“I’ve gained a little weight,” he said. That was true. “It needs to be re-sized.”
His father was nodding—a gesture that said Yes, yes, go on, not Yes, yes, I see. He wondered how well his father could see him, how well he could read the expression on his son’s face.
“And anyway, Janie and I have been separated for a while.”
“I wondered,” his father said. “I thought it might be something like that.”
* * *
NOW THE BUS IS IN THE CITY, the high hundreds, making its way through neighborhoods that remind Laurence of war, or natural disaster, or Hell itself. Automobiles abandoned at curbside—stripped, demolished, consumed by old fires. Storefronts with windows cracked or shattered or blackened from within by yellow smoke; display signs with neon lettering torn free, unreadable. Shabby men sit in doorways, presiding over broken glass and garbage and all imaginable litter. Dark children play their stunted games in filthy lots. What did they have for Easter dinner?
“Tapioca,” the woman behind him says. “A nice tapioca. She poured cream over it from the Haviland pitcher that used to be my mother’s.”
* * *
“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO CARRY ON a conversation with the man,” Laurence says to his friend Candace. They are sitting in the kitchen of her Stuyvesant apartment. “We have no common ground—I never realized that, until my mother died, and then it slowly dawned on me that I’d always talked to her and never to him. I don’t even know why I visit him anymore.”
“You have an obligation,” Candace says. “He’s your father and you love him.”
“I suppose.”
“You do, don’t you?”
“Love him? Sometimes I wonder. I sit in that shabby living room with him and I can’t think of a damned thing to say. ‘What about the Red Sox this year?’ I can’t ask about his friends; they’re all dead. I can’t remind him how much he misses Mother. I’m ashamed to take him out to eat, because I can’t bear watching him slobber.”
“How old is he?”
“Eighty-seven. He can barely see what’s going on in front of him. He eats like an infant.”
“Be kind,” Candace says. “Here.” She gets up from the table and opens the refrigerator door. She wears a green satin housecoat she calls “a wrapper,” its hemline halfway up her thighs. “I have something special for us.”
“What is it?”
“Fresh blueberries.” She sets a bowl between them, an empty saucer for each of them. The blueberries are large, almost black.
“Where do you get fresh blueberries at this time of year?”
“Hothouse,” she says.
“I’ll bet they’re frozen.”
“They’re fresh. Is this a lovers’ quarrel? Are we going to argue over the blueberries?”
“How about sugar?” Laurence says.
“Aren’t I sweet enough?”
“No cream?”
“You wash them down with this.” Candace stands a bottle of clear liquor on the table, and two cordial glasses. “Raki,” she says.
“I’ve never had it,” he says. “Is it like vodka?”
“It’s Turkish, and it’s more like ouzo. If you put water in it, it turns cloudy.”
He pours a little into a glass, sniffs at it, tastes it. It has an edge to it that bites his tongue and leaves his throat chilled. “Wow,” he says.
“It’ll stir you with desire,” Candace says. She comes to his side of the table, puts her arms around his neck and sits in his lap. “But let me help.”
He lets her kiss him. She takes off his tie, unbuttons the first three buttons of his shirt and kisses him on the collarbone.
“You realize you only visit me when you feel guilty about your father,” Candace says. “That’s not very often.”
“More often than it used to be,” Laurence says. He takes a single blueberry from the bowl.
“Aren’t you noticing me?” she says. She leans away from him and tilts his jaw upward so that their eyes meet. “Are we going to enjoy today, or what?”
“Certainly,” he says. He raises the cordial glass elegantly to his lips. “No more complaining about the old man. No more picking fights.”
He sips. Candace hugs his head to her bared bosom. The raki, cold and sticky, dribbles down his chin.
2. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
She was a sometime fashion model, and once, after she had gone to bed early because the day was unusually warm and she was exhausted by it, she had a dream that disturbed her deeply. She dreamed she weighed the same number of pounds as the number of her lover’s post office box. The number was 388.
She got up anyway and made coffee, did her exercises, showered and phoned her mother. Over a second cup of coffee she sat at the kitchen table and pondered doing her nails. The telephone rang once.
“It’s me,” said her lover’s voice.
She pressed the buzzer to unlock the lobby entrance. Then she opened the hall door and waited until she heard the elevator arrive.
“What kept you?” she said. “Did you stop at every floor to ask directions?”
* * *
SHE TOLD HER LOVER ABOUT THE DREAM.
“That’s plenty of pounds,” he said, “three-eighty-eight. You could model tents for L.L.Bean.”
“I’ve sworn off chocolate for good,” she told him. “Nothing in excess. Nothing in moderation. Just nothing.”
“What are you making for breakfast?”
“It’s lunch.”
“Brunch, then.”
“I thought I’d try a soufflé. The last time you were here I offered you an omelet and then discovered I didn’t have any eggs. You recall?”
“I do. Except I was the one who offered to make the omelet.”
“The best promises are the ones we don’t have to keep,” she said. “What you don’t know is that Mother called the next afternoon, and I told her about your visit. That is, I told her about not having eggs. She was shocked. Horrified. ‘I didn’t bring you up to be a poor hostess,’ she said. ‘How could you not have something so basic as eggs?’”
