“What happened after that?” Naomi asked.
“Oh, after that they got together again and we had another little sister and we all moved out West. Los Angeles.”
A warmth came over Naomi, a feeling like love. The woman across the table had become her sister, and nothing was secret between them and nothing was unforgivable. “Our family was real close,” she said, carefully because the words wanted to mix themselves up.
“Some families are.” Athena looked irritated.
Naomi wondered if what she had said about her own family was taken as a criticism of Athena’s family. I ought to be going home, she thought. Mama’s alone. What am I doing, sitting here laughing with this woman who almost murdered her father?
“My father was a barber,” she heard herself say. “Had a shop where they’ve got Rich’s Cafeteria now. He died of a heart attack when Cort was still almost a baby.” Her tongue and lips got in the way of her words. She wanted to say that he was a small man and meticulously neat, she wanted to describe his face and the way he walked and his gentle hands that smelled of cologne, but she couldn’t form the words right, and even if she could, respect would prevent her from describing his physical aspects. The memory of him bloomed up here in this place where she ought not to be, and she was a delinquent child whom he had come into the bar for, to fetch home. Hal had gone into bars and Cort went into bars, and that was all right. But what was she doing here when she ought to be home with her mother, especially on this day, the day a year ago her brother had died?
“How old’s your mother?” Athena asked, and began to laugh again. One of the three young men in a row at the bar turned his head to watch her. “The reason I asked, I had this idea about your mother and my dad. Maybe they could get together.”
Naomi watched the young man watching Athena laughing. Athena could not see him. Her friend might be pleased with his interest, Naomi thought, but to her it was not interest in Athena as a woman, it was a contemptuous interest, because the woman was not young, because her sagging throat moved with the laughter, and the gold particles in her teeth shone in the amber light. As she watched the young man watching—a man with a crew cut over his flattish head and wide eyes in a small face—a desire rose up in her to protect her friend with love, to protect even the young punk, to protect everybody with a love that would submerge all contempt. He saw her watching him and turned his gaze on her, and a many-fingered lightning raced across her belly.
“We ought to arrange it so they’d get married,” Athena was saying. “One time I tried to get him to go into a rest home. I told him he’d have lots of friends, but he wouldn’t budge. So I thought, what the hell, let him have his own way, take care of him, give me something to do in the evening besides file my fingernails.”
A seeking look in Athena’s large eyes shocked Naomi, and she fumbled around in her conscience for the right response. In her friend’s eyes was a desperate need to be instructed in the rigors of her own old age coming, a need to be solaced even by the picayune face of Naomi, by Naomi, who was ignorant of what everybody else knew. But Naomi could console only her own, only Mama and Cort. She heard herself laughing, she bent her head down to the rickety table, laughing at the joke that Athena had already left far behind. “Oh, they’d make a couple all right!” she agreed.
“You girls think of something funny?” the young punk asked.
“We just arranged a marriage,” Athena said.
“For you?”
“Oh, yes, for me!” Athena, laughing, almost choked on the smoke of her cigarette.
“Well, why not?” he asked, his eyes closing for an instant to hide the taunting in them, his mouth smiling acceptingly. “Why not?”
Athena was pounding her chest to bring up the smoke. “Don’t ask me why not so many times or I’ll tell you why not!”
Naomi, impressed by her friend’s rejection of the young punk’s ridicule, bowed her head to the table again, laughing, taken over by pleasure with her own life. She was who she had chosen to be, a county courthouse clerk, unmarried, going home in a minute to her mother.
The sky was dark when she got off the bus and walked the three blocks to home. “Mama,” she called, unlocking the door, accidentally kicking a small sample box of cereal left on the porch. With the door open, her hand on the knob, she stooped to pick up the box. On it was the face of a happy squirrel wearing a bow tie. “Mama,” she called, “somebody left something for you.”
Her mother was lying on the sofa, covered by the afghan, her face pale in the flicker and waves of blue light from the television screen. No light was on anywhere in the rest of the house. “Where you been?”
“I did some shopping.”
“Today’s the day he died.” Her mother lifted her arms, and Naomi sank down and gathered up the old body grown so thin in the past year. But her mother thrust her away. The smell of the bar was on her.
Naomi pushed herself up and stood unsteadily, took off her hat, took off her coat, stepped out of her high-heeled shoes. She had been reminded for over a month that this Friday was the date he had died a year ago. She had known it herself without reminders. Without any warning in herself, a wail came up, and more wails, sounding like wails of remorse to appease her mother. Unable to do anything about them, she could only wonder. They weren’t over her brother, nor over her mother, and she didn’t know what they were over, unless they were over herself.
