Cul-de-Sac Read online

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  He raised a hand to his face.

  “You look like you’ve been beat up.” When she reached for him Paul leaned away. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  The usual impression of Paul Milton might be that of a handsome young college professor on whom students, male and female alike, had crushes … five-ten but appearing taller because he was slender and long-legged, flat-stomached and smooth-skinned, blond hair and blue eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, a face that promised to remain forever boyish.

  But that promise had been broken in the month since Annie last saw her husband, his face now haggard and hollow-eyed, his expression nervous and frightened. Bruises discolored his left cheek and temple, his left eye was blackened, his normally thin lips were swollen fat.

  Usually fastidious about his appearance Paul was filthy, his hair so greasy it stuck together in clumps and didn’t look blond, his jeans actually stiff having been worn so long without a wash. Paul’s once-white shirt had big underarm stains, the outer rings dark brown, the inner ones urine-yellow. When Annie finally stepped close to hug him she could smell his rank body odor, his bad breath.

  Paul endured the hug as if it were a medical procedure he’d been warned would hurt a little.

  She asked again what had happened to him, he didn’t answer and wouldn’t look her in the eye.

  “Have you seen yourself in a mirror?”

  He mumbled something about putting in a lot of hours, not getting any sleep.

  No, Annie thought, it’s worse than that. She looked over his shoulder … the room, Paul’s workshop, was large and tall-ceilinged, had obviously once been a library with hardwood paneled walls and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were now filled with power tools, some of them brand-new still in their boxes. This was an interior room, no windows. Most of the far wall was taken up by a massive fireplace of red brick, in the middle of the room was a big camel-backed couch covered in black leather cracked and split, horsehair stuffing sticking out in several places. Paul had apparently been using the couch as his bed, a blanket draped on one end, food wrappers and milk cartons on the floor.

  He cleared his throat.

  Annie waited but Paul said nothing. The old-fashioned cast-iron radiators around the walls must’ve been operating at full tilt because the room was stifling hot.

  Bringing her things in she avoided looking at Paul, his condition made them both self-conscious. “Why is it so warm in here?” She took off the denim jacket hoping that Paul’s Favorite Dress would earn a comment.

  It didn’t. He mumbled something about being cold all the time, Annie didn’t catch every word. As if to illustrate the point, he tucked both hands deep into his filthy armpits and hugged himself.

  “You bought new tools?” she asked, trying to keep her voice light and unaccusing.

  “You can’t stay here.”

  Annie went over and stood right in front of him. “Why not?”

  “It’s … not safe.”

  “You mean the building, the structure, isn’t safe?”

  Paul didn’t answer.

  “I’m not leaving until I find out what’s wrong.”

  “Wrong,” he said, repeating the word in a monotone.

  “You look … like you’ve been through something terrible.” He looked like a mental patient who’d been turned out on the streets without medication or hope.

  “Cul-De-Sac,” he whispered as if the name was a secret or terrible profanity.

  “It’s too much isn’t it … too big to renovate by yourself.”

  “You have to leave.”

  She tried hugging him again but he went stiff in her arms. Annie drew back and smiled. “You’re going to be okay, I’m here now and you’re going to be okay. You said on the phone that you’d fixed up a bedroom and bathroom, why don’t you show me where they are … I’ve been in that car—”

  “Annie …”

  “I’m here, I’m not leaving you.” When she put an arm softly around him Paul began crying, Annie staying close, comforting him as you would a child. “Show me that bedroom and bathroom, I’d like to take a shower.”

  “Down the hall.”

  “Good.” Annie picked up one suitcase, leaving the other for Paul, but when she got to the door he wasn’t behind her … he’d gone to the other end of the room, to the fireplace.

  Paul had his hand on the brick chimney. “Remember this chimney,” he said … a request, not a question.

  “Remember it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Remember this chimney.”

  “Paul, I don’t—”

  “Just remember it.”

  “All right.” When she turned to the door again Paul spoke her name. He was still touching the brickwork.

  “Remember this chimney.”

  “Okay I’ll remember it.”

  “Good.” He seemed satisfied, coming over to Annie, picking up the suitcase on his way, even stretching his swollen lips in what might’ve passed for a smile. Annie smiled back but as soon as he went in front of her she lost that smile.

  After they were out in the hallway Paul shut the workshop door, closed the hasp, and squeezed the padlock into place. Annie asked him why he was locking it but Paul didn’t answer. He went to an electrical panel box and flipped switches, bringing on some lights, then led Annie halfway down one side of the hallway-balcony. Paul stopped and brought out a key ring, unlocking a door.

  Although not as large as the workshop-library this room also had twelve-foot ceilings, one wall dominated by four huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The only furnishings were a chair, a table with a lamp, and on the floor a mattress that was covered with a sheet.

  Annie walked to the windows thinking how dramatic they could be if they weren’t covered with old shades and rotting curtains. “Which way do these windows face?”

  “East. The bathroom’s through there,” Paul said, indicating a connecting door. He went back and locked the door to the hallway.

