Brighty was walking across the room with what Bob took for semiurgent purpose. “Hello, Brighty,” he said; when she saw Bob, she altered her course and made for him directly. Seizing his hand, she said, “And to think I used to turn down a dance.”
“Oh?” said Bob.
She formed her face into a coquettish expression and held a phantom cigarette to her lips: “‘I’m going to sit this one out, thank you.’” She dropped the cigarette and shook her head at the memory of herself. “What in the world was I thinking?”
“You were following your own tastes and whims.”
“Tastes and whims, he tells me!” She socked Bob in the arm and hurried off to wherever she’d been going.
Maria had told Bob he should jettison the schedule and come and go as he wished; deciding he’d had enough for the day, he bid the group at the long tables goodbye, and made for Maria’s office. Her door was half-open and she was — on the phone. She made a question mark face at Bob and Bob gave her a thumbs-up. She made the OK sign and he saluted. He made walking fingers and she made the OK sign and he bowed and left the center. Stepping down the path, Bob found that he felt happy; and he understood Maria had been correct regarding her adjustments to his visits. The thought he carried with him as he made his way home was that he’d landed in a place where, in getting to know the individuals at the center, he would likely not suffer a boredom.
JILL WAS A SINCERELY NEGATIVE HUMAN BEING WITH UNWAVERINGLY bad luck and an attitude of ceaseless headlong indignation. Every day she was met with evidence of a hostile fate, and every day she endeavored to endure it, but also to combat it, but also to locate people to talk to about it. She found Bob willing to listen to a degree that was, she told him quietly, as if it were a secret she could somehow keep from him while at the same time telling him, uncommon. In this way he was precious to her, but she was never gentle with him, never thankful. Bob was like a horse run and run, and never fed or watered, only whipped. By the end of Bob’s first month of bookless visits to the center he had established something like a friendship with Jill, or what passed for friendship in her world. No warmth, but a familiarity, with each party comfortable to act as him and herself. Bob couldn’t say what Jill thought of him, but he found her an engaging presence, and he began to look forward to their communications whenever he moved in the direction of the Gambell-Reed Senior Center.
It was a moody day. Bob arrived at the center and found Jill at her usual station, where she sat working on another thousand-piece puzzle: a desert sky at dawn cluttered with hot-air balloons. She did not say hello to Bob, because she never said hello; but he knew she knew he was there, and he knew she would eventually speak, and that this speaking would be the naming of a complaint, and it was: she sighed a long sigh and said, “I’m so tired, Bob.”
“Rough night?” he asked.
“Stupid question.”
Bob took up a puzzle piece and began searching for its position in the picture. “I thought there were no stupid questions,” he said.
“Where’d you hear that? On the internet?” Jill laughed ruefully to herself. Anti-internet sentiment was common from Jill. Bob had almost no experience with that overvast landscape, but somewhere along the line Jill decided he was a devotee and she was disdainful of his behaviors.
She began pumping her hands, explaining to Bob that she had at long last regained the feeling in her thumbs.
“That’s good,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” she told him, explaining that the numbness had been replaced by a throbbing pain at the thumb joints. The reference to her thumb pain made her think of other pains, and she became expansive on the subject, soliloquizing about her history with pain: the pain of her youth, and the pain of midlife, and her present engagement with it. She spoke of pain as a perceived punishment, pain as a discipline, and lastly, about how much the pain hurt. “You understand that, right?” she said.
“Understand what?”
“It’s only pain if it hurts.”
This seemed self-evident. But then, as was not uncommon, Jill made Bob doubtful of his knowledge. He thought of his own aches, which in recent months had been mounting, and asked, “But what’s the definition of hurts?”
“Do you involuntarily jolt in your seat? Are you sucking in short, sharp breaths with your eyes shut up tight? Does your vision go red in splotchy flashes, and you’re worried you might fall over or faint?”
“No.”
“What you’re experiencing is not pain,” Jill said, “it’s discomfort.”
“Not pain.”
“Discomfort is not pain.”
Jill said that her pain was near constant and impossible to get used to, to not be surprised by. She spoke of a wish to measure it, a volume or weight she might assign it, to share with doctors, with strangers, bus drivers. “People would be impressed if they knew the size of it,” she said. “The way it is now, they simply can’t understand. You can’t.” They worked on the puzzle in earnest, silent competition. With both of them going full tilt they completed the image in ninety minutes; as soon as it was done, Jill broke it up and returned the pieces to the box. Later, they were sitting under the television watching a show where four adult women screamed at each other in front of a live audience of adult women who also were screaming. There was an unknowable emotional connection between the women onstage and those in the audience; the more the women onstage screamed, then did the screaming of the audience also increase. At times the two groups were screaming with all of their vigor and volume: altogether too profound a passion for one o’clock in the afternoon, was Bob’s thought. During a commercial break came a comparative silence, and Bob turned to Jill, who was staring at him. She asked Bob if she’d told him about her new heater, and he said she hadn’t. “Tell me now,” he said, and she did.
Her new heater, a fickle and mysterious device. It would sit in cold silence, in defiance of its own on-ness, then roar to life in the middle of the night while Jill slept, overheating and smoking — black, acrid smoke, which set off her fire alarms, which woke up her neighbors, who twice had called in the fire department, who permanently damaged Jill’s carpets with their clanking, filthy boots. This was a classic Jill yarn in that the problems were multifold and collectively unwieldy. In listening to such stories as this it was easy to become lost in the mirror-maze of her misfortune; but Bob wished to be helpful, and so he always made to seek out the root of any one particular problem in hopes of uncovering a solution and improving the quality of her life in some small way. “You should unplug the heater before you go to bed,” he told her.
“I did unplug it, Bob. That’s what I’m saying. The heater turned itself on when it was unplugged.”
Bob said, “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Anyway it was turned off when I went to sleep,” she said.
“That’s not the same thing, though.”
They watched a commercial for laundry detergent that featured an animate teddy bear crawling into a washing machine. Jill said, “He’s going to get more than he bargained for.” The screaming show resumed but Jill hit the mute button. “I’m not done talking about the heater,” she said.