14 Stories (11 page)

“We have no phone here,” Mr. Samuels says.

“Your apartment.”

“Just let him go. It looks bad and one of us goes upstairs to call, the other will be left with him alone.

“Then no phone, Arkin. You better just go yourself or maybe you want me to walk you to the street for a cab.”

“I'll be okay,” Arkin says. “Excuse me. I was really stupid. And this hand. I can't believe it,” and he wipes his face and leaves.

“I really do feel lousy about clubbing him,” I tell Mr. Samuels. “But it seemed like he wanted to kill me at the time.”

“If you thought he did, then I guess nothing else you could have done, though lucky it wasn't his head. Since it's the tenants who employ you, I'm sure we could also be sued. Wait here a minute.” He goes upstairs, returns with some ice for my chin and a can of beer for me, then goes back upstairs. I stay the rest of my shift. One of the tenants relieves me at eight o'clock and I go home, try and sleep, can't, and call Mr. Gibner.

“Listen, I don't know about this security work anymore. When I club someone I feel bad about it, and when I can't club them when everyone thinks I should, you feel bad about it. I just don't know what to do.”

“Could be this guard work isn't your line, that's about all I can say.”

“Maybe it isn't. If you don't mind I don't think I can even finish out the week in that building.”

“All right, if that's the way you want it. Though believe me, chances of your having to raise that club again there for the next few months are just about nil, but anything you say.”

I bring my uniform and club to him, get my pay, and start looking for work in a totally different field. By three, after a few interviews and no luck, I'm exhausted and I go home and sleep till around the same time the next day.

I met Beverly at a Mediterranean resort town between Barcelona and Tarragona—bumped into her actually as we had both been reaching for a pink pindar shell one rarely finds in this area and which we had been searching for doggedly, when our heads collided. We laughed about the accident, felt the bumps that had been mutually produced on our foreheads, were glad we both spoke English so we could apologize and joke intelligibly about the collision rather than stumble along in broken Spanish to the frustration of ourselves and the stranger we were addressing. I gave her the pindar shell, though it was rightfully mine in that I saw it first and in fact had my hand on the shell when our heads came together, and invited her for coffee at a cafeteria that overlooked the shore. In a half-hour it seemed as though we'd known each other for months. Our interests were much the same, and both of us remarked, almost at the same time, that such open personal happy conversation had never come as quickly or easily with anyone else.

That evening we slept together and while I lay in bed drinking a glass of wine, Beverly noiselessly beside me with her arms wrapped around my legs, I thought that this was the woman I was going to remain with for probably the rest of my life. She had everything I had ever found desirable in a woman: intelligence, understanding, a good nature and sense of humor and was thoroughly feminine, seemingly talented and self-sufficient and she very much appealed to my groin. After a week of sharing the same hotel room and during the days hiking to small villages and Roman ruins in the area and picnicking and making love in out-of-the-way caves and grottoes along the sea, I proposed to Beverly and she said “Of course” and nonchalantly returned to finish sewing back a belt loop on my blue jeans, as if what I had asked her had for days been comfortably settled in her mind.

We spent a week in Granada, staying at its most luxurious castle turned hotel and fantasizing ourselves living alone in the Alhambra and taking great exotic baths together in its enormous basement tubs, and then flew back to the States and announced our marriage plans to our respective families. Everyone was exhilarated with the news. My brother said I had landed the catchiest of catches, my best friend told me that Beverly was an appallingly beautiful and brilliant young woman and that regardless of our twenty-year friendship, if she and I ever separated he would be the first person to offer her his loving hand.

The wedding was planned for the following month, and after all the invitation cards had been mailed and some checks and presents had already been sent to us, Beverly told me she was getting cold feet. She said she had had a few dreams of how she had practically killed herself after learning I had been unfaithful to her with her closest friend. I told her to push the thought right out of her head: I had loved and been intimate with several women in my life but each one I had been faithful to, even—during a two-year army hitch—to avoiding the brothels of Bangkok and Tokyo and California, since at the time I was engaged to a woman in New York. She said she was very glad I felt this way and so of course the wedding would go on. But two days later I received a telegram from her saying the wedding was definitely and irrevocably off: she still got dreams and premonitions I was going to be unfaithful to her, and because of her strong religious background and close family ties she would never be able to go through such a deception without seriously hurting herself, and in particular not one involving her husband with her dearest friend.

