Disturbing the Peace

by Richard Yates

  They found it only after walking down wrong corridors, taking wrong elevators and asking directions of people who didn’t speak English; and when Wilder was dressed (an incredible pleasure: his own clothes and shoes, his own wristwatch and walletful of money), he said “Listen, Paul. Something I’ve got to do. Got to find the canteen, or the gift shop or whatever they call it.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Come on. Must be on the ground floor.” It was, and Wilder bought a carton of Pall Malls. With his own pen he wrote “For Charlie with many thanks,” and signed his name. “Now,” he said. “Where’s the Psycho elevator?”

  “John, what is this?”

  “Never mind. It’s important.”

  “‘Men’s Violence Ward?’” said the puzzled elevator man. “Ain’t no ward by that name.”

  “Well, that may not be the official name,” Wilder said, “but it’s the men’s ward on the seventh floor.”

  “Can’t take you up there anyway. Ain’t no visiting hour today.”

  “I’m not a visitor, I’m a – Well, look. Just take this up to the ward, give it to the cop at the door and tell him it’s for Charlie. Will you do that?”

  “Oh. Sure, okay.” And the door slid shut.

  “Son of a bitch’ll keep ’em for himself,” Wilder said, “or else he’ll give ’em to the cop and the cop’ll keep ’em. I should’ve insisted on going up. I should’ve demanded to go up.”

  “John, it doesn’t matter. Can’t you see it doesn’t matter?”

  “It does matter. Some things matter, that’s all.”

  But at last they found their way through corridors and waiting rooms and doors into the abrupt, fresh air of First Avenue, and Wilder said “Wow.” Then he said “My God.”

  It was midafternoon on a fine September day, and nothing had ever smelled so sweet. Tall buildings rose in a deep blue sky and pigeons wheeled and sailed among them; clean cars and taxicabs sped uptown bearing sane, unfettered people to the sane, unfettered business of the world.

  “I’m parked right around the corner,” Borg said as they walked. “Have you home in no time at all. John? What’s the trouble now?”

  He had stopped to read a torn scrap of paper from his pocket: Henry J. Spivack, M.D., with an address and phone number lettered underneath. “Nothing,” he said, and let it flutter from his hand to the dirty street. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  Chapter Three

  What the Wilders called “the country” was a clapboard bungalow on half an acre of ground, fifty miles up the west bank of the Hudson. It would have been exposed to a great many other bungalows except for the dense shrubbery and trees shielding it on three sides and a high rustic fence along the fourth – that gave it the seclusion they prized, and there was a small lake for swimming close by.

  But the best and most bracing part of the country was getting there: the trip across the George Washington Bridge and the long pastoral ride up the divided highway. As with certain other family pleasures, expectation topped fulfillment.

  “… I think this is my favorite time of year,” Janice was saying, “when it’s just beginning to get fresh and cool again. Oh, I suppose it’ll be even nicer in a few more weeks when the leaves really turn – all those lovely yellows and oranges and reds and browns – but even so, this is marvelous.”

  “Mm,” he said. She had done a great deal of talking since he came home from Bellevue yesterday – most of it serving no purpose except to fill silence – and he knew that was because he’d said so little himself: he had mostly drunk bourbon and looked out of windows, or sat blinking in bewilderment along the shelves upon shelves of tightly packed books. “Well,” he said now, doing his best, “it’ll sure feel great just to lie on a blanket in the grass.”

  Tommy, in the back seat, had been silent since leaving home. He was methodically pounding an unused regulation baseball into the oiled pocket of his fielder’s glove, and he wore a New York Yankees cap. The Yankees were far ahead in the American League pennant race, and Tommy liked winners.

  “How do you want to work it, Champ?” Wilder asked him. “Take a swim first and then play catch, or play catch and then go swimming?” And he instantly regretted calling him “Champ.” He used that nickname, or “Buster,” or “Slugger,” only in times of family tension when it seemed urgent to be hearty (on mornings, for example, when he knew the boy had lain awake and heard his parents fight the night before), and he knew that Tommy knew it too.

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I don’t care.” And the flawless surface of the road sped along under their tires.

