“What time?” she asked. She stuck the Bic between her lips.
“Four thirty.”
“And what time is it now?”
“Three minutes past noon.”
“Three minutes past noon?” Liz said. “Is that all?”
“Now four minutes, according to my digital.”
“Thanks for the precision,” Liz said.
“Texas Instruments, you know.”
Liz put the telephone down then lay back with her eyes shut. There was a suggestion of a headache now, a faint pounding somewhere deep inside her skull. The small guy with the hammer. Sometimes he had a buzz saw. There had been champagne last night. The guy from Dallas seemed to like the stuff—a Dom Perignon, one bottle after another. Then it occurred to her that maybe Norma had been making one of her little jokes, a tiny pun. Texas Instruments. Well, hell, she was always catching Norma’s jokes a second too late. She turned on her side. The guy from Dallas, before fading into a drunken stupor, had mentioned something about a certain stock. Why was she having this difficulty in remembering the name? It’s going to go up, baby, faster’n a rocket on the Fourth of July. What was its goddamn name?
Auto something.
Auto what?
She rose and wandered into the bathroom and, sticking her head inside the shower stall, turned on the cold-water spray. The shock was terrible. She moaned, pulled her face away from the stream, wrapped her hair in a towel. She walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a can of orange juice and popped the top. The stuff tasted vile, acidic, like it was vinegar. She sat down at the table, lit a cigarette, gazed at the white sun on the window. Baby needs her vitamins. Through the fog she could hear the echo of her mother’s voice. Baby needs this, baby needs that. (Auto what? Auto-Tech? Auto-Flagellation?) Why, when she felt low, did she always hear an echo of her mother? Guilt, what else? The other side of that abominable currency they called The Puritan Work Ethic. She sipped some more of the orange juice, made a face, pushed the little can away. It was the letters that did it, of course. Once a week, with a regularity that was dreadful, they came from Chicago. The crabbed handwriting on the envelope, the cheerful platitudes inside, the maternal warnings about the perils of the big city (as if Chicago were a hick town). I know you like your work, dear, and I know how good it makes you feel to teach remedial reading to those black kids, but I worry, about whether you’re looking after yourself.
Remedial reading! The Remedial Reading Escort Service, Discretion Guaranteed. She put out her cigarette in the garbage disposal unit, flipped the switch, listened to the blades grate. Sometimes she imagined going back to Chicago, sitting down in that cluttered shaded room her mother insisted on calling a “Parlor,” and just coming out with the truth about Baby. See, Mom, it’s like this. I’m not really involved in education, at least not as you understand that word. My work is more along the lines of, well, ahem, hum, social intercourse? She tried to picture her mother’s face. The blank look. Incomprehension. My baby is a—?
Frankly, yes. A simple matter of economics, Mom.
Dream on, Liz.
She looked inside the refrigerator again. Apart from another can of orange juice, two eggs—one of which was cracked—an empty jar that had once contained wheat germ, and an old piece of a submarine sandwich, there was nothing. Her mother would die if she looked inside this machine. A nutritionist’s nightmare. She shut the door again. She looked at the kitchen clock. 12:19. Then she wondered if she could go back to sleep again, but it seemed pointless. She thought about the guy from Dallas. He’d worn a suit he might have ripped off from a museum dedicated to the relics of the life of Hank Williams. Fluted pockets in the shapes of arrows. New Texan money. You could smell it on his flesh. The folds of his clothing. It hung around him like some angelic aura.
She walked into the living room, sat down on the sofa, stared around. She never felt at home in this room. It had a sense of a glossy photograph to it, something you looked at but didn’t actually participate in. Unlike the bedroom, it was neat and ordered. Even the ashtrays were empty, shining. Closing her eyes, crossing her legs, feeling the same muscular twinge as before, she sat back. AutoTron! That was it. I swear by it, I really do.
She reached forward to the coffee table and picked up the telephone, punching numbers. The snooty girl in Max’s office answered; she always did so with the kind of arrogance that suggested she was speaking through a gauze germproof wrap round the mouthpiece.
“Liz Blake. Let me talk to Max.”
“I’ll see if he’s available, Miss Blake. Please hold.”
Scratching. Buzzing. Then Max was on the other end of the line. He had one of those sonorous voices you associate with radio reports of distant wars.
