The Sixth Commandment (17 page)

“Standing up in a hammock.”

“Hell,” I said laughing, “I don’t even know the New York way. Unless it’s impotence. I’m going to beg off, Millie. I appreciate your kind offer, but I’m somewhat weary and I’m somewhat drunk, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. Another time. When I’m in tip-top condition.”

The toes dug deeper.

“Promise?” she breathed.

“Promise,” I nodded.

I paid the tab, we collected hats and coats, and I walked her out to her Ford Pinto in the parking lot. She was feeling no pain, but she was talking lucidly and wasn’t staggering or anything. I believed her when she said she could get home all right.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’m practically stone cold sober. I might even stop by Red Dog Betty’s and see if there’s any action tonight.”

“Don’t do that, Millie,” I urged. “Go home, go to bed, and dream of me. I’ll go upstairs, go to bed, and dream of you. We’ll have a marvelous dream together.”

“Okay,” she said, “that’s what we’ll do. You’re so sweet, I could eat you up. Come in and sit with me a minute while the car warms up.”

She pulled me into the car with her, started the engine, turned on the heater. I fumbled for a cigarette, but before I knew what was happening, she was all over me like a wet sheet. Her mouth was slammed against mine, a frantic tongue was exploring my fillings.

I knew it wasn’t my manly charm. It wasn’t even her physical wanting. It was misery and loneliness and hurt. It was despair. And the only way she could exorcise that was to cleave to a warm bod, any bod. I just happened to be the nearest.

She pulled her mouth away.

“Hold me,” she gasped. “Please. Just hold me.”

I held her, and hoped it was comfort. She took my hand and thrust it under her coat, under that long, voluminous skirt. She had been truthful: all she had on beneath the shift was perfume. She pressed my palm against a long, cool thigh. She just held it there and closed her eyes.

“Sweet,” she whispered. “So sweet. Isn’t it sweet?”

“Yes,” I said. “Millie, I’ve—”

“I know,” she said, releasing my hand and smiling bravely, “you’ve got to go. Okay. You’ll be in town awhile?”

“Another few days at least,” I said.

“We’ll get together?” she asked anxiously.

“Sure we will.”

“Listen, all that stuff I said about Julie Thorndecker—I shouldn’t have said all that. It’s all bullshit. None of it’s true. I’m just jealous, that’s all. She’s so beautiful.”

“And young,” I said, like an idiot.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. “She’s young.”

I kissed her cheek and got out of there. I watched her drive away. When she turned onto Main Street, I waved, but I don’t think she saw me. I hoped she wasn’t going to Red Dog Betty’s. I hoped nothing bad would happen to her. I hoped she’d be happy. I hoped I’d wake in the morning without a hangover. I hoped I’d go to Heaven when I died.

I knew none of these things was going to happen.

I went back into the bar. I had two straight brandies, figuring they’d settle the old tum-tum, and I’d be able to sleep without pills. Something was nagging at me. A memory was nagging, and I couldn’t recall, couldn’t define, couldn’t pin it down. It had nothing to do with the Thorndecker investigation. It was a memory revived by something that had happened in the past hour, something that had happened with Millie Goodfellow.

It was more than an hour before I grabbed it. I was up in my room, hunched over on the bed, two boots and one sock off, when it came to me. I sat there, stunned, a wilted sock dangling in my fingers. The memory stunned me. Not the memory itself, but the fact that when it happened, I was convinced it would turn my life around, and I’d never forget it. Now it took me an hour to dredge it out of the past. So much for the woes of yesteryear.

What happened was this …

About two years previously—Joan Powell and I enjoying a sharp, hard, bright, and loving relationship—I was assigned a field investigation in Gary, Indiana: not
quite
the gardenspot of America.

An assistant professor in a second-rate engineering school had submitted an application for a modest grant. His specialty was solar energy, and he had been doing independent research on methods to increase the efficiency of solar cells. They’re squares of gallium arsenide that convert sunlight directly to electricity. Even the types used in the space program were horribly expensive and not all that efficient.

