Brass Bed, The by Fletcher Flora

Author:Fletcher Flora [Flora, Fletcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

WE RETURNED to town that evening, and it was dusk when Harvey let me out in front of the house I lived in. The street lamps were on, and the lights in the houses, and there were live things making noises in the trees. "Won't you come up?" I said.

"No," he said, "I think I had better get along if you don't mind."

"It's all right. I don't mind."

"I'm sorry for what happened, old boy."

"I'm sorry too, but it can't be helped now."

He drove away with the boat on the trailer behind the car, and I went upstairs to the apartment. I opened the windows, and the dead air stirred, the cooler night air moving into it from outside, and I undressed in the dark room and put on a robe and went down the hall to the bathroom and had a shower. When I returned, the room was already considerably cooler, and I put on a clean pair of shorts and sat on the bed in the shorts in the dark, feeling the air move on my skin and staring at a white blur in the corner of the room which was a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter. I wondered if the novel about the goliard would ever get finished, which didn't seem at all likely the way things were going, and I wondered if it would ever get published, even if it got finished, and this also seemed very unlikely in the general run of luck as it was.

It is possible that it happened just the way she said, I thought. It is entirely possible. Perhaps he stood up in a spirit of anger or of amorousness and started toward her and simply lost his balance and fell. Perhaps the boat had drifted far enough away by the time he came up so that he could not reach it, and perhaps, as she said, the first thing that occurred to her was to jump in after him and try to save him, and if that is what she thought and tried to do, it was really a brave and commendable thing, though possibly mistaken. He was very big and strong, much too big and strong for so slight a woman, and if he was terrified and fought her, as frightened people are supposed to do in the water, it is certain that she could not have held him or helped him or prevented his slipping away.

This is what I thought. I lay on my back on the bed and tried to hold the thought in my mind until it became strong and secure and sure of itself, but I began to think in spite of myself of how she had wished that he would die, and how she had said that he was afraid of the water and could not swim, and how right afterward in time that seemed far too short he had in fact died, as she had wished, of drowning, as she had mentioned.

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