Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “What do you really want, Henry?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a beer, sir, if you got one.”

  Cole took him through the garage into the lower level of the house and seated him in the family room lit by a wall of windows. At the end of the room, covered by a sheet, was a pool table, seldom used. Dated magazines, mostly Time, were stacked into a corner, next to a rack of old reference books from Cole’s schooldays.

  Henry said, “Doesn’t look like you spend much time down here. What’s it look like upstairs?”

  “I don’t give tours. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Cole climbed one brief set of stairs and disappeared up another, his footsteps muffled in thick carpeting. Henry sat deep in an upholstered chair and stared at a fireplace that had not been used in years. Above the mantel was a brass clock whose hands gave out the wrong time. Cole returned with a tapered glass and a bottle of German beer that poured out as dark as chocolate.

  “You buy the best, don’t you, Mr. Cole?”

  “You’re not complaining, are you?”

  “Not me. I’m grateful for everything I get.”

  “How well do you know Mrs. Baker?”

  “I’m a gentleman. Some things I don’t tell, but you could kinda say I grew on her.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  Henry drank deeply of the beer. “Company I worked for, last September, did her driveway. Ever seen her house, Mr. Cole? Makes this place look like a shack. Her husband’s a blueblood, did you know that?” He poured more beer into the glass. “I feel funny drinking alone.”

  “Don’t let it worry you.”

  “I let everything worry me. Lucky I don’t have an ulcer. Want to hear something rich, hard to believe? Only place I didn’t worry was Nam. That’s because in the army I mattered. I had two stripes said I did.”

  “Henry,” Cole said quietly, “that was a lot of years ago.”

  “I know that better than you. Every morning I wake up, I got an exact count how long it was. I’m not brooding about it. Like I said before, I’m facing facts. Women like me now, five years from now they won’t like me so much. Biggest thing I got going is I can pick up a shovel and hold my own with a road gang. Give me a hammer, I can pound a nail. Doesn’t say much, does it?”

  Without comment, Cole stepped to a window, gazed beyond apple trees in full flower to the darkening edges of the lawn, and had a vision of soldiers operating at high pitch during combat and going crackers with the silencing of the guns. He raised the window a few inches and admitted a mild breeze, his eye distracted by a wasp playing on the screen, his ear taken by the territorial anger of a robin.

  “I got out of the army, Mr. Cole, I went back nights to school. Got my diploma in a year. I’m no dummy. Even went on to community college, but I didn’t stick it out. I was still young then. Nobody told me I’d grow old so fast.”

  Cole spoke in a dry voice not entirely meant to be heard. “If you can name the people who didn’t tell you, maybe we can sue.”

  Henry heard. “My mother, we can start with her. Except we’ll have to dig her up. Chicopee cop did her in, Mr. Cole, but it got hushed up. Guys were always beating up on her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Some people aren’t meant to make it,” he said with a shrug from the chair, his eyes blue studs beneath a careless fall of hair. “I could use another bottle of beer, if you can spare it.”

  “That’s all she wrote,” Cole said with a nod at the empty, a slow step removing him from the window. “Whatever you’re leading up to, it’s time you hit me with it.”

  “I want to go back to school.”

  “Commendable.”

  “ ‘Fore it’s too late.” His voice came from the depths, his whole life for a fleeting second distilled in his eyes. “ ‘Fore they find me in a ditch like they did my mum.”

  “There’s a community college nearby,” Cole said quickly.

  “I still need a job.”

  “Yes, you’ve made that clear.”

  “I want to work for you, Mr. Cole. You got things need fixing on the house, I could do them. I saw right away you got a drainpipe needs replacing, probably the gutter too. I run out of chores here, I could do things at your office. Run errands, drive you places. I’m not talking full-time, just when you need me.”

  Cole felt a flicker in his stomach and a warning from a dark corner of his brain. He said nothing.

  Henry cranked himself out of the chair, and his voice came out as a rush of water would to challenge a void. “Look me in the eyes, Mr. Cole, and tell me I’m asking too much.”

