STANLEY URIS TAKES A BATH

 

Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00 P.M. were not his style.

And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer-not a real writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist. The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man’s books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath-the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.

It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate-she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. “It was full of monsters,” she said. “Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and… I don’t know… bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that.” It had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. But Stan felt as if he’d rediscovered one of his childhood chums… He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn’t… I knew those stories made him feel bad, too… and… and…”

And then Patty Uris began to cry.

That night, lacking roughly six months of being twenty-eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game-show, Family Feud. She simply adored Richard Dawson and thought the watch-chain he always wore was terribly sexy, although wild horses would not have drawn this admission out of her. She also liked the show because she almost always got the most popular answers (there were no right answers on Family Feud, exactly; only the most popular ones). She had once asked Stan why the questions that seemed so easy to her usually seemed so hard to the families on the show. “It’s probably a lot tougher when you’re up there under those lights,” Stanley had replied, and it seemed to her that a shadow had drifted over his face. “Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real.”

That was probably very true, she decided. Stanley had really fine insights into human nature sometimes. Much finer, she considered, than his old friend William Denbrough, who had gotten rich writing a bunch of horrorbooks which appealed to people’s baser natures.

Not that the Urises were doing so badly themselves! The suburb where they lived was a fine one, and the home which they had purchased for $87,000 in 1979 would probably now sell quickly and painlessly for $165,000-not that she wanted to sell, but such things were good to know. She sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall in her Volvo (Stanley drove a Mercedes diesel-teasing him, she called it Sedanley) and saw her house, set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, and thought: Who lives there? Why, I do! Mrs Stanley Uris does! This was not an entirely happy thought; mixed with it was a pride so fierce that it sometimes made her feel a bit ill. Once upon a time, you see, there had been a lonely eighteen-year-old girl named Patricia Blum who had been refused entry to the after-prom party that was held at the country club in the upstate town of Glointon, New York. She had been refused admission, of course, because her last name rhymed with plum. That was her, just a skinny little kike plum, 1967 that had been, and such discrimination was against the law, of course, har-de-har-har-har, and besides, it was all over now. Except that for part of her it was never going to be over. Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father’s car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing. Part of her would always be walking next to Michael in his rented white dinner jacket-how it had glimmered in the soft spring night! She had been in a pale green evening gown which her mother declared made her look like a mermaid, and the idea of a kike mermaid was pretty funny, har-de-har-har-har. They had walked with their heads up and she had not wept-not then-but she had understood they weren’t walking back, no, not really; what they had been doing was slinking back, slinking, rhymes with stinking, both of them feeling more Jewish than they had ever felt in their lives, feeling like pawnbrokers, feeling like cattle-car riders, feeling oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned; feeling like mockies sheenies kikes; wanting to feel angry and not being able to feel angry, the anger came only later, when it didn’t matter. At that moment she had only been able to feel ashamed, had only been able to ache. And then someone had laughed. A high shrill tittering laugh like a fast run of notes on a piano, and in the car she had been able to weep, oh you bet, here is the kike mermaid whose name rhymes with plum just weeping away like crazy. Mike Rosenblatt had put a clumsy, comforting hand on the back of her neck and she had twisted away from it, feeling ashamed, feeling dirty, feeling Jewish.

The house set so tastefully back behind the yew hedges made that better… but not all better. The hurt and shame were still there, and not even being accepted in this quiet, sleekly well-to-do neighborhood could quite make that endless walk with the sound of grating stones beneath their shoes stop happening. Not even being members of this country club, where the maitre d” always greeted them with a quietly respectful “Good evening, Mr and Mrs Uris.” She would come home, cradled in her 1984 Volvo, and she would look at her house sitting on its expanse of green lawn, and she would often-all too often, she supposed-think of that shrill titter. And she would hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a goy husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue.