  The way they worked it was to play catch first, while Janice, wearing a big floppy hat, knelt and squatted in the sun to weed her vegetable garden.

  It wasn’t a good game of catch – no warm, sweat-raising pull and release of muscles with each exchange, no clean flight of the ball to a satisfying pock in the glove, no easy laughter and congratulations (“Hey! …”; “Nice! …”). Well over half of Tommy’s throws were wild and sent his father racing breathlessly over the grass or down on all fours under the bushes, where twigs whipped his face and mud soaked the knees of his clean chino pants. Once a pine needle stabbed him in the eye.

  Then his own throws began to go wrong, making Tommy do the running, and if nothing else, that gave him a chance to get his wind back. “Let’s try – let’s try a couple of grounders,” he called, hoping to make it easier on them both, but there was nothing easy about grounders on this lumpy ground: the ball jumped and flew in crazy directions; they ran and went sprawling and Tommy’s Yankee cap fell off.

  “Haven’t you two had enough?” Janice inquired, smiling up from the garden. “Don’t you want to go for a swim?”

  “How – how about it, Tom? Feel like calling it – calling it quits?”

  “I don’t know; I don’t care.”

  Things didn’t go well at the lake either, but that was to be expected. Janice was an excellent swimmer and Tommy was good too, for his age, but Wilder had been afraid of water – and afraid to admit it – all his life. Through boyhood and youth he had done his best to avoid swimming; when it was inevitable, he’d endured it as a kind of aquatic clown, thrashing and dog-paddling, helplessly gulping and inhaling water, scared of putting his head under but taking hilariously graceless flops from springboards to win laughs he never heard as he struggled blind and terrified back to the air. This was one of the first things Janice had learned about him, before they were married, and had caused one of their first quarrels (“But that’s silly, John; anybody can learn to swim.” “Okay, okay; I’m silly, then. Let’s shut up about it”). When Tommy was a baby and even until he was five or six, it hadn’t mattered much: he could wade in deep with the boy wriggling and squealing on his shoulders, and he’d greatly enjoyed the trusting grip of small thighs around his neck and fingers in his hair – it had been especially good in heavy ocean surf where nobody really swam anyway and the whole point was to jump and shout in the breakers – but over the past few years, here at the lake, Janice had taught Tommy to swim. She had done it tactfully: if he’d ever asked why Daddy didn’t teach him, she’d probably said that Daddy was too busy or too tired, or that Daddy didn’t really enjoy swimming as much as other things, like – well, like playing catch.

  The lake was crowded today – people from neighboring bungalows out for a last chance at summer – and that made him less conspicuous as he hung back to fuss over the careful arrangement of blanket and towels and shoes and wristwatches while his wife and son struck out for the white raft that always seemed an impossible distance away. Nobody in a crowd this thick was likely to notice that he waded up to his nostrils before starting to tread water and only then began the desperate flailing and kicking, with tightly held breath, that enabled him at last to reach out and grasp one of the wet chains securing the raft to the steel drums beneath it. Once he had that chain he was all right; he could rest, maneuver for purchase and heave himself up, shedding water
and whipping back his hair with a gasp of relief that might have been a victorious athlete’s sigh.

  “Hi,” Janice said as she and Tommy made room for him. There was no way of telling whether they’d watched his journey out here.

  “It’s a little chilly, don’t you think?” she said. “Look, I’m all goose pimples.” He looked, and she was. She lowered her voice. “And it’s so crowded. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many people here before, have you?”

  No; he hadn’t.

  Nor had he ever seen anything quite so lovely as the slim young girl who walked alone among the huddled bodies on the raft at that moment, murmuring “Excuse me” as they moved aside for her. She wore her bikini with a sweet combination of shyness and pride, and when she stood erect at the base of the diving board she seemed unaware of anyone watching. She took three gracefully measured steps, then both arms and one splendid thigh rose up, the thigh came down, the board shuddered under her powerful spring and she was airborne, parting the water with almost no splash at all.

