The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  "You're Mrs. Rutherford's friend," he said, letting her treat it as a question, or not.

  "Five years," she said, nodding once for each word.

  "A terrible accident," he said, signifying by a conspiratorial glance that neither Marjorie, who was tinkling ice in the kitch­enette, nor the television-bound children were listening.

  Mrs. Ryan shook her head, sad all at once. "Yes. Terrible. Ter­rible, and the children no father. What will happen? What will happen to them, the poor dears?"

  He could only shake his head. Whatever he was here for, it was not to help, and this woman, with her sternness gone, was no longer definable.

  Marjorie brought him his gin and tonic. He was sitting on the plastic-covered sofa, and the coffee table, full of potted plants, was over against the wall next to the television set, so he held the wet glass in his hand, sipped the cool liquid and felt the lemon slice touch his lip. Marjorie took a straight chair from the dining al­cove, placed it at a distance from him that seemed precise to the inch, then carefully sat on it, her knees together, her hands in her lap. She looked at him brightly. Over her shoulder was the room's one window, heavily armored with metal latticework secured by a padlock. From the top of the television set, gold-framed Kodacolor photographs of two smiling children looked down upon their subjects, who did not smile but gazed with grave faces at the now muted excitements of the picture tube.

  She was telling him about how much it cost to garage the car, the Ford station wagon in which they had taken trips to the coun­try; the garage rent was forty dollars a month and now it was go­ing to be raised to sixty. They couldn't leave it outside because it would be vandalized, or stolen, as it had been once. She was afraid to take the subway into Manhattan. Mickey had taught her how to drive. She didn't want to sell the car but was afraid she'd have to now. All this told cheerfully, brightly. These were mere facts, were they not? She didn't mean to give the impression of com­plaint, or at least not more than the usual, ordinary, ongoing com­plaints about the city.

  Marcia scuttled over on her knees and turned the volume up, a sea-crash of undifferentiated breathings and cries, transcended by the man's joking, patronizing voice: Yes, my dear Mrs. Mustig! And now . . . and now! Yes! Yes! Here it is ... .

  "Honey, Honey!" Marjorie called across the noise. "We can't hear! Turn it down!"

  Marcia, on her knees in front of the haze of color and sound, paid no attention to her mother. Mickey looked at his mother once, quickly, then at Marcia with an amusement he tried to con­ceal; evidently he considered his little sister a character. Marjorie got up, big and graceful, and turned the volume down. Marcia waited until her mother was seated again before she turned the volume back up.

  "If you don't turn it down we'll have to turn it off!" Marjorie called to her.

  There was more of this, Luke feeling the detachment of the ob­server, the nervousness of one who feels embarrassment in oth­ers, until Marcia was crying and pouting. Finally Mrs. Ryan said, "I'll take them out, Marge. Here, let me get them ready." She had decided to trust him, as they always trusted him unless they were slightly insane. "Mickey, go get your clothes changed. We'll go to the playground." She took Marcia's hand and led her into a bed­room, Marcia's face red and wet, her lower lip still swollen into a pout.

  He took a swig of his gin and tonic and Marjorie said, "Here, let me freshen your drink. Maybe I'll have one, too. It's hard for kids just sitting around, but what can you do?"

  He shook his head. She took his half-full glass away and he heard the prying fracture of ice in an ice tray, the thud of the re­frigerator, its hiccup before it hummed—domestic noises he hadn't heard for several months unless they were ones he had made himself.

  At first there had been the friends who came to see how he was taking it, husbands and wives bringing food. And the few neigh­bors he knew in that dormitory suburb stopped by with not much to say at first except the half-mute words of consolation and the touching of hands. Later some came to offer advice, his dissolu­tion apparent but not too obvious because he did the dishes and picked things up, more or less. But evidently there were ways beyond his ken in which Helen had kept the house fresh and new; after a while an aura, or patina, of staleness and neglect had sifted through the house like a fog.