  • • •

  Ben Baker was playing the piano in the drawing room, a romantic tune from the thirties that his mother had taught him. He played it badly. When he glimpsed the stout shape and skimpy legs of Mrs. Mennick, he gently lowered the lid over the keys as if putting the music to sleep. Mrs. Mennick approached with a caring smile, and he lifted his well-barbered head and viewed her with a degree of love, for she was a composite of his childhood nannies and tutors, none of whom his mother had found quite acceptable, though he had cherished them all. One nanny used to rumple his hair when talking to him, and another had cuddled him into her vast lap while reading to him. A sickly child, he had been educated at home until early adolescence, at which time he had been sent off to boarding school, the most miserable years of his life, his university ones only a scant improvement.

  Mrs. Mennick said, “You certainly look rested.”

  “Well, I had a good night’s sleep and a nice nap this afternoon.” His nap had followed his medication, which he had taken early in order to be alert for the evening. His eyes shone, and his face had so much color that it seemed someone had slapped him on both cheeks.

  “I’m so glad you’re home, Mr. Ben. I prayed for you every day.”

  “That’s why I’m better,” he said to please her, and rose from the piano bench to breathe in the scent of cut grass from the open windows. Mrs. Mennick’s brother, who operated a small landscaping business, had driven a mower over the lawns that morning.

  “Dinner will be at eight,” Mrs. Mennick said, “unless you’d like it earlier.”

  “Eight is fine.” He gazed beyond her. “Is Mrs. Baker in her room?”

  “Yes, she is. I just came from there.”

  “Then I think I might visit her.”

  “I’m sure she’d like that.”

  He left the room with a measured step and ascended the stairway, pausing to rest on the landing, for he knew that his stamina was limited. He paused again near his bedroom, his since childhood, some of his toys still in there, stashed in a closet. He peered in to see whether Mrs. Mennick had neatened up after his nap. She had.

  His wife was in the master bedroom, his pleasure to have given it to her. She needed the space, the privacy, and he had wanted her to have the view from the bow window, where she sometimes struck a pose that had been his mother’s. Her door was closed, and he placed an ear against it. If she was doing business on the phone, he did not want to infringe a rule by intruding. Hearing nothing, he rapped once and was answered immediately. He slipped in and clicked the door shut behind him. She came forward, slender and long-limbed, fluid in the way she filled a dress. His heart ached at the sight of her. His kiss was tenderly given and returned with enough life to make him heady.

  “Such a long time,” he murmured, exorbitant in his emotions, lips trembling, eyes almost filling. “I love you, Lou.”

  “I shouldn’t want you to stop.”

  “I thought maybe …” He loathed his awkwardness. “… if you aren’t too tired.”

  He marveled at the effortlessness of her movements and the dexterity of her fingers as she shed jewelry, then rustled out of her dress. Her beauty, to him, outmatched that of starlets, models, and centerfold maidens in Playboy, back issues of which a fellow patient had bestowed upon him at the hospital. Her lingering winter pallor added to his wonderment and made her seem pure and himself young. His b
lood ran quick. Yet in removing his own clothes he was shy and slow and stumbled over his shoes.

  “Come,” she said from the open bed. He felt special, lifted, extravagant, and responded with courage and daring. With an errant breeze on his backside, he absorbed her heat and scent, bruised his lips on a diamonded ear, and relished the rasp of her breath and the fire in his own. The telephone rang but scarcely disturbed him, and the answering machine soon silenced it.

  Later he lay lulled, flattened, seemingly content, except for an arm thrown hard over his eyes. “What’s the matter, Ben?” she asked from the prop of an elbow, and he smiled vaguely.

  “The Romans had a catchphrase for it. Post coitum triste. The sadness that follows sexual fulfillment.” His eyes were dim. “I don’t want to lose you, Lou.”

  “Little chance of that.”

  “One never knows.”

