He goes into a bar, buys a beer, tells himself to speak slowly and conscientiously and watch out for slurs and repeats, dials her number from a pay phone there. She says “Hello,” doesn’t seem tired, he says “It’s Howard, how are you, I hope I’m not calling too late.” “It’s not that it’s too late for me to receive a call, Howard, just that of the three to four calls from you so far, most have come this late. Makes me think … what? That your calls are mostly last-minute thoughts, emanating from some form of desperation perhaps. It doesn’t make me feel good.” “But they’re not. And I’m sorry. I get impulsive sometimes. Not this time. You were on my mind—have been for days—and I thought about calling you tonight, then thought if it was getting too late to call you, but probably thought about it too long. Then, a little while before, thought ‘Hell, call her, and I’ll explain.’ So some impulsiveness there after all.” “All right. We have that down. So?” “So?” “So, you know, what is the reason you called?” “I wanted to know if you might like to meet at the Breakers for a drink, or maybe it’s too late tonight for that too.” “It probably is. Let me check the time. I don’t have to. I know already. Way too late. If you want, why not come here.” “That’s what I’d like much better, really. You mean now, don’t you?” “Not two hours from now, if you can help it.” “Right. Is there anything I can pick up for you before I get there?” “Like what?” “Wine, beer? Anything you need? Milk?” “Just come, but without stopping for a drink along the way.” “I already have. But so you won’t get the wrong idea, it was because my phone wasn’t working at home. Just tonight, which was a big surprise when I finally picked up the receiver to call you. So I went out to call from a public phone. But I didn’t want to call from the street. Too noisy, and I also didn’t want to give you the wrong idea that I’m always calling from the street. So I went into this bar I’m in to call but felt I should buy a beer from them first, even if I didn’t drink it—though I did—part of it—rather than coming in only to use their phone. That’s the way I am. I put all kinds of things in front of me.” “Does seem so. Anyway, here’s my address,” and gives it and what street to get off if he takes the bus. “If you take the Broadway subway, get off at a Hundred-sixteenth and ride the front of the train, but not the first car, so you’ll be right by the stairs. The subways, or at least that station at this hour, can be dangerous, so maybe to be safer you should take the bus or a cab.” “A cab. That’s what I’ll do.” “Good. See you.”
He subways to her station, runs to her building. If she asks, he’ll say he took a cab. They say hello, he takes off his jacket, she holds out her hand for it, probably to put it in what must be the coat closet right there. He hands it to her and says “I took the subway, by the way. Should have taken a cab, but I guess I’m still a little tight with money. I’m saying, from when I wasn’t making much for years. I don’t know why I mentioned that. It was a fast ride though—good connections—and I’m still panting somewhat from running down the hill to your building,” has moved closer to her, she says “I didn’t notice—you ran down the hill here?” he bends his head down, she raises hers and they kiss. They kiss again and when they separate she says “your jacket—excuse me. It’s on the floor.” “Don’t bother with it.” “Don’t be silly—it’s a jacket,” and picks it up, brushes it off and hangs it in the closet. He comes behind her while she’s separating some of the coats, jackets and garment bags hanging in the closet, turns her around by her shoulders and they kiss. She says “Like a nightcap of some sort—seltzer?” “Really, nothing, thank you.” “Then I don’t know, I’m enjoying this but we should at least get out of this cramped utilitarian area. The next room. Or maybe, if we want, we should just go to bed.” “Sure, if it’s all right with you.” “I’ll have to wash up first.” “Same here.” “And I wouldn’t mind, so long as you’d come with me, walking my dog.” “You’ve a dog?” “It’ll be quick, and I won’t have to do it early in the morning.”
