Neighbors

by Thomas Berger

  Enid left the bed. She wore beige pajamas in some slippery synthetic. She opened a closet and found a pale-blue robe.

  Keese's question was surly: "Isn't that Elaine's?"

  "I lent mine to Ramona," Enid replied in a matter-of-fact tone which Keese found greatly exasperating in this case.

  "You'll be interested to know that I threw them out," he said bitterly. "Just before Elaine got home, luckily. I sent them packing, those God-damned trash." He glared fiercely at her.

  She smiled at him. "Just as well."

  "What?"

  "I say, it's a relief, isn't it? It just gets to the point where you have to take some sort of decisive action with people like that."

  "Just a minute," said Keese. "I don't quite get this, Enid. When did you turn against them?"

  "I was never with them," said she, solemnly shaking her head. "I was simply playing for time. Frankly, they frightened me."

  Keese scowled, trying to figure this out. "Is that why you invited them to stay the night? Did they threaten you? I wish I had known this. We have a police force in this town."

  "Oh, no! Imagine how it would seem if we had the police eject our neighbors. Could we ever live it down? Then there is that thing about their car. If provoked they could make some ugly trouble, Earl."

  "Well, they've evened the score on cars," Keese said. "Perry Greavy came a while ago with his wrecker and hauled away our automobile. That was Harry's revenge! But enough of this wretchedness! Elaine's waiting downstairs, dog-tired by the look of it. Go on down, and I'll straighten up here."

  But Enid insisted it would go faster if they worked together. And as it turned out Keese was happy that she had stayed. During this common effort their seeming differences were expunged: whether or not she had truthfully explained the reasons for her seeming sycophancy to the new neighbors, Keese decided to disregard what had happened—even though he was wounded by her lack of confidence in his ability to defend their home. No doubt she had learned her lesson. He had thrown them out! He would not soon forget that victory, though his hand still ached from Harry's mauling.

  When they had completed their task Keese and Enid went together to fetch Elaine, like a pair of footmen in some palace. They tended to fall into a ceremonial mood with their daughter. Now they halted in the doorway, as if awaiting permission to approach her, but she leaped from the sofa and went to embrace Enid. She also kissed her father, which she had not done on her entrance.

  "Elaine," Keese said, "I seem to be getting absentminded. Did I or did I not take your case upstairs?"

  Elaine dropped her lip. "I forgot it outside! Yes. I put it down while I looked for my key."

  "You should get it then, Earl," said Enid, with the self-important air of one who provides necessary direction.

  Keese was stung by this, but determined to rise above it. To complain would be merely to call the insult to Elaine's attention. He turned and moved briskly to the door.

  But just as he was reaching for the knob, the bell sounded. This noise was very startling, because it seemed as though the bell had been touched off by his gesture.

  He opened the door, and there stood Greavy—the old man, not the son. He too wore a billed cap made of padded orange plastic. He had a swarthy chicken-corded neck, a thrusting pointed pale jaw, and a thin and mean figure. Had his eyes shown a spark he might have looked like a fanatic, but they were lackluster.

  "Say," he said, looking past Keese and into the hallway and seeing Elaine and Enid, "I never knew you would of have had your women up and around at this hour."

  Keese believed he could identify an implication to the effect that he was being accused of tyrannical practices—unless that was due merely to Greavy's peculiar grammar. "It's only midnight," he answered, and then, annoyed with himself for accepting it as an accusation, added: "Should I have asked your permission?"

  Greavy jerked his head as though he had been slapped in the face. He mouthed some silent speech, perhaps a bitter one, but aloud he addressed Keese almost obsequiously. "I give your auto a inspection, but I couldn't find nothing wrong with it, so I brung it back. Now if you was to have trouble with it tomorrow, you just bring it in." He began to nod his head in what looked like the onset of an obsession-compulsion. "Yes, sir, you just bring it in, bring it right in, you hear? If you have any trouble—"

  "I'll bring it in," said Keese. "Don't worry about that." He saw Greavy continue to nod. He couldn't endure much of this. Therefore he stepped forward and down, compelling Greavy to give way and breaking the spell of which the garageman was captive.

  He looked towards the driveway. "Car around back? Keys in it?"

  Greavy leaned towards him and spoke discreetly. "I guess you had a good laugh out of it?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Made a fool of me?"

  Keese studied the man's face in the light that came from inside the open door: his expression revealed nothing. "Fool? No, sir! I didn't ask to have my car hauled away. Someone has been playing a joke on us both."

  Greavy's worn face heaved in something that was perhaps a smile, though the same gesture of mouth and set of eye would have served as his reaction to stepping in excrement. "Say, would you mind shutting that door of yours? The womenfolk, you know."

  Greavy was never less than surprising. Why should he care whether Elaine and Enid were in a draft? Not to mention that Keese had suspected from his last speech that he was taking a hostile turn.

  "Certainly." Keese pulled the door to.

  "Now, mister," said Greavy, "I say you're a dirty shitsack. How about that?"

  Keese found this cryptic. "I don't get your drift," he said equitably. "You can't be getting nasty. You were just so nice!" But he remembered how Greavy had been on the phone, turning ugly without warning.

