Three Short Novels (34 page)

“Maybe a hundred thousand,” she said.

“They all catch the bus at this hour?”

She laughed, and he bent over to grip his knee. “Don't make me laugh,” he said. “My knee buckles.”

He limped behind her aboard the bus and half fell into the seat beside her, his leg stiffened out into the aisle. Some passengers, who had ridden the bus every evening for as many years as she had, nodded at her and glanced at him, examining him, she knew, for any resemblance to her, for only a relative would ride home with her after all her years of riding alone. Never out of the clear sky, out of the sky from where mates fell, would a sort of handsome man fall into the seat beside her, Naomi, the woman with a face flat and familiar as the advertisement placards above the bus seats.

“This knee is a good thing,” he said. “I don't have to get up to let a lady sit down. You see?” His breath smelled of clove gum or mouthwash. His hand, gripping the horizontal steel rod on the back of the seat ahead, was a pale hand with high blue veins, almost the hand of a convalescent, but so strong in its power over her that she had to glance away. She felt sick with the suspicion that he was playing a trick on her. Only a drunk, only a man without a conscience could play a trick
like this on a homely woman.

“You think I'm mean, Naomi, because I don't let a woman sit down?”

It was her chance to say yes. Yes, get up and get off and let somebody else sit down, somebody I'm used to. The only other answer she could give was No, and, by saying No, imply that she liked him sitting there, but if she said No, he'd go back to the bar and tell the bartender about what the scared, silly woman had said, that she liked him sitting by her.

“But I ain't a mean person, Naomi.” He spoke so low the passengers in the seat ahead, their ears protruding to catch the conversation, could not hear. “Only I don't like to
prove
I ain't mean by doing something nice. When I have to do something nice, I feel mean.” He gave a small, hiccuping laugh to tell her he was only joking. “Naomi sounds like an Indian name,” he said. “There used to be a burlesque queen who was a full-blooded Cherokee. Some of them Indian girls are real beauties.”

“Was that Princess Nadja?”

“Was who Princess Nadja?”

“The Cherokee girl.”

“Hell, Nadja ain't an Indian name. It's Roosian, ain't it?”

“I thought you were married to the Cherokee queen.”

“Me? I wasn't married to no Cherokee.” He glanced up quickly as a few passengers, wanting out, pressed past the others standing in the aisle, and, when the commotion was over, he continued to gaze up into the faces above him. After a few moments, he suddenly sat up straight. “Three times,” he said. “I been married three times, all of them fine women to begin with. I must of been fine to begin with myself or they wouldn't of begun with me.” He laughed soundlessly. “There's a beginning and there's an end. Nobody likes endings and that's why they get bogged down in the middle.”

“Which one was Princess Nadja?” she asked. That voluptuous
woman with moon-white hair had become a terrible adversary, a woman whose seductiveness was as beyond her as the moon was beyond her. “I bet you made her up,” she said, wanting to wound him, wanting to let him know she was not a dupe. “Am I right?”

“Right as rain,” he said.

So she destroyed his imaginary princess, and the real ones remained beyond him, this pale, thin barker, pants presser, barman, clown. If she lived alone, she thought, she'd ask him in for supper. She would have no fear that he had come to sponge on her for a meal and then make fun of her afterwards to the bartender. She'd have no fear because she would say right off, tough like Athena, You want to come in for supper? You look like you need some meat on your bones.

He was smiling, maybe over the loss of Princess Nadja, running his hand over his head, scratching at the gray hair that had a mealy look though all his clothes were clean as a whistle, scratching with a monkey's musing curiosity.

“I get off here,” she said rising.

