As he looked into her disappointed eyes, he saw her family lurking behind them, restricting her freedom, compelling her to think and feel as they did. She was imprisoned within herself. The realization horrified him. He was sorry for her pain, pitying her bonds, but glad that he had glimpsed them early enough to escape.
Are you going to kiss me and hold me? her eyes asked. And how long will it last? Then she saw that he was not prepared to pay the toll and moved away as if she had been betrayed again. He watched her flee from the gazebo and run across the grass in the rain, taking with her every fantasy he had nursed about her, leaving him with a conflicting sense of relief at having escaped arousing her feelings.
The pitiable terror that she had shown him stayed with him permanently, growing more painful whenever he recalled it. Not a month went by in the years since when he did not think about her physical lushness, the smell of her soap, the sexual grasp that he might have awakened in her in a vain effort to dispel the youthful horror that she had deposited in him.
He lay half awake, trying again to forget the dream of Vera, knowing that he would never lose it, then recalled Annette, the dark-haired girl in her twenties who had shared a cabin with two men that same summer in the mountains. He had watched her come out after lunch to sit by the pool, and her bikini-clad body had seemed exhausted from lovemaking. She had noticed him, he was sure, and he had felt that she was avoiding his eyes because she knew that everyone knew, but she didn’t seem to care. She was imprisoned by her sexuality, and was giving herself to two young men in a vain attempt to burn it out, to quiet her soul. His very gaze seemed to arouse her, he had felt, and she seemed to cringe under his scrutiny as she tried to ignore him.
So you know, her glancing, dark eyes said. So what. It’s not your business. And yet part of her seemed to say, I’m a prisoner, I’m trapped, and I don’t know what to do. Visions of what they were doing in that cabin preyed on his imagination all that summer. The two men, both younger than her, always slept late....
He sat up out of his dream and looked around his bedroom, wondering if it would be warm enough to go down and sit by the pool. After all, it was late May, and the temperature might get up to eighty, they had said.
He rose, went to the picture window and looked down five stories to the pool. The usual suspects seemed to be gathering at the patch of blue water, harmless types working for small businesses around town, dreaming of going to a big city for a job one day, but too insecure to ever do so. If they had any fears or phobias, they were buried deeply. He had nothing much to fear from going down among them.
He went to his CD player, put on some vintage disco, then went and did some exercises on his Soloflex. When he felt hungry, he went into the kitchen and stuck a complete brunch, coffee included, into the microwave, then wandered over to make sure his team of VCRs was taping the movie and Olympic events that he had set them to catch.
He dressed for the pool, reminding himself that he still had twelve days of vacation time left before he went back to the insurance office. Maybe he’d go somewhere for the last six days.
At poolside, he was dozing with his cap over his face when he heard Marianne, his neighbor from the fourth floor, say to her friend, “You’re lucky, your boyfriend’s your pal. You can talk to him.” There was a short pause. “Either you’re lying or just bragging.”
“I’m bragging.”
“I’d need an ass-lift to get a man like that. Don’t deny it, I see how he looks at you.”
“He’s just fooling.”
“He worships your ass,” Marianne answered. After a moment of silence, she asked, “You know Alice who lives up front?”
“I’ve seen her.”
“Well, she’s terrified of being without a man. She almost gets hysterical about it. I don’t understand it.”
“Well,” her friend said, “that’s because you already have a kid, and you’ve rid yourself of a bad guy. You see things from the other side. But doesn’t she have a boyfriend?”
“Sort of,” Marianne said. “He’s a plump guy she doesn’t seem to like much, but she lets him come over. He lives an hour away, somewhere south of here. He rarely stays over. I hear them arguing about it.”
Suddenly the conversation was drowned out by splashing.
“Stop that, Mel,” Marianne called to her boyfriend as he came out of the pool.
He laughed and said, “I heard you talking about chubby! What’s up?”
“Chubby?” Marianne’s girlfriend asked.
“Alice—he doesn’t like her much.” Marianne lowered her voice. “We were together at a bar, before I knew Mel, and Alice came on to him.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Well,” Mel said, “maybe she’d be good for a blow job.”
“What!” Marianne shouted. “Don’t talk like that.”
“It’s okay,” Marianne’s friend said. “Don’t you ever listen when they’re all together watching the game?”
“Who’s gonna hear?” Mel asked. “Hey, Frank, are you asleep?” he called.
Frank decided to act asleep.
“Well, I’m going inside,” Marianne said. “Coming, Estelle?”
“Sure thing,” her girlfriend said.
Frank remembered Alice now. She wasn’t all that bad-looking. Overweight, yes, but erotic in the way heavier women get when they’re losing weight and looking hungry. He had seen her poolside in short, white pants and a flimsy T-shirt, and she had looked attractive. He recalled smiling, and she had looked back gratefully. Rubens would have painted her with delight, even though she wasn’t as full as his usual ones.
