Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  The few hours that the doughnuts had sat there hadn’t hurt them much. The sugar on the outside had melted, but all in all they had held up as well as anyone could expect. The jelly doughnuts seemed a little excessive right then, so Walt ate two of the glazed, and then went back out and drank more water out of the hose. His hands had steadied out, his head had quit throbbing, and he felt almost like working again. For a moment he wondered whether he shouldn’t fiddle with the photoelectric gadgetry like he’d promised Amanda, but clearly it was too late in the afternoon to start something that complicated.

  Then it came to him that Amanda was driving around town without a jack in the trunk. It would be his luck entirely if she blew a tire and found herself stranded. Walking around to the garage, he looked out toward the front of the house. The Toyota was parked at the curb. He grabbed the jack off the benchtop with the idea of putting it away, and then headed down the driveway.

  There was a woman’s voice just then, and he turned to find his neighbor out watering the lawn. “Hi, Sue,” he said, waving the jack cheerfully. “Water my lawn while you’re at it, will you?”

  She waved back with the hand that was holding the hose, spraying water in his direction.

  “Hey!” he said, jumping aside.

  She laughed. “You asked.” She walked toward him, sprinkling the lawn on either side. “Is Amanda getting dressed up for the progressive dinner Saturday night?”

  “Yeah,” Walt said, standing by the trunk. “Her birthday dress.”

  “You wearing your birthday suit too?”

  “You know I don’t go in for dirty talk,” he said to her.

  “Seriously,” she said. “What kind of birthday dress? Nice? Evening wear?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Walt said. “Sort of.” He unlocked the trunk, and the lid popped open. “Some kind of dress. You know, all one piece.”

  “A one-piece,” she said, nodding her head as if he were an idiot. “I’ll ask her myself.”

  A shopping bag lay in the trunk. Walt looked away for a moment and then looked back at it, unbelieving. There was a shoe box in it. What did this mean, that she had been out hitting shoe stores all afternoon? He dropped the jack into the trunk and pulled the box out of its bag.

  “Shoes!” Sue said, looking over his shoulder.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see.”

  He pulled the lid off and held the box out. Inside was a pair of plain leather shoes, nothing fancy, but somehow, in some way that he couldn’t quite identify, they looked expensive as hell. There was no receipt this time. He looked into the bag, but there was nothing in there either.

  He realized that his neighbor’s eyes were as wide as half dollars. “Ferragamo,” she said.

  “Is that it?”

  She nodded, looking at the interior of the box as if it held a diamond tiara.

  “Nice, eh? Good shoe?”

  “Man!” she said, and nodded again. “How much did you have to give for them?”

  “What?” Walt said, not quite taking it in.

  “I’m not being nosy, I just … Tell me how much? Bob is such a damned skinflint! I’m going to hold this over his head for years. Jeeze, I can’t believe a man would buy a pair of Ferragamos for his wife. Especially not her husband, if you know what I mean.”

  “How much do you think?” Walt asked, alarmed now. Amanda had clearly lost her mind. “Take a guess.” He realized he was talking through clenched teeth and made an effort to relax.

  “A thousand?”

  “A thousand! Good God!” He reeled back against the car and sat down hard on the bumper.

  “More?” she asked. “Or did you get them on sale? What’s wrong?”

  “Yeah,” Walt said. “Nothing.” He felt faint. “I got them on sale.” He looked at the bag in the trunk. “At Nieman Marcus.”

  “Still, they must have been plenty. I guess I don’t need to know exactly. They’re normally a four-figure buy, though. I know that much. Bob might buy them if they were half price.”

  Walt shook his head as if it beat all, Bob’s being a tightwad. Bob was going to kill him, of course, spoiling Amanda like that. Maybe Walt would just come clean with him, admit that Amanda had a thing for shoes, and that it had gotten a little out of hand. He couldn’t, though. You didn’t rat on your wife. He would just have to brass it out if Bob said anything to him. Some men were tight-fisted, some weren’t. It wasn’t his fault if he had a generous spirit.

