The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  Darnell smiled, not a big broad smile like Johnny’s, but there was some of the same meekness. “You know what psychologists would say,” he said. “That what you describe is wish fulfillment. They’d say when we’re distressed, our minds invent whatever will soothe us.”

  “Sure,” she answered. “But I know what daydreams are, and Johnny’s presence isn’t anything like that. It’s palpable. He’s not just some dream-kid. There’ve been a thousand times I wanted him to be there but couldn’t conjure him up. He comes when he comes. If I’m just fulfilling wishes, why can’t I snap my fingers and make him appear?”

  Darnell apparently had no answer for this. He was silent for a minute, no longer watching her but staring at the chessboard instead. The blue of his eyes seemed to flicker, as if a dream were passing through them.

  “I envy you,” he said at last. “The spirit that haunts you is made of sunshine. What if it were made of something not so friendly? Darkness . . . dreadful sounds . . . things that groan in the night?”

  Sarah saw that he too was sweating.

  Chapter Eight

  Peter’s car was still there Sunday morning. In the middle of the afternoon, Sarah went out for another look, and there it was. Incredible. Didn’t he ever need to go out for condoms or something?

  She returned to her apartment, hot and miserable, and didn’t even bother to sit in front of her computer. There was no point in pretending she could work. She should get out of the apartment, but that might mean missing his exit. Why was she so interested? Let him screw his heart out, catch syphilis and gonorrhea, why should she care?

  But she did. She wished she had a peephole into the woman’s apartment. If he was going to be nesting up there like an obscene vulture, she should at least be allowed a glimpse into the nest. Was this abnormal? Probably, but she had no statistics to tell her.

  She tried to convince herself that her curiosity was driven by concern instead of voyeurism. The strange noises Darnell claimed to have heard from the woman’s apartment—what had he said? Moans, muffled cries? Sounded like sex, and no doubt sex was what she was wishing she could see or hear, maybe just to fuel her anger.

  No sense trying to make it sound healthy, she thought. It was masochism, pure and simple. Peter was trying to torture her, and she was eagerly lending a hand.

  She ate a tuna sandwich for dinner, sitting by the kitchen window so she could see him if he came down the fire escape, but nothing was descending except the sun. Surely he wasn’t going to spend another night! Didn’t he have to teach tomorrow? Maybe she had missed hearing him leave? She finished her sandwich and went back out to see if his car was still there.

  It was. The sun getting low in the west, and the Volvo hadn’t budged. Too fucking much.

  All day she had been considering going to meet her downstairs neighbor. No sense in trying to make that sound healthy either, pretending that her chief interest was being a good neighbor. Nope—whoever lived there must have been getting an earful, and maybe she would like to share a scrap of what she had heard.

  Sarah stepped across the landing and knocked. She waited and knocked again. She could hear a television’s canned laughter, and it seemed to be laughing at her. She didn’t blame it. She was about to retreat to the gloomy safety of her own apartment when a faint voice said, “Who’s there?”

  “Hi. I’m Sarah. I moved into apartment A.”

  Sarah heard bolts being drawn, a lock turning, and the door came open the two inches that the chain allowed. A bespectacled eye peered out, blinked.

  “Hi,” Sarah said again. “I just moved in, I thought it’d be nice—”

  “Just a minute.”

  A bony claw moved to the chain, fumbled and trembled, and the door opened to reveal a very old black woman half a foot shorter than Sarah. Her hair was pure white and braided, the braids wrapped and pinned neatly on her head like a cap. She wore a flowered dress that nearly touched the floor.

  “Hi, I live—” Sarah started to repeat, but the old woman interrupted with, “I heard you, I heard you. I ain’t altogether deaf yet. Sarah, that’s a right pretty name. My name’s Esther Robison. I was speculating who moved in there. Come in, Sarah, and make yourself at home.”

  The tiny woman’s step was quick and agile. Sarah followed her along the short hallway to the mirror-image of her own living room, but this one was dark, lit only by the TV screen and a single lamp with a dim bulb, and it was cluttered with old chairs and stands and cabinets and vases and photos and knickknacks and a hundred other things half-hidden in the shadowy nooks and corners. The windows were all closed, sealing in hot air scented with lavender and must and old woman.

