The airline clerk interrupts. The man gives up looking at the woman—he thinks she may be about twenty-five—and buys a round-trip, coach class ticket to an eastern city.
His flight leaves in an hour. To kill time, the man steps into one of the airport cocktail bars and orders a scotch and water. While he sips it he watches the flow of travelers through the terminal—including a remarkable number, he thinks, of unattached pretty women dressed in fashion magazine clothes—until he catches sight of the black-haired girl in the leather coat. She is standing near a Travelers Aid counter, deep in conversation with a second girl, a blonde in a cloth coat trimmed with gray fur. He wants somehow to attract the brunette's attention, to invite her to have a drink with him before her own flight leaves for wherever she is traveling, but even though he believes for a moment she is looking his way he cannot catch her eye from out of the shadows of the bar. In another instant the two women separate; neither of their directions is toward him. He orders a second scotch and water.
When next he sees her he is buying a magazine to read during the flight and becomes aware that someone is jostling him. At first he is startled that anyone would be so close as to touch him, but when he sees who it is he musters a smile.
“Busy place,” he says.
She looks up at him—Is she blushing?—and an odd grimace crosses her mouth and vanishes. She moves away from him and joins the crowds in the terminal.
The man is at the counter with his magazine, but when he reaches into his back pocket for his wallet the pocket is empty. Where could I have lost it? he thinks. His mind begins enumerating the credit cards, the currency, the membership and identification cards; his stomach churns with something very like fear. The girl who was so near tome, he thinks—and all at once he understands that she has picked his pocket.
What is he to do? He still has his ticket, safely tucked inside his suitcoat—he reaches into the jacket to feel the envelope, to make sure. He can take the flight, call someone to pick him up at his destination—since he cannot even afford bus fare—conduct his business and fly home. But in the meantime he will have to do something about the lost credit cards—call home, have his wife get the numbers out of the top desk drawer, phone the card companies—so difficult a process, the whole thing suffocating. What shall he do?
First: Find a policeman, tell what has happened, describe the young woman; damn her, he thinks, for seeming to be attentive to him, to let herself stand so close to him, to blush prettily when he spoke—and all the time she wanted only to steal from him. And her blush was not shyness but the anxiety of being caught; that was most disturbing of all. Damned deceitful creatures. He will spare the policeman the details—just tell what she has done, what is in the wallet. He grits his teeth. He will probably never see his wallet again.
He is trying to decide if he should save time by talking to a guard near the X-ray machines when he is appalled—and elated—to see the black-haired girl. (Ebony-Tressed Thief, the newspapers will say.) She is seated against a front window of the terminal, taxis and private cars moving sluggishly beyond her in the gathering darkness; she seems engrossed in a book. A seat beside her is empty, and the man occupies it.
“I've been looking for you,” he says.
She glances at him with no sort of recognition. “I don't know you,” she says.
“Sure you do.”
She sighs and puts the book aside. “Is this all you characters think about?—picking up girls like we were stray animals? What do you think I am?”
“You lifted my wallet,” he says. He is pleased to have said “lifted,” thinking it sounds more worldly than stole or took or even ripped off.
“I beg your pardon?” the girl says.
“I know you did—at the magazine counter. If you'll just give it back, we can forget the whole thing. If you don't, then I'll hand you over to the police.”
She studies him, her face serious. “All right,” she says. She pulls the black bag onto her lap, reaches into it and draws out a wallet.
He takes it from her. “Wait a minute,” he says. “This isn't mine.”
The girl runs; he bolts after her. It is like a scene in a movie—bystanders scattering, the girl zig-zagging to avoid collisions, the sound of his own breathing reminding him how old he is—until he hears a woman's voice behind him:
“Stop, thief! Stop that man!”
Ahead of him the brunette disappears around a corner and in the same moment a young man in a marine uniform puts out a foot to trip him up. He falls hard, banging knee and elbow on the tile floor of the terminal, but manages to hang on to the wallet which is not his.
The wallet is a woman's, fat with money and credit cards from places like Saks and I. Magnin and Lord & Taylor, and it belongs to the blonde in the fur-trimmed coat—the blonde he has earlier seen in conversation with the criminal brunette. She, too, is breathless, as is the policeman with her.
“That's him,” the blonde girl says. “He lifted my billfold.”
It occurs to the man that he cannot even prove his own identity to the policeman.
————
Two weeks later—the embarrassment and rage have diminished, the family lawyer has been paid, the confusion in his household has receded—the wallet turns up without explanation in one morning's mail. It is intact, no money is missing, all the cards are in place. Though he is relieved, the man thinks that for the rest of his life he will feel guilty around policemen, and ashamed in the presence of women.
1983
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE ANT PEOPLE
Jonathan Penner
They lay curled in their chaise lounges; the ocean foamed at the island dunes like milk. Perry and his wife were sharing a cottage with another couple. On the darkest nights, when the island seemed to slip its moorings, he sometimes liked to tell about his father and Jasmine.
