But the looks she had given him weren’t anything compared to the ones she had given Kimberly and Madison. She looked at them as if they were gigantic cockroaches she wanted to douse with Raid. She was no doubt worried that Madison was going to spit up huge geysers of curdled milk onto one of her paintings, which would also have been fun to see. That was something else that intrigued him about the woman—she lived in a basement apartment that, once you got inside, looked like some kind of art gallery. And it turned out that she worked at an art gallery, which explained why all the stuff covering her walls made it hard to see what color they were painted, though he had noticed they were a butterscotch gold. She had nice stuff, though. Very, very nice. If a person was into collecting things, that is, which was another way he had changed his thinking of late.
He and Kimberly hadn’t lingered that night, although Patsy Stewart had kept insisting that they see just this one more feature that her brilliant handyman of a husband had thought of adding to the apartment. When Bruce met older women, he often tried to imagine what they had been like when they were younger. He knew exactly what kind of girl Patsy Stewart must have been—stodgy and serious, tediously dull and industrious, explaining everything in great yawn-inducing detail, always concerned that everybody follow the rules. She had probably had that same hairdo since high school, too, lacquered hard like a football helmet. In his girl-chasing days, he never ever would have gone after a Patsy Stewart type.
When he thought about what it would be like to be married for years and years and years to somebody like her, he knew it would take a special kind of man, someone who wasn’t all that concerned about earthly pleasures. At church Pastor Monroe was always talking about storing up treasures in heaven. Well, maybe there were going to be endurance rewards up there for people like Patsy Stewart’s husband.
But he knew if he were ever to say anything like that out loud, at least in the hearing of women, he’d probably be whapped on the side of the head with somebody’s pocketbook. “You think men are the only ones who have to put up with duds for spouses?” somebody would scream, and he’d feel the blows of other pocketbooks on other parts of his body. And he could try to explain himself till he turned blue in the face—“Hey, wait a minute, I was talking about people in general, anybody stuck in a boring marriage, not just men”—but the attack wouldn’t stop until he was lying senseless on the ground. Women had developed such an edge these days, a lot of them anyway. They used to be able to take a joke better.
Anyway, if a man happened to be interested, if he had any energy left after a couple of decades of hedonism, if he hadn’t witnessed the tragic side of love or the whole tragedy called life really, if he hadn’t decided to clean up his act once and for all, this woman next door could be looked upon as a challenge. When he and Kimberly had gotten into the car that night, Kimberly had laughed again about the extremely high chill factor in Celia’s apartment. “The ultimate touch-me-not,” she had called the woman.
But Bruce had shaken his head. No, that was much too mild, he had said. She was way beyond touch-me-not. She was look-at-me-not, speak-to-me-not, be-in-the-same-room-with-me-not, breathe-the-same-air-as-me-not. And Kimberly had laughed and bounced Madison on her knee and said she sure wouldn’t be running over to borrow eggs and sugar from her. “I don’t think she’ll be giving you any come-hither looks,” she had told Bruce, to which he had replied, “Nope, only the go-thither kind.”
The jack-o’-lantern’s mouth was almost done now. Maybe he would skip the nose since there wasn’t much room left with the eyes and mouth spread out the way they were. No, Madison might notice the absence of a nose. She knew all the body parts, said their names as she pointed to them. He wouldn’t want to confuse her by omitting something as important as the nose. Maybe a little round hole would serve the purpose. He certainly couldn’t make it too big or the whole face might collapse in on itself. Maybe he should get out his drill and make two little nostrils.
He heard Celia’s front door slam and looked back over to see her get in her car again and back out of the driveway. She was carrying her tennis bag this time and wearing a short white skirt. She was good at backing out of the driveway, going quite fast and using only the rearview mirror the whole way until she got up to the top, ready to enter the street. Then she would turn her head to look for cars both ways.
Bruce checked his watch. Almost four o’clock. She wouldn’t be home till almost dark probably, and by then he would have left for church. What would she say, he wondered, if she knew how many times he had watched her come and go, flying down the driveway and stopping on a dime in the exact center of her parking pad, then later rocketing backward as if the world depended on her getting somewhere on time?
* * *
One Saturday shortly after they had moved in next door to her, he had seen Celia pull into her driveway while he was in the backyard mixing paint. He was converting part of the basement into an apartment by then, following some of Milton Stewart’s suggestions, even accepting Milton’s offer to help with the plumbing and electrical.
Together the two of them had knocked through the basement wall and installed an exterior door to make it a walk-out apartment like the Stewarts’.
To Kimberly, who fortunately was one of the few women who could still take a joke, Bruce had quipped that he was letting poor Milton help as a favor, to give him an excuse to get out of the house. “He’s got to be in the terminal stages of boredom living with the likes of Patsy,” he had said. “I’m just giving him a little shot of morphine.” And Kimberly had laughed before popping him with Madison’s diaper bag.
