The Love of a Bad Man Read online

  Even knowing what I know now, that Ray was trying to take me as a fool the same as the rest of them, I wouldn’t have done things any differently. I’d still have forked over 99 cents for the finest stationary at Edgerdam’s. I’d still have sprayed my perfume over each billet-doux, and closed each envelope with a kiss. I’d still have snipped a lock of my hair when he asked for it — dark reddish-brown like dried blood — to do his shady voodoo magic.

  Why? Because it made my heart beat faster and still does, thinking back. Because it was high time I was courted for once.

  Ray knew more than a thing or two about courting. Ramón, as he signed his letters so sweetly. That lilting Spanish way of his came across even on paper, though his English was actually far better than most. His willingness to write about his feelings made him seem so Continental, so unlike American men. That and his photograph — all black hair and burning eyes and a rose in his lapel.

  For days after each letter, I’d be walking on air, blushing like a Christmas ham. I’d forget about being hungry and then remember, and take more than usual pleasure in my meals. There was something extra-sweet about unwrapping a bonbon and slipping it into my mouth, with Ray on my mind.

  I didn’t think of it as lying, not telling about my weight or the kids or those black moods of mine. It was more like a smear of Vaseline over a camera lens, a little something to make the picture more flattering. And if I was edgy about meeting him, when he wrote of making the trip down that summer, it was nothing next to the thumping of my heart.

  It’s a cruel thing to think back to that sunny day I met Ray at Pensacola Station, and then to think of where we are now. How hopeful it looks from here, like a postcard, the colours saturated and the edges just so slightly water-stained. Birdie had taken the kids overnight and helped me choose a dress — black, slimming, with a gay scalloping of lace around the collar. On top of my curls, I’d pinned a little black hat with a fine birdcage of black net.

  I knew him as soon as he stepped onto the platform, by the rose in his lapel and the fedora on his head and his light gentleman’s traveling suit, but most of all by his look. A look that took in the whole of me, from my little black hat to the bows on my black pumps, and saw past the fat to the hopeful, well-scrubbed woman that I was.

  ‘Marta.’ My name flicked off his tongue like some kind of exotic pebble. Then he gave me the rose.

  For Ray’s visit, I’d stocked the Frigidaire with all those things men love: sirloin steak, cold cuts, beer, olives, figs, and chocolate pudding. There was also wine, him being European, and scotch, in case he preferred the strong stuff. I’d blown most of my pay cheque on making sure his belly would be filled and his senses dulled, but it turned out I hadn’t needed to spend a dime. We were in bed before I even had a chance to put that rose of his in water.

  It was loving like I’d never even dreamed. Not a quick, shameful thing in the dark, but birdsong and coins of light through the curtains. Afterward, I fed Ray olives straight out of the jar and he licked the brine from my fingers. He couldn’t seem to get enough of me, grabbing handfuls of my flesh and cooing into my ear, ‘Marta, Marta, you are so much woman! You’ll take care of me, no?’

  I’d take care of him. I wanted to shout from the skies that I’d take care of him, that I'd fill his flat belly and give him sponge baths and bring him drinks on ice every day of the week, so long as I could have him in my bed. For kicks, I even put on my uniform for him and played nurse. He had this cute way of flinching every time I brushed the hair from his forehead and tried to mop his brow with the wet cloth.

  Things changed the next afternoon when Birdie started banging on my door and bleating, ‘Martha! For shame. These babies have been crying for you since breakfast!’

  It wasn’t just Ray’s spooked look and the way he covered it up so quickly, or even how sweetly he told me he adored children. Actually, it was the smell in the bedroom that told me I’d been bewitched: brown rose and liquor and brine, all mixed up with our body odours. A smell not so different from all the others who’d shared my bed over those past seventeen years.

  I didn’t send Ray packing then, nor in the days to come. Instead, I watched him. I watched him with Willa Dean and Anthony, doing a funny trick with his nose and teaching them a ditty about big fat elephants with waving trunks. I watched him when I dropped hints about some money I might have in the bank and where my best jewellery was kept. I watched him when he didn’t think I was watching.

