In For a Penny (15 page)

“It’s early for that, isn’t it?” Peggy’s voice nearly struck him dead, and he jammed the cork down into the bottle so that wine geysered a foot into the air, splashing back down onto the countertop.

“It’s
Saturday
,” he said lamely, glancing at the clock on the wall. “And it’s after four, for God’s sake. I just thought I’d call it a day early and relax with a nice glass of wine.”

“Okay. Sure. Why not?”

“Something’s wrong?” He tried to stare her down. “If you’re going to start breaking up the bar with an ax, I’ll relax with a cup of tea instead.” He put the bottle back into the cupboard and shut the door.

“What a grouch,” she said.
“Have
your glass of wine. I really don’t care. But don’t be so defensive about it.”

“Now I’m defensive. I
hate
that ploy. It’s one of the five unanswerable allegations.”

“For God’s sake, no one’s alleging anything! What’s
wrong
with you?

“With
me?”

For a moment she simply looked at him, but then she grinned, her mood changing on a whim like a storm passing. “This is so goofy,” she said. “Listen to us.”

He frowned at her, not willing to be mollified that easily. Peggy’s way of instantly getting over things always made him a little angry, because it seemed to him to be another way of winning. But now his mood changed, when into his mind came a small epiphany: that
he
, in fact, was the big winner—silver, pearls, God knew what else out there waiting for him—and that she had no notion of it. It was
his
goddamn lucky day, not hers. That thought was followed by a question: whether in the case of a divorce the wife got half of the loot that the husband had stashed in the garage, or whether she got damn-all because she didn’t
know
there was any loot stashed in the garage.

But he banished the thought from his mind as unworthy, vaguely ashamed of himself for having let it enter in the first place.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She appeared to be troubled now, her mood having shifted again. “You look kind of wrecked or something.”

“Wrecked?” He glanced into the mirror over the kitchen sink, and what he saw made him blanch. His hair had apparently lost its mind, and looked bushy and standuppish, as did his eyebrows, as if he had been working hard to turn himself into a Halloween devil. His face was pasty, too, his skin grainy and old-looking, his mouth set in a rictus of unidentifiable emotion. He tried to push his hair flat and to compose himself, to relax his face.

“I guess
I am a
little tense,” he said. “Sorry to lose my temper like that.”

“Wait a minute,” Peggy said, a look of comprehension coming over her face. “You didn’t take that penny back, did you? That’s it. You’re still suffering from guilt. It’s been eating you up all day long.”

“Sure I took it back,” he lied, “purse and all. Nothing’s eating me up. I feel fine.”

“Okay,” she said, giving up. “I’m going back to my sewing. What are the other four, by the way?”

“The other four what?”

“The other four unanswerable allegations?”

“I just made that up.”

“Then answer me this one: you didn’t happen to stop by the grocery store did you?”

“No. I guess I forgot about the eggs. I’ll get them, though. Don’t even think about going yourself, or else I
will
be mad.” He smiled at her to show he meant it, although he was abruptly conscious of the deception, of the lie within the smile, of the entire fraud, and in that instant he almost blurted it out—the money at the park, the dimes, the pearls, the weird notion that he hadn’t returned Mrs. Fortunato’s purse because it was …

… he couldn’t say quite what it was. But that alone was troubling, troubling enough, certainly, to warrant against haste. Until he understood things, he told himself as Peggy started up the stairs, he would keep his own counsel. The phrase appealed to him immensely—
his own counsel
. There was wisdom in it, as there was in all those homely old phrases. Whose counsel would you keep if it weren’t your own?

He realized that Peggy was speaking to him. “What?” he asked.

“I said give me till six.”

“Sure,” he said. “Take your time.”

When she was gone he picked up his book, hauled the wine bottle out of the cupboard, and went out through the back door, closing it softly and ducking into the garage where he turned on the trouble light above the bench. There was no reason to light the place up like a carnival; it would merely attract Peggy’s attention. He took the bowl of pearls out of the drawer. They were
big
damned things, some of them the size of his thumbnail.