  Sarah could tell that the gooseneck rocking chair in front of the TV was where Esther usually sat, so she chose the sofa covered with worn pink fabric, its wooden arms carved to resemble bunches of grapes.

  Esther shut off the TV, making the room even darker. “Would you like some tea? I got a kettle warming.”

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  The old woman disappeared into the kitchen, and Sarah gazed into the dining room, where a table and chairs and china cupboard were not so much visible as suggested in the thick shadows. The silence, the darkness, and the stale air made her feel as if the city were far away. She listened for a sound from upstairs. Nothing, just Esther in her kitchen.

  The old woman returned, a large teapot trembling in her hands and tilting so that tea dribbled out of its spout onto the threadbare Oriental rug.

  “Let me help you.”

  “No, no, that’s fine.” Esther managed to place the teapot onto the coffee table without too much damage, and then disappeared into the darkness of the dining room. There was a clatter of china, and she emerged with cups and saucers.

  “D’you like sugar?” she asked.

  “No thank you.” In fact Sarah did, but she thought the woman’s exertions had been enough for one evening.

  Esther sank into her gooseneck rocker as lightly as a dried-up leaf. “Just let it steep for a minute and then maybe you can pour it,” she said. “Spect you find it a mite warm in here, don’t you? Heat don’t mean much to me no more, but the cold go right through me. I gotta keep them windows closed count of the neighborhood ain’t what it used to be. My daughter tell me, Ma, get outta here and come live with me, but I ain’t going nowhere at my age. I lived here ever since my husband died back in ‘82.

  “Awful nice a you to come by. I don’t get much company no more, ‘cept my daughter Marcy come by every week. Maybe you seen her? She bring me all kind a groceries, everything I need. Never miss a week to visit me, that girl. She getting up, though, I spect she must be, le’see, she must be 76, 77 year old now. She don’t look it though, if you was to see her. She always been right pretty, that girl. See how that tea’s doing there, will you, honey?”

  Footsteps, directly overhead. Someone, at least, was ambulatory up there. The sound was somehow reassuring, taking the upstairs drama out of the theater of sick fantasy and placing it in the real world. The footsteps moved west through the hallway, probably to the bedroom, and dissolved again into silence. Great. Time for another bout of sweaty lovemaking.

  “Me, I’m 98, and I sure do look it,” Esther was saying. “No, don’t be saying nothing flattery, I’m showing my age and that’s a plain fact. In the canister there, I mean the one with the roses, you find some sugar. If you just stir four lumps in mine I ‘preciate it. Always liked it sweet. Much ‘bliged. Marcy, she the only one a my kids still alive. Oh, I got grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I even got me some great-great-grandchildren. Can’t ‘member all their names. Most a them live down in Virginia, and I don’t get to see ‘em more’n once in a blue moon. Coulda swore you said you didn’t take no sugar. Now, where was I? My husband Sam, he died back in ‘82. Weren’t no surprise neither, way he smoking them cigarettes every waking hour . . .”

  The teapot emptied, and Sarah half-listened to the old woman while keeping her ears alert for a
nother sound from upstairs. Esther Robison could remember when the neighborhood had been filled with flowers and church bells and playing children—“and nice children too, not the kind like to slit your gizzard sooner’n look at you.”

  At last she talked herself out. “You got folk yourself?” she asked Sarah.

  Sarah told her about her parents’ death. She started to say something about Peter, how he hadn’t been much help, when suddenly there was a loud groan from the direction of the upstairs bedroom.

  Esther cocked her head. A few seconds later, there was a low, deep moaning—either the world’s greatest orgasm or someone in serious pain. Esther shook her head and clucked her tongue with disgust.

  “Have you ever met her?” Sarah asked. “The woman who lives up there?”

  “I ain’t met her, but I seen her. Pretty thing, I guess. She ain’t there too often, and when she come in she like as not be sneaking up the back way, up the far ‘scape, always on a Friday. Almost always got a man with her, and always a different one too. I can tell you reliable she don’t really live up there. Bet you five dollars she married, and she renting this place on the sly just to take her boyfriends on the weekend when her husband ain’t looking.”

