In the hesitant sunlight the forsythia stood, a golden shock. It had lived, Luke realized. And now it blossomed. Luke smiled, scratching the hair on his chest. Wait until he told Forrest and Gambino. And Janet, even Janet hadn’t been sure. Standing with arms folded, back in Virginia, where they lived two blocks from the Elizabeth River and two miles from the Chesapeake Bay. Paradise. “What are you doing, Luke, will you look at me, are you crazy?” Luke on his knees in the black mud. The U-Haul backed up to the front porch. Her fault they had to move: her life, her career. Opportunity. But Luke said he understood. He went along with it. Dawn, and while Janet packed what was left in the refrigerator and then remembered to prop open the door with a stick he took the shovel and an old sheet from out of the truck and began digging. “Janet, can’t you see?” The root ball nearly unearthed. “But it’ll die up north, Luke.” Writhing worms, the smell of rotting leaves. The dirt dark-green beneath the tips of his fingernails. “No it won’t, Janet.” Peaches playing, trying to steal the sheet. Ignoring the gray squirrel that stole the last of the birds’ seed. “I sure hope not, Luke, but I still say you’re crazy.” Luke bound the root ball in the muddy sheet, then walked for the last time through the now-empty house, smudging all the doors he closed. Below, the U-Haul’s impatient exhaust whitened the air around the front porch.
Luke stared from the back porch at the forsythia. The new landlord said he didn’t mind just as long as the dog didn’t dig holes. She ain’t a digger, is she? No, Luke said. He laughed. I’m the digger. Well, I don’t want no holes. Chicago wasn’t that bad once you got used to the traffic and the crowds and the gray winter sky. The trees with no leaves. The wind and the cold and the snow. Luke watched Peaches run the narrow width of the yard. At first the snow fell as beautifully as the snow on that beer commercial with the Clydesdales on TV. But then it turned to filthy slush and froze. Nothing like a stretch of wet slush to put the old bounce in your step. Joking with Gambino and Forrest at the new agency. Janet was tearing up the ladder, and Luke tried to make new friends. Her working days growing longer as the winter days grew short. Why go home after work to an empty house? The two men introduced him to Rush Street. Warm enough there in the crowded, steamy bars, and after a few drinks—well, you could almost think you were back in Norfolk at a little place along the Bay, the freckled waitress bringing you a plateful of oysters, Janet squeezing your arms as she filled your ear with the news of her new show. How she had most of the funny lines. How she was born to play Noel Coward. How even the assistant director cracked up during the confrontation scene, and wouldn’t he come to a rehearsal to give her notes? She needed his raw, untrained reaction. Oysters clean and cold, sweet taste of shell. Janet’s high cheeks always flushed when she talked about theater. Her full lips, long hair. Luke’s blood thinned as she gradually began to outgrow the town next to the river and the Bay, but when he saw her on the stage— He stared hard at the forsythia. When the curtain rose on Janet she’d be bigger than the theater. Her voice would fill the house. The applause would crack like pistol shots whenever she made her exit, and she never played to them or milked them, and when she was blocked upstage she played upstage. All of it made Luke happy. He had his job at the modest agency, and Janet’s popularity helped his sales. After a successful run new clients would call in, asking the receptionist for Janet’s husband. And when she was in rehearsal he had the dog and the large yard, his tools and his bags of peat moss in the shed, and throughout the spring and summer there was hardly a day when at least one flower was not in bloom. Luke loved his flowers and each opening night heaped them on Janet. Their life in Virginia had been as full as the ripe figs he let swell and burst on the drooping tree for the hungry mockingbirds who ate the insects that swarmed on the bursting figs.
Disconnected thoughts of morning. Luke inhaled the spring air. His mind saw his drooping fig. It swirled away in the smoke inside any tavern on Rush Street, and as he walked back into the apartment’s tiny cluttered kitchen Forrest and Gambino elbowed their way to the bar for another round, and in his reverie he was surrounded by strangers and darkness, and he knew in his heart he was lost.
