She filled our two plates and then sat down across from me, smoothing her skirt beneath her. Her thighs, I thought, would be very pale and soft and fleshy. I stared at her like someone in a trance, till she asked me, “How’s the stew?”
“Oh! Delicious,” I said, although I hadn’t yet tasted it.
She raised her wineglass. “To us,” she said.
“To us,” I repeated.
The way she served wine tickled me: one glass for each of us with each dinner, already poured beforehand. Me, I was used to drinking either not at all or far too much. This moderation business was a whole new approach.
Upstairs, the roommate’s shoes were creaking back and forth. I heard a door slam, then a drawer bang shut. “Is she mad about something?” I asked Sophia.
Sophia shrugged, which was answer enough.
“She thinks I’m a loser, doesn’t she.”
“Heavens, no! Why do you say that?”
I sliced into a chunk of potato and said, “She’s pointed out to you that I’m basically no more than a manual laborer. That I have the fashion sense of a Hell’s Angel, and my prospects for advancement are flat zero. Right?”
Sophia flushed and looked down at her bosom again.
“Not to mention I hold the title of World’s Oldest Living Undergraduate,” I said. Then I said, “Hey. You didn’t tell her about the Renascence School and all that, did you?”
“Certainly not,” Sophia said.
Even Sophia didn’t know everything; just the more dashing highlights. We were in that stage where we were formally presenting each other with our pasts: Sophia’s prim, Mary-Janed childhood, my nefarious adolescence. I liked the fondly nostalgic way she said, “When I was a little girl…,” and she liked the fact that I’d have struck her as slightly scary if she had met me in my teens. “You were one of those boys who hung around the corner in packs,” she’d surmised. “Who piled twelve deep in a car and hooted out the windows. Who smelled of cigarettes when they brushed by me on the sidewalk.”
“Oh, I never cared much for cigarettes,” I’d told her. “I preferred to smoke the harder stuff.”
Just to see her expression of thrilled horror.
Now she said, “Betty’s merely a roommate. I got her name off a bulletin board. What do I care what she thinks?”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s not true that I have no prospects — I mean, if I wanted prospects. I could always get a job at Dad’s foundation. Does Betty know about the Foundation?”
“I believe I did happen to mention it,” Sophia said.
“Also, I’ve held the same one job for almost eleven years,” I said. “That’s more than you can say for a lot of other guys.”
Sophia reached across the table and laid a hand over mine. “Barnaby,” she said. “It’s fine. Whatever you do. Really.”
I squeezed her fingers.
Granted, Sophia wasn’t the type I’d fallen for in the past. She was luxuriously padded, and she carried herself from the hips in a settled and matronly manner. She probably weighed more than I did, in fact, but I found this sexy. It made me conscious of my own wiriness, and the springy, electric energy in the muscles of my legs. Sitting on that vinyl chair, I had all I could do not to leap up and fling myself across the table. But I stayed where I was and just smiled at her, and then I speared a cube of beef.
After supper, we moved to the living room. We settled on her sofa, surrounded by dried flower arrangements and frilled glass candy dishes, and started kissing. Once we drew apart when we heard footsteps crossing the upstairs hall, but it was a false alarm and we resumed where we’d left off. I stroked her creamy skin and I cupped her lush, heavy breasts in the circle-stitched cotton bra that I could feel through the silk of her blouse. When Betty’s footsteps crossed the hall again, we had to separate in a hurry and straighten our clothes.
I told Sophia she should come to my place. She turned pink; she knew what I was asking. She said, “Well, maybe soon. Give me a little more time.” I didn’t push it. I almost preferred it this way for now. I left her house whistling. I imagined she’d be slipping into a quilted bathrobe exactly like her roommate’s, and scrubbing her face, and brushing her teeth, and settling down for the night in her four-poster bed.
It always seemed to happen that we lost a lot of our older folks at the tail end of winter. Just when the worst of the weather was behind us, when you’d think a person would be gathering strength and looking forward to spring, why, we’d get a sudden call from a relative, or we’d find a week’s worth of newspapers littering a client’s lawn. During the first half of March, Mrs. Gordoni went into the hospital and didn’t come out again; Mr. Quentin succumbed to whatever illness he’d been battling for the past six years (he’d never named it, and we weren’t supposed to ask); and Mr. Cartwright died of a heart attack. Now I took Mrs. Cartwright shopping all on her own, and she was very different — wavery and bewildered. Funny: I had thought he was the dependent one in that couple. But you never know. I took her to the grocery store and she walked the aisles with this testing sort of posture, placing the balls of her feet just so, as if she were wading a creek. “Isn’t it ridiculous,” she told me, “how even in the face of death it still matters that the price of oranges has gone up, and an impolite produce boy can still hurt your feelings.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I steered her toward the dairy case.
I thought about one time when I’d driven the Cartwrights to a pharmacy and Mr. Cartwright had paused in the doorway to announce, “This used to be a pharmacy!” in his loud, impervious, hard-of-hearing voice, and the other shoppers had all raised their heads and looked around them for a second, plainly wondering what it was now, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he was objecting to the heaps of extraneous merchandise, the beach chairs and electric blenders pharmacies seemed to stock these days. Maybe he was just confused. At any rate, remembering the slight jolt that had rippled through the store made me smile, and Mrs. Cartwright glanced up at me just then and happened to notice. I worried she’d be offended, but instead she smiled too. “You’re a good boy, Barnaby,” she said.
None of my customers had the least inkling of my true nature.
Then Mrs. Beeton died — that nice black lady whose children always fussed so. First I knew of it, I telephoned to see if I should pick up any groceries on my way to her house, and her daughter was the one who answered. Said, “Hello, Barnaby!” and chatted awhile, cheery as you please. Not a clue about her mother. Finally I said, “Could I talk to Mrs. Beeton a minute?” A silence. Then she said, “Let me give you to my husband, okay?” And her husband got on the line — a man I’d never met. “My mother-in-law has passed as of yesterday morning,” he told me. I guess her daughter just couldn’t say the words.
I’d always admired Mrs. Beeton. She had such a sweet, chuckly face, and this attractive darker outline to her upper lip. Dirt was her personal enemy. Let her catch sight of a cobweb and she would not rest until she’d killed it dead.
And then Maud May broke her hip and had to go to a nursing home. Maud May! My Tallulah client, with her movie-star cigarette holder and her pitchers of martinis and her drawling, leathery voice. I visited her to get instructions — which plants needed watering and so forth — because she swore this was not a permanent state of affairs. “No Vegetable Villa for me,” she said; that was what she called nursing homes. “I’m getting out of here if I have to crawl on my hands and knees.” Then she dropped to a whisper and asked me to bring her a carton of Marlboros. “Sure thing, Ms. May,” I told her. (We’re the muscles, not the brains.) But I sounded cockier than I felt. She’d given me a start, lying there so helpless. Why, Maud May was my foreign correspondent, you might call it, from the country of old age. She had this way of reporting on it in a distant, amused tone. “I used to think old age would make me more patient,” she’d told me once, “but instead I find, oh, Gawd, it’s turned me into a grouch.” And another time: “Everybody claims to venerate older women, but when I ask what for, they all mention things like herbal medicine, and I can’t tell an herb from a mule’s ass.”