Three Short Novels (35 page)

She reached up to the table and drew herself up, and she sat down. Although she was suffocatingly hot, she left her coat on.

“Fix you some hot coffee,” he said. “You should of seen all the coffee we drank over in England, on those cold nights with the V-1's buzzing around. Did I ever tell you about the time the anti-aircraft brought down a V-1 over the airfield? It began to bob around up there, turned around, changed its mind, and fell just half a mile away.” He cleared his throat, a loud, raspy, prolonged scraping.

She was afraid to touch her cheekbone and afraid to lay her head in her hand, afraid that any soothing of herself might be mistaken for reproach.

“You going to take your coat off?”

She shook her head. The coat comforted her, the coat gave her dignity, it gave her access to the outdoors and protection against the inside of strange houses, like this one. She was about to draw her coat together when he went down on his knees, encircling her hips, laying his face in her lap, kissing the triangle into her closed thighs.

“Naomi, I wish I was a saint myself. Then it would be impossible for me to be mean.”

“Danny, I'm no saint, Danny.”

“Yeah, you are, you are, and when I leave that's what's going to
make it easier for me because I'm going to say to myself, she's a saint and she knows I'm just human. You see what your trouble is, you saints? You make it easier for us to be human because you make allowances. Am I right? You make allowances?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“All I mean is you forgive people.” He laid her hand on the crown of his head, moving her hand back and forth, and, when he took his hand away from hers, she went on stroking his head, thought she felt no love for this man who had come out of nowhere, out of everywhere, and fooled her into thinking she was his woman and fooled her again by elevating her above everybody else, calling her a saint because he was going to leave her and saints always forgive.

“Suppose you lived in Omaha, suppose you had children, suppose you died—your Mama would get along. She lost her precious son, so she's taking it out on you. Because you're just Naomi. What's Naomi doing, still alive? You ever stop to think that over? You ever stop to think?”

You ever stop to think?
Stop
what
to think? The heart?

“When are you going?”

“Did I say I was going anywhere?”

“You said you were going.”

“Oh, hell, I say that all the time. It keeps me alive.”

Wiping her face with the sleeve of her coat, she stood up. She went down the hall to their bedroom and lay down on the bed, still with her coat on, face up. He followed her, sat down by the bed, and removed her shoes, chuckling, attempting his old seductive wit in the sound of it. “I bet you don't believe I ain't mad,” he said. “That's a fine thing—you knock a woman down and then you tell her you ain't mad.”

She lay weeping openly, uncaring how grotesque her face must be. She knew why he had pushed her down. He had pushed her down, this simple-minded woman, because she had turned her face
toward him as toward the sun. Who had ever seen before that Naomi Costigan was a woman with a heart in her breast? He had pushed her down because she had made a mistake, because he was only a pale and shaky itinerant drunk, and she ought to have known. She ought to have known even from the start, even from the nights of love, and at last his contempt for her for not knowing threw her to the floor.

“Don't cry, Naomi,” he said, kissing the soles of her feet. “I'm not going, don't cry.”

So small his allotment of love! It seemed to her that each person at birth was granted an allotment of love to give to someone, or to two, or to three, or to the world, but how small his allotment of love! She didn't know how to measure other persons' love for her, like her mother's, like Cort's, but this man's was like Hal's. Her brother ran out on everybody, and this man was running out. They had the least to give. The least. Humbly, he was massaging her feet, his hands small and cold and straining to be of help, but her feet were numb to his hands, and her ears were deaf to his voice. She was transforming him into nothing, so that when he was gone no one would be missing.

8

D
olores returned to her parents' house four years after she had left it. When she climbed down from the bus, her father, waiting in the alleyway where the buses came in, embraced her. “Don't look at me,” she said.

“Hell,” he said, walking her solicitously to his car, arm around her, “you look like you ate too many kumquats. You took sick from kumquats when you were a kid.”

The bedroom off the kitchen was waiting for her, curtains, spread, rug all new, all blue, a color she had turned against, along with ruffles. She took off her clothes that were saturated with the bus fumes and the sweat of her illness, slipped on a nightgown, lay down, and slept at once, slept on an immense airy bed of relief and return, wakened over and over by tormenting dreams.

At seven, her mother came home and into the bedroom on the soundless rubber-soled oxfords she wore at work. Dolores had seen her parents several times in the years she had been way, when they had come up to the city to visit her, but her mother's face, this time, was glaringly older. The fever must be doing crazy things to her eyes. Her mother bent over her, covering her face with kisses. “It's all right,
I'm immune,” her mother said. “Bugs run the other way.”

For weeks she lay in bed, waiting for recovery. Evenings, she watched her parents in the kitchen, an audience of one observing two actors on the stage. They had lived in marriage for twenty-five years and if someone were to ask them to sing just one note, each choosing one, they would sing the same note, she was sure. The girl in the bed denied any accomplishment in their similarity. Two persons, almost fifty years old, who had never lived in any other city, who had never held other lovers in their arms, what did they know? Something more than she knew, or less? One afternoon, sleeping, she heard the vast silence in which the neighborhood was set. Not since those last moments between herself and the man in the shack on the beach had she been surrounded by so much meaningful silence, and she listened for the breaking of the wave. But this silence belonged to a time farther back, this was the silence that surrounded Hal Costigan. Calling for her mother, she woke herself completely to the fact that it was early afternoon in her parents' house with nobody home yet.

