That was an improvement: she no longer had to feel he was watching her all day.
Soon after he started working in the little room she went in there to clean up, while he was gone at school, and tried to shift the placement of a heavy cardboard box containing winter clothes. It tipped and came open, and she found a fifth of bourbon, half full, that had lain hidden in the folds of an overcoat. She considered taking it out and putting it among the official bottles in the kitchen cabinet, but in the end she laid it carefully back where it seemed to belong.
She resurrected the manuscript of A New Yorker Discovers the Middle West and worked fairly steadily on it for some days, but she couldn’t make it cohere. The trouble, she decided, was that the essential point of the article was a lie: she hadn’t discovered the Middle West, any more than she had discovered Europe.
One Sunday morning she sat in the rocking chair in her robe, with Cindy sprawled across her lap. She held her breakfast coffee mug in one hand, stroking Cindy’s bristly fur with the other, and she sang a childhood song in a small voice, scarcely aware of singing at all:
‘How do you do, my Cindy?
How do you do today?
Won’t you be my partner?
I will show you the way.’
‘Know what?’ Jack said, smiling at her from the breakfast table. ‘The way you carry on with that dog, anybody’d say you want a baby.’
She was startled. ‘A baby?’
‘Sure.’ He got up and came to stand beside her, and his fingers began to play with a lock of her hair. ‘Doesn’t every woman want a baby sometime?’
The advantage of being seated, while he stood over her, was that she didn’t have to meet his eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sure, I guess so; sometime.’
‘It might be pointed out,’ he said, ‘that you’re not getting any younger.’
‘What’s all this about, Jack?’
‘Let Cindy get down. Stand up. Come and give me a hug. Then I’ll tell you.’ He wrapped her close in his arms and she put her head against his chest, so that it still was not required to look at his eyes. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When I got married I didn’t know what I was doing; did it for all the wrong reasons; and for years now, ever since the divorce, I’ve been saying I’d never do it again. But the point is you’ve changed all that, Emily. Listen. Not now – oh, not now, baby, but soon – as soon as the damn book’s done – do you think you might consider marrying me?’
He took both her hands and held her at arms’ length. His eyes were shining, and his mouth was curling into a shape of shyness and pride like that of a boy who’s just stolen his first kiss. There was a tiny trickle of egg yolk on his chin.
‘Well, I don’t know, Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s a thing I’d have to think about, I guess.’
‘Okay.’ He looked hurt. ‘Okay; I know I’m no prize package.’
‘It isn’t you; it’s me. I just don’t know if I’m ready for—’
‘Okay, I said.’ And after a while he went into the little room and shut the door.
They still took walks nearly every afternoon – the country was rich with autumn foliage – but now it was Emily who tended to walk with her head down, keeping her own counsel, looking at her shoes. Without saying anything about it, they avoided the route that led past the solitary oak tree.
In November she made up her mind to leave him. She would go back to New York but not to Food Field Observer; she would find a better job, and a better apartment too; she would embark on a new and better life, and she would be free.
All that remained was breaking the news. She formed the opening phrases in her mind and rehearsed them several times: ‘Things aren’t right, Jack. I think we both know that. I’ve decided the best thing to do, for both of us, is to…’ And she sat waiting for him outside the closed door of the little room.
When he came out he moved as if he’d been shot in the back. He sank into the sofa across from her, and she looked at him closely for signs that he might have been nipping from the secret bottle, but he was sober. His eyes were as round as an actor’s in the final moments of a tragedy.
‘I can’t,’ he announced, barely above a whisper, and she was reminded of the way Andrew Crawford had said ‘I can’t’ in bed, years ago.
‘Can’t what?’
‘Can’t write.’
She had comforted him so often at times like this that now she was empty of all consolation and reassurance; she could only tell him what was true. ‘I wish you wouldn’t say that,’ she said.
‘You do? Well, so do I. I wish a lot of things.’
It was clear that she couldn’t tell him now. She waited two or three days, until she was damned if she’d wait any longer, and then she said it. ‘Things aren’t right; I think we both know that. I’ve decided the best thing to do…’
She could never afterwards remember how she finished that sentence, or what reply he made to it, or what she said next. She remembered only his brief show of raffish indifference and then his rage, when he shouted and threw a whiskey glass against the wall – he seemed to feel he might get her to stay if only they had a loud enough quarrel – and then his collapse into pleading: ‘Oh, baby, don’t do this; please don’t do this to me…’
It was two in the morning before she could make a bed for herself on the sofa.
With the fall chilling rapidly into winter, she went back to New York alone.
Chapter 3
She knew she was awake because she could see morning light in the pale floating shape of a closed Venetian blind, far away. It wasn’t a dream: she was lying naked in bed with a strange man, in a strange place, with no memory of the night before. The man, whoever he was, had a heavy arm and leg flung around her, clamping her down, and in her struggle to free herself she knocked over a bedside table that fell with a crash of broken glass. It didn’t wake him, but he groaned and turned away from her; that made it easy to crawl down to the foot of the bed and get out, avoiding the glass, and feel her way along the wall for a light switch. She didn’t panic: nothing like this had ever happened to her before, but that didn’t mean it would ever happen again. If she could find her clothes and get out of here and get a cab and go home it might still be possible to put the world in order.
