The House on Coliseum Street

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “I thought of that,” Joan said.

  “I wash my hands of it,” Aurelie said, “the whole horrible thing.”

  “That’s all right,” Joan said, “I don’t mind really. Not much. Not really.”

  “Mon Dieu!” Aurelie said.

  “Don’t feel bad about it.”

  From the startled look on Aurelie’s face Joan saw that she had profoundly surprised her—for the very first time in her life.

  THE LAST DAYS OF September passed. Joan went to classes occasionally. She could see the way the other students looked at her now—a mixture of amusement and annoyance. A nut: they thought clearly. She shrugged and paid no attention. She scarcely talked to anyone, even people she had known long before. She still had her job in the library and she spent long hours on the top level of the stacks, alone, painfully reading book after book, not knowing a day later just what she had read.

  She had not seen Fred Aleman for several weeks. She had been out with him only once since her return from the coast. He called, regularly three times a week, but she still found excuses not to go out.

  “My telephone friend,” he called her, and she knew that he was not joking. Still, she put off the inevitable. And she really did enjoy the long bantering conversations. She just did not want to see him. She was relaxed and at ease on the phone. Face to face she was afraid. She did not think about the future. She did not allow herself to.

  Late one afternoon she was leaving the library—earlier than usual because she was hungry. She had forgotten to have lunch. As she was halfway out of the Gothic door, she stopped, blinking into the light.

  She could see only the silhouette for a moment. But she knew that; she would recognize that anywhere. “Fred,” she said, “I thought you’d be working.”

  “I came up to catch you, if that’s the only way I can do it.”

  He took her arm and steered or pulled her into his car that was double-parked just outside.

  “I was going over to get a hamburger or something.”

  “No lunch?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll take you over to the Azalea Grill.”

  They drove silently. Still silently they slipped into the bright red lacquered booth.

  Finally Joan said: “I’m still sort of dazed. I was so busy working.” She had a second’s private panic as she realized that she could not recall the title of the book she had just been reading.

  He didn’t question her. And she relaxed, smiled a little and felt better. “It’s a real pleasant surprise, though,” she said.

  The hamburger came; she doused hers with onions and relish and bit into it eagerly.

  “You really were hungry.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  He had only coffee; he sugared it carefully and stirred it slowly. “Finish up your food, little animal, then I want to talk to you.”

  In less than five minutes she was done. “I wasn’t hungry, I was starving.”

  “Okay,” he said, “now listen to me.”

  “Before or after dessert?” she grinned.

  “Be serious now.” He was staring right at her and she felt the same squirming sensation she always felt when confronted with directness.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I think I’ve been an idiot,” he said levelly, his eyes unblinking.

  His eyes fascinated her the way dark eyes always did: they were mirrors, they were surfaces, they were deep cones that went back to a tiny point that was where he lived. A tiny point way back in the middle of his head.

  “A god-damn idiot not to put some things together.”

  “How?” she asked because she felt she had to say something.

  “When you went to the coast,” he asked steadily, “were you pregnant?”

  Why does he have to be so direct, she thought. Why ask? If he knows.

  “That was a long time ago,” she dodged.

  “So you were.”

  “This is silly.”

  “Don’t you think you could have asked me something about it?”

  He thinks it’s his … and maybe it is. Maybe. Just maybe. Stranger things have happened. And it doesn’t matter whose it was. Because it’s gone. It wasn’t anybody’s but mine, and it’s gone.

  “I went off for a little vacation,” she said, “just because I was tired. It wasn’t anything so dramatic.”

  “It fits,” he said, “it all fits. You were kind of strange before you left, and you’ve been very strange since you came back.”

  “How strange?”

  “Withdrawn… Like you were waiting for something.”

  So he’d noticed it too… And what was she expecting? What was it? “I don’t mean to be strange or anything.”

  “You little idiot, why didn’t you ask me?”

  “There wasn’t anything to ask.”

  He went back to his coffee, stirring the weak brown liquid slowly about.

  “Looks like you’re about to poach an egg in that,” she said irrelevantly.

  “Well,” he said wryly to the coffee cup, “you’ve got courage for one thing.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m an awful coward.”

  “But you didn’t have to.”

  “There wasn’t anything to do.”

  “But you wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t wanted to, I guess…”

  “I didn’t do anything. Anything at all,” she repeated patiently.

  He wasn’t listening to her. He was thinking out loud. Thinking old thoughts. Thoughts he had run through the projector of his mind so often they were fraying at the edges and the words were memorized and familiar.

  “I guess that wasn’t any way to start… So I guess you were right.”

  She drank her water slowly, only half listening to him.

  “You gave yourself a pretty awful beating, you know. You look tired. And older.”

  “It’s the weather,” she said. “I hate this weather.”

  “It took me a long time to put things together, when it shouldn’t have. But I am sorry.”

  “Look,” she said, “everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Do you want to go home?”

  “No,” she said, “just drop me off at the library.”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK Joan bought herself a car, a secondhand black Pontiac.

