Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  The next morning while the women were all gathered around the pool and the two guys the manager had hired were filling up a van with Brewster’s furniture and boxes, he showed up at my door with a fat plastic garbage bag and this giant smile on his flawed, reddish old face. He laughed. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “Look what I found. And exactly where I said he’d be.” I took the bag from him. It twitched; it was heavy. It was Abe, of course. Brewster had rescued him. That was the last time we saw each other.

  • • •

  But the daughter called again this morning. So here I am, like a fool. The house is canary yellow with a half-circle driveway in front under high pine trees. I park my car behind a rental Buick near the door and get out. I have bought and brought a plastic “cat carrier” but leave it on the passenger seat. When I push the doorbell, a short woman about forty years old in a black dress comes and opens the door. Her name is Susan. There’ll be no funeral for Brewster; he’s to be cremated. Only five cats are left—“The other one died a month ago,” Susan says—and I wonder what she would’ve thought had she seen nine. The survivors are Killer, Abe, a small new gray tabby, and the twin black cats. So much for superstitions.

  “There’ll be almost twenty thousand dollars for you. Daddy was always pretty frugal, except for them,” she says, looking affectionately at the cats, curled up together on a futon couch I don’t recognize. “I’ll hate to have to take them to the pound, but.” She shrugs.

  The house looks inside much like Brewster’s apartment always looked—comfortable, squared away—although that may be Susan’s doing. There’s a long counter, a serving bar between the kitchen and dining room, and arrayed on top are five or six of the fabric-covered boxes that Brewster made, along with a camera and his antique pistol. “You want that?” Susan asks when she notices me notice it. “Take anything you want, really.”

  “No, but thanks,” I say.

  There’re lots of windows, lots of light. It’s a nice old house. Open cartons on the floor show books, and the kitchen’s completely done, with cabinet doors swung open, empty shelves, dishes and glasses and such swathed in newspapers in more cardboard cartons, waiting only to be sealed. Three big dark green “lawn and leaf” plastic bags are lined up beside the front door. Odd that I didn’t see them before. His clothes, probably. They’re the same sort of bag he had Abe inside five months ago. It occurs to me only now that the cat could’ve suffocated, for some reason a suddenly terrifying thought.

  I look around, searching for Abe, to make sure I did see him, just now, and there he is, asleep, indifferent. I wonder if he is sad, if he knows that Brewster isn’t ever coming back.

  “So, which one is it?” Susan asks and slides to the couch where the cats are, settles at one end and reaches out to pet the nearest.

  “I’d like one of those boxes,” I say, and when she gives me a puzzled look, “one of the cases he built, the camera case, or the one he made for the cassettes and CD’s. They’re beautiful things.”

  “Surely,” she says, “anything you want. I’m shipping a few things north, but most of it is going to go to the trash or the Salvation Army, so don’t be shy. It feels like throwing away his whole life.”

  I pick a box, a rectangular one the size of an encyclopedia, covered in gray material, and open it. The inside, finished in gray felt, is four long horizontal compartments, the last one divided into thirds. A fancy paper clip and two of those sleek blue pencils with black tips lie in one of the compartments. Staedtler. It’s a beautiful thing. What was this for? The box closes perfectly, and then holds closed with no need to flip the tiny brass latch. And it comes into my mind: Brewster’s been completely alone for five months.

  “Now I wish I had come down here more than a couple times,” she says. “I feel so selfish.” She looks teary, then slips into her thoughts, a vacant look, and shakes her head slowly side to side.

  “Susan, I don’t mean to be weird, but I don’t want the money,” I say. “Do something with it for me, will you?”

  “Don’t think I can do that,” she says. “Legally, I mean.”

  “I’ll write a letter. Give it to the Humane Society or something. I’m serious. I absolutely can’t take it.” I hold my hands up, palms out. “It’s wrong,” I say, as if that made any sense, and walk up to the couch. The snowshoe cat seems to recognize me, steps across the futon and offers its cheek for my hand.