“How’s the street, Max?” she said.
“Inscrutable as ever,” he answered.
“A question. What is AutoTron going for?”
“AutoTron. Hang on. Let me look.” There was a shuffling of papers. She pictured Max in his untidy office; despite his voice, he had the appearance of a gnome, a leprechaun, dwarfed by the stacked papers on his desk.
“AutoTron, AutoTron, AutoTron. Let me see.” He paused, and there was more shuffling and crackling. “You got a tip or something?”
“The horse’s mouth, my dear.”
“Ah. Here we are. AutoTron stands in the current trading at fifteen-sixty. One five six oh.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Expanding company. Light industry. Electronic components mainly. Based chiefly in Fort Worth. It’s been pretty steady lately. No great dramas. If it’s a roller coaster ride you want, kid, this isn’t the one.”
“Since when did I speculate, sweetheart?” Liz said. “Whatever else I may have, I don’t have the soul of a gambler.” She paused. Where was her calculator? She couldn’t find it. “How many can I buy for a grand, Max?”
“A grand.” She could hear him shuffle paper again, presumably looking for his calculating machine. Then he was tapping buttons. “Sixty-four, leaving you with small change.”
“Go ahead then. Do it for me.”
“You want me to sell something to meet it?”
“No, listen, I’ll get the cash to you tomorrow, okay?”
“You got it.”
“Thanks, Max.” And she hung up. She wandered around the room for a time, wondering what the word of a drunken Texan was worth on the open market. It better be good, baby, she thought. She stood at the window and looked down into the street. Two years, she thought. She had given herself two years to get in and out of this game. Invest and save, save and invest, and don’t squander a single opportunity. After that she would get out fast. But suddenly two years seemed like a hell of a long time, a huge slice out of the surface of your life. Then she was thinking of her mother again—a picture she didn’t want to entertain. It’s only for two years, she said to herself. Then you can come in out of the cold . . . come in to what? back to what?
A business of some kind. Something the two years would bankroll. She hadn’t figured it out yet.
Turning from the window, she sighed. Zest for life, she thought, where are you when I need you most? She went back inside the bedroom and began to rummage through the closet for something to wear. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror and what she saw was someone still pretty, someone with the kind of good looks that suggest a certain innocence—the kind of appearance you might associate with a former candidate for the title of The Illinois Soybean Producers’ Pageant Queen. All I need, she thought, is a sash, a dress of virginal white, and that spacey glassy smile that could only be the direct result of a lobotomy.
She made a face at her own reflection, then moved away from the mirror.
2
There was a public telephone on the corner opposite the apartment building. As she dialled the number she looked through the dirty glass at the concrete structure: a dark city bird, a pigeon, flew in an awkward way from a window ledge, flapping, appearing t
oo heavy for flight. She dropped two coins in the slot, still watching the bird as it vanished somewhere overhead. From the center of the street there was an abrupt gust of steam, which billowed away in a broken ribbon in the late afternoon sunlight. She put the receiver back down and heard her coins clatter back down the chute. She took off her dark glasses for a moment and rubbed her eyes. Earlier, there had been fear, the far edge of anger, but she had gone beyond that now; now she didn’t feel anything unless she started to think about Elliott, but why the fuck should she give Elliott head room? She flipped the pages of a tattered directory; yellow at one time, the pages were bleached to a grubby white. Hotels, hotels. She found the number of The Americana, put more money in the slot, dialled. She asked to speak to room six oh nine. She waited. Then she heard the man’s voice.
“Walter?” she said.
“Who is this?”
“You don’t remember?”
A pause. Then he said, “Bobbi?”
“Right.” She slipped her dark glasses on. She watched a news vendor rush past with a bunch of papers under his arm. “I’m sorry about last night.”
He was quiet again. “It’s okay. I guess I came on too strong, didn’t I?”
“It was my fault,” she said.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“No, it was mine. I couldn’t . . .” She forgot what she was going to say: her mind was suddenly empty.
She heard him laugh. “Look, honey, I’m a hick. I don’t know the score exactly. I misjudged the situation, that’s all. What do I know? Huh? Pocatello Walter, what do I know?”
She waited. A moving truck rumbled along the street; she saw the sign MAYFLOWER. She wanted to say, You don’t understand, Walter. You don’t understand why I ran the way I did. You don’t even begin to understand. I can’t make you see.
