“Heavens! Was that man there when you came in, in the garage, exposing himself?” says Persephone. Catcalls from the rest of the women. “You guys. Seriously, there ought to be some way he can get help. Well? Obviously he’s in need.”
The day of the flasher, May, like a real, established lover, was listening to a small unloving mockery of Jackie in her mind. This gave her some relief. But suddenly the doorway where Jackie was standing went dark as a negative. It grew veins like the sheen in coal. Her amusement was cut off by the fear, for the first time, that she really was having a stroke: fading room, vertigo, angel advancing to take her through that tunnel described in the near-death book.
If so it was a miniature, domesticated stroke, coming and going in three breaths.
If May doesn’t leave the restaurant now she will be late for work. She gets up, she tips more than the cost of the coffee. Old women don’t tip. It is hers, this nationality: old women. This country: old. Last night she planted her flag in it, in the middle of the night, hearing an echo in the room. Leg cramps awoke her. A beam of sunlight had been narrowing itself through the magnifying glass someone—her father!—held in his hand, until a tiny fire hissed on a dry leaf. Her legs hurt from crouching with him. She heard herself call someone to come.
She had a feeling she had shouted for her mother, she knew she had gone even farther back the second before she woke up all the way, and had been home from school in bed, her legs hurting. But she woke before the necessary moment, when her mother would be heard running up the stairs, hurrying to her, up from the cellar, her hands smelling of the potato bin—or no, how awful to have confused them—but it was deep night, May was barely awake—her potato-storing stepmother with her real, her darling mother, who would sit down on her bed smelling of typewriter ribbon and cigarettes and say, “How about a story?”
Of course it is May’s own stories that draw Jackie to her desk, and often the others as well. They like to hear how May gets around; they squeal at what happens to her in ordinary places where they go themselves: restaurants, movie theaters, auto parts stores. They like her attitude.
Her story for today is about the boy who came and sat on the hood of her station wagon when she was stopped at a light. This massive, rust-eaten Ford that her daughters refuse to drive when they visit is hers because when she taught, she was the one who drove on field trips. Once it roared through the city with May at the wheel, to museums, parks, the Science Center, filled with the daydreams of teenagers packed thigh to thigh.
The boy climbed up on the bumper and rocked there, peering through the windshield at her before turning himself around on the heels of his hands and sitting down rather gently, considering he was on the hood. When the light changed, the car behind paused and then went around her. The driver was a woman, who pretended not to notice the boy sitting on May’s car. May got out and said hello. She could never ignore a boy of this age, fifteen, sixteen. She said, “Anything I can do for you?” From the movies, she knows how to say that in a way somebody from the country of the young won’t resent. She doesn’t attempt their lingo but neither does she use conspicuous phrases from the past.
The boy looked down at his legs and up at the stoplight before he said, “Uh . . . ?” It came out a question, followed by a long pause. He was not going to be displaced, but he was swaying, hesitating. He was looking around for squad cars or the officers on bicycles they had now. If only I knew karate, May thought. She would have arced him lightly off the hood onto his back on the grass strip along the sidewalk. Then she would have invited him go to have coffee with her, if he drank coffee, and begin a new life.
That’s what would happen in the movie of this encounter. The comedy. In the tragedy he would take the car. First he would have to shoot her. But no, the tragedy would be his life, not hers. If he shot her it would be accidentally; that would be in keeping with the trajectory of his existence. She would come late in the credits, having appeared for only those moments in the last scene: The Old Woman.
In her account it doesn’t happen either way.
She asked the boy if he was sick. “Nah,” he said. “I need a car.” He was sizing her up, but she had the idea he couldn’t see her very well, the morning sun behind her making him squint. “Aw, now,” he said, “look like I could have this kind of a car.”
“You ought to have a better car than this,” May said. “You can see it has problems. You have to work your way into handling this kind of a car.”
He made his hand a visor over his eyes and surveyed the block. “Aahhh . . .” he said, as if he might spit. “Keep it. I’m to the point . . . I’m done. I’m done. I can’t get there anyway.”
“Where?”
“Over to the center.” He paused in thought. “My hours.”
“Your hours. Community service? Juvenile court?” May said sharply. She knew about hours. They all said “my hours.” The boy didn’t answer, or even nod, he slid off the car and stood swaying. He paused to think, he grappled with desires in himself, she thought, that had no object. The things he wanted were not here, and could not be produced. He started away sideways, with his palms up, and when May followed, he ran. Now she was looking into the sun, and saw only his shape. He ran with grace and looseness, loose knees—she recognized this, this was heroin—his body dipping like a lighter flame before it comes to poise, but he managed it.
He ran away from her.
With her stiff legs, there was no question of chasing him to make him understand he had to get to his hours. All of his future, whether he would be permitted work, tenancy, fatherhood, even a life of any length, hinged on whether he could slide through a crack that had opened, whether he showed up, on this particular morning, where he was expected.
Don’t disappear! she wanted to shout, seeing him pass straight out of some young social worker’s patience, out of the folder marked Probation. Wait, don’t disappear!
