Mary heard the faint sounds of singing coming from his stereo, and beyond him, through an archway at the far side of the room, she saw a hallway bathed in shadows and light, like in the Edward Hopper picture that hung behind her boss’s desk at the Jaguar Agency. It was strange, but she got the idea that in the world in general her question—“Who is the me that I want Earl to see if the me he sees isn’t me?”—was an integral part of life, while in the room where this man sat reading, it was not. Perhaps she got that idea because he had a reading lamp behind him—its cord stretched across the floor—making it look like he was out of himself. Other than the chair and the stool and reading lamp, the room was empty.
Mary’s childhood home was two blocks over and one block up. She’d walked along Yakima Avenue countless times during the years she lived there. She’d even trick-or-treated at this house, climbing onto its porch while her mother stood down on the parking strip, just about where the loaner Jag was now. Her mother had had the dangerous gift, too, and had been bereft when it left her.
Inside the house, the man put down the wineglass that he’d apparently picked up when Mary wasn’t looking. And now, with his book on his lap, he was staring at the window, slightly above her head. Though she’d been standing still, she froze. How humiliating to be caught like this, a Peeping Tom, a Peeping Mary, whose beauty screamed that it wasn’t peeping but being peeped at that she was born for.
When he stood and came to the window, she had the thought that sexual intrusion—which, after all, was the bludgeon of a Peeping Tom—truly was a crime and that she should be ashamed of herself. What right did she have to intrude upon this man, who had not intruded on anyone, save, perhaps, those who lived in the book he was reading? But she held her ground, her eyes at the bottom of the obtuse triangle formed by the aging curtains. If he caught her, she’d make no excuse, like saying she had car trouble or needed directions.
Time passed, with Mary outside looking in and the man looking directly at his own reflection, maybe seeing new wrinkles in his face or perhaps simply pondering whatever had caught his attention in his book. So much time passed, in fact, that Mary’s eyes began to water, until she finally did the unthinkable and rapped on the window with the bent middle knuckle of her left hand. She could see the man’s thoughts ride back up into this ten o’clock Sunday evening.
“Hello?” he said, turning toward his front door.
“No, out here!” called Mary. “I’m in your side yard.”
The man swung around again and pushed back the curtain.
“Oh,” he said, “hi,” as if thinking that someone had knocked on the front door had been silly of him.
“I was just passing by and remembered the The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” said Mary.
“I didn’t live here then,” he said. “Lived up in Seattle.”
“Yes, well, that’s where they pretended the movie took place. It was Tacoma, though; even Wright Park was in it. No one wants to give Tacoma credit for anything.”
The window had a double pane, so their voices felt both distant and small, as if coming from people who had said those same words long ago, like maybe during the actual filming of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. The male star of that movie, Matt McCoy, had been Annabella’s husband in it, but Mary couldn’t picture him. She closed her eyes to bring him closer but could only see the man who looked through the window at her now, who was handsomer than Matt McCoy was anyway.
“I know it’s an odd request, but do you mind if I stay out here awhile?” she asked. “You know, sort of get my bearings?”
He looked back at his lamp and chair and stool, then once again at Mary. “This house is the Lourdes for fans of that movie,” he said. “You’re about the sixth person who’s come around since I moved in. But knock yourself out.”
He closed the curtains and went back to his reading before she could say that she wasn’t a fan of the movie but had been sent by someone who was an absolute fan of Lourdes, Sister Wendy Beckett from TV.
Mary returned to the chestnut tree. The loaner Jag was on the street, the man was in his living room, and under the tree was a chair quite like the one she’d seen him sitting in inside, wicker and comfy-looking, with armrests and even a plastic sort of all-weather pillow. She hadn’t noticed the chair when sneaking up to the house, but here it was, ready for indoor or outdoor use, a chair for all seasons, like Paul Scofield in the movie he was famous for. Sir Thomas More standing up to Henry VIII, and Sister Wendy Beckett explaining the meaning of art … Such connections were beautiful, with no element of danger in them at all.
