Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  Still they told him it was dull, and although he thought their offices no more interesting than his—Loeffler’s MOMA calendars and butterfly chairs—he now agreed with them about his own. Dull. Maybe a two-headed secretary out front. But where would Kelli sit? Where would she put her cat snapshots and dead seashells? Maybe some posters, for some television religion or a fifth-rate rock group, one he had never heard or heard of, which wouldn’t be hard to find, as he never listened to the radio anymore or watched the music channels or turned on the stereo for that matter. Silence, Tilden thought, was sweet, like Saturday mornings had been.

  The Saturday that Paulie had first arrived at his door, he had ignored her knock, sat beside the plants sipping coffee in the slanting light from the mini blinds over the windows, but she would not go away, so he finally got up and went to the door and opened it, then stood there denying he was her father, she, who should have been more embarrassed than he was, because she was outside and he was inside, just as adamantly, one foot up on a suitcase, asserting it.

  He had shut the door on her, at least twice, then looked out through the blinds in the vain hope that she’d go away. She was tall, nearly six feet, muscular, dark-haired, Italian. Jeans and khaki shirt. She had settled on the top step and lit a cigarette, coughed, then, after five minutes or so, knocked again.

  “Tilden,” she said, through the door. “This is silly. You think you can ignore me and I’ll go away? I’ve got no place to go.” More knocking. “Nineteen sixty-six. Boston. My mother’s name was Tina. You were drunk. You made a big thing about never drinking anything but vodka. Stupid, right? But what can you expect from a twenty year old? You had a show on the college radio station; you played Doors records, over and over. You have a big scar across the back of your neck. They took off a birthmark or something. Let me in.”

  It had ruined his morning, and all the mornings since, because now she was up before seven every day, with the blinds open and coffee brewing, like one of those women in the ads on the Weather Channel, leaping out of bed, where she had somehow mysteriously washed her face—there was never any oil on it—and her nightgown unwrinkled, so that he wondered if she had slept in it at all. He had been married twice, and women just didn’t look like this in the morning, and their voices weren’t light and had no lilt, and their eyes were bleary. Like his own. But Paulie came out of the back bedroom of the small apartment new born, every morning. It was misery.

  One Friday, before leaving for work, she said, “Still don’t like me, do you?” and he had said, “You get in my way,” and then he had thought about it all day at the office.

  When he got home, she wasn’t there yet, so he went to the market around the corner and bought a loaf of his bread, and a jar of his brand of peanut butter, and two rib eyes, meat, and a case of Schaefer, which he counted on to have all the additives and unnatural junk which she claimed gave her headaches. He was arranging it all on the kitchen counter when she got back.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “What’s all this stuff?” she said, throwing her hair back with her hand. “Steaks, no less. You’re showing the flag, right? That’s so cute!”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Had to work late. Some very important cultural stuff happening next week, some kind of meeting. I met this very sexy British guy. His name is Ryan. Only he’s short. Comes to here,” she said, drawing a hand across her breasts. “If you didn’t want me to work late, you shouldn’t have gotten me a job.”

  “Does this little guy have a little apartment?”

  “You mean,” she said, “a little apartment I could move into? Let’s not rush things. I only just met him. When do we eat?”

  They ate the steaks—he cooked—and then drank the entire case of beer, save one, until to her, the headache she planned became somehow uproariously funny, and to him, she began to look more like a woman, and less like a problem, or at least like a different kind of problem, until he was shaking his head, mostly to stop looking at her, stop noticing how pretty and how perfect she was, like the pretty, perfect vegetables she brought home from the natural store, or her sweet breath which he knew came from some kind of natural toothpaste she got at the same place.

  He got up and walked from the front room into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “You want this?” he said, holding the last can of Schaefer up in the triangle of light from the refrigerator, above the door.

  She shook her head. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” she said. “Of Ryan? You don’t want your daughter going—”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I’ve gotten rid of two wives. I’m not going to have a daughter. The price is too high.” And that ended the party.

