Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  The two women who lodged the charges against him are former employees of his in the sheriff’s office. He had fired one of them for cause (the alcohol smell was all over her in the mornings, mingled with a too-heavy fragrance of peppermint), and the other, her close friend, quit in anger. After an interval of several weeks, the two of them retaliated: Coleman, they said, had consistently made threats, demanding sexual favors. They’ve hired a lawyer and the charges are official. It’s been in the newspapers. He’s going to have to answer for it, this lie. There has never been anything but a little lighthearted kidding, and in fact the two women did most of that. Nothing of their carefully coordinated story contains a shred of truth, yet Coleman has lain awake in the slow hours of night with a feeling of having trespassed, of having gone over some line. He has repeatedly searched his memory for any small thing that might tend to incriminate him, and there’s nothing, and he still feels like a criminal.

  Now his wife gets up from the table and takes her coffee cup and saucer to the dishwasher. He stands here, faintly sick, while she moves toward the entrance to the living room. “I’m so tired,” she says.

  “If they’re in the wall,” he tells her, “there isn’t going to be any way to use that room until we get them out.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  He’s in his pajamas, and she’s dressed. She has already done some work in the yard. The effect of everything, at least until now, has been to create a wordless haphazardness in her; the whole house is portioned out in unfinished tasks, all of them now carrying the weight and significance of full-blown projects, and these are things she would normally have taken care of as a matter of her daily routine: she has intermittently been cleaning in the kitchen and living room; ironing clothes in the upstairs hallway, running the washing machine, polishing furniture, dusting surfaces, and making a very bad job of everything—a streaked, unformed, slapdash confusion. If he tries to help her, or asks that she give him something to do, she shrugs and says there’s nothing, he will only get in the way. Until last night, she kept to herself what she’s actually going through, and he feels this as a kind of tacit indictment, though he hasn’t expressed the thought, even to himself. After his initial outraged denials and his show of horror and repulsion at the cruel audaciousness of the assault on his integrity, his manner with her has been tentative, almost sheepish, as though he fears harming her by reminding her too much.

  Once a charge like that is made, his lawyer told him, once that kind of poison is let into the air—well, it’s tough to live down. It’s very difficult even to live down in your own mind. Coleman has tried to explain all this to Peg, and in doing so has begun to realize how much she herself doubts him.

  Last night, at last, she gave forth the words of her grief, her anger; holding the newspaper up and saying, “Everybody on this street takes this, thing! Everett. Up and down this street. They all know.”

  “If they read that, then they don’t know a goddamn thing,” he said. “Do they?”

  “They know more about us than we know about any of them. They know what I do and they know what you do.”

  He heard the emphasis, and reacted. “They don’t know what I do, Peg. They have no idea what I do, the way you mean it—because I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything but fire a goddamn drunk with no morals and no conscience. And when all this comes down to the truth, you’re going to be ashamed of yourself for believing her and that other bitch.”

  “Don’t call them bitches. Can’t you hear what that does?”

  “They are bitches. They’re worse than bitches. They’re sluts. A couple of ruthless vindictive . . . Look. There’s a word for women like that, and I haven’t used it yet. They’re trying to ruin me, Peg. They’re trying to take away my livelihood.”

  “You won’t prove anything by using that language.”

  “I should call them ladies?”

  “Just don’t use that language. That shows an attitude.”

  “I have an attitude. I’ve got a right to have an attitude.”

  “Well, you can’t afford it. We can’t afford it. We have to show everyone you’re innocent.”

  “How do we do that? We’ve been through this—it’s their word against mine. I’m fucked. Christ, Peg, even you believe them a little. After all these years. Even you.”

  “I didn’t say I believed them,” Peg said. But then, in the next moment, half turning from him, sniffling, she went on: “You were so thick, the three of you. Going out for beers after work—all that. I don’t believe them. I’m trying to make you see why I might—just for a second—why anyone might—oh. Christ—I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Yeah,” he told her. “And that’s you—imagine what it is for all these other people.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” she sobbed.

  There was still the rest of the long night to do.

  Now, glancing out the sliding doorway to his left, he sees the lawn mower with a pair of her garden gloves draped over the handle. It was the sound of the mower that awakened him this morning. There are zigzags in the grass, wide places where she missed.

  “I’ll finish the grass,” he says.

  She pauses at the doorway and turns. “What?” Her voice is almost irritable. “I did the grass.”

  “You missed a few places.”

  She leans forward and gazes questioningly out the window. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I guess I ought to get dressed first,” he says.

  “What about the bees?”

  “I’ll check outside.”

  Normally, on nights when he can’t sleep, he goes down to the spare room, where he can read without keeping her awake. He went down there this morning to change the sheets, in preparation for the arrival of their only daughter, who’s due in this evening from Los Angeles. Janine wants to be in movies. She attended college out there, and stayed, and recently changed her name. She’s calling herself Anya Drake, now. The name change hasn’t brought her any discernible benefit. There’ve been one or two callbacks after auditions, and one small part for her hands in a soap commercial. You see her hands in a large bowl of soapy water, and then you see them applying oil to the palms, a gentle motion that the camera light makes more sensual than applying oil to one’s hands ever is. Coleman is unreasonably embarrassed by the thing, as if there’s an element of shame about it all—she seems to be exhibiting something more private than her hands. He has been married twenty-six years and has never been unfaithful to his wife.

