“Howard?” Tentative. Nervous.
“You know, kiddo, it’s not really that bad,” he said.
“Do you mean the house?”
Howard didn’t answer. The older man took a tape measure from his pocket and laid it against the dark molding. Then he wrote something into a little black notebook.
The buyers breathed on our necks, staring at their future. “Oh, Ronnie,” she said, an exhalation like the first chords of a hymn. I would not have been surprised if she had knelt then or made some other mysterious or religious gesture.
“One of these days,” Howard said. “Pow! One of us will be knocked on the head in that crazy city. Raped. Strangled.”
“Howie …”
“And do we have adequate bookshelves? You know you have no room for your books.”
The oak bookshelves before us held all the volumes, A through Z, of the American Household Encyclopedia.
The old man measured the door frame and wrote again in his book. Perhaps he would turn around soon and measure us, recording his findings in a feathery hand.
Jason and another boy discovered one another and stared like mirrors. What would happen, I wondered, if we took the wrong one home, bathed him and gave him Frosted Flakes, kissed him and left the night-light on until he forgot everything else and adjusted? The baby drew on her pacifier and dreamily patted my hair.
Everyone else had passed us and Howard was still in the same doorway. I pulled on his sleeve. “The baby is getting heavy.”
He took her from me and she nuzzled his cheek with her perfect head.
We proceeded slowly to the master bathroom, the one with the dual vanities and a magazine rack embossed with a Colonial eagle.
“Howie, will you look at this. His and hers.”
He didn’t answer.
We went into the bedroom itself, where ghosts of dead queens rested on the carved bed. “Mortgages. Cesspools. Community living.” I faced him across the bed and hissed the words at him, but he didn’t even wince. He looked sleepy and relaxed. I walked around the bed and put my arm through his. “Maybe we look in the wrong places for our happiness, Howard.”
He patted my hand, distracted but solicitous. I walked behind him then, a tourist following a guide. At the olde breakfast nooke, I wanted to sit him down and explain that I was terrified of change, that the city was my hideout and my freedom, that one of us might take a lover, or worse.
But I was silent in the pantry, in the wine cellar and the vestibule, and we were finished with the tour of the house. We stood under the fluttering banners and watched the serious buyers reenter the builder’s trailer. Howard shifted the baby from arm to arm as if she interfered with his concentration. Finally, he passed her to me without speaking. He put his hands into his pockets and he had that dreamy look on his face.
“I’ll drive back,” I said, as if this wasn’t preordained.
There was more traffic now, and halfway home we slowed to observe the remains of an accident. Some car had jumped the guardrail and there was a fine icing of shattered glass on the road.
“Do you see?” I said, not sure of my moral.
But Howard was asleep, his head tilted back against the headrest. At home, I could see he was coming out of it. He was interested in dinner, in the children’s bath. He stood behind me at the sink and he had an erection.
Later, in bed again, I got on top for the artificial respiration I had to give. His mouth opened to receive my tongue, a communion wafer. I rose above him, astounded at the luminosity of my skin in the half-light.
Howard smiled, handsome, damp with pleasure, yes, with happiness, his ghosts mugged and banished from the room.
“Are you happy?” I had to know, restorer of faith, giver of life. “Are you happy?”
And even as I waited for his answer, my own ghosts entered, stood solemn at the foot of the bed, young girls in undershirts, jealous and, watchful, whispering in a grown-up language I could never understand.
16
IT DIDN’T HAVE TO mean anything. It could have been fatigue, nerves. The magazines had a lot of articles about situations like ours. “Things Couples Don’t Talk About.” “When Your Husband Needs Help.” Crammed between the Jell-O molds and the hip-slimnastics, serious-looking guest doctors, photographed wearing their stethoscopes, gave cheering advice to wives of listless men. What to do. What to do.
But it had been a long, asexual winter. The steam heat seemed to dry all of the body’s moistures and shrivel the fantasies of the mind. From the nineteenth floor of Building A, I watched snow fall on the deserted geometry of the playground. The colors of the world were lustless, forbidding. White fell on gray. Gray shadows drew over white.