“You’re checking out today?” she said. She gazed across at the apartment building once more. Somebody passed in front of an upper window.
“Yeah. In about twenty minutes. Matter of fact, you were lucky to catch me.”
“All I wanted was to say sorry,” she said.
“Listen. You got a number? Maybe I can call you if I get the chance to come back again? We’ll take it slower next time—”
She hung up. She laid her face against the cold glass of the box. Next time, she thought. How could she tell about next times? About any times? Sometimes the future was as inscrutable as a deck of cards laid face down. Sometimes she didn’t think there was a future—or if there was, then she didn’t have any control over it. She wasn’t like Elliott. Elliott had control. Control over everything.
She felt angry again. It wasn’t a hot thing now, more a feeling of ice, more like she was looking at the sensation from a point outside of herself. I don’t want to think about you, Elliott. Fuck you.
Somebody rapped on the glass with a coin. “Lady, you using that phone?”
Bobbi stared at the face outside. A small red face with the kind of abrasive quality you saw sometimes on New Yorkers. Why didn’t they just wear labels? she wondered: It’s me against the world, hang a fucking slogan round their necks.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said.
“Lady, it’s hard to tell.”
She knocked the door shut with her knee and picked up the receiver again. Then she shoved more coins in and pressed the familiar digits. Dear Christ. Why was he never in his goddamn office? Beep. His flat foreign voice followed by that beep. She hated that sound. And what she remembered all at once was crying into the telephone while the tape turned, sobbing and pouring it all out while the machine recorded it, understanding how ridiculous she was being—nobody is listening, there’s nothing there but a telephone answering device, not a person, just a gadget and a strip of magnetic tape, for Christ’s sake. Why, Elliott? Again and again she’d asked that question. Why, Elliott? Why won’t you allow it? What have I ever done to you? But that was a long time ago and she wasn’t going to be that vulnerable again, not in front of him. Besides, she had Levy now, and Levy was different, kinder, more like some half-forgotten uncle.
She pinched her nostrils, making her voice thin and nasal, thinking it might pass as an impersonation of him. She said, “I can’t allow it, Bobbi. I don’t see any real grounds for it. I have to have strong grounds, Bobbi, and you’re not actually giving me any, are you?” She laughed into the receiver. “Was that close, Elliott? Did that sound like you?” Then she paused, looking across at the apartment building. The windows were all empty, flat empty rows of glass. They reflected the orange of the late sunlight. “I guess you found what I took, didn’t you? You looked in the bathroom and you found it, right? I should say, you didn’t find it. That would be more correct, actually. More grammatical, actually. Wouldn’t it, Elliott? Then you ask yourself, I wonder what she’s going to do with my razor? Right again? She’s off-the-wall and she has a razor and she’s out there somewhere . . . You don’t like that thought, do you? But you don’t know where to find me.” She paused again, then she sang the same phrase in a tuneless way. “You don’t know where to find me.”
She slammed the receiver down. She adjusted the strap of her purse. Then she stepped out of the telephone booth. The man on the sidewalk, muttering something about dames to himself, brushed past her and shut the glass door. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk, staring at the entrance to the apartment building, smiling to herself in the manner of someone with a secret too deep, too arcane, to share.
She walked slowly across the street.
3
Liz rode in the elevator to the fifth floor; in the burnished wood she could see a dim image of herself. Raising her face, she saw that there was a mirror set in the ceiling of the elevator. The reflection seemed to diminish her and she wondered why, even after all this time, she still felt faintly nervous about going to somebody’s apartment. Odd—she shouldn’t have been bothered by it now. Maybe it was the same with an actress, stepping on to a stage to speak the same lines night after night; maybe you never quite got over the swarm of butterflies, no matter how many times you went through the same experience. Then she wondered if she looked okay, glancing once more at herself in the overhead mirror—hell, half the time nobody noticed. Half the time they were too drunk to care or too egotistical to notice, wanting to talk about themselves. (Pittsburgh, right, lived there all my life. Nice place. You want to see a picture of the old homestead?)
