by Peter Straub
That was how he would spend this peculiar morning. He would buy himself a thirty-fifth birthday present. Then, if he felt more like himself, he would go in to work.
Bunting located his sunglasses on his dining table, pushed them into his breast pocket, and let himself out of his room. The corridor looked even shabbier than usual. Sections of wallpaper curled down from the seams and corners, and whole sections of the wall had been spray-painted with puffy, cartoonish nonsense words, bango skank. jeepy. Bunting’s feeling of breakability increased. He worked his way through the murk of the hallway to the elevator and pushed the button several times. A few minutes later, he stepped out of the elevator and permitted himself to breathe. After the elevator, the lobby smelled like a freshly mown hayfield. Two ripped couches of imitation leather faced each other across a dirty stone floor. A boxy wooden desk stood empty against a gray wall miraculously kept clean of graffiti. A six-foot fern was turning a crisp, pale brown in a pot beside the desk.
Bunting pushed his way through the smudgy glass doors, then the heavy wooden doors past the row of buzzers, and came out into bright sunlight that instantly bounced into his eyes from the tops of a dozen cars, from clean shop windows, from the steel wristbands of watches and glittering earrings, from a hundred bright things large and small. Bunting yanked his sunglasses from his pocket and put them on.
When he passed the drugstore, he remembered that he needed a new pack of nipples, and turned in. Inside, a slanted mirror gave him a foreshortened version of himself, all bulging forehead and sinister glasses. He looked like an alien being in disguise. Bunting walked through the glaring aisles to the back of the store and the displays of goods for infants.
Here were the wonderful siblings of the Pacer family, but as he reached for them, he saw what he had missed the first time. The drugstore carried not only the orange nipples with the special crosscut opening, but in rows on both sides of the juice nipples, flesh-colored nipples for drinking formula, white nipples for drinking milk, and blue nipples for drinking water.
He took down two packets of each kind of nipple, and then realized that perfect birthday presents were hanging all over the wall before him. On his first visit, he had not even noticed all the baby bottles displayed alongside the nipples; he had not been interested in baby bottles then, apart from his own. He had not imagined that he would ever be interested in other baby bottles. And in other ways also he had been mistaken. He had assumed that baby bottles remained the same over time, like white dress shirts and black business shoes and hardcover books, that the form had been perfected sometime early in the twentieth century and seventy or eighty years later was simply reproduced in large numbers. This had been an error. Baby bottles were objects like automobiles and breakfast cereals, capable of astonishing variation.
Smiling with this astonished pleasure, Bunting walked up and down past the display, carrying his packets of white, orange, blue, and flesh-colored nipples. The first transformation in bottles had been in shape, the second in material, the third in color. There had also been an unexplained change of manufacturers. None of these bottles before him were Prentiss baby bottles. Every single one was made either by Evenflo or Playtex. What had happened to Prentiss? The manufacturers of his long-lasting, extremely serviceable bottle had gone out of business—skunked, flushed, busted.
Bunting felt a searing flash of shame for his parents: they had backed a loser.
Most baby bottles were not even round anymore. They were six-sided, except for those (Easy Hold) that looked like elongated doughnuts, with a long narrow oval in the middle through which a baby’s fingers could presumably slide. And the round ones, the Playtex bottles, were nothing more than shells around collapsible plastic bags. These hybrid objects, redolent of menopausal old age, made Bunting shudder. Of the six-sided bottles—nursers, as they were now called—some were yellow, others orange, and some had a row of little smiling faces marching up the ounce markings on the side. Some of these new types of bottles were glass, but most were made of a thin transparent plastic.
Bunting instantly understood that, except for the ones that contained the collapsing breast, he had to have all of these bottles. Even his headache seemed to loosen its grip. He had found the perfect birthday present for himself. Now that he had seen them, it was not possible not to buy one each of most of these varieties of “nursers.” Another brilliant notion penetrated him, as if sent by arrow from a heavenly realm.
He saw lined up on the shelf beside his stove a bottle for coffee and one for tea, a bottle for cold vodka, another for nice warm milk, bottles for soft drinks and different kinds of beer and one for mineral water, a library of bottles. There could be morning bottles and evening bottles and late-night bottles. He’d need a lot more nipples, he realized, and began taking things down from their hooks.
Back in his apartment, Bunting washed his birthday presents and set them out on his counter. The row did not look as imposing as he had envisioned it would—there were only seven bottles in all, his old Prentiss and six new ones. Seven seemed too few. He remembered all the bottles left on the wall. He should have bought more of them. A double row of bottles—“nursers”—would be twice as impressive. It was his birthday, wasn’t it?
Still, he had a collection—a small collection. He ran his fingers over the row of bottles and selected one made of clear plastic, to sample the difference between it and the old round glass Prentiss. Because he felt a bit dehydrated, he filled it with tap water and pushed a blue Water Nipple through the cap ring. The new nipple was deliciously slippery on his tongue. Bunting yawned, and half-consciously took the new blue-tipped bottle to his bed. He promised himself he would lie down for just a few minutes, and collapsed onto the unmade bed. He opened his book, began to suck water through the new nipple, and fell asleep so immediately and thoroughly he might have been struck in the back of the head with a mallet.
