Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “It’s an unlisted number?”

  “Oh Christ,” I said, thinking it aloud to myself more than saying it. I put my hat on the rack and went up the back stairs. “I think I’ll check on Lightning. See how many fingers he’s smashed by now this time.”

  Lightning Walters was an old timer who had worked on moving vans for forty years. He was semi-retired now, but he helped me out during the rushes and between times when I needed an extra helper, or to crate a job—as was the case today with Art Salerno in Fort Wayne. (All the good that did me!) At seventy he was pretty slow with a hammer and saw, but he could still get five rooms wrapped and boxed in only half again the time it should take, which isn’t too bad by today’s standards.

  He was on the second floor, halfway through the job. The hammer quickened its tempo at my approach, iron doors giving their usual warning. I sat on a finished crate and chewed the rag with him for a few minutes.

  “How are things, Lightning?” He got his nickname ironically of course, but not because of the speed with which he weelds a hammer, but because he never strikes twice in the same place. He bent three or four six-penny nails while I watched, and had to pull them out and start over again, though that was probably nervousness at having an audience.

  “Oh, I’m feeling fine,” he said, showing an assortment of teeth as black as watermelon seeds, as well as some glimpses of watermelon pink in the wide open spaces between. You will notice that he answered a question about how things were by telling how he felt—a typical response. People constantly bragging about their health are just as hard to take as hypochondriacs. “Never felt better in my life.” He pulled a bandanna from his hind pocket and wiped non-existent sweat from his brow, then tobacco juice from his chin which was plenty existent. I knew the peon of praise to his superb physical condition which my question touched off would be climaxed by the inevitable statement: “I never had a sick day in my life.” Well it was no secret why he never. He smoked cigars and a pipe as well as chewed tobacco, and as one of the boys on the van remarked, his filthy old mouth was probably the most sanitary place on earth. No germs could possibly live in there.

  I took about as much of Lightning as I could, but when I left he had contributed his bit to the deterioriation of my mood—which was what I wanted. People bent on a self-destructive tear often find their spirits soaring at the same time they’re plunging, in the heights and depths at once somehow. Frank Novak, whose place I stopped in on the way home from work, wasn’t pleased to have me get as expansive as I did on three or four quick drinks. He kept the afternoon Blade spread out on the bar, and added nothing to the conversation except a few occasional remarks about what was in the news. He seemed interested in a prowler around town. I told him to forget the prowler and join me in “Sto Lat,” the Polish drinking song that says, “May you live a hundred years.” With a good-natured laugh he said no, it was too early, and refused to serve me any more—or rather diplomatically persuaded me not to ask him for any more. I know the signs. I laughed comparatively, to show there were no hard feelings, and told him he could expect me back after dinner.

  I walked in a little after eight o’clock, to find a bunch of the boys talking about the prowler as if there had been no interruption of the discussion. Frank was in the thick of it. There was the usual variety of viewpoints. Some said he was a Peeping Tom, which started a general free-for-all on what motivates people like that. Frank said he thought it was the secrecy of it. “That’s a thrill in itself to them—having to do it on the sly. Like children doing something, or just being somewhere, that’s forbidden. There was even a murderer some years ago who said that just breaking into a house satisfied some kind of sexual urge. The danger of it and all.”

  “Then why did he kill? Why didn’t just breaking into the house satisfy him?” another guy said.

  I listened to the discussion swirling around me for about two or three drinks, and then put in my two cents. I suggested that all these abnormalities, from harmless peeping to rape and murder, were exaggerations of normal instincts. That we’re all prowlers, thieves, rapists and murderers at heart, or have a dash of it in us. This is the beast sleeping ineach of us, dozing lightly in some. Long before I finished my remarks I noticed Frank waiting impatiently behind the bar to answer me.

  “Now wait a minute,” he said. “Just a minute. You’re saying two different things here. First that the criminal in each of us has gotten out of hand, second that each of us is a criminal under control. Which of these two do you mean?”

  “It seems to me they’re the same thing said two different ways, or maybe it’s sometimes one, sometimes the other. But if you want me to vote for one, I’ll say the first. Most criminals do in deed what we do in thought all the time. That was Christ’s basic principle, the big truth he got hold of. Everybody commits adultery in his heart. The peeper is corrupting a perfectly natural and normal thing: curiosity. The instinct to look at a woman. If you walk down the street and accidentally see one undressing behind a window you’ll stop and watch. Set out to find one, and you’re a peeper. But the impulse is the same.”

