by Jack Finney
Each time, presently, Harry had taken out his cards, exhibited the signatures he had, and begun talking impassively of the modern need for “teetotalism.” Each time the other man had begun to smile anticipatorily, but Harry’s face remained expressionless, and as he talked on with a low-voiced almost angry intensity, deep voice rumbling, Lew watched the other man’s smile waver, become fixed, then fade. Finally Harry brought out a pen, pressing the other man to sign, insistently and with latent threat. And presently, each time, eyes bewildered, the man had reluctantly taken Harry’s pen and signed, glancing away in embarrassment. Harry had examined the signature, nodded solemnly as he tucked the card away with the others, soberly congratulated the man with a handshake, and resumed the interrupted discussion.
The man from the other law firm had complained by phone to Tom Thurber, a senior partner of their firm, and Harry had been called into the office, and formally rebuked. He’d listened, offering no explanation, then pulled out his cards and asked Tom to sign, too, and Thurber had laughed.
Lew followed the shoreline road of this northern arm of the Bay; then slowed for the Ricardo Road stop sign, and turned toward the service road and freeway just ahead. Harry had taken a long-paged legal typescript from his briefcase, laid the briefcase along his slanted thighs, arranged his papers on it, and as they rode he followed the text line by line with the tip of a yellow wooden pencil. As Lew turned toward the freeway entrance, Harry glanced up, then resumed his reading, murmuring, “God-damned legal gobbledy-gook.”
“Bring it up at the meeting this morning,” Lew said. “Propose that we be first in pioneering plain English,” and Harry said, “Yeah.”
On the crowded freeway, Harry working, they rode in silence, a part of the sluggish river of cars, moving up the long Waldo Grade, then into the Waldo tunnel which bored through a particularly high range of Marin County hills. Watching the narrow arched opening of daylight ahead, Lew waited for the moment just beyond it. It came: as they passed through the opening, there it all was—the great red towers of Golden Gate Bridge ahead, and beyond them across the blue Bay the clean white city spread out on its hills. It was a moment Lew waited for, this first, suddenly expanding look at the city, and as always he felt a little surge of anticipation at knowing he was going down into it, followed by the little anticlimax of knowing exactly where he had to go. He said, “Harry, could you give up law?”
“Give it up?”
“Yeah. And go into something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know: I just mean is it okay with you if this turns out to be all you ever do?”
Harry turned away to look ahead through the windshield. “Well. I get something out of it. In court, anyway; sometimes you can feel your argument taking hold.” He glanced at Lew. “Something about the way a judge starts to listen, and you know you’re winning if you just don’t blow it: I like that. Not this shit”—he rapped his knuckles on the briefcase. “But sometimes in a courtroom. . . . It’s a fight; you know? You can feel you’re really a lawyer.” Harry sat watching the great rust-red towers enlarge. “But I could give it up. Get into something else, and not even miss it a week later. Sometimes I see myself doing something outdoors. What about you?”
“Well, yeah; there’s some fun in it. I like working up a brief; for appeal. Working it over, becoming persuasive; you can feel it when it starts getting some bite. But still; sometimes it bothers me that this could be more or less it from now on.”
Ahead, traffic from the Sausalito entrance seeped onto the freeway. Well ahead, halfway across the bridge, brake lights flickered, everything before them slowing to a stop because of the toll plaza up ahead at the San Francisco end. Harry sat watching the stopped traffic, then said, “Hey, it’s Friday: what’re you guys doing tonight?”
“Nothing I know of.”
“Come over for supper: we’ll lay in some hamburger and junk, and do something. Or nothing. We could play some bridge, damn it, if Shirley’d settle down and finish learning the game. Come early, and we’ll drink it up a little.”
• • •
Friday or Thursday night generally meant food-shopping, and for that Jo waited for Lew. She owned a sun-faded blue Chevy van. She’d bought it for its floor space, using it to deliver her finished models; but it was third- or fourth-hand, the shocks nearly gone, and so cumbersome—heavy wooden bumpers projecting a foot or more front and back—that it was hard to park. So she waited for Lew and his VW.
