Ask for Me Tomorrow

During the afternoon Gilly cried, sometimes for B. J., sometimes for herself. Mrs. Morrison gave her two pills and Violet Smith brought her the kind of drink Violet Smith had often made for her own consumption before she’d taken the pledge.

When she finally ran out of tears she used eye drops to clear her eyes, and witch hazel pads to reduce the swelling, and make-up to obscure the lines of grief around her mouth. Then she walked across the hall to her husband’s room.

She said, without looking at him, “I went to see Ethel Lockwood this morning. She showed me the letter she got from B. J. in prison.”

He moved his head. He didn’t want to hear about it. Everything was far away and long ago. Who was Ethel?

“The letter had a number of interesting things in it, personal things about me. The consensus of opinion is that I have no class. Imagine that. I always thought I was such a classy dame. Didn’t you?”

He knew what was coming.

“Also, I’m dirty. I don’t stand around in the shower all day, so I’m dirty.”

He could hear the note in her voice that meant she was going to throw a fit and nothing and nobody could stop her. Not even Mrs. Morrison, who thrust her head inside the door and asked if there was anything she could do.

“Yes,” Gilly said. “You can drop dead.”

“I told you to lie down and rest after taking those pills. I naturally assumed—”

“You can assume right up your ass to your armpits.”

“Your knowledge of anatomy is rather meager.” Mrs. Morrison turned her attention to the wheelchair. “I’ll be out in the hall if you need me, Mr. Decker. Press the buzzer and I’ll hear it. I’ll probably hear a great many other things as well, but it is my duty to stick with my patient in fair weather or foul. Press your buzzer. Have you got that, Mr. Decker? Signify that you understand me by raising two fingers of your right hand for yes. Or did we agree on one finger for yes and two for no? I’m not sure. No matter. Buzz.”

“You buzz,” Gilly said. “Buzz off.”

“I shall be in the hall, Mr. Decker. Listening.”

He lay silent and motionless, wishing all the women would go away and never come back, Mrs. Morrison and Violet Smith and Gilly, and now this other one, Ethel. Who was Ethel?

Gilly described her briefly. Ethel was a vicious-tongued, sanctimonious snotty old bitch.

“Where’d she get the right to criticize me? I have as much class as she has. Goddamn it, I’m a classy dame. Are you listening? Do you hear that, you nosy parker out in the hall? I’m a classy dame!”

She began to cry again.

“You know what it said in the letter? It said, ‘I don’t understand how it all happened between Gilly and me. She was a lot of fun and we had some laughs, but then suddenly she was expecting me to marry her. She asked me to.’ That’s what it said in the letter, making it sound like I begged, like I was lower than low.”

Tears and more tears.

He wished he could offer her some comfort or explanation, anything to stop the deluge that threatened to wash them both out to sea. We are drowning, Gilly and I, we are drowning together.

Twenty-one

Aragon spent Sunday driving the rutted roads and walking the dusty streets of Rio Seco. He began near the shoemaker’s shop where Jenkins had lived and worked his way past the tinsmiths and weavers and potters and wood-carvers into the red-light district of sleazy bars and sin shows and cubicles where the prostitutes lived and worked and died. He talked to peddlers, cabbies, hookers, mariachis. None of them had heard of Tula Lopez.

At eight o’clock he returned to his hotel to have dinner. The clerk on duty at the desk when he stopped to pick up his room key was the same elderly man who’d given him the insecticide on the first night of his stay. He looked nervous. “You like it here at our hotel, sir?”

“It’s fine.”

“No more mosquitoes?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.” I drink beer and the mosquitoes siphon it off before it can damage my liver. It’s a pretty fair system.

“I was telling Superintendent Playa what a quiet and polite young man you were for an American.”

“And why did you tell the superintendent that?”

“Because he asked.”

“That seems like a good reason.”

“I thought so.” Some crazy insect was hurling itself at the light above the desk, and the clerk watched it for a while with a kind of detached interest. “Why the superintendent asked, I don’t know. But you will certainly find out.”

“Certainly?”

“Oh yes. He’s waiting for you in the dining room. Since seven o’clock. Already he’s eaten one dinner and may have finished a second by this time. Naturally, we cannot present him with a check. It would be unwise. Yet it hardly seems fair that the hotel should pay, since the reason he’s here is you. Once in a while a policeman comes to the hotel, but never so important a one and never one with such a huge appetite.”

“Put his dinners on my bill.”