She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better-to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails. Months would go by when she did not think such thoughts. She would think: Maybe all of that is finally past me. I am not that girl of eighteen anymore. I am a woman of thirty-six; the girl who heard the endless click and grate of those driveway stones, the girl who twisted away from Mike Rosenblatt’s hand when he tried to comfort her because it was a Jewish hand, was half a life ago. That silly little mermaid is dead. I can forget her now and just be myself. Okay. Good. Great. But then she would be somewhere-at the supermarket, maybe-and she would hear sudden tittering laughter from the next aisle and her back would prickle, her nipples would go hard and hurtful, her hands would tighten on the bar of the shopping cart or just on each other, and she would think: Someone just told someone else that I’m Jewish, that I’m nothing but a bignose mockie kike, that Stanley’s nothing but a bignose mockie kike, he’s an accountant, sure, Jews are good with numbers, we let them into the country club, we had to, back in 1981 when that bignose mockie gynecologist won his suit, but we laugh at them, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Or she would simply hear the phantom click and grate of stones and think Mermaid! Mermaid!

Then the hate and shame would come flooding back like a migraine headache and she would despair not only for herself but for the whole human race. Werewolves. The book by Denbrough-the one she had tried to read and then put aside-was about werewolves. Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?

Most of the time, however, she felt better than that-felt she was better than that. She loved her man, she loved her house, and she was usually able to love her life and herself. Things were good. They had not always been that way, of course-were things ever? When she accepted Stanley’s engagement ring, her parents had been both angry and unhappy. She had met him at a sorority party. He had come over to her school from New York State University, where he was a scholarship student. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and by the time the evening was over, she suspected that she loved him. By the mid-term break, she was sure. When spring came around and Stanley offered her a small diamond ring with a daisy pushed through it, she had accepted it.

In the end, in spite of their qualms, her parents had accepted it as well. There was little else they could do, although Stanley Uris would soon be sallying forth into a job-market glutted with young accountants-and when he went into that jungle, he would do so with no family finances to backstop him, and with their only daughter as his hostage to fortune. But Patty was twenty-two, a woman now, and would herself soon graduate with a BA.

“I’ll be supporting that four-eyed son of a bitch for the rest of my life,” Patty had heard her father say one night. Her mother and father had gone out for dinner, and her father had drunk a little too much.

“Shh, she’ll hear you,” Ruth Blum said.

Patty had lain awake that night until long after midnight, dry-eyed, alternately hot and cold, hating them both. She had spent the next two years trying to get rid of that hate; there was too much hate inside her already. Sometimes when she looked into the mirror she could see the things it was doing to her face, the fine lines it was drawing there. That was a battle she won. Stanley had helped her.

His own parents had been equally concerned about the marriage. They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought “the kids were being hasty.” Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.

Only Stanley had seemed sure of himself, confident of the future, unconcerned with the pitfalls their parents saw strewn all about “the kids.” And in the end it was his confidence rather than their fears which had been justified. In July of 1972, with the ink barely dry on her diploma, Patty had landed a job teaching shorthand and business English in Traynor, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta. When she thought of how she had come by that job, it always struck her as a little-well, eerie. She had made a list of forty possibles from the ads in the teachers” journals, then had written forty letters over five nights-eight each evening-requesting further information on the job, and an application for each. Twenty-two replies indicated that the positions had been filled. In other cases, a more detailed explanation of the skills needed made it clear she wasn’t in the running; applying would only be a waste of her time and theirs. She had finished with a dozen possibles. Each looked as likely as any other. Stanley had come in while she was puzzling over them and wondering if she could possibly manage to fill out a dozen teaching applications without going totally bonkers. He looked at the strew of papers on the table and then tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools, a letter which to her looked no more or less encouraging than any of the others.

“There,” he said.

She looked up at him, startled by the simple certainty in his voice. “do you know something about Georgia that I don’t?”

“Nope. Only time I was ever there was at the movies.”

She looked at him, an eyebrow cocked.

“Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable. “I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is anothah day.” Do I sound like I come from the South, Patty?”

“Yes. South Bronx. If you don’t know anything about Georgia and you’ve never been there, then why-”

“Because it’s right.”

“You can’t know that, Stanley.”

“Sure I can,” he said simply. “I do.” Looking at him, she had seen he wasn’t joking: he really meant it. She had felt a ripple of unease go up her back.

“How do you know?”

He had been smiling a little. Now the smile faltered, and for a moment he had seemed puzzled. His eyes had darkened, as if he looked inward, consulting some interior device which ticked and whirred correctly but which, ultimately, he understood no more than the average man understands the workings of the watch on his wrist.