I became extremely depressed. In two weeks I would have to return to teaching Language Arts in a city junior high school and I wasn't in the mental and emotional shape for the job. I rented a car and drove to the Smoky Mountains and camped out for a few nights, fished, hiked, read, swam, had a quiet thoughtful time. Beverly was gradually being released from my mind. One thing I resolved was that the next woman I fell in love with, as I had learned with Beverly that there wasn't any greater feeling than being in love and having it totally reciprocated, would have all the good qualities Beverly had and one she thoroughly lacked, and that was an utter confidence in her man.

One afternoon while I was fishing on the lake I heard a woman screaming for help from about forty feet away. I paddled over to her, handed her my oar and told her to hold on to it till I was able to lift her safely into the canoe. She had gotten a leg cramp while swimming she said as she rested in the boat—thought she was going to drown for sure, and then she fell asleep from exhaustion. I shook her, as I wanted to know which side of the lake she wanted to be paddled to, then gave up and brought the canoe back to my dock. I carried her to the grass and placed a blanket over her. She woke, smiled, and said I had very pretty teeth and eyes and that she greatly admired my mustache, and asked if I could hold her awhile as she was very cold. I held her, she felt cold though firm and nice, she kissed my cheek, joked about how this Latter-day Saint had finally found her latter-day savior, said that she does meet people in the strangest of places, oh yessirree, and held me tight till she fell asleep in my arms.

When she awoke she said she didn't want to return to her boyfriend and friends across the lake. “I decided I want to be with you: cooking, cleaning, rolling up your sleeping bag and scaling and boning the fish you catch, I'II try not to be in the way—I promise,” and I said I was feeling very strongly about her too. I liked her directness, small cute body and adorable young face and ridiculous unconventional chatter and ways, and after we cooked dinner I told Shannah about Beverly and the exact reason I was camping alone. Shannah said that Beverly had obviously been too rigid and uncompromising a woman for me and so I was far better off without her. She said she would live with me and have my children without marriage if I wanted—that I could have as many women as I liked during our relationship and she would never complain. I told her I wasn't quite ready to get involved again, though we could write one another and if we both still felt the same way in two months then we could meet in Washington or Richmond and really get acquainted. Shannah agreed, said she now saw there wasn't any good reason for rushing into a new love affair herself, and I called a taxi from the camp grocery store and we shook hands and said goodbye. I went for a swim, and when I returned to the site I found Shannah sleeping on top of my sleeping bag, a note pinned to the blanket over her saying she had already been separated from me too long and besides her boyfriend was a bore. I snuggled next to her, she laughed, roughed up my hair, said let's both get into the bag and make like a couple of crazy Humminggay heroes, and we got inside the bag and after a bit of uncomfortable squirming found a relaxed enough position for making love.

Shannah moved into my apartment with just a valiseful of her poetry and clothes. I started teaching that Monday, happier than I had been since the night I proposed to Beverly. A couple of days into the term I saw a very beautiful young woman in the teacher's lunchroom whom I almost instantly desired as much as any woman I had known. There was something about her look—this bored placid look compared to the easy-to-please expression of Shannah's and the often frightened bewildered face of Beverly's, and I was also attracted by her hair, which was long, silky and blond compared to Shannah's thick bright red locks which hung to her shoulders and Beverly's shiny black pageboy. Her body was shapelier than Shannah's and longer than Beverly's, though all three women were equally attractive in different ways by any standard other than perhaps some strait-laced ones, and had strong legs, delicate-to­sensual features, tiny waists, graceful necks, high chunky buttocks and slender hands.

