Men are enticed by the mythical female creature, too beautiful to possess, who will destroy any man who tries to tame her.
This looks like a murder mystery but is actually a portrait of psychosis, as Nora slips further away from reality.
Nora caused a scene in the restaurant, returning from the ladies room barefoot, removing her fur to reveal she was naked.
Her husband was a cipher to her, an imagination she created. Why would she talk to a hallucination? She told everyone, including him, that he had died, so when he was found hung in his bathroom, she wasn't surprised. At the sanitarium, she found it easier to pretend to be sane.
She could go home now.
She alone knew about The Gray Eyes - clear and unblinking every moment of every day - who heard and understood the unspoken, to whom she must remain pure and clean. She was obedient and powerless, and when she was bad they absolved her of sin. At a visit to the zoo, she was disturbed to discover The Gray Eyes had a physical body, a man named Ed.
An advertising salesman drinking his commissions away, he was impressed by her beauty and wealth. She would spend days looking at him without speaking. The Gray Eyes, to her, lived in a world that had nothing in common with the flesh, bringing a feeling of terror at being touched (except in a tempestuous scene as she caressed her naked body alone, clean and pure from a bath, touching herself in front of her mirrors, moving about the room into an orgiastic dance of submission until she was sated).
Attracted to easy living, Ed spends her money on horses, putting up with her artistic temperament so he can sign her monthly cheques over to his account.
When they move to a beach house, she is unable to maintain her will over her mind and needs to dispel this man, who speaks and calls her name, touching her... as her thinking dissolves into "an understanding of the capricious deceleration of time, aiding her escape toward the far end of space, where God the Creator is now revealed as Destruction, stationed as if at the end of a corridor. Earth was the center of space, her house itself a space ship, simply tethered to the earth, ready to break free of this unsafe world."
This is a strange excursion into the psychotic mind. We never know a sane Nora, she is completely in her own world. There are flashback memories which caused her breakdown, and when the past, the present, the future, all merge in her mind, she becomes completely untethered. This was original, entertaining and well written, reminding me of the novel The Pyx by John Buell, where the reader is left in the wreckage with an unknown outcome.
Stuart Friedman wrote several other books starring unusual women (The Fly Girls, The Trouble With Ava). The other title I own is a relationship novel, The Way We Love.
The Bedside Corpse and his other novels are available as inexpensive eBooks, as well as print, and audio.
1955 / Paperback / 160 pages
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