They walk the dog, make love. They see each other almost every day for the next few weeks. Museums, movies, an opera, eat out or she cooks for them in her apartment or he cooks for them in his, a party given by friends of hers. They’re walking around the food table there putting food on their plates when he says “I love you, you know that, right?” and she says “Me too, to you.” “You do? Great.” That night he dreams he’s being carried high up in the sky by several party balloons, says “Good Christ, before this was fun, but now they better hold,” wakes up, feels for her, holds her thigh and says to himself “This is it, I don’t want to lose her, she’s the best yet, or ever. Incredible that it really happened. Well, it could still go bust.” He takes her to meet his mother, has dinner at her parents’ apartment. He sublets his apartment, moves in with her. He can’t get used to the dog. Walking it, cleaning up after it, its smells, hair on the couch and his clothes, the sudden loud barks which startle him, the dog licking his own erection, and tells her that as much as he knows she loves the dog, the city’s really no place for it. She says “Bobby came with me and with me he stays. Sweetheart, think of it as a package deal and that Bobby’s already pretty old.” When his lease expires he gives up his apartment to the couple he sublet it to. He begins insisting to Denise that Bobby’s long hair makes him sneeze and gives him shortness of breath, which is keeping him up lots of nights, and that the apartment’s much too crowded with him. “If we ever have the baby we’ve talked about maybe having, it would mean getting an apartment with another bedroom at twice the rent we pay now, which we couldn’t afford, or disposing of the dog somehow and staying with the baby here.” She gives Bobby to a friend in the country. “If one day we do get a larger apartment,” she says, “and Bobby’s still alive, then I don’t care how sick and feeble he might be then, he returns. Agreed?” “Agreed.”
They marry a few months after that and a few months later she’s pregnant. They planned it that way and it worked. They wanted to conceive the baby in February so they could spend most of the summer in Maine and have the baby in October, a mild month and where he’d be settled into the fall semester. He goes into the delivery room with her, does a lot of things he learned in the birth classes they took over the summer, to help her get through the more painful labor contractions. When their daughter’s about a month old he starts dancing with her at night just as that man did three years ago. He has two Mahler symphonies on record, buys three more and dances to the slow movements and to the last half of the second side of a recording of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Denise loves to see him dancing like this. Twice she’s said “May I cut in?” and they held the baby and each other and danced around the living room. Dancing with the baby against his chest, he soon found out, also helps get rid of her gas and puts her to sleep. He usually keeps a light on while he dances so he won’t bump into things and possibly trip. Sometimes he closes his eyes—in the middle of the room—and dances almost in place while he kisses the baby’s neck, hair, even where there’s cradle cap, back, ears, face. Their apartment’s on the third floor and looks out on other apartments in a building across the backyard. He doesn’t think it would stop him dancing if he saw someone looking at him through one of those windows. He doesn’t even think he’d lower the blinds. Those apartments are too far away—a hundred feet or more—to make him self-conscious about his dancing. If his apartment were on the first or second floor and fronted on the sidewalk, he’d lower the living room blinds at night. He’d do it even if he didn’t have a baby or wasn’t dancing with it. He just doesn’t like people looking in at night from the street.
5
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Frog Fears
His daughter’s asleep upstairs, his wife’s out. After his wife left he got his daughter to sleep by giving her a bath (very brief; small portable plastic tub in the kitchen into which he poured three parts hot water to two parts cold), reading to her for about fifteen minutes, then in the dark telling her another part of the “Mickey and Donald Go Fishing” story he’s been making up f
or her just about every other night for the past year, and finally singing a few nursery rhymes in a low voice to his own impromptu tunes. His wife went to a movie in the nearest big town from here. Seventeen miles along mostly curvy country roads. She wanted him to go with her, he would have but not enthusiastically (doesn’t especially like movies, and especially in theaters and in the evening when he has to drive a good ways to one), but they couldn’t get a babysitter. “You go,” she said. “No, you go, since you’re really the one who wants to.” A new Russian movie she’s been eager to see since they saw the trailer of it in a Manhattan theater last year and she read a couple of reviews. Being shown in the town hall meeting room, on hard fold-up chairs, so not the most comfortable place to see a relatively long and, from what the trailer suggested and she told him the reviews said, slow, dark, dense movie. About two-and-a-half hours. That’s what someone at the town hall said tonight when she called up about it. It’s been almost an hour since she said she’d be home. The movie might have started late. The organizer of the event, Denise has said, tends to wait till the last possible customer has bought his ticket, decided if he wants anything at the refreshment table, sat down and taken off his sweater or shawl and hung it over the back of the chair, before she starts the movie. The single showing of the only movie being shown in that