Well, he laughed and sat down and they got to talking and before long he was meeting her there every afternoon at five while her husband moaned and fretted over last-minute rush jobs and his wife drank herself into oblivion in her own kitchen. And when that moment came — their first embrace — she reached out for his arms as if she were drowning.
But now the screen flickered and The Furious Hours gave way to Riddle Street and she eased back in her chair, the vodka and soda at her lips like recirculated blood flowing back into her, and watched as the heroine — one of the towering sluts of daytime television — carved up another man.
The funny thing was that nothing hurt, or not particularly or any more than usual, what with the arthritis in both knees and the unreconstructed hernia that felt as if some animal was living under his skin and clawing to get out — no, he hadn’t broken anything, he was pretty sure of that. But there was something wrong with him. Desperately wrong. Or why else would he be lying here on his back listening to the grass grow while the clouds became ghosts in winding sheets and fled away to nothing and the sun burned the skin right off his face?
Maybe he was dying, maybe that was it. The thought didn’t alarm him, not especially, not yet, but it was there, a hard little bolus of possibility lodged in his brain. He moved the fingers of his right hand, one by one, just to see if the signals still carried that far, and then he tried the other side, the left, and realized after a long moment that there was nothing there, nothing he could feel, anyway. Something whispered in his ear — a single word, stroke—and that was when he began to be afraid. He heard a car go by on the street out front of the house, the soughing of the tires, the clank of the undercarriage, the smooth fuel-injected suck of the engine. “Help!” he cried. “Somebody help!”
And then he was looking up into the lace of the pepper tree and remembering a moment on a bus forty-five years ago, some anonymous stop in Kansas or Nebraska, and he on his way to California for the first time and every good thing awaiting him. An old man got on, dazed and scrawny and with a long whittled pole of a neck and a tattered straw hat set way back on his head, and he just stood there in the middle of the aisle as if he didn’t know where he was. Walt was twenty-nine, he’d been in the service and college too, and he wasn’t acquainted with any old people or any dead people, either — not since the war, anyway. He lifted weights two hours every morning, rain or shine, hot or cold, sick or well, and the iron suffused him with its power like some magic potion.
He looked up at the old man and the old man looked right through him. That was when the driver, oblivious, put the bus in gear and the old man collapsed in his shiny worn suit like a puppet with the strings cut. No one seemed to know what to do, the mother with her mewling baby, the teenager with the oversized shoes, the two doughy old hens with the rolled-in-butter smiles fixed on their faces, but Walt came up out of his seat automatically and pulled the old man to his feet, and it was as if the old guy wasn’t even there, nothing more than a suit stuffed with wadding — he could have propped up ten old men, a hundred, because he was a product of iron and the iron flowed through his veins and swelled his muscles till there was nothing he couldn’t do.
Eunice refreshed her drink twice during Riddle Street, and then she sat through the next program with her eyes closed, not asleep — she couldn’t sleep anymore, sleep was a dream, a fantasy, the dimmest recollection out of an untroubled past — but in a state suspended somewhere between consciousness and its opposite. The sound of a voice, a strange voice, speaking right to her, brought her out of it—It was amazing, just as if she knew me and my whole life and she told me I was going to come into some money soon, and I did, and the very next day I met the man of my dreams—and the first thing she focused on was her husband’s empty chair. Now where had he got himself off to? Maybe he’d gone to lie down, maybe that was it. Or maybe he was in the kitchen, his big arms that always seemed to be bleeding pinioning the wings of the newspaper, a pencil in his big blunt fingers, his drink like liquid gold in the light through the window and the crossword all scratched over with his black, glistening scrawl. Those were skin cancers on his arms, she knew that, tiny dots of fresh wet blood stippling the places where his muscles used to be, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t care. It was like his hernia. “I’m going to be dead soon, anyway,” he said, and that got her down, it did, that he should talk like that. “How can you talk like that?” she’d say, and he’d throw it right back at her. “Why not? What have I got to live for?” And she’d blink at him, trying desperately to focus, because if she couldn’t focus she couldn’t give him a look, all pouty and frowning, like Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. “For me, baby,” she’d say. “For me.”
The idea of the kitchen sent her there, a little shaky on her feet after sitting so long, and her ankles weren’t helping, not at all — it felt as if somebody’d snuck in and wrapped truck tires around them while she sat watching her programs. The kitchen was glowing, the back windows glazed with sun, and all the clutter of their last few half-eaten meals invested with a purity and beauty that took her breath away and made her feel like crying, the caramel of the maple syrup bottle and the blue of the Windex and red of the ketchup as vibrant and natural there as flowers in a field. It was a pretty kitchen, the prettiest kitchen in the world. Or it had been once. They’d remodeled in ’66—or was it ’69? Double aluminum sink, self-cleaning oven, cabinets in solid oak and no cheap lamination, thank you very much. She’d loved that kitchen. It was a kitchen that made her feel loved in return, a place she could retreat to after all the personal nastiness and gossip at the library and wait for her man to come home from coaching football or basketball or whatever it was, depending on the season.
The thought came to her then — or not a thought, actually, but a feeling because feelings were what moved her now, not thoughts — that she ought to maybe fix a can of tomato soup for lunch, and wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to fix some for Walt too? Though she knew what his reaction would be. “I can’t eat that,” he’d say, “not with my stomach. What do you think, I’m still thirty-eight?”
Well, yes, she did, as a matter of fact. And when he was thirty-eight and he took her away from Stan Sadowsky and blackened both of his eyes for him when he tried to get rough about it, he’d eat anything she put down on the table in front of him, shrimp cocktail in horseradish sauce right out of the jar, pickled cherry peppers, her special Tex-Mex tamales with melted cheese and Tabasco. He loved her then too. Loved her like she’d never been loved before. His fingers — his fingers were magic, the fingers of a masseur, a man who knew what a deep rub was, who knew muscle and ligament and the finer points of erectile tissue and who could manipulate her till she was limp as a rag doll and tingling all over.
Sure, sure he could. But where in Lord’s name was he?
The sun had moved. No doubt about it. He’d been asleep, unconscious, delirious, dehydrated, sun-poisoned — pick an adjective — and now he was awake again and staring up at that yellow blot in the sky that went to deep blue and then black if you stared at it too long. He needed water. He needed bourbon. Aspirin. Ibuprofen. Two of those little white codeine tablets the doctor gave him for the pain in his knees. More than anything, though, he needed to get up off this damn lawn before the grass grew through the back of his head. Furious suddenly, raging, he gave it everything he had and managed to lift his right shoulder and the dead weight of his head from the ground — and hold it there, hold it there for a full five seconds, as if he were bench-pressing his own body — before he sank back down again. It wasn’t going to work, he could see that now, nothing was going to work, ever again, and he felt himself filling up with despair, a slow dark trickle of it leaking into the black pool that was already inside him.