Gay Place (48 page)

“What the hell’ve I been eating?”

“I’ve just got to get home. Don’t you understand?”

“All right. When do I see you?”

“Call.” She gunned the motor; the old car lurched ahead, slowed, gasped, and moved on down the street.

It was a really very old automobile. The smell was not so bad once she had got started and turned the air vents on her face, but she could barely see over the dashboard and the hood seemed enormous, stretching out and up to a fantastic length like the nose of an airplane. The seats were littered, front and back, and she could not bring herself to examine any of the refuse. A fading, years-old
Adlai
sticker clung to the inside of the yellow windshield and flapped in the breeze. Something fell down in her lap from the sun visor, and it made her jump. Paintbrushes. Oils. John Tom, she thought.
“John Tom,”
she said aloud.

A block ahead of her was the old house they had shared for a studio. She slowed and stopped in front of it; a half-dozen rental agents’ signs were tacked on the door and windows and splintered columns. It was just an old shell of a house — three rooms — but there had been a skylight and the floors had not been in any imminent danger of collapse. They had shared the studio for several months prior to his leaving town. It had not taken long at all — the memory of it always seemed to amaze her. It was almost like a party; neither had ever taken the other very seriously.
Stop looking, like that,
he had said.
Stop looking at me that way.
But she could not really stop — she had no intention of stopping — and the first time, before anyone had even arranged to have the bathroom cleaned or the old furniture covered, they had ended on that awful sofa, or davenport was what he called it, and it had taken her forever to wriggle out of those paint-spattered denim slacks.

Oyez, we dug each other right off!

How come you let that Good Doctor cut out?

Well how come?

You went off and got yourself killed? ’Cause that old house had a cuckold’s haunt.
Zat all?
They’re so serious, the both of them, always taking themselves so serious. He’d of never, my Neil’d never, and if you’d only hung around the old place and let us run our course I wouldn’t be half so bitched up now and groaning about your being gone and not coming back and painting your goddam picture all the time, yours and Neil’s …

She sat looking at the old house until the smell from the seat cushions caused her to drive on down the street. A mile from home, halfway up one of the hills, the old car began to slow. She accelerated, but there was only a pulling-air sound in response. After it had rolled to a stop, she tried for several minutes to get the car started again, stretching her nice legs — such
nice
brown legs — toward the button on the floorboard. She ground the starter until the dashlights grew dim, and just before they faded completely she could see that the gas gauge registered empty.

“Kermit — you son of a bitch,” she said.

She sat for a moment and then took the keys and stepped out into the street. There wasn’t a sound, not even another car droning in the distance. In the eastern sky there was just a faint coloring, the barest suggestion of Sunday morning. She began to walk up the hill. Before she had covered a block the tears were streaming down her face, and she stumbled along the empty streets with the faint light of the dawn at her back. Walking across the graveled drive toward the house she could see that Neil’s car was missing, and then it occurred to her — struggling with the front door latch, fumbling with the keys, Kermit’s and her own — that her roadster had been left parked someplace in the city. She could not recall where: some boozy vale. Perhaps it had been turned back into a pumpkin. She lay in her upstairs bed with the light coming in through the windows and the sweet party dress stuck against her feverish skin. She was overtaken by an irresistible weeping, but there was no one in the big house who could hear.

“W
HAT WAS THAT RUMBLE?
”

“My death rattle, honey …”

“Perhaps it was thunder … What did you say?”

“I like your saxophone player.”

“Isn’t he nice? You think it was thunder? He’s often out there.”

“Every night?”

“Nearly every night I’m here to listen.”

“Always in the alley?”

“Yes. Always. I’ve never seen him in the street. He’s crippled.”

“Is that why he stays in the alley?”

“What?”

“Is it always ‘Roses of Picardy’?”

“If that’s what it is. Always.”