When she found the switch the apartment sprang into existence around her, but she didn’t recognize it. She still didn’t recognize the man, either. He was facing away from her but she could see his profile; she studied it as carefully as if she were making a drawing from life, but it meant nothing. The only familiar things in the room were her clothes, draped over the back of a corduroy armchair not far from where the man’s shoes and pants and shirt and underwear lay strewn on the floor. The word ‘sordid’ came into her mind; this was sordid.
She got dressed quickly and found the bathroom, and while combing her hair at the mirror she realized that getting out of here wasn’t absolutely essential; there was another alternative. She could take a hot shower and go to the kitchen and make coffee and wait for him to wake up; she could greet him with a pleasant morning smile – a slightly reserved, sophisticated smile – and as they talked she’d be sure to remember everything she had to know: who he was, how they’d met, where she’d been last night. It would all come back, and she might easily decide she liked him. He might make Bloody Marys to ease their hangovers, and take her out for breakfast, and it might turn out to be—
But this was the counsel of irresponsibility, of promiscuity, of sordidness, and she quickly decided against it. Back in the room where he slept she righted the spindly table that had fallen with its load of bottles and glasses. She found a sheet of paper and wrote a note for him, which she propped on the table:
Be careful:
Broken glass on floor.
E.
Then she let herself out of the apartment and was free. It wasn’t until she was on the street – it turned out to be Morton Street, near Seventh Avenue – that she felt the weight of all the unaccustomed drink
ing she must have done last night. The sun assaulted her, sending yellow streaks of pain deep into her skull; she could barely see, and her hand shook badly in trying to open the door of a taxicab. But riding home, inhaling the hot wind that came in through the cab window, she began to feel better. It was Saturday – how could she be so sure it was Saturday when she’d forgotten everything else? – and that gave her two full days of recuperation before she had to go back to work.
It was the summer of 1961, and she was thirty-six.
Soon after coming back from Iowa she’d been hired as a copywriter for a small advertising agency, and she’d become something of a protégée to the woman who ran it. It was a good job, though she would rather have been in journalism, and the best part of it was that she could live in a high, spacious apartment near Gramercy Park.
‘Morning, Miss Grimes,’ said Frank, at the desk. There was nothing in his face to suggest that he might have guessed how she’d spent the night, but she couldn’t be sure: she walked through the lobby with a bearing of unusual severity, in case he was following her with his eyes.
The wallpaper of the hallway was patterned in a yellowon-gray design of rearing horses; she had passed it hundreds of times without a glance, but now the first thing she saw on getting off the elevator was that someone had penciled a long, thick penis jutting out from between one of the horses’ hind legs, with big testicles slung beneath it. Her first impulse was to find a pencil eraser and rub it out, but she knew that wouldn’t work: it would have to be obliterated with new paper.
Alone and safe behind her own locked door, she took pleasure in finding that everything in her home was clean. She spent half an hour soaping and scrubbing herself in the shower, and while there she began to remember the events of the night. She had gone to the apartment of a married couple she scarcely knew, in the East Sixties, and it had turned out to be a bigger, noisier party than she’d expected – that accounted for the nervousness that had made her drink too fast. She closed her eyes under the pelting of hot water and recalled a sea of talking, laughing people out of which several strangers’ faces came up close: a jolly bald man who said the whole preposterous idea of Kennedy for President had been a triumph of money and public relations; a thin, dapper fellow in an expensive suit who said ‘I understand you’re in the ad game too’; and the man who was probably the one she’d slept with, whose earnest voice had talked to her for what seemed like hours and whose plain, heavy-browed face was very likely the face she had studied this morning. But she couldn’t remember his name. Ned? Ted? It was something like that.
She put on clean, comfortable clothes and drank coffee – she would have loved a beer but was afraid to open one – and was just beginning to enjoy a sense of her life’s coming back to solidity when the telephone rang. He had struggled awake; he had groaned through his own morning ablutions and guzzled a beer; he had found the number she’d probably given him and prepared a courtly little greeting for her, a mixture of apology and reawakened desire. Now he would ask her out for breakfast, or lunch, and she would have to decide what to say. She bit her lip and let the phone ring four times before she picked it up. ‘Emmy?’ It was her sister Sarah’s voice, and it sounded like that of a shy, serious child. ‘Look, it’s about Pookie, and I’m afraid it’s bad news.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘No; but she’s very— Let me start at the beginning, okay? I hadn’t seen her for four or five days, which was sort of strange because she’s usually – you know – over here quite a lot, so this morning I sent Eric over to the garage apartment to sort of check on her, and he came running back and said “Mom, you better get over there.” She was lying on the living-room floor without any clothes on, and at first I thought she was dead: I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing, but I was pretty sure I could feel a very faint pulse. Another thing: she’d gone to the— Can I be basic?’
