by Packer, Vin
For a moment, during the first part of their drive, he had pretended to himself that nothing had changed. He had told Margaret calmly about the trip he would have to take to Winston-Salem, about the directorship, and a few details of the merger plan. Then she talked and he listened. Listened, and predicted to himself that she would say just the sort of thing she did say. First, the new things they needed. A new car. A new freezer. All new solarium furniture. And — there was always one item he could not predict — a new tree for the west lawn. Then, the trip. The trip would come after the announcement that Robert was a vice-president. There was the Orient and there was Africa, or they could simply go to Nassau again. Right now, though, the party the day after Robert returned. Not a buffet again, no matter how many guests they invited. Margaret wanted a sit-down dinner. Robert became so caught up in his little game of pretense that he could see himself at the party. He was wearing his new light-tan shantung suit, crossing the lawn where Margaret needed a new tree, carrying a drink to someone. He was saying “Thank you” in response to someone’s “Nice party, Robert.” That had been his life, in a nutshell, for the past twenty-one years. Margaret said something, and he could see it in his mind’s eye; then, before he knew it, the image had already come about, and he saw it on the screen of his memory.
“… so if he comes,” Margaret was saying now, “you just won’t be able to have a fourth drink. Don’t imagine you can sneak one without John Hark noticing it!”
There was that flat, emphatic note to her voice that told Robert she would take time out to reach into her bag for a cigarette. She never lit a cigarette when she was making a point, not Margaret. Margaret knew what she was about; Margaret had definite ideas. Robert turned his head away from the road and looked at her very carefully, taking her in with a certain wonder. He saw her in profile, the pale blue chiffon scarf whipping her cheeks in the wind, the creamy beige crêpe dress hugging her body; at the indentation of her bosom, the large gold necklace he had bought her at Jay Thorpe — her cool, soft features familiar, all of them — familiar as his own. Still, an enigmatic sensation filled Robert Bowser when he looked at his wife. He had been married to her for over two decades, yet he could predict only her performance, the same way he could predict the performance of an adding machine, or the Lincoln, or the sump pump at their house. In no way could he predict what Margaret was thinking, or whether she could stray as far from their lives as he so often did in his thoughts.
“There’s a fifty-mile limit on this road,” Margaret said then. “You’re not nervous, are you? It’s all over now, Robert.”
“I wasn’t nervous. You mean about the directorship?” “Yes.”
“I wasn’t nervous about it.”
“There’s always a let-down after a build-up of anticipation. It’s very common. You’re probably a little depressed.”
“Am I?” He wondered if that were true, that he was depressed. The truth was, he decided, he felt nothing.
“Very common,” said Margaret. “A natural feeling.”
“Do you have it ever?”
“Everyone does, of course. I just wish you’d slow down. You’re driving too fast and we’ll get a ticket.”
Robert smiled to himself at her threatening him with the law.
Margaret said, “I don’t blame you for driving fast through this part of the trip, though. I wonder how people live like this. I suppose they don’t even know the difference. They’re too caught up with basics — making a living, paying for the television set, raising children they can ill afford — basics. Slow down, please, Robert. Why don’t we just exclude John Hark? We’ll invite him another time.”
It was a wretched landscape, full of paint-peeling diners and dilapidated houses built too close to the road; Tastee-Freeze stands, discount houses, oil drums for garbage, gas stations and billboards. There was a dump somewhere nearby, a stench from it, and smoke that hung over the area like a tired haze of hopelessness. Still, many, many times when Robert drove this route he felt not a repugnance like Margaret’s, but a fascination — a wonder — and oddly, something akin to desire — not for any one thing, certainly not for any one — but for another way of being. There was a house along this route, somewhere very near where they were, a particular house that always happened to Robert. That was the only way he could think to put it. It “happened” to him. He was watching for it now.
“Do you want to exclude John Hark?” said Margaret.
“So I can have a fourth drink before dinner?” A fourth, he thought, and perhaps a fifth … and he saw himself in a small cafe in Brazil. It was hot and the cool drinks tasted marvellous.