  Janine, or Anya, as she now calls herself, intends this visit as a rest. She told her mother over the telephone that when she feels up to it, she wants to try getting stage work in New York. Her mother told her about the harassment charges, and Janine/Anya expressed nothing but indignation. But Coleman feels there is significance in the fact that her plans are fluid, now (they sounded anything but fluid before): traveling on to New York might come sooner rather than later.

  Janine/Anya’s old bedroom is crowded with Coleman’s worktable and tools, and the unfinished cedar chest on which he has been working. Wood is an old passion. The spare room is where they moved her bed, and where she stays whenever she visits, though it’s been three years since the last time.

  He tries hard to concentrate on the matter at hand: there’s a yellow jackets nest somewhere around the spare-room window, a way in for them through the casing. He’ll have to attend to it. He puts on jeans and a T-shirt, goes back downstairs, and slowly traces along the seal of the window frame. He has to displace a lot of dust, and thick tangles of cobweb. The window seems sealed. He stands in the room and listens, but the sounds of the house are too loud to hear anything in the wall. He gets down on his hands and knees and follows along the baseboard, and here are two more dead bees, a third struggling sluggishly along the carpet. He kills it with his shoe, shuddering.

  “I’ll call the pest control people,” Peg says from the door.

  Her voice has
startled him. If she’s noticed this, she chooses not to remark it. “You think we can get somebody out here this afternoon?” he asks.

  “Not likely.”

  “What about the room, then?”

  “Anya Drake can sleep on the sofa for a few days.”

  He stands, and faces her. “You sound great.”

  “Well?”

  “She’s got a right to make her own way, Peg.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That doesn’t mean without help. Listen to you.”

  “Tell me what you’d like in the circumstance,” she says.

  “I’d like us not to talk about it,” he tells her.

  She almost smiles. “You’d like us not to talk about what?”

  It’s a soft, clear, dry April day, with breezes starting and stopping. The curtains over the windows in the upstairs bedroom billow with a soundless rush, then fall still. Sitting on the bed to tie his shoes, he hears her running the tap down in the kitchen. He finishes tying the shoes, then brushes his hair. It’s almost completely white now, and while he liked the streaks of gray when they began, about a dozen years ago, he has been unhappy with it for some time now, disliking the way it makes his eyes look—colorless, flat under the white eyebrows. For a time, he’s even considered using one of those gradual dyes, to darken it. But the idea contains its own contradiction: since the purpose of the dye is to hide the gray, the only logical step, if he decides to use it, would be to move to another city, and never again see anyone who knows him as he has always been.

  As he has always been.

  “My God,” he says, low.

  How can he think of his appearance now, or ever again? It’s as if his mind goes on its own track, separate from him, and there’s something insinuating about his very vanity. It makes him recoil. He can’t even look at himself in a mirror.

  Downstairs once more, he stands behind Peg as she spoons more coffee into the machine. He wants to put his hands on her, but feels awkward about it. He stands close, not touching. “You wonder why you can’t sleep.”

  “I can’t stay awake in the days.”

  “You’re all turned around.”

  “We both are.” She looks at him.

  “Peg,” he says. But they’ve already said everything. Or that’s how it feels. “I’ll take care of everything today. I’ll go pick up Janine. I’ll finish the grass. I’ll handle the bees. You try and get some sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep now. I’d like to sleep tonight.”

  “You have to take it where and when you can get it, honey.”

  “Don’t you have to see Rudy today, too?”

  “Rudy’s got all I can give him right now.”

  Rudy’s their lawyer. Rudy has expressed how bad the situation is: Coleman and the two women were seen together on numerous occasions in a bar near the sheriff’s office, drinking together and talking—and flirting. Yes, there was some of that, the kind of talk that happens in bars, adults together in the haze and good feeling of drinks and music. He never touched either one of them except in friendship, and that was never anything more than a pat on the shoulder, or a kiss on the cheek. They kissed him on the cheek. There were times, driving home, when he stumbled on the pleasant fact that indeed, he felt no physical enticement concerning them at all. They were attractive, and funny, and he liked them. He’s twenty years older than they are. He worried and fretted over Deirdre, like a father, when her drinking spilled over into work hours, and the humor and ease between the three of them dwindled and became pure tension.

  “You’re certain there was never any talk about—say, how either one of them likes to have sex. That kind of thing?”

  “Never.”

  “You’re sure you never made a joke—even a joke—about sleeping with one of them?”

  “Look, Rudy. Correct me if I’m wrong. Harassment is supposed to be I threaten them with their jobs if they don’t screw me or blow me. Right?”

  “You never made a joke about sleeping with one of them.”

  “I don’t know—Jesus, I might’ve. Everybody jokes that way sometimes, right? I might’ve said something in response. In response. But I never had a serious thought about it and never went one step anywhere near it.”

  “You never made a pattern of jokes about sleeping with one of them.”