  It was a stimulating discussion, and I had a good evening with my cronies without getting stewed. Yet when I left the tavern I walked home in a depressed mood. I had written the whole Lena business off, she was washed out of my life on a tide of events over which I had no control, and now my thoughts kept returning to Elsie in a general feeling of guilt. Guilt isn’t the right word, but there isn’t any for the vague, uneasy sensation I was experiencing, so it will have to do. There must be something to the Mrs. Grundy business after all, and to the Christian principle I just found myself citing (speaking of Christ purely as a moral teacher of course). Maybe there’s sound psychological reasons for leaving something on your plate, for a sop to the gods even though they don’t exist. Now I felt unhappy that things had come to such a pass between Elsie and me. There was no love life between us save for the purely physical satisfactions, mechanically sought, mechanically given. Yet now that the distraction of Lena was out of the picture, I could begin to see that what had soured me on Elsie sexually was the religious war, which was really irrelevant to it, or ought to be. Elsie was more attractive than Lena when it came right down to it. She was better looking, or would be if she learned to dress and make up, and her figure was better if only by virtue of there not being so much of it. If you saw the two of them lying on a beach I think Elsie would draw your eye more or hold it longer—it was only when you stopped to talk to them that you could see Lena had more style and pizazz. And there I had been going to all that trouble to see Lena, who I didn’t really like. Obviously I was drawn to her by the style and pizazz—and because she was something new. Ah, there you have it, the all-important and never to be underestimated factor of novelty. Familiarity is an alienator of affections, no use in denying that. The author of Something for Mrs. Grundy made the point that variety is as much an instinct as sex itself, hence all the hightailing for new pastures and fresh objects of desire.

  All these things were churning through my mind in the chaotic jumble we call thought when I got a novel sensation from a totally unexpected quarter.

  I always came home from Frank’s place through the alley. I closed the gate behind me and had just passed the garage and was walking across the yard toward the back porch steps when a noise in my bedroom made me stop. It was just the scrape of a chair, but there was something so secret and mysterious about it that I stole over and stood quietly under the window. The shade was almost, but not quite, drawn. By taking a step back and standing on tiptoe I could just look under it into the lighted room.

  Elsie had just undressed, and was standing at the foot of the bed, ready to get into her nightgown. As I watched, she slipped it over her head and wriggled into it with her arms in the air. It was a charming feminine motion, and supposedly done every night at this time and often in my presence, but did I ever notice it? Had I ever? Watching her when she didn’t know she was being watched—least of all, of
course, from out here—that was what gave the scene an extra flavor. In fact there was an odd thrill about it, a dash of secret excitement quite unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It remained with me after I had locked up the house and gone to bed myself, causing me to take Elsie in my arms in a way that, I guess, I hadn’t done in some time. I slept a little better than I had in some time too, and without getting up for any extra nightcaps.

  The next night, about half past ten, I was stretched out in bed with my clothes on looking at an art magazine when I glanced up to find Elsie sitting at the dresser in her shift, brushing her hair. Funny, I thought, here a man will pour over cheesecake when the real-life article is in the same room with him. All he has to do is lift his eyes from the page and there’s the substance, but no, he prefers to feast his eyes on the shadow. I remembered my little adventure of last night and had a whim to repeat it. I got up, putting the magazine aside. I hovered around for a minute, giving the drawn window shade a slight hitch up so it would clear the sill, and said something about going outside for a breath of air before locking up. Smoking a cigarette, I drifted down the porch steps into the yard and resumed my post under the window.

  She was in profile to me this time, but the effect was if anything that much more provocative. Her pink slip fell away above her crossed legs, offering a tantalizing glimpse of plump white thigh. She was slow in undressing, and I noticed for the first time, appreciated, a certain thoughtful leisure in the way she did things when she was by herself. She may of been half-hazard in the way she put her hair up, but not in the slow, methodical way she brushed it. She seemed to enjoy that. She had a cigarette burning in an ashtray, as always when at the dresser brushing her hair or manicuring her nails, and she would interrupt what she was doing to pick it up and take a drag, each time watching herself do so in the mirror. Eternal charming feminine sight!

  I crouched there in the shadows watching for fully fifteen minutes before being rewarded with the crowning sight. She stepped out of her underthings, as women do, put her nightgown over her head, and then there was the same delightful wriggle as the silk slipped down her flanks and settled in folds about her with a secret whisper I fancied I could hear out here. I couldn’t wait to get back to her. It was only afterward that I got up again and locked the house.

  This went on for several nights. Sometimes I would go out when I knew the charming performance was about to begin, sometimes I would lurk around the back yard without knowing, adding a tingle of uncertainty to it. I would smoke a cigarette and wander along the fence, looking idly at the view across the alley. A number of shades were up, and I saw from two or three windows how careless people can be, but that was not what I was out here for, and I would turn away. Old Mrs. Stepanek could be seen ironing in the kitchen in her slip, not a sight to detain anybody for long. Once she put her iron down and went to the window to lean out of it, spreading her hands on the sill for a look around. When she withdrew she pulled the shade down. No need for any such precautions, Mrs. Stepanek, I thought sympathetically.

  I pursued my new-found fancy for the better part of three weeks I would say, not regularly by any means, that is to say not nightly, but when the mood took me, and while I cannot recommend this rather sophisticated practice indiscriminately and without regard for the individual temperaments concerned, it did add a certain zest to my own domestic life. It is a taste for special palates, an extra fillip for jaded sensibilities.

