by Paula Guran
“Your period has begun.”
“I’m on the pill. It’s just that I’d like to rinse out my underwear and hang it up to dry overnight, and I don’t have a nightie. Would you turn off the lights in here when I’m ready to come out of the bathroom?”
“Certainly.”
“If you want to look you can, but I’d rather you didn’t. Maybe just that little lamp on the vanity?”
“No lights at all,” I told her. “You divined very quickly that I am a man of no great courage. I wish that you exhibited equal penetration with respect to my probity. I lie only when forced to, and badly as a rule; and my word is as good as any man’s. I will keep any agreement we make, whether expressed or implied, as long as you do.”
“You probably want to use the bathroom too.”
I told her that I would wait, and that I would undress in the bedroom while she bathed, and take my own bath afterward.
Of the many things, memories as well as speculations, that passed through my mind as I waited in our darkened bedroom for her to complete her ablutions, I shall say little here; perhaps I should say nothing. I shot the nightbolt, switched off the light and undressed. Reflecting that she might readily make away with my wallet and my watch while I bathed, I considered hiding them; but I felt certain that she would not, and to tell the truth my watch is of no great value and there was less than a hundred dollars in my wallet. Under these circumstances, it seemed wise to show I trusted her, and I resolved to do so.
In the morning I would drive her to the town in which I live or to St Louis, as she preferred. I would give her my address and telephone number, with twenty dollars, perhaps, or even thirty. And I would tell her in a friendly fashion that if she could find no better place to stay she could stay with me whenever she chose, on tonight’s terms. I speculated upon a relationship (causal and even promiscuous, if you like) that would not so much spring into being as grow by the accretion of familiarity and small kindnesses. At no time have I been the sort of man women prefer, and I am whole decades past the time in life in which love is found if it is found at all, overcautious and over-intellectual, little known to the world and certainly not rich.
Yet I dreamt, alone in that dark, high-ceilinged bedroom. In men such as I, the foolish fancies of boyhood are superseded only by those of manhood, unsought visions less gaudy, perhaps, but more foolish still.
Even in these the demon’s shadow fell between us; I felt certain then that she had escaped, and that he had come to take her back. I heard the flushing of the toilet, heard water run in the tub, and compelled myself to listen no more.
Though it was a cold night, the room we would share was warm. I went to the window most remote from the bathroom door, raised the shade, and stood for a time staring up at the frosty stars, then stretched myself quite naked upon the bed, thinking of many things.
I started when the bathroom door opened; I must have been half asleep.
“I’m finished,” Eira said, “you can go in now.” Then, “Where are you?”
My own eyes were accommodated to the darkness, as hers were not. I could make her out, white and ghostly, in the starlight; and I thrilled at the sight. “I’m here,” I told her, “on the bed. It’s over this way.” As I left the bed and she slipped beneath its sheets and quilt, our hands touched. I recall that moment more clearly than any of the rest.
Instructed by her lack of night vision (whether real or feigned), I pulled the dangling cord of the bathroom light before I toweled myself dry. When I opened the door, half expecting to find her gone, I could see her almost as well as I had when she had emerged from the bathroom, lying upon her back, her hair a damp-darkened aureole about her head and her arms above the quilt. I circled the bed and slid in.
“Nice bath?” Then, “How do you want to do it?”
“Slowly,” I said.
At which she giggled like a schoolgirl. “You’re fun. You’re not like him at all, are you?”
I hoped that I was not, as I told her.
“I know – do that again – who you are! You’re Larry.”
I was happy to hear it; I had tired of being myself a good many years ago.
“He was the smartest boy in school – in the high school that my husband and I graduated from. He was Valedictorian, and president of the chess club and the debating team and all that. Oh, my!”
“Did you go out with him?” I was curious, I confess.
“Once or twice. No, three times. Times when there was something I wanted to go to – a dance or a game – and my husband couldn’t take me, or wouldn’t. So I went with Larry, dropping hints, you know that I’d like to go, then saying okay when he asked. I never did this with him, though. Just with my husband, except that he wasn’t my husband then. Could you sorta run your fingers inside my knees and down the backs of my legs?”
I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”
“That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”
“You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”
“Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and beat you up.”
I said that I had heard that before, though I had never understood it.
“You don’t get mean when you’re drunk.”
“I talk too much and too loudly,” I told her, “and I can’t remember names, or the word I want to use. Eventually I grow ashamed and stop talking completely, and drinking as well.”
“My husband used to be happy and rowdy – that was before we got married. After, it was sort of funny, because you could see him starting to get mad before he got the top off the first bottle. Isn’t that funny?”
“No one can bottle emotions,” I said. “We must bring them to the bottles ourselves.”
“Kiss me.”