This woman looked at me, emitted an expression that wholly disapproved of my staring, and went back to sipping her ice-cream soda, which stimulated me even more. I sat at her table and asked what grade she taught. Seventh, she said, and I told her I taught the same group of monsters and that most days last year they had sent me home sick and tight in the head and belly and very often close to tears. She said she thought that might happen to her also, though truthfully she had only just begun to teach, and loudly drained the soda from the bottom of the glass till a strawberry from the ice cream got caught in the straw. She said her name was Libby and I said “Well, Libby, I don't know how you're going to respond to what I'm about to tell you though I suspect all your composure and reasonably good feelings to me will dissolve the moment I say what I feel most compelled to say, but I'm absolutely stuck on you—hooked is more the word I mean, and have been from the second I saw you sitting here sucking up this soda, and that I've never had such an immediate feeling for a woman and I ain't just putting you on.” She said that what I was saying was both juvenile and absurd, and excused herself and left the room.

I returned to class and was feeling dejected when a student entered the room with a note from Mrs. Redbee. Who, I asked, and he said “The pretty teacher from upstairs with the long blond hair and you know,” and he gestured with his hands and chest to describe Libby's fairly large breasts. I tore open the envelope, and the note from Libby said she was very sorry she had been so abrupt before, she had never known how to react to honesty directed straight at her, if that's what it was, but for one thing she was married, for another she had two children of her own, for a third she thought she felt the same way about me, had, in a sense, from the moment she saw me sitting there nibbling away on my runny egg-salad sandwich, and that really turned her life into an unwanted dilemma, because when she left for work today she was feeling intensely in love with her husband, so what should we do? And what about me—the same truth now: was I married, engaged, did I have any kids?

I sent back a note with one of my students saying I wasn't engaged or married but living with a woman who up till the time I last remembered leaving her warm and wet in our morning bed—and I had recalled that delicious image during every class period break till lunch—I loved more than any one person on earth. She sent back a note saying we both apparently faced the same problem with probably the same brutal consequences if we followed our impulses and so it seemed best we should forget whatever romantic feelings we might have for one another as life was too troublesome an affair to contend with as it was. My return note said I thought she was right, indubitably inexorably immemorially right, and that accompanying this note was a photostat copy of my lesson plans for the year, as I figured she might use them since she was an inexperienced new teacher teaching the same grade and subject I taught She sent back a two-by-three-foot manila envelope, and inside was a note the size of a fortune cookie message that said “Stick all classified material in this envelope and burn.” I laughed so hard I cracked the class up. After I restored order and provided the class with more dictionary words to look up and define at their desks than they could do in five periods, I sent two students to Libby's room with a large carton filled with three more cartons of progressively smaller size, and inside the smallest carton a note that said “Missiles deactivated; explosives under control.”

We met after dismissal at the teachers' time clock. Libby said she was glad the fire was out though after giving it some thought she really didn't think we were all that combustible, and then looked for our timecards in the card rack and punched out for both of us. We parted at the bus stop, agreeing that as long as we were teaching in what the city considered a problem school, we should remain, for the mutual protection of ourselves and discipline of our classrooms, helpful colleagues to one another.

That evening I spoke to Shannah about Libby. I only mentioned over dinner that I had met this fairly attractive female teacher today who had just started in the profession and had a lot to learn, but Shannah quickly flew into me as to what I really wanted to say. “Nothing more to it than that,” I said, “except for the fact that maybe we were unusually pleasant and considerate to one another for teachers,” but Shannah said “Come on, Cy, out with it, where's the old honesty, I already told you I wouldn't mind your sleeping with three brand new teachers as long as I'm the only one who has your love.” I told her there had been nothing more between Libby and me except for a momentary infatuation, but Shannah screamed back “You're in love with her, you bastard, I can see it all over your ugly dishonest face,” and when I said that perhaps I was in love with Libby, she said “Then don't think I'm going to stay here while you're sulking and pining away for some bitch you'd rather be with, no boy, not me,” and she went to the bedroom to pack her poetry and clothes. She returned to the table while I was finishing my dinner and said “I'll stay, you know, if you guarantee me your total committed love,” and when I said I couldn't give that when it was requested of me, she borrowed a hundred dollars for a hotel room and left the apartment. Then Libby called, said she had accidentally blabbed out to her husband about this fairly attractive male teacher she met, and, after he had pumped it out of her, about that fleeting five-minute nice-feeling time she had had with me. Her husband became so enraged, as she had unwittingly said all this in front of her children, that he demanded she move her flighty carcass out of the house that instant, and did I know of any place she could stay?