“But we just got here,” I said, and we were fighting at the floating bar, swimming awkwardly around, treading water.
He wanted a real drink — no fruit in it.
He wanted a steak. “Fuck this fufu shit,” he said. “Everything here is skewered on a stick.”
Then I was down the beach away from him and scoring dope.
He said, “You stupid bitch.”
He said, “I hope you get sick.”
Our bedroom was sealed, drawn against the flickering sea.
Cold floor and filmy curtains, stony bed — I couldn’t fall asleep here and smoked my way to somewhere else.
All the time the terrible Walter was counting his money. He was figuring the tips.
He was sipping whiskey in the sealed room after dinner, near the window, in the dark; and because the room was very cold, I left him alone and opened the bathroom windows to let in the warm, wet air. I took a hot shower, which calmed me — but not for long. The sealed room where we slept was very cold and dark, and Walter was in the corner, without his shorts on, drinking, and his body, I saw, was wildly hairy. He saw me looking at him, and he said, “I hate you, too.”
All of the nights on that island, he sat in the bedroom and drank, and I sat in the bathroom and smoked, and we yelled out at each other horrible names. We cried.
I said someone else’s name over and over, and he said someone else’s name, too.
I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, he did, too.
“But where the fuck is my home?” he asked. “Why the fuck did I move in with you?” he yelled, yet he would not leave the brownstone once we were home again and living through the city’s spring arrived while we were gone.
A second spring passed before he died, the terrible Walter, still in the phonebook, at my address.
WEST SEVENTY-SIX
THAT DOG! HE USED to eat his own poo, and you’d kiss him! Remembering an Arlette story made me rueful when in the next room Walter retched whatever was left besides what he had been drinking. Walter’s lips were sausage-mottled, fat grubs I had long ago ceased to kiss, but why had I kissed him to start with?
I had been late, over an hour late, to where we met at a restaurant called Billy’s — loud, close, dark, full of manly hands handling money. He ordered for us old-fashioned, expensive food which he paid for with an aggressive signature. I thought his illegible hand meant he was powerful. Also, importantly, he was older by almost twenty years. Hailing me a separate cab, he said, “I don’t wait longer than ten minutes for anyone, but I did for you tonight. I will never wait for you again.”
No man had reprimanded me in years, but this sweet-sour scolding I remembered — Mother’s Walter, especially — and the charged feeling was the same, so I said yes when he called again, and I was not late.
The terrible Walter wanted children. Insisting on what we had and what we could have together, he said, “I’m not so old we couldn’t try. We could have children.”
“Why not?” I said. I wanted company, but by the time Walter moved into the brownstone not a week in some warm place or chops at Billy’s Friday nights could make us happy. We argued and drank; we wept for being lonely; children were out of the question; children would never have helped.
The terrible Walter introduced me to a man named Carter who was married to a Mitten on the board of a best school. After the evening with Carter and Mitten, the terrible Walter asked me, “Now do you think you’re important?”
Not since my mother had anyone hurt me with my own hurtful thoughts, and I felt sobered.
Walter was homely and heavy and old; he was coarse and lurid and prurient.
We did not like each other and yet perversely made plans for Barbados while he bossed me around and I lumped it being sullen. I liked and I didn’t like being told what to do; I thought, Walter knew how the city worked, and then I thought, he didn’t; but he knew about fucking hard, and he was crude and risky. He took me to unlikely corners where girls could be bought, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, would never although girls are my favorites. I thought, I deserve a Walter, and he must have thought he deserved me, or else why did we stay together, a year, another year until he died? Fucking was why. Fucking was respite from meanness.
WEST SEVENTY-SIX
WALTER LAY ON MY bed loudly servicing himself, saying afterward, “You owe me.” He said, “Pay me. You’ve got some money. I’ll gladly leave,” so I signed to pay what he thought he was due on condition he leave, and then, of course, he died. On an ordinary day — Percodan and Scotch — Walter took up his worn, overstuffed folders and drove off in a taxi to the firm. His bridge-playing, genius friend, a man tilling millions, saw him take the stairs, but no one else he knew encountered him. They think Walter cabbed it downtown and up again without changing cars, but what happened after he came back to the brownstone? The depression on the far side of the bed was evidence he lay there on our sodden sheets listening to the radio. (The radio was still on when I came home.) There was evidence he drank, he took pills, he got sick. He phoned an ambulance.
Someone got the money he surely must have left.
Someone got the money I paid to his estate. … “Sign nothing with fine print,” a daddy could have warned me, but I had signed Walter’s document; I had said yes, I would pay him to move out, and then he did — forever. Only the document held up.
MR. EARLY
AT LEAST I WAS working. I was teaching at the same small school, a small job, yes, teaching, but work not without its pleasures — yesterday’s student writing, “Why can’t Jane see the good things the bad things have?” The steamy urgency of her hand, the felt-tip blots — I had to smile. The loud way she came to Mr. Rochester’s defense, the caped, brooding Rochester, a man as ugly as my own Mr. Early, Rochester, who, in disguise, tested Jane and found her worthy; every year some girl fell in love; this year it was Anna. “I’d marry him!!!!!!!!” Anna wrote. “Who cares about his crazy wife?”
Mr. Early’s wife was soft-spoken, estranged, and not crazy, merely sad was how Mr. Early had once described her. Now she was on the telephone, speaking quietly.
Mr. Early died in the droughted summer when I was twenty-seven, a number I remember because I remember the summer of that year when the exhausted, yellow trees browned in August and lost their leaves overnight, that was the year when bookstores (the close, piled, classroom kind and the silencing kind — often paneled — any kind really) really made me sick. Bookstore fear overtook me the year Mr. Early and Walter died. I was twenty-seven; I saw death behind every sentence: “… a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.” Summer session classes. I was teaching one and so was Mr. Early. Miles and miles apart, we were teaching last classes when he died. Mr. Early died in a classroom — his heart gave out in a dashed, absurd coincidence: “I heard a fly buzz when I died. …” Mr. Early was reading this poem to his class when he collapsed at his desk and died a death so appropriate, a person might think he had staged it except that Mr. Early wanted to live. He had said so in letters; the last arrived only a week before he died. Long, typed, smally folded in a small envelope, his last letter came with poems he had written and signed. Odd signature he had. Half print and leaned backward, it was at odds, I thought, with his generous voice. He said a lot of his sentences started with the words, How could I … so that why should I be surprised by mine?