5
Dolores left the city a few days after high-school graduation exercises, boarding the bus to San Francisco. She found a place to live in an apartment shared by three other girls. It was a first-floor apartment, old, heavily carpeted, the living room full of potted plants, the mantelpiece laden with dime-store china figures. They took turns cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the living room that nobody used. Above them lived more girls, and on the third floor, the top, lived the landlady, a Frenchwoman who came down to investigate complaints and to make complaints of her own. Her rooms for girls were known to agencies for immigrants, to the French consul, and were advertised in the “For Rent” columns, and no more than a day passed between the vacating of a room and the renting of it. At the time Dolores moved into the front bedroom that faced the street, two French girls were living in the bedrooms down the hall, one a secretary at the consulate and the other a typist for an importer, and the fourth bedroom was rented to a girl from Chicago, a cocktail waitress, who made use of the extra closet in the living room to hang up the clothes her own closet couldn’t hold and to set out shoes in a row, shoes with heels fantastically high—lucite heels and gilt heels and electric-blue suede heels and red lacquered heels.
“Oh, you are so attracteef!” Janine, the consular secretary, told Dolores the first day. Chatting over coffee in the small kitchen, Dolores began to sense sharply the appraising that women do of one another. Janine was observing Dolores’s womanness, everything about her—her skin, her features, her hands, her legs, her hair, particulars even more meaningful than they had been to the men in her mother’s cafe back home, and Dolores felt the presence of the thousands of women in the city, the women by whom she would be measured and against whom she would measure herself. The eyes of this woman showed a degree more of keenness than that in men’s eyes, a desperation, a touch of despair, and Dolores felt trapped by this woman across the table, this flattering woman constantly pushing up the sleeves of her soiled pongee kimono, tossing back her short dark hair.
Dolores found a job as waitress in a small restaurant serving expensive lunches on white tablecloths, and in her third week there accepted an invitation to take a ride around the city from a gray-haired, bustling man, a contractor who joked with her almost every day, snuffling his laughter down his nose. Back home, small-time contractors came into her mother’s cafe in clothes the color of concrete dust and complained about unions, lumberyards, architects, owners, and banks. This one wore tailored suits and parked his red and white Corvette at the foot of a hill and pointed out to her an apartment building
at the top, its windows hot gold in the setting sun, or parked before a modern house, square, a great reflective expanse of glass facing the bay, or before a stark, concrete church, a neon cross dividing its triangular front. Once, when they were parked on a hill that gave a view of the Embarcadero, she expected him to say that the white ship alongside a pier was his, like an exuberant child would say to an adult in tow. But she saw that she was the child, believing that a city grew up by itself, magically. Not only did he alter the skyline, change the views of the city, he knew about scandals in city politics, and those involved in the scandals were friends or enemies of his; he patronized the best restaurants and the jazz clubs, and pointed out to her which innocuous houses had once been famous houses of prostitution.
Her first time out with him he had explained that his wife was away for a couple of weeks and he needed to hear a woman laughing and to help her put on her coat, and she laughed at the comedy they saw and gracefully moved her shoulders for the coat. The evening was his way of telling her he missed his wife. The following night he parked his car in the Marina, and while the masts of the sailboats swayed across the windshield, he spent two hours caressing her. She prepared for the third evening by dropping scented balls of oil, like somber-colored jewels, into her bath water, by changing earrings three times and lipstick twice, by drawing mascara lines around her eyes, fascinated by the effect of each artifice.
“You are stunning!” Janine clapped her hands, muttering something in French, like a prayer. “Who is he? Who is the man? Is he a movie star?”
Dolores sat at the kitchen table and, over a cup of black coffee, told Janine about him while the woman muttered prayers in French and allowed her pongee kimono to fall open at her breasts.
“Oh, he is a man of distinction,” Janine said. “That is the kind of man you deserve. You have an expenseef look,” laughing with an excess of pleasure that proved the laughter false.
The flattery was demanding something of Dolores. She couldn’t reject it because she needed even flattery’s imitation of praise. It demanded that she confirm the truth of it and surprise this woman with the truth. Toying with her teaspoon, her voice low, she said, “There was a man back home, he was an attorney, he was running for Congress. I mean he was very intelligent and everybody liked him, and he killed himself over me. I mean he was in love with me. He had a wife and child.”
Janine lifted her dark eyes to stare, and a tangle of noises came into her throat, a seductive laugh entangled with a moan. “Ah, no, that is terrible! Poor man! Poor man! I could tell when I saw you. Whenever you see a beautiful girl who is sad, you can say to yourself, ‘Some man has wounded her, he is tied to his wife’s apron strings and he did not have the courage to untie himself.’ That is the way it is. But with you I saw something more, something tragic. I said to myself, ‘There was violence. The man shot his wife.’ And then it came to me, ‘No, he shot himself. That girl has that look of losing what she can nevair get back.’ ”
“You knew about me?”
“I looked and I knew.”
“You mean I didn’t even have to tell you?”
