Easy and Hard Ways Out (21 page)

“Oh, jeez, I hope not,” said Brank. “It's possible. I haven't studied the situation that closely.”

“Because I'll tell you this straightforwardly. Any man has number two floating in his basement, that man has trouble. And I'm not saying this just because you're a customer.”

A year later, two days after Brank had quit Sperry when they refused him a raise, the backup occurred again, triggering Joan into hysterics.

“I can't take it from you, Harvey,” she'd sobbed. “You care about no one but yourself. There was no reason to give up this job. You just did it for spite, like you always do. You find excuses. And this lousy, stinking house. I curse the day I moved in here. I really do. I hate it! I hate it! And I hate you too!”

Brank had felt sorry after that, not for leaving the job, but sorry for her (she was, after all, correct), and had immediately phoned one of the larger plumbing companies. Within hours, a slim, academic-looking man calmly detailed his plans to save the situation.

“We come in with machinery. We come in with men. We come in with tools. We come in with experience.”

Brank had agreed instantly to the huge expense, impressed with the man's professorial appearance and the words “come in,” which seemed somehow to conjure massive, urban-renewal type industrial involvement. The actual operation, however, consisted of a lone Cuban who, wearing a yellow raincoat and holding his nose, descended into the cesspool with a shovel. Six months later the problem returned, and Brank threatened suit in Small Claims court.

“Go ahead,” the original salesman had told him, dropping his briefcase and seeming suddenly less academic. “We'll come in with the top lawyers.”

For Brank, there followed another job, a flooded basement, a small fire in the living room, death of the lawn, and a massive dishwasher overflow. Joan had seemed, eventually, not to recognize these setbacks, launching instead into impossible, trancelike speculations on home improvements. A sort of peak was reached one day when, with Brank feverishly bailing water from the den, she'd curled up on a corner of the high-riser and said wistfully, “I think a covered patio might be nice.”

His father's weather calls began about that time, and soon after, Brank had come home one evening to find a note scrawled on a paper bag left on the table.

Dinner in oven. Heat for 10 min. Make sure to shut off. Take dessert in fridge, third shelf. I have gone away
.

Love
,

Joan

The writing was spidery and uneven; it was as if two enormous, nearly equal forces were pulling in opposite directions on her wrist.
I have gone away. I have gone away
. Brank's mind, trained despite itself in engineering problem-solving, perceived no immediate, rational interpretation of this, and so proceeded (as on an exam) to something it could understand. The paper bag on the table meant there was no available writing paper. Make a note to get writing paper, the mind told itself. It wasn't until the oven had been on for seven minutes that it occurred to him all at once, the sense of it nearly drowned out by the thrill of discovery:
Hey, I think she's left me
. He forgot, of course, to shut the oven off, and it remained on overnight.

He visited her twice at her parents' house (she'd had a demure nervous breakdown) and they'd talked quietly, he murmuring crazed, silken promises, she weakly stroking his hair while he kneeled by her bed. Once, he reached in under her pajamas and pinched one of her nipples, but felt bad afterward, the phrase “alabaster breasts” running through his consciousness and making him feel strangely dirty and perverted. She returned home in six weeks, and for some reason, the image that remained with Brank the longest was the floral-print pattern of the wallpaper in her parents' bedroom, how small and cozy it made the room look, the unnatural closeness and sweetness of it, her lying there, thin and unmoving, eyes rigidly closed.
Alabaster breasts …

Bruce had been born a year later, and Brank began to last longer at his jobs. He sat now in the backyard with Joan and his parents, the aluminum folding chairs casting lengthening shadows in the Sunday autumn afternoon sun.

“I don't care what anyone says,” said Brank's father. “Sitting outside here like this is worth a million bucks. A million bucks.”

Brank tried to picture his father actually making the trade, cavalierly turning down a check representing an entire life of easy luxury for a few minutes of lounging in a backyard aluminum chair.