  “My dear,” Aurelie said with horror when she saw it, “you’re not going to leave it parked out front?”

  “Where else? when we haven’t got a garage.”

  “Couldn’t you park it farther down the street?”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll move it.”

  Doris looked at it carefully. “And I had to pull teeth to get two hundred,” she said softly. “Rich bitch.”

  After that first day Joan kept the car parked around the corner. And in a way she preferred that. For no one at the house knew when she drove away. Not that it mattered whether they knew or not. They would never have thought of stopping her.

  But they might have asked idly, to make conversation, “What are you doing, where are you going?”

  And questions would spoil things. Joan floated—not happily, but not unhappily either—suspended in space, unhampered, able to move at will. Like water, she liked to think.

  The secrecy was necessary to her. She wanted to move without anyone knowing she was moving. She wanted recurring fantasies—that she was a ghost and slid through doors and slid through trees and crept into houses and watched what happened there. (For with this new urge of hers went a great curiosity—a curiosity about little things, about details of living.)

  She had taken to leaving by the back steps, the narrow twisting flight that not even Clara used any more. The single overhead light had long since burned out and nobody bothered to replace it. She had to feel her way, carefully, her arms stretched out on both sides of her, palms resting on the walls to guide her down.

  One day she was absolutely startled to meet Aurelie with Doris, f
lashlight in hand, coming up.

  “Mercy sakes,” Aurelie said, “you’ll break your neck, child, without a light.”

  Joan backed up again without a word and let them come up. The stair was far too narrow to pass.

  “Were you going through in the dark?” Aurelie asked.

  Joan just nodded.

  “Cat’s eyes,” Doris giggled.

  Aurelie shrugged. “Don’t break your neck. And by the way it will be about half an hour before the steps are dry.”

  “Sure,” Joan said, “sure thing.”

  It was not until she was groping her way down that she realized what had happened. They had waxed the regular stairs. Of course. She could smell the crisp sharp odor of the wax; she had been smelling it all along without noticing.

  And they had thought she had noticed. So they did not know. She was so relieved that she stopped in the middle of her groping and grinned triumphantly to herself. They still did not know that she used this way regularly. They still did not know…

  She felt like laughing. She felt like sitting right down and laughing.

  She still had her way out. She had slipped it by their very noses. She was still free. To come and go unnoticed. In secret.

  Not that she knew why… She didn’t bother to ask herself that. It just was and that was all.

  She kept her job in the library, asking for the late hours that none of the staff wanted. She liked the quiet still emptiness, where each step, however carefully rubber-cushioned, echoed right through the building. She liked the way—at closing—the lights went out, tier after tier, first the stack lights, then the reading rooms, and last of all the corridors. She found she could move just ahead of them, as she would have done before a coming tide.

  She would stand at the door of the stacks until those lights blinked and disappeared. She would move to the door of the reading rooms and wait the five minutes there. Then, moving slowly, she would time herself to be just at the front door when the hall lights blinked out.

  She rarely missed. When she did, she corrected the timing by a few seconds’ conversation with the watchman who stood waiting to lock up.

  She would find herself going down the wide outside steps in the soft warm fall night. She would go down them without any hesitation, because she knew them so well. And she would turn down the sidewalk, walking slowly to her car. She always parked several blocks away, deliberately. She walked slowly, purse swinging idly in her left hand, her heels making tiny sounds on the cement. She followed the paths through the dark buildings, paths lit only by an occasional light standard. She made her walk as long as possible: she liked the feel of the dark, of the little night wind, of the smell of the earth, the leaf mold cooling after a day’s heat, of all these things around her. And her alone.

  She rather liked being alone, it gave her a sharp clear feeling. This is me, she could say to herself in the dark, and for the first time she would know exactly what she meant. She did not have to figure herself in relation to other people now.

  And in the dark—on the shadowy benches, in the doorways of the Gothic buildings—she could hear the quick shuffling and shifting of the couples as she passed. Sometimes, because her ears were sharp, she could hear their whispers off in the distance, sharp hushed little whispers—before they heard her steps and fell silent for her to pass.

  Sometimes, hidden by a tree, she would stand stock-still and listen. As if she were hunting. Listen until the small sounds of the warm night came back. And it seemed to her then that the whole dark was full of couples, the buildings, the bushes, the shrubs, the trees, even the leaves overhead. Soft wet sounds.

  That stopped when she moved again.

  When she finally got to her car she would snap on the radio and see her hand outlined in the little light from the dash. And she would feel clear and hard and definite.

  It was a very comfortable feeling.

  Though it would then be a few minutes past eleven, she rarely went directly home. Instead she went driving. The car had given her a feeling of new mobility and looseness. She did not care particularly where she went. She chose streets because she liked the way they looked. One night she turned down only the widest avenues, palm-fringed and littered by the falling seeds of tremendous golden-rain trees. Another night she drove along the narrowest and darkest back streets, dirt rutted, littered with cans, where Negro faces peered at her and she tried to hide her white nakedness.

