“Sure thing, Lieutenant.”
“I’m innocent,” the man protested to Peter. “What’s your crime?”
He was out of the office before Peter could explain that he also was innocent.
“Well, I’m through fooling with you, Peter,” the detective said, looking in his desk drawer for something (a gun?). “We both know that Auntie Windsor was the one who slugged and robbed you. Are you going to make an identification or not? You know, you can be jailed for withholding evidence.”
Peter hesitated, considered the alternatives, liked neither. Sweated.
‘Well? Get off the pot.”
Peter planned to say, All right, I’ll sign it (better Windsor’s death than his own) but when he opened his mouth, “No” flew out like a dying bird.
“I’m sorry you said that, Peter.” A tear of sorrow at the corner of his mouth.
Peter walked to the door, his back to the detective, expecting to be shot down at any minute. …
“Come back here with my ashtray, Peter.”
“Sorry.” He returned the ashtray to its place.
The detective smiled balefully. “Well, Peter, I must say you’re a disappointment to me.” He blew his nose, a call to battle.
“My name to you, Lieutenant, is Mister Becker.”
The detective honked his nose again. “As I say, Peter, you’re a disappointment to me.”
Peter, bumping into a chair as he left, escaped with his life; Mister Becker, barely.
| 9 |
Afterward he was sorry, but not about that—about other things.
Fired from his job, Peter returned home early for dinner, came home at two twenty-five (a little late for lunch) and besides, there was no one there to have lunch with.
And besides: where was she?
Lois’s classes, he knew (like the back of his hand, like the underside of his tongue), were over at twelve; even if she had gone to the cafeteria for lunch and afterward to the library to get some books, she should have been back by two. He gave her a half-hour’s grace; then, benevolent, though out of work, he gave her another fifteen minutes free of charge, but somewhere inside his head the meter was running, ticking off the fare: a nickel of blood every quarter of an hour.
He found himself, for all his irritation (though perhaps because of it), desperately in love with her—his desire for her an ache extending from chest to groin. He was reminded of a Sunday they had gone for a drive to Bear Mountain, and had in an open field, under a tree, come together in a fever of love. He could almost taste the memory. They had remained in the field, holding each other all afternoon and into the night, not wanting to leave. “Let’s never go back,” Lois said. “Okay,” he agreed, “we’ll stay here forever.”
Where was she? At a quarter to four—Lois still not home—Peter stopped hallucinating long enough to call Herbie.
Gloria answered. “I’m sorry, there’s no one by that name here,” she said.
“By what name? This is Peter, Gloria. Herbie’s brother,” he added in case she had forgotten.
“Oh!” Silence. “How do I know it’s you?”
How? “Who else would claim to be me?” he said. “Also, you can recognize me by my body odor.”
Silence. “You don’t have body odor, Peter. I mean, I’ve met men who are really offensive to be in the same room with.”
“Yeah?” What could he say? “As a matter of fact, Gloria, I like your smell too.”
“It’s French perfume. Herbie gets it from some importer friend of his.”
“What’s Herbie doing?”
Gloria sighed. “He’s out of town for a while, Peter. On business.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything, but really, I don’t know. Really I don’t.”
He didn’t know what to believe; Gloria had an absolute incapacity both, it seemed, for telling the truth and for lying credibly. “Is Herbie in some kind of trouble?” he asked.
“Isn’t he always?” Then, as if she hadn’t already given it away: “He went west, somewhere in the West, Peter, on some kind of business trip. That’s all I know. Word of honor.”
“Where in the West?”
She didn’t know. Somewhere in the West.
Peter added up his information: “You don’t know where Herbie is, or what he’s doing, or when he’ll be back. Do you know anything?”
“I know I’m all by my lonesome,” she said dolefully.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Love burned in his groin, the song of his sorrows. “Do you need anything?”
He thought he heard her shrug—the phone in its way a marvelous instrument—envisioned her collapsing into Herbie’s Goodwill sofa, “Stardust” crooning to her, serenading them both in the background.
“Well,” he said, tired of talk, listening.
He heard her nod.
“Can you hear the music?” she asked after a while. He nodded.
“I can’t hear you, Peter … Peter? Hey, have we been cut off?”
“Yes.”
“You! You had me worried about you. I thought maybe you’d fainted again, like last night when you tried to hit Herbie. How are you, by the way? Hold on. I’m going to turn the record over, or would you like to hear it again?”
By popular request, “Stardust” was held over for a second performance. “I made it louder so you could hear it on your end too.”
The frivolousness of their enterprise began to bother him. “Gloria, when did Herbie leave? He didn’t say anything about it last night; I don’t remember him saying anything.” He felt oddly responsible for Herbie’s flight, as if through some secret malice—his itch for Gloria—he had willed Herbie out of the way.
“Listen to the music, will you?”
He listened. He could hear her breathe; the other music, “Stardust,” seemed out of tune.
Lois came in, softly, as if she wasn’t sure she belonged. “How are you feeling?” she asked, mouthing the question.
He shrugged, “Stardust” wheezing the deadening heart cries of nostalgia in his ear.
