“She’s smiling.”
“Why not? Blue Cross is paying for everything.”
“Well,” she said, brazen as a cuspidor, “you fixed me up, too.”
“Another triumph for Medicare.”
“That injection was just what I needed.”
“How often do you get those seizures?”
“As often as I can get those injections.”
“I see. Well, you mustn’t become too reliant on them. The supply may run out.”
She was happy. Glad to be alive. Pleased to still be with him. Whatever had been before, and whatever was on the way, none of it could dislodge her dependency on him. Modesty, upbringing, ladylike decorum—all of it went by the boards whenever they made love. He could reduce her to nothing more than a sexual container with just five thrusts of his marvelous member. She could hate him before, but she’d love him during and after. And he knew it as well as she did, so why hide from it? Who was there around to expel her from the convent? “Luther—I love you.”
“Ah,” he said, twisting his nonexistent mustache, “that makes two of us.”
“If I apologize, will you accept?”
“Certainly. What’s the apology for?”
“For crowding you.”
“Forget it,” he said, feeling crowded. “I know I have my shortcomings.”
“Shortcomings!” She laughed. “Why, you have more shortcomings than a midget nymphomaniac.”
He chuckled with pride. “Very good. I keep forgetting how clever you can be.”
“Yes. And me from a family where mother and father are honored and Christianity revered.”
He grew stiffly uncomfortable and changed the subject shamelessly. “My darling countess, news has come. News of an unsettling nature.”
She said nothing, just watched him get out of bed, bolt naked. He turned to her with grandiose smile and went into his bit as if he were fully attired in noble raiment. “France has fallen. Our comrades are in shackles.” He raised one finger as though brandishing a royal scepter. “But one has escaped. One near and dear to me.”
She went along with the male Godiva. “And his name, pray tell?”
“Fat Chance.”
“Pardon?” She was instantly nonplussed. Was he putting her down? Or worse, was he deliberately confusing her? Not letting her get too close to him?
“That’s his name. Theodore ‘Fat’ Chance. Theodore, after his father. Fat, after his belly.”
“Fat Chance.”
“Yes. Somehow he evaded the vile English trap, and already he’s on his way…here.”
“Here.”
“Yes.”
“To live.”
“Yes,” and he turned smilingly sincere. “He’s an old friend. An accountant who’s fallen on hard times and…he’s been evicted from his pad and I bumped into him in the A&P, where he was stealing bouillon cubes and I said, ‘Fat, come and stay with us.’”
“For how long?”
“For the time being.” He turned away and, evidently feeling naked, slipped into his robe while adding, “Starting tomorrow.” Then he picked up his guitar and sat down with it and acted as if he had never mentioned Fat Chance at all. “Here’s an old sea chanty my father wrote for me the night I was conceived. It was first played on my mother’s labia, and nine months later, it was performed in concert on our common umbilical cord. As I recall, it went something like this:
I hope you’re a girl,
because if you’re not;
I can’t name you Florence,
or Helen, or Spot.
He played and sang with a frightening ease, but was very careful not to look at Tiger. Cued by his casual manner, Tiger silently acknowledged that a new phase in their relationship had begun. The Age of Zigzag. It would come in obliquely, and it would settle in devious mosaics. It would bewilder and pain for a while before eventually giving way to a more final ending, which was no doubt already in the wind. And she trembled in the smell of it, for she realized that, as always, she would be powerless in the face of change and hopeless in the wake of parting. Still, there was always the possibility that it was exactly as Luther had stated it, a coincidental meeting in the A&P with an old friend. Fat chance.
8
Tiger could see that Fat had been aptly dubbed. He was Fat. Fat like a cherubic Buddha. Squat and bottom-heavy and somewhat pear-shaped, he was in his mid-twenties and still growing, sideways. He was neatly, if not fastidiously, dressed in what could only be described as Altoona Baroque. He showed no outward signs of poverty, yet possessed no inward qualities of great breeding. He was a pleasant enough type, soft-spoken—even subdued. Still, even as he smiled at her, Tiger couldn’t help recalling that there was a subsurface to every iceberg, and a dark side to the moon, and thorns to the rose, and seeds to the grape, and rats in the basement of even the finest houses. Whose rat and what basement Fat had come from remained to be seen.
