Angle of Repose (80 page)

“Ah, yeah,” Ada said disgustedly, “I forgot you was on the wagon.”

Shelly was on her feet. “Glass of water?”

I got the pills past the obstructing place and said, “Oh, sit down, quit fussingl Watch the ballgame.”

We watched the ballgame.

Matty Alou walked on four straight pitches. Roberto Clemente on a 3-1 count hit one of Gaylord Perry’s spitters to the base of the flagpole in centerfield, and Alou came all the way around. Out on the lawn the sprinkler kicked out its traveling arc of water. Our eyes were careful not to stray from the television screen. Under my hands I felt the leap and tension of the stump like the physical embodiment of my panic at seeing her there, a threat or a premonition.

I watched Willie Stargell come to the plate, reverse his bat, and knock dirt out of his spikes with the little end (baseball is like ballet, it is full of traditional movements). The camera was on Perry, pitching from the stretch. He leaned, got the signal, straightened, stretched his arms over his head, brought them down. His head turned; he glared at second base. Then his gloved right hand went wide, his long left arm went back, he threw. Stargell hit it over the right centerfield fence, and the television roared at us with a sound like a bathtub filling. Ed held his nose, Al Sutton laid the wart between his lips as if he were spitting out a seed. I sat there alert to my once-wife, intensely, acutely aware of her body, her feet, her knees, her white summer handbag like a white kitten in her lap, and wondered why she was there, what I could do, how I could escape, and with both hands I pressed on my stump the way a boy might hold onto his tumescent organ, gritting his teeth with emotions he is not prepared for and cannot cope with.

Quite suddenly Ed stood up. “It ain’t our day. I might as well go take down those dead pines. You want ’em sawed into fireplace lengths?”

He is a remarkable man, Ed Hawkes. He understands a lot without having to be told. In one simple question he made up for the over-protectiveness of our women; he let me recover from my uncontrollable stump and the nervousness of those pills; he gave me the chance to say casually, “Sure, we can use a good woodpile this winter.”

With a working of the eyebrows at me, a pleasant little nod at Ellen, he went out. Ellen hardly noticed his going. Her eyes were on me, so that I turned myself a little away, absorbed in the ballgame. Outside I heard Ed moving the sprinkler and then running hard to get away from its moving arc. After a couple of minutes his pickup started and went out the drive.

I moved my body, for pain was working up the sawed-off bone clear into my hip joint, and as I turned, there was Ellen still watching me like the lady that’s known as Lou, like a leopard in a tree, like a gun on the wall.

“You’re staying on through the winter, then,” she said.

“Of course.”

“I understood there was some . . .”

“Question?” I said. “None that I ever heard of.”

But of course I don’t talk to Rodman, or that doctor, as you do. And don’t drop your eyes to poor old Ada’s crippled claws, or listen to her wheeze. She’s as strong as a horse, she’s good for a lot longer than I am.

My attention had wandered. I saw that my adherents and protectors were on their feet, the whole bunch of them–Shelly with a decisive bounce, Al nimbly, not to be caught seated while a lady stood, Ada groaning up onto her bunion-bulged carpet slippers. She looked at Ellen Ward with dislike and resentment. “I guess them dishes won’t do themselves. Shelly, you want to help?”

“I was thinking I’d better go sort out letters.”

“What letters?” I said. “What dishes? Sit down, both of you. It’s Saturday afternoon. Stick around.”

“I’ve got fifteen years of Grass Valley letters still to put in order, and there isn’t a lot of time,” Shelly said.

“Isn’t a lot of time before what?” I said.

“School starts in ten days.”

“I thought you weren’t . . .”

Smiling, she frowned a
warning:
not in front of Mom. I shut up, but she made me mad, talking about breakups just when all our conversation should emphasize the comfort and security of routine.

“Don’t let all those Grass Valley things weigh on you,” I said. “They’re not important. All that is after.”

“After what?”

“After everything’s happened,” I said crossly. “After I’ve lost interest.”

“Didn’t they put up a lot of refugees from the San Francisco fire and earthquake up here? I’ve just glanced through them, I thought I saw something about that.”