For all I knew it was an epidemic of some kind—regional, even national. It wasn’t something you could ask your neighbors. But didn’t the whole building seem silent, encased in an icy slumber like a fairy-tale curse?
There were rumors of a sex maniac in the complex. It’s about time, I thought. Had he known that we needed him, that winter had frozen us in our hearts and our beds? Was his to be the kiss of awakening?
But even he didn’t do much of anything. He was seen twice by elderly widows whose thin shrieks seemed to pierce the brain. There had been an invasion of those widows lately, as if old men were dying off in job lots. The widows marched behind the moving men, fluttering, birdlike. Their sons and daughters were there to supervise, looking sleek and modern next to the belongings: chairs with curved legs, massive headboards of marriage beds trembling on the backs of the movers. The widows smiled shyly as if survival embarrassed them.
Now two of them had encountered a sex maniac. Help, they had shrilled. Help and help, and he had been frightened off by their cries before he could effect the renaissance we needed. I wondered where he waited now in ambush and if I would ever meet him on a loveless December night—that is, if he even existed. Who could trust the word of those distracted women?
But then the sex maniac was seen by a more reliable source. The superintendent’s wife came from a mining area in Pennsylvania, a place not noted for frivolity. She had gazed at a constant landscape and she had known men who had suffocated in sealed mines. Her word was to be honored; she had no more imagination than the grocer’s boy. After the police were finished, the women of the building fell on her with questions. Did he just—you know—show himself? Did he touch her? What did he say?
She answered with humorless patience. Contrary to rumor, he was merely a white man, not very tall, and young, like her own son. But not really like her own son, she was quick to add. He had said terrible, filthy things to her in a funny quiet way, as if he were praying, and I saw him in my mind’s eye, reedy and pale, saying his string of obscenities like a litany in a reverent and quaking voice.
The superintendent’s wife said he hadn’t touched at all, only longed to touch, promised, threatened to touch.
Ahhhhhhhhh, cried the women. Ahhhhhhh. The old widows ran to the locksmith for new bolts and chains. The men in the building began to do the laundry for their wives. They went in groups with their friends. Did the sound of their voices diminishing in the elevators remind the superintendent’s wife of men going down to the mines?
Howard ruined our wash, mixing the light with the dark, using too much bleach. “Did you see anything?” I asked. But it seemed that he hardly even saw me.
In the meantime there were other men in my life. The children developed coughs that made them sound like seals barking, and the health plan sent Dr. Pearlman. He was thin, mustachioed, bowed by the burden of house calls. Bad boys in bad neighborhoods stole his hubcaps and snapped off his aerial. Angry children bit his fingers as he pried open the hinges of their jaws. I clasped a flower pin to my best housedress, the children jumped on the beds intoning nursery rhymes, but the doctor snapped his bag shut with the finality of the last word. His mustache thin and mean, he looked like the doctors of my childhood. We trailed after him to the door, but he didn’t turn around. Never min
d. There were policemen to ask us leading questions and to write our fiction down in their notebooks. There was the super with his cruel and burning eyes, the usual parade of repairmen and plumbers.
There was the delivery boy from the market. His name was Earl. I coaxed him into the apartment. Just put it there, Earl. Just a minute while I get my purse, Earl. Is it still as cold out there? Is it going to snow again? Will the price-level index rise? Is my true love true to me? But he was a boy without vision or imagination. He counted out the change and he hurried to leave.
That night I said to Howard, “Love has left this land.” When Jason and the baby were tucked in behind veils of steam from the vaporizer, we tried to disprove it. We turned to one another in that chorus of coughing children and whispering radiators. The smell of Vicks was there, eaten into my hand, into the bedclothes, and the lovemaking was only ritual.
