“Hey, hey,” he said, confused, rising with her, hopping out into the aisle, glancing toward the front of the bus and toward the back, like someone trapped. A string of hair swung out over his forehead as he swung his head from left to right, and she bent her head into his back, laughing at him. She poked her finger in between his shoulder blades to tell him he was blocking her way. At once he lurched down the aisle, jerked forward and backward by the motion of the bus. Tossed out, they stood on the corner before the drugstore’s lighted window confronting them with a jumble of hot-water bottles, perfumes, toothpaste tubes, dead flies, and holly wreaths.
Past stucco houses, mottled and faded like the one she was going to, he walked beside her, fast, his narrow shoulders hunched under his rakish sport jacket. It was a cold twilight with a rose-colored light in the sky. “I can’t come in,” he said. “I got to get back and meet this friend of mine at Rich’s Cafeteria. I’m just escorting you home because you’re afraid of the dark.” After a block of the same houses, he asked her if she lived alone, and then he asked her who she lived with, and then if she had brothers and sisters, and, without any warning to herself to not tell, she was telling him about Hal.
“That’s something I’d never do,” he said, his voice mingling awe and pity. His small feet in polished old shoes, once stylish, went quickly, dapperly along. “I guess it takes courage, uh? Maybe I ain’t got that kind of courage.”
Was he praising her brother to ingratiate himself? But she wanted no member of her family around, least of all her dead brother. A man was walking her home. She had laughed with him on the jolting bus, she had been smart enough to see that he talked big, and cruel enough to tell him that she saw. Oh, what a fascinating life she led! The pleasure she had found in this encounter began to desert her now as she heard his praise for her brother, for her brother who was always praised, and praised now for the courage to take his own life.
“Well, so long,” he said, the instant she paused by the small lawn worn bare in spots by children’s feet. “Naomi sounds like a river,” he said, and sang softly, “By the banks of the Naomi, an Indian maiden waits for me. You think that’s a tune that’ll catch on? You got a piano?”
“Yes,” she said. “We used to play it but nobody’s touched it for years.”
“We’ll work out a tune,” he said. “We’ll make a million bucks,” and he gave a tricky salute, tugging at the brim of an imaginary hat, and went back the way they had come, a man wanting her to feel the loss of him. She could tell that much by the way he walked, briskly, confident of his charm.
That was the way it began. He rode home with her again and made excuses for not coming in before she made excuses for asking him in. He bought her lunch and invited her to a movie. After the movie she went up to his room in the National Hotel and he sat on his bed and she sat in the chair, and he told her about his other marriages. His first wife had died, his second had left him for another man, and his third he had left, and there was no Princess Nadja among them. The serious way he told about his life showed his respect for her. He percolated coffee on a hot plate and gave her some stale cookies to dip. On the sidewalk before her house he kissed her very lightly. The next time she went out with him they did not go to a movie. He met her in the hotel’s drab, cold lobby and they went up to his room, and he was gentle in his passion. A delight began to stir in the core of her being, that night. It did not take her by surprise because she had suspected all along that it was waiting there.
Naomi was deserting her mother to go and live with a man who came out of nowhere. That was the way her mother described the change in the daughter. Naomi and her Dan were married by a judge in the county courthouse and moved into a rented duplex, and Naomi interviewed a woman for the job of companion to her mother. Mrs. Wade came into the recorder’s office at noon, a plump, uneasy woman who couldn’t smile, and Naomi became at once the one to be interviewed, reversing the positions, wanting not to subject the woman to the ordeal, the quivery-faced woman with the dodging eyes. They sat across from each other at the Dairy Lunch, and Naomi apologized for everything at home, the mix-up in the cupboards, the worn linoleum on the kitchen floor, and her mother’s mind in captivity to her son’s death. “You’ll have to listen to all that,” she said. “She’s never going to give up her suspicions.” Naomi told about everything that might displease the woman, wishing the woman would refuse the job now, because, if she walked out on the job later, she’d carry away with her a stranger’s unsympathetic knowledge of secret sufferings, both Naomi’s and her mother’s.
