivian. You start out just being overpoweringly curious and you end up getting hooked. You do something once and it can set a pattern forever. Why? How? I get the strangest feeling of reality-unreality whenever I think back to that cold bleak bedroom and the smoky twilight closing down and the burnt-linen stink of flu coming through the smell of mother's lilac toilet water—"

I got the damndest scare just then. I thought Vivian moved. I thought her body moved just a little. But I decided right away that it was because I'd been frightening myself remembering that afternoon with Beatrice so long ago.

“That was how I got hooked, Vivian. The fixation might have gradually faded, or it might not, but I was slow in getting social and starting to go with the girls and then about four or five years later there came the fiendish wonderful coincidence of moving to the city and discovering that my uncle there had the job of night attendant at the morgue. He had the family weakness for liquor; I hung around and played up to him. Pretty soon he took to leaving me to answer the phone while he sneaked out to get a drink. I won't go into that much, it didn't last long, but for a few evenings I inhabited a temple of Edgar Allan Poe— Poe had my weakness, Vivian, or at least he understood it damned well, just read ‘Premature Burial,’ ‘The Oblong Box,’ ‘Usher,’ ‘Berenice,’ and ‘Ligeia.’ Yes, for a brief space I had my dark-faned shrine, my Ulalumes and Annabel Lees. Most of the bodies were horrible, but not all.

“It only lasted three nights. On the fourth someone came checking up. I wasn't suspected, I got things hidden in time, but my uncle was reprimanded both for being away and for leaving me in charge, and he was transferred to another job.

“Right then I realized I was up against a big choice. I could go into the undertaking business and find a spot where I'd be able to fulfill myself from time to time—someday even in my own parlor!—or I could turn my back on the whole thing for the childish disgusting obsession I sometimes knew it was. I could try to fight it.

“I stewed around for quite a while making my decision. I once even contemplated trying to work my way through medical school and become a doctor, but it occurred to me in time that the temptations I'd be subjected to then would be too dreadful. I've never wanted to hurt society, Vivian, believe me! What little I've done, I've been driven to by overpowering urges.

“I finally decided I would try to fight it, and for the next twenty years I must say I made a pretty good job of the battle. I even went so far as to achieve relations of a sort with a couple of women—it wasn't so much completely successful as dull and troublesome. It never led anywhere. I found more satisfaction in certain aspects of art and literature and fantasies.

“I'm no dunce, Vivian. I know there are some women who are supposed to enjoy playing dead, but neither of mine did. One of them laughed at my suggestion, the other tried but was no good at it. Or maybe the pretense meant nothing to me, like some people can't enjoy sex with mechanical contraceptives, or even achieve it.

“I also seriously tried out a number of different churches, figuring they'd help me control myself and achieve some serenity, but I eventually discovered that most religions put so much emphasis on death and on sex as an evil or dangerous thing that they contributed to my urge instead of dissipating it. I stayed away from the church then and did a better job of keeping myself in line.

“But you know how it is with men in their forties, Vivian—or maybe you don't—anyway, they wake up one morning and realize that things they've always told themselves they'd do some day, in some sweet never-never land of success, are suddenly a matter of now-or-never.

“And then you came along, Vivian dear, and you were so damnably attractive that all my old urges awakened at a bound. You looked like a Poe heroine, a Pre-Raphaelite sorceress, a Bronte-Hepburn type; your eyes were dark-circled, you were delightfully thin, so that I was always conscious of your lovely skeleton, as if it were trying to burst out and join in a dance of death. And you were obviously neurotic, restless, easily frightened, very nervous, habitually melancholy and depressed, so that from the very start I thought of you as the Little Sister of Death. And then I finally got to know you, I found that you were very intelligent, sensitive, charming, and compassionate, full of little insights that hovered around the out-skirts of my secret. You liked to walk in cemeteries and romance about the old gravestones. You liked to hear about the pastel tombs of Mexico, the narrow vaults of New Orleans, the Aztec maidens thrown in the well, and the nuns who died in their cells a-fever with love of Christ. And once you imagined you were Persephone, Queen of the Dead, and I stopped you quick, because I knew I couldn't keep my secret for long if you went on like that.

“You know, Vivian, I think that if I ever could have really loved a living woman, it would have been you. With you it could have happened, Vivian.

“You know why it never happened, Vivian, why it never had a chance of happening? It was because during those first months I only watched you from a distance—remember how long I was in saying more than two words?—and during that time I built you up into a symbol, I watched you die and I handled your dead body in my fantasies every night, so that by the time I got to know you better the pattern was set and only some impossible explosion of the mind could have changed it. I could only go on seeing as much of you as I dared, enduring the bittersweet torture of your presence, having my fantasies get more complex and unsatisfactory, and imperious every night, feeling the pressure build up, fighting to hold myself in check.