“Tell Herbie to call me when he gets in,” he said into the phone, nagged by a disproportionate sense of deceit.
“Is your wife there?”
He nodded.
Lois, changing her clothes, watched the silence with amused curiosity. “Who are you talking to, Peter? Is there someone at the other end?”
“Gloria,” he said. “Herbie’s Gloria,” he felt constrained to add.
“Don’t make a stranger of yourself,” Gloria whispered into his ear and with that, without a good-bye, she hung up.
“Good-bye,” he said to an empty phone and felt, without knowing why, as if he had lost something he needed.
Lois, in ass-tight tan slacks and her father’s white shirt, was sweeping the linoleum floor with a pushbroom in a fury of purposeful activity—the dust dancing in the air like pollen. Peter identified with the dust, felt displaced.
She raged silently at the linoleum, which seemed, as always, to resist all efforts to change its indefinably soiled face. Without a word—too much to say to be said—they were enemies. When the floor was suitably beaten, she began on the green walls with a discolored dust rag as if they were an ancient and implacable foe. What was her rush? he wondered. And tired—her fury exhausting him—he lay down on the bed to rest. Not to sleep, just to rest, to shut his eyes for five or ten minutes.
Lois woke him five hours later.
“You’ll sleep your life away,” she said sadly.
“Am I too late?” he asked, his head bobbing up as though it had been under water. Someone had been dying in his dream, or was already dead for all he knew, the face covered with leaves, and he had been looking desperately for help—the face of the earth deserted.
‘You’re always too late,” she said, and for some private reason kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s be friends, Peter. Please, baby.”
He agreed. They shook hands on it. Then, w
anting what wasn’t offered, he kissed her; she seemed merely tolerant—an ache of regret in the deepest hollow of his chest. “For how long?” he asked.
“Don’t spoil it, Peter.”
Truces, he discovered, were even harder to fight than wars.
“I was fired today,” he confessed, to show his good faith, to test hers. Then, since they were friends, he told her of his interview at the Queens police station and in telling it had the sensation of having been hit anew on the back of the head.
Lois commiserated, sitting next to him, her arm around his shoulders. “And then what happened?” she asked with a child’s detached curiosity, as though the story he was telling had nothing to do with their lives.
His stomach yawned. “When I got back to the garage, Mr. Palace, the man who hired me, said that it looked to him that I didn’t have my mind on my work, and wasn’t there something else that I would be happier doing. I said no. ‘Let’s face the bitter facts, Becker’—Peter mimicking Palace’s fast-talking officiousness—’you just weren’t cut out to be a hack driver. Some is. Some isn’t. In another line of work, you may be another Einstein or something—how do I know?—but you’re like tits on a boar hog as a cab driver, I hate to tell ya.’ “When he had finished, wilfully amused at the recollection, Peter looked as if he wanted to cry.
“That’s a laugh,” Lois said. “I bet you were the best cab driver they had.”
He thought so too. “Only second best,” he said modestly, though in getting lost, in getting into difficulties, there was no one better—Peter a master of screwing up.
For no apparent reason—nothing he had done at the moment—Lois moved away from him, her eyes raw with the memory of some real or imaginary hurt. Her silence, indelibly fragile, seemed to accuse him of some irreparable failing—accused him, judged him and found him guilty. And what had he done?
What’s the matter? he wanted to ask her, but was afraid of what her answer might be.
“Lois …” he said gently, his voice walking over a surface of eggs.
She shook her head. “You could have identified him,” she said, “if he was the one who robbed you. There’s nothing wrong in that.”
He climbed wearily off the bed. “I did what I did.”
“But why did you …? God, I don’t understand you!” Her voice almost a scream.
“My father used to say the same thing.”
“I should have married your father,” she said quickly, choking on it. “What bothers me, Peter,” she said in the voice of sweet reasonableness, “is that this man robbed you and almost killed you, and you act as if it was nothing. And what’s worse—and this is unforgivable—you throw away your job when we need the money most, to protect this man, this pervert, from a punishment he’s earned. Do you think he’s even grateful to you, you jerk? I think he probably wanted to be punished.”
He closed his eyes, trying not to hear, the words pouring through like beads of acid, poisoning his spirit.
His refusal to defend himself gave her the feeling, against all reason, of being in the wrong. “There’s no excuse for what you did, Peter,” she nagged compulsively. “By condoning his crime—don’t you see that?—you become as guilty as he is. You assume his guilt.” She was done, smiling bitterly at some odd reminiscence.
“Let’s not fight,” he said, barely in control of his rage.
“You started it.”
“The hell who started it, let’s stop it.” He shook her to make his point.
With a cry she sprang from the bed, her eyes large with terror, as if his shaking her had dislodged the anesthetic scab from some half-healed wound.
Peter stared blindly at the wall, his rage riding in him like too much of a heavy liquid, when a shoe came crashing against the back of his head. He stumbled to his feet, red coming off the walls like waves of heat. He had the peculiar sensation of being injured somehow beyond the reality of pain.
“Stay away from me,” she said.
He located the voice at the other side of the room. “I won’t hurt you,” he muttered, feeling his head, almost surprised at finding it still there.
