by John Hersey
* * *
—
THE sea in her was calm.
Macaboy had her album, and she didn’t mind. She had figured it out. She remembered how, on the day he came to hang the door, she had talked about Venice, and he had nodded, as if to say, “Yes, I know.” Sure. He had seen that picture of her in Piazza San Marco, sitting at the table in front of the restaurant next to the clock tower, on the sunny side of the square; she had asked the Dutchman at the next table to snap the photo. And the day Macaboy first picked the lock and found her throwing things away, and they’d talked, and she’d mentioned the Russian trip, and again that nod. She’d noticed it. Sure. He knew. She and Greg in Red Square with the mad onions of St. Basil’s behind them. And another time: about body surfing on Nausset beach, and about those incredible Cape dunes. His eyes lit up that time, he didn’t even have to nod. She’d seen what happened in his eyes. That picture showed her topless on the lip of the dune against the sky with the beach grass tickling her calves: that guy she’d met an hour before, the psychiatrist who’d walked way down the great beach, took the picture after they’d fucked in the sun, hidden in a crater of sand back in the dunes. For sure, Macaboy had her album. That meant she’d get it back, anyway.
* * *
—
THE Dutchman had admired her little Rollei 16S, and she had gone off with him to his room filled to the brim with grapy sunlight as if with vino bianco, in the hotel on the Grand Canal, the Gabrielli Sandwirth, with a shutterable window looking down on a zoo of red-and-black tugs, Taurus, Ursus, Equus, Caper, tethered along the bund out in front. They set fire to the afternoon on a huge, lumpy bed. He spoke little English. She remembered telling herself that following that sort of impulse was the natural thing. And those ten minutes on the Truro dunes—five minutes, the doc had a slight problem of ejaculatio praecox—the idea had been so wild!—three minutes’ conversation with a good-looking stranger with salt spindrift frothing around the ankles and then a hurried climb into a moon landscape and immediate total knowledge: she had the hairy, sweet-mouthed man of science psychoanalyzed after four shoves of the well-developed walking muscles of his rear end. That Tufts student she got talking to on the Turbotrain to Boston; the professional baseball player—he was never going to make it big, he was on the Yankees’ Syracuse farm team—who picked her up in the First Avenue bar called Rafe’s; the man in Philly who looked exactly like her father—guilt-free incest; the unshaven hitchhiker on Route I-91 who had the price of a motel room in his pocket—the fillip of danger; and of course Greg, how many times at unexpected times?—two hundred seventy-seven spurs of startling moments? Always the giddy idea of spontaneity, the worked-up satisfaction in the head—and the slackness of the body, the orgasms as weak as sighs, the headaches afterward, the soreness for several days that she finally came to think of as her freedom tax.
Now she had cast all that off. She believed she had the new-found play and flexibility—and vulnerability—of a soft-shelled crab just after the shedding of the old hull. Her mind-trip the other day, coming up that way out of sleep onto a sparkling, crystalline terrain—all new—had been like a conversion. She had been yearning and striving for some such crisis, without quite being able to define it or name it, for so very long that she had reached a stage of utter exhaustion. For ages all her energy had gone into the hard work of being apathetic. Her readying had been months and months, years perhaps, of egoistic anxiety, until even that tight worry had grown weary, gone flabby. And then, the moment having been brought to ripeness in that limitless gel of futility, it had come: this explosive upsurge of ardent, tender possibility. She still mistrusted it.
* * *
—
HER windowful of rainy sky was growing dim. A second evening alone. Her hunger sang in her. The energy with which she had vibrated in all her waking hours since last Monday was thinned out now into an alertness in the mind. There was nothing left to do. She had dusted, washed, laundered, rocked, mulled. She was too excited, too full of her own fictions, to read. She floated in her fast.
