“That I’m really sorry. Bob was just really drunk and, you know, clowning around. He didn’t mean anything. Please come sit down. Just for a minute. Will you do that?”
“Mmmm-hmmm.” Dolarhyde never said “yes,” as he had trouble with the sibilant /s/.
They sat. She twisted a napkin in her hands.
“Everybody was having a good time at the party and we were glad you came by,” she said. “Real glad, and surprised too. You know how Bob is, he does voices all the time—he ought to be on the radio. He did two or three accents, telling jokes and all—he can talk just like a Negro. When he did that other voice, he didn’t mean to make you feel bad. He was too drunk to know who was there.”
“They were all laughing and then they . . . didn’t laugh.” Dolarhyde never said “stopped” because of the fricative /s/.
“That’s when Bob realized what he had done.”
“He went on, though.”
“I know it,” she said, managing to look from her napkin to his goggles without lingering on the way. “I got on his case about it too. He said he didn’t mean anything, he just saw he was into it and tried to keep up the joke. You saw how red his face got.”
“He invited me to . . . perform a duet with him.”
“He hugged you and tried to put his arm around you. He wanted you to laugh it off, Mr. D.”
“I’ve laughed it off, Eileen.”
“Bob feels terrible.”
“Well, I don’t want him to feel terrible. I don’t want that. Tell him for me. And it won’t make it any different here at the plant. Golly, if I had talent like Bob I’d make jo . . . a joke all the time.” Dolarhyde avoided plurals whenever he could. “We’ll all get together before long and he’ll know how I feel.”
“Good, Mr. D. You know he’s really, under all the fun, he’s a sensitive guy.”
“I’ll bet. Tender, I imagine.” Dolarhyde’s voice was muffled by his hand. When seated, he always pressed the knuckle of his forefinger under his nose.
“Pardon?”
“I think you’re good for him, Eileen.”
“I think so, I really do. He’s not drinking but just on weekends. He just starts to relax and his wife calls the house. He makes faces while I talk to her, but I can tell he’s upset after. A woman knows.” She tapped Dolarhyde on the wrist and, despite the goggles, saw the touch register in his eyes. “Take it easy, Mr. D. I’m glad we had this talk.”
“I am too, Eileen.”
Dolarhyde watched her walk away. She had a suck mark on the back of her knee. He thought, correctly, that Eileen did not appreciate him. No one did, actually.
The great darkroom was cool and smelled of chemicals. Francis Dolarhyde checked the developer in the A tank. Hundreds of feet of home-movie film from all over the country moved through the tank hourly. Temperature and freshness of the chemicals were critical. This was his responsibility, along with all the other operations until the film had passed through the dryer. Many times a day he lifted samples of film from the tank and checked them frame by frame. The darkroom was quiet. Dolarhyde discouraged chatter among his assistants and communicated with them largely in gestures.
When the evening shift ended, he remained alone in the darkroom to develop, dry, and splice some film of his own.
Dolarhyde got home about ten P.M. He lived alone in a big house his grandparents had left him. It stood at the end of a gravel drive that runs through an apple orchard north of St. Charles, Missouri, across the Missouri River from St. Louis. The orchard’s absentee owner did not take care of it. Dead and twisted trees stood among the green ones. Now, in late July, the smell of rotting apples hung over the orchard. There were many bees in the daytime. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away.
Dolarhyde always made an inspection tour of the house as soon as he got home; there had been an abortive burglary attempt some years before. He flicked on the lights in each room and looked around. A visitor would not think he lived alone. His grandparents’ clothes still hung in the closets, his grandmother’s brushes were on her dresser with combings of hair in them. Her teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. The water had long since evaporated. His grandmother had been dead for ten years.
(The funeral director had asked him, “Mr. Dolarhyde, wouldn’t you like to bring me your grandmother’s teeth?” He replied, “Just drop the lid.”)
Satisfied that he was alone in the house, Dolarhyde went upstairs, took a long shower, and washed his hair.
He put on a kimono of a synthetic material that felt like silk and lay down on his narrow bed in the room he had occupied since childhood. His grandmother’s hair dryer had a plastic cap and hose. He put on the cap and, while he dried, he thumbed through a new high-fashion magazine. The hatred and brutishness in some of the photographs were remarkable.
He began to feel excited. He swiveled the metal shade of his reading lamp to light a print on the wall at the foot of the bed. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.
The picture had stunned him the first time he saw it. Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears, might be visible in the darkroom, might fog the film. He put cotton balls in his ears. Then, fearing that cotton was too flammable, he tried steel wool. That made his ears bleed. Finally he cut small pieces of asbestos cloth from an ironing-board cover and rolled them into little pills that would fit in his ears.
The Red Dragon was all he had for a long time. It was not all he had now. He felt the beginnings of an erection.