Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  “I need a little bit of money.”

  “I don’t have any money.” She felt wary.

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  “I don’t.” She was thinking of her wallet upstairs. Maybe seven or eight dollars, that was all.

  “You’ve got access to Daddy’s money, right? Tuition money? You could spare a little bit.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Eddie grinned. “How do you think?” He examined his fingernails, then looked up at her again.

  “Naomi told you that?” She must have. She’d told him everything else.

  “So?” he said.

  “No.” It wasn’t even her money. “Why don’t you get a job, Eddie? Support yourself.” She thought about all those schools. “What about your father? He must have money. If I give you money, I won’t be able to pay for tuition, and they’ll wonder where it all went.”

  “Make something up,” he said.

  “Your mother then. Get it from her. There must be somebody else besides me.”

  “You are so fucking ignorant,” he said. She remembered how his mood had shifted exactly this way in the motel, how he could be talking pretty calmly and then turn ugly. “My mother,” he said slowly. Carole could feel his breath on her face. Feel the cold of the glass against the back of her head. “Is nothing but a stupid cow.”

  She looked at the door to the dorm again. She wanted so badly to get out of the car, to go back inside, to feel safe. “You don’t need to tell me about her,” she said. “If you don’t want to.” She didn’t want to know.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “You brought it up. You’re entitled. My mother makes about five grand a year renting apartments. We’re not talking Pease and Elliman here. We’re talking crap. We’re talking roaches. We’re talking Brooklyn and Queens. Christ. She gives me nothing, not that that’s the way it could have been if she’d just had the smarts to use the money Lindbaeck sent her for my education, but oh, no, she gets all up on her bandstand about how the money’s for my education. Not for groceries, not rent, not clothes. Nothing but tuition and books.” He laughed, throwing his head back. “He’d never have found out because he didn’t give a flying fuck. He never even visited. He moved back to Norway after I was born, and I never saw him again. And we’re talking big-ticket schools, too. Collegiate, Hotchkiss, Kimball Union, a couple of colleges. For that we had to live in a walk-down in Germantown. I figured, Why not make the old man pay if that’s what his game was? So I got myself expelled. They don’t refund the money when you get kicked out, you know.”

  “You got expelled on purpose?” Up to now she’d assumed it had been recklessness and bad luck.

  “Why not?”

  She was silent. The information made him seem so much worse, so much more dangerous. All along, Carole had thought he was connected to something else, something big enough to absorb him. A family somewhere who’d gotten disgusted with him perhaps, but still a family. Still a connection he’d be afraid to blow. But there wasn’t anybody. He was untethered, with no one to answer to. Except me, she thought.

  “What if I don’t give you money?” she asked him.

  He paused. “But you will,” he said. “You don’t really have a choice.”

  She had to think fast. “There’s hardly anything in the account right now. They’ll fund it for second semester, though.”

  Eddie reached over to her, frightening her. “Hey,” he said. “Relax.”

  “What are you doing?” she said as he reached again. “Don’t touch me.” She could hardly breathe.

  “I just remembered something I wanted to ask you,” he said. “You know what I heard?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

  He’d raised his hand to her shoulder and was running his thumb up and down her neck. It made her think of that night, when he’d checked for Rita’s pulse. “Relax, will you? You’re too uptight. I’m not going to hurt you. I just wondered—” His thumb stopped moving and pressed lightly just above her collarbone. “I heard this makes orgasm better. You ever hear that?”

  “What?” She barked out the word. He was insane. “What?” she said again. “Of course not.” She pushed his arm away, but slowly, not wanting to make a sudden move.

  Eddie sat back and sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t think it was true either. It’s crazy. That’s what I thought when I heard it. Shark fins, tiger balls. All just a lot of superstition. I just wondered if you’d ever heard that.”

  “I want to go now,” she said, reaching for the door handle.

  “Wait,” he said. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

  “I told you I can’t.”

  “Write me a check. Postdate it or something.”

