Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “Looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  She had said, “Boogey,” closing the door. There was no one to tell when she turned in a short story and the professor had laughed, looking at her top sheet. “Would you consider using another name?” he said.

  “Why? That’s my name.”

  “I know. But there is another Laurel Wynn writing.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Good Lord. Jackie Collins will be turning up next.”

  “Hardly,” she had said. She was surprised he knew of her.

  Hal was in his bathroom and the shower had started. Laurel rushed across to the bedroom where he had moved his clothes, which enraged her. As Bud looked up from the single bed where he slept with Hal, she mouthed toward him, Traitor. She took him jogging but he would not put a paw into bed with her. Things from Hal’s pockets were ranged along his dresser, and she took twenty dollars from his wallet. Most men knew precisely how much money they carried, but Hal never missed anything. Some mornings he had so few bills she couldn’t take anything, and then she was furious. She felt owed. Why is this my life? Laurel wondered as she fled back to her room to stash the money in her purse.

  Hal came from the bathroom and said, “Morning,” toward where she sat at her dressing table, and she replied with reluctance, “Morning.” They were like strangers meeting in a boardinghouse. Too many mornings she put on her baggy-kneed jogging suit and stayed in it all day; she was past “looking pretty for her husband”: why bother, when they would go on and on as they were? When Hal came out of his bedroom, he was dressed crisply and cleanly. He did a lot of ironing in the garage, where the board stayed up permanently; in winter, the garage was heated. If she left a blouse in the dryer, he ironed that for her. Laurel saw no reason to do his ironing when he had nothing to do all day.

  In the kitchen, he was sitting at the table drinking coffee and working the Times crossword puzzle. She was often annoyed that he worked the puzzle first every day and also on Sundays. Soon he would practice the chanter to his bagpipes, a thin and threadlike sound like a flute. This was a concession to her morning working hours, her need for silence. Afterward he would blow up the pipes full blast and march about his trophy room to some different drummer in his own head.

  There, glass eyes stared down; not one but three buffalo heads from the American West, a Tennessee bear, a Mississippi wild turkey; game from Africa that included a fully mounted bongo, the size of a grown cow. “Decadent.” “Something out of Teddy Roosevelt days.” These were the comments they heard in Soundport, where this room did not go over as in Mississippi, a world of hunting men. “Mom,” Rick said one day, “do you realize this room is Hal’s monument to himself?” They were drinking tea and picked up their cups and walked out. The least likely man in the world to deserve honor, she had thought. Along the mantelpiece Hal had ranged a regiment of lead soldiers, brightly colored and wearing Scottish raiment, kilts, blowing pipes, charging on steeds, marching into the Battle of Culloden. “Does he ever go chuk-chuk with them?” Rick asked.

  “Not yet,” she said. “He hasn’t played with them in the backyard under a forsythia bush yet, either.”

  Bud, in his soft mouth, brought in the Times in its waxy blue wrapper each day. Hal said continually, “The poor bastard.” He meant his trained retriever had nothing else to retrieve in suburbia, this place she had brought him to. Aside from the puzzle, Hal never turned to another page of the paper. She needled him because she could not help it. “What’s the news?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t happen to glance at the headlines when you opened the paper?”

  “No. There’s a notice the price has gone up. Fifty lousy bucks a month. We ought to drop the paper.”

  “I like to read it. What’ll you do today?”

  “Work on my suntan.”

  Work! Hal would lie in the backyard naked from nine till five, oiled with that old mixture, baby oil and iodine. She had not heard the expression “work on a suntan” since high school, anymore than she had seen anyone quirk one eyebrow since then, still thinking it was sexy. But she was not indifferent to the dark eyebrow and to that lock of hair falling over his forehead. Laurel leaned over Hal’s back, wanting to feel his nearness since they were to go on living together. “That’s b-ê-t-e.” She pointed to blanks he had left. Hal did not move.

  “It is?” he said. He filled in the letters with a tentative pencil point. “Black beast,” she said to Bud. “You shall die like a dog.”

