He knew when he was defeated. He slunk back up the stairs, crawled into the rancid sheets, waited for sleep to hammer him into unconsciousness. As he sank, he cursed the old house they had purchased, the structure that was once the carriage house of a prominent American millionaire. He cursed the suburban community, cursed the neighbors, cursed the crab-grass, cursed the ceilings he had scraped and painted, cursed the Long Island Expressway and finally, just before going under, cursed the rancid sheets. He must remember to ask Gloria to change the sheets.
In the morning he was better. He was always better in the morning. The great ache in his groin was subdued and the stiffness in his muscles seemed gone. He wished he were older. He wished his recuperative powers were less good. If only he could be fifty and have the excuse of being tired. But no. He and Gloria were both twenty-five. They were able to work eighteen hours a day. They did.
Gloria had left a list on the bureau. “Mow the grass,” the note said. “Prepare for fall seeding.” Unquestioning, he pushed the old mower over the crabgrass. It was automatic labor and he welcomed it. For he was a dreamer, and he liked tasks that allowed his mind to wander. There were dreams of coolness and cleanliness, dreams of clean sheets and women fresh from hot showers, dreams of hands without blisters and breasts free of sweatshirts. He dreamed of air-conditioned apartments overlooking urban rivers, of stereo sets and soft lights. Horny was the word.
Gloria was deep in the bowels of the house, scraping paint that had been applied at the turn of the century. He was alone with his dreams and his hand mower. He was thinking of high-rise bachelor apartments, of building superintendents and professional repairmen, of plumbers and electricians. Finally he heard the voice.
“Mr. Earbrow,” the voice said. “Oh, Mr. Earbrow.”
It was a woman’s voice, the woman’s voice. Gillian Blake was leaning against the back fence that separated their properties. The only other time Morton had seen Gillian was at the party. He had congratulated her on something. What was it? Yes. On being the only woman in the neighborhood who didn’t hang over back fences and offer advice to neighbors. And here she was hanging over the back fence, with that soft, frilly housecoat.
“You seem to be working so hard,” Gillian said. “Wouldn’t you rather use our power mower? We’re not using it today.”
Morton Earbrow found himself staring. Staring hard at her slim, exciting face. Then staring hard at her slim, exciting body. Her arms were slim and exciting, too. Lightly tanned arms and a fine coating of sun-bleached hair. Those arms, he decided, had never lifted anything heavier than a champagne glass. Maybe a tennis racquet—but that just for effect. She was, he suddenly realized, part and parcel of his most glorious dreams.
“Thank you, Mrs. Blake,” he said, “but.…”
“You’re welcome to it,” Gillian said.
“To it?” He hadn’t wanted to say that. He knew he was a fool. He knew she was talking about the power mower. Despite the phrasing, the way she talked, the way she looked. Despite all that, she was talking about a power mower.
In point of fact, Gillian was not talking about a power mower. If there was anything in the world that held less interest than a power mower, she couldn’t imagine what it might be. It was just that, on the evidence, the quickest way to Morton Earbrow’s heart would probably be astride a power mower.
“The mower is in the garage,” she said.
“Well, thank you, Mrs. Blake,” he said.
Morton vaulted the fence easily, and walked beside her to the garage. It was cool in the garage, cool and dark. He could see through an open door what must be a den. Cooler and darker. There was a couch in the den. Gillian leaned in the doorway and looked at him. He could feel that aching sensation in his groin, and he turned away and looked at the power mower.
“You work very hard,” Gillian said. “I hear you working at night, too.”
“Well, the house needs a lot of … work,” he said.
“Don’t you ever just sit around and relax?”
“Not very often,” he said. “It’s an old house.”
“My husband doesn’t sit around and relax either,” Gillian said. She wondered whether she was going too fast. “But our house is a new house. It’s just that he’s never home any more. He has work in the city.”
“You both work in the city,” Morton said. “I mean I’ve heard the show.”
“I’m surprised,” Gillian said. “Very few men listen to us.”
