As he gazed at the west side of the pond, he noticed that the apple blossoms floating on the water had collected into a kind of clump. The water lapped against the boat. He bent over and with his right index finger began absentmindedly to write his name on the pond’s pale green surface. When he realized what he was doing, he started to laugh.
Eric called in September, November, and twice in December. In a remote and indistinct voice he said he wasn’t having an easy time of it, living by himself. Two weeks before Christmas he announced that he had moved out of the cabin and was living in a rented room in Ely, where he worked as a stock boy at the supermarket. He thought he would give the experiment another month and then call it quits. He said—as if it were incidental—that he had met another woman.
“What about Lorraine?” his father asked.
“That’s over.”
“It’s a good thing you fall out of love as fast as you fall in. Who’s the new one?”
“You’ll meet her.”
“I hope so.”
In February, after a heavy snowstorm, Eric called again to say that he’d be down the following Saturday and would bring Darlene with him. “Darlene?” his father asked. “I knew a Darlene once. She ran a bowling alley.”
“You should talk,” his son said. “Wilford.”
“All right, all right. I see your point. So you’ll be here on Saturday. Looking forward to it. How long’ll you stay?”
“How should I know?” his son said.
George buzzed the apartment to let him know that his son and his son’s new girlfriend had just come in. Mr. Bradbury was waiting at the door when he heard the elevator slide open, and he went on waiting there, under the foyer’s chandelier, while in the hallway Eric and Darlene worked out a plan. The only remark he could catch was his son’s “Don’t let him tell you …” He couldn’t hear the rest of it. What to do, or what to think, or something of the sort.
After they knocked, he waited thirty seconds, timing it by his Rolex. When his son knocked a second time, harder and faster, he said, “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
He opened the door and saw them: a surprised young couple. His son had shaved his beard and cut his hair short; the effect was to make him seem exposed and small-townish. He looked past his father into the apartment with the roving gaze of a narcotics agent. “Hi, Dad,” he said. The woman next to him looked at Eric, then at his father, waiting for them to shake hands or embrace; when they did neither, she said, “Hi, Mr. Bradbury,” and thrust out her hand. “Darlene Spinney.” The hand was rough and chapped. She glanced into the apartment. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Eric’s father said, moving aside so that they could step into the foyer. “Come in and warm up.” Eric slipped off his parka, draped it over a chair, groaned, and immediately walked down the hallway to the bathroom. Mr. Bradbury helped Darlene with her coat, noting from the label that she had purchased it at Sears. The woman’s figure was substantial, north-woods robust: capable of lifting canoes. “I wonder where that son of mine went to?”
“Eric?” She glanced down the hall. “He’s in the bathroom. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Bradbury: you make your son real nervous. He’s as jumpy as a cat. What I think it is, he’s got diarrhea, bringing me here and seeing you. That’s two strikes. One more strike and the boy’ll be out cold.”
He looked at her with some interest. “Come into the living room, Miss Spinney,” he said. “Care for a drink?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a beer?”
“Sure.” He leaned toward her. “I suppose my son has warned you about my drinking.”
“What he said was you sometimes have hard stuff before lunch.”
“That is correct.” He went to the refrigerator, took out a Heineken, and poured it into a glass. “That is what I do. But only on weekends. You can think of it as my hobby. Did he tell you anything else?”
“Oh, I asked, all right. Nothing much but mumbles.”
“What’d you ask?”
“Well, for instance, did you get mean.”
“When I drank.”
“Right.”
“Why’d you want to know?” He came out of the kitchen and handed the glass to her. They both walked toward the front window.
“Do you know mean drinkers, Mr. Bradbury? I don’t guess so. I know a few. In my family, this is. It’s not nice conversation and I won’t go through all the details, about being hit and everything. This,” she said, looking out the window, “is different. I sort of figured you were a man who doesn’t have to hit things.”
“I never learned,” he said, giving the words a resentful torque. “I hired people. Now where did you and Eric meet? I can’t imagine.”