  He expected a pair of heavily muscled arms to reach out and help her back to the raft, but none did: she was alone. She climbed back herself and sat shaking out her long black hair, talking to nobody. Except for a young couple absorbed in each other, the raft was filled either with children or with adults of middle-and post-middle age: bald heads and sagging flesh and varicose veins.

  “Let’s go back in,” Janice said. “I want to put on some clothes and get warm, don’t you?”

  “Okay. You two go on ahead. I’ll be along in a minute.”

  He watched their precise four-beat crawl to the shore, watched them gather up their things and disappear into the bushes; then he gave his whole attention to the girl, who had stood up in readiness for another dive. When she came back from this one he would speak to her. He wouldn’t try to help her onto the raft – that might spoil everything – but it would certainly be easy to sit beside her as she dried off (if they were sitting, she wouldn’t see how short he was; then later when they stood up it might turn out that she wasn’t really very tall), and now as she gravely advanced to the board he allowed his mind to fill with a happy rehearsal of their talk.

  “You know, you’re really very good at that.”

  “Oh?” (Shaking her hair, not quite meeting his eyes.) “Well; thank you.”

  “Live around here?”

  “No; I’m visiting my parents. They have a little …”

  “You in school?”

  “No; I graduated from Holyoke last June; now I work for an ad agency in the city.”

  “Which one? Thing is, you see, I’m in the same business.”

  “Really? Well, it’s …”

  She had executed her three dancer’s steps now, performed her wonderful thigh-flexing and her leap, and his secret dialogue raced ahead.

  “… Maybe we could meet for lunch sometime.”

  “Well, actually, I – yes, that might be nice.”

  And later: “Oh, this has been such fun, John; I mean I’d heard of expense-account lunches, but I’ve never really …”

  And later still, after their first brandy-flavored kiss in the taxicab downtown: “What street? Varick Street? Is that where you live?”

  “Well, not exactly; just a little place I think you might like …”

  The bubbles had long vanished from her splash, and he waited for the water to break again with her surfacing, but it didn’t. He stood up (Who cared how short he was?) and watched for her on all sides of the raft like an alert, conscientious lifeguard. Only after what seemed a full minute did he see her moving far away, her slender arms stroking as smoothly as Janice’s as she made for the shoreline and the trees, going home. And then, sitting hunched until his heart had slowed down and the ache of disappointment in his clenched jaws relaxed, there was nothing to do but slide into the cold water and fight his way home himself.

  One good thing: there was plenty of bourbon on the kitchen shelf. As soon as he was dressed he got out the ice and made himself a double that was more like a triple.

  “Feel like a drink?” he asked Janice.

  “No thanks.” She was sitting on a tall kitchen stool in her slacks with a colander in her lap, snapping string beans for dinner, and didn’t look up. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”

  “Seems late enough to me.”

  And not until he’d gone outdoors for the first few greedy swallows did he figure out why he was so angry. It wasn’t because of the girl on the raft (the hell with the girl on the raft), or because Janice had asked if it wasn’t a little early, or because her crisp little snap-snap of string beans had always been an irritating sound; it was because the stool she sat on, with her tennis shoes hooked over its middle rung, was exactly like the cop’s stool at the door in Bellevue.

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered aloud, and his free hand made a trembling fist in his pocket as he walked around the yard. “Son of a bitch.” Because this was the funny part, the neurotic part, the crazy part: he was still furious. Wasn’t it supposed to be true that if you could isolate the cause of an irrational anger it would go away? Didn’t everybody know that? Then why wasn’t it working? All he wanted now was to go back into the kitchen and say “Janice, get off that stool.”

  “What, dear?”

  “You heard me. Get your ass off that fucking stool.”

  She’d look as astonished as if she’d been slapped; the colander might fall from her lap and if it didn’t he’d grab it up and send it clattering against the wall, spraying string beans.

  “I swear to Christ if you don’t get off I’ll knock you off ! Is that clear?”

  “John,” she’d say, standing up and backing away in fright, “John, what’s the – John, are you—?”

  He’d get the stool then, swing it high and bring it down in so mighty a crash that its splintered legs and rungs would skate across the floor, and as she cowered against the wall the very sight of her would enrich his voice with a thunderous rage: “Whaddya think you are, some cop? Some cop in a mad-house? Huh? You think you’re some broad-assed, bull-dyke cop keeping the lunatics in line? Huh? Huh?”

