Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  He and Max had never had the same tastes in women. But he was alone in his neighbor’s yard, unwilling to cross the driveway to his own house, and deeply conscious of his status as the most alien-looking party-goer there. And thus, when the music stopped again and the woman with the braids bumped into him during the course of her final, sightless swirl, he forced a smile and managed a greeting.

  She looked him over, smiling with what he took to be amusement. Then, as if she thought he might have more interest in her than she cared for him to have, she began to explain that she was waiting for a friend. And he, torn between his desire to confirm that he had no particular interest in her either and his longing to keep her talking until the driveway crowd dispersed, asked her what her friend did for a living.

  It was a moronic question, he realized right away, but it seemed to delight her, and she informed him that her friend modeled for a group of artists.

  Then she asked him whether he had had anything to eat. Her tone, he thought, was maternal, and he guessed that she suspected he was a stray. When he didn’t answer right away, she offered to take him in and show him where the food was in a soft, high, melodious voice that was well-suited to her enormous eyes and her braids. He imagined that she would walk him to the door, point him to the food table, and then vanish, happy to be rid of him. Glancing over at the purple bus and seeing that the crowd there was finally disbanding, he became emboldened and made some crack about being familiar with kitchens as he had one of his own.

  She grinned, delighted, it appeared, to have sparked his ire, and squinted as though to better evaluate him. He imagined that she was seeing him as he was now, an ambitious, intelligent young man capable of profound thought. The notion made him smile, and that made her laugh again. Her laughter sobered him and made him more anxious to hurry away.

  A car pulled into the driveway. She stretched her neck to look at it, and when she realized that its driver was not the man she was waiting for, the model, her enormous eyes swept back to Pete. The music had gone out of them. They looked sad now, and darker, two huge, darkening caverns.

  She began to explain the reason for her sadness. Her friend, she suspected, was attracted to one of the artists he modeled for, an older woman. This woman had invited him to come back to her apartment on several occasions for a private session. As far as she knew, he had resisted in the past, but tonight … well, she just had a feeling.

  Feeling the arrogance passing from him, Pete shifted his weight as she spoke. He didn’t know how to free himself from her cavernous gaze, her unbidden confessions. He could smell her perfume. It smelled like vanilla, and he realized that he was hungry. He fingered the top of his note-pad and imagined himself describing her in terms of a cake. A cake was good; you consumed a little and then walked away from it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you would want to include in your regular diet.

  Perhaps she took his smile to mean that he was sympathetic to her dilemma, for she began to expound on it, informing him that she was thinking of riding past the artist’s apartment to see whether her friend’s car was there. If it was, then maybe she would knock and confront him … them. Maybe it was time to get it out in the open for once and for all.

  She hesitated, searching his eyes for a reaction, but he was preoccupied, working on the words that would sanction his escape. He began to say that he had some place to be himself, but his explanation was cut short by the hand that descended on his shoulder. Its placement was so familiar that he half expected to turn around and see Max. But it was only the bearded man. He was carrying a large bottle of red wine, speaking to the woman with the braids, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was supporting his weight on the shoulder of a total stranger. If Pete pulled away, the man, who was swaying, would stumble.

  Only half listening to their conversation, Pete gulped when he heard the word “stuff” repeated several times. The bearded man, who was still clinging to his shoulder, bent over and placed the wine bottle on the ground. Then he reached into his pocket with his free hand and produced the “stuff.” The woman took the small, plastic bag from him, opened it, and sniffed. Then she turned to Pete and asked if he would care for some.

  Pete shook his head. Max had tried to get him to try it on several occasions, but he had always refused. If he wouldn’t try it with Max, then certainly he was not about to try it with two strangers. But the bearded man guffawed heartily at his refusal, and when the woman petitioned him again, he agreed.

  The three sat down on the grass, and while the woman produced the papers and began to roll, Pete surveyed the driveway and the expanse of lawn, looking for the police whose onslaught he anticipated. He couldn’t think why he had agreed to participate. He couldn’t think why he hadn’t stayed in his room with Chaucer.

  When his turn came, he drew, then choked. They giggled, and he was surprised to find himself giggling along with them. He felt dizzy and wondered where his animosity had gone. Then all at once he located it, submerged beneath the tinkling of their combined merriment. To console himself, he told himself that he was only doing his writer’s work. He slipped his hand into his pocket and fingered his note-pad again. Now he was more anxious than ever to return to his room. He had things he wanted to write, he realized, many things, too many things in fact. His mind was a stream, but its flow was obstructed by a barrier of downed trees and rocks. His watery thoughts were piling up higher and higher, trying to break through. He was drowning.

  He passed what was left of the joint to the woman and she pulled a bobby pin out from behind her ear and set the roach into it. She lit it up, blew out the flame, and sucked the smoke that resulted into her nostrils. He noticed that her hands were long and thin and white in the moonlight, her fingers nimble. Their fluttering motion made him think of wings. She pushed off the roach and put the bobby pin back into her hair. As he saw no other bobby pins anywhere on her head, he imagined he had just witnessed this one’s sole function.

