Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  You were supposed to be away for the whole weekend with the Debate Team. Only they called it off, and so you got back home a little after midnight Friday. Walked into the house happily, already slipping out of your clothes, with a whole unexpected, unplanned weekend ahead of you. You were tiptoeing (you thought maybe she would be asleep). Otherwise we would have heard you, I think. Maybe. Actually we were each and both reaching that state of being where the explosion of a bomb in the driveway or the front yard wouldn’t have distracted us. If we’d heard at all. You tippy-toed into your own bedroom, switched on the light, and got about halfway into some familiar, cheery greeting when you saw that smile and cheer were being wasted on the large, inadvertent, pale and glowing moon of a bare ass. Mine.…

  After that things began happening kind of quickly. But I can, by some oversimplifying, impose an order and sequence on events. Geraldine is free of me as if repelled by an electric shock. She has got the sheet all around her—thus even more fully exposing me to chilly light and chill air—and she is trying to curl up under the pillow. You, still without a full word, have turned toward the bureau and snatched open the top drawer. I have not yet moved. Not purely out of shock and fright, mind you, but also because I can vividly imagine a large, blue-black, shiny, well-oiled, well-kept revolver, probably a .38 Police Special, resting in the bureau drawer just beyond your fingertips. And naturally I am amazed that you would have a gun in there. You know how strongly I feel about the necessity for gun control. My position on the possession of handguns has always been quite clear. Politics and ideology aside, however, I am thinking that I am sure enough about to be shot at, but with luck I may yet come out of this alive. I am betting it all on the fact that you are (1) completely surprised, (2) naturally a little nervous, (3) basically nonviolent, (4) hopelessly inept with mechanical things, (5) and probably a lousy shot. My first thought is that I must begin by offering you a target, something to shoot at, but which, if hit, will likely do the least permanent damage. Hoping that luck, thick muscle, and adequate fat will save my vital organs, banking on the expectation that one good clean messy hit will bring you to your senses, I therefore exaggerate the somewhat awkward position which Geraldine has left me in, trying with the facility of a contortionist to curl up completely behind that largest of muscles. Hoping that the bland bare sight of it will so enrage you as to cause you to miss me altogether.

  Instead of a shot, however, in this timeless instant, I listen to your deep breathing and some considerable rummaging in the bureau drawer. Things start landing on the floor. I decide I’d better sneak a peek, even though it may be my last one. Therefore I shift my strategy and my stance slightly, rising up higher. To view you more or less as, say, the center sees the punter on fourth down.

  At which point, precisely, you turn back toward the bed, twist, rather; twist your head to look at the bed. Our glances meet. Upside down, of course. And I am happy to see that you are empty-handed.

  What else can I do, then, prior to resuming my original position, what can I possibly do but wink?

  “Geraldine!” you shout.

  Muffled noise from beneath the pillow.

  “Where the hell is my fucking gun? I left it in the top drawer.”

  Ah, a familiar domestic situation. In a trice and a twinkling Geraldine is back in charge.

  “Well,” she says clearly and distinctly, “I haven’t touched it. Try the bottom drawer.”

  Clutching her sheet—in fact all of the sheets pulled out from under me in one smooth deft yank—she is now rising with every intention, it seems, of helping you search for the gun.

  Wrapped in her cloud of sheets, she is suddenly between us.

  And I? Off of that bed in a roll. Scooping up my undershorts like a third baseman handling a hot grounder. Out the window without wondering if it’s open or not.

  Discovering, a good hundred meters away from the house, that indeed it had been open and all I have wrapped around me is the screen and its frame. A picture entitled “The Wages of Sin” is moving twinkle-toed, screen and all, through a series of almost identical backyards in the Whispering Pines Subdivision. Tangling blindly with rows of hedges while trying to take them like low hurdles. In one case having a memorable encounter with a portable outdoor grill on wheels. Which sails me along merrily as far as a blue plastic swimming pool, through which I thrash and splash, half-drowning, while packs of dogs begin to bark and various lights come on.

