The Man in the Window (11 page)

The lady today in the backseat of the Lincoln, who’d they take from her? Mrs. Malone, Jim Rose called her. And the strange-looking guy in the hat and scarf beside her, her son probably. He looked young around the eyes. It had to be Mr. Malone who’d
died, her husband. Welcome to the club, Mrs. Malone. Arnie raised his beer in a salute, then downed a big gulp. Poor lady. She had quite a smile. Even under those circumstances, she managed to smile and thank him for fixing the car. She was a hell of a lot more gracious than that stiff, Jim Rose.

LuLu had a smile on her, too. She didn’t smile so much the last couple of years before she died, though, because of her dentures. She was terrified they’d fall out of her mouth. She must have gone through a tube of Dentu-Grip a week—you couldn’t have pulled the damn things loose with a pair of pliers. She never let him see her without them. At night, she’d work on herself in the bathroom, then scurry across the room in the dark to bed.

“You’re going to kill yourself, running around in the dark like that,” he’d say to her.

“If I do,” she whispered, her words mushy and toothless, “don’t you dare look at me until they get my dentures in.”

“Hell, LuLu. What you so sensitive about your teeth for? I got a hook! I’m missing my entire hand! I’m the one who should be sensitive.”

“But you’re a man, Arnie. It doesn’t matter to you in the same way. I was pretty once,” she said softly.

Arnie reached out to touch her, with his hook he realized at the last moment, so he shifted around and reached again with his good hand. “Not once. Still. You’re pretty, still.”

“Sure. In the dark.”

“In the dark I got my hand again, you got your teeth. There’s nothing wrong with the dark. You’re pretty, I’m handsome. We get to do it all over again.”

“I’d like to do it all over again, Arnie.”

“All of it?”

“Most of it,” said LuLu. “The parts with you. The parts with you when my teeth were good.”

Arnie sat on the porch steps, Duke at his side, remembering LuLu as she wanted to be remembered: young, her smile bright, her teeth good.

He jumped when an apparition in white suddenly appeared before him.

“Iris girl, don’t be creeping around this late at night. You want your old man to piss himself?”

“You’d just be joining the club,” said Iris. “Most all the old men I took care of tonight pissed themselves. And worse, let me tell you.”

Arnie raised his hand. “No, don’t tell me. You’re always wanting to tell me. How come is it you health people got to be so quick with the bad news? I never saw a group of people so eager to give all the nasty details.”

Iris stood before Arnie and looked him in the eye, which she could manage only because he was sitting on the porch steps. “All the details? You’d piss yourself for sure if I ever gave you all the details.”

“So, good. You keep your details, and I’ll keep my pants dry.”

“Well, you’re certainly in a feisty mood. What are you and that ratty dog of yours doing up so late?”

Arnie looked past her to the dark and the fireflies. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t seem like much of a night for sleeping. Thought I’d wait up for you. You know.”

Iris put her pocketbook down and sat on a step below him. A good deal of her round fat bottom hung over the edge. She looked out into the night for a while, then she said, “So, thinking about Mom, are you?”

“Sure. You know it. Thinking about LuLu.”

Iris wondered what that would be like, to love someone so much. She knew that somewhere in the dark, amidst the glow of the fireflies, LuLu was there for Arnie. A love that conjured up the dead. In the hospital when someone died, they died, that was it. Nothing you could bring back, nothing in between about it. Well, that wasn’t quite true—the Tube Man was certainly in between. Great. Arnie has LuLu, and I have the Tube Man.

Arnie was thinking along the same lines, missing LuLu and feeling sorry for himself, but feeling sorry for his unnaturally
homely daughter, too, because she had no one to miss. He tried sometimes to see in her some extraordinary hidden gift, some thing of great beauty, the pearl that would make her attractive to a man. But if there was a pearl, it lay deeply and irretrievably buried. Where she was not unsightly, she was merely ordinary. Her voice didn’t dazzle, she had no great brains, she cooked but with no particular interest or talent for it, she couldn’t dance and didn’t want to (a wise choice—when Arnie imagined Iris throwing her concentrated weight around a dance floor, his stomach went acidy). Her hair didn’t shine, her feet were not small, the clothes she wore didn’t enhance her qualities, because she had few qualities to enhance. She could be funny at times, and kind at times, but not overwhelmingly, not to a degree that might cause a guy to give her a second look. The best Arnie could come up with for Iris’s main selling point was that she did what she was supposed to do. Which wasn’t so bad really, in a world where you couldn’t depend on anybody. Iris showed up for work on time, she bathed regularly with sensible soap, and she paid her bills. Arnie doubted there was anyone out there staying up nights fantasizing about a woman like that.

