They went on like this all through the fall, and while he wondered, listening to her play the piano, he knew that eventually she would act if he did not. They were shadowed by a sense of humor which sometimes seemed a longer shadow of events.
She knew what he had done, or what he meant when he said it, which he did at length. She had heard all about it, and she listened with such attention that she might have been taking him literally. He said quite seriously—so she had to smile—that he had killed his wife. All right, not killed—merely destroyed. Yet not her but her life. Or their life. That is, by not leaving her. (She had left him.) He said all this as if he would recall, and recall in order to amend. But this long crime against womanhood, this murder, had it not required an accomplice? he was asked—asked more than once, and once in her dark, lovely bedroom.
An accomplice? She meant his wife, of course.
Well, nobody had caught him, nobody had put him in jail for it. So forget, forget, forget.
And, naturally, his girlfriend was right, but he shook his head, staring at the ceiling in the dark room. Her hand found his face and covered it firmly. "You see, they changed the law. We’re on the honor system now. You punish yourself."
"Don’t want to be on the honor system," he muttered, but she didn’t change the subject.
"John, you’re still half married."
He looked through her fingers into the darkness and made a satisfied sound; the hand upon his face was delicious. He kissed the hollow of her palm and turned to look her in the eye.
She asked if he minded her calling him half married. He touched her mouth and he remembered that she had said he hadn’t really thought about that old marriage of his. Think about it, forget it, think about it, forget it, she seemed to be saying. They listened to a neighbor’s stereo drumming deeply, distantly. She gave his forehead a long, soft kiss, which was like when she whispered in his ear, whispered until the finest-spun words became breath.
Once, on the way home, from streetlamp to streetlamp, past gentle, lurid light, past probes of flashing cabs winging downtown over potholes and heaves of the avenue, he thought that he had not really been married after all. Across the street, the blonde prostitute who was always zipped tight into the bright colors of her costume stood dark-eyed and pale at the entrance to an alley, so that she looked like she had the key to its high iron gate. His hands were cold, and he stopped for coffee in a place he had passed many times—a little hole-in-the-wall newsstand cafe. Why had he wanted to stop there? Nothing much—it was at the intersection where he turned.
He would come along in the middle of the night before dawn, following a coastline, and then, across the street, through the sidewalk service window, he would see a woman pouring coffee from a glass pot that seemed to hang from her knuckles. Three or four men leaned on their elbows at the cramped counter inside. A nurse in white stockings and a dark coat would come along—or, once, an off-duty cop with his satchel—and stop at the window and pick up a paper if the early papers were out, fold it, and hand the money through. The woman, who looked Puerto Rican, was framed in the service window and gave change or passed out a pack of cigarettes, and she might pause and look out across the avenue. At this intersection he would turn and walk the rest of the way home crosstown. But this one night he went in and took the remaining stool at the counter. There wasn’t much room inside. Someone must have been right behind him in the street, because the woman went to the window with a brown paper bag. She must have had it ready. She handed it out to a man who wore a knitted face mask. The man laughed at something she said, and she came back to the counter and poured John a cup of coffee, assuming with a smile that that was what he wanted.
A cup of coffee was a cup of coffee. Yet staying overnight with his girl wasn’t staying overnight unless he had breakfast with her. So didn’t he like her, that he had left her and come here for coffee on the way home? The coffee was almost strong; it was rich and had a faint, natural sweetness to it.
His girlfriend slept easily. Once, he had phoned her on the way home and she was already asleep and brought the phone slowly to her ear while he imagined her dark bedroom and the dark living room beyond it. He had left her there in the middle of the night. But he loved her and he loved having breakfast with her. She talked of moving. He thought of a better life. She had said at the very beginning that he was her other body. Well, she was his. They had met at a fund-raising party given by her radio station. Her name was Linda.
He kept her to himself. He did tell his friend Harry how he had danced in a deserted subway station with her and had spent the night in a tent on a small mountain in New Jersey in order to prove to her that New Jersey did have mountains. And one Sunday at the pier he had slowly—keeping an eye on her—drawn a pencil out of his jacket pocket and surprised himself by doing a picture of her. He never drew—he couldn’t draw at all. "You see?" she had said.
"Linda sounds pretty and she sounds nice," Harry said. "When am I going to meet her?"
Harry lived forty minutes upriver by train. John and Harry met at the gym, where they put on the gloves but seldom boxed. Light gloves for the punching bags. He and Harry had reached a point of skill at which they could talk while working the speed bag, one resting, the other working, snapping the small black Everlast bag up against the circular platform it hung from. It sounded like tap dancing when the timing peaked, the hands went faster and faster, the bag twice as fast.
Harry was much heavier and had a full English mustache. He told jokes while he worked out. Sometimes it was an awful joke you wouldn’t repeat except to someone you were very sure of. All the time, he went on striking the bag in front of him, single-punching, side-slapping, or double-punching fast after the bag hit up against the far side and before it hit the near side again.