  If I had diamonds and rubies enough, I’d have hidden them within his eyeshot and let him rob me, bit by bit. As it was, I didn’t have much in the world worth stealing and Ray didn’t have much cause to stay. Every day, I saw him getting edgier, checking the train timetables when he thought I wasn’t looking. One morning, he stepped out to make a phone call while I was cooking his eggs and ham, and returned with his hat in his hands.

  ‘Marta, my sweet. Alas, my business needs me back immediately.’ His voice was soft, his eyes sadder than an orphan’s, his suitcase already packed. ‘I will send for you as soon as my affairs permit.’

  Try as I did to delay him, to bribe him with promises of fried lunches and pay cheques to come, he was on the express to New York by midday. The kids were home from nursery school, but it only made me lonelier to see them staring at me with the eyes of Al and Ernie. ‘Quit your goggling!’ I shouted at them, puffing myself up larger than usual, until they both began to snivel. That gave me a moment’s satisfaction. Then I started snivelling, too.

  I never dreamed of New York City the way some folks do. I guess it always seemed too far from me, like London or Paris or any other city in the world with tall skyscrapers and snow in the winter. But when I arrived there on the morning train with my suitcase and black dress, I liked the way it made me feel. Small, anonymous, strong in my anonymousness. Like my loneliness didn’t matter, any more than what I’d eaten for breakfast.

  Ray’s apartment wasn’t big, like he’d told me. Even by New York standards, it seemed pretty mean to me, squeezing in after the Polack superintendent and his belt of keys. ‘You wait for Mr Fernandez here,’ he said. ‘You no interrupt my dominoes again.’

  And so I sat myself down on a rickety piano stool and waited. Waited and snooped.

  Small as the place was, Ray had plenty of fine things. Cigarette cases, watches, ivory cufflinks, silk ties, and a great many gold finger-rings. There were suits, too, of tailored soft cashmere and wool. What caught my eye most though was his bureau, or what he had stuck up over it — swatches of hair in all colours, from faded blonde to artificial copper to my own dried-blood-red. Every one of them tied with ribbon and speared with pins.

  It was a cruel feeling, seeing that, like being ten years old again and flipped onto my belly in the dark. For an instant, I felt weak. Then I was inside those drawers, reading other women’s words, the pathetic keening of them like a gate in need of oiling. Whether tomorrow is bright or blue, there is one lasting thing — my love for you. Miss Ida Dickinson, Iowa. Sinse I was a littel girl I have prayd for a man who traits me like a princese. Miss Loretta Browne, Ohio. Te quero mucho, Ramon! Me corozone! Miss Charlotte Putnam, New Hampshire. Words that made me more ashamed to be a woman than all the flesh on my body.

  Not remembering all that happened next makes it better in a way. Because it’s all still dark to me, from the moment I heard Ray’s keys in the door to when I woke up in bed with him. The first thing I noticed when I came to was that I was naked, and then that he was naked. So naked that even the thick black hair of his head was gone, replaced by a bald dome with a crooked white scar across it. ‘Now there are no secrets between us, Marta,’ Ray said slyly, a little sadly. I followed his eyes to the nightstand and saw a toupee lying there like a dead rat. ‘No secrets.’

  We had some good times in that little apartment of his, in those next few weeks especially. The smallness didn’t bother me any, since it meant being closer to him. Ev
ery morning, I got to listen to him trickling into the toilet bowl, which was just about the cutest sound I ever heard. I got to toast his breakfast bagels and kiss the crumbs from his lips. I got to bully that superintendent of his about busted pipes and cracks in the plasterwork.

  Ray seemed to like having me around too, once he got it into his head that I was there to stay. If you ask me, he enjoyed having someone to talk about his scams with. ‘This watch, given to me by lady from Wisconsin. This candelabra, I find in old lady’s house in Carolina. This apartment, belonged to widow I married for one month. Also old, very old.’ He spoke innocently, like a little boy who snatches eggs from birds’ nests. ‘All the ladies love me. I give them what they want and then I take. It is fair game.’

  Maybe it was fair and maybe it wasn’t. I do know that it gave me the willies to see Ray’s voodoo, the locks of hair he fashioned into dolls and the love notes he set alight. But when he came to me with smoke on his hands and told me what he saw, my fears flew from me like pigeons from the windowsill.