“Well, I, uh, better be going,” Morton said. “Lots of mowing to do today. We’re going to be seeding later on.”
“Really?” Gillian said. “How interesting.”
Morton thought that was delivered in an ambiguous manner, but decided against pursuing it.
“Maybe you had better test the mower before you go,” Gillian said. “It hasn’t been used in some time.”
Morton Earbrow took the machine out into the sunlight beside the swimming pool. He looked at the water, at the small waves stirred up by the wind off the Sound, and he looked at the mower. He realized it was a fine machine, a self-propelled rotary, with a 31/2-horsepower, 4-cycle engine, not to mention an automatic starter, a push-button hydraulic fuel pumper, an automatic compression release and a die-cast magnesium alloy housing unit. A beautiful machine, actually, and Morton Earbrow wondered why he couldn’t drum up more enthusiasm. He flicked the switch, the machine came alive, purred for a full minute and died.
“Something seems to be wrong,” he observed.
“Oh, I hope it’s nothing serious,” Gillian said.
“We’ll have it fixed in a jiffy,” Morton said.
He spoke with confidence. And there was, in truth, no reason why Morton Earbrow should have doubts. He had in the past few months repaired chain saws and drills and sanding machines and hand saws and hammers and lathes and he had never yet encountered the machine that could resist his skillful touch.
As he began testing the ignition system, the spark plugs, the distributor, the carburetor, Gillian disappeared. When she came back she carried a cold beer for him. When she came back she was wearing a bathing suit. It was a strange bathing suit, Morton decided, a bathing suit with openings in unexpected places—a bathing suit that seemed to be held together by shoelaces. He accepted the beer and turned back to the lawn mower.
“You mean you’ll be able to put all those pieces back again?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s not too complicated, actually,” Morton said. “But I can’t seem to isolate the trouble.”
“But that’s wonderful,” Gillian said. “When something goes wrong we always have to call in a man.”
Morton Earbrow returned home for his wrenches and screwdrivers. When he came back, Gillian was in the pool. She swam nicely, especially when one considered the slimness of her arms, which was precisely what Morton was considering. He returned his attention to the machine slowly, regretfully and, for once in his life, to a machine that seemed to be getting the better of him. Of course, Morton Earbrow had no way of knowing that Gillian had emptied a shaker of salt into the gas tank earlier in the day.
His wife appeared but once. Precisely at noon, wearing Bermuda shorts and sweatshirt, she came over and handed him a liverwurst sandwich. No mustard. She disappeared again into the bowels of the house.
Gillian spent the afternoon stretched out on the striped chaise lounge. She thought briefly about Ernie Miklos and felt a twinge of sorrow. She hadn’t wanted it to end that way, nothing quite so violent as that. It was sorrow tempered with relief, though; she might not have gotten him home. And how would she have explained that?
The sun was striking her full force now, and she shifted from her stomach to her back. She was aware also of the heat of Morton Earbrow’s gaze every time she twitched a muscle. At that moment she inhaled—just for effect, just to see what would be the reaction of her little home handyman. Before exhaling, she had the satisfaction of hearing a wrench drop.
The sense of challenge was already waning. And
Gillian Blake, warm and rested, allowed her mind to speculate on the next candidate. Someone a trifle harder, she mused, someone who would put up more of a … struggle.
Melvin Corby—he was so frightened by his wife; he would surely be a challenge. Or maybe Paddy Madigan, the retired prize fighter, but there was something missing there, something about him she didn’t quite understand. Marvin Goodman, the skinflint.… Willoughby Martin, if he even cared about girls. The possibilities seemed endless. But a challenge, who would be a challenge? There was Mario Vella; everyone said he was a member of the Cosa Nostra. No, not him, not yet.
Rabbi Joshua Turnbull, a man of God. That would surely be a challenge. Well, why not?
“You must be so tired,” she said to Morton Earbrow. “Wouldn’t you like to take time for a drink?”
“I think I’ve found the problem,” Morton said. “Something seems to be clogging the fuel line.”
