Double Delight Read online

Fanny Winston, hair newly colored and permed, had that festive, somewhat florid-cheeked look of a woman who has been through an ordeal for beauty’s sake, and is determined to believe that the ordeal has not been in vain. As Terence helped her walk from the hairdresser’s salon to his car parked at the curb, she leaned heavily on his arm, though she was using, too, her aluminum walker, and peered up at him with a coquettish sort of petulance, saying, “Well!—you’re diplomatic, aren’t you!—silent as the tomb.” Terence realized that he’d been expected to comment on his mother-in-law’s hair, which was an eerie bluish-silver, synthetic as spun glass, permed in such a way as to lift in swirls from her scalp, to disguise the hair’s thinness; this was in fact the style in which Mrs. Winston had been wearing her hair for years, and Terence thought it quite becoming. It was the elderly woman’s puffy, sagging, rouged face that was the problem.

  “Your hair is very becoming, Fanny,” Terence said, smiling. The harsh chemical odor of the permanent wave, thinly disguised by something sweet and perfumy, made his eyes water. “I like it that way, very much.”

  “It’s the same way I’ve been wearing it for years.”

  Before Terence could speak further, Mrs. Winston grunted, swinging herself around into the passenger’s seat of the Oldsmobile, as Terence held the door open. Once, helping Mrs. Winston into the car, at a time when she was still using her wheelchair, Terence had inadvertently let slip the heavy door, and it had struck her swollen knees.

  As they drove out of the village and into the semirural suburban neighborhood where the Greenes lived, Mrs. Winston chattered and Terence listened, or tried to listen. Trying to keep his thoughts from flying to Trenton, to Ava-Rose: Would she love him less, if he could not help her relocate The Craft of Beauty, soon? Mrs. Winston was visiting the Greenes for a week, or was it two weeks, or was it forever, and in her chatter she oscillated from being grateful she was in Queenston—“You can’t imagine, at your age, how lonely my life is now”—to complaining, as if conspiratorially with her son-in-law, of her daughter—“I may be old-fashioned, but I simply don’t approve of a mother with two young girls spending so much time out of the house. What an active circle of friends you two have!”

  Terence, who had seen virtually nothing of his Queenston friends for months, murmured, affably, “Yes.”

  Mrs. Winston complained too of Kim, who seemed to have no time at all for her grandmother any longer—“It’s rush rush rush, no wonder she’s so skinny, and if it isn’t her friends it’s gymnastics now, did you see the bruises on the poor girl’s arms?—from falling off the bars, she says. There’s something unhealthy about all this activity.”

  Terence, driving his car, murmured, “Yes.” Though he had not known that Kim was interested in gymnastics. Hadn’t that been Cindy?

  Mrs. Winston continued, vigorously, “Isn’t it a surprise, Cindy in a senior high school production?—at her age? It’s done wonders for her morale, and she’s lost weight, but I do worry—you know what actors are like. I wouldn’t doubt they all smoke marijuana.”

  The last time Terence had seen one of Ava-Rose’s young nieces, the lanky, curly-haired girl had been lounging on the top step of the sagging veranda at 33 Holyoak, smoking a cigarette. A cigarette! At her age! It was a warm, muggy day, and the girl wore alarmingly short denim shorts, and a yellow elastic halter top in which her small pale breasts swung disconcertingly loose. Terence had been upset to see the girl so provocatively dressed, for anyone to notice who drove by, and he thought it shocking that she was smoking—“Is this something new, Dana? Or—Dara?” The girl stared at him, and laughed, as if he’d said something inadvertently funny. “If you don’t even know my name, Dr. Greene, maybe it ain’t up to you to tell me can I smoke or not, huh?” She spoke in a throaty voice, and she’d stuck out her lower lip in the pouty, seductive Renfrew manner; not so hostile as her words might indicate, but rather more flirtatious. Terence, blushing, could only think to mumble, “Well, I hope your sister doesn’t smoke, too,” and the girl continued to stare at him, cool, bemused, “What sister? I don’t have a sister, Dr. Greene. Who told you that?”

  The chemical fumes from Mrs. Winston’s hair assailed Terence’s nostrils and eyes, and he was beginning to feel slightly nauseated. Mrs. Winston did not want the windows of the Oldsmobile lowered more than a crack, so that her hairdo wouldn’t be disturbed. “—on TV, all the time. So upsetting! But if it isn’t marijuana it’s crack. Oh my yes, we all know about crack.”

