by Packer, Vin
Jim said, “You know her?”
“Who?”
“Jill Latham.”
“She runs the bookstore, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, some dish. Thought your brother was a goddamn introvert, according to you. You’re always saying he’s a goddamn introvert.” Jim laughed. “She’ll fix his wagon.”
“Her?”
“Sure. She’s on the make.”
“You make me sick.”
“She is.”
“You think every woman is. You’re so conceited it’s nauseating. Really, Jim, it’s simply nauseating.”
“I’m telling you I know. Every night I go there she’s always watching me. You can tell when someone’s watching you.”
“She probably thinks you’re coming down with a tropical disease. Look at your face.”
“Thanks,” he answered. “Thanks a lot for all your human kindness. I got a sunburn. Thanks for understanding.”
Evie listened to the wild notes of the tenor sax and felt herself moving to the music. The music went right through her and she wished she could just get up and run fast, or shout, or do something as wild as it all sounded. She knew she was getting depressed with Jim Prince. Before she had been willing to nurse the depression along and think of how hard it was to have a hard core inside of you eating away, a core of loneliness. A hard one. She wanted to express herself tonight, to go someplace and find some way to express what she felt, and have it all out.
“Do you have your car, Jim?”
He was angry. “Yeah.”
“All right, I’m sorry.”
“Do you have to be so bitchy all the time?”
“No …. I wish we could drive someplace — fast.”
“There you go,” he said, “off your rocker.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Jim leaned forward and touched her arm. “Listen, baby, I try to understand. I try to understand you all the time, baby. Listen, all I want to do is get along with you.”
“Let’s go someplace and have a drink. We’ve never had a cocktail in some bar. Some smoky bar.”
Jim laughed. “You’re really crazy,” he said. “You’re sweet and crazy. Aw, come on, come on, then.”
He called good-by to Jake and took her hand. Beside her, he was much taller and he was aware of his height, and of Evie, and of the way she looked in thin summer clothes without stockings. She looked fine.
He said, “You can be sweet, baby.”
“What did you mean about Jill Latham making eyes at you?” Evie asked. As she walked with him down Broad Street to the parking lot, she was still imaging herself, how she looked, and how she would seem to other people. She practiced expressions. She had a serious expression now, as though she and Jim were discussing something terribly important.
“Well, she acts — funny, or something,” he said. “Funny.”
They turned off the sidewalk onto the gravel of the parking lot. Evie was not listening to Jim Prince’s answer to her question. She was wondering vaguely what he would be like when he was Russel Lofton’s age, and what Russel Lofton had been like at twenty-one. She was looking straight ahead at the darkness on the hills behind the lot, and she decided the expression on her face must be striped with serenity and sadness.
“Listen,” Jim said. “Three nights in a row last week she asked me if I had an extra pencil. I mean, three nights in a row.”
Chapter Four
My coffee’s cold
Like the heart I gave my man.
I got no scheme,
I got no real fine plan.
Just listen to my boast now —
I entertain a ghost now.
— Fatal Blues
THE LIGHTS FLICKED — once, twice, and again. Old Mr. Crocker began to giggle.
Mrs. Whitmore made a yellow smile and called out, “Closing time. Clos-ing time.”
Charlie heard it all. He had been waiting for this minute a half hour, waiting without working and waiting with a weak wonder that he told himself was stupid. God, he could smell the lilacs and they were sweet. He stayed right where he was, his head bent to his book, his feet crossed, curled under the chair. He couldn’t look up. He knew what to call it. It was a crush. He didn’t know what to do with it. In a minute she would say something to him and he would be worse off than Mr. Crocker. He was acting like Mr. Crocker right now, he thought, like the village idiot.
How could a little thing like borrowing a pencil be such a big thing? How could he be sitting in the whole world in Azrael, Vermont, and be making a big thing out of a little thing like borrowing a pencil? Oh, God, it was a tense moment, he knew that.
“Clos-ing ti-yam.”
O.K. Get up. Go and get the goddamn pencil and say you were glad to lend it and forget it. Go home. O.K. Get up! He closed the book and put the yellow pad under it and pushed back his chair. She was right behind him then.
She said, “Thank you so much.”
They began to walk. She was shorter. He had wondered if she would be shorter, and she had heels too. She said, “My name’s Jill Latham.”
“Charlie Wright,” he managed to mutter. Couldn’t he just speak it out? She said, “Pardon me,” and he repeated his name, and she said, “Are you at the university?”
“No. Next year I plan to go to Harvard.”
“I thought you were at the university.”
“No.”
“You’re here almost every night, aren’t you?”
“Just about. Yes.”
“Well!” she said, and Mrs. Whitmore called good night to them and they were out in the summer night, going down the stone steps. The stars were out.
She said, “Do you like to read, Charlie Wright?”
The way she said it. His two names at once. He watched the steps carefully. It was foolish, but he thought if he didn’t he might fall.
“Yes. All the time.”
“All the time?”