“Hey, hey,” he said, confused, rising with her, hopping out into the aisle, glancing toward the front of the bus and toward the back, like someone trapped. A string of hair swung out over his forehead as he swung his head from left to right, and she bent her head into his back, laughing at him. She poked her finger in between his shoulder blades to tell him he was blocking her way. At once he lurched down the aisle, jerked forward and backward by the motion of the bus. Tossed out, they stood on the corner before the drugstore's lighted window confronting them with a jumble of hot-water bottles, perfumes, toothpaste tubes, dead flies, and holly wreaths.

Past stucco houses, mottled and faded like the one she was going to, he walked beside her, fast, his narrow shoulders hunched under his rakish sport jacket. It was a cold twilight with a rose-colored light in the sky. “I can't come in,” he said. “I got to get back and meet
this friend of mine at Rich's Cafeteria. I'm just escorting you home because you're afraid of the dark.” After a block of the same houses, he asked her if she lived alone, and then he asked her who she lived with, and then if she had brothers and sisters, and, without any warning to herself to not tell, she was telling him about Hal.

“That's something I'd never do,” he said, his voice mingling awe and pity. His small feet in polished old shoes, once stylish, went quickly, dapperly along. “I guess it takes courage, uh? Maybe I ain't got that kind of courage.”

Was he praising her brother to ingratiate himself? But she wanted no member of her family around, least of all her dead brother. A man was walking her home. She had laughed with him on the jolting bus, she had been smart enough to see that he talked big, and cruel enough to tell him that she saw. Oh, what a fascinating life she led! The pleasure she had found in this encounter began to desert her now as she heard his praise for her brother, for her brother who was always praised, and praised now for the courage to take his own life.

“Well, so long,” he said, the instant she paused by the small lawn worn bare in spots by children's feet. “Naomi sounds like a river,” he said, and sang softly,
“By the banks of the Naomi, an Indian maiden waits for me
. You think that's a tune that'll catch on? You got a piano?”

“Yes,” she said. “We used to play it but nobody's touched it for years.”

“We'll work out a tune,” he said. “We'll make a million bucks,” and he gave a tricky salute, tugging at the brim of an imaginary hat, and went back the way they had come, a man wanting her to feel the loss of him. She could tell that much by the way he walked, briskly, confident of his charm.

That was the way it began. He rode home with her again and made excuses for not coming in before she made excuses for asking him in. He bought her lunch and invited her to a movie. After the movie she
went up to his room in the National Hotel and he sat on his bed and she sat in the chair, and he told her about his other marriages. His first wife had died, his second had left him for another man, and his third he had left, and there was no Princess Nadja among them. The serious way he told about his life showed his respect for her. He percolated coffee on a hot plate and gave her some stale cookies to dip. On the sidewalk before her house he kissed her very lightly. The next time she went out with him they did not go to a movie. He met her in the hotel's drab, cold lobby and they went up to his room, and he was gentle in his passion. A delight began to stir in the core of her being, that night. It did not take her by surprise because she had suspected all along that it was waiting there.

Naomi was deserting her mother to go and live with a man who came out of nowhere. That was the way her mother described the change in the daughter. Naomi and her Dan were married by a judge in the county courthouse and moved into a rented duplex, and Naomi interviewed a woman for the job of companion to her mother. Mrs. Wade came into the recorder's office at noon, a plump, uneasy woman who couldn't smile, and Naomi became at once the one to be interviewed, reversing the positions, wanting not to subject the woman to the ordeal, the quivery-faced woman with the dodging eyes. They sat across from each other at the Dairy Lunch, and Naomi apologized for everything at home, the mix-up in the cupboards, the worn linoleum on the kitchen floor, and her mother's mind in captivity to her son's death. “You'll have to listen to all that,” she said. “She's never going to give up her suspicions.” Naomi told about everything that might displease the woman, wishing the woman would refuse the job now, because, if she walked out on the job later, she'd carry away with her a stranger's unsympathetic knowledge of secret sufferings, both Naomi's and her mother's.