  “I saw her bring someone up Friday night,” Sarah said.

  Maybe there had been something funny about the way she said it, something in her voice that caused Esther to peer at her through her spectacles.

  “He wouldn’t be a friend of yours, I s’pose?”

  “Well . . .” And Sarah for some reason told her the whole story.

  Ester sat frowning and thinking for a while after Sarah finished. “Don’t like to poke my nose where it don’t belong,” she said. “But do I hope, child, that he eventually come back down.”

  What on earth did that mean?

  “I ain’t altogether deaf yet, and when you get my age sleep don’t come too regular. I guess I hear most everything. You gonna say I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but men go up that far ‘scape with her—and sometimes they don’t come back down.”

  Jeez. It made no sense. Probably they came down while the old woman slept.

  But when was Peter going to come down?

  “But if he do come down, it’ll be tonight,” Esther said. “Always Sunday night when they leave. Them that leaves, that is.”

  The two women listened, but there were no more sounds. Sarah looked at her watch: almost 9:00. She thanked Esther and promised to fix dinner sometime soon for her. As she stepped into the landing, it felt as if she were leaving an airless den, but as she entered her own place, silent and dark, it seemed just as stifling.

  After midnight, as she lay drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa, she heard footsteps, slow and stumbling, on the fire escape. She hurried to the study window and peered past the blind.

  It was Peter. He was alone, shuffling slowly down the iron steps, hanging on to the rail to keep from falling.

  He looked very drunk. But this time he wasn’t singing.

  Chapter Nine

  Though Peter was no longer perched over Sarah’s head in his love-nest, he still seemed to hover like a vulture over her thoughts. She thought she had known all of his flaws as well as she knew her own, but this raw crudity was something new. She didn’t know what to expect next. Every sound upset her, as if he might be at her door or ascending the fire escape steps again to perform another crude burlesque.

  As with any Punch and Judy show, there was a touch of the sinister. Esther’s words stayed in her mind: “Sometimes they don’t come back down.”

  Howard Goldwin called her on Thursday. “Sare, my love, have I got tales for you. About your sexy-exy.”

  “Got a few of my own,” she said, and she told him everything that had happened.

  “You must meet me for a drink,” Howard said.

  As she turned the corner from her street, she looked to make sure that Peter’s car wasn’t back. It was an irritating new compulsion, just one other way that he had infected her peace of mind.

  Howard was waiting for her at a bar near his house, seated at his favorite table on the patio so he could smoke. Unfortunately, Paul Finney was with him. Sarah had been hoping for a private conversation.

  “Sare, my love. You know Dr. Finney, don’t you?”

  She could tell by his expression that Howard would prefer privacy too, but there was no getting rid of Paul Finney. He was a man who needed a lot of company, people to watch him drink. Short and unattractive, he looked like a fat leprechaun. The department tolerated him because he had tenure and he had published a few important books before the bottle had dissolved his wits.

  Finney rose halfway from his chair and smiled. “It is a pleasure to see you again, my dear.” He sounded like a fat leprechaun too.

  Sarah nodded. A waiter came out as she sat down, and she ordered a cappuccino.

  Howard lit a cigarette and stroked his elegant mustache. He was a slender man of about fifty, perfectly groomed, his dyed black hair combed with a fanciful hint of a wave at the sides.

  “Well, where shall I begin?” he said. “Let’s start with The Gossip According to Karl Hoffmann. By the way, I suppose you’ve heard that the illustrious Dr. Hoffmann has befriended Emily Larkins?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Well, but of course you know Dr. Hoffmann?”

  She didn’t.

  “My dear! You are the last of the anchorites! Everyone knows Hoffmann. He’s a very popular figure at the faculty club because after one drink he’s absolutely powerless to stop his tongue. He would describe the condition of his own grandmother’s under-drawers if anyone were to ask him. So he recounted a most lurid tale, no doubt related to him in the strictest confidence by Ms. Emily.