So the two of them sat on the steps looking out into the night, Arnie feeling sorry for Iris, and Iris feeling sorry for Arnie, but neither of them really wanting to talk about it, because what, after all, could you say?

Iris took off her nursing shoes and wiggled her white-stockinged toes. “Any more beers left?”

Arnie stood up, relieved to escape his thoughts. “Sure, sure. Stay there, I’ll get you one.”

“Great,” she said, rubbing her feet. “I wore the treads off these babies tonight.”

“Bad night?”

Iris opened her mouth to speak.

Arnie pushed on the screen door and hurried inside. “No details! No details!”

Duke yawned and regarded Iris. A crushed bit of firefly flickered weakly on the corner of his mouth. Iris brushed it off. “Why don’t you be useful and eat something like cockroaches or ants?” Arnie came back out with her beer and a fresh one for himself. They drank and listened to the crickets. Iris felt the alcohol ease through her. She thought about her night—the GI bleeder, wrapping bed 1 in the shroud sheet, the Tube Man, Libby and Dolores and Denise. She let the beer flow around all of it, and through it, until the edges were a little less sharp, the particulars less defined. She let herself drift, all the way back to the encounter she’d had on the way to work. Now she had time to think about it, to wonder about the man in the baseball hat and purple scarf.

She’d wondered about it all night, of course, but didn’t have enough time to really get to it. She kept meaning to ask Libby or Denise about him, they’d both grown up in Waverly, but it had been so damn busy. Something was wrong with him, obviously. As a nurse, she’d seen lots of people attempt to conceal or disguise their disfigured parts. The ladies who wore bright scarves around their necks to hide their tracheotomies, or the ones who wore gloves on their arthritic hands, even in the summer. That old Irish guy who wore his golf cap, even in bed, to cover the metal plate in his head where the skin wouldn’t graft. Sometimes the wound was in a place where clothes couldn’t do any good. Like the patient last month who’d lost part of his tongue to cancer. He couldn’t wear anything to hide his tongue; the best he could do was place his hand over his mouth when he spoke, like a shy oriental girl. What with the tongue and the hand, Iris never understood a word he’d said.

So what was wrong with the man in the hat and scarf? It must have been pretty bad, that he had to wrap and cover himself like the Invisible Man. She swallowed and looked around at the shadows of the night. Now there was a creepy thought: Maybe he
was
the Invisible Man. She didn’t remember seeing his hands or anything. No. His eyes. How could she have forgotten them?
She’d looked right into them. The Invisible Man didn’t have eyes; he always wore sunglasses. The man in the car looked like he wanted to be invisible, though. He didn’t get out much, she was pretty sure of that. The way he scrunched down in his seat when she asked him about the funeral and that rusty, unused sound to his voice. She’d heard voices like that before, people who’d been in comas for days or weeks and then awakened. They always sounded dry and a little lost.

His voice was unused, maybe, but not his eyes. He lived through his eyes, she could tell. Like the paralyzed patients she’d worked with, those imprisoned bodies with the eyes that were everywhere. Their sight was almost a palpable thing. She could feel it on her skin when she entered the room, and when she bathed them and turned them. They were so hungry for something new to look at. They used their eyes to look, and to smell, too, and to touch and taste. It was very strange for her to be so appreciated for her physical presence. She, Iris, who had not one thing of beauty to offer, was practically devoured by the eyes of her paralyzed patients. She’d felt something like that when the man in the hat and scarf lifted his eyes to her.

Iris began to feel a little funny. She tried to blame it on the beer, but that wasn’t it. And she was very tired, but that wasn’t it either. She hadn’t eaten a proper meal since breakfast—too many Pepsis and candy bars. Maybe her blood sugar was screwy; she was certainly fat enough for it to be a problem. She shook her head to clear the dizziness, then stared into the darkness. The night surrounded her, and she forgot that Arnie and Duke were nearby. She was alone. A sound, a faint sound, and lights, too. The crickets, that’s what she heard, and the shimmering lights came from the fireflies. She lifted her hand and placed it softly on her chest, felt the rising and falling there. The sound of the crickets became the voice of the man in the hat and scarf, and in the light of the fireflies she saw his eyes.