  I shall pause in my headlong flight through the awakening neighborhood, suspenseful and pathetic as it may be, to say, “Meanwhile, back at your house …”

  Now, Ray I have to confess that this next part is not purely imagination. I got it from Geraldine the next time we met. I do not give my unqualified credulity to her version, of course. Geraldine, bless her heart, has a tendency to lie grandly when she can or has to. And when she cannot, she will certainly do a little needlepoint upon the plain pattern of truth. So I do not believe that part of her story—how later she managed to con you so that, when the time for apology could no longer be deferred, it was you who apologized. And then were deeply grateful for her forgiveness.

  It’s possible, I’ll grant you. Perhaps also true, but I prefer not to accept it. Nor, for that matter to think about it very much. However, I am willing to accept other elements as basic facts.

  The two of you together searched through the bureau for your pistol. No pistol. In your perfectly understandable anger and dismay, you turned on Geraldine and accused her of having hidden the damn thing, just in case this ever happened.

  Very dumb move, Ray.

  She denies it. Did not touch, has not ever touched that damn dumb fuckingpistol of yours. Would not either. Being as how she, for one, knows how to respect another person’s goddamn privacy. Then she reminds you how you were down in the basement, cleaning the pistol, a couple of days ago.

  Maybe, you allow. But you wouldn’t have just left it down there.

  Yes, you did. You did! Because you got a phone call from the Dean. You had forgotten all about that—the meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy. You had to haul ass over there, fast as you could.

  Now you remember it all—the call, a wild, fast drive over to school in the Triumph, tearing up four flights to the Dean’s Office, two clumsy steps at a time, bursting into the room a half hour late and suddenly all those astonished, hostile faces looking at the doorway and you standing there in work clothes, panting, both hands all grubby with oil and grease.

  Down you go to the basement, Ray, to look and see for yourself. And I go with you, even now. Feeling it all. Stiffness and the slight vague pain in your bad leg. Stooping at your height, under the low ceiling, moving toward the worktable. Where, sure enough and just as you left it, there’s the pistol amid rags, an oil can, toothbrush, patches, and a stiff wire brush for the bore. You stand there a moment, testing the cool, pure, clean weight of it. Then a brief flash of inspiration, a flicker of a smile. Yes, she has got you cold, dead to rights and right back in your place. But you smile to yourself, poor deluded Ray. You climb back up the basement stairs. Slow, regular, noisy. Conveying decision and direction. Clump, clump, clump, the ever-so-slight drag of the gimpy leg, through the kitchen, diagonally across a piece of darkened living room, and back into the bedroom.

  To find her changed into her best nightie, sitting at her dressing table, back to you, but able to see you enter in her mirror. What happens next I can’t claim to know; but either, without missing a stroke with her hairbrush as you approach, she informs you that you’d be a whole lot more scary if that gun were loaded; or equally likely, she reacts with operatic fright, so convincing that you immediately reassure her by showing her the gun is not loaded, whereupon you find yourself having to apologize for frightening her half out of her wits.

  In any event, apologize you will, must, and do. And now you are ready to talk about it, to discuss the whole thing.

  She is not ready, but a light is in her eyes. She’s got an idea. John Tow
ne is lucky to be alive. He needs to be taught a serious lesson. You can agree on that much, if she keeps talking and you don’t stop to think about it. If you had shot me when you first came in, you’d have been within your rights; if you proceed to shoot me now, however, even assuming you do find the shells for the pistol, it will technically be first-degree murder. Geraldine says she hates the thought of you in jail. She needs you. She needs you near and available. Maybe you could get off on grounds of temporary insanity, but …

  You are practically hypnotized by then, Ray. What’s more, she has an even better idea. The two of you should get in the car and drive over to my place. I should be there by now. You will wake us up and scare the wee-wee out of me with the big gun and making a horrible face like you did when you came sneaking back in the bedroom trying to be funny. You can take the clothes and shoes I left behind, and hurl them on my living-room floor, enjoy fully the look on Annie’s vapid, pretty face as she discovers, at long last, the truth about the two-faced, two-timing, sonofabitching sex fiend and monster she is married to. Then turn with pride and dignity and leave them to each other. She has all the money, such as it is, you know. A taste of poverty will serve Jack right. At that point, Ray, you accept her logic. Partly because it is better than doing nothing, and no question, you do love that Geraldine. And who wouldn’t? She may be a little tacky, but she is a truly first-rate piece of ass.