The woman moved in that evening, and Naomi’s mother called her at the recorder’s office the next morning. She doesn’t answer me, Naomi. She was two hours in the bathroom last night. Nobody needs to take a bath that long. I was afraid she’d fainted. Suppose she died in there? She didn’t answer me and finally I had to scream at her, and she said she’s got a right to privacy. Several nights later Mrs. Wade phoned Naomi at home. Maybe you better come this one night. Maybe if she knows you come when I call you, she won’t feel she needs you so bad. I been with old people like this before. One of ’em slashed his wrist so his daughter’d come back from New York. They think they can stop the sun from going down. Naomi put on her coat and hat, left the supper dishes in the sink, and took a taxi to the house, and her mother clasped her in her thin arms. “She won’t believe me,” her mother complained. “I told her they did it to him, but she won’t believe me.”
It took a while before Naomi’s mother and Mrs. Wade began to make balky, grudging moves toward one another, but when a kindly acceptance was found, the familiarity seemed too much for them to handle—what each one knew about the other. Then her mother began to call to her again.
“She went to her room right in the middle of cooking our supper and she won’t come out,” her mother said, waiting at the table in the kitchen, wearing the quilted satin bathrobe, a present from Cort and Naomi, an extravagant present to impress upon her their love that they knew would never, never compensate for the loss of her son, Hal.
“It’s Naomi,” she said, knocking at the door of the bedroom that had been her brothers’ and then hers and was now Mrs. Wade’s.
The woman opened the door after a minute, a quivery-cheeked woman with all her excess flesh that was too much of herself when the self was only a companion to a shrill old woman as deserted as herself. The woman’s pale blue eyes were enclosed in pompoms of flesh, but, hidden as they were, they still attempted to slide away.
“Mama’s sorry,” Naomi said. Ah, poor woman I ought to know! she thought. And she was ashamed that she was only Naomi who was to be as deserted soon as this woman in the faded dress and the new apron. Ah, poor woman! So much like myself and so much like Mama. We are all so much alike, skinny from loneliness or bloated with it.
After that night, Naomi went across the city though nobody called her and though, often, she found her mother and Mrs. Wade contentedly, querulously watching the brawls and commotions on the television screen. She went because her husband was away in the bars until they closed, and because the nights he stayed home and drank alone, he played cruel jokes on her with words, jokes that ridiculed them both, himself and Naomi, Na-o-mi, the greenhorn, the goody-goody, the simple-minded woman who had fallen for him. Naomi sat beside her mother, holding her mother’s hand, watching the screen and not remembering much from one second to the next, her soothing fingers sometimes pressing too hard on the bones of the hand she held.
One night he barred her way. “What’re you putting your coat on for?” he said. “You ain’t going anywhere.” He was wonderingly sober.
“I’m going over to Mama’s.”
“You ain’t going to Mama’s, girlie,” he said, and for a moment, because she was locked in and didn’t know the man, she was a child again, her mind was a child’s mind, wondering whether girlie was an affectionate word or a derisive one. Then she turned and ran down the hall to the back door. He ran after her and caught hold of her coat and
threw her down on the kitchen floor. Her hip struck the floor and her face struck the table leg. She pulled her skirt down—it had leaped up past her knees—and attempted no other move, afraid that any move other than the modest one would make him more angry. For a second, as she lay stunned, she felt that he was right, throwing her down. It was such an extreme act, he must be right. Ashamed because she had brought him to violence, she could not look up into his face, she could only stare at his shoes. The great number of times she had left this apartment to find a queasy comfort from her comforting of her mother all added up to a crime. Her coming and going was a crime of futility.
“You’re a goddamn saint, Naomi,” he said, “but I ain’t religious. It makes me sick to see a saint. They don’t serve no good example, they just make you feel like a louse. Get up, get up,” he said, banging around the coffee pot from one burner to another. The match he struck leaped out of his hand and fell on the table, and he swung after it furiously, and blew it out. With shaking hand, he struck another match. “Get up, get up. Sit down, sit down. Take off your coat, stay awhile.”
