The Evening News (7 page)

“Introduce me,” I said.

They said they would but didn't. I realized they were a dead-end street. So I put my proverbial noodle in the sauce pan and waited one fine evening for Jo to leave the dormitory. Then I sauntered to the corner pay phone.

“Hello,” I said, “is Jo there?”

Marsha said no and asked if there was a message. I liked her voice and carefully explained that I had an exam the following day and was calling to see if Jo could take me to the dormitory library. Admission required a resident I.D. Marsha repeated that Jo was out. I thanked her for the information. Then Marsha sighed and offered to take me to the library herself.

“No,” I said. “That would be too much to ask of a stranger.”

“Well, it isn't exactly like we're strangers,” Marsha said. “We're both friends of Jo. Do you have a name? My name is Marsha.”

“My name is Thaddeus Alexander Cooper III, but you can call me Thaddeus.”

“Hello, Thaddeus.”

“Hello, Marsha.”

“I can meet you down in the lobby in ten minutes if you'd like.”

I said sure, then checked the coin return. At the dormitory I
waited in the lounge. When a wonderful and beautiful girl appeared, looking about through a pair of thick-lensed glasses, I approached her and took her hand. She said, “Thaddeus?”

“In the flesh,” I said. I flashed her my best smile.

We walked upstairs. I watched her shapely legs take the steps two at a time. Outside the library she turned suddenly and said, “Thaddeus, where are your books?” I struck my forehead. “Where is my mind?” She laughed, and as I took her arm I suggested we go to the snack bar instead for some coffee.

There Marsha told me she wanted to be a writer and that she would like her writing to change the world and make it a better place in which to have children. I told her I was a disgruntled economics major. I closely watched her face. I said economics was very mercenary. Then I hung my head and lowered my voice and confessed to be looking for something meaningful to do with my life. I think that was the clincher, the word “meaningful.” After I said it, Marsha sipped her tea with lemon and beamed.

My reader, I am well aware that you sit somewhere wondering what will happen to Thaddeus when Marsha discovers what kind of fellow he really is. He is a rogue, you think. A manipulator, a liar, perhaps even a jerk. There he sits writing in her dormitory bedroom; he has designs on her hymen; he openly admits his deceit. Like my mother and my uncle you frown upon me, but understand my hand. Marsha knows that I'm not an economics major nor a student nor entirely honest, but since I have told her these things myself she has come to respect me. Reread that. Marsha respects, even admires, my
honesty
about my dishonesty. She says that is a start. To her I am a challenge. These lies are the basis of our relationship.

You're sitting here before me very quietly. Your eyes are open, so you must not be asleep. Do you have any questions? Am I making everything clear? I invite any and all questions. Just raise your hand and shout out.

A dark woman in the back row asks what I look like.

A fine question, miss. As you can see, I'm thin and youthful, fond of wearing black, and also extremely handsome, in a sensitive, tubercular, swashbuckling sort of way. Yes, the group kneeling in the aisle.

I beg your pardon.

No, Sisters, this isn't a lecture on
Hamlet.

Who sold them tickets?

A voluptuous young thing in a bikini asks what I do in my spare time.

Miss, allow me a moment to think. I do so much, you realize. I ski and ride horses and scuba dive; I play rugby, baccarat, jai alai, mah-jongg, and ice hockey. I'm an avid reader of the classics, and I keep a macaw and several salt-water turtles in my home. I'm a lifetime subscriber to
National Geographic,
and I shoot big game whenever and wherever I can.

The redhead tonguing the banana.

“Thaddeus, why do you write?”

My pet, I'll quote for you my father. He said, “If you wanted a seat by the window, halfback, how come you're standing here next to me in the aisle?” By this he meant that if you want something done you should do it yourself. My dear, and all of you millions of readers and listeners out there, I feel that in these times of economic strife and spiritual uneasiness there is a crying need for literature which will help lead us out of the wilderness and onto the paths that will make this world a decent place in which to have children. So I'm merely trying to do my bit, to carry my share of the load, and I hope, yes I sincerely do hope, that if each and every one of you who hears my voice could do just one nice thing today, then this old world will soon be a great place in which to have children.