* * *
—
SHE thought a great deal about the turning of the wheel—about Macaboy and his father; the generations. Her own father did a kind of soft-shoe dance at the edge of her speculations (she saw a shadow of her mother dialing a phone, dialing, dialing). She had understood that Macaboy had a powerful tie with the past, in his tangle with his father, the timehold all the more intense now that the son had come so far back in from contempt, hot rancor. Even, she thought, if Macaboy had realized his revolution of “values” in the sixties, even if it had come out like a formulated plot, his new world would surely have had much of his father’s in it. The old moral tickets were embedded in him, as determinant as spirals of DNA. His strong love now showed how deeply. Macaboy’s big deal would only have been a translation. His father had fallen short; he wanted to go all the way. From the way Macaboy talked, she gathered that it was his father’s failure to be completely himself that had enraged Macaboy.
Her hunger, and these thoughts, made her own father’s existence in her more vivid to her than ever.
* * *
—
SHE was sitting in her chair when she saw sunlight lick the cross on the acute peak of the roof of the Lithuanians’ church, St. Casimir’s, up on Greene Street. Behind it—blue sky. Had she sat in her rocker all night, while a rutting wind mounted one cloud after another and chased it off to the south? She did not know. Time, too, had become a sort of emptiness.
* * *
—
THE noon siren farted across town. Elaine sat forward. For a flickering moment she wondered if Macaboy had abandoned her. Then it came to her that actually it was he, not she, who was being held captive by the walnut door. She settled back, began to rock.
* * *
—
IT was growing dark again. She managed to start the rocker swinging again. Her hunger was a thin humming contralto complaint in her ears, a monotone, not exactly a warning—a reminder, it seemed, of some other need.
* * *
—
NIGHT. She was not really frightened. She thought she should go to her bed. She thought it and thought it.
Then she heard a real click and three firm knocks.
She was up in a rush, flying weak-kneed through a double darkness, of her room and her light-headedness.
She pulled the door open. Macaboy was a leaning tower. He had set a carton crammed with groceries down on the floor beside him. His face was side-lit by the bare forty-watt bulb in the hall. At what she saw, she lunged forward. Well-fed strength from some source surged into her consoling arms.
Chapter 35
IN the sidelight of the weak bulb in the hall the door has a texture of dark shot silk. An oiling would bring this out even more, he thinks. He puts the groceries down. Listens. The rocker is not measuring her travels. He turns the Stanloc’s oval knob. Raps the upper panel with triple authority: father-mimic, fatherless son, doormaker. At the sound of swift movement that he hears beyond the door he assembles the appropriate facial expression of a man who has just taken on the burden of his heritage. His deepest sadness, which he doubts he can hide, is that he cannot yet get his hooks into the emotion about his loss he considers his privilege and duty to feel. Maybe this counterfeit sadness will show and tell enough.
The beautiful slab of his work swings open and he sees at first only a box of darkness, which astonishes him. Then out of the black she comes bowling at him. She is in a jay-blue housecoat. He catches an intimation of Victorian paleness, glints of two sapphires; wings are outspread. She bangs into him and straightens him to the perpendicular. He feels her giving strength. Her body is hard and soft against his. Her cheek is hot. “Darling, darling,” he hears. “Are you all right?”
All right? He is aroused, while she clings. As when before? Eiffel. Empire State in the trousers. He is as merry as a fox ter
rier. He wonders: Hey, is that my pecker, or Pop’s?
* * *
—
“CAN I take a shower?”
“Be my guest.”
“I came straight. I feel kind of raunchy.”
“I’ll get you a towel.”
He waits in the living room. All the lights are now on; the room, he sees, is double-dusted, and every object is consciously placed. She has oiled the inside of the door: he feels her care as if it were of him, a backrub. She brings the towel. He thanks her and goes into her bedroom, and shuts the bedroom door.
He undresses, takes an admiring gander at his not quite detumescent selflet, goes into the bathroom, turns on the shower, and twists the shower head so the streams hit the shower curtain for maximum sound effect
Then with ocelot speed he returns to the bedroom, gets a wire cutter, a knife, and a small roll of Scotch electric tape from his pants pockets, falls to his knees by the head of the bed, pulls the side table away from the wall, takes the phone from it, peels the wire ends with deft swipes of the cutter, matches the pairs, twists them firmly together, and tapes them up. Then he tucks everything back in place and goes and takes his shower.
