A Patchwork Planet (14 page)

Then she gave me a deliberate, slow smile that turned my knees weak, and she went to rejoin her mother.

B
Y THE END
of April I’d saved eight hundred and sixteen dollars. I had hoped to be farther along, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to meet my goal of a hundred extra per week. Well, at least it was a start. I got myself a savings account and a little cardboard booklet to record all further deposits.

For most of May I had this very lucrative short-term client—a young guy who’d broken his leg in four places while mountain biking. He lived alone in a two-story house, and I had to be there first thing every morning to help him down the stairs and drive him to his law office. Then I’d pick him up at quitting time, come back again at bedtime … Not to mention the groceries he needed bought, the shirts he needed taken to the cleaner’s, and so on. When his cast was shortened to shin length and he could get around on his own, he gave me a goodbye gift of a hundred dollars. Rent-a-Back employees are not supposed to accept tips ever, under any conditions, and I told him that, but he said I had no choice. He said, “It’s take it now or have it come to you in the mail, which would cost me the price of a stamp.” So I took it. I confess. It would let me hit eighty-seven hundred that much sooner.

Sophia knew I was in debt. She even knew the amount, but not the reason. (Why get into the particulars? The Chinese carving and all that.) She was very understanding about it. She never expected me to buy her presents or take her anywhere fancy. Instead she ferried her Crock-Pot meals to my place after work. (We’d given up on her place, now that we needed more privacy.) First we’d go to bed and then we’d have our supper, tangled in a welter of sheets, leaning against the propped pillows that bridged the gap between my mattress and the back of the couch. I’d be in my jeans again, but she would stay naked, like that painting I have never understood where the men are picnicking fully dressed but the woman doesn’t have a stitch on. Me, I tend to feel kind of undefended without my clothes, but Sophia seemed astoundingly at ease. She’d drape a napkin across her stomach and nibble on a stewed pork chop, then wipe her fingers on the napkin and toss back the loose coils of hair streaming over one shoulder. And meanwhile, I would be asking her questions. There was so much I needed to know about her. No piece of information was too small: her favorite color, favorite crab house, favorite television show … I guess really I was asking,
What does it feel like, being you?

And maybe she was asking the same. She was interested in my parents. She was curious about my brother. She wondered if he and I were anything alike. (“Not a whit,” I told her.) And especially, she wanted to know about my marriage. Where had it gone wrong? Why had Natalie and I split up?

“Why’d we get together in the first place, is more to the point,” I said. “A weirder combination you can’t imagine. Natalie with her good-girl forehead and me fresh out of reform school.”

“Oh, now,” Sophia chided me. “It wasn’t a reform school.” But she was wearing her thrilled look, as if she hoped to be contradicted.

“Well, it was a rich-guy variation on the theme, at least,” I said. “Certainly my neighbors thought as much. They pretended not to know me that whole summer after I graduated—everyone but Natalie. Natalie’s family had moved in across the street while I was gone, and one afternoon I’m mowing the lawn and Natalie comes over with a pitcher and two glasses set just so on a tray. Says, ‘Could I interest you in some lemonade?’ Could I interest you: such a quaint way to put it. ‘Why not,’ I tell her, and I swig down a glass, and that might have been the end of it, except then my mother pokes her head out the door and invites us in for iced tea. As if Natalie weren’t already operating her own refreshment service in the middle of our yard! Well, poor Mom; I guess the sight of a respectable girl was a little too much excitement for her. I tell Natalie, ‘Cripes, let’s get out of here,’ and I leave the mower where it is and we walk off, just like that. So everything that happened after was my mother’s fault, you might say.”

“Your mother did approve of her, then,” Sophia said.

“Oh, sure. Both my parents approved. It was Natalie’s who objected. They’d heard stories about me, of course. Also, I was wearing my hair about halfway down my back that summer. Natalie’s father called me Jesus. ‘Will you and Jesus be going to the movies tonight?’ This was when they were still allowing her to see me. Later, we had to sneak. I’d hired on at Rent-a-Back by then, and she would ride along on my jobs—spend the day with me while her parents thought she was swimming at their club.”