  Marjorie brought back two gin and tonics. This time she sat in the deeper chair, her long legs crossed, and offered him a ciga­rette, which he accepted. She got up to get him an ashtray, a heavy metal square with a thin, Giacometti-like figure standing on one edge of it, arms raised in a supplicating pose.

  "What's this?" he asked, surprised; even though it decorated an ashtray, the figure was unlike any other object he'd seen in the apartment.

  "It used to have a saying on it," she said, hastening to explain that it was incomplete as it was. " 'Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?'"

  Yes, for a moment, in that strangely precise way in which the eye assesses value, it had been wrong for this place. Now he looked more closely at the supplicating figure and saw that it hadn't the rough unsentimentality of Giacometti; each limb and feature, though skeletal enough, merely implored.

  When Mrs. Ryan and the children, who now wore their play­ground dungarees, had left, Marjorie asked why he wanted to talk to her, really.

  "So I can write about your experience, I guess," he said. "What it's been like for you."

  "But why me in particular?" she asked, blushing a little around the edges of her makeup, which now seemed a mask he wished she hadn't wanted to wear, though that mask was part of what he must observe. To her, he supposed, it wasn't a mask at all, but sim­ple reality; one wore makeup in certain situations just as one wore clothes, and clothes were not necessarily a mask.

  "Because Jimmo McLeod and Mike Rizzo talked to me about your husband, and your name and address were on a list I got from Gentleman."

  "Sheila—Mrs. Ryan—made me call and check on you," she said.

  "And I passed?"

  "They said you were a well-known writer. Then Sheila—Mrs. Ryan—looked up Gentleman in the book and it was the same num­ber you gave me, so we figured you were you." She laughed, then stopped suddenly, as though her easy laugh had been wrong. "But what could you write about me?"

  "I want to find out who you are, what it was like before and af­ter. I know my questions might make you unhappy and if you don't want to answer them, please don't. I don't want to add to your tragedy, even in little ways."

  "Is that what reporters say?"

  "It's what I say, anyway," he said.

  "I thought just now you were going to cry," she said. "Now, if I do, my mascara will get all gooey and my false eyelashes might fall off. You know, tears look funny on pancake makeup. They sort of roll down like they were on oil or something." She laughed again, her eyes, which he now saw were light green, looking out of their heavily darkened rims at him.

  "Why do you wear it?" he asked, a question he hadn't intended.

  She thought, frowning at him, though not in anger. She blinked, and he wondered if her lids felt sticky. Closed, her eyes were ragged black slits in fleshcolored paste.

  "If I'm going to have to cry I'll take it all off," she said. "I don't know why I didn't think I'd have to cry. You're going to ask about Mickey and where we went when we went on trips to the country. We went to Pennsylvania sometimes, sometimes Vermont, or At­lantic City. Sometimes on Sunday we just drove around in the suburbs looking at houses. You know, with a yard, a garage and grass. Neither of us ever lived in a house, but I always wanted to try it. Just think! Your own house? Do you live in a house?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Is it nice? Trees and grass and all?"

  "Yes, it's nice. You'd like it."

  "I'd like to see it sometime. Where is it?"

  "In Wellesley, Massachusetts."

  "But you know, with all those doors and windows on every side, don't you feel funny? Like, somebody could look in, or break in. Like, here, we got the door with the police lock, and bars on the
windows. I mean if somebody tries to get in at least I know what door." She stopped and shook her head, the high golden crown of her hair seeming too massive to rotate that quickly. "But you want to ask questions, right?"

  "Well, you're answering them before I even ask," he said.

  "You mean you want to know things like we wanted to live somewhere else? Anyway, who wouldn't?"

  He asked her about her life before she was married, and she told him that she came from the Bronx, grew up in the Bronx, graduated from high school and worked as a receptionist-secre­tary in a private clinic. She met Mickey Rutherford because she sometimes dated his younger brother, who was in high school when she was. Mickey never went to regular high school, but he got an equivalency certificate in the army, where he was a techni­cian—a mechanic. In Vietnam he was wounded in the back when a rocket landed thirty feet away from him. Then when he got out of the army his uncle, who was a shop steward, got him into the IUOE. He was only on permit a year before he got his card.