Frank dozed for a while. When he woke up and looked around, the deck around the pool was nearly deserted, except for Alice and her heavyset boyfriend coming out of the water. She was heavier than he remembered, and she looked tired today.
Frank sat up as they went by and his eyes met the boyfriend’s. I’m here only to get laid, the man’s eyes said apologetically, so don’t think my taste is this bad.
Frank glanced at Alice. She shot him a look of defeat, and he wished that he had kept his hat over his face as her terror flooded into him—I’m going to be manless, without love or children. I’m going to die alone, an old maid. I’ve put out and gotten nothing for it, and I never will!
He lay back and covered his face, trying to regain his composure, but it was too late; she was inside him, infecting him with her fears.
He peered out from under his cap and saw her boyfriend smiling falsely at her. She smiled back more convincingly, but the turmoil inside her would not subside. At any moment, mantislike, she would reach out and tear off her boyfriend’s head.
Frank felt a migraine coming on, and knew that this newest catch was going to be bad. He should have stayed in bed. He should not have underestimated his neighbors. Still peering out from under his cap, he could see that Alice was watching him, as if a way had opened between them and she could see into him.
It was nothing like that, of course. People imagined things about each other all the time, and the more clues they had, the more accurate their imaginings. People could feel each others’ emotions because people were synchronous with each other, sympathetically tuned, because every human being was more alike than different, shading in and out of each other with no clear break anywhere. It was completely involuntary. Two people sucking each other’s thumbs feel as if they are sucking their own thumbs. A man’s next door neighbor sees a glum look on his friend’s face, and from his years of conversation with him, suspects that he knows what’s wrong. A man shows up at the local grocery when his wife is away, and the clerk imagines that the man’s wife has left him.
The migraine was roaring in now. Frank got up and tried not to look at Alice. She was pitying herself, hungering and mourning at the same time, and he wished that he could stop her emotional bleeding. What he needed was to pick up something else to wipe out her fear and pain. He sat up and got to his feet.
“Hi,
Frank!” Alice called, waving as her boyfriend lunged into the pool and made a massive splash.
Frank waved back and started for the gate. The migraine staggered him and he stopped, doubting that he would stay on his feet. It was his own fault for having come outside.
“Are you okay?” she called out.
“Fine,” he said, then hurried through the gate and went into the building. The elevator door was open. He stepped inside and punched in his floor, already feeling better.
In his apartment, he looked out the window and saw Alice’s boyfriend swimming across the pool. After one lap he struggled out and sat down in the chair next to her. She looked away. Frank watched them as they sat together, looking anything but together even from this height, settling for each other, afraid to be alone, and he knew that the boyfriend would not be with her long.
Frank turned from the window, sat down in his easy chair, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, then looked around at his living room, noting that the carpet wouldn’t need cleaning for some time yet. He examined his audiovisual system, with its two VCRs, wide-screen television, CD player carousel, turntable, and sur-round-sound speakers. The system kept him from having people over, because he didn’t want to pick up their disdain for his stuff. The only thing he was sure of was that they’d admire his cherry desk. Who knew? They might like his whole place, but why take the chance? This worry had started when he had visited an old college buddy, Steve, and had picked up his fear of having his stuff dissed. The fear had been strong: don’t dis my stuff, don’t tell me, please, that it’s second-rate, that there are better models. Frank had picked it up from Steve. He wished that he could simply pass it on, so that he could invite people again.
“You’ve always got something,” Steve had said to him one day in their off-campus apartment. “We’ve got the same money, but you always have more stuff,” he went on, pointing to Frank’s then very modest stereo hookup.
“So? You get to listen to it.”
“It pisses me off.”
“Why should it? I only try to make the best of things, a little at a time, but it adds up.”
“You’re a pain in the ass. You never stop.”
“Do the same, in your own way,” Frank had advised him.
“And be like you?”
“In your own way, I said.”
“You’ve always got to be in charge,” Steve said, beginning to get aggressively strange.
“So what’s your complaint?”
“You always have your own way with these little... additions of yours!”
“Look—things don’t always go the way I’d like, but the fight is always joined, the victory real, however small. Your trouble is you don’t fight, you don’t struggle, and then you envy others. Cynical and skeptical, you poison your own life. And you’ll never know what fortune might have brought you if you had been there to meet it. Any fool knows that when he goes to the track.”
“You win at the track, Frank?”
“I’ve never been, but here’s the difference between us. Fortune knows that I’m ready to be defeated completely, so there’s not much it can do to me, except reward me enough to keep me playing, waiting for the moment of my ruin. But at that moment, I’ll step aside and refuse to play.”
“You’ll see it coming?”
“I’ll see it coming. I’ve seen it stalking me in countless small ways.”
“You’re a shark, Frank. That’s all you’ll ever be, but you hide it from yourself in a really nutty way.”
“You really believe all this about me?”
“I’m not as sure of anything as you are. Maybe there’s some kind of hope for you, but you’d have to fall flat on your face to find it.”
