Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  She came along into the living room and tinkled away halfheartedly on the piano by the bay window. I got back to work. The music wasn’t so bad, but she took to making little comments to me, like “Did you like that?” and “I played that rather badly, didn’t I?” And I’d have to stop what I was doing and tell her, Yes, I liked it, and No, she’d played it very well, and on and on. She’d ask me to listen to something, and it seemed rude to turn on the drill while she was playing. So things kind of slowed down after lunch.

  By four-thirty there was about another half-day’s worth of work ahead of me. There was no way around it: I’d have to come back the next day to finish. I told Mrs. Pollard, who didn’t seem at all bothered by the news. Then I left, and went home and growled at Miriam.

  She was mean right back at first, but when she could tell I was really bad off she got quiet, and then she started being really sweet, the way she could be. It didn’t help much, though; and when we went to bed all I could think about was going over to Pollard’s again the next morning. I believe I dreamed about those goddamn windows that night, and Mrs. Pollard and that soup, and her fussing at the piano.

  The next day was worse. Old Jed was still fishing, and his wife was real friendly now, popping in and out of the living room all morning, asking me did I want a cold drink, what did I want for lunch. I tried to be polite, but there I was hunched down on the floor like a dog, breathing up fibers of wood and iron, running sweat, with Mrs. Pollard at my elbow, giggling into my face.

  “Now maybe you can explain it to me,” she said.

  “What’s that, ma’am,” I said, kinda dull and discouraging. But she wasn’t discouraged a bit.

  “Why would a grown man want to go off and sit in an old leaky boat on a lake and get bitten all to pieces by mosquitoes, just so he can come back and tell me about the big one he nearly got?”

  “I’m not one for fishing, ma’am,” I said, patient. “But some like it.”

  “Well now, I just don’t understand that,” she said. “Leaving your house and your bride to go off with a bunch of boys and jiggle a worm around in the water.”

  Bride my ass.

  “Well, ma’am,” I said, from down there on the floor. She bent down toward me a little, with her head on one side like a canary, waiting. “Fish are mighty quiet,” I said.

  She didn’t understand at first; then she got a look on her face, and hemmed a little, and got up from the sofa and left the room.

  After a while, the maid came in to tell me lunch was ready. I washed up in the powder room again, and went into the kitchen this time, where there was a place laid on, a cold sandwich and a glass of tea. That suited me just fine; the maid got me more tea when I asked, and the rest of the time I just ate, enjoying the silence. I swallowed the last bit, and finished the tea; I was beginning to feel better. Then she came into the kitchen, all hoity-toity, and a chill in her voice to frostbite you.

  “I hope you’ll be done soon,” she said. “I’m having guests at six.”

  “Coupla hours,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said, and went away.

  I went back to work. It was still hot as blazes, and the work was as tedious as ever, but I was on the seventh window now; the end was in sight. I started whistling; after a few minutes, Mrs. Pollard came in.

  “Could you please,” she said, “try to be a little quieter? I have a terrible headache.”

  She wasn’t hardly out of the room again when it all came back. All those things I’d been able to put aside for a little while—the pain in my back from bending over on the floor; the blisters that had opened on my hands; the whole goddamn rotten experience of being in that house and doing that prissy work that wouldn’t have needed doing if the first guy had done his job right to begin with. I was covered with iron filings, and I’d run two long splinters into my hands from the junk wood on the window frames. It hadn’t been interesting work even, fixing up fussy little iron gates for my boss’s guns he never shot, and I’d spent more effort on it than it deserved, each window a custom job where it oughta been a simple repeating pattern. And all the time I’m down there on the floor or hauling bars around, old lady Pollard is chattering into my ear complaining about the heat, pulling at her blouse so I can see the flat freckly skin of her chest. That hundred dollars was looking a hell of a lot smaller now.

  It kept right on shrinking over the next coupla hours, till I was finally done. I collected my tools together and wrapped up the dropcloths, and behind me Mrs. Pollard went past to look at the gunroom windows.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “It looks like a jail in here.”

  “Jails are to keep people in,” I said. “This here’s to keep ’em out.”

  “I wish it weren’t so—obvious,” she said.

  “Can’t figure a way to make iron bars you can’t see,” I said.

  That shut her up for a minute, but she came back quick.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have a terrible time getting the sawdust up off the carpets,” she said pointedly. “And those wood chips won’t go in the sweeper.” She sighed. “I guess we’ll be down on our hands and knees picking them up.”

  I doubted she’d be on her hands and knees doing anything; sure as shit that poor maid would do all of it, while Mrs. Pollard twittered at her from the couch. It had been the worst weekend of my life, and I was mad enough to chew glass, but I held my tongue. Just said good-bye, and got out of there.

  I dragged myself home, feeling like something was broken in me, and beyond fixing. Never mind what my dad used to say, that work done with your hands is honest work. I felt low. I pulled into the house, and on into the kitchen, with nothing but nasty words and a nasty look for Miriam, who listened for a minute, and then left the room.

  I followed her into the bathroom, my anger even bigger without an audience, and saw she was twisting the taps in the tub.

  “I don’t want a goddamn bath,” I said.

