In July, Donald had a two-week vacation, and Marilyn’s vacation (ten days) coincided with it. Joshua was in summer school because he had failed plane geometry, so they had every afternoon alone together. Donald had promised to go fishing with Starley on Chesapeake Bay, but he never got around to calling him. Joshua’s absence allowed them time to make love listening to music, go to the swimming pool in back of her apartment, walk slowly, holding hands, to the fish market for lobster.
Things changed at the end of the month when it turned out that Joshua had again failed plane geometry. By this time Donald was staying at her apartment most nights, so he was there when Joshua came home crying. The two of them stood in the hallway weeping. She tried to embrace him and he shoved her away. That made her cry so loudly that she bellowed. Joshua swore that he had done his best, that the teacher was a witch who punished a student even when he tried and failed. He said that he didn’t care about the two sides of an isosceles triangle, and he would stab himself in the heart with the point of a compass if he had to take the course again. He ran out, slamming the door. Marilyn went around the house, moving in patterns that made no sense, trying to round up all the compasses. They were all around the apartment: rusted compasses, compasses bent out of shape, compasses empty of pencils; they looked ugly and evil, like something the Nazis would use. She eventually found four of them and held them out to Donald, the metal instruments shaking in her hand louder than dice, and told him to bury them. He buried them under a mock orange bush near the swimming pool, dropping a stub of a pencil that had been in one of them on top of the grave as a marker. He had not buried anything since his pet turtle died when he was twelve. When he went back to comfort Marilyn, things started to come apart: he told her that she was a good mother, and she turned on him and said, “How can you give advice when you know nothing about parenting? When you haven’t seen your son all year, except for one day last December?” Later that week she went to see the school counselor. She came home and told Donald that Joshua was “disturbed” by their living together, that he would have to go. “You’re going to let a fifteen-year-old tell you how to live?” Donald said. “What would you know, when you have a child you completely ignore? If you loved that child, and if he was suffering, and if you could help him, and if you … if you ever cared enough to help him, then you’d know, you’d. …” She stood there, trembling. Lobster stew was bubbling on the stove. That night Donald had two hamburgers at a drive-in restaurant and went home and waited for her to call and apologize. She didn’t call that night or the next night, and each night when the phone did not ring, Donald went to sleep praying that Joshua would have to repeat the course. At night he would awaken, sweating, stomach heavy, having been fooled by some slight noise into thinking that the phone was ringing. With only three days of vacation left, knowing he had to get himself together, he did what he always did when he was in trouble or feeling blue — he called Starley. Starley had been his best friend in college; he had taught him how to take apart a carburetor, had patiently tutored him in logic. Starley had taught him, late in life, to whistle. After college, they had gone to New York together.
That night Starley and Alice met him for drinks at My Blue Heaven. They were late, so at the time Donald was to meet them, he crossed the street and went into the bar. He had almost finished his gin-and-tonic when they came in. He was sucking on the wedge of lime, and liking its greenness. The booths were padded in blue plastic, and there were silver-flecked blue Formica tabletops. Up near the ceiling were tiny twinkling blue lights. On the wall in back of the bar was a big cutout of Rita Hay worth, in a striped bathing suit; it had been stuck on a piece of board lettered “The One That Got Away,” which had formerly held the huge plastic fish that was now hanging at the other end of the bar, its snout pointed up the skirt of Marilyn Monroe, who was pouting and pushing her full white skirt down as if, unexpectedly, a wind storm had just started up between her knees. There was, next to this, an anatomically correct baby-boy doll, painted Day-Glo blue.
“None of this would have happened if you had gone to the beach for your vacation,” Alice said to Donald.
“I wanted to be with her. Her kid was in school. Everything was going fine until the little bastard flunked plane geometry.”
“Get him a calculator,” Alice said.
“Plane geometry isn’t the sort of course that a calculator would help in,” Starley said.
“Give me a light, Dickie,” Alice said.
He lit her cigarette.
“I don’t think this place is as funny as I used to,” Alice said. Nobody said anything.
“I’m in a bad mood, and I apologize for it,” Alice said. “All week I’ve been trying to give up smoking by smoking these cigarettes that are made of lettuce.”
“Why don’t you call Marilyn and see if she won’t come have a drink with us?” Starley said.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do we have to be here if he’s going to have a drink with her, Dickie? I’d feel awkward. I already feel sick to my stomach.”
“Then put that thing out.”
“I can’t. I need to smoke in social situations.”
Years before, in New York, Starley had told Donald that his only misgiving about marrying Alice was her chain-smoking. The smoke made him cough. At the wedding reception there had been little silver trays with pastel-colored Nat Sherman cigarettes.
They sat looking at the tabletop. The waiter was avoiding them. The waiter had apple-pink puckered cheeks like Howdy Doody.
“Do you think you would do us a favor?” Alice said. “Dickie and I haven’t been out to dinner in so long that I can’t remember it, and the sitter could only come for an hour tonight. Do you think you could go stay with Anita?”
“Alice!” Starley said. “He doesn’t want to be our baby-sitter.”
“That’s okay, Starley,” Donald said. “It doesn’t matter where I brood. You go out and have dinner. I’ll go over to your place and watch Anita.”
“Thank you,” Alice said.
Starley rolled his eyes dramatically. He stood up, and then Alice bumped out of the booth. She looked heavier. Her skirt was wrinkled. Mascara had smudged under one eye. The summer before, he and Starley had picked up a whore after a day of fishing on Chesapeake Bay, and while he went at it with her, Donald had sat drunkenly on the floor across the room, casting his line into her hair. There was a little plastic worm attached to the fishing pole, and once he missed and she reached down and pushed the thing off of her breast, saying, “Ugh! Make him stop!” “She says she wants you to stop, Starley,” Donald said. Then the whore started giggling, and Starley frowned at him. “She says she wants you to quit it,” he said. He was drunk. He was naked. Earlier (this was in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge) he had put his underpants on his head and marched around saying he was Ponce de Leon (Florida was on his mind; his son was on his mind). They played tag. The whore was easy to catch because she didn’t want to play tag in the first place, so she never really tried to get away. When she bumped into a table and nicked her shin, she refused to play anymore. They all sat around drinking gin-and-tonics. She flipped a coin to see who got her first. Whoever got “tails” got her. Much later the three of them stood, in towels, on the tiny balcony outside their room. In the parking lot a family was unloading their station wagon. There was a windblown mother, and a husband not quite as tall as she was who carried an infant in a baby seat, and a little girl, about five, who sat on the gravel and made demands as her father removed suitcases. The little girl started crying, and her mother fumbled her up in her arms, and they all marched into the Howard Johnson’s and disappeared.