The Man Who Loved His Wife Page 2

  “Don’t listen to yourself,” his teacher said. How could he help it? His ears had not been cut off. It was far worse when he used an electronic device. To his oversensitive ear the tones were like those cute TV characters whose echo-chamber voices extol floor wax, pancake mix, and pet food. With or without the machine, he heard too acutely. Offensive tones echoed in his mental ear until he felt that he would go mad. One day, he smashed the instrument and discharged the therapist (with an unforgivable letter about her ability, her clothes, and complexion).

  The man who had visited him at the hospital, the breezy fellow whose soft, hoarse voice he had sworn to surpass, suggested group therapy. Fletcher and Elaine attended several classes. Advanced students happily conversed, recited poetry, sang huskily. Elaine went about saying that she was thrilled by the indomitable spirit of people who had won the battle against disability. But Fletcher, who had to join a beginners’ group, could not bear his classmates’ squawks and hoots and efforts to sound human. This, too, was abandoned. He said he could do better alone. Elaine worked with him, using the therapist’s manual. At times Fletcher was hopeful and industrious, practiced, noted improvement, but one bad session, one unconquerable sound, and he would quit for days.

  Several new electronic devices were purchased, each hopefully, each a magic machine which would give him a clear, smooth voice. The latest invention, the costliest, was little better than the others. At home he never used them, but would never go out alone without the crutch. In time he became better able to communicate, but never without self-consciousness. Lesser men, those who had not made fortunes, learned with patience and humility; economic necessity drove them to speech. Fletcher had no such incentive. He had made himself secure, could give in to impatience and bad temper. His ego had been permanently maimed; there was no cure for lost pride.

  New symptoms developed: spasms, excess mucus, dryness of the mouth, temporary paralysis. He was certain that the cancer had returned. This time I will die, he thought, not unhappily. But the surgeon showed him X-ray plates with a benefactor’s smile. Nothing more, he said, than neurosis and prescribed psychiatry.

  Fletcher was horrified. The wife of one of his business friends, a rich man who could give a woman anything her heart desired, alternated between the analyst’s couch and the booby hatch. No headshrinker could give him back a lost voice, for God’s sake. He retreated farther into himself, fled when visitors came to the apartment, and in public places let Elaine speak for him. She ordered meals in restaurants, cashed checks, performed every chore that demanded speech with strangers. Through his lawyer and broker, both old friends, he sold out the last of his business interests and arranged investments that would permit him to live on his income.

  They moved to Los Angeles because it was far away and reputed to have a good climate. An unseasonable heat wave . . . in February! . . . destroyed that illusion. Blistering desert winds dried the air so that crust formed on the stoma which had to be kept open so that air could be drawn into the damaged trachea. Every breath became painful. The specialist recommended by his New York doctor suggested that he live near the ocean. Elaine found a house upon a hill in Pacific Palisades where fog kept the air cooler and moister than in the city. He let her furnish it as she liked and spend what she pleased, but would allow no visitors. Nothing mattered to him except the concealment of disability.

  For a time Elaine was carried away by the excitement of decorating a house and reviving a garden. Inevitably boredom set in. Elaine was completely of this world, gregarious, used to city excitements, a whirl of activity and friendships, passionate involvements. She had hoped to draw Fletcher into her world. “You can’t become an island,” she told him.

  “A what?”

  “An island unto yourself.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “No man is an island entire of itself; even man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a clod to be washed away by the seas, Europe is less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were—”

  “Oh, poetry,” he interrupted.

  “It’s famous,” she told him loftily.

  Since he had given up smoking he sucked fruit drops. Purposely he rolled one against his teeth. “Who wrote it? Longfellow? Tennyson?”

  “John Donne.”

  “Never heard of him.” In the voice of the gullet there is no inflection. Gesture and facial expression announced scorn. A great poet’s name ought to be as well known as Shakespeare or Cadillac.

  Elaine did not remind Fletcher that he knew very little about poetry. His self-esteem had become so frail that she could not utter a word that he might interpret as criticism. She left a book of poems on a table in his den and noted with pleasure that he had secretly looked into it. One day he came to her with the proud news that he had found another great poem, opened the book to a stanza he ordered her to read aloud:

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

  By each let his be heard;

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word;

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  Evidently he had memorized the lines. His lips moved as Elaine read. For a time then she allowed herself to believe that a new life had opened to him. She sought other interests, unsuccessfully, for Fletcher had never learned to lose himself in quiet pursuits nor to accept the consolations of art. The books she brought home—volumes of history, philosophy, science, essays—were untouched, the poetry anthology returned to the shelf. He preferred a game of gin rummy, taught her to play pinochle, but found her such an unsatisfying opponent that he soon returned to his games of solitaire, his detective stories, and the flashy accounts of murder featured in the best newspapers of Los Angeles.

  It was during this period that she gave him the diary.