Harry invited him to come up with Linda for the weekend. He asked Harry for a rain check. Sure; it rained all the time up at their place, Harry said. John laughed, and Harry said it was all very well for John, who wasn’t always tied down to his office, but a weekend for him was a weekend. Harry was not a friend to tell you what you should do; but " ‘John and Linda’— that sounds pretty good," he said, and just at that moment the member of this mythical couple who was present was overtaken by a yawn so true and deep, opening across the eyes and the spine, across the shoulders and cheekbones, that he flubbed his timing and sent the speed bag glancing off, and stepped back to complete his yawn, which then seemed to find further depths in him, while Harry stopped the bag and took over. He got going at once. "She cutting into your sleep?" he said, going about his work and grinned at some still point in the midst of his target’s blur until he suddenly finished off his sequence with a smash that practically blew the bag off its swivel.
Harry wouldn’t volunteer advice, but he cared about John, and he listened. "I’ve known you a long time; if she says you’re still married, she’s probably right."
"Then I’m a bigamist," John said and laughed. Harry was a lawyer.
"The worst kind. They can’t do nuthin’ to ya."
"That’s what you think," said John.
John told Linda what Harry had said, and knew he shouldn’t have.
"Harry and his wife knew her," she said, and, in a catch of her breath, she was about to go on, but she thought a moment, distracted in the dark when John moved. "I wonder where she is," she finally said.
"Don’t," said John, wondering if she thought he knew.
"She’s better off where she is," came the voice in front of him in his arms.
"You make it sound like Heaven," he said.
But then she unbent a leg and stretched it, his thigh against hers. She snuggled back against him. "We can’t all be in Heaven," she said, yawning.
"Then there’s the real bigamist you read about in the paper, who really and truly has a double life; and that is a lot of life," he said, as she listened in the darkness of her bedroom.
"I don’t believe it," she said.
Linda found another apa
rtment. It gave him pause. She couldn’t wait to get out. The new apartment was a dozen or so blocks uptown and would be better in every way except the rent was more. John was going to help her move. Then, a week before the end of the month, she got a call from the departing tenant at the crack of dawn to say, with humor, that he had already departed. She phoned her new super and decided at once to take the day off and clear out. She called John and told him not to change his plans, she had phoned some friends of hers—a couple with a van.
They came over, and the job got done in three trips; the move was all finished by mid-afternoon. Just as they were sitting down to have a beer the phone rang; it was the former tenant, asking if everything was cool. Thanks again, he was told.
For the time being, only the large kitchen needed a paint job. And that was where Linda was standing all by herself, thinking, when, at six-thirty, John found the front door unlocked, pushed it open, and politely touched the buzzer. He had seen the place once already but not in its present mess. She came out to greet him. He gave her a kiss on one tired cheek. Her stomach made a hungry sound. They gave each other a lot of little kisses, and she was so friendly holding him that he could feel words forming in her mouth. Her arm lay along his shoulders; she thanked him for sending over the plant, which he saw out of the corner of his eye near the piano—a heroic plant, large-scale and formidable, with a very simple Latin name he had forgotten.
She was happy with the bare brick wall across from the piano. Did she need another table in the living room? Well, he said, what about one of those swing seats that hung from a chain bolted to the ceiling? She laughed at that. Keep the furniture off the floor as much as possible, he said. They contemplated the loft bed in the corner of the living room by a window. The former tenant had built it, but he hadn’t tried to get any money for it or for some beautifully made bookshelves with sliding panels. He said he had to give up the place because the landlord wouldn’t let him sublet. Linda had acquired an official, though obsolete, street sign marking an intersection near her old apartment. The steel-framed, blue-background style signaled a neighborhood of fire escapes and steeples and great quantities of flowers passing on a horse-drawn wagon, all of which John recalled as clearly as he had heard the man on the wagon calling up to the windows, a man in a cap—though that horse-drawn wagon creaking down a city block without a lot of parked cars was much less his to remember than his parents’, who didn’t live in the city now. Linda’s street sign was a collector’s item: where had she found it? Oh, her friend with the van had given it to her.
How did the piano sound in its new home?
She told him to listen for himself, and she played a hymn standing up; without the pedal it had the briskness of a march.
He stayed that night and the next night. She had the lock changed and gave John a key to the apartment and one to the street door.
He said he would keep them for an emergency. He wouldn’t use them. He wondered what emergencies he meant.
Walking home from her former apartment, he had felt that that was her part of the city—her city, though she had come to it not long ago. When she lived there, he had walked uptown and over, and it was a shade less safe than walking from the new apartment. This new route was crosstown, past a public school, then up two blocks, then crosstown. Both neighborhoods were new to him, both old, both more Hispanic than ten years ago; and if he occasionally phoned on his way home, he wasn’t checking to see if she was asleep or O.K., he was extending some happiness he had that she was there in that place.
