Facing the Music (14 page)

I carried the beer out to him and he drank about half of it in one swallow. I sat down again to watch him work and asked him if he wanted a cigarette. He had some of his own. He picked up the lock and the knobs and started putting them into the door.

I asked her if she was going to be at home the next night. I had to ask her twice. She looked up and I told her that I'd probably get through with the doors that night. I told her that if she didn't care, I'd go ahead and tear out the old linoleum and lay the new the next night. If she didn't care.

She'd pulled her dress up over her legs. Her legs were kind of skinny but they weren't that bad. I didn't know if she meant to do it on purpose or not. Maybe she was so drunk she didn't notice it.

She didn't know if she was going to be home the next night or not. She asked me if I wanted to come back the next night. I told her I'd just like to get through. The quicker I got through, the quicker I got paid. She said she'd have to decide.

I knew he wasn't going to be interested in me. The only thing he was interested in was the money. He couldn't wait to get out of my house. And I'd been sitting there thinking such foolish things. I was ashamed of myself. I don't know anything about dating, I've been married so long. Going out to bars alone, hoping for some man to pick me up: I don't want that kind of life. My drink was almost empty.

I told him I needed a fresh one and got up to make it. I didn't know I was in such bad shape. My head started swimming when I got in the kitchen. I dropped my glass.

I heard a glass break and I stopped what I was doing. I got up and looked around. I didn't see her anywhere. Then I heard her. I thought maybe she'd fallen and hurt herself. She sounded like she was crying. I went down the hall and found her in the kitchen. She was down on her knees, on a towel she had folded underneath her. She was crying and picking up the broken pieces of glass. I didn't know what the hell to do.

I know you're not supposed to feel sorry for yourself. But I had always had somebody to take care of me and tell me what to do. It's so frightening to be alone. I was only trying to reach out to somebody. All I wanted was a little conversation. I was just trying to be nice to him.

I was so ashamed for him to see me crying. I'd just had too much to drink and I'd gotten depressed. He was standing behind me. He asked me if I was okay and I said I was. It was so quiet. The glass had gone everywhere. I wanted to make sure I got it all up so I wouldn't step on a tiny piece while I was barefoot one morning. I told him that it was okay, that he could go back to work, that I'd get him another beer in a minute. Then he knelt down beside me and started helping me pick up the glass.

She seemed so helpless and so weak. She wasn't anything like Betty. She wasn't hard like Betty. I know it embarrassed her for me to see her like that. And I was afraid she might cut herself, so I got down on the floor to help her. She was trying to stop crying. I didn't know what was wrong or what to say. I felt bad for her, and I wanted to help her if I could. All her mascara had run down from her eyes in black streaks. She'd smeared some of it wiping at her eyes. She said it was nice of me to help her. Then she said Richard. That was the first time she'd said my name.

I looked at him. He was just as embarrassed as I was. I thought about how I must have looked to him, half drunk, with my eyes red from crying. I had cried so much because of Harold. Nobody knows what I went through. He wasted so much of my life. All those years that were just thrown away. I wanted to tell him so bad about what had happened to me. I had so much on me that I wanted to unload. I turned to him and I put my hand on his shoulder. I wanted him to kiss me, or to put his hand on my breast. Or to at least hold me. I wanted to tell him what was wrong with me.

I didn't know what to say when she touched me. I stopped what I was doing and I looked at her. She was trying to smile. Her eyes were wet. I didn't know what she wanted. Maybe just somebody to listen to her. Maybe something else. But she was old enough to be my mother.

She said what if somebody asked you to do something. And it wouldn't hurt you, if it was just a favor that somebody wanted you to do, would you do it? If it didn't cost you anything and it would help the other person. She said if I just knew. She said he had other women. That he'd beaten her. That nobody knew what she'd been through.

She started crying again. She put her head on my shoulder and she took my hand and slipped it around her waist. I didn't know what else to do but hold her. She started sort of moaning.
I didn't have time to do anything. She said I want you. She put her mouth on mine. She was holding my ears in both her hands. I tried to pull back. I tried to tell her that she was drunk and she didn't know what she was doing. But she unbuckled my pants. It happened in a second. She pulled it out and started rubbing it with her hands, moaning. She leaned back and pulled up her dress and I ran my hands up underneath her. I couldn't help it. I didn't know what to do. I knew she was drunk and I was afraid she'd holler rape when she sobered up. We got up somehow and went back against the counter. She opened her dress and pulled my head down to her. I couldn't get away and didn't want to.

I just went crazy for a minute. Once I touched him I couldn't stop myself. He started running his hands all over me. I knew I should stop but I couldn't. I didn't even know him. I knew he was going to think I was a whore.

I just lost control of myself. I didn't even care what he thought. I just wanted someone to put his arms around me and hold me tight. I didn't want to stop. I knew if we kept on it was going to happen. I wasn't even thinking about how I'd feel the next morning, or how I'd feel after it was over. I was just thinking about how I didn't ever want him to stop. But finally he did. He stopped and backed away from me. He looked like he was scared to death. I don't know what I looked like. Half my clothes were off. I think I asked him what was wrong.

I finally got ahold of myself. I think I said shit or something. We were both breathing hard. I fastened my pants back up. She was staring at me like a wild woman. There was a chair pulled out beside the table and I went over to it and sat down. She didn't say anything for a minute. I think she was buttoning her dress. I waited until I thought she was done and then I turned around and looked at her. She was wiping her eyes with her fingers. She fixed herself another drink. Then she went to the refrigerator and got me another beer. I started to just get up and leave. But she brought the beer and her drink over and set them down and dropped into the chair beside me. She looked dazed. We almost did it, she said. Yeah, I said. We almost did.