  “Okay,” she said, pulling up on the handle.

  “Do it now,” he said. “Go on. Go up there and get the check.”

  She had another thought. “But Daddy will see it’s made out to you, Eddie.” She hoped Naomi hadn’t told Eddie that she reconciled the checks, that her father never even saw them. “He’ll ask me who you are.”

  She expected him to say “Make something up” the way he usually did, but this seemed to bother him. “Shit,” he said.

  She took advantage of the opening. “I’ll get you cash during the break. It’s the best way. Just tell me how to get it to you. Where to bring it.”

  “Don’t you go finding me,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

  Chapter Eight

  She skipped morning classes the next day and walked the six blocks to the Star, where she sat in the back sipping coffee. It was mostly men in the place at that hour—businessmen in suits and construction workers wolfing down big platters of eggs. And it was loud too, a lot of talk and laughter, much different from the women she was used to in the afternoons. She felt safer tucked away at the back, where nobody bothered her.

  She hadn’t slept after Eddie left. She had gone back to the room and found Josie and Fiona sitting side by side on Josie’s bed waiting for her, grinning and sly.

  “So,” Josie had said. “You were holding out!”

  “He’s sooo cute,” Fiona had chimed in. “You parked with him. We saw. The windows were steamed.”

  “Get lost,” she had said to them and then gone straight to bed, not that it was possible to sleep with the two of them whispering about her—with her right there, the covers pulled over her head. They’d finally gotten bored and left the room, the lights still burning, so she’d had to get up and turn them all off, and by then she’d been completely buzzed, wide awake. She’d gone back to bed and counted the days until winter break. Nineteen. Less than three weeks before he came looking for her again, before he surprised her on the street or showed up at the apartment. Three weeks to come up with some money for him. He hadn’t said how much, but he wasn’t talking about twenty dollars, she knew that much.

  But it wasn’t just that. The whole idea of going home again at all, of being back in the apartment and back under a microscope, made her panic. Her parents were going to be watching her, asking a million questions, just the way they had at Thanksgiving when she’d gone home for three awful days of nonstop interrogation about her classes, about the other girls and what clubs she had joined, and of course Neal. Then Emily and her husband had come for dinner, which was even worse. Emily had sat at the dining room table talking about Carole as though she wasn’t even there. “Awfully quiet, Patsy. Cat got her tongue, I suppose. And no word about the new beau either?” And then to her husband, “Carole has met a boy from Princeton.”

  Three whole weeks of that when she got home, plus always looking over her shoulder for Eddie, plus stealing money from her father, which it would be if she did it because the money wasn’t hers, it was his, and she was entrusted with it. No mistake about that. And plus, she’d thought, feeling heavy as stone, there was going to be a vacation week in the spring and then the whole summer to get through with them. Over and over and over for four more years.

&n
bsp; I saw you do it, Eddie had said. I saw your hands.

  She watched Nancy, the counter waitress. She was so efficient, as though she’d been wound up and set loose. Not a minute to think, Nancy sometimes said of her job when things were slower. Carole watched her sweep tips into the pocket of her apron, then run a sponge over the counter, slap down a paper place mat and silver, fill a juice glass with water for the next customer, and reach for the coffeepot and start pouring refills up and down. Everything efficient and clean, the opposite of her own life. All that order was something to aspire to. Imagine being so busy with your work that you didn’t have a minute to think.

  At ten, she walked the six dreary blocks back to campus. She’d already cut two classes, and she knew she wasn’t going to make the rest of them. She went into the room to find Josie and three of her friends sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing bridge. They had been talking when Carole opened the door but fell silent at once, which meant they’d been talking about her. Around them were ashtrays full to the brim with cigarette butts. There was a layer of smoke suspended in the air at eye level.

  Carole opened the window and lay down on her bed. The silence continued.

  “Your mother called,” Josie said.

  “When?” Carole said. Fiona giggled.

  “A while ago. We had quite the chat,” Josie said.

