Besides, the eye was faraway and the finger blunted by unsuccess.
Without opening it, I slid Grack’s letter back into the mailbox and strolled down the street toward the dry cleaner to pick up my pants, rinsed in gasoline and creased for Phyl. I didn’t hurry. A pair of trousers draped over my arm, I felt light and tricky in the ankles, healthily underfed, ready for any flight. I poked about the neighborhood, still carrying pants. The trees had thickened, the bark cracks turned darker, in the only three years since I had been a college kid visiting here. I bought a newspaper. I enjoyed the sweet images of childhood pressing back on a lazy day—roller skating in the streets, garages nicked by scout knives in this season, legs suddenly long with Phyl under the streetlamp evenings—while I enjoyed (yes! relished!) my feebleness of resolution in putting Grack’s letter back in the box.
And I found the same kids in the street, wearing the variant faces produced by the hormones of chlorophyll, wheat germ, and dextrinized chocolate secreted since I was a boy devoted to Wheaties and Big League Gum, playing the same touch football under branches aflutter with dying leaves. There were the small quick curly-headed ones, the slow long-legged ones, pensive and pimply in adolescence, the hungry hotheaded athletes, all of them frowning with what the suburb does to children while their mamas talk on the telephone and wiggle to help the gas pass itself, as they wiggle for nothing else. I put my pants on a Home Edition of the Press and yelled, “Let me see it!” I was a big fellow to them. The ball came in a high arched spiral, unwobbling, and I caught it hard against my chest. I could still do that! I could throw a long pass, too, proud of myself in touch football. (Girls watched!—children sprung tall whose knees and other corners were beginning to take kindly to flesh. A pale blond girl, in blue jeans and her father’s shirt, sucked at a leafstem and waited, learning from us the interest of her coming age.)
“Again,” I called.
They threw it again.
“Now try this one—”
It was a flagrant weakness to postpone the moment when I must again confront Grack at the mailbox by my father’s front door. What else could I do now but undecide myself? How long could I wait for the decay of paper and ink, the corruption and dissolution of an appeal from my friend? I danced attendance. I played football in the street while I imagined the letter blowing away in the wind, stolen, burnt by fire and forever unopened. In the meantime girls were looking; it was autumn in the suburb, a golden dust and spinning birch leaves in the sky, while someplace the carnie was moving south, moving southwest along roads with ditches on both sides. In the meantime a studious pale blond girl, sucking a leaf, held herself and learned how men could perform. I had found an old game, a consolation for violence violently subdued, during my walk through the autumn sure of its frost and of its renewal. Having left the letter in the box, I pressed the hard lacing of a football against my outstretched palm. I loved myself for the twist which my body recalled with a long high pass far out to the smallest of the players. Let Grack make it himself now! I had grown up in touch football and still knew it well. (A pretty little girl watched and said nothing.)
“Again!” I cried.
They did it once more.
“I’ll show you the sidewalk play,”—and without waiting for their reply I explained how the ball carrier takes the center in the street, darts across the curb and the lawn to the walk, beyond the row of trees, and then wings a straight low pass to his right end far down the sidewalk. “See? Now let’s practice it. Get out to the double-u,”—furious with pride, the strong sweat staining my shirt and stinging along my jowls.
No one moved but the girl chewing at her leaf. A man with a briefcase had stopped and was watching, grinning, tucking, zipping, and buckling because he had just done business for “the Singer people” or “the Hoover folks” with one of the housewives. The child plucked a fresh leaf.
“See it here, I’ll show you the way it’s done. You get the other team out of balance. I’ll explain it again.”
They stood straddle-legged with their mouths like movie heroes in abstract know-how and their hands loose on corduroy hips. Endlessly the leaves were spinning down in each vagary of breeze on the trees turning away from summer above us. Screen doors slammed to; a slipshod infant fell, bawled, was hushed; somewhere a television roared, was tempered.
“Go on out, I’ll shoot you a long one,”—and the prickle of sweat at my jaw turned chill all at once.