  He put the shoes back in the box and shut the trunk. He sure as hell wasn’t going to wave them in Amanda’s face like he had that morning. It hadn’t done a nickel’s worth of good anyway. More likely it had led to this latest atrocity. He wondered if there was any hope for her after all. There was that TV ad from where was it?—Mt. Sinai Hospital—having to do with addictions therapy. What the hell had the number been? He couldn’t remember. Of course there was some little chance that she would be feeling guilty about now, wrangling with the ghost of Aunt Janet. Maybe she’d come clean if he just left her alone.

  He found himself in the garage again. A thousand bucks! That was sheer insanity. You could buy two cows for that kind of money, one for each foot, and get change back, too. He opened the doughnut box and pulled out another glazed. It tasted like cardboard to him, but he ate it anyway, to prove a point, and then ate another. He closed the box back up and pushed it away. Feeling a little queasy, he plastered on a smile and went in through the kitchen door. Amanda was chopping up vegetables at the counter, putting together a salad.

  “Build the prototype?” she asked.

  “No. No time for it. I pounded nails all afternoon. How about you?” She looked nice, fixed up as if to make an evening out of it. There were a couple of steaks marinating in a pan and a bottle of champagne in the ice bucket. But Walt couldn’t see anything but the shoes, looming in his mind like the ghost at the feast.

  There was no question of him eating. He realized he was nauseated. Automatically he thought about the doughnuts, about how many he had eaten that day. What?—Six? Eight? More like ten.

  “Something wrong?” Amanda asked. “You don’t look too good.”

  He nearly blurted it out right there. Clearly she was setting in to butter him up with the steaks and champagne and all. And what after that? An intimate evening in front of the fire? He half wished he hadn’t found the shoes at all. Or eaten those last two doughnuts, which were playing nine ball in his stomach.

  “I’m … not feeling too well,” he said. “Touch of the flu, I think.” A wave of nausea struck him, worse this time. “I’ll head upstairs. Lie down for a minute.”

  “Should I put the steaks away?”

  “What? I don’t care,” he said angrily. “Turn them into a pair of shoes.” He bolted for the stairs, barely making it to the bathroom in time. He was sweating and shaking again when he sat down on the edge of the bed, but after a few minutes of resting he felt better. He could hear kitchen sounds down below. Amanda had switched on the stereo, some kind of lazy-man’s jazz.

  “You coming down?” Her voice sounded froni the bottom of the stairs.

  He got up slowly, anticipating a bad stomach. He was all right, though. Too damned many doughnuts; that was the long and short of it. Well, that was it. That was the end. He was taking the pledge. Cold turkey. On the wagon. Tick-a-lock, doors and windows. He went back downstairs, full of determination.

  Amanda was dancing in the kitchen, tossing the salad with a flourish of the wooden utensils. She was obviously high on shoes. She had gone on a bender herself, but shoes, unlike doughnuts, didn’t make you sick with nausea and regret. He watched her until she saw his face and stopped.

  “What?” she said.

  “You know damned well what.”

  “Suppose you tell me anyway.”

  “Suppose you tell me.

  “Let’s see … ” She waved the salad spoon in the air and squinted, as if she could see a thought balloon forming over her head. “I give.”

 
“The shoes.”

  “What shoes?”

  “You know damned well what shoes!” he shouted, flying into a rage. “Don’t bait me. You’ve got a problem. A big one. How much, a thousand?”

  “Guess.”

  “Guess! I don’t have to guess. Sue told me. A thousand dollars! No human being on earth needs a thousand-dollar pair of shoes. It’s obscene. I don’t care whose Aunt Janet corked off and left you money. You’d better rein it in.” He nodded his head at her.

  “Or what? What if I don’t ‘rein it in’?”

  Speechless, he looked around the kitchen for something to vent his fury on, something to smash up, maybe. Something to crush. He grabbed the champagne bottle by the neck, tore off the foil, untwisted the wire, and yanked the cork out. Then, his hand trembling, he poured his glass full, the bubbles rushing down over the side. Upending the glass, he downed the champagne at a gulp.

