Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 12

  While I was slinking back down the stairs after my second encounter with April, I ran into Julia, the night nurse from the apartment below me, who was coming up to ask me a favor. With her was dog Raton. He was a detestable little creature, with the general size and shape of a cheap footstool, patchy hair, a voice like marbles bouncing on glass, and a tail that was no better than it should have been. Julia herself was quite presentable – a well-upholstered, fast-talking immigrant from the East Coast. Her eyes went well with her nurse's greens. Unfortunately, the favor she wanted to ask me was to walk Raton that night before I went to bed. She had to take a double shift, and she was afraid he'd destroy the apartment if she left him alone there for 16 hours. Not to mention the strain on his bladder and the guilt he would feel if hydraulic pressure finally got the better of him. Once we'd actually exchanged a few words I found Julia quite appealing, but I was anxious not to form any kind of relationship with Raton. On the other hand, there were neighborly good feelings to consider, and plus I was still humid and shamefaced from April's pricey embrace, and wanted to keep the conversation short. So I quickly caved in, accepted Julia's key, and fled before she could get too deeply into her complaints about the noise level from Mr. Clabber's refurbishing project. What to me were distant and mildly annoying rumbles and screeches were coming from only a few feet below her and driving her crazy. In addition to which, she worked at night and had to sleep during the day, when the workmen were at their exercise. I didn't want to listen to her laments, the green eyes not withstanding. I had enough problems of my own.

  Other than the Raton walk – which was reasonably successful, involving only one hysterical attack on a bemused Rottweiler – I kept a very low profile for the next few days, hoping Arthur might realize I had no cash and just forget about the whole thing. I knew it was a forlorn hope, though, and there were times while I was waiting for him to show up – while I was dusting the door lintels, for example, or lying in bed in the pre-sunrise gray, awake but not looking forward to the sound of the orange juice splashing into the glass – that, taking stock of my whole situation, I longed for the relative simplicity of a terminal disease, which I felt would not only relieve me of the necessity of any action but would also absolve me of all blame. Or at least that people, if there were any people still around who cared enough to blame me for anything, would put it all on the back burner in deference to my pitiable condition. Advancing age, loss of wife, inability to finish even a basic scarf, and of course the looming settling of accounts with Arthur – all inspired nothing but a kind of weariness in me. Together they seemed to be organizing themselves into a lazy vortex with its narrow, dancing tail pointing inexorably down into the toilet bowl of life. Some kind of final heroic battle seemed preferable: a nice, clean cancer or a wasting disease that would leave my mind clear to make wise and stoic pronouncements to the friends (I might still have time to make some) gathered sadly around my bedside, at home of course, no hospitals with their bedpans, tubes feeding into bruised wrists, or raving roommates.

  It was a good thing that I had only a couple of days to wallow in those fantasies – who knows where they might have led. But it was Leilah, not Arthur, who broke them up by knocking on the door, or rather using her key to open it without even warning me that she was coming. Luckily, she didn't find me lying in bed staring at the ceiling in the middle of the afternoon, as she might well have. Instead, feeling that I was not quite ready to pull the musty blanket of nihilism over my head, I had roused myself to wash the bathtub, so I was down on my knees in the bathroom, scrubbing away at a particularly stubborn hummock of mildew, when she walked in.

  “What the hell happened to this place?” she said from the doorway behind me. For some reason I wasn't surprised to hear her voice. I rinsed the cleanser off the sponge and my hands without turning around, then stood up to face her in a pungent cloud of chlorine. Unfortunately, she looked great: very tanned and fit and attractive, despite the shapeless jeans and faded flannel shirt. Looking at this person, recently my life's companion, glowing with physical health, smiling a little pityingly, and completely lost to me, I was instantly seized with a spasm of jealousy and hopeless misery, as if no time at all had passed since she had left. I was conscious of how pale and puffy I must look in contrast to her, and to the birdman's wiry, vegan physique. I was also humiliated. She looked like a person with plans, places to go, a future; meanwhile, her expression made it quite clear that she had more or less expected to find me washing the bathtub or something even more ignominious, as if that was all I had to do with my life. Which wasn't far from the truth.

  “Hello,” I said, drying my hands and advancing to fill the doorway, so that she had to back out toward the living room. “What brings you back to the city? You look like you've been birding your ass off. I hope you're using sunblock.”

  She waved her hand. “I just came back to get a few things. We've pretty much been living in the truck all summer, so I haven't needed a lot. But now it's almost time to start preparing for the social season in Bridgeport, California.” She laughed, a little uncomfortably I thought.

  “Is that where he lives?”

  “He has a little house there, up in the hills. Propane heat, solar electricity. He teaches all summer and then works on his books in the winter.” I was trying to imagine Leilah skidding along the windy streets of Bridgeport, where snow would be banked up along both sides of the main drag and all the tourist shops would be closed for the winter.

  “They have opera up there?” I asked.

  “Very funny. It's a tradeoff. Life is tradeoffs.” Implying that she was happy with this particular exchange.

  “And what will you be doing all winter, while he works on his books?”

  “Lots of things. I'll be helping him with the proofreading, page layout, that kind of thing. Plus reading. Taking long walks. Cross-country skiing. It's quite beautiful up there. Knitting. That's one of the things I need to pick up – my knitting stuff.”

  “All of it?” I asked. “Did you rent a truck?”

  “No, I just need needles and patterns, plus a lot of yarn. Bridgeport has a yarn store, but there's some special stuff I want to start with.”