  “Food first,” she said, calm, and went back to the kitchen. I followed her again. She fed me while the bath was filling, and then she took me by the hand and led me to the tub.

  “Get in,” she said.

  The water was hotter than hell. “Jesus!” I said. “You trying to boil me?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” she said.

  It took a minute till I could sit down, but when I did, the water closed over me like a healing hand. I laid my head back and shut my eyes. The nastiness in me was beginning to be crowded out by the food and pure exhaustion.

  I heard a kinda suspicious rustling, and when I opened my eyes, sure enough Miriam was pulling off her dress, and rolling down her panties.

  “Hell,” I said. “Not now.”

  “Shut up,” she said, stepping into the water. It rippled around her and up my chest, and lapped at the undersides of my arms, which were lying along the cool sides of the tub. Ignoring me, exactly like you would a fractious child, she took up the cake of soap and began to wash me.

  First my chest, where a froth came right up. Then sending her little hands up my neck, under my unshaven jaw. Along my arms, rolling the muscles in her hands like dough. She rinsed me off with water, using a Tupperware bowl she’d brought in with her from the kitchen.

  She cleaned my legs, yes, and my feet, giving each one its turn between her breasts, holding it there to soap it, working her white fingers between my toes, tickling me. I can’t do justice to that sight—Miriam, squatting in the water between my legs, rolling the soap in her hands. I had recovered enough by then to play with her, sliding my foot back and forth against her breasts, stretching out two toes to pinch the nipple. She looked up at that, and frowned, and then smiled a little.

  “Better?” she said, and I nodded.

  You pick the strangest damn times to pay attention. You perked right up when I got to Miriam’s breasts. You like that stuff about the feet, huh? Well, this ain’t a story about feet.

  After she’d rinsed off my legs, I thought she was done, but she got the soap agai
n, and reached for one of my hands which dangled, bitten and scarred and stained, under the water. She put the soap between our three hands, two of hers and one of mine, and rolled it over and over, working up a foam. Then she put the soap aside and started on my hand, rubbing with her palms and fingers my fingers and palm, scraping her fingernails over the stubborn places, avoiding the blisters. She rooted out the dirt from my fingerprints, picking her way through the terrain of my right hand, and then she took up a nail brush and scrubbed at my fingernails, which were lined dark with grime and wood stain.

  She worked until the hand was pink, and clean as it ever would be, and while she worked I closed my eyes and lay quiet. In all my young life I had never experienced anything to come close to what I’m telling you about now. And I’d had my share of women by then, and some of them like fire in bed. But always with sex there’s a certain pressure, an expectation, and it distracts a little even when everything else is very good. With this there was no distraction—I lay back, purely selfish, while Miriam washed my hands.

  When she’d finished with the right hand she dipped it under the water, and began all over again on the other, just as careful and slow, like she wasn’t tired at all. I lay there lazy, being ministered to.

  When she was done, she kind of pushed my legs aside and made room for herself. We just lay there like that, her on top of me, her hair spreading out across my chest and her arms tight around my back. We stayed there for an hour, maybe, without moving. When we got up the water was cold, and my temper was gone.

  Before we went to sleep, she turned over on her side and whispered to me.

  “Be sure you get the whole hundred,” was what she said.

  Acourse old Jed tried to knock me down to seventy-five, but I wasn’t having any, and he finally forked over the whole thing. So there was that. And Rupe was tickled by what I told him about Mrs. Pollard and her piano; I didn’t fill out the story, but I let him draw his own conclusions. So there was that.

  The hundred went on a hundred different things, and Rupe pulled that story every which way until it was thin as a thread. My blisters healed, and Miriam left me. So the only thing that lasted was the memory of that bath. I probably woulda remembered her anyway, but because of it I think of her kindly, wherever she is, in spite of all the bitterness that came along between us later. She was an unusual woman, gifted with the understanding that sometimes a man wants to be less than he’s commonly supposed to be, that sometimes he wants to lie back in the water and be bathed. And she understood about my hands. When I lifted them out of the water they looked new, and I was new too, and peaceful.

  There ain’t nothing like the gentleness of a gentle woman in dire circumstances. Maybe you meet a woman like that yourself someday, Buddy. Maybe then you won’t be fooling around here, pointing that camera at people and shooting your questions off in a New York voice like you got no time to waste. Life ain’t in urgency, Buddy. I hope you figure that out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ladies’ Man

  ALL THAT TALK about girls. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if Jack was deliberately taunting him, or what. Maybe not; maybe at his age, every man around here had gotten laid a hundred times, and they just didn’t suspect that Buddy had never had a girl.

  Or had once had a girl. Just once, but it didn’t really count. He hadn’t even felt that way about her. She was short, with a solid build and huge Bambi-lashed blue eyes, and they’d been alone in her dorm room, looking at records. He’d been on the floor, flipping through the stack, while she sat on the bed, looking over his shoulder. That’s a good one, she’d said, pointing, and out of the corner of his eye he’d seen her boot. It was a pull-on type, skintight, with a little suede fringe dangling at the top, where her jeans tucked in. The sight had charged him, and he’d stood up halfway, quickly enough to startle her, and without thinking further he’d twisted and fallen across her, by some luck catching her mouth with his.