Mary sat down in the chair, crossed her legs, and asked herself what her life meant. Down on the street, that loaner Jag meant something. It meant fine craftsmanship, precision engineering, but was she finely crafted, did she have precision engineering, past the skin-deep effect that had made her so much money? Twice she’d gone home with new Jaguar owners, giving them the prize they’d hinted that making such a purchase would necessitate.
Ten o’clock on Sunday night. Earl was surely beginning to worry. Maybe he’d called her cell, which, she realized when she felt her jeans, she had left in the Jag. Her own apartment in Old Town was closed and dark, rain was threatening, and the pleasure of the woodchuck comparison was dissipating fast. “Okay, Sister Wendy, what’s it all about?” she asked. “My heart’s so heavy sometimes.”
She didn’t expect Sister Wendy to answer, but a shadow came across her eyes when she looked at the rain clouds, giving her the sense that someone had heard her, plus the strength to ask a second question. “Why can’t I just love and be loved in return?”
“That’s the essential lyric in ‘Nature Boy,’ the Nat Cole hit from 1948,” said the man from inside.
Her first thought was, Here we go again, and sure enough, he was carrying his chair, identical to the one she sat in, plus two big umbrellas. Did she have to get hit on every day of her life?
“I never got a living room set. I just keep taking one of these chairs inside and bringing it back out again,” he said.
He put his chair beside hers, but not too close. When he gave her one of the umbrellas, she thanked him in her most guarded voice.
“Here’s a coincidence,” he said. “I was just reading about this time in 1956 when Nat King Cole got mugged on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. No respect for his greatness among the racists.”
“Don’t kid a kidder, mister,” said Mary. “You were reading no such thing.”
“Don’t kid a kidder” had been her mother’s expression.
“I was,” he said. “I’ve nearly finished his biography, and I was listening to his recordings when you knocked on my window, so maybe you asked yourself that question because you heard it in his song.”
He sang a line from “Nature Boy,” making her remember the ethereal tune. Could it be true? Could her most recent question not have come from Sister Wendy Beckett but from Nat King Cole?
“It’s a good question, no matter who made me ask it,” she said.
“I guess,” said the man, who told her his name was Steve. He opened his umbrella and leaned so far back in his chair that he looked like a laid-back lifeguard. He said, “Half of life is disappointment and missed opportunities.”
In any other situation, such a comment would have seemed maudlin to her, but he said it cheerfully enough, and she was sitting under his tree, after all, as unexpected a place for her to be right then as Paris, France. He was right to bring the umbrellas, too, since a fine rain had started falling. She opened hers and sat back like he was. “How long have you lived here that you don’t have a living room set yet?” she asked. “I saw that you put your Edward Hopper up, so you must have been here for a while.”
She remembered as soon as she said it that the Hopper was in her boss’s office at work. It showed a woman naked from the waist down, sitting on the floor by a bed.
“A year last week,” he said. “Lost all my furniture in the divorce. That’s my half a life
of disappointment. Married twenty-four years and I’m forty-eight years old now.”
Earl had a living room set, a dining room set, three bedroom sets, and a kitchen set, and there was a croquet set on his lawn. Even when he played croquet, his narcissism came out.
“Did you ever even see The Hand that Rocks the Cradle?” she asked.
“Got it on DVD. When I bought this place, the movie was part of the sales pitch. At closing they gave me a copy.”
Mary’s intention had been to sit here late into the night, waiting for an answer to her question, but now she sat back up. “You mean you’ve got the movie inside right now?”
They each carried a chair into the house, leaving the umbrellas on the porch. And sure enough, the book on the floor next to the plate of cheese was Velvet Voice, Nat King Cole’s biography. The man’s TV was on a cheap metal cart, with the DVD player on its top. It, plus a guitar in an open case and a globe of the earth, Mary hadn’t been able to see from the window. He also had plenty of DVDs. He looked back at her as he searched for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, to say he had four loves: books, movies, music, and vino. She liked the way he said vino, though she would have thought it an affectation had Earl said it that way.
