A Pleasure to Burn (15 page)

The Cricket on the Hearth

T
HE DOOR SLAMMED AND
J
OHN
M
ARTIN WAS OUT OF HIS
hat and coat and past his wife as fluently as a magician en route to a better illusion. He produced the newspaper with a dry whack as he slipped his coat into the closet like an abandoned ghost and sailed through the house, scanning the news, his nose guessing at the identity of supper, talking over his shoulder, his wife following. There was still a faint scent of the train and the winter night about him. In his chair he sensed an unaccustomed silence resembling that of a birdhouse when a vulture's shadow looms; all the robins, sparrows, mockingbirds quiet. His wife stood whitely in the door, not moving.

“Come sit down,” said John Martin. “What're you doing? God, don't stare as if I were dead. What's new? Not that there's ever anything new, of course. What do you think of those fathead city councilmen today? More taxes, more every goddamn thing.”

“John!” cried his wife. “Don't!”

“Don't what?”

“Don't talk that way. It isn't safe!”

“For God's sake, not safe? Is this Russia or is this our own house?!”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There's a bug in our house,” she whispered.

“A bug?” He leaned forward, exasperated.

“You know. Detective talk. When they hide a microphone somewhere you don't know, they call it a bug, I think,” she whispered even more quietly.

“Have you gone nuts?”

“I thought I might have when Mrs. Thomas told me. They came last night while we were out and asked Mrs. Thomas to let them use her garage. They set up their equipment there and strung wires over here, the house is wired, the bug is in one or maybe all of the rooms.”

She was standing over him now and bent to whisper in his ear.

He fell back. “Oh, no!”

“Yes!”

“But we haven't done anything—”

“Keep your voice down!” she whispered.

“Wait!” he whispered back, angrily, his face white, red, then white again. “Come on!”

Out on the terrace, he glanced around and swore. “Now say the whole damn thing again! They're using the neighbor's garage to hide their equipment? The FBI?”

“Yes, yes, oh it's been awful! I didn't want to call, I was afraid your wire was tapped, too.”

“We'll see, dammit! Now!”

“Where are you going?”

“To stomp on their equipment! Jesus! What've we done?”

“Don't!” She seized his arm. “You'd just make trouble. After they've listened a few days they'll know we're okay and go away.”

“I'm insulted, no, outraged! Those two words I've never used before, but, hell, they fit the case! Who do they think they are? Is it our politics? Our studio friends, my stories, the fact I'm a producer? Is it Tom Lee, because he's Chinese and a friend? Does that make him dangerous, or us? What, what?!”

“Maybe someone gave them a false lead and they're searching. If they really think we're dangerous, you can't blame them.”

“I know, I know, but us! It's so damned funny I could laugh. Do we tell our friends? Rip out the microphone if we can find it, go to a hotel, leave town?”

“No, no, just go on as we have done. We've nothing to hide, so let's ignore them.”

“Ignore!? The first thing I said tonight was political crap and you shut me up like I'd set off a bomb.”

“Let's go in, it's cold out here. Be good. It'll only be a few days and they'll be gone, and after all, it isn't as if we were guilty of something.”

“Yeah, okay, but damn, I wish you'd let me go over and kick the hell out of their junk!”

They hesitated, then entered the house, the strange house, and stood for a moment in the hall, trying to manufacture some appropriate dialogue. They felt like two amateurs in a shoddy out-of-town play, the electrician having suddenly turned on too much light, the audience, bored, having left the theater, and, simultaneously, the actors having forgotten their lines. So they said nothing.

He sat in the parlor trying to read the paper until the food was on the table. But the house suddenly echoed. The slightest crackle of the sports section, the exhalation of smoke from his pipe, became like the sound of an immense forest fire or a wind blowing through an organ. When he shifted in the chair the chair groaned like a sleeping dog, his tweed pants scraped and sandpapered together. From the kitchen there was an ungodly racket of pans being bashed, tins falling, oven doors cracking open, crashing shut, the fluming full-bloomed sound of gas jumping to life, lighting up blue and hissing under the inert foods, and then when the foods stirred ceaselessly under the commands of boiling water, they made a sound of washing and humming and murmuring that was excessively loud. No one spoke. His wife came and stood in the door for a moment, peering at her husband and the raw walls, but said nothing. He turned a page of football to a page of wrestling and read between the lines, scanning the empty whiteness and the specks of undigested pulp.

Now there was a great pounding in the room, like surf, growing nearer in a storm, a tidal wave, crashing on rocks and breaking with a titanic explosion again and again, in his ears.

My God, he thought, I hope they don't hear my heart!

His wife beckoned from the dining room, where, as he loudly rattled the paper and plopped it into the chair and walked, padding, padding on the rug, and drew out the protesting chair on the uncarpeted dining-room floor, she tinkled and clattered last-minute silverware, fetched a soup that bubbled like lava, and set a coffeepot to percolate beside them. They looked at the percolating silver apparatus, listened to it gargle in its glass throat, admired it for its protest against silence, for saying what it felt. And then there was the scrape and click of the knife and fork on the plate. He started to say something, but it stuck, with a morsel of food, in his throat. His eyes bulged. His wife's eyes bulged. Finally she got up, went to the kitchen, and got a piece of paper and a pencil. She came back and handed him a freshly written note:
Say something!