I trust you now recognize the extent of my integrity. Marsha, as you know, already has.

“We've got to communicate,” I told her one evening.

She asked me what I meant.

“Well, Marsha,” I began, “we mean so much to me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But we've been living a lie, Marsha,” I blurted.

Then I sat her down and told her everything: how I am not a student, how I do not have a lakeside apartment but really live with my mother in the back of the tiny restaurant, how I do not have a job programming computers for the Coast Guard, how I have had to put up with the back of my uncle's hand after my father died, how I am not a connoisseur of gourmet foods but have eaten my mother's soup for more than half my life and still intensely dislike it. I hid my face as I spoke these words. I wrung my hands. I tried to gnash my teeth. Then I said: “Marsha, after all of this, surely you cannot like me anymore.”

She began crying. I moved slowly toward her, comforting her, taking off her Coke-bottle glasses, brushing my hands against her breasts.

“Thaddeus,” she said, “you can't really mean that.”

“Oh,” I said, “but I do.”

“But you're wrong,” she said, smiling. “I still like you. In fact, I like you even more now that you've told me the truth.”

“You cannot be serious,” I said.

“Thaddeus, I am. Don't you realize that it took far greater courage for you to have told me these things, and that you must be even more of a good and meaningful person to have been able to say them?”

“Don't compliment me,” I said sternly. “You deserve better than me.”

“Oh no, Thaddeus. No, no.”

I had her blouse off and was working on the zipper of her jeans when Jo had to come in with Stuart, which was fine with me. Let's pretend we're not here, Marsha, I whispered, but she quickly dressed and led me into the front room, saying hey everybody, let's have a party, and I had an awful time.

For weeks after that she pleaded with me to take her to my
mother's tiny restaurant. I finally consented, but I insisted we go in disguise. I told her it was better to test the waters before leaping. Marsha agreed that my idea had good intentions, but outside the restaurant she tore off my rubber eyeglasses with attached false nose and furry mustache and pushed me inside the door. As I picked myself up from the restaurant floor I shrugged and called out, “Guess who I brought home for soup, darling Mother?”

Marsha liked my mother very much. She told me later that she could really empathize with the trauma of being a blue-collar woman living without the support of her husband and having no one, really, to lean on. I told her my mother leans on my uncle. I told her my uncle leans heavily on me. I told her the colors of collars have little to do with anything, that what is important is the bulge in the back pocket. I quoted to her the wisdom of my father: “Sorry, sweetheart, I can't change anything over a five.”

My mother fed Marsha more than soup. She ladled out the assessment that her son was a bum; then she peppered Marsha's impressionable young mind with the idea that she could reform me. It was a challenge of sorts. Marsha chewed on it slowly, then swallowed and smiled, the stupid zeal of newfound direction shining from her eyes upon me like twin headlights.

She was so excited that evening that when we returned to her dormitory she turned to me and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse. She smiled and asked me if I didn't feel a little overdressed. I told her I felt fine. Marsha removed her blouse, then dropped the straps of her bra down over her shoulders and asked if I could give her a backrub. I told her I didn't think it was her back she wanted rubbed. She giggled and unhooked her bra.

“No, Thaddeus. Not my back.”

I was standing in her closet. Marsha approached, rotating her hips, her thumbs hooked in the belt loops of her jeans. I got a sudden headache. My stomach knotted. I started to
wheeze and sneeze. Marsha toyed with the tongue on her zipper, flicking it first up, then a notch at a time down. I could smell mothballs. My eyes were watering. Calmly Marsha stepped from her jeans.

“It's getting late,” I said.

“But, Thaddeus. The night's just started.”