  "What are you gonna do about it?" Greavy asked.

  Bored with this exchange, Keese looked again into the darkness towards the driveway that went through his side yard. "Car's round back, I guess. I'll go get the keys." He stepped down onto the path.

  His trailing foot had not left the step when Greavy struck him in the stomach with wondrous force for such an emaciated-looking creature. His fist went into Keese's soft belly as far as the wrist.

  Keese curled in upon himself and fell to the ground. Pain obscured such other feelings as he might have had. When he was able to breathe again and his stomach-ache had become less acute and more profound, he was alone on the walk. He raised himself onto his knees and looked blearily down the street: once again he saw the taillights of the wrecker turn the corner and go out of sight beyond the trees.

  He struggled to his feet, but he stayed bent at the waist. Elaine was waiting for him to bring in her overnight case. Where was it? He shuffled, bent, to look in the shrubs on either side of the door. He followed the footpath to the public sidewalk, should she have left it anywhere along the route. He explored the curb: there was light enough to find a valise, had one been there. But none was.

  He turned back and plodded up the path to the house. He didn't know how to tell Elaine that her case had been stolen. How terrible! One's own neighborhood should be a safe harbor. Suddenly the Keeses lived in a criminal slum.

  Elaine and Enid were gone from the front hall. Keese dragged himself upstairs. The bed in the master bedroom remained in the tangle left behind by Harry & Ramona. It was Enid's duty to change that linen. He looked for her in his daughter's room, but she was not there. No one was anywhere on the second floor. Perhaps Elaine had opted for a snack after all and Enid had had a few delicacies put away for just such an emergency. He descended to the ground floor and went to the kitchen.

  There was Elaine, and there was Enid, and Harry stood just inside the back door. He flinched when he saw Keese, and he moved his feet into a position that suggested readiness for a quick exit.

  "Dad!" Elaine said with enthusiasm. "Harry found my case outside and brought it in."

  Keese did not want to start any trouble in front of his child, but he could n
ot refrain from asking: "At the back door?"

  "Yes," said Harry. "It seemed the safer course." His face remained bland.

  "Wasn't that nice of him?" asked Elaine, who was standing at the edge of the table in a funny twisted posture which gave prominence to her right hip. "I think he deserves a drink at least."

  "Gee, Elaine," Keese said, refusing to look at Harry, "we don't have a drop of anything in the house."

  Elaine swung her case from the floor to the table. She undid the clasps, opened the little valise, and reaching amongst the wadded stuffs within, found and brought forth a flat pint of colorless liquid.

  "Could that be vod?" Harry asked, being emboldened to leave the door and advance on the table. He obviously could sense that Keese was stymied by the presence of Elaine.

  Elaine waved the bottle at her parents, one by one. "Join us?" she asked, as if she and Harry already made a team.

  Keese had gone off the hard stuff eighteen months before. He felt no better physically, but refraining from spirits and cigarettes gave him a taste of the sort of stern discipline required by certain faiths, religious and political.

  "What do you want for a mix?" he now asked dolefully. "I doubt we've got any quinine water."

  "I know we have none," said Enid, making a triumph of it.

  "I take my poison plain," Elaine said, brandishing the bottle.

  Harry was near the overnight case now. He leered into it and said: "Nifty undies."

  Keese might have struck him then, had he been close enough, but Elaine simpered and said: "Thank you, sir!"

  Keese had no explanation for that: in his presence Elaine had always been rather brittle with men. The old Elaine would have deflated Harry in short order.

  At least Enid now seemed less eager to please than on the occasion of Harry's previous visit. Perhaps she had finally got his number. She stood nowhere near him. Her only weakness was her costume: her nightclothes were if anything less revealing than daytime attire, but they seemed wrong in the presence of a stranger, and of course the robe wasn't even her own.

  "I'll get some ice," Keese said hastily. He could still feel the stomach-ache, and by no means had he forgotten Greavy and the need to square accounts with the old man. But first he would have to deal with Harry again. The only things that could be said for his new situation were that Ramona was absent, thank God!, and that Elaine was home, giving him even more incentive to defend his honor.

  As he took the ice-cube tray from the refrigerator, Enid went into the dining room, and by the time he had levered the cubes loose and lifted away the grid she was back with two squat tumblers. She brought these to him at the sink. Harry meanwhile had pulled out a chair and offered it to Elaine. Keese looked over his shoulder to watch her sink dreamily upon it. Harry quickly chose a chair for himself and pulled it near hers. He bent towards her and began to speak in an animated undertone.

  Enid came with the glasses at this point. Keese said to her, sotto voce: "We'll have to do something."

  Enid moued and shrugged. This seemed appallingly cynical. Keese put two cubes in each glass as she extended it to him, then called each one back and added a third piece of ice. With one glass in each hand Enid went symmetrically to serve Elaine & Harry. Keese realized that he was already thinking of them as a pair.

  Elaine's bottle stood on the tabletop. Enid seized it and poured one glassful of vodka and gave it to Harry, who made a parody clown-smile and said, with some attempt at a comic impediment of speech: "Thank you, ma'am, God damn."