At the Safeway, Jo inside, Lew waited in the car, angle-parked at the curb before the huge store: he wore tan wash pants and a red plaid shirt buttoned at the sleeves. The air was warm, his window open, the sun still well above the hills across the freeway behind him, Daylight Savings still on. The low, red-tiled roofs of the great shopping center extended out to the curb line, roofing the sidewalks before the store fronts; from speakers tucked up under the roof, music sounded softly. People passed steadily along the walk before Lew’s bumper, and he sat watching them, studying their faces.
When Jo appeared with her loaded shopping cart—in the peach-colored cotton dress and white sandals she would wear to the Levys’—Lew got out, and helped her unload into the car. They got in, but he didn’t immediately start the engine. He sat staring at the windshield for a moment, then turned to her. “You know something?” he said puzzledly. “I never see anyone I know down here. We live here. In Strawberry. But all I ever see here is strangers.”
“Well, it’s probably the biggest shopping center in the county. And right beside the freeway. So the people you see here come from everywhere.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He started the engine.
Driving home along the road he had walked last night, it seemed to Lew that now it was a different place. Cars passed; people moved about their yards in the late daylight; the chug of a power motor sounded somewhere. Looking out her window, Jo smiled in content, and said, “Strawberry’s a pleasant area, isn’t it. So green and peaceful.”
They’d said this to each other before, and Lew nodded automatically. “I guess,” he said, then surprised himself. “But . . .”
She looked at him. “But what?”
“But it’s always the same, damn it. All you ever see is people out mowing their lawns, trimming their hedges, painting their houses.”
“Well, what should they be doing?”
“I don’t know.” Then he laughed, shrugging. “I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”
They had supper out on the Levys’ balcony, a dozen feet from Lew’s, across the intervening driveway. In canvas-and-wood chairs they sat in the building’s shade, but across the road and down the lightly wooded slope beyond it the pool and two of the tennis courts still lay in the last of the sunlight. Occasionally commenting, they watched a young woman in one-piece white tennis costume sweating with effort as she batted back lobs served up by a practice machine, the court littered with the yellow balls. Beyond the courts and pool, the Bay lay blue and sparkling, eight or ten sails visible.
For a considerable time, talking lazily, often silent, they sat sipping red wine, passing a gallon jug around. Then, the sun down, the Levys went into the apartment, and presently Shirley brought out hamburgers and potato chips on paper plates, trailed by Rafe, their elderly terrier, sniffing the air, tongue anticipating. Harry followed with two filled glasses and two cans of beer. “Iced tea,” he said, handing Jo her glass. “Cheap beer”—he gave Lew a can, then set Shirley’s glass on the floor beside her empty chair: “Hemlock.” He wore frayed tan shorts, dirty, unlaced sneakers over bare feet, and a white T-shirt speckled with holes.
Shirley handed Harry his plate, and he sat down and began wolfing the fat, dripping hamburger in enormous bites, leaning forward so the squeezed-out catsup would drip down between his knees to the plate he’d set on the floor; occasional fragments of meat falling to plate or floor were snatched by Rafe. Lew sat at one end of the narrow balcony, chair tipped back against the side railing, pap
er plate held up under his chin, eating and watching Harry. He had noticed before that on weekends Harry liked to dress and eat as sloppily as he could; exaggeratedly so. Under the thin white material of Harry’s T-shirt and curling over the neckband lay a matting of black hair so dense and springy it held the light cloth away from his skin, and the hair lay black and thick across his big forearms, and curled on his immense legs. He had, not a belly, Lew said to himself, you couldn’t say that, but a general thickening around the middle; he looked effortlessly strong, and Lew was conscious of envying Harry his physical strength. He was strong, too, for his size, more than people often realized, and he enjoyed chances to surprise them with the power of his arms or legs. But still he envied the size and strength of really big men.
Hamburgers distributed, Shirley was sitting, too, plate balanced on her bare knees. Now she lifted her glass from the floor, and sipped, staring absently out over the rail. As though his eyes had simply been attracted by the movement, Lew allowed himself to casually turn and look at her; he tried to be careful not to look too often or too long at Shirley.