She reached up to the table and drew herself up, and she sat down. Although she was suffocatingly hot, she left her coat on.
“Fix you some hot coffee,” he said. “You should of seen all the coffee we drank over in England, on those cold nights with the V-1’s buzzing around. Did I ever tell you about the time the anti-aircraft brought down a V-1 over the airfield? It began to bob around up there, turned around, changed its mind, and fell just half a mile away.” He cleared his throat, a loud, raspy, prolonged scraping.
She was afraid to touch her cheekbone and afraid to lay her head in her hand, afraid that any soothing of herself might be mistaken for reproach.
“You going to take your coat off?”
She shook her head. The coat comforted her, the coat gave her dignity, it gave her access to the outdoors and protection against the inside of strange houses, like this one. She was about to draw her coat together when he went down on his knees, encircling her hips, laying his face in her lap, kissing the triangle into her closed thighs.
“Naomi, I wish I was a saint myself. Then it would be impossible for me to be mean.”
“Danny, I’m no saint, Danny.”
“Yeah, you are, you are, and when I leave that’s what’s going to make it easier for me because I’m going to say to myself, she’s a saint and she knows I’m just human. You see what your trouble is, you saints? You make it easier for us to be human because you make allowances. Am I right? You make allowances?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“All I mean is you forgive people.” He laid her hand on the crown of his head, moving her hand back and forth, and, when he took his hand away from hers, she went on stroking his head, thought she felt no love for this man who had come out of nowhere, out of everywhere, and fooled her into thinking she was his woman and fooled her again by elevating her above everybody else, calling her a saint because he was going to leave her and saints always forgive.
“Suppose you lived in Omaha, suppose you had children, suppose you died—your Mama would get along. She lost her precious son, so she’s taking it out on you. Because you’re just Naomi. What’s Naomi doing, still alive? You ever stop to think that over? You ever stop to think?”
You ever stop to think? Stop what to think? The heart?
“When are you going?”
“Did I say I was going anywhere?”
“You said you were going.”
“Oh, hell, I say that all the time. It keeps me alive.”
Wiping her face with the sleeve of her coat, she stood up. She went down the hall to their bedroom and lay down on the bed, still with her coat on, face up. He followed her, sat down by the bed, and removed her shoes, chuckling, attempting his old seductive wit in the sound of it. “I bet you don’t believe I ain’t mad,” he said. “That’s a fine thing—you knock a woman down and then you tell her you ain’t mad.”
She lay weeping openly, uncaring how grotesque her face must be. She knew why he had pushed her down. He had pushed her down, this simple-minded woman, because she had turned her face toward him as toward the sun. Who had ever seen before that Naomi Costigan was a woman with a heart in her breast? He had pushed her down because she had made a mistake, because he was only a pale and shaky itinerant drunk, and she ought to have known. She ought to have known even from the start, even from the nights of love, and at last his contempt for her for not knowing threw her to the floor.
“Don’t cry, Naomi,” he said, kissing the soles of her feet. “I’m not going, don’t cry.”
So small his allotment of love! It seemed to her that each person at birth was granted an allotment of love to give to someone, or to two, or to three, or to the world, but how small his allotment of love! She didn’t know how to measure other persons’ love for her, like her mother’s, like Cort’s, but this man’s was like Hal’s. Her brother ran out on everybody, and this man was running out. They had the least to give. The least. Humbly, he was massaging her feet, his hands small and cold and straining to be of help, but her feet were numb to his hands, and her ears were deaf to his voice. She was transforming him into nothing, so that when he was gone no one would be missing.
8
Dolores returned to her parents’ house four years after she had left it. When she climbed down from the bus, her father, waiting in the alleyway where the buses came in, embraced her. “Don’t look at me,” she said.
“Hell,” he said, walking her solicitously to his car, arm around her, “you look like you ate too many kumquats. You took sick from kumquats when you were a kid.”