He had been twelve, he could remember this distinctly. His father had come home on a Friday, impatiently fingered through the mail, lit a burner under the waiting potatoes that Mrs. Lawrence always peeled and sliced, mixed mayonnaise into the carrots that Mrs. Lawrence invariably shredded, and asked—he'd been a widower since Perry was two—“What would you think of my getting married?”
But the question was how Perry, a shrimp with an old man's cane and built-up shoe, no brother or sister, no money or lawyer, no understanding of guns, could prevent it. The woman would share his father's bedroom, where Perry would have to knock before entering. He could foresee the complete loss of his own privacy, and a shortage of closet space. In his own closet were collections and toys not touched for years, things that would seem babyish today, lifted out into the light.
“Who to,” he asked.
For a long time his father had dated a woman like those in movie previews—that was how Perry still thought of them, because the movies themselves, his father had said, would be dull as hell for them both. The woman was thin, with huge mobile eyes, the whites too large for the irises, the irises too small for the pupils. Her perfume was stupefying, and she gave Perry stale sticks of gum from her purse when his father wasn't looking. When his father took him to baseball games she often came too, cheered at the wrong times, and incited Perry to plead for a cupped slush both of them loved, one that (his father shouted) destroyed the teeth, then the jaw.
But the woman whose name his father now pronounced, as neutrally as the time of day—“Jasmine Cook”—a partner in his architectural firm, didn't chew gum and couldn't possibly have ever cheered at anything. Her eyes were dead as marbles. All her expression was in her dark abundant hair, on which she must have spent half her life, transforming herself every day or two: poodles and ponytails, bunches and bangs, severe parts and sumptuous waves.
Vanity? Boredom? An architect's hobby? You'd see her head chained in braids, which it seemed to burst overnight, appearing the next morning in shock waves of fluff. For years, Perry hadn't understood that her manifestations were all of one person. She looked built to the scale of his
father, the biggest guy in line at any ticket window. Her skin was so unblemished that it seemed to have just come from the store. Except for her unpredictable hair, she might have been a newly bought refrigerator, and it was that, her seeming not human, that always made Perry feel creepy after he had seen her.
“I don't know,” he said.
Now his father was sprinkling paprika on the four chicken breasts, eaten five nights a week and endlessly reincarnated, that Mrs. Lawrence eternally skinned. In two minutes his father would turn on the radio for five minutes of six o'clock news. Then they would both sit at the kitchen table, reading, eating applesauce, while the potatoes boiled and the chicken filled the house with its sharpening aroma. Nothing would be the same: Perry felt a suffocating rage.
“I don't think you should,” he said. Then he turned his chair around, away from the table, and sat squeezing both his soft upper arms. He knew that his father knew he was crying, but that they could continue the conversation as long as his father didn't see his face. If that happened he would find himself swinging through the air onto his father's lap, held between his father's arms and beating chest, inhaling the smell of his father's clothes and body; and if that happened he wouldn't be sure why he was crying, or whether he could stop.
————
His trouble, he would say in years to come, out for napoleons after the movies, masked and perspiring at Halloween parties—his trouble, he explained at poolside barbecues, standing chest-deep with a can of beer (he barely swam but loved the weightlessness)—his trouble had been that he never had a plan, because even thinking about Jasmine hurt so much he had to stop.
The Saturday after his father told him, Jasmine came over so they could all (said his father) discuss it reasonably. But none of them discussed anything. His father mowed the lawn at furious speed while Jasmine, her hair back in a kerchief, edged and swept the walks. Perry sat on the grass with his cane and radio and canteen of grape juice, now and then pulling weeds from the flowerbed border, feeling the house and lawn shift their loyalty from himself to her. When the mail came he hurried to get it—he didn't think he could even touch it if Jasmine touched it first. His father stopped and straightened, pressing both hands into the small of his back, arching so that his belly protruded in a way Perry found disgusting, then wrung out his sweatband and asked, “Anything good?”
And there was. The brown-wrapped box was marked KEEP FROM EXTREMES OF HEAT AND COLD. Perry took it inside and opened it at the kitchen table.
This was one of those times when the world surprised him with its fairness. It was months before that he'd ordered an Ant City from an illustrated ad in Boy's Life magazine, the drawing a closeup of two huge ants conversing in a cross-sectioned tunnel Please Allow Six Weeks For Delivery—that seemed excessive, shameless, and he'd been pessimistic from the start, drawing less hope from the “Please” each time he reread the clipping. He came to sense the ant merchant's sneering triumph: here was a crippled twelve-year-old whose father didn't want ants anyway, the kind of kid you could do anything you wanted to.
But here was the package, and inside a manual—Enjoying Your Ants—and what looked like a little double windowpane, the space between its two glass panels half-way filled with sand—and a thumb-sized cardboard tube marked “LIVE ANTS!” His father and Jasmine had come into the kitchen behind him. “Lemonade?” his father asked, rattling ice from a tray of cubes. Jasmine pulled up a chair next to Perry's. He could smell her unfamiliar sweat, sweeter than his father's, somehow damper.
“How fascinating,” she said.
