By the time Robert finished in the kitchen she was packing. “Where are you going? I thought the Y had no room.”
“I’ve got some money. There’s some cheap hotels by the train station. I figure I can go to one of those and hold out for a couple of days while I look for some kind of roommate deal. And I gotta call my agency, see if maybe they got work for me.”
“Stay here.” Robert went to the door and opened it. The newspaper was on his welcome mat. “Here’s the paper. You can call around from here.”
She took the paper from him. “This is really nice of you,” she said. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear. I’ll come over and cook you dinner every night for a week. I’m a good cook, really I am.”
He wrote his office number on a piece of paper and dug his spare key out of a drawer in the kitchen. “Let me know what happens,” he said. “I’m late. I’ve got to go.”
All day he thought about Gayle. He said almost nothing in his meetings, gave his secretary nothing to type, and was short to the point of abruptness with his callers. Just before five Gayle called him.
“I couldn’t find a place. Everybody wants more money up front, or they want you to have a regular job, or the place is too far away from the train or the bus.”
“Don’t worry. You can stay with me.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “I found a chicken in your freezer and defrosted it. When will you be home?”
It was nice to have someone to answer to. This must be how Jeremy felt, speaking to Shelly late in the day about dinner plans, about the children, or what had happened that day. He smiled involuntarily. “Give me an hour. I’ve still got a few loose ends to tie up.”
Robert hurried quickly through paperwork that otherwise might have taken him much longer. When he got home the apartment was warm and bright and the aroma of the chicken in the oven wafted out to greet him. “Hi, Bobby,” Gayle said, coming out of the kitchen. “Did you have a good time at work?”
Robert smiled. After dinner he took Gayle to see a movie, and then to a little Italian place near his apartment for cappuccino and pastry. He thought he had never spent a more enjoyable evening.
The next day was Saturday and Robert took the day off. It was rare for him not to work on the weekends, unless someone like Jeremy or Shelly or a visiting relative insisted. They went shopping at the Italian Market on 9th Street, buying fresh vegetables, fish, smoked ham and imported cheese. In the afternoon they went to the Museum of Art and Gayle oohed and aahed as Robert lectured her about the paintings.
That night he built a fire in the fireplace, at Gayle’s request, and they sat next to each other on the sofa. For a while they talked, and then Gayle leaned her head against his shoulder and reflexively Robert put his arm around her. They kissed.
Robert had always found sex awkward. While he enjoyed it, he always worried about where to put his arms, when to kiss and when to whisper. But with Gayle everything moved sweetly, as if in a dream, and Robert, who was prone to thinking about things too much, did not think at all.
That night, she slept next to him in his bed instead of out on the sofa, and once again he had no problem with insomnia.
The next day they drove out to the farmlands beyond the suburbs, looked at the changing leaves and had lunch at a country inn. They bought cider and tart apples at a farm store, talked and smiled.
When they got back to his apartment, Robert shuddered at what he saw. The apartment was littered with pieces of clothing-- both Gayle’s and his own. Her toiletries spilled off the small counter in the bathroom. Books were out of place and there were ashes in the fireplace. It made him very uncomfortable and he began to clean up. “I’ll do it tomorrow, Bobby.” Gayle sat on the sofa and patted the place next to her. “Come sit by me.”
Robert shook his head. “I can’t live this way. It’s too much. I can’t change just like that.”
Gayle got up to help him clean, but she didn’t know where anything went. She didn’t know his ways, how he liked things. “Just sit down,” he said. “Just leave me alone.”
Gayle went into the bedroom. While Robert cleaned around her she watched two sitcoms and an hour-long evening soap opera. When he came to bed they both fell asleep on their own sides, being careful not to touch.
By the morning Robert felt he had part of his own life back. “I’m going to look for a job really hard today,” Gayle said. “A permanent job, so I can get my own place and get out of your hair.”
“Don’t rush it,” Robert said. “Hold out for the right job.”