  She’d let him, never saying a word, just helping him pull her jeans down, and later reaching a hand up and ruffling it through his hair, as though he were an animal. They hadn’t even taken all of their clothes off. Part of him regretted that; maybe if they’d taken that bit of extra time, she would have been more present, more involved. The other part of him knew that if he’d hesitated at all, it wouldn’t have happened. He couldn’t have forced her; if she’d said anything like “Stop” or “No,” he’d have stopped, and maybe they would have discussed it, and then it wouldn’t have happened at all.

  Still, it was too bad that it stood as his only sexual experience. If there had been others after her, the first time might have become softened by successive glories, laughable. As it was, its memory was merely void, as though nothing had been gained or learned, just everything thrown into question, by the act. There hadn’t even been a sense of novelty or release to it; he’d felt, slipping in, as though he’d done it before; all those movies and TV, he guessed, teaching familiarity with things you didn’t really know about. He had the same feeling about skiing, or firing a gun, although he’d never done those before either; but he’d seen it done in living color so many times, he felt as though he had.

  They weren’t even friends after that; he passed her on campus many times, and they said Hi, but never stopped to talk. He worried for a while that she’d told her roommates about his ineptitude—He just jumped on top of me, actually fell on top of me, it was pathetic—but, reflecting, he knew that she hadn’t; she hadn’t known what to make of it any more than he had. And he worried for a while that she’d get pregnant; he evaluated her figure every time he saw her, but she never seemed any fatter, so he didn’t think about it anymore. By then, he was preoccupied with something else, another girl.

  Tate. What a stupid name for a girl, and how beautiful and right it was for her. With her short straight black hair and snapping black eyes, her deep voice that was like a man’s, but unmistakably female. He’d joined the Glee Club to be close to her, and worked his way to stand behind her, losing his place in the Mahler they were learning, leaning forward to breathe in the fragrance of her hair. He couldn’t figure out her clothes—they looked like a man’s, but they fit her. She was tallish, so maybe they were her brother’s. She wore loads of bracelets around her wrists, but no earrings, and she never did anything with her hair, just let it hang, glossy and smooth, to just below her ears, the forehead banged like Prince Valiant’s.

  He’d tried to get her to be the subject of his first short film. “It’s a portrait,” he’d said. “Non-synch sound.” She’d looked quizzical, and her friends had jostled each other while they’d waited for her.

  “A movie about me?” she’d said.

  “A portrait,” he repeated. “The professor said to do anybody. I figure it’s more interesting if you don’t know the person.”

  “But you know me,” she said.

  “Not really,” he’d said, blushing. “I mean, we’re not friends, or anything.”

  Or anything, her buddies had chortled, behind her.

  “Well,” Tate had said, putting her hands in her pockets. “Um. I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t got much time this semester.”

  “But it won’t take long. It’s only five minutes.”

  “Five minutes?” she asked, like that was incredible. “What can you do in five minutes?”

  “A lot,” he said. “Think about it. Five minutes is a long time. We’ve only been talking about two. Less than that, even.”

  “Huh,” she said. “What would I have to do?”

  Strip, said the peanut gallery.

  “Anything you like,” he’d said, ignoring them. “Talk, or sing, or whatever.”

  “Well,” she said again, and the way she hesitated made it clear to him that she wasn’t sure of his name, “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “Okay,” he’d replied, not sure what he meant. “Okay.”

  “Good luck,” she’d called after him as he’d walked away.

  He’d ended up doin
g a four-minute segment on the girl who lived next door to him in the dorm—someone he studied with occasionally, and who sometimes displayed signals of having a crush on him. He’d filmed her dancing in her room—she was a ballet student—using strange camera angles. Getting down on the floor while she leapt over the camera, or crouching on the top of her hastily cleared bureau. He’d used an unrelated soundtrack, taped from a study session, her explaining the significance of a passage in Twelfth Night.

  Szilardi had liked the film, although he told Buddy that he’d have to “tone it down.”

  “All those weird camera angles, they’re fine,” he said. “If they have a purpose.” He came closer to where Buddy sat, and shook his head slowly, to emphasize his meaning. “But not just for the hell of it.” He’d walked away again, circling the room as he talked. “You show a natural ability,” he’d said. “But you must avoid self-indulgence.”

  A natural ability. He had hugged those words to himself after class, and repeated them to his father, during their Sunday morning telephone conversation.

  “He says I have a natural ability.”

  “Well, fine, son. That’s great. How are your other classes?”

  “Boring.”

  “Uh-oh. That means you’re not doing so well.”

  “I’m doing okay,” he had protested.

  “You never were the type to try hard at anything that bores you.”

  What do you know about it? he wanted to say.

  “Really, Dad, I’m doing fine.”

  “Well, good. Do you need money?”

  “Of course.”

  They’d shared a laugh at that.

  “Where does it go, son? On a girl?”

  “No.”

  “If I’d saved all the money I spent on girls in my youth, I’d be a rich man now,” said his father. “Promise me one thing.”