He started talking about the little girl. At first I wasn't listening. I was almost in shock. It took a long time for me to calm down. My heart was beating too fast, and I was wet. I wanted to kiss him again but I was scared to try. He said she wasn't his. It was something about her telling him she was divorced and then later after he'd been living with her for a while, admitting that she had never been married. I think I was just staring at my drink when he started talking. But then what he was saying started sinking in and I started listening to him. I couldn't believe what we were doing, just sitting there in my kitchen talking and drinking after what we'd done. He said it didn't matter to him for a while about the lie she had told him because he loved the little girl and felt like she was his. He was the only daddy she'd known. But he didn't love the woman. I could tell that just from hearing him talk. He said he carried the
little girl everywhere he went, even if he was just going to the store for something.

There was something wrong with her legs. She couldn't walk right. They had all these tests done on her and had her fitted with braces and then his insurance company wouldn't pay the bills because he wasn't married to her mother. I wondered what she looked like. I had this picture of black hair and a frowning face for some reason. He said he was afraid to leave her. He said he didn't love her, but he couldn't leave the little girl. He said he didn't know what would happen to her. I felt better about everything, about losing my head, after we talked for a while. But he was working all these jobs at night to try and pay the doctor bills. I felt like . . . I just don't know what I felt like. Cheap. Stingy. For getting him to lower his price. And I felt awful for drinking too much and having those daydreams about him, and then kissing him and all. He kept talking. The more he talked, the worse I felt over feeling so sorry for myself about Harold.

I asked him what he was going to do. He said he didn't know. He said if he left her there was no telling what would happen to them. He said the woman had never worked a day in her life and didn't finish high school and had been brought up on welfare. He said she didn't know what it was like to have to work for a living.

I shouldn't have talked so much. I didn't mean to tell her all my problems. I know everybody's got problems, and everybody thinks theirs are worse than everybody else's. I know she
had it bad. Married to a son of a bitch that slapped her around. She felt like her whole life had been wasted. She talked some, too. She said she knew what it felt like to have to stay with somebody without love. She knew what I felt like. She was as miserable as I was.

I probably could have taken right back up where we left off. I was tempted to. I don't think I've touched a woman who was that hot ever. I thought when women got older they didn't care anything about sex. Or maybe she was just trying to reach out to somebody. She didn't come right out and say it, but just from the things she said, I could tell she hadn't slept with her ex-husband for years. I felt so goddamn sorry for her. But I didn't want her to feel sorry for me. I didn't want to work anymore, though. I just wanted to load my shit up and go somewhere. I thought about asking her if she wanted to go drink a few beers with me, but really I wanted to be by myself. I had to decide what I was going to do. I knew I couldn't keep going the way I was going.

I asked him what he was going to do and he said he didn't know. He said he'd keep on working. He was hoping she'd grow out of it. He said he didn't mean to dump all his problems on me. But he said the little girl would sit on the floor and hold her arms up to him when he came in from work and beg him to take her. He said he thought she sat on the floor all day because her mother wouldn't help her try to walk or even pick her up. He said all she did was read magazines and watch TV. I don't know how he could have gotten mixed up with somebody like
that. I don't know why he couldn't have gotten somebody who deserved him.

I told her that if she didn't care I'd just leave the doors and finish up the next night, or the next. I had to get away. I hated to just leave her wall like that, but there wasn't any way I could finish hanging the door that night. She said it would be okay, that I could come back and finish it whenever I wanted to. She said she never had any company and nobody would see it anyway.

I watched him roll up his cord and put away his tools and get ready to leave. I wanted him to stay, but I didn't ask him to. I could tell he had a lot on his mind. His hands had felt so good to me. I knew I was going to cry after he left. I knew I was going to cry and I knew I was going to drink some more. I wanted him right then more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. I would have given him anything. But all he wanted was to leave. I wasn't going to try to hold him. I wasn't going to make a fool of myself again. But right up until the time he left, I would have made a fool of myself. Gladly. When he went out the door I knew I'd never see him again.

I rode around for a while. I didn't want to go back home just yet. I wanted to run but I didn't have any place to run to. Some people can just walk away, turn their backs and go on and forget about it. I couldn't. But it didn't stop me from thinking about it.

I went to a bar on Jackson Avenue and counted my money before I went inside. There was just enough left from what I'd borrowed from Leon to get a couple of pitchers of draft. There wasn't anybody in there I knew. I sat at a table by myself, in a booth in a dark corner. I thought that if I sat quietly by myself in the dark and drank, I'd be able to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Florida was the best place to go. There was no cold weather to stop you from laying brick. There was plenty of building going on. Jobs were supposed to be easy to get.

But I couldn't stop thinking about Myra down on the floor, crying. Or about how she felt when I was kissing her. I'd never had anybody want me that bad. I'd never had anybody so desperate reach out to me like that. And I'd turned her down. I regretted it.

I kept drinking. Betty didn't know what it was like to have to work, to be strapped into a job like a mule in a harness. The company I worked for didn't give a fuck if I broke my back. They'd just hire somebody else. There were people standing in lines all over the country wanting jobs. She didn't understand that. She didn't know what it was like to have to work when you were hurt. You either kept up or you didn't. If you didn't keep up they'd let you go.

She looked so awful down on the floor. I was still thinking about her by the time I finished the first pitcher. I had to scrape all my change together to make the price of the last one. I knew I'd be drunk by the time I finished it, but I didn't care. I wanted to get drunk. I felt like getting drunk would help me more than
just about anything right then. So I got the other pitcher and sat back down in the corner with it. I knew by then that it had been wrong for me to turn her down. And I needed to talk to her some more anyway. She had listened to me and she had seemed to understand. She was so much kinder than Betty, so much gentler. Her body had been so soft. I wanted to take all her clothes off gently and touch her whole body and make her happy. I wanted to heal her. I kept drinking. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea.