She nodded her head, politely believing him. Then, cautiously, she started homing in on what was, for her, the issue. “And Leda, how is she, poor thing?”
“Leda is fine, Viola.”
“She’s getting out of the house, then?”
“Well no, not often. Sometimes we take her up to the roof for a bit of air. It’s closer than the street.”
“Ah, the pain!” Mrs. Galban murmured with swift, professional sympathy that the years had not been able to blunt. Indeed, it was probably better exercised now than when she’d been an aide at Bellevue. “You don’t have to explain—I know it can be so awful, can’t it, pain like that, and there’s so little any of us can do. But…” she added, before Ab could turn aside the final thrust, “… we must do that little if we can.”
“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” Ab insisted.
Mrs. Galban’s look was meant to be understood as reproachful in a sad, helpless way, but even Ab could sense the calculations going on behind the brown, cataracted eyes. Was this, she asked herself, worth pursuing? Would Ab bite?
In the first years of Leda’s invalidism Ab had picked up extra Dilaudin suppositories from Mrs. Galban, who specialized in analgesics. Most of her clients were other old women whom she met in the out-patient waiting room at the hospital. Ab had bought the Dilaudin more as a favor to the old pusher than from any real need, since he got all the morphine that Leda needed from the interns for next to nothing.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Mrs. Galban lamented quietly, staring into her seventy-eight-year-old lap. “A terrible thing.”
What the hell, Ab thought. It wasn’t as if he were broke.
“Hey, Gabby, you wouldn’t have any of those things I used to get for Leda, would you? Those what-you-call-ums?”
“Well, Ab, since you ask … ”
Ab got a package of five suppositories for nine dollars, which was twice the going price, even here on the playground. Mrs. Galban evidently thought Ab a fool.
As soon as he’d given her the money, he felt comfortably unobligated. Walking off he could curse her with buoyant resentment. The old bitch would have to live a damned long time before he ever bought any more plugs off her.
Usually Ab never made the connection between the two worlds he inhabited, this one out here and the Bellevue morgue, but now, having actively wished Viola Galban dead, it struck him that the odds were strong that he’d be the one who’d shove her in the oven. The death of anyone (anyone, that is, whom Ab had known alive) was a depressing idea, and he shrugged it away. At the far edge of his shrug, for the barest instant, he saw the young, pretty face of Bobbi Newman.
The need to buy something was suddenly a physical necessity, as though his wad of bills had become that cock and had to be jerked off after a week-long abstinence.
He bought a lemon ice, his first ice of the year, and strolled among the stalls, touching the goods with thick, sticky fingers, asking prices, making jokes. Everywhere the vendors hailed him by his name when they saw him approach. There was nothing, so rumor would have it, that Ab Holt couldn’t be talked into buying.
2
Ab looked at his two hundred and fourteen pounds of wife from the doorway. Wrinkled blue sheets were wound round her legs and stomach, but her breasts hung loose. “They’re prizewinners to this day,” Ab thought affectionately. Any feelings he still had for Leda were focused there, just as any pleasure she got when he was on top of her came from the squeezing of his hands, the biting of his teeth. Where the sheets were wrapped round her, however, she could feel nothing—except, sometimes, pain.
After a while Ab’s attention woke Leda up, the way a magnifying glass, focusing on a dry leaf, will start it smoldering.
He threw the package of suppositories onto the bed. “That’s for you.”
“Oh.” Leda opened the package, sniffed at one of the wax cylinders suspiciously. “Oh?”
“It’s Dilaudin. I ran into that Mrs. Galban at the market, and she wouldn’t get off my back till I’d bought something.”
“I was afraid for a moment you might have got it on my account. Thanks. What’s in the other bag, an enema bottle for our anniversary?”
Ab showed her the wig he’d bought for Beth. It was a silly, four-times-removed imitation of the Egyptian style made popular by a now-defunct TV series. To Leda it looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a box of Xmas wrapping, and she was certain it would look the same way to her daughter.
“My God,” she said.
“Well, it’s what the kids are wearing now” Ab said doubtfully. It no longer looked the same to him. He brought it over to the wedge of sunlight by the bedroom’s open window and tried to shake a bit more glitter into it. The metallic strings, rubbed against each other, made soft squeaking sounds.
“My God,” she said again. Her annoyance had almost betrayed her into asking him what he’d paid for it. Since the epochal argument beneath the plane tree she never discussed money matters with Ab. She didn’t want to hear how he spent his money or how he earned it. She especially didn’t want to know how he earned it, since she had, anyhow, a fair idea.
She contented herself with an insult. “You’ve got the discrimination of a garbage truck, and if you think Beth will let herself be seen in that ridiculous, obscene piece of junk, well… !” She pushed at the mattress until she was sitting almost upright. Both Leda and the bed breathed heavily.
“How would you know what people are wearing outside this apartment? There were hundreds of these fucking things all over the playground. It’s what the kids are wearing now. What the fuck.”
“It’s ugly. You bought your daughter an ugly wig. You have every right to, I suppose.”
“Ugly—isn’t that what you used to say about everything Milly wore? All those things with buttons. And the hats! It’s a stage they go through. You were probably just the same, if you could remember that long ago.”
“Oh, Milly! You’re always holding Milly up as though she were some kind of example! Milly never had any idea how—” Leda gave a gasp. Her pain. She pressed her hand flat against the roll of flesh to the side of her right breast, where she thought her liver might be. She closed her eyes trying to locate the pain, which had vanished.
Ab waited till Leda was paying attention to him again. Then, very deliberately, he threw the tinselly wig out the open window. Thirty dollars, he thought, just like that.
The manufacturer’s tag fluttered to the floor. A pink oval with italic letters: Nephertiti Creations.
With an inarticulate cry Leda swiveled sideways in bed till she’d made both feet touch the floor. She stood up. She took two steps and reached out for the window frame to steady herself.
The wig lay in the middle of the street eighteen floors below. Against the gray concrete it looked dazzlingly bright. A Tastee Bread truck backed up over it.
Since there was no reproach she might have made that didn’t boil down to a charge of his throwing away money, she said nothing. The unspoken words whirled round inside her, a plague-bearing wind that ruffled the wasted muscles of her legs and back like so many tattered flags. The wind died and the flags went limp.
Ab was ready behind her. He caught her as she fell and laid her back on the bed, wasting not a motion, smooth as a tango dip. It seemed almost accidental that his hands should be under her breasts. Her mouth opened and he put his own mouth across it, sucking the breath from her lungs.
Anger was their aphrodisiac. Over the years the interval between fighting and fucking had grown shorter and shorter. They scarcely bothered any longer to differentiate the two processes. Already his cock was stiff. Already she’d begun to moan her rhythmic protest against the pleasure or the pain, whichever it was. As his left hand kneaded the warm dough of her breasts, his right hand pulled off his shoes and pants. The years of invalidism had given her lax flesh a peculiar virginal quality, as though each time he went into her he was awakening her from an enchanted, innocent sleep. There was a kind of sourness about her too, a smell that seeped from her pores only at these times, the way maples yield sap only at the depth of the winter. Eventually he’d learned to like it.