  “This’d be the one,” I say. “He called it ‘Killer.’ ” Involuntarily I laugh and Susan looks at me and laughs, too. I raise my free hand to my face and try to force a straight expression, but laugh again.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll take good care of her,” she says. “There’s some more stuff in that front bedroom—” She points. “—if you want to look at it. I’d rather you had it than nobody.” She stands up and smoothes her skirt, lifts her purse from a table, back to being business like. She’s leaving. “I’ve got to go back by the funeral home that’s handling things, and the supermarket. More tape, more boxes. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. But you’ll be all right. And seriously, it wouldn’t bother me if the whole place was empty when I got back. Just pull the door to when you leave. There’re two big bags of that special veterinary cat food in the laundry room. It’ll just go to waste otherwise.” She points past the kitchen. “It was nice to meet you. Daddy really loved you, I think.” She walks on out, shuts the door behind her, and there’s the sound of a car door and the engine firing, then complete silence.

  It feels weird being there by myself so I collect the gray box in one hand and Killer in the other hand and walk out and put them in my car, then come back inside for the bags of cat food. The other cats follow to the door as I carry away the two heavy bags. I put the bags in the trunk, then get in the car and sit for a while looking at his house. It’s quiet. I can’t leave, it’s as if something’s holding me there, I’m starting to get really spooky. I wish to God she hadn’t left first. I wish she’d come back. I wish, I wish, I wish.

  • • •

  The cats go limp, legs hanging free, when I carry them out to the car, one after another, one in each hand, as if they’ve known all along that they’re going with me and have been waiting only for the idea to show up in my mind. The car’s full of their faces.

  I’m projecting, no doubt. They’re just cats, stepping around on the upholstery, sniffing things, sidling between the seats, settling, jumping, finding spots, all eyes. I feel better now though, and glance back up at the house, at the yellow door. “Okay?” I ask, and reach out to turn the key, and as the engine starts, the car rocks a little.

  Sale

  Quinn sold the car one Friday morning in the parking lot of his new apartment complex. The buyer trembled as the two of them walked around the car. A skinny, very fair man in a pink oxford shirt, deathly pale in the morning sunlight. When he reached out and ran his finger along a deep crease in the front fender, Quinn nodded. “That dent tells a story,” he said, and laughed. The guy crouched and stared hard down the length of the car, looking for waves in the body panels. Something he read in a magazine article, Quinn thought. He can’t see a thing. Jesus, somebody should tell him not to wear pink shirts. Looks like the inside of a watermelon. Name is probably Allen or something. The man stood by the driver’s door, staring inside.

  “My wife’s car,” Quinn said. “Ex-wife. Her ex-car. She … she—We’re divorced. She spent too much time with the neighbor down the street.”

  “Looks in good shape,” the pale guy said.

  Quinn nodded. “He was on television, a weatherman; on weekends. She thought he was some kind of star.” Jesus, he thought. His face. Watermelon rind.

  “Can we start it up?” the guy said.

  “What? Sure, here.” Quinn handed him the keys. “Need to goose it a couple times, get some gas on the way.”

  The guy started the car. “You mind if I have a friend of mine look it over?” He sat in the driver’s seat with one leg hanging out the open door
and leaned forward, listening to the engine. “That ticking normal?”

  Quinn shrugged. “I know from ticking, right? How about nine hundred? Two bills for ticking. You know that dent I showed you?” Quinn said. “They were parked in front of the house, one night. I was inside, watching Masterpiece Theater, and I heard brakes and then this shriek, like somebody pulling a rack out of a gigantic oven. I ran outside and there was my wife and the weatherman, and some kid with one of those stupid trucks, the ones way up in the air with the airplane tires?

  “My wife was buttoning her shirt. The weatherman, he’s giving the kid a hundred bucks, a hundred dollar bill. He’s doing my wife right on the street in front of my house, and he carries around hundred dollar bills.” Quinn looked around the perfect, empty parking lot. “So I moved here.” The apartments were red brick, almost orange. A low chain-link fence ran along the edge of the parking lot.

  “I’m sorry,” the guy said.