It was actually Milton who had told him, after Bruce had asked a few questions, that Celia used to work for a newspaper but now worked at an art gallery. That in itself was interesting. To go from a daily immersion in the dry facts of journalism to the imaginative world of art revealed some strange conflicts at work in the woman. There wasn’t any wondering about which job she liked best, though. Her apartment was packed with art, not newspapers.
But even if you hadn’t seen her apartment and had never heard the clipped, sparse way she talked when forced to give an answer and couldn’t read her body language, something about her eyes would tell anybody with half a brain that she had the brooding, melancholy temperament of an artist. Or at least an art lover. Either that or she was mad at the world about something—or maybe just deeply sad. At his age Bruce had been around the block enough times to know that mad and sad were often flip sides of the same coin.
The two different jobs were particularly intriguing to Bruce, because he himself had those same bipolar tugs in his own background—the solid world of facts and the fluid world of art. In his case it was science and math on the one hand and drama and film on the other. So when Bruce had happened to see Celia pull into her driveway late that Saturday afternoon in March while Milton was still inside wiring the kitchenette in the basement apartment, he had called out, “Hey, could I ask you something?”
She was already out of her car and walking toward her front door by then, carrying a couple of plastic Wal-Mart bags. She turned her head but kept walking, slowing down only slightly and frowning, as if to say, A person can always ask, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll get an answer. He had the feeling he’d better talk fast or she might vanish inside while he was in midsentence. He broke into a trot and actually stepped through the low hedge into the Stewarts’ backyard as he talked so by the time he had finished his question, he was standing up on the driveway extension right beside her Mustang.
His question was something he had been mulling over in the past hour or so. It didn’t come out quite as he had it planned. He stumbled around a bit and ended badly. “I saw in the paper where there was this Norman Rockwell exhibit coming to Atlanta next week.” No response from the snow queen, so he forged ahead. “Well, see, I was wondering if real artists would ever go to something like that. I mean, you know, would they think his stuff was too commercial to be real art?”
He was looking into the sun, which made it hard to see her face clearly. He heard her answer, though, as she inserted her key into the lock on her front door.
“You’d be an idiot not to acknowledge Norman Rockwell as a real artist,” she said.
He held up his hands and pretended to be insulted. “Hey, let’s not get personal.”
She didn’t joke back, though. The door was open by now, and she stepped inside. As she closed it, she added, “You couldn’t begin to touch an original Rockwell if it came up for auction.”
He tried again, laughing once more. “So I’m not only an idiot but an impoverished one, huh?” he said. He could have told her about his grandmother’s money, but he knew that would come across as bragging. Anyway, the door was already closed. He remembered waiting for a few seconds on the off chance that she might open the door and add something lighthearted and conciliatory. But when she didn’t, he made his way back through the hedge to his own backyard, feeling exactly like the idiot she had implied he was.
Then there was another time, that night maybe a couple of weeks or so after that, when Kimberly and Madison were out, and water started dripping through the basement ceiling. It turned out that Kimberly had flushed one of the upstairs toilets right before she had run out to get in her van, not realizing that sometime earlier Madison had dropped a little pint-sized stuffed monkey into that very toilet, never dreaming as she drove merrily off to buy groceries, which was something most normal people did during the daytime instead of at night, that the water in the toilet was slowly rising higher and higher, then spilling over the edge and splashing onto the ceramic tile floor, and that by the time she arrived at Winn-Dixie and got Madison happily settled in the front of the grocery buggy, it was running toward the corner of the bathroom where the floor sloped downward, already beginning its seepage through baseboard, past subflooring, through insulation, around joists, and past ceiling tiles to drip onto the new Formica countertop in the basement kitchenette.
Luckily, Bruce had been laying carpet in the basement that evening, so he caught the problem early. He was reciting Oberon’s final speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the exact moment he registered the sound of the sixth or seventh drip against the Formica, which made him look up from the hallway floor and into the kitchenette. His first thought coming out of the sixteenth century back to the twenty-first was that the leak must somehow be connected with the rainstorm that had finally gotten started after a good half hour of earnest preliminary thunder.
He even had time to feel a flush of anger over it, especially since the man who had sold them the house had claimed that the roof was only five years old, before it hit him that a leak in the roof couldn’t possibly reach the basement this fast. At that point he ran upstairs, saw the situation, and threw down armfuls of towels, then started yanking open closet doors searching for a plunger, which he never found because, for some reason that was further evidence of the Mystery of Womankind, Kimberly had decided to store the plunger next to the washing machine in the laundry room off the kitchen, a place he would never have thought to look because it would hardly be convenient for the kinds of disasters that necessitated its use.
The storm now revving itself up to full gear, he ran out the side door and across the backyard to Celia’s door. He knew she was home because her car was there and lights were on. He rang the doorbell, rang it several times, in fact, before she opened the door the tiniest crack and looked at him with those sad eyes of hers, a frown creasing her forehead.
It was another frigid reception, which was no surprise. What did surprise him, though, was how tongue-tied he felt again. What was it about this woman? And he didn’t exactly come across as John Wayne or Arnold Schwarzenegger when he flinched visibly at a huge crack of lightning. He tried a few light, off-handed comments, but she didn’t yield an inch.