They played John Tom’s old records on the phonograph. She had a marvelous figure, and moved back and forth, to the phonograph and to retrieve the sherry bottle, easy and unembarrassed. It was not so easy for Neil; though he felt better after he had got his underwear back on. He lay on a rollaway bed. He remembered helping John Tom pick it out at the Sears Roebuck store. It was about three-quarter width, and with the cheap bolsters it was an adequate studio couch for the back part of the shop. He lay there watching the girl. In a few years she would be getting thickish through the middle and in the upper part of her legs, but none of it had really begun to show. It was a pleasure to watch her, and even more a pleasure to see a woman with large breasts and a big behind who had not yet begun to fatten and decay. So many of those college girls …

“I think you will like this.”

She sat next to him and they shared the glass of sherry. He tasted it.

“Very good … It’s always ‘Roses of Picardy?”

“The same every night.”

“
There
was a song …”

“What?”

“I had a record of it once. Sidney Bechet.”

“Bechet?”

“Yes. Perhaps someone will bring it back and record it. With a beat. And a hipster choir in the background. Let’s hope so.”

“Yes.”

They lay nearly sideways together, his head up against her breasts. He turned and kissed the flat of her stomach. She said something — Yiddish or Arabic — he could not tell what.

“Hmmn?”

She laughed. “I don’t think it’s translatable.”

“Do you like John Tom’s records?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you have any of your own?”

“Yes. But you might not like them.”

“Ah! Let’s see. Petrouchka. Prokofiev … Vaughn Williams?”

“No. They’re mostly sixteenth century.”

“And you’ve been reading Thomas Hardy.”

“Only the poetry.”

“You’re unhealthy — that’s what you are. You’re not falling into any of the recognizable patterns for the healthy, American brain-girl fresh from …”

“Healthy? I’m unhealthy?”

“No. Not how you think.”

He turned on his front side and rested his chin along the curve of her middle. Then he pulled himself up toward her face and they kissed for a time. There was still some easy responsiveness between them. It had not been a spectacular thing; she was neither matter-of-fact nor especially fevered about it. But it was something out of the ordinary, and he guessed, like everything else, it could be attributed to her being a foreigner. A function, a need fulfilled. With some poetic imagery to sustain the illusion.

“Is this old couch often put to such uses?”

“What? This couch …?”

“Have you any lovers?”

She thought a moment. “I don’t think so.” And then: “Oh! The
couch.
No … And not this way. I’ve spent some nights here. And kissed men here.”

He felt unaccountably, queasily jealous. Did those juices ever stop flooding the darkened pools of the ego? He was overwhelmingly assaulted by vague notions of crime. It was a tyranny, and he felt somehow unmanned.

“I’m sick,” he said.

“You’re feeling badly?”

“In the head.”

She stroked his temples. He supposed it was as good a therapy as one could find. It was miraculous how much better he felt already. He got his face down between her breasts.

“Ah!”

“All right?”

“Wait … There.”

The mechanism ground along, resuming, slowly at first, undemanding, nearly aimless, and then the dark passages loomed up ahead of them and they were lost for a few moments in glimpses of each other and the dawn coming through the windows at the far side of the room. His thoughts were incoherent and all out of context: remembering the crippled saxophone player in the alley and the feel of Owen Edwards’ damp backend and an edifice of triteness used to describe somebody’s one-man show — the one posthumously staged by Andrea in John Tom’s behalf —
“the palette caked, the brushes dry …”

He slept for a little while. When he awoke she was still next to him, her head propped against one of the bolsters, smoking a cigarette.

“Do you like this?” he said.

“Of course I like this. Don’t you like this?”

“Yes. Perhaps I just need reassuring.”

“Strange … Do you feel better?” She did not smile; she was altogether serious.

“Yes.”

“I may come to Washington.”

“Really? That would be very nice.”

“Stanley asked me.”

“Stanley’s very nice.”

“He said he could find me a job.”

“I imagine he could. You marry Stanley, by the way — or anyone for that matter — and your problems are ended.”

“What an odd thing to say.”

“Why?”

“Americans are always trying to end all their problems. When the trick is to use them to some advantage.”

“I mean the passport, the citizenship business.”