  “Worry about real things, Ben. The rest is a waste.”

  The telephone rang again when he was back in his clothes and she was coming out of her bathroom, her black hair brushed back and her eyes liquid-bright. She answered it on the second ring, her voice brisk. Then her eyebrows shot up and she muffled the mouthpiece.

  “It’s business, dear. Would you excuse me?”

  He moved with a jerk. At the door he turned tentatively, saw that her hand was still on the mouthpiece, and closed the door behind him.

  • • •

  Like her life, Emma Goss’s supper was simple and solitary, a small plate of deli ham, leftover baked beans, and tomato wedges, with brown bread on the side. She drank her coffee black, with just a touch of sugar. She was, in actuality, quite accustomed to eating alone, for her husband used to manipulate his fork with one hand and turn the pages of the newspaper with the other. Of course the difference then was that she needed only to speak and he, eventually, would have replied.

  She helped herself to an extra dollop of beans, conscious of the approach of evening, her loneliest hours. More easily managed was the daylight, and cherished were the errands that occupied her mornings. A taxi, often the same driver, toted her to the dry cleaner, the cobbler, the bank, the drugstore. Twice a week she went to the market on South Union Street, where the checkout clerk was especially pleasant and the manager, a bald man with a turtle face, never failed to wish her a good day. If the weather was suitable, gardening filled her afternoons.

  She cleared the table, did the dishes, and took herself into the front room, where she sat erect in an armchair to thumb through magazines and glance out the window. The magazines were subscriptions that continued to arrive in her husband’s name, as did utility bills and junk mail. His clothes and his shoes, including a pair of Florsheims he had never worn, remained in his closet, and his razor and heart pills were still in the medicine cabinet. The mattress on their bed harbored two hollows, the greater one his, which she sometimes slipped into as if an arm had drawn her. Sometimes, at her loneliest, she wished for the sleep of death.

  She tried to believe in an afterlife but could not, perhaps because he had not. She did, however, believe in his ghost or, if not that, his leftover presence. Often, at odd moments, she felt she heard his footsteps in another room, and only last night, pausing near the china closet, she glimpsed herself mirrored in the glass and the shape of him looming up behind her. She was on the edge of fainting when she felt his hand touch her shoulder, familiar and firm enough to steady her but too intangible for her to grasp. That was when she knew she should not sell the house and leave him to strangers.

  She put aside the magazines, which had failed to divert her thoughts, and gazed through the window at the trim bungalows across the street. Only from the stenciled markings on the mailboxes did she know the surnames of the occupants, busy people into whose lives she did not presume to intrude, not even when their children damaged her shrubs or chalked graffiti on the herringbone brick path leading to her front door. She might have spoken to the culprits herself but feared being sassed and making matters worse. She had little knowledge of children. Harold had opted to have none, and she was the only issue of late-married parents who had sheltered her from a world they had never much understood.

  Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, came a blast that made her heart flip. A youth on a motorcycle had detonated the engine and now was roaring past the house. Immediately she pressed her fingers against her ears to choke the sound and catch her breath.

  A few minutes later she entered the spectral dim of the dining room, shades lowered to shield the furniture against the sinking sun, and stood before the china closet hoping to glimpse her husband, but the moment was not right. Even her own reflection was vague, as if she were more of his world, wherever that might be, than this one. “Harold,” she said aloud to the dead air, which did not stir.

  Her loneliness swelled when she stepped into the well-lighted den, where his long, dignified face of firm features pressed close to the bone peered back at her from a standup frame. It was one of the few photographs she had of him, for he had never been much for staring at a camera. The local paper used it when he was promoted to public works supervisor and reran it when he died. She gazed at it hauntedly while giving a little twist to her wedding band, the symbol of a marriage in which she had exerted little will of her own, instead snuggling herself into the comforting curve of his life and formulating her thoughts under the shadow of his. In return, he had given love, fidelity, and support. He had been close with money, but she had wanted for nothing, and their annual two weeks at a seaside cottage had been an adventure of sorts.

