She came up from the covers into the twilight and listened to Mr. Warrant, on the edge of deep sleep, on the precipice of years of dreams that combined and recombined, mumble about Joyce and his wife and someone else, Bob or Rob, or maybe not that name at all. The tides at Inchon. Her own name, Nancy, called out once as if it were punctuation, an exclamation point. Or was it a question mark? Nancy? This isn’t…
She lay stretched out next to him and didn’t strain to listen, to decipher his weightless words as airy as his body next to hers. She was substantial, lotioned, perfumed, ready for anything. But slowly she saw herself right in this room lighted by the streetlight she passed every afternoon now when she drove straight here from work. “Hey, I’ve been phoning you,” Marvin said. The newest man, too. Your machine broken? Yes, it is, she said. And brought Ms. Bojangles and put her out of sight in a far room where they were both sure of mice, the chenille balls offering unlimited entertainment.
Then she was eager for it all to be done with — the dinners with little variation between fried foods; endless puzzles; television — so in the twilight she could listen to his weightless digressions and fill herself with his odor, the pungency of the room, the licorice smell of all the photographs, the gray underwear. The carpet full of pieces of paper; underneath the bed, the exposed springs a jungle of cobwebs and lint. There must be remnants of her in there, Nancy said to herself. For now, in the afternoons, before fried pork chops, strips of mealy steak, she would come in here and raise the blinds, her one act of alteration, and examine drawers and closets.
But there was nothing left of hers except a closet of empty hangers wrapped in yarn, cloth flowers entwining the crooks. And empty bureau drawers; his dingy clothes all in one shallow top drawer. Under pajamas never out of their wrappers, she found a pistol but jerked away from it. The chill on its handle like the cold of all inanimate metal. She recalled the shed, the gloom of all the closed factories lining her route here.
She drank in everything, you know. Her father wouldn’t have been a bit surprised; her mother, always out of mind, would have been properly scandalized. Her fellow workers remarked on her calm. Someone thought she was pregnant; impossible given the impossibility of such from the small soft penis she only cupped as he told her about the drowned boy at Inchon; the brother who’d stolen his girl when they were teenagers and who lived for thirty years in a VA hospital because he lay down on the outskirts of Metz and refused to advance or retreat, to take any further actions against the enemy.
Madelaine Woo said, “You look tired,” and they both saw her face left unpampered. The emollients, placentas, balms of tarragon, and avocadoes at home in the empty house.
She took herself a history. She forgot Ms. Bojangles in the far room living off mice and quickly forgetting about people. The boy at Inchon became her lover. The penis in her hand swelled in her mind and took her so huge it filled her anus too. Sometimes she moaned as Mr. Warrant talked. At puzzletime she brought out yellowed ones she had found and carefully erased. So that the answers were references to men and events thirty years ago. Mr. Warrant was surprised because he thought everyone had forgotten. “My God,” he’d say. “Nancy, look at this. Nancy, see here?”
She moved more slowly. Sensuous; she’s practicing for something, someone, they’d said at the office. She dropped out of fashion but they all opened their mouths in excitement. She is beautiful, they all agreed. She is magnificent. Her hips are perfect. A delicious soufflé.
In the mirror she examined her face. She scrubbed away the makeup. She had passed a point somewhere recently, she knew. Once, without it, she was a child, a featureless girl. But now she was almost eyebrowless and a painful plain. I’m this way now. Belonging to this mirror and this unsalable place. I do my work, but I move more slowly. I think, but often I am there waiting for twilight and the absence of his body. I have always had the passion of pursuit, so I’ll pursue this. All of this. This isn’t… she remembered. But now nodded at these eyes in the mirror and said “Yes, it is” out loud.
She discovered the cat and called it Ms. Bojangles again. She abandoned the plates high in the dark towering cabinets to all the up wafting grease. She cut her hair too short. They were surprised. Her father slammed into the treetops in 1969 and wished her luck, never thought of his wife, cried out a moment before dissolution at his daughter’s terrible purposefulness which could always give pain.
And here’s the contrast: As limbs whipped the metal to shreds, he only wanted to live. And live everything again at once — to be her age, younger, older, older than anyone he’d ever met. Be an ancient man protected from harm on a screened porch. The very last thought the amorphous face, constantly changing in some movie he’d seen once.
But not Nancy, not now. Now she came to Mr. Warrant’s and fried foods, worked puzzles, watched TV, lay next to his minute body, her own body more weightless from not soaking in herbed butters and comfit of womb of lamb.
What is she doing? they began to wonder. Did you notice too? And Madelaine Woo nodded her flat moon face like the affirmation of an Asian goddess. Her clothes aren’t straightened. And no one but the two “gopher” boys talked about her odor. The smell of sour milk or of meat grease poorly doused with Chanel.
Marvin believed it might be drugs but didn’t say that to anyone; instead he turned his attention to someone in the accounting department. Only Madelaine asked and, receiving a vacant stare, didn’t ask again for over two months until she cajoled Nancy to lunch at a new restaurant full of aquariums and gorgeous waiters in tight Italian pants that zipped up the side.
“What is wrong? What’s happened? Are you ill? You had a mammogram last month… is that it? Nancy, can I help? Everyone’s worried sick about you.”
And on and on until she had stopped, her face flushed, her eyes full of tears. Real tears for me, Nancy thought, and patted Madelaine’s hand and told her everything would be fine soon. Only a temporary personal problem. “It’s my mother… she’s terribly sick,” she told her. And added the threat of cancer since Madelaine had mentioned the mammogram.
And later in one of the rooms, her rumpled suit collecting cat hair, chenille threads, the odor of pork sausage and eggs for supper, she was sorry for lying, for sacrificing her mother, and wondered what if it were true.
But she breathed in the age, was, to her mind, older than her mother, than the man she slept next to every night. Once he had reached for her, his small hand running up her thigh. But she had brushed him away and felt sincere and elevated by her dismissal. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she whispered into his deaf ear. “Huh?” “Not now, later,” she spoke up, her voice muffled by carpet, drapes, afghans.
She still did well at selling houses. She’s lost almost all of her beauty, the newer man said. The newest woman had never seen it. “But not her touch; no, she’s still got that magic touch.”
I’m learning everything, she thought. About it all. And she took on the older clients, men who wanted to rub up against her in narrow doorways in empty office buildings. Their wives in other cities. And she stayed still for them, her eyes averted, until they both passed into long corridors scuffed by mailing carts.
By now she had practically emptied her house. There were a few clothes, all the photographs, the answering machine all lighted up, the tape crammed with voices and whining beeps.