* * *
—
“YOU must be some clean,” she says, when he finally reappears.
“I was washing away my bad thoughts,” he cheerfully says. “Ever since I got the news about Pop dying I’ve remembered dumb things he did.”
“You’re having a reaction.”
“He always took my side against Mom.”
“That seems dumb to you?”
“But, you see, it put her on a hell of a spot. One of the rules of her life was that you respected your husband’s opinions. To my Mom, life’s been a parlor game. It has like these rules. It’s God’s backgammon game—she’s bonkers for backgammon. Life is a game of backgammon. You take what the dice give you, you make your moves, you move according to the rules. You try to win, but if you start losing you play a back game: you begin sacrificing stones right and left so as to build your defenses in your home table—where the other guy wants to do his winning. Since before I can remember she’s been saying, ‘No, Eddie. You may not. That’s a rule. Remember?’ So then just while she’s saying it, along comes Pop and changes the rule, right in her face. He had her off balance three-quarters of the time.”
“You’re bound to have a reaction.”
“You should have seen her at the funeral. She looked so relieved. I think she was glad he was finally out of her hair.”
“Was your brother there?”
“Arden? Yeah. What a mess he is.”
“How a mess?”
“He was coming on with this shit about ‘Now that I’m the head of the family.’ ”
“Give yourself some time, Macaboy.”
* * *
—
HIS words are bitter but his manner is blithe. His eyes are leaking ohms—his natural exuberance resisted by his sense of form. This is an aspect of the tension that makes him an artist in wood. He gives a blow-by-blow account of the funeral. It is a comic tale. The preacher, whom Macaboy’s father always called Reverend Ichabod Crane, stood with his stalk neck sticking out of his backwards collar, intoning a gloomy eulogy that amounted to a slightly adulterated self-portrait. “Thank God they’d screwed down the lid of the coffin. Pop had to be laughing so hard under there that the mortician’s makeup was cracking.” His Mom was gawking around to see who had come. Arden looked as if he was adding figures—doing an inventory of the estate.
“I’m going to have some money,” Macaboy says. “You know: Not enough and too much?”
* * *
—
THEY burn a roach, passing it back and forth, while Elaine gets dinner: a tuna-fish salad, with cut-up celery, and onion and olive slices, and tomato quarters, and halves of hard-boiled eggs. Macaboy’s glittering eyes follow every move. Is she going to go to that drawer by the sink and pull out the carving knife? Something has surely shifted in her. Her moves are steady. She laughs in the right part of her throat. Her eyes are a buyer’s eyes. He feels a stirring of the building trades in his pants.
She turns and says, “You were the undy-freak, weren’t you?”
“The who-whaaa?”
“You’re the one who broke in here—jimmied the door, you warned me about that gap, the old door—broke in here and got into my drawers: in both senses of the word. Right?”
He tokes and does a grassy ha-ha. Then with charming eyes he says, “It was part of the sales promotion for our company. You did place an order the next morning, after all—didn’t you? It was a setup. I’m not really that freaky about intimate textiles.”
“I know you’re not,” she amiably says.
“I’m a freak for what they cover,” he says.
“Eat,” she says, pushing the salad at him.
* * *
—
THEY both know what is going to happen. The death recedes. Their laughter is like kissing. He can feel his balls stirring. Her buoyancy exactly matches his. He is in a force field of her acceptance. The meal starts off like the eating scene from Tom Jones—every bite and lick and lip-shove is an erotic signal, appetite is a metaphor; but soon this tapers off, because the sense of perfect understanding causes extraordinary thoracic aches and a kind of lassitude. He puts his fork down.
Words have the tactile quality of foreplay.
“That’s the best door I’ll ever make.”