“And that’s why you’ll never be anything,” he had told Steve, “thinking like that. You’re afraid of everything.”
Today he could more easily see the bad stuff coming at him— especially when someone was ready to pass on a fear to him. They didn’t know they were doing it, and they weren’t really doing anything, of course. It was the small accumulation of information, the placing of three or more points on a piece of paper. Once there were points to connect, a line and a direction were established. With most people it was three scenes or more—situations or moments from their lives, enough for him to pick up the drift of their lives, maybe even sum up a life. They always had elaborate reasons for never becoming themselves. Dismay would flood through him, and shame for the other person, that they had fallen so low within themselves.
As for himself, he figured that insurance executive was about the best he could do; anything more demanding would be sabotaged by his ability to pick up other people’s hurt. It had made him a good, sympathetic insurance salesman for a time, because he had a way of making people feel properly insecure about the provisions they had failed to make for their futures, before convincing them that his company would make things right for them—and keep it right for the rest of their lives. He had helped people to confront their fear of the future; but every sale had given him more than their signatures on the policy. With every “Trust me and sign on the dotted line” had come a new deposit from the damned.
Finally, after nearly twenty years, it was all he could do to control his flypaper innards behind the closed doors of a private office. He never went out into the field these days, and planned to retire by forty.
He got up from his chair and looked down at the pool again. Alice was now sitting alone, upright on the edge of the lawn chair, hands folded in her lap, and he guessed that she had just broken up with her man.
He lay down, grateful that the migraine had failed to blossom fully. Still fatigued by the poolside encounters, he tried to avoid fixing on Alice’s terror of being manless. If he could somehow delay his reaction, the fear might die away.
He fell asleep and found himself standing on the second-floor porch of his first postcollege apartment, just as a group of homeless people came by and began to pick through his garbage. He went inside, but one young man came up the front stairs and opened his door.
“What do you want?” Frank called out.
“Ah, come on, Billy, let us in.”
“I don’t know you,” he answered, going inside and locking the door behind him. He went to the phone and rang the police. When they were on their way, he opened the door and found the hall empty.
Rushing to the back porch, he opened the door a crack, peered out, and saw that the man, the old woman, and two teenage boys were still picking through his garbage. The police arrived and began to move them along as gently as possible.
Frank opened the door wide, and the man who had come to his door looked up and shouted, “Thanks for the help, Billy!”
And Frank became Billy, betraying these homeless derelicts. The young man looked up at him reproachfully as the police told him to move along.
Later the cop came up and asked, “Did you know any of them?”
“No, officer,” Frank said with a twinge of guilt, wondering if somehow he had known the man and forgotten, or couldn’t recognize him now. “No, I don’t know any of them. Who are they?” Suddenly he was afraid that the cop wouldn’t believe him.
“We’ve been watching groups of them since this morning,” the cop said. “They seem harmless enough. Good thing it’s warm. The mayor doesn’t want any of them to die while they’re in town.”
“Where will they go?” he asked, but the cop turned away without answering, and Frank woke up to Alice’s fear of growing old alone, drying up and wrinkling, and decided that he would spend the last of his vacation as far away from home as possible, as soon as possible, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean.
He heard her speak his name softly as he lay on the beach in the Bahamas. Then she was whispering to him, saying that he could give her what she needed, that she wasn’t unattractive, that she could care for a man deeply and for a lifetime, suggesting to him that she was startling in the nude, that she exercised and kept up her health, that she would gi
ve him fine sons and daughters, that he should hurry to her now, before desolation ruined her for him.
He knew that he was saying these things to himself, but they were just as true as if she could reach into him and say them herself, as much as any human being could. He turned over, found his phone under the towel, and dialed his apartment building’s switchboard.
“Henry, this is Frank. Connect me with Alice what’s-her-name. You know who I mean?”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks.”
The phone rang three times, then a fourth. He was about to hang up when she answered it.
“Hello, Alice?”
“Yes?”
“This is Frank. You know.”
“Yes, Frank. What is it?”
“Well, I was wondering if I could come over and talk to you when I get back.”
“Get back?”
“I’m in the Bahamas.”
“And you’re calling from there? What’s this about?”
“Uh—I think it’d be better if I tell you when I get there.”
She coughed nervously. “What’s this about, Frank? You’re going to make me wait and wonder—how long?”
“A day or two. It’s nothing bad, believe me.”
“Then tell me now.”
He was silent, knowing that he should not talk to her over the phone, surprised by her alertness and suspicion. Her boyfriend had not left her in a good state.
“Frank?”
“See you soon!” he said, and pressed the button. He was out of breath, he noticed, and wondered why; usually, reaching out to someone calmed him. Then he realized that she had been confused by his call and that he had picked up some of her distress. But she had also been excited and intrigued by his interest, he concluded, and felt calmer.
Black Pockets Page 3