“The turtle couldn’t help us,” he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look-that look of surprised musing-was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.

“Stanley? What are you talking about? Stanley?

He jerked. She had been eating peaches as she went over the applications, and his hand struck the dish. It fell on the floor and broke. His eyes seemed to clear.

“Oh, shit! I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Stanley-what were you talking about?”

“I forget,” he said. “But I think we ought to think Georgia, baby-love.”

“But-”

“Trust me,” he said, so she did.

Her interview had gone smashingly. She had known she had the job when she got on the train back to New York. The head of the Business Department had taken an instant liking to Patty, and she to him; she had almost heard the click. The confirming letter had come a week later. The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9,200 and a probationary contract.

“You are going to starve,” Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. “And you will be hot while you starve.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett,” Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.

Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy-lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: “don’t hurt me, dear.”

“I will never hurt you,” he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 27th, 1985-the night of the bath.

Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the Traynor Flats Shopping Center opened, he got a job with the H amp; R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then $17,000 a year-this seemed a king’s ransom to them, in those days when gas sold for thirty-five cents a gallon and a loaf of white bread could be had for a nickel less than that. In March 1973, with no fuss and no fanfare, Patty Uris had thrown away her birth-control pills.

In 1975 Stanley quit H amp; R Block and opened his own business. All four in-laws agreed that this was a foolhardy move. Not that Stanley should not have his own business-God forbid he should not have his own business! But it was too early, all of them agreed, and it put too much of the financial burden on Patty. (’At least until the pisher knocks her up,” Herbert Blum told his brother morosely after a night of drinking in the kitchen, “and then I’ll be expected to carry them.’) The consensus of in-law opinion on the matter was that a man should not even think about going into business for himself until he had reached a more serene and mature age-seventy-eight, say.

Again, Stanley seemed almost preternaturally confident. He was young, personable, bright, apt. He had made contacts working for Block. All of these things were givens. But he could not have known that Corridor Video, a pioneer in the nascent videotape business, was about to settle on a huge patch of farmed-out land less than ten miles from the suburb to which the Urises had eventually moved in 1979, nor could he have known that Corridor would be in the market for an independent marketing survey less than a year after its move to Traynor. Even if Stan had been privy to some of this information, he surely could not have believed they would give the job to a young, bespectacled Jew who also happened to be a damyankee-a Jew with an easy grin, a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of his adolescent acne still on his face. Yet they had. They had. And it seemed that Stan had known it all along.

His work for CV led to an offer of a full-time position with the company-starting salary, $30,000 a year.

“And that really is only the start,” Stanley told Patty in bed that night. “They are going to grow like corn in August, my dear. If no one blows up the world in the next ten years or so, they are going to be right up there on the big board along with Kodak and Sony and RCA.”

“So what are you going to do?” she asked, already knowing.

“I am going to tell them what a pleasure it was to do business with them,” he said, and laughed, and drew her close, and kissed her. Moments later he mounted her, and there were climaxes-one, two, and three, like bright rockets going off in a night sky… but there was no baby.

His work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta’s richest and most powerful men-and they were both astonished to find that these men were mostly okay. In them they found a degree of acceptance and broad-minded kindliness that was almost unknown in the North. Patty remembered Stanley once writing home to his mother and father: The best rich men in America live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am going to help make some of them richer, and they are going to make me richer, and no one is going to own me except my wife, Patricia, and since I already own her, I guess that is safe enough.

By the time they moved from Traynor, Stanley was incorporated and employed six people. In 1983 their income had entered unknown territory-territory of which Patty had heard only the dimmest rumors. This was the fabled land of six FIGURES. And it had all happened with the casual ease of slipping into a pair of sneakers on Saturday morning. This sometimes frightened her. Once she had made an uneasy joke about deals with the devil. Stanley had laughed until he almost choked, but to her it hadn’t seemed that funny, and she supposed it never would.

The turtle couldn’t help us.

Sometimes, for no reason at all, she would wake up with this thought in her mind like the last fragment of an otherwise forgotten dream, and she would turn to Stanley, needing to touch him, needing to make sure he was still there.

