right at my elbow. Inside was a note Jackie had scrawled to her accountant, paper-clipped to a thick form the IRS had sent her. Under the form was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of four people, two short and dumpy, two tall and elegant. “Here it is,” I said expressionlessly. “I suppose you must have thought the envelope was empty.”
“Oh, of all the silly—” She gave a brief conspiratorial giggle. “I wrote that note right before I went to bed. I was half-asleep. Well, there we go. The mystery is solved. It’s very lucky we found it, Claudia; I was afraid that things would never have been the same between us if you’d lost this picture. We’ll have to hurry now, that man is coming to get it.”
It took everything I had not to slap her. I should have slapped her.
At four-thirty, the messenger arrived and bore away the accursed thing. At four thirty-five, Jackie took off her suit and stockings and underwear, and sank gratefully into a steaming tub to soak away the day’s cares.
She was fanatical about her bath. Juanita was under strict instructions to clean it only with a chamois cloth and supersoft liquid soap imported from England. A sterilized water tank had been installed next to the tub; a man came twice a week to refill it with distilled water, pure molecules of hydrogen and oxygen free of all minerals, chemicals and biota. He also changed the filter which had been placed at Jackie’s insistence over the mouth of the tap in case the water met any germs on its short journey through the foot or two of immaculate copper pipe that ran from the tank. The cost of all this was enormous, but it was worth any amount of money not to have to bathe in “that dreadful city water, just absolutely disgusting, and it’s full of I don’t know what diseases, it makes me sick just thinking about it!” She said this with evangelical intransigence, her delicately flared nostrils borne aloft above the cloacal stench of the municipal water mains. I sometimes wondered what she thought about, lying there; I pictured the surface of her mind, seething with all the sharp and irritating discrepancies between what she felt and what she wished she felt. How soothing it must have been for her to know that the water she lay in held nothing but what it seemed to hold.
Just before five o’clock, as I was wheeling my computer table into the pantry, Jackie summoned me tubside. She lay immolated in water clear as plastic wrap, encased like a sandwich. “My dear,” she said, smiling beguilingly up at me as if that terrible episode had never happened, as if a whole new Claudia blew in on the winds of each mercurial change of mood like a series of memoryless Venuses, “would you mind getting my radio for me?”
I looked down at her through narrowed eyes. She wore a puffy clear plastic cap. Her body was long and pale as a shoal of sand, her pubic hair a bloom of seaweed. I was suffocated by this terrible intimacy. No one should have been so bound to another person. No one should have needed someone to do the things she asked of me.
I unearthed her radio and brought it into the bathroom, where I plugged it in and adjusted the dial to the AM station that featured her old and very dear friends Sammy, Perry, Frank, Dean and Bing. “Put it where I can adjust the volume,” she said. “It has a way of creeping up. If it gets too loud it’ll give me a headache.”
I cast a flinty eye at the plastic shower shelf that hung from the nozzle overhead, a rickety contraption she was too cheap to replace. It had descending shelves for soap and shampoo bottles, and prongs at the bottom for washcloths and back brushes. Its hook, which was all that kept it suspended from the showerhead, had a crack in it, and was on the verge of breaking. With black-hearted insouciance, I hung the radio handle on one of the washcloth prongs, taking care to give the radio provisional purchase against the tiles so it would stay put until someone touched
“Oh, of all the silly—” She gave a brief conspiratorial giggle. “I wrote that note right before I went to bed. I was half-asleep. Well, there we go. The mystery is solved. It’s very lucky we found it, Claudia; I was afraid that things would never have been the same between us if you’d lost this picture. We’ll have to hurry now, that man is coming to get it.”
It took everything I had not to slap her. I should have slapped her.
At four-thirty, the messenger arrived and bore away the accursed thing. At four thirty-five, Jackie took off her suit and stockings and underwear, and sank gratefully into a steaming tub to soak away the day’s cares.
She was fanatical about her bath. Juanita was under strict instructions to clean it only with a chamois cloth and supersoft liquid soap imported from England. A sterilized water tank had been installed next to the tub; a man came twice a week to refill it with distilled water, pure molecules of hydrogen and oxygen free of all minerals, chemicals and biota. He also changed the filter which had been placed at Jackie’s insistence over the mouth of the tap in case the water met any germs on its short journey through the foot or two of immaculate copper pipe that ran from the tank. The cost of all this was enormous, but it was worth any amount of money not to have to bathe in “that dreadful city water, just absolutely disgusting, and it’s full of I don’t know what diseases, it makes me sick just thinking about it!” She said this with evangelical intransigence, her delicately flared nostrils borne aloft above the cloacal stench of the municipal water mains. I sometimes wondered what she thought about, lying there; I pictured the surface of her mind, seething with all the sharp and irritating discrepancies between what she felt and what she wished she felt. How soothing it must have been for her to know that the water she lay in held nothing but what it seemed to hold.
Just before five o’clock, as I was wheeling my computer table into the pantry, Jackie summoned me tubside. She lay immolated in water clear as plastic wrap, encased like a sandwich. “My dear,” she said, smiling beguilingly up at me as if that terrible episode had never happened, as if a whole new Claudia blew in on the winds of each mercurial change of mood like a series of memoryless Venuses, “would you mind getting my radio for me?”
I looked down at her through narrowed eyes. She wore a puffy clear plastic cap. Her body was long and pale as a shoal of sand, her pubic hair a bloom of seaweed. I was suffocated by this terrible intimacy. No one should have been so bound to another person. No one should have needed someone to do the things she asked of me.
I unearthed her radio and brought it into the bathroom, where I plugged it in and adjusted the dial to the AM station that featured her old and very dear friends Sammy, Perry, Frank, Dean and Bing. “Put it where I can adjust the volume,” she said. “It has a way of creeping up. If it gets too loud it’ll give me a headache.”
I cast a flinty eye at the plastic shower shelf that hung from the nozzle overhead, a rickety contraption she was too cheap to replace. It had descending shelves for soap and shampoo bottles, and prongs at the bottom for washcloths and back brushes. Its hook, which was all that kept it suspended from the showerhead, had a crack in it, and was on the verge of breaking. With black-hearted insouciance, I hung the radio handle on one of the washcloth prongs, taking care to give the radio provisional purchase against the tiles so it would stay put until someone touched
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