Frog (8 page)

He calls, they meet, have coffee, take a long walk after, the conversation never lulls, lots of things in common, no forced talk, good give and take, mutual interests, laughs, they touch upon serious subjects. Her teeth are fine. Her whole body. Everything's fine. Profile, full face. Some bumps, bulges, but what was he going on so about her hips and nose and so on? Scaring himself away maybe. They're right, all part of her, fit in just fine. She's also very intelligent, not meek, weak, just very peaceful, thoughtful, subdued, seemingly content with her life for the most part. They take the same bus home, he gets off first and says he'll call her soon, she says “That'll be nice,” waves to him from the bus as it passes. He doesn't call her the next week. First he thinks give it a day or two before you call; see what you think. Then: this could get serious and something tells him she's still not exactly right for him. She's a serious person and would never have anything to do with him in any other way and maybe playing around is what he really wants right now. She may even be too intelligent for him, needing someone with larger ideas, deeper thoughts, better or differently read, a cleverer quicker way about him, smooth-spoken; she'd tire of him quickly.

He calls a woman he used to go out with but was never serious about more than a year ago and she says “Hello, Howard, what is it?” “Oops, doesn't sound good. Maybe I called at a wrong time.” “Simply that you called is a surprise. How is everything?” “Thank you. Everything's fine. I thought you might want to get together. Been a while. What are you doing now, for instance?” “You're horny.” “No I'm not.” “You only used to call when you were horny. Call me when you're feeling like a normal human being. When you want to have dinner out, talk over whatever there's to talk over, but not to go to bed. I'm seeing someone. Even if I weren't. I could never again be around for you only when you have your hot pants on.” “Of course. I didn't know you thought I was doing that. But I understand, will do as you say.” The phone talk makes him horny. He goes out to buy a magazine with photos of nude women in it. He buys the raunchiest magazine he can find just from the cover photo and what the cover says is inside, sticks it under his arm inside his jacket, dumps it in a trash can a block away. He really doesn't like those magazines. Also something about having them in his apartment, and why not do something different with the rutty feeling he's got. A whorehouse. He buys a weekly at another newsstand that has articles on sex, graphic photos of couples, and in the back a couple of pages where they rate whorehouses, single bars, porno flicks, peep shows and sex shops in the city. He goes home to read it. There's one on East Fifty-fourth that sounds all right. “Knockout gals, free drink, private showers, classy & tip-top.” He goes outside and waits at a bus stop for a bus to take him to West Fifty-seventh, where he'll catch the crosstown. He has enough cash on him even if they charge a little more than the fifty dollars the weekly said they did, plus another ten for a tip. He wants to do it that much. He gets off at Sixty-fifth—butterflies again—will walk the rest of the way while he thinks if what he's doing is so smart. The woman could have a disease. One can always get rid of it with drugs. But some last longer than that. You have to experiment with several drugs before one works. And suppose there's one that can't be cured with drugs or not for years? No, those places—the expensive ones—are clean. They have to be or they'd lose their clients. He keeps walking to the house. Stops at a bar for a martini just to get back the sex feeling he had, has two, heads for the house again feeling good. No, this is ridiculous. His whoring days are over. They have been for about ten years. He'd feel embarrassed walking in and out of one; just saying what he's there for to the person at the front desk, if that's what they have, and then making small talk or not talk with the women inside, if they just sit around waiting for the men to choose them—even looking at the other men in the room would be embarrassing—and then with the woman he chooses. “What do you like, Howard?” or whatever name he gives. Howard. Why not? No last one. “You want me to do this or that or both or maybe you want to try something different?” It just isn't right besides. He still wants very much to have sex tonight—with a stranger, even—but not to pay for it. A singles bar? What are the chances? For him, nil, or near to it. He doesn't feel he has it in him anymore to approach women there or really anywhere. To even walk into one and find a free place at the bar would be difficult for him. Maybe Denise would see him this late. Try. If she doesn't want him up, she'll say so quickly enough. Or just say to her “You think it's too late to meet for a beer?” If she says something like “It's too late for me to go outside, why don't you come here,” then he'll know she wants to have sex with him. She wouldn't have him up this late for any other reason. And if he comes up at this hour, shell know what he's coming up for. If she can meet at a bar, then fine, he'll start his approach from there. Suppose she gets angry at him for calling so late and being so obvious in what he wants of her, expecially after he said a week ago he'd call her soon? Then that's it with her then, since he doesn't feel there'll be anything very deep between them, so what he's really after is just sex. But don't call from a pay phone on the street. She may think he always walks the streets at night and get turned off by that.