“Yes,” I said. “Who cares? Sit down. Watch the ballgame.”

But she ignored my desperation, that insolent wench. She looked at me with her head on one side and said that if I didn’t need her to work she guessed she’d go wash her hair. Brown-legged in her shorts, filling her cotton jersey, she smiled at Ellen, murmured a good-bye, and left.

Ada had already hoisted the beer cooler up onto her stomach. Her arms squeezed the top so that it popped off. She put it back on. Her fingers slipped and scrabbled on the Styrofoam, the last joints turned at excruciating angles. Her ankles sagged inward on her overweighted arches, her slippers with holes in them to ease the swollen big toe joints shuffled like crippled animals across the floor. None of this was lost on Ellen Ward.

Grunting, Ada got over the sill and inside. That left Al Sutton alone with the two of us, and he couldn’t wait to be gone, though I begged him to stay and have another beer and help generate a Giant rally.

“Fat chanth,” Al said. He was painfully embarrassed, laughed uneasily, shrugged, pulled out his quadruple focals from his shirt pocket and put them on and looked at the television through them, flinched back, said “Jethuth!”, yanked the glasses off, laughed guiltily, put them in his pocket, took them out and put them on again, looked at me and then at Ellen through them, gave another hollow laugh like a groan. He pulled the glasses down on his nose, and the eyes which had been rolling and changing back of the lenses like the eyes of nigger baby dolls you used to throw baseballs at in county fairs looked at us with anguished kindness and apologetic goodwill. He stepped back into a chair. “Woopth, pardon,” he said, and set it back where it had been before he bumped it. The wart appeared between his lips and was sucked back into a sweet imbecilic smile. “Boy, I better get out of here before I butht thomething,” he said. “Nithe to meet you, Mitheth Ward. Lyman, you take care, now.” He managed to get hold of the screendoor handle, let it slip, banged the door, yanked it open, walked into its edge, got by it, and clowning his own clumsiness, the back of his neck red, pulled his head between his shoulders, tightened his neck muscles and widened his mouth, picked up his feet very high and tiptoed away laughing hollowly, leaving me with the ballgame and my ex-wife.

The withered, whittled, hopelessly alive stump twitched and jerked under my down-pressing hands. Out on the lawn the sprinkler called attention to itself like a conspirator in a melodrama,
pst! pst! pst!

Now!
my fear and anger said to me, and I turned my chair to face her head on. She was not ready to meet me; she frowned down on her hands and handbag as if on the verge of some decision. I cried at her silently, You dare to come here and sit on my porch and drive away my friends! You dare to sit there as if you were welcome, or had a right? Do you remember at all what you did to me? Have you no shame? What do you want here? What have I got left that you’d like to take away from me?

She said to her pale hands, “This business of staying through the winter, of course you can’t be serious.”

“Oh yes I can,” I said, and up came her eyes, one swift open look, dark blue, familiar, shocking. I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well–known better than one knows the look of one’s own eyes, actually–and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure. Right then it was as if a woman whom I despised and feared had opened her dress and revealed herself and smiled, asking something that made me rage and grit my teeth. One flicking look, no more. I held onto my stump and told myself oh, be careful!

“Who’ll look after you?” said Ellen Ward in the reasonable tone she had used to use on adolescent Rodman when he wanted a motorcycle or demanded to go hitch hiking with a mixed crowd of high school students and spend Easter weekend on the beach at Carpinteria or La Jolla. “It’s just not sensible. The young one’s going–and you’re well rid of her, if you ask me–and the old one’s so crippled up she can’t even hold a cigarette. She’ll drop you and break your hip or something. You can’t stand anything else wrong with you, darling.”

“I can stand anything I have to stand!”

Her eyes came up again, she eyed me speculatively where I sat trapped in my chair. I was pressing down hard with my hands, but the newspaper in my lap shook and rustled. She smiled, to reassure me; then her eyes left me and went to the television. She half rose. “Do you want this on?”

I did not answer, glaring at her in defiance and despair. She shut off my ally, inconsequent motion and irrelevant noise. “Well, we can discuss it later.” (Later?) “Now that I’m here, won’t you show me the place?”

“I don’t know that you’d like it.”

“Not like it? It’s lovely, so quiet and old fashioned. I was noticing the roses as I came in.” She smiled; her teeth were pointed. “I’m sure it’s been very good for you. It’s only that once the weather gets bad, and with only that old woman, you can’t . . .”

“She’s about four years older than you,” I said. But it was a boy’s defeated bleat. She smiled with her filed teeth, ignoring my hostility.

“Come on, show me around. I want to see the yard and the house and all of it. Where you work, where you sleep.” The way she smiled and smiled made me frantic with apprehension. Coaxingly she said, “Can’t I be allowed a little curiosity about you?”

The
monster.

I spun the chair and started for the screen door, either intending to escape or to hold it open while she passed through–who can say for sure?–but she was alert, she got there first and held it for me.

I saw that I had no choice but to take her around, and I resolved cunningly that the sooner she saw everything, the sooner she would leave. On the way up through the orchard I gave the chair full throttle, trying to outrun her, but my batteries were low and she easily kept up. The fruit was reddening among the leaves of Grandfather’s old apple trees, the wasps were busy in the windfalls, the air smelled of cider and incipient fall.

At the top I wheeled into the flat path along the fence, and stopped. “This is where I do my daily dozen,” I said. I lifted the crutches out of their cradle, laid them across the chair arms, and with my hands pushed myself up until I stood on my one leg.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Take my exercise. Do you mind waiting a few minutes?”

“Must you, now?”

“This is the time.”

I took pleasure in the anxiety on her face. Now let’s see who’s helpless, I said to her, or thought at her. Let’s see who needs looking after. I had the crutches in my armpits, my one foot was on the footboard, my hands felt the weight as it came on them. First one crutch on the ground, then the other. Now the part that called for concentration. Lean, hop. There. Smooth as glass. Furious, pumping like three-legged racers at a picnic, I swung off up the path, out from under the hand she put anxiously out to steady me. Steady yourself, I thought. A bit late, there. Always a bit late.

Turning and pumping back, I enjoyed the consternation in her face. I swung, I pegged, I flew, I turned with the precision of a guards-man in front of Buckingham Palace and went pounding up the path again. Let her stand there and get an eyeful of my independence and my manual skill and the endurance left in the old carcass she pretended to be so concerned about. Lost your boy friend, did you? I said as I dug and swung. Like to be asked in out of the cold? Well the hell with you. I don’t need you. I’ve got a life I’m content with. Every afternoon I run up and down this course–my version of jogging. One legged or not, I’m in shape. Jumping stump or not, pains and pills or not, it isn’t an utter has-been you’re dealing with. Get an eyeful.

I intended the full eight laps, or maybe more, but at the end of six I knew I had to stop it. My heart was bursting my chest, my stump was red hot, I had to swallow my breathing so that she wouldn’t hear it. All casually, ready to pop, I swung my foot up onto the footboard and started to turn, ready to let myself down. But the chair rolled a few inches, I was thrown off balance, I dropped the left crutch and grabbed for the arm. And she was right there, bracing me. I was half leaning on her. I could smell her.

Trembling, I eased myself down into the seat. She kept hold of my arm until I was down, and then stooped and retrieved the fallen crutch. She said nothing; her face wore an erased, concealing look.

“Thank you,” I said, and put the crutch in its cradle. Raging with humiliation, my stump making tired, convulsive jerks, I started back down toward the rose garden.

She came along, but she stayed back so that I could not see her. I had the sense that she watched me, and her silence worked on me like a poultice. I babbled, telling her how Grandfather had started this rose garden even before Zodiac Cottage was built, back when he and Grandmother and Betsy lived in the little house where Ed and Ada Hawkes lived now. How he spent all his evenings and weekends puttering, developing his own hybrids. I showed her some of them, or the descendants of some of them, cuttings made by my father, or by Ed Hawkes after Father began to lose his buttons. A real family rose garden, three generations old, some of the varieties unique. I took pride in it, more than I had all summer. It seemed to me then that my own position was more secure if that rose garden was important to me. I told her that until Father got so eccentric that he drove people away, rose fanciers used to come from all over to see that garden, and beg or buy plants or cuttings.