He had the voice of a man in a coma, just roused from his sleep. His voice was the sound of crickets. And his eyes were
the eyes of a paralyzed man that touched and tasted everything before him. His eyes shone with the light of fireflies.

She had never imagined such words, and she had to listen to them over and over to get their meaning. His voice was, his eyes were, over and over, until at last the words clarified themselves in a simple and unbelievable sentence, which she spoke quietly into the darkness before her.

“I’m thinking of a man.”

Arnie, just behind her on the front steps, had been watching her closely. When she spoke, the words went into his left ear, his bad one.

“What? What’s that?”

Iris hardly heard him. I’m thinking of a man. She’d never, ever thought of a man before. Of
men
, yes, faceless men in daydreams, men who didn’t exist and never would. But the actual eyes of a specific man, and his voice—she’d never dared. What would have been the point? Why ponder eyes that would never turn in her direction, or imagine a voice that would not speak her name? Had the man in the hat and scarf spoken her name? No. No, of course not. Or had he? When she tried to remember what they had said to each other in the cemetery parking lot, it seemed now that he might have said her name several times, as if calling to her. And he looked at her, in a way no man had ever looked at her. His eyes had called her name, too, hadn’t they? Something moved from him to her, left his eyes or mouth, and came to her.

“Iris,” said Arnie.

But the voice she heard belonged to the man in the hat and scarf. “Hello, Iris.” A coma patient coming to, the sound of crickets. I am thinking of a man.

“You okay?” said Arnie.

Iris turned to him and brought him into focus. She found her own voice, and said too loudly, as if overcoming the rasp and chirp of the crickets, “Sure I am. Of course I am.” She smiled.

The smile made Arnie nervous. He scratched his hook back and forth over the wooden porch step. “You been changing shifts too often. You look a little dazed, girl.”

She turned her face again to the dark. What if, she thought, what if there is nothing at all wrong with the man in the hat and scarf? Be careful, Iris, it can’t be true, she warned herself. Don’t go too far with this. But she couldn’t stop. Maybe, she giggled and grew warm beneath her nurse’s uniform, maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe he’s so good looking he has to hide himself so that women won’t bother him. She imagined then the face of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, obscured by his turban and flowing sash. Peter O’Toole’s voice spoke her name. “Iris,” he said with a wearied relief, as if he had crossed an interminable desert to find her, to place her name on his tongue like water from an oasis. He chooses me, because of all the women in the world I expect it least. And I will be the only one who ever gets to see his face. Each night, before we get into bed, he’ll bend down and I’ll remove his hat, and then his scarf, and kiss his sweet, pale, hidden skin.

She jumped when Arnie’s hook touched her own skin, the cold metal pulling her out of an Arabian bedroom and away from sweet kisses. She looked at Arnie’s hook and thought again of the face behind the hat and scarf. Peter O’Toole’s features melted away in the wavy heat of the desert. She knew better. She knew it was really a world of hooks instead of hands, where secret injuries were protected by baseball hats and bandaged by purple scarves. She was a nurse, and she knew when she was in the presence of a wound. She had a thought then, as she looked out into the night. She tugged at her white uniform and chewed on her lip. Am I drawn to the man or his wound? She pictured the wedding night, saw herself dressed in a bridal veil and nursing cap. The big moment would not involve lovemaking, but a different experience of the flesh. Late into the night, and on into the morning, she’d dress and redress his face, expertly applying antibiotic salves, experiencing his wounds until they became her own.

That was about as far as she could go. “Iris,” she said out loud, “you’re a real sicko.”

Arnie still touched her lightly with his hook. “What?” He turned his good ear toward her. “What are you saying?”

She sucked down the remainder of her beer. “Nothing, Arnie. I’m not saying anything.”

“You were. Don’t say you weren’t. Whispering all the time so I can’t hear you. I might as well be conversing with Duke here. Least when he barks I can understand what the hell he’s saying.”