  So you gather up my clothes and get in the station wagon. Solemnly, with even a certain stiff ceremony to the occasion. I bet you even held the door open for Geraldine when she climbed in.

  It is, or will be, important you are not driving the Triumph. You are behind the wheel of a John Wesley College wagon, the one you checked out earlier to drive the Debate team.

  I’ll bet—I can actually see it happening—you haven’t driven two blocks before Geraldine, her spirits and confidence now fully restored, has punched on the radio and is humming along with the music of an all-night record show.

  Meanwhile, Ray, I had made it safely home. Out of Whispering Pines, through the fringes and edges of town across town, skirting the campus but using the park and the cemetery to good advantage, part way along the railroad tracks, and finally home, over the plowed field behind our (Annie’s) literally Colonial house. The real thing, only all furnished in blond Swedish and Danish and probably Finnish modern, with rugless, highly polished, wide-board floors, damn few objets, barish light-colored walls. Only a very few choice pictures and prints hanging, and those changed regularly. Fresh cut flowers, artfully arranged. Some old musical instruments that nobody plays, mostly stringed things all out of tune. Pots and ceramics made by Annie herself, together with a few elegant examples of her stitchery. And not to forget the brick and board bookcases; the big stereo setup that can rattle every windowpane in the house. The nursery for Allison, not out of Winnie the Pooh at all, but instead as sparse as everything else, with strictly functional toys. One bare cold bathroom upstairs with a high, claw-footed, stained, wheezing turn-of-the-century tub. A toilet with an honest-to-God chain pull. And ancient, scratchy towels (oh long before Margaret Drabble tried to make them popular!). Hardly a mirror in the whole house except for the one in the bathroom—small, old, distorted, badly lit, silvered—over the medicine cabinet. Where, if you peeked, you find it as neat and bare as a GI’s footlocker. Only the most basic toilet gear, a bottle of Listerine, and a bottle of aspirin so old that the tablets were crumbled to powder.

  Did I mention the bedroom? Most of it occupied by our big, low bed. Which was really only a mattress and an inner spring set up on wood blocks.

  Maybe that’s what first attracted me to Geraldine. Such a good old simple broad, you know? Everything phony and wonderfully cluttered. Fancy bathroom with all the latest equipment and the soft, colored toilet paper, the covered seat for the john, the cute and vulgar stack of reading material. I think you even had a bidet. I may be wrong. But when I try to picture your bathroom, I always see a bidet gleaming there. And who could forget the full rich medicine cabinet of Geraldine Wadley? I picture everything I can imagine and then I multiply by two. Then add a little forest of pill bottles, every kind of prescription from a couple of dozen different doctors. All about half full. And Geraldine had big soft, expensive, wraparound towels just like in the movies.

  Ray, I have to admit I really liked your bathroom.

  So, anyway, winded, battered, and bruised, toes stubbed and feet full of splinters, eyes teary from twigs, I find myself home at last, sneaking in. Why do I sneak? She’s wide awake, reading a book in the living room. Oriental kimono, smoking a Schimmelpenick cigar, reading a book and listening to Segovia.

  When I come in, Annie looks over the top of her book and reacts. Very cool, as ever and always.

  “Hi, Jack, is anything wrong?”

  “I’m afraid I may be in a little trouble.”

  “Oh … what kind of trouble?”

  So I explain how I was in the Library working late as usual. And how I got a phone call from Geraldine Wadley. All frantic about how some kind of an animal is loose in the house. Big bat or a flying squirrel or something like that. Ray is away on the Debate trip and she is scared out of her mind. Would I, as a very big favor, please, please come out there and get rid of it?

  I was, naturally, playing on every decent chord I could reach. Annie loves animals. All kinds of animals indiscriminately. Supreme contempt for any woman who is frightened of any animal. Besides which Annie has always had a dim view of Geraldine. Convinced Geraldine is a slut and a hussy and a Jezebel. Cheap and tawdry temptress. Two-dollar whore, etc., etc., etc.

