Read Online Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Stone
Tags: Fiction, Psychological
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features were—how to say?—refined. He loved the “Bezeidenhout.” They’ve been married eleven years and she is firmly Ellie Brookman now. “Why don’t you use your maiden name?” he enjoys asking her. “So many women do.”
“The students can’t spell it,” she says primly. “They can’t even say it.”
She knows she’s being teased but won’t react. On the rare occasions when he gets to hear her pronounce her maiden name, she utters a priceless interlacing of Plattdeutsch and Canadian vowels that only other people from White Lake could possibly understand. She’s not crazy about the “Elsa” either. Chet Baker sang on.
Now it has to end with Maud. It’s been a week since Ellie called to tell him she was pregnant. He tried to reason it. Maud, he thought, was there to grow up.
She’s here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end. Reasoning was not very supportive. Special pleas. As a friend of his had once claimed: “I’m not a womanizer. Just an easy lay.”
She won’t understand it now but eventually she will. It won’t be easy. Also, it was always a good idea to break upsetting news—or say anything that engaged her emotionally—when she hadn’t been drinking—which, after dark, was rarely. Maud was one of the great student juicers, a not uncommon group given the pressures of the college. The drink didn’t seem to drain her energy or affect her grades. Such was the resiliency of youth. The semester was ending; they won’t have to meet in class, and she will find herself another adviser.
Is this cynical? Yes, he realized it perfectly well. Still he felt compelled to reason a further defense. This is love, as it is sometimes called. It always has to end. In practice it has a morality all its own. Surely she didn’t expect to marry him. In the unlikely event of such folly, she would walk in a year or two, chasing the smoke of the next fulfilling experience. Maud wanted fulfilling experiences. She wanted them for free. She’s reckless, he thought—heedless, demanding, and she’ll always be that way. She’ll break a few hearts before she’s through.
Chet Baker explained love, how it was funny, that it was sad.
7
P ASSING HIS CLOSED WINDOWS on the street side of the quad the following afternoon, Brookman could hear his office phone ringing. Five or so minutes later, after he had opened the last lock that secured his office from the world, the phone was still sounding off. He let it ring as he hung up his coat. He had spoken with his wife from the Toronto airport minutes before, so there was no doubt in his mind that it was Maud. His cell phone was so frantic with messages from her, ranging from the apologetic to the drunkenly enraged, that he had been driven to turn it off. Whether Maud knew he was in the office or not, she was relentless. He let it ring. No signal or wire could convey what he had to tell her. In time she would show up at his office and he would say what needed saying. He threw the office curtains open because there were no longer any wonders to conceal.
The remnants of his fire simmered in the hearth. Every morning one of the college servants was dispatched to lay and start a moderate blaze in each of the offices. This would usually go out before the first appointments. Brookman tortured a flame from the kindling. The fire irons were folk art from a hospital craft shop in Rhode Island. They had an animal theme, horned and phallic. Over the mantel was a poster from the Museum of Modern Art depicting Picasso’s
Boy Leading a Horse.
Brookman set the wicked poker in the andirons and seated himself on a handsome black leather sofa he had salvaged from the building’s basement. He picked up the receiver. The silence on the wire was absolute. He imagined her palm pressed against the speaker.
Within minutes the phone began to ring again. This time, he thought, there might be news from Ellie on her journey, but the
“The students can’t spell it,” she says primly. “They can’t even say it.”
She knows she’s being teased but won’t react. On the rare occasions when he gets to hear her pronounce her maiden name, she utters a priceless interlacing of Plattdeutsch and Canadian vowels that only other people from White Lake could possibly understand. She’s not crazy about the “Elsa” either. Chet Baker sang on.
Now it has to end with Maud. It’s been a week since Ellie called to tell him she was pregnant. He tried to reason it. Maud, he thought, was there to grow up.
She’s here to grow up. She has to learn a few things, and one of them is that everything comes to an end. Reasoning was not very supportive. Special pleas. As a friend of his had once claimed: “I’m not a womanizer. Just an easy lay.”
She won’t understand it now but eventually she will. It won’t be easy. Also, it was always a good idea to break upsetting news—or say anything that engaged her emotionally—when she hadn’t been drinking—which, after dark, was rarely. Maud was one of the great student juicers, a not uncommon group given the pressures of the college. The drink didn’t seem to drain her energy or affect her grades. Such was the resiliency of youth. The semester was ending; they won’t have to meet in class, and she will find herself another adviser.
Is this cynical? Yes, he realized it perfectly well. Still he felt compelled to reason a further defense. This is love, as it is sometimes called. It always has to end. In practice it has a morality all its own. Surely she didn’t expect to marry him. In the unlikely event of such folly, she would walk in a year or two, chasing the smoke of the next fulfilling experience. Maud wanted fulfilling experiences. She wanted them for free. She’s reckless, he thought—heedless, demanding, and she’ll always be that way. She’ll break a few hearts before she’s through.
Chet Baker explained love, how it was funny, that it was sad.
7
P ASSING HIS CLOSED WINDOWS on the street side of the quad the following afternoon, Brookman could hear his office phone ringing. Five or so minutes later, after he had opened the last lock that secured his office from the world, the phone was still sounding off. He let it ring as he hung up his coat. He had spoken with his wife from the Toronto airport minutes before, so there was no doubt in his mind that it was Maud. His cell phone was so frantic with messages from her, ranging from the apologetic to the drunkenly enraged, that he had been driven to turn it off. Whether Maud knew he was in the office or not, she was relentless. He let it ring. No signal or wire could convey what he had to tell her. In time she would show up at his office and he would say what needed saying. He threw the office curtains open because there were no longer any wonders to conceal.
The remnants of his fire simmered in the hearth. Every morning one of the college servants was dispatched to lay and start a moderate blaze in each of the offices. This would usually go out before the first appointments. Brookman tortured a flame from the kindling. The fire irons were folk art from a hospital craft shop in Rhode Island. They had an animal theme, horned and phallic. Over the mantel was a poster from the Museum of Modern Art depicting Picasso’s
Boy Leading a Horse.
Brookman set the wicked poker in the andirons and seated himself on a handsome black leather sofa he had salvaged from the building’s basement. He picked up the receiver. The silence on the wire was absolute. He imagined her palm pressed against the speaker.
Within minutes the phone began to ring again. This time, he thought, there might be news from Ellie on her journey, but the
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