She let him borrow a plunger, though, and when he returned it a little later, he stammered out a few other dumb things in an attempt to act witty and manly before she almost caught his heel in the door in her haste to get rid of him. He could only hope he had come across less klutzy than he felt. It made him a little mad, actually, since he used to be so good at bluffing his way through awkward moments. How could such a small person, a little frozen minnow of a woman, make him feel like a twelve-year-old? It was enough to make him wish he had gone to Patsy Stewart’s front door instead of Celia’s even if Patsy would have been a lot slower and not nearly so nice to look at. She would probably have delivered a lengthy admonition about how to avoid such mishaps in the future and would have called Milton to come and give some pointers on how to repair the damage.
Then in June Bruce had done the stupidest of all stupid things. Celia had been gone for several days. Milton had told him she was in Georgia closing out her grandmother’s affairs. Kimberly had been bugging Bruce to rip out the dining room chair rail, which some former obviously color-blind owner had painted lime green. She wanted to wallpaper the whole room and didn’t want to mess with the chair rail, which, besides being an ugly color, also had two conspicuous gouges in it that looked like somebody had hacked at it with an ax.
So one day when Kimberly packed up Madison and took her to the kiddie pool at the YMCA, Bruce tackled the chair rail. It didn’t take him long. He leaned the pieces against the front steps, then went back in to get his hammer so he could remove all the nails before stacking the boards out by the street for pickup. Just as he stepped out the front door again, hammer in hand, he saw Celia’s red Mustang flash down the Stewarts’ driveway toward her parking pad. So she was back already from her grandmother’s. Like a doofus, he reached down without thinking or looking and grabbed one of the lengths of chair rail only to feel an immediate stab of pain as a nail dug into his palm.
At the bathroom sink inside, he washed the wound with soap and water, then let the water run over it while he looked for a Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet, all the drawers, even the small closet next to the sink. Where in the world did Kimberly keep the Band-Aids? Every time he removed his hand from the flow of water, it started bleeding again. He grabbed a wad of tissue and pressed it against his palm, then hurried to the other bathroom to look. No luck.
How irritating. What if Madison hurt herself and needed a Band-Aid? What would Kimberly do then? What was so hard about keeping some basic first-aid supplies on hand and storing them in a convenient and likely place? He remembered the toilet plunger. Maybe the Band-Aids were in some similarly illogical place. Maybe he should look in the refrigerator or the file cabinet.
But then, maybe he could put the situation to good use, he thought as he made his way out the front door and down the Stewarts’ driveway toward Celia’s apartment. Although part of his mind was saying, “Don’t be a fool, leave her alone, give it up,” another part was saying, “Just ask for a Band-Aid, make it short, play it cool.” But he needed to act like his injury was cause for some concern, not just a minor scrape, or he would look ridiculous once again.
This time would be different. He would act mature and serious, yet brave and low-key. He would hold back a little, not seem so eager to please. He wouldn’t talk himself into a corner this time. He would call on all his old skills with women, which he didn’t use that much anymore, though he knew he surely must still have them. He would try just this one more time to correct her opinion of him and then let it go and never bother her again. By now he knew that she must think he was one of those learning-disabled adults who couldn’t function independently, who was given small menial jobs around the house.
He was surprised to see that she was still sitting in her car, almost as if she were waiting for him to show up, th
ough he knew for sure that wasn’t the case. Arriving at the car, he saw that her eyes were closed. He knew she couldn’t be asleep because women didn’t fall asleep that fast, especially ones torqued up as tight as this one. He tapped lightly on the window of her Mustang with a knuckle, and from the way she jumped, you would have thought he had fired a gun at her point-blank.
Naturally all his intentions of acting intelligent and winsome fell flat. He couldn’t seem to open his mouth without uttering something inane. But once again she gave him what he asked for, though with the same disapproving set of her mouth as before. As if she were thinking, How many more times is this man going to show up at my door on the pretext of needing something? Can’t he do anything for himself? After the Band-Aids were in place, he helped her carry her things in, but it was clear that she wished he hadn’t offered. After he left, he imagined her going around with a sponge and disinfectant, wiping all the surfaces he had touched.
Then the hot volley of words through her kitchen window that day back in August. As if he had purposely waited until she had company for supper, then somehow beamed Kimberly’s new cat over to set up a howl on her window ledge. How was he to know the demented cat would be lurking in the basement, waiting to bolt out the door as soon as he opened it? And how was he to know it would streak across the backyard toward the Stewarts’ house and fling itself up against Celia’s kitchen window? Bruce had seen the light on in the kitchen, but how was he to know Celia was just sitting down with a supper guest?
The least she could do was show a little gratitude to him for chasing the cat down and taking it away. But no, not Her Royal Rudeness. She opened the window and let loose, telling him she didn’t appreciate a joke like that, if it was supposed to be a joke, that she despised cats, and that if that was his cat, she’d better not ever see it around her apartment again or she would . . . blah blah blah.
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