The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Two months out of college and undecided on a career, Tom Hanauer answers an ad in the classifieds seeking a “night companion.” He discovers to his pleasant surprise that he will be more of a hired conversationalist and chess opponent than a caregiver and that his employer stays up all night and sleeps during the day.
As Tom adjusts to this nocturnal existence, he finds that his employer, the lady of the house, is in a kind of cold war with her estranged husband, a disgraced mycologist who, as a result of his ongoing experiments, has forced his wife and children to devise individual strategies to protect themselves. Tom gradually learns the reasons for the strange behavior of the Morhan family.
Chapter 7: The Interloper
I sat in my car outside the Morhan house at one minute after nine, irritably spinning the radio dial and slapping at mosquitoes that had already found me. I turned off the radio and got out of the car, walking back and forth across the cul-de-sac. I strolled around toward the garage, then stopped, hearing footsteps swishing through the grass.
A woman in a dark dress came around the back of the garage, black against the blackness of the woods, her thin arms crossed over her chest as if she were cold, carrying a paper bag in one hand. As she turned to enter the garage I called out to her. “Hello? Is that Hettie?”
She stopped reluctantly, turning only her head to acknowledge me. “Yes?” There was a weary impatience in her voice, but neither surprise nor fear.
“It’s Tom Hanauer,” I said, moving closer. “How have you been?”
“Minding my own...” She didn’t finish the sentence. Turning her head, she began to walk again.
“Will you say hello to him for me?” I regretted the impulse as soon as I’d spoken.
“Ain’t botherin’ with you,” she tossed over her shoulder, and then opened the professor’s door and slammed it behind her.
I walked back around to the front of the house, remembering what Roland had said about seeing her going to the bomb shelter. Then the gate creaked and Catherine stepped through it, walking carefully over the grass on high heels. She was dressed in a black cotton blouse open at the neck and a short white skirt. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied back, revealing as if for the first time the sleek felinity of her head and her strong, slender neck. She stopped in front of me, her half-smile inviting me closer. I stepped forward and embraced her. “You look so beautiful.” I kissed her face and neck. She hugged me tightly.
“I heard you talking to someone just now,” she said.
“It was Hettie.”
Her smile faded. “Oh.” She took my arm and moved toward the car.
“In a big hurry,” I went on. “And dressed like she was going to a funeral.”
“Funny you should put it that way.”
“Why funny?”
“All right, it’s not funny. What’s the difference?”
Opening her door, I said, “Sorry. I keep forgetting it’s none of my business.”
“You got that right.” She sat tensely in her seat, staring straight ahead. I watched her with a sick feeling, wondering if I’d spoiled things for the evening. After a moment she looked at me. “I’m sorry. But all you know about my father is what my mother has told you, and that’s a very one-sided viewpoint. Their marriage is in the toilet, and that’s too bad, but it’s all over and done with. He’s still my father. I can love him or hate him, but I can’t divorce him. I can’t judge him either, not the way she does.
“There are reasons that I can’t explain... mitigating circumstances. He’s ill, for one thing, and needs someone to take care of him. Mother’s just not the nurturing type. And what she probably hasn’t told you is that he’s a brilliant scientist who’s done great things in his field. He doesn’t play by your rules or mine, but he’s responsible for his actions. And so is Hettie. If they’ve got something going on... well, it’s nobody else’s business.”
“That’s broadminded of you,” I said. “Listening to you talk about him makes me regret even more that I didn’t get to meet him.”
Her eyes, for the briefest instant, became very cold. “You may yet.” Then, taking my hand, she said urgently: “Let’s go, before Mother sees us. She knew without being told that I was going out with you. But let’s not rub it in her face.”
We drove to a bar to hear a local blues band I liked. We got there early enough to get one of the few tables, and when the waitress came, Catherine surprised me by ordering a glass of wine. “Beer,” I said, looking askance at Catherine. She stared back with a defiant smile.
The music started and she immediately got up and took my hand. She danced well, with the same unconscious ease and pleasure in being watched that I’ve envied in other women I’ve known. When the song ended, she let me off the hook and we sat down. I leaned over and said: “I just tried to imagine Roland sitting here with us. It’s hard to do.”
The band was getting louder. She put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in my ear: “He’s never been to a bar in his life.”
“How do you figure he got that way?”
“Combination of things. Neglect, for one thing. My mother wasn’t much of a mother, and my father was too busy with his career. Patrick and I ignored him because he was so much younger. He didn’t make friends easily. Truth is, he doesn’t really need people. He never did. Don’t worry about Roland. He doesn’t.”
“What should I worry about, then?”
Her lips brushed my ear. “Pleasing me.” I felt her teeth on my earlobe, and then the end of it lightly touched by the tip of her tongue.
