All These Condemned Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes.
    Wilma asked me to come up to her apartment. A chat about our tie-up with the advertising agency, Fern and Howey. But from the moment I walked in, I sensed how it was. She had set her de luxe stage, and all I had to do was reach out. I damn near did. I was very, very close. But I kept remembering Randy Hess, remembering that big ring she had put in his nose, and I didn’t want any such ring in my nose. A business relationship was entirely enough. I gingerly untangled myself and made it just obvious enough so that she could hint that I was scared. I said it wasn’t that, exactly, and was rewarded with her look of derision. From that afternoon on she started seeing even more of Mavis. It sounds a little crazy to say that because she batted zero with me, she would concentrate on making my wife emotionally dependent on her, but not when you know Wilma. She has to win, somehow. I think it was Steve Winsan who told me about the titled lady in Cuernavaca who consistently and politely declined all invitations to attend parties at Wilma’s place. Not long after that the Mexican authorities found an irregularity in the titled lady’s residence permit, and the lady had to go back from whence she came.
    Wilma had been entertaining the Mexican official who was in charge of those permits.
    She has to win, somehow.
    I can understand some of it and I don’t blame her. She came from nothing. From a complete nothing. The lower East Side, they say, where you learn a hell of a lot about survival. Maybe it was there that she learned she had to win all the time. And maybe if she was still struggling, that desire to win would be channeled in the right direction. But she
has
won, and so it has been diverted to a lot of social and personal stuff, where it becomes just so much malicious mischief, and worse. Like those two husbands she took on. One ended up a hopeless alcoholic, and the first one shot himself. They were sort of unstable guys to start with. I sometimes think she is attracted to instability, that she sort of feeds on it. Randy Hess is a pretty good example of that.
    I’ve made her sound like a mess. Actually she is a hell of a lot of woman. You’ve got to admire her. But sort of in the way you admire a parade going by. With a lot of drums.
    We got in the car and started up the parkway and you could feel what kind of day it was going to be in the city. A bake job. One of those Dutch-oven days followed by a night when all that stone would be radiating heat until dawn.
    Mavis said, “Dahling, it would have been a dreadful day to stay in town.” Accent, intonation, huskiness—all a lovely imitation of Wilma Ferris. And she was drenched with that damn stuff Wilma uses. Blue Neon, it’s called. Twenty bucks an ounce, and our chemists say it’s one of the heaviest in the Ferris line. I wished Wilma Ferris would be suddenly taken dead. It wouldn’t affect my job. And it might give me my wife back.
    Once we got far enough north so that we had a reasonableassurance of keeping moving, I pulled over on the grass and put the top down. I’d needed the new car like a second head, but once Wilma had casually mentioned that she thought closed cars were terribly dull, I knew that sooner or later I would have to trade.
    We had the big fight before we got to Albany. I guess I started it. It was some damn thing she said that parroted an opinion of Wilma’s. And I asked her if she would please, for God’s sake, start being herself and stop being a cheap imitation of Wilma. And she told me that Wilma was the finest woman she had ever met, and Wilma was doing so much for her, and I ought to be grateful instead of stinking about it, and it was any wife’s job to improve herself and she wanted to be a credit to me, and it helped me for her to be so close to Wilma, her best friend practically, and I wanted to shut her up in a jail or something so she couldn’t have any friends, make a nun out of her or something. And then she got as far away