Thinner Read online

  All right, the facts. The fact was that Heidi's unexpected move had excited him tremendously, probably because it had been unexpected. He had reached for her with his right hand and she had pulled her skirt up, exposing a perfectly ordinary pair of yellow nylon panties. Those panties had never excited him before, but they did now ... or perhaps it was the way she had pulled up her skirt that had excited him; she had never done that before, either. The fact was that about eighty-five percent of his attention had been diverted from his driving, although in nine out of ten parallel worlds, things probably still would have turned out perfectly okay; during the business week, Fairview's streets were not just quiet, they were downright somnolent. But never mind that, the fact was that he hadn't been in nine out of ten parallel worlds; he had been in this one. The fact was that the old Gypsy woman hadn't darted out from between the Subaru and the Firebird with the racing stripe; the fact was that she simply walked from between the two cars, holding a net bag full of purchases in one gnarled and liver-spotted hand, the sort of net bag Englishwomen often take with them when they go shopping along the village high street. There had been a box of Duz laundry powder in the Gypsy woman's net bag; Halleck remembered that. She had not looked; that was true enough. But the final fact was just that Halleck had been doing no more than thirty-five miles an hour and he must have been almost a hundred and fifty feet from the Gypsy woman when she stepped out in front of his Olds. Plenty of time to stop if he had been on top of the situation. But the fact was that he was on the verge of an explosive orgasm, all but the tinest fraction of his consciousness fixed below his waist as Heidi's hand squeezed and relaxed, slipped up and down with slow and delicious friction, paused, squeezed, and relaxed again. His reaction had been hopelessly slow, hopelessly too late, and Heidi's hand had clamped on him, stifling the orgasm that shock had brought on for one endless second of pain and a pleasure that was inevitable but still gruesome.

  Those were the facts. But hold it a second., folks! Hang on a bit, friends and neighbors! There were two more facts, weren't there? The first fact was that if Heidi hadn't picked that particular day to try out a little autoeroticism, Halleck would have been on top of his job and his responsibility as the operator of a motor vehicle, and the Olds would have stopped at least five feet short of the old Gypsy woman, stopped with a screech of brakes that would have caused the mothers wheeling their babies across the common to look up quickly. He might have shouted, 'Why don't you look where you're going?' at the old woman while she looked at him with a species of stupid fright and incomprehension. He and Heidi would have watched her scurry across the street, their hearts thudding too hard in their chests. Perhaps Heidi would have wept over the fallen grocery bags and the mess on the carpet in the back.

  But things would have been all right. There would have been no hearing, and no old rotten-nosed Gypsy waiting outside to caress Halleck's cheek and whisper his dreadful one-word curse. That was the first ancillary fact. The second ancillary fact, which proceeded from the first, was that all of this could be traced directly back to Heidi. It had been her fault, all of it. He had not asked her to do what she had done; he had not said, 'Say! How about you jack me off while we drive home, Heidi? It's three miles, you got time.' No. She had just done it ... and, should you wonder, her timing had been ghastly.

  Yes, it had been her fault, but the old Gypsy hadn't known that, and so Halleck had received the curse and Halleck had now lost a grand total of sixty-one pounds, and there she sat, and there were brown circles under her eyes and her skin looked too sallow, but those brown circles weren't going to kill her, were they? No. Ditto the sallow skin. The old Gypsy hadn't touched her.

  So the moment when he might have confessed his fears to her, when he might have said simply: I believe I'm losing weight because I have been cursed - that moment passed. The moment of crude and unalloyed hate, an emotional boulder shot out of his subconscious by some crude and primitive catapult, passed with it.

  Listen to me, he said, and like a good wife she had responded: What, Billy?

  'I'll go back and see Mike Houston again,' he said, which was not what he had originally intended to say at all. 'Tell him to go ahead and book the metabolic series. As Albert Einstein was wont to say, "What the fuck."'

  'Oh, Billy,' she said, and held her arms out to him. He went into them, and because there was comfort there, he felt shame for his bright hate of only moments ago ... but in the days which followed, as Fairview spring proceeded at its usual understated and slightly preppy pace into Fairview summer, the hate recurred more and more often, in spite of all he could do to stop it or hold it back.