He found the DVD, put it in his machine, and walked over to hand her its case, which bore a photo of Rebecca De Mornay, torn down the middle to make her seem evil, plus another of Annabella Sciorra looking calm and healthy, a lover of ordinary life. Matt McCoy was there, too, but back a little, since his was a minor role. Mary wondered if the man she sat with now—if Steve had played a minor role in his marriage, and also whether he would like to play a fuller one in whatever life awaited him.
“Okay, ready to roll,” he said, “This amarone is perfect for horror films. Would you like some?”
He pointed at the wine bottle on a tray, where two glasses sat, both of them recently washed.
“Do you really think it’s a horror film?” she asked. “I always thought it was a thriller.”
“Thriller—horror film—okay, here’s the truth. They gave me the DVD when I bought the house, but I’ve never been able to watch the whole thing through.”
That made her laugh. She wouldn’t have watched it, either, sitting in the very house where all the violence had taken place. At least not alone. At least not without familiar furniture surrounding her. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle would be about the world’s worst movie in such a situation, but it was a great first-date movie, would make a terrific story for a couple to tell their children later on. Her parents’ first date, she remembered, had been going to see to see Psycho at the Roxy downtown.
When he asked her what was funny, she said, “I was just thinking of the improbability of things, that’s all.”
She meant the improbability of everything, of birth and death and all the mistakes in between, but when he smiled, it was clear he thought she meant the evening they were experiencing together, which, of course, was also pretty high on the improbability scale.
He’d turned on more lights when searching for the DVD, so now she got a better look at him. Yes, he was as handsome as a movie star from the old days, as handsome as Cary Grant, and, like Cary Grant, there was no duplicity in his face, no hidden agenda, only this befuddled aspect.
“Here we go,” he said, pouring them both some vino.
The film’s opening shot was of the outside of the house with its porch and large front yard. She saw the parking strip where her Jag sat now, and she saw the oak tree where she’d spied Annabella. She also saw the chestnut they had sat under, with their umbrellas open and the rain coming down.
Steve sat beside her just as the camera moved inside to the wide and inviting staircase near the front door. For the longest time, no one spoke in the movie; perhaps three full minutes passed while the camera ventured upstairs and down, outside and in, until finally people entered the frame, first Annabella, making breakfast for her family, then her husband and daughter in an upstairs bathroom, singing a song by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Mary decided that tomorrow in her apartment in Old Town she would do her own spring cleaning, maybe even take her furniture outside so she could better get at the walls and floors. Maybe she’d put a sign up saying YARD SALE, then sit out there in one of her chairs. She’d have to call her boss, tell him she was taking the day off, and she would call Earl, too. He didn’t deserve the treatment he got from her. He deserved a clear explanation.
A mentally handicapped man came sneaking around the side of the house in the movie, much like Mary had sneaked up on the window on this Sunday night. The man had been sent by a charity organization Annabella’s husband contacted, to do repairs in preparation for the arrival of the baby Annabella was about to have. But his sudden appearance made Annabella scream and drop the glass of orange juice she was holding, shattering it all over the floor. The handicapped man wasn’t dangerous—by the movie’s end, he would be the family’s savior—but Annabella’s initial fear foreshadowed the danger that would soon arrive in the person of the undeniably beautiful Rebecca De Mornay.
Mary glanced at Steve, reluctant to buy new furniture, unable to watch this movie in the house in which it had been made, yet sitting here reading Nat King Cole’s biography. And singing her the opening lines of “Nature Boy.” Maybe when the movie ended, she would ask him to sing it again, or perhaps she would ask him to take that guitar from its case and play her something of his own invention, since she seemed to know that was what the guitar was for. Or maybe they would simply carry their chairs back outside and she would drive on home.
But whatever might happen later, now she wanted to concentrate on the movie, so she could see the beauty of this house and the street she had walked down as a child. She sipped her wine and nodded to show him her appreciation of it. It was a terrific wine, far better than the one she’d spilled in Earl’s bed when Sister Wendy had let her know that it was time her real life got started, that there was no art at all in selling Jags.