  She sat at her husband’s desk, switched on the flexible lamp, and took out a box of stationery. Her sole correspondent was Mildred Murphy, her old neighbor who had moved to Florida. Each week, in a small dainty hand, she wrote Mildred a letter filled with local news garnered from the Eagle-Tribune and frequently included clippings, which increased the postage. Mildred’s reply was always prompt but never more than what fitted on the back of a picture postcard. With Harold’s gold Parker pen, one of the gifts he got on retiring, she wrote Dear Mildred and then remembered she had written only two days ago.

  In the kitchen a breeze gave her a chill. She shut the window and stood shivering near the telephone on the wall. When slipping into depression, she found it essential to hear the live voice of another human being. A few days ago she had rung up the reference desk at the Lawrence library and asked an amiable woman named Winnie Reusch for information on past mayors of the city (“When exactly did the Irish come into power?”), and another time she had spoken for several minutes to a Delta Airlines clerk about flights to Florida. This time, a question ready to roll off her tongue, she tapped out the home phone of attorney Cole.

  His line was busy. And stayed busy.

  A panic set in, but she fought it by returning to the desk in the den. She laid out a fresh sheet of stationery, picked up the pen, and began writing swiftly and fluently, her head tipping farther and farther to one side as if to let someone read the words over her shoulder.

  The letter was to Harold. His eyes only.

  • • •

  Louise Baker had told her husband it was business, but that was true only in a general sense, for the caller was Barney Cole and the subject was Henry Witlo. She said, “If he’s too much for you, forget it, send him on his way.”

  “I just want to know what I’m letting myself in for,” Cole said with a note of annoyance.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He barrels in. He twists and pushes, comes at me from every angle. I agreed to help him find a job, not adopt him.”

  “Is it that bad, Barney, really?”

  “He’s Goldilocks, for Christ’s sake. I’m afraid I’ll come home some night and find him sitting in my chair, eating off my plate. He’s already taken a leak in my bushes.”

  Her laugh was grim and faint, perhaps not heard.

  “You really pick ‘em, Lou.”

  “No taste. That what you’re telling me?”

  “I sim
ply don’t understand, that’s all.”

  “Let’s say I had an itch and leave it at that.” She spoke carelessly, and from his end of the line came a heavy sigh, as if something had been extracted from him, an illusion perhaps. She said, “We mellow, Barney, but we don’t change. I’m still just a guinea girl from Lawrence.”

  His voice came slowly. “I heard through the grapevine you’re doing well out there. You’ve got the best of all possible worlds.”

  “You heard correctly.”

  “You’re gentry.”

  “I use the right fork.”

  “Must belong to a few clubs.”

  “I’m president of the Mallard Junction Improvement Society. We keep the town pristine.”

  “I’ve never met your husband.”

  “No reason you should have.”

  “Sickly fellow, I’ve heard.”

  She was silent, tolerating the tone of the conversation only because it suited her purposes.

  Cole said, “I understand you’re making money.”

  “That I don’t talk about,” she said coolly.

  “We used to talk about everything.”

  “In bed, Barney, not on the phone.” She shoved aside her hair and shifted the receiver to her other ear. “And in those days you were my lawyer.”

  “And those days are gone.”

  “Everything must end.”

  “I know that, but does Henry?”

  She stared through the bow window. In the lowering light of day the lawns were fiercely green, as if paint had been applied, and the sky was at its bluest. “Now you have the nub of it,” she said, watching crows sweep toward distant treetops. “You always did have a quick grasp.”

  “You want me to keep an eye on him, keep him occupied. You don’t want him coming back on you and smudging what you have out there. Otherwise you’ll have to deal with him in ways that might not be ladylike.”

  “Now you have it all,” she said simply.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”

  “I knew I didn’t have to. But I’ve given you an out, haven’t I? If he’s too much of a chore, forget him, send him on his way.”