  IT BECAME HIS obsession, a guarded secret, the man’s private life. Like every amateur writer, Fletcher considered each sentence immortal, every turgid idea daring and original. In the way of those who establish new religions and accept their own beliefs as the ultimate word of God, he saw revery as reality and fed bias with every trifle of every uneventful day. Time and time again he returned to his favorite entry:

  Evil is in the air around us. Look at those nearest you. Every soul contains every sin. In the hidden self the murderer waits. I have seen the change in E. From love to pity, from pity to disgust, from disgust to evil. Guilt shines right out of those beautiful eyes. When she is the sweetest to me she is most deceitful. Is her kindness a way to hide her wish to get rid of me? She is a devious woman.

  He had written and rewritten this entry on pages of old memo pads marked: FROM THE DESK OF FLETCHER STRODE. When finally his prose had satisfied him, he had copied the paragraph into the diary. In his active days Fletcher had scribbled notes on the memo pads, dictated the complete thoughts and messages to educated secretaries who had corrected errors of syntax. Now he found value in words and became committed to thought. Had he lived longer he might have developed some kind of philosophy.

  Words which he had never spoken (devious, obsession) became as valuable to Fletcher as his gold Patek Philippe watch or platinum and pearl cufflinks in his safety deposit vault. The diary was also kept locked away. To show that she respected his privacy, Elaine asked no questions, never remarked that he shared none of his secrets. It was beyond imagining that into this secret volume he was writing her doom. Obsession. Devious. The words gave him strength. Exercise of the imagination nourished belief in what he had written. Labels fastened to his wife’s character and activities fixed upon her a wealth of guile that would have served a Borgia.

  Nature and habit had shaped Fletcher to compete, surpass, exhibit strength, enjoy public triumph. Without these he did not care about living. The thought of suicide was inevitable. He pondered it constantly, considered various methods, suffered the pain of poison, the terror of drowning, the stink of gas, the diz
ziness of the long plunge, the shock of gunfire. He also thought about the availability of the various means, the quantity of pain, the matter of time, even the untidiness; he anticipated the drama of the discovery of the body, heard exclamations of shock, counted messages of condolence, envisioned the floral offerings, attended the funeral. Life held little attraction for him; he knew greater pleasure in the contemplation of death. All in fantasy, of course, conceived and carried out on goose-down pillows or behind the wheel of a car. Thus far he had satisfied the urge by rehearsals played out in the theater of revery, but there was never any doubt of his intention.

  These vacillations were not caused simply by the urge for self-preservation. He had a wife. He foresaw her future too clearly. Aware of the frustrations of a young woman tied to an afflicted man, he recognized in her every sigh and silence the needs of a young woman’s passionate nature. When he had been able to satisfy her, Fletcher had enjoyed the spectacle of her charm for other men, had relished his triumph over her younger admirers. Now there was no solace for castrate pride. Several doctors had assured him that there was no physical reason for his loss of power. It was a block, mental and emotional. These learned opinions were of no help. How could theoreticians know the hopelessness of effort, the sick shame of failure?

  Elaine was damnably tactful. In bed she protected his manly pride, just as in shops and restaurants she used little ruses to save him from the pity of clerks and waiters. Her patience embarrassed him. He suspected the tenderness with which she embraced him and the gallantry which pretended that mere physical contact could fulfill her. She was now twenty-eight, lovelier in ripeness than in girlish promise. Her husband could not fail to notice the jets that sparked out of men’s eyes at the sight of her rounded limbs, the rise of her breasts, the delicious curves of hip and buttock. The thought of her heat spent upon another man, the vision of her unclothed flesh close to a naked male body, tormented his days and made night unbearable. He was determined that no other man should possess his lovable wife . . .

  Nor the fortune accumulated through his years of hard work. As a rich widow Elaine would be even more desirable than the working girl he had married. Prophetic specters haunted him. He saw another man, young and robust of voice, in his house, his car, his bed. Day by day these images grew sturdier. He had only to see his wife shake hands with a man and he was possessed by the will to destroy her.

  There had come into his mind, nourished as it was by ghoulish newspaper photographs, the thought of a double death. He saw as through a lens the two bodies on a disarranged bed. Impossible. Every man’s strength has limits. His ended with the vision of damage to the beloved body. He wanted only to make certain that she would never know fulfillment in another man’s arms. With such assurance could he die peacefully.

  Out of nightmare and brooding, out of newspaper sensations, out of the contrivance of detective stories, he made a plan of devilish ingenuity. He would commit suicide so that his death should seem the result of murder. The plot was devious and irresistible. A wealth of devices sprang to mind. With the zest and care he had once given to big business deals, Fletcher Strode planned his death. Schemes were shaped and reshaped, details altered. His mind became a theater in which the drama was endlessly rehearsed. The perfect murder: revenge and self-destruction. Evidence would be circumstantial but convincing. He did not want Elaine to be executed as his murderess; he convinced himself that her charm would save her this fate. He preferred to foresee her future in a woman’s jail where her beauty would fade, her sparkle dim, where she would grow old and stale before, if ever again, she lay with a man.