“I've always thought you were at least partly aware of what was going on those two times I almost killed you on impulse. First, there was the night I almost threw you into the lagoon in the park. I was going to go in with you and hold you under. There was a faint blue light around us from the distant boulevard lamps, remember? You always have been my Blue Girl, Vivian, moody and pale, though now you're painted by electricity rather than Gainsborough. Yes, there was a blue light around us and we were talking about suicide and there was nobody near—"

Again I thought Vivian moved! Just as though she'd shuddered and I'd caught the end of the shudder as my eyes turned to her. I was certain that once again I'd been scaring myself remembering eerie things, but this time I had more difficulty putting what I thought I'd seen out of my mind. I watched her motionless chest for several seconds before I went on.

“The second time was when I almost brained you with the stone ashtray out there in the living room.

You suddenly turned round and caught me holding it back over my shoulder and I had to do a ridiculous pirouette to pass it off as a jape. You know why I checked myself that time, Vivian? It was solely because I had thought : ‘I don't want her all bloodied up, I don't want even the back of her skull crushed, I'll do it a better way.'

“Once I'd thought of that I had no choice. It was just a matter of moving efficiently with a minimum waste of time, of stealing the cyanide from the photoengraving department and refilling the two Nembutal capsules, of getting a duplicate set of keys to this apartment the noon you let me come here from the office to fetch the homework you'd forgotten, of waiting for the time in your mood-cycle when you'd make the big complaint about not being able to sleep and, when it came this morning, taking you aside and offering you my two yellow capsules with much insistence that you take them both tonight and with repeated warnings that you tell no one—because, I said, most people these days are so irrationally critical of sleeping pills and especially of anyone not a doctor handing them out.

“I was afraid afterwards that I'd overdone it. You know, Vivian, I've often wondered during this last month of preparation whether you hadn't caught on, at least in some nebulous way, to what I was up to. I've been behaving in such a flighty, abstracted way, or at least it's seemed so to me. I'm no actor, you know. I never could play it cool. My repressions don't make me restrained, only tongue-tied and jumpy. So I've often wondered whether you hadn't caught on as to what I had in mind and were letting me go ahead with it because you yourself wanted it that way. Oh, not that you've asked me to kill you in so many words, but you've liked talking about suicide and you thought the Mexican candy skull I bought you was charming and you've told me how you keep coming back to the line in Keats’ ‘Nightingale’ about being ‘half in love with easeful death’ and after all you are my Blue Girl, my Dancing Skeleton, my Sleeping Beauty, my Snow White, my Little Sister of Death ...

“Yes, I really thought you knew the cyanide or some swift death was in the capsules when you took them from me. But if you did know that, Vivian, I wonder now if you really had to take them. If you were so much in love with death, I might have been able to love you alive. I'm actually beginning to think I could. My God, Vivian, if that was the way you felt, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you open my eyes blinded by my mania-habits and my fears? Vivian, why—”

For a third time I thought that Vivian moved! Only this time it was I who shuddered. What if she should get up now, I asked myself, and come at me grinding her teeth and tear off the sleeping mask, and open her eyes to show just the whites and throw her arms around my neck stranglingly? I've never believed in the supernatural, though I've had an aesthetic taste for the weird, but now in that blue-litten room the whole impossible universe of vampires and zombies and werewolves suddenly came alive for me. What if the dead did come back ... in the body?

No, no, I told myself, it was clearly an illusion born of my nervousness and self-dramatizing. And even if Vivian's body actually had twitched a little, there were natural causes. I mustn't forget rigor mortis— my uncle told me the usual horrendous stories and I had done enough reading on the subject.

Besides, in all my rather absurd oratory I had lost sight temporarily of my chief purpose in coming here tonight. Thinking of that, I almost laughed. I moved toward the bed. Once again I caught the sweet foul odor of corruption—upsetting but reassuring too. Once again I sprayed the lilac cologne.

And then—you know, it's hard to believe this, but it's true—I discovered that I had lost my desire, or rather the hot, male intensity of it. Either my somewhat ridiculous spouting and melodramatic self­ justification had sublimated it, or that moment of supernatural dread had chilled it. At any rate, there was Vivian lying there, more beautiful than I've ever seen her, infinitely desirable, all ready for me, and here I was worse than a eunuch. It was a scene for the gods to snicker at as they watched our painful antics from their lecherous couches on Olympus.

But I wasn't going to be cheated that way, no, I told myself, I'd murdered to get Vivian and I was going to have her. So I rang up the red curtain that had been closed ever since I met Vivian, and my girls came out of the wings and began to put on their thousandth performance, or something like that, of Lesbian Gang, Miss Satan's School, Sisters of the Whip, Hell's Sorority House, and the other little dramas I have concocted over the years. I don't know why it's so exciting to imagine girls torturing girls, but it is for me and I gather from pornographic books and photographs that my taste is not unique.