“Well, no. You know. I like to read.” Great, he thought, great dialogue. He said, “You must too.”
“Oh, yes. My, yes. I read and read, but not all the time.” She laughed. “You know what Emily Dickinson said: ‘God permits industrious angels afternoons to play.’ “
Charlie didn’t know what to say, and he laughed hoarsely. His laughter sounded vacant and strange. He said, “Yes,” and they were at the bottom of the steps, standing still.
“I live over on Deel Street,” she said. “If you’re going that way, we might walk along together.”
“Sure,” he said. “Good.”
At first he was disappointed and unsure that it was as glorious as he had thought. He thought, Well, here I am walking along beside her. So what? And he thought, This is nothing. This is nothing at all. He had a very clear picture of the situation, Charlie Wright, age sixteen, walking home with the woman who ran the Red Clover Bookshop. That, in itself, was nothing. The street lights were bright, it was a hot night, and from the fields over near the creek beyond the library the crickets clacked their persistent songs. Nothing special.
Then they turned off Broad and went down Evans toward Deel and the street was darker and they were not talking. Then he was nervous, and he felt not glad to be taller than she was, but clumsy and oafish, like a giraffe. Then it was the way it was before.
“For a long time,” she said, “I have walked this street alone. Sometimes it’s hard.”
“Don’t you know anyone?” Charlie asked.
“Know anyone?” she answered.
There was nothing he could say to that. He did not even understand it. Suddenly he wished he were more mature. He was a kid. Just a kid.
“It’s a street that reminds me of many streets. Many streets.”
“I guess they’re all the same,” he said, wondering what was all the same, what he was talking about.
“From city to city, town to town, country to country,” she answered. “Odd. Yes, odd.”
“Yes,” he said.
She said, �
�My, yes.”
He was surprised to hear his own voice blurt out, “Well, what do you do?”
“Do?”
“I mean with your time.”
“Do?” She gave a little laugh. “Do?” she said. “I keep my shop. I eat. I read. I stay out of trouble. That’s what I do.”
“What are you reading now?” He looked at the worn book under her arm, the red cover with the rubbed-out gold lettering he could not read because of the bad light in the street.
“This? This is a book of A. E. Housman. Are you familiar with the poems of Housman?”
“I read one or two,” he said, “I think.”
She recited a line: “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover,” and she sighed. She said, “I am immensely fond of A. E. Housman.”
Charlie thought she was lovely and mysterious and that it would be very hard to ever understand her and he must try very hard. She was different from anyone he had ever talked to before. She was like someone from a book or movie, someone unreal who did not belong with real people. He thought of the date of this day and decided he would remember it. He would mark it down in the flyleaf of a book and put “J” after it. Then he would know always when it had happened, when he had first talked with her.
Under a lamppost on Evans Street three of the younger boys from Azrael High were sitting on their bikes talking. They whistled when Charlie walked by with her and one of them said, “Who’s your gal, Charlie?” and another yelled, “Hold me closer. Closer, I say. Closer!” All three laughed raucously at this, and Charlie could feel his face hot and red.
Jill Latham said, “They all seem to be like that. Young — but invariably, children. Wild. No tenderness.”
Charlie had never heard anyone speak of tenderness. It was true. It was what he thought put into words by her. He thought that she must understand everything. Everything.
The house on Deel Street was a brown frame house with a white porch and white steps and a white glider on the porch. There was a light burning in the hallway and Charlie thought that it was a big house for her to live in all alone, with a downstairs and an upstairs. She turned to him where the sidewalk to her house and the sidewalk they were on formed a ? and she said, “I wonder if you would enjoy a soft drink.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a warm night,” she said. “Come along, then.”
She walked ahead of him up the wooden steps, holding the screen door open for him, and he followed her inside. The smell of the house was not like her. It had a damp salt smell, and the furniture was old-fashioned and worn. She led him into the parlor, a small room with several cushioned rockers, a shaggy red couch, a table beside it with a bowl lamp, the bulb covered with a scorched green lamp shade. On the floor there was a record player, the kind that was wound with a crank handle, and a single record was placed on the turntable. The rug was so worn that the pattern was a vague resemblance to great yellow flowers, and the edges were frayed. Framed landscapes, yellowed with age, hung on the walls, which were papered in faded line crosses, and the paint at the window sills was peeling.
“I’ll be a moment,” she said, “only a moment. You just make yourself comfortable.”
Charlie sat down uneasily on the red couch and stared about the room. He felt embarrassed for her and sorry for her and he thought, What does a house matter anyway? It’s not her fault. It was left to her. The only thing in the room that was like her was the books, row upon row of books on the wall opposite him, and in the corner some were stacked on the floor. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nine-twenty, and he wondered what they would say to one another and how long he would stay. It was sad to be there but he was glad he was the one, because it didn’t matter to him that the house was old and ghostlike, and not like a house where she would live.
When she came back into the room, she was carrying a bottle of pop and a glass of ginger ale. She handed him the bottle. “Boys,” she said, “like it from the bottle, don’t they?”