“You’ll feel a little festive when you return, Robert. Why shouldn’t you have a fourth drink? Last week when all this Baker business came up, you were having four and five before dinner. One night I counted five.”
“Were you worried?”
“Of course not! I’ve never once seen you intoxicated! You’re not a John Hark. It’s very simple.” “What is?”
“Don’t be picky, Robert. You know what I’m saying. I can’t tolerate drunkards, not John Hark’s sort. He gets very sloppy, Robert. You never do! It’s very simple.”
“Yes, I guess it is. Very simple.”
“Most things are,” said Margaret. “We just won’t ask him.”
It was precisely then that Robert saw the house, at the very moment Margaret made it definite that John Hark was not to attend their party.
It was a run-down, squat, two-story house, gray shingle, next to one of Route 22’s ubiquitous diners. The grass around it had not been cut in all the years Robert had been studying it. Many of the windows were broken. In front, the mailbox was damaged, so that the white container dangled off its post, upside down. In the side yard there was a rusty icebox, and on the front porch, bedsprings with a few coils popped. Perhaps this evening Robert noticed details he had not noticed before (he could not remember having seen the turned-over mailbox), but the house itself was the same and his feeling was the same. He knew the psychological name for his sensation was déjà vu — the feeling of having seen it before, and more — the feeling of hiving experienced it before. Lived in it? No, not that at all — experienced it was the only way he could think of it. Robert knew that the psychologists would point out that Robert had made the trip from Bucks County to New York and back countless times in the past fifteen years. He had probably seen the house, without thinking about it, for years, and only in recent years noticed it. Yet did that explain the sudden impact of shocking nostalgia that had overcome him the first time he had noticed it? And the same reaction, somewhat diluted by repetition, each time thereafter? The curious thing about it was that mixed with the nostalgia and the déjà vu was a sharp revulsion, a fear — a feeling that he had already experienced total degradation, and that the smell of it was in his nostrils and its taint all through him. At times he tried imagining himself living there, but he could not really visualize himself in the house. He could only wonder who would ever think to look there for Robert Bowser. It was before he had any reason to believe he would need a hideout. It was back in the years when he was in between risks, after he had left Brown & Forbes, and before he had become treasurer for King & Clary.
They drove beyond the house while Robert recalled those years. There had been opportunities, of course, and temptations. In Robert’s work there always were. Robert’s conceit was that he was selective and cautious — that he would not expend any energy on a project simply for the thrill of a gamble. Robert had a scorn for the petty gambler, the petty thief — the small mind whose ambition could be temporarily satiated by a lucky day at the racetrack or a successful venture through a bedroom window at night. The scorn was mixed with wonder as well — the same wonder Robert always felt when he observed people who had simply let go the rules, senselessly, flatly, and were facing the consequences. When he saw, in the tabloids, photographs of disheveled thugs who had been caught accosting their victims on city streets, in taxis, or h
allways (usually with little more profit than ten or fifteen dollars), it was as though he were witness to their nakedness. He felt as though he had come across them walking around nude — a revulsion and a wonderment. What had ever made them think they could get away with it? In those years between risks, Robert asked himself that question often, and always with disgust for them, and for all get-rich-quickers. No, it took time and thought for the coup, and in the past five years, while Robert did not frame the thought exactly in his mind, part of his exhilaration was rooted in a dim awareness that he was not going for little things in a little way. No one would ever have reason — even now — to look in a house like that for Robert Bowser. That thought came to mind, and with it a strange inch of fear, and then Margaret’s voice brought him back to the present.
“I said, shall we have dinner at the Canal House when we get to New Hope, or shall I fix something from the freezer?”
Robert Bowser took hold of himself, let the past moments all go … even the near past and very pressing ones of his dilemma. He came full center to Right Now. Until Sunday night when the Varig jet left the ground, Right Now was the exigency. He must believe that and act in that belief. He was Margaret Bowser’s husband. They were driving home and trying to decide, en route, where to eat.