There were rumors that the sex maniac had moved on, to fresher territory or a better climate. I had never seen him. Not once crouched in the corner of the laundry room, not once moaning his demands on the basement ramp, not once cutting his footprints across fresh snow in the courtyard.
But Howard had been a sex maniac himself, mumbling his own tender obscenities against my skin, telling me that I drove him crazy. He had been a mugger waiting to turn me upside down and shake out all my sexual loose change. Didn’t he remember? Was I being unfair?
It’s really no one’s fault, I told myself. I huddled against Howard’s back. It was the fault of the atmosphere, the barometric pressure, the wind velocity. It didn’t mean anything at all.
17
HOWARD’S BASS PLAYER WAS leaving the group for a long engagement with a blues singer in Las Vegas. Louis came to the apartment to drop off some music and to say good-bye before he left for the airport. He came in dragging his cased fiddle, his black hair shining with melted snow. “Can’t leave this in the car, man,” he said. “I’d be out of work in a minute.” He was excited, almost manic. You could tell by the way he moved and by the smile he couldn’t dim, even when he spoke his regrets about splitting with the group. But Vegas, man!
I had never been there myself, yet I saw a kaleidoscopic picture of neon lights, whirling roulette wheels, and overdressed people killing themselves to have a good time.
Louis was Howard’s age, but he was single. He’d had lots of women and one or two common-law arrangements, broken by mutual consent. And he had lived everywhere, even in France for a while, before we knew him. Howard looked pale in the radiant glow of Louis’s enthusiasm.
Later, the apartment seemed very quiet, and even the street noises were muffled by a fresh fall of snow. Howard was writing into a ledger at the kitchen table. I watched him from the sink where I was washing the supper dishes. Once in a while Jason coughed lightly in his sleep.
It should have been cozy, just us insulated against the night, with no need for conversation or even music. And yet I felt uneasy, as if sound, any sound, would hold back something as yet unknown but surely dreadful. What could be dreadful in that kitchen? I squeezed suds through a nylon sponge; Howard wrote into his book. He looked especially sweet to me then, and boyish in his concentration. “Hey,” I said. “Do you know what you look like?”
Howard held one hand up and scribbled into the ledger. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. And then, “What did you say?”
“I said, do you know what you look like?”
He tapped his pencap on the table and he didn’t seem very interested.
I went ahead anyway. “You look just like a little kid doing his homework.”
“Ha!” Howard said. “That’s a laugh.” But he wasn’t laughing, or even smiling, for that matter. His expression was more like an ironic smirk, and I felt sorry that I had broken the safety barrier of our silence.
“I don’t see anything funny,” I said.
“It’s not funny,” Howard agreed. “It’s actually sad, your telling me I look like a kid. I was just thinking that I feel like an old man.”
“You?” I said.
“I feel about a thousand years old.”
“You don’t look a day over nine hundred to me,” I said.
But Howard still didn’t smile. He didn’t even look up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’re not sick or anything, Howie, are you?”
Howard closed the ledger and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he seemed slightly dazed, unfocused. “No, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “I just feel … I don’t know ….”
I dried my hands and sat down on another chair, pulling it close to his. “Give me a little hint. I really want to know. Does it have anything to do with me?”
“It’s nothing, I told you. Only a feeling. I’m probably just tired.”
“Sure,” I said, eager to believe him. “Winter can do that. It gets into your bones and saps all your energy. And you haven’t been sleeping that well, anyway. Tossing all night, talking in your sleep.”
Howard’s eyes cleared. “I do?” he said. “What do I say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Mumbles, moans. You’re probably only dreaming. Have you been having bad dreams lately?”
Howard nodded.
“Do you want to tell me about them?”
“Paulie, you know I don’t believe in that stuff. Dreams don’t have anything to do with anything else.”
“Oh, Howie, you can’t mean that! Dreams are an important part of your unconscious life. They’re like wonderful mysteries you can unravel. Come on, tell me. You’ll probably feel better if you talk about it. Is it always the same dream?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s in it?”
“You are. You and the kids.”
