Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  Charles pulled up the carrots and knocked the moist soil off them, pulled up some onions, shaking minuscule clods from their clinging hair roots, and then snapped off a large rhubarb leaf, elephant ears as he and Jerome used to call them, and laid the vegetables over it. His father was tearing up larger weeds from the strawberry patch. Charles started weeding the edge of the garden and heard somebody calling, “Young man, yoo hoo! Oh, young ma-an!"

  In the next yard, through the Crosshatch of branches and limbs, he saw a nun standing beside a clothesline post, a rope in one hand. "Young ma-an, could you help me with this, please?" She did mean him. He pushed his way through the brush and went toward her with his head bowed; for ten years he hadn't been able to look a nun or a priest in the eye, feeling as he'd felt when he was a child and had sinned—that they could see into the depths of him and recognize a doomed Catholic, hamstrung by degradation and condemned to hell. Even the detached and placid nuns who sat in Grand Central with collection plates in their laps made him glance away, when their gazes met, as if to avoid the evil eye.

  "This has come loose," she said, holding out the rope. "I can't reach, but I hope you can, and would you tie it back up for me, please?"

  "Sure."

  He reached up, strung the rope through a metal eye, and tied it tight. "That's two half-hitches," he said. "It'll hold."

  "Oh, thank you, thank you so much."

  She was shorter than Susan and had a hearty, big-toothed smile, and her eyes, deep brown, were fixed on him with such an unvarying look of gratitude he couldn't turn away. She was younger than he was.

  "Are you Mr. Neumiller's son?"

  "Yes."

  “The resemblance is so striking, as I'm sure you've been told. We're praying for your mother's soul this week, and I'm going to add some prayers of my own while I hang out the clothes.”

  "That's very kind of you.”

  "I'll say a prayer for you."

  "Thank you," he said, and wondered if this was what church-going people called a blessing, in or out of disguise. He went to the garden and weeded again, for an hour or so, watching his shadow grow longer in front of him, and thought of jolting down a furrow on a tractor with Lionell, and of how farming was so much a private part of the past in him, and then his father came up, and said "I guess we'd better be going now. I have other things I have to do.” His face had color in it for the first time since Charles had been home, and he seemed refreshed. Charles grabbed up the leaf of vegetables and followed him to the door. He knocked again and while waiting turned to Charles with the first direct look since he'd shown him the money in the basement. "Why do you dress up so?" he asked.

  Charles fingered the lapel of his jacket "Oh, I don't know. Habit, I guess.”

  "You mean you have to dress up like that every day?”

  "Just about."

  "What for? Nobody sees you when all you do is talk into a microphone."

  "The people who hire me do."

  "Huh! It sounds just about as bad as teaching school!” He tried the door, again, rattling it open and shut a few times, and then shook his head. "I guess she's out at her son's. He lives a few miles toward the next town. That's too bad. I really wanted you to meet her, and her you."

  "Could we stop another day?"

  "How many days are you staying?”

  "Oh, about a week, I suppose."

  "Good, then. That's what we'll do.”

  At the car Charles put the vegetables on the floor in the back, and then got in and the library books slid over the seat toward him. His father put his hand on the stack of them and said, "I better do this. The library is only a couple of houses down and closes soon, I think."

  The Midwestern predilection for driving a block and a half when it would be simpler and faster, not to say healthier and less expensive, to walk, which Charles was as guilty of as the next one. It was a new library, a long, low building of buff-colored brick with plate-glass windows in redwood frames across its front; one gable touched the ground. They went through the plate-glass doors into a sunny open area with metal bookshelves along the walls and a rank of metal shelves to the left. Long reading tables, set far apart and gilded by the late-afternoon sun, were like slabs of bronze to read from. His father went up to a counter and put the books down and a petite woman with silvery hair and the complexion and figure of a twenty-year-old, holding her lip-sticked mouth firm, came out of a glass-windowed office to the counter across from him. "Oh, Mr. Neumiller, it's you." She had a French accent and stared out of gray eyes with a wide-encompassing sympathy that also contained an appeal, a plea, almost

  "These are the books Laura had out.”