He said, “I’d rather eat at Chez Odette, on the way into New Hope.”
He even thought of escargots Bourguignons, saw the shells, smelled the pungent odor of the garlic sauce; saw his hands beside the plate, reaching for the silver implements for spearing and shell gripping.
The only trace of strain was the beginning of a severe headache. He could feel the pressure, as though somewhere in his brain was the minute start of a crack, prelude to a gradual crumbling, as though somewhere in the depths of his mind everything would come apart suddenly, if he could not contain the pressure.
TWO
HARVEY PLANGMAN was early.
He parked the MG in front of the Princeton Inn, in New Jersey, at quarter to six.
Lake Budde was not due for fifteen minutes. It had disappointed Harvey that Lake had not simply said, “Come on over to the house!”
Not only had it wounded Plangman’s pride, it had also ruled out the possibility that Lake might invite him to stay overnight. Lake had made everything very clear.
“I have an hour to kill, I guess,” he had said on the telephone. “I’ll meet you for a drink.”
• • •
Unless Harvey could work out something with Lois Cutler, it meant spending money for a motel. He had not planned to call Lois until tomorrow, but after several moments of nervous indecision, Harvey decided to make the call to Pennsylvania from here. It sounded good, too.
“Well, hi there, Lois,” he would say, in a casual tone. “I’m over here in Princeton.”
It would sound as though he were often driving about to places like that, doing this and that, looking up old friends and friends of the family, and sitting around on their grand old wide white porches, sipping something cool, looking out at a vast expanse of very green, long lawn.
When he walked inside the Inn, he saw the telephone booth immediately. He had always been very good at spotting telephone booths and men’s rooms. It was a practiced accomplishment. He liked walking into a place and finding his way around without asking directions of anyone — just as though he were completely at home in his surroundings — as though he had been there many times.
This time, instead of going directly to the phone booth, he dallied by the front desk. He waited for the girl behind it to finish her conversation with an elderly gentleman. Harvey Plangman had decided that the girl had glanced up at him with a peculiar look as he walked in the door.
It was almost as though she were saying: What is he doing here?
Harvey was twenty-three years old, a native of Missouri, living now in Columbia, Missouri. He was very tall and thin, with jet black hair he wore in a combination ducktail-brushcut of his own invention. The white jacket he was wearing this evening was originally a waiter’s. He had bought it at a uniform supply house, cut off the metal buttons, and sewed on white pearl buttons. It was a little something he had learned from the boys at Kappa Pi fraternity, where his mother was housemother. He wore the jacket’s collar turned up in back, and turned up just slightly on the sides. He wore a light blue button-down shirt, a solid white tie, and in the center of the tie, a light blue stickpin. The stickpin had originally been a hat pin, which Harvey had bought in Woolworth’s to match the shirt’s color, then ingeniously filed down to size. The light blue handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket also matched the shirt’s color, as did his socks. His dacron trousers were a near match, off-color just enough to blend in nicely. His shoes were white bucks. Harvey tried never to wear more than two colors at a time, and to tie in his accessories with the color scheme. He owned seven different kinds of watch bands, including an all-purpose scotch plaid one.
Harvey Plangman’s father had died while his mother was seven months’ pregnant. His mother had moved in with her mother in Columbia, Missouri, and Harvey was raised by the widows in a rickety, three-story yellow frame house on Wentwroth Street, in the heart of the state university section. As the years passed, the university expanded. Houses were torn down and replaced by bookstores, soda fountains, and haberdasheries. The widows turned down all offers for their house. They cooed over it and fussed with it, the same as they did with Harvey. It seemed neither the house nor Harvey would ever want, so long as the widows were their caretakers. After Harvey’s grandmother passed away, the upkeep of the house and Harvey became too much for his mother. She accepted an offer from Kappa Pi fraternity to turn the house into an annex for them. Harvey slept on the couch in the living room, and his mother converted a side porch into her bedroom. The rest of the rooms were occupied by Kappa Pi’s.
