Here Bruce collapsed laughing, finally losing his glasses.
"God, honey, I said, what happened to your teeth?
She said, Nothing. I looked again and her teeth were there, but they were so dark you could barely see them. They were little stubs, all gunky and black."
"Like a bunch of sardines, or something," Bruce managed to get out, and whether it was truly funny or if I'd succumbed to the power of the archive, it struck me as the funniest remark I'd ever heard.
When we left, Hazel and Bruce remained seated at the picnic table and waved at us as we walked ourselves out of the house. The last thing I saw was Bruce pushing his glasses and Hazel kissing him on the cheek with her smacky lips full of overfresh lipstick.
On the way home I got the notion that we'd just gone to a play together, that this was sort of the kind of entertainment Mary had in mind if we went to Florida, and that I'd had a little audition myself with Mary watching me all afternoon. I now had apparently proved myself a worthy audience for the road show we would take in.
Mary and I sat out again in the oilcloth chaise, kissing like teenagers, her throat a soft, firm, pipey thing that amazed me more than anything had that day. I suppose I mean to say that Mary amazed me, but it was things smaller than the whole proposition that kept riveting me-her throat, her skin, her flowers, her smooth idle days, her nut friends, her no-bio. Her liquory, solid taste and lack of babble. It was the first time I'd ever been involved with someone without a large measure of something like dependence obtaining-"emotional dependence," the university psychiatrist called it when I consulted him about my growing European phone debt-and I say this of course realizing that I was by election almost dependent upon her in two weeks for even the food I ate. We were not maneuvering one another, we were striking no contracts, tacit or implicit. We were, to my mind, free to like each other and that was that. As I say, I found this amazing and still do. We could smell the entire garden, cool and breezeless.
"Florida has palms with T-shirt monkeys with rattle eyes climbing them, bombing Yankee white trash with coconuts," Mary suddenly offered.
"They have Yankee white trash?"
"Sure. Wear Bermuda shorts and long socks and hard shoes."
I took this to mean we were indeed going, and pretty soon. Leaving with her in her stagecoach Mercury seemed as radical as staying in her house by myself, but I supposed the going was just one more moment in the reaction series of life I had decided to subscribe to, so I told myself I'd best prepare to arrive in Florida dressed as the husband of a widow I knew not too well. If it was not pure coincidence that I read of Havana Carlisle one day and met Hav-A-Tampa Bruce the next, then elemental forces decidedly beyond my control were at work.
I was not far wrong. Mary's pace in the garden changed, and she began transplanting some small camellias from a nursery bed to a permanent terrace. In general she started moving about like a nesting bird putting this here and that there. I decided to do something about my room.
I must have gotten a look of cogitation on about giving up my own place, because Mary suddenly called from twenty yards away, "What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing. Sorting things out."
"Please don't," she said, and went on with the camellias.
I went straight to Bilbo's and had coffee and found Ebert. He gave me a look of mock amazement. "Am I seen you today or tamarr? I thought you retire?"
"Been busy."
"I know. Shack up."
"Right. Get cleaned up and come with me."
"Not the Car Wash."
"No."
We went to my old room. I found James, the janitor, who called himself the factotum, and who was arguably the only normal human being in the place. When he initially showed me the room, he conducted himself not unlike a porter at the best hotel in the world, opening the door for me, crossing the room and opening the window, standing back to let me approve of everything. "You got a good view," he said.
The view was of an adjacent building's roof with a compressor on it. With a deafening screech, the compressor engaged. He did not flinch; he took a deep, satisfying breath, as if showing me the quality of good mountain air. "That radiator works," he said, "but the furnace does not," and laughed. "I am James, the factotum." Here he paused, as if to let me comprehend things, and I believe I did: for $85 a month, a man with a title like factotum would not be asked to fix anything like a furnace.
"Guy moved out down the hall," he then said, a bit conspiratorily, as though confident that I'd gotten his meaning so far and we could now begin to be intimate. "Come on."
I followed him to another room, in which he showed me a cardboard box. In it were some books on Freud and a snorkel and mask. "You can have this shit," he said. "She will not know a thing about it." I would learn that "she" was the manager, whose desires and requests James took some pleasure in contravening.
My accepting the books and swim mask was, I believe, my acceptance of his terms of operation, his not fixing things and grand title.
So I got James up to the room and introduced him to Ebert.
"Nice suit," James said, indicating my powder-blue togs.
"Cold," Ebert said. "You a cold brother." James ignored him-I think he consciously repudiated all black blackness.
"James," I said, "all this shit is yours, and give Ebert what of it he'd like."
"What?"
"I'm through with this stuff."
"You are what?"
"There's that snorkel the other dude left. I'm leaving everything in here with it."
This felt wonderful, though at bottom it made me nervous: it was a room packed full of the dear trash we all get attached to, and you usually require a fire or a Hood to rid yourself of it.
Ebert said, "Man, what you mean?"
James said, "Yes. I believe he is disturbed." He had a penchant for well-enunciated, and sometimes abstract, speech. "It is a complex thing," he added. "I am amazed and amused."
Ebert picked up my basketball and palmed it aloft. "Man can't give all his shit away."
"You want that basketball? It's new."
"I see it new," Ebert said, using the emphasis to reinforce his assessment that I had cracked. He looked at the photograph of Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski taped over my desk.
"This your chick," he said. He thumped it.
"You can have that, too."
"I don't even know her."
"I don't either."
James laughed at this and walked to the window from which he had shown me the view. Something in his attitude there suggested he had accepted the estate: the trip to the window was a sidelong inventory of the trouble and value of the inheritance.
Ebert dribbled the basketball, thundering the old, hardwood floors.
"Cut that out," James said. "Pick what you want."
"Take this off your hand," Ebert said, holding the ball. "And this." He got an electric alarm clock. "You a trip."
James and I were by this point in a line, high, ineffable conspiracy. I was feeling physically lighter, and he was calculating profit, the overwhelming return on the worthless books and snorkel he had initially invested with me. He had categorized the stuff into boxed trash and pawnable goods.
"Fellows, it's been real," I said. James gave me a limp, earnest handshake. "Good lucks," he said. It was perhaps the only anomaly of speech I ever heard out of him, and I would not presume to call it an error, for it could have been his own correctly grammatical way of saying there are several kinds of luck.
"You too, James."