  “You’re really ticked off,” Amanda said to him, smiling. Apparently she thought it was funny.

  He stood there breathing.

  “They’re Sue’s shoes.”

  “What?”

  “The shoes in the trunk,” Amanda said. “They belong to Sue, dummy. Bob bought them for her, believe it or not. She brought them over to show me today, and as a sort of joke we put them in the trunk.”

  “As a sort of joke?” He stared at her. It was unbelievable. His own wife, telling him this. The rottenest sort of betrayal. He poured another glass of champagne, then shoved the bottle back into the ice bucket.

  “I was wondering if you’d go searching through my car again,” she said, “looking for evidence.”

  He blinked at her. “I didn’t go searching through you car.”

  “This morning you didn’t?”

  “This morning I was looking for a scissors jack, to build my … my prototype.”

  “Your prototype.” She nodded. “And this afternoon? The prototype again?”

  “I was putting it back.” Without another word he set his glass down and walked away, out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He wasn’t hungry anyway. Methodically he got undressed and put on his pajamas, then found his book and climbed into bed, flopping back down onto his pillow in order to stare at the ceiling. There was the sound of paper crackling under his head, and he jerked back up again, scrabbled around, and looked into his pillow case.

  Puzzled at what he saw, he dumped it out, over the edge of the bed. About a hundred white paper bags fell out, each one with the logo from Lew’s All-Niter on the front. “What the hell?” he wondered, getting up. Then he knew what it was, the stash from under the front seat of his car, the bags he had been stuffing under there for months.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. It had come to this, had it?—open season on him. He picked up the pile of bags and went quietly back downstairs. Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table sipping champagne, her book open in in front of her. She glanced up at him and smiled, apparently still thinking it was all a grand joke, that they could laugh at it together.

  “I was looking for my prototype,” she said, seeing what it was he was carrying.

  Silently, he dumped the bags on the table, dusted sugar crumbs off his hands, and walked away again, up the stairs.

  •

  He lay there alone all evening, trying to read. He wasn’t going to budge. By God if there was an apology due, it wasn’t due from him. He had been set up, ridiculed. Amanda had thrown the doughnut business into his face, kicked him when he was already down. And his conversation with Sue, out at the curb, him carrying on like some kind of damned Pinnochio … it didn’t bear thinking about.

  He was suddenly hungry. He smelled the steaks searing now, on the Farberware grill. Well, Amanda could eat his, for all he cared. To hell with food. The thought of her eating without even inviting him down, though …

  He heard Sue come in shortly after that, the two of them whispering down there, no doubt discussing him. There was the sound of laughter. For a moment he thought about storming downstairs and setting them straight. He actually got out of bed. But then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and saw that his pajamas made him look like a fool. He didn’t have the energy to get dressed.

  At ten he began to wonder whether she meant to sleep on the downstairs couch. Maybe she was already asleep, or had gone out. There was no sound at all below. He turned the light off and lay there thinking, listening to his stomach growl, unable to sleep. He wondered if it was the end of his marrriage, and toyed with the idea of calling a lawyer in the morning, rig it so that Amanda would overhear the call. He wasn’t serious about the lawyer, but a prank like that would serve her right after her trick with the shoes.

  He began to think about the prototype, assembling it piece by piece in his head so that he could picture the web of ropes and pulleys and counterweights and springs, all of it tugging and spinning, windows opening and closing like the workings of his brain, which right then was an overactive mess. It seemed unlikely that he would ever sleep normally again. He was monumentally hungry, too, but he was damned if he was going downstairs after a snack. Amanda would just have to live with the idea of him alone and starving upstairs. He got up finally and put on his robe and slippers. Nothing made him madder than being unable to sleep.

  As quietly as he could he tip-toed downstairs. She was probably asleep in the den, but he decided against looking in. If she were awake she would think he had come down to make amends, and that wouldn’t do. This time she would be the one to apologize.