  Terence had lost the thread of their conversation. He said, tentatively, “None of the kids smokes, thank God.”

  “Oh but Phyllis has begun again, hasn’t she? She’s looking very good these days, all that tennis, but I do worry—”

  Close ahead was the Queenston River, a narrow but deep stream which Terence must cross by way of a quaintly rattly single-lane bridge; a sturdy enough bridge, having been refurbished years ago, even as, to much local outrage, its weathered wooden sides and roof were removed, for visibility’s sake. The unpaved road approaching the bridge was tortuous, and posted at fifteen miles an hour, and the bridge itself at five, but no one would wish to speed in such circumstances for what if the car veered suddenly off the road on the ramp leading to the bridge, what if the car crashed through the bridge’s narrow railings, what if we plunged into the water?

  What if the old woman was trapped in the car, and drowned?

  “Terence?—why are we going so fast? That bridge—”

  Before Terence had stopped by the hairdresser’s salon to pick up Phyllis’s mother, at Phyllis’s request—for Phyllis herself was busily caught up in a fund-raising luncheon for a local state senator—he’d had a drink at the Queenston Inn; a vodka martini. He was not an afternoon drinker and vodka martinis did not appeal to him but, somehow, he’d had the drink, or was it two drinks, which had helped to quell the curious buzzing in his head, unless it had contributed to the buzzing, and, now, as Terence pressed down on the accelerator, staring transfixed at the narrow bridge ahead, a delicious sort of vertigo flooded him, like a reprise of the vodka going down, coursing sharply, yet warmly, through his blood. How happy I am! How happy, knowing what I must do!

  As in a film, Terence saw the white Oldsmobile crashing through the bridge railing, sinking beneath the surface of the rushing water, saw Fanny Winston trapped inside, in the passenger’s seat, saw himself rising gasping and white-faced to the surface, then diving back, with the intention of extricating the terrified woman from the car—for Terence Greene was a moderately good swimmer for a man of his age and physical condition and this would be expected of him. He saw himself trying, and failing, to save his mother-in-law, maybe she was wedged into the seat?—maybe her heart had given out, with the shock? Still, he would try! he would try! heroically, he would try! And by this time another car would have come along, there would be at least one witness to Terence’s effort, and to the desperation with which, as if it were his own mother trapped there in the car, he insisted upon diving back into the water another time—

  “My God, no—!”

  Panicked, Terence pumped at the brake pedal; turned the steering wheel straight so that, bouncing and clattering over the plank floor, the heavy car rushed over the bridge, and not through the railing: He’d been aiming it, at a subtle slant, to the right. Cold sweat broke out over his body, his heart pounded with adrenaline—how close he’d come to a terrible accident! Close beside him, Fanny Winston was exclaiming in a high, breathless voice, “Oh!—oh!—oh!”

  The Oldsmobile plunged on, holding the road; Terence brought it so quickly back into control, perhaps it had never been out of control. Cold sweat broke out over his body and his teeth were chattering with the enormity of what had almost happened, but he managed to apologize to Mrs. Winston, and to explain: “This damned car, the brakes need relining. I’m so sorry, Mother—”

  It was the first time Terence had ever called Fanny Winston “Mother,” though, from time to time, rather wistfully, she’d suggested to Ph
yllis that he do so.

  Now, it did not seem that the badly shaken woman heard; or, if hearing, that she comprehended. She was gasping for breath, one hand pressed against her bosom. “Oh, oh!—my God!” Terence saw that her face, beneath her makeup, had gone a ghastly ashen hue; her quivering mouth hung slack.

  What if she should die after all, of a heart attack?—as a result of his careless, absentminded driving?

  Fortunately, Mrs. Winston recovered from her fright by the time Terence turned up the drive at 7 Juniper Way. He worried that she would be furious with him, as well she might have been, but, when he stooped over her, to help her out of the passenger’s seat, she smiled weakly at him and gave him both her hands so that he could pull her out; her manner was subdued, chastened. Breathily she murmured, her eyelashes fluttering, “Oh my that was a close call, wasn’t it, Terence! God was watching over us, that’s all!” looking up at Terence in anxious appeal.

  Terence said, gravely, “Yes. He was.”