When Bunting awoke two hours later, he could not remember exactly where, or even exactly who, he was. Nothing around him looked familiar. The light—more precisely, the relative quality of the darkness—was all wrong. He did not understand why he was wearing a suit, a shirt, a tie, and shoes, and he felt some deep, mysterious sense of shame. He had betrayed himself, he had been found out, and now he was in disgrace. His mouth tasted terrible. Gradually, his room took shape around him, but it was the wrong time for this room. Why wasn’t he at work? His heart began to beat faster. Bunting sat up, groaning, and saw the rank of sparkling new baby bottles, each with its new nipple, beside his sink. The sense of shame and disgrace retreated. He remembered that he had taken the morning off, and for a moment thought that he really should write a letter to his parents as soon as his head cleared.
But he had just talked to his parents. He had escaped another Christmas, though this was balanced by some alarming news his father had given to him. The exact nature of this news would not yield itself: it felt like a large, tender bruise, and his mind recoiled from the memory of injury.
He looked at his watch, and was surprised that it was only eleven-thirty.
Bunting got out of bed, thinking that he might as well go to work. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth, taking care not to get water or toothpaste on his jacket or tie. While he gargled mouthwash, he remembered: his mother had fallen down in some supermarket parking lot. Had his father insinuated that he ought to come back to Battle Creek? No, there had been no such insinuation. He was sure of that. And what could he do to help his mother, even if he went back? She was all right— what she had really minded was breaking a lot of eggs.
THREE
An oddly energetic exhilaration, as if he had narrowly escaped some great danger, came to Bunting when he walked back out into the sunlight, and when his bus did not arrive immediately, he found himself walking to DataComCorp’s offices. His body felt in some way still not his, but capable of moving at a good rate down the sidewalks toward Columbus Circle and then midtown. The mid-autumn air felt fresh and c
ool, and the memory of the six new baby bottles back in his apartment was a bubbling inner spring, surfacing in his thoughts, then disappearing underground before coming to the surface again.
Did ever a young mother go into a drugstore in search of a baby bottle for her new infant, and not find one?
Bunting arrived at the door of the Data Entry room just at the time that one of his fellow workers was leaving with orders for sandwiches and drinks. Few of Bunting’s fellow workers chose to spend their salaries on restaurant lunches, and nearly all of them ate delicatessen sandwiches in a group by the coffee machine or alone at their desks. Bunting generally ate in his cubicle or in Frank Herko’s, for Frank disdained most of their fellow clerks, as did Bunting. Though some of the other clerks had attended trade or technical schools, only Bunting and Frank Herko had been to college. Bunting had two years at Lansing College, Herko, two at Yale. Frank Herko looked nothing like Bunting’s idea of a Yale student. He was stocky and barrel-chested, with a black beard and long, curly black hair. He generally dressed in baggy trousers and shabby sweaters, some with actual holes in the wool. Neither did Herko behave like his office friend’s idea of a Yalie, being aggressive, loud, and frank to the point of crudity. Bunting had been disturbed and annoyed by Herko during his first months in Data Entry, an attitude undermined and finally changed by the other man’s persistent, oddly delicate deference, friendliness, and curiosity. Herko had seemed to decide that the older man was a sort of treasure, a real rara avis, deserving of special treatment.
Bunting asked the messenger to bring him a Swiss cheese and Black Forest ham sandwich on whole wheat, mustard and mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato. “Oh, and coffee,” he said. “Black coffee.”
Herko was winding his way toward the door, beaming at him. “Uh huh, black coffee,” he said. “You look like black coffee today. Nice of you to make it in, Bunting, my man. I take it you had an unusually late night.”
“You could say that.”
“Oh yes, oh yes. And we show up for work right after getting out of bed, don’t we? With our beautiful suit all over wrinkles from the night before.”
“Well,” Bunting said, looking down. Long pronounced wrinkles ran down the length of the suit jacket, intersecting longitudinal wrinkles that matched other wrinkles in his tie. He had been too disoriented to notice them when he had awakened from his nap. “I did just get out of bed.” He began trying to smooth out the wrinkles in his jacket.
Frank took a step nearer and sniffed the air. “A stench of alcohol is still oozing from the old pores. Had a little party, didn’t we?” He bent toward Bunting and peered into his face. “My God. You really look like shit, you know that? Why’d you come to work anyhow, you dumb fuck? You couldn’t take a day off?”
“I wanted to come to work/’ 3unting said. “I took the morning off, didn’t I?”
“Rolling around in bed with the beautiful Veronica,” Herko said. “Hurry up and get into your cubicle before one of the old cunts gets a whiff of you and keels over.”
He propelled Bunting toward his row and cubicle. Bunting pushed open his door and fell into the chair facing his terminal. A stack of paper several inches high had been placed beside his keyboard.
Herko pulled a tube of Binaca from his trousers pocket. “For God’s sake, give yourself a shot of this, will you?”
“I brushed my teeth,” Bunting protested. “Twice.”
“Use it anyhow. Keep it. You’re going to need it.”
Bunting dutifully squirted cinnamon-flavored vapor onto his tongue and put the tube in his jacket pocket.
“Bunting cuts loose,” Herko said. “Bunting gets down and dirty. Bunting the party animal.” He was grinning. “Did Veronica do a number on you, or did you do a number on her, man?”
Bunting rubbed his eyes.
“Hey, man, you can’t just show up in last night’s clothes, still wasted from the night before, on top of everything else three hours late!—and not expect me to be curious.” He leaned forward and stretched out his arms, enlarging the baggy blue sweater. “Talk to me! What the hell happened? Did you and Veronica have an anniversary or a fight?”
“Neither one,” said Bunting.
Herko put his hands on his hips and shook his head, silently pleading for more of the story.
“Well, I was somewhere else,” Bunting said.
“Obviously. You sure as hell didn’t go home last night.”
“And I was with someone else,” Bunting said.
Herko crowed and balled his fist and pumped his arm, elbow bent. “Attaboy. Attaway. Bunting’s on a roll.”
Again Bunting saw his parents posed before their peeling house like the couple in American Gothic, his father on the verge of uttering some banal heartlessness and his mother virtually twitching with anxiety. They were small, Bunting realized, the size of dolls.
“I’ve been seeing a couple of new people. Now and then. Off and on.”
“A couple of new people,” Herko said.
“Two or three. Three, actually.”
“What does Veronica have to say about that? Does she even know?”
“Veronica and I are cooling off a little bit. We’re creating some space between us. She’s probably seeing other people too, but she says she isn’t.” These inventions came easily to Bunting, and he propped his chin in the palm of his hand and looked into Frank Herko’s luminous eyes. “I guess I was getting a little bored or something. I wanted some variety. You don’t want the same old thing all the time, do you?”
“You don’t want to be stultified,” Herko said quickly. “You get stultified, going with the same person all the time.”
“It was always hard for Veronica to relax. People like that don’t ever really slow down and take things easy. They’re always thinking about getting ahead, about how to make more money, get a little more status.”
“I didn’t know Veronica was like that,” Herko said. He had been given a very different picture of Bunting’s girlfriend.
“Believe me, it even took me a long time to see it. You don’t want to admit a kind of thing like that.” He shrugged. “But once she starts looking around, she’ll find somebody more suitable. I mean, we still love each other, but…”
“It wasn’t working out, that’s obvious,” Herko supplied. “She wasn’t right for you, she didn’t have the same values, it could never turn out happily. You’re doing the right thing. Besides, you’re going out and having fun, aren’t you? What more do you want?”
“I want my headache to go away,” Bunting said. The sensation of a slight, suspended drunkenness had passed, and with it the feeling of inhabiting an unfamiliar body.
“Oh, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say so?” asked Herko, and disappeared into his own cubicle. Bunting could see the top of his head floating back and forth like a wig over the top of the partition. Desk drawers moved in and out. In a moment Herko was back with two aspirin, which he set atop Bunting’s desk before going out to the water cooler. Bunting sat motionless as royalty. Herko returned with a conical paper cup brimming with water just as the woman came in with a cardboard box filled with the department’s orders from the deli.
“Hand over our wonderful four-star lunches and leave us alone,” Herko said.
They unwrapped their sandwiches and began to eat, Herko casting eager and importunate looks toward the older man. Bunting ate with fussy deliberation, and Herko chomped. There was a long silence.
“This sandwich tastes good,” Bunting said at last.
“Yeah, yeah,” Herko said. “Right now, Alpo would taste good to you. What about the girl? Tell me about the girl.”
“Oh, Carol?”
“What’s this ‘Oh, Carol?’ shit, Bunting? You think I know the girl, or something? Tell me about her—where did you meet her, how old is she, what does she do for a living, does she have good legs and big tits, you know—tell me!”
Bunting chewed on slowly, deliberately, regarding Herko. The younger man looked like a large, sh
aggy puppy. “I met her in an art gallery.”
“You devil.”
“I was just walking past the place, and when I looked in the window I saw her sitting behind the desk. The next day when I walked past, she was there again, so I went in and walked around, pretending to look at the pictures. I started talking with her, and then I started coming back to the gallery, and after a while I asked her out.”
“Those girls in art galleries are incredible,” Herko said. “That’s why they’re working in art galleries. You can’t have a dog selling beautiful pictures, right?” He shook his head. His sandwich oozed a whitish liquid onto the thick white paper, and a trace of the liquid clung to the side of his mouth. “You know what you are, Bunting? You’re a secret weapon.” A bit more white liquid squirted from the corner of his mouth. “You’re a goddamned missile silo.”
“Carol is more like my kind of person, that’s all,” Bunting said. Secretly, this description thrilled him. “She’s more like an artistic kind of person, not so into her career and everything. She’s willing to focus more on me.”
“Which means she’s a hundred percent better in bed, am I right?”
“Well,” Bunting said, thinking vaguely that Veronica had after all been very good in bed.
