But his only word to me was more of the same.
"Wife," my best friend said.
I WAS READY when the felon came. Doubtless, he presumed that improvising would throw me off, his randomizing the weekdays and the hours that he cleaned. Certainly he could not have anticipated that I too could keep to an indeterminate routine, varying the time I departed for the office, the time I returned home, never repeating my behavior many days in a row. Make no mistake of it, I am not without my guile.
I was ready.
I could hear him down there, struggling to climb the steps to the second landing, no doubt straining with the weight and bulk of the lumpish vacuum cleaner that he used. I had never seen the machine and I had never seen him, but I imagined that both were big — very large, perhaps. That is why I had the hammer in my hand when I opened the door to take up my station at the top of the stairs.
Of course he left off coming when he saw me.
He lowered the machine to free himself of his burden, a brilliant red canister very like a decorative oil drum, the thick hose looped around his squat dark neck a serpent of a kind, a very serpent!
"What do you want?" he said.
"The sled," I said.
"Sled?" he said. "I have no sled."
He was not a big man.
I am not a big man. But he was not big, either — or so it then seemed to me sighting along the diagonal line that ran from me down to him. And he was old. Sixty or more. Not that one can know with people of his kind.
"You criminal," I said, and raised the hammer to make certain he saw I meant business.
"You're crazy!" he shouted up at me from where he with noticeable awkwardness stood.
"Crazy?" I screamed. "You call me crazy?"
I took two steps down.
He responded by shoving the vacuum cleaner against the iron railing and jamming it there with his knee.
"Crazy man, crazy man!" he shouted. "Leave me alone, you leave me alone, or I tell!"
"Whom will you tell?" I screamed. "It is I who will tell! I will tell them that you called me crazy! I will tell, you filth! I will tell that you called the father of a boy crazy! I will tell them that if I am crazy, it is you that have made me crazy! Filth! Dirt!" I shrieked. "Go get the sled from wherever you put it or I will give you this!"
I held the hammer higher.
He let go of the vacuum cleaner and it slammed all the way down, its sullen descent thunderous as the steel barrel bashed the stone all the distance to the bottom.
He was quick for a man of his years, huffing up the stairs with bewildering speed. I hardly had a moment to ready myself, to swing with the force that was needed.
I hit him. I hit him in the face.
I think it was a solid blow.
I HAD JUST GOT my friend upright in his chair again when the woman that was coming toward us called out. She called loud enough for everyone to hear.
"I'll take him!" she called, and all the diners turned to gape, gaze, wait.
It would be a scene that everyone could enjoy, the theater that is implicit in every public setting.
You know what I mean. We are all of us identical in this too, in our preparations for pandemonium, in confidently readying ourselves for it to scatter the order that so astonishingly obtains. I for one am never impressed by the statistical increase in murder and assault, believing that whatever rules us and contains us and keeps us from obliterating everything in sight can never do so with our connivance for very long.
She came ahead, cutting a robust figure through the stilled tables, calling out to us as she came, "I'll take him! I'll take him!"
She would be the wife, I thought, and this is of course who she was.
I stood to make the introductions, and the other fellow, instructed by my courtesy, stood too.
"My name is," I began, all welcome. But her attention was well to the side of me.
"I don't care what your name is," she said, regarding first her husband and then the woman who was still seated. "I want to know what her name is."
The second woman wasted not an instant. She pushed back her chair and rose. "My name?" she said, her voice no less moderate than when she had said, "No one is safe." I recall thinking what a wonderfully controlled woman this is, the very thing of the legislative, of the state. I recall thinking what it would be like to enter her bed, to be in receipt of feeling expressed with such temperance. I imagined it would be a congenial experience, reminding myself that reserve nothing can dismantle is immensely more arousing than is the inner beast made manifest. Is it this that taxes my fondness for my wife?
"My dear," the second woman said, "I am the person your husband had been sleeping with until a few brief weeks ago."
WE HAVE A NEW SLED NOW — not a plastic one, but a product made of a kind of pressed-wood material, a composite perhaps. Still, it is a Flexible Flyer, and that's the top of the line. We bought it in the next larger size.
I suppose we would have had to give up the old one, anyway. To be sure, my boy is growing.
I wonder what sort of disfigurement the custodian displays on his face. It was a ball-peen hammer and therefore the striking surface was round, a small knob at least a nose width at the most.
He still services the building according to some irregular schedule he has devised. But I have naturally returned to my usual habits, off and away at nine sharp, back at my door at six on the dot, except of course for Fridays and Wednesdays, when I fetch the laundry and the groceries home.
You may be wondering if I have taken to placing the larger sled in the hallway where the missing one was kept.
I have, as a matter of fact.
I understand from my wife that the fellow still complains when he comes to do the carpet. He wants that little oblong cleaned just like the rest — and insists he will not resituate a sled to do it.
My wife tells me the old fellow is very angry about our persisting failure to cooperate, that he is threatening to remove any and all obstructions that interfere with his work. My wife tells me the custodian says we are insane to continue to provoke him like this. My wife tells me that this is what the man says — if it proves your disposition to take on the face of it what tales are told by such a wife as I have.
GUILT
I FELT ADORED. I felt adored by people and things. Not loved merely. Adored, even worshiped. I was an angel, born an angel. I recall knowing I did not have to do anything particularly angelic to be viewed in this light. I was blessed, or I felt blessed. I don't think this feeling came into being exactly. I don't think it grew as I grew. I think it was with me right from the start. It was what I stood on. It was the one thing I was sure of. It moved with me when I moved. It was acknowledged by everything that saw me coming. Animals knew it, the dogs in the neighborhood knew it, all the parents knew it, not just mine. The sidewalks knew it. If I picked up a stick and held it, I knew the stick was holding me back, would be willing to embrace me if it could. Everything held me back or wanted to. The sky wanted to reach down with its arms when I went out to play.
I had blue eyes and blond hair and I was very pretty. I was favored in these ways, it is true. But I was not vulnerable on account of it. I mean, the condition of adoration in which I understood myself to be held was in no respect dependant upon prettiness. This was not an opinion of mine, not anything susceptible to test, proof, refutation by argument or circumstance. To say this understanding was conditional would have asserted nothing more than the testimony that experience is conditional.
Of course.
Let's not be silly.
I WISH I COULD THINK of a way to get speech into this without disrupting things. But I don't think I can. If presences could talk, I could do it. Presences are what counts in what I'm getting onto paper now that I am forty-seven. The people don't count. Not even Alan Silver counts. Besides, I cannot remember one thing Alan Silver ever said. Or what anybody else did.