“You have a beautiful setup here,” said Brank's mother, a short woman who summed up situations. “You have a lovely wife, a wonderful son, an—”

“Ma, I know all that,” said Brank.

“—interesting job, and a gorgeous house except for that one downstairs bathroom, which is nothing.”

“We never make in there,” said Joan.

Brank stood up, stretched, and wandered around to the front where Bruce sat on the steps, methodically hammering a cookie to bits. “Brucie,” he said, walking over and fondling the boy's head in his arms, “Mommy says she finds you licking the floor. Tell Daddy why you lick the floor.”

“I like to lay in the wet,” said Bruce.

Brank took the boy's miniature hand in his own, began pushing back the cuticles on the tiny fingernails. The air had become suddenly chilly, the weak sun no longer able to hold off the autumn cold. Brank looked down at his son, wondered what would become of him, wondered if he himself would ever be a good father. Across the street, Sandler, a neighbor, gave a torpid wave. Though formerly he'd been Brank's friend, their relations had cooled when Brank had hired Sandler's son to care for the lawn, and the boy, after a minor pay-rate squabble, had mowed a giant word,
SHIT,
on Brank's newly planted Merion Blue.

“Do you know I love you?” said Brank.

Bruce squirmed away impatiently and laughed. “Uh-huh.”

“When you get older,” said Brank, “Daddy'll show you how to mow terrible words on people's lawns, okay?”

“Okay,” said Bruce.

“I hear you've been putting in overtime,” said Brank's mother after supper. Brank knew his parents would be leaving soon: his mother, unable to use any bathroom except her own, could stay away from home only as long as nature's demands remained bearable.

“We have a job that's due,” said Brank.

“There's a problem,” said Joan, “and it's getting worse, but he won't tell me what it is.”

“Maybe he can't talk about it,” said Brank's mother.

“To his wife, he can talk,” said Joan.

“Why? He never talked to me,” said Brank's mother.

Joan shook her head. Brank recalled what his mother had once said after an argument.
I wouldn't
say she's cold, but if she slit her wrists no blood would come out
.

Brank's father cleared his throat. “You ever do anything original there, Harvey? Anything you can patent?”

“All patents go to the company, Dad. They make you sign an agreement.”

His father seemed not to have heard. “Because patents are very important. Did I ever tell you about the revolving sign on the Times Building? You know, the lights that give the news and—”

“Dad, you've told me that story a million times.”

“Well, the guy who really invented that worked on it for three years, and one hour before he got to the patent office, someone else patented it. Now there should be a lesson there somewhere.”

“I don't see any lessons,” said Brank.

“Even as a child he was tight-lipped,” said his mother.

A half hour later, Brank leaned over his father's car to say good-bye. It was only in the dim light of the street lamp that he suddenly realized how old his parents seemed, how old they
were
, how thin and unsteady and stiff, how dried and mottled their skin, unsure their movements, how suddenly fragile and mortal they'd become.

“Watch how you drive, Dad,” he said, almost choking.

“We've had a wonderful time,” said Brank's mother. “It was an excellent dinner, your place is shaping up beautifully, you have a marvelous wife and a happy, secure life here in the suburbs.”

“Thank you,” said Brank.

“Just check your phone,” said Brank's father, as the car began to move. “The tone of the ring seemed a little low to me.”

In the bedroom, Brank stood naked and stared at Joan as she started to undress.

“Don't stare at me.”

“Why?”

“I can't undress in front of you when I'm mad.”

“Why're you mad?”

“Because something is going on at work and you're not telling me.”

“What am I not telling you?”

She pouted and removed her blouse and brassiere. “I don't know. You're not telling me what you're not telling me.”

“I can't follow that,” said Brank.

She hung her blouse on his erection. “I won't go any further,” she said.

Brank shut off the light, grabbed her, and kissed her. His hands roamed down to her thighs, her panties. “I'll help you,” he said.

“I'm still mad,” she said, kissing back, gasping, caressing him.

“I've always wanted to have sex with a mad woman,” said Brank.

