“I’m making lentil soup,” she said, turning to the stove and peering into a cast-iron pot. In the bulky sweater Kim looked plump and wifely; she who was so thin that Harry would sometimes clean and jerk her over his head and spin around calling, “Choppers! Incoming wounded!” At the time she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. “This’ll be the last lentil soup of the winter, I guess.”
“Looks like it.”
“You can have some when it’s ready.”
“Thanks.”
“If you promise not to mention Harry.”
“I can promise that,” I said.
The old pink radio on the kitchen table emitted a familiar promo. Two bars of the psycho-kazoo opening to “Crosstown Traffic,” followed by the synthesized effect of a starship’s landing, and then my own voice, filtered and phased, sounding as though I were a twenty-seven-foot black man about to get very angry. “WDAN!” said my disturbing voice. “Huge Music!”
“You’re the one who listens,” I said. In general I pretended that it did not trouble me to labor in the ratings cellar, but at the discovery that Kim tuned in to that doomed little station, I was moved and took it as incontestable proof of her rightness for me.
“Harry makes me,” she said.
She carefully straddled a kitchen chair and motioned for me to do the same. I sat. I looked at the ashtray between us, in which there were fifteen or sixteen bent butts. Kim smoked far too much, even for a waitress. Now she lit another.
“I’m going to have to stop,” she said, in a sad little voice, as though it had never occurred to her before.
“Sure you are.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Was he trashed when you got home?”
“Oh, no, not really,” I said.
“Don’t lie.”
“He was breaking my mother’s dishes in the basement.”
“Oh, boy.”
“And he had the heat on.”
She put down her cigarette, and her brown eyes got very wide and surprised.
Then she laughed, without sarcasm, with a happiness so genuine that I was taken aback. It was deep and caroling laughter, and it seemed to invite me to turn Harry, the idea of Harry, into a risible fool, to flatten him into a cartoon character and laugh him right out of her affections. This was the simple task before me.
“What’s so funny?” I said; the question sounded more harsh than I had intended.
“Nothing,” said Kim. She looked down at the coal of her cigarette and bit her lip.
“Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby,” I said. I went over to her chair and knelt on the floor beside her. She sat, looking at her cigarette and calmly crying. I didn’t know why she was crying, whether because Harry was gone or because I was still there, but I felt very sorry for her. Once in a while you will see a waitress like that, crying at the back of a restaurant or in the hallway by the phone, staring down at a monogrammed matchbook in her fingers, and consider for a second or two the untold hardness of a waitress’s life. I reached around and pulled her to me. There followed the briefest of struggles before she fell sprawling into my arms.
“Come with me,” she said, after a minute or two. She stood and led me down the hallway and into her bedroom. Her gait was too brisk to be seductive; she had some business to attend to. I had been in her bedroom many times before, had felt the thrill of seeing her white bedclothes and rows of empty shoes, but never with this acute a sense of being suffered, like a smelly old dog on a miserable night, just this once allowed to sleep indoors, on the still warm hearth — of being such a lucky dog.
On her bed there stood a large cardboard Seagram’s box, taped shut, and bearing, in Harry’s antic handwriting, the Magic Marketed label TREASURE.
“What’s in the box?” I said.
“I have no idea.” She looked at it as though it might go off any second. “He brought it over yesterday after work. Will you give it back to him for me?”
“He didn’t say what was in it?”
“I didn’t ask. I stopped asking questions about his junk a long time ago.”
“Because you didn’t love him anymore,” I said, taking hold of her chin and drawing her to my lips. At this mild demonstration of amorous force — an effect I have never been adept at pulling off — she put her knee into my stomach, firmly, and I fell gasping to the floor.
“I will always love Harry,” said Kim. “I will always, always love Harry.”
“I understand that,” I said.
“I’m sorry I kicked you.”
“Thanks,” I said, getting up. “I’m sorry, too. It was just all that kissing we did back there in the kitchen.”
“Sure it was.”
“Wait here,” I said. I sighed, as much to catch my breath as to register my impatience with her and with Harry’s goddam toys, then picked up the cardboard box and carried it out of the room.
“I know what to do with it,” I called over my shoulder.
“What?” she said, with a strange furrow in her voice. She followed me out of the door and laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. “What are you going to do with it? Vince?”
“You’ll see.”
The box was a good deal heavier than it looked, and I wondered, as I bore it out of the kitchen door and down the back steps, what might be in it, and why Harry had packed it all up in this way and left it sitting on Kim Trilby’s bed. The sun was still shining, there in the backyard amid the skinny poplars and the rusted-out Kelvinator with its door chained shut, and it was going to be a beautiful afternoon. I set the treasure down on the brittle grass and went into the cellar, where I had left the battered old spade I’d used to shovel the walk all that winter, ostensibly for the benefit of Kim’s upstairs landlady, Mrs. Colodny, who afterward would always feed me frozen kishkes from the KosherMart. The spade in question had got hidden, I saw, behind a stack of Harry’s boxes marked BEEHIVE PANELS and G.I. JOE HEADS in the far corner, but I got it out and went straight to work.
“Come on, Vince,” said Kim, calling to me from the back steps of her apartment. “That’s Mrs. Colodny’s dirt you’re messing up. Hey, Vince, come on. I get it, O.K.?”
I grinned at her and kept on. Digging is one of the most difficult of boring chores, if I have not transposed the adjectives, and it took me a good fifteen minutes of sweating and cursing, but when I finished I was wet and hot and exhilarated and the thing was three feet under the ground. Kim stayed where she was, hugging herself in that loose sweater and lighting a third cigarette with her second. I leaned on the spade, and for a moment we regarded one another across the lawn. I didn’t know what I had proved, exactly, and she probably didn’t know what had impressed her, but I had proved something, and she looked impressed. I let the spade fall, went to her, and rested my head against the doorjamb, breathing hard, and waited for Kim to throw herself, without regret, without apprehension, into my faithless embrace.
“What happens to it now?” she said, staring bitterly out into the sunny backyard at the black patch of earth I had uncovered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that would depend on what it is.” Perhaps, I speculated guiltily, Harry had packed up every note I’d ever left him, and all of the baseball cards and Playboys I had bought him when his asthma got bad, and the cigar box of ancient Inuit teeth from my trip to Alaska that he’d said he needed, and the French edition of Tropic of Cancer labeled, thrillingly, “Not to be taken into the U.S.A.,” which I’d picked up for him at the Bryn Mawr-Vassar bookstore on Winthrop Street one day. There might have been some pretty swell stuff in that box; I realized that.