“Yes, sir,” the muscle-bound one said. “Hotter than a firecracker in hell out there. You gonna be living here, sir?”
“My wife and I, yes. And our little baby girl.”
“Little baby girl,” said the smaller one and glanced in the direction of the hallway, where Melanie had gone with a box of framed photographs. Ballinger saw the look he gave his friend. William hadn’t seen it.
Melanie came back through for another box. The muscle-bound phone man watched her, barely pausing in his work—his large hands quickly manipulating the wires in the wall. He followed her with his gaze as she carried another box down the hallway.
William had put his head back, drinking the last of a bottle of water, and again he didn’t see the look the two younger men exchanged.
Ballinger said, “How about concentrating on what you came to do, boys?”
“Sir?” the smaller one said.
William had swallowed the last of the drink and simply stared.
“What’s your problem?” said the big one. “Sir.”
“Just do what you came to do and get out,” Ballinger told him. “That way, you get to keep your jobs.”
The two phone men accomplished their task and made a sullen exit, and for a time Ballinger and his daughter and son-in-law worked in silence. Finally William cleared his throat and said, “You know, Jack—I wasn’t unaware of their attitude.”
Ballinger gave no answer to this.
“I’m sort of used to how people respond to the situation.”
“They were ogling my daughter.”
“She’s my wife,” William said. “We’re quite used to it—believe me.”
“OK,” Ballinger said. “Forgive me.”
“Please don’t be angry about it, Jack.”
Ballinger apologized once more. He had the unbidden urge to tell the other man not to call him Jack.
“Well,” William said, “I don’t want you to think it’s not appreciated, either. Your allegiance.”
“William,” Melanie said, “you make it sound like a treaty’s been signed.”
“Melanie’s got a great future as an editor,” Ballinger said. And when there was no response he added, “Little joke.”
The three of them sat drinking more of the cold mineral water. The quiet had become oppressive. William crossed his legs and began talking about the study he wanted to make of the poems of the Christian mystics. His pale, skinny calves showed above the black line of his socks.
Melanie broke in on him. “Daddy, Mom did tell me I should ask you to stay.”
“Well,” Ballinger said, marking with a pang of sympathy William’s embarrassment at the interruption, “I’ve got a lot to do, honey.”
In the past several months, he had only spoken with his wife on the telephone. She told him in a breathless excited voice that she had uncovered in herself a love for doing volunteer work of all kinds. On weekends she spent time in a nursing home, helping with the more seriously impaired residents. She had become friends with a marvelous hundred-year-old woman named Alma, who was confined to a wheelchair. Mary walked her around the grounds on breezy sunny days. “We talk about everything,” she told Ballinger over the phone. “She’s one of the most fascinatingly unegoistic people, if that’s how you can put it, that I’ve ever known. You know what she said to me, Jack? She said she was continually surprised by life’s abundance. A hundred years old, abandoned in a home, and saying that.”
“She sounds positively hortatory.”
Silence.
“Mary?”
“I was telling you something important, Jack. You don’t know the woman. Why do you have to belittle everything.”
“It was a joke, OK? I’d like to meet her sometime.”
“I have to go now,” she said.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” he told her. “It’s nice to hear any voice.”
“You’re not seeing anyone?”
“Are you?”
“No, Jack. I’m not.”
“I’m getting angular, I think.”
“Poor thing.”
A man came to turn the water on in the middle of the afternoon. It took only a moment. Melanie began washing the shelves of the cabinets in the kitchen, singing softly to herself. William kept working in the extra room, filling the bookcases. Ballinger went out to a delicatessen in the town square and bought sandwiches. The humidity soaked him. In the delicatessen it was crowded and noisy. Two slow fans turned in the ceiling; the place smelled of garlic and oil. At one end of the room, in one of the small booths, a couple sat close together, slung over each other it seemed, even in this heat. Another pair stood holding hands.
Ballinger could not have supposed he would miss Mary so much, since in the last days they had spent in one house together they had suffered tension over the slightest things. It had been Mary who said, “I won’t live this way. I won’t have us turn into one of those couples always sniping at each other.” He hadn’t wanted that either. Mary believed that they had lost the sense of how to be with each other over the years of raising Melanie. He supposed this was true. But he had been alone all these months. He would not have said that he had taught himself, particularly, to live without her.
Outside, the brightness gave him a headache. When he got back to the apartment, the air-conditioning felt wonderful. He set the bag of sandwiches on the coffee table. “Lunch,” he said.
Melanie didn’t stop. “I want to get this done first.”
William came in with his arms full of books. “Be right there.”
Ballinger sat down and took a bite from his sandwich. He could see his daughter through the opening into the kitchen. She stood on a chair, one shapely leg lifted slightly off the seat, reaching to get a corner of the shelf. He averted his eyes. A sense of how William would look at her had come to him; there had been something strangely guilty and sexual in the moment. He stared out the window at the sunny street, chewing the sandwich. His head throbbed. William came haltingly back into the room and, pulling a chair up, sat across from him, reaching into the bag.
