Don’t you believe it! What can you get free these days? Advice. Cancer maybe. It’s a miracle a man can stay in business with the prices. Everybody out to fuck his neighbor… oh, lady, I am sorry! Geez, I’m really sorry.”
As they walk slowly along a gravel path through the park, her hand in the crook of his arm, she asks, “What was that mec jabbering about?”
“Oh, nothing. It never occurred to him that you don’t speak English.”
The crisp air has cleared LaPointe’s headache away, and the little food has settled his stomach. The thin wintery sunshine warms the back of his coat pleasantly, but he can feel a sudden ten– or fifteen-degree drop in temperature when he steps into a shadow. The touch of this sun, dazzling but insubstantial, reminds him of whiter mornings on his grandparents’ farm, the soil of which was so rocky and poor that the family joke said the only things that grew there were potholes, which one could split into quarters and sell to the big farmers to be driven into the ground as post holes. All the LaPointes, aunts, cousins, in-laws, came to the farm for Christmas. And there were a lot of LaPointes, because they were Catholic and part Indian, and you can’t lock the door of a teepee. The children slept three or four to a bed, and sometimes the smaller ones were put across the bottom to fit more in. Claude LaPointe and his cousins fought and played games and pinched under the covers, but if anyone cried out with joy or pain, then the parents would stop their pinochle games downstairs and shout up that someone was going to get his ass smacked if he didn’t cut it out and go to sleep! And all the kids held their breath and tried not to laugh, and they all sputtered out at once. One of the cousins thought it was funny to spit into the air through a gap in his teeth, and when the others hid under the blankets, he would fart.
On Christmas morning they were allowed into the parlor, musty-smelling but very clean because it was kept closed, except for Sundays, or when the priest visited, or when someone had died and was laid out in a casket supported on two saw horses hidden under a big white silk sheet rented from the undertaker.
The parlor was open, too, for Christmas. Kids opening presents on the floor. Christmas tree weeping needles onto a sheet. A pallid winter sun coming in the window, its beam capturing floating motes of dust.
The smell of mustiness in the parlor… and the heavy, sickening smell of flowers. And Grandpapa. Grandpapa…
Whenever a random image or sound on the Main triggers his memory in such a way as to carry him back to his grandfather, he always pulls himself back from the brink, away from dangerous memories. Of all the family, he had loved Grandpapa most… needed him most. But he had not been able to kiss him goodbye. He had not even been able to cry.
“…still mad?”
“What?” LaPointe asks, surfacing from reverie. They have rounded the park and are approaching the gate across from his apartment.
“Are you still mad?” Marie-Louise asks again. “You haven’t said a word.”
“No,” he laughs. “I’m not mad. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. About being a kid. About my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather! Tabernouche!”
That is a coincidence. He hasn’t heard anyone but himself use that old-fashioned expletive since the death of his mother. “You think I’m too old to have grandparents?”
“Everyone has grandparents. But, my God, they must have been dead for ages.”
“Yes. For ages. You know something? I wasn’t mad at you this morning. I was sick.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
She considers this for a while. “That’s funny.”
“I suppose so.”
“Hey, what do you want to do? Let’s go somewhere, do something. Okay?”
“I don’t really feel like going anywhere.”
“Oh? What do you usually do on Sundays?”
“When I’m not working, I sit around in the apartment. Read. Listen to music on the radio. Cook supper for myself. Does that sound dull?”
She shrugs and hums a descending note that means: yes, sort of. Then she squeezes his arm. “I know why you’re leading me back to the apartment. You didn’t get enough last night, did you?”
He frowns. He wishes she wouldn’t talk like a bar slut. He can hardly direct her to the apartment after she has said something like that, so they leave the park and stroll through back streets between Esplanade and the Main. This day of sunshine after weeks of pig weather has brought out the old people and the babies, making it seem almost like summer. In winter, the population of the Main seems to contract at its extremities; the old and the very young stay indoors. But in summer, there are babies in prams, or toddlers in harnesses, their leashes tied to stoop railings, while old, frail-chested men in panama hats walk carefully from porch to porch. And on the Main merchants stand in their open doorways, occasionally stepping out onto the sidewalk and looking up and down the street wistfully, wondering where all the shoppers could be on such a fine day. If one stops and looks in the window, the owner will silently appear beside him, seeming to examine the merchandise with admiration, then he will drift toward the door, as though the magnetism of his body can draw the customer after him.
The weight of her arm through his is pleasant, and whenever they cross a street, he presses it against his side, as though to conduct her safely across. They walk slowly down the Main, window-shopping, and sometimes he exchanges a word or two with people on the street. He notices that she automatically bends her knee to disguise her limp when a youngish man approaches, though she doesn’t bother when they are alone.
Around noon they take lunch at a small café, then they go back to the apartment.
For the past hour, Marie-Louise has puttered about, taking a bath, washing her hair, rinsing out some underclothes, trying on various combinations of the clothes she bought yesterday. She does not do domestic chores; the coffee cups go unwashed, the bed unmade. She has tuned the radio to a rock station which serves an unending stream of clatter and grunting, each bit introduced by a disc jockey who babbles with obvious delight in his own sound.
LaPointe finds the music abrasive, but he takes general pleasure in her busy presence. For a time he sits in his chair, reading the Sunday paper, but skipping the do-it-yourself column, which he finds less interesting than it used to be. Later, the paper slides from his lap as he dozes in the afternoon sunlight.
The burr of the doorbell wakes him with a snap. Who in hell? He looks out the window, but cannot see the caller standing under the entranceway. The only cars parked in the street are recognizable as those of neighbors. The doorbell burrs again.
“Yes?” he calls loudly into the old speaking tube. He has used it so seldom that he doubts its functioning.
“Claude?” the tinny membrane asks.
“Moishe?”
“Yes, Moishe.”
LaPointe is confused. Moishe has never visited him before. None of the cardplayers has ever been here. How will he explain Marie-Louise?
“Claude?”
“Yes, come in. Come up. I’m on the second floor.”
LaPointe turns away from the speaking tube to look over the room, then turns back and says, “Moishe? I’ll come down…” But it is too late. Moishe has already started up the stairs.
Marie-Louise enters from the bedroom, wearing Lucille’s quilted robe. “What is it?”