“Get real, Bobby. The right job is the first one anybody offers me.”
Jeremy called late in the morning to ask Robert’s advice on an organizational scheme his law firm was considering. “So what did you do this weekend?” he asked Robert.
“I went out and picked up a woman after I left your house on Thursday. She fixed breakfast for me on Friday, and we decided she should move in. I took her to the art museum on Saturday and then the country yesterday.”
There was dead silence on Jeremy’s end. “That’s nice,” he said after a while. After another pause, he said, “Robert, you’re my best friend, so I think I can tell you this. You’re weird.”
“You and Shelly have been after me to find a woman and settle down for years. I finally do and you tell me I’m weird.”
“This is a conversation we can’t have on the phone,” Jeremy said. “Why don’t you meet me for a drink after work?”
“Come over to the apartment. Bring Shelly. You can meet Gayle.”
Jeremy hesitated for a minute. “Let me check. I’ll call you later.”
It wasn’t until almost five that Jeremy called back. “Sorry it took so long, but Shelly had trouble finding a sitter. What time do you want us at your place?”
“Six o’clock,” Robert said. Jeremy agreed, and Robert dialed his home number. There was no answer. “She must have gone out on an interview,” he said to himself.
He got home at a quarter to six and from the moment he opened the front door, he knew there was something wrong. “Gayle?” he called. The apartment was dark and there was nothing cooking in the kitchen. He walked around the apartment, calling her name. All her things were gone. In the bedroom, he found a note in the middle of his bureau, which was immaculate.
“Dear Bobby, I’m sorry I screwed up your life. I tried to get your stuff back the way it was. Thanks for everything, Gayle.”
Robert sat on the bed for some time holding the note. He looked up when he heard voices. “Robert?” Jeremy called from the living room.
Jeremy and Shelly walked into the bedroom as Robert looked up. “You left the front door open,” Jeremy said. “Are you all right?”
Robert handed him the note. As soon as Shelly read she sat down beside Robert and put her arm around him. In a gesture that was so uncharacteristic of him that it stunned all three of them, Robert leaned his head onto her shoulder and began to cry.
In the kitchen Jeremy poured them all tall crystal glasses of Scotch and water. The three of them sat on the sofa. Jeremy and Shelly watched with concern as Robert dried his eyes and took a deep drink of the Scotch. He put the glass down on the coffee table without looking for a coaster, and Shelly and Jeremy traded alarmed looks.
“Where could she have gone?” Robert asked. “She must have gotten a job and a place to live. How could she just leave?”
Gradually, Jeremy and Shelly heard the whole story. “You know you aren’t the most flexible person in the world,” Jeremy said.
“But I always believed I could change if I wanted to. Now I know I can’t. I’ll be this way until I die.”
Shelly went into the kitchen and made some soup while Robert and Jeremy sat on the sofa and talked about nothing in particular. When the soup was done, Jeremy led Robert to the kitchen and they watched him eat. Afterwards Jeremy took him to the bedroom, gave him a sleeping pill and made sure he was settled in bed. Jeremy stopped at the doorway before turning out
the light and turned to look back at his oldest friend. “I’m sorry,” he said.
When Robert woke, it was still dark outside, and the numbers on his digital clock glowed 3:00. If he lay still, he could hear the sound of trucks and motorcycles passing on the street, the creaking of the old building, water rushing through the pipes. He sat up in bed and it took him a minute to remember what had happened.
In a flash, he knew where Gayle was. She was back at the funeral parlor, he was sure of it. Sitting on the steps, waiting for the first cold light of morning and her uncle to come to work. And even if she wasn’t there, Robert could wait for her uncle and see if he knew how to find her.
He was up and dressed quickly. There were definite merits to being organized, Robert thought, even if there were negative points as well. In the car, he turned to a rock music station that he never listened to and hummed along with the music.
