“Giving the old guy a thrill? Good idea.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m just saying,” said Dench in a hushed tone. “He’s probably loaded. And gonna keel soon. And …”
“Stop.” This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom, like his father, who had fled through the men’s room window. “Don’t say another word.”
“Hey — I’m not talking about murdering him! I’m just saying you could spend a little time, make him happy, and then the end result might be, well … we’d all be a little happier. Where’s the harm?”
“You’ve really gone over to the dark side.” He could be shameless. Perhaps shamelessness kept bitterness at bay. Not a chance Dench could ever be bitter. Never even post-bitter. Bitterness came when one had done the long good thing and then gone unrewarded. Dench would never operate that way. She, on the other hand, had been born with a sort of pre-bitterness, casting about for the good and unacknowledged deed that would explain her feelings — and not coming up with it. So instead a sourness could beset her, which she had to appease and shrink with ice cream and biographies of Billie Holiday.
“Hey, wasn’t it you who wrote, ‘Get your hands on some real meat’?” Now he began to sing. “ ‘An old shoe can be made chewy like game / but it takes a raftload of herbs and it’s just not the same.’ You wrote that.”
“That was a love song to a chef. Before I knew you.”
“It’s good. It’s got existentialism and advice.” His eyes avoided hers.
“You’re pimping me. Is this what you call your ‘talent for life’?” He had once boasted he possessed such a thing.
“It’s a working view.”
“You’d better be careful, Dench. I take your suggestions seriously.”
He paused and looked at her, sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other. “Well, my first piece of advice is don’t take my advice. And there’s more where that came from.”
“There’s a smell in the house. Yeasty and sulfuric. Can you smell it?” She looked at Dench with concern, but he seemed to have none.
“The zeitgeist!”
“Something rotting in the walls.”
“Meat or shoe?”
“Something that died in the winter and now that it’s spring is decaying in the floorboards or some crawl space or one of the walls of this room.”
“Maybe my allergies are acting up. But I think I have smelled it along this side of the house, on warmer days, out there trying to get better cell phone reception. A cabbagey cheese smelclass="underline" goaty with a kind of ammonia rot.”
She reached for a sip of Dench’s coffee.
“He probably has adult children who will inherit everything.”
“Probably,” said Dench, turning away and then looking back at her to study her face.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
Dench’s sexiness, his frugal, spirited cooking (though he was no Jim Barber), his brooding gaze, his self-deprecating humor, all had lured her in. But it was like walking into a beautiful house to find the rooms all empty. In those beginning years she often saw him locking eyes with others, as if in some pact. He still had no money. She paid. At times he glanced at her with bewildering scorn. There was, in short, little romantic love. No conversation of tender feelings. Just attachment. Just the power of his voice when it spoke of things that had nothing to do with them, when it churned round and round on its loop about his childhood dogs, misdeeds, and rages at his lot. He was attractive. He was amusing. But he was not emotionally well. Intimacy was not his strong suit. “Clubs and spades,” he joked. “Not diamonds, not hearts. Red cards — I just see red. They throw me out of the game every time.”
“Shut up and drink your beer.”
Where were the drugs?
She could see he felt sometimes that he could prey upon her insecurities and still be taken in and cared for by her. Was not the news always full of one beautiful young movie star after another thrown over for some younger and more beautiful movie star? What hope was there for ordinary women? He required a patroness but had mistakenly auditioned for her. If she possessed fewer psychic wounds than he had hoped for in a woman her age, or at least different ones, he would attempt to create some. But she was less woundable than he might think. She had not had a father who had to see a man about a horse. She in fact had a father who’d been killed by a car named after a horse. Along with her mother. A Mustang! How weird was that? Well, she had been a baby and hadn’t had to deal with it.
Her grandmother had almost never mentioned her mother. Or her father. They had been scurrying across a street to get home, holding hands, which had fatally slowed them down.
Where were the drugs?
Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit. Once she had found a letter in Dench’s coat — it was a draft in his writing with his recognizable cross-outs and it began, It has always been hard for me to say, but your love has meant the world to me. She did not read to the end but stuffed it back inside the coat pocket, not wanting to ruin things for him or the moving surprise of it for herself. She would let him finish his composing and choose the delivery time. But the letter never arrived or showed up for her in any manner whatsoever. She waited for months. When she finally asked about it, in a general way, he looked at her with derision and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Inside the old man’s house wide doorways led to shaded rooms, corridors to stairways to more corridors. Whole areas of the house were closed off with ivory quilts hung with clipped rings from fishing spears — to save on heating, she quickly surmised. There were stacks of reading material — a not uncozy clutter of magazines, some opened and abandoned, and piles of books, both new and used. On top of one was a dried-out spider plant that looked — as they used to say with blithe heartlessness of all their dying spider plants — like Bob Marley on chemo. She recognized the panic at even a moment’s boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time. In a far room she spied a piano, an old Mason & Hamlin grand, its ebony surface matte with dust, and wondered if it was tuned. Its lid was down and stacks of newspaper sat on top.
“Don’t mind the clutter, just follow me through it — the muffins are in the kitchen,” he said. She followed his swaying gait into the back of the house. Beneath the wisps of white hair his skull was shiny and his scalp had the large brown spots of a giraffe — if only they weren’t signs of looming death they would look appealing and whimsical and young people would probably want them — give me a liver spot! — as tattoos. Smaller versions freckled his hands. “I keep hoping this clutter is charming and not a sign of senility. I find myself not able to tell.”
“It’s like a bookstore or a thrift shop. That kind of clutter is always charming.”
“Really?”
“Perhaps you could go all the way and put little price tags on everything.” A shaming heat flushed her face.
“Ha! Well, that was partly the idea with the book nook out front. That I could put some of this to use. But feel free to add your own. All contributions welcome.” The muffins were store-bought ones he had reheated in a microwave. He had not really made them at all. “I shop sparingly. You never know how long you’ve got. I don’t even buy green bananas. That’s investing with reckless hope in the future.”
“Very funny.”
“Is it?” He was searching her face.
“Well, I mean … yes, it is.”
“Would you like some coffee, or do you want to just stick with your own?” He signaled with his head toward the paper cup she still held, with its white plastic top and its warted brown vest made of recycled paper bags. She looked on the counter and saw that it was instant coffee he meant, a jar of Nescafé near the stove. He turned the burner on, and gas flamed into the blue spikes of a bachelor’s button beneath the kettle.