“What did that mean?”
“He was a salesman and he always warned me to watch out for fast talkers. ‘Keep a clear head and don’t get fooled,’ he used to say.”
“That was all?”
“Just about.”
“What else?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. What else?”
“When I was about sixteen he told me that it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl as a poor girl.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” she said.
“No?”
“I like being rich and I don’t mind being loved. What a shrewd man your father must have been.”
“He should’ve been a preacher.”
“You mean he was religious?”
“No, not at all. He was just good at preaching a good game. Some guy fast-talked him for all his money with a scheme about a machine called Super Scoop that would give you scoops of ice cream like you were getting Cokes at a Coke machine.”
“No kidding,” and she buried her head in the pillow, laughing.
“Sure. Super Scoops. He didn’t want me to believe anybody because he believed everybody. He believed in everything.”
“My father,” she said, “only believed in himself.”
“What was his problem?”
“Since when was believing in yourself a problem?”
“You just said it like he didn’t believe in anybody else.”
“I don’t know who else he believed in. God and distilled water.”
“What?”
“Distilled water. He went all over the world and wherever there was bad sewage he got big business selling distilled water. Then it all got so big and so successful there was nothing to do but retire.”
She sat up, a silk bedshirt falling away from her shoulders. She cradled Gene’s head, caressing his throat. “Father became a gardener, planting in the yard, and even buying a small lot of vacant land close by so he could build a rock garden. But after that Portuguese boy was drowned downtown in a sink – remember how it was such a big story in all the papers? – killed by that lunk-head who had sexually assaulted the boy, my father then discovered the death penalty. He was determined to bring it back, and he came alive like he’d never been before.”
She got out of bed, gathering her underwear, and said, “He became such a big public speaker. It was his whole concern and he sat for hours reading, rolling a ball-bearing between his fingers.” She had a dresser drawer packed with his collection and she spread old yellowing photographs, engravings, and accounts of condemned men on the bedsheet before him. “They’re up in the attic, too,” she said. “Boxes and boxes, and rare old books. Maybe you’d like to see them, but it’s so hot and narrow up there, you’ll get a cramp in your back.”
She sat quietly for a moment, touching her thigh, and then she crossed her legs and stroked her instep. “Bad arches. I’ve always had bad arches. He used to say, ‘You should wear support shoes.’ It got so he watched everything like a kind of cop in the months before he died. He accepted all invitations to speak about death and the penalty and sometimes even paid his own expenses.”
There was a jar of very expensive cream on the night table. She was sitting on the end of the bed, hunched over, and he took the cream and began to rub it into her back, kneading the muscles that were surprisingly hard, even knotted. For a moment her whole body seemed to relax, and she let out a deep sigh, not so much of relief but aloneness, and, lifting her long hair, he kissed the nape of her neck. She shivered and became rigid again. “It gave my father pleasure,” she said. “That’s exactly the way he put it. It gave him pleasure arriving in an unknown town, having his hand pressed by eager men and women, the hushed attention when he spoke about the way we could kill a man, and then there was the applause and appreciation from the local police. He kept all the photographs from those trips, there in the album I showed you, cut into ovals like rows of eggs, smiling in all of them, serene. ‘Not the look of a condemned man,’ he told me the week before he just dropped dead in the street.”
Gene was sitting cross-legged and holding her from behind. “You know what’s weird around here?” he said. “The place is full of vases. Vases everywhere and there’s never any flowers.”
“My mother told me never to sleep in a room with flowers. They steal the air.”
“So why not when you’re awake?”
“Stealing’s stealing, day or night.”
“You know what else I couldn’t figure, looking at all those albums?” he said.
“No.”
“There’re no pictures of your mother. There’s only that photograph hanging in the sewing room.”
The sepia portrait had been trimmed into a triangle and framed in rococo gilt. Between the frame and the wall there were old palm fronds curling over the face of a woman with high cheekbones and wide eyes and a shining forehead.
“Mother wasn’t a Catholic,” she said, “but she always went to Mass every year on Palm Sunday. She never said why but she always laughed quietly when she went out the door and said every donkey has its day.”
2
As they walked late one night from her home, Helen asked, “Were you born anywhere near here?”
“Sure. And I still live in the same house.”
“You’re kidding. Nobody I know but me lives where they were born.”
“You want to see where I live?”
They went south along shaded streets, the houses dark and the windows long and lean. Bicycles were chained to verandah railings. A police car passed by and came around the block again, slowing down. “The trouble with the police is they think everyone is a criminal,” she said. “They’re corrupted like that. Imagine having to live with a man looking for the criminal in you.” She suddenly called out caustically to the cop, “Anything I can do to help you, officer?”
“That was wonderful,” Gene said as the police car moved away.
“It was not. We should be left alone. We should all be left alone and not bothered.”
“I meant you were wonderful.”