  She rarely got home before three. Usually too she stopped off at the Azalea Grill for a hamburger. Without thinking she would find that her circling ended in front of its chromium counters, and she would come blinking from the dark into the brilliant blue fluorescent glare.

  One afternoon, in the very first weeks of October, she had just wakened and was stretching idly in bed, when Fred called her. They chattered a bit. Though she was aware of something else in his voice, she was too sleepy to isolate it.

  Finally he asked directly, “Should I call you again?”

  She was startled. “What?”

  “Would you be happier if I didn’t call you again?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, imitating a yawn, and stalling for time. “I just woke up.”

  He was not going to be put off. “Would you miss it if I didn’t call you again?”

  And she very deliberately said something that wasn’t true. “I guess not,” she said, “I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” he said quietly. And hung up.

  She put the receiver back carefully and sat on the edge of the bed for quite some time, wondering: why did I say that? When I know it isn’t true. Why did I? Why do I want to hurt myself?

  She was learning to look upon herself as a separate person. She found herself observing her activities, being a little surprised with each discovery. She regarded herself with interest and detachment, as if she were a strange zoo specimen of whose behavior she did not entirely approve.

  She found herself watching for Michael Kern. She had already done it several times before she realized what she was doing.

  Often during her night prowls she would pull to the curb, leaving the motor running, and listen to the empty streets or the sound of the lake. It was just one of the things she did. It did not particularly matter to her where she was. Most times she did not notice.

  But this one time, a wet gusty night, she looked out of the window and read the number on the yellow stucco apartment building she had stopped by. She had never seen it before. It was on a side street facing a little park. The number was familiar; she stared at it: 4608. Done in flowing curving iron letters over the iron-barred door.

  She remembered. She had called Michael Kern just twice. She had looked him up in the phone book. Both times. 4608 Villere Street. That was it. She had remembered without knowing it.

  She went over and glanced at the names over the long line of bells. She found his without any trouble. There was still mail jammed in the box. Which meant he was not home yet. She scurried off hastily, and back in the dark safety of the car she realized that her hair was dripping cold streams of water down her neck. She had forgotten to use an umbrella.

  She sat very quietly for a few minutes. Until she saw a Ford convertible slide into place at the side of the building. And a hunched figure dash for the door. She was not sure who it was, until he stopped and fumbled for his mail, holding a cigarette lighter as he unlocked the box.

  Then he was gone into the depths of the building. She waited patiently to see what light went on. The third floor on the left side. It wasn’t a very deep building. All the apartments must run from front to back, so their rooms would be strung out in a long straight line. Like a shotgun house, she thought, only an apartment instead.

  And what was it like inside? She wished she had seen it. Now she wished she had. What were the rooms like? How many were there? Were they furnished with the usual wicker and chintz, or did he bring his own stuff? And were the owls still there? Or had he sent them on to his aun
t? The owls, the stuffed owls…

  She shook her head and drove off quickly.

  A couple of nights later she was back at the same place, knowing now how she had come there. The lights inside were on this time; the curtains weren’t drawn, though it was too high to see. She studied the two bars of light, blurred in the drizzle. Yellow radiance in the mist, little glow like yellow smoke, drifting out.

  After about ten minutes she saw him come out. This time he wasn’t alone. There was somebody with him, somebody tall, wearing a bright green raincoat. Whose high heels clattered as they ran across the rain-soaked sidewalk.

  When they were gone, she stared into the splattered windshield.

  Drops, dribbles, drops, dribbles, she thought nonsensically. Dribble dribble toil and tribble.

  And she laughed out loud at herself.

  She sat very still, letting her eyes see the patterns of dark and light, not thinking of anything at all. Drifting. Like seaweed.

  She wouldn’t go to the beach any more. Just to the mountains. Where there were sleek green fish in shallow stony streams…

  She didn’t notice until the flashlight touched her face. She saw the shiny black raincoat first, then the shiny visor and the shiny badge.

  “You in trouble, lady?”

  Then she saw the prowl car pulled in right behind her.

  “Goodness,” she said, “you startled me.”

  “You in trouble?”

  “No,” she said, “mercy no.”

  “Look,” he said, “it’s not exactly the safest place, alone in a car. Things happen.”

  She smiled her best finishing-school smile. “That’s why I leave my motor running.”

  The officer shook his head. “Sounds kind of crazy to me.”

  She chuckled softly. “It is.”

  “Why this block and this same spot?”

  “I guess you noticed me here before.”

  He nodded.

  “Before I get myself shot for a suspicious character …” Her voice trailed off as she thought of the proper words to use. The man was waiting patiently. She couldn’t see his face. “Look,” she said, “it’s like this. I had a boyfriend and we broke up, not much more than a couple of months ago. Not that much. I’ve been waiting to see if there was a chance for me. Until tonight he’s come home alone. Only tonight there was a girl up there. So I know he’s got a girl. And that’s what I wanted to find out.”