The elevator stopped. She got out. She walked along the corridor. The apartment number—shit, what the hell was it? She searched in her purse for the piece of paper on which she’d scraped the number with the useless ballpoint. Pausing under a lamp, she tilted the paper so she could read it. Five two four. What are you like, five two four? She stopped in front of the door, took a compact mirror from her purse, stared at herself quickly (too much lipstick?), and then pressed the buzzer. Almost at once, as if the guy were waiting on the other side, the door was jerked open. He was a man of medium height, nondescript features, but he looked okay—as far as you could tell from surfaces. Sometimes you got the creeps, the weirdos, or highrollers with fat billfolds and an interest in Nazi souvenirs, leathers, wetsuits, riding crops. All that stuff made her sick. Sometimes she’d thought, with surprise: Hey, I’m straight, no kinks, look at me.
She stepped inside the apartment. The guy closed the door.
“I’m Liz,” she said. Fly me to the moon.
“Ted,” the man said.
“Good to know you.” She looked round the apartment quickly. Average place, lived-in, nothing fancy. The guy wasn’t rich, he wasn’t poor; just another In-Between. For a moment she looked at the far wall where some kind of religious icon hung. She went closer to it: a small plaster cast of the Virgin Mary, gaudy in color, the lips bright red and the eyes too blue to be real—like the kind of souvenir you imagined pouring out of Mexican factories in their millions.
The man laughed in an embarrassed way. “It’s not mine,” he said.
“No?�
�
“It’s not even my apartment. I borrowed it from a friend. He’s in Maine and I’m only in town for a day or two . . .”
It’s okay. Save the lengthy explanations, she thought. Then she sensed it in the air, his nervousness, a certain tension, the need to ramble on to no real purpose. She turned away from the little statue and smiled at him. The designer of the figure had contrived to make Christ’s mother look like a Tijuana hooker. Some kind of achievement in that, she thought.
“You never used the service before?” she asked.
“No, not exactly,” he said. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants.
“They told you what I did and what I didn’t do?” she said.
He nodded. “It’s okay,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I don’t have any . . . well, what you might call exotic needs.”
“Where’s the bedroom?” she asked.
“Um, that door there.”
She went briskly towards it. She pushed it open, stepped inside, moved towards the window. The drapes were drawn; red cotton burning in the slipping-down sun. Neat: the bedspread matched the drapes and the drapes matched the rug. A blood-red room. She thought she remembered it from a nightmare. She called out, “Hey, are you coming through?”
He shuffled into the doorway. She sat down on the bed, watching him; he was as wary as some animal whose life has been one of avoiding larger predatory beasts. The meek were supposed to inherit something, she thought. She couldn’t remember what it was exactly. She smiled at him: the full dazzle this time, the come-on.
“Sit down. Here. Beside me.” She patted the bedspread.
He moved cautiously towards her.
“Did they tell you I got over my leprosy?” she said.
He stared at her for a moment. She could hear the penny drop in his head. Then he smiled.
“Cured. Completely cured.”
“Yeah,” he said. He watched her as she undid the buttons of her blouse. “Let me do that,” he said. “Is it okay if I do that?”
“Feel free,” she answered.
She watched his fingers tremble with her buttons. He was hopeless. She had to help him, first with the buttons, then with the buckle of her belt. With any luck, she thought, this could be a severe outbreak of premature ejaculation and I could be gone before the statutory hour had faded away . . . She lay back across the bedspread in her underwear, watching him hover above her. There were times when this was the worst moment, when all the fears you’d managed to keep hidden came like bats to the surface. Maybe he’d pull pantyhose from his pocket and wrap them around your neck, or pull a switchblade and stick it between your ribs. There were those times when, at your most vulnerable, you wanted to shut your eyes and drift away and imagine there was nobody else in the room with you, you were all alone; sometimes you imagined an old lover, somebody familiar and boring and wonderfully safe. Melvin Pike, for example. Sweet old Melvin, who had taken that graceful flower called virginity one bitingly cold Chicago night beneath the bleachers at the high-school football field. Fumbling Melvin, who could no more catch a pass than he could cut it as a lover. What she suddenly remembered now was the overpowering smell of his sulphurous acne cream and how she wanted to be sick and how quickly he’d shuddered and come and gasped like some beached fish. Dear old Melvin. He’d become a corporation lawyer and married Anita Semler and they had a house in Des Moines, two kids, an English sheepdog, and a parakeet.
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