She took his arm. They had to step off the sidewalk twice to avoid lawn sprinklers left on all night. “It’s against the law, you know,” she said. “Leaving that water on. But there are laws that just don’t apply to some people and nobody knows it better than that cop. Nobody’s more class-conscious than cops. Ever notice that?”
They crossed an old footbridge over a ravine. “No,” he said, “but this is it.”
“What is? The ravine?”
“No. The street along the other side. I grew up by the ravine. It runs right through the centre of the city.”
She stood looking along the deep length of ravine darkness. “It’s like a scar,” she said.
“It’s a secret place.”
“I love secret places. I love it when people take me to their secret places.”
There was a heavy, chilling mist and the few bridge lamps were dull and shimmering. He held her close. “This was a lousy little two-storey town when I grew up down here,” he said. “Everything was two storeys, tiny ambitions.” They heard foghorns down at the lake. She brushed her lips lightly against his hand. “But then I found out there were people down there in the ravine and some were on the run, fugitives from their families or from the law, and winos. You could find a drunk on the side of the hill any morning and these drifters fascinated me, living under the old iron bridge in their own little cardboard and plywood shelters. Even in the winter they were there, and it’s like they were angels loose in the ravine, living under a big iron rainbow. I’ve always wondered what it must be like living under any kind of rainbow.”
The front lights were on in his house and they went inside. “It’s still a fine sturdy place,” he said, showing her the sitting room. “Of course, the rooms are narrow in these old homes. I just seem to live a narrow life,” he said, laughing.
“Do you always leave the lights on?”
<
br /> “Yeah.”
“All night?”
“Yeah. My father used to do it.”
“Why?”
“‘Leave a light on for your mother,’ he used to say.”
“Where was your mother?”
“She left him a note one night and took off.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah. She told him life was like a hat shop. So he said leave a light on in the shop, maybe she’ll miss her old hat.”
They were sitting at the back of the house in a glass-enclosed room crowded with plants, vines, and creepers, and the room was lit by a ribbon of neon light around the window ledge.
“It’s strange in here,” she said.
“I find it settles me down,” he said. There was a little white wicker chair in the corner and she sat in it, surrounded by leaves and ferns. He sat on the edge of an old leather easy chair.
“You sit in here watching the plants?” she asked.
“They probably watch me.”
“You know, sometimes I feel my father’s watching me.”
“Out in the bushes.”
“What bushes?”
“It’s just a family joke.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, it’s not really a joke. I mean, my father and I once, when I was a boy, got lost up north in the bush country and we sat up all night in the dark listening to the goddamndest noises that put the fear of hell in us. From then on that’s where he said the dead hang out – in bush country, or in the bush leagues.”
“What in the world are the bush leagues?”
She was sitting curled up in the dark corner, arms around her knees, feeling a damp weight on her thighs. The closeness in the air frightened her. She wanted to be comforted.
“The bush leagues,” he said, settling back into his easy chair. “That’s baseball. When you’re not good enough for the big leagues you play in the bush leagues.”
“Did you play in the bush leagues?”
“No, but my father was a sandlot third base coach, the local leagues. He was wonderful, the way he got so dressed up. His team had these kind of cobalt-blue uniforms with yellow stripes down the legs and WORLD MEDIA BROKERS in yellow letters on the back, and he used to scream at the umpires.”
“He sounds like a man my father would’ve hated.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It was all wonderful play-acting for him. Sometimes he got all confused on the field.” He closed his eyes and she felt as if she were slowly easing away from him into the dark earth smell of leaves and ferns. “You see, he’d wave his arms around like a windmill, waving a runner home. And when the runner got called out by a country mile so everybody saw he’d made a mistake, he’d scream, kick the dirt, and finally the umpire would pump his fist, yelling, You’re outa here, you’re outa the game. He’d laugh, patting his hands together like a pleased boy. That was the beautiful thing, see? To him it was all a game, it had nothing to do with life. That’s what he used to say: ‘Life’s real, kid, and playing baseball is playing for time. You get thrown outta life and what you are is dead.’”
“And your mother never came home?” she asked, her voice almost a hush.
“Nope. That was real. About a year after he died I got a telegram saying she was dead, too.”
“But you still keep the lights on.”
“Well, you can’t turn your back on the dead,” he said, laughing again. “They may be out there lost in the bushes.”
He stretched his legs. They sat in silence for a long time. Then she said, “I think I feel ashamed.”
“Ashamed of what?” he said, reaching out to her shadow in the corner, but she was farther away than he thought.
“Nothing. I just feel this need.”
He rested his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging together, staring at her shadow in the shadows. There were always raccoons outside in the alley at night. He could hear them, up from the ravine, rummaging for food.
She said fiercely, “I want to make love.”
“What?”
“I need to make love.”
She stood up and stepped out of her skirt and panties, and still wearing knee-high black boots, stockings, and a garter belt, she lay down on the floor, her head in the shadows, knees up and spread.
“Here?” he asked.
