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spot where I'd be able to fulfill myself from time to time someday even in my own parlor! or I could
turn my back on the whole thing for the childish disgusting obsession I sometimes knew it was. I could
try to fight it.
 I stewed around for quite a while making my decision. I once even contemplated trying to work my
way through medical school and become a doctor, but it occurred to me in time that the temptations I'd
be subjected to then would be too dreadful. I've never wanted to hurt society, Vivian, believe me! What
little I've done, I've been driven to by overpowering urges.
 I finally decided I would try to fight it, and for the next twenty years I must say I made a pretty good
job of the battle. I even went so far as to achieve relations of a sort with a couple of women it wasn't so
much completely successful as dull and troublesome. It never led anywhere. I found more satisfaction in
certain aspects of art and literature and fantasies.
 I'm no dunce, Vivian. I know there are some women who are supposed to enjoy playing dead, but
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neither of mine did. One of them laughed at my suggestion, the other tried but was no good at it. Or
maybe the pretense meant nothing to me, like some people can't enjoy sex with mechanical
contraceptives, or even achieve it.
 I also seriously tried out a number of different churches, figuring they'd help me control myself and
achieve some serenity, but I eventually discovered that most religions put so much emphasis on death
and on sex as an evil or dangerous thing that they contributed to my urge instead of dissipating it. I
stayed away from the church then and did a better job of keeping myself in line.
 But you know how it is with men in their forties, Vivian or maybe you don't anyway, they wake up
one morning and realize that things they've always told themselves they'd do some day, in some sweet
never-never land of success, are suddenly a matter of now-or-never.
 And then you came along, Vivian dear, and you were so damnably attractive that all my old urges
awakened at a bound. You looked like a Poe heroine, a Pre-Raphaelite sorceress, a Bronte-Hepburn
type; your eyes were dark-circled, you were delightfully thin, so that I was always conscious of your
lovely skeleton, as if it were trying to burst out and join in a dance of death. And you were obviously
neurotic, restless, easily frightened, very nervous, habitually melancholy and depressed, so that from the
very start I thought of you as the Little Sister of Death. And then I finally got to know you, I found that
you were very intelligent, sensitive, charming, and compassionate, full of little insights that hovered
around the out-skirts of my secret. You liked to walk in cemeteries and romance about the old
gravestones. You liked to hear about the pastel tombs of Mexico, the narrow vaults of New Orleans, the
Aztec maidens thrown in the well, and the nuns who died in their cells a-fever with love of Christ. And
once you imagined you were Persephone, Queen of the Dead, and I stopped you quick, because I knew I
couldn't keep my secret for long if you went on like that.
 You know, Vivian, I think that if I ever could have really loved a living woman, it would have been
you. With you it could have happened, Vivian.
 You know why it never happened, Vivian, why it never had a chance of happening? It was because
during those first months I only watched you from a distance remember how long I was in saying more
than two words? and during that time I built you up into a symbol, I watched you die and I handled
your dead body in my fantasies every night, so that by the time I got to know you better the pattern was
set and only some impossible explosion of the mind could have changed it. I could only go on seeing as
much of you as I dared, enduring the bittersweet torture of your presence, having my fantasies get more
complex and unsatisfactory, and imperious every night, feeling the pressure build up, fighting to hold
myself in check.
 I've always thought you were at least partly aware of what was going on those two times I almost killed
you on impulse. First, there was the night I almost threw you into the lagoon in the park. I was going to
go in with you and hold you under. There was a faint blue light around us from the distant boulevard
lamps, remember? You always have been my Blue Girl, Vivian, moody and pale, though now you're
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painted by electricity rather than Gainsborough. Yes, there was a blue light around us and we were
talking about suicide and there was nobody near "
Again I thought Vivian moved! Just as though she'd shuddered and I'd caught the end of the shudder as
my eyes turned to her. I was certain that once again I'd been scaring myself remembering eerie things,
but this time I had more difficulty putting what I thought I'd seen out of my mind. I watched her
motionless chest for several seconds before I went on.
 The second time was when I almost brained you with the stone ashtray out there in the living room.
You suddenly turned round and caught me holding it back over my shoulder and I had to do a ridiculous
pirouette to pass it off as a jape. You know why I checked myself that time, Vivian? It was solely
because I had thought :  I don't want her all bloodied up, I don't want even the back of her skull crushed,
I'll do it a better way.'
 Once I'd thought of that I had no choice. It was just a matter of moving efficiently with a minimum
waste of time, of stealing the cyanide from the photoengraving department and refilling the two
Nembutal capsules, of getting a duplicate set of keys to this apartment the noon you let me come here
from the office to fetch the homework you'd forgotten, of waiting for the time in your mood-cycle when
you'd make the big complaint about not being able to sleep and, when it came this morning, taking you
aside and offering you my two yellow capsules with much insistence that you take them both tonight and
with repeated warnings that you tell no one because, I said, most people these days are so irrationally
critical of sleeping pills and especially of anyone not a doctor handing them out.
 I was afraid afterwards that I'd overdone it. You know, Vivian, I've often wondered during this last
month of preparation whether you hadn't caught on, at least in some nebulous way, to what I was up to. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]