  There was a whir as the cards were shuffled, then the slap, slap of their being dealt.

  “She asked all about Neal,” Josie said. The other girls, Caroline and Laurie, were staring at the floor.

  “I said ‘You mean my Neal?’ To tell the truth, roomie, I didn’t think you’d even noticed about Neal. I was actually flattered to think my life was of any interest to you.”

  Carole stared at the wall, her eyes prickling with shock.

  “Guess what your mother said.” Josie had stopped dealing.

  “Come on, Josie,” Laurie said. “Don’t.”

  “No, no,” Josie said. “I have every right.” She stood and crossed the floor to Carole’s bed. “She said ‘No, Carole’s Neal, dear. From Princeton.’” Josie had the inflection in her mother’s voice in spades.

  Carole could not move.

  Josie continued. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend at Princeton named Neal too. What an incredible coincidence.”

  “Might we meet your Neal?” Fiona said with a mean smirk.

  “Stop it,” Carole said.

  “But there’s more,” Josie said, her voice rising. “Didn’t your Neal just give you the same little heart-shaped pin that my Neal gave me? Imagine that!”

  “Please,” Carole said.

  “You’re so jealous. I didn’t know how jealous you were. You want my life so badly.”

  “I do not want your life,” Carole said, furious, not caring for once. She looked at the four of them in their nearly matching outfits, their nearly matching hairdos. “Nobody in their right mind wants your life because you’re spineless, Josie, such a loser, and you don’t even know it. If it doesn’t say Brooks Brothers, it must not be a shirt, right? If it doesn’t go to Princeton, it must not be a guy. And you’re vicious too. Stupid, unimaginative, and vicious is how I see you. No, I don’t want your life, but my mother does. And I certainly don’t want Neal.”

  “You couldn’t have my life if you paid for it,” Josie said.

  Carole got up and made an imaginary line down the center of the room with her arm. “From now on,” she said to Josie, “you keep your friends on your own side of the room.”

  “I want you to call your mother right now and tell her the truth. It’s a violation, what you did,” Josie said, looking at the others.

  “Now,” Carole said, shooing the other girls out of her territory.

  “I’ll call her myself, then,” Josie said. “I’ll tell her you’re just so pathetic you made it all up. And anyway, Neal wouldn’t look twice at you, just in case you were thinking—”

  “My side of the room.” Carole kicked the pile of cards across the imaginary line.

  “You’re in so much trouble,” Josie said.

  She didn’t go to another class that day or the next. The house mother came to talk to her. Mrs. Minnehan, with her brittle red hair and crepe-paper skin, wanted to know what the trouble was. Josie had been talking. Then the nurse, Miss Saunders, knocked on the door and came in. She laid a cool hand on Carole’s head to see if she was sick. When they left, Carole knew she couldn’t stay. Pretty soon they’d make a federal case out of her. Her parents were going to hear about everything. And what about when Eddie came after her again, which he would over Christmas break, only weeks away?

  That night, very late, she rose from bed and pulled open her drawers. She got her suitcase out of the hold at the end of the corridor and started piling in her clothes. Josie woke and turned on the light. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “It’s all yours.” Carole opened her closet and pulled everything out at once, hangers and all, and stuffed it into the suitcase. When she was done, she sat on her suitcase and waited for dawn. Josie went back to sleep but woke later and watched Carole.

  “You’re so weird,” Josie said.

  Carole called for a taxi from the pay phone, then went back to the room. By now Josie had told other girls in the corridor. They were standing on Josie’s side of the room, arms folded, watching. “You can’t just go,” Josie said. “You can’t just leave without telling anyone.”

  “Sure I can,” Carole said.

  “Nobody ever just leaves Vassar,” Josie said, almost pleading with her.

  “Watch me.”

  When the taxi arrived, she asked to be taken to the station, where she waited over an hour for the train to Manhattan. She kept looking over her shoulder for Mrs. Minnehan or somebody else from Vassar. Nobody came.