“At the supermarket. He was working in produce, and I was up there at the checkout. I’d never seen him in town before he started working in the back. Well, I mean”—she looked for a place to set down her beer, hesitated, and held on to it—“I thought, oh, what a nice face. Two glances and you don’t have to think about it. So we ate our lunches together. Traded cookies and carrots. He’s nice. He gave me a parking ticket. He said it was an old joke? Anyway, we talked. He wasn’t like the local boys.”
“No?”
“No. He can sit by himself. When he works, he listens to the boss, Mr. Glusac, giving him orders, and he has this so-what look on his face. He’s sweet. Like he’s always making plans. He’s a dreamer. Can’t fix a car.”
“I don’t think he ever learned.”
“That’s the truth. Doesn’t know what gaskets are, says he never learned to use a socket wrench. That car of his was hard-starting and dieseling, and I told him to tune it, you know, with a timing light, and he tells me he’s never removed a spark plug in his life. ‘We didn’t do that,’ he says. Jesus, it’s a long way down.” She was gazing at the frozen pond in the park.
“Eleven floors,” Mr. Bradbury said. “You can’t hear the harlot’s cry from street to street up here, more’s the pity. I look down on it all from a great height. I have an eleventh-floor view of things.”
She said, “I can see a man walking a dog. Eric says you write commercials.” She sat down on the sofa and glanced at the muted newscaster on the television set. He noticed that her fingernails were painted bright red, and that the back of one hand was scarred. “Is it hard, writing commercials?”
“Not if your whole life prepares you to do it. And of course there are the anodynes. If it weren’t for them, my heart wouldn’t be in it.”
“Anodynes.”
“I’m sorry. Painkillers. Things that come in bottles and tubes.”
“I only had a year of community college before I had to go to work,” Darlene said, and just as Mr. Bradbury understood what her remark was supposed to explain, she said, “I’m always afraid I’m boring people. Eric says I don’t bore him. Do you know your TV set is on?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s it on if you aren’t listening to it?”
“I like to have someone in the room with me, in case I get a call from the fraud police. Ah, hey, here’s the kid.”
Eric had reappeared silently. His father turned to look at him; he might have been standing in the hallway, out of sight, listening to them both for the last five minutes. Eric sat down next to Darlene on the sofa, putting his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled close to him, and Mr. Bradbury resisted the impulse to close his eyes. He sat down in his Barcelona chair. “So,” he began, with effort, “here you are. Give me a report. How was nature?”
“Nature was fine.” With his free hand Eric brutally rubbed his nose. The nose was running, and he wiped his hand on the sofa.
“Fine? Did the flora and fauna suit you? I want a report. Did you discover yourself? Let’s hear something about the pastoral panorama.” Darlene, he noticed, was staring at his mouth.
“It was fine,” Eric said, staring, without subtlety, at the ceiling.
“I hate it when you look at the ceiling. A world without objects is a sensib
le emptiness. Come on, Eric, let’s have a few details. Did you from outward forms win the passion and the life, whose fountains are within?”
“My dad is a quoter,” Eric said. He glanced at Darlene. “He quotes.” He saw his father looking at him. “It was fine,” he repeated, facing his father.
“He won’t talk about that time alone in that cabin, Mr. Bradbury, so you might as well not ask. Lord knows I’ve tried.”
“Just between him and his psyche, eh?”
“ ‘Psyche,’ ” Eric said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”
“There you go, criticizing my vocabulary again. When will I be allowed to use the six-dollar words they taught us at college? Never, it appears.” He smiled at Darlene. “Pay no attention to me. I inflict my irony on everybody.”
A long pause followed. Eric’s father had begun counting the seconds in groups of two when Darlene said, “You wouldn’t believe all the city people who come up north to commune with nature. Like that woman Lorraine, her family. We see them all summer. They buy designer backpacks and dehydrated foods they don’t eat. Then they sleep on the ground for two weeks, complain of colds, and whiz home in their station wagons. Me, I’m lucky if I can sleep in a bed.”
