“Hi,” Anita said.
“Hi,” he said. He hobbled out of the room. He went down the hall to Francie’s room and found her conscious, flat on her back, Dickie seated behind her, brushing her hair.
“Good night,” he said to both of them. “I’m going up to the attic to go to sleep.”
Dickie raised the brush to his forehead in salute. Perry took the afghan draped over Francie’s mattress and headed for the attic stairs.
“He drilled a hole in your wall, Francie,” Dickie said, making his words come slowly, in time with the brush strokes. “In the other room, he crouched down and concentrated all his energy, and his right eye bored a hole about half an inch deep in the wall.”
He climbed the stairs to the attic slowly and carefully, wishing there were a handrail. The afghan was draped around his neck like a towel.
Francie painted, and the attic was where she usually went to do it, although it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He groped for the light bulb at the top of the stairs and fumbled for the switch on the side of it. The attic lit up. To his left was the mattress, under the window, flecked with oil paint. It was the mattress the cat had had a litter on when he and Beth Ann and Francie, Dickie and Gus lived together in Connecticut. He sat down awkwardly because of the cast, sighing as he sank down because he would just have to get up in another minute to turn off the light. In front of him was a stool with a piece of material draped over it. On top of the fabric was a conch shell. Little tubes of paint were scattered on the floor like cigarette butts. He always liked to sleep in Francie’s attic, and went there by choice instead of to the spare bedroom. In the morning the light came through the four-over-four windows and made a Crosshatch pattern on the floor.
He lay back on the mattress, pulling the afghan over him, and tried to block out the noise from the party. He heard rock-’n’-roll, pretty clearly. Then he opened his eyes and concentrated on the music; it was rock-’n’-roll, and he could hear it clearly.
He took off his belt and watch and unbuttoned his jeans. There was a slight odor of cat about the mattress. He got up and put off the light and went back to bed. The bass downstairs was turned up so high that he could feel the reverberation through the mattress, and it made him think of one of those motel beds that vibrate when you deposit a quarter. The last time he had been in one of those beds it was in a room he shared with Francie, after he drove to Francie’s sister’s house to pick her up and bring her back to this house. Francie had been married to a lawyer for a year, and when the marriage broke up, she flew to her sister’s. She missed the house and wanted to come back to it, but she was afraid that she might cry in public. She called him because she said that she did not want to cry on an airplane or train. They could have made the ride from her sister’s to Francie’s house in New Hampshire without spending the night in a motel. Stopping had been Francie’s idea. She wanted to spend the night in a motel and go back in the morning, when the house wouldn’t look as nice, when the sunlight would make all the dust visible, when she wouldn’t be sentimental for the good times she and her husband had had in the house. They sat in the motel on their twin beds and each drank a Coke from the machine outside their door. Francie had been going to pay for the motel with her American Express Card, but then she realized that the bill would go to her husband. She didn’t have any money, so he paid for the room. They had each put quarters in the boxes attached to the headboards and been shaken off to sleep. At least they had pretended that, because it wasn’t the right night to sleep together. The next morning when they woke up it was raining, and when they got to her house it looked even more depressing than she had hoped it would. He was never clear on why Francie and her husband divorced, except that Francie did not want children and wanted to be a painter.
Before he fell asleep he heard the silence. He was conscious of it not because he heard the music die out or voices get quiet, but because he heard a car starting outside. It sounded as if everybody downstairs had gone home. Waiting to fall asleep, he thought about what Francie had told him recently: that he was her best friend. “A woman should have another woman for her best friend,” Francie said and shrugged, “but you’re it.” “Why would you have to have a woman for a best friend?” he said. She shrugged again. “It’s hard for men and women to be best friends,” she said. He nodded and she thought he understood, but all he meant to acknowledge was that they were close, but there was also something hard about that. What it was, was that it had never been the right time to go to bed with her, and if he did it after all this time, he would have been self-conscious.
Beth Ann was in Albuquerque.
Delores — spacy Delores — had traveled from Palo Alto to Miami and was headed north.
Drifting off to sleep, he thought about being on the subway in Boston, where he had stopped on the way to Francie’s earlier in the day to pick up some things for her at Charrette. An old lady had struck up a conversation with him, saying that she was a rarity, a native Bostonian. She asked him where he was from. “Michigan,” he said, although he was not from there. He hated talking to strangers, and he felt that there must be something wrong with him because so many old ladies thought he was a nice young man; they talked to him in spite of his long hair and leather jacket, with the leather so old it was flaking off like scabs. But she had a friend in Michigan, so she went on and on about it. “Then I moved with my family to Fort Worth,” he said, “and then we lived in Germany until I was a teen-ager, and then we moved to New Jersey, and Iowa, and Los Angeles.” She nodded, greatly interested. “How long have you been in Boston?” she asked. “Six days,” he told her. Then she caught on — something told her he was putting her on, or crazy. He could see her narrowing her focus on the rotting leather, raise her head a bit to look at where his hair edged over the shoulder of the jacket. “Tomorrow I’m going to Mexico,” he said. She didn’t speak the rest of the ride, from Charles Street to Harvard Square.
In the morning he went downstairs, looking for coffee. The door to Francie’s room was closed. In place of a DO NOT DISTURB sign was a sign that Delores had taken from the pool at the condominium where her parents lived: POR FAVOR PONGA LES TOALLAS EN EL CESTO. He thought that he could use a shower, and wondered if there would be towels. His friends’ bathrooms never had towels, and he could not imagine how they dried off. He got distracted by the odor of bacon, walked into the kitchen to find a plate of half-eaten eggs and bacon, and Daryl Freed slumped over it.
“Fucking creep stole my car,” Freed said.
“What are you talking about?”
Freed had pulled his cardigan sweater over the top of his head. He looked like a mad nun. He looked as if he had been awake all night.