Hush Hush (11 page)

While Allen was on his way downstairs, Teresa came to the window for a second and looked at me. Just looked. She was wearing jeans and an oxford shirt, white, maybe pale yellow, near as I could tell. She looked sad, worn out.

“I’ll fix it, next week,” I said. “The window. I’m sorry.” She gave me that sleepy-eyed smile and turned away from the window. I had thought she would find it romantic, pebbles on the glass, standing shivering down below her bower and so on, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the glass was cheap and cold and the rock had to be sized accordingly. And I threw a little too hard maybe, afraid of missing the window entirely.

“I’m glad to see you,” Allen said. I took a step back toward my car as he walked up, stocky, zipping his leather jacket and breathing a little heavy. His eyes were very beautiful, blue. My eyes, my dead father’s eyes. “Let’s go over to my place,” he said. “Get out of this weather.”

I followed him to his apartment, a big place on the fifteenth floor of a fifteen story high rise building with an underground garage. I parked on the street, and by the time I
got upstairs, he had made himself tea and was sitting at his kitchen table watching the television in the living room, with the sound muted. Tea, I thought. Since when does Allen drink tea?

“Well, Webster, what are we going to do?” he said. “Want a cup?” He lifted his, pointed to a saucepan of steaming water on the stove in the kitchen. The apartment was big and very white, walls, rugs, even the table he was sitting at was hot white formica. Frost on the windows. A pillow and sheets and blankets were lying on the living room rug, as if he’d been sleeping there. The rest of the place somehow looked a little in disarray, too. “Tea?” he said.

I shook my head. “You got a beer?”

“Help yourself,” he said. “Course it’s probably not that fancy German stuff you like.”

“Anything with bubbles is fine,” I said, taking a bottle from the bright white refrigerator.

“So what are we going to do about this?” he said, and pushed out a chair for me with his foot. “About you hounding my girlfriend.”

I was looking at his bull neck, the big tendons or whatever they are standing out at the side, looking like rope. “She told you.”

“She told me nothing, bighead. Boy, you really do think I’m stupid, don’t you?” He took a long, slow breath and then sighed. “Just because you’re so goddamn smart doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

He was right, I knew. A bad habit, underestimating other people, a habit I hate in my friends, probably because I do it myself.

He sipped his tea. “This is hurting me, you know? This …” He didn’t finish. He looked around the L-shaped living-dining
room, stared for an instant at one of the lamps on which the shade was crooked, then looked into his cup. “She’s the best woman I ever had, best one I’ll ever have a chance of, and now big brother is sneaking around, reciting poetry and junk. Taking her to little boutiquey restaurants, on money he borrowed from me.”

“Money’s real important to you, isn’t it, Allen?”

“It’s important to you when the waiter brings the check, isn’t it? Don’t Gandhi me, Web, okay? I haven’t been doing real well, lately. You don’t make much of a Gandhi, anyway. I mean, you’re kind of soft, easy, self-indulgent, and libertine.”

“Me?” I said. “I’ll be going now, little brother.” I got up to leave, set the beer down. “You were fooling around on Teresa from day one. Yes sir, you’re a regular ascetic—blondes and brunettes only. She threw you out, remember? And you’re calling me a libertine? You know what the word means?” A mistake.

But he just shrugged. “Okay, so you’re just soft and self-indulgent,” he said. “The difference is, I don’t pretend to be Gandhi.” He waved his hand and sighed again. “How much of your interest in Teresa is because she’s my girlfriend? You ever think about that?”

“Yeah. She isn’t anymore. Your girlfriend. Yeah, I thought about it.” I sat back down across the table from him, circled the beer bottle with my fingers. He was watching me, sipping the tea, waiting. There was some look on his face. Certainty, confidence.

“I couldn’t figure it.” I looked at him. “I don’t know,” I said. He was smirking. But maybe he wasn’t. “Anymore. Anything. I don’t know.” It was as if he wasn’t even interested in our conversation anymore. His face was the big, quiet face of a child, of Allen as a child, of a time when it seemed that
everyone knew what was going on but me. He had always been this way. And I thought, It never ends.

I stood up from his table, tried to say goodbye but couldn’t, waved and then walked out and down the hall to the elevator, still there from when I’d come up in it. I remembered being in the hospital room with my father two weeks before he died, and I said something to him about coughing, only the way I said it it sounded like
coffin
, and my father looked at me, startled, with a look of terror on his face. And I thought about my own dying, and suddenly it was obvious that Teresa didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t ever care for me. I hadn’t the confidence for it. The elevator doors drew open, and I got on.

My giant yellow stepladder shifted, then rose up on one foot, and a minute later I was there, on the concrete, like that, sweetly, aimlessly recalling the history of my escape. Now I’m in the hospital. Can I move my arms and legs? Yes, I can, now I can. It was yesterday I was sort of paralyzed.

