“That’s Linda.
“That’s Janey like you.”
Fritz. Sam. Elizabeth.
Marge felt like weeping.
“I don’t know all their names, sweetheart. How could I know all their names?”
“Oh,” Janey said. When the downstairs bell rang, Marge stood up suddenly and the rhyme book dropped to the floor.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Janey stood looking up at her. She stared at the door for a moment and then went to press the buzzer that opened the street door.
“Janey, go ride your horsie for a while.”
Janey’s horsie stood in a fenced-off section of the back yard, a red plastic horse on springs. Sometimes when Janie rode it, she would pass into a kind of trance and bounce for over an hour in an unvarying rhythm with a blankness in her eyes which Marge found alarming. But Janey was not in the mood for horsie riding and she began to pout. Marge could hear a man’s step on the hall stairs.
“Get,” she screamed at Janey. “Get down there.” Janey began to cry.
“Get, get,” Marge shouted, shooing the child away. Janey ran to the top of the steps that led from her bedroom to the yard and stood just outside the door, tear-stained and obstinate. Marge closed the bedroom door. The man outside knocked.
“Yes?” Marge inquired. She stood motionless in the center of the room staring at the closed door.
“It’s Ray,” the man said.
Marge forced herself to open the door to him; he went quickly past her with a glance. He was suntanned and short-haired. He had cold eyes. Janey had insinuated herself back into the living room but when she saw the man she fled, through her bedroom and down the steps to the yard.
Ray set a dun-colored AWOL bag down on the living-room table and went to look out the window.
“I’m not ready for this,” Marge told him.
He looked at her without sympathy.
“What do you mean you’re not ready for this?”
“I haven’t got the money,” she said. Even in her own ears, the whine grated.
“Why, you dumb cooze,” the man said softly.
She was trembling. That morning she had put on a dirty purple sweater and a pair of jeans out of the laundry bag.
She felt soiled and contemptible.
“I mean I haven’t got it here,” she told the man.
He sat down in a wicker chair and rubbed his eyes.
“You got any coffee?”
Marge hastened to the kitchen. She poured the burned coffee she had been drinking into the sink and put on a fresh pot. Ray was pacing the living room.
“I called you, right? How come you don’t have it?”
“I missed the bank. I went to the aquarium.”
When she turned from the stove he was standing in the kitchen doorway with a slim smile.
“You didn’t say anything on the phone about the aquarium. You said you’d be ready.”
“I know,” Marge said. “I really don’t know why. I didn’t want to on the phone. I was going to go to the bank today.”
The man was knitting his brows in mock concentration.
“Somehow I thought you’d come at night.”
“I hope you got off on the fish,” he said. “You’re not getting shit until I get paid.”
“Any way you want to do it.”
He looked her over and she hung back against the louvered kitchen doors, ashamed.
“When are your people coming to pick up?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
He turned his back on her and walked to the window.
“What do you mean tomorrow, you think? What is this shit?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes it is tomorrow. The twentieth.”
“If I beat up on you and took off your smack I’d be within my rights,” he told her. “You can’t deal with people in this outrageous fucking manner.”
“I’m sorry,” Marge said.
“They get suspicious. They get mad.”
“I understand,” she said.
To her surprise, he smiled again.
“You’re not trying to fuck me over, are you, Marge? You and some people?”
“Well, no” Marge said. “Honestly. It’s just me and John.”
“You and John,” Ray said.
When the coffee boiled, he asked for whiskey to put in it but Marge had nothing in the house except cassis. He poured some over his black coffee.
“I got a hangover,” he explained.
“Me too,” Marge said.
He blew on the coffee.
“You a junkie, Marge?”
Marge tried to smile.
“Jesus,” she said lightly. “Do I look like a junkie?”
“That’s not always a factor.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said.
He stood by the window frowning, listening to the springs of Janey’s horsie in the yard. “What’s that?”
“It’s my daughter’s toy horse.” He nodded and sat down on a cushion, clasping his hands between his knees.
“You’ve seen John?” she asked him.
“Yeah, I’ve seen John. If I hadn’t seen John I wouldn’t be here, right?”
“How is he?”
“Fucked up.”
“Is he really in bad shape?”
“He ain’t in no worse shape than you.” He looked her over again, rather sourly. “You concerned or just curious?”
“Concerned,” she said.
“Who are the people you’re selling to?”
“Friends of friends.”
“You mean you don’t know them?”
“I don’t know people like that,” Marge said. “John set it up. He knows a lot of weird people over in Nam. He’s good at that sort of thing.”
“No, he’s not.”
“I thought he was,” Marge said.
He stood up quickly and went to the window again.
“You’re a mark, Stuff. The people you’re dealing with are gonna know that right away. Unless they’re as unconscious as you are.”
For the first time, she realized that he was afraid.
“This sucks,” he told her.
He had a hungry face; in it Marge detected a morphology she recognized. The bones were strong and the features spare but the lips were large and frequently in motion, twisting, pursed, compressing, being gnawed.
Deprivation — of love, of mother’s milk, of calcium, of God knows what. This one was sunburned, usually they were pale. They always had cold eyes. They hated women.
“Well, what do you suggest?” She looked away from his eyes. “I mean, what do we do now?”
“You pay me,” he said. “I give you the smack.”
“Well, obviously,” she said. “I’ll have to go to the bank.”
“Obviously.”
She was aware that he had moved close to her. He carried the hallucinatory circus scent of patchouli oil, the smell of dope and cold-eyed freakery. She shivered.
“You’re a fuck-up.”
She was almost too frightened of him to be angry.
“Listen,” she said, “we’ll just have to make the best of it”
“What do you think the best of it would be?”
He had reached out and placed his forearm across the back of her thighs; his arm slid upward until his palm was stretched across her buttocks. She was not facing him and he did not turn her toward him, but took one of her breasts in his hand and held it — not caressed but held it — an act of acquisition.
She could not make herself move. Her only act of resistance was to look at him, and what she saw repelled every instinct with which Marge associated her heart. His eyes seemed as flat as a snake’s. There was such coldness, such cruelty in his face that she could not think of him as a man at all. His forward hand released her breast and slid along her belly, the one behind rose gently along the rear seam of her jeans to the small of her back; at first he made no move to kiss her.