She said, “Well, I’d better be getting on my horse.”
“Hazel, if you were me, what would you do?”
“About what?”
“You know — Ruby.”
“Pension her off. Put her in a good orphanage. Feed her to the sharks. How the heck should I know what to do? It’s your life.”
“That’s the point, I don’t feel it is my life any more. I feel like I’m in a box and somebody’s sitting on the lid. Or—” George stroked his chin and scowled out the window. “Or like those lobsters way out there caught in the traps. At first they don’t realize they’re in a trap, they keep going through the same motions they always did, until zip, somebody pulls them up and there they are, lobsters Thermidor.”
“George Anderson Thermidor,” Hazel said.
Blinking, George drew his eyes away from the sea, and the invisible lobster traps. “I don’t know why I’m talking like this. It will give you the wrong idea of Ruby. Actually she’s a very shy, sweet kid.”
“No traps?”
“No.”
“Then what are you worrying about? No traps, no George Anderson Thermidor.” Hazel reached over the bar and patted him kindly on the shoulder. “You’ve got another one of your crushes, is all. Cheer up. You’ll get over it, same as always.”
George stared at her gloomily. “You’re a pretty swell woman, Hazel.”
“Baloney.”
“No, I mean it. You know what we should do, Hazel? We should go out right now and tie one on, for old time’s sake.”
“We should, eh?”
“We’ll go the rounds, how about it? I’ll forget all about this joint, and Ruby.”
“We’ll go the rounds, eh?”
“Why not?”
“You figure out why not.”
She began walking toward the door, very slowly, as if she expected to be called back.
George watched her, looking a little bewildered. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“But I thought you and I—”
“My idea of how not to have a good time is to go the rounds with you and watch you get stinking drunk so you can forget another woman.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake.”
“You give me a pain, George. You give me a big fat pain.”
She went out and slammed the door, and a minute later he could hear her racing the engine of the old Chevy. The smell of its exhaust fumes floated in through the open windows along with the smell of kelp and dead fish and hot rolls baking in the kitchen and tar from the underwater oil wells.
George watched the Chevy bounce along the wharf and then he turned and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was the same as it always was, except that it looked terribly surprised: What did I do or say? I just asked her to go out, to go the rounds.
It seemed to George that people deliberately or maliciously misunderstood his intentions. He always had the best intentions in the world, but lately every time he opened his mouth he got into trouble, the same as he did when he was a boy. When George was eight he had swollen adenoids and he kept his mouth open a great deal of the time to breathe through. One day when he was playing in the barranca behind his house, a bee flew into his mouth, and before he could spit it out the bee stung the roof of his mouth. For a long time after his adenoids had been removed, George kept his lips pressed together very tightly and he looked like a little old man with no teeth.
George had told this story to nearly everyone he knew, to point a moral, but he never told the sequeclass="underline" that he was still deathly afraid of bees and that whenever he was worried he kept his jaws clamped together and his lips compressed, and looked like a big middle-aged man with no teeth.
Breathing through his nose George crossed the foyer and the dining room decorated with yacht pennants and abalone shells, and passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
While the bar and the dining room were deserted, the kitchen was alive with a kind of hysterical activity. A boy in a brown apron was oiling the dish-washing machine and whistling through his teeth. This boy had a gap between his two front teeth which was bad for talking but fine for whistling so he expressed himself not in words but with a variety of whistles, like a bird. All through the day and night his whistling served as an obbligato to the other kitchen sounds: the hissing of steam, the shrill squawking of the griddle, the banging of oven doors; bursts of Victor Herbert from the pastry chef and Romanelli’s eloquent cursing; the buzz of an electric timer measuring the minutes backwards, and the spasmodic peal of Mr. Romanelli’s own special alarm clock which he set to remind himself to do all kinds of things, to phone his wife, order turkeys, bawl out the linen-supply service and have the spark plugs checked in his car. At intervals throughout the day Romanelli’s alarm went off and the boy with the gap between his two front teeth whistled his allusive obbligatos.
Romanelli put down the chicken he was singeing and came over to George. He was stripped to the waist, but he wore his white chef’s hat.
“Lousy hot,” Romanelli said.
George nodded, without unfolding his lips.
“Some lady was here. Nice lady. She brought a present to you.” Romanelli’s eyes danced and his stomach heaved in silent laughter. “On the carving table I put it. Oh my, oh my.” Though Romanelli was inclined to be irritable, he dearly loved a joke, and when he laughed he laughed all over. His head bobbed, his chest shook, his feet stamped and his eyes laughed tears. “Oh my. Such a present. Such a nice lady.”
On the carving table was a freshly caught stingray. It was not quite dead. Its barbed tail moved now and then, and on each side of its head its dull, vicious eyes stared at George.
George’s mouth opened.
“Take that goddamn thing out of here,” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Take it out, get rid of the goddamn thing!”
He turned and saw Ruby standing in the doorway, looking pale and surprised. When she met his gaze she moved her arms convulsively and two cups rolled off the table beside her. They didn’t break, and Ruby bent over hurriedly to pick them up. Her handbag fell on the floor.
“And you,” George yelled. “You over there, you’re fired, see? Collect a week’s pay and get out! Hear me? You’re fired!”
Ruby grabbed her handbag and ran.
Romanelli impaled the stingray on a carving knife and carried it out to the garbage can.
Even after the stingray was gone George could still smell it, its sharp fishy odor mingling with the odor of soap and baking pies and chicken livers and Ruby’s Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder.
3
Gordon Foster’s office was one of ten pink stucco bungalows built around a court on the upper end of Main Street. Nine of the bungalows were occupied by physicians specializing in various fields; Gordon was the only dentist.
Whenever Elaine Foster came to call for her husband she took particular care with her grooming and her costume. As she walked through the court, past the goldfish pond and the lantana hedges, she held her head high, not exactly pretending that she was one of the physicians’ wives, but half-consciously hoping that passers-by would mistake her for one. It was always a disappointment to her when she had to turn in at Number Seven, which was plainly marked, “Gordon W. Foster, D.D.S.”
Elaine believed that Gordon could have been a real doctor if he had had more initiative, or if he’d met her earlier in life, so that she could have supplied the initiative. As it was, when they met, Gordon was already a dentist, and even Elaine’s considerable powers couldn’t make him into anything else. Their marriage had been colored by Elaine’s bile-green feeling that she had been cheated, that Gordon should have become a real doctor because she herself had all the attributes of a perfect doctor’s wife. She was energetic, competent, smartly groomed, and she had a low, cultured voice, excellent diction and a smattering of grammar: I’m very sorry the doctor is not in... You may reach him at his office... Yes, I shall see that he receives the message...