“These damn knees of mine,” he said. “Although I have very good cholesterol, you know. One-fifty-six. And my blood pressure’s one-ten over seventy-six.”
“William,” Melanie called from the kitchen, “talk about something else.”
He had taken a bite of his sandwich, and his answer was slightly garbled. “You-wite, hon. Stupid—course…” He smiled a little sheepishly at Ballinger.
“It’s OK,” Ballinger said. A concession. He nodded at the other’s grateful look.
When Mary arrived, unexpectedly early, gleaming with the heat, carrying the baby in a small bassinet, Melanie became agitated, almost childlike, talking rapidly and happily about the apartment and the rooms and how she planned to fix them up. As they stood in the small room that would serve as Melanie’s study, Ballinger made a joke about moving into it temporarily.
“Temporarily?” Mary said to him, with a look. It wasn’t ungenerous, or sarcastic, but rather candidly questioning.
“It’ll be a little break from living in Ernest Borgnine’s basement,” he told her. He had only meant it in the spirit of the moment.
“Poor baby.”
Melanie said, “Speaking of babies…”
They all went into the living room, where the child had awakened in her bassinet. They took turns holding her. They ate the sandwiches and drank the cold water, and then Melanie fed the baby while the rest of them worked.
Ballinger wandered into the room where the bookshelves were. They had been built into the wall by a previous tenant, floor to ceiling on three walls, with a large desk built into the fourth wall, below a window which sun now poured through. William had got the first few shelves filled, in what was clearly no particular order. Books lay in tall stacks in front of each section around the room. Ballinger browsed among the titles. “You’re gonna need some curtains to keep out that sun,” he said to William, who bent down and picked up an armful
of books, groaning softly.
“Melanie’s already picked out the ones she wants.”
“You have more books than I do,” Ballinger told him.
There was a hopeful something in the older man’s expression. “I’m like a pack rat. I can’t even get rid of the bad ones.”
“Is there any order you want?”
“No, sir.” He flinched slightly, having said this, as if he expected Ballinger to seize on the use of the word sir.
Ballinger stepped over to the next section and began filling it. The two of them remained quiet for the hour it took to get everything put away. One of the last boxes contained a pair of bookends made of wood, two carved elephants that William had brought back from England, forty years ago. “I was studying Shakespeare,” he remembered. “At the beginning of it all. I was on fire with it. That feeling—all the wonderful books you’re going to read for the first time. I’ve always believed in the good fortune of books, you know?”
“The first time I read Faulkner,” Ballinger said, “I was in Mississippi. Nineteen seventy. Twenty-one years old. In the air force.” He put the bookend in its place on the shelf. “I bought a copy of As I Lay Dying. I remember thinking that title seemed about right for somebody with my morbid imagination.”
“I met Faulkner once.”
Ballinger looked at him.
“We shook hands and talked a little about horses.”
“I think I would’ve asked him about writing,” Ballinger said.
“That would have been a strategic error, I think.”
Perhaps it was not so odd, now, to discover in himself something like affection for the older man. Nevertheless, the feeling surprised him.
“I guess,” William Coombs said, almost tentatively, “there are some advantages to being an old guy.” His smile was faintly chiding.
By the end of the afternoon, they had the apartment in livable shape, had even hung some of the pictures, though Melanie wasn’t certain yet how she would finally want them arranged. She wanted to think about it, she said. But they had got all the furniture in place and put most of the clothes and books and dishes away. The empty boxes were stacked out on the front stoop. Melanie said they had worked long enough. She was going to take a shower.
“I’ll work on putting the crib together,” William said.
“You’ve done enough for one day,” said Melanie’s mother. “You won’t need the crib for another month, at least, William.”
“I’ll just give it a couple turns.”
Ballinger gazed at the heated gleam of his estranged wife’s skin, still such lovely skin. Oddly, he saw her as a person separate from him, someone new. He lost time for a moment and was outside memory, a delirious, pleasurable elsewhere. But in the next instant it changed in him, like a sort of mental turning of gears, and he was back in himself, aware of her as herself. How awful it had been, living through the long bad last days in the house, feeling nothing—an appalling and frightening apathy. It depressed him now to remember it.
He put the television on and sat on the couch, watching the news without really taking it in. The shower ran, and now and again a banging came from the nursery. Mary sat across from him with the baby.
“Would you like to hold her?” she said. There was a hint of her private tone with him, the old intimacy. Force of habit.
“You wouldn’t mind?”
Her smile was softly remonstrative. “Jack, really.”
He got up, turned the television off, and went over to her, and she handed the baby up. Ballinger stood there. The small face looked too soft to touch, the mouth open. “She’s not cranky now,” he said, low.
“How have you been?” Mary asked him.
He felt like crying. The feeling surprised and embarrassed him. He handed the baby back. “I’ve been better, Mary.”
She had turned her attention to the baby. But when she spoke, it was to him. “I miss you.”
“Me too.” He felt a weight on his breastbone. He reached down and touched the child’s impossibly smooth cheek.