“Let’s get out of here.” She nodded. I finished my beer and led her through the crush of people. We walked quickly to the car, and when I got in she slid over to my side. Pulling out of the lot, I said: “Where can we go?” She slid her hand under my shirt. “My house.”
“But your mother—”
“She won’t know. It’s a big house, and she leaves me alone.”
“Okay.” I parked on the street a block away. We hurried up the street and around the side of the house to the cluttered garage. Taking a set of keys from her purse, she unlocked the rear door and whispered, “Wait here,” then opened the door and shut it behind her.
I was sweating, as much from my own fever-heat as the trapped heat of the garage. As my eyes adjusted, the outlines of a door began to form out of the blackness of the wall: the professor’s. He was up there right now. I took a step toward it, then heard rapid footsteps. The door beside me opened and Catherine motioned me inside. “She’s up in her room,” she whispered, opening the glass door of the last room facing the courtyard — the farthest room from the wing where Carla and Roland lived, situated, I couldn’t help noticing, on the Professor’s side of the house.
I stepped inside the air-conditioned darkness. She closed the curtains but didn’t turn on the light. I heard her purse hit the floor, and the next thing I felt was her arms encircling my chest from behind and her lips on my neck. Her teeth closed lightly on the nape even as her fingers fumbled with my belt buckle.
I tried to turn around but she held me tightly, whispering “Wait!” between her teeth. She began and I finished pulling my pants down, then kicked off my shoes and stepped out of them. The underwear followed, and she unbuttoned and stripped off my shirt. I stood there: a naked man being held by a fully-dressed woman with her teeth in his neck, and an image of mating ducks flashed through my mind.
“Don’t turn around yet.” She released me, and I heard her kick out of her shoes, unzip her skirt and unbutton her blouse. A small rain of clothes, and then her hands held my upper arms and turned me around. Her pose now seemed almost a parody of a demure and simple nude, one arm across her belly, her hand grasping her forearm, eyes wide and glistening in the dark.
I was dazzled by the purity of her skin and its lambent contrast with her hair, the lyre-like collar bones, her taut belly and womanly hips, and the way the ribs outlined against the skin with each breath. But my need was both quickened and complicated by fear: her own family’s warnings against her, and the boyfriend crying in the restaurant came back. Even as I entered her welcoming embrace, I tried to keep some splinter of myself unkindled...
I am sleeping in an upstairs bedroom of a mansion, the guest of someone whose name I can’t recall. In a subconscious reverie I think about a conversation earlier that day with a friend. The talk was about a series of break-ins in the neighborhood, of people waking up and finding a mysterious intruder in the house, who had come to steal something they themselves were unaware of possessing. I wake up suddenly, having heard a sound downstairs.
The phone beside the bed rings, and I answer it. A voice yells, “Get out right now!”
I tore myself out of the paralysis of dream, as if the voice on the phone had meant, “Get out of this dream right now!” and awoke in a half-sitting position in bed. Projected onto the darkness were the quickly-fading arabesques of dream chemicals, like patterns of a kaleidoscope in dim light.
For a disorienting moment I had no idea where I was, then I saw Catherine’s hair spread out on her pillow, and put out my hand to stroke the white arm thrown over her shoulder. She made a fretful sound in her sleep and turned over. The luminous dial of the alarm clock read 3:20. I lay back down, and my heartbeat slowly calmed.
I’m in a rustic cabin with my childhood friend Carl Sullivan, an adult now and sitting shirtless and barefooted at a wooden table, sleeping with his head on his arms. I’m washing dishes, absorbed in my task, when Carl wakes up and looks at his chest in horror. “Hives!” he screams. The skin of his chest and neck has become in the space of a moment mottled with angry red patches. The condition progresses with lightning speed as I watch: the redness becomes more pronounced, and Carl’s face is distorted with pain and fear, his hands curled into claws poised to scratch but unable to, because in the next second the “hives” grow out of his flesh in the form of red, leaf-shaped protrusions like the blossoms of a vine growing under the skin.
Seeing these pointed, flower-like things emerging in great numbers from between his matted chest hair makes my skin crawl, and I begin to share his panic. “Call a doctor!” Carl screams, paralyzed with pain.
I run out of the cabin and down a lonely dirt road, looking for a pay phone. But the road seems to lead only further into the country. I’m still running, but with a sense of futility now, knowing there’s no phone this way and wondering if it’s too late to help Carl.
I come to a house which seems the merest shell around an oak tree the size of a sequoia, its top lost in the clouds. I knock on the door, and a thin, sharp-eyed man with long gray hair answers the door and invites me in. He hands me a brand of eyedrops that gives one the power of flight. I use them and fly through rooms as spacious as the sky, but find the power lines running along the ceiling a serious obstacle to soaring. The gray-haired man is Patrick Morhan.