  They started out to jog and Hal headed for the ironing board; they went along a sylvan road shaded by trees like a forest and along a stream where Bud pranced in, tiptoeing highly, and sent skyward a lot of ducks. Laurel lagged and stood against a tree; she wondered about Hal’s bent back and how he resisted when she leaned over him, tightening his elbows to the kitchen table. Well, she did not beg, though she asked him to sleep in the same bed with her. Then often she was driven into a frenzy by his drunken snoring. She rose up in bed like a banshee and stood in its middle, kicking at him with one foot till he rolled out.

  She could not help it that other nights she lay awake, her fury accumulating that after all their desperate longing while he was in prison, he had chosen a separate bedroom. She got up and went to the kitchen those nights and filled a large pot with water and tossed it over him, asleep. She could not believe the bizarre behavior Hal had driven her to, or how much feeling she could have. Rick liked to ape Hal. When he was in the trophy room before TV, Rick nodded his head, back and forth and back and forth, and finally snapped it to the back of the chair, dropped his mouth open, and was in Hal’s nighttime position, where he stayed till the wee hours. Hal called himself “sleeping.” She told him, “I call it being passed out.” Finally, it was actually amusing that she had sat for years watching his head nod back and forth, her heart leaping in excitement when finally his head snapped to the chair’s back, his mouth opened, and he was “sleeping.” Blessed quiet. She would turn off the television set, which Hal kept on at a high pitch, claiming himself to be half deaf after all the years guns had gone off close to his ears. Then she could read in solitude. Only how long do you read and how much do you retain, Laurel? Hasn’t Rick said to you, “I don’t think you ever go to bed with a clear head.”

  Why had Hal never thought to commit suicide? Rick once wondered. Because he would leave no absence in the world, she said. Laurel sat on the sylvan road thinking how her husband had become a paid piper, an entertainer. He was in demand for birthdays, weddings, funerals. She tried to overcome her sense of disparagement and to be wifely. She told him, “You’re so popular, you ought to up your price from twenty-five dollars an hour to thirty-five”—this man who owned thousands of acres of prime farmland. “Maybe you’re right,” Hal said. “I saw William and his wife at that garden party where I played.” Laurel grew tired of staying home so many nights and holidays, and she had accompanied him on engagements but gave up. She was relegated to a corner and no one spoke. She was the entertainer’s wife. When Hal played for a men’s group at the Waldorf-Astoria, he was asked to wait in the kitchen till his appearance; one of the kitchen help offered him a cup of coffee. They were all Puerto Ricans and Hal could not even spend time joking around with them as he could have with blacks.

  Hal went up and up on the social scale in the Scarabees band. He had earned a tall hat with a feathery plume. “I’ve been made captain of the color guard,” he said. She told him that was wonderful, eyeing the feather and thinking of William’s picture recently in Business Week. That Monday night the Scarabees’ band practice began at five-thirty. Hal said he wouldn’t have dinner till later. He must! She had it cooked. Laurel went on accommodating herself to his fluctuating hours for practice because she was conditioned by her past. Her husband was owed being fed. And she had spent a long while on gravy for his pork chops that night. She had driven herself to tears of frustration in the after
noon, trying to hide the fact she had melted a bottle’s worth of aspirin in it. She believed this dose was enough to kill Hal. First she emptied in the whole bottle and the aspirin bubbled up like a witch’s brew and left a filmy yellow scum. Twice she rushed to town to buy more aspirin. Her last batch of gravy was the best: thyme, garlic, rosemary; she worried about having overdone the condiments. Hal must take his tray and go ahead to TV. But once he took a bite, he threw down his fork and rushed to the downstairs powder room, where he spit and spit and rinsed his mouth. “That gravy tastes like vinegar. Or aspirin,” he said. God damn! How did he know the exact right mystery ingredient? “Mine’s fine,” Laurel had said, glued to TV.