He goes into a bar, buys a beer, tells himself to speak slowly and conscientiously and watch out for slurs and repeats, dials her number from a pay phone there. She says “Hello,” doesn't seem tired, he says “It's Howard, how are you, I hope I'm not calling too late.” “It's not that it's too late for me to receive a call, Howard, just that of the three to four calls from you so far, most have come this late. Makes me think … what? That your calls are mostly last-minute thoughts, emanating from some form of desperation perhaps. It doesn't make me feel good.” “But they're not. And I'm sorry. I get impulsive sometimes. Not this time. You were on my mind—have been for days—and I thought about calling you tonight, then thought if it was getting too late to call you, but probably thought about it too long. Then, a little while before, thought ‘Hell, call her, and I'll explain.' So some impulsiveness there after all.” “All right. We have that down. So?” “So?” “So, you know, what is the reason you called?” “I wanted to know if you might like to meet at the Breakers for a drink, or maybe it's too late tonight for that too.” “It probably is. Let me check the time. I don't have to. I know already. Way too late. If you want, why not come here.” “That's what I'd like much better, really. You mean now, don't you?” “Not two hours from now, if you can help it.” “Right. Is there anything I can pick up for you before I get there?” “Like what?” “Wine, beer? Anything you need? Milk?” “Just come, but without stopping for a drink along the way.” “I already have. But so you won't get the wrong idea, it was because my phone wasn't working at home. Just tonight, which was a big surprise when I finally picked up the receiver to call you. So I went out to call from a public phone. But I didn't want to call from the street. Too noisy, and I also didn't want to give you the wrong idea that I'm always calling from the street. So I went into this bar I'm in to call but felt I should buy a beer from them first, even if I didn't drink it—though I did—part of it—rather than coming in only to use their phone. That's the way I am. I put all kinds of things in front of me.” “Does seem so. Anyway, here's my address,” and gives it and what street to get off if he takes the bus. “If you take the Broadway subway, get off at a Hundred-sixteenth and ride the front of the train, but not the first car, so you'll be right by the stairs. The subways, or at least that station at this hour, can be dangerous, so maybe to be safer you should take the bus or a cab.” “A cab. That's what I'll do.” “Good. See you.”

He subways to her station, runs to her building. If she asks, he'll say he took a cab. They say hello, he takes off his jacket, she holds out her hand for it, probably to put it in what must be the coat closet right there. He hands it to her and says “I took the subway, by the way. Should have taken a cab, but I guess I'm still a little tight with money. I'm saying, from when I wasn't making much for years. I don't know why I mentioned that. It was a fast ride though—good connections—and I'm still panting somewhat from running down the hill to your building,” has moved closer to her, she says “I didn't notice—you ran down the hill here?” he bends his head down, she raises hers and they kiss. They kiss again and when they separate she says “your jacket—excuse me. It's on the floor.” “Don't bother with it.” “Don't be silly—it's a jacket,” and picks it up, brushes it off and hangs it in the closet. He comes behind her while she's separating some of the coats, jackets and garment bags hanging in the closet, turns her around by her shoulders and they kiss. She says “Like a nightcap of some sort—seltzer?” “Really, nothing, thank you.” “Then I don't know, I'm enjoying this but we should at least get out of this cramped utilitarian area. The next room. Or maybe, if we want, we should just go to bed.” “Sure, if it's all right with you.” “I'll have to wash up first.” “Same here.” “And I wouldn't mind, so long as you'd come with me, walking my dog.” “You've a dog?” “It'll be quick, and I won't have to do it early in the morning.”