“I wasn’t offended.”
“I told her you weren’t. ‘Men. What do men know?’ That’s what she said to that.”
She began separating the eggs for the soufflé. This was the difficult part; she had always thought so. She broke the first egg and let the yolk wobble in her hand, the white slip through her fingers into a measuring cup. She flopped the yolk into a bowl.
“I’ve never seen anybody do it that way,” her lover said.
“It’s the only way I know.” She broke the second egg.
“There’s something about it that’s—I don’t know—erotic.”
She looked at him; he seemed hypnotized by the bright yolk she balanced in her hand. “Is it obscene?”
“No, no,” he said.
She did the third egg. Now that he had obliged her to notice, the yolk warming in her palm and the white dribbling over and through her fingers seemed nearly sexual. She felt her cheeks hot. My goodness, she said to herself, am I actually blushing? A moment later her lover had circled in back of her to embrace her.
“You don’t feel like three-hundred-eighty-eight pounds,” he said. “Why not forget the eggs for a little while?”
“Have it your way.”
She squirmed around for a kiss, holding her hands high to keep from getting him sticky. He kissed her a second time.
“Don’t let me forget the recipe calls for four,” she said.
* * *
MONDAY SHE SLEPT LATE. When she woke up she turned on the bedside radio to listen to the weather forecast. Heat. She hauled the pillow over her head and sighed.
I’m too heavy to crawl out of bed, she told the empty room. I don’t really mean that, she reminded herself; it isn’t a joking matter.
She got up and switched off the radio, made coffee, then came back to the bedroom to do her exercises. The telephone rang three different times. Once it was her mother. Once it was her agent. Finall
y it was her lover.
“I miss you,” he said. “What are we hatching for the weekend?”
“Oh, very clever,” she said. “But I don’t have to stand for humor; I know my rights.”
“By the way,” he said, “I persuaded the post office to change my box number.”
“To what?” she said.
“A hundred-six.”
She shrieked. “Did you say six or sixty?”
“Six.”
“Oh, you darling,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?”
3. THE WORD
On the weekends she stayed with him, the first sound she heard in the morning was the meowing of his cat. The people in the next-door apartment also had a cat, only theirs was put out overnight; his was strictly an indoor cat, black and nearly a dozen years old and just beginning to be fat. The next-door cat always came to its front porch and yowled to be let in. His crouched in the bedroom window, peering down, and the two cats carried on a conversation until the next-door cat went inside.
“It’s an aubade,” she had said to him one day.
“What’s that?”
“A morning-song.” She’d turned her face toward him and kissed his neck, feeling the sleepwarmth of him radiating from under the blue sheet. “‘Aubade for Two Felines.’”
“What time is it?” He always wanted to know the time, as if time mattered.
* * *
SHE’D KNOWN HIM NOW for nearly a year, knew by heart the stories of his bad marriage and worse divorce, and of the lovely house in the country he’d had to forfeit. Of course the stories were all as seen through his eyes, so she took everything he said as if she were a confirmed skeptic. But she was not a skeptic; she was in love with him.
She could never get him to admit that he was in love with her. “I’ve decided to be fond of people,” he said, “but I’m too old to love them.”
Sometimes she said, “It’s her, isn’t it,” meaning the ex-wife, meaning to propose that she had soured him on love, meaning to give him an excuse for not again declaring his love for a woman—even if they lived together.
Other times she said, “But I love you; I don’t mind saying the word to you,” meaning she wished for reciprocity, for mutual declarations, for whatever the idea of love really had to do with the two of them.
Whatever way she put it, he changed the subject. She despaired of hearing the word.
* * *
ONE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED. It was his birthday and the champagne they drank for celebration had gone to his head; his eyes glistened and his speech slurred and he would not look at her, but only at the cat asleep in her lap where she sat under the bay window.
“That cat,” he said. “He used to be an outdoor cat. Had six acres to hunt, was out most of the time except on really cold days in January. He hunted rabbits and pheasants and field mice, and one day he brought home a rat he must have gotten near a neighbor’s trash pile. Birds, bunnies, you name it. He was always bringing his trophies home. That’s cats.”
“So they say.” She held the cat in her lap and listened to the man; she watched his face. Both his words and his demeanor were solemn, intense.
“He’s healthy as a horse now, this cat. I only have him at the vet’s for his annual shots. But all the years I was married, and we lived on those six acres, and there was all this wonderful hunting for him, he was at the vet’s over and over. He’d get into fights—other cats, raccoons, maybe a skunk or two—and his wounds would abscess. He always had to take pills, get shots, have the abscesses lanced. And worms. He was always getting worms, especially tape, from the stuff he ate in the wild.”
“Poor kitty,” she said, petting the cat’s wide brow and stroking its tattered ears.
“You pay a price for being free,” he said. Now he looked at her. “I think I’ve finally learned that.”
She felt the old cat purring under her hands. Ah, she thought, so this is how he says it.