  “She didn’t want to be ordinary, I guess. And he was on TV.” Quinn drew himself full height and threw his arm out, drawing in the air with a finger. “You know, pointing to those swirly lines with the pimples.” He screwed up his face in a lurid smile. “It’s a cold front, here … so get out the fuzzy wuzzies tonight—” His hand hung in the air, pointing to an imaginary map. “Stars,” he said, and shook his head. “I still watch him, every weekend.”

  The pale guy looked at the car.

  “Why don’t you just take it?” Quinn said. “Just get it out of here.” The car was a big green Chrysler, nine years old. It looked stupid in the parking lot, in the evenings, when all the Hondas and Toyotas and the GM copies of them and a few Jaguars and Corvettes and one black Porsche came home. “Just take it. Have you got ten bucks?”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Quinn laughed. “Hey, don’t be. That’s life, right? Thing that bothers me is, I wanted to call the cops. I mean that’s what I thought: Call the cops; get the kid a ticket; square it with the insurance. But he was right. Give the kid a hundred dollars. Burns me up. That’s what we have stars for. They always know what to do.” He smiled.

  In a green car, Quinn thought, he looks even stranger. Extraordinary. People’ll say, Allen, where’d you get that car? Hey everybody! Look at Allen’s new car.

  Vexed

  There was never a chance I’d be anything but his brother or she would be anything but his girlfriend, but I had gotten mixed up with my brother’s ex-girlfriend anyway. It was obviously a stupid idea, but things are obvious to you only if you don’t mind them being so. And, anyway, many and rich pleasures attach to stupid behavior.

  It was about four a.m. and twenty degrees when my rock—a little heavier than I thought—broke right on through Teresa’s window, dropping into her apartment. No, I thought, and glass splashed down the side of the apartment building and onto the sidewalk at my feet.

  Before I could move, Allen, my big little brother, was standing at the window looking down at me. I owed him money, which was one reason that he wasn’t already downstairs beating me to a pulp. Teresa is his sometime girlfriend—they’re trying to “patch it up” he tells me. What she tells me is that she’s finished with him, that it’s “done, over” and I believe her until Allen comes to her window at four in the morning. Allen is twenty-six and I’m twenty-nine, and I borrow money from him and take Teresa out to dinner. I should’ve told Allen that I’d been seeing Teresa, but he can get ugly.

  “What do you want, Webster?” he said, thinking I came to see him. That he couldn’t imagine it otherwise was insulting, in a way. “Are you vexed, or something?”

  Once I read a Russian novel, a translation, and then I went around saying “vexed” all the time. In the novel, a great many people were “vexed.” It was maybe ten years ago, but Allen has never let me forget it. It has always been his way of reminding me that I was nerdish, that he was taller, stronger, tougher than I was. He missed that moment late in high school when it became clear that that no longer mattered. His ex-girlfriend’s affection for me would not compute in Allen’s conception of the world. Bye bye Mr. Soloflex. Hello, Vexed.

  He had slid the broken window up and was standing there, fully dressed, and staring at me like I was from some other galaxy. From his expression I guessed it was him who was vexed, likely having one of those pained “talks” that two people have at four in the morning fully dressed, those tight, strained conversations in which she is telling you she doesn’t care for you but you refuse to hear it, and if it’s at the beginning of your time with her you’re right to refuse to hear because she might just be giving herself room to operate, but if it’s at the end of your time with her, you are wrong, and she wants only for you to go away.

  This was what was going through my mind, along with a desire to kill him, as I stood on the sidewalk freezing. This was what I wanted Teresa to be saying. Teresa is five foot eleven, and she runs, in shiny spandex and a T-shirt. Teresa has sleepy green eyes and a cat’s smile. She sings. Walks around the apartment singing, My momma done told me / When I was a baby … But you don’t love a woman because her voice is beautiful and her foolish belief that she is ten pounds overweight is an illusion, and she’s so lovely it makes you weep. Teresa thinks she just might possibly love me, and that’s what makes you love a woman, that possibility. If she’s sure she loves you, if it’s a certainty, you get overconfident, even indifferent, but if it’s only a possibility, you are finished. Maybe it’s different for other people, I don’t know.