  Enid filled the other glass and began to drink it herself.

  "Muth-er!" Elaine complained.

  "Your father," Enid said, "doesn't want you to have any."

  "Not true!" Keese cried. And he had thought that Enid was back in sympathy with him! He was really losing ground. He moved to take the initiative, and asked Harry, in the harshest voice he could produce: "You have a father?"

  Harry had already drained the first glassful of vodka. He lifted the bottle from where Enid had placed it and poured himself a refill. "As a matter of fact, I don't," he said at last, with a sly grin. "I was conceived by artificial insemination: an anonymous semen-donor."

  Keese cursed himself for giving the man that opening.

  Elaine said: "Harry, please pour me some vodka."

  Harry's answer was surprising. "No," said he. "If your dad says you can't have any, then that's good enough for me."

  "It's my bottle," Elaine said indignantly, "and I'm almost twenty-two."

  Keese now insisted on being heard. He did this by speaking unusually softly, not by turning up the volume. "Elaine, please don't believe that I didn't want you to have a drink. Why your mother told that vicious lie—I'm sorry, that's what it was—I have no idea."

  Outrageously, Harry responded to this with a prolonged Bronx cheer.

  Keese kept control of himself. "Why'd you do that?" he asked quietly.

  "Stick to your guns, Dad!" cried Harry. Apparently he felt that Keese was in danger of abandoning some cherished principle. Wasn't it typical of a rogue like him to be concerned with the integrity of others?

  Keese put his hand at Enid. "You don't need that." He remembered his suspicion, at one point earlier, that she had smelled of whiskey. He had no idea of what she did all day. She handed over her glass docilely enough now. He accepted it and gave it to Elaine.

  "Don't you ever do anything like that again," his daughter told him, and never had he been so wounded, by her or anyone else, for never had she so admonished him: the fact was that he had never opposed a wish of hers in all her life. It was of course impossible to gratify every wish of a small child, but when the necessity had come for that, he had vanished, letting Enid do the dirty work. He could never bear to say no to Elaine, and he had no apology whatever for that weakness. But was it a kind of justice now that he should be falsely blamed for this current deprivation?

  Whatever, he believed it more graceful not to insist on his guiltlessness, especially before a stranger, perhaps even an enemy, like Harry.

  "All right, I won't," he said to Elaine. But he couldn't bear it long, and he asked fearfully: "You don't hate me?"

  "Well," Elaine said petulantly, "I might forgive you, but you must apologize to Harry."

  For what? Was this unspeakable swine alienating the affections of his darling daughter? Elaine was staring fiercely at him.

  "Elaine—" he began.

  "Daddy!"

  "All right, I-beg-your-pardon-Harry," Keese said quickly. But acting on Elaine's command he found the apology easier to make than he had expected. It was, after all, really for Elaine's benefit and not Harry's. Despite all he did for her, Keese felt apologetic towards Elaine at all times, having been half of the conspiracy which had brought her into clamorous life from the serenity of the void.

  "If you're man enough to apologize," said Harry, "I hope I'm big enough to accept it." He shoved his large hand up at Keese. On their last transaction Harry had all but broken the bones in Keese's fingers, bringing him to the floor in pain.

  Therefore Keese ignored the gesture and addressed Elaine: "How's your drink? Vodka, eh? Is that a new taste?"

  "Daddy, I want you to shake hands with Harry."

  Keese was desperate enough to resist her: unless he evaded this demand he would be squirming in agony on the kitchen floor, for he had no doubt that Harry would not restrain himself if given the advantage.

  "Oh," said he, "I don't really think that's necessary, Elaine. I'm sure that Harry understands." He smirked in hatred at Harry and walked to the sink, so that he would be nowhere near the man.

  "I'm sorry, Earl," Harry said, as if in patient explanation, "but no apology can do without the shake. Oh, it's worthless without the shake!" Obviously he would not let this opportunity escape him.

  Elaine said nothing more, and Keese could not bear to look at her. Nevertheless, the force of her demand weighed ever more heavily on his conscience. He could not avoid shaking with Harry, that was clear. He tur
ned and stared into the sink—and saw the tray of loose ice cubes.

  He scooped one up, walked briskly back to Harry, and grasped his hand. He enjoyed Harry's look of consternation as his neighbor closed upon the ice cube. Harry's hand lost the initiative. Keese was able to get a powerful purchase with his own fingers (the ice was as nothing to him), and he gave Harry a taste of the pain he had writhed under not long before. He sensed that Harry was struggling to maintain composure. Keese himself was immune to the cube.

  The most priceless element was provided, appropriately enough, by Elaine. "Now," she asked her father, "don't you really feel better?"

  "I certainly do," said Keese, smiling honestly and thus weakening himself sufficiently for Harry to make his escape. But the man had been decisively punished. To cap his victory, Keese dropped the ice cube (somewhat shrunken) into Harry's glass. "Freshen it up," he said with a jovial distention of nostril. "By the way," he added, reluctant to lose the floor, "Greavy returned my car. There was nothing wrong with it, you see."