The Brass Bed

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Jolly said. “Is that you, Felix?”

I stood for a moment and watched dust particles moving lazily in the slanting shaft of light.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m very glad you’re home, because I need you quite desperately, and you must come over at once.”

“Must I? Why?”

“I told you, Felix. I need you.”

“I need you too. I admit now that I need you like the devil, but I am determined nevertheless to survive without you.”

“Oh, Felix, please don’t be contrary. Something terrible has happened, and I don’t know what to do about it, and you simply must come at once.”

“What’s happened?”

“Well, it’s difficult to talk about, but Sid is here, and he seems to be dead.”

I thought about this briefly without any particular feeling because it seemed to me wholly incredible, there being a heroic dimension and dignity to dying that was surely beyond Sid’s attainment.

“Sid?” I said. “Sid dead?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“He is quite cold and everything, Felix, and he doesn’t move, and I am certain that he is dead.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

I hung up and stood there feeling the rhythmic pumping of my head. The dust particles moved in the shaft of light. The idea of Sid’s being dead still seemed fantastic, and I was not inclined to believe it. I moved through the light and the dust and began to dress and after a while was down in the Chevvie in the street. The Chevvie didn’t want to run, but I insisted, and it finally did. It was a few minutes after ten when it started, and it took me twenty minutes to get it to Jolly’s. I left it at the curb and went inside and found Jolly in the living room. She was sitting in a chair with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes in the dusk of drawn drapes looked abnormally large and darkly luminous.

“Thank you for coming, Felix,” she said.

Her voice was small and handled the ridiculously formal little expression of gratitude as if it were extremely precarious business. I didn’t say anything in response, just staring at her, and she got up unhurriedly and put her arms around me. Her body was quiet against mine, only her breasts moving softly in the act of breathing, and I could feel her warm breath on the side of my neck. I let her hold me and submitted passively to the pain of wanting her, but I did not touch her with my hands.

“Where’s Sid?” I said at last.

“He’s in the garage,” she said.

I put my hands on her then, on her shoulders, and pushed her away.

“In the garage? What the hell’s he doing there?”

“He isn’t doing anything, Felix. Being dead, he’s just lying there and doing nothing at all.”

“Damn it, Jolly, that’s not what I mean. I mean, why did he go to the garage in the first place?”

“Well, it’s very reasonable, and I’m perfectly willing to tell you all about it, but first I think we had better go look at him and decide what we are going to do about him and all that. Don’t you think so?”

I didn’t want to go or see him or have anything at all to do with him, but it was necessary to go and see him and do something with him just the same, which was a necessity I could recognize in spite of not wanting to, and so I went. I turned and went out into the hall and back through the kitchen and out into the back yard and down across the yard to the garage, and Jolly came after me. We went into the garage through a small side door, which was standing open, and the big Caddy sat there gleaming and quiet in the interior dusk. Sid was lying on the floor behind the car with his head directly under the exhaust pipe, and the heavy, jointed garage door had been pulled down from overhead and fastened on the inside. He was lying on his side with his face turned so that he seemed to be staring along the floor under the car, and one arm was extended on the concrete as if he had been stretching it out for something that he had wanted and desperately needed and had not reached. I knelt beside him and looked at him closely, and he seemed somehow very small and shrunken and terribly isolated and immune, and I didn’t bother to touch him because he was obviously dead and had been dead for a long time. Standing, I went back along the side of the Caddy, the shining, impersonal murderer, and looked in through the glass of the front door and saw that the ignition was on and the gas gauge registering empty. Jolly was watching me from her position near the small door through which we had entered, and I could hear quite distinctly in that quiet place the measured sound of her breathing. The gas was still heavy, and my head was beginning to hurt, and I went on past her and outside.

She followed me and said, “You see? As I told you, he is dead.”

“Why didn’t you call a doctor?” I said.

“Doctor? Why on earth should I call a doctor, Felix? It is impossible for a doctor to help anyone who is dead.”

“Nevertheless, calling a doctor would have been appropriate under the circumstances. It’s what almost anyone would have done to start with.”

“Well, it didn’t seem appropriate to me, and the truth is, I didn’t even consider it after discovering that he was dead.”