  Mickey loved his kids. He was a home-loving man. "I still can't believe sometimes he's not coming home. Sometimes I have to shake myself, around five or six, because without knowing it I been expecting to hear his key in the lock. And then I got to know he's not ever going to come busting in and grab me and the kids ever again."

  She put her fingers to her eyes, then looked at them. "I better go wash my face," she said. "Look, I don't want to weep all over the place. I'm not a crybaby. ..." She got up, trying to suppress a high whinny of grief, and went into the bathroom past the sign,

  MICK IN THOUGHT.

  As the water ran in the bathroom he considered flight from her, but that would be betrayal. She wouldn't know why he had left. She would wonder, and feel bad on that account as well. He liked her, and felt that she was good. He was aware of his mental note-taking: ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM on that plaque from a gift house or souvenir shop supposedly meant, Don't let the bastards wear you down. A conversation piece. He thought about the social implications of that, of everything; but the woman behind the bathroom door was real, a system of life exquisitely tuned to feel pain.

  All his life he'd had the feeling that he thought about things other people didn't think about—not because of their lack of imagination or intelligence, but because they acted upon some ethical or moral code that he had somehow missed, as though he'd been out of school the term it had been introduced into everyone else's consciousness. And so now he thought of her naked haunches, and how they would be vast and warm as sand dunes, sea grasses blowing between. This vision was not sexual, it was just there, tawny and immense.

  After a few minutes she came out of the bathroom, her hair tied back and with a different face made of honest shiny skin incorporating pores, the inner shadings of her own blood, green eyes rimmed by the faint rosiness caused by tears, and a small white scar at her left temple.

  "This is what I really look like," she said, blushing.

  "You look more real," he said.

  "More's the pity."

  The telephone rang, and she got up quickly to answer it. "It's for you," she said, surprised as one always is in that circumstance.

  As she handed him the receiver their fingers touched, then it was Robin's voice at his ear. "Hey, Luke? I'm sorry I didn't make it today, but I got hung up." Luke thought of dogs in the rut. "But is it okay if I come over and get the pictures? Have you asked her about it?"

  "No, not yet. Let me ask." He turned to her and said, "It's the photographer. He'd like to take pictures of the apartment and you and the kids. Would you mind that?"

  "Like this?" she said, putting her hands on her washed and shining face. "My God!" Then she said, "You didn't tell me about any pictures."

  "I was going to ask you. Anyway, it can be some other time." He wanted to say that it could be never, if she didn't want them to take pictures, and in leaving out this option he felt the twinge of coercion.

  "Oh," she said. "Well ..."

  "I don't want to intrude," he said. But he didn't want her to say no to the photographs, either. Even now there was the sense of getting this assignment over with. But then what would he do? She nodded, and he told Robin to come.

  "All right," she said. "Let's sit down." They sat down and lit cig­arettes. "Mickey didn't smoke. He used to get disgusted with me. 'Why smoke that garbage?' he always said."

  "A good question," he said. "I always used to think—maybe I still do—that if I could live a certain kind of life, with everything just right, I'd never even think of smoking."

  "When you're sound asleep, maybe," she said. "We're fellow ad­dicts, you know?"

  He considered telling her that they had more in common than that, but he was afraid of that connection, and also of a loss of con­trol. It seemed a meanness in him that he could not share it with her, and in not confessing his own loss he felt cruel and small. He had never trusted secrets; in many ways they seemed more power­fully evil than lies.

  She found him easy to talk to. She said this. She told him about Mickey, when they first dated and he'd taken her to his social club, The Nocturnes, and later when they'd had an engagement sort of party there, with the club—it was a dingy sort of basement, real­ly—all festooned in crepe paper. Her maiden name was Burns and she wasn't Catholic, but Mickey was and now Mickey Jr. and Marcia were Catholic, which was all right but it made her feel fun­ny sometimes. Was he a Catholic?

  "No," he said.

  "Carr. Is that German? Jewish?"

