He threw himself upon her mercy.
“I’ve nothing to serve you.”
“I’m on Weight Watchers.”
“I don’t even know if there’s bouillon. I haven’t been cooking.”
“It isn’t important,” she said. “At a time like this it’s us who should be doing for you.” Suddenly she moved forward and took him in her arms; then, astonishingly, this brisk woman of the earlier errand began to sob hysterically. By stepping forward she had reversed their roles. He pressed her against him, thinking, I can’t give her grapes, but I’ll stand here and let her hang on. Was this dignity, he wondered? The comforted comforting. Was he Ethel Kennedy reassuring a shaken Andy Williams, Coretta King grim and brave at the peace rallies?
“There, there,” he said.
Tall as himself, the woman buried her running nose in his ear. His ear was no tangerine, but surely this was hospitality of a sort too. She gripped him fiercely and moaned and he pressed her harder and patted her back and moved her hair with his hand, and before he knew it he had an erection. Could she feel it? He extricated himself gently. “I’m going back to my mourner’s bench,” he said. The woman blew her nose in her handkerchief and moved to the neutral corner of his father’s sofa. There she continued to sob, though more quietly now. He waited politely and thought, surprising himself, that this had been his first sexual contact in a long time. And with a woman who, though at the most only five or six years older than himself, was in his mind the physical and spiritual counterpart of those guests of his parents when he was in high school, and so through some trick of associative displacement was old enough to be his mother. He recalled how those women had pleased him, inspired his lusts, their laughter over cards overheard through his bedroom door open just a crack (concupiscent, their mah-jongg concentration in its sheer physical huddle; beneath the folding card table their stockinged knees would be touching) sending him signals like whores in daylight gossiping in kitchens or doing their nails, and he blushing simply to overhear recipes recited, as though those treats they prepared for their husbands were code for the exotic movements they made in their beds. He understood why they appealed to him, coming as they did into his parents’ lives with his father’s rising fortunes, their presence associated with the TV, and the new gadgets and the other merchandise. Perhaps his own low-level sexuality had to do with being broke, his hard-on — another odd displacement only now subsiding — with his being in his father’s house again. Which made him an Oedipus of the domestic for whom jealous of his father’s place meant just that: place.
“May we speak?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was such a shock to all your father’s neighbors, to all his…friends.”
He nodded gravely, hoping to say something that would spark additional condolences, suddenly needing to hear them, to encourage the proper — all forms of regret were proper, always in season, like basic black — as a necessary aspect of his position, not hiding in commonplaces so much as seeking circuits in them.
He cleared his throat and began.
“Well, one thing — he certainly lived a full life.”
“Fifty-nine? Fifty-nine is a full life?”
“I mean he lived life to the brim. Each day was a new possibility. He got pleasure out of things. He never lost his curiosity about life. That’s why he retired young, I think. To give himself a chance to feel new things. Always to keep on discovering, keep on learning.”
“He didn’t know what to do with himself.”
“He took pleasure in the apartment. The way he fixed it up.”
“The bills beat his brains in.”
“He passed in his sleep,” he said. “Painlessly?” he added uncertainly.
“Who’s to know?” she said. “When your heart falls downstairs you probably feel it pretty good.”
“At least he couldn’t have suffered long,” Preminger said.
“He died alone. If you’re alone when something like that hits you, you get plenty scared.”
Out of commonplaces, Marshall shrugged and sat silently.
“I like to think,” she said finally, dropping her devil’s advocacy, “that at least his last months weren’t entirely all that terrible. There could have been a little sweetness. Toward the end. Frankly, that’s why I’m here.”
“I see.”
“Not the only reason, of course,” she added hurriedly. “If there’s anything I can do don’t hesitate to ask me.”
“That’s very kind, Mrs.—”
“Riker.”
“Mrs. Riker.” He’d been in Chicago two days and was beginning to understand that there were things people could help him with. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is something. I don’t have my car yet and don’t know the neighborhood. Do you drive? Maybe tomorrow or the next day you could take me around to the supermarket and I can lay in some supplies. I mean when you go shopping. I don’t want you to make a special trip. I could go with you, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” she said coolly.
“It’s not important,” he said, “I just meant if you’re stopped at a red light in the lane nearest the sidewalk in a cloudburst and I happen by in the same direction with heavy bundles—”
“Listen,” she said, “there could be plenty of people here in a little while. Can we talk?”
He’d forgotten that she’d started to tell him something, and now he waited noncommittally for her to go on.
“I know your car isn’t with you,” she said. “You flew. Of course there’s nothing in the house. Your father ate in restaurants, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to go shopping together.”
“Oh?”
“Come on,” she said, “what ‘Oh?’ You know what I’m talking about. What was between your father and me was no big deal. It isn’t as if we slept together. It was a flirtation pure and simple. He was a lonely man and he liked to think we were having some sort of, I don’t know, adventure. It wasn’t vulgar. I didn’t encourage him. I didn’t lead him on. At no time did I lead him on,” she said positively. “You don’t believe me?” He just stared at her, his groin warming like toast. “All right,” she said, “let’s be frank. How much do you know?”
“How much?”
“You’ve been here two days. I’m the person who didn’t let you in yesterday. I believed you when you said you were Phil’s son. I didn’t want you in the apartment till I had a chance to get in here. But damn it, I couldn’t find the key.”
“I want the key returned,” Preminger said icily.
“This is crazy,” she said. “You’ve been alone here two days. A person looks around. He looks for papers, photographs.”
“My father is dead,” he told her. “Do you think I came to ransack the place?”
“No, of course not. This would be a sentimental thing. Look, how much do you know?”
“I don’t know anything,” Preminger said miserably.