“That is why you told me. Because I knew already. You could see in my face that I knew. All my life I have this intuition. It has nevair disappointed me. Nevair. Have you also felt intuition? They do not have it, men do not have it. Only women. It is mysterious, who knows where it comes from? That is why they look up to us. When a man takes a woman out, as tonight this man will take you out, he will be in awe of you. Because you have the intuition. They envy us for it. We have this gift while they,” and she clapped a hand to her head, “they think and they think how to figure out somebody, who to trust and who not to trust, but the woman, she has the answer just like that,” snapping her fingers. “You have intuition about this man?”
“George, you mean?”
“That is his name? You have intuition there will be trouble?”
“He’s married, if that’s what you mean.”
“Married or not! Sometime there is no trouble at all with the married ones. I am talking about how you feel . . .”
“You mean am I in love with him?”
“No, no, no! I am asking—do you feel trouble is coming?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, good then. That is good. You have a nice time and do not worry.” Janine’s eyes were luminous—she had revealed herself. She was a seeress, she knew about Dolores’s past and future, and her thin mouth smiled a false apology for her intrusion into another person’s life.
Dolores’s heels, clicking sharply on the sidewalk from the Corvette to the door of his apartment building, were silenced by the thick carpet of the foyer. Silence now, like the unspeaking moment before the embrace. They hurried in silence up the stairs and past the doors of other tenants, doors he must have entered with his wife for an evening’s visit, and came at last to his door.
A lamp was on in the small entry. He went before her into the living room, switching on another lamp. “Come on, come in, don’t stand there like a country cousin,” he called back to her. He did not help her take off her coat, as he had done in restaurants and theaters, and she dropped it on the long beige couch. “Want some coffee?” he asked, drawing curtains together across the expanse of glass, closing out the reflection of the large white lamp he had lit. The moment’s reflection of the lamp had intrigued her—the lamp itself was his, but the reflection of it, like a lamp out in the night, was hers. “Come on, let’s have some coffee. Something else, see what we can find. Usually some fish eggs around, put ’em on crackers.”
Her heels still silenced by carpet, this one the color of sand and that sent up a thick, stuffy feeling into her legs, she followed him toward the kitchen. At the kitchen doorway he turned, impetuously, fitfully, to watch her cross the room, a nervous, embarrassed smile in his eyes. “Come on,” he said, taking in how she looked in his apartment, a girl whose face was excitingly unfamiliar and whose body he was to know in a little while.
She followed him into the small, gleaming kitchen, and sat down at the glass-top table. Through the glass she saw her legs and how her short black dress slipped up past her knees as she crossed them. He tossed his cigarettes onto the table. Every time, before, he had brought out the pack gracefully, a wordless, confidential, insinuating offer. She did not touch them. She put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands and watched him opening jars, stooping to look for crackers in a low cupboard, measuring coffee for the tall chromium percolator.
“That thing looks like a rocket,” she said, and he laughed, a quick, eager laugh to make them both feel at home.
“It does, it does,” he agreed, talking so fast as he counted spoonfuls that his teeth caught at the words. He’s fifty, she thought, and he talks as fast as a kid. Some coffee grounds scattered over the top of the stove, and he glanced at her sideways to see if she had noticed.
“You nervous?” she asked, laughing.
“Naw, naw, I hate this teaspoon stuff. I hate little bitsy stuff. I’m a mountain mover, like to move big things fast. You know what I’ve always had in mind to do? Move New York to San Francisco and vice versa. Lots of people I know in New York are never going to get out here, so I could do that little favor for them. No more blizzards in winter, no more steam baths in summer.”
“I like this city where it is,” she said, implying that she was already rooted there, making the entire strange, confusing city her own so that she might feel less homeless now in his apartment, less vulnerable to him.
“What’s the matter with you, you don’t like to move around?” He was glancing at her derisively. “You come up from Fresno? San Bernardino? and that’s the big move in your life? Got no ambition?” He set out a jar of caviar, crackers on a plate, little silver knives, and jerked out the other chair. “Go ahead, eat,” he said, biting a cracker in two. The black caviar slid down his tongue. “I like women with ambition. The only trouble with my wife, it made her kind of shrill, you know what I mean? When
I first met her it was fine, she was restless, she had to be the best in everything and that meant bed, too, and that was fine. But after a while the ambition destroyed the woman in her. What you’ve got to remember is not to let it destroy you but you’ve got to have it in you. You just want to be a waitress all your life?”
She had no answer. Why should she drag up wishes enmeshed in her life, unformed wishes that were a part of her being, and give them as answers to his nervous hounding of her? She sensed that he was talking so fast and so compulsively, jamming crackers and caviar into his mouth, because he felt on the spot and wanted her there instead.
“Is that it?” he persisted.
“I don’t know what I want,” she said.
“You want to marry a fry cook and get yourself six kids?”
“Maybe,” she said. The caviar was too fishy and black. She had never eaten the stuff before and could not make herself like it while beset by his heckling in this kitchen that belonged to his wife.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Not much.”
“You marry a fry cook and eat french fries and fried eggs every meal. You like that better?”
Three Short Novels Page 23