  She stopped, blinked, looked at him, then started to cry, quietly.

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said. “I’m sorry. You forced your way in here. I got you a job. I had a nice, quiet, sensible life, before. Peaceful, goddamn it. I pay the rent. I like you, but …”

  “But?”

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said. “There’s one more can of beer. On the top shelf. And some bourbon in the cabinet. And I sleep all day Saturday, so if you get up at the crack of dawn, don’t start playing the radio and singing, for God’s sake.” He looked at her. “Tiptoe, for God’s sake. Understand?” He looked away, and walked back to his bedroom and took his clothes off and got into bed, and fell asleep before he could get angry. She was right; he was jealous, but only a little. It would pass.

  • • •

  The next morning, he woke up at eleven, with a headache. When he got to the front of the apartment the glare from the windows hurt. He closed the blinds, twisting one of the plastic wands until he felt it break up at the top behind the sheet metal where you couldn’t see what was going on. He thought, briefly, of going to the other windows and breaking the other two, on purpose, but let it go, settled down into the couch.

  “Aspirin?” she said, from the kitchen.

  He nodded.

  When she brought him the pills and a glass of water, she was decked out in high heels and a long rayon dress, black, all open lace over a black slip, or a bodystocking, or something. “Anything else you want?”

  He squinted and blinked. “What is this?” he said, waving his hand at her clothes.

  “This is the Forties look. You like it?”

  “On Saturday?” he said. “Anyway, I thought high heels were unnatural. A chauvinist conspiracy or something.”

  She gave him a blank look, and then said, “I need the car. Okay? I’m not walking nineteen blocks looking like this. I have to go in today. Big project.” When she saw his squinting, smug expression, she said, “I’m going to work because Ryan will be there and I put on some stuff because Ryan will be there, fancy stuff, this dress, the stockings. I feel stupid enough without you staring at me.” She stood looking at him. “Why’re you shaking your head?”

  He smiled. “I’m remembering the years I spent worrying about whether women cared about me, noticed me. The work they must have been doing that I never saw.” He shut his eyes.

  “If it’s non-effective, I’ll put my soviet outfit back on. If it’s—”

  “It’s effective,” he said. “Maybe too effective. Just make sure old Ryan’s got a nice apartment.”

  “I told you last night. He lives in a hotel.”

  He nodded. “I figure about twenty minutes for the aspirin to work. Ten more minutes.”

  “Tilden? Tell me something.” She picked her purse out of the seat of the armchair at the end of the couch, stood pushing things around in the purse until she came up with a tiny maroon brush. She drew it slowly through her long, dark hair. “Why do you live this way?”

  There was a time when a woman brushing her hair was the most beautiful thing in the world to him. “This way?”

  “In the dark,” she said.

  “I’m a mole,” he said, and pointed to his eyes.

  “Don’t you ever want to dance? Or go to a movie or—Or a woman
? People die, you know? Then it’s over. I mean, you bought a brown car, for God’s sake. Mama—She told me you used to be brash. What happened?” She dropped the hairbrush back into the purse and zipped it, put her hands on her hips. “All you do is work and eat. And sleep.”

  “I drink.”

  “Not very much,” she said. “Never enough.”

  “If you drink too much, you have to think about it.” He looked up, but the light still hurt. “The car keys are on the hook, by the door.” Squinting.

  “Yeah, I got them.” She shook her head, opened the purse again. “I’ve gotta go.” She leaned over him and gently kissed his hair. “I could stay home. We could drink up the bourbon. Go to bed.”

  “Get out!”

  “Just kidding, Tilden, Jesus. Calm down. You’re acting like my father or something.” He lifted his feet up on the couch and turned to face the back, heard the purse zip closed again, and then her heels on the hardwood floor, finally the spring slip the bolt into the latch of the door.

  • • •

  Paulie was gone all day, and all day Sunday. Some time during the night she had returned the car, because when he looked out the blinds on Sunday morning, there it sat in front of the building. Brown.

  He tried not to wait for her, even tried Sixty Minutes after the football games were over, but got distracted trying to tell whether the newsmen’s suits were expensive, and their watches and their haircuts. He even thought of trying to call the hotel—but then remembered that he didn’t know the kid’s last name. He used to read, but that was no good either, he couldn’t concentrate, so finally he got out the vacuum cleaner.

  He straightened the rugs, pushed the chairs and the couch around, and ran the old vacuum back and forth, sweating, until the plug jerked out of the wall and he moved it to a new outlet. He left her room until last, stood before the door for a minute, and finally pushed open the door. The floor was littered with coathangers and panties, khaki shirts, sections of newspapers and crisp department store bags, leg weights, running clothes, and small balls of black hair. Tilden let the hose drop, walked over and sat on her unmade bed. He could smell Shalimar, or Emeraude, one of those.

  There had been a girl, before he left school the first time, in Boston, a pretty, quiet Italian so shy she could barely speak. He remembered riding her bicycle into an old church, sitting up by the altar. “I’m the bishop. You’re the bishop’s whore.” He put his hand to the back of his neck, touched the scar. Vodka, that was right. The time he had gotten beat up on Marlborough Street, for taking somebody’s liquor, she took care of him, covered his face with hot wet towels, touched his forehead, and brought him aspirin for three days. “I don’t believe it,” he said, out loud, and looked at the floor, settling for a moment on her discarded underwear, then quickly looking at the vacuum in the doorway.

  Tilden stood up, and then sat back down, looking at a Vogue on top of a stack of magazines. He thought the telephone was ringing, in the front of the apartment, but listening harder, heard nothing. Jesus, he thought, no thank you.

  The girl on the magazine cover, blonde, in a three-quarter pose, her perfect face disappearing under the logo and her soft breasts nearly bare above a pale blue evening dress, holding his eyes, spaghetti straps, that’s what they used to call them, ten years since he’d done this, looked at the goddamn pictures so hard it was as if you were trying to make the photograph start breathing, and he remembered knowing their names, Renee Russo, and Lois what’s her name, and Kim Alexis, and Lauren Hutton, of course, Verushka, way back, and Karen Graham …

  “Fuck this,” he said, shoving the magazines off onto the floor so that they slid over the clothes and hangers all the way to the wall. Tilden lay back on the bed, but when he felt his shoulders touch the sheet, jerked back up onto his elbows, then sat straight up and grabbed the clock from the table and threw it against the wall, and then, for good measure, finding nothing else, threw the table the clock had been on and picked up magazines from the floor and threw them too, tearing the covers, listening to the pages slap against each other until they hit the walls.

  I am enjoying this, he thought, and looked at the radio, on the carpet. I am enjoying this very much. He brought his shoe down on the imitation wood grain plastic, in which there was a little too much black, and it only sort of squeaked, so he stepped back to kick it into the wall, getting a little lift so that it hit about two feet up from the floor molding, leaving a black dent in the paint and loose plastic below. “Up, and … good!” He was almost shouting, twisting around, turning back, looking, and he tried the bed, with both hands managing to throw the mattress against the other wall, a spinning throw which let him fall, like a dancer, on top of the box spring where he lay looking up, gasping for breath. This is it, he thought. This is the way I used to be. He laughed and looked around. Standing in the doorway, her feet in carefully chosen spots in the pretzel formed by the hose of the vacuum cleaner, Paulie was looking back at him, smiling.

  “You taking a break or what?” she said.

  He started giggling, watching her, staring at her, the black dress which was all holes, black faded to a sort of charcoal color, her hip cocked, her pelvis pushed front and center by the high heels like the models in the magazines, staring, and he could feel the look on his face, just past a smile, enjoying it, drunk with love, or something like love, thinking, I’m giggling, for God’s sake, like everybody else.