Luther was at the far end of his apartment, fussing with a toy that had seen better days, while Fat stood facing Tiger, his valises at his side. He seemed genuinely apologetic. “I’m sure it’s an imposition, but I guess it couldn’t be helped. I have no place to stay and”—he had to reach for the words, and what he came up with sounded suspiciously like a repetition of something Tiger had heard the night before—“having fallen upon hard times…so—” He shot his small shoulders into an upward shrug, looking like a turtle retreating. And when he let them come down, all his flesh jiggled before arriving at a rippling halt.
Tiger could smell the collusion in the room, and she neatly managed to get herself between Fat and Luther so that they could not see each other without shooting her dead in her tracks. She smiled mucho simpático at Fat. “Well, you’re an old friend and…Luther doesn’t have many old friends. And, seeing as how this place is so bare—say—maybe you can help us with our redecorating? Luther says you’re a decorator.” The honey dripped from her fibbing lips.
Luther had to smile. Tiger was onto him, and Fat was on his own. Fat would have to stew in his own juices, which were considerable.
“Oh, yes,” Fat stewed, “I do decorating. Yes, I do that.”
Tiger picked up on it quickly. “Or are you a wood carver? I forget.”
Fat was in the fire and sputtering. “Oh, well. You might say I’m a…kind of a wood-carving decorator. I decorate with…carved wood.”
Tiger moved on victoriously because the fat rat had been cornered by the relentless cat. “I see. Well, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?” She became hospitably Biblical. “Take the east wing. You’ll be warmed by the morning sun.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Fat was pleased to be off the griddle, and he picked up his bags like a hungry bellhop. “My, ah, logs will be arriving soon. I’ll carve you something nice. Maybe a little table—or a fence.” He lost himself in the next room, which was big enough, tripping over his bags in the getting there and arriving in the east wing like an elephant come to die.
Tiger stalked over to where Luther sat at his workbench, quietly humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She was superbly in charge, waiting to see if Luther wouldn’t be the first to fill the silence. He was. “Not much work for a wood carver these days. And he has a son in prep school, a little Italian kid. I believe his name’s Pinocchio. Nice kid, but he lies a lot, has this big nose that keeps growing. Terrible.” He said all that while never looking at her.
“And how long do you know him?” Tiger asked.
“Should I face the jury?”
“Just answer the question, please.”
“Oh, I’d say I know him about…twelve minutes. But it feels longer.” He knew she wasn’t buying, so he got a little closer to the truth. “I know him from around. I mean, I pass him on the street and I say, ‘Good morning,’ if it’s morning, and ‘Gee, it’s raining,’ if it’s raining. And yesterday I said to him, ‘Hello, it’s Wednesday, why don’t you move in?’ And he said, ‘Good-bye, I’ll see you Thursday,’ and there he is, big as lif
e.” He glanced at Fat and added, “Bigger.”
Tiger probed deeper. “Why did you lie to me?”
Luther became a prominent plastic surgeon. “It was necessary. I discussed it with Dr. Gillespie and the entire staff, and we all agreed to lie because we had no way of knowing if the operation would be successful. It could have left your face horribly scarred. Happily, it turned out well, and I’m pleased to inform you that you’ll be playing the piano again in no time. Or is it the kazoo that you studied at Juilliard?”
Tiger was more upset than angry. She didn’t want to broach the issue head on because that always ended up with her the loser. Still, if she let it go without some cursory questioning, it would be her own private Munich for sure. “Luther, have I been—Is it really so difficult being alone with me that you have to pick up…itinerant wood carvers?”