  It was a warm night outside, the sky clear and full of stars. He wondered if the possum were somewhere around as be eased open the garage door and flipped on the light. He felt a certain affinity to it, to its solitary nocturnal habits. The garage was a comforting place to be late at night like this. It was as if he were getting away with something by being out there, as if he were hoodwinking time.

  He opened the doughnut box and sorted through the few that remained. The glazed didn’t appeal to him, maybe because he’d got sick after eating the last two. They were leathery-stiff, too, like old road kill. There was a good chance the jelly doughnuts would have held up, though, with the jelly inside to keep them moist. He pulled one out, leaned his elbows on the bench, and took a bite, chewing moodily while his eyes traced the avenues of holes in the pegboard on the wall.

  Idly, he fished out one of the glazed, laid it on the benchtop, and mashed it flat with a piece of wood. He mashed the three other glazed the same way, remembering the day his father had broken up all his smoking pipes on his anvil, all the time smoking one last pipeful of tobacco.

  He had come out with some vague notion of assembling the prototype, putting in a couple of hours out there. But the bits of rope and the wooden pulleys scattered on the bench didn’t speak to him. They were so much sad junk now. And of course the scissors jack was lying in the trunk of the Toyota again.

  He picked out the last jelly doughnut. One for the road. That was absolutely it. He had been riding the doughnut train, but now it was the end of the line. He could see the terminal, rushing at him out of the night. He bit deeply into the thing, hitting the pocket of jelly just as a knock sounded at the nearly-closed door. Jumping in surprise, he smeared the doughnut up his face, a glop of jelly filling one of his nostrils. He spun around, trying to hide the doughnut.

  Amanda stood at the half open door, still dressed, but in her bedroom slippers. He could feel the jelly dripping down his upper lip, and he tried to clean it off with his tongue. She had started to speak, but apparently couldn’t get the words out, and her eyes shifted away from his jelly-smeared face to the bench top where the weirdly flattened doughnuts lay amid the refuse of the prototype.

  She looked at his face again, without, he thought, any humor in her eyes at all. “Why don’t you come to bed?” she asked. “I’m sorry about the shoes and the doughnut bags and all. I didn’t know you were that … serious.”

  Even then he wanted to protest. Serious how? No sense of humor? A seri
ous doughnut habit? He started to point to the flattened doughnuts, to show her just how serious he really was, but then abruptly he saw the futility in it, and he flipped off the light and followed her into the house.

  •

  They took Walt’s car next morning, but Amanda drove. Walt felt foggy and subdued. He couldn’t argue with her suggestion that they find him a new pair of shoes before Saturday night. Apparently, there was a firestorm of sales raging at the mall. And as a concession to him they were stopping at Le Wing’s Shoe Repair on the way. Amanda had no problem with his putting new soles on the old shoes, which were lying now on the backseat. You could patch nearly anything, no matter how shabby and worn out it had become.

  He realized suddenly that she was turning north up the boulevard, past Lew’s All-Niter. He sat on his hands and stared out the windshield, conscious of her glancing at him. What did she expect, the shakes? Doughnut withdrawal?

  Cut it out, he told himself. It had been his decision to go on the wagon. He hadn’t said anything about it to her. She had caught him with the jelly doughnuts at midnight, hiding in the garage, but even so it had been her that had apologized—for the shoe trick and for the bags in the pillow. Walt had felt like a four-year-old. This morning there had been no mention of any of it, only the new shoes suggestion, the visit to the mall.

  Without warning she turned into the lot, past Lew’s Packard, and pulled into a space. “I wouldn’t mind a couple of crullers,” she said.

  He blinked at her. “Crullers? You’re kidding?”

  “Why would I be kidding? I never said I hated doughnuts. You’re the one who said that. Let’s get a couple to go.”

  “It’s not … It’s not that. It’s just that crullers aren’t …” He realized that he was jabbering, that he had no real idea what he wanted to say, what he wanted.

  “Aren’t what? What on earth are you talking about?”