Now Marla Baker was caught in a staring contest with — was it black-haired Leanna, the woman he’d talked with at Mass? — the two of them confessing everything with their eyes, tears streaming down their faces, in a moment of such intensity they seemed to have surfaced into sunlight and been frozen there …
Singing the Miss America song, the recorded voice of Bert Parks whispered under the cheering. The Leanna woman had disappeared. English headed for the facilities, seeing that Marla Baker, gazing off now with shiny eyes and not listening to the talk of her companions, still had a drink to finish on the table in front of her.
Three or four men waited to use the john, but they were all so intoxicated, talking about nothing and struggling to make it clear, that he just went in ahead of them. The walls inside were completely papered over with magazine photos of naked boys, thousands of them striking every possible attitude and conveying intentions that, for all their being only photographs, made him uncomfortable. He went into the stall and leaned against the side of it, while his cigarette burned away rapidly like a fuse. Then he was trying to light another one, but the matchbook danced in his fingers and floated off, and the stall pitched forward and knocked him on the back of the head. He washed his hands, which felt as if they were dressed in big fat rubber gloves. His face in the mirror, ringed by dozens of photographed penises, seemed to be still in the process of forming. Over and over again he splashed his eyes with cold water.
When he got out, the sleeves of his sweater were all wet. He’d lost Marla Baker.
There were only a few people left in the place. There was a man trying to write a check at the bar, squinting at the mystery of his checkbook, two young fellows waiting for the man and both of them drumming their fingers with exasperation, there were two women across from one another at one of the little round tables, alone in a sea of little round tables, a bartender smoking a cigarette with a distant look of pleasure on his face, and out beyond the area of light, a waiter circling through vagueness with a dim white rag, as if he were surrendering.
English had no idea what to do. He had a feeling it didn’t matter.
As he left the Beginner’s he said hello to a young man and a young woman who clung to one another just inside the entrance, and the young man sobbed, “I don’t want to die! I want to live!”
English would ask people — tomorrow. He would find out where Marla Baker lived just by asking people — tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight he was having trouble carrying out his first assignment, and some difficulty delivering his head out beyond the doors.
Over the next few weeks the several squads of tourists in evidence on his arrival just disappeared. In the whole town only two or three restaurants stayed open for business, their windowpanes filmed with steam and bordered by grimy snow. Brief thaws came often, but Provincetown seemed, in general, arctic and bereft.
His two jobs kept him busy enough, but in the evenings English didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt the fires of a deadly boredom. When he didn’t have night work he stayed late in the bars with the people whose malfunctioning faces floated above their beers, turning from his own image in the mirror to another one of him in the black window. By this time there were only a few taverns open, and he kept seeing the same terrible people over and over. In the cafés where he ate breakfast, the local fishermen drank coffee and argued about certain financial realities of the industry over which they had no control and about which, it seemed to English, they weren’t entitled to have any opinions, or anyway, it began to seem to him, not such stupid ones; and they traded lies and passed judgment on their colleagues and rivals endlessly, until he believed he would get up and go over and tip someone’s eggs into his lap, just to see.
He was getting to be a creature of the night, spying till the zero hour, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays working a shift at WPRD from two until six in the morning. His employment wasn’t going all that happily. At the station they had only those two four-hour shifts for him, and he’d been doing next to nothing as Ray Sands’s assistant investigator. His one investigation, in fact, still involved tracking Marla Baker — who turned out to be older than she’d looked at first, a middle-aged divorcee — from her apartment to her lover’s house and back again, several times a week.
On these occasions the lovers had dinner together, and English recorded their conversations with a mike taped to the window glass. They lay together on the living-room couch till midnight or so, these two bland middle-aged women, and talked, and embraced, and massaged one another with scented oils, and he recorded all this, too, with the same mike taped to the glass of a different window. It was the kind of thing he’d sworn never to be reduced to, but he couldn’t remember when, exactly, this oath had been pledged. Everything was softened in the candlelight of their romance, and unknown to them, he skulked outside with the clouds of his breath, adjusting the volume knob with frozen fingers. His ski mittens dangled by little clips from the sleeves of his black leather jacket, two limp, flabby hands that wrung themselves helplessly while their owner went around doing things he disapproved of.
One night Marla Baker and her lover, whose name was Carol, had a visitor. It was the woman he’d spoken to in church his first day in this town and then pitifully invited to dinner — Leanna.
The three of them held a kind of conference in the kitchen. All English witnessed, through a slim parting of the living-room curtain that gave him a view of the archway to the kitchen, were the stove, which slowly developed a face out of its dials and seams, and the torso of Marla Baker, with sweater sleeves pushed back to her elbows. He saw her hands put an orange kettle on the flame and then saw them take it away when it steamed. Under his blue knit watch cap he wore small Walkman earphones, and he heard everything they said. But it was the length of the silences, those clutching lulls in talk, that spoke the clearest.
English had never realized, until he’d listened to recorded conversations, how much time people spend saying nothing, thinking about what they’ve heard and preparing what they have to say. But in this little gathering, made excruciating by Leanna’s presence in a way never quite specified, these three women started and stopped a lot more than usual, agonized through their remarks about the tea, and choked up when they talked about the weather, as if they were making terrible confessions. English pressed his palms against the window to quell miscellaneous distorting vibrations.
After that night, Marla Baker and Leanna started sleeping together occasionally at Marla’s apartment. The first time it happened, English climbed a tree and put the mike on a fishing pole, nudging it close to Marla’s bedroom window, and he listened. The two women undressed after a while and went to bed. They slept together as sisters might have, giving one another not so much pleasure as comfort. Marla and Leanna, Marla and Leanna — it had a nice sound to it. They’d been lovers once, but it hadn’t worked out the way they’d planned. They certainly knew how to let themselves weep.
English spent that evening straddling a branch, the tendons in his thighs at first uncomfortable and then, after a while, really on fire, wondering who was paying for this service, who was ultimately listening to these tapes, to what use was he or she putting them, what was this person like? Later he’d tell himself that if there was a beginning to his troubles, that was it: wondering.
It was almost 3 a.m. He couldn’t believe he was sitting in a tree with these items, which it would be impossible to explain if anybody asked: much worse stuff than, there was no comparison with, really, the medical implements he’d been convinced were soiling him a couple of years ago. Hadn’t his experience as his own unsuccessful hangman turned his life around? At what point had he gotten this corrupt?