She said, “I’ve been remembering.”
“And?” he said.
“I don’t know.” She looked at him. “I can’t say exactly how I feel. It’s not a mental thing.”
He waited. But she was attending to the baby again. The baby had stirred and was trying to build up a cry.
Melanie came in from the bedroom, drying her hair with a towel. She’d changed into a pair of denim shorts and another white blouse. “William and I will go pick up some Chinese food for dinner,” she said. Her husband called from the other room that he needed help getting up from the hard wood floor. “Daddy, would you?” Melanie said.
At the doorway of the room, looking at his graying son-in-law, Ballinger thought of death, the future. Yet he was filled with an odd exaltation—a sense, as Mary’s friend Alma might have put it, of life’s unexpected abundance. The older man grasped his hand and pulled, rising, bones creaking. Ballinger looked at the bald crown of his head. He had never felt more uncomplicatedly friendly toward anyone in his life.
“I got too stiff, sitting in that one position,” said William. “But this damn crib is substantially done.” He laughed, low, at his own profanity.
They gazed at it. The baby cried in the other room.
“Thanks for helping me get up,” William said simply, moving off down the hall. Ballinger turned and followed. The older man stopped at the entrance of the living room, leaned on the frame, and flexed his knees.
Melanie said. “Dad’s staying. Right, Dad? Tell him he’s staying, Mom.”
Mary’s response seemed modulated, as though she were trying to keep something back. “If he wants to,” she said, “I think that would be fine.”
“Please stay,” William said, putting his arm around Melanie’s waist.
Ballinger looked at them, husband and wife, forty years apart. He had a moment of being too strongly aware of the force of loving, the power and flame of it, as Melanie leaned in to turn the edge of the blanket down to look at her baby girl. He was close to tears again.
When Melanie and William had gone, Mary sat on the other end of the couch, away from Ballinger. She put her hand out and rocked the bassinet slowly. For an awkwardly extended time, they were silent. Then the baby made a small disturbed sound, and Mary murmured, “All right. It’s all right.”
Ballinger said, “How’s Alma?”
Mary looked at him. “Oh, fine. Thanks for asking.”
He said, “I thought about her today. I remembered what she said about abundance.”
“She’s having a little trouble with arthritis in her hips now. It makes her irritable.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Her family neglects her terribly. She lives in that place—”
“She’s got you.”
“Don’t make it sound easier than it is.”
“Jesus, Mary. Have you and Melanie been at some conference specializing in verbal policing or something? Sometimes I say exactly what I mean. You’ve known me long enough to know that I’m not very subtle.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mary said. “It’s difficult for everybody.”
“I never said it wasn’t gonna be difficult, did I?”
“No. You were very clear about how it was going to be.”
A moment later she said, “How have you been, really, Jack?”
“I do cartwheels in the mornings.”
She was still rocking the bassinet. “You know why Melanie did this about going out and getting the dinner, don’t you?”
He waited.
“I’ve been tending this child and remembering. All day I’ve been doing it.”
“Melanie said you looked so happy.”
She smiled. It was a wonderfully familiar-feeling smile. “I missed you all morning, Jack. The baby was crying, and I was busy, but I missed you. Missed you. I didn’t want to be young again or anything like that. Do you understand me?”
“I wanted to hit these two phone men earlier,” he told her. He couldn’t think.
She stood. “I’m going to get some water or something.”
“I think there’s some mineral water left.” He watched her go into the kitchen. When they had been younger, their desire for each other had often contained an element of humor; they could laugh and tease and play through a whole afternoon of lovemaking. He took a deep breath, then stood and walked in to her. She was standing at the sink, running water.
“Tepid water,” she said, turning to face him.
“Mary.” He took the little step toward her. She put the glass down. The water was still running. He reached past her, turned it off, and then his hands were on her shoulders, pulling her to him. To his exquisite surprise, her arms came around him at the waist. He put his mouth on hers, and the two of them tottered there, under the bright light, holding on. He was dimly aware of their one shadow on the wall, tilting. He breathed the flower-fragrance of her hair.
“We’ll wake the baby,” she said.
The phrase sounded so perfectly right, so natural, that he forgot for an instant where he was, where he had been, what processes of dissolution and legal wrangling he had been through over the past months, what loneliness and sorrow, what anger and bitterness and anxiety, negotiating an end to his long and complicated life with this still-young woman, who held so tight to him now, murmuring his name.
RICHES
Mattison bought the lottery ticket on an impulse—the first and only one he ever bought. So when, that evening, in the middle of the nine o’clock movie, the lucky number was flashed on the television screen and his wife, Sibyl, holding the ticket in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, put the coffee down unsteadily and said, “Hey—we match,” he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She stared at him and seemed to go all limp in the bones and abruptly screamed, “Oh, my God! I think we’re rich!” And even then it took him a few seconds to realize that he had the winning ticket, the big one, the whole banana, as his father put it. Easy Street, milk and honey, the all-time state lottery jackpot—sixteen million dollars.
Someone to Watch Over Me Page 2