It was a good life-there was no wild drinking, no outside sex, no drugs, no boredom, no bitter arguments about what to do next. There was only a single cloud. It was her mother who first mentioned the presence of this cloud. That her mother would be the one to finally do so seemed, in retrospect, preordained. It finally came out as a question in one of Ruth Slum’s letters. She wrote Patty once a week, and that particular letter had arrived in the early fall of 1979. It came forwarded from the old Traynor address and Patty read it in a living room filled with cardboard liquor-store cartons from which spilled their possessions, looking forlorn and uprooted and dispossessed.

In most ways it was the usual Ruth Blum Letter from Home: four closely written blue pages, each one headed JUST A NOTE FROM RUTH. Her scrawl was nearly illegible, and Stanley had once complained he could not read a single word his mother-in-law wrote. “Why would you want to?” Patty had responded.

This one was full of Mom’s usual brand of news; for Ruth Blum recollection was a broad delta, spreading out from the moving point of the now in an ever-widening fan of interlocking relationships. Many of the people of whom her mother wrote were beginning to fade in Patty’s memory like photographs in an old album, but to Ruth all of them remained fresh. Her concerns for their health and her curiosity about their various doings never seemed to wane, and her prognoses were unfailingly dire. Her father was still having too many stomach-aches. He was sure it was just dyspepsia; the idea that he might have an ulcer, she wrote, would not cross his mind until he actually began coughing up blood and probably not even then. You know your father, dear-he works like a mule, and he also thinks like one sometimes, God should forgive me for saying so. Randi Harlengen had gotten her tubes tied, they took cysts as big as golf-balls out of her ovaries, no malignancy, thank God, but twenty-seven ovarian cysts, could you die! It was the water in New York City, she was quite sure of that-the city air was dirty, too, but she was convinced it was the water that really got to you after awhile. It built up deposits inside a person. She doubted if Patty knew how often she had thanked God that “you kids” were out in the country, where both air and water-but particularly the water-were healthier (to Ruth all of the South, including Atlanta and Birmingham, was the country). Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.

And in the middle of this chatty-and often catty-outpouring, in the middle of a paragraph, a propos of nothing which had gone before or which came after, Ruth Blum had casually asked the Dreaded Question: “so when are you and Stan going to make us grandparents? We’re all ready to start spoiling him (or her) rotten. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Patsy, we’re not getting any younger.” And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.

Feeling low and homesick for their old place in Traynor, feeling unsure and more than a little afraid of what might be ahead, Patty had gone into what was to become their bedroom and had lain down upon the mattress (the box spring was still out in the garage, and the mattress, lying all by itself on the big carpetless floor, looked like an artifact cast up on a strange yellow beach). She put her head in her arms and lay there weeping for nearly twenty minutes. She supposed that cry had been coming anyway. Her mother’s letter had just brought it on sooner, the way dust hurries the tickle in your nose into a sneeze.

Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Alien’s films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it-it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.

In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong,” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.”

They took the tests. They showed that Stanley’s sperm was perky, that Patty’s eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.

Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to sexual impotency-the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.

Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.

“I never do,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Think of procreation during.”

She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. “It’s me,” he said. “It’s my fault.”

She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.

“Don’t be a stupid,” she said. But her heart was beating fast-much too fast. It wasn’t just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt-knew-that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn’t her. It was him. Something in him.

“Don’t be such a klutz,” she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.

“I’m not a klutz and I’m not being stupid,” he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, “and you know it. It’s me. But I don’t know why.”

“You can’t know any such thing.” Her voice was harsh, scolding-her mother’s voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.

“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, “I know now. I know what’s wrong.” Not just you not catching pregnant-everything. Everything that’s wrong with my life.”

“Stanley, nothing’s wrong with your life!”

“I don’t mean from inside,” he said. “From inside is fine. I’m talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn’t. I wake up from these dreams and think, “My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand.” I’m afraid. But then it just… fades. The way dreams do.”

She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can’t remember. Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.

No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985-the night of the bath-their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter’s pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when he didn’t know she was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.

Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of Family Feud on the night of May 28th. Patty had six of Stan’s shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling beast on the front of this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.

Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello-Uris residence.”

He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows. “Who did you say?”

Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn’t fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn’t need much of an acknowledgment… that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.