  By this time Tommy would be crying in the kitchen doorway, helplessly clutching the fly of his pants (as the ancient man had clutched his shrunken genitals in Bellevue and caused Spivack to say “Hey there, sexpot”), and in the momentum of his fury he would turn on Tommy too. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; you better take a good look, kid, and don’t forget it. Wise up. I’m your father. This is your mother. I’m a certified lunatic and she’s a cop, do you understand that? A cop! A cop!”

  None of that happened, but only because he stood whispering it all to himself, breathing hard, with one arm tight around the trunk of a tall rustling tree in the silence of the yard.

  The next morning was bright but too cool for the lake, so he did what he’d said on the highway would sure feel great: he lay on a blanket in the grass.

  Well before noon he was getting up to stretch every twenty minutes or so, aiming a congenial smile at Janice in case she happened to look up from the garden, and going inside to pour a quick, deep shot of whiskey which he downed like medicine at the kitchen sink. Several times, when the drone of Tommy’s transistor radio in another room seemed to guarantee that he wouldn’t be seen, he had two or three.

  After lunch he took a nap; when he awoke very late in the afternoon he struggled heavily up to sit on the edge of the bed and called Janice, and she came to sit beside him.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you were planning to spend a few more days up here, but I want to go home tomorrow. The thing is I’ve got to get back to the office.”

  “Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘got to,’ dear,” she said. “George Taylor can wait.”

  “Of course he can wait. It’s not him, it’s me. I just think the sooner I get back into a normal working routine the better I’ll be, that’s all.”

  He knew he couldn’t expect her to say “You know best,” or anything like that, but
at least she didn’t argue. She studied the leaf-mottled rectangles of sunset on the floorboards for a while; then she patted his knee and said “All right.”

  He was in the kitchen, fixing the first of what he vowed would be his only two drinks before dinner, when he heard her announcing the change of plans to Tommy. “Dear, Daddy and I’ve decided to go home tomorrow. You won’t mind that very much, will you?”

  And Tommy said he didn’t know; he didn’t care.

  “Well, hey, stranger,” George Taylor said, lumbering around his big desk with his hand held out. “Janice said you might be laid up another week.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how the flu is; sometimes it hangs on, sometimes not.” And Wilder allowed his knuckles to be crushed in welcome back to work.

  “You did a great job in Chicago; got some good reports on that.”

  “Well, that’s – fine.” But it was strange, too: he could remember almost nothing of Chicago.

  “Like to go over some of that stuff with you today; then there’s a couple new things coming up. You free for lunch?” He was back behind the desk now, punching one of the many buttons on his complicated telephone. “Honey,” he said, “Mr. Wilder ‘n’ I’ll be wanting a table for two at Rattazzi’s, twelve thirty. Right.”

  And so at twelve thirty they presented themselves to the headwaiter in the upstairs room, who called them “Gentlemen” like Charlie in Bellevue. The martinis here came in stemmed glasses, but the stems were only an inch high and the glasses as deep as tumblers. Well before George Taylor had finished his first it was clear that he’d grown bored with going over the Chicago stuff and the new things coming up: as his voice trailed away in incomplete sentences and his eyes wistfully roved the crowded tables he seemed bored with the very idea of The American Scientist, with advertising, with business and with money itself – and who could blame him for that?

  He was fifty-six and burly, with a healthy crop of red hair just beginning to turn grey. As vice-president in charge of advertising sales he had risen as high as he ever would in the corporate structure. His excellent salary and stockholder’s dividends accounted for less than half his income; the rest came from shrewd investments. He lived in an exclusive Rockland County village; all his children were grown and he was a grandfather of three. Another man might have turned obsessively to golf or sailing or collecting antique shotguns, but George Taylor’s avocation was young girls. More than a few of his lunches with Wilder in the past had featured stories of girls who found it impossible to leave him alone, who hounded him and begged for him and fought for his favors, of how at least one had wept in his arms all night after her formal engagement to some recent graduate of Harvard Law.