“Darlene has insomnia,” Eric explained.
“Right. I do. That’s why I don’t understand people sleeping on the ground. Who wants that when you can shower in a bathroom and sleep in a bed and look out from the eleventh floor? Not me.”
“Insomnia,” Mr. Bradbury said. “How interesting. Ever tried pills?”
“You have insomnia?” she asked. “Try bananas. Or turkey. They have an enzyme, tryptophan, and that’s what you need. Unless you’re hardcore, like me. I have to run, eat bananas, skip coffee, but it usually doesn’t make any difference.”
“We jog together,” Eric said.
They were cuddling there, Darlene and Eric, Mr. Bradbury decided, to test his powers of detachment. Before this was over he would be a Zen saint. He thought longingly of the vodka bottle in the kitchen cupboard, whose cap he had not, not, removed once today: his hands were folded in his lap, as he watched Darlene place her hand on Eric’s leg. The truth, he thought, raising one hand to scratch his ear, is an insufferable test of a man’s resources. Tilting his head imperceptibly, he glanced for relief at the Lichtenstein above the sofa. “Bananas?” he said.
“Eric says you wrote those Colonel Crisp commercials.” Her voice was egging him on into the kitchen: glass, ice cubes, and the tender care of the liquor.
“Yes.” He would not stand it. He could not stand it, and began to get up.
Darlene twisted around, so that Eric’s hand fell off her shoulders onto the sofa, to look at the wall behind her. “What’s that?” she asked.
“That? Oh, that’s a Lichtenstein.” He sat down again.
“Is it valuable?”
“Yes. I suppose so. Yes.”
She was looking at it closely, probably, Mr. Bradbury thought, counting the dots in the woman’s face. “Do you write radio commercials, too?”
“Oh, yes. I once wrote a spot for a lightbulb company with a Janáek fanfare in the background. That made them sit up.”
“Jesus!” Eric stood suddenly. “I can’t stand this!” He went down the hallway, and they both heard a door slam. Just then Elena came into the living room to announce that lunch was ready.
“It’s a hard life up here on the eleventh floor,” Mr. Bradbury mused. “Maybe he went to get a banana.” He waited. “Or some white meat.”
“I’ll get him,” Darlene said, rising. “His moods’ve never bothered me. Did you know,” she began, then stopped. She apparently decided to plunge ahead, because she said, “He talks a lot about his mother.”
“Not to me. She died of cancer, you know.”
“Yeah. He said so. He remembers all of it. He likes you, Mr. Bradbury. Don’t get him wrong. He’s crazy about you. I shouldn’t say this.”
“Oh, please say it. Crazy about me?”
“Oh sure. Didn’t you know?” She looked surprised.
Mortified and pleased, he watched her disappear down the hall.
After lunch, whose terrain was crossed by Mr. Bradbury’s painfully constructed comic anecdotes about daily work in an advertising agency, he suggested that they all go out for a walk in the park. Eric and Darlene agreed with an odd fervor. After bundling themselves up, they took the elevator down, Darlene checking her face, making moues, in the elevator’s polished mirror.
Outside the temperature was ten degrees above zero, with no wind, and a sunny sky. When they reached the park, Darlene ran out ahead of them onto the pond, where the park authorities had cleared a rink for skating. A loudspeaker was playing Waldteufel.
“Don’t lecture me,” Eric said. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.”
“Who, me?” Darlene was now out of earshot. “That’s for suckers. Can you tell me yet how long you’re staying?”
“Why do you keep asking? A few days. Then we’re going north again. I’m going to be up there for the rest of the winter and then re-enroll next fall and graduate in the spring.”
“I don’t suppose she’s going with you.”
“I don’t know.” He waited. “She’s interested in our money. The money.”