These hard-speaking, busy Chicagoans. Pale and paunchy in their three-piece suits, always in such a hurry to relax. Making work of having fun, and where did it end, where did it lead to? Blood pressure higher than the Sears Tower. A stroke before you turned fifty. Parking lots and jam-packed elevators, and only boys playing baseball ever looked up at the sky. You looked for a parking space and prayed there wasn’t a fire hydrant, and you walked more quickly than the footsteps that followed you down the dark street. And the only green things that grew came in green plastic pots with watering directions, and they paled beneath your apartment’s barred windows, and every time you looked up there was another slick, bright billboard, the grinning sexless face of yet another shill.
Peaches paces the length of the fence. Back and forth, back and forth, like the caged leopard at Lincoln Park Zoo. Luke watched her from between the bars on the back porch window. Then he put on water for coffee. How did it begin?
The agent waiting backstage, impeccably dressed. One of those lovely, ageless women, with skin like an Oil of Olay ad. Closing night. Blithe Spirit. “Marvelous, Janet, you’re just the thing.” Janet beamed, then said thank you. The woman did not smile when she took Luke’s hand. “You have such a comic sense. Such articulation and timing. I’ve watched you and decided that you’re right for me.” “What?” asked Janet, nervously looking at Luke. The woman slipped a card from her leather case. “My name is Mrs. Wescott, I have offices here on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and I know the real thing when I see it.” Janet nodded. Luke noticed the dirt beneath his fingernails and coughed. “I place commercial talent.” A smile broke across the agent’s lineless face. “Lunch tomorrow, Janet, at the Omni?”
The first commercial was a thirty-second spot for Food Towne. Janet wore motley and painted her face. She had to juggle two lemons and a lime, the bells on her fool’s cap merrily jingling, while crouching inside a Food Towne shopping cart pushed by an unseen technician down the fruit-and-juice aisle. Her mistakes caromed off the applesauce and jellied cranberries. It took seven takes before she made it past the Bartlett pears and the mandarin oranges, where the cart gently stopped and where she delivered her lines perfectly:
We don’t clown around at Food Towne!
Prices slashed to save!
Two weeks later she played a harried housewife who solved her dinner-time dilemma by purchasing a precooked chicken covered with paprika from Food Towne’s deli section. The next week she was Eve in the Garden of Fresh Produce, leading a swimsuit-clad Adam by the hand to the winesaps. It was a slow news day, and that one attracted a local reporter and a Mini-Cam. After the station aired the feature, the offers simply rolled in.
Janet hawked Colts and Aspens for Fisher’s Friendly Dodge; she draped her neck with pythons and boa constrictors and touted Tidewater’s Serpent City. On the radio her voice extolled the virtues of extermination for Captain Ray’s Cockroach A weigh. For three months she was the Grossman’s Rubber Radial Tire Girl, popping like a jack-in-the-box from a stack of inner tubes. Then the local contracts stopped. Janet was overexposed. Mrs. Wescott accepted an offer from Baltimore. Luke stood in the corner of their bedroom, watching Janet toss underwear into her bag.
“Don’t look at me with that look, Luke. I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not looking at you with any special look.”
“Sure you are, Luke. Your eyes are just like Trouble’s.” Trouble was the cocker spaniel that lived across the street.
“No,” Luke said, “I’m just watching you pack.”
“I get in the car and there you are with Peaches on the front porch making me feel guilty, and I look across the street and there’s Trouble staring at me through the fence with those sad eyes.”
“Janet, what did I ever do to make you feel guilty?” He picked up a pair of bright pink underpants that
had fallen to the floor.
“It’s like Mrs. Wescott says, once you go into this business, business comes first.” She took the pants from Luke. “Time is money. I know you want me to start acting again.”
“I never said that, Janet.”
“You don’t have to say it, Luke. Look at how you’ve been moping around. The gardenias have those little bugs again.”
“I know. I dusted yesterday.”
“They’re beautiful, Luke. You know I love them.” Janet smiled. “And I love you. But you can’t expect me to stay here and act in Little Theaters all my life. Mrs. Wescott says—”
“Janet, I know what Mrs. Wescott says.”