  "Oh, Mr. Neumiller, I'm so sorry about her. Please accept my deepest sympathy.”

  Martin nodded.

  "She was the best reader in town, my most regular customer, and it brightened my day just to see her walk through the door, she was so beautiful."

  He nodded, and then shook his head with such sudden fierceness tears flew all over the books and spattered the counter on either side of them. He swung away, his face a child's, and went for the door and Charles had to take several quick breaths, as though he'd accepted a blow to the stomach, before he could move; his legs were so numb he wasn't conscious of his feet striking down, and it was as if the building were traveling, at the speed it chose, backward around him. He stopped at the swishing door. His father was in the passenger seat, staring sightlessly out the side window, so Charles got in behind the wheel, as if asked, smelling an odor of disruption and fear, and was about to say he'd seen enough of the town, when his father said, "Go over to the corner here and take a left."

  He drove out of town with his father directing him, past a country club and golf course with hilly greens so bright this late in the year they looked made of emerald, and seemed a timeless, unpopulated paradise in the midst of the fall world. The countryside became more rolling and deciduous, and then Charles was directed down a graveled drive bordered by an orchard, which curved around to a colonial-style house, a newly built one, with a pair of cars in the double garage and a yellow convertible at the entrance. "This is Clarence Woodruff’s," his father said. "He's starting a new, sort of exclusive subdivision out here. I've worked for him in his house and on the grounds, and he mentioned a while ago that he had a little job for me to do. I'm not quite sure what yet. An hour's work, he said."

  Charles followed him through the garage, where a glazed black Lincoln reflected the varied size of the two of them, and at the back door his father pressed a button that rang a pair of chimes inside, and then a tall man, with a ruddily tanned face and a white crew cut, opened the door, a mixture of perplexity and astonishment in his slaty eyes. "Martin," he said.

  "I've come about that job you mentioned."

  "Well, you didn't have to come so soon. I mean—"

  "It's best if I keep busy."

  "Well, sure. Whatever you say, Martin." The man began shaking his arms and legs, held at stiffened length while he balanced on one foot, as if something unbend able in him had given way and his limbs were rubber hoses or rugs he was shaking clean. "It's not really that much. I could've done it myself, I suppose. Come on in We're getting a draft or a chill tonight. We got so god damn many gadgets to keep adjusted you'd think we lived in the zoo. Come on. I'll show you here."

  They followed him through a kitchen that looked like the one in Pettibone after it had been remodeled, with dark-stained cabinets of birch and a peninsular luncheon counter, a rule of order reigning over it, and into a small bedroom. "It's this friggity-shit old carpet," he said, and kicked at it with his toe. "She says it's worn out, the wife that is, and wants to put in one of those Persian things.'

  "So you want it taken up?" Martin asked, and Charles heard a new note in his voice, and saw how weary he was.

  "Yes."

  "We'll have to get that quarter round off first. I'll go get some tools."

  Charles and the man started maneuvering around in the doorway to let
him out. "Oh," he said. "Oh, I'm sorry. This is my son Charles. Charles, this is—"

  "Clarence Woodruff!" The man smiled and tool Charles's hand, and said, "Say, you don't happen to be that boy of his who does that Rollie McPherson sonofagun, do you?"

  "Yes," Charles said. Rollie McPherson was a cartoon character in a commercial for McPherson's beer; Charles was his voice.

  "Well, I'll be damned! I've told your dad he's one of my favorite characters on TV, and I mean it, too! Could you do me a sample of him?" He gave Charles's hand a quick shake.

  In a rumbling bass that was a cross between Charles's conception of Falstaff and Mr. Magoo, Charles said, " 'These love-el-ly tankards are loaded with thee ah luscious ha-ah-oney of the earth!' "

  "Well, I'll be go-to-hell," the man said. "It is you."

  "Yes," Charles's father said. "It's amazing what he can do with that voice."

  My God, Charles thought, he believes in what I do.