They walk the dog, make love. They see each other almost every day for the next few weeks. Museums, movies, an opera, eat out or she cooks for them in her apartment or he cooks for them in his, a party given by friends of hers. They're walking around the food table there putting food on their plates when he says “I love you, you know that, right?” and she says “Me too, to you.” “You do? Great.” That night he dreams he's being carried high up in the sky by several party balloons, says “Good Christ, before this was fun, but now they better hold,” wakes up, feels for her, holds her thigh and says to himself “This is it, I don't want to lose her, she's the best yet, or ever. Incredible that it really happened. Well, it could still go bust.” He takes her to meet his mother, has dinner at her parents' apartment. He sublets his apartment, moves in with her. He can't get used to the dog. Walking it, cleaning up after it, its smells, hair on the couch and his clothes, the sudden loud barks which startle him, the dog licking his own erection, and tells her that as much as he knows she loves the dog, the city's really no place for it. She says “Bobby came with me and with me he stays. Sweetheart, think of it as a package deal and that Bobby's already pretty old.” When his lease expires he gives up his apartment to the couple he sublet it to. He begins insisting to Denise that Bobby's long hair makes him sneeze and gives him shortness of breath, which is keeping him up lots of nights, and that the apartment's much too crowded with him. “If we ever have the baby we've talked about maybe having, it would mean getting an apartment with another bedroom at twice the rent we pay now, which we couldn't afford, or disposing of the dog somehow and staying with the baby here.” She gives Bobby to a friend in the country. “If one day we do get a larger apartment,” she says, “and Bobby's still alive, then I don't care how sick and feeble he might be then, he returns. Agreed?” “Agreed.”

They marry a few months after that and a few months later she's pregnant. They planned it that way and it worked. They wanted to conceive the baby in February so they could spend most of the summer in Maine and have the baby in October, a mild month and where he'd be settled into the fall semester. He goes into the delivery room with her, does a lot of things he learned in the birth classes they took over the summer, to help her get through the more painful labor contractions. When their daughter's about a month old he starts dancing with her at night just as that man did three years ago. He has two Mahler symphonies on record, buys three more and dances to the slow movements and to the last half of the second side of a recording of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. Denise loves to see him dancing like this. Twice she's said “May I cut in?” and they held the baby and each other and danced around the living room. Dancing with the baby against his chest, he soon found out, also helps get rid of her gas and puts her to sleep. He usually keeps a light on while he dances so he won't bump into things and possibly trip. Sometimes he closes his eyes—in the middle of the room—and dances almost in place while he kisses the baby's neck, hair, even where there's cradle cap, back, ears, face. Their apartment's on the third floor and looks out on other apartments in a building across the backyard. He doesn't think it would stop him dancing if he saw someone looking at him through one of those windows. He doesn't even think he'd lower the blinds. Those apartments are too far away—a hundred feet or more—to make him self-conscious about his dancing. If his apartment were on the first or second floor and fronted on the sidewalk, he'd lower the living room blinds at night. He'd do it even if he didn't have a baby or wasn't dancing with it. He just doesn't like people looking in at night from the street.