He didn’t look back, either, to check if an old woman was in pursuit, clutching her chest.
When he shied against a Dumpster and rebounded into the alley and out of sight, May sat all the way down on the curb in her olive dress, dizzy and clammy. She hadn’t had any breakfast. The restaurant with the skylight and the little girl were still ahead.
Don’t tell that part.
Don’t go on and on. Tell it briskly.
“Oh, May,” Jackie would say with a sigh. “What if something had happened to you?”
“She was going to take him right on over to the center!” That would be Patricia. “She would do that.”
“She would.” Carmen, the supervisor, would fold her arms. “Wouldn’t you? Admit it. You’d pick somebody up. You’d let ’em in your car. Oh, you have to be watched. We had better keep a very close eye on you.”
Often they fell to talking about May as if she were a child. “I think it’s those movies she goes to, don’t you? She is running out to the movies. The R-rated, that’s what she likes.”
Sometimes at the office May feels like a child falling asleep in the back seat of a car, half hearing itself talked about, with everything left to others. Not with Patricia, who bullies her, but with the younger ones. She loses the sense of what they are saying, and feels only the presence of them in their dry-cleaned blouses and perfume, with their watches, earrings, polished nails, their toes slipped out of shoes, stretching against the nylon. No matter what might await them when they ride down the seven floors in their coats to leave the building, here inside, perfume hangs in the air and helpless laughter from the day before, from every day, waits to be resumed. These things are restful, like being rocked, or riding an escalator that never arrives at the top, though it is going there, where it seems something indeed might be waiting: a message, a divine caress. Basking like this, she can await it.
The talk goes on until somebody looks at the clock and says, “Well, I have a whole disk over there and if I don’t do it today Carmen will shit.”
“I will,” Carmen will say, disappearing into
her own cubicle. “I will do that, so get to work or I’ll have you fired.”
“I could sit here all day,” Jackie will say, “but I guess I should get something done. Everyone else is. Well, May. What a life. I wish my grandmother took some interest in life, like you,” as she picks up her hair, in which bars of sunlight from the blinds are lodged like combs, makes a tube of her fingers, and draws it all smoothly down her back.
May is a year younger than Jackie’s grandmother. If May were a man, the gap would be less. Come to dinner with me, he would feel free to say, because old age doesn’t matter in men.
But that isn’t true either. Two old men have apartments in May’s wing, the retirement wing. One is very old, and has a body like a label that is peeling away; one day his hipbone will snap dryly if he shifts as his foot comes down hard on the concrete steps. Though fatigue covers him like ash, he dresses well; his suit follows the caved-in lines of his body. He combs his yellow-white hair with Alberto VO5, a smell May remembers. His son, who must be seventy, comes every day to take him somewhere. Son and father argue on the stairs over who is in charge of the descent.
The other old man has a stronger, denser body than the man in the suit. He has done work with it. He has lived in the building longer than May has, but his skin—she sometimes gets a look at him in the stairwell; like her he shuns the elevator—has not lost a certain sunburned tinge. Savage eyes, this man has, that flash at her as she comes up the stairs pulling on the rail, a message of hidden and secret, demonically persistent youth. Lately she has begun to feel a stirring of the same sort of feeling about him that she let herself in for when she started noticing Jackie. One little fire is not enough, apparently; another must sputter to life.
Still, she thinks, even if it conjures itself up out of nothing, love is not imaginary. If this feeling drawn out of her by the very sight of certain people is a kind of love. It’s not the same thing as food eaten in dreams, of that she is stubbornly sure. The body feels it and it’s real, it is always real.
Once she saw the man on his balcony as she was trying to ring somebody else in the building to let her in. It was early spring and unusually warm; she had left her coat at work with the keys in the pocket. The man’s chin was turned to the sky, which was a rare March blue, streaked with the flame shapes of hurrying clouds, and he was grimacing, holding the railing as if he might rip it up out of the concrete. He did not belong in this building! It could not be he who lived in a building for old people, himself old! The blue and white sky streamed away from him. He looked down at May and she filled her hair out a little with her fingers as she looked up. Oh, I’m weak in spring, she thought, with a tenderness for her old habits. She took several backward steps to see him, backing into the little courtyard, which had a stone bench for them to catch their breath on. She felt for the bench behind her and sat down, not even checking to see if the pigeons had made a mess. She couldn’t stop looking up at the figure on the balcony.
I’m in the same country, she wanted to yell up to him. She didn’t ask him for help getting into the building, even though for a second she had imagined he must see the blue fire all around her.
TWO
Troublemakers: Nathanael
Troublemakers. Because of the home, and what was in it, because of the bad luck of being from a certain kind of home. “So you’re a kid, and things are bad at home. You want to make trouble for somebody else, you want to get even. Anybody knows that who’s missing a parent. Say a divorce. Say a parent dies.”
May looks up.
“One parent is insufficient.” The man has broken in on stories going around the table, a round table for eight with the napkins in cones on the dinner plates. She watches him.