  “I've been knitting. I got into it after you left. I've been hanging out with your group a little bit, too.” That brought up thoughts of April and Arthur, and I had to restrain myself from blurting out the whole sordid tale to her. She'd been my only real confidant for 25 years, after all. But I'd have been embarrassed to confess that I'd already betrayed her, even though she was living in sin with the birdman and might even have been relieved to hear of my escapade. I couldn't bear to take the chance of sinking any lower in her esteem, if that was possible. She was making a shiny new life for herself, and all I'd been able to accomplish since she'd left was to get myself rolled on by the dark underbelly of this five-unit apartment building.

  She wanted, or pretended to want, to see The Scarf, and tried to be encouraging, but for me it was just another humiliation, with its wavering edges and stitches all different sizes and tensions. I couldn't tell her, of course, that I was only doing it in order to have some social context, no matter how tenuous. Probably I didn't have to tell her. At least showing it to her occupied a few minutes, but we eventually had to get around to the subject of the clothes and everything else she'd left behind.

  “You're kidding,” she said at first. And later, after she'd stomped around the apartment opening closet doors and slamming them again, “You asshole! I can't believe it!”

  “You left, for chrissake,” I yelled at her. “I had no reason to think you were ever coming back. I got tired of looking at the fucking mess around here! Most of that shit you'd never have worn again anyway, so I'd still have had to get rid of it. Get some new clothes! How much does a pair of jeans cost? Most of what you had wasn't going to go over in Bridgeport, anyway.”

  "God DAMN it! What were you thinkin
g about? What right did you have to just throw out all my things? That's my property. Couldn't you have waited a little bit? Were you really in such a hurry to eliminate me from your life?”

  That, I thought, was unfair. “YOU eliminated yourself from my life,” I told her. “As far as I was concerned, I was just cleaning up the wreckage.”

  “You've been wanting to do that for 25 years,” she said. “And then you wait to do it behind my back. That's so YOU, Randall!” She put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “Are you doing anything with your life?” she asked, almost softly.

  “Not much,” I admitted, lowering my voice too. “A few things. Knitting. Victor Carogna has been teaching me to shoot a handgun, so I've been doing a little of that.” That and screwing your friend and knitting companion April.

  “Victor?” She seemed surprised, and a little taken aback, to hear his name. “Why would you want to do that? You've never had any interest in guns. And you and Victor . . . it's an odd couple.”

  “It's not like we're great friends or anything. He's just taken me in hand. He's trying to pump up my male hormones. But I'm actually good at it, so why not?”

  She shook her head and changed the subject. “I think you owe me a few thousand bucks.”

  “You and everyone else,” I told her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don't HAVE any money! Why does everyone seem to have so much trouble understanding that? I'm retired, I took a big hit on my income. I have to pay the whole rent with you gone. I may have to move, in fact.” Thinking that it might be a good idea at this point anyway. Move to Barrow, Alaska or anywhere beyond the likely reach of Arthur, and where my superannuated balls couldn't get me in any more trouble.

  “Well, since you threw away all my stuff, you certainly don't need all this room. You should move. Look at this place.” Waving her arms at the bare walls and empty shafts of sunlight. “It looks like you did move, frankly. It's a blank. Doesn't it depress you?”

  She was right, and it did depress me. I could only shrug. “I know it's not really my place to be giving you advice,” she went on, “but you've got to do something."

  "You sound just like Victor Carogna,” I told her. “That's how the handgun thing came up.”

  She ignored me. “You don't look good. You can't sit here knitting for the rest of your life. I know you don't even like knitting, and you obviously don't have any talent for it. Do you see anybody, besides the knitting group? They're not really your friends, you know. Especially Victor Carogna. What happened to all your teacher friends?”

  “All two of them, you mean? I don't see them too much. They're too busy, I guess.”

  “It's summer," she pointed out.

  "Well, they're going to be too busy. In the fall. What's the difference? Look, I was having enough trouble adapting to retirement. I kind of lost my identity, you know, and I haven't had time to build up a new one, or at least find out what the old one was, underneath the teacher veneer. And then you took off. What do you think that did to the adjustment process? You've got your ready-made new thing going, but what do I have? I'm working on a few things, but it takes time. Nobody's dropping a new life in my lap.”

  She stared at me, with her tan forearms crossed under her breasts that I couldn't believe were no longer mine. “I'll give you my cell phone number. His house doesn't have a phone. You probably wouldn't call me there anyway. Please call me when you've figured out what you're going to do with yourself. Or if you just need to talk. I don't like to see you kicking around this antiseptic environment.” I wanted to think she was genuinely concerned, but I knew it was just a twinge of guilt, seeing me at loose ends. She pecked me on the cheek, and I managed not to respond.

  “How's the cat doing,” I asked her instead.

  That set her back a bit. “I don't know,” she admitted. “She got out of the tent one night out there in the Jeffrey pines at Mono Lake and didn't come back. I'm hoping she's just running wild out there, living off fieldmice.”

  “You mean the coyotes got her,” I said, trying to be offhand. Well, the cat had been a sort of feline version of Raton. But I saw a big symbolic component there anyway.

  “You owe me money, god damn it,” she said as she went out the door, carrying several shopping bags filled with yarn. “I'm never going to be able to replace all those clothes. And what about all my papers? And my postcard collection?” But she wasn't really too hot about the whole thing any more. I think she was beginning to realize I'd done her a big favor.