She did not speak of it. Not to her mother, or her father—who lived alone in Santa Monica now—or her two married sisters, or her younger brother; not to friends. It was bad manners to make yourself and your troubles the subject of conversation, even with family. More than fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.
She had never wanted to be defined by marriage anyhow.
Since the divorce—from Sean, who was pretty but unfaithful and lazy, had a drug habit, and doubtless everyone wondered what she must have seen in him to begin with—she had been working behind the counter in the Memphis Belle diner, which was close enough to Beale Street and the Peabody Hotel to remain fairly busy most of the time. She would say that her life was too hectic for her to feel sorry for herself, though this wasn’t really the case. Life was in fact not all that crowded with events. And, as everyone knows, when there is brooding to do, people who are so inclined will make the time. She simply wasn’t the type to agonize about her own situation. She was what a friend in school once described as fortunately curious; her focus was always on the world outside herself.
The divorce was final almost a year ago, and aside from a dinner here and there, or a movie, she hadn’t been seeing anybody. She had been surprised to learn that Sean was getting married again, but that was something she thought was rather entertaining. She joked about it with her sisters, her mother. The poor sad girl, whoever she was.
Elaine remarked with a kind of serious mirth that for herself, she wanted some time to rest up. And that was true.
She did miss sex sometimes. Well, she missed closeness. She had never been able to be casual about intimacy, even as everyone else she knew tended to that, or seemed to. You couldn’t tell really what people were like alone. But for her, she had to feel that her heart was involved, that it all came from there.
These days, when she left work in the evenings, she went straight back to the little house on Cleveland Street, with its flourishing indoor plants and its book-lined walls, its neatly stacked collection of popular and classical music, and its little flower garden in back.
Home.
Where, she would say, she could breathe easily. Her life was simple. She had been telling people that she rather liked living alone. She cooked for herself, and enjoyed a good crisp glass of Sancerre or a little Bordeaux in the late evenings. Her sisters, like her father, lived far away—Belinda in Maine and Chloe in Vancouver, and they had families that kept them busy. Belinda had three children, and Chloe had two; Belinda, a dental hygienist, was married to a dentist; Chloe used the term homemaker to describe herself and had married a tax accountant who bought and sold antiques. Both men were handsome, blond, steady, and usually warmhearted, though they had never thought much of Sean, and had been fairly vocal about that at times. And withal, Elaine never once implied to her sisters that in her own estimation their husbands were chokingly smug and finally rather humdrum. Everybody was good friends from a distance, as their younger brother once put it. He was in college, now, at Vanderbilt, three hours away. The whole family was scattered in distance for Elaine, except her mother, who lived just across the river, in Arkansas. Now and then her mother drove over to Memphis to visit, but she seldom stayed long, since Elaine had no television. Elaine’s entertainment was reading, listening to music—particularly opera—doing some gardening, and occasionally writing little notes and snippets she was too modest to call poetry, or prose either.
Sometimes what she wrote really did take the form of a kind of playful verse:
Call that song all morning from the trees
A word that’s far from song. Say antifreeze
Croons to the dawn, then winterize your car
With music from the puffed throat of a bird.
A word’s a sound, too—thought, quick-fetched from far,
In use before we counted Time. Absurd.
But mostly they were more in the nature of notes to herself. For instance, this evening, she wrote:
Said I felt fine automatically politely to the man in the straw hat today, and was surprised that in fact did feel fine, after a morning full of bright sun in which I hadn’t quite noticed the inner clouds. Such a strange sense seeing him coming. But we spoke and my little private cloud cover sailed off in the wind. Bright sun inside all afternoon. Pack for Mother’s. Water.
That last word was a command, stemming from long-standing trouble remembering to do daily tasks like watering. She had always been objective about her own nature. She was thirty-three, and single again, and Sean was out in Las Vegas, working as a blackjack dealer. Always good with his hands, he’d done a little of that down in Tunica, Mississippi, before the divorce. He loved the game. But he was never very happy being married. She always had the feeling that he was only partly there. And then she had thought fondly she would have a child someday. For a while it was an area of serious tension. She hoped for it, longed for it. He dreaded even the slightest trace of the idea, said it gave him the willies. “You have a child and in a week you’re old and getting ready to die. It just makes it all go so much faster. Bang. Like that, you’re a grandfather and it’s all basically over.”
“No,” she told him. “It goes exactly as fast as it goes. And you look up and it’s gone bang all right, and you’re alone in a room with a urine smell coming from you because you haven’t had a shower for a week and there’s nothing but the TV. And you still die.”
Then he would resort to the old ersatz morality: “I don’t want to bring an innocent child into such a terrible world.” “Don’t lie about it, Sean. You’re afraid. Admit that you’re afraid.”
“All right. I’m afraid,” he said. “You bet I’m afraid. I’m so scared I can’t take in a full breath, you know? I can’t sigh. It’s all stuck right here in the middle of my chest, the place they usually point out as the seat of emotion. And my number one emotion just now is fear.”