Even pride had to admit their sense of me now. One of them spoke in a murmur compounded of high executive condescension and the remnants of his boyish impatience: “Go home, Mister, we’re in the middle of a quarter. Give us Jimmy’s ball back. He’s letting us use it.” Another came grinning toward me, holding the Home Edition of the Press as a cradle at arm’s length before him: “Here’s your pants, Mister. They’ll get dirty on the ground like that. We already heard about the sidewalk play.”
“Nosy!”—this one down the street.
Surely it was as they thought: the intruder had no rights. They played touch only for touch and that was all, while I made of their sport a spurious triumph upon the world of my absent, vacated, forfeited childhood. “Who is” (the question was a titter) “who is that Joe?” Still their skill was at more than football; they knew how to use my risk of self at the game for their purposes of vindictiveness, as they used the game itself to console them for foregoings, for waiting to grow up, for traveling hard against each other.
“Nosy! Oh nosy!” A shrill cry careened down the street after me with my pants and the paper, and it came from the witty smallest one, to whom I had first thrown a fine long pass. “Lookit his nose, lookit! Ja-ever see it?” The delicate blond girl turned her regard sweetly upon him.
Home much later, my elbow had already begun to stiffen from the football and from my unnatural carrying of my cleaning. I had even been down to the river with it, where the freighters and the pleasure craft moved and seemed not to be moving in a commerce that never ceases, even at the bend of the stream downtown. I had hung my pants on a starved dog-wood branch until I heard the heightened end-of-day whir of traffic on the road above, and then I went home. It was time to shower for Phyl.
The mail had been removed from the box. There was nothing on the table for me but an advertisement for a tie pool: exchange two old ones for a grab-bag Kravate. (“Be sharp, stay sharp, think sharp, men, at a minimal cost for terrific accessories.”) Dad was pretending to doze in a chair. “Any mail for me?” I said.
“What? Just what’s on the table.” The letter had gone away, exactly as I had prayed it would. I knew the heady triumph of the gypsy whose enemy dies after he has stuck pins in his image, burned his fingernail sheddings, crossed his shadow with a strangled cat’s tail. And his chagrin: think of the gypsy returning to the woods for the head of the cat and fondling it to say, I remember when that man was a friend. “You’re late, son. Been doing something?” He wore the drawn, righteous, self-tormented face of a diplomat or of a sick old Tom.
“Been out all day. Played a little touch football, limber me up again.”
“That’s fine, get yourself some air,” my father said. “Trouble with work is you get muscles but no air. Those kids know how. Best thing in the world for you.”
Rioting within, I ran to my shower. Done for me once more! I didn’t care what he had made of Grack’s letter: I had dreamed right and proven that even a day of indecision could end in irrevocable decisions. The letter was gone; I needed never ask of it—it had never been delivered, it had never been written, it had never existed. Like the nose before my flat new one, it was vanished from my life and no good to me. I could forget it. (I shaved in the shower without cutting myself.) Had I ever guessed that my delay before the letter was a way of giving another my decision to make? The gypsy’s cat was only an instrument. I sang and soaped myself, even to the grainy hairs, oily and bulbous at their roots, a chief, a desired player at least in this realm.
6. Tried the sidewalk play once more<
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I DIDN’T have to talk. It had been years, but sure, she was still ready to be my Phyl. Ready: but not yet or ever mine. The side-looking cast of her eyes supplied what explanation she needed, and she murmured, very fast, the polite words for a neighbor after a voyage. When she had spent them all, she smiled, showing the budded teeth through her small swollen mouth, and slyly added: “You’re thinner around the hips, Bud. You used to have some fat, some curves there. Quite a rear you used to have—quite a rear.”
“It was only baby fat,” I said. She looked fine to me. Even the subtle new lines about her eyes (those black calculators) gave well to the vital quickness of her movements, her bones, and the organs within. She tossed her head, and her body rippled, and she was still a girl despite the deepness at her breasts and the lace at her eyes. We avoided talk of her marriage. He was in New York. That was a mistake, I think—I mean our not speaking of it. Disbelief in explanations was one of our habits, although we were no better than others; we needed them. We never tried explanations. They had seemed inappropriate since our grammar school days together, when we had played Hospital through the long summer afternoons and had cured each other of indigestion, broken arms, and wanting anyone else. Once we had eaten ice cream and smeared it and then tongued it away. Inexplicably children together, we had even slept side-by-side touching in the grass through the heat of July and the swarming grasshoppers.