They’re in a hotel ballroom, behind a wall of draperies drawn across the spring night and bellying just a little where a rumor of the Chicago wind reaches them. They’re talking about the classroom, about troublemakers. There is still just this category “troublemaker”: no metal detectors, no blackened spoons in lockers, no despair. Or there must be despair. But no one says so here, no one at this education conference in 1960; they’re talking about pranksters, fatherless misbehavers, motherless Huck Finns: troublemakers.
May has one or two in her classroom, one of them the author of a scrawled page in the pile she brought with her to grade in her hotel room, about a recent massacre in South Africa. She is surprised and pleased that this particular boy turned in anything at all, let alone knew of this event.
The headline on the newspapers in the lobby says, “U-2 Pilot Called Spy.” At their table few believe the spy story. A social studies teacher from the South, a pretty woman in a sweater set May thinks would attract some notice in the classroom, complains to her, “You watch, the Kremlin is going to twist this. I told my husband, ‘I don’t care, you go down in the basement and fix us a shelter. We’ve got kids. We’re too far out of town to get to the municipal building.’”
May believes the spy story. Obviously the plane was spying. The man she is listening to and watching believes it, she can tell. But before an argument can get under way, the whole table has swerved into whether Kennedy will take all the primaries, and then back to the matter of the school system.
He, a barrel-chested Negro man in his fifties, is principal of a small high school in the Midwest, the subject of an article they all have in their conference folders. May is one of a group of teachers receiving awards for their innovations. So many that it will seem, as they are called up to the stage by geographical region, that everybody in the smoky room is getting an award. The innovations are various classroom methods already in wide use, the real origins of which no one would be able to trace—they’ll be laughing about that in the bar—methods that will go in and out of vogue two or three times over the years they are high school teachers.
For centerpieces the tables have little maypoles with rulers and compasses on the streamers, in support of the theme Math Closes the Gap. The gap is the missile gap.
Right after the election the missile gap ceased to exist, though for decades it didn’t cease to hold certain jumpy children—May heard this from friends teaching grade school—in a spell of attention while a missile might or might not be glinting overhead, curving into its descent. May often thought of the missile gap rather bitterly, not for the reasons she might have expected of herself, political reasons, but because the words missile gap were part of that spring, with the sheaths and wide cloth belts droves of them wore up onto the stage to receive their engraved circle pins, the music—“Volare” in the piano lounge and in the elevator “Theme from A Summer Place”—and her first sight of the man she fell in love with in the eighteenth year of her marriage.
Somebody had taken the trouble to put together dozens of the maypole centerpieces for the banquet. “Those little rulers, can we take them with us for the supply closet?” “May we take them, please.” This was the group cheerful and flushed from having escaped into the cocktail lounge before dinner, fleeing the lukewarm tea in the conference room.
The man she was staring at during dinner was not so jovial. He kept picking up his goblet of Hawaiian Punch and setting it down again. Not so many Negro faces in the crowded room. Four or five. He had the big knuckles of arthritis. Hands like that always caught her attention, a silent announcement of the body’s presence as a thing.
There they were, hundreds of them in the room, bodies going about their own slow assimilating and shedding behind all the speeches and the voting, the slight but incessant activity of the meeting that they, the bodies, had to take part in, which had nothing really to do with them. Like the big carp with a tattered fin, swimming along the glass at the aquarium they had visited in the afternoon. In the wrong place.
It was just that body, that thing that nourished itself, swerved and dived, that May was to have in common with him. Lust—or so she thought for a long time. Excitement, cold and fresh. She thought she had drawn up a bucket with something in it, some element of herself on a sim
ple errand of appetite; never did she think it was herself, or would become personal, grow limbs and make for land and for the occasions—embarrassing and frightening, grim, sweet, hazardous—of untimely love.
His hands were not restless, even tapping the glass with a fingernail that had a vertical dark streak in it.
The man looked at May too, at certain points in the conversation. An indulgence toward the others at their table flickered up between them. She saw him look at her dress and her in it. And then, as if by appointment, they met in the piano lounge. Women still eased themselves into bars in those days. You didn’t just saunter in and order a drink, you pretended to be looking for somebody. That’s what she did, she came down by herself after dinner, and there he was.
“Three times, we met after that. That’s all we had. I wasn’t the right type for a love affair, and I never did it again, I can tell you. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. He felt the same way.”
May glanced back at her daughter, who had stopped on the sidewalk to laugh with her head thrown back. “Oh, God! Mom! It’s worse that you smoked!” Vera tucked May’s arm against her. “Don’t be offended. You aren’t, are you? Go on. He felt the same way?”
Lovers came and went in Vera’s life, men who were her friends, then not her friends, then her friends again if they were content to be. Men who were each other’s friends, as often as not.
They were walking after dinner in an invisible rain. In the afternoon May had been to the eye doctor, and her dilated eyes were coming back to normal at a slower rate than the doctor had said they would. The streetlights and the neon signs wore soft, pliant auroras, making a slow, watery galaxy of the two blocks to the parking lot.
Seven Loves Page 2