Inside Dornberg’s house, Mae made a sound, something like an exhalation that ended on a word. He turned, saw that she was standing in the entrance of the living room, in the glow of the television, gesturing to him.
“What?” he said, moving to the screen door.
“Speaking of your high-heeled shoe. Look at this.”
He went in to her. On television, a newsman with an overbright red tie was talking about the body of a woman that had been found in a pile of leaves and mud in a wooded section of the county. Dornberg listened to the serious, steady, reasonable news voice talking of murder. The picture cut away and the screen was blank for an instant, and when he heard the voice pronounce the name Edith before going on to say another last name, the name of some other girl, his heartbeat faltered. On the screen now was a photograph of this unfortunate woman, this coincidence, not his Edith, some poor stranger, twenty-five years old, wearing a ski sweater, a bright, college-picture smile, and brown hair framing a tanned face. But the moment had shocked him, and the shock was still traveling along the nerves in his skin as Mae spoke. “You don’t suppose—”
“No,” he said, before he could think. “It’s not her.”
His wife stared at him. He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he watched the unfolding story of the body that was in tennis shoes and jeans—the tennis shoes and part of a denim cuff showing as men gently laid it down in a fold of black plastic.
“Tennis shoes,” he managed. But his voice caught.
She still stared at him. On the screen, the newsman exuded professional sincerity, wide-eyed, half frowning. Behind him, in a riot of primary colors and with cartoonish exaggeration, was the representation of a human hand holding a pistol, firing.
Mae walked into the kitchen.
He called after her. “Need help?”
She didn’t answer. He waited a moment, trying to decide how he should proceed. The damage done, the television had shifted again, showing beer being poured into an iced glass in light that gave it outlandishly alluring hues of amber and gold. Already the world of pure sensation and amusement had moved on to something else. He switched the TV off, some part of him imagining, as always, that it went off all over the country when he did so.
In the kitchen, she had got last night’s pasta out, and was breaking up a head of lettuce.
“What should I do?” he asked, meaning to be helpful about dinner, but he was immediately aware of the other context for these words. “Should I set the table?” he added quickly.
“Oh,” she said, glancing at him. “It’s fine.” The look she had given him was almost shy; it veered from him and he saw that her hands shook.
He stepped to the open back door. By accident, then, she knew. All the months of secrecy were done. And he could seek forgiveness. When he understood this, his own guilty elation closed his throat and made it difficult to speak. Outside, in the dusk beyond the edge of the field, from the lighted half-finished house, the sound of guitar music came.
“Think I’ll go out on the deck,” he told her.
“I’ll call you when it’s ready.” Her voice was precariously even, barely controlled.
“Honey,” he said.
“I’ll call you.”
“Mae.”
She stopped. She was simply standing there, head bowed, disappointment and sorrow in the set of her jaw, the weary slope of her shoulders, waiting for him to go on. And once more he was watching her, this person who had come all the long way with him from his youth, and who knew him well enough to understand that he had broken their oldest promise to each other—not the one to be faithful so much as the one to honor and protect, for he had let it slip, and he had felt the elation of being free of the burden of it. It came to him then: the whole day had been somehow the result of his guilty need to unburden himself, starting with the high-heeled shoe. And there was nothing to say. Nothing else to tell her, nothing to soothe or explain, deflect or bring her closer. In his mind the days ahead stretched into vistas of quiet. Perhaps she might even decide to leave him.
“What are you thinking?” he managed to ask.
She shrugged. Nothing he might find to say in this moment would be anything he could honestly expect her to believe.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Now she did look at him. “Yes.”
“I’ll be out here.”
She didn’t answer.
He stepped out. The moon was rising, a great red disk above the trees and the pond. A steady, fragrant breeze blew, cool as the touch of metal on his cheek. The music had stopped from the other house, though the lights still burned in the windows. Behind him, only slightly more emphatic than usual, was the small clatter of plates and silverware being placed. He watched the other house for a while, in a kind of pause, a stillness, a zone of inner silence, like the nullity of shock. Yet there was no denying the stubborn sense of deliverance which breathed through him.
When something shattered in the kitchen, he turned and saw her walk out of the room. He waited a moment, then quietly stepped inside. She had broken a wine glass; it was lying in pieces on the counter where it had fallen. He put the smaller pieces into the cupped largest one and set it down in the trash, then made his way upstairs and along the hall toward the bedroom. He went slowly. There seemed an oddly tranquilizing aspect about motion itself. It was as if he were being pulled back from disaster by the simple force of sensible actions: cleaning up broken glass, climbing stairs, mincing along a dimly lighted hallway.
She had turned the blankets back on the bed but was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he said.
“I broke one of the good wine glasses.”
“I’m not hungry either,” he told her.
She said nothing.
“Mae. Do you want to talk about it?”
Without looking at him, she said, “Talk about what?”
He waited.
“We only have two left,” she said. “I just hate to see the old ones get broken.”
“Never again,” he said. “I swear to you.”
“It happens,” she told him. “And it’s always the heirlooms.”
“How long have you known?” he said.
“Known?”
Again, he waited.