  "English, or Scottish, I think. Maybe it was once spelled K-e-r-r—you know, like Deborah Kerr."

  "Oh, the actress! Yeah, sure. I always used to pronounce it Curr. I saw her on the Late Late Show with Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. I been watching the Late Late Show a lot lately."

  When he asked her about her finances she spoke as openly; the money seemed like a lot, but she knew it wouldn't last long unless she went to work. She'd been putting that off, because of Mickey Jr. and Marcia, but she'd have to go looking soon.

  He found that she was afraid of blacks, though without the in­tensity or even shrillness that usually came with that fear; she had no programs for a solution to that problem. She knew Mickey felt stronger on the subject, but he also said many blacks couldn't get jobs, so maybe they had to steal. She'd heard him say that. And he admired black athletes. He was crazy about Muhammad Ali, though he always called him Cassius Clay. He couldn't admire that man enough; whatever he said just broke Mickey up.

  She showed him pictures of Mickey, her hands trembling and her voice tremulous at first. In one picture the family sat at a pic­nic table among long-needled pines, a blue lake behind them. Mickey's curly fair hair was thick, and his wide red face grinned more intensely than anyone else's. "This old lady came along and Mickey got her to take the picture," Marjorie said. "She really loved doing it but he had to teach her how to hold it and look through the viewfinder and push the button. That's at Lake George, last summer."

  She knelt beside him, her red fingernail pointing out the blue lake, the far shore. Her round arm, reddish and fuzzed, gave off heat, and again he saw her monumentally naked, tawny dunes and grasses shimmering, baking under the force of sunlike energy.

  She got up and slipped the pictures back into a maroon album that had the words, Our Family stamped in gold on the leatherette cover. "I got to stick them all in there sometime. I never got around to last summer's."

  She was nervous, smoothing her undone hair back, taking a step toward the kitchen, running her hand over the edge of the dining table and looking at her fingers for dust. "It's strange you being here," she said, blushing at what that might mean.

  "I understand," he said.

  "But everything's strange. What are you going to write about me?"

  "The way you are, I hope, and how you're taking it, and how you look. I'll let you read it first."

  "How I look! God, I look awful."

  "Not to me."

  "You don't like makeup, huh?"

  "W
hy paint skin? It's already got its own color."

  "You're a wierdo, you know that?" She laughed,then looked at him seriously and shook her head. "I feel like I ought to call you by your first name, now. Luke, right? You call me Marge, okay?"

  "Okay, Marge."

  "That's better," she said, and sat down again, this time with a lit­tle carelessness, as if the upholstered chair were sturdier than it had been before. "Luke? You go around talking to people all the time that had something bad happen to them? Is that what you do all the time? I mean, news is bad news, right? And you're after the news. What I mean is, how can you stand it? I mean really."

  "News isn't always bad," he said. "Just most of the time."

  "It bothered you a lot to come here, right?"

  "Yes."

  "You don't have to show me first. You know—what you write about me."

  "I will, though, if I write anything."

  "You mean you don't have to write the article?"

  "Not if I don't feel like it."

  "But it's how you make a living, right?"

  "Partly, anyway."

  "You're awful sad, you know that?" she said, frowning, worried for him. "Let me get us another gin and tonic. Got to cheer you up, Luke."

  She made them another gin and tonic, and told him, their ice tinkling and their fingers on the cold moist glasses, about her fa­ther and mother. Her father was the super in an apartment build­ing with forty units—forty families in it and somebody got mugged in the elevator last week. It was getting worse and they ought to have a security guard in the lobby. Her mother had a heart condition. Her brother was in the navy and her little sister was getting married next month to an optometrist. Marjorie seemed happy to talk, to look at him and smile and sip her gin and tonic.

  "You're married, Luke, right? And you got a family up there in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I can tell."

  "How can you tell?" he said. Of course she had to ask that ques­tion sooner or later and force him into a choice of answers, each option having a precise moral value—yes, or the truth. "No, I didn't mean to ask you how you could tell. I had a family but in January my wife and two children were killed in an accident."