Chapter 10 Goodbye, Tiny Sea Creature #3
A few minutes passed, then Jimmy came in. “You’re awake!” he said. “How are you feeling?” He switched the bedside lamp on. “Blimey, you’re as white as a ghost.”
“How long was I asleep for?”
“I dunno, about four hours? I sat and kept an eye on you. I only went to the lav just now. You gave me an awful fright. I thought you were a goner.”
She smiled wanly. “Me, too.” She remembered him undressing her. “I’ll buy you some new towels. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind not—”
“What do you take me for? Course I won’t tell anyone else. Who did you go to, though, to get it done?”
She assumed he was asking out of concern, and couldn’t see any point in dissembling. After all he’d witnessed, the game was up. “It was a doctor. But not, you know…”
“No one who’s on the up and up.”
“Quite.” She sat up, and he arranged her pillows so she could recline comfortably. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything. You’re so lovely to have looked after me like this. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t be daft. I couldn’t exactly leave you in that state, could I?”
As soon as he went upstairs, George pulled back the sheet and searched.
She thought she remembered a particularly painful contraction, followed by the feeling she had passed something.
But she wasn’t sure. And she needed to be sure.
She had to know if it was really gone from her body.
Eventually, scanning the stiffening, burgundy-stained bottom sheet, she picked up a flesh-colored lump.
No bigger than a grape, it had discernible fingers, little slits for eyes, and a pin dot for a mouth.
The head was half the size of the body, which had a sort of tail.
It looked like a tiny sea creature. Goodbye, tiny sea creature, she thought.
I hope that didn’t hurt you as much as it did me.
Robbie had spent the evening at his desk, working on his novel.
He’d never be so grandiose as to say “my first novel,” as this presupposed publication, and also that a second and third would smoothly follow.
He embarked on a new first novel every six months or so.
The first few chapters always went so well that he looked forward to the glorious reception of his debut and—the true triumph—the chagrin of his enemies.
Until, that is, around the thirty-thousand-word mark.
Overnight, doubts and fears and general self-loathing illuminated the futility of his enterprise, his delusion in thinking he had it in him to produce a real work of literature, the shame of ever having harbored such ludicrous notions.
Before long the cycle would begin again, usually when he read a splashy new novel he judged mediocre or worse.
I can do better than that, he’d think indignantly.
The younger the author and the more tediously “modern” the style, the greater was his motivating pique.
If it was a girl in her twenties writing autobiographically, the affront might sustain him for forty thousand words.
He’d long wondered if being in love would prove conducive to working, to inspiration, or if the muse would desert him altogether.
The latter seemed more likely, for Robbie imagined he wrote best when he was unhappy, which was most of the time.
Yet current circumstances belied this. His and Jimmy’s initial trysts had progressed to a full-blown affair, conducted on both sides with astonishing fervor.
They had an established routine of tapping on each other’s doors around midnight, after the house had fallen silent save for its own clanks and creaks.
Before 6 a.m., they slipped back into their own beds.
Robbie then floated through the day in a sort of haze, the previous night replaying like a mind film as he worked.
Even his mundane editorial tasks seemed to take on a new charm.
And every evening, when he retired to his room to work on his novel, his fingers fairly flew across the typewriter keys.
His brain swam with ideas; he could actually feel the sentences taking perfect shape and traveling from his head to his tingling fingertips.
Despite hardly sleeping, he was never tired.
He kept looking back, with a kind of morbid curiosity, to the first time he and Jimmy properly talked, that afternoon in his room.
He’d have sworn he had no inkling of what was to come.
His blindness alarmed him. And yet nothing in his life had prepared him to recognize a lover.
His marriage to Pamela—poor old Pamela, he thought with a fleeting stab of remorse—had left him unchanged.
Untouched. He wasn’t sure if they’d ever had a real conversation, not counting dreary spates of bickering.
Whereas he and Jimmy talked voraciously, about everything and anything.
No one, Robbie marveled, had ever paid him such attention, listened to his opinions so eagerly.
Except neither of them, it occurred to him now, were very forthcoming about themselves.
Invasive questions were avoided, as though their communion was too exclusive, too precious to be sullied by the failures and cruelties life had doled out.
Glancing at the clock, he saw it was 11:30 p.m. Jimmy had been out this evening. At least, no noise had emanated from his room. He often went out. Robbie neither asked nor cared where he’d been—why should he, when their happiness in each other’s company was unmistakable?
Getting up to brush his teeth, he heard voices from downstairs.
He sometimes did; George’s room was directly below, and there was a brass vent on the chimney breast. It sounded like a man’s voice, though, which was odd.
George wouldn’t have gentleman callers at this hour.