He scribbled a reply:

What?

She wrote again:
Anything! Break the silence. They'll think something's wrong!

They sat staring nervously at their own notes. Then, with a smile, he sat back in his chair and winked at her. She frowned. Then he said, “Well, dammit, say something!”

“What?” she said.

“Dammit,” he said. “You've been silent all during supper. You and your moods. Because I won't buy you that coat, I suppose? Well, you're not going to get it, and that's final!”

“But I don't want—”

He stopped her before she could continue. “Shut up! I won't talk to a nag. You know we can't afford mink! If you can't talk sense, don't talk!”

She blinked at him for a moment, and then she smiled and winked this time.

“I haven't got a thing to wear!” she cried.

“Oh, shut up!” he roared.

“You never buy me anything!” she cried.

“Blather, blather, blather!” he yelled.

They fell silent and listened to the house. The echoes of their yelling had put everything back to normalcy, it seemed. The percolator was not so loud, the clash of cutlery was softened. They sighed.

“Look,” he said at last, “don't speak to me again this evening. Will you do me that favor?”

She sniffed.

“Pour me some coffee!” he said.

Along about eight-thirty the silence was getting unbearable again. They sat stiffly in the living room, she with her latest library book, he with some flies he was tying up in preparation for going fishing on Sunday. Several times they glanced up and opened their mouths but shut them again and looked about as if a mother-in-law had hove into view.

At five minutes to nine he said, “Let's go to a show.”

“This late?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You never like to go out weeknights, because you're tired. I've been home all day, cleaning, and it's nice to get out at night.”

“Come on, then!”

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“Promise not to talk mink and it's a go. Get your coat.”

“All right.” She was back in an instant, dressed, smiling, and they were out of the house and driving away in very little time. They looked back at their lighted house.

“Hail and farewell, house,” he said. “Let's just drive and never come back.”

“We don't dare.”

“Let's sleep tonight in one of those motels that ruin your reputation,” he suggested.

“Stop it. We've got to go back. If we stayed away, they'd be suspicious.”

“Damn them. I feel like a fool in my own house. Them and their cricket.”

“Bug.”

“Cricket, anyway. I remember when I was a boy a cricket got in our house somehow. He'd be quiet most of the time, but in the evening he'd start scratching his legs together, an ungodly racket. We tried to find him. Never could. He was in a crack of the floor or the chimney somewhere. Kept us awake the first few nights, then we got used to him. He was around for half a year, I think. Then one night we went to bed and someone said, ‘What's that noise?' and we all sat up, listening. ‘I know what it is,' said Dad. ‘It's silence. The cricket's gone.' And he was gone. Dead or went away, we never knew which. And we felt sort of sad and lonely with that new sound in the house.”

They drove on the night road.

“We've got to decide what to do,” she said.

“Rent a new house somewhere.”

“We can't do that.”

“Go to Ensenada for the weekend, we've been wanting to make that trip for years, do us good, they won't follow us and wire our hotel room, anyway.”

“The problem'd still be here when we come back. No, the only solution is to live our life the way we used to an hour before we found out what was going on with the microphone.”

“I don't remember. It was such a nice little routine. I don't remember how it was, the details, I mean. We've been married ten years now and one night's just like another, very pleasant, of course. I come home, we have supper, we read or listen to the radio, no television, and go to bed.”

“Sounds rather drab when you say it like that.”

“Has it been for you?” he asked suddenly.

She took his arm. “Not really. I'd like to get out more, occasionally.”

“We'll see what we can do about that. Right now, we'll plan on talking straight out about everything, when we get back to the house, politically, socially, morally. We've nothing to hide. I was a Boy Scout when I was a kid, you were a Camp Fire Girl; that's not very subversive, it's as simple as that. Speak up. Here's the theater.”

They parked and went into the show.

 

A
BOUT MIDNIGHT THEY DROVE
into the driveway of their house and sat for a moment looking at the great empty stage waiting for them. At last he stirred and said, “Well, let's go in and say hello to the cricket.”

They garaged the car and walked around to the front door, arm in arm. They opened the front door and the feel of the atmosphere rushing out upon them was a listening atmosphere. It was like walking into an auditorium of one thousand invisible people, all holding their breath.

“Here we are!” said the husband loudly.

“Yes, that was a wonderful show, wasn't it?” said his wife.

It had been a pitiable movie.

“I liked the music especially!”

They had found the music banal and repetitive.

“Yes, isn't that girl a terrific dancer!”

They smiled at the walls. The girl had been a rather clubfooted thirteen-year-old with an immensely low IQ.

“Darling!” he said. “Let's go to San Diego Sunday, for just the afternoon.”

“What? And give up your fishing with your pals? You always go fishing with your pals,” she cried.

“I won't go fishing with them this time. I love only you!” he said, and thought, miserably, We sound like Gallagher and Sheen warming up a cold house.

They bustled about the house, emptying ashtrays, getting ready for bed, opening closets, slamming doors. He sang a few bars from the tired musical they had seen in a lilting off-key baritone, she joining in.

In bed, with the lights out, she snuggled over against him, her hand on his arm, and they kissed a few times. Then they kissed a few more times. “This is more like it,” he said. He gave her a rather long kiss. They snuggled even closer and he ran his hand along her back. Suddenly her spine stiffened.

Jesus, he thought, what's wrong now.