The truth was that she had been afraid, too.
Eight years of that, and she was ready to call it quits. They were both ready, the two of them. Childless, and aimless, too. They had met in college. He dropped out soon after. She finished, but didn’t want to teach or do any of the other tasks for which her education had prepared her. She took the classes because she wanted to read the books. She had a hunger for good books. Even so, she and Sean spent a lot of time smoking dope and watching television over the years, while he worked for the county keeping order among case records, and she went from job to job, mostly editing the dreadful failures of expression rife in the work of people who wrote for trade publications, in-house newsletters, and the occasional greeting card summary of a family’s year. And this past December, when Tammy’s daddy chided her ever so sweetly for eating like a horse, Tammy looked up at him and said “neighhh.” So cute. And, we all agreed, advanced for a four-year-old.
Mind-numbing.
They had been together almost five years before they married. And the day they went through with it, she had to resist inwardly the sense of it as a probable mistake; things were already going south. She had come to think of these eight years as the time it took to admit the truth. They were both happier separate from each other. He called now and then to tell her how he was and to ask how she was. Everything was still friendly. And of course he would never change. He was scarily like her father, both of them locked in a kind of perpetual adolescence, except that her father seemed proudly aware of the fact, and poor Sean didn’t have the slightest intimation of it. Occasionally, through the past few months, speaking from the noise and clamor of a Vegas hall, he would say he missed her, and he wanted to know, with that nearly childlike straightforwardness, if she missed him.
She would tell him, quite honestly, no. “You be happy,” she’d say. “I’m happy.”
And he was happy; that was true now. He was about to be remarried, and was moving on, and she was glad of that, truly. And yet there had been these passages lately, under the cloud. They had nothing to do with him; she was certain of that. All this started
well before he announced his new situation. But something was changing in her heart.
Today, at the diner, she watched the man in the straw hat come walking from far up the street, beyond the trolley stop, out of the shadow of the big YMCA building, his white shirt showing bright in the sun, and the straw hat looking new, a perfect yellow color with a black band. She saw him, and abruptly had an unbidden strong sense that this morning would be important, that something momentous would take place. It stopped her. She stood holding the coffeepot, paused, examining the thought. What was it about the image of a man in a straw hat, walking in sunlight, that should cause her to have such a premonitory jolt? She sought to dismiss it, but she watched him come on, anyway. He carried something under one arm and as he neared, coming up the hill, she saw that it was books. She assumed he would turn down Third Street, or walk by when he got to the block where the diner was, but his gait increased slightly, and he strode up to the door and looked in, looked right at her as if he were looking specifically for her, one hand held up to hold the hat on his head in the breeze. Then he pulled the door open and entered. The motion of him, stepping to the window and looking in, startled her. It was ridiculous.
He nodded at her, took a seat at the counter, and picked up one of the menus from the little rack of them there. He asked for black coffee, and when she brought it, he ordered eggs over, with no bacon and no toast, and a small bowl of grits with cheese. They chatted pleasantly about the weather, the hot day. Nothing out of the ordinary about it. There was gray in his beard. He was fifty-something. A soft-spoken gentleman from the city, no one she knew. Her heart was beating in her cheeks.
She left him alone, and went to the register, where a very old woman was waiting to pay. She did not look at Elaine, but just handed her the check, with the money for it in exact change. “Was everything all right?” Elaine said.
The old woman nodded and shuffled out the door. The sun beat down on her head with its loose strands of white hair, and it shone on her scalp. Elaine looked away.
The man in the straw hat was reading one of his books. She worked around him, cleaning the counter, and tried to imagine how people got through. She and Sean had spent so much time stoned, out of it, sitting in front of the television. She got him to take the TV with him when he left. She did not miss it, even a little. The dramas they had watched before he took it away went on, and the depicted lives changed as they would, and it meant nothing to her and she would never be able to explain to herself how it could’ve got hold of her the way it had. She would spend a week worrying how something was going to unfold in a fictional life, and it was all soap operas, except the operas had come to prime time and the dialogue was better. She decided that what she felt about the approach of the man in the straw hat was a holdover from those hours of watching the television dramas, where everything had a meaning and the camera eye, so much like a human eye, never looked at anything that didn’t mean something was about to happen. She was tired; she hadn’t been sleeping well.
The man was gazing at her. “You all right today?” he asked. It was customary in Memphis to put it like this—it was a rough equivalent to “how are you?” except that it was also infused with a friendly concern quite absent from the other expression. She had always loved it. You didn’t encounter it anywhere else, as far as she could tell, except Memphis. “You all right today?” As though the questioner and the person being asked were in an ongoing conversation about something through which both were struggling. It was part of the charm of where she lived.
“I feel fine,” she told him. And she did. She noticed it; the cloud had lifted again, was gone again. She wiped the counter and gazed at him. “Everything all right?” she asked him. “The food, I mean.”
“Just right,” he said. “The food, I mean.” He smiled.
“Wonderful. How’s everything else?”
