“Soon.”
“Tell me what day!”
“Real soon, Andrea.”
“I guess you better go now. You’ll be late.”
Leo acts strange and uncomfortable. He says he wants to talk to me after I’ve finished the check-out. He says we can go down the street for some coffee. Familiar place, but a long time since I had been in there.
He lights a cigarette and puts a lot of sugar in his coffee and says, “The bookkeeper at Kash-Way called up at two o’clock. Myra says if she’d taken the call she could have covered. But that Pritchard bitch took it and went running to the old man. What Kash-Way wanted to know, how long do they have to wait before you show.”
I think back. I am confused. It takes me a little time to remember. It was supposed to be done over two weeks ago. But I couldn’t finish up that day. I went to see Andrea. Then when the girl went down my list I told her Kash-Way was changing their reporting period. I turned the folder in and forgot to add it to the list the next day and the next. Forgot it entirely.
“He pulled the file and sent Walker out there.”
“Was he sore, Leo?”
He reaches into his pocket and takes out the white sealed envelope with my name typed on it. M. Harris. “Jesus, Marty, I’m sorry as hell. He ran the final check for you. It’s in here, with all the deducts. It goes through the end of the week, through tomorrow.”
I tear off the end of the envelope, blow it open, peer down into it and read the amount. Not enough. Only one check.
“What about the pension thing? Don’t I get back just what I put in if I get fired? No matching funds or anything and no interest. But it’s mine, what I put in.”
“The way it reads, you get the check at the end of the quarter following the quarter in which employment is terminated. It’s an escrow thing, with the money invested. It should help out. Maybe four grand or five even, the years you’ve been covered.”
“Leo, you want to buy my pension money?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Three thou. We draw up a legal contract. It’s got to be five, anyway. It’s a big return for four months. You swing a loan and you come up like roses.”
“What’s the matter with you, Marty? Aren’t you listening? After nineteen years you got fired.”
“I know.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?”
“The blond piece of ass from the cafeteria. Young stuff. Rothstein seen you with her once and followed you back to her pad.”
“Bug off, Leo. Drink your coffee and go.”
“We’ve been friends a long time. Look, you got to get yourself sorted out. I mean it. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”
He looks at me and then he gets up quick and moves back. It showed on my face, probably, how much I wanted to smash his mouth and his eyes. “You poor bastard,” he says, and he leaves.
“Marty, honey, I’m sorry! You’ve got to try to have some understanding, too. Look at me. I’m a housewife and a mother, and the whole thing, everything I am, kind of hangs on you and your job. And there should be some trust between people married so long, right? So what you should understand is that when I find out you got fired over a week ago, and I find it out like by accident, who should blame me for going up like a rocket? Marty, darling, I said terrible things to you. Don’t you understand it was because I was upset? I was scared, darling. I’m still scared. I can’t help it. You know what my old man was like, the way we had to live because he was a bum. So a job is important, sure. But we can always make out somehow. People always make out somehow. Do you see anybody starving to death on the street lately? Marty, my God, look at me at least. And listen. There’s more, isn’t there? More than just the job. So all right. So we can put everything back together again, you and me, like the old days. Marty, I don’t care what it is, but if you just keep sitting there like that and not telling me anything, and the tears running and running down your face, Marty... my heart will break right in two. Right in two.”
I am sitting in an old wing chair, part of the furnishings of her furnished apartment. She is wearing a man’s T-shirt with a ripped shoulder and with some kind of college or high school seal printed on the front of it, in blue that is now so faded it cannot be read. She has fastened her hair back out of the way with a wide red rubber band. She missed some pale strands, and when they tickle her cheek, she blows out of the corner of her mouth at them.
She has taken the drawers out of the chest of drawers and put them on the bed. She is selecting the things she wants to keep and putting them in her two suitcases and in two cardboard cartons I am to ship for her.
It is a gray day, thick, hot, with a taste of acid and oil in every breath. The room lights look orange against the gray. Her arms and legs and face are sweaty, so that there are highlights on them from the window light or the light bulbs.
She looks at a pleated tan skirt for a long time and then drops it onto the discard pile near the foot of the bed.
“When you’re not sure,” I say, “make another pile. I can send those along too.”
“Good old Marty. Nothing is too much trouble.” The “Marty” is punishment. We both know that. But I have not called her Andy in retaliation. She looks over at me. “You can do anything except get me that money.”
“I tried to find a way.”
“Sure. I know. You tried.”
She continues sorting and packing. We had said goodbye. I had stayed there with her all night and the night before. The bodies had said good-bye to each other, very sweetly at first, and then in a straining, sweaty bitterness, demeaning each other.
She straightens up from sorting her shoes, wipes her forearm across her forehead, and frowns at me. “I didn’t know you were going to lose your job. I didn’t know you were goofing off. I didn’t know you were running here to screw me when you should have been working. I wouldn’a let you do that, Marty. I thought you were a man. I thought you could handle things. You come through to me now like some kind of puppy-sick kid. What happened to you, Marty?”
It is a good question. Why should everything that means anything in all the world narrow down to a hundred and ten pounds of bare girl, to the blindness that lasts ten seconds when she spasms and gasps and leaps? Why should I be forty blocks away from her and suddenly have such a twisting, shifting thing happen in my gut, like a fountain of steaming oil, turning me weak and dizzy, making everything around me so unreal that I have to come across those forty blocks as quickly as I can, moving through the paper city, up the cardboard stairs, right to the only reality left, the warm, smooth, young flesh under my hands, the sweet breaking mouth hungry under mine, the girl eyes dazed and glazed with all her wanting?
It is a good question and I have no answer I can give her. She is still frowning at me when the telephone rings.
She sits on the comer of the couch, legs crossed, picking the phone up from the end table. “Yes? Oh, Velma! Hey, I thought it would be the phone company about turning off the service. Yeah. I told them. I’m packing, sure. What else? It leaves at three fifty. An express bus. It’ll drop me off at Milwaukee sixty miles from home, but my brother Joe is driving over to meet me. What’s on your mind, Vel?”