  Hal worked his way up to Sublime Prince in the Scarabees. “Golly, cat’s whiskers,” she said. They had to celebrate. He would never complain about how strong she made his drinks. When he was asleep, she would dash him with lighter fluid and drop a match, as if he had gone to sleep smoking. She worried about burning the great Oriental rug from Matagorda. When he ran amok in flames, she would open the door and shoo him outside and run after him with a blanket. She would show the firemen, the police, and medics how she tried to save him, and they would see her singed hands. Did she have that much courage? And could she cry on cue? Maybe it would be easier to put a plastic bag over his head when he was “sleeping.” Instead, she would press her thumbs to that bulged-out Adam’s apple she had looked at for years when he had passed out. She thought of all the times he had peed on the walls, missing the toilet bowl. She thought about a lot. Laurel bent lightly over him. Hal opened his eyes and looked up with a sweet expression. What maddening deity took care of him, and why? “What are you doing?”

  I’m a murderess. I’m trying to kill you.

  Instead, she kissed him on the forehead. “Darling, you were choking in your sleep. I was trying to wake you up. Come upstairs now and put on your jommies and go to bed. It’s late.”

  Willingly, he let himself be led; so often he had a submissive, childlike demeanor. She had thought he liked being told what to do, being commanded by women, and she should have been more like Sallie, rather than making her opposite nature even more opposite. When he let himself be led, when he looked up at her smiling so sweetly, she believed what attracted her in Hal’s letters was buried somewhere in him. Her heart turned over, her groin ached, although she was aware the aching was over what she had expected, rather than over Hal in actuality. One afternoon, when she was sewing a button, he did come up to her, trembling and ready. Just as she was about to lie back, she said, “Oh, never mind.” It seemed too much trouble to take her clothes off in the afternoon. He looked surprised and said that was the first time she had ever turned him down and it hurt his feelings.

  She pleaded with band members to talk to him about his drinking. The drummer Boomer tried to help. Otherwise, she noted, band members did not meet her eyes at parties, embarrassed by their nonparticipation. Hal promised Boomer he would do better; he gave an oath. Then there was the gathering one night in a roadhouse in some hinterland of Connecticut. Hal got so drunk the hatcheck girl laughed when he came stumbling toward her, one foot weaving before the other like an inept tightrope walker. Laurel could not bear the sight of him.

  There was another time in Bridgeport when he tried to shut her out of the car, intending to leave her stranded on a dark street, far worse than being abandoned to the Delta. She fought him like a wildcat to get into the car, and with a strength she did not know she possessed. She knew better than to argue about doing the driving. When he lost directions, another time, and could not find a parkway exit, he stopped suddenly and put his hands around her throat then, his thumbs holding her again without pressure. But to sit those moments with the thought he could lose reason or shut off her air by accident was to look into hell, like the night by the toilet.

  That night, coming from the roadhouse, he made no protest about her driving. He was asleep before they left the parking lot. She hated his appearance and his failure to keep his promise to Boomer, in effect to the band, to do something about his drinking. She had stopped depending on soft promises to her. “I won’t do it again.” Tina said, too, “I’m so tired of promises.” Tina, who grew up to be what she was destined to become.

  Hal woke up in the garage. He was like a bug on its back trying to turn over, his legs flailing out the open door till he could figure out where to put them. She had never known such loathing and disgust. She whacked him across the face. Her bracelet caught him above one eye and opened a cut; blood began to spurt. She had locked the kitchen door, not knowing there was a key. But she had feared future retaliation. She feared ever being hit across the head again, as her father had hit her twice and as Hal had, once breaking her nose. There was a humiliation to it that sank deep; there was a sense of fury at not being able to do anything that moment. And what she had, by now, was a terrible fear about her brains ever again being rattled in the way they had been, about their never again being the same.

  She had thought herself safe, but Hal came up the stairs. Rounding the bed, he had said, “Laurel, I’m going to drown you in the toilet. It’s what you deserve.”

  There was a long time she lay there in the moonlight before she dared to say, “Hal, you can’t make this look like manslaughter.”

  In a while, she whispered, “Not this time. You’ll go to prison forever. Think how horrible it’s already been for your children.”