  Chapter Ten

  179

  He made the appointment for the metabolic series through Houston, who sounded less optimistic after hearing that Halleck's steady weight-loss had continued and that he was, in fact, down twenty-nine pounds since his physical the month before.

  'There still may be a perfectly normal explanation for all this,' Houston said, calling back with the appointment and the information three hours later, and that told Halleck all he needed to know. The perfectly normal explanation, once the odds-on favorite in Houston's mind, had now become the dark horse.

  'Uh-huh,' Halleck said, looking down at where his belly had been. He never would have believed you could miss the gut that jutted out in front of you, the gut that had eventually gotten big enough to hide even the tips of your shoes - he'd had to lean and peer to find out if he needed a shine or not - especially he never would have believed it if you'd told him such a thing was possible while he was climbing a flight of stairs after too many drinks the night before, clutching his briefcase grimly, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead, wondering if this was the day the heart attack was going to come, a paralyzing pain on the, left side of his chest which suddenly broke free and ripped down his left arm. But it was true; he missed his damn gut. In some weird way he couldn't understand even now, that gut had been a friend.

  'If there's still a normal explanation,' he said to Houston, 'what is it?'

  'This is what those guys are going to tell you,' Houston said. 'We hope.'

  The appointment was at the Henry Glassman Clinic, a small private facility in New Jersey. They would want him there for three days. The estimated cost of his stay and the menu of tests they expected to run on him made Halleck very glad he had complete medical coverage.

  'Send me a get-well card,' Halleck said bleakly, and hung up.

  His appointment was for May 12 - a week away. During the days between, he watched himself continue to erode, and he strove to contain the panic that nibbled slowly away at his resolve to play the man.

  'Daddy, you're losing too much weight,' Linda said uneasily at dinner one night - Halleck, sticking grimly by his guns, had downed three thick pork chops with applesauce. He'd also had two helpings of mashed potatoes. With gravy. 'If it's a diet, I think it's time you quit it.'

  'Does it look like I'm dieting?' Halleck said, pointing at his plate with his fork, which dripped gravy.

  He spoke mildly enough, but Linda's face began to work and a moment later she fled from the table, sobbing, her napkin pressed to her face.

  Halleck looked bleakly at his wife, who looked bleakly back at him.

  This is the way the world ends, Halleck thought inanely. Not with a bang but a thinner.

  'I'll talk to her,' he said, starting to get up.

  'If you go see her looking like you do right now, you'll scare her to death,' Heidi said, and he felt that surge of bright metallic hate again.

  186. 183. 181. 180. It was as if someone - the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, for instance - was using some crazy supernatural eraser on him, rubbing him out, pound by pound. When had he last weighed 180? College? No ... probably not since he had been a senior in high school.

  On one of his sleepless nights between the fifth of May and the twelfth, he found himself remembering an explanation of voodoo he had once read - it works because the victim thinks it works. No big s
upernatural deal; simply the power of suggestion.

  Perhaps, he thought, Houston was right and I'm thinking myself thin ... because that old Gypsy wanted me to. Only now I can't stop. I could make a million bucks writing a response to that Norman Vincent Peale book ... call it The Power of Negative Thinking.

  But his mind suggested the old power-of-suggestion idea was, in this case at least, a pile of crap. All that Gypsy said was 'Thinner.' He didn't say 'By the power vested in me I curse you to lose six to nine pounds a week until you die.' He didn't say 'Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, soon you will need a new Niques belt or you will be filing objections in your Jockey shorts.' Hell, Billy, you didn't even remember what he said until after you'd started to lose the weight.

  Maybe that's just when I became consciously aware of what he said, Halleck argued back. But ...

  And so the argument raged.

  If it was psychological, though, if it was the power of suggestion, the question of what he was going to do about it remained. How was he supposed to combat it? Was there a way he could think himself fat again? Suppose he went to a hypnotist - hell, a psychiatrist! - and explained the problem. The shrink could hypnotize him and plant a deep suggestion that the old Gypsy man's curse was invalid. That might work.

  Or, of course, it might not.