  “Picture this. It is Sunday night, in fact by now it’s the wee hours of Monday morning. Imagine that you are Ms. Emily, lying in Peter’s bed in the grips of deepest anxiety because you’ve neither seen nor heard from your Romeo for days—since Friday morning to be precise. Has he been beset by thugs? Or perhaps by wicked wenches? Can it be that he’s suffering amnesia caused by a bump on the head and is now residing somewhere in New Jersey, quite unable to recall the name of the woman who haunts his dreams?

  “Ah, but you perceive a sound, a key in the front door, a familiar footstep in the hallway. Your Ulysses has returned from the dark unknown! You hear him approaching the bedchamber. You tremble beneath the sheet, in dread of fainting. Suddenly he is there in the room—but, alas, he seems perfectly oblivious of your presence. He lurches blindly through the darkness, muttering strange words out loud, the most shocking obscenities peppered with utter gibberish. His clothing is soiled, and he reeks of the sewer. The air of the room is overcome with noisome effluvia, the vile stench of loathsome bodily secretions that better we leave unnamed.”

  Paul Finney began to chortle and choked on his scotch. He gasped for air, his eyes bulging. “Howard! You are positively cruel!”

  “At last, in great alarm,” Howard continued, “you switch on the bedside lamp and call out his beloved name. He covers his eyes and bellows as if he’s been struck by a cudgel. ‘Who’s there?’ he cries, and his voice makes your very hackles rise like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”

  Howard stopped. “Oh. You’ve drunk all your cappuccino. Allow me to buy you another.” Like Scheherazade, he loved to suspend his stories in mid-climax.

  “If I could trouble you for another scotch,” Paul Finney said.

  Trying to ignore Finney’s pathetic eyes, Sarah watched Howard walk into the bar. Usually she found his outlandish performances amusing, but today she was put off by his tone. She wasn’t convinced there was anything funny about this story. It sounded as if Peter was suffering a nervous breakdown or maybe slipping into psychosis.

  But then, Howard exaggerated everything. He could turn a minor spat at the faculty club into Armageddon. Probably Peter had merely come home with a hangover and a sore pecker.

  Howard placed their fresh drinks on the table and res
eated himself, carefully adjusting the crease of his trousers as he crossed his long legs. “Well, where was I?”

  After Peter had covered his eyes, as if the light hurt them, he had begun to threaten Emily. What was she doing in his house? Did she imagine that she lived there? He had grabbed her roughly and wrestled her to the front door and had thrown her out into the yard—stark naked. A moment later he hurled out her car keys and purse and locked the door. The terrified woman had no place to go; she was allowing a couple of Asian students to stay at her apartment.

  “So of course she drove, naked as the good Lady Godiva, to the house of Dr. Hoffmann, who, aroused from his slumbers, found in his heart the commendable charity to give bed and shelter to the hapless nudist.”

  “Jeez.”

  Howard looked disappointed. “I thought you would find this amusing.”

  “What’s going on?” Sarah asked. She kept thinking of Esther’s comment: “Sometimes they don’t come down.”

  “The old boy’s flipping his wig,” Howard said. He stroked his mustache and grinned, obviously not sharing her concern. “My diagnosis would be that he’s become so full of himself that there’s no longer any room for his wits. They have fled, seeking more hospitable accommodations.”

  “I seem to have missed part of this story,” Finney complained. “Where was Bellman over the weekend?”

  “Visiting Sarah’s upstairs neighbor,” Howard said. Sarah wished he would keep his mouth shut, but he quickly told Finney everything that Sarah had related to him about the mysterious blonde.

  “So every Friday she emerges to find a man,” said Finney. He seemed to find this the most fascinating part of the story. As he gazed thoughtfully at his drink, Sarah could discern the hint of a once-handsome face beneath his sagging features. “Every Friday,” he repeated.

  “Book Two,” Howard said. “Shall we call it The Apocalypse? As related—to the office of the Dean, no less—by six or seven young undergraduates enrolled in Soc. 237. It appears that Monday and Tuesday our addled protagonist forgot to come teach his class or even to call in, for that matter. But yesterday he made an appearance, a rather disheveled one I regret to say. I’m told his hygiene was questionable, his clothing less than pristine, his handsome face obscured beneath a scruffy growth of beard.” Howard leaned toward Sarah and lowered his voice. “I have it on good authority that his fly gaped open!