“Oh, forbidden fruit! No wonder you two were attracted,” Sophia said.

I was about to go on, but then a sort of hallucination stopped me in mid-breath. I swear I saw Natalie’s arm, just her arm, resting on the window ledge of my car. She was waiting in the passenger seat while I was with a client. And I was stepping out the client’s front door, walking down a flagstone path, heading through brilliant sunlight toward Natalie’s bare, tanned arm.

Sophia said, “What happened next?”

“Oh …,” I said. “We got married.”

“That seems awfully sudden,” Sophia said.

“Well, she was about to go off to college, see. She was leaving in September.”

Sophia hesitated. Then she asked, “Did you have to?”

“Have to? Oh. Have to get married. No,” I said, “we didn’t have to. I’m sure all the neighbors thought we did, though. To the neighbors, I was the bad guy. Natalie was ‘that lovely sweet innocent Bassett girl.’ It must have disappointed the hell out of them when Opal didn’t come along till fourteen months after the wedding.”

Sophia said, “So why …?”

“But anyway!” I said. “You can imagine her parents’ reaction. Mine took it more in stride. I think they hoped marriage would settle me down some. They got together with Natalie’s parents and worked out all the arrangements—agreed we’d live over the Bassetts’ garage and both of us would attend Tow-son State, and I’d keep on at Rent-a-Back in order to look like the breadwinner. Not that I really was. Our parents bankrolled just about everything. Our two mothers got into this decorating war, and pretty soon we barely had room to slither between all the furniture. And after Opal was born! They went wild. Cradles, strollers, changing tables … I don’t know where
I
was in this. I mean, there are huge chunks of time I honestly don’t remember. All at once I was standing at our front window one day, looking down at the driveway, and Natalie was buckling the baby into the car. This was a Volvo wagon her parents had given us when Opal was born. And I watched her shut the passenger door and walk around to the driver’s side, and I said to myself, ‘Why, great God in heaven! I seem to have married one of those station wagon mommies!’ So we got divorced.”

Sophia paused in the middle of licking her fingers. “Just like that?” she asked me.

“Well, no. Not instantaneously. First there was a lot of messy stuff. I admit I wasn’t a model husband. Finally she took Opal and left. Didn’t even warn me. Didn’t even offer me a second chance. Well, you’ve seen Natalie. You’ve seen how she kind of floats along in this sealed-off, stubborn, exasperating way Or maybe you didn’t get a close enough look at her.”

“No, not that close,” Sophia said. “She did seem very … poised.”

“To put it mildly,” I told her. Then I said, “But why are we wasting our time on all this? Don’t we have something better to do?” And I picked up our two plates and set them on the floor, and then I lifted her napkin.

Every word I had told her was true, but there was a lot I’d left out. Why we’d gotten married, for instance. I didn’t tell her that I was the one who had pressed for it—that I was dying to marry, wouldn’t take no for an answer, wouldn’t agree to wait. I didn’t tell her that at first I felt as if I’d finally come home. Hard to believe, I know; hard for even me to believe. “Did all that really take place?” I wanted to ask somebody. “Could that really have been me? How did I appear from outside? Would you say I seemed aware of my surroundings?”

The only thing I knew was, one morning I looked out the front window and thought,
Great God in heaven!
I felt as if I’d awakened from a long, drugged sleep, and the last thing I clearly remembered was Natalie bringing me lemonade. “Could I interest you?” she had asked. And I had taken a single sip and all at once found myself married to a station wagon mommy.