  Two nights before he was scheduled to check into Glassman Clinic, Billy stood on the scales looking dismally down at the dial - 179 tonight. And as he stood looking down at the dial, it occured to him in a perfectly natural way - the way things so often occur to the conscious mind after the subconscious has mulled them over for days and weeks that the person he really ought to talk to about these crazy fears was Judge Cary Rossington.

  Rossington was a tit-grabber when he was drunk, but he was a fairly sympathetic and understanding guy when he was sober ... up to a point, at least. Also, he was relatively close-mouthed. Halleck supposed it was possible that at some drunken party or other (and as with all the other constants of the physical universe - sunrise in the east, sunset in the west, the return of Halley's Comet you could be certain that somewhere in town after nine P.M, people were guzzling manhattans, fishing green olives out of martinis, and, quite possibly, grabbing the tits of other men's wives), he might be indiscreet about ole Billy Halleck's paranoid-schizo ideas regarding Gypsies and curses, but he suspected that Rossington might think twice about spilling the tale even while in his cups. It was not that anything illegal had been done at the hearing; it had been a textbook case of municipal hardball, sure, but no witnesses had been suborned, no evidence had been eighty-sixed. It was a sleeping dog just the same, though, and old shrewdies like Cary Rossington did not go around kicking such animals. It was always possible - not likely, but fairly possible - that a question concerning Rossington's failure to disqualify himself might come up. Or the fact that the investigating officer hadn't bothered to give Halleck a breathalyzer test after he'd seen who the driver was (and who the victim was). Nor had Rossington inquired from the bench as to why this fundamental bit of procedure had been neglected. There were other inquiries he could have made and had not.

  No, Halleck believed his story would be safe enough with Cary Rossington, at least until the matter of the Gypsies dwindled away a bit in time ... five years, say, or seven. Meantime, it was this year Halleck was concerned about. At the rate he was going, he would look like a fugitive from a concentration camp before the summer was over.

  He dressed quickly, went downstairs, and pulled a light jacket out of the closet.

  'Where are you going?' Heidi asked, coming out of the kitchen.

  'Out,' Halleck said. 'I'll be back early.'

  Leda Rossington opened the door and looked at Halleck as if she had never seen him before - the overhead light in the hall behind her caught her gaunt but aristocratic cheekbones, the black hair which was severely pulled back and showing just the first traces of white (No, Halleck thought, not white, silver ... Leda's never going to have anything as plebeian as white hair), the lawn-green Dior dress, a simple little thing that had probably cost no more than fifteen hundred dollars.

  Her gaze made him acutely uncomfortable. Have I lost so much weight she doesn't even know who I am? he thought, but even with his new paranoia about his personal appearance he found that hard to believe. His face was gaunter, there were a few new worry lines around his mouth, and there were discolored pouches under his eyes from lack of sleep, but otherwise his face was the same old Billy Halleck face. The ornamental lamp at the other end of the Rossington dooryard (a wrought-iron facsimile of an 1880's New York streetlamp, Horchow Collection, $687 plus mailing) cast only a dim wash of light up this far, and he was wearing his jacket. Surely she couldn't see how much weight he'd lost ... or could she?

  'Leda? It's Bill. Bill Halleck.'

  'Of course it is. Hello, Billy.' Still her hand hovered below her chin, half-fisted, touching the skin of her upper throat in a quizzical, pondering gesture. Although her features were incredibly smooth for her fifty-nine years, the face lifts hadn't been able to do much for her neck; the flesh there was loose, not quite wattled.

  She's drunk, maybe. Or ... He thought of Houston, tidily tucking little Bolivian snowdrifts up his nose. Drugs? Leda Rossington? Hard to believe of anyone who can bid a two no-trump with a strictly ho-hum hand ... and then make it good. And on the heels of that: She's scared. Desperate. What's this? And does it tie in somehow with what's happening to me?

  That was crazy, of course ... and yet he felt an almost frenzied need to know why Leda Rossington's lips were pressed so tight, why, even in the dim fight and despite the best cosmetics money could buy, the flesh under her eyes looked almost as baggy and discolored as the flesh under his own, why the hand that was now fiddling at the neckline of her Dior dress was quivering slightly. Billy and Leda Rossington considered each other in utter silence for perhaps fifteen seconds ... and then spoke at exactly the same time.