“She says husbands are a liability in this business.” Janet stood still. She stared past Luke, then at him. “She says I have all the tools, and great potential. I could make it in the big markets, Luke. I’ve done nearly everything I can here. But in New York or Chicago—” She rolled her eyes. “I might be able to do a couple national spots. Think of the residuals.” She squealed and clapped her hands. “You could quit your job and live off me and do whatever you feel like.”
“I’m doing what I feel like now. But things are different. You’re an actress. You belong on the stage. You’re not a—”
“When are you going to wake up? You know I love the stage, but there’s no money in it.”
“There doesn’t have to be. I work. Remember? We can both live off what I make.”
“Sure, and I’ll just sit here all day and rot. I don’t know about you but I’m not content to stay in Norfolk for the rest of my life.” She shook her head, then pulled from an open drawer a pair of panty hose.
“Your acting’s very important to me. It was like,” he sighed, “like you were up there on the stage for the both of us.”
“Well, the commercials and the money are very important to me. I’m good at them, Luke. Really good. And I’m going to get even better. Don’t stand in my way.”
He didn’t. He and Peaches waved good-bye from the front porch. Then he went inside and broke one of his cardinal rules. He called FTD and had a bouquet of gladiolas and carnations delivered to Janet’s hotel room in Baltimore. His card read KNOCK ’EM DEAD.
She did. Norfolk, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia. Like a runaway locomotive, Janet’s career steamed up the Eastern seaboard, whistles screaming, engine barreling past all the stops. Clear track ahead. Nothing stood in her way. Logically her next move should have been to New York City, but Mrs. Wescott decided the train should veer to the west. She’d arranged a top-drawer deal with her office in Chicago. “Pack your bags,” the agent told Luke and Janet. “I’m so pleased to tell you that you’re going to the Windy City.” She left the faint smell of citrus behind her in the room, and while Janet drove to the ABC store Luke called up the landlord to break the lease. Farewell, Paradise. In the yard the pyracantha berries blazed like the tips of safety matches. The rose of Sharon blossoms sadly shook their pink and purple heads. The mockingbirds clung to the fig tree, eating the insects that ate the bursting figs; and Luke pulled off a fig leaf and stared at it, stared at his garden and Peaches, who slept beneath the fence covered with honeysuckle, until Janet returned with the champagne and two stemmed glasses in her hand.
The morning coffee slowly dripped through its paper filter. Luke waited in the kitchen, now shaved and showered and dressed. Saturday. What was he to do? He had those policies to look over—two hours of work, tops. Janet said she’d be tied up all day, unless the shooting went quickly. But then it never did. He took a cigarette from the open pack lying on the counter and stuck it in his mouth. No, he thought. Not yet. Not before even coffee. One of the bad habits he’d picked up since moving to Chicago. He pushed the cigarette back into the pack. The coffee was nearly ready. He thought about Melissa.
He went into it with his eyes open; he knew that now. Though when he first met her in the bar on Rush Street he fooled himself and still thought of himself as a victim. Southern boy forced to move to the ugly, urban North, and like a Norfolk sailor fresh off ship Luke was looking for it, and Melissa was willing. She was twenty-three, Janet’s age when they’d married five years ago. Dark eyes, short hair, and blush on her cheeks that deepened when Luke walked over. He’d noticed her watching him as he listened to Gambino and Forrest analyze that Sunday’s Bears game, and out of boredom and pure lust he turned to her and nodded and then smiled his sweetest smile, and when he motioned her over she motioned him over, and that was the beginning.
At the sink Luke rinsed out a mug. He never meant it to be more than a one-night thing. Flexing his charm before a pretty woman in a big-city bar. How far could he get? If Janet could make it in this city, he could too. He was polite but blatant. Touching Melissa’s hand that rested like a sparrow on the table, brushing her knees with his beneath the table where no one could see. Waiting for her to tell him to get lost so he could return to Forrest and Gambino with the tale of how he struck out. He expected to strike out. He was surprised when Melissa agreed to his suggestion that they pick up a bottle and go to her place, and he was even more surprised when they arrived there and she put some cool jazz on the stereo and then sat next to him on the sofa and turned and kissed him.
