“Okay.” She swallowed. Very well. Drive a car? His car? Very well. If he asked her to drive the car, she could drive the car. “Okay. Why were you in the cave?”
“What? Oh.” Now he was walking up and down the greenhouse not limping badly, shouldering, hands in pockets. Does he notice how clean and smooth the concrete is? She felt the floor with both hands; it was cool and iron-colored and silky as McWhorter’s driveway. She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina. “I go down in caves sometimes,” she said. He told her about the tiger.
“But the tiger wasn’t there.”
“No.”
“Then—?”
“Then what?”
“Then there was more than the tiger?”
“Yes.”
“You were trying to find out something besides the tiger.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I was asking a question to which I resolved to find a yes-or-no answer.”
“Did you find the answer?”
“Yes.”
“Which was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you came back up and out.”
“Yes, I came back up and out.”
“Is that good?”
“Good?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. At least I know what I have to do. Don’t worry.”
“About what?”
“About money. I’ll pay you back.”
“I don’t worry about money. Money worry is not instigating.”
“No, it’s not. You’d better go.”
She enjoyed her errands.
Straight to the bus station, where she found the silver Mercedes. Though she wanted to try the keys and practice starting the car, she decided not to. Someone might see her. She would do her errands, wait until dark, and drive to the country club.
Nobody saw her.
What pleasure, obeying instructions! Then is this what people in the world do? This is called “joining the work force.” It is not a bad way to live. One gets a job. There is a task and a task teller (a person who tells you a task), a set of directions, instructions, perhaps a map, a carrying out of the task, a finishing of the task, a return to the task teller to report success, a thanking. A getting paid. An assignment of another task.
She clapped her hands for joy. What a discovery! To get a job, do it well, which is a pleasure, please the employer, which is also a pleasure, and get paid, which is yet another pleasure. What a happy life employees have! How happy it must make them to do their jobs well and please their employers! That was the secret! All this time she had made a mistake. She had thought (and her mother had expected) that she must do something extraordinary, be somebody extraordinary. Whereas the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable, get an ordinary job, in itself a joy in its very ordinariness, and then be as extraordinary or ordinary as one pleased. That was the secret.
On to Western Union, which was part of the Greyhound bus station. As she wrote the message she tried not to make sense of it. The telegram cost $7.89. When the clerk read the message, she said to him casually but with authority: “Straight message, please!”
“Right,” said the clerk, not raising his eyes.
Victory! She had made it in the world! Not only could she make herself understood. People even understood what she said when she didn’t.
It was a pleasure spending her money for him. Why? she wondered. Ordinarily she hoarded her pennies, ate dandelion-and-dock salad.
She sat on her bench but in a new way. The buildings and the stores were the same but more accessible. She might have business in them. Le Club was still there, its glass bricks sparkling in the sun. A cardboard sign in the window announced a concert by Le Hug, a rock group. What a pleasure to have a job! Smiling, she hugged herself and rocked in the sun. Imagine getting paid for a task by the task teller! Money wherewith to live! And live a life so, years, decades! So that was the system. Quel system!
A real townie she felt like now, bustling past slack-jawed hippies, moony-eyed tourists, blue-haired lady leafers, antiquers, and quilt collectors.
When she went into a building, the dog stayed on the sidewalk paying no attention to anyone until she came out. He showed his pleasure not by wagging his tail but by burying his heavy anvil head in her stomach until his eyes were covered.
There was no way to see Dr. Battle except to sign a clipboard and wait her turn as a patient. She had to wait two hours. She liked him, though he was too busy and groggy from overwork and thought she was a patient despite her telling him otherwise, sizing her up in a fond dazed rush, not listening, eyes straying over her, coming close (was he smelling her?). His hand absently palpated her shoulder, queried the bones, tested the ball joint for its fit and play. Unlike Dr. Duk he didn’t bother to listen, or rather he listened not to your words but your music. He was like a vet, who doesn’t have to listen to his patients. There were other ways of getting at you. He saw so many patients that it was possible for him to have a hunch about you, a good country hunch, the moment you walked in the door. Better still, it was possible for her to subside and see herself through his eyes, so canny and unheeding, sleepy and quick, were they.
Well then, how did she look to him? Is my shoulder human? He cocked an ear for her music. The fond eyes cast about to place her, then placed her. She was classifiable then. She was a piece of the world after all, a member of a class and recognizable as such. I belong here!
He looked at her boots. “You just off the trail?”
“Well no, though I’ve been walking quite a bit.”
“And you’re feeling a little spacy.”
“A little what?”
“Spaced out.”
“What’s that?”
“Are you on something or coming off something?”
“What?”
He didn’t seem impatient with her dumbness. “Okay,” he said, counting off the questions on his fingers. “Are you taking a drug? Are you taking the pill? Are you coming off the pill? Are you pregnant?”
“No to one and all.” How would he treat her madness? ignore it, palpate her shoulder and tell her to lead her life? Would she?
“Okay, what’s the trouble, little lady?”
“I’m fine. What I was trying to tell you was—”
“You look healthy as a hawg to me.”
“—was to give you a message from—” She wanted to say “from him.” What to call him? Mr. Barrett? Mr. Will? Will Barrett? Bill Barrett? Williston Bibb Barrett? None of the names fit. A name would give him form once and for all. He would flow into its syllables and junctures and there take shape forever. She didn’t want him named.
Sluggishly, like a boat righting itself in a heavy sea, Dr. Battle was coming round to her. He began to listen.
“From who?”
“Your friend Barrett,” she mumbled. The surname was neutral, the way an Englishman speaks of other Englishmen.
“Who? Will Barrett? Will Barrett’s out of town,” he said as if he were answering her questions.
“Yes.”
This time his eyes snapped open, click. “What about Will Barrett?”
“You are to come see him this afternoon when you finish here.”
“What’s the matter with him? Is that rascal sick?”
Rascal. The word had peculiar radiations but mainly fondness.
“No. That is, I think he is all right now. He is scratched up and bruised and his leg is hurt but he can walk. This is in confidence. He doesn’t want anyone to know about this message.” It was a pleasure to talk to another person about him.
“In confidence?” For a second the eye went cold and flashed like a beacon.