  'Leda, is Cary -' 'Cary's not here, Billy. He's'

  She stopped. He made a gesture for her to go on.

  'He's been called back to Minnesota. His sister is very ill.'

  'That's interesting,' Halleck said, 'since Cary doesn't have any sisters.'

  She smiled. It was an attempt at the well-bred, pained sort of smile polite people save for those who have been unintentionally rude. It didn't work; it was merely a pulling of the lips, more grimace than smile.

  'Sister, did I say? All of this has been very trying for me - for us. His brother, I mean. His -'

  'Leda, Cary's an only child,' Halleck said gently. 'We went over our sibs one drunk afternoon in the Hastur Lounge. Must have been ... oh, four years ago. The Hastur burned down not long after. That head. shop, the King in Yellow, is there now. My daughter buys her jeans there.'

  He didn't know why he was going on; in some vague way he supposed it might set her at ease if he did. But now, in the light from the hall and the dimmer light from the wrought-iron yard lamp, he saw the bright track of a single tear running from her right eye almost to the corner of her mouth. And the arc below her left eye glimmered. As he watched, his words tangling in each other and coming to a confused stop, she blinked twice, rapidly, and the tear overflowed. A second bright track appeared on her left cheek.

  'Go away,' she said. 'Just go away, Billy, all right? Don't ask questions. I don't want to answer them.'

  Halleck looked at her, and saw a certain implacability in her eyes, just below the swimming tears. She had no intention of telling him where Cary was. And on an impulse he didn't understand either then or later, with absolutely no forethought or idea of gain, he pulled down the zipper of his jacket and held it open, as if flashing her. He heard her gasp of surprise.

  'Look at me, Leda,' he said. 'I've lost seventy pounds. Do you hear me? Seventy pounds!'

  'That doesn't have anything to do with me!' she cried in a low, harsh voice. Her complexion had gone a sick clay color; spots of rouge stood out on her face like the spots of color on a clown's cheeks
. Her eyes looked raw. Her lips had drawn back from her perfectly capped teeth in a terrorized snarl.

  'No, but I need to talk to Cary,' Halleck persisted. He came up the first step of the porch, still holding his jacket open. And I do, he thought. I wasn't sure before, but I am now. 'Please tell me where he is, Leda. Is he here?'

  Her reply was a question, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. He groped for the porch rail with one numb hand.

  'Was it the Gypsies, Billy?'

  At last he was able to pull breath into his locked lungs. It came in a soft whoop.

  'Where is he, Leda?'

  'Answer my question first. Was it the Gypsies?'

  Now that it was here - a chance to actually say it out loud -he found he had to struggle to do so. He swallowed -swallowed hard - and nodded. 'Yes. I think so. A curse. Something like a curse.', He paused. 'No, not something like. That's bullshit equivocation. I think I've had a Gypsy curse laid on me.'

  He waited for her to shriek derisive laughter - he had heard that reaction so often in his dreams and in his conjectures - but her shoulders only slumped and her head bowed. She was such a picture of dejection and sorrow that in spite of his fresh terror, Halleck felt poignant, almost painful empathy for her - her confusion and her terror. He climbed the second and third porch steps, touched her arm gently ... and was shocked by the bright hate on her face when she raised her head. He stepped back suddenly, blinking ... and then had to grab for the porch railing to keep from tumbling off the steps and landing on his pratt. Her expression was a perfect reflection of the way he had momentarily felt about Heidi the other night. That such an expression should be directed against him he found both inexplicable and frightening.

  'It's your fault!' she hissed at him. 'All your fault! Why did you have to hit that stupid Gypsy cunt with your car? It's all your fault!'

  He looked at her, incapable of speaking. Cunt? He thought confusedly. Did I hear Leda Rossington say 'cunt'? Who would have believed she even knew such a word? His second thought was: You've got it all wrong, Leda, it was Heidi, not me ... and she's just great. In the pink. Feeling her oats. Hitting on all cylinders. Kicking up dickens. Taking ...