The Bottom of the Ocean

Dear Charlie,

It's ten o'clock, on what day, or what night, I don't have to tell you, and I suppose you are marveling that I have anything left to say. It would be a marvel if I had anything new to say, Counselor, after the time we've spent together in the last seven months. I don't have anything new to say. I just want to put everything down in one place for somebody to have, for you to have, and do with what you can. I want my story, at least, to stay alive. And look, Charlie, someday, if you watch and wait, a chance to get that monster will come. A chance will come!

The girl's name was Patty Felston. Or Patty Barnes Felston. (I know you know all this, Charlie. I'm just trying to make a record.) Her husband's name was James Felston. He's an architect and he and Patty were of the same age, as it happened, thirty-two. I met her in February or March of 1958. She was working for a decorator outfit on Hellmer Street, Interiors Unlimited. I took her to lunch a couple of days after I met her, an entirely legitimate thing to do, since after all I did have the responsibility for getting the whole four floors of offices done over.

I saw her now and again while the work was being done. That was finished in July 1958, and I kept right on seeing her, usually for lunch, very occasionally for a drink after work. Once or twice we had dinner. By the fall I was working on her very hard, and I admit it. I never denied that. I was working very hard on two other girls as well, and I never denied that, either. Look, Charlie, nobody ever accused me of making a secret of the fact that I like girls. During the late unpleasantness, you remember, there was a big fuss made over the fact that nobody could find a girl I'd ever asked to marry me. There's a simple enough reason: I never had such a notion. I like to go out with girls, and I like to sleep with girls, and after a while I like to do the same thing all over again with other girls, and what about it? I used to like to, rather, to state things strictly accurately. No, I still like to, but I used to do it. Ugh. Gackles.

You never knew Patty, and that's a shame. There were prettier girls, but not many, Counselor, not many. Patty was brown all over. Brown-blonde hair, brown eyes damned near black, gold-brown skin. She wasn't frantic. She didn't bounce. She moved slowly, almost as if she wasn't sure which way to turn, but she was sure, all right. She was bright. But this slow, soft air of hers was wild. It always seemed to me that she was winding up, winding, winding, winding up some great big goddamned ever-loving blue steel spring in there and God help us all when the ratchet slipped and the spinning started.

I got nowhere with Patty for a long time. Oh, for a good long time. I'm telling you the truth, Charlie, I never knew anything like it. In the whole business, I think the one thing that you never believed was my telling you that before that night in the Bellanca we'd gone to bed those other times and two of them just to hold hands and talk and nothing else but that's the way it was. We did. Twice. I had to, with her. It had to be that slow. I always believed and I still do that more women are (continued on page 142)Ocean(continual from page 69) talked out of bed than are talked into it, and I think that if you're going to make out, a minimum of conversation about it is what you need, but there are exceptions to every rule and Patty certainly was an exception. We must have had twenty hours of talking before we did even the bundling bit. It wasn't that she didn't want to. She did, of course. Well, I say of course and it doesn't necessarily follow. I mean I'm not trying to suggest that because I asked her, she couldn't say no. She said no for a long time, and she said maybe for a long time, but she did like me. You know that. I knew it early. She more than likes me, she was in love with me, and that was the first of the three mistakes I made: not running like a thief the first minute she said she loved me. Loved, I don't need. That was not a good break, when Foster came up with that letter of Patty's to the Dorance girl. (What has caused more grief than women blabbing to their girl-friends) If she'd said only that she loved me, OK, but when she said that she'd told me she loved, me and put down what I said -- that was poor. Well, there's no point in going over all that, is there. Hardly. Not now.

Of course I was stupid. If I hadn't been stupid I wouldn't be here, and, man, I'm here, and when you're here, I just don't know how to say it, this is the here-est place there is, this is the only place there is, right here, one foul, square, dirty-gray chunk of space, and how you know you're here is it's just as if the room was at the botton of the ocean and all that weight pressing down on you from every direction, to be sure you can't get out. This is really the big squeeze, and I wish I could get it across to you what it means to be here.

Hell, what's it matter, it's not a problem that's going to bother me for a lot longer.

But I was stupid to stand still for the love bit, and I was stupider when I know she was talking. After all, it's poor form for any girl to talk, and it's really seriously bad when she's married. When Pete Timken phoned me, I should have left for Hong Kong. I must have been out of my mind.