“Really,” I said, “I have to go.” My reader, as you can figure, it was the evening's soup that sickened me; my tongue felt thick in my mouth and my vision was all in a blur. Still Marsha stalked me, chasing me out of the closet and into the front room. I felt like a rat in a trap. I scurried back to the bedroom, attempting to hide beneath the bed; then I ran into the tiny kitchen where I leaned back against the refrigerator and feigned passing out. Marsha opened the cupboard in search of a glass for water. Terrified, I bolted past her and out the door of the dorm apartment, making at last my escape.

I'm out of breath. Yes, I see there are more questions. Just call out.

“Mr. Cooper, er, Thaddeus, could you tell us what is your favorite part of the story?” asks a feathered woman holding a bow and arrow.

Yes, miss. I smile. Your question.

Aren't I the charmer?

“Thaddeus, do you have any peculiar writing habits?” asks an elderly woman with pencils sticking out from her hair.

I'm very glad you asked me that question, ma'am. I have to admit that like most writers I like a clean and comfortable work area, preferably a bedroom with a window in a dormitory, and that I like to write under the constant expectation that at any given moment the door will fly open and Marsha will leap into my arms, proud and happy of this, the story that will save me.

The old woman with the tattered coat and matching shopping bags?

“I'm your mother.”

Hello, Ma.

“This is a dirty story.”

No it isn't, Ma.

“Thaddeus, don't tell
me.
I know dirt when I see it.”

Hey, not in front of all these people, Ma.

“You raise a kid in a decent home and feed his face three times a day and look at what he does for you: he writes pornography.”

As my father—your husband—always used to say, “If you ain't got a quarter or a token there, grandma, you and your purse can get off at the next stop.”

And presently I too am approaching my stop. As I sit here, waiting for Marsha, staring out this dormitory window. The sky is gray and clouded. I want sun. Do you hear me up there?

Sun?

I could write
The sun is shining
and you would think it was. But the sun isn't shining. And my writing it wouldn't make it so. I think I'm beginning to understand that.

It will rain. I hate the rain. If it weren't for the rain—

Oh well.

Has my life been saved? How about it, Marsha?

She doesn't seem to be able to come to the phone right now, my dear reader, so we'll just have to wait until next time to find out. Let me say, however, that it's been real. Remember, you knew me when.

We'll close with more words from my father.

“Put the corks back in your bottles, cowboys, this is the end of the line.”

You take care now.

Sincerely,

Thaddeus Alexander Cooper III

I have been waiting here for four hours now. For a while I thumbed through a copy of
Cosmopolitan,
reading an interesting article about how to prepare cucumber bisque. Then for a
while I lay down. I sat up. I turned the light off and on, oh, I'd say fifty or so times. The switch was stunning. Then I paced the room. There are six big steps the long way and four-and-a-half big steps the short way. This does not count the bedroom.

Counting the bedroom, there are six more steps. There are two desks. Two chairs. Two beds. Two desk lamps. Two dressers. A pair of bulletin boards. I feel like I'm inside Noah's ark.

Yet there is only one window. This fact depresses me. If there were two windows, perhaps the second would offer me a different view. I am speaking figuratively. There
are
two windows, one in the front room and one here in the bedroom. But their vistas are identical.

I touched each at least one hundred times. I thought that by doing this I might change something. Six big steps, touch; six big steps, turn; six big steps, the same view. The only thing that changed was me. I got very tired. I sat down then and inspected the walls.

They seem made of cardboard. The exception is a small area above the bedroom window, which seems made of something else. It is brown. It's also circular, very much like a cloud, but unlike a cloud it doesn't remind me of anything except perhaps a water stain, or perhaps a cloud. I'm sitting directly beneath it right now.

On the front room walls are three pictures. The first has a young child running naked through a forest, looking as if someone or something is chasing it. In the treetops it reads
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
.

So was yesterday. I cannot tell if the child is a girl or a boy.

The second is a print of a very uncomfortable-looking blue old man who is strumming an equally uncomfortable-looking blue guitar. A larger canvas might have made the two more comfortable. I didn't like this picture.

The third finds W. C. Fields squinting at a fistful of playing cards. Once I saw the movie this picture came from, and, as I
remember, Fields was cheating. I cannot remember if he was caught.