On the new route, he passed a Spanish restaurant with a big guitar worked into its neon sign, unlighted on these dark, early mornings. The fancy plasterwork was like the facade of a Spanish restaurant in Linda’s old neighborhood; they had never eaten there. He missed the old route: the dilapidated stoops; a cleaner’s with a lighted clock and a gloomy poster that said "New Suede" above a sheep with long eyelashes, walking (or standing) happily in its sleep; an office building with a dingy marble lobby, where, behind two sets of doors, the watchman sat with his back to the street, reading his paper, a Thermos on the table beside him; then the rather nasty drugstore displaying a clutter of skin remedies and bottles of headache remedies and little propped-up advertisements and, seedy there in the light from the street, a bulky carton slightly used and askew, containing some prosthetic device. Then, a couple of doors down, past the meat market that had a rabbit and an unplucked bird hanging in the window at suppertime but nothing at three in the morning, there was the delicatessen with the powerful all-night cat lying on its side in the space between the plate glass and a crate of large, thick-skinned eating oranges, which were directly below a hook-load of bananas blanched to a sharp pallor by exposure to the solitary light of the streetlamp. He knew all these private landmarks, right down to the pay phone on a concrete post next to a steel-mesh trash basket. He missed that old route; it went only as far as the intersection, where the newsstand cafe was. From there on, his route home remained the same.
Two doors down from the brocade-curtained window of the Spanish restaurant was Linda’s new fish market, a pillow store on one side and a pet shop called Fin and Claw on the other. The white enamel fish trays, more vacant than the plate glass, seemed to slant more sharply than when they were full of gray and coral shrimp and white layers of fillet.
The restaurant people had gone home; the fish people would be getting up to go to the wholesale market across the river. The married people were traveling in their sleep, but together. He tried to imagine his one-time wife in Heaven. It was like failing to get a phone call through. He felt that Harry and his wife knew where she had ended up. How terrible, but he didn’t ask. He could imagine only real places like Hawaii, at the other end of the world, except Hawaii was very expensive.
Linda got mad one night going down in the elevator. "So what if you did kill her?" The door slid open, and suddenly they were facing the lobby and the superintendent, who was all dressed up, so the dark glasses he always wore looked different. "So what if you did kill her?"
John shushed Linda, and they all laughed.
"So what if you did kill her? That was her destiny. To leave you. And your destiny was to survive her."
The super watched them go out. Linda was mad, all right.
"I think of her in Hawaii," said John.
Linda laughed. "Don’t think of her at all," she said, going through her bag out on the sidewalk. She had locked herself out; but there was the super. But John had the keys.
One morning John and Linda were walking arm in arm into the cold, glaring winter sun. A truck in front of the fish market was unloading long boxes of glittering fat halibut, striped bass, red snapper, and silvery blues; the name in large red letters on the truck was not the fish market’s name. So the fish came to the fish people, he said, rather than the other way around. He knew she was looking at him as if seriously he were the village idiot, but more the way she did sometimes at the movies, so that, turning to see her amber eyes in the light of the screen looking at him—it was like opening his own this timeless morning to find her leaning above him, bare and warm, the sun on her neck and on her arm and in her hair. Seeing her was living.
He had yawned and smiled and said that he had overslept. Slept, she had said, not overslept. She had run her fingers along his jaw and rubbed it lightly, busily. He recalled finding a new part of her body during the night; he told her he wasn’t sure now exactly where it was, and they amused themselves by being slightly awed at this.
When they got up and got going, she talked a lot. She had woken by mistake while it was still dark, and she thought that he had to get home and it was her fault that he hadn’t. John watched her drink her orange juice and said he had certainly dreamed, but all he knew was that in one dream he was in bed with her, hugging her and listening to the piano.
Wow! She liked that. Linda put her orange juice on top of the piano and sat down and played a song fast. Except, she went on, in her dream—and she slowed down and loo
ked fondly over her shoulder at him as she continued to play—in her dream they were high up off the floor and she hadn’t minded. John had the answer. "I was in your old bedroom, and you were in your new living room"—he pointed at the departed tenant’s handiwork—"and there’s a bed and a piano in each."
She played the song again, his presence evident in the sway of her shoulders. Hey, what time was it, she called, and went on playing. The phone rang, but she didn’t stop, and by the time John got there the person had hung up. He lay down on the bed for a moment and listened to the music in the other room, as if he were alone.
When they went out, the light was miraculous against the winter cold. He felt they were a couple. But then she said, "We make a good couple." What could he say? She started making conversation, and he hated himself —almost.
According to Linda, the former tenant had phoned her again to ask uncertainly if she had had trouble closing the bathroom window; she could get the super to fix the sash if she could find him.
When was this?
A couple of times: once when she was playing the piano before she left for the office, then yesterday as she came in the door.
So that was him this morning.
She wouldn’t be surprised.
Can’t go through life not answering the telephone.
She didn’t propose to.
But she hadn’t this morning.
But generally she did answer. Plus she’d had company.
"The Departed Tenant is nostalgic," he said. "He can’t seem to tear himself away."
"The Departed Tenant was heading for New Mexico originally," said Linda.
"Where was he yesterday?"
"He had to dig up an extra dime; he was in a pay booth."
"He talked an extra nickel’s worth?"
Women and Men Page 43