“Sure.”
She sat down beside him and he could smell the lilacs again, and another smell he could not be sure of. She smoothed her skirt across her lap and said, “Now tell me about yourself. You’re going to be a brilliant scholar, are you not?”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I like to study.”
“Of course you do.”
“Some fellows are more interested in sports, I guess, but I’ve always liked to study.”
“Young men of real depth do,” she said. She sipped the drink, watching him with the rim of her glass at her mouth, and she smiled. “It’s nothing to apologize for. I suppose sometimes you find you have to apologize for liking to study.”
Charlie could have cried. He found himself choked inside, tight and quivering with a warmth he had never realized, and it was like not being awake and imagining everything that was happening. Happening the way he wanted it to happen. He found himself able to talk, to tell her. “And my mom is always saying I should be interested in something else. My sister isn’t like me at all. You know — she’s a girl. Well, I don’t mean that — but I mean she’s always talking about fellows and kidding me about getting girl friends and things. But I don’t pay attention to her. Sometimes I feel like her older brother instead of her younger brother.”
“You are old for your age. It’s true.” Miss Latham sipped more of her drink. “You are,” she said. “Young men like you usually are. My, yes.”
“You are too,” he said, and then he blushed scarlet and said, “I didn’t mean — ”
“I know.”
“I mean, m-most women, I guess, don’t find themselves interested in Emily Dickinson and A. E. Housman, you know.”
“They’re too busy raising their families.”
“I guess so.”
“Raising their families,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
“The pursuit of knowledge does not often interest women after thirty. Women after thirty have other things to oc-cu-py their minds.”
“Like my mother. My mother runs the Gazette.”
“They get mar-ried, and have babies, and they have other things to talk about.”
“After my father died, she had to raise Evie and me by herself.”
“Most women are married by thirty.”
“Mom got married when she was twenty-two.”
“Hmmm?”
“Mom got married when she was twenty-two.”
“Did she now. Did she.”
“Yes.”
“She must be a love-ly woman.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t say that. She’s fine, all right, but not much of a looker. She works hard.”
“Ummm.” Jill Latham finished the ginger ale and stood up and walked around the room. She stopped at the table to take a cigarette from a black box and light it, then stood by the window blowing the smoke out toward the night air. “Charlie Wright,” she said, “would you like me to play some music?”
“Oh, sure. That’s a swell idea.”
“Good.”
She walked over to the phonograph, stooped down, cranked it, and turned to look over her shoulder at Charlie with the cigarette in her mouth. At that instant she did not seem like the same woman. There was a certain hard line to her mouth, and the cigarette dangled between her lips with the smoke spiraling up past her eyes. Her eyes seemed a bright gold color. She said, “Ordinarily I don’t like this kind of music. I prefer the works of Haydn, Bach, Mozart, the more classical music, but this is a record I have had for some time. Blues.”
She put the needle over to the edge of the black record and stood up, looking down as it spun. It was a scratchy record, a slow scratchy one, and the singer had a deep, husky voice.
“My coffee’s cold
Like the heart I gave my man.
I got no scheme,
I got no real fine plan.
Just listen to my boast now —
I entertain a ghost now.”
Charlie did not hear all the words.
He watched her face, saw the kicked, hurt look come to her eyes. Her hand ground out the cigarette in the ash tray and she seemed to listen very carefully, as though she had never heard the song before. She stood quietly, swaying slightly to the rhythm and nodding her head, but she did not look at him. Charlie wished he knew what it was that made her hurt, he wished he knew and could help her. He thought he ought to say, “Jill, tell me about it,” the way a grown man might, and then he thought, Stupid jackass, there’s nothing you can do to help her, no matter what it is. She doesn’t want your help.
The music whined to an end, and suddenly Jill Latham smiled at him. She said, “It is a very old record. It tells a story, you know. I like it because it tells a story.” She bent and turned it off and walked back toward the couch. “I’m afraid I bored you with my old record.”
“Bored! Gee, no! No, I was interested.”
“A young scholar like yourself exposed to the more tawdry aspects of life.”
“I wasn’t bored at all. I liked it.”
“I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to hear the words any more. At one time they seemed very clear.” Jill, tell me about it.
Charlie swallowed what was left in the bottle and Jill Latham sighed. “Well,” she said, “well, it was very nice of you to accompany me to my home. I did appreciate it greatly, greatly.”
“Heck, no. I mean, thanks for the Coke.”
He was standing then, looking down at her. She said, “You are a tall boy too.”
Charlie grinned. “I really liked the record,” he said.
“You’re sweet. You’re very sweet.” She looked at him for what seemed a long time and he had to look away from her.
“Very sweet,” she said again. She walked with him out through the hall to the screen door. He had not wanted to go, he wanted to stay. He felt himself absorbed with the mystery of her and nothing about those minutes with her seemed as though they had anything to do with Azrael, Vermont. They seemed far away and foreign.
“Thank you again for the pencil,” she said.