Is it Mom? she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called “the bellyache” since his early forties, had had a heart attack.

Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. “You… you! Well, I’ll be goddamned! Mike! How did y-”

He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized-or thought she did-his analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She also thought she wouldn’t mind kissing him herself.

As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley’s blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove-Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: “Are you sure, Mike?” Finally, after a very long pause, he said, “All right, I understand. Yes, I… Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I… what?… No, I can’t absolutely promise that, but I’ll consider it carefully. You know that… oh?… He did?… Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes… sure… thank you… yes. Bye-bye.” He hung up.

Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that the audience survey would answer “math” in response to the question “What class will people say Junior hates most in school?” The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley’s face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table-lamp, with its green glass shade.

“Who was that, Stan?”

“Hmmmm?” He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“No one,” he said. “No one, really. I think I’ll take a bath.” He stood up.

“What, at seven o’clock?”

He didn’t answer, only left the room. She might have asked him if something was wrong, might even have gone after him and asked him if he was sick to his stomach-he was sexually uninhibited, but he could be oddly prim about other things, and it wouldn’t be at all unlike him to say he was going to take a bath when what he really had to do was whoops something which hadn’t agreed with him. But now a new family, the Piscapos, were being introduced, and Patty just knew Richard Dawson would find something funny to say about that name, and besides, she was having the devil’s own time finding a black button, although she knew there were loads of them in the button box. They hid, of course; that was the only explanation…

So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl, when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later… but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it? No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show-she couldn’t even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.

Okay-she’d take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was… or who it was.

She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. The first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut. Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley never closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them-the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.

Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done before in her married life-not here, not on any other door in the house.

The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub… but then you’d hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now-as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager’s legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.

This one was around her heart.

“Stanley? Stan?”

This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door. When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.

“Stanley?”

Her heart. Her heart wasn’t in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.

“Stanley!”

In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down and went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water. Plink… pause. Plink… pause. Plink… pause. Plink…

She could see the drops forming on the snout of the faucet, growing heavy and fat there, growing pregnant there, and then falling off: plink.

Just that sound. No other. And she was suddenly, terribly sure that it had been Stanley, not her father, who had been stricken with a heart attack tonight.

With a moan, she gripped the cut-glass doorknob and turned it. Yet still the door would not move: it was locked. And suddenly three nevers occurred to Patty Uris in rapid succession: Stanley never took a bath in the early evening, Stanley never closed the door unless he was using the toilet, and Stanley had never locked the door against her at all.

Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to prepare for a heart attack?

Patty ran her tongue over her lips-it produced a sound in her head like fine sandpaper sliding along a board-and called his name again. There was still no answer except the steady, deliberate drip of the faucet. She looked down and saw she still held the can of Dixie beer in one hand. She gazed at it stupidly, her heart running like a rabbit in her throat; she gazed at it as if she had never seen a can of beer in her whole life before this minute. And indeed it seemed she never had, or at least never one like this, because when she blinked her eyes it turned into a telephone handset, as black and as threatening as a snake.

“May I help you, ma’am? Do you have a problem?” the snake spat at her. Patty slammed it down in its cradle and stepped away, rubbing the hand which had held it. She looked around and saw she was back in the TV room and understood that the panic which had come into the front of her mind like a prowler walking quietly up a flight of stairs had had its way with her. Now she could remember dropping the beer can outside the bathroom door and pelting headlong back down the stairs, thinking vaguely: This is all a mistake of some kind and we’ll laugh about it later. He filled up the tub and then remembered he didn’t have cigarettes and went out to get them before he took his clothes off-

Yes. Only he had already locked the bathroom door from the inside and because it was too much of a bother to unlock it again he had simply opened the window over the tub and gone down the side of the house like a fly crawling down a wall. Sure, of course, sure-

Panic was rising in her mind again-it was like bitter black coffee threatening to overflow the rim of a cup. She closed her eyes and fought against it. She stood there, perfectly still, a pale statue with a pulse beating in its throat.

Now she could remember running back down here, feet stuttering on the stair-levels, running for the phone, oh yes, oh sure, but who had she meant to call?

Crazily, she thought: I would call the turtle, but the turtle couldn’t help us.

