by David Gates
Paula Wilson-Sturdivant, girl detective.
It’s one of my amusements up here. The other morning I was unpacking a box of PAPERS & MISC when I looked out the window and saw him in the backyard by the old oil drum where the people who’d lived here had burned their trash. Steven, who puts the caps from toothpaste tubes in with the number-two plastics to be recycled—I swear—was touching a match to a big sheet of paper and thrusting it from him as flames leaped up. “Just a particularly lousy piece of work,” he said when he came in. I said the obvious: if it had bothered him enough to burn it, it must’ve had something he could use. He asked if I was reverting to hippiedom, saying it in a way I was supposed to think was only kidding.
So when he left to go get the mail, I went out to the barrel. But he’d even smashed up the ashes.
• • •
Around one this afternoon, I heard Steven go downstairs. The upstairs bathroom is right over the kitchen, and there’s a grate in the floor for heat to come up. I tiptoed into the bathroom and knelt to watch. I could see a corner of the stove and most of the sink, where I’d put the filter basket with soiled filter and spent coffee grounds still in it. I saw him pick it up; his shoulders rose and fell, a martyr’s sigh.
I printed out my pages and went downstairs. He was lying on the sofa reading The Pickwick Papers. The last time he went on one of his reading binges, it lasted for over a month. This was back in the city. He got through seven Dickens novels and blew off an album cover that would have paid him three thousand dollars. He told them he’d been mugged and his arm was in a cast. “But what if you run into one of them?” I’d said. He’d said, “I don’t plan to be going out.”
“Good morning,” I said. I didn’t mean it as a bitchy way of saying it was already afternoon; it just came out. “Listen, I have to run over to Oneonta to the stationery store. You need anything from the outside world?”
“Am I not invited?” he said.
“Of course,” I said. “Sure. You just looked so comfortable.” How could I do what I needed to do at the liquor store with him along?
“The master of illusion,” he said.
“How’s the book?”
He shrugged. “Reads about the same as last time.”
“No, I mean the wolf book.” The children’s book he’s working on is about a lost wolf cub, which is adopted by a peasant family but finally returns to the forest to be with its own kind. The crap he’s handed is not his fault.
“Oh, the book,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?” This, I guessed, was meant as a lighthearted peace overture. “Good,” he said. “Rockin’ right along.”
I tried to think of a delicate way to find out if he was on the verge of another Dickens thing. Finally I said, “When do they want them by?”
“What’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday,” he said. “So, a week from tomorrow. Not a problem. Barring a sudden coffee shortage.”
What about a cigarette shortage? I thought. He’d gone through nearly a pack last night. How could he be lying there not jumping out of his skin? Why would he want to come with me to Oneonta instead of trying to hustle me out of here so he could smoke? Then I got it. He must have run out, and at some point he would excuse himself to do an “errand.” With any luck, he’d take long enough for me to get to the liquor store. But wait: if he hustled me out of here, he could just walk down to Webster’s. I didn’t get it.
“I was looking through this,” he said, “to see if there was anything in the Seymour stuff I could use. I always thought Phiz was way overrated, and I sort of wanted to give old Seymour a tip of the Hatlo hat. You know the story, right?”
“What story?” I said, obediently.
“Okay, Seymour was the first illustrator on the book—see, Dickens was just this young guy they hired to crank out text. But in the middle of the thing Seymour kills himself, and they got some bozo to fill in for a couple of weeks or whatever and then they found Phiz. Look at this, this is the last thing Seymour did.”
It was an ugly picture of a dying man on a bed.
“Why did he kill himself?” I said.
“Got me,” he said. “I know Dickens sort of ran roughshod over him, which I guess didn’t help matters. But I think it was just, you know, his life.”
He got up and located his boots, his checkbook, the car keys, his red plaid hat. “Carl plow the driveway?” he said, peering out the kitchen window as he zipped up his red plaid jacket over his down vest. “Did a great job.” As we walked out the door, he handed me the keys.
In Oneonta, he came into the stationery store with me; while I bought a ream of paper I didn’t need, he picked out a half-dozen pen tips. Then he wanted to go have rice pudding at the luncheonette, where he got quarters for the jukebox and played Randy Travis singing the forever-and-ever song. How could he bear the irony? How could he put me through it? I watched his hand, the one with the ring, beat time on the Formica. He never announced he had an errand; I tried to think how to manage a run to the liquor store, but it couldn’t be done. On the way back out of town we hit the Grand Union, where I bought stuff for Chicken in a Bread Loaf, and craftily omitted the dried mint.
When we got home, he kissed me—on the lips, warm—and went up to work. He hadn’t had a cigarette, apparently, since sometime last night. If he was a man who could pick up a thing and then just drop it, where did that leave me? Thinking about Marilyn, I supppose. He was married to her for fifteen years, then dumped her because she got old. (He says that’s not what happened.) She was only forty-two. I took the pad from next to the phone and figured it out. Forty-two minus twenty-nine: I would be forty-two in thirteen years. In the same thirteen years, he would be—forty-seven plus thirteen—he would be sixty. Past the point where he could get another twenty-nine-year-old, unless she was supremely stupid, and probably fat as well. Not the kind of security one might desire, but nevertheless. I put the pad back, leaving the sheet with my calculations. On the off chance he might ask what they were.