Gillian reached down and let her uncalloused, satiny hand stroke the back of his neck. He jumped to his feet immediately.
“Come on in and have a drink,” she said. “Come on, you deserve it.”
“A little break wouldn’t hurt, I suppose,” he said.
From the garage to the den, darker and cooler. He sat on the couch and let the air conditioning unit strike him directly.
“I’m going to get your slipcovers all …,” he started and stopped.
“A Tom Collins this time?” she said. “Change your luck?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” he said.
She carried the drinks to him, sat down beside him. That bathing suit; he couldn’t imagine how it was held together. The stresses.…
“What’s next?” Gillian said.
“Excuse me?”
“On the house,” she said. “What’s your next project?”
“Who knows? Gloria makes lists. She doesn’t let me see them until the weekend. But there’s lots to do. Lots of work on an old house. Never ends. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t bought it.”
“What does your wife think about it all?”
“She likes it,” he said. “She says it keeps her busy. That’s what I can’t understand … you must hear this kind of thing all the time. I guess you know almost everything about marriage.”
“Everything,” she said. It sounded cynical. It was cynical.
Her eyes were amber in the dark. “Everyone has problems. People don’t seem able to reach out to each other any more.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean. But what do you do when that happens?”
“I could tell you what I say on the radio,” Gillian said. “Reason, patience, share mutual interests—but what I say when the microphone is off is something else. I don’t think the people out there in radioland are ready for what I really think.”
She was reaching out her right arm to emphasize the point, and Morton Earbrow looked through one side of her net bathing suit and received a clear vision of her right breast. It seemed both soft and firm. Not like a melon perhaps, more like a pear. But then he had nothing against pears.
“The important thing”—she was still talking—“and this is what I wish I could say on the radio, is that you communicate, communicate with someone, anyone. Reach out and touch another soul. Love someone, that’s the important thing. Love and be loved.”
“But how?” Morton said. “Who?”
“Use your imagination,” she said.
Morton timidly reached out and touched Gillian’s knee. His fingers, his fingers would surely leave dust marks on her. But there was no stopping now. He slid his hardened fingers above her knee, to the flesh of her thigh. Slim but soft. He could feel her skin quiver beneath his fingers. He could feel her hand on his knee, feel her hand tightening, moving. His hand slid higher on her thigh and she moved toward him, made it easier for him.
It was then that Morton Earbrow’s mechanical genius paid dividends. Without stopping to think about it, without ever having seen a blueprint, acting on instinct alone, he found the string that held her bathing suit together. It came off in three sections. Then they were touching each other in the deepest, most secret places, reaching out. Yes, by God, communicate with someone. Morton bent her beneath him and she was beyond resistance.
“I’m going to soil your couch,” he remembered. “My knees and elbows, they’re.…”
“Kindly shut up,” she said.
She had removed the belt to his Bermuda shorts and was pulling them down, down and off. And then, without more words, they merged. In the dark, in the cool darkness, they communicated. Faster and faster they communicated, harder and harder, in dozens of places, in countless ways. Fingers and nails on skin, teeth on skin, then great shudders of total communication. There were explosions of understanding, and the long-drawn-out paroxysm of being as together as two people can be.
“You see,” she whispered later. “That’s what I meant. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
“It seemed so easy.…”
They came apart then and rested in the dark. Morton began to laugh and he couldn’t stop.
“I’d forgotten about this,” he said. “I’d forgotten there was more to life than mowing a lawn.”
“There are lawns to mow and lawns to mow,” she said.
“A lawn is a lawn is a lawn”—and he was laughing again. Laughing and reaching for his shorts.
“What’s your hurry?” Gillian said. “The lawn can wait. That lawn can wait.”
“My wife,” he said. “It’s afternoon and I should have started the seeding by now.”
“I think you just did,” Gillian said. “I’ll let you go, but only if you promise to come back.”
“When?”
“Almost any time,” she said. “My husband hasn’t been coming home much lately. Just check the driveway. If the car is here, he’ll be here. If the car’s away, then we can … play.”