4. PILLOW TALK
It was three in the morning and though Quentin had dozed fitfully since coming to bed at eleven, he had not been able quite to relax, quite to fall calmly into sleep. His head ached; the muscles of his neck throbbed; if he lay just so, it felt as if he had pinched a nerve in his left shoulder, and the pain careered down his arm to the elbow. He turned over from his right side to his left and tried to arrange his legs around the cat, curled at the foot of the bed.
“For heaven’s sake,” his wife said hoarsely, “what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he said. “My legs ache.”
“Then take a couple of aspirin.”
“Maybe I will.”
He put his arms around the pillow and hugged it against his face. He tried not to move, he tried not to be aware of his body. For a while he watched the red pulse of the digital alarm clock, until its numbers changed from 3:23 to 3:24. Then he closed his eyes and thought how even though he had come home nearly two years ago, he might never again be comfortable in his wife’s bed.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING he made a phone call. It was not a thing lightly done; he had weighed its advisability during this morning’s shower, and rehearsed his lines to the bathroom mirror while he shaved. Now, listening to the telephone’s tuneless ring, he was afraid. He rested the fingers of his free hand against the cradle, thinking: If it’s a man, I’ll break the connection. And then: Or if she sounds hurried.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice.
“Jan? It’s Quentin.”
Though he had not hung up, for several moments the silence at the other end of the line nearly persuaded him that she had.
“Quentin,” she said finally. Grudgingly. “Look, this isn’t a good time. I’ve got company coming for lunch.…”
“I have a favor to ask,” he said. “Really, I won’t keep you.”
“You couldn’t keep me,” she said. “What’s the favor?”
“I thought perhaps we could have a drink together, sometime this week.” It was not one of the lines he had rehearsed.
“What for? Old times?”
“It’s been a couple of years.”
“It seems like only forever,” she said. “It seems like something that never happened.”
“But what do you think?” he said.
“No; forget it.” How quickly the impatience rose in her voice. “Damn it, Quent, don’t keep calling me like this.”
“I don’t,” he said. In fact, he had called her four times. Once he had gotten her out of the shower, twice he had waked her up, once —he was almost certain—he had interrupted lovemaking. “It’s just that I call at bad moments.”
“Well this is another,” she said.
“Janice.” He said the name desperately. “I want my pillow.”
“Your what?”
“That’s the favor. That’s the reason I called. I don’t want to have a drink with you—I mean, I’d like to have a drink with you, but it’s not why I telephoned. I want my pillow.”
“What on earth for?”
“I’m having trouble sleeping.”
“Take a pill,” Janice said.
“No, really. I can’t get comfortable; my neck gets all twisted and stiff.”
“This is screwy. You’re honestly giving me grief over a pillow that’s been on my bed from the beginning?”
“We bought it together,” he said. “Remember? We went to Dayton’s; I picked it out and charged it to my account.”
“I inherited that pillow when I left you,” Janice said. “It’s mine.”
“I slept on it for almost two years,” he said.
“You,” she said. “Only you could be emotional about a pillow.”
“It’s nothing to do with the emotions. My neck misses it, my head misses it, my spine misses it. Is there a real reason I can’t have it? I’m not asking for the pictures, I’m not asking for the tapes, I’m not asking for the wine glasses. I’m not even asking for the Chicken Wellington recipe.”
Janice sigh
ed. “Quent, I don’t have the time for this. All right, you can have the pillow.”
“Can you meet me at Chase’s around four?”
“Carrying a pillow?”
“Please,” he said. “We can have a drink, too. We can talk a little.”
“Pillow talk,” she said. “I always wondered what that meant.”
* * *
“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA what a fool I feel?” Janice said. “Prancing through the streets with a pillow under my arm? Having to walk past those threadbare old men huddled in doorways? You can imagine how they watched me.”
“Wistfully,” he said.
“Yes.” She sat across the table from him with the pillow in her lap. “Just your sort of look.”
“You could have put it in a paper bag.”
“It’s queen-size. Where was I supposed to find a big-enough bag?” She glanced around the room. “Everybody’s staring,” she said.
“You could sit on it,” he said. “I could tell the waiter you’re my daughter.”
She glared. He had forgotten her killing look, the one that had always told him what a trial he was. He was obliged to avert his eyes and consider the pillow in her lap; the small blue flowers of the ticking reminded him of Saturday mornings—English muffins, love, lugging the clothes hamper to the laundry room, changing the linens of the wonderful bed.
“Do you still drink daiquiris?”
“Sometimes.”
“I mean would you like one now?”
“All right.” She opened her purse and took out several crumpled bills.
“Let me,” he said.
“No. I’ll fend for myself.”
“Please.” He pushed the bills toward her.
“Damn it,” she said, “I’m trying not to make a big deal out of this. Do you mind?”
“Sorry.”
“This is the second episode we’ve had over your dumb pillow. Let’s make it short, and as sweet as possible.” She tried to draw her chair nearer the table; the pillow was in her way. “Here,” she said. “Take this thing.”
He put it on the floor, propped by the legs of his chair. For a peculiar instant he wanted to hug it, put his face against it.
“What was the first episode?” he said.
Who Will Hear Your Secrets? Page 11