I waited half an hour (did dishes, cleaned the top of the stove, scrubbed the downstairs toilet, put the dishes away, scoured pot marks out of the kitchen sink), then went up and knocked on his door. Loud saxophone jazz. He called, “Yo.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said to his door. “I have to go back to Grand Union. I forgot the stupid mint for the chicken.”
He opened the door. No smell of smoke. “You forgot what?”
“Mint,” I said. “They call for mint.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t they carry mint at Webster’s?”
“I doubt it,” I said. I’d forgotten about goddamn Webster’s. Actually they were pretty well stocked if you didn’t mind paying their prices.
“Well, hell,” he said, “just leave it out. You don’t want to go all the way back to Oneonta. How much do they call for?”
“Tablespoon,” I said. It was a teaspoon.
“Bag it,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
“It really won’t,” I said. “It’s going to taste blah.”
He sighed. “Christ. Well, look. Why don’t you just fix something else? Roast the chicken like you would anyway, and we’ll eat the bread as bread, you know?”
“But you like the other so much,” I said, feeling vile.
“Paula,” he said. “It’s truly decadent to drive forty miles round trip for a tablespoon of mint, for Christ’s sake. You’re putting wear and tear on the car, you’re burning up fossil fuels …”
I tried to think: if my motives had been pure, would I be justified in thinking he was being a prick? And: would it seem more suspicious to fight him on this or to acquiesce? More suspicious to fight, I decided.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I guess you’re right. Look, what I’ll do is, I’ll run down to Webster’s and if they don’t have mint I’ll figure out something else for dinner, okay? You sure you won’t be disappointed?”
“Au contraire. I will admire your resourc
efulness in the face of domestic crisis.” He reached around and patted my ass.
• • •
I threw my sketchbook in the backseat—that would be my alibi—and drove to Webster’s, where I bought a jar of dried mint and a pack of Care Free peppermint gum. I’d chewed all five sticks by the time I got to the liquor store in Oneonta. They didn’t have pints of Rémy, so I had to buy the next size up, which I really couldn’t afford. Then on the way back I remembered: fossil fuels. Steven wasn’t so anal that he’d know the odometer reading, but he might know how much gas there was. I calculated forty miles at, say, twenty-five miles per gallon. I stopped at Cumberland Farms and put in two dollars’ worth. Back at the house, just in case, I pushed the little button on the trip odometer to make all zeroes come up. Let him wonder.
I was smart to leave the bottle in the car: Steven stood there in the kitchen, the orange juice carton (no glass) in his hand. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, putting the carton back in the refrigerator. “Alice Porter called and I got stuck on the phone for an hour.” An hour meant five minutes.
“So you shouldn’t have picked it up,” I said. “Why the good Lord made answering machines.”
“I was expecting it to be Martin,” he said. “Our auteur has made still more changes in her text, and he had to be sure they didn’t affect the pictures. This woman thinks she’s Flaubert. I mean, this has been going on and on and on. I told Martin, this is the end of it. Fini.”
“Are they going to make you change anything?” I said.
“No, it’s just stuff like where she had the wolf with his tail ‘held high,’ it’s now ‘at a jaunty angle.’ Jaunty, for Christ’s sake. I mean, this is what my life has come down to, ‘a jaunty angle.’ I told him, I said, ‘Look, the picture’s done, he’s got his tail in the fucking air, and if the goddamn angle isn’t jaunty enough, they can shove it.’ ”
“Good for you,” I said.
“So where’ve you been?” he said. “You didn’t go all the way back there, did you?”
“No, you were right, they had it at Webster’s. I went up to Randolph Pond and tried to do some sketching.” I held up my sketch pad as evidence.
“Good for you,” he said. “You haven’t sketched for a long time. Let’s see.”
I shook my head. “They suck,” I said. I got a book of matches out of the drawer. “I’m going to use the Steven Sturdivant method. Burn it before it gets out of hand.”
“You’re kidding, I hope. You know, you were absolutely on the money with what you said the other day. How does that thing go? ‘The man of genius makes no errors’?”
“I’m not a man,” I said, “and I’m not of genius. Be back in a second.”
“Come on, now,” he said, grabbing for the pad. “Let the old doctor have a gander.”
“No, Steven.” I twisted away. “I’m serious.” If he’d gotten the pad away from me, he would’ve seen that the last sketch in the book was of a little girl at Jones Beach, with pail and shovel. But the word serious seemed to back him off. I slammed the door behind me, to lend myself still more power.
Standing over the rusty oil drum, I ripped out two blank pages and set fire to them. Then I ripped out the little girl and burned her up, too. When I came back into the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush upstairs. I listened to Steven’s footsteps going back to his workroom, then went out and brought the new bottle in. I brought the level in the old bottle up to something like what I guessed it had been—apparently I’d hit it much harder last night than I remembered—took a slug of what was left for old times’ sake and poured the rest into the sink, running hot water to chase it down. I put the empty bottle back in the paper bag, stuffed it into a milk carton and tucked it away in the bottom of the garbage. Okay: crisis averted. I lit the oven, unwrapped the chicken, sawed the top off the bread loaf with the good knife from Broadway Panhandler, and began clawing out the soft inside.