  Ava-Rose, I am in terror of what I am becoming.

  Ava-Rose, I must stop seeing you.

  Late one evening Terence hid in his study and telephoned Ava-Rose. The phone at the other end rang and rang, as if in mockery.

  My darling Ava-Rose, I can’t live without you: We must marry.

  At last, on the eleventh ring, the phone was answered, and then somewhat rudely—“Yah? Who’s this?”

  Terence was disconcerted, for the voice was no one’s he recognized. He could not even have said whether it was male or female. Had he not heard, amid the background noises (voices, laughter), Darling’s unmistakable shrieking, he would have supposed he’d called the wrong number. “Who is this?” he demanded.

  “Look, mister, y’wanta talk to somebody, or what?”

  “Yes, I do. I want to speak with Ava-Rose, please. This is—”

  “Yah? What? Can’t hear ya.”

  “—‘Dr. Greene,’ tell her. ‘Dr. Greene.’ She’ll know who I am.”

  The noise at the other end swelled, as if the receiver had been flung down facing it. What a mystery, and how disagreeable—the Renfrews always went to bed by ten-thirty, and it was now ten-twenty. Clearly something was going on. A party? House guests? (Terence seemed to recall that Ava-Rose had mentioned Renfrew relatives coming to visit them, from West Virginia.) He could hear laughter very like Holly Mae’s, rising, raucous.

  Seconds passed, and no one picked up the receiver. Terence muttered, anxiously, “Hello? Hello?”

  Indeed, the receiver must have been flung down, and forgotten. Darling the parrot shrieked happily, “Beeeyt PEEZE! Beeeeyt PEEEZE! BEEEEYT PEEEEZE!”

  This went on for some time.

  Anticipating hours of sleeplessness, alone in the bed in the upstairs guest room to which Phyllis had exiled him, Terence decided he would stay up for a while and work. Since Quincy Ryder’s death, Terence had fallen behind in his work at the Foundation. Documents to peruse, reports to prepare, dozens of letters to answer. Phyllis remarked upon his looking “haggard” and Mrs. Riddle continued to worry that he was “under such a strain,” but the truth was, work had always been a solace for Terence, even as a boy. There was pleasure in getting something done, and in occupying the mind. Aunt Megan would call out cheerfully, seeing the boy’s melancholy face, “Here, kid, might’s well make yourself useful!” And so he did, and was.

  How lonely I am. Ava-Rose, have mercy.

  Terence would have preferred working with his hands to work at his desk, but there was no question of that, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. (His handyman chores about the house—why hadn’t he time for them, any longer? Or was it that, deeply in love with another household, he had little passion left for 7 Juniper Way? Yet the Renfrews did not want Terence Greene hammering and fussing there. Ava-Rose explained, “Cap’n-Uncle and Auntie would feel, oh I don’t know!—like somebody was spying on them, somehow.”)

  So Terence worked at his desk. Past 1 A.M., past 2 A.M. Until print swam in front of his eyes, his eyelids grew irresistibly heavy, he laid his head down on his arms—and fell asleep, as into a dead faint, within seconds.

  Sensing that he was asleep and dreaming, sensing too, by his body’s clammy heat, how he was slipping helplessly into a nightmare of spellbinding terror, Terence was aware both of his head on his arms, and of a ghostly movement outside his window. Someone had jumped down from the garage roof, which, due to the slope of the land, was not so high at the rear as at the front; he was moving, in a walk, not a run, in the direction of the woods. Beyond the woods, on the other side of the Greenes’ property line, was an unpaved road and on that road Terence seemed to know there was a car, a sporty-ugly Camaro parked.

  How Terence Greene knew this, he could not have said. But he knew.

  As he knew too that the ghostly figure had crept across the garage roof from one of Kim’s bedroom windows on the second floor of the house.

  With an alacrity rarely his by day, Terence got at once to his feet, ran from his study and through the darkened downstairs to the rear door off the utility room. Where by day he might have had to search for long minutes, and then futilely, for a flashlight, the urgency of the dream provided him with his flashlight at once—for there it was, suddenly, in his hand.

  Outside, the May night smelled of cool earth, damp leaves. The trees that were newly budded by day were skeletal by night. In the very exigency of the moment Terence had time for a stab of regret that, since Chimney Point, he had neglected his property—a lawn crew came weekly, as to the homes of Terence’s neighbors, to service grounds at which property owners scarcely glanced.