Three lucky strikes in one day, by God! Four if you counted the penny. What did they say about
that
? Once was a fluke, and twice was a
hell
of a coincidence. But the third time was something more: the third time was the charm—a plot, a pattern, a cold fact, hard and bright as a diamond. Diamonds! The idea transported him. A basket of cut stones would do the trick. He would be happy then. Not that he despised the pearls—not at all—but a handful of diamonds would be another matter entirely.

Carefully he poured a coffee mug full of wine, read hastily through the passage in the book, and then dropped one of the smaller pearls into the mug. The wine clouded almost at once, as if the pearl were emulsifying. He watched in fascination as the surface of the wine grew turbulent, eddying and roiling for a full thirty seconds before it calmed again and grew translucent, a faint afterimage of the pearl seeming to hover within the depths, like the moon in a night sky. Slowly the wine became transparent, like blood-red Kool-Aid, and he saw that the pearl and its image had vanished utterly.

“Over the river,” he said out loud, and drank the wine in the spirit of Cleopatra. He gagged, nearly retching at the vinegar taste of the tainted wine, and then realized that he was already drunk as a lord, the pearl-enriched elixir having gone straight to his head.
Rich
as a lord, too, he reflected, steadying himself against the bench. He laughed hilariously at his own wit, muffling his mouth with his hand until he could contain himself. In the ensuing silence he heard an echo of the departed laughter, far removed, but coming so distinctly from behind him that he turned toward the window, where he saw what appeared to be a face peering in at him.

A hoarse cry strangled out of his throat as he lurched forward, nearly knocking over the pearls. Slowly he turned again to the window: it was apparently his own face that looked back at him—the face he had seen in the kitchen mirror, but even more misshapen and pale and bloated, the old glass no doubt distorting the image. The years of dust lent him a ghostly pallor in the feeble garage light.

On a whim he picked up the jar of pearls and held it up so that it, too, was reflected in the windowpane alongside his own face, which smiled back at him with an unspeakable satisfaction as he nodded his head. “A king’s ransom,” he said out loud, the words tasting like the pearl-infused wine, and then, as with the laughter moments earlier, he heard the phrase re-uttered in a drawn-out sibilant whisper. His ears savored the sound, and the bowl full of pearls shone with an opalescent light.

He caught sight of his upraised wristwatch then—nearly five o’clock. In only an hour Peggy would have him in her grasp, and the day wouldn’t be his any longer. “I don’t mean to be impolite,” he said, winking theatrically at the reflected image, “but I’m in something of a hurry.”

“Hurry,” the face in the window repeated back to him, and he returned the pearls to the drawer and turned toward the door with a renewed sense of urgency, heading straight out to the sidewalk.

. . .

He spent the next hour simply wandering, looking into bushes, turning over leaves and scraps of paper, peering into back alley trash cans, his quest taking him into uncharted neighborhoods. Although he was at a fine pitch of expectation, nothing at all spoke to him. There had been something about the dimes and the pearls that had done just that—
spoken
to him, compelled his attention—but by the end of the hour, when he was forced to turn his steps toward home, the silent world seemed to him to be very nearly empty of hope, and he had to brace himself and manufacture a smile when he entered his house.

. . .

“Let’s get Chinese and stay home,” he said to Peggy, the two of them standing in the kitchen. “And maybe a movie.” He forced himself to remain still, although he was nearly beside himself with the urgency of getting back outside. “It’s been a long day. Last thing I want to do is go out again.”

“Sounds good to me,” Peggy said cheerfully.

He fetched the take-out menu from where they kept it on top of the refrigerator. “Kung pao chicken?” he asked, glancing out the window. It was twilight. In ten more minutes night would fall. In the darkness, he reflected, he would never have seen the dimes in the flowerbed or the pearls either, even if they’d shouted at him.

“Wonton soup,” she said. “And I think broccoli beef. What do you want? Would you rather have orange beef?”

