“Damn it to hell,” he said. “I knew I had made a mistake as soon as I saw it wasn’t Pivnick. But what a mistake! What an extraordinary mistake! Marcia will never believe this!”
He was glowing and bubbling. Then his face went suddenly somber, as if he just had a power failure. “But I could have killed you,” he said. “An innocent man. I could have shot you down in hot blood. And you were not even Pivnick.”
“Not for a moment.”
“My God,” he said. He looked at the gun in his hand and shuddered. Then he jammed it into his pocket, bowed halfway to the floor, apologized to both of us for the interruption, and headed for what was left of my door. Very little was. He took two steps and the gun went off in his pocket. He lost two toes on his right foot, and it was hell getting the bleeding stopped. I thought sure the cops would come and let him go and arrest me for picking apples out of season. The cops didn’t come.
“Bostonians,” he said, dully, looking at his feet.
“Marcia and Pivnick?”
“The shoes! One hundred and ten dollar Bostonians!” He glared at them. “And only seven years old. The salesman swore they would last a lifetime. Bostonians!”
I considered pointing out that one of them was still in perfectly good shape, as were eight of his toes. But I kept this to myself.
Francine ripped up a pillowcase to make bandages. I fixed him up and told him he ought to go to a hospital. He said he had to go to Rhinebeck. I don’t know if he ever found Pivnick or not, but if I were Marcia I would be very goddamned careful from now on.
Once we were rid of Marcia’s husband, Francine remembered that she didn’t have any clothes on. It was really pretty funny. Before the jerk kicked the door in, it was easy enough for her to pretend that she didn’t know what was happening, or that we were just necking a little, or whatever she wanted to pretend. And while he was there waving the gun in the air and talking about Pivnick, we both had too much to worry about to think about being naked. But then he went out and closed my broken door behind him, and there we were. I turned to look at Francine, and she pulled a bedsheet over her really sensational body and tried to look everywhere but at me.
I got onto the bed and scurried over next to her.
“My,” she said, “I really have to be getting home now, Chip.”
“Oh, it’s real early, Francine.”
“What a strange man! I thought he was going to shoot you or something.”
“Well, he tried.”
She talked about him, the sort of brainless talk Francine was good at, and meanwhile I got a hand under the sheet and kept putting it on Francine, and she kept moving it off without missing a beat.
Then she said, “I wish you would cover yourself up, Chip.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t have any clothes on.”
“It’s a warm night.”
“Be nice, Chip.”
“Huh?”
She chewed her lip. “I shouldn’t even be here.
I don’t know what got into me.” Nothing, I thought. “But I guess I just got carried away because of the things you said and how sweet a boy you are. You’re very sweet, Chip.”
I went to kiss her, but she got her mouth out of the way very skillfully. “Be nice,” she said.
“Nice? I thought we would sort of get back to what we were doing.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Before he walked through the door.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Well, just for the record, Francine, we were about to make love.”
“Really, Chip, I don’t—”
“I mean I was lying on top of you, for Christ’s sake, and you were telling me to shove it in all the way to your neck. I mean let’s not pretend we don’t know our names, for Pete’s sake. I mean that’s what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted, and I don’t see why all of a sudden we have to pretend that we just met each other at a church picnic.”
She was staring at me.
“I mean it seems pretty silly,” I said.
She turned away from me. “You’re a very crude boy,” she said.
“A minute ago I was very sweet.”
“I thought you were, but obviously I was mistaken. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Well, give me a minute and I’ll cut the ropes.”
“What?”
“The ropes that are tying you down so you can’t escape my evil clutches. I’ll cut you loose and you can hurry home.”
“Chip—”
“What?”
She sighed a couple of times. Her eyes stole a look at me, moving over my body to the part of me she wanted me to pull a sheet over. She withdrew them, but they came back again of their own accord.
She said, “If you would just be a gentleman, and if you would tell me the things you said before, you know, about thinking I’m really pretty and that you like me as a person and you respect me, then everything could be the way it was before.”
I made her say it again. And she said it again in just about the same words.
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Say, do you suppose we should put our clothes on first so that we can start over from the beginning?”
“That would be best, Chip.”
“That sure is a great idea,” I said.
“I’m glad you — Chip, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Chip, now stop that!”
“It’s my thing,” I said, “If I want to play with it, I’ve got every right in the world.”
“If you think I’m going to sit here and watch you, you’re out of your mind!”
“Would you like to do it for me?”
“Chip, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”
“Go home.”
“But I thought—”
“Go home.”
“Chip?”
“Go home.”
When she went home, I stopped playing with myself. I was only doing it to annoy her. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that I got any kick out of it, at least in a sexual sense. But it sure got old Francine’s teeth on edge, and that was the general idea.
After she left I sat around for a while. I got dressed again and had a look at the door. If the barber saw it he was going to have a fit and if he didn’t see it I didn’t want him cutting my hair, because he would be likely to lop off an ear. I mean it was smashed beyond recognition. You couldn’t make it look like a door again. The only way to hide it was to hang a picture over it, and I didn’t know where to get one at that hour.
What I did was take the door right off its hinges and carry the whole mess downstairs. I put all the pieces back with the garbage from the drugstore two doors down. The next time Mr. Bruno asked for the rent, I asked him when he was going to bring my door back.
“Door? What door? I never tooka your door.”
“Then where did it go?”
“Jeez,” he said, and added something in Italian. The next day two of his sons came and hung a new door for me. The next time I saw old Bruno he said he was sorry they had taken the door off without telling me, but it needed painting. I got so I had trouble knowing whether that guy kicked my door in or not.
But all this is off the subject. I guess I’m trying to duck the obvious question, which is was I losing my mind or what?
Because Francine would have let me do it. She just about came right out and said she would let me do it if only I would play up to her the way she wanted. She spelled it out for me, just about, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t get the message, and what did I do? I sent her home, for Pete’s sake. I sat there, pulling my pud like a total dip and told her to take her whatchamacallit and go home, and kept telling her until she went.
I sat around for hours trying to figure it out. And the best I could come up with was that I had just been trying to get laid for so long that finally something snapped inside me and I just wasn’t going to go through all that goddamn nonsense again. If you stop to think, ever since I left Upper Valley I had been planning on working hard and applying myself and being straightforward and open and honest and sensible, all in a heroic All American effort to Get Ahead. And time after time I wound up being dishonest and sneaky and conniving, and floated around aimlessly and didn’t save money and wasn’t getting ahead, and all because the only thing I really gave a damn about was getting laid. And it might have made sense if I was making out like a maniac, but I wasn’t getting anyplace at all, and the whole thing just wasn’t worth the trouble.