“Oh yes … I suppose they would be.”

He dozed for a moment, his face resting against her dark shoulders. He heard her talking.

“What?”

“I wouldn’t want to do that, though. For a while at least. Stanley is a very good person and I would want to live with him and no one else …”

He was dimly aware that she was articulating some kind of fundamental approach to life, but he fell to sleep again while she was talking and he could never remember the rest of it. He came awake again about an hour later, and Elsie was now sleeping soundly beside him. He got to his feet and dressed and then stood for a few minutes looking at the girl. He found an old yellow bedspread in a closet and covered her before turning to leave.

The sun was well advanced. The tower clock at the college chimed a half hour, and he looked up to see the time. There were lowlying clouds circling the horizon in the east and they lit up the sky with streaks of amber and blue and fading browns. Driving toward home he began to pass cars crowded with people in Sunday dress and occasional good citizens on foot, and as he approached a church he had to stop for a procession of children, fresh-faced and beautiful in vibrantly colored smocks and gowns and vestments. They passed by, strung out in ones and twos, not talking though irresistibly tempted, vastly excited by the hour and the promise of an Easter Sunday. A pair of scrubbed and faintly smiling nuns tagged along. He thought about his two little girls and how he would have to start in immediately upon his arrival at the house to hide all their beautifully colored eggs. For no reason — and only for a few seconds, really — he began to cry.

H
E RESOLVED TO GIVE
the day over to the children. This would be their day — he would dedicate himself to the proposition. Everything in him would be offered up. He had got to leave them with something.

He searched the kitchen for the eggs. There were some candied ones hidden in a basket, wrapped in colored cellophane, on a shelf next to the liquor supply. The ones Andrea — or Emma — had dyed for them earlier in the week were stored in the refrigerator. He would hide them all in the backyard, in the deeper growth beyond the swings and the sandpile. Then he would wait for the children and they would wander outside together and hunt for the eggs. When every one was found they would take turns hiding them all over again. He would stay close to them and they would talk; he would tell them a story, spin out a parable on what it was all about, improvise, make a speech. Surely he could think of
something —
anything — to say to his own lovely children. The old house was silent and the day grew warm.

He wandered out back and hid all the eggs. Then he made himself some instant coffee and sat for a time at the kitchen table, trying to read the Sunday paper. But the front page was full of politics — himself and Edwards and Fenstemaker — and it oddly failed to hold his interest. And besides, he would be cheating on the girls if he got his mind to working in that direction again. He finished off the coffee and set the paper down, rubbing his eyes. The old house rumbled with the sleep of others, and he experienced a momentary sensation of utter fatigue. He looked out a window, feeling lightheaded and a little boozy in the lambent morning air. If he had ever really got to bed that evening, he knew there would have been a terrible hangover later on. But he felt perhaps a brief rest might do him some good; not sleep — he felt no need for sleep — but just a temporary cessation of the demands he had been making on himself, the calling upon resources no longer his to give. He wandered into the study and lay quietly for a time on a narrow couch. Then he was conscious of nothing until he awoke with his father-in-law bending over him.

“Neil … Neil, boy …”

“Wha … What is it?” He sat up suddenly, looking around. “What’s the time? Are the girls —”

“I wouldn’t of waked you for anything else. It’s the Governor. He’s on the phone.”

He rubbed his eyes and got to his feet. “What time did you say it was?”

“I don’t know what he wants,” the old man was saying. “Doesn’t sound especially urgent, but I couldn’t get it out of him …”

The old man walked with him into the hall and handed over the telephone receiver. Neil held the instrument for a moment — carefully and a little away from him as if it were a particularly distasteful laboratory specimen.

Then he was conscious of voices in the main room, sounds of displeasure, cross and tiresome. He looked in, still holding the telephone receiver. Andrea was arguing with the girls; the two of them sat together in small chairs facing a blank television screen. Someone else stood nearby — he had to push his eyes into focus to see that it was Andrea’s mother. He could not imagine where she had come from.