  She picked up the wine bottle, opened it, and drank. The bearded man drank next, then Pete. He was still drowning in the jumble of the things that he wanted to write, but now he didn’t mind so much. Sometime during her lighting of the roach, he had learned to breathe water. He was a fish now, swimming through his thoughts, looking them over with piscine objectivity.

  As the bearded man got up and staggered back to the house, it occurred to Pete that the woman had never even bothered to introduce them. Then he remembered that she had never introduced herself. He imagined names for her—Moon Beam, Sea Spray, Crystal Claire—and seemed to see Max looking down on him from the heavens, from up beside the white lunar orb, smiling, laughing at his awkwardness. He smiled back at him. The woman clutched his elbow and suggested they take a walk.

  Her suggestion brought him back out of the murky waters in which he had been swimming. He stood up, explaining that he had to leave, and she volunteered to walk him to his car. He said he would rather she didn’t and started moving toward the road. She laughed abruptly, picked up the wine, and started after him, asking him why not. He walked faster, hurrying down the driveway rather than crossing it. He didn’t want her to know that he lived right next door. He didn’t want her to know anything about him.

  Out on the street, they both looked left and right. As the revelers had all parked on the lawn or in the driveway, there were no cars in either direction. She asked him where he was parked, and now he had no choice but to tell her that he lived next door, that he had walked over, that he had a test tomorrow, and that he had to go prepare for it.

  She seemed to find it all equally amusing, and following him into his yard, she chattered about her own affiliation with the college. She had been a philosophy major, she told him, but had dropped out before getting her degree when she realized that philosophy was about as useful in the real world as a box of light bulbs was to someone who lived in a cave.

  So, she imagined herself a part of the real world! It was astonishing. He shook his head and tried to concentrate on
Max, who would have known what to say to dismiss her.

  She seemed to be fascinated by the fact that she was being shunned. He suspected that it had never happened to her before. It made him feel good about himself.

  They reached the side door and he dug in his pocket for his keys. She laughed, and looking at the neighbors’ house, asked him who on earth did he imagine might try to break in. He looked there too; the answer seemed obvious. He opened the door and got behind it, but as if to force her entry, she put her hand on the knob. He told her that his parents were both asleep. She was amazed to learn that he still lived with them. She lifted the wine bottle to her mouth and gulped, then offered him a swallow. He shook his head. She shrugged and turned away. He watched her cross the driveway, the bottle swinging at her side, her braids swinging at her hips, her hips swinging beneath her skirt.

  The house had never seemed so silent. He opened the refrigerator and removed one of the sandwiches his mother had left for him. He opened a beer and sat down at the table and thought about Max.

  Max had been comfortable with everyone. He could smoke a joint with the hippies or drink a beer with his father’s construction crew or sip a martini with Pete’s parents. Neither had siblings of their own and they had thought of each other as brothers. Pete had liked to imagine that Butch, Max’s father, was his father too. His own father worked at IBM. When he came home at night, he was tired. Pressure, he always spoke of pressure. He spent his free time reading newspapers. He knew everything about everything. He never cursed. He never strayed. He never yelled. He was boring.

  Butch, on the other hand, carried a Colt .45 and wore cowboy boots. He hunted. He had a shop in the basement in which he made lamps, repaired watches, and cleaned his guns. He let Max smoke down there, cigarettes or pot, whatever he wanted. When his wife called down to see if the boys were behaving, he yelled up, “Don’t worry, Nat, I got my good eye on them.” But when Nat shut the door, he laughed and took a drag of whatever Max was smoking. He had a camper on the back of his truck, and he let the boys hang out in it. Sometimes he took them with him to spend a night out in the woods, beneath the stars. He said it was good for the soul to spend a night outside once in a while. He never got angry with the boys, but sometimes he pretended to, and then he called them “horses’ asses.”

  Once, Pete and Max had been out late drinking and were trying to sneak back into the house, up to Max’s room, without awakening Butch or Nat. They were halfway up the stairs when they ran into Butch’s .45. Pete screamed and fell back into Max’s arms. When Butch was finally able to stop laughing, he said, “I thought someone was breaking in!” Later, over coffee in the kitchen, he admitted that he’d known it was them. He showed them the .45’s barrel, which was empty.

  But now Max was dead, and Pete, whose presence only awakened painful memories in Butch, had stopped going to visit him. He would have to get through life without them.

  He was not in the mood for Chaucer anymore. Chaucer hadn’t known Max; Chaucer had never known anyone like him. He’d never heard him laugh, knew nothing of his biting sarcasm or his imitation of Nixon. He hadn’t heard Max howl the night he had had to bury his beagle in the field behind his house, and he’d never been with him at a poetry reading, where, Max proved, girls were as easy to pick up as pennies.

  Pete could feel his chest contracting and his breathing becoming irregular. Blaming his obsessive thoughts on the pot, he went up to his room and lay on his bed with his pillow held over his head.

  Time passed. He had stopped crying and could hear his heart thumping against the mattress. He released his pillow but left it on his head. He turned his face to the wall and was staring at the darkness there when all at once he heard a sound which was not his heart. It seemed to be coming from downstairs.