  At times he weakened, rejected the whole idea, enjoying freedom from obsession until some incident . . . another man’s delight in Elaine’s grace . . . would spark the scheme to life again. With exquisite cunning Fletcher worked out tricks and ruses that would seem part of her plot to kill him. Into his diary went paragraphs of suspicion, phrases of fear, suggestions of the ways a woman would kill, nuggets of information gathered from newspaper reports and crime fiction. Begun as a means, the diary became an end, Fletcher Strode’s work of art, obsession and legacy:

  One who looks for opportunity finds it everywhere. The smallest weapon, something right under your hand, could be a weapon. When I see her with a kitchen knife in her hand or turning on the gas heater at night I wonder. It would be easy for her to say that a man in my physical and mental state would take his own life. I see this in those dreamy eyes when she does not know I am watching her. When she is shocked out of one of those dreams she shivers and shakes at seeing me close to her and hearing the hell . . .

  The entry was unfinished. Fletcher could not write down words that described the hellish horror of his voice.

  2

  “I WANT YOU TO DIE? WHERE DID YOU EVER GET AN idea like that? It’s weird. Sinful.” But Elaine had to turn away to hide the burning shame of her face. Over her shoulder she continued to scold, “As for my dreaming of freedom”—she turned toward him again, her face faintly pink—“why should I? Freedom from what? As if this place weren’t so devastatingly beautiful and I”—she paused to stretch her long body on the long chair and give attention to a family of quail going through their ritual movements on the grass—“weren’t in love with you.”

  The garden was alive with the scents and sounds of early spring. Freesia and narcissus sent out strong perfumes, the grass glittered with dampness left by morning fog, bees and hummingbirds pondered the rich choice of blossoms. Elaine closed her eyes to recall the past and Fletcher when she had first known him, a man totally committed to life.

  “I don’t deny that I said that freedom’s the most wonderful thing for a girl, by why did I say it? You’ve got to consider the circumstances. When your best friend weeps over long distance after getting her divorce, you’ve got to think of some way to console her. Freedom’s great for Joyce, but Fletch, really!” Since he had lost his vocal authority Elaine had tried to control her own speech so that he would not know the passion of her pity. “Darling, please don’t take everything so personally.”

  Fletcher turned to study the rosy countenance. They were in the small trellised pavilion that had been added as a conceit by a previous owner of the property. Their garden was out of all proportion to its neighbors’, just as the Mexican ranch house was too mellow and simple for the district. All around them, the trees had been cut down, gardens cut up into building lots upon which stood pretentious, sterile houses surrounded by cactus and broad-leafed tropical plants set into patches of colored stone.

  “I’m so happy here, honestly, I dote on the place. And the garden’s getting better every day, don’t you think? Next winter I’m going to plant more azaleas, huge, expensive plants, Fletch, under the pines. Pinks and deep rose color, don’t you think it’ll be beautiful? And so amusing to work out.”

  The quail continued their odd dance, Elaine dreamed of costly shrubs, a plane buzzed overhead, and Fletcher smiled at her enthusiasm. The movement of indulgence was not to last. A truck had entered the driveway and stopped at the kitchen door. “Oh, heavens, I’ve forgotten!” and Elaine ran, long legged and supple, toward the house where the milkman waited.

  Fletcher, following less frantically, came upon them as Elaine with a devastating smile told the fellow, apologetically, “Of course it’s not your fault, but I do think at the prices they charge, your company could deliver fresher eggs.”

  “I’ll take it up with the board of directors.”

  Elaine laughed immoderately, her husband thought. The milkman was young and blithe. With all of these sturdy tradesmen she made a ceremony of selection, asked questions about each item, discussed family habits. “I ought to take that disgusting non-fat, but we hate it. My husband, especially, and he’s the one who can’t afford to put on another ounce.”

  His weight, thought Fletcher, was not the business of the youth who stared flagrantly at Elaine’s long legs in cream-tan trousers, at hips and breasts whose curves were not entirely conceale
d by the loose overblouse. As always when she passed the time with a man, Fletcher was plagued by unendurable visions.

  Later that day he went shopping with her. At the supermarket he suffered fiercely, pushing the cart in her wake as she exchanged greetings with clerks, selected washing powder and stood reflective before counters of fruit. “Do you think this melon is ripe, Fletch? I have no talent at all for melon-pinching.” She darted after the fruit clerk, addressed him a look so engaging that the fellow must consider himself infallible in judging melons. At the check-out counter a boy greeted her like a long-lost love. Fletcher stood behind the odious cart while the cocky kid held her in discussion of the weather. At once Fletcher saw her, lively and unclothed, in the boy’s arms. The vision, more real than the labels of Marvel-Bleach or Vigor for Stubborn Stains, remained while her packages were checked; changed its male protagonist when a muscular package boy ran to offer service. Sweating, but with self-control, Fletcher allowed the boy to push the cart to the parking lot and load their bags into the car. Elaine offered thanks as though the kid had won an Olympic medal, turned back to wave as Fletcher drove out of the lot.

  In the convertible silvercloud Lincoln Continental, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher Strode made a picture as handsome as a color advertisement, the man big and rugged, deeply tanned, the young woman sleek and lovely, her dark hair careless in the wind. She chatted about the dinner menu, about the absurdity of her pleasure in a ripe honeydew, her indignation at the tastelessness of California tomatoes. Earlier these ardors would have been roused by the works of Chagall, Bernstein, and Balenciaga.