It took him a while to find the funeral parlor again, the temple of lights he had seen from the plane, because at that hour the lights had all been extinguished. They must be on a timer, he thought. He pulled up in front of the building and stopped.
There was no one sitting on the front step. He had expected to see Gayle there, had visualized her so clearly, that at first he didn’t understand he was seeing nothing. He slumped back in the car and began to cry again.
He must have dozed off in the car, because he woke suddenly to the sound of someone knocking on the window next to his head. He was freezing and his eyes were fuzzy. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and looked out the window.
Gayle was standing next to the car, leaning down and looking at him. He turned the car on and rolled the window down. “Aren’t you cold?” Gayle asked, rubbing her hands together. “Crazy guy like you, sleeping in a car in November.”
There were a few fingers of light creeping over the murky Delaware, and it seemed to Robert that it would be a bright, beautiful day. “Get in,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
Gayle went around to the passenger side and got in. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to get some advice on funeral planning,” Robert said. “I thought I’d get here early, get a head start.”
Gayle laughed. “That’s the first real joke I ever heard you make. I didn’t know you had it in you.” She looked at him. “How’d you know I’d be here?”
He shrugged. “I guessed. I figured that even if you weren’t, your uncle would know how to find you.”
“He said he could give me some people to talk to about jobs. I was coming over to meet him.”
Robert turned to look at her. “I thought I was happy with my life the way it was. But now I know I was just sleeping. I woke up when I met you.”
“I had this dog when I was a kid,” Gayle said. “Skinniest mutt you ever saw. I found him on the street, and I took him home and fattened him up, and he was the best dog. I guess I’m just a sucker for sad cases.”
She looked at him. He was smiling. “Come on,” she said, pushing his shoulder. “It’s still freezing in here. Don’t you know any place we can get some coffee?”
Robert nodded, still smiling. “I know a great place.” He put the car in gear and took off, riding alongside the river, where the sun was rising in a giant yellow ball of gas and fire.
You’re Pretty When You Smile, Ima Jean
I lost my aunt at the grand opening of the new Sherwood Dales Shopping Center last Wednesday. It was a terrible cold day, but Aunt Rose Maria said, “I want to go, Ima Jean. They will have fireworks and visits by celebrities and dozens of new stores,” just like she was quoting from a newspaper ad.
Since it wasn’t like I had anything else better to do, I drove us to the new mall just about ten o’clock in the morning. The parking lot was endlessly crowded, and we had to park clear at the far end just to find a space. I ask you, why would someone want to open a new shopping center on such a cold day? And if you were some TV star, would you want to come all the way up to Albany New York in February for such a thing?
Well, we went on inside, looking for celebrities and the person who was giving out all the balloons. I was working my way through the crowd when I looked around for Aunt Rose Maria and realized I had lost her. At that time, of course, I thought she was just merely lost.
So I pushed my way back to the entrance and saw all these people standing around Aunt Rose Maria, who was lying on the floor. She was already gone by then, but even if she wasn’t, if she had seen all those people making a fuss over her, it would have been enough to kill her.
By the time I got to her, someone had called for an ambulance. “Oh my,” I said. I got right down on my knees and took her hand. “Aunt Rose Maria. Come on, honey, wake up.”
I could feel the heat going out of her hand as I sat there on the new tile floor, crying and telling people I was really all right. By the time the ambulance arrived and all the people backed away, squeezing the balloon lady up against the wall of the new jewelry store, Aunt Rose Maria was well and truly gone.
The doctor said later it was her heart that gave out and it had been quick and painless. I asked how did he know-- had he been through the same thing himself? He didn’t say, just kind of smiled at me and patted my hand.
I have lived with Aunt Rose Maria since I was four years old, when my parents got divorced and wandered away. I used to get cards from them, one on a birthday, maybe, and sometimes cards from both on Christmas, but over the years we just lost touch.