town this week, other than a nature movie at the library, let’s say. There’s no real movie theater there. White Hill. The nearest real theater (marquee, box office, refreshment stand and soft movie seats), which shows a movie two to three times a day on weekends, is in an even larger town twenty-one miles past White Hill. Elksford. It’s twelve on the dot now. Takes a half-hour to drive back from White Hill under normal driving conditions. There may be a thick fog on the road and she’s driving very slowly. The route from their village to about five miles from White Hill is along a peninsula. Or even stopped for a while when the driving became too hazardous for her because of the fog. He’s never seen a movie in that hall. She’s been to two this summer, both times with a friend of theirs who couldn’t go tonight, and came back around when she said she would. He did see one in the Elksford theater, only because she’d wanted to see it even more than this one and he didn’t want her driving that far alone at night or even walking back to her car after the movie was over. Elksford’s about ten miles from a national park and can get rowdy at night. Motorcycles; campers filling up on food, booze and gas and getting drunk or high. White Hill has no bars or stores open past nine. Only times he’s been inside the town hall have been in the basement once a summer for the last few years when they take their cats there for their annual shots. Cheaper and easier than in New York. An Elksford vet who sets up a clinic every Monday night. Even puts a desk nameplate out, probably so the pet owners can spell his name right on their checks. Dr. Hugh van Houtensack or von Hautensack. There have been accidents on the roads around here because of the fog, most of them early morning or late at night. He reads about them happening every other week or so in the local weekly. One man lost a leg last summer. In a rented car, visiting his daughter and son-in-law for a few days, so probably wasn’t familiar with the area and also might not have known how to drive in fog. Denise knows the roads and what to do with the headlights in fog. She’s more than seven months pregnant. Maybe she shouldn’t have been driving. Her stomach’s already pressed up against the steering wheel. If she pushes the seat back any farther she can’t reach the floor pedals. Maybe she suddenly got labor pains or false labor pains she took for the real ones and went to the White Hill hospital. Should he call? His daughter snores upstairs. She sleeps in a crib in the one room upstairs, their own bed behind a screen. Don’t call. Denise knows the difference between the two pains, and he’s sure she’d try to call him before she went to a hospital, but definitely have someone at the hospital call him once she got there. Maybe she met someone she knows at the movie and they talked after, wanted to continue the talk so went for coffee or ice cream at the sandwich and ice cream shop a couple of miles past White Hill. She would have called, from the town hall if it had a phone, but definitely from the shop. She might be driving along the secondary road to their private road right now. Or driving down the private road any second now. He’d see the headlights thirty seconds or so before she reached the house. My worries are over he’d say if he saw the lights now. He’d go outside to greet the car, open the door for her, help her out, kiss her and walk back to the house holding her shoulder and hand. The headlights would only be from her car. Maybe twice a summer someone’s driven down their road by mistake—none so far this summer, far as he knows—and for some reason almost always in the day. Not many people around here leave their grounds after dark. And so few unusual things happen around the cottage that he thinks they’ve always told one another when someone’s driven down their road by mistake. Olivia snores. Loves to see her sleep. He goes upstairs to see if she’s OK. He knows she is but goes upstairs just to do something but also, he just now thinks, to pull the covers back over her if they’ve slid off and to push her left leg back in if it’s sticking through the crib bars. That’s the one that recurrently comes out; the other side of the crib’s against the wall.
She’s OK, everything in place, in the same position, far as he can tell, she was in when he last looked in on her an hour ago. About an hour and fifteen minutes now. Nobody to call. The town hall, but he’s just about sure nobody’s there to answer. Looks outside the bedroom window that faces the front. Doesn’t seem to be any fog around. Bug light above the front door and the living room floor lamp he was sitting under give off enough light to tell. But the roads always get the fog worse than their house. Denise would also have called, if she was going anywhere but home after the movie, to make sure everything was all right with Olivia. Something’s wrong. He’s almost sure of it. There’s just no reason for her not to be home by now. He thinks that even if there was an accident on the road that prevented her car and others from going around it—on one of the two narrow bridges, for instance—she would have got the trooper to somehow call him or gone into someone’s home to call herself. No, that’s going too far—both those. Olivia stirs, turns her head over to the other side. She probably did that several times in the last hour, stuck her foot out of the crib and brought it under the covers too. He hopes she wakes up. He’d love to pick her up, wrap a baby blanket around her and hold her to him till she fell asleep again. Maybe singing to her; probably just quietly. Maybe she has to pee. She doesn’t wake up. He pulls the covers back, feels inside her diapers. Dry. If they were wet he’d go downstairs to run warm water over her washrag, change her in the crib.