At first, this sudden masculine invasion fascinated Harvey.
He hung about outside their rooms taking everything in with wide-eyed wonder. He noted the heavy, silver-backed hairbrushes, the shoe trees and shaving kits, and the aroma of tobacco, polished leather and costly brands of brilliantine. It was his first acquaintance with the paraphernalia of his own sex. He began to watch and tag after the frat brothers, to retrieve their nearly empty bottles of aftershave lotion from their wastebaskets, placing them on his own bureau, and to collect other things thrown out by them — worn leather wallets, shirts with frayed cuffs and collars, broken cigarette lighters — anything, everything.
There was an embarrassing moment one day when he picked a sweater off the banister, by the trash. There was a hole in the elbow, and spots down the front. He was under the impression it had been discarded by its owner, but that was a mistake. There was a fuss. Harvey returned the sweater, wanting desperately to explain that he had never intended to abscond with it, but the sullen-faced boy whose sweater it was, frightened Harvey into speechlessness. He handed over the sweater unsmiling and without a word.
There were other embarrassing moments. Once, when he was hanging about the third floor, sifting through the trash as silently as he could manage, a young bespectacled boy came from the room opposite, shouting like someone who had lost his senses. He was sick and tired, he declared, of Harvey sneaking around like a goddam Indian; sneaking around and pilfering.
Soon Harvey’s mother received a typewritten, formal note from the proctor in charge of the annex:
It is absolutely essential that no one except members of Kappa Pi fraternity and their invited guests have access to the rooms and hallways which compose their living quarters. The only exception which can be be made is Maud Washington, cleaning woman!
After that, Harvey threw out every single thing of theirs which he had collected. In his fantasies he helped wizened old men across the street, and was the recipient of vast wealth upon their deaths the following day — a day which invariably ended with Harvey’s brutal announcement to KP’s annex proctor that the fraternity was to be off the premises by sunup.
After that too, Harvey developed a habit of taking things from stores in Columbia — not big things, not important things. He would carry a small razor blade wrapped in gauze in his jacket. Occasionally it would be a label that he would snip from a coat in one of the more expensive haberdasheries; sometimes, a set of handsome buttons from a sports jacket. Once or twice, he managed a tie, a pair of socks — little thefts. But he never took anything again from the Kappa Pi trash cans.
Evenings when Harvey and his mother were sitting down to dinner, a thunder of KP footsteps on the hall stairs would announce their mass departure. They were off to the House for their meal. It was, to Harvey’s mind, very much like the return of the Royal Guard to Buckingham Palace. As they passed the living room doorway, some of them would glance in, wave, or simply gawk at Harvey and his mother, sitting at the card table they used for meals. Harvey always felt as though he were some strange, pathetic species which they had never before seen.
Sometimes, girl friends of the Kappa Pi’s called on them at the annex. None of the girls Harvey knew were that pretty, or that sophisticated. There seemed to be some special aura of splendor about them, even those who were not pretty. There was a way about them; their hands seemed whiter and more graceful, and on their fingers they wore simply-cut gold rings containing a single pearl, or tiny, delicate little-finger bands with real diamonds dotted in arcs. Their hair seemed to shine; seemed softer, brighter, longer. When they spoke, they used their eyes with great self-assurance — an arch of the eyebrow, or a penetrating meeting of their eyes with yours, until you looked away uncertainly.
• • •
On occasion they would peer into the living room and say:
“Is this the Kappa Pi house? Is this 702 Wentwroth Street?”
Then to Harvey everything in the room would look, not just second-rate, but third- and fourth-rate. He wished his mother would stop wrapping the bottoms of flowerpots in aluminum foil. He wished they had window shades which were not torn and weather-stained. He wished, he wished — and outside in the hallway, some chuckling Kappa Pi would be telling a girl: “No, of course, this isn’t the House. This is simply an emergency annex.”