  “Never. No. There was no pattern.”

  “You never commented on their clothing or anything like that?”

  “I’d say, you look nice today. With Deirdre I started having to say it because most days she came in looking like she’d spent the night out on the street doing tricks and got drugged up and left for dead. She was at the front desk, for Christ’s sake. Can’t I get some people to say how she looked? She looked terrible.”

  “She claims she was drinking because of the—the pressure you were putting her under. The—the harassment.”

  “It’s a lie. Rudy, it’s a fucking lie. And I’m going down the fucking drain with it and it’s not right. It’s not right.”

  The Colemans have had a very good marriage, that they seldom remarked on. It’s been their life, and though to outsiders they might have seemed to take it for granted, they were often very grateful for each other in the nights, sometimes without quite being aware of it as gratitude. Neither can imagine, even now, how it might be to end up having to live without the other. They raised Janine. Or, rather, Anya. They went through the loneliness that followed upon her leaving them, and they had grown used to having her gone.

  One of the manifestations of this loneliness was that Coleman took into his circle of affection the two young women who worked for him. Deirdre and Linda. They had gone to school together—they were only a couple of years older than Janine/Anya. Once he invited them to the house for a cook-out, with Peg and a few other people—neighbors, and some others from the sheriff’s office. Everyone had a fine time until Deirdre, very drunk, began to cry for no reason. Linda helped her out to the little Toyota they had arrived in, and drove her away. Later that night, while the Colemans were undressing for bed, Peg said that Deirdre reminded her of Janine a little, and seeing her that way, crying, sloppy, falling all over herself, a spectacle, made her worry about Janine in a way she hadn’t been accustomed to worrying particularly. Janine had been so well focused in her teen years. And now she was experiencing unsuccess and disappointment, all those miles away.

  “It was as if I was given a vision of Janine acting like that on somebody’s patio in Los Angeles County.”

  Coleman agreed. It was true.

  And he worried all the more as Deirdre started coming to work late smelling of mint and alcohol. The rest of that summer and into the fall. There were days she never even bothered to call, and Linda would lie for her then, claiming that she had called.

  “I’m gonna have to let her go,” Coleman told Peg. “And it scares the hell out of me. Like I’m letting Janine go, somehow.”

  “You feel like you’re firing Janine,” Peg said.

  “That must be,” he told her. “Must be part of it.”

  It was during high school that Janine first showed serious interest in the performing arts. Peg had taken her to ballet classes and dance classes from the time she was a little girl, but a lot of little girls were in those classes. Janine, by the time she finished high school, was playing summer stock in the dinner theaters of the valley. Coleman still wonders if she really has any talent. He’s not gifted with an ability to tell, has no ear for music, nor any sense of how acting happens. He likes to read, and rarely watches any television, and the movies seem too much the same: nudity, language, an excess of explosions. Noise. The ubiquitous bass voice whispering the words of the previews. It’s always the last battle for humankind, the race to save the whole world, the future. Or else it’s too cute or outrageous for words, with lots of quirky characters you wouldn’t want to know. Janine/Anya wants to be a part of that, and her mother has always believed in her.

  But privately Peg has expressed her co
nviction that Hollywood is politics, who you know—all those children of movie stars, starring in their own movies, with careers of their own: the sons of Lloyd Bridges; the Fondas, the daughters of Janet Leigh and Cliff Arquette and Blythe Danner. It’s difficult for her to believe poor Janine/Anya has much of a chance. And the name change did hurt her feelings. Before Coleman’s trouble broke upon them, she had resolved that during this visit she would question her daughter about settling down in a job here in Charlottesville.

  Perhaps that won’t come up now. Coleman doesn’t want it to, knows it will lead to arguments and tension. Before Janine/Anya left for California there was plenty of that to go around.

  Standing out on his porch, he looks across the road to the tall oaks bordering the field on that side. The sun blazes on the leaves, and above the trees a crow swoops and dives to avoid a darting blue jay. Perhaps the crow is looking for a meal in the blue jay’s nest. Now it’s a pair of blue jays, harassing the crow, making a racket that you can hear above the sound, in the near distance, of a lawn mower. Coleman steps down into his grass, which is striped with Peg’s passes through it, and walks around the house, to the outside of the spare-room window. There’s an abandoned bird’s nest attached to the underside of the porch at this end, but no sign of a yellow jackets’ nest. He goes farther along the wall, and around to the back of the house, crouching low, trying to see under the boards of the deck there. His back hurts. Behind him, over the sound of the lawn mower, comes the voice of the neighbor, Mr. Wilkins, shouting at his eleven-year-old son.

  “Pull it back, you idiot. Back around. For Christ’s sake. Pull it BACK.”

  Coleman looks at them, small in the distance, two acres away, the man standing there with his hands on his hips, and the boy trying to maneuver the lawn mower that’s bigger than he is. The boy’s trying to pull it back up the small incline beyond a shrub, and is not succeeding. His father shouts at him. “Pull it back, you idiot. BACK. Can’t you understand English?”

  The boy finally gets the mower level again, then tries leaning into it, facing it toward the lawn, away from the incline.