“We are? Well, go ahead. What happens?”
“It’s a lousy dream,” he said. “I can’t help what I dream. The house is on fire. You’re all inside.”
My heart tripped. “Where are you?” I asked.
“Downstairs, in the street.”
“But you’re trying to get inside, aren’t you, to save us?”
Howard didn’t answer, and he looked stricken with sorrow.
In dreams begin responsibilities, I thought. But I said, “Well, that happens,” forcing cheer into my tone. “Everyone has dreams like that, where you’re paralyzed, helpless, in the worst situations. But what’s really bothering you? In real life, I mean. Is business okay?” He hadn’t talked that much recently about the studio, or about the weekend jobs.
“Yeah, business is okay,” he said. “But that’s just it. I’m in business. Me, a guy who used to play gigs, who sat in and jammed for the hell of it. Now I’m keeping books.”
“Well,” I said, not sure of what to say next. “Maybe I could help you with the bookkeeping. I wasn’t exactly a whiz in math, but I’d try.”
Howard lit a cigarette. “No, it’s okay,” he said. “The books aren’t that bad. They’re only a symbol, anyway. It’s the other things. Keeping a businessman’s hours. Trying to teach those poor squeaking kids the sax and clarinet.”
“You could cut down on the lessons, Howard, couldn’t you? We’d still get by.”
“I suppose …” he said, but his voice was flat with despair. And he looked round-shouldered, defeated. He certainly didn’t look like a kid anymore.
It’s only Louis, I thought, bursting in here and spoiling everything with his jazzed-up happiness. Louis strumming and thumping new girls with a careless joy, as if they were bass fiddles, or moving free on that late flight to Las Vegas, his plane setting down in a dazzle of lights.
Of course Howard saw only what he wanted to see. He would never picture Louis waking lonely in a motel room or, years later, dissipated and disappointed, and wondering why he had chosen to live that way.
I tried to imagine Howard’s old life. I remembered, with a pitching sensation, the first time I saw him in that haze of sweet music. And I remembered Sherry’s warning about the special sensuality of musicians. Was it dependent
on a whole life-style or only on the particular sounds they made together in dark, evening places?
“And you’d still have your club dates,” I said.
“Ah, even the club dates are a drag now. I’m hustling for a buck all the time, and there’s hardly any excitement, any fun in it.”
Fun! Who had fun at his job? Did he think my job was fun? Let him try to find romance in the kitchen, hilarity in the laundry room.
Even kings and queens probably hated their jobs from time to time, and wished they could climb down from their thrones and be freewheeling and without responsibility. That was the key to the whole thing of course: responsibility, maturity. But I knew intuitively that it wouldn’t be a wise thing to say to Howard then. Reasonable, realistic talk was the last thing he wanted to hear when he was dreaming of freedom, of earlier times. It would only be taken as a lecture by his leading millstone.
“When the kids are a little older,” I said, “I’ll get a job too. This isn’t a life sentence, Sweetheart.”
And finally Howard smiled, but indulgently, the way he sometimes smiled at Jason or the baby. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing. I’ll get over it. I’m practically over it already.”
But I wasn’t convinced. I still felt uneasy, even threatened, and I searched my head for new ideas. “Say, did you ever think of writing songs?” I asked. “All you’d need is one big hit.”
“I’m not a songwriter,” Howard said.
“You could write the music. I’d do the words,” I said. “Who knows? Maybe that’s where I have to go with my poetry.”
“Will you cut it out, Paulie?” Howard said. “I’m not a songwriter. I’m a musician.” He pushed his chair back from the table, as if he were going to stand up.
I moved quickly from my chair to his lap.
“Jesus! Easy,” he said.
“Rhyming can’t be harder than free verse. June, moon, tune. See?” I snapped my fingers and moved my feet in a fast, desperate shuffle. “We’ll be a team, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, like Lerner and Lowe. There must be a fortune in songwriting. Then you’d never have to do anything you didn’t want to again.”
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