Now, an unskilled sleeper, I had been roused from my carnival dream (Grack did this!) and walked imperfectly awake, stiff-elbowed, thick-tongued, and dim-sighted despite my looking. I was walking without Grack, his approval tight in my fist. “I wanted to ask you, Bud …” She wondered how my father was making out; I told her great. He was making money, I said, and preserved by his life and not growing old too fast. The letter was not part of this speech, nor the love and dread of me in the sight of my mother’s photograph on the dining room shelf.
“I’m hungry, Bud,” she said.
“Do you want something to eat?”
Her laughter rang out as we strolled a business street of the suburb. “If I want something to eat for being hungry,” she cried, tears wetting her study of me. “Well, I’ll make a bargain—”
I had forgotten my father’s automobile parked at her home. Out of old habit, we had begun strolling as if rewarding ourselves for high school homework finished.
“There’s Doc Dinny’s,” she said. “Listen, let’s be as if I mean it when I say I’m hungry.” With a schoolgirl playfulness she announced that she could eat only half of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. Would I be responsible for the other half? Yes. By the time I had finished two mouthfuls, she had devoured her share and I offered her mine. She hesitated, her eyes glinting sideways at me under the crooked lids, the cast in her left eye emitting Grack’s wary glitter while she waited in simple hunger and in the pleasure of it. She studied the ragged edge where I had eaten; then just where the mark of my teeth was most perfect, she took a bite. She smiled at me, her lips salty with bacon.
“Let’s get out of here, Phyl.”
“The jukers bother you? It’s pretty loud,” she agreed. “That was good. You always bought me a good bee-el-tee, Bud.”
Did we need this talk after so many years?
We strolled and kept cool (“Let’s not and say we did”) to the alley which we both remembered for that first time, grown-up, that I had jammed her against the wall to kiss her. When I had finally loosened my arms and knees to let her go, she had clung to me and followed me away and then, with a laugh wild as any hey-rube call, pulled me back until I felt the crumbling brick against my own head and shoulders.
We turned into the alley together as if it were home.
When we came out again, bent and blinking against the streetlamp, she had agreed, though only for tonight—this was her condition, her paltry economy, a holiday welcome to me home—and we walked back to the automobile, chattering as old friends do after one has emerged from a long illness or a long quarrel. I reminded her of how, in high school, when all the girls practiced keeping the boys waiting, she had run to the window to watch me turn onto Buena Vista Street, and then gone to the piano to serenade me up the walk with “Themes for Two Hands from the Great Symphonies.”
“You like me the way you always did, Bud?”
“I never forget anything, Phyl.”
“You just remember me, that’s all?”
“It’s always new to me, Phyl.”
“You talking about me now?”
“You now, Phyl.”
The kiss, salty with bacon and her swollen lips, her flesh which loved my motherless cruelty trembling, had signified more than our jokes and our teasing. She agreed to the cabin, but only to the same one, the old one we knew, as if our past of cabins, a traditional right, pointed the way for her to be decent although engaged. Precedent it was. A lawyer it was.
Only our memories had rights—this her dearest mistake; how could she hope, in our return to what was gone, for a matching of histories as we had used to match homework? She shuddered in the morality of a suburban romantic, far from the strife of business and love, a well-rested heroine fresh from her waiting, although she knew to move close and her hands played greedily. Greedy all over me and impatient for the profit of it. “You’re beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” I think I was saying in that alley we really still knew. Spite, spite. But I believe we really remembered it there and together.
Then we drove through the city and the whiteness of frost on the highway and the empty lots (but it was only moonlight) toward the roadhouse—LIQUOR! TRUCKERS STOP HERE—silently gossiping in memories and, for the moment, content with our strangeness to each other.