Honor didn’t allow it, and quite right, too.
Intrigued, Robbie lay down on the floor and put his ear to the vent.
He couldn’t make out the words being spoken, but after a few moments he realized he was listening to George and Jimmy talking in low tones.
His lungs tightened as he strained his ears, all his senses, to hear their conversation.
Still he could only make out a few snatches.
But it was enough. George: “You’re so lovely…
” Jimmy: “… couldn’t ever leave you… there’s no one else but you… ”
Robbie went over to the washbasin and quietly vomited.
He cleaned up the mess, brushed his teeth, then lit a cigarette and lay on his bed.
A sense of inevitability gripped him. Of course this would happen.
How could he have foreseen otherwise? It was almost as though he’d hated George proactively, somehow knowing that one day he’d have a good reason.
He’d never felt such humiliation. It was too awful to be borne.
He wanted to crawl under his bed and hide away forever.
How long had it been going on? Were they laughing at him behind his back?
Was George exultant that she’d been right to call him queer?
He’d have to move out of the house, obviously. He couldn’t look either of them in the eye ever again. It dawned on him that Jimmy’s purported dislike of George had been a ruse, a sleight of hand to conceal that he, like most men on earth, found her irresistible.
But why, Robbie puzzled, why did he bother with me? It couldn’t have all been pretend, and even if it were, to what end? He had nothing to offer Jimmy, no money or useful favors.
The nicest weeks of his life had been obliterated in seconds.
He struggled to think of a silver lining.
No more subterfuge and secrecy counted as one, conceivably, except that didn’t work, as the clandestinity, the whispering under bedclothes, the muffling of mouths in the heights of passion, the leaving of filthy little notes under each other’s pillows had but added to the vertiginous thrill of it all.
When he heard Jimmy’s tap on the door, the usual somersault of joy pulsed through him, chased within a split second by self-castigation.
He wasn’t sure if he could deal with a confrontation.
But neither could he feign ignorance. His new knowledge would be written on his face.
He got up and opened the door, then went and sat on his bed without saying anything.
Jimmy shut the door. “Got you a present,” he said, handing him a packet of Spangles. “You said they were your favorite.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked his shoes off.
“I know,” Robbie said quietly. “I know about you and George.”
Jimmy put his hand on the back of Robbie’s neck and ran his fingertips in shivery circles around the soft hollow at the base of his skull. “What about me and George?”
“I know you’re having an affair.”
Jimmy laughed and didn’t stop circling his fingertips. “Are we? First I’ve heard of it.”
Robbie tried to pull away from him. “I heard you, just now. In her room.”
Jimmy laughed again, but he was nervous.
Obviously Robbie had it all wrong. Yet he seemed so angry, as though he might not be talked out of it.
“I don’t know what you reckon you heard.
But if you’d have seen the state of George this evening, you’d realize nooky was the last thing on her mind.
With me or any other bugger. She’s been to some butcher, hasn’t she.
Killed her baby, like you said she would.
I found her collapsed on the landing. I’ve been watching over her, making sure she didn’t bleed to death. ”
“Oh my God! Oughtn’t she to go to a hospital?”
“She can’t, can she. Not after what she’s done. Don’t worry, she’ll live. Maybe this will be a lesson to her, eh?”
“Poor girl. Pretty tough lesson, isn’t it?” He remembered George telling him, accusingly, that he was lucky to be a man. How keenly he agreed with her now.
Jimmy shrugged, rather unfeelingly, thought Robbie.
“No one had a gun to her head. She had a choice. Unlike the baby.” He sighed, then grinned.
“You were properly jealous, weren’t you?
” He took Robbie’s hand, brought it to his lips, and started kissing each of his fingers.
“Did you think I’d thrown you over for her?
Now why would I want to do a thing like that? ”
Robbie closed his eyes as Jimmy drew his fingertips between his teeth.
“Were you furious?” said Jimmy between nibbles. “Did you want to slap her around the face? Or slap me around the face?”
Robbie laughed weakly. “I’ve never resorted to physical violence. Not outside the battlefield. But yes, maybe I did want to slap you.”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Though usually I deserve it.”
Robbie looked at him. I ought to be relieved, he thought. The terrible thing he believed had happened hadn’t happened. But the bubble of anguish in his stomach didn’t dissipate. It was the shock, he told himself. In time, the shock would wear off; his nerves would catch up with reality.
Jimmy put his hands on Robbie’s shoulders and began kissing him. Robbie let himself be kissed; then he let himself be pushed back onto the bed. He opened his eyes and said, “So, there’s no one else?” Jimmy smiled, whispered, “No, no one,” and pinned Robbie’s wrists above his head.