  ‘Marta. I see the little girl with the pretty red curls. She is crying every night. Why does she cry? Why does nobody hear her? I think, yes, my little girl wants to be loved …’

  Helping Ray out with his lonely-hearts scam was my idea. He hadn’t wanted a partner, had argued that it was a solo operation. I argued back that it couldn’t hurt to have a woman’s opinion. Really, it was just that as soon as he started talking about making a trip to Cleveland to fleece some desperate divorcée, I started worrying he’d never come back. If anyone knew how persuasive a desperate woman could be, I did.

  So it was that I began sorting through his correspondence, shucking off any prospects that weren’t to my liking. If they were too forward with him, for instance, or their portraits too attractive (though Ray claimed the loveliest photographs were always fifteen or twenty years out of date.) Likewise, they couldn’t be too savvy. What we looked for were the believers, moony-eyed and superstitious, who wore their bleeding hearts like brooches and their loneliness like too much cheap perfume.

  Our first was a farmhouse upstate, belonging to a spinster in her middle fifties. She was a Puritan of some kind so she wouldn’t meet Ray without a chaperone, which suited me just fine. Together, we rode up in a rented Pontiac: ‘Charles Martin’ and his respectable married sister ‘Mildred’. We spent two dull nights sitting by a crackling fire drinking apple cider and, in the dead of the third, took off with $300 in bonds and an engraved Civil War pistol.

  There were others after that, all over New England and into the Midwest. Best in my eyes were the God-fearing ones, who came away from Ray in a blush but always kept their lips pursed and their drawers on. Sadly, his feelings about them weren’t the same as mine.

  ‘These white church bitches, they are stingy. They do not keep nice things and do not trust until we are standing at altar.’ Ray kept sighing and rubbing his flat belly. ‘Alas, I shall starve, Marta.’

  Of course he was being dramatic, but I couldn’t stand the thought of Ray going without when I’d vowed to take care of him. He deserved the finest in life: caviar, cufflinks, champagne in crystal goblets. And if I couldn’t provide it, some other dame surely would.

  Miss Fay was a Catholic, which meant the breeding instinct was even stronger in her than most. I saw it as soon as we arrived at that poky place of hers in Albany, with all its near-naked Christ figures. But all Ray saw were the dollar signs.

  ‘She will give ten thousand dowry for me to marry her. Ten thousand! ’

  Though close to seventy, the bitch wasn’t as frail as all that, and was always cuddling up to Ray on the pretext of showing him her Virgin Mary collection or admiring his fine suits. It got under my skin so much that once, when he was out of the room, I put it into her head that he could do with a haircut.

  ‘No, no, sweetheart! I have trusted barber in New York City! You will see …’ He squirmed as Miss Fay tried to fit a towel around his shoulders, much like I used to imagine Ernie squirming in the hands of the Japs.

  Ray didn’t show me much loving that week in Albany; not nearly so much as he did the Fay woman, it seemed. Because her hearing was bad, I had the occasion to jump on him a few times when she was saying her prayers or snoring in bed, but mostly Ray gave all his loving to her, and I didn’t go crying about it. I sat in the back of the sedan while she rode shotgun with him, driving from bank to bank to draw funds for her dowry. I didn’t bite her head off at the dinner table, when she had the nerve to ask him, ‘Charles, how is it that you’re so nice and lithe, and your sister so stout?’ I shared a queen bed with her at night, and never once put a pillow over her face, no matter how many chances I had. I kept my moods in check — until I didn’t.

  It wasn’t my plan to bump her off, any more than it had been Ray’s. It’s just, when I got up for a midnight snack and saw her side of the bed empty, then heard the hoo-ha in his quarters — well, that did it for me. One minute, I was seeing her old face turned up to his on the pillow, as gleeful as a little girl’s. The next minute, the face was no longer gleeful, was hardly a face even, and I was holding something wet and heavy.

  ‘My God, Marta,’ Ray was whispering, all his warm Latin colour gone. ‘Marta, what have you done …?’