Sophia started catching a morning train back from Philly on Sundays so that we could see more of each other. (The roommate spent Sundays with her family in Carroll County, and we knew we’d have the house to ourselves.) I would meet the train and drive her to her place, and we’d fix a big lunch that was really a breakfast—bacon, eggs, waffles, the works. Then we would climb the stairs to her bed, which was not a four-poster, after all. It was a spool bed—same general idea. And there was a curlicued nightstand with a silk-shaded lamp on top, and a bureau with cut-glass knobs. The drawers were packed with neat, flat layers of clothing; tiny flowered sachets were tucked in all the corners. I know because I checked when she was in the bathroom. I smoothed everything down again just the way I’d found it, though. She didn’t suspect a thing.

Later in the afternoon we might watch a videotape or take a walk, but we separated earlier than other days because she had her Sunday routines to follow—her stockings to rinse out, hair to shampoo, blouses to iron for the coming week. “Go, go,” she would say, and I would go, grinning, and spend the evening picturing her in her quilted bathrobe, her shower rod strung with damp nylons. Even her most mundane rituals seemed dear to me, and touching.

She had two sets of friends who were married couples. All the others were single women, and I knew them only by hearsay—their latest diets or trips or boyfriend problems. The couples she introduced me to personally. She took me to the Schmidts’ for supper, and the Partons were invited as well. They were okay. Nice enough, I guess. I borrowed a khaki sports coat from Joe Hardesty, because I couldn’t wear my tweed anymore now that it was summer. We talked mostly about the Orioles. I think one of the husbands had had something to do with building the new stadium.

She asked me, what about
my
friends? Couldn’t we double date with someone? Oh, women get so social, sooner or later. She asked about my brother and his wife. I said, “Lord God, Sofe, you don’t want to spend a whole evening looking at baby pictures.” She said she wouldn’t mind a bit. Well, I did want to do things right this time. I said, “I know what! I’ll talk to Len Parrish. Maybe we could go out with him and one of his girlfriends.”

Because I couldn’t think of anyone else—any of my coworkers, for instance. Martine and Everett seemed to have broken up, or so I gathered from the fact that Martine never had the truck nowadays. Not that either one of them would have been Sophia’s type. Ray Oakley’s wife didn’t like me; she claimed I was a bad influence. My only hope was Len. Which goes to show how desperate I was.

And he knew it too. “Well, gee, pal,” he said, “I’m not sure. I’m awfully busy.” In the end, though, he agreed to meet for drinks. He named a bar I’d never heard of that he had discovered downtown.

This was on a Sunday night, the only night he had free, which meant that I was at Sophia’s while she was choosing what to wear. She must have tried on half a dozen outfits. Each one, I said, “That looks fine,” and she’d say, “No …,” and shuck it off again.

“It’s only Len,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I don’t even like the guy! He’s more my mom’s
idea
of my friend.”

“Then why are we bothering to do this?” she asked, in a voice with a teary edge to it.

“Beats me,” I told her.

By the time we left, her bedroom floor was a solid mass of cast-off clothes. She had settled finally on brown slacks and some kind of long white blouse—not much different from any of the earlier get-ups, as far as I could tell.

We took her car because mine was in the shop again. I drove, and she watched for street numbers. The bar turned out to be very easy to spot: a sheet of glass for the front, with
DOUGALL’S
slashed carelessly across as if the sign painter had barely found the energy for the job. We heard the music even before we climbed out of the car. I started feeling old; I’d fallen behind on the music scene a long time back. And no doubt Sophia felt even older. She paused in the doorway, patting her hair. Then we braced ourselves and walked in.

Of course Len was late. Of course we had to sit alone for half an hour—me nursing a beer, she toying with the stem of her wineglass, the two of us shouting above the din about made-up topics. (“Isn’t that an unusual picture over the bar!” “Oh! My. Yes.”) Finally Len breezed in with this six-foot-tall girl so blond that I thought at first she was bald; not a sign of an eyebrow on her; all languorous slouch and pouting pale lips. They were both in black turtlenecks, although it was a warm June night. “Barn!” Len said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You two been waiting long? I looked for your car out front; figured you weren’t here yet.”

“We came in Sophia’s car,” I said. “Sophia, this is Len Parrish. Sophia Maynard. And …” I looked toward the blonde.