It’s like he expects all this, she thought, eating demurely, pretending she was in a restaurant with music and candles and aquariums built into the walls. Here, really, it was too warm and awfully humid as if their bodies, the cooling oil, pasta, salad, puzzle books gave off water, sweated into the air. She watched droplets stream down the door behind him that opened onto some room or yard she’d never seen, that she didn’t want to see. There at the table she promised she’d never learn about a yard or room or garage or if there was a car or anything else at all.
She took an interest in Mr. Warrant’s puzzles. In some other room removed from the kitchen, where there were no odors of expensive oils and seasonings, they sat at a card table in the middle of furniture covered with chenille bedspreads. Onstage like chess champions, she thought. But a ghost audience.
“You’re a smart one,” he said. “Yep, you are a smart one.” And she was surprised at his limited vocabulary. Vocabulary, she said to herself, and realized it was a word from school, further surprised she could fill out the puzzles with ease. But they’re easy, of course. While he suffered over them. “No, don’t tell me now. Keep quiet.” His voice a command. Like Todd in throaty, aroused tones, telling her to roll onto her stomach.
She smelled him, imbibed him. What is this but age? And she couldn’t place any of it exactly. Not among the most narrowly focused recollections. Not leather she’d smelled in France. Or fabrics in shops. Or the smell of any man anywhere before. Wasn’t it a house whose door she had just unlocked? On a tree-lined street, broken sidewalk a disadvantage. She saw clients stepping over it dramatically, arching eyebrows. A house on the edge somewhere in Pittsfield maybe. Almost a dozen things. Fashionable, ghetto, expensive, cheap. But the air when she opens it first, alone, doing her homework. God, she’s devoted, hard-driving, a hell-of-an-agent. Agent, she liked the word. A secret agent. Words and puzzles; she breathed in again. She’s not wearing underwear, you know. The young office boys talked at the cooler under the aerial view of the city they sold off piece by piece. She bends over for fun. To tease. But no, she never teased. Or not really.
The odor of this very old man. Only a little like walls in houses that almost sell but never do. They talk about nothing at all. She cleans up but leaves her watch on the window ledge as the excuse for coming back she doesn’t need. He sleeps at the card table a deep, dead sleep. There is no snoring, no movement. He is dead, she thinks, and cannot touch him; not the weak-muscled arm, even the shoulder under the thin shirt. She goes out and home and takes a long, hot shower, smells her skin, and ladles it with balm of peaches and placenta.
But every night she is there, at the door. Mr. Warrant’s face expressionless. I am a social worker, she thinks. That’s what it’s like to him.
She moves about the house. It is unsalable. It is huge and amorphous, shifting and dark with those high, narrow windows people sold and bought once which look out into tree-tops and sky sliced by power lines. Add to that the weakness of his small-wattage bulbs. But no, she says, I’ll make do with it all like this. Exactly. Though from room to room she is lost. And turning back around, finds the door to the kitchen or the room with him at the card table. As if there were fifteen kitchens and rooms with card tables. All off a room dreadfully dark, the furniture towering. Like her images of the barren mills. His house a closed factory, without production. Waiting for nothing at all. The odor of the shed, of its newspapers and grease, confined her for a time to the two rooms where every night they worked their way through endless puzzles. “You are bright.” I am also beautiful with perfect hips, she told herself. Not many can say that — perfect hips. Absolutely perfect. Sculpture, one had said. Brown. Delicious. Some foreign fruit. A soufflé. Risen to perfection.
Often he dozed profoundly. She straightened the kitchen, put her graceful fingers into deep and obscure cabinets. The cups, those mugs, the plates dulled by a century of bacon grease.
They watched TV, “Wheel of Fortune.” He called her Joyce. “Who?” she’d turned to ask over the card table scattered with puzzle books. “What?” he answered her. “Joyce ‘who’?” His eyes snapped back to the expensive gifts for the winning contestant. As exotic and foreign to him as sapphires and camels — an animal she’d ridden with pleasure in Cairo; a gem she’d been given more than once.
She read her magazines, her magnificent suit attracting the chenille to it, mixing with Ms. Bojangles’s yellow hair. Even you could never sell this house, she told herself. What did I just say? Joyce, who?
Then she stayed the night. She planned nothing. Why? What do you plan? Planning was for work. She had slept with Marvin again. He had eaten strawberry jam off her clitoris. She had screamed for the first time some sound that had sent Ms. Bojangles tearing down the hall to sit near the heat vent and had jerked Marvin’s head up. In the dark his eyes like Negroes’ in old movies. Feets do yo stuff. “Nancy, my god, did I hurt you?” But she lay perfectly still, speechless. At first it was because she had no reason to give him, then it was a game, finally she couldn’t bear to talk. He dressed and drove away, the rumble of his Lancia like thunder through frozen February air at three in the morning.
They had eaten bacon sandwiches and played the puzzles. She was getting worse; he was improving. They watched “Wheel of Fortune” and, after scouring the ancient black iron skillet, she shook him gently, averting her eyes from the thick strand of saliva connecting the corner of his lip to a liver spot on the back of his hand the shape of Chile. Let’s go there, the German lover had pointed at a poster in a window. Santiago de Chile. The street full of assured brown faces.
She led him through the darkness from the card table to the bedroom she had guessed at but never been in. And inside it was the same dark towering furniture, a room from Dickens, she thought, surprising herself with an image of some woodcut from a high school library book.
She undressed in a frenzy, upsetting herself a little. This isn’t like me at all. Hurrying is spoiling it, she thought. But she turned off the light, left her clothes in a pile, and slid between the covers. The sheets were clammy, they felt as if they’d never warm. She rolled side to side and finally lay still, turned her eyes to Mr. Warrant, who sat heavily on the opposite edge of the bed. Slowly he took off his slippers. Still sitting, he removed his pants. And in the twilight from some outside light through the half-opened blinds, she shuddered. The more he took off — old-fashioned undershirt like Madelaine Woo wore to picnics, her nipples huge rosettes, the billowing boxer shorts — the smaller he became until lying next to her, letting out a heavy sigh, he was nothing at all. She was the weight in the bed. And when she turned toward him, he rolled to meet her. And the instant they touched his whole body twitched as if he’d been electrified like those TV patients with paddles to their chests.
“Nancy!” he said. “What is this? My God, girl. My heavens. This isn’t…” But he didn’t finish. And neither could she, though, her hands on his thin leg, her mind snagged the sentence and tried to complete it. This isn’t. But positive as always — as they always said, she took the lemons of life and made lemonade — she ran her freshly oiled fingers up his thigh.
Her graceful fingers found his penis and massaged it carefully. She located its thick undervein and followed it with long reassuring strokes. But there was no length to it. His scrotum was a thick still bag in her palm. And when she ducked her head under the covers, her tongue ready to moisten, coax, he held her head still. In the absolute dark her nose touched his hairless chest and she breathed in all the unusual odors. She felt his chest heave in spasms and she listened to him cry through the heavy damp quilts. For a long time she rested, his hand having released her hair, and she heard his stomach rumble from the bacon. She smelled his age like all old things that weren’t people. Her own grandparents had died young. She had never sold a nursing home. Old people never came up to her on the streets. Distant grandchildren always put their useless houses on the market.