We kissed. I had always thought it absurd to speak of someone enraptured by a kiss, yet I knew a happiness that I had not thought myself capable of.
“Larry was really smart, like you. Did I say that?”
I managed to nod.
“I want to lie on top of you. Just for a minute or so. Is that all right?”
I told her truthfully that I would adore it.
“You can put your hands anyplace you want, but hold me. That’s good. That’s nice. He was really smart, but he wasn’t good at talking to people. Socially, you know? The stuff he cared about didn’t matter to us, and the stuff we wanted to talk about didn’t matter to him. But I let him kiss me in his dad’s car, and I always danced the first and last numbers with him. Nobody cares about that now, but then they did, where we came from. Larry and my husband and I. I think if he’d kept on drinking – he’d have maybe four or five beers every night, at first – he’d have beaten me to death, and that was why he stopped. But he used to threaten. Do you know what I mean?”
I said that I might guess, but with no great confidence.
“Like he’d pick up my big knife in the kitchen, and he’d say, I could stick this right through you – in half a minute it would all be over. Or he’d talk about how you could choke somebody with a wire till she died, and while he did he’d be running the lamp cord through his fingers, back and forth. Do you like this?”
“Don’t!” I said.
“I’m sorry, I thought you’d like it.”
“I like it too much. Please don’t. Not now.”
“He’d talk about other men, how I was playing up to them. Sometimes it was men I hadn’t even noticed. Like we’d go down to the pizza place, and when we got back he’d say, the big guy in the leather jacket – I saw you. He was eating it up, and you couldn’t give him enough, could you? You just couldn’t give him enough.
“
And I wouldn’t have seen anybody in a leather jacket. I’d be trying to remember who this was. But when we were in school he was never jealous of Larry, because he knew Larry was just a handy man to me. I kind of liked him the way I kind of liked the little kid next door.”
“You got him to help you with your homework,” I said.
“Yes, I did. How’d you know?”
“ A flash of insight. I have them occasionally.”
“I’d get him to help before a big quiz, too. When we were finishing up the semester, in Social Studies or whatever, I wouldn’t have a clue about what she was going to ask on the test, but Larry always knew. He’d tell me half a dozen things, maybe, and five would be right there on the final. A flash of insight, like you said.”
“Similar, perhaps.”
“But the thing was – it was – was—”
She gulped and gasped so loudly that even I realized she was about to cry. I hugged her, perhaps the most percipient thing I have ever done.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that, and I guess I’d better not or I’ll bawl. I just wanted to say you’re Larry, because my husband never minded him, not really, or anyhow not very much, and he’d kid around with him in those days, and sometimes Larry’d help him with his homework too.”
“You’re right,” I told her, “I am Larry; and your name is Martha Williamson, although she was never half so beautiful as you are, and I had nearly forgotten her.”
“Have you cooled down enough?”
“No. Another five minutes, possibly.”
“I hope you don’t get the aches. Do you really think I’m beautiful?”
I said I did, and that I could not tell her properly how lovely she was, because she would be sure I lied.
“My face is too square.”
“Absolutely not! Besides, you mean rectangular, surely. It’s not too rectangular, either. Any face less rectangular than yours is too square or too round.”
“See? You are Larry.”
“I know.”
“This is what I was going to tell, if I hadn’t gotten all weepy. Let me do it, and after that we’ll . . . You know. Get together.”
I nodded, and she must have sensed my nod in the movement of my shoulder, or perhaps a slight motion of the mattress. She was silent for what seemed to me half a minute, if not longer. “Kiss me, then I’ll tell it.”
I did.
“You remember what you said in the kitchen?”
“I said far too many things in the kitchen. I’m afraid. I tend to talk too much even when I’m sober. I’m sure I couldn’t recall them all.”
“It was before that awful man came in and took my room. I said the people going to Hell were dead, and you said some were and some weren’t. That didn’t make any sense to me till later when I thought about my husband. He was alive, but it was like something was getting a tighter hold on him all the time. Like Hell was reaching right out and grabbing him. He went on so about me looking at other men that I started really doing it. I’d see who was there, trying to figure out which one he’d say when we got home. Then he started bringing up ones that hadn’t been there, people from school – this was after we were out of school and married, and I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years.”
I said, “I understand.”
“He’d been on the football team and the softball team and run track and all that, and mostly it was those boys he’d talk about, but one time it was the shop teacher. I never even took shop.”
I nodded again, I think.
“But never Larry, so Larry got to be special to me. Most of those boys, well, maybe they looked, but I never looked at them. But I’d really dated Larry, and he’d had his arms around me and even kissed me a couple of times, and I danced with him. I could remember the cologne he used to wear, and that checkered wool blazer he had. After graduation most of the boys from our school got jobs with the coal company or in the tractor plant, but Larry won a scholarship to some big school, and after that I never saw him. It was like he’d gone there and died.”