  That first night she stayed at the Hotel New Yorker, an enormous rambling structure on Thirty-fourth Street, way past its prime. The dim corridors upstairs went on forever, and her room was tiny, with barely enough space to walk around, but it felt safe, like the booth at the Star Luncheonette, tucked away, a place where no one could find her.

  In the morning she went to the bank and emptied her bank account of what was left of her Vassar money. There was five hundred and eighty-seven dollars, sixty less than she thought she had. Her father would have given her a lecture about that. She was supposed to know to the penny. She folded the money, put it in her purse, and walked up Eighth Avenue, with the purse clamped tight against her stomach, starving. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast yesterday, and she went into the first place she found, Bo’s, a small diner, steamy and loud, squeezed between two buildings. Bo and his wife ran the place, shouting out a kind of shorthand Carole had never heard before about food. A blond with sand was coffee with cream and sugar. A raft was toast. The twins were salt and pepper.

  She tucked herself into a booth at the back and scanned the newspapers people had left lying around, looking for an apartment. There were so many, and she had enough money, so how hard could it be?

  The first place she saw was a single room on West Thirtieth with a bathtub next to the kitchen sink and windows that looked out on the building next door. The man who met her there watched her like a hawk and wanted to see ID. “Driver’s license, birth certificate, whatever,” he said. When Carole said she didn’t drive and didn’t have any ID with her, he asked where she’d lived before. Upstate, she told him. Where? He wanted to know. Poughkeepsie, she said. You bring a reference? he asked. The whole exchange lasted about a minute and a half.

  “I have cash,” she said, thinking that might be the problem. “I can pay.” She brought out her roll of money, and the guy took a big step back away from her and waved his hands in front of his face as though she’d just pulled out a gun or something.

  “Young lady, don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t ever do that. Don’t you go showing that around that way.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but the law is the law. I can’t rent to you unless y
ou can show me some ID.”

  The same thing happened with the second place and the third, although she didn’t show the money again. After each failure, she went back to Bo’s and started all over again with other people’s discarded papers.

  “You lookin’ for a place?” Mrs. Bo was a short, dark-haired woman who wore a small bow above her bangs that matched her outfit. She tipped the coffeepot and filled Carole’s cup. Carole nodded. “How long?” Mrs. Bo wanted to know.

  “Three days,” Carole said.

  “I mean how long you need it for? You looking for something permanent or temporary?”

  “Just a while,” Carole said.

  “Then maybe I know somebody,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at Carole. “What’s the story on you anyway?”

  Carole made it up as she went along, remembering Naomi’s advice from way back to keep it simple and as close to the truth as possible. She was taking a semester off from college, she explained, to do some research on Henry James at the New York Public Library. “I have plenty of money,” Carole said. “I can pay.”

  It turned out to be a sublet on East Thirty-first. The guy who was renting it had gone off for reasons that were never explained. But it was a nice enough place on the second floor. It had three deadbolts and a chain inside the door. The windows all had bars on them. Pretty bars, curved and filigreed, but still bars. The living room was long and narrow, with a high tin ceiling that had been painted so many times that the detail in it was blurred. The furniture was cheap—Scandinavian chairs with legs that tapered to little points and low plastic tables. The only windows were in the living room at the front and in the bedroom at the back. In between it was dark, and she needed to keep all the lamps burning, even in the daytime.

  Mrs. Bo was the intermediary, collecting her money and telling her the rules. He only wanted fifty dollars a month, with four months paid up front, as long as she would take care of the place. “He’s not allowed to sublet,” she said of the apartment. “But he wants somebody in here to look after it. So if anybody asks, like somebody in the building, or if the super comes nosing around, you tell them you’re the niece from upstate. That’s all you say.” She gave Carole an address in Iowa where she was supposed to send any mail that came in. She was supposed to keep the plants watered, she was not ever to answer the buzzer if it rang. And she was to let no one into the apartment. If she could promise all that, they had a deal.