Of course he’d take a shower with her first. Of course he’d bring fresh drinks into the bedroom. Melissa could do with him what she wanted, and she did, and he lay passively beneath her as she moved above him, but then it became too much for him to bear. He took the initiative. He wasn’t savage—that wasn’t his style or nature—but he was rather aggressive as he thumped Melissa for all he was worth. Thinking about Janet, Chicago, Mrs. Wescott. Watching the snow that fell so purely against the bedroom window, that on the streets below was changing to slush. When he collapsed upon her he was relieved the episode was finished and eager to get dressed and drive home through the furious snow. He wanted to take another shower before Janet came home for the night, exhausted from her long day of shooting. But Melissa’s arms held him in the way that Janet’s used to, and Luke’s pretense withered and shrunk. He slipped from her body. The ice cubes in one of the glasses on the nightstand shifted suddenly, clicking like a thrown lock.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “You guys are all alike, it wasn’t me.”
“That’s not true,” Luke lied. “I don’t see anyone else here, do you?”
“Sure, there’s a whole crowd of other people here. Can’t you feel them? What’s your wife’s name?”
“Janet.”
“So you are married.” She shook her head.
He stared into her brown eyes.
“Got a houseful of kids?”
“Just a dog.”
“That’s sensible.”
“I thought you knew. Or that it didn’t matter.”
Melissa rolled farther away from him and lit a cigarette. “It doesn’t, fella. Don’t take any of this personal.” She tried to laugh. “Most of the time I’m only talking to myself.”
“That’s no way to be.”
She turned. “And who are you to give advice? Christ. If one of us could use a talking to, it’s you, big boy. You make a regular thing of this, this cheating on your old lady?”
Luke shook his head.
“First time, huh? Well, join the club. There’s millions of you unhappy saps out there, little boys waiting for mommy to turn around so you can sneak into the nookie jar.”
“That’s clever. Did you just make that up?”
“Aren’t you going to be late for mommy?”
Luke didn’t know why but he kissed Melissa then. And when the palms of her hands pushed him back, he took her hands and kissed her hands. That moment was the real beginning, he later realized. “I was out with Gambino and Forrest,” he told Janet the next morning when he got home.
He poured himself a cup of coffee. December, January, February. By Saint Patrick’s Day he and Melissa knew something would have to change. He wasn’t getting her anywhere, she told him as they stood on a salt box on S
tate Street watching the mayor lead the parade; and later as they sat in an Adams Street bar drinking green beer he told her he’d take her any place she wanted. Yes, Luke said, taking a deep drag off Melissa’s cigarette, I’ve decided to divorce Janet. Melissa nodded gravely, then said she’d believe it when she saw it. It’s more difficult than you think, she told him. Believe me. She patted his forearm. I’m wasting my life on you. She opened her purse and left a couple of dollars on the table, then stood and buttoned her long coat.
“So long,” she said. “I hope I don’t run into you again.”
“Melissa,” Luke said, standing behind the table. “Melissa, wait.”
She didn’t. And that was that, and Luke knew he deserved it. He gazed around the messy kitchen, at the stacks of dirty dishes and encrusted pots and pans piled on the stove. Forrest and Gambino had been very sympathetic. They took Luke back to the Rush Street bar where he and Melissa had first met, and the two men held a funeral, buying a round of whiskeys for the house and toasting Luke’s grief and then even having one of the waitresses carry out a shoebox shrouded in black crepe paper which the men then drank to and, many whiskeys later, at midnight, drunkenly buried in the remains of the melting snow. Twenty minutes later Luke stood in the hallway of her apartment building, tapping out “Shave and a Haircut” on her bell. There was no answer. The next afternoon he called her twice, but the telephone rang and rang and rang. Luke grieved.
The Evening News Page 10