“Actually, I don’t know what he is. I mean, I wouldn’t count on that fence if I were you. Also, I’m not sure I like the fact that you’re so suspicious. You do that a lot, you know. It’s not a pleasant trait.” Having thus turned the gun on her, he got up and wandered out of the apartment and into the hallway. He started down the four flights, never looking back to see if his pet Tiger was padding along behind, which she was.
She chose not to raise her voice at him because she knew she had too few options left. Still, she spoke to him in motion, her words seeming to arrive at his ears just as he was going on to the next landing. “If you didn’t lie so often, I wouldn’t have to be so suspicious.”
“If you weren’t so suspicious, I wouldn’t have to lie so often. I could lie only occasionally, every now and then, like a normal man. But, no—with you around, I have to lie all day long.”
“Which comes first—the chicken or the egg?”
“The rooster.” He stopped and turned up at her, holding his arms open so that when she walked eight stairs down, she was wrapped within them. He hugged her as he stood there, just two steps closer to earth than she was. And he pressed his head against her chest while his big hands moved lower and kneaded her buttocks. “I love you,” he said, as his hands moved on in search of greater treasure.
Standing above him as she was, he seemed a painfully small boy with an Oedipus thing for mommy’s ass. She smiled down at him, allowing his hands to go further beneath her skirt because it was so evil, so unlike anything she’d ever done before she met him. She really couldn’t believe what he was doing with his big fingers, and all of it without as much as a by-your-leave. The cad, he was tugging the elasticity from her panties as well as the starch from her argument. Incongruity. Unpredictability. They were his most fabulous weapons. He could make her hurt for him in the most outrageous situations. And once having transported her into such delightful euphorias, he could get her to forget everything and agree to anything.
He looked up at her from between her breasts, resorting to a moment of undeniable sincerity, which she immediately recognized as his way out. “Tiger, I don’t know. I don’t know why some months have only twenty-eight days. Or why, when a person gets a bop on the head, he gets a bump instead of a dent. Or why I asked Fat to move in. I mean, he’s not terribly attractive. And I never really thought he’d show up. But he’s here, so let’s let him hang around a couple, two, three, four days—till he finds another place. And then—out he goes. Okay? Is that okay, baby?”
She was dissolving in his hands, no longer really caring to argue the topic under discussion. For who would she be fooling? Oh, why, she thought, why did women have to give themselves away so quickly? Why the instantaneous lubrication at just a touch? How many arguments over how many centuries had ladies lost because a male finger found access? She kissed the top of his lying head and melted upon his studious digits. “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Good. Then it’s settled.” He quickly collected his tunneling fingers, and she felt as though her insides had gone along with them. He went hustling down the remainder of the stairs while she stood there in painful dilation, the petals of the rose crying mutely for the return of the bee. Then she followed him down, knowing full well that any time he chose, he could use his shamelessness as a battering ram against her twenty years of uptight morality. It was a measure of their relationship. He could make love to her on the roof of a church, in full view of the congregation, any time he wanted and twice on Sunday. And when he had concluded the debauchery, he could get her to sing the lead in the next hymn.
When she reached the street, he was already fifty yards away but was running back toward her, looking as though he were about to shout, “Look, Ma—no cavities!” Instead, he swept her up in his winged arms, and beaming like a happy fool, he said, “I need you. We can make it work. We really can. This town needs a dentist, Arlene. You’ve seen the cavities. Well, the mayor and the City Council have offered us that little house on Elm Street—rent-free! It’ll be a great place for the kids. Stay with me, Arlene. Stay.”
Tiger was at once the Three Graces—Helpless, Hopeless, and Hapless. “Does it have a sycamore tree?”
“A big one. A hundred feet high and twenty around. Rover will go out of his fucking mind.”
“A garage?”
“Enormous.”
“A white fence?”
“With ivy.”
“I’ll stay.”
He lifted her up and whirled her around as in a perfume commercial. Why was it that it never seemed real to her? He kissed her and said, “Can anyone feel about you as I do? Name six.”
She smiled at his nuttiness. “Jesus…”
“Good. Five more and you win a seat alongside the guest of honor at the Last Lunch.”