  Terence sighted the moving figure, about to disappear into a stand of evergreens about thirty feet away. “Hey, you! Wait!” he called out. The flashlight was already on, illuminating a thin, wiry boy clad in black. He turned defiantly to face Terence, grinning into the beam of light as into stage lights. Gold chains and a heavy gold medallion around his neck glittered; there were bright studs in both his ears, and a thin gold ring through his nostrils. His skin was pale as parchment and his eyes glassy and manic. Studs Schrieber.

  “Yah? You talking to me, ‘Mr. Greene’?” His question was a drawl, mocking.

  Terence stammered, “You—what the hell are you doing here!”

  Now the nightmare began to build, pulsing with rage, and horror, and a profound visceral revulsion, as if one species of life were confronted with another, in a bitter death struggle. An animal, upright. Though Terence was seemingly paralyzed with terror he was at the same time so charged with adrenaline he sprang forward to meet his enemy with something like passion. How happy! Knowing what we must do!

  Yet Studs Schrieber stood his ground, brazenly. Hands on his hips. Knees slightly bent. It was clear from his bright, manic eyes and slip-sliding grin that he was high on some drug—“stoned.” His black T-shirt hugged his skinny ribs, damp with sweat; his lurid gold jewelry winked.

  Terence swung the flashlight menacingly. “You’re forbidden to come onto this property, you little bastard! You know that!”

  “So what, man? I do what I wanta do.” Bemused, Studs Schrieber ran his hands through his punk-style hair. He did not seem to mind in the slightest the flashlight beam in his face. The pupils of his eyes were tiny as caraway seeds. “Just like you, man.” He giggled.

  “What—are you talking about?”

  “Man, you know.”

  Terence stared at the boy. It was at this point, he would recall afterward, that the dream-logic queerly shifted, so that, though he stood facing the jeering boy, he was also, simultaneously, back in the house, asleep at his desk; his head, so heavy! heavy as death! on his folded arms. He was both pleading with Studs Schrieber, and threatening him. He was both advancing upon him, swinging the flashlight like a club, and retreating from him, that look of recognition, hideous filial recognition, in the boy’s eyes. Yet: how happy! Knowing what we must do!

  “—Kim’s told me plenty of shit about you, man,” Studs Schrieber sa
id, baring his damp teeth in a mock-smile, “you and your old lady both, how you screw around. Wild! Weird!—like, you think you can tell Studs Schrieber what to do, huh? No way, man!” He was making a windmill-like motion with his fists, as if mimicking an elderly man’s pose of aggression. “Hey look, ‘Mr. Greene,’ I saw you once, myself—buying some goofy three-hundred-buck birdcage, out on Route 1. Kim says you got some girlfriend or something, but what the hell, man—live and let live, huh?” He was giggling even as the flashlight smashed down on his head, shattering the glass.

  Seemingly in the same instant, Terence woke at his desk.

  How heavy his head on his arms, how dazed his brain, as if stuck to the inside of his skull! His mouth was parched, coated with something oily and acrid. He was both excited and deathly tired. The time on his wristwatch was 5:05 A.M.

  “The night—where has it gone?”

  Outside his study window it was still dark; yet a porous, misty dark, yielding to dawn. Terence made a motion to rise, thinking to use his bathroom, and to try to sleep for another hour, in bed, but his left leg was numb. Then in a sickening rush his dream came back to him and he saw himself, disheveled, panting, jaws clenched, hauling the rolled-up length of carpet out from behind the basement steps where it had been hidden for nearly a year, and up the steps; hauling it into the back yard; and, by moonlight, on the pine needle–scattered hill at the foot of which Tuffi lay buried beneath a flagstone marker, undoing the twine that held the carpet, opening the carpet, and rolling the lifeless body of Studs Schrieber onto it.

  “My God!—what a nightmare.”

  Next, Terence saw himself dragging the carpet, with the body inside, the twine neatly binding it up again in a roll, up to the driveway; he backed out the Oldsmobile, opened the trunk, and, clumsily yet resolutely, managed to get the rolled-up carpet into the trunk, one end protruding. He located more twine in the garage—he who, by day, would have searched futilely!—and secured the trunk top, with such eerie dispatch that it would surely have seemed, to an observer, that Terence had long planned all this, beforehand.