Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [468]
After she made love to the hitchhiker, she no longer felt Gary's presence near. She didn't feel it after that for a long time. Felt as if he had gone away. That left her depressed and close to dead. Still, she kept on having sex. It didn't solve anything, but not having sex also solved nothing. Either way, she was not going to fall in love.
Still, sex left her feeling ugly. She tried to figure it out. She was the one who was living. If she had tension and could get rid of a little by making love to somebody, and then, once they were gone, even the memory of them was gone, and had nothing more to do with her, or her body, or her heart, or her memories, so where then was the treachery to Gary?
Still, sex left her more and more out of touch with him. She was drifting in her heart. It was hard to get started on any program to improve herself. Larry told her she was smart enough to walk right out of the swamp by herself, but the truth was she felt lazy and was tempted to say, "Oh, fuck it, I'm in a swamp. I'll stay here."
The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.
Several times that year, when friends would get to talking about Gilmore, Barry Farrell, in the course of the evening might volunteer a tape. People were curious to hear Gilmore's voice. So Barry would play one of the cassettes, but listening to Gary's voice would totally chill him out. The tapes were so interesting to other people that they never wanted him to turn them off.
Larry was now doing interviews with various people in Provo who had known Gary, and Lucinda kept typing the transcripts. After a couple of months when that job began to peter out, she went to work for David Frost who was doing a series of television interviews with Richard Nixon.
Lucinda did the work in Los Angeles, transcribing Frost's tapes in an office building in Century City from four o'clock in the afternoon until about eight o'clock in the morning three days a week.
There she was, locked in this empty skyscraper with Richard Nixon's voice coming out of a tape recorder, and it was not nearly so interesting as Gary Gilmore. She kept hearing Gilmore's voice, and in her mind, he sounded like a cowboy. Mean, gravelly, twangy, economical, boyish, vulnerable, full of love squeezed into tight little pellets.
A year after the execution, Kathryne Baker wrote to Schiller:
You know, Larry, I used to feel sorry for Gary, but what he's done to my girls, what he's still doing to them, well I could kill him a hundred times over-I live with Gary every day, the fear of him in April, is driving us all crazy! When night comes for her, its a nightmare for all of us. She is scared to death of the dark because "he's out there with a gun killing people." She doesn't say Gary . . . only "He"-and she's truely haunted-at 4 AM last week, hysterical, "He's out there killing people, now he's gone to kill more people-hurry, we got to get up there before He kills more!" this is how it is all the time-even in her sleep-when she sleeps. It makes no difference if we are all here, She must be reassured all night that he can't get in & kill us, no one sleeps the whole night because April wakes us every hour with "Are you allright mama-what are we going to do??!" I tell you Larry I hate Gilmore so bad I wish he was here so I could kill him! April . . . from the things she says in her sleep & her panic at the sight of blood, I guess Gary's shoes and pant-legs must have been covered with blood & brains, I guess so if the wall's were splattered, I don't know what to do anymore, I can't talk to Sissy about her feelings towards Gary, she hides them, but will relate to music and cry long for Gary, it's in poems-I can't talk to April about Gary, because she don't & won't mention his name hardly ever-night before last in her sleep she said, "there he is with blood on him & that crazy look in his eyes."
Now, who,