“Luther…”
He had already broken away and was taking, two at a time, the stone steps of a nearby brownstone. At the front door he turned and motioned for her to hurry and join him there. Still riding the tail of his momentum, she climbed the red steps, and together, they entered the building’s vestibule.
There were confronted by a directory listing the building’s tenants. There were a dozen names, each with a bell button before it. Luther grabbed her and spun her around as in Pin the Tail on the Donkey. “Close your eyes and stick out a finger.” She complied, naughtily extending her middle finger. “Not that one,” he chided. So she retracted the obscene digit and shot out, in its place, the traditional index finger. “Good,” he said. “Now—go!”
He nudged her toward the directory, and blindly her finger pressed a random bell button. Up there somewhere she could hear the caustic buzzer ring. She opened her eyes and leaned back against Luther and waited for God to strike them both dead. Instead, a grating female voice floated down the stairwell. “Exterminator?”
The door had been opened, and Luther shouted up at it. “Yeah!”
“It’s about time!”
“Yeah!” He checked the name on the directory: Brewsterman, 3B. Then he grabbed Tiger’s hand and led her up the stairs, saying nothing. It was a way of life.
Mrs. Brewsterman stood in the opened doorway, a sour lady, fiftyish and belligerent and fair game. There was a kerchief over her hair, but it didn’t really cover the big pink curlers that stuck out like the lethal points of so many land mines. Tiger felt that should the woman get nasty, they could touch her points and explode her. And wouldn’t that curl Mrs. Brewsterman’s hair?…
Mrs. Brewsterman was not happy. Her gnarled hands lay tapping her thick hips, and her voice shot out like a top sergeant’s. “You certainly take your sweet time. I called eight thirty this morning.”
Luther was at his best, a lying fool with the conviction of Christ. “Sorry, but seems like the whole city’s crawling with mugwumps.” He flicked something from his shoulder, making a face and watching it fall, then stepping on it, and grinding it into the floor. Tiger did likewise with whatever thing was on her shoulder. All she ever needed was the first line of any of Luther’s songs and she could join right in. Just to sweeten the illusion, she reached across at Mrs. Brewsterman and flicked at somethi
ng on her shoulder. But she never had a chance to grind it into the floor because, somehow, it flew away and Tiger watched it go.
Mrs. Brewsterman recoiled in revulsion. “Mugwumps?”
Luther was leaning offhandedly in the doorway. “I’m afraid they’re all over.” He feigned a sudden confusion. “You did call about the night-crawling mugwumps, didn’t you?”
“I called about ants…Night-crawling what?”
Luther explained patiently and professionally. “We’ve had eight calls in this building alone, but most of them are from the first floor. Mugwumps start at ground level, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Anyway, you’re on the third floor, and since it’ll take ’em awhile to work their way up, we’ll come back later—when they do.” And he actually started to leave, smiling reassuringly at her as if to establish his nonreliance on the hard sell.
Mrs. Brewsterman grabbed at his sleeve, and he jumped, pretending that he thought he’d been attacked by an entire gaggle of mugwumps. “What about the ants?” she asked, growing increasingly concerned.
Luther made light of it, even laughing. “Listen, once the mugwumps move in, you’ll wish you had the ants back. Anyway”—he started to leave again—“keep all your soap out of the way. Most people keep it in the refrigerator. Only don’t get it mixed up with your cheese, a-ha-ha.”
“Soap?”
“Do you use it?”
She didn’t quite know how to take that. “Well, we bathe.”
“Yes. That’s where the trouble starts.” Luther had her and he moved in for the kill. “Soap is a mugwump favorite, Mrs. Brewsterman. Anyway, don’t worry about it for now. You’ll know they’re around when you see the little black shells in the soap. They leave their pincers there, you know. And—oh—keep your toothpaste tubes closed real tight. They love to burrow in there, especially if it’s a fluoride. They love fluoride. I guess it’s good for their tiny little needle-sharp teeth.”
A Glimpse of Tiger Page 5