“George, you wouldn’t recognize her.”
“She’s a changed person,” Mills said.
“You remember how oversexed she used to be?”
“Used to be,” the straight man said.
“How she’d doodle all this really raunchy stuff in her school-books, put it all around her separators like a kind of embroidery, work it into her biology papers so that even her teachers couldn’t tell if she were a scientist or kinky?”
“This is the part that gets me,” George Mills said.
“She started sketching the stuff on her bedroom walls.”
“Fouled her own nest, did she?”
“Jenny saw it. Well she was meant to. Mary left her books all over the place. She never bothered to shut her bedroom door.”
“It was a cry for help,” George Mills said.
Messenger looked at him. “Well it was,” he said. “I mean there’s Milly and Sam yelling their heads off, shouting how sick she was, how a kid her age ought to get her head up out of the gutter. Then Jenny came along. Jenny has a trained eye, you know. You’ll never guess what happened. Jenny thinks she’s terrific, that she’s this anatomical savant or something. I mean no one noticed how really good the kid was till Jenny saw what she was up to. You know what she did when she first saw the stuff?”
“What did she do?”
“Stripped for the kid. Right then and there. Took off her dress, pulled down her panties, ripped off her bra. ‘Draw me,’ she told her. ‘Get all my details.’
“She tried to get her enrolled in a life class at the university but they’ve got this rule that no one under sixteen—”
“Get on with it,” Mills said.
“She’s having her own show. When she gets a few more drawings together she’s having a show at this really important gallery. She draws her boyfriend, the kid she used to fuck. She poses him straining on the pot, she poses him whacking off. Sam shows them around, the sketches. The kid doesn’t mind. Nora’s agreed to pose for her, Jenny has. Even Sam.”
“Her father? Her father poses for her?”
“Even her sister,” Messenger said. “Even Milly. Even the respectable one.”
“Isn’t it queer, George?” Louise asked. “Isn’t it queer how life works out?”
“My back is killing me,” George Mills said. “Why are you telling me this stuff?”
“Because,” Messenger said. “Because it is queer how life works out. And because,” he said, “because I’m the epilogue man, George!” He rose to go, turned at the door to their bedroom. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t guess I’ll be dropping by anymore. I won’t be in the neighborhood much. I’ve given up my Meals-on-Wheels route.”
“Oh,” Louise said, “we’ll miss you, Cornell.”
“I turned it over to Max and Ruth. They’ve got a car. Meals-on-Wheels will pay for their gas. They qualify for free meals themselves. Meals-on-Wheels will provide them.”
Mills sprang out of bed and raced toward Messenger. Louise had to hold him. She forced her husband back to his bed, his feet sliding backward on the bare floor. He waved his raised fist at Cornell, who stood his ground in the doorway.
“They jumped at the chance,” Messenger said calmly. “It turns out they never really liked cheese. It turns out cookies were a stopgap. It turns out they don’t care much for poetry. It turns out lectures bore them. It turns out they’ve tin ears and won’t even miss the recitals.”
It turned out it was not the last time he was to hear Messenger’s news. He saw him again about a week later. Louise was in bed with a sore throat and George had stopped off at a supermarket to pick up some things for their dinner — canned soup, a frozen pizza. It was not one of the places they usually shopped. Mills was in the express lane waiting to be checked out. The store had installed scanners to read the universal product code stamped on the labels and packages like cramped, alternating thicknesses of wood grain in cross section, or marks on rulers, or passages of spectography, or like boxes of pencils, like awning, like pin stripes on shirts. The lines and numbers could have been ciphers, hieroglyphs, but when the checkout girl brushed the mysterious little blocks of code across a glass plate, a vaguely digital readout appeared in a banner like a red headline above the customer’s head. It registered the name of the item, the quantity, its cost. Mills had never seen the machine operate before. He had no idea how it worked and was so absorbed that at first he was unaware that someone was talking to him, saying his name. It was Messenger.
“I was going to call you,” he said. “There’s some loose ends to tie up.”
“Sure,” Mills said.
“The name Albert Reece mean anything to you?”
“Arthur Reece?” Mills said absently. He wasn’t paying close attention. A woman he thought he recognized from the neighborhood had come into the supermarket. She wore a man’s loose-fitting khaki trousers and a tan jacket. She wore a fedora and carried a big leather drawstring bag. A heavy key ring on a retractable steel cord hung from her belt loop.
“Albert Reece. One of the Meals-on-Wheelers. A sour-hearted old bastard. I told you about him.”
The woman had taken the key ring and stretched it out as far as it would go. She slipped a key into a lock in the copy machine at the front of the store, turned the key and pulled out the cash drawer where the change collected. She dumped the money into the bag. When she replaced the drawer she took a rag and a bottle of Windex from her jacket pocket and proceeded to polish the glass facing plate where the customers set the originals they wanted copied.
“Sure, I told you about him,” Messenger said.
“Probably,” Mills said. “You told me about everyone else.”
“He won a hundred thousand dollars,” Messenger said. “He’s going to be on the six o’clock news.”
“A hundred thousand dollars?”
“In one of those contests. Some sweepstakes thing. Reader’s Digest, Publishers’ Clearing House — something. He was so excited I couldn’t get it straight.”
The woman was cleaning the money out of the bubble gum machines, the dime and twenty-five and fifty-cent candy and toy vending machines with their miniature NFL helmets and tiny major league baseball caps folded like fetuses inside their clear globes. She took about twenty dollars from the plastic pony. She owns them, he thought. She owns them, they’re hers. She makes a fortune. I’ll be, he thought.
“He says he’s going to buy a house with it,” Messenger said, “that any Meals-on-Wheelers on his route who want to can move in and live with him.”
“I’ll be,” Mills said.
“How do you like that?” Messenger said.
“I’ll be.” But he was staring at the woman from the neighborhood who owned the machines. She was talking to a man Mills guessed was the manager, who was checking the money with her from her drawstring bag and who accepted a percentage of the receipts from the machines and wrote out a check to her in exchange for the rest of the coins.
And that still wasn’t the last time. The last time was a few days later. Messenger phoned.
“Did you see him?” Messenger asked. “On TV? Did you see him?”
“Yes.”
“Did I lie?”
“No.” He could barely speak.
“Well there’s something else,” Messenger said.
“Yes.”
“Remember I told you about that story I wrote? The only one I ever published in The New Yorker? The one Amos Ropeblatt took out an option on? That he’s been renewing every year for eleven or twelve years now for five hundred dollars a year?”