Aunt Rose Maria was my mother’s oldest sister, the one that always had to take care of the family and never did get married. But she loved me, and I liked living with her fine, and things had worked out for nearly twenty years. I grew up in her little house in Guilderland, which is a suburb of Albany. My best friend Louise Ann Calderone lived down at the corner, and her daddy had put in an above-ground swimming pool, so I guess my life was very good.
Louise Ann was the first person I phoned from the hospital. She has preferred to be called Louise since we were in high school, but old habits die hard. “I rode over in the ambulance with Aunt Rose Maria, and forgot entirely that my car was at the mall,” I said. “Can you come over and pick me up?”
I was sitting in the lobby sucking on a lozenge one of the nurses had given me and just staring into space when she came in and sat down next to me. She took my hand and said, “Oh, Ima Jean. What are you going to do now?”
Like she had any ideas. Louise Ann is the kind of girl who never had an original thought in her head. All the years we were growing up together, I was the one who decided what to do, or which boys to go out with, or what movies to see. I always did everything first--I smoked cigarettes first, and pot first, and I was the first to go all the way with a boy. About the only thing Louise Ann did before me was get married, and I think Jay Tucker had a lot more to say about that than she did.
“I don’t know, Louise Ann, should I be doing something?”
“Well, you have to call the funeral home, don’t you? I mean, I don’t profess to be an expert about this kind of thing, Ima Jean, but she does have to be buried some time. You can’t just leave her in the hospital like a potted plant you take to someone who is sick. She has to go into the ground, and I can’t see you out there at the cemetery digging yourself, not with the ground as frozen as it is.”
We walked out to her car and she drove me to the mall. She pulled into the parking lot and I directed her to where my car was. “I suppose I should call Clayton Durning,” I said. “His daddy is a funeral director, isn’t he?”
“And Clay is in the business with him,” Louise Ann said knowingly. “When we buried my Grandpa he was right there saying nice things and holding a little bottle of ammonia with violets on it.”
“Will you come over to the house with me? Please, Louise Ann?”
“I already had to put off starting supper for Jay Tucker,” Louise Ann said. “I do hope he’ll understand. Come on now, you drive and I’ll follow.”
Even when we got to the
house I shared with Aunt Rose Maria, it still hadn’t sunk in with me that she was dead. I expected her to come out of the kitchen in a flowered apron, her big breasts heaving after the exertion of making her famous chocolate drop cookies, flour staining her fingertips and a smudge of chocolate on one cheek.
Louise Ann called Clayton Durning and he said he’d stop by on his way home. “He said he would make the arrangements to have the deceased brought over from the hospital to the home,” Louise Ann said. “Imagine that, ‘the deceased.’ When he’s known your Aunt Rose Maria nearly all his life, to go calling her the deceased, like some old dead person you read about in the newspaper.
“Oh, that reminds me, we’ll have to call the newspaper,” she went on. “You and me should sit here now and write up something nice for them, what with all the things she did and her dates and such so they can put a nice obituary in.”
“She never did very much,” I said, “Excepting raise me.”
“Well, she did that, didn’t she?” She took a piece of my aunt’s flowered note paper that said “A Note from Rose Maria” on it and started to write. She led me through all the particulars of the obituary as if I was a little child. I was surprised to see her be so competent at this kind of thing, seeing as how I had not been through it before to teach her, but I was given to understand that when her grandpa died she had been very observant.
“Are you going to have to get another job?” Louise Ann asked me when we had finished with the obituary.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t rightly thought about it yet. I’ve had a lot on my mind these last couple of hours.”
“I don’t think there is a restaurant in town that would hire you as a waitress, Ima Jean. Not after what you did at Rocco’s Tacos. Although someone from out of town might be ignorant of your past and hire you.”
“It was a minor grease fire, Louise Ann,” I said. “It happens all the time. So don’t get so uppity about it. The other places I worked just didn’t have the right atmosphere, that’s all.”
The Cat Who Got Married Page 5
