548
SUSAN SONTAG
terior voices. He dismissed them. They went. Now, with this one, he is
not so sure.
Jekyll slows down. He has glimpsed a pair of feet in high heels
sticking out between two bushes. Run! No, stop. He retraces his steps,
grim-mouthed, his pulse leaping. Face down behind the bushes,
moaning, is a black woman in a tight red skirt and pink satin blouse.
Jekyll kneels next to the open purse lying at her side, and turns her
over. She looks about forty-five, consumes mostly carbohydrates,
shows the usual signs of hyperthyroidism and high blood pressure,
and is bleeding from a ragged cut on her face and a deep slash on her
left arm. Jekyll stands and steps back onto the path, looking about to
see if there is anyone to assist him. The woman moans. The twilight
advances, languidly proceeding into darkness. Nobody is in sight.
Bending from the waist, Jekyll finds the woman too heavy to lift.
He has to stoop in order to gather her, clumsily, in his arms. Since just
recently he could easily lift patients as heavy as she is, Jekyll wonders if
he is getting out of condition. Still, he is managing better than Utterson
would be, if Utterson were here, stooping beside a bush, trying to pick
up a heavy body. He wouldn't find it so easy. Utterson looks strong, but
that's mainly because he's fat. And the carbuncle embedded in his right
side must pain him sometimes. Should Utterson, because he likes to
show off, be trying right now to lift one of his docile pupils above his
head, he'll probably keel over-Jekyll thinks, with tense pleasure.
Jekyll slowly makes his way out of the park with his inert burden,
looking for a squad car or a taxi.
Jekyll is sitting to one side of the twelve-foot high fireplace
(under the bogus heraldic arms) of the great hall-the main building
of the Oyster Bay estate being a Languedoc castle built in the 1920's
by a Long Island faucet millionaire, and the rent for the whole prop–
erty being a sum paid annually by one of Utterson's most generous
admirers, a Texas oil magnate's widow now living in Bermuda. Utter–
son, in dinner clothes and a boiled shirt, his haunches filling the big
upholstered chair opposite Jekyll, is toying with a water pistol. In the
far shadows of the room, under an Art Deco stained glass window
depicting the Grail saga in ten panes, a pupil is taking notes. Jekyll has
come out to see Utterson to complain about being spied on. He's sure
that his phone is tapped and his mail is being opened.