Let’s Meet Saturday and Have a Picnic
[1999]
THIS IS A DIFFICULT STORY TO TELL after so many years, not only because my memory is fading but also because of all these interruptions. Nurses, they call them, but they’re really only immigrants from who knows where—the Philippines, Nigeria, Vietnam … I asked one young woman when I first got here if she was Ethiopian, but she insisted I call it “Eritrea.” She even wrote it on my napkin for me, using an E instead of the A that I thought it began with. I shouldn’t be hard on her, though, since my name is spelt with a K not a C, and I’ve spent my life correcting people. It’s Kurt, not Curt, and my last name is Larson. I’m eighty-nine years old and am living here at Tobey Jones, a nursing home for the semi-well-heeled near Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Washington.
The Eritrean woman’s name is Ruth, so I guess she grew up Christian. She calls me “Mr. Kurt,” and not long after she wrote her country’s name on my napkin, I became her favorite resident. She comes into my room quite often now to hold my hand and talk. I haven’t been able to figure it out. Either she’s a saint or she’s practicing her English, but either way she asks me interesting questions, which is more than I can say for family members, like my son, Lars, or his son Lars Junior. They come, stay for twenty minutes, surrounding me not with the faces and voices of my loved ones but with nodding flowers, fragrant as the smell of death. Eighty-nine years old. A woman two doors down is also eighty-nine, and insists on calling us both eighty-nine years young.
It’s 1:00 A.M. and Ruth is working the night shift out of homicide with her partner, Frank Smith. Ha ha. No, that’s the beginning of Dragnet, a great TV show from the 1950s. It is 1:00 A.M., though, and Ruth is working nights, which she likes because it’s quiet and she can come in for longer stretches to sit and call me “Mr. Kurt.” Ruth’s beautiful, I should say, with a narrow face and long cheeks and breasts I would have died for until I was eighty-two. Now I have only the memory of dying for them.
“Mr. Kurt,” Ruth w
hispers. “Are you awake?”
I’m sitting up in bed with my lamp on, reading War and Peace, but I answer her nicely. “Why yes, Ruth, I am. Come on in, dear, have a seat.”
“Mrs. Truman’s on the prowl again. Want me to close your door?”
Mrs. Truman is the other eighty-nine-year-old. She sometimes mistakes me for her husband.
When I nod, Ruth latches the door, then opens a stepladder that leans against my window, locks its legs, and sits beside me on it. The stepladder was in my kitchen until Lars, my grandson, brought it here so he could put up fancy curtains. Ruth’s posture is perfect on the stepladder. “I’m not intruding?” she asks, one finger pointing at War and Peace.
I’m more than halfway through the book, at the Napoleonic Wars part, and I’ve been thinking of those who died before me, legions upon legions of them, most around Ruth’s age.
“It can wait,” I tell her. “You look tired, Ruth.”
She’s brought her lunch and is trying to open it quietly. It’s a homemade something or other from Eritrea, and she tears off a piece and hands it to me. I’ve always liked foreign food, even before the current ethnic restaurant craze, but Ruth’s lunch tastes like a spongy bandage with hot sauce on it.
“I’m not tired,” she says. “I bet I get more sleep than you do, Mr. Kurt.”
She has a bottle of water with her and cracks its seal. The curtains Lars Junior put up are hanging from the window behind her. Ruth was in my room recently when he came over. Lars Junior is a fool with women, has messed his life up with a lot of them, yet he can’t see the beauty in Ruth. He has taken over my business, an automobile agency, while his father, my son, spent his life delivering milk.
“After the war, I fell in love with a Korean woman even younger than you are now, Ruth,” I say. “Would you like to hear that story, or would you rather have me finish the one about my septic tank?”
I’d started my septic tank story in the dining hall, an inappropriate place for it, I guess. Mrs. Truman was at my table and spit some mashed potatoes onto the front of Ruth’s uniform. “The love story, Mr. Kurt,” she says, “If it’s good, when I fall in love, I will remember you and tell it to my husband.”
Tacoma Stories Page 9