  Of course, Annie liked you a lot, Ray, and thought you were patient and long-suffering.

  I continue to create my simple fiction. I get out there (never mind how, Annie doesn’t ask) to your house and discover a flying squirrel is indeed in the basement. In passing I mention the fact that Geraldine greets me at the door wearing only her panties and bra. Insisting that she was so upset and panic-stricken that she probably forgot all about her personal appearance.

  Knowing better, Annie smiles and permits me to continue my tale.

  Well, Geraldine has this big pistol and she wants me to shoot the flying squirrel. I will have none of that. Truth is, I couldn’t bring myself to kill a flying squirrel. But I explain it to her in more practical terms. I am liable to shoot up her lovely home. A .38 slug could easily carry over to a neighbor’s house. Anyway the explosions will wake up the whole subdivision. What I will do, I say, is catch the beast and release him outside.

  “Catch a flying squirrel? You?” Annie laughs at that.

  “Scoff as you may and must,” I answer her. That’s exactly what happened. In the limited space of the basement I was able to run the bugger down and trap him in an old badminton net. But not before I ripped my trousers on a nail, dirtied my shirt, and soaked my shoes in water leaking from the ancient hot-water heater.

  After I set the squirrel free in the yard and returned, Geraldine seemed very grateful. She insisted that the least she could do was to sew up the rip in my trousers and run the shirt and socks through her washer and dryer. (Annie is sternly against dependence on appliances.)

  I remind Geraldine that it is getting pretty late and that the Library is already closed. I better go on home as is. Nonsense, Geraldine insists, wouldn’t dream of sending you home like that. What would Annie think? I am urged to go into the bedroom, hand my stuff through the door, stretch out, relax, watch TV or something. And she’ll be through in a jiffy. Should I call Annie? No use worrying Annie about it. She’s probably asleep by now anyway.

  In trusting innocence I did as she suggested. I did, however, notice that while I had been crawling around down in the basement she had modified her outfit. Changing into a black, powdery, filmy sort of a peignoir. And once I was inside the bedroom I noticed (one each) panties and bra draped across a chair. But I honestly never stopped to think …

  “You’re too naïve,” Annie concludes.

&nb
sp; “Maybe so,” I am willing to concede.

  I stretched out on their bed. Since I share my dear and loving wife’s supreme contempt for TV and since there are no books in the bedroom, merely some old copies of Cosmo and Mademoiselle …

  “She has always dressed too young.”

  … I dozed off briefly. Eyes tired from my long hours of study. An intimate touch, the odor of an unfamiliar perfume waked me. There she was, on the bed beside me, as bare-assed as Eve in Eden, an amorous glint in her eye if I ever saw one …

  “That bitch!”

  But wait. Nothing really happens. Then suddenly everything happens. Who drives up, lights flashing across the bedroom walls, but my good friend Ray? What will I do? If I try and explain everything, will he believe me?

  I never had a chance to decide what was the right thing to do. For just as Ray came whistling and limping into the house, Geraldine made a unilateral decision. She hollered rape at the top of her voice. Ray came into the bedroom just in time to see me bail out of the window.

  God knows what will happen next. They might even call the police.

  Now, Ray, here is where Annie really surprised me.

  “What happens next, sport, is that you get some clothes on, and we will drive over there and straighten the whole thing out.”

  “Don’t you think it might be better to wait until morning? Let things cool off a little?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll see Ray at school tomorrow anyway and tell him the complete story. No use your getting involved too.”

  “Don’t be such a coward,” Annie says. “Whenever something serious happens in our lives, you always try to avoid it. Usually by comedy. You will go right to the center of a scene and then cop out with a gag line.”

  “Show me a gag line and I’ll go after it like a dog chasing a stick,” I say.

  But there is no getting out of it. I get dressed to go. I am thinking, what the hell, Ray will never shoot me down in front of Annie. And she will attribute your fantastic story to your sense of misguided nobility—the desire to protect Geraldine’s (ho-ho-ho) reputation.