  “Stay right there,” Allen said, finally, leaning out and looking down at me. “I want to talk to you.” I felt sick. The cold was coming through my jacket like it was paper.

  Two months before when Teresa threw Allen out, he didn’t much concern himself about it, but when he found out that she was seeing someone, he was suddenly all over her again. Lilies, no less. Earrings. When I suggested he probably had found the earrings, on his carpet, Teresa got mad at me. It took all I had not to tell Teresa that that was, in fact, exactly where he had gotten them. He told me. This whole thing is not bringing out the best in any of us.

  While Allen was on his way downstairs, Teresa came to the window for a second and looked at me. Just looked. She was wearing jeans and an oxford shirt, white, maybe pale yellow, near as I could tell. She looked sad, worn out.

  “I’ll fix it, next week,” I said. “The window. I’m sorry.” She gave me that sleepy-eyed smile and turned away from the window. I had thought she would find it romantic, pebbles on the glass, standing shivering down below her bower and so on, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the glass was cheap and cold and the rock had to be sized accordingly. And I threw a little too hard maybe, afraid of missing the window entirely.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Allen said. I took a step back toward my car as he walked up, stocky, zipping his leather jacket and breathing a little heavy. His eyes were very beautiful, blue. My eyes, my dead father’s eyes. “Let’s go over to my place,” he said. “Get out of this weather.”

  I followed him to his apartment, a big place on the fifteenth floor of a fifteen story high rise building with an underground garage. I parked on the street, and by the time I got upstairs, he had made himself tea and was sitting at his kitchen table watching the television in the living room, with the sound muted. Tea, I thought. Since when does Allen drink tea?

  “Well, Webster, what are we going to do?” he said. “Want a cup?” He lifted his, pointed to a saucepan of steaming water on the stove in the kitchen. The apartment was big and very white, walls, rugs, even the table he was sitting at was hot white formica. Frost on the windows. A pillow and sheets and blankets were lying on the living room rug, as if he’d been sleeping there. The rest of the place somehow looked a little in disarray, too. “Tea?” he said.

  I shook my head. “You got a beer?”

  “Help yourself,” he said. “Course it’s probably not that fancy German stuff you like.”

  “Anything with bubbles is fine,” I said, takin
g a bottle from the bright white refrigerator.

  “So what are we going to do about this?” he said, and pushed out a chair for me with his foot. “About you hounding my girlfriend.”

  I was looking at his bull neck, the big tendons or whatever they are standing out at the side, looking like rope. “She told you.”

  “She told me nothing, bighead. Boy, you really do think I’m stupid, don’t you?” He took a long, slow breath and then sighed. “Just because you’re so goddamn smart doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

  He was right, I knew. A bad habit, underestimating other people, a habit I hate in my friends, probably because I do it myself.

  He sipped his tea. “This is hurting me, you know? This …” He didn’t finish. He looked around the L-shaped living-dining room, stared for an instant at one of the lamps on which the shade was crooked, then looked into his cup. “She’s the best woman I ever had, best one I’ll ever have a chance of, and now big brother is sneaking around, reciting poetry and junk. Taking her to little boutiquey restaurants, on money he borrowed from me.”

  “Money’s real important to you, isn’t it, Allen?”

  “It’s important to you when the waiter brings the check, isn’t it? Don’t Gandhi me, Web, okay? I haven’t been doing real well, lately. You don’t make much of a Gandhi, anyway. I mean, you’re kind of soft, easy, self-indulgent, and libertine.”

  “Me?” I said. “I’ll be going now, little brother.” I got up to leave, set the beer down. “You were fooling around on Teresa from day one. Yes sir, you’re a regular ascetic—blondes and brunettes only. She threw you out, remember? And you’re calling me a libertine? You know what the word means?” A mistake.

  But he just shrugged. “Okay, so you’re just soft and self-indulgent,” he said. “The difference is, I don’t pretend to be Gandhi.” He waved his hand and sighed again. “How much of your interest in Teresa is because she’s my girlfriend? You ever think about that?”