  At first he thought that his parents had returned early from their weekend, but then he realized that it couldn’t be them. His mother would have phoned to let him know. And if she hadn’t been able to reach him, she would have yelled up from the door so as not to frighten him. She knew how much he worried about things; she was a worrier herself. Together they could go on for hours embellishing their concerns. She’d told him many times that he shouldn’t worry about his worrying, that the two of them worried only because their imaginations were overactive, that one day he would put his overactive imagination to good use. He hated it when she said that. He hated to think that what his creative writing professor referred to as his “unique talent” was really nothing more than a personality flaw.

  Pete had failed to lock the door. Actually, he had chosen not to lock it, because the woman with the braids had made fun of him. There was no noise coming from next door anymore. He imagined that she had returned to the party and had told some of the others about the indifferent young man who had shared her pot and her wine and then refused to let her into his house. Her audience would have roared with laughter. One of them would have dared another to break into the house, to steal something, just to put him in his place.

  He held his breath and listened, hoping that the robber would take the first thing he saw and hurry out again. He could imagine him looking over his mother’s collection of copper pots that hung above the stove. But apparently the pots weren’t satisfying, for now he heard the footsteps moving into the living room and then mounting the stairs.

  It occurred to him that perhaps it was not some half-drunk party-goer after all. A half-drunk party-goer would be stumbling, perhaps even snickering as he considered his audacity. This intruder was moving slowly, purposefully. Pete was afraid for his life.

  The footsteps ascended, one creaking stair at a time. Then they reached the landing and started down the hall. Pete quaked with fear and felt tears mounting all over again. He considered calling out; if the intruder’s intention was merely to rob, perhaps he would leave when he learned he was not alone in the house. But if the intruder’s intention was something other … was murder!… then he would know just where to go.

  He could not catch his breath. His heart was pounding so loud now that it nearly obscured the sound of the footsteps. His blood was rushing madly through his veins. He tried to remember the contents of his room, the whereabouts of his baseball bat. He thought it might be in the closet and willed himself to get up from the bed, but he couldn’t move a muscle; he was paralyzed with fear. When the footsteps were just outside his door, he screamed, “Max!”

  “Who’s Max?” a female voice inquired.

  In the silence that followed Pete experienced a great range of emotions beginning with profound relief and ending with a rage that was equally profound. When the intruder flicked on the light, Pete quickly turned his tear-streaked face to the wall and clutched at the pillow which was still on his head. She must have seen some tell-tale movement in his shoulders, for she gasped, and stringing together a score of whispered apologies, she rushed to his side. She tried to turn him over, but he refused to budge. He had never hated anyone so much before in his life.

  She began to massage his back, gently at first and then with more gusto. In a breathy staccato she explained that she had only come for consolation and hadn’t meant to frighten him. She had driven past the artist’s apartment, and, sure enough, her model-friend’s car was there. She had gone up to the door, thinking to confront them, but then she had thought better of it and had merely peeked in the window. And there they were, in the living room, the artist on the sofa and her model-friend on the floor at her feet, leaning against her legs. They weren’t talking, but they looked as though they had been talking intimately and were now considering the words they had exchanged. She suspected they had been discussing her, deliberating over the best way to inform her of their relationship. They had looked so sad, so pensive, so affectionate. Desperate for distraction, she had come back to the party, but everyone had gone by then. She remembered how carefully Pete had listened to her earlier and got to thinking that maybe …

  He cut off her discourse with a burst of laughter. Her hands froze
on his back, then lifted. In a little-girl voice, she asked him what was so funny. Her query only made him laugh harder. He could feel her shifting her weight, rising from the bed.

  His laughter was wild, reckless, the culmination of his missing Max and the fear that he had experienced when he had thought himself about to join him. He was losing control, but he didn’t care. He wanted to laugh until he cried again.

  He stopped to catch his breath and heard her moving across the room. The light went off. Imagining her going back down the dark hall, feeling her way along the wall, her enormous green eyes wild with insult, he howled all over again. But then he heard her voice, and felt her weight on the bed again. Her thumbs found his spine and began to rotate. “Relax,” she whispered. “Just relax now. It’ll all be okay.”

  Eventually, he relaxed and yielded to the pressure of her fingers. He felt as though he were sinking into the bed, merging with the mattress. He was close to sleep when she asked him again who Max was, and his voice was trance-like as he explained that Max was dead. He went on, telling her about places they had gone, things that they had done together.

  After a while she withdrew her hands from his back and attempted to remove the pillow from his head. He had been clutching it so tightly for so long that it took him a moment to disengage his fingers. She dropped it onto the floor and went back to massaging him. He remembered how deftly she had used her fingers in the moonlight to light the roach, how long and white they were, how they had seemed to flutter.

  She began to speak, softly explaining that when people die, their loved ones become angry with them for leaving. He, she suggested, was angry at Max. It was a ridiculous notion, but as he was too tired to laugh anymore, he let her go on with it. When she finished with that theory, she set forth others. She equated his loss of Max with her loss of her model-friend, and stretching out on the bed beside him, she began to tell him some of the things that they had done together. She sighed deeply when he interrupted to mumble something about having a test the next day. Mindlessly, he turned to inhale her breath and her cake-like fragrance.