“I have a confession to make,” he said as I lit the candles. “I smoked most of a pack of cigarettes last night.”
“Steven,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“I decided I’m not going to do it anymore,” he said.
“How come you did it at all?”
“Well, we had that—and believe me, I’m not blaming you—but we had that unpleasantness yesterday that never really got resolved, and I felt like I was under the gun with those pictures, which it turns out I’m not, I mean I’m actually in very good shape with them. I think all it really was, I was just looking for an excuse to do it. So I did it.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry if I contributed.” I began cutting the stuffed bread loaf into inch-thick slices.
He shook his head. “Not your responsibility. It was my choice.”
“And you had them around,” I said.
“Yeah. I had them around.” He did his snorting laugh. “But I think this has taught me something. I mean, if you weren’t reason enough, there’s Trigger Junior to think of.” Trigger Junior was his provisional name for the baby.
“What about you?” I said. “Aren’t you reason enough?”
“Well, I never have been,” he said. “Maybe that’s changing. Did I tell you? I think these pills might be starting to do something. This morning I woke up and I felt just sort of—I don’t know. Not heavy of heart for a change. I can’t really describe it. But I definitely didn’t want a cigarette, despite putting all that nicotine into my system last night. Which I find almost scary.”
“But that’s wonderful,” I said. I laid a slice on his plate and a slice on mine.
“God, that looks splendid,” he said. “At any rate. Full disclosure.” He cut off a corner and speared it with his fork. “I’m assuming we still care about that.”
“I think we do.” What else was I to say?
“Good.” He put the corner in his mouth. “Mmm. Surpassed yourself.”
“I’m glad you like it,” I said, not meaning it to sound that dismal.
“In the interest of even fuller disclosure,” he said, “I must further confess to you that I nipped a bit at the cognac while you were out this afternoon. I don’t actually know why. Except that it was like, I really wasn’t craving a cigarette and that freaked me out. It was like nothing was wrong, you know? And that made me suspicious that something was really wrong that I didn’t even dare bring to consciousness, so I thought I’d better drink to sort of preempt it. Does that make any sense at all?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention. How could he not have noticed that so much was gone out of that goddamn bottle? And now what? Try to keep him out of the kitchen and pour out some of what you just poured in?
We ate.
He took a second slice.
Half of a third.
Now he was talking about names for the baby. Lately he’d been liking Margaret. Did I know that was the same as Pearl?
“The same in what sense?” I said, getting up to clear the table.
“You know, etymologically,” he said. He stood up too, and reached for the platter with the remains of the stuffed bread loaf.
“Sit,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. I think you’ve had a hard day.”
“Only in my head.” He carried the platter and the salad bowl out to the kitchen; I set the plates and glasses on the counter next to the sink. “Tinfoil be the best thing?” he said, pulling open the drawer.
“Why don’t you just let me take care of it?” I said. I snatched the foil out of his hands. “Just go and sit and relax. Actually, you know what would be lovely? If you would put on some music, I’ll take care of this stuff and then bring our desserts out to the living room. How would that be?”
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said. He took down a brandy snifter.
“What are you doing?” I said. “I’ll get that for you. Go and sit down.”
“I can get it.” He opened the cupboard door, took out the bottle of Rémy, looked at it and said, “What the hell?”
&
nbsp; He looked at me. Then I saw his eyes go down to my hands and get big. I looked down, too. I was sawing the saw thing on the aluminum-foil box across the thumbprint part of my thumb. There was blood on the front of me.
“You’ve been drinking,” he said.
“Obviously,” I said. I couldn’t feel the pain yet. I had a picture in my head of a bad person in shame.
“You’re pregnant and you’re drunk?” he said. “Don’t you know what that can do? Do you care? How could you do it? What the hell is going on in your mind?”
“I’m not drunk,” I said.
“You’re a whore,” he said. “Where did you go this afternoon?”
I wasn’t angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn’t understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.
STAR BABY
When Billy gets home, his nephew’s playing with that thing where marbles roll down slanting wooden rails and drop through holes onto the rail below. It takes a supposedly entertainingly long time for a marble to make it all the way down. This was Billy’s toy when he was a kid; Deke found it in a box in the basement.
“Hey, tiger. How was your day?” He sets the Times on the dusty Baldwin spinet and nods at Mrs. Bishop.
Deke says, “Watch this.” He lets a marble go.
Billy waits until it’s halfway down to say “Cool.”
“Yeah,” Deke says, “but watch.”
Billy watches the marble roll and drop, roll and drop, then turns to Mrs. Bishop. “How was it today?”
She looks over at Deke. “He’s a good boy.”
So nobody’s giving him a straight answer. But at any rate the TV’s not on. Unless she just now snapped it off, having heard his car. He could touch a wrist to it and check, but that would be a bit much. Cassie had let Deke have a TV in his room, which he’d watch for hours while she did what she did. Seven years old.