“You’ve been so strange all day. What’re you talking about?”
He understood now that the burden had been returned to him, and he was not going to be allowed to let it slip.
“I guess I’ll go back down and watch some television,” he said.
She kept brushing her hair.
Downstairs, he put the uneaten dinner away, then turned the television on and stood for a minute in the uproar of voices and music—a huge chorus of people singing about a bank. Finally he walked out on the deck again. From the unfinished house came the hyperbolic percussion of an electronic synthesizer. Shadows danced in the windows, people in the uncomplicated hour of deciding on one another. A moment later, he realized that Mae had come back downstairs. She was standing in the kitchen in her bathrobe, pouring herself a glass of water. She glanced at him, glanced in his direction; he was uncertain if she could see him where he stood. She did not look unhappy or particularly distressed; her demeanor was somehow practical, as though she had just completed an unpleasant task, a thing that had required effort but was finished, behind her. Seeing this sent a little thrill of fear through him, and then he was simply admiring her in that light that was so familiar, the woman of this house, at evening.
Quietly, feeling the need, for some reason, to hurry, he stepped down into the grass and walked out of the border of the light, toward the pond. He did not go far, but stood very still, facing the column of shimmering moonlight on the water and the four bright, curtainless windows in that house where the music grew louder and louder. He no longer quite heard it. Though the whole vast bowl of the night seemed to reverberate with drums and horns, he was aware only of the silence behind him, li
stening for some sound of his wife’s attention, hoping that she might call him, say his name, remind him, draw him back to her from the darkness.
TANDOLFO THE GREAT
for Stephen & Karen & Nicholas Goodwin
“Tandolfo,” he says to his own image in the mirror over the bathroom sink. “She loves you not, oh, she doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t.”
He’s put the makeup on, packed the bag of tricks—including the rabbit that he calls Chi-Chi, and the bird, the attention getter, Witch. He’s to do a birthday party for some five-year-old on the other side of the river. A crowd of babies, and the adults waiting around for him to screw up—this is going to be one of those tough ones.
He has fortified himself, and he feels ready. He isn’t particularly worried about it. But there’s a little something else he has to do first. Something on the order of the embarrassingly ridiculous: he has to make a delivery.
This morning at the local bakery he picked up a big pink wedding cake, with its six tiers and scalloped edges and its miniature bride and groom on top. He’d ordered it on his own; he’d taken the initiative, planning to offer it to a young woman he works with. He managed somehow to set the thing on the back seat of the car, and when he got home he found a note from her announcing, excited and happy, that she’s engaged. The man she’d had such difficulty with has had a change of heart: he wants to get married after all. She’s going off to Houston to live. She loves her dear old Tandolfo with a big kiss and a hug always, and she knows he’ll have every happiness. She’s so thankful for his friendship. Her magic man. Her sweet clown. She actually drove over here and, finding him gone, left the note for him, folded under the door knocker—her notepaper with the tangle of flowers at the top. She wants him to call her, come by as soon as he can, to help celebrate. Please, she says. I want to give you a big hug. He read this and then walked out to stand on the sidewalk and look at the cake in its place on the back seat of the car.
“Good God,” he said.
He’d thought he would put the clown outfit on, deliver the cake in person, an elaborate proposal to a girl he’s never even kissed. He’s a little unbalanced, and he knows it. Over the months of their working together at Bailey & Brecht department store, he’s built up tremendous feelings of loyalty and yearning toward her. He thought she felt it, too. He interpreted gestures—her hand lingering on his shoulder when he made her laugh; her endearments, tinged as they seemed to be with a kind of sadness, as if she were afraid for what the world might do to someone so romantic.
“You sweet clown,” she said. She said it a lot. And she talked to him about her ongoing sorrows, the man she’d been in love with who kept waffling about getting married, wanting no commitments. Tandolfo, a.k.a. Rodney Wilbury, told her that he hated men who weren’t willing to run the risks of love. Why, he personally was the type who’d always believed in marriage and children, lifelong commitments. It was true that he had caused difficulties for himself, and life was a disappointment so far, but he believed in falling in love and starting a family. She didn’t hear him. It all went right through her, like white noise on the radio. For weeks he had come around to visit her, had invited her to watch him perform. She confided in him, and he thought of movies where the friend stays loyal and is a good listener, and eventually gets the girl: they fall in love. He put his hope in that. He was optimistic; he’d ordered and bought the cake, and apparently the whole time, all through the listening and being noble with her, she thought of it as nothing more than friendship, accepting it from him because she was accustomed to being offered friendship.
Now he leans close to the mirror to look at his own eyes through the makeup. They look clear enough. “Loves you absolutely not. You must be crazy. You must be the Great Tandolfo.”
Yes.
Twenty-six years old, out-of-luck Tandolfo. In love. With a great oversized cake in the back seat of his car. It’s Sunday, a cool April day. He’s a little inebriated. That’s the word he prefers. It’s polite; it suggests something faintly silly. Nothing could be sillier than to be dressed like this in broad daylight and to go driving across the bridge into Virginia to put on a magic show. Nothing could be sillier than to have spent all that money on a completely useless purchase—a cake six tiers high. Maybe fifteen pounds of sugar.
