Barry N. Malzberg - Gehenna.pdf

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GEHENNA
Barry N. Malzberg
Fictionwise Publications
Copyright ©1971 Barry N. Malzberg
Edward got on the IRT downtown local at 42nd Street for Greenwich
Village. The train stopped at 33rd Street, 27th Street, 17th Street and
Christopher Circle. As it turned out he met his wife at this party.
It was a standard Greenwich Village all-of-us-are-damned gathering.
She was sitting in a corner of the room, her feet bare, listening to a man
with sad mustaches play a mandolin. Edward went over to say hello to her.
She looked at him with vague disinterest and huddled closer to the
mandolin player, who turned out—on further inspection—to be her date
for the night. But Edward was persistent—his parents had always told him
that his fearfulness was his chief detracting characteristic—and later that
night he got her address.
Two days later he showed up with a shopping bag filled with gourmet
food and asked her if she would help him eat it. She shrugged and
introduced him to her cats. Three weeks later they slept with one another
for the first time and the week after that the mandolin player and he had a
fight, at the end of which the mandolin player wished them well and left
her flat forever. Edward and Julie were engaged only a few days after that
and during the month he married her in Elktown.
They went back to New York and started life together. He gave up
mathematics, of course, and became an accountant. She gave up painting
and took to going to antique shops once a week, bringing back objects
every now and then. It was not a bad life, even if it had started out,
perhaps, a bit on the contrived side.
Three years later Edward opened the door and found Julie playing with
their year-old daughter, shaking a rattle and putting it deep into the
baby's mouth. The scene was a pleasing one and he felt quite contented
until she looked up at him and he saw that she was crying.
He put down his briefcase and asked her what was wrong. She told him
that their life had been an utter waste. Everything she wanted she had not
gotten—everything that she had gotten she did not want. She was
surrounded by things, she told him, she had prepared herself as a child to
 
despise. And the worst of it was that all of it was her own fault. She talked
of divorce but only by inference.
Realizing that the fault was all his, Edward said that he would check up
on some suburbs, get them a nice-sized house and some activities for her
during the day. And so, he did—all of it and they were very happy for a
while if gravely in debt—until he came home from the circus one night
with his daughter and found that Julie, feet bare, had drowned herself in
the bathtub.
* * * *
Julie got on the IRT downtown local at 42nd Street for Greenwich
Village. The train stopped at 32nd Street, 24th Street, 13th Street and the
Statue of Christ. As it turned out, she met her husband at this party. It
was a standard Greenwich Village we-are-finding-ourselves party and he
came in late, dressed all wrong, his hands stretching his pockets out of
shape. He was already very drunk.
She was there with a boy named Vincent who meant little to her but
who played the mandolin beautifully and sang her love songs. If the songs
were derivative and the motions a trifle forced—well, it was a bad period
for both of them and she took what comfort she could. But when her
husband-to-be came over and spoke to her—his name was Edward as it
turned out—she could see beyond his embarrassment and her misery that
a certain period of her life and of the mandolin player's was over. He
wanted her telephone number but because she didn't believe in telephones
she gave him her address instead while Vincent was off changing his
clothes. She told him that she was very unsure of herself.
Three days later, while she was still in bed, he came with flowers and
candy and told her that he could not forget her. With a smile she invited
him in and the first time was very good—better than it had been with
Vincent, anyway. Edward was gone when Vincent came later that evening
and she told him that she had been lusting after the sea all her life—now
she at least had found a pond. Then she told him what she and Edward
had done. He wept and cursed her. He told her that she had betrayed
everything of importance, the small reality they had built together—but
she was firm. She said that lines must be drawn for once and for all
between the present and the possible.
After that she saw nothing of either Vincent or Edward for a week. Then
Edward came with a suitcase. He said he had moved out of his parents’
home and had come to marry her. She did not marry him right away but
they lived together for some weeks—one evening she found a note in her
 