“I oiled it.”
“I noticed.”
“You should see: the wood drinks the oil.”
“I know. I’ve done it a hundred times.”
Every short sentence has the texture of a groan. He who has talked so much about safety realizes only now, for the first time in his life, its sensual meaning. The wound he did not know he had is healing. The image of his father’s gritted teeth fades. He sits at the kitchen table, reaches for her hand. Everything glides in his mind. Preparatory lubricants flow from his cock. He knows without having to touch that she is very wet, too; she is safe. He will not hurt her, he will not be heavy, she knows that. The utter safety of her most secret places will cause them to engulf and eagerly suck at his generosity, no matter how huge it is. This knowledge is the core of the promise of pleasure, and Macaboy has not the slightest fear that the promise may prove sweeter than the pleasure itself.
“O Macaboy,” she says with a sigh. “You horse’s ass.”
He laughs and she laughs. He laughs at the woman’s mourning at the idea of surrender. She laughs because she can crack the code of her own protest: It is he who is surrendering.
Their looks splice. No one has to speak. They rise and go together to the other room.
* * *
—
HER hair floats around her on the percale—the ivy hair of the Primavera. He is on his side, his head raised, his cheek on his hand, his forearm propped on its elbow. He is drinking in, by the dim indirection of the living room lights, her skinflush, the slight puffiness of her lips, her Libra eyes—in perfect poise. He tastes the hormones on a light kiss.
She turns her head from side to side, as if in persisting disbelief. “Jesus, Macaboy. Jesus. I had twelve orgasms.”
He lies back and stares at the ceiling, and shifts a bit—the crown is a little uneasy on his head in this position. He believes her.
* * *
—
IN sleep, too, she looks safe. Both hands together, in the flat attitude of prayer, are wedged under her left cheek. Her legs are drawn up. Her face still shows the swollen look of satiety and the trust of someone too young to know.
Carefully Macaboy slips out of bed. His clothes are all over the room. He stores up the memory of every move of their scrimmage. A laugh would waken her, he actually puts a hand to his throat to stop it. He dresses as he can.
In the living room he writes her a note. Then he turns out the lights, giving her the little that is left of total night
He opens the door with great care, slips out, and quietly pulls it to. He looks at the oval knob of the Stanloc but does not turn it before he tiptoes down the hall toward dawn.
Chapter 36
AFTER lunch she went yet again to the walnut door—the twentieth time that day?—and placing her hands flat against its satiny surface she kissed it. “Hi, door,” she said.
Once more she was in the throat of a two-day wait. His note had said he had to go back up to Avon to help his mother sort ducks and drakes, back Tuesday. And he had ended with: Our service manager is grateful for your endorsement of our company product. The signature: Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M.
“Hi, product,” she said, patting the door. Then she doubted that the door was what he had meant.
She felt so loose she thought she might just melt down into a glob of oobleck. A zillion nerve-ends had come untied. She was too relaxed to be elated. She felt like an important number, rounded off to the nearest oh oh oh.
Late in the afternoon she noticed that she was walking a lot. Bedroom living room kitchen living room bedroom…. She still had the floating feeling of earlier in the day, she was paddling along the surface of a wish-fulfillment dream; but she began to feel a tidal current making up. She became aware, too, that in each room she was stopping to look out the window: at the high surge of the sycamores in the square, already brownish now in summer wilt; at the rusty jungle gym (had a child mercilessly grown up and drifted away?) in one of the Court Street backyards; at the funky outrageousness of the big Stick-Style house up on Greene Street, with its mazes of embroidered brick—just a glimpse of it was visible from her bedroom window—which Macaboy said had been built by a Jewish corset manufacturer in the 1870s and was now a Convent of the Daughters of the Holy Ghost. The sky was smoky, the sun was a yellow ashtray. She ate snacks. She walked again. She saw the evening sun go down. She rode at some fences in her rocker. Her thighs felt springy. She hugged herself. She was Elaine Quinlan.