‘You mean she’d emptied her bowels?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, Sarah, people do that when they’re—’
‘I know, but there was a pulse. Anyway, as luck would have it our own doctor is on vacation, and the man filling in for him is this kind of rude young guy I’d never seen before; he examined her and said she was alive but in a coma, and he asked me how old she was and I couldn’t tell him – you know how Pookie’s always been about her age – and he looked around and saw all these empty whiskey bottles and he said “Well, Mrs. Wilson, nobody lives forever.” ’
‘Is she in the hospital now?’
‘Not yet. He said he’d make arrangements but it might take time. He said we could expect the ambulance some time this afternoon.’
It still hadn’t come by the time Emily eased herself off the sweltering train at St. Charles, where Sarah met her in the old Plymouth she shared with her sons. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Emmy,’ she said. ‘I feel better about everything already.’ And driving very slowly, puzzling over the gearshift and the floor pedals as if she’d never quite mastered the knack of them, she began to take her sister home.
‘It’s funny,’ Emily said as they passed a giant pink-and-white shopping center. ‘When I first came out here this was all open country.’
‘Things change, dear,’ Sarah said.
But nothing was changed about the old Wilson place, except that tall weeds had long eclipsed the little great hedges sign. Tony’s maroon Thunderbird stood glistening in the driveway. He bought himself a new one every other year, and nobody else was allowed to drive it; Sarah had explained once that this was his sole extravagance.
‘Is Tony home?’ Emily asked.
‘No; he went off fishing for the day with some of the guys from Magnum. He doesn’t even know about any of this yet.’ Then, after she’d parked at a respectful distance from the Thunderbird and gotten out to stand frowning over the car keys in her hand, she said ‘Look, Emmy, I know you must be starving but I think we ought to look in on Pookie first. I mean I don’t want to have her just lying there, okay?’
‘Sure,’ Emily said. ‘Sure; of course.’ And they walked on crunching gravel to the sunbaked box of the ‘garage,’ whose garage space was too narrow for modern automobiles. Emily had visited her mother in the upstairs apartment several times – listening to her talk for hours under the close beaverboard ceiling, staring at photographs of herself and Sarah as children on the smudged beaverboard walls, waiting for the first possible chance of escape – but nothing prepared her for what she found now at the top of the creaking stairs.
The naked old woman lay face down, as if she’d tripped on the rug and fallen forward. The heat of the place was all but unbearable – she might easily have collapsed from the heat alone – and it was true about the whiskey bottles: there were six or eight of them around the room, all ‘Bellows Partners’ Choice’ and all empty. (Had she been embarrassed to put so many bottles into the trash for one of the boys to remove?)
‘Girls, I’m terribly sorry about all this,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘Isn’t there something we can do?’
‘Do you think we could get her into bed?’ Sarah said. ‘For when the ambulance comes?’
‘Right. Good idea.’
First they prepared the bedroom. The tangled sheets looked as if they hadn’t been changed for many weeks, and Sarah couldn’t find clean ones, but they did their best to make the bed presentable; then they went back to get her. They were both sweating freely by this time and breathing hard. Crouching, they eased her over on her back. Emily took her under the armpits and Sarah under the knees, and they carried her. She was small but very heavy.
‘Careful of this door frame,’ Sarah said, ‘it’s narrow.’
They sat her on the bed and held her upright while Sarah worked with a comb at her sparse hair.
‘Never mind that, dear,’ she seemed to say as her loose head wobbled under the comb. ‘I can do that later. Just cover me. Cover me.’
‘There,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s a little better. Now, if you can sort of
turn her, I’ll bring her feet up and we’ll – that’s it – easy; easy – there.’
She was lying face up with her head on the pillow, and her daughters stood back from the ugly old body with a sense of relief and accomplishment.
‘You know something?’ Sarah said brightly. ‘I’d give a lot to have that good a figure when I’m her age.’
‘Mm. Does she have a nightgown or something?’
‘I don’t know; let’s look.’
All they could find was a light summer robe that was almost clean. Stooping and jostling each other, they worked a sleeve of it up one soft arm and stuffed the flimsy cloth under her back to bring the other sleeve into place; when the robe was finally closed and fastened their mother was dressed, and they drew the top sheet up to her chin.
‘Well, I can tell you it hasn’t been easy,’ Sarah said as they went back into the living room to gather up the whiskey bottles. ‘It hasn’t been easy having her here over the past – what’s it been now, four years?’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I mean look at this place.’ Holding three or four bottles in one arm, she used her free hand to gesture around the apartment. Every surface in sight was filmed with grime. The ashtrays were heaped to overflowing with very short cigarette butts. ‘And come here; look at this.’ She led Emily into the bathroom and pointed down the toilet bowl, which was brown both above and below the waterline. ‘Oh, if only she could have stayed in the city,’ Sarah said, ‘with things to do and people to see. Because the thing is there was never anything for her to do out here. She’d always be over at the house, and she wouldn’t watch television; she wouldn’t let us watch television; she’d talk and talk and talk until Tony was nearly out of his mind, and she’d – she’d—’
‘I know, baby,’ Emily said.
They went downstairs – the fresh air felt good, even in the heat – and carried their armloads of whiskey bottles to the kitchen door of the main house, where they pressed them deep into a garbage can that was crawling with flies.
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