Read Online Murder for the Bride by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online
Authors: John D. MacDonald
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each other, almost from the moment we met. We had been extraordinarily well mated physically. The endless wanting had resulted in something almost hypnotic. Yet the strength of it did not make it good, or even valid. It was far too much on the physical level. I could look back and see that though she was shrewd, clever, alert, she actually had little intellectual resource. She had read nothing. She could not talk abstractly. She ate and slept and cared for her body. Thus it could not be called love, in my understanding of the word, because love must also exist on an intellectual and a spiritual level, as well as emotional and physical.
It took me long hours to decide that perhaps I had not loved her after all. I could not as successfully dramatize my personal position with that new knowledge in mind, and that made the conclusion more difficult. It had been a desperately strong case of physical infatuation.
My conclusion did not in any way lessen my desire to get my hands on the person who had twisted the wire tightly around her throat. In fact, in a most odd way, it strengthened and reinforced my desire, because it made her more vulnerable.
I slid through a wet darkness into nightmare. I was on a boat. I had caught Laura on a cruelly barbed hook. She flopped about, nude, on the floor boards of the boat in her death agony while the guide kept saying it was a common type of fish, but inedible.
Chapter Six
I slept until noon and awakened in that drugged state where dreams seem to cling to the fringes of the mind and cannot be dislodged. The dreams give everything a look of unreality, and make all past experience implausible. In that state it seemed incredible to me that I had been married to anyone named Laura, and more incredible that Laura could have been a notorious person named Tilda Renner. It all seemed like something from a very poor movie, the sort of movie where the characters are yanked around on strings in order to heighten melodrama.
It is possible to understand, objectively, that there are Tilda Renners in this world, and Haussmanns and Glinkas. There is a sickness in the world, and such people are the symbols of the disease. Symptomatic. But it is far more difficult to understand such people in relation to your own life. Life is composed of small daily acts, small attitudes, small opinions. Insert the Renners and Haussmanns and Glinkas into your daily affairs, and the result is dangerously close to comedy. High, lusty comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. People who strut and bellow and wear false noses.
Once I saw a Burmese hillside that stank because tanks with bulldozer blades had covered the Jap-made caves from which they had fired on us, and then the rains had come and had washed away the dirt mounds. At first glance, at first full comprehension, it was a complete horror. Then the mind veered away from comprehension and all that was left was the stink, a troublesome nauseous stink about which everyone complained.
So it is with the Renners and the Haussmanns and the Glinkas. You comprehend them for a moment, and comprehension sickens you, and so you think of themonly on the basis of their ability to complicate your own life.
I sat on the bed and smoked the first cigarette of the day and tried to brush away the clinging bits of dreams, the same way you paw your face after walking through a narrow place strung with the webs of spiders.
This day was going to be worse than all the others, I knew. The humidity seemed to have gone up to an impossible high. Sweat ran from my throat and down my chest. The pillow and the sheets were sodden.
I went to the French doors and looked up at the sky. It was a pale brassy blue. I could feel the heat of the sun-drenched street against my face.
I showered and shaved and picked the coolest outfit I could find: white sleeveless shirt, rayon cord slacks, sandals. I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered hearing once upon a time that children do not increase their
It took me long hours to decide that perhaps I had not loved her after all. I could not as successfully dramatize my personal position with that new knowledge in mind, and that made the conclusion more difficult. It had been a desperately strong case of physical infatuation.
My conclusion did not in any way lessen my desire to get my hands on the person who had twisted the wire tightly around her throat. In fact, in a most odd way, it strengthened and reinforced my desire, because it made her more vulnerable.
I slid through a wet darkness into nightmare. I was on a boat. I had caught Laura on a cruelly barbed hook. She flopped about, nude, on the floor boards of the boat in her death agony while the guide kept saying it was a common type of fish, but inedible.
Chapter Six
I slept until noon and awakened in that drugged state where dreams seem to cling to the fringes of the mind and cannot be dislodged. The dreams give everything a look of unreality, and make all past experience implausible. In that state it seemed incredible to me that I had been married to anyone named Laura, and more incredible that Laura could have been a notorious person named Tilda Renner. It all seemed like something from a very poor movie, the sort of movie where the characters are yanked around on strings in order to heighten melodrama.
It is possible to understand, objectively, that there are Tilda Renners in this world, and Haussmanns and Glinkas. There is a sickness in the world, and such people are the symbols of the disease. Symptomatic. But it is far more difficult to understand such people in relation to your own life. Life is composed of small daily acts, small attitudes, small opinions. Insert the Renners and Haussmanns and Glinkas into your daily affairs, and the result is dangerously close to comedy. High, lusty comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. People who strut and bellow and wear false noses.
Once I saw a Burmese hillside that stank because tanks with bulldozer blades had covered the Jap-made caves from which they had fired on us, and then the rains had come and had washed away the dirt mounds. At first glance, at first full comprehension, it was a complete horror. Then the mind veered away from comprehension and all that was left was the stink, a troublesome nauseous stink about which everyone complained.
So it is with the Renners and the Haussmanns and the Glinkas. You comprehend them for a moment, and comprehension sickens you, and so you think of themonly on the basis of their ability to complicate your own life.
I sat on the bed and smoked the first cigarette of the day and tried to brush away the clinging bits of dreams, the same way you paw your face after walking through a narrow place strung with the webs of spiders.
This day was going to be worse than all the others, I knew. The humidity seemed to have gone up to an impossible high. Sweat ran from my throat and down my chest. The pillow and the sheets were sodden.
I went to the French doors and looked up at the sky. It was a pale brassy blue. I could feel the heat of the sun-drenched street against my face.
I showered and shaved and picked the coolest outfit I could find: white sleeveless shirt, rayon cord slacks, sandals. I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered hearing once upon a time that children do not increase their
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