"This is Dr. Peter Timken," he said. The slob! The fat-headed, stinking, brassed, mothering son of a bitch. Die, you dog, you pig's, you camel's die, goddamn you, that's the message he's going to get from me. I'll see him tonight, Charlie. I mean right down the hall, I'll see him. I'm sure the bastard will be there. Look, he's a doctor, he can get in, he'll be there. And why not? Isn't he doing the job? He sure is. He's the one who fixed it all up for me.

"I'm Dr. Timken," he said to me that day in his office. It was all very mysterious. I dodn't know what the hell I was doing in his damned office. I even shook his hand.

"I'll get right to the point," he said, "Mrs. James Felston is a patient of mine. She gave me your name and your telephone number. I asked her to after we had spent a considerable amount of time in conversation about you. She told me, in detail, about her relationship with you. I've advised her to break it off, to stop seeing you, and that's the same advice I'm going to give you."

"Well, thanks a lot," I told him. "It's big of you. I have the same delight in unsolicited advice that most people do, the same gratitude for it, and the same likelihood of paying any attention to it. Tell me, you say Patty's your patient: are you a psychiatrist?"

"I," this monster from forty fathoms says, "am a cardiologist. I'm also a very old friend of Mrs. Felston's."

I admit this shook me a little. "Does Patty have some difficulty with her heart?" I asked him.

"I told you she was my patient," he said. "You may draw from that any conclusion you wish."

I didn't say anything, so he started in again. He was Patty's friend. He had her best interests in view. He knew her husband. He had his best interests in view. He didn't know me, but he had me best interests in view. He was a real missionary, out to take care of everybody. I was doing an enormously cruel thing, he said, scheming and plotting to make Patty fall in love with me, intent on nothing but getting her into bed, no matter if it loused up her marriage -- and it would, he was sure of that. I could agree with him there. Could be. That's chance a girl has to take.

Timken raved on. Worlds like "evil" and "fraudulent" and "fake" came pretty easily to him. I finally asked him a question. I said, "How long have you been in love with Patty, Doc?"

It got rough, then, I told him what I thought of him, butting into other people's affairs, and he told me what he thought of me as a home-wrecker, and if I wouldn't have been giving him fifteen or twenty pounds I'd have taken a shot at him, but he was too big. And too rugged. You know the type: he probably played lacrosse all the time he was at Johns Hopkins and now he plays squash twice a week at the Harvard Club. Anyway, I said goodbye to him. In a way. What I actually said was, "I'll bet you a couple of guineas, Doc: I'll lay her before you do."

Naturally I never saw him again until that night. The strange thing was, it wasn't the first time, or the second or the third, that night in the Bellanca. If it had happened the first time, I'd be able to understand it better. But maybe that's not reasonable. Maybe, for her, the importance and the excitement of it grew each time, instead of declining each time as it did with me.

If it hadn't been for Timken's big-brother attitude, I would never have bothered to make it with Patty. I'd have bothered to make it with Patty. I'd have quit, like a bright boy, the minute I knew she was talking, and the minute I knew she had a heart thing, or any suspicion of one. But Timken really roused the beast in me. And you know a funny thing? I don't believe he wanted to go to bed with Patty. All right, I know he was in love with her, but it was some weird kind of high-level thing, in his mind, where he took care of her, and watched out for her, and loved her madly from a distance, one of those deals. I know that's what it was. I could tell from the way he acted, and of course I went round and round with Patty about him, and I could tell from what she said. Hell, they'd known each other for eleven years, and he'd never even tried, she said.

I don't count calling him that night a mistake. I thought then and I think now that it was the only thing to do. I had to have a doctor for her, he was near, and she was his case. Well, maybe it wasn't the smart thing to do. I supose the smart thing to do would have been to get her dressed and get her out of the hotel some way. That's hard, but it's been done. At least with men it's been done. In our own time, and only with famous people, I know for sure of three: a millionaire businessman, an actor, a composer. They all died in somebody's arms, the wrong somebody's arms, and they were all walked out. But you can't do it alone, it takes at least two people. In the back of my head, maybe I thought Timken would help me do just that, if he couldn't bring her back, but actually I think I called him because I knew she'd had a heart attack, and because I thought he might be able to bring her back.

Well, as I guess everybody in this country who can read must know, he couldn't. He tried. He gave her a big injection of adrenaline right into the heart. No good. He tried everything he could, short of opening her chest and messaging her heart, and he even thought of that, he had a scalpel in his hand, but he said he knew it wouldn't work. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. I doubt his judgment was at its best. He was coming unstuck around the edges. He was crying, you know. He was standing there, looking down at her, crying, crying, you wouldn't have thought he was a doctor.