Patrick Morhan is a huge green python, trying to make me confess to some crime. To force it from me, he bites and suffocates a second snake head protruding from the coils. The head is somehow myself, even though I’m standing alongside watching “myself” being interrogated. I can’t breathe, I can’t wake up if I don’t answer. “The rabbit!” I scream. “The black rabbit!”
I heard myself groaning and sat up. It was getting light outside. Catherine was leaning on her elbow looking at me, eyes puffy in her sleep-battered face. “You had a nightmare,” she said, stroking my arm.
I was badly shaken. “The black rabbit. I haven’t thought of that in years.”
“Come here.” I rolled over and embraced her. Her hand rested on my forehead. “Tell me,” she said.
“In the small town where I grew up, there was an older boy named Ed Merrill who lived across the street. His father was in his fifties when he was born, and had died suddenly the year before. I think Ed was still angry at his father for deserting him. I was seven or eight, and he must have been in his early teens.
“He had a pet python, a big one, ten feet at least, and he fed it live animals, though I didn’t know that at the time. I was playing out in the yard one day when his mother was at work and he called me over. He had a black rabbit in his arms, the big domestic breed they sell as pets, and he let me hold it for a long time, urging me to make friends with it. He told me the rabbit’s name was Ernie. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some fun with Ernie.’
“So I followed him back to his room, basking in the big boy’s attention, holding this warm and cuddly Easter Bunny in my arms. He kept the snake in a glass box on the floor and, before I had time to realize what was happening, he took the rabbit by the scruff of the neck, opened the glass top and dropped it in. The snake was tightly coiled in one corner, as still as clay, but almost immediately the head came up out of the center of the coils, its tongue testing the changed air.
“The rabbit was exploring its new space, oblivious to the danger. It even sniffed the patterned hide of the snake. It happened so quickly — the snake lunged, engulfing the poor thing’s head in its mouth, and in a flash had two coils around it. I saw the legs kicking helplessly, the snake’s hideously distended mouth, and I ran as fast as I could out of that house, across the street and into my room, where I locked the door and got under the covers.
“When my mother asked me what had happened, I started crying. I had nightmares about that rabbit for a long time. It took my parents years to forgive Ed his little stunt.”
“And this is the first time you’ve dreamed about it since then?”
I nodded. “But there’s something else, too: your father was in the dream. He was the snake, I think, and I was too, somehow. It’s strange, because I didn’t dream about the rabbit, only the snake. I was being interrogated, forced to say, ‘the black rabbit,’ as if confessing to a crime. I can understand what the dream was about: buried guilt for having helped kill it, but why have I dreamed about your father all three times I’ve slept in this house? I’ve seen him only once and never met him.”
Her eyes avoided mine. “Maybe because you’ve heard so many bad things about him.”
“There were other dreams, too, every bit as strange... but I can’t remember them.”
She got out of bed and put on a robe. “I’m going to see if Mother’s asleep yet. You’d better get dressed. Hate to kick you out” — she smiled sweetly — “but I’m kicking you out.”
“Any chance of seeing you tonight?”
She paused at the door, and spoke without turning her head: “Of course. Come at midnight. Park your car down the street and wait in the garage. I’ll let you in.” She opened the door and went out.
Driving home, I thought about our night together, certainly the most intense and protracted bout of lovemaking in my life, if somewhat lacking in gentleness. Catherine was an aggressive lover, as uninhibited as I was restrained, suggesting variations, urging me on with four-letter verbs. Yet her gestures of affection seemed almost cursory, and after such intimacy, I felt no closer to her. She was keeping me at a distance unbridgeable by sex, something new to my rather limited experience.
Her “danger” still fascinated me, but I was beginning to feel that her heart was out of reach. I’d vainly imagined myself the exception to Roland’s “next one,” but maybe that’s all I was, this week’s guest lover. Roland had given her an “agenda” commensurate with his imaginative, if slightly paranoid vision of the world outside his room, but wasn’t it more likely — regardless of the perplexing recurrence of the professor in my dreams — that Catherine was less a collaborator in obscurely sinister doings than a troubled, promiscuous young woman? No, that was unfair. She might have been the healthiest person I’d ever met, sexually speaking. I certainly wasn’t.
I couldn’t deny my contradictory feelings: her very lack of inhibitions, of those qualities of modesty and shyness that had always attracted me, had — even as I enjoyed the fruits — put me off a bit. She was too experienced for her age, too free of even the appearance of innocence. But I wanted her very badly. The smell and taste of her still lingered on my skin.
I was tired and run-down, caught in the jet lag between my nocturnal life and the diurnal way of things. Last night hadn’t helped. I felt as if I’d exhausted myself not only with sex, but dreams. One gorges on dreams sometimes, wallows in them, and in doing so saps the waking energies. I would sleep late, then kill the day somehow, until I could see her again.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