  “Honey why are you keeping everything locked?”

  He started to reply but changed his mind.

  “Have you had break-ins?”

  He shook his head and asked her if she wanted to take a shower or a bath.

  “Shower I guess.”

  “I’ll turn it on, takes a while for the hot water to get up here.”

  “Thanks.”

  Annie told herself everything was going to be fine, they’d each take a shower and then make love, afterwards Paul would explain what’d happened to him. She was in the middle of her cycle, the right time to get pregnant … which was part of Annie’s motivation for plotting this surprise visit.

  While Paul was in the bathroom Annie tried to make one of the window shades roll up but it was rusted tight. When she yanked really hard, the dirty shade broke out of its brackets and clattered to the floor putting up dust and half a dozen fat black flies that buzzed so persistently around Annie’s face she was forced to wave them off with both hands.

  Paul came running out of the bathroom looking first at his wife then at the uncovered window. “What have you done!”

  “I thought it would be nice to get the morning sun but—”

  “Oh Sweet Jesus,” he muttered grabbing the old linen shade and holding it to the window as if it might stick there of its own accord.

  When Annie put a hand on his shoulder he jumped like she’d struck him. “Paul, it’s all right … leave the shade off.”

  But he kept struggling to rehang it, the linen tearing in his hands, several of the flies having landed in his greasy hair.

  “Paul stop it.”

  He looked at her and finally conceded the futility of what he was attempting.

  Standing at the window Annie couldn’t see anything out there in the dark except a distant glow from a shopping center. “It’ll be nice in the morning, to be awakened by
the sun.”

  After moving her away from the window he went over and turned out the overhead light … the room now illuminated only by the light from the bathroom.

  “What’s wrong?” She chastised herself for asking it again, he obviously wasn’t ready to talk yet. “I’ll go take a shower.” Annie stepped into the light from the bathroom doorway and turned, made sure Paul was watching, then slowly raised her dress. Once in a rare moment of sexual candor he had told her that the image of a woman slowly raising a hem and eventually revealing she was wearing no underpants … he found it powerfully arousing. Annie had used this information to great success on several occasions.

  But now Paul watched her blankly. When he finally understood what she was doing he looked away in embarrassment. Annie felt ashamed of herself. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, realizing only later that she’d left Paul in the dark.

  After showering quickly Annie wrapped herself in a towel and came into the bedroom to find that Paul had turned on the little lamp by the mattress … he’d also torn off a six-foot length of shade and had taped it to the window as far up as he could reach.

  Before she could speak he pointed to the exposed upper portion of window and said, “See, you can still have the morning sun.”

  She smiled but also wondered what was out there he didn’t want looking in. Cul-De-Sac had no neighbors within sight.

  A section of water-stained window shade was still on the floor, Annie holding Paul by the arm and telling him the shade was an ancient map scroll, brown and rusty-red stains forming islands and isthmus-connected continents on a yellowing fabric sea.

  Usually enchanted by Annie’s fanciful stories he listened now with dull expression.

  She kept talking, hoping to lighten his mood. Encouraging him to his knees she took her husband by finger on circumnavigations that led to encounters with parrot-feathered natives, escapes from nose-boned cannibals, to islands where the women were beautiful and bare-breasted and the men wore only the briefest of loin cloths.

  He began softly crying.

  She wrapped him in her arms. “Is it the money?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Early in their marriage she withdrew everything she’d saved over the years to invest in Paul’s dream of buying old buildings, renovating them, then reselling at a profit … the dream failing on that crucial third point. Creditors had shut them down in North Carolina and Annie still wasn’t sure where Paul came up with the down payment for Cul-De-Sac, this decaying former hotel-hospital-asylum, this sixty-room monstrosity in the Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C.… but when he left North Carolina a month ago to start the renovations he promised that this time he’d make them rich.

  “If we have to,” Annie said, “we’ll declare bankruptcy, I’ll go back to work, we’ll start over again.”

  Paul had stopped crying but wasn’t replying to anything she said.

  “Nothing matters as long as we stay together.” After Annie’s father died, her mother married and divorced three times, each marriage more hateful, each divorce more acrimonious … Annie pledging herself not to repeat the pattern. She was with Paul for life.

  He apologized.

  She went over and opened a suitcase, bringing out a bottle of white white. “It’s not champagne …” Annie produced two plastic glasses that had an unnerving tendency to lose their stems. “And these aren’t crystal but—”

  “Our anniversary,” Paul said, closing his eyes and looking as if he might start crying again.

  “Three years tomorrow … and another reason I pulled this silly stunt of coming here to surprise you.”

  “It wasn’t silly.” He sat next to her on the mattress.

  “I even brought a corkscrew,” she said, bending to search through the suitcase.

  Paul touched her dark red hair and quoted from the Bible, “You are my refuge and my fortress … you cover me with your feathers and under your wings I find trust.”

  He had been a theology student, they’d met at graduate school and Paul sometimes joked that he gave up God for Annie. He was still a religious man and had remained active in what he called lay ministries, working with drug addicts and prison inmates.