When he has made his last inspection of the clown face in the mirror, and checked the bag of tricks and props, he goes to his front door and looks through the screen at the architectural shadow of the cake in the back seat. The inside of the car will smell like icing for days. He’ll have to keep the windows open even if it rains; he’ll go to work smelling like confectionery delights. The whole thing makes him laugh. A wedding cake. He steps out of the house and makes his way in the late afternoon sun down the sidewalk to the car. As if they have been waiting for him, three boys come skating down from the top of the hill. He has the feeling that if he tried to sneak out like this at two in the morning, someone would come by and see him anyway. “Hey, Rodney,” one boy says. “I mean, Tandolfo.”
Tandolfo recognizes him. A neighborhood boy, a tough. Just the kind to make trouble, just the kind with no sensitivity to the suffering of others. “Leave me alone or I’ll turn you into spaghetti,” he says.
“Hey guys, it’s Tandolfo the Great.” The boy’s hair is a bright blond color, and you can see through it to his scalp.
“Scram,” Tandolfo says. “Really.”
“Aw, what’s your hurry, man?”
“I’ve just set off a nuclear device,” Tandolfo says with grave seriousness. “It’s on a timer. Poof.”
“Do a trick for us,” the blond one says. “Where’s the scurvy rabbit of yours?”
“I gave it the week off.” Someone, last winter, poisoned the first Chi-Chi. He keeps the cage indoors now. “I’m in a hurry. No rabbit to help with the driving.”
But they’re interested in the cake now. “Hey, what’s that? Jesus, is that real?”
“Just stay back.” Tandolfo gets his cases into the trunk and hurries to the driver’s side door. The three boys are peering into the back seat. To the blond boy he says, “You’re going to go bald, aren’t you?”
“Hey man, a cake. Can we have a piece of it?” one of them says.
“Back off,” Tandolfo says.
Another says, “Come on, Tandolfo.”
“Hey, Tandolfo, I saw some guys looking for you, man. They said you owed them money.”
He gets in, ignoring them, and starts the car.
“Sucker,” the blond one says.
“Hey man, who’s the cake for?”
He drives away, thinks of himself leaving them in a cloud of exhaust. Riding through the green shade, he glances in the rear-view mirror and sees the clown face, the painted smile. It makes him want to laugh. He tells himself he’s his own cliché—a clown with a broken heart. Looming behind him is the cake, like a passenger in the back seat. The people in the cake store had offered it to him in a box; he had made them give it to him like this, on a cardboard slab. It looks like it might melt.
He drives slow, worried that it might sag, or even fall over. He has always believed viscerally that gestures mean everything. When he moves his hands and brings about the effects that amaze little children, he feels larger than life, unforgettable. He learned the magic while in high school, as a way of making friends, and though it didn’t really make him any friends, he’s been practicing it ever since. It’s an extra source of income, and lately income has had a way of disappearing too quickly. He has been in some travail, betting the horses, betting the sports events. He’s hung over all the time. There have been several polite warnings at work. He has managed so far to tease everyone out of the serious looks, the cool study of his face. The fact is, people like him in an abstract way, the way they like distant clownish figures: the comedian whose name they can’t remember. He can see it in their eyes. Even the rough characters after his loose change have a certain sense of humor about it.
He’s a phenomenon, a
subject of conversation.
There’s traffic on Key Bridge, and he’s stuck for a while. It becomes clear that he’ll have to go straight to the birthday party. Sitting behind the wheel of the car with his cake behind him, he becomes aware of people in other cars noticing him. In the car to his left, a girl stares, chewing gum. She waves, rolls her window down. Two others are with her, one in the back seat. “Hey,” she says. He nods, smiles inside what he knows is the clown smile. His teeth will look dark against the makeup.
“Where’s the party?” she says.
But the traffic moves again. He concentrates. The snarl is on the other side of the bridge, construction of some kind. He can see the cars in a line, waiting to go up the hill into Roslyn and beyond. Time is beginning to be a consideration. In his glove box he has a flask of bourbon. More fortification. He reaches over and takes it out, looks around himself. No police anywhere. Just the idling cars and people tuning their radios or arguing or simply staring out as if at some distressing event. The smell of the cake is making him woozy. He takes a swallow of the bourbon, then puts it away. The car with the girls in it goes by in the left lane, and they are not looking at him. He watches them go on ahead. He’s in the wrong lane again; he can’t remember a time when his lane was the only one moving. He told her once that he considered himself of the race of people who gravitate to the non-moving lanes of highways, and who cause green lights to turn yellow merely by approaching them. She took the idea and ran with it, saying she was of the race of people who emit enzymes which instill a sense of impending doom in marriageable young men.
“No,” Tandolfo/Rodney said. “I’m living proof that isn’t so. I have no such fear, and I’m with you.”
“But you’re of the race of people who make mine relax all the enzymes.”
“You’re not emitting the enzymes now. I see.”
“No,” she said. “It’s only with marriageable young men.”
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 54