“Broccoli’s fine,” he said, already dialing the number of Mr. Lucky’s Chinese restaurant, which was a half mile from the house. Even the name of the place was heavy with promise. Twenty minutes before the food was ready, they said to him. Not much time. He gave them his telephone number and hung up. “Half an hour,” he told Peggy. Maybe forty minutes. They’re busy.”

“I’ll pick it up,” Peggy said. She was already holding a sweater now. “I’ll grab a movie on the way.”

“No, let me,” he said. “You make a better pot of tea than I do. Seriously. I could use some air. Besides, I’ll get those eggs while I’m out.” He took the sweater from her and hung it over the back of a chair.

“But you’ve been running around all day,” she told him. “You said you didn’t
want
to go out. And besides, you don’t know what movie to get. You’ll rent
The Godfather
again.”

“I promise I won’t. It’s your pick. Anything you want. I’m easy tonight,”

“Are you?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows at him.

“How about something romantic?” He wiggled his eyebrows back.
For God’s sake hurry up
, he thought.

“Okay,” she said.
“Somewhere in Time.”

He hesitated, nearly backing off in order to argue with her. He would rather put his head in a clothes press. “Sure,” he said. Time was wasting. Minutes might be worth millions.

“We could get something else. How about…I don’t know. Give me some ideas.”

“Nope. I’m on my way.
Somewhere in Time
it is. It’ll for sure be there, anyway.”

He went out the door and made a beeline for the car, checking his watch. When he got to the boulevard he instinctively turned toward the downtown, away from Mr. Lucky’s and the video store, following a hunch. The light ahead of him turned yellow, and he stepped on the accelerator, running through it on the red, seeing a car swerve past his rear bumper as a horn blared. A second later he heard what sounded like the heavy metallic crash of the car hitting something solid, and he looked into the rearview mirror in time to see an old junker up over the curb half a block back, the driver already climbing out, apparently unhurt, shaking his fist. Water from a broken hydrant was shooting into the air, falling back down onto the hood of the car.

He turned down an alley and slowed the car, his mind racing with fear, and briefly he pictured himself going back down to the boulevard to see what had happened, to see if he could help, to trade insurance cards. …

The picture had no reality in his mind, though. It was spilt milk—or spilt water, he thought, pulling out of the alley onto a residential street, hearing the rising note of a siren from the direction of the fire department. Several blocks farther down he once again followed his hunches and pulled into a parking lot, which was dim in the evening twilight, although a mercury vapor lamp threw a bright glow over two trash bins and illuminated the doors that led into the backs of shops. A half dozen pigeons had congregated on the asphalt and were pecking at fallen crumbs near the bins, their heads darting forward and backward like an evolutionary mistake.

He pulled into a stall and got out, crossing straight to the bins and looking in, letting intuition guide him, barely breathing with anticipation as the pigeons flew away in a rush of beating wings. In the first of the two bins he saw nothing even remotely interesting—some broken pieces of particle board shelving, a wrecked overstuffed chair crammed in sideways, and, visible beneath the chair, a stack of flattened cardboard boxes.

He leaned in and pulled out the chair cushion, which was torn open and soiled. He punched it a couple of times, feeling for the crinkle of paper money or the clink of coins, then threw it aside, pushed himself further over the edge, hauled the chair out of the way, and yanked aside some of the cardboard, spotting a paper bag beneath that was stuffed with something. Money?

Picturing tightly packed hundred dollar bills, he shoved half his body into the bin to reach it. Why not thousand dollar bills, he wondered, flailing at the bag, ten thousands. But when he pulled the bag out he found it was full of Styrofoam popcorn, and he hurled it back in angrily, noticing then that there was a line of greasy dirt across his shirt from where he had pressed against the edge of the bin. He cursed as he hurried to the second bin, which looked even less likely than the first, full of restaurant garbage that stank to high heaven. A mop handle thrust up out of the refuse, and he pulled it out to stir things with, moving aside greasy paper wads and dead vegetables and immense coffee filters full of wet grounds.