When she began to recover, she took short walks to the drugstore and looked into the magazines, and she sat in the shade of the trees in the backyard and knit a sweater for her father, and she planted flowers, day by day, gradually, and when she felt strong enough, a girlfriend got her a job in a cocktail bar, working two hours on weekend evenings. She had her hair cut and curled and tinted red. She wore her filmy blouses and cinched her wide gold-leather belt tight around her waist. After a few weekends of parrying with the customers, she began an affair with a man older than herself and married, like most of the other men she'd been with. She went to meet him in vacant apartments and houses that he, as realtor, was agent for. He was big—football-player size—and that size, along with his deep blue eyes edged by thick black lashes, impressed the women shopping for homes with their husbands. His office chalked up more sales than any other in town, he told her.

Because she knew the affair would end, she began to imagine herself desperately in love with him. As always, there had to be some meaning to the time with a man. The meaninglessness of each time was like a sin for which there was no name. She repeated to him his criticism of his wife, and her caresses were promises to be the wife he ought to have. She held to him on mattresses that he covered with an old, faded spread he kept in his car, and begged him to love her.

On the day that was to be the last day, he was already in the apartment when she arrived. He was at the table in the dining room, reading the evening paper, his coat off, his feet up on a chair. He did not greet her. He was concentrating on something in the news and on the secret use he was going to make of it. She went into the bathroom to see again how her hair was done, cut again and curled again and tinted red again, and the sight of herself in the mirror evoked the many mirrors in the beauty salon, where she had just been, and all the reflected faces, hers among them, seemed, in memory, like participants in a plot that would net them nothing. She went into the kitchen to open the cartons he'd brought.

“You ever see such stupidity?” he called. “God! If you can't do it yourself, then don't do it at all. Here the guy hires a two-bit gangster to do the job for him and not only does he fumble it, he's a witness against him, he sits up there and says Dr. Dick hired me to do it. So it's just like hiring a witness against you, that's what it comes down to.” He read on for a minute. “What's crazy about the whole thing is this—here the guy wants to do away with his wife so he won't have to give her half his fortune when he gets a divorce, and now, boy, he won't have a penny left if he goes free. The lawyers'll get it all. That's what I should have been, a criminal attorney, get hired by all the guys who murder their wives.” He had a loud, easy laugh that came from down in his chest.

She spooned the delicatessen food onto the paper plates, not answering. His ridicule of the man on trial was another way, a final
way, of telling her how impossible it was for a man to free himself of a vengeful wife.

“What's the matter? You sore at me?” he asked.

While they ate, he talked on about the trial. He took his time when he ate, chewing with his big jaw, his mouth closed as his parents had taught him, his blue eyes pleased with the food and with the details of the trial that he was relating between the long, slow bouts of chewing. Over the coffee and cake, he said, “If you had in mind to do something like that, you couldn't ask your wife for a divorce because it would cast suspicion on you. If I'd ask Laurie, she'd tell her mother, she'd tell all her friends, she'd tell her auntie. The best way is to be lovey-dovey, the best way is to leave off seeing the girl for, say, two, three months, maybe a year, get close to your wife again. . . .”

“Go back to her!” she screamed. “You never left her so it won't be so goddamn hard to crawl into her bed again.” With the back of her hand she knocked her empty paper cup off the table.

“The tenants,” he cautioned.

“Everybody's stunted! Your Dr. Dick is stunted and his mistress is stunted and even the poor wife who got done in because she wanted all she could get, she was stunted, and the goddamn judge who has to sit there and judge, he's stunted, and all the jurors. Everybody is.”

“Everybody is,” he said, agreeably.

Lying beside him on the bed, knowing that this was the last time, she told him about Hal Costigan. She said that the man had been in love with her and had killed himself because of the scandal. She said that she was seventeen then and beautiful, as if she were old now, a remark to remind him that she was as beautiful now as ever and young enough to be his daughter. Voice breaking, she told the story into his ear, and she knew by the tension in his body that he was listening differently from the man in the beach shack. He was lying on his back, gazing up at the ceiling, listening closely, and when he turned to her she knew that she was as exciting for him as she
had been their first night. The shame she felt over her version of the tragic, unknowable story of another man's suicide was effaced by the flaring up of her desire for this one.

When she left, he was sleeping so heavily he seemed to be sleeping away the density of his body, an infinitesimal amount with each exhalation. She covered him with the side of the spread that she had been lying on. The room was warm, the wall heater was on, but she could not leave him exposed in his nakedness. She put on her clothes, and, when she closed the door, she tried the knob over and over to make certain it was locked.

The apartments opened onto a small square court paved with dark red Mexican tile, spikey cactus plants in the corners. She went on tiptoe across the court, her high heels ringing only now and then on the tiles, and walked along the dark street toward her own neighborhood a mile away. On this street with its few dim lamps and overgrown shrubbery, she was back in the city of her childhood. She felt her return more than she had felt it on the day she lay down again in her own bed in her parents' house, because now Hal Costigan was close beside her again. She had called him up, back on the mattress, to make use of him in the living present, and here he was, beside her again and of no use to her at all. What he had done to himself made her all or made her nothing, and she had clung to the belief that it had made her all, because the other belief was unbearable—
to be nothing, to be nothing.
What he had done to himself told her she was nothing and everybody nothing and the world nothing.

A need to be consoled by her parents grew stronger the closer she came to their home. Her suspicions about her parents, about monotony, about each one's loss in the hope of gain, were blotted out by her need to be consoled. The door was left unlocked, sometimes, and tonight she saw a meaning in that negligence. It was natural, strangely natural, to live without fear of harm or loss. She went on to their bedroom, turning on no lights along the way, and paused in the doorway,
calling softly to her mother.