  Of all the things that could’ve gone through my head, cleaning up that night, it was Ray’s first letter that I thought of: Why did I choose to write to you? Because you are a nurse, so I know you have a full heart and a great capacity for love and comfort. Over and over again, those words, and a thudding determination in me to live up to them. And I did. While he lost his lunch somewhere in the hallway, I took care of the mess, as only a professional could.

  We put Miss Fay in the trunk of the sedan. The next morning, we’d skip town, but for those small, dark hours, I wanted only to bring him comfort. It was true, I had a great capacity for it.

  The French dame lived in a pretty shingle-style house a little way outside Grand Rapids. She wasn’t really French but her name was, and the way she moved around in her low dresses and high-waist slacks, smoking in drawback, you’d think she was in a foreign film or something. She had a baby daughter, too, also with a French name, and just about the most pampered thing you ever saw in her smocked dresses and ringlets that smelled of strawberry shampoo. Thinking back to Willa Dean and Anthony where I’d last left them, crying on the stoop of the Salvation Army Church, it seemed a crime for any child to be so cared for.

  Since Miss Fay, we’d been living out of our suitcases. Her dowry kept us in milk and honey, but we never talked about settling down. After what had happened, I couldn’t help feeling a sunny lawn in the suburbs was out of bounds.

  Ray seemed to feel it, too, with a kind of spooked pride. ‘You love me so much,’ he’d say. ‘I know it. You are so much woman.’

  But woman as I was, that didn’t stop him goggling at Frenchy.

  Delphine was what she called herself — French for ‘dolphin’, which was pretty stupid, if you ask me. She was a young forty-one, not fifty pretending to be forty like a lot of those others. She had loved her husband very much, but he ‘was never the same after the war’ and had died ‘tragically’ soon after little Rainelle was born. She didn’t trust the men who came courting when Mr Downing was barely cold in the ground. Her dream was to find a ‘man of character’, interested in a ‘lasting commitment’.

  ‘I hope you understand,’ she told Ray. ‘I have a little girl to think of.’

  For all her talk, it only took the bitch a couple of days to open up her bedroom to Ray. There was nothing I could do about it either. She wasn’t deaf like the other one and when I tried to put my hands under Ray’s clothes or give him little smooches, he’d just say, ‘Marta, control yourself! There is baby present.’

  That baby. Why he gave a damn what happened to her I don’t know, when he never once mentioned Willa Dean and Anthony. Maybe he sensed what a ticking time bomb little
Rainelle was. Though happy enough to toddle off with me for an ice-cream cone or taffy in the playground, the sight of Ray almost always had her in tears. If he happened to be touching or even seated near her mama, she’d start wailing, ‘Maaa! Maaa!’ and not even that ditty about the fat elephants and their wavy trunks could calm her.

  Ray didn’t like to leave us dames alone together, but most days we’d be waiting at least a half-hour for him to finish grooming himself. ‘I’ve never known a man to spend so long in the bath,’ Delphine gushed one morning, too dreamy to even touch the tower of pancakes she'd just made. She actually seemed to think we were friends, funnily enough; that me taking her kid to the park while she rolled around with Ray made us something like sisters-in-law.

  ‘Oh, Charles has always been that way,’ I sneered. ‘A real dandy.’

  Delphine didn’t even bat an eye; she was too dumb or too in love, I guess. Instead, she rested her chin on her hand and mistily stared at the planters on the windowsill. ‘That lovely thick hair …’ she sighed. Then she started fussing about his coffee getting cold, saying maybe she should make a fresh pot, and it was such a pathetic thing that it would’ve been a crack-up, if she hadn’t kept going on and on. So I said it, just to shut her up.

  ‘Why don’t you surprise him, Dolphin? Take it to him in the bath …?’

  Seeing Delphine scuttling around, getting the new pot ready, gave me a mean kind of satisfaction. Little Rainelle sat in her highchair, following her mama with round saucer-eyes. Hardly a minute later, there was a crash in the bathroom and the screaming started. Ray came running out after Delphine, stark naked except for the toupee he was fixing over his scar, and he was pleading, ‘Darling, darling, it’s me, Charles! I am the same man! Don’t be crazy, please!’