“You look a little like a girl I know, Pauline’s girl, Joy is her name—”
“I just remind you of someone? You’ve traveled a lot?”
“Not so much. A little. She’s just a kid daughter of a friend of mine. Anyway, how could you remind me of anyone when I’ve known you ever since—”
She interrupted. “Yes, ever since,” she said. “It’s really been a long time you’ve known me, Bud. Other girls should remind you of me.”
I looked a question at her, but the eye was turned inward and it seems that she was thinking of all that time without thinking of me, no matter what she said to make what we were doing nice. She moved next to me. Had we always been so strange, shaken out of time? No, in those days we had made demands for trust, thickened flesh and mingling breath signifying great ambitions toward mingling of heart, abstractions and ideals to the flow of finicky adolescent blood. “Themes for Two Hands”—and from the great symphony. She slipped her hands into my shirt and let me slip my hands, too, and brushed her mouth down my cheek, and a moment later she slipped away to tilt her head in order to show me her lips pouting because bruised, because amused. “You never did wear an undershirt,” she said. “I always remembered that about you.” She had learned early to bring politics to the play of love. She laughed in that time after parking, before stepping out onto gravel, and told me that the new sudden laughter was not for the undershirts I didn’t wear nor for the fine combed-yarn tee-shirts that she had once given me (the last one worn out and used to wipe a windshield in southern California my first winter in the carnie), but for the lessons she had taken because her parents could spare the two dollars a week and I liked music. For this: the piano. “Never play it anymore,” she said. “I played it for you.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Knowing his cousins from Jacksonville to San Diego, I was easy and my voice loud with the keeper of the motel behind the roadhouse. A bloated, purple-faced wino with a stained white knit shirt open on a chest bald and plump as a woman’s, he drawled, “Checkout at noon,”—rocking on his heels and grinning from me to her and back. Phyl kept cool, studied her face in a purseflap mirror, didn’t touch her lipstick. “There’s a rag there to put under the shower if’n it drips. Noise aggravates some folks, t’rists I mean—sensitive that way
with that driving and all.” He pronounced “tourist” as if it were the newspaper word “tryst,” his unwieldy mouth wearing the jealous leer proper to the keeper of this place, whose sign declared itself An Approved-Type Motel. A Home For Your Car. Phyl snapped the purse shut and waited.
He retreated, still grinning, his fat back wobbling. Phyl moved near to give me the flex of her legs and the soft cradling of her breasts in latex when she stepped forward to pull the cord on the mosquito-lamp. Faintly came the music from the roadhouse across the lot:
“And lead me to the valley
Where the still waters flow
Oh I got a gal …”
For a quarter in a slot we could have had the use of a radio. My arm burned where her softness had passed, and my thigh took it, too, like the shock of an unsheathed wire. There was no mailbox at the door of the cabin. Even Grack could not find me here.
Stung and hot, I stood at the door, drawing breath, thinking: Free. And not even curious about what Pa had done with the letter. I leaned gratefully into the damp night air, turning at the smell of hops which seemed to flow back past the few scraggly pine between the roadhouse and us. The sign—LIQUOR! TRUCKERS STOP HERE—was flashing behind a wooden building. It signaled itself to me only by the bobbing red halo above the roof, a smoke which drifted nowhere, but I already heard the steady click of the mechanism from my long looking out of flopster hotel rooms and down midways at closing time. STOP HERE! the smoke said stubbornly, then paled, then repeated. I knew at that doorway while Phyl was busy behind me the awfulness of being absent within my body under the stars of this continent, neither at sea nor at land but rising like the imprisoned neon smoke, red to a click and black to a click, falling and rising, in love with land and sea, in love with sky and cloud, while imprisoned to a click between them all. I thought: Stop here! I thought: Click! and then thought it again. The sense of hopeless love was in this, that I did not even know for whom this love burned or whether it burned or drowned, although my skin had been scorched by her warm flesh and my places were swimming for her places. And I was cold in that doorway. And I was hot there, shivering when she put her hands on me.
Man Who Was Not With It Page 5