The professor had developed, he said, a method of electronic amplification that boosted the energy output above that of fossil fuels at half the cost. Not only did I not know what the hell his diagrams and equations meant, but Scientific Research Records, who analyzed his proposals, more or less admitted they were stumped: “The claims made herein represent a totally new and unique approach to this particular problem, and there is nothing in current research to substantiate or refute the applicant’s proposals.” In other words: “We just don’t know.”

Lifschultz Associates reported the professor was small potatoes, financially speaking. He had a mortgage, a car loan, two kids in college, and a few bucks in the bank. Small insurance, small investments, small everything. Mr. Everyman.

Donner & Stern didn’t have much to add of a personal nature. The professor had been married to the same woman for twenty-six years, had those two kids, drove a five-year-old car, didn’t drink, gamble, or carouse, was something of an enigma to neighbors and colleagues. He was polite, quiet, withdrawn, didn’t seem to have any close friends, and apparently his only vice was playing viola in a local amateur string quartet.

I went out to Gary to see him, and it was pretty awful. He had fixed up a basement lab in his home, but it looked like a tinkerer’s workshop to me. He didn’t talk much, and his dumpy wife was even quieter. I remember they served me a glass of cranberry juice, and put out a plate of Milky Ways cut into little cubes.

I thought he was a loser—the whole family were losers—and I guess some of this crept into my report. Anyway, his application was denied, and he got one of our courteous goodby letters.

A few days later he tried to swallow a shotgun and blew his brains all over his basement workshop.

I don’t know why it hit me so hard. The professor wasn’t rejected just on the basis of my report; the special investigators had been as unenthusiastic as I was. But I couldn’t get rid of the notion that his suicide was my fault; I had done him in. If I had been a little kinder, more sympathetic, more understanding, maybe he’d have gotten his ridiculously small grant, and maybe his cockamamie invention would have proved out. Maybe the guy was another Edison. We’ll never know, will we?

The night after I heard of his death, I had dinner with Joan Powell. We ate at a restaurant on West 55th Street that specialized in North Italian cooking. Usually I thought the food was great. That night the pasta tasted like excelsior. Powell knew my moods better than her own, and asked me what was wrong. I told her about the suicidal professor in Gary, Indiana.

“And don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault,” I warned her. “Don’t tell me that logically I have no business blaming myself. I don’t want to listen to any logic.”

“I wasn’t going to serve you any,” she said quietly.

“It goes beyond logic,” I said. “It’s irrational, I know. I just feel like shit, that’s all.”

“Must
you use words like that?”

“You do,” I reminded her.

“Not at the dinner table,” she said loftily. “There is a time and place for everything.”

I poked at my food, and she stared at me.

“Todd, you’re really hurting, aren’t you?”

“He was such a sad schlumpf,” I groaned. “A little guy. And plain. His wife was plain, too. I mean they had nothing: no wit, no personality, and they weren’t even physically attractive. Do you think that affected my judgment?”

“Probably,” she said.

“You’re a big help.”

“Do you want advice or sympathy?”

“Neither,” I said. “But five minutes of silence would be nice.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Must
you use words like that?”

“I told you, there’s a time and place for everything.”

“Powell, what am I going to
do?”

“Do? You can’t do anything, can you? It’s done, isn’t it?”

“How long am I going to feel this lousy? The rest of my life?”

“Nooo,” she said wisely, “I don’t think so. A week. A month maybe. It’ll pass.”

“The hell you say,” I growled. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Where?”

“Anywhere. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“All right,” she said equably. “You owe me half a veal cutlet Parmesan.”

“Put it on my bill,” I said.

“You’re running up a big tab, buster,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re good for it.”

If I had been in a better mood, I would have enjoyed that night: late September, with balm in the air over a little nip that warned of what was coming. I don’t know how long we drove—an hour maybe. No, it was longer than that. We went up to the George Washington Bridge, turned around, and drove back down to the Battery. Not what you’d call a restful, bucolic drive. But working the traffic helped keep my mind off my misery. I don’t think Joan Powell and I exchanged a dozen words during that trip. But she was there beside me, silent. It helped.