It didn’t matter anyway. She had gotten as far as zero and she must have said something not quite standard, because the operator had asked if she had a problem. She had one, all right, but how did you tell that faceless voice that Stanley had locked himself in the bathroom and didn’t answer her, that the steady sound of the water dripping into the tub was killing her heart? Someone had to help her. Someone-

She put the back of her hand into her mouth and deliberately bit down on it. She tried to think, tried to force herself to think.

The spare keys. The spare keys in the kitchen cupboard.

She got going, and one slippered foot kicked the bag of buttons resting beside her chair. Some of the buttons spilled out, glittering like glazed eyes in the lamplight. She saw at least half a dozen black ones.

Mounted inside the door of the cupboard over the double-basin sink was a large varnished board in the shape of a key-one of Stan’s clients had made it in his workshop and given it to him two Christmases ago. The key-board was studded with small hooks, and swinging on these were all the keys the house took, two duplicates of each to a hook. Beneath each hook was a strip of Mystik tape, each strip lettered in Stan’s small, neat printing: GARAGE, ATTIC, D’STAIRS BATH, UPSTAIRS BATH, FRONT DOOR, BACK DOOR. Off to one side were ignition-key dupes labelled M-B and VOLVO.

Patty snatched the key marked UPSTAIRS BATH, began to run for the stairs, and then made herself walk. Running made the panic want to come back, and the panic was too close to the surface as it was. Also, if she just walked, maybe nothing would be wrong. Or, if there was something wrong, God could look down, see she was just walking, and think: Oh, good-I pulled a hell of a boner, but I’ve got time to take it all back.

Walking as sedately as a woman on her way to a Ladies” Book Circle meeting, she went up the stairs and down to the closed bathroom door.

“Stanley?” she called, trying the door again at the same time, suddenly more afraid than ever, not wanting to use the key because having to use the key was somehow too final. If God hadn’t taken it back by the time she used the key, then He never would. The age of miracles, after all, was past.

But the door was still locked; the deliberate plink… pause of dripping water was her only answer.

Her hand was shaking, and the key chattered all the way around the plate before finding its way into the keyhole and socking itself home. She turned it and heard the lock snap back. She fumbled for the cut-glass knob. It tried to slide through her hand again-not because the door was locked this tune but because her palm was wet with sweat. She firmed her grip and made it turn. She pushed the door open.

“Stanley? Stanley? St-”

She looked at the tub with its blue shower curtain bunched at the far end of the stainless steel rod and forgot how to finish her husband’s name. She simply stared at the tub, her face as solemn as the face of a child on her first day at school. In a moment she would begin to scream, and Anita MacKenzie next door would hear her, and it would be Anita MacKenzie who would call the police, convinced that someone had broken into the Uris house and that people were being killed over there.

But for now, this one moment, Patty Uris simply stood silent with her hands “clasped in front of her against her dark cotton skirt, her face solemn, her eyes huge. And now the look of almost holy solemnity began to transform itself into something else. The huge eyes began to bulge. Her mouth pulled back into a dreadful grin of horror. She wanted to scream and couldn’t. The screams were too big to come out.

The bathroom was lit by fluorescent tubes. It was very bright. There were no shadows. You could see everything, whether you wanted to or not. The water in the tub was bright pink. Stanley lay with his back propped against the rear of the tub. His head had rolled so far back on his neck that strands of his short black hair brushed the skin between his shoulder-blades. If his staring eyes had still been capable of seeing, she would have looked upside down to him. His mouth hung open like a sprung door. His expression was one of abysmal, frozen horror. A package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor blades lay on the rim of the tub. He had slit his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow, and then had crossed each of these cuts just below the Bracelets of Fortune, making a pair of bloody capital T’s. The gashes glared red-purple in the harsh white light. She thought the exposed tendons and ligaments looked like cuts of cheap beef.

A drop of water gathered at the lip of the shiny chromium faucet. It grew fat. Grew pregnant, you might say. It sparkled. It dropped. Plink.

He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub, written it in two huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the second letter of this word-his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark-his final impression on the world-as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her:

[Image of the handwritten word “IT", written in blood]

Another drop fell into the tub.

Plink.

That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband’s dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.

 

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