“I’m sorry about the dirt on the couch,” he said.
“Never apologize,” Gillian said.
There were other visits that week. There were Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. And that following Sunday afternoon, with his wife out shopping for spreading junipers, Morton lay down in his uncut crab-grass and rolled over like a puppy and felt happy to feel the cushion that was growing beneath him.
It wasn’t just that the lawn never got mowed. Everything fell behind. He painted one window and didn’t do the one beside it. He ordered the ceramic tile for the kitchen counter but never ordered the adhesive. He constructed half of a redwood deck and threw his hammer into Mario Vella’s yard. The lawn became a field and the house was winning the fight and Morton Earbrow enjoyed the luxury of a world disintegrating around the core of his happiness.
Gloria, meanwhile, scraped the woodwork and stained it and covered it with liquid plastic. She peeled the wallpaper from the hall and put up some more. And, unsurprisingly, she could not help but notice that Morton was no longer keeping pace. She stopped making her lists because she suspected they were not even being read.
On Monday there was an argument.
“I think you owe me an explanation,” she said. “You go out to Modell’s for paint and it keeps you three hours—”
“You know those crowds at Modell’s,” he said.
“And you come home without any paint. And that smile—I don’t see anything so funny. Then on Thursday you have the office softball game and you say you’re so tired you can’t do a thing around here.”
“Well, I do work during the week,” he suggested.
“Sit at a desk,” she said. “While I’m here trying to make us a nice home, a good life. And you’re sitting there at that desk and you don’t care how we live.”
“I care,” he said. “I care. But not twenty-four hours a day. It’s inhuman to slave around this house all day. There’s no time for anything else. God, when I think of what it was like when we were first married—”
“That’s all you ever do thi
nk about,” Gloria said. “I’m beginning to think I married some kind of a sex maniac. That may have been all right before we had responsibilities. We’ve finally got a home. Soon we’ll have children. We’ve got to start getting organized.”
“Children!” Morton was shouting now. “How in the hell can two people have children when they don’t even sleep together?”
“Sex maniac!” she screamed.
“Damn right!”
“If that’s all that being married means to you,” she said, “then we have one beautiful relationship.”
“Oh, shit!”
“All you want is my body,” she went on. “What about building a life together, a home for our …?”
“Shit, shit, shit!” The deep end. “Screw a life together. Screw the home. Screw your body.”
“I’m not listening to you,” she said.
“Goodbye,” he said.
The dream returned then. The neat, always tidy bachelor apartment. The predecorated, regularly cleaned, air-conditioned, bachelor apartment. The stereo set, the sleep-in guests, Gillian Blake. And Morton Earbrow knew what must be done. He walked up the freshly finished stairs, entered the recently papered bedroom, shoved aside his work clothes, jammed his suits and shirts into two suitcases. And left.
A week later he made the phone call.
“Gillian?”
“Morton,” she said.
“What’s doing?”
“What’s doing with you?” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’ve got this great new pad,” Morton said, “here on 66th Street. You can see the East River right behind the smokestacks.”
“That sounds great,” Gillian said. “Where’s Gloria?”
“Gloria who?” he said. “Hey, you’ve got to drop up here after the show. I’ll show you the East River. I’ll show you my etchings.”
“You mean it’s all over with Gloria?” she said.
“It never was with Gloria,” he said. “How about …?”
“Goodbye,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Goodbye,” she said.
Click. Morton Earbrow felt the phone go dead in his hand. He stood there, looking beyond the smokestacks at the East River. He was aware of the mechanical hum of the air conditioner, and the room seemed suddenly cold. Morton Earbrow, a do-it-yourselfer with nothing to do, spent the next hour listening to his new FM radio. He mixed himself two martinis. He changed the linen on his new bed. And it was not until late that night that he began constructing a small and somewhat crude wine rack out of coat hangers and an orange crate. It was hard going, mainly because he didn’t have the proper tools.
Naked Came the Stranger Page 6