Tonight she wore a short-sleeved light blue middy blouse with a white sailor collar, and tailored white gabardine shorts with a blue stripe up the sides. They were very short; she liked to show off her fine legs, and once more Lew noticed how without blemish they and her arms were, no least suggestion of tiny broken vein, red mark, or unevenness of texture; probably the same all over, he thought. Her hair was black, eyes dark, skin very white; she avoided the sun. Just looking at Shirley was a pleasure, and Lew made himself turn away for fear of looking too long, retaining the last visual impression of her face, relaxed and absent. It was a pretty face, intelligent, shrewd, but not aggressive; she was ready to like people, accepting them as they seemed, had liked Lew and Jo on sight.
Lew looked past her at Jo, comparing, and she smiled and winked, and he grinned. Tonight when they got home, they’d undress, turn back a bed, and lie down together for the best kind of sex, prolonged and amiable: the mutual knowledge lay in the air between them, and Lew felt consciously happy. He liked looking at Jo, knowing what was going to happen later, and he felt proud of the way she looked in her short, peach-colored dress.
Harry scooped up his can, swigged beer audibly, the can nearly vertical, then set it down, wiping his mouth with the back of his other hand. He said, “Well? Anyone want to talk about rent control, recession, or venality and incompetence in government? If so, feel free, but don’t mind if I leave: this is the weekend, and I am in unholy retreat.”
Lew said, “Don’t we have to at least cover pollution, racism, and the rise in violence? And who wants to be first to say ‘lifestyle’? You’re right,” he said. “I get tired of the talk, talk, talk. Anyone says ‘environment,’ ‘media,’ or ‘Women’s Lib,’ and I’ll kill them.”
“Aren’t they things that ought to be talked about?” Shirley said.
“Sure. But after a while not unless you’ve got something new to add. And I haven’t. And haven’t met anyone lately who has.”
Harry said, “What we need are some new problems.”
“Well, I’ve got one,” Lew said, and complained that no one in Strawberry was ever seen to do anything out of the ordinary, “including me.”
“Well, what should they do?” Shirley said.
“Well, I’m all for lawn cutting, hedge trimming, washing the car, and other fundamentals. But just once I’d like to drive by somebody’s house, and see him out painting an enormous mythical landscape on his garage door. Most of them around here are big—two-car garages with one big door painted white, like a couple hundred big, empty canvases crying out for creativity. And there are quite a few flagpoles around. Always with the American flag, if any. Well, I’d like to see a guy run up his own personal flag. Divided into quarters each bearing some symbol of his personality. Or hell with creativity, how about a guy out in his yard just having fun. Out on the lawn carrying his wife around piggyback, laughing and squealing.”
“Hey, yeah,” Shirley said. “Why don’t we do that, Harry? Right now. You carry me around piggyback. Down there by the curb.”
“I will if you’ll make up the flag I design, no questions asked. We’ll drape it over the rail here. Or, hey; this is better. We all strip, powder ourselves white, and pose. On Lew’s balcony. After dark; I’ll rig up a spotlight. Absolutely motionless in classical pose, the way they used to do in the circus. Living statuary. How about driving by and seeing something like that in Strawberry, Lew?”
Jo said, “We could do that famous statue of the couple, ‘The Kiss.’ ”
Harry said, “Or a couple in even more classical pose called ‘The—’ ”
“Never mind,” Shirley said.
“You’re absolutely right,” Harry said. “Be hard to hold the pose motionless.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Yeah, but nobody’s supposed to object to that word any more. Not since about nineteen sixty-three.”
“Well, I don’t care.”
“Not, ‘I don’t care’: What you mean is, you don’t give a fuck.”
“I mean I don’t like casual, pointless dirty talk. And there is such a thing as dirty talk. It’s so show-offy, this oh-so-casual dropping the words into ordinary conversation.”
“Lew, how often do you punch Jo right smack in the mouth?”
“Once a week; that’s my allowance. We talked it out. Reasonably, rationally, trying to understand each other’s real feelings and basic needs. And that’s what we agreed on; it was Jo’s suggestion.”
“Doesn’t sound like nearly enough.”
“Just try it, buddy-boy,” Shirley said scornfully. “I watched the karate lessons on KQED, you know.”