I must say my girls never seemed such cheap and sleazy creatures as they did tonight, even Miss Satan herself and poor frightened Lovey-Dovey. Or maybe they put on a brilliant performance and it was just me that felt cheap, having to use them that way.

At any rate, they eventually had the desired effect on me. They always do. I turned once more to the bed.

And then—oh, I didn't lose my ardor, quite the contrary, but Vivian looked so very beautiful and lovely and loving, as if she were somehow making an effort to make herself nice for me in death, that I wished her alive with that understanding of me and I felt lonely and sad to my core, though still loving, and I knelt down beside the bed at her feet to kiss, not her icy hand, but the sleeve of her white silk kimono, begging for forgiveness, yearning for her pardon.

As I did so, I noticed that the white bedclothes were wet at that point, so wet that droplets were forming at the hanging edge of the white coverlet and dripping noiselessly onto the thick carpet. The liquid was absolutely colorless and odorless too—I touched my nose to it. And it was very cold.

It had to be ice water—as if a rubber sheet full of ice water under the bedclothes were leaking.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe.

Then I got the odor of corruption, stronger than ever, but clearly not from the ice water. I stooped lower then on my knees, still holding the hem of Vivian's kimono to my lips, and looked under the bed.

Not two feet away from me was a dishpan full of garbage. A purple-gray hunk of meat was the main part of it, flanked by crescents of mold-spotted cantaloupe rind, and scattered over with gardenia blossoms. Beyond it was a little, gray, grill-faced microphone lying on its back with thin wires going from it toward the head of the bed.

Still holding the hem of her kimono and kneeling and bending so that my face almost touched the carpet, I followed the inconspicuous wires with my eyes. They traveled around the foot of the baseboard and disappeared under the bathroom door.

I instantly realized exactly what had happened—there was no reasoning to it, no deduction; one moment ten thousand facts and ideas weren't in my head, the next moment they were.

Just as I'd guessed, Vivian had suspected me all along. She'd gone to the police—maybe not for the first time—as soon as I gave her the capsules—during lunch hour, of course. The powder in the capsules had been easily identified as cyanide, but because they only had Vivian's word that I'd given her the capsules and because in any case they wanted to nail me—and because policemen have as hot nasty tastes as other men—they'd laid this little trap for me with Vivian's cooperation. Maybe the blue lights had helped give them the idea, though if the lights hadn't been blue they'd have simply turned them off.

Yes, it must have been the police who had planted this microphone, and maybe the police who had hit on the point about the blue lights, but it must have been Vivian who had thought of concealing her eyes, which no one can keep from blinking, with the black sleeping mask. As for her breathing, she'd have kept it shallow and I hadn't even looked at her five consecutive seconds.

And I was somehow certain that it was Vivian who had thought of the rubber sheet full of ice cubes and the dishpan full of garbage. I could imagine the police chuckling enthusiastically as she suggested those items. The police are our guardians, but they like their pornography as much as the next chap.

Yes, I was curiously sure they'd enjoyed my little performance, even been thrilled by it, both Vivian and the police—and I rather wished I'd gotten the bit about Miss Satan's School on the tape, and Lovey-Dovey's last torments.

Yes, Archie, I told myself, Vivian will have nightmares about it, or maybe pleasant dreams, all the rest of her life. And those crooked-brained, blue-coated voyeurs will keep the tape in their secret black museum and play it for kicks for the next fifty years. But after all, you did put the cyanide in those capsules, Archie old boy, and for killing the thing you love there's no pardon to the end of time, or at least until the end of you.

I knew exactly what was going to happen next, but just the same I stood up and quietly started for the door to the living room.

Before I was halfway there it began to open. I stopped where I was.

Vivian sat up in bed with a jerk. Jill-in-the-box. The mask stared at me.

Through both doors the cops came into the bedroom. One of them switched on the big yellow ceiling light. Under it, Vivian's skin was pinkly flushed.

The cops came toward me, but I stood there aloof, looking at Vivian. Now I could see her eyes through the mask.

She jerked the sheet up to her neck, but kept staring at me.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me one way, but almost immediately another hand jerked me the other. My coat tore. It was comic. I pretended not to notice, and really I hardly did.

Vivian's face was contorted with fury, but whether at me—and why—or at the cops—and why—I couldn't tell. Maybe if she'd taken the mask off, baring all her expression, I'd have been able to. For instance, was the flush merely anger?

It was an interesting problem. I still ponder it when the bare globe turns out in the concrete ceiling overhead and I wait for sleep.