“I’ve just moved house. Everything’s in boxes. Just went back to the old place to make sure everything was out of it.”
“No fun,” she said. “But the coffee’s good, right?”
“Perfect.”
A moment later, she asked if he would like a refill.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s good coffee.”
“I make it myself,” she told him. “Because I drink it, too.”
He held the cup to his lips and blew across the lip of it. “Very rich.”
“Yes. Some people think it’s too strong.”
“They pour a lot of cream into it?”
“And sugar.”
“Never liked it any other way but black.”
“I used to put a lot of sugar and cream in it when I was young,” she said.
“You’re still young.”
“Well.”
He turned the pages of the book and sipped the coffee. When she asked him if he’d like still more, he nodded, and held out his cup. She poured it full again.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve had some good news this morning.”
“Really.”
He nodded, still smiling, though she thought she saw a kind of sad light in his eyes.
“Is it something you can share?” she asked.
The smile stayed. “I’m not gonna die just yet.”
“Oh,” she got out. “That is good news.” She believed he might say more, but he went on eating, reading one of the books. She watched him. He did not look ill. Probably some routine medical exam had showed him to be healthy. Or maybe he was ill, and in some kind of remission. She caught herself trying again to imagine how people got through. There was work, and she went about it with a kind of heavy concentration, glad of him there, but not wanting to bother him, either.
Presently, when he got up to pay she went to the register and he handed her a twenty. “That was very good,” he said while she made change. “You made me feel like I was in your kitchen.”
“You’re very kind.” She handed him his change, and he was already on his way out the door. He stopped where he had been sitting and put ten dollars down. “Thank you,” she called after him. He waved. She watched him walk on up the sidewalk, toward Main Street and the trolley stop there. He trotted the last few steps because the trolley was arriving. He got on, and rode away toward the loop leading around to Mud Island and the river, and for some reason this gave her a sudden strange sense of abandonment, as though she were watching the departure of a precious part of life. She went to the big sink and washed her small hands and wondered.
Perhaps a minute later, she found a playbill on the floor by the stool where he had been sitting. It was for something that was showing that week at the Orpheum. Inside was a ticket stub, and a little piece of notepaper with writing on it, not quite readable, and what appeared to be a phone number smeared to illegibility by moisture; it looked like running mascara. She put the playbill and its note in the little box her boss, Mr. Green, kept for lost and found. To her knowledge, nothing had ever been put there before.
Pack some books. Set alarm for seven. Pack to go straight from work. Curious that he would say that about dying.
Men think about it more?
That’s the orthodox way of seeing it, I believe. Read that somewhere.
That evening, she had an extra glass of Sancerre, and went to bed a little groggy. She tried to read, but kept nodding off. Yet as soon as she shut the light, she was wide awake, lying there open-eyed in the perfect dark—her bedroom windows were covered by heavy curtains; no light from the street and no bright moon could get through. She kept thinking of the man in the straw hat. It was such a funny, wide-brimmed hat, and he’d worn it at an angle. It shaded his face, the little beard and mustache, the green eyes, friendly eyes that were also somehow rather gloomily piercing. The irises didn’t quite reach the lower edges, where the little pouches drooped, the color of old bruises. It was a strange face; it was very interesting, even unforgettable. But no one would have thought it was good to look at. Indeed, at first glance, one might have said it was ugly.
She kep
t seeing it, trying to go to sleep. And sleep wouldn’t come. It had felt so strange, standing there watching him come, as though he were her future itself. She couldn’t shake the idea. Nothing important had taken place. She had served breakfast to him and he had left a large tip and gone on his way. And the little playbill and note had dropped from his pocket.
Those faces that we see once and think we’ll
Forget, come back sometimes at night to keep
Us company. Night’s stare, bereft of sleep,
The black pause that never quite takes you deep
—because a human face stays and is real.
What is it in my mood that turns on clay?
What hooks me, wriggling—
I’m not unhappy, we say, she says, they say
Night comes on, jiggling
While this wide sky forms more clouds day by day
You’ll probably never see the man again and you know it and it doesn’t make any difference if you do see him again. Why did seeing him and talking to him do that to you? And why, why can’t you go to sleep?
At dawn, tired and bleary-eyed, she finished packing for the visit to the house in Arkansas, drank a big cup of coffee for what she knew would be a long day, and drove her little car to the diner. Yesterday, last night, she decided, was an anomaly, weariness, and then too much wine, and perhaps the start of a fever. Insomnia sometimes did give her a feverish feeling; and songs—passes in her day, voices, things people said or did, images, instances—replayed themselves with the persistence of delirium. She recalled the way it felt, pausing to watch him walking along, from nowhere, it seemed. That sense of life shifting in the very moment. She thought about him all the way to the diner. After she parked in the lot, she stepped to the side of the road and looked toward where she had first seen him. Preposterous. The sun was brightening there, rising to the level of the far trees yonder. At the top of the farthest hill up that way there was the YMCA building, and she decided that he had probably spent time there, and walked out looking for something to eat.
Something Is Out There Page 17