  "While I get the tools. Chuck, you could start moving some of the furniture to one side, I guess."

  "Just handle that biggest dresser like it was eggs," the man said. "It's one of the wife's heirlooms. I can't even keep my socks in it. She'd go on the warpath if it got scratched or nicked up."

  Charles moved the smaller pieces, and when his father returned with the tools, they moved the big dresser together, then the bed. They pried the quarter round away from the baseboard and used screwdrivers along the edge of the carpet to pop loose the tacks, which they put into a big coppery ashtray that had been beside the bed, and then into a can, because, as Charles's father said, "I save everything like that." They loosened one half of the carpet and folded it back, then folded back the pad, exposing a hardwood floor that had the honeycombed pattern of the pad imprinted on it in accumulated grit. Martin asked for a vacuum cleaner and swept up the dirt and sand, while the man said, "It's a good thing the wife's out mayor campaigning with a floozie friend, or she'd be mortified to death. You'd think she never cleaned in here, when all she does is sweep and scrub and bitch about dirt." He asked them if they wanted a drink.

  "I don't drink," Martin said. "But my son here might like something."

  "No, thank you," Charles said. And then, "Oh, well, if you have a beer, a beer might be nice."

  "A McPherson's?"

  "Why not?"

  "You can tell your bosses when you see them that I buy their beer because of you." The man winked and came back with a pewter mug. Charles took a long draught and found it was largely foam, and then was disoriented to see the room appear in a curve through the glass bottom of the mug, as if he were drinking the room up, too. He set the mug aside and as he moved around, popping up tacks, took sips from it with his eyes closed. When the carpet was completely loose, they carried it and the pad out to the garage, and Martin vacuumed the rest of the floor. They moved the furniture back, and as they were leaving, after the man had thanked Martin and reminded him to turn in his time, Martin asked whether he minded if they gathered some of his apples.

  "Oh, no, no," the man said. "Heck, no. Take all you want."

  "I’ll take out my pay in them," Martin said.

  "No, no, now you turn in your time, too, Martin, you hear?"

  They put the tool chest in the trunk of the car and Charles's father took out a cardboard box he'd brought. They walked up the crest of a low hill to the orchard; the hill was steeper on the opposite side and the beige and raspberry-colored trees, heaped near its base where it fell away to a plain, were like a-heavy brocade. Fallen apples lay in the grass at their feet and the fall sun, low and bronze in a lime-colored sky, was reflected on the rounded side of each one. Nature's wholeness in infinity. Charles and his father filled the box in no time flat, and the ridged pile of apples seemed to glow from the returned strength of being clustered close in numbers at their end. "Let me get another box," his father said. "I want to get some of the rest of these."

  "Are you sure you want so many?"

  "What do you mean?”

  "Isn't this enough?" .

  "They're all windfall. If I didn't take them, they'd go bad and be lost. I doubt if he even has any of these picked. Land is a new business now."

  They filled the second box and put both of them in the trunk, and then his father lifted his left hand and looked at the inside of his wrist, where he wore his watch, his fingers clenched into his palm, and said, "It feels like a storm to me.”

  They got in, with him behind the wheel, and drove off. The sun was beginning to set and the wind rose, blowing leaves from the tree-lined road against the windshield in gusts, and it became so cold Charles closed his wind-wing.

  “That feels like winter,” his father said.

  With the wing closed, Charles could feel the compact quality of the car around them as it moved itself and their bodies through the tinted underworld of the changing countryside, and saw a girl on a horse come galloping toward them down in the ditch at his side of the road, laughing, laughing and lashing her black horse with a little stick she held, her hair streaming backward over her shoulders, and as they passed she smiled and cried out and waved her stick at Charles and he turned and saw a Siamese cat with a sphinxlike face riding on the back of the saddle behind her buttocks, active over its leather curve, and then the cat's teeth bared in a wide-mouthed miaow or yawn, and the entourage of them gradually grew smaller as they galloped toward the sun.

  "Is she a student of yours?" Charles asked.

  "Not that I know of."

  "She's certainly friendly."

  "That she is, yes."