  She was there a long while, feeling the beating of her heart near his and wondering in the pale light what he was thinking, what he was looking at inside himself, or if he was even capable of thought then. Whatever possessed him went away. He suddenly sat back. With her neck aching, she had gotten up and turned on the light. She could not believe the amount of blood everywhere; even the walls and the rug had smears. “I’m not going to clean all this up,” she said. “You do it.”

  Hal went away with his obedient air and came back with a pail of soapy water and a steel-bristled brush. He worked silently and well. She said once, “Don’t soak the rug with water.”

  That night she slept with scissors under her pillow because it was the only weapon handy. Hal had stayed in the kitchen awhile where the knives were. She fell into a half sleep, thinking how unbelievable it was to live as she did. She thought about the time when Hal blackened her eye in Soundport and she could not hide the truth from her mother. “Why,” her mother said, “why did you have to marry someone just like your father? It happens all the time.”

  Laurel wended her way homeward with Bud. She had been gone so long, by now William would have come looking for her. It would not occur to Hal something could have happened. Bud stuck by her when she sat by the stream with her head to her knees, refusing to cry. Like many dogs, Bud understood sorrow and trouble in others. He sat quietly, not knowing what to do, only to wag his behind if she looked his direction, expressing sympathy in his muteness.

  She felt heavily then the burden of Jubal’s death, the way she bore a lot, thinking everything was her fault. In childhood she figured out the reason for her existence was to carry about pain in her heart. She always believed God had happiness ahead for her. She thought He paid her off with William, who gave her backbone and spine and taught her direction, to set her sights high. No divorce she knew about had been mourned as she and William and Rick had mourned. She and Rick never stopped discussing it, as apparently he and his dad did not either. Sex seemed in the long run so much the least part of marriage. They had to go through what they had gone through, she supposed. And rue it. Laurel jogged along home, reminding Bud about Jubal and Buff. “Remember?” Jubal went to prison Hal’s last year. Rick assured her they could not have continued keeping him in the suburbs, and they recalled Jubal’s swimming in the neighbors’ pools and how he ate the homemade soup and then brought home the kettle in his mouth when a woman put it out on her doorstep to cool. He frequented local restaurants. How delighted Hal’s sergeant had been to have Jubal, the only full-blooded bloodhound they had. The
dog boys taught him “street experience”; she laughed. He populated the camp with puppies. In that way, he lived. Jubal became famous. “And,” Rick said, “he was a true working dog, doing what he was born for. Not just a suburban slob.” Not only was Jubal a natural at tracking prisoners, but so good he was borrowed by the state police to find a lost child, a hunter lost in the woods. But when Hal came back from house-hunting in Delton, he said Jubal had died of hookworm, and she felt responsible. “Prison was his finest hour,” Rick said.

  She looked at him that day and said quietly, “So was it Hal’s.”

  When Laurel came in through the garage, Hal was ironing. “Didn’t you miss me? Didn’t you worry?”

  He smiled slightly. “I was wondering where you were.” He looked strange. On Tuesdays he was always pale and puffy about the eyes after his late Monday night in the bar. This afternoon, as always, he would nap. His hands would be crossed on his stomach, his Wallabees turned upward; he never removed his shoes.

  “I have a meeting of Literacy Volunteers this morning. You can practice your pipes.” He went on ironing, his head bent.

  Laurel sat down drinking coffee and attempted to work the rest of the crossword puzzle. Hal came inside with his arms loaded with ironing. He stopped by the kitchen table with a pained expression. “Laurel, we need to talk about our marriage.”

  “What is wrong with this marriage is you are a drunk. You do absolutely nothing. And I have no respect for you in any area of your life.”

  “Oh,” he said, passing on. “No respect for me.”

  What the hell respect did he think anybody had for him? she wondered.

  She was surprised by her outburst and somewhat frightened. What could it mean? She did not want to take back her words but ought to soothe them over. Or else they would remain between them forever like a deadly little silence. She remembered this same kind of thing happening with William. Then she had not feared his leaving her, as she’d had the leverage of Hal. Now she had nothing. And she was terrified of abandonment.