  “Tilden? Are you okay? Should I call somebody?” He blinked. “You hurt,” he said, “you know, just standing there in that goddamn dress. But … don’t move. Are you tired?”

  She stood, motionless, like a woman on display with her perfect brown eyes, perfect black hair, and glowering dark skin wrapped around the muscles of her neck. “Now?!” she said, reading his eyes. “Now you want to fuck?”

  “No …” Tilden shut his eyes. “Yes. I wish you hadn’t said it that way. We could break some more stuff instead,” he said. “Let’s do that.” He got up, reached down for one of the pastel blue leg weights, hesitated, and picked up the radio, the cord wrapping itself around his leg until he kicked loose and reached out with it, saying, “Yeah. Here. You go first. I’m buying.” He handed her the radio, which, missing only a couple of the clear plastic lenses from the front, felt like a brick.

  She kicked her shoes into the room and stood weighing the radio in her hand, taking practice throws, sidearm.

  “Hard,” Tilden said. “Throw it hard. It’s a tough little bastard.” He leaned over, kissing her neck just as she threw. The radio hit the opposite wall and fell apart.

  “Good,” Tilden said. “That was good. Great. Sorry about …”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It felt … nice. How much shit can we break?”

  “A prudent amount.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re buying?”

  He nodded. “Get the bourbon,” he said, and then followed her as she walked down the hall, her long arms stretched out so that her hands slid along the walls tearing the Jazz Festival posters in half leaving meandering white edges which looked like the stock charts the newspapers published. She rose up on her toes to slap the sickly beige cover off the smoke alarm, which immediately began howling. In the living room she pushed over a lamp, and Tilden stepped on the shade until the bulb shattered inside. She cleared a bookshelf, hooked her stockinged foot under the table in front of the couch, lifted it a quarter inch, and yelped. Turned around, picked up books from the carpet. “Here,” she shouted, handing him one, pointing at the three plants under the window, and then they threw books, one by one, until the plants were down. She turned and put her arms around his neck, sagging against him, pulling him down. “Tilden,” she said, lips to his ear to be heard above the screaming smoke alarm, wrapping herself around him, “let’s break a rule.” He reached down, put his hands on her, feeling her through the dress, and felt like he was all hands.

  • • •

  “Tilden?” she said, in the morning, leaning over him, in
the nightgown although she had slept without it, standing now with a cup of coffee in her hand, finger marks up and down her bare arms, her eyes clear, her hair shining, brushed to within an inch of its life. “You’ve gotta get up.”

  Sitting up in the bed, he set the coffee aside, and drew his fingers along her forearm. “Me?”

  She nodded, sat beside him. “I bruise easily,” she said, and grinned. “I was always very proud of that. If you say you’re sorry, I’ll break your face.” She looked at her arms, and the grin turned to a broad smile. “I mean, I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at him.

  “How bad is it out there?” he said, pointing out the bedroom door. “The furniture. It’s all coming back to me.”

  She shook her head. “Minor league,” she said. “I’ve already put most of it back. I put that ugly plant in some water, in a mayonnaise jar. You’re going to need a new lamp though. You can probably replace that one for a buck and a half.”

  “The lady has never bought a lamp.”

  “The gentleman has never been to the Salvation Army store.”

  “Right,” he said. He put his hands on her breasts, felt her nipples through the thin nylon.

  “Work,” she said.

  “Screw work.”

  “Tilden, you devil. You’re going to break another rule?”

  “Hey,” he said, “there’s only one rule. Jesus said. And then there’re a lot of second-rate types making up a lot of extras. Middle management types. And Jesuits.” He drew his hands away. “You in love with this Ryan person?”

  “You mean, Did I sleep with him?”

  He laughed. “No, I meant what I said.” He kissed her through the nightgown, pulled away, smiled at her. “I assumed you screwed the child’s brains out. Isn’t that what you young people do?”