The bedroom off the kitchen was waiting for her, curtains, spread, rug all new, all blue, a color she had turned against, along with ruffles. She took off her clothes that were saturated with the bus fumes and the sweat of her illness, slipped on a nightgown, lay down, and slept at once, slept on an immense airy bed of relief and return, wakened over and over by tormenting dreams.
At seven, her mother came home and into the bedroom on the soundless rubber-soled oxfords she wore at work. Dolores had seen her parents several times in the years she had been way, when they had come up to the city to visit her, but her mother’s face, this time, was glaringly older. The fever must be doing crazy things to her eyes. Her mother bent over her, covering her face with kisses. “It’s all right, I’m immune,” her mother said. “Bugs run the other way.”
For weeks she lay in bed, waiting for recovery. Evenings, she watched her parents in the kitchen, an audience of one observing two actors on the stage. They had lived in marriage for twenty-five years and if someone were to ask them to sing just one note, each choosing one, they would sing the same note, she was sure. The girl in the bed denied any accomplishment in their similarity. Two persons, almost fifty years old, who had never lived in any other city, who had never held other lovers in their arms, what did they know? Something more than she knew, or less? One afternoon, sleeping, she heard the vast silence in which the neighborhood was set. Not since those last moments between herself and the man in the shack on the beach had she been surrounded by so much meaningful silence, and she listened for the breaking of the wave. But this silence belonged to a time farther back, this was the silence that surrounded Hal Costigan. Calling for her mother, she woke herself completely to the fact that it was early afternoon in her parents’ house with nobody home yet.
When she began to recover, she took short walks to the drugstore and looked into the magazines, and she sat in the shade of the trees in the backyard and knit a sweater for her father, and she planted flowers, day by day, gradually, and when she felt strong enough, a girlfriend got her a job in a cocktail bar, working two hours on weekend evenings. She had her hair cut and curled and tinted red. She wore her filmy blouses and cinched her wide gold-leather belt tight around her waist. After a few weekends of parrying with the customers, she began an affair with a man older than herself and married, like most of
the other men she’d been with. She went to meet him in vacant apartments and houses that he, as realtor, was agent for. He was big—football-player size—and that size, along with his deep blue eyes edged by thick black lashes, impressed the women shopping for homes with their husbands. His office chalked up more sales than any other in town, he told her.
Because she knew the affair would end, she began to imagine herself desperately in love with him. As always, there had to be some meaning to the time with a man. The meaninglessness of each time was like a sin for which there was no name. She repeated to him his criticism of his wife, and her caresses were promises to be the wife he ought to have. She held to him on mattresses that he covered with an old, faded spread he kept in his car, and begged him to love her.
On the day that was to be the last day, he was already in the apartment when she arrived. He was at the table in the dining room, reading the evening paper, his coat off, his feet up on a chair. He did not greet her. He was concentrating on something in the news and on the secret use he was going to make of it. She went into the bathroom to see again how her hair was done, cut again and curled again and tinted red again, and the sight of herself in the mirror evoked the many mirrors in the beauty salon, where she had just been, and all the reflected faces, hers among them, seemed, in memory, like participants in a plot that would net them nothing. She went into the kitchen to open the cartons he’d brought.
“You ever see such stupidity?” he called. “God! If you can’t do it yourself, then don’t do it at all. Here the guy hires a two-bit gangster to do the job for him and not only does he fumble it, he’s a witness against him, he sits up there and says Dr. Dick hired me to do it. So it’s just like hiring a witness against you, that’s what it comes down to.” He read on for a minute. “What’s crazy about the whole thing is this—here the guy wants to do away with his wife so he won’t have to give her half his fortune when he gets a divorce, and now, boy, he won’t have a penny left if he goes free. The lawyers’ll get it all. That’s what I should have been, a criminal attorney, get hired by all the guys who murder their wives.” He had a loud, easy laugh that came from down in his chest.
Three Short Novels Page 26