He goes downstairs, sits in the living room chair under the lamp, picks up the book he’s been reading, stares outside. Mosquito buzzes his ear. He jerks his head back, looks around for it, sees it, holds his hand and the book out on either side of it and slaps. Got it, but nothing’s there when he looks at the book and his hand. Spreads his fingers wide, looks at his lap and the floor, stands and brushes off anything that may be on his chest. Doesn’t see how he could have missed it, since he didn’t see it fly away, but it’s sometimes happened. It’ll be back. He goes to the window. Private road leading to the secondary road roughly a quarter of a mile up the hill. Right on that road to the general store and main country road 2.3 miles away. Mosquito again, once around his head, and when he holds out his hands to slap it, though there’s much less light here, it darts away and seems to go up the fireplace chimney, but he’s lost it in a darker part of the room for a few seconds, so that could have been another one. Right on that road to White Hill. Movie’s probably been over an hour and three-quarters by now, longer if it started on time. So it’s been almost an hour and a half since she should have been home, and longer if she left the movie early because she didn’t like it, let’s say, or wasn’t feeling well. He can see only a few feet of road going up the hill. Can see some sky through the trees. A dark blue with a streak of bright light. Good. Must be a clear night and full moon or no more than a day bef
ore or after one. Better for driving. Some full-moon nights, which they don’t get the effect of in front of the house because of the tall trees, it’s almost as if streetlights lit the road. They usually say something about the moon when it’s full. Just that there is one and it looks nice over the bay from their deck and lights the path and garden behind the house as electric overhead lights would and maybe something about its face. But it’s rained or has been cloudy or misty the last three days. Slippery roads? No, they were dry this afternoon when they drove to the lake to swim, though some puddles on the road when the culverts under them must have got clogged. Denise, get home now, come on, will you? Oh shit, where is she? Way past midnight. She’s been tired lately because of the pregnancy. Quiet upstairs. Very quiet inside this room and around the house. Baby inside kicks hard now. It could have kicked so hard she lost control of the car for a few seconds and crashed. He should have gone with her. Of course he couldn’t. Then convinced her to stay home. “If the movie’s that good and been reviewed so much,” he should have said, “it’ll be coming around New York for the next year.” Some men could have stopped her car. The old trick of pulling alongside her car and pointing to the back wheel as if something were wrong with it—just the driver visible, the others lying on the seat or floor—and she should stop. He’s warned her about it, but a while ago, so she may have forgotten it or only remembered it once she got out of the car. Read about it happening to a woman in New York, another somewhere else, and that’s just what he’s read. They’d stop, if she did, and jump out after she stepped out to look at her wheel or just rolled down her window, and do who knows what to her. “I’m pregnant,” she could say and that might work with some of them but excite one of them even more. “You’ll kill the baby,” she could say and they could get so guilty or just want her out of the way so she can’t identify them that they’d kill her and dump her into a ditch along the road or drive into the woods along an old quarry or clammer’s road and dig a hole and bury her or cover her up with brush and leaves. It’s happened. It could happen. He hasn’t heard of it happening around here, but no area’s exempt, especially one with so many transients. Campers from the national park who were out for a good time and got carried away. Maybe it has happened around here, since he doesn’t know what’s in the local papers between Labor Day and July 1. He can’t hear any cicadas, or whatever are the summer’s last noisemaking insects of that kind. Maybe the phone’s dead or off the hook. Goes into the kitchen and picks up the receiver. Working. He looks outside. No lights coming down the road. Thinks he heard something outside—an animal walking, or a person, or falling tree branch hitting the ground. He goes out the kitchen door and looks. Nothing. “Anybody here?” Holds his breath to listen. Not even car sounds from far off. If a car were approaching their road from either way, he’d be able to hear it from here even if it were a half-mile away. Thinks so. Or maybe just from the top of the road. Very few cars on it at this time. Maybe none. Maybe there won’t be one till five o’clock or so when the lobstermen drive past their road to the point a mile away. Who to call? No one. The phone’s ringing and he runs to the kitchen to get it. Olivia cries. Oh God, he thinks, what to do? “Mommy Mommy, Daddy,” she screams. Phone rings probably scared her. He picks it up. “Denise?” “No,” a woman says. “Is it something immediately urgent?” “Well…” “Anyway, please, whoever it is, hold for ten seconds—a minute at the most. I have to see about my daughter. OK?” “I guess.”
Frog Page 7