“Lew, is there much wife-swapping in Strawberry? I mean permanent swaps.”
Shirley and Jo went to the kitchen and brought out second hamburgers, and Harry offered more beer or wine. They stayed out till the street lamps came on, then the air turned chilly, and they went inside. Shirley wouldn’t play bridge, but got out a Monopoly board, and they sat at the all-purpose card table beside the kitchen, and played till nearly one o’clock.
In Jo’s apartment then, Lew lay waiting in bed and, Jo calling from the bathroom, they talked, as people do when they’ve had a quiet good time with good friends, about how long they’d all known each other. Lew and Harry had gone to the same suburban-Chicago high school hardly aware of each other, the school a big one and Harry a class behind Lew. A dozen years later, finding themselves working in the same San Francisco law firm, the men had become friends. But the real friendship began, Lew and Jo agreed now, when the four of them met.
Lew was thinking of moving from the city, he’d told Harry one morning, and Harry nodded, standing in Lew’s little office. “Well, it’s not a bad commute from where I live,” he said. “You might take a look.” This said casually; a friendship was developing, but Harry was cautious about seeming premature.
Lew said, “I was thinking of a house.” He sat tilted back in his desk chair looking up at Harry.
“Buying one?”
“Hell, no; renting.”
Harry shrugged. “Well, you might find one, but it’s not easy, and they’re expensive; I tried. I like a house, I grew up in a house.”
“Me, too.”
“I like the extra room, and walking around my own place any way I want, indoors or out, belching and scratching my ass.”
“Yeah, we had a big yard; attic; full basement. My dad still had a sled he owned as a kid in the attic, a Flexible Flyer. And I had a twenty-two rifle range in the basement.”
“I had a darkroom. We even had two spare bedrooms upstairs just for company. My father didn’t make a lot of money either, but you could have a house then; everybody did. Well, maybe you’ll be lucky. You got your own furniture?” Lew shook his head. “People don’t generally rent their houses furnished any more, Lew; they get wrecked. But see what you can do, and then if you want, drop in and
look over the apartments where we are. Meet Shirley, and we’ll show you around.”
“Can I bring a friend?”
“Sure, of course.” Harry nodded, and turned to the door, careful to show no curiosity.
Talking of that time—Jo moving about the room putting small things away, shutting drawers, closing the closet—they agreed that the move to Marin had worked out well. The two women had liked each other on sight, though Harry took a little getting used to, she said. Lew and Harry, and often the four of them, played tennis on the apartment courts. Sierra skiing was only three hours away; they had all driven up half a dozen times this last winter. In good weather they went to the county beaches a lot, Stinson especially. The men had done some skin-diving with rented equipment; tried surfing and abandoned it, neither having started young enough to be good. Harry had gotten Lew into climbing, and they had twice scaled high, almost sheer faces, and descended. Now the two couples were talking with some seriousness of buying a small sailboat together. They borrowed each other’s books, ate and drank and went to movies together. But more than what they did, Jo said—she was in bed now, and they lay with the bedside lamp on, talking—was the way each of the four enjoyed the others. “It’s more than the usual two-couple friendship, where it’s mostly the men or mostly the women who are friends: all four of us are friends. I wouldn’t know what to do without them.”
“Sure. It’s a good life,” Lew said, turning on his side to face Jo. “Especially right now,” and Jo nodded, smiled, and said, “Yes.”
• • •
CHAPTER THREE
• • •
A good life, but four nights later Lew again awakened from what seemed to him like a sound sleep: for no reason he understood his eyes opened and immediately he lay fully awake. This time he was with Jo. He could just hear her slow breathing, and lying quietly, not to disturb her, it occurred to him to wonder: How long would they stay together? Months? Years? Immediately he was curious, and lay trying to think about it clearly. Was this quiet, modest, likable woman someone he could live with indefinitely? On and on? For the rest of his life? Did he want to? He couldn’t say, and tried to force an answer. He liked Jo very much; more than anyone else he knew; didn’t entirely know why, just did. He would miss her; he’d do a lot for her, and gladly. He admired her, and was proud of her. Was all that enough? It didn’t sound like it. He tried another direction: What if she left him? Well, he didn’t like that, but would survi—