After we watched a Staten Island ferry pull in and pull out—about as exciting as watching grass grow—I drove back up the east side to Powell’s home. She lived in one of those enormous high-rise luxury apartment houses that have an institutional look: hospitals, office buildings, or just a forty-story file cabinet.

There were two below-ground parking levels. Powell didn’t own a car—didn’t drive, as a matter of fact—but after I started seeing her, dating her, spending time in her apartment, including weekends, I persuaded her to rent a parking space. It cost fifty a month, and I paid it gladly. A lot easier than trying to find parking space on the street in that neighborhood. Plus the fact that my hubcaps were relatively secure.

Our parking space was down on the second level. A little like parking in the Lincoln Tunnel. It was a scary place: pools of harsh light and puddles of black darkness. Silent cars, heavy and gleaming. Concrete pillars and oil stains. I parked, switched off the motor. We lighted cigarettes, and were very alone.

I went through it all again. The schlumpfy professor, his crazy scheme, his mousy wife. The glass of cranberry juice and cubes of cut-up Milky Ways. The amateurish home laboratory, and how I couldn’t understand what the hell he was mumbling about when he showed me his equations, demonstrated his equipment, and made an electric fan run on the power of a 100-watt lightbulb shining on a chip of white, glassy stuff.

Joan Powell let me gabble. She sat apart, hugging herself against the basement chill. A cigarette burned down in her lips. Her sleek head was tilted to keep the smoke from her eyes. She didn’t say a word while I spun out my litany of woe and declaimed my guilt.

I ended my soliloquy and waited for a reaction. Nothing.

“Well?” I demanded.

“You know what I think you need right now?” she said.

“What?”

“A good fuck.”

“Oh my,” I said. “Listen to the lady.”

We put out our cigarettes, turned to stare at each other. Powell was looking at me steadily, and there was something in her fine features I had never seen before: strength and knowing and calm acceptance. Maybe we’re all created equal, in the sight of God and under the law, but there is quality in people. I mean human character runs the gamut from slug to saint. I realized, maybe for the first time, that this was one superior human.

And because I was feeling so deeply it embarrassed me, I had to say something brittle and smart-alecky. But I never did get it out. I choked on the words, and just came apart. I don’t apologize for it; it had been coming on since I heard of the professor’s messy death. But I wasn’t mourning just for him; I was crying for all the sad, little schlumpfs in the world. For all of us. The losers.

Powell was holding me in her arms then, and I was gasping and moaning and trying to tell her all those things.

“Shh,” she kept saying. “Shh. Shh.”

I remembered she stroked my hair, kissed my fingers, touched my lips. She held me until I stopped shivering, pulling my head down to her warm breast. She rocked a little, back and forth, like a mother holding an infant. She smelled good to me, warm and fragrant, and I nuzzled my nose down into her neckline and kissed the soft skin.

It all went so slowly. After awhile it went in silence. I had the feeling, and I think she did too, that we were alone on earth. We were locked in a car, in an underground garage, the weight of an enormous building above, the whole earth below. We were in a coffin in a cavern in a mine. I had never known such sweet solitude, closed around like that.

And I had never known such intimacy, such closeness, not even naked on a sweated sheet. Without speaking, we opened to each other. I could feel it, feel the flow between us. My anguish was diluted by her strength; I suppose she took some of my hurt into her. Sharing eased the pain. When I kissed her, it was almost like kissing myself. A strange experience, but there it was. She was me, and I was her. It was peace. That’s the only way I can describe it: it was total peace.

Well … that happened two years previously. I was convinced that night was going to remake my life, that I would suddenly become saintly and good, full of kindness and understanding. I didn’t change, of course. The next day I was my normal shitty self, and a week later I had forgotten all about the dead professor, and a week after that I had forgotten all about an hour of total peace in an underground garage with Joan Powell when we had done nothing but hold each other and share. If I remembered it at all, it was to wonder why we hadn’t screwed.

Now, two years later, sitting in a lonely room in Coburn, N.Y., the memory of that night came back. I knew what had triggered it: those few moments alone in the car with Millie Goodfellow. I had felt the stirring of the same emotion, the feeling of closed-in intimacy, of being the only survivors in the world, everything blocked out but the two of us, comforting, consoling.