Sweeping a dripping hand an inch above the swimming pool's surface, or, supine on webbed plaid plastic, thoughtfully patting his baking belly, Perry would try to convey to his listeners exactly how Jasmine talked. “How fascinating”—as though it were boring, and elementary, and sad. That was her only tone of voice, the pitch of defeated wisdom. No matter what she was saying, she said endurance was all there was.
She was turning rapidly through Enjoying Your Ants—even his father couldn't read that fast, and Perry guessed she was faking. “First drip some water into the city,” she said. “May I help?” She brought the thing shaped like a double windowpane over to the sink, then back to the table. “Why don't I hold it,” she said, “and you be the one to put them in.”
“I'm not a four-year-old,” said Perry.
“What?”
He began peeling off the tape that secured the cap of the tube. Of all times, he wished she were not here now, but with his father looming up at his other side, glugging and sighing at a tall glass of lemonade, there was nothing he could say. He pulled off the cap and peered inside—a slowly churning tangle of black. Excited, he gently began tapping them from the tube down into their waiting city.
There were far fewer than he had expected, no more than fifteen or twenty, but they were enormous ones, and Perry could see that this was going to be wonderful They would always be in sight: their city was sliced so thin that their tunnels and rooms would have walls of glass. When the tube was empty he told Jasmine, “Put the top on.” She reached to close the city. Then she made a peculiar sound, as though she had been suddenly squeezed.
A single ant had somehow not gone in and was clinging to the top rim of the city, its antennae twiddling the air. “Wait,” said Perry. But she was already coming down, her face averted as though the ant might jump at her. She caught him between the city and its top, and he hung out by one leg, his other legs working furiously. Perry grabbed the city, freed the ant, and dropped him in. The trapped leg detached itself and fell to the kitchen table.
“Hate them,” Jasmine said, backing slowly away from the table, her hands spread like pitchforks against her thighs. Her face was still expressionless. Perry's father, wetting a fingertip, picked up the severed leg at once and took it outside, from where came the clang of the garbage can lid. “If you marry her,” Perry screamed into the wall, but ended in humiliating silence—what could he even threaten?—stopped as suddenly as though his canetip had entered a crevasse.
————
“I want you at the wedding,” said his father.
The ants milled slowly, apparently helpless, atop their sandwich of sand, and when Perry went to bed that night he expected to find them dead in the morning. But again, to his surprise and somehow his worry, the world was working as advertised. The little guys had gotten themselves organized and made a start on tunnel construction, piling what they excavated, so that the building went up as well as down.
“I want you at the wedding,” said his father.
After that they did a lot of their work in the daytime, and Perry watched as the network of tunnels grew brilliantly, stupidly, intricate. The ants seemed to have no sense of how constricted they were, or how few. Did they think they could raise their young in those tunnels? Enjoying Your Ants said all of them were workers—shipping queens was against the law. How did they expect to reproduce, or what else were they building for? He fed them a cornflake every day, watered them, and waited for the first deaths: the dead, said Enjoying Your Ants, would be buried in a graveyard at the top of the city. But even Fiveleg—the only one Perry could identify—was hauling his grains of sand with what seemed inexhaustible vigor.
“I want you at the wedding,” said his father. “Have some faith in me.” He crossed his legs on the footrest of his reclining chair. “I've known her a long time. We work well together.”
“Do you—” Perry attempted a knowing expression that a moment later he felt was ridiculous. Do you love her, he had thought he would ask, but the words seemed too silly.
Nevertheless his father understood. “Not like I love you. This is different.”
“You haven't justified it, Dad.”
His father looked at him closely. “I want you to be my best man.” Then his father stared down at his huge slippered feet, pinching his cheeks with one hand so that his lips protruded. Finally he said, with an anger that startled Perry, “If it's a mistake I can mak
e a mistake.”
Perry felt unfairly beaten. How could you argue with something like that? “I won't live here,” he said. Suddenly his life with his father seemed laminated into the past—even right now, stretched on the carpet next to the big chair, doing homework while his father rustled and snapped through newspapers, the smell of his father's socks coming through his cracked black slippers: strange! He wished he could tell his father what it was like—remembering the present.
(“That's obscure,” his wife would remind him years later, hearing the story again, with friends in a bar about to close—“Get to the car horns,” she would tell him, stranded in a foreign airport.)
“I want you to be my best man,” said his father. Perry saw himself in the wedding procession, walking alone in his great shoe, tilting over his cane. “I want you to hand me the ring.”
Later, Jasmine came to his room, to see the ants, she said. Perry pointed to where their city stood on his dresser, next to his clock and Jacques Cousteau bathyscaphe. The bathyscaphe was a masterpiece—the only survivor from his years of building models. Now, seeing Jasmine's eyes flick past it, he knew he would throw it out as soon as she left the room.
“They're amazing,” she said. “Why don't those tunnels collapse?” It sounded as though she wished they would.
“This is my room,” said Perry.
Jasmine had begun to lower herself to the floor, but now she stood up straight, huger than ever next to Perry's little dresser, near his child-sized desk and chair. Her hair was styled like a helmet, as though she'd come from another planet. “Why don't you like me?” she asked, expressionless.
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