“It’s better now,” I said, and I took her hand, just as she had taken mine going upstairs.
She misunderstood, which may have been fortunate. “It is. It really is. Having you here like this makes it better.” She used my name, but I am determined not to reveal it.
“Then after we’d been married about four years, I went into the drugstore, and Larry was there waiting for a prescription for his mother. We said hi, and shook hands, and talked about old times and how it was with us, and I got the stuff I’d come for and started to leave. When I got to the door, I thought Larry wouldn’t be looking any more, so I stopped and looked at him.”
“He was still looking at me.” She gulped. “You’re smart. I bet you guessed, didn’t you?”
“I would have been,” I said. I doubt that she heard me.
“I’ll never, ever, forget that look. He wanted me so bad, just so bad it was tearing him up. My husband starved a dog to death once. His name was Ranger, and he was a blue-tick hound. They said he was good coon dog, and I guess he was. My husband had helped this man with some work, so he gave him Ranger. But my husband used to pull on Ranger’s ears till he’d yelp, and finally Ranger bit his hand. He just locked Ranger up after that and wouldn’t feed him any more. He’d go out in the yard and Ranger’d be in that cage hoping for him to feed him and knowing he wouldn’t, and that was the way Larry looked at me in the drugstore. It brought it all back, about the dog two years before, and Larry, and lots of other things. But the thing was ... thing was ...”
I stroked her hand.
“He looked at me like that, and I saw it, and when I did I knew I was looking at him that very same way. That was when I decided, except that I thought I’d save up money, and write to Larry when I had enough, and see if he’d help me. Are you all right now?”
“No,” I said, because at that moment I could have cut my own throat or thrown myself through the window.
“He never answered my letters, though. I talked to his mother, and he’s married with two children. I like you better anyway.”
Her fingers had resumed explorations. I said, “Now, if you’re ready.”
And we did. I felt heavy and clumsy, and it was over far too quickly; yet if I were given what no man actually is, the opportunity to experience a bit of his life a second time, I think I might well choose those moments.
“Did you like that?”
“Yes, very much indeed. Thank you.”
“You’re pretty old for another one, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Wait a few minutes, and we’ll see.”
“We could try some other way. I like you better than Larry. Have I said that?”
I said she had not, and that she had made me wonderfully happy by saying it.
“He’s married, but I never wrote him. I won’t lie to you much more.”
“In that case, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Or two? Perhaps three?”
“Go ahead.”
“You indicated that you had gone to a school, a boarding school apparently, where you were treated badly. Was it near here?”
“I don’t remember about that – I don’t think I said it.”
“We were talking about the inscription Dante reported. I believe it ended ‘Lasciate ogrti speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ Leave all hope, you that enter!”
“I said I wouldn’t lie. It’s not very far, but I can’t give you the name of a town you’d know, or anything like that.”
“My second—”
“Don’t ask anything else about the school. I won’t tell you.”
“All right, I won’t. Someone gave your husband a hunting dog. Did your husband hunt deer? Or quail, perhaps?”
“Sometimes. I think you’re right. He’d rather have had a bird dog, but the man he helped didn’t raise them.”
I kissed her. “You’re in danger, and I think that you must know how much. I’ll help you all
I can. I realize how very trite this will sound, but I would give my life to save you from going back to that school, if need be.”
“Kiss me again.” There was a new note in her voice, I thought, and it seemed to me that it was hope.
When we parted, she asked, “Are you going to drive me to St Louis in the morning?”
“I’ll gladly take you further. To New York or Boston or even to San Francisco. It means Saint Francis, you know.”
“You think you could again?”
At her touch, I knew the answer was yes; so did she.
Afterward she asked, “What was your last question?” and I told her I had no last question.
“You said one question then it was two, then three. So what was the last one?”
“You needn’t answer.”
“All right, I won’t. What was it?”
“I was going to ask you in what year you and your husband graduated from high school.”
“You don’t mind?”
I sighed. “A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death; and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.”
“Did you think that salesman was really a cop? I think you did. I did, too, almost.”
“No or yes, depending upon what you mean by ‘cop’. But we’ve already talked too much about these things.”
“Would you rather I’d do this?”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it with every fiber of my being. “I would a thousand times rather have you do that.”
After some gentle teasing about my age and inadequacies (the sort of thing that women always do, in my experience, as anticipatory vengeance for the contempt with which they expect to be treated when the sexual act is complete), we slept. In the morning, Eira wore her wedding band to breakfast, where I introduced her to the old woman as my wife, to the old man’s obvious relief. The demon sat opposite me at the table, wolfing down scrambled eggs, biscuits and home-made sausage he did not require, and from time to time winking at me in an offensive manner that I did my best to tolerate.