“When you lose your temper I’m afraid of you,” the voice said.
The room was mostly dark; a puddle of light coming from a deserted reading lamp gave him the sense of a spotlight on an empty stage—the performer, for whom it was intended, forgotten or lost. The unused light touched him with inexplicable regret.
He discovered himself absently holding on to the shoe that had hit him, as though he had intended in the first heat of his rage (embarrassed now at the realization) to throw it back. Relaxing his grip, he let it slip out of his hand to the floor, the sound of its fall much louder than he had anticipated, the noise reverberating inside his head. His throat was chalk-dry.
“You win,” he said hoarsely and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.
He let the cold faucet run for a while, testing it with a nervous finger; Lois was on the phone in the living room, talking too low for him to overhear. When he finished his drink, which for all his pains was not cold enough to satisfy his thirst, Lois had already hung up.
“Who were you speaking to?” he said, a man who was suspicious even of the water tap.
“I’m borrowing my father’s car for tomorrow.”
He nodded. It was a fact.
After Lois’s announcement there was no longer anything to argue about, so husband and wife—Peter and Lois—became friends again, compromised into peace by the irreversibility of fact. Peter thought that even in slacks and her father’s shapeless white shirt, Lois looked beautiful. And she was willing to believe that—his hair a monument to disorder, a hole in his head—he looked better than usual.
They spent the night as friends.
It was one of their best nights. In the morning she said, “I understand now why you let Windsor go.”
“Why did I?” he wanted to know.
“Because you’re a good guy; you don’t like to hurt people. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” he said.
“Why then?”
He kissed her—his wife, his child, the mother of his hopes, his Lois.
“You did it,” she said—the soft cry of a languid bird, “because you had to. Am I right?”
“I did it because you have big breasts,” he said, kissing one nipple, then the other.
“They’re tender,” she cried, “but I don’t mind.”
Then he kissed her belly, which trembled like a pulse.
“I understand,” she said. “You did it because …”
Then her mouth. Her mouth.
“I love you terribly, Peter,” she said when she could breathe again. “Do you believe that?”
(And Stanley.)
“Do you love me?” she asked.
It was like that. In the morning. In the afternoon, at three-thirty, they drove in Lois’s father’s black Ford to Dr. Henderson’s office; in the evening Peter returned the car himself, a son-in-law, a member of the family. And Lois … his wife—she bled …
| 10 |
Lying on Dr. Cantor’s couch, Peter would study the ceiling, its cracks and panels, its clouds of shadow, as though he were looking at the secrets of the universe. On his second visit he asked the doctor, who was sitting somewhere, invisibly, behind him, “Why do you think Lois walked out on me, Doctor?”
“What do you think?” the voice—kindly, soft, slightly bored—asked him back.
Peter shook his head, his mind an ultimate blank, thousands of miles of desolation from ear to ear. “I told you what I thought yesterday,” he heard himself saying.
He heard the shuffling of pages, the breath of movement. Briefly. “You said something about sexual difficulties.”
Peter didn’t want to talk about sex with someone he couldn’t see. He found a cunt on the ceiling, a cosmic box, cradled in the shadow of two enormous breasts.
It became a battle of silences. The doctor waited for Peter to talk, but Peter, studying t
he erotic pleasures of the ceiling, was wary of giving anything away. Peter was interested in answers. The doctor, insofar as Peter could tell, was interested in questions, also in his notebook. Also in his watch.
When the silence began to oppress him, Peter turned around, twisting his neck, to see if the doctor was still there. Dr. Cantor looked bored. Who could blame him?
“Do you think I need this?” Peter asked, sorry to be wasting the doctor’s time.
“Relax,” Dr. Cantor said gently. “It’s better if you forget that I’m here. Just say whatever comes into your head.”
He nodded. Of their own perverse will, tears pierced the skin of his eyes. “I miss Lois,” he said hoarsely.
“That’s understandable. I’m afraid …”
“I miss her, Dr. Cantor, and I don’t know why.” The words like pinpricks in his throat.
“Peter, I’m afraid our time is up for today. We’ll talk again on Friday.”
Between appointments—a charity case, he went twice a week—Peter worried about having nothing to say to the doctor, worried about boring the guy who seemed in his secretive way to be an all-right guy for a middle-aged psychiatrist. On the subway Peter had his best ideas. Riding the IRT to school, Peter could think of hundreds of things to tell the doctor—dreams, secret longings, fears, imaginary conversations, insights—but in Dr. Cantor’s office he choked; silence possessed him like an interminable dream.
“Where were we at the end of last session?” the doctor had the habit of asking. “Do you remember?” The sound of notebook pages, of falling leaves.
Nowhere. (They were two of a kind.)
Embarrassed about their failure to communicate, worried that the doctor was losing confidence in himself, Peter made conversation—a terrifying effort—with the painful self-approval of a man giving his last dime to charity. “My dreams,” he said one Tuesday, no longer interested in the ceiling, “would you like to hear about them, Doctor? I have a dream in which a woman is dying and I feel for some reason that it’s my job to save her.” He waited for the doctor to engage himself.
“Do you know who this woman is?”
A Man to Conjure With Page 13