“A good woman’s failing. I kind of like her,” Mr. Bradbury said. “Diamond in the rough and all that. At first I thought she was queen of the roller derby. Didn’t know if she was playing with a full deck.”
“I almost proposed to her,” Eric said. “Almost.”
“Oh Christ.” His father stomped his right foot in the snow. “You, with all your, well, call it potential, and you want to marry a girl who counts out change?”
She was far ahead of them on the ice, pulling two children on skates around in a circle. The children yelled with pleasure.
“She’s … different, Pop. With her, everything’s simpler. They don’t have women like her around here, I don’t think. You don’t get what I mean at all.”
“Oh, I get it. You went up north looking for nature, and you found it, and you brought it back, and there it, I mean she, is. Overbite, straight hair, chapped hands, whopping tits, and all.”
“You wouldn’t believe,” Eric said, watching her, “how comforting she is.”
“What?” He stopped and waited. “Well, I might.”
“When I wake up, she’s always awake. She has a way of touching that makes me feel wonderful. Generous.” Now they were both watching her. “It’s like love comes easily to her.”
“God, you’re romantic,” his father said. “It must be your age.”
“Want to hear about how wonderful she is? In bed?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“You used to want to hear.”
“I shouldn’t’ve asked. That was a mistake. Glückschmerz. Besides, couples don’t live in bed. You can’t insult a waiter or cash a check in bed. As a paradigm for life, it’s inadequate.”
Eric was showing an unsteady smile. “I want to throw myself at her feet,” he said. “We’re the king and queen of lovers. Love. God, I just lap it up. We can go and go. I don’t want life. I want love. And so does she.”
“Have we always talked this way?” his father asked. “It’s deplorable.”
“We started getting a little raw about two years ago. That was when you began asking me about my girlfriends. Some pretty raw questions, things you shouldn’t have been asking. I mean, we all know why, right?”
“Just looking out for my boy.” In the cold, he could feel his eyelid twitching.
“You could mind your own business, Pop. You could try that.” He said this with equanimity. Darlene was running back toward them. She ran awkwardly, with her upper torso leaning forward and her arms flailing. Three children were following her. As she panted, her breath was visible in the cold air.
“Sometimes I think I lead a strange life,” Eric’s father said. “Sometimes I think that none of this is real
.”
“Yeah, Chekhov,” Eric said. “I read him, just like you told me to.” Darlene ran straight up to Eric and put her blue mittens, which had bullet-sized balls of snow stuck to them, up to both sides of his face. She exposed all her teeth when she smiled. She took Eric’s left hand. Then she reached down with her other hand and grasped Mr. Bradbury’s doeskin glove. Standing between them, she said, “I love winter. I love the cold.”
“Yes,” Mr. Bradbury said. “The bitterness invigorates.”
Not letting go of either of their hands, she walked between them back to the apartment building.
They sat around for the rest of the afternoon; Darlene tried to take a nap, and Eric and his father watched a basketball game, DePaul against Marquette. When the game was half over, Eric turned to his father and asked, “Where are your cigarettes, Pop?”
“My little friends? I evicted them.”
“How come?”
“I quit in December. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was fixing to die. The outlines of my heart were all but visible under the skin, it hurt so much. I felt like a corpse ready for the anatomy lesson. So: I stopped. Imagine this. I threw my gold Dunhill lighter, the one your mother gave me, down the building’s trash shaft, along with all the cigarettes in the house. I heard the lighter whine and clatter all the way to the heap at the bottom. What a scarifying loss was there. And how I miss the nicotine. But I wasn’t about to go. I may look like Samuel Gompers, but I’m only fifty-two. I figured there must be more to life than patient despair, right?”
Sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa on which his father was sitting, Eric held his hand up in the air behind him. “Congratulations,” he said. The two of them shook hands. “That took real guts.”
“Thank you.” He checked his fingers, still yellow from nicotine stains. “Yes, it did. I agree.” He thumped his chest. “Guts.”
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