_______

His daughter's asleep upstairs, his wife's out. After his wife left he got his daughter to sleep by giving her a bath (very brief; small portable plastic tub in the kitchen into which he poured three parts hot water to two parts cold), reading to her for about fifteen minutes, then in the dark telling her another part of the “Mickey and Donald Go Fishing” story he's been making up for her just about every other night for the past year, and finally singing a few nursery rhymes in a low voice to his own impromptu tunes. His wife went to a movie in the nearest big town from here. Seventeen miles along mostly curvy country roads. She wanted him to go with her, he would have but not enthusiastically (doesn't especially like movies, and especially in theaters and in the evening when he has to drive a good ways to one), but they couldn't get a babysitter. “You go,” she said. “No, you go, since you're really the one who wants to.” A new Russian movie she's been eager to see since they saw the trailer of it in a Manhattan theater last year and she read a couple of reviews. Being shown in the town hall meeting room, on hard fold-up chairs, so not the most comfortable place to see a relatively long and, from what the trailer suggested and she told him the reviews said, slow, dark, dense movie. About two-and-a-half hours. That's what someone at the town hall said tonight when she called up about it. It's been almost an hour since she said she'd be home. The movie might have started late. The organizer of the event, Denise has said, tends to wait till the last possible customer has bought his ticket, decided if he wants anything at the refreshment table, sat down and taken off his sweater or shawl and hung it over the back of the chair, before she starts the movie. The single showing of the only movie being shown in that town this week, other than a nature movie at the library, let's say. There's no real movie theater there. White Hill. The nearest real theater (marquee, box office, refreshment stand and soft movie seats), which shows a movie two to three times a day on weekends, is in an even larger town twenty-one miles past White Hill. Elksford. It's twelve on the dot now. Takes a half-hour to drive back from White Hill under normal driving conditions. There may be a thick fog on the road and she's driving very slowly. The route from their village to about five miles from White Hill is along a peninsula. Or even stopped for a while when the driving became too hazardous for her because of the fog. He's never seen a movie in that hall. She's been to two this summer, both times with a friend of theirs who couldn't go tonight, and came back around when she said she would. He did see one in the Elksford theater, only because she'd wanted to see it even more than this one and he didn't want her driving that far alone at night or even walking back to her car after the movie was over. Elksford's about ten miles from a national park and can get rowdy at night. Motorcycles; campers filling up on food, booze and gas and getting drunk or high. White Hill has no bars or stores open past nine. Only times he's been inside the town hall have been in the basement once a summer for the last few years when they take their cats there for their annual shots. Cheaper and easier than in New York. An Elksford vet who sets up a clinic every Monday night. Even puts a desk nameplate out, probably so the pet owners can spell his name right on their checks. Dr. Hugh van Houtensack or von Hautensack. There have been accidents on the roads around here because of the fog, most of them early morning or late at night. He reads about them happening every other week or so in the local weekly. One man lost a leg last summer. In a rented car, visiting his daughter and son-in-law for a few days, so probably wasn't familiar with the area and also might not have known how to drive in fog. Denise knows the roads and what to do with the headlights in fog. She's more than seven months pregnant. Maybe she shouldn't have been driving. Her stomach's already pressed up against the steering wheel. If she pushes the seat back any farther she can't reach the floor pedals. Maybe she suddenly got labor pains or false labor pains she took for the real ones and went to the White Hill hospital. Should he call? His daughter snores upstairs. She sleeps in a crib in the one room upstairs, their own bed behind a screen. Don't call. Denise knows the difference between the two pains, and he's sure she'd try to call him before she went to a hospital, but definitely have someone at the hospital call him once she got there. Maybe she met someone she knows at the movie and they talked after, wanted to continue the talk so went for coffee or ice cream at the sandwich and ice cream shop a couple of miles past White Hill. She would have called, from the town hall if it had a phone, but definitely from the shop. She might be driving along the secondary road to their private road right now. Or driving down the private road any second now. He'd see the headlights thirty seconds or so before she reached the house. My worries are over he'd say if he saw the lights now. He'd go outside to greet the car, open the door for her, help her out, kiss her and walk back to the house holding her shoulder and hand. The headlights would only be from her car. Maybe twice a summer someone's driven down their road by mistake—none so far this summer, far as he knows—and for some reason almost always in the day. Not many people around here leave their grounds after dark. And so few unusual things happen around the cottage that he thinks they've always told one another when someone's driven down their road by mistake. Olivia snores. Loves to see her sleep. He goes upstairs to see if she's OK. He knows she is but goes upstairs just to do something but also, he just now thinks, to pull the covers back over her if they've slid off and to push her left leg back in if it's sticking through the crib bars. That's the one that recurrently comes out; the other side of the crib's against the wall.