  One night about half-past ten I was crouched in the shadows at my customary observation post when there was a rustle of footsteps behind me and a hand gripped my shoulder. I saw the glimmer of a badge and a cop’s face, accompanied on the other side by another. “All right, that’s about enough of that, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked as I was hustled away between them through the alley gate, and then toward a squad car parked some distance down with the motor off and the headlights out. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Oh, cut it. Let’s not play games.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I live there. That’s my house.”

  “Then what were you doing looking into it like that?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  I was helped into the back seat and joined by one of the cops while the other got in behind the wheel and drove off.

  “You’ll have to do better than that, Mac,” the driver threw over his shoulder as we turned onto the street. “We’re cracking down on altogether too many prowlers lately. I don’t know what it is. The weather, sunspots, world tensions, or just a run of something you get now and then for no reason you can explain. What’s your name?”

  “Stanley Waltz.”

  “Got any identification?”

  My wallet was in my coat, which I didn’t have on, so the answer to that was negative. “But if you drive me back I’ll get it and show you.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “There!” I turned and pointed back in the direction we had come, and with considerable spirit, for I was getting my dander up. “I live there, that was my back yard. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Then why were you acting so suspicious?”

  “I was only doing what I have a perfect right to do. It’s my property and I’ll prowl on it all I want, and I’ll act as suspicious on it as I goddam please! As you’ll learn to your regret,” I said with heat, for we were slowing to a stop in front of the Third Precinct Station. “Who reported this?”

  “I don’t know. We just got the call on the short wave.”

  “Mrs. Stepanek? Because she don’t have to worry anybody will bother her.”

  Much has been written about the subject of reality and allusion, and how the two merge into one in an individual’s life. I wouldn’t know what to call this as I was escorted up the station stairs. They were real enough, and so was the broad doorway through which we walked—yet the whole thing was a fantasy. The main desk was on a raised platform behind a massive wooden rail that would give anybody walking up to it, even someone lodging a complaint, the feeling of a wretch before a high tribunal. A Sergeant Michaelson was on duty, according to a name plate on the desk, which had a short wave mike on it and a mess of papers he was working at. Two smaller desks behind him were unoccupied at the moment, though in the course of the next few minutes a sleepy looking cop entered from a back door and sat down at one of them. The cops who were running me in steered me up to the main desk.

  “Charge?” said the sergeant.

  “Peeper.”

  The sergeant gave me a glance before pulling a form sheet toward him, murmuring something like “At last.” By now I had hit on my plan.

  “That was what I had gone out to look for, Your Honor,” I said. “I thought I’d heard a noise outside, and it was in all likelihood him, since there was this call reporting him. So I stepped outside to check. But I saw nothing. He had apparently escaped.”

  “You didn’t look as though you were seeing nothing in that window,” the cop who’d been driving said. I now recognized him as a blond Polak I had seen around town. “You looked as though you were seeing plenty—and getting your fill. We watched you ourselves for a couple of minutes to make sure. You weren’t looking for any prowler. You were watching a show.”

  “It was my own house, which I understand is a man’s castle. That includes the grounds I take it.”

  “What were you watching?” the desk sergeant put in.

  “I was watching my missus prepare to retire for the night.”

  “Couldn’t you do that from inside?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “I see.” He stroked his chin in a way that indicated he didn’t exactly, but was trying to. “Do you make a regular practice of this?”

  “I don’t see that my private life is any concern of this department.”

  “You may be disturbing the peace in some way.”

  “You’re disturbing the peace. I’ll make this a test case
in any court you care to name. And I may also sue you for false arrest if you don’t stop this nonsense and let me go.”

  Losing my temper was all to the good, since it indicated that I was telling the truth, at least to the desk sergeant’s satisfaction. It was to him I addressed my plan. When he asked for my identification I told him it was at home, then gave him my name, address and telephone number and suggested a simple call there would clear this all up. “Doesn’t 922 Sparrow Street sound like the number of the house where you picked me up?” I asked, turning to the driver of the car. He allowed that it did. The other cop had disappeared, but a man in plain clothes had joined the group, taking notes of his own. His interest seemed to me sympathetic and intelligent as he listened to the questions and answers. I now proposed to the desk sergeant that he check the phone number I reeled off to him against the name and address I gave him by consulting the directory on his desk. He did, and they tallied of course. “Now why don’t you call my house and ask the lady who answers to give you a description of me.”

  That was how it was all straightened out. The Mrs. Stanley Waltz who answered said it was true her husband had stepped out of the house for a minute and had not been seen since. She described me, a square-jawed man of forty with dark eyes and kinky black hair parted on the left, and calloused hands, but what he was wearing when last seen she couldn’t for the life of her say. Showing that we never look at one another. A few questions about our private lives (such as her maiden name, etc.) and a comparison of her answers with mine satisfied the desk sergeant, who then told her she could come and get me any time. But he didn’t dismiss me immediately.