“Here,” she said, “and hurry.”
He was in his stocking feet. He couldn’t grip the tiled floor. Her head was by the chair and she was holding on to the wicker legs. “It’d be better with you on your hands and knees,” he said. She got up and crouched over so that he held her shoulders, half squatted over her haunches, and he made love to her until she shuddered in small spasms and let out a keening wail. When she sank down he lay on her, filled with the perfume in her hair. She said, “You didn’t come, did you?” and he said, “No.” She sighed and said, “That was unfair, making me cry out like that.”
3
The next day, she went to Palm Springs. She sent a single rose with a note to the bookstore. He sat alone in his house at night, waiting for the phone to ring. He knew she would be all right. He just wanted the phone to ring, but she didn’t call. There was a lot of rain, and dampness seeped into his bones. It was hard to sleep. Two weeks passed. Then she called late one night and said she was home and that she had been drinking. “No, it’s not because of the rain,” she said. “I don’t care about the rain. For tonight I care to be alone.” A week later, at about two in the morning, she called and said, “If you come over, I’ll take you to one of my secret places.”
The streets were empty as they walked. “It’s funny,” she said. “The whole time I’ve been away I was thinking about my mother. I should’ve known her but I didn’t know her.”
“Me either.”
“But yours ran away. Mine stayed put and never seemed to be anywhere. We used to sit in her bedroom and hardly talk. She always wore nylons with seams and she’d run her hands along the seams, over and over, trying to get them straight. But they were always wobbly. She began going to bed early, you know, eleven, ten, then right after supper, closing the day down earlier and earlier until she never got out of bed. Father took her her meals, more courtly the more he was out of her life. She seemed content, except she always said: ‘Watch out, watch out.’”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. She was so firm about it, indifferent to everything else except watching out. Nothing ever happened to her and nothing’s happened to me, or maybe it has. But my always watching for something big to come along, well, somehow everything has seemed so small.”
She drew close to him in the night air. After a while they went to an all-night restaurant. “This is it,” she said. There were booths at the back and a horseshoe counter with full-length mirrors alongside the take-out stall. They sat at the counter in swivel chairs.
“You know,” she said, “I came in one night and there was an old man in a homburg hat sitting here.” They ordered the Golden Crispy Waffles from the big glossy menu. “I mean, he had a cribbage board and cards and we played for an hour, and the next night he was back but I didn’t want to play again. I could see he was counting on it, but he’d forgotten to wear his hat. He was bald and I distrust men with shiny heads.”
A boyish broad-shouldered cop had walked along the mirrored wall to the take-out stall. He asked for a double-double coffee. “There’s a sweet tooth,” she said. “A sweet-tooth cop.”
A man who had a lopsided gait had come in behind the cop. He hurried to an empty chair and pocketed the dollar bill that had been left behind as a tip. Then he sat down and the waitress bawled at him, “Hey, I hustle too hard for my tips. I hustle and I don’t care if you’re a retard or not.”
“How do you like that?” Gene asked her.
“Like what?”
“A little case of theft.”
“They’ll work it out,” she said. “Leave them alone and they’ll work it out.”
The man sat staring into an empty cof
fee cup. There was a lipstick mark on the rim of the cup and he touched it. Then he picked up a crust of cold toast and ate it. “I don’t care,” the waitress said, walking over to the cop, who came back, lumbering slowly, looking a little flushed. The waitress said, “It’s my tip.” The cop sat down, speaking quietly to the man, saying, “It’s her tip, you see. It’s hers. You can understand that. You have to give it back.” The man shook his head stubbornly and drew little empty egg shapes on the countertop. The cop moved the knife and fork away.
“That’s really strange,” Helen said. “That’s what my father used to do at every meal.”
“What?”
“We had to take the knives off the table until after he said grace.”
“Where the hell did he get that idea?”
“I don’t know. But it sure gave a funny feel to eating when we picked up our knives.”
“Come on,” the cop said, “be a good guy. You’ve got to give it back.” The man fumbled and took the dollar from his shirt pocket. He gave it to the cop who handed it to the waitress who came over to Helen and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s mine, see, because I gotta hustle.”
The cop stood up and said quietly, “Come along now. It’s probably best if you go home.” He caught sight of himself in the mirror and flushed, as if embarrassed at how big he looked, and then he frowned and said, touching the man on the shoulder, “Come on now. It’s all for the best.” The cop held the door open for him.
The waitress said, “I don’t trust cops.”
“I don’t trust cops either,” Helen said.
“But the cop,” Gene said, “handled it beautifully.”
“I don’t like cops,” Helen said firmly. “I don’t like cops.”
“Well, maybe so, but the cop worked it out.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“We better go,” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” she said, rolling her napkin into a little ball. She dropped it into her empty coffee cup. He left the waitress a good tip.
“Well,” she said at the door, “how do you like our first disagreement?”
“It happens to the best of us,” he said.
All the Lonely People Page 13