Carla said, “He wouldn’t be hard to find.” And then she asked would I mind unplugging my phone.
After that it was like we were kids again, only better. We watched terrible old movies on TV and ate peanut butter and red onion sandwiches. We told all the jokes we could think of and when Carla laughed I could look in and see every silver filling in her mouth. But it got later and we decelerated. Something had been settling on us all the while, like dust.
“Do you ever want to turn around and go backwards?”
I didn’t quite know what she meant, but I said sure.
“Like you missed the turnoff somewhere and are getting more and more lost? It’s that way for me about half the time. And Boston, the people around me all trying to be so hip and loose and ending up mostly just trying.”
“Could be you’re getting too old for school.”
“Compared to what? Remember, I had two whole years to think about it and what did I do but go running on back. The institutional setting. And I haven’t earned a single gripe, have I? So I’ll get my degree and go to work for a museum or someplace where I can restrict myself to old things. Because I’ll tell you, this new stuff is too goddamn flat for me.”
I pictured her on a landing strip in the middle of Nebraska with no trees anywhere around; and I could share the terror of a horizon that began at the edge of her shadow and never really stopped.
I said, “There’s a Randolph Scott western on channel two.”
Where I wanted to give comfort, I could offer only distraction. And the bruise above her eye, now shading into a dismal range of purple-brown, was like a litmus gauge of her feelings.
“It’s late and I really have to turn myself off,” Carla said.
Persuading her to take the bedroom, I stretched out on the couch with a folded topcoat for a pillow. I didn’t expect to sleep much anyway. I saw the strand of light under the bedroom door go out. I picked at dead skin on my lip and listened to the radiators knock. Herding my thoughts through the minefield of inadmissible love was no easier than it had ever been. I composed a fantasy of Carla and me living in a windmill. We had leaded windows and wooden utensils and a garden like a Brueghel painting. There were soft, forgiving contours as I dozed slowly off.
I came awake to the sound of running water. Carla emerged from the kitchen with a drinking glass and became in the blue cast of the streetlamp a character from a 1915 children’s book. I pretended to sleep, my lids raised just enough to see. She had a man’s white shirt on and her hair spilled over the collar in a way that made me dizzy. Pressing the glass against her swollen brow for a moment, she looked down at me with what I imagined to be tenderness. I would never know. She placed the glass on the floor next to me and went back to bed.
I did not sleep again until the sun was up, and briefly then. But Carla moved on in that time. Her note said she was taking an early train in order to catch a friend’s on-campus dance recital. For breakfast I had a bowl of coffee ice cream. I dusted and mopped and rearranged the contents of the refrigerator. Finally I went in and sat on the bed. I noticed that it was snowing, had been for some time. There were pigeon footprints on the white sill. I would never know. Rolling onto my stomach, I inhaled what I could from the indented pillow.
The phone rang only minutes after I plugged it back in. It was Ted. He sounded unhinged. He told me he’d been drinking all night, submerged in remorse and confusion.
“I don’t understand what she does to me. It’s unearthly. She’s so steady. She’s so impervious. How do I figure out what goes on inside her?”
I hung up on him. What he had to say I already knew.
24
THIS, SOMEHOW, IS MY fourth day off in a row and I feel listless, out of touch. Didn’t I have more stamina when I was young? Wasn’t it easier keeping the balls in the air? I head out for the Boyers place to say how’s business, hoping something or other will chime.
They’re in the garage, packing up orders — boot knives, freeze-dried stroganoff, like that. The slogan is stenciled on the walclass="underline" YOUR KEY TO SURVIVAL IS KNOWING WHAT THE DOOMED WILL NEVER LEARN. Last year Sonny went up to Denver for a three-week course in mail order merchandising.
“Where you been holed up?” he says.
Dawn turns her back, picks at a line of window putty.
“You know, the usual places.”
She’s wearing cracked mules and a coral housedress; her soft swaying bulk seems lethal. Sonny busies himself moistening strips of package tape on a gray sponge ball, and something strains against the seam of his mouth. It’s awkward in here, thick with the poorly hidden anguish of a hospital waiting room. Always expecting bad news, these two. Maybe they’ve had some.
“So how’re the boys?” I say clumsily.
Dawn sends a black look to her husband. “Off at Curry’s on a sleepover.”
Sonny, breathing hard, makes a wet weave of the tape.
“Clear them out to clear the air,” she adds cryptically. Her tough, shiny hair is rumpled, like a doll’s pulled from the bottom of a toy box. “Not like they done anything.”
I notice the can of Mace fastened to Sonny’s belt and I wonder about domestic strife with so much weaponry at hand. I study cobwebs, look at my watch.
“It’s not any of their decision,” Sonny says.
Dawn brushes past me. “Ain’t anybody’s.”
Then, through gypsum board, we can hear her clanging and banging in the kitchen. The chalkboard is in there, the textbooks reinforced with masking tape, homemade stools where the boys sit to receive instruction from their mother — a little diorama of the pioneers.
Sonny drops onto a stack of sealed cartons; his lips contort. “They say if you give respect you’re supposed to get it.”
Things aren’t chiming so much, but I’m curious, drawn in. Otherwise I’d make some sense, say, “Came at a bad time,” and get moving. All these tools collected here, canteens and manuals, the hard details, convince me there’s something to look for. I want to light a cigarette but I’ve left them in the car.
And now Sonny has on his bully pulpit face. He wants me to know that every American child will consume by the age of eighteen the energy equivalent of sixty thousand gallons of gasoline, that in a minute’s time twenty-five babies are born for whom there are no protein resources.
“Dawn doesn’t want to grow up.” He shrugs. “I just don’t get through to her.”
“Why can’t you meet in the middle?”
Smiling, Sonny confides that later in the week he is scheduled to enter Cherry Ames Hospital for a vasectomy.
“Dramatic,” I say, but it isn’t the word I want.
“I know, I know. My old man was alive, he’d say just chop the damn thing off and be done with it. I come from five brothers and three sisters, fruitful. But that was then and this is now.”
Suddenly I feel like a tired cop pressed by duty against the rancor of strangers. I really want that cigarette.
“And it’s no more than what she wants for herself. She’s got to grow up and face up.”
He looks straight at me, his tight eyes asking me to take sides.
Trying to change the subject, I ask, “Still planning that extension off the back of the house?”
But for Sonny there is only one subject. “Crying for the space, God knows. All squeezed like we’re in a toothpaste tube. Something to face up to is the plain and simple limits of where we’re at. I’m not getting rich with this mess,” slapping the cartons under him, hunching himself as if yoked, in traces. “Just to get us all through, all together. I’m no fucking swami.”
The family man deflected by his family. He looks up, down, looks ahead, looks for an escape hatch. The only reassuring thing I can think of is it isn’t me.