The boyfriend clapped. Fox went upstairs to vomit. The boyfriend left. Max stood by the piano, his score under his arm. Hebe trotted up to him, her red face raised, wondering again about Vase-line. Thea and Sophia went around turning out the lights.
“Leave your face alone,” said Max to Hebe. And to Gail, “You’ll come upstairs soon?”
She nodded. In fact she followed on his heels. In fact, naked, she was in their hard bed before he was, and she wrapped him in her limbs with a spider’s ardor. At the moment of irreversibility, the wave breaking, she thought not only of Michelle Pfeiffer, tonight’s imagined partner, but of Michelle Pfeiffer wearing that bracelet of diamonds and silver and black enamel that Gail had denied herself. She blinked the trinket away, and its wearer too. Max returned from his ablutions. His naked pear-shaped body glowed in the moonlight; his eyes now looked like worthwhile coins. Mein Mannchen, she thought. My little man.
SHE SLEPT FOR A FEW HOURS. Then, awake as if she had been smacked, she got up and put on the oilcloth coat and went downstairs, not worrying about noise. The music room was empty. The door to the porch was ajar. Thea was alone out there. She sat on an aluminum chair, her arms resting on the porch’s wooden railing, her head on her arms. With a light scrape Gail dragged another chair toward the young woman and sat down beside her. Thea raised her eyes. Their hands touched.
What was there to say? That the pair of oddly matched roommates Foxcroft and Maurice had made a reasonable go of the lives they had been given to lead. That if anyone cares to inquire I have done the same. “Helping one man die — it is the work of many persons.” She did say that.
From within the house they heard a groan — inanimate; the back door had opened. The footsteps of one person sounded on the wooden steps outside the kitchen. Then a little yawn: a car trunk opening — and a little clap: a car trunk closing. The pair of feet, seemingly stronger now, returned to the house, and the back door closed again.
Thea sat up straight.
“The car keys — I left them on the counter,” Gail said. “He saw them, at dinner. Your mother saw him see them. I saw her see him see them.”
There was a sizzle from the kitchen. Soon that heavenly fragrance drifted in. The sizzle grew louder, like fingers snapping a joyous message: it’s cooked, thoroughly. It’s ready to be savored and swallowed and unresentfully disgorged, this sliced back portion of some magnificent pig.
CAPERS
PICKING UP LOOSE CHANGE — it was Henry’s idea. An activity — not a crime, not even a misdemeanor. And these days any sport that aroused his enthusiasm was worth playing. It was so easy. The stuff lay all around them. It lurked under the mailboxes and in the corners of the elevator and on the sidewalk. It could be fished from chair cushions at the movies. Dorothy found oily coins in the gutter. She washed them and sometimes polished them. Once, in a diner, two quarters were lying on the counter near Henry and he picked them up. The counterman held out his hand. “Those are mine,” he said. “My tip from the guy before you.” Henry relinquished the money. On her stool Dorothy stared straight ahead. Henry would have kept those quarters — would have stolen them. Stealing was a crime. Yet it was the counterman who looked ashamed … ashamed for Henry, maybe.
The next morning she went downtown to do an errand. On a busy sidewalk she found herself plucking a purse from the gaping backpack of a careless young woman striding ahead of her. The young woman wore a red knit hat with a royal blue pom-pom. Dorothy — who had owned such a hat herself, a lifetime ago — drifted sideways to a window display. Heavens, she thought, counting the money in the purse. Forty dollars and change. What are you doing. Run after her, run after her. Ahead, the pom-pom bobbed above the crowd of shoppers. Dorothy stuffed the purse into her own handbag. Take it to the police station, say you found it on the street. Instead she entered the subway and boarded the trolley that would trundle her home. Failing to hand the police a dropped purse was not a crime. She could keep the thing; it might even be legally hers. Or if she turned it in at the police station and that devil-may-care pompom didn’t bother to report her loss, the purse might devolve to Dorothy, the honorable rescuer of a found object. Not until the trolley emerged into the light did she remember that she had not found the money. She had swiped it.
She confessed to Henry that night.
“How much?”
“Forty dollars, but even if it were forty cents—”
“Some spoiled college girl. Her daddy will make it up to her.”
“Henry …”
“Let’s try the horses.”
The next day they took the train out to the race track and bet twenty dollars twice, and lost both times. “So now you’ve made retribution,” said Henry in a merry voice. They rode back in warm silence, holding hands.
“Gambling is unreliable,” Henry pronounced that night. “Picking pockets — that’s the solution.”
“To what problem?” He glared at her, but she went on. “Pocket picking takes training by a master, and Fagin’s been hanged.”
“I’ll learn it on my own. Remember how I used to play Debussy? I can be light-fingered.”
He’d made Debussy sound like Sousa, and he’d known that at the time. Now he reformulated the past — a habit of the elderly. Morality, too, got reshaped, and ethics. “Filching money from individuals is dangerous,” she said in a knowledgeable voice. “Let’s bypass cash.”
“Bypass?” It was not a popular word.
“Cash is useful only to buy merchandise,” she explained. “Let’s go directly to the merchandise. Stores.”
He grinned at her. “What a girl I married.”
She grinned back, but her heart was wilting. This crumbling of old values must be a sign of dementia, mustn’t it. Perhaps his was an encapsulated dementia, confined to mild misbehavior. Petty crimes would stave off worse senility. She knew some poor old fellows who tried to fondle waitresses.
SOMETIMES SHE STILL FELT a craving. Early in the morning, say, when dawn turned their gray walls an intense lilac she liked to think of as whorish. Her hand would creep across the bedclothes like a blue-veined mouse. He’d be sleeping on his back, which he wasn’t supposed to, because of the apnea. Snoring, stopping, snoring, stopping. She’d shake his shoulder just hard enough to make him turn over — away from her — onto his side. Usually he didn’t wake up. That was okay. He needed what rest he could get. He slept so poorly, waking frequently, finally waking for good — for bad, really: waking cranky and staying cranky until the lunchtime beer, which turned him cheerful for a little while and occasionally even amorous. And so, sometimes, in the early afternoon … But he always needed the pill, and they had to wait an hour, and she was dry no matter how much of that old lady’s gel she slathered on; she might as well just brush her teeth with it. And at that hour the light pouring into the bedroom showed them plainly to each other. The grooves on his face were often greasy. His scalp, underneath what hair was left, was pale as an oyster. Keratoses lay on her chest like pebbles. Her own hair had never achieved whiteness; sunlight cruelly revealed its similarity to straw. And if he were to kiss the hollow of her neck — which he had loved to do long ago, entering that silky purse above before the silkier purse down below, as he used to say — now he’d find the space above her clavicle filled with loose, shuddering skin, like crème fraîche. And it took him so long to come, pounding insistently as his younger self would never have done; and it would have taken her even longer, probably forever; but, spent, he rolled away, leaving her chafed and sad.