Their lovemaking was rapid, violent on both sides; sometimes her excitement seemed so great that Brank worried she would have a heart attack in the midst of everything. Despite himself he kept thinking of his friend Kaplan (now institutionalized), who once had been fired from a mortuary job for, as he'd put it, “fucking the stiffs.” Just as they finished, Brucie began to cry, and Joan abruptly rose, a thin residue trickling viscously down her thighs as she ran to tend him. When she returned, Brank was nearly asleep.

“This doesn't change things,” she said.

“I know.”

“I'm still mad.”

“I know.”

And later, when he was half unconscious, she said, “I threw up this morning. Is vomit bad for the cesspool?”

“Uh … nuh. Nuh.”

“Good night.”

“Uh.”

He blurted it quickly next morning at the door: “That temperature problem is still there, and the Air Force is coming Friday. Steinberg told me not to mention anything about it.”

He left before she could say a word.

BIRD'S FEET

Four months earlier, when Brank had gone into the hospital for a week of tests on his thymus, LoParino had given him a coloring book and a box of sixty-four Crayolas. Surprisingly, during the days, Brank found himself actually shading in some of the pictures, feeling foolish, and concealing them from his roommate, but coloring them nevertheless. This, then, seemed to be LoParino's special ability: to bring out the childishness in Brank against his will, to call forth the immature and irrational.

“Your suggestions,” said Brank now as he stood over LoParino's desk, glancing over his shoulder to see if Pat had returned, “are immature and irrational.”

“It'll be terrific fun.”

“We'll end up fired.”

“It's a good cause.”

“That has never influenced either of us to do anything.”

At the next desk, Lubell wrote furiously in his notebook.

“I'll draw up the petition,” said LoParino. “I'll even take it around for signatures. All you have to do is bring it to the Congressman, whoever he is. I mean it's your area they're trying to pull the fast one in.”

“Mario,” said Brank, feeling himself closed off, caught both emotionally and intellectually, “leave me alone, will ya? I just wanna grow senile in peace. Lemme alone.”

“We might not even need the petition. If Pat helps, maybe the whole thing can be straightened out instantly.”

“It's bad to involve her, Lo, I'm telling you. No matter how nice she is, she's management.”

“You mustn't label people, Harv. That's paranoid. She's different. She's a nice person. Besides, I'll do all the explaining.” While he was talking, he fired a rubber band at Lubell, who looked up suddenly as it plunked him on the head.

“Someday,” said Lubell, face flushed, “you'll get yours. Someday someone will show you what it means to be a professional. Both of you.”

Brank saw Lubell was wearing an Engineering Society tiepin. He thought: right wing, John Bircher, patriotic, dumb, never reads books. And then realized he was labeling again, jumping to conclusions, that LoParino was right, that maybe even Lubell was right.

“I guess,” said Brank, nodding toward Lubell, “he won't sign our petition.”

Pat came in and glanced quickly at Brank before taking her seat.

LoParino rose from his desk and approached her, Brank following. “Pat, Harvey has run into a situation which he finds a bit difficult to cope with. Basically, he's—”

“Can't Harvey speak for himself?” said Pat, enjoying the double looks of discomfort that resulted.

“Well, I didn't really want to mention this,” said Brank, the childish, coloring-book feelings welling up. “It's just, well—”

“That you want to marry me,” said Pat.

Brank smiled in relief. “Yes. Yes. I want to marry you.”

“I'm busy this week,” said Pat. “Maybe next week.”

“What other supervisor could you tell that to?” said LoParino.

Pat looked at both of them cynically. “Fellas, I'd love to continue this conversation, but I have something unimportant to attend to, if you don't mind.”

Lubell, who never ever kidded with supervisors because it was disrespectful, wrote feverish gibberish in his notebook while listening intently.

“Pat,” said LoParino, “Brank really does have something to ask you.”

Brank squirmed. “Ah, it's no big thing really. It's about the Yig filter. It fails after five temperature cycles, but it'll pass inspection because the spec is only for three.”