  When they brought the apples into the house, Marie said, "Oh, there are so many," and Katherine said, "We'll have to do something about them." She mentioned a fall she'd spent on an aunt's farm farther north, and soon the house was filled with a smell of cinnamon and sugar and cooking apples as she and Marie prepared a large caldron of applesauce to can. Through a picture window in the living room, Charles could see that the length of the street was lined with burning leaves. Legs and rakes moved in front of and among the orange-red mounds. It was the time of evening when everybody wants to wander in their own thoughts for a while, one part of the world preparing the food, the other anticipating its daily gift of kingdom come.

  His father started a fire in the fireplace and stared at it, distant and subdued, as if the day for him were already complete, and then ate dinner in silence, staring ahead with the same look, his left hand lying beside his plate in a fist again. He excused himself and went down to the basement to bed. Marie and Katherine got the applesauce into jars, and then Marie finished off the notes of gratitude. Charles clicked on the television in the living room.

  "Are you coming to bed?" Katherine asked.

  "Soon."

  He found half a bottle of cooking wine in the cupboard and sat down in a swivel rocker in front of the television set, taking occasional sips of the salty-tasting stuff, and snatched the usual evening fare and then a late show about a newspaper reporter in New York; since he'd just come from there, all of the sets seemed inconsistent and made of cardboard, and then another movie went through his mind like the twinning of a paradox, and it was 3 a.m. His retinas and the back of his brain felt scorched from so much television, which he never watched in New York, not even to hear himself, and shouldn't have watched in total darkness, and he got into bed feeling led astray and badly abused. His head ached. He thought he heard rain falling with force in waves that seemed arranged in patterns over different areas of the flat roof.

  Katherine turned and kissed his shoulder.

  "Oh," he said. "I woke you up."

  "Not really. I've been waiting."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I'm horny," she said.

  "Oh."

  "It's been days— weeks, it seems."

  "I know." He put a hand over her breasts and felt her nipples already erect.

  "It's running down my leg," she said, and then jounced the bed and wiggled herself until he was on top of her. She was moving wit
h so much abandon by the time he entered, he lost a moment, and then almost himself, and then seemed to swell to twice his size. She clenched and became relaxed and erratic in a way that traveled over his length. She began again. He was striking glistening ramparts. He held back until her body softened in the familiar way, and felt his sperm had sprung from his arches and emptied his tendons all the way to the center of his crotch; his legs were numb and immobile. He rested on her breasts and then lifted up on an elbow. She was asleep.

  He looked toward the window. If it was raining before, it had stopped; there was a moon. In its pale light the bench below the oak glowed as though phosphorescent, as bright as the blue disc of the night light against the wall, the round pool of luminescence like an opening onto another world. He started and grabbed at the covers. Had she knocked? He could feel somebody waiting there. He got out of bed, his pubic hair damp and matted, feeling wet to his knees, on the threshold of fever or another bout of mental illness, pulled on his underpants, and opened the door. The hall was empty. There was a light burning in the kitchen at its end. Had he left it on?

  The kitchen was empty, the living room was empty, and he turned off the lights as he passed through them, came back to the bedroom, closed the door, and got into bed. He sat up.

  The presence was inside the room.

  Had he been thinking of his mother toward sleep? Sometimes when he thought of her or tried to reconstruct I scene from the past that contained her, he was able to sense her close. He could feel the presence across the room, in front of the window, too tall and slow-moving to be his mother; it was Laura's height, and passed in front of the window as though pacing, and he remembered sitting outside on the bench once, reading, as Laura used to, and looking up to see her staring out this window and beginning to pace the moment he saw her, as if in a cell, and then, jarred loose by the confusion in his mind, a fragment of a movie he'd seen in a Lamaze class, when Katherine was pregnant, returned, and he saw the woman on a table with a sheet covering her, her legs up, her buttocks showing and bloodied, a mucus-wrapped lead emerging from her engorged and slick vagina, opened like a wide-open mouth. And then, from beyond the walls and floor of the bedroom, he heard his father cry out.