“Freddie!”
“Seventeen doctors. No insurance. Car costs alone shunting you around to doctors cost more than four thousand that year, not including regular maintenance, filters, shocks and the like. Should’ve rotated the tires but I was trying to keep costs down.”
“There was something wrong with my blood or something,” Francine protested.
“Bought you a goddamned armload of coral bracelets. Supposed to be good for melancholia. Never wore them. Never gave them a chance.”
“They pinched,” Francine said.
“Even stole aspirin for you. Stole aspirin every chance I got.”
“That was very resourceful.”
“Oh, be sarcastic, see where that gets you. There’s no point in discussing it further. We’re broke.”
The sheltie limped out into the sun, sated. He barked hoarsely, then stopped. He was becoming more and more uncertain as to his duties.
Francine went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She searched the refrigerator until she found a lemon, a small shriveled one from which she had some difficulty coaxing a bit of zestful juice. The refrigerator was full of meat. Freddie did the shopping and had overfamiliarized himself with the meat department.
“Broke,” Francine said. He couldn’t be serious. They had a house, two cars. They had a gardener. She returned to the living room and sat down opposite her husband. He was wearing a white formal shirt, stained, with the linkless cuffs rolled up, black shorts and large black sunglasses. His gaze was directed toward an empty hummingbird feeder.
“It’s bats that drain that thing at night,” Freddie said. “You don’t have hummingbirds at all, Francine. You’ve got lesser long-nosed bats. They arrive in groups of six. One feeds while the others circle in an orderly fashion awaiting their turn. I enjoyed watching them of an evening. Can’t even afford sugar water for the poor bastards anymore.”
“What do you propose to do about our finances, Freddie?”
“Ride it out. Let the days roll on. You had your year of sleeping eighteen hours a day.”
“But that was a long time ago!” Once she had been the type of person who didn’t take much between drinks, as they say, but the marathon sleeping — it actually had been closer to twenty hours a day, Freddie always was a poor judge of time — had knocked the commitment to the sauce right out of her.
“Seventeen doctors. No insurance. Never found out what it was.”
“I pictured myself then very much like a particular doll I had as a little girl,” Francine mused. “She was a doll with a soft cloth body and a hard plastic head. She had blue eyes and painted curls, not real curls. The best part was that she had eyelids with black lashes of probably horsehair, and when you laid the doll on its back those hard little eyelids would roll down and dolly would be asleep. Have I ever told you that’s how I pictured myself?”
“Many, many times,” Freddie said.
Dusk arrived. A dead-bolt gold. Francine maintained an offended silence as vermilion clouds streamed westward and vanished, never again to be seen by human eyes. Freddie made drinks for them both. Then he made dinner, which they took separately. A bit less meat humming in the refrigerator now. Francine retired to the bedroom and turned on the television. The sheltie staggered in and circled his little rug for long minutes before collapsing on it with a burp. He smelled a little, poor dear.
Freddie in seersucker pajamas lay down beside her in the bed. He settled himself, then placed his hand in the vicinity of her thigh. A light blanket and a sheet separated his hand from the thigh itself. He raised his hand and slipped it beneath the blanket. But there was still the sheet. He worked his hand under the fabric until he finally got to her skin, which he patted.
They were watching a film which was vicious and self-satisfied, tedious and predictable, when in a scene that did not serve particularly to further the plot a dead actor was introduced to digitally interact with a living one.
The dead actor was acting away. “Look at that!” Francine said.
The scene didn’t last long, it was just some cleverness. The dead actor seemed awkward but professional. Still this wasn’t the scene he had contracted for. Watching, Francine knew a lot more than he did about his situation, but under the circumstances he was connecting pretty well with others.
“What are you getting so upset about?” Freddie said.
“Space and time,” she said. “Those used to be the requirements. Space and time or you couldn’t get into the nightclub. Our senses establish the conditions for the world we see. Kant said our senses were like the nightclub doorkeeper who only let people in who were sensibly dressed, and the criteria for being properly dressed or respectably dressed, whatever, was that things had to be covered up in space and time.”
“Who said this?”
“Kant.”
Freddie removed his hand from her thigh. “Something’s been lost in your translation of that one, Francine. Why does one want to get into the nightclub anyway? Or that nightclub rather than another one?”
“We’re the nightclub!” she said. “We’re each our own nightclub! And the nightclub might want other patrons. Other patrons might be absolutely necessary for the nightclub to succeed!”
“I think it’s a little late for us to be discussing Kant with such earnestness,” Freddie said.
“You mean a little this night late or a little life late?”
He nodded, meaning both.
She snatched the blanket off the bed and walked through the darkened house to the patio. It was long past the hour when people in the neighborhood used the outside. It was a big concern among Francine’s acquaintances, who were always vowing to utilize the outside more, but after a certain hour they stopped worrying about it. To many of Francine’s acquaintances, the outside was the only flagellator their consciences would ever know.
She wrapped herself in the blanket and lay on the chaise longue. She was very uncomfortable. When she lay on it in the daytime she was not at all uncomfortable. Finally she managed to wander into sleep, a condition for which she was losing her knack. When she woke it was glaring day and the gardener’s face was hanging over hers. His name was Dennis, Dennis the gardener who had been in their employ for years. She had never been stared at so thoroughly. She frowned and he drew back and stood behind her. He placed his fingers lightly on her forehead and ran them down her neck, then dragged them up again and rubbed her temples. The day was all around her. The refulgent day, she thought. His hand floated to just above her collarbone and she felt an excruciating pain as his thumb dug into the tendon there and scoured it. She screamed and struggled upright.
“That shouldn’t hurt,” he said mildly. “It’s because you’re so tense.”
She hurried into the house and quickly dressed. There was no coffee. She required coffee, and there was none. The house was silent. Both Freddie and the sheltie were gone. He sometimes took the dog for a walk, which Francine had thought was kind before she learned that their destination was usually a small park on a dry riverbed frequented by emaciated and tactically brilliant coyotes. There had been several instances when a coyote had materialized and carried off some pet absorbed in peeing, frolicking or quarreling with its own kind and thus inattentive to personal safety. Francine had accused Freddie of being irresponsible, but he insisted that attacks were rare. More important was the possibility of attack, which gave distinction to an otherwise vapid suburban experience and provided a coherence and camaraderie among a group of people who socially, politically and economically had little in common. They were a fine bunch of people, Freddie assured her, and they shared a considerable pool of knowledge regarding various canine personality problems — fear biting, abandonment issues and hallucinations among them — as well as such physical disorders as mange, anal impaction, seizures and incontinence, to name only a few.