  As Annie looked into his soft and battered face she thought it telling that Paul had cast her as his refuge, his fortress, his winged comforter … instead of the other way around. She was the emotionally stronger of the two and also older, thirty-five to Paul’s thirty. Strange that she should have married a younger man considering that since the age of ten Annie had been in love with someone fifteen years her senior.

  When she came up with the corkscrew Paul said, “I’ll go take a shower then we’ll have the wine … I mean the champagne.” He stood and took a few steps toward the bathroom before turning back to Annie. “I haven’t … kept myself very clean.”

  She nodded.

  “I feel … vulnerable when I’m in the shower.”

  “This is a big spooky place, being here alone at night I can see how you might—”

  “I’m not alone.”

  “You’re not?”

  He came over and knelt next to her. Annie saw that one of those fat black flies had lodged in his hair, buzzing there, and while she tried to brush it loose Paul whispered to her, “Satan lives in Cul-De-Sac.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Sometimes I open a door and he’s just standing there.”

  “Oh Paul …”

  “I first saw Satan floating in a bathtub.”

  “Paul don’t …”

  “Last time I fell asleep, when I woke up his face was right there next to me … do you know what’s hanging out of his mouth—”

  “Please stop, you’re scaring me.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Paul … how long have you been like this?”

  His eyes were large with a kind of terrified wonder, his whispering becoming even softer. “Sometimes he plays a piano, I can hear Satan playing the piano … but then I go looking and I can never find the piano. And he’s always scratching at the walls, scratch, scratch, scratch … can you hear it, he’s scratching now, you probably think it’s mice but it’s not, it’s—”

  She put a hand over his swollen lips.

  Lying naked on the mattress, listening to the shower running in the next room, Annie got her mind in a twist wondering if Paul’s mental breakdown was so severe he might kill himself … or even try to hurt her. He could come back in here, see Annie on the mattress, think she was Satan and try to kill her. It’s terrible to be afraid of someone you love. Jesus.

  Annie would’ve bet a million dollars she’d never fall asleep, too worried and frightened, but obviously she had slept because suddenly she was awakening to a dark room, the lamp by the bed out, no illumination from the windows, just a slit of light showing under the door to the bathroom … and a figure standing, looming, at the foot of the mattress.

  “Paul?”

  The figure made a sound, like a pig’s grunt.

  It was then she realized the shower was still running, Paul still in the bathroom … Annie shouting for him.

  The intruder came down onto the mattress with her, Annie scrambling away but getting caught by the foot, being dragged close … he was incredibly strong and kept grunting, other animal sounds too, Annie thinking of what Paul had said about Satan, she wanted to call again for her husband but was too occupied trying to get away from—

  He started laughing. “Who in the hell are you anyway?”

  Annie kicked until he let go then she brought up the sheet to cover her nakedness before finding the lamp and turning it on.

  He grimaced as if the light hurt. He had a long narrow face and large dark eyes, his black hair combed straight back. Wearing black slacks with a dark red shirt and heavy work boots, he was roughly Annie’s age, average height and weight … could’ve been considered handsome, nose very straight and jawline strong.

  “What are you doing here!” she demand
ed.

  He stretched out, elbow on the mattress, head resting casually on one hand. “I asked first.”

  “I’m Paul’s wife.”

  “St. Paul married?” He seemed amused but then his face darkened. “You see this is exactly what I was worried about, a man who keeps secrets from his partner.”

  “What do you mean … partner?”

  “Where’s the elephant?”

  “What?” She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

  “The elephant, Mrs. St. Paul, the goddamn elephant.”

  “How do you know Paul?”

  He abruptly yanked on the sheet pulling it from Annie’s hands and exposing her breasts.

  “Small tits but nice buttons.”

  She tried to get the sheet back, then crossed her arms over her breasts.

  “How’d you like having them chewed on?” he asked, drawing back his lips to reveal teeth that were clean and straight but grotesquely large … like something out of a bad monster movie. He slipped a hand under the sheet. “You ever take it up the ass?”

  “Paul!”

  “I have.”

  “Paul!”

  “St. Paul!” he shouted, mocking her. Then he stood on the mattress and started unbuckling his belt. “I’ll show you something you ain’t never seen.”

  “Please.”

  “Everybody begging for Old Scratch.”

  They both heard the shower shut off. He took his time looking over at the bathroom door and down at Annie before stepping from the mattress. “You tell St. Paul if he’s double-crossed me on the elephant I will personally deliver his soul to hell.” He went up on his toes and left the room like something on hooves.

  Annie reached the bathroom door just as Paul opened it, one towel around his waist, drying his hair with a second towel. “Boy that really felt good.” He looked almost normal again.

  “There was a man here!”

  Paul’s haunted expression returned.

  “We have to get out of here!” Annie had already put her dress back on, wishing she had time to go through a suitcase for something more substantial to wear, for underpants and jeans and a heavy shirt.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He called you St. Paul, said something about an elephant—”