mailbox, just like that, saying that Vincent had committed suicide.
She never found out who had sent the note and she never told Edward
anything. But a week later they were married in Yonkers and went to a
resort upstate, where they were happy for a few days.
They came back and bought furniture for her flat. He dropped out of
astronomy and became an industrial research assistant— or something
like that.
For a long time her days were simple—they were, as a matter of fact,
exactly like the days she had known just before she met Edward—and the
nights were good, pretty good anyway. Then she became pregnant in a
diffierent sort of way and eventually the child, Ann, was born—a perfect
child with small hands and a musical capability. Edward said that they
would have to find a real home, now—he was very proud—but she said
that the old life could keep up, at least until Ann was ready for school. But
one night he came home early, very excited and—just like that— told her
that he had found them a home in the suburbs. She told him that this was
fine. He said that he was very happy, and she said the same.
They moved to the suburbs and were content for a while, what with car
pools and bridge and whatnot, as well as good playmates and a healthy
environment for Ann. But Edward, for no reason, began to get more, and
more depressed and one morning when she awoke to find his bed empty,
she went into the bathroom to find him slumped over the bathtub, him,
wrists open, blood all over the floor, a faint, fishlike look of appeal in his
stunned and disbelieving eyes.
* * * *
Vincent got on the IRT downtown local at 42nd Street for Greenwich
Village. The train stopped at 37th Street, 31st Street 19th Street and Christ
Towers. As it turned out, he lost his girl at this party. It was a standard
Greenwich Village look-how-liberated-we-are kind of party and it was a
strange thing that the two of them went separately since the 42nd Street
stop was the nearest to both of their apartments. But she believed in
maintaining her privacy in small, damning ways.
She was sad that night, sad with a misery he could not touch, much less
comprehend. It had been a good time for both of them—they had been
going together for the four months since she broke off with his closest
friend—and he played her songs on his mandolin—promises of lost and
terrible loves, promises of a better future, songs of freedom and
loneliness—and she loved his mandolin. She told him that she found her
whole soul in his music.
 
So he was playing songs for her at the party this night, not even wanting
to be there, hoping that they could go back to her flat and put the
mandolin beside the bed and make their kind of love, when he saw that
she was looking at another man in the corner of the room—a man of a
different sort from the rest of them, since he was the only one who was not
already drunk. The man was looking back at her and in that moment
Vincent knew that he was quite doomed, that he and Julie were quite
finished.
To prove it to himself he left his instrument on her knee and went to the
bathroom. When he came back they sprang apart like assassins and he
knew that the man had her address. There was nothing to do, of course,
but to leave the party and he helped her with her coat, put his mandolin
over his shoulder and led her down the stairs. Halfway to the street he told
her that she had betrayed them. She did not answer, later murmured that
she could not help herself, much less another person—but she would make
this night the best of all the nights that she had ever given him.
And so she did, all night and into the dawn while her cat stroked the
mandolin making wooden sounds, rolling the instrument around and
around on the floor. In the morning he left her—and took his
clothing—and then he did not see her at all for a few days. When he came
back there was a different look on her face and the man was in her bed,
lying next to her.
He did not care—he had lost any capacity for surprise when she, had
come from his closest friend, broken enough to need him. He only wanted
to meet the man named Edward (who might become his closest friend
too) but the man did not want any part of him at all and there was a very
bad scene—a scene that ended only when Vicent knocked the man to the
door and smashed him there to the floor.
But he never saw her again, victory or not. He had no need
to—everything that needed proof had been proven. But he thought of her
often and many years later, when he killed himself by leaping from a
stranger's penthouse, his last thought as he felt the dry wind and saw the
street coming at him was of his old mandolin, her solemn cat and the
night she had given him her best because she had already partaken of his
worst.
* * * *
The child Ann—who had very sensitive and gentle hands— became a
young woman who was drawn at odd moments to the windows of pawn
shops in which she saw old mandolins—and once, for a week, she took
 
flute lessons. But she had no money and less patience—that last was her
biggest fault, along with a lack of assertiveness—and she dropped them.
Now she is going to a party in Greenwich Village. She does not know what
will happen to her. The night is still a mystery. She is still young enough to
scent possibilities in the, wind—tonight may hold some finality, although
one never knows. See her, see her—she is in the Times Square stop of the
IRT—the engineer sounds a song in the density.
She counts the stops and waits. The train stops at 34th Street, 28th
Street and 14th Street. Now it is at Christopher Street and Sheridan
Square.
The End
 

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