I made the third mistake then. He said that he'd have to call the police, and he said that since it was a hotel, it would look, better, for me if I wasn't in the suite. He told me to go downstairs and wait. And like a moron, I did, I left him alone with her. For some fat-headed reason. I thought that Patty's death had softened him up, and too I remember thinking that of course he would want to help keep down the scandal as much as possible, since he was a friend of her husband's, and the longer I could be kept out of the picture, the better. So I went, I went. Great Christ in his pain, what a monster, what a thing. what a crawling, slime-soaked slug, God roast the bastard and don't oil him. I went. And that was the third mistake. I don't count going into the bar. I don't think it mattered, then, that the cops found me there. It looked bad in the papers, but I don't think it really mattered, the lobby or the bar, people could understand, that at a time like that the thing you'd want most would be a drink. The big thing was that I wasn't in the room where Patty was. Of course Timken knew that, and planned it, but that was only the side effect. He had a better reason for wanting to get me out of the room.

Hell, Charlie, I was so fat, dumb and happy that even when they hustled me into the station house I wasn't worried Look, people die that way every night. All right, they're mostly men and they're mostly old but they die that way all the time. I knew there was going to be some trouble, some publicity, some questions, I knew I was going to have maybe a little nuisance with her husband, but I wasn't really scared. I even remember I said to myself that at any rate she'd died happy, in ecstasy and believing that somebody loved her. It should happen to me tonight.

Well, They walked me into the station house and there was this old sergeant on the desk. One of the cosp said, "This is the fella from the Bellanca."

Is it now?:" the sergeant said. He stared at me for a while, then he turned to some joker up there with him, a civilian, and he said, "You know, there's two things I hate, and that's a man that will steal from the poor and a man that will beat a woman naked. Mind, now I'm not sayin' there's not times when it does a woman good to feel the flat of your hand, and good and hard, too, but that's just in the ordinary way of things, across the table, you might say. But a man that beats a woman naked is an evil thing, and nothing too bad can happen to him."

I didn't know what the hell the old goat was talking about. I thought he was finishing off some conversation that he'd had going befoer I came in. Then he said to one of the cpos. "What do you want to book him for right away? Take him out in the back and let him talk for a while, until he gets it straight in his mind what really happened. And mind the stairs."

That was when they hustled me into the squad room, and throught that into another room and then one of them opened a third door and the other shoved me and the next thing I knew I was flying down the cellar steps on my head. And that was why I looked the way I did when you saw me the first time. It was quick, I'll say that for them. They had me back out in the front room ten minutes later, and I must have looked like I'd jumped off a building.

"The poor man fell down the stairs, didn't he," the stairs, didn't he," the sergeant said.

Afraid so, Sarge," one of the cops told him.

"And after I told you to watch out for that," the sergeant said. "You're a careless fella, the both of you. As for you," he said to me, "we're about to book you for murder in the first degree, unless you have some outstanding objection."

"I don't know what's going on here," I said. "All I know is that you've got me mixed up with somebody else. All right, a girl died in my bedroom, but that's not murder in any degree, that's not even manslaughter, that's just an accident, for God'd sake, and..."

"Your shut your dirty mouth," the sergeant said, "or I'll come down there to you myself. An accident, was it? And the girl lying over there one mass of bruises from head to toe, her nose broke, an ear on her half off, a bruise over her heart as big as your two hands. An accident you call it?"

Charlie, that's the way I found out what he'd done. That was how I got the message, and where and when. Why did he do it? He'd known her for eleven years. For eleven years he claimed he'd loved her. She told me that. So how could he? Well, all right, he's a monster, he'd no part of anything human, he's a creeper, a crawler, you lean on him and your arm will slide into him up to the shoulder, all right, all right, but what did I do to him that would let him do it to me, I went to bed with a girl he didn't want and he's going to hang me for it, an hour from now he's going to hang me for it, they're not going to do it, he is, and he' going to get away with it just like he got away with what he did in that room in the Bellanca, like he got away with being at the autopsy and faking that up about the blow killing her, not the excitement, and the whole rest of it.

Charlie, the thing is, for God's sake keep this letter, and let people read it. Let them know, Charlie, let them know.

Bertrand L. Jellinoe