The woman moved in that evening, and Naomi's mother called her at the recorder's office the next morning.
She doesn't answer me,
Naomi. She was two hours in the bathroom last night. Nobody needs to take a bath that long. I was afraid she'd fainted. Suppose she died in there? She didn't answer me and finally I had to scream at her, and she said she's got a right to privacy.
Several nights later Mrs. Wade phoned Naomi at home.
Maybe you better come this one night. Maybe if she knows you come when I call you, she won't feel she needs you so bad. I been with old people like this before. One of 'em slashed his wrist so his daughter'd come back from New York. They think they can stop the sun from going down.
Naomi put on her coat and hat, left the supper dishes in the sink, and took a taxi to the house, and her mother clasped her in her thin arms. “She won't believe me,” her mother complained. “I told her they did it to him, but she won't believe me.”

It took a while before Naomi's mother and Mrs. Wade began to make balky, grudging moves toward one another, but when a kindly acceptance was found, the familiarity seemed too much for them to handle—what each one knew about the other. Then her mother began to call to her again.

“She went to her room right in the middle of cooking our supper and she won't come out,” her mother said, waiting at the table in the kitchen, wearing the quilted satin bathrobe, a present from Cort and Naomi, an extravagant present to impress upon her their love that they knew would never, never compensate for the loss of her son, Hal.

“It's Naomi,” she said, knocking at the door of the bedroom that had been her brothers' and then hers and was now Mrs. Wade's.

The woman opened the door after a minute, a quivery-cheeked woman with all her excess flesh that was too much of herself when the self was only a companion to a shrill old woman as deserted as herself. The woman's pale blue eyes were enclosed in pompoms of flesh, but, hidden as they were, they still attempted to slide away.

“Mama's sorry,” Naomi said.
Ah, poor woman I ought to know!
she
thought. And she was ashamed that she was only Naomi who was to be as deserted soon as this woman in the faded dress and the new apron.
Ah, poor woman! So much like myself and so much like Mama. We are all so much alike, skinny from loneliness or bloated with it.

After that night, Naomi went across the city though nobody called her and though, often, she found her mother and Mrs. Wade contentedly, querulously watching the brawls and commotions on the television screen. She went because her husband was away in the bars until they closed, and because the nights he stayed home and drank alone, he played cruel jokes on her with words, jokes that ridiculed them both, himself and Naomi,
Na-o-mi,
the greenhorn, the goody-goody, the simple-minded woman who had fallen for him. Naomi sat beside her mother, holding her mother's hand, watching the screen and not remembering much from one second to the next, her soothing fingers sometimes pressing too hard on the bones of the hand she held.

One night he barred her way. “What're you putting your coat on for?” he said. “You ain't going anywhere.” He was wonderingly sober.

“I'm going over to Mama's.”

“You ain't going to Mama's, girlie,” he said, and for a moment, because she was locked in and didn't know the man, she was a child again, her mind was a child's mind, wondering whether
girlie
was an affectionate word or a derisive one. Then she turned and ran down the hall to the back door. He ran after her and caught hold of her coat and threw her down on the kitchen floor. Her hip struck the floor and her face struck the table leg. She pulled her skirt down—it had leaped up past her knees—and attempted no other move, afraid that any move other than the modest one would make him more angry. For a second, as she lay stunned, she felt that he was right, throwing her down. It was such an extreme act, he must be right. Ashamed because she had brought him to violence, she could not look up into his face, she could only stare at his shoes. The great number of times
she had left this apartment to find a queasy comfort from her comforting of her mother all added up to a crime. Her coming and going was a crime of futility.

“You're a goddamn saint, Naomi,” he said, “but I ain't religious. It makes me sick to see a saint. They don't serve no good example, they just make you feel like a louse. Get up, get up,” he said, banging around the coffee pot from one burner to another. The match he struck leaped out of his hand and fell on the table, and he swung after it furiously, and blew it out. With shaking hand, he struck another match. “Get up, get up. Sit down, sit down. Take off your coat, stay awhile.”