I’m working in school supplies, next to pet supplies. Charlene brushes past me, lets her hand drag across my butt, laughs. “So close, but yet …” I say. Her smock is untied and her blue silk blouse is unbuttoned halfway down. “Dream on, college,” she says. She takes a box of pencils and slips it into her blouse, then draws the smock tight and ties it. Charlene steals things, for fun mostly. I do, too. There isn’t a lot of fun working in a place like this.

I go back to work, watching the white metal ceiling for the bird that sails around in the steelwork and surveillance cameras up there. A starling. It got in months ago, but it hasn’t been around for at least a week, so maybe they were right, and it died of thirst like they said it would.

Charlene’s boyfriend, Patricio, dumped her last week for a black girl on dayshift named Lakeshia. Patricio is my best friend here. He’s big. Charlene is small, short, sexy, in a Spanish sort of way. The stuff that dreams are made of.

In the pet shop there’s a kid looking into a fish tank, hands
around his face, forehead on the glass, staring into the aquarium. Guy’s about twelve. The store is Wannabe Wal-Mart, it’s near midnight on a Friday, we never close. I’m sale-ing stuff, putting on Manager’s Special stickers, $1.99, a hundred and twenty boxes of pencils. It’s a trick. The computers’ll pick the new price up anyway, and there’s a sign on the shelf, but they think the customers like to see these stickers.

I wish I could be there staring in at the neon tetras, watching them zoom around. At least they enjoy their little pointless lives. We used to have a baby boa constrictor, but it died. It was really murder, the dumbass store management murdered it. They wanted $99.00 for it. Duh. Like they’ve never seen who shops here.

“When you going to take me out to dinner?” Charlene says, bumps me a little with her hip. “I am off at two.”

“I can’t afford you. I eat peanut butter and jelly.”

“Oh, I
love
peanut butter and jelly,” she says, and licks her lips. “White bread.”

“Well, okay, good. I’ll pick you up, ten after two. Hey, Charlene, what do you do with all the stuff you swipe?”

“I don’t know what you talking about, college boy,” she says. “You need a rain gauge? A Beretta? Some car wax? You go to law school, you can defen’ me, okay? I pay you in merchandise.” She flips her shining, shoulder-length hair, and from nowhere produces the box of pencils and tosses it back on my shelf. “I got pencils,” she says. “Two o’clock.”

I watch her walk away, swaying. She’s a certain kind of sexy, buys expensive clothes, wears them a little loose, walks good, the voice, knows how to look at you, smiles. A woman who knows everything. You look at her and think, Nothing I could ever do would make this woman nervous. And then she’s out of sight. I look up into the white steel rafters.

Later, after I’m off, in the back Patricio comes up to me carrying a pool cue in each hand. “Man, you poaching my woman?” he says, and stares hard, until he starts laughing and I breathe out. “First thing she did was come to tell me, cholo,” he says. “Here, you’re gonna need some of these. Rocket fuel.” He puts a couple pills in my shirt pocket.

“She wasn’t serious,” I say.

“Serious?” Patricio says. “She is desperate. Just pretend she don’t scare you a bit.” He holds one of the cue sticks out to me. “Take this. We gonna get that bird. He been back here all night. Been shitting all over the stock.”

Outside the breakroom is the warehouse area, the stock piled on pallets in rows, like a lumberyard or a library. Patricio’s got big yellow fourteen foot ladders at opposite ends of the long, narrow space.

“There he is,” Patricio says, pointing up to the starling sitting on the bottom of one of the exposed steel joists. “Bird-ball,” he says, grinning, and swings his pool cue like a bat. “I be Sammy Sosa, you be that red guy.” He means Mark McGwire.

We climb the ladders and run the pool cues along the corrugated steel of the roof for the racket it makes, to start the bird flying. Air must be twenty degrees warmer up here. As soon as the starling lights somewhere we shout and bash at the ceiling again, and he’s off again. The ladders rock and shudder as we slash at him and he flutters out of range until one time Patricio swings and almost falls, and the starling jumps frantically straight up and thumps against the ceiling, then drops four feet and swoops back toward me on the far side of the ladder, in perfect position, rising, floating, right in the center of the strike zone. It feels like I’m shaking my head but I’m not moving. I’m leaning.

My arms jerk the pool cue out horizontal, for a bunt. He
doesn’t hit it. He stops on it, instantly, bobs over head first and rights himself, then spins around, weird, dance-y footwork, to face the other way. He’s black, green, feathers iridescent as his wings disappear, gasping for breath, watching me with one coral-colored eye. He is perfection. “You got him!” Patricio yells. I have got him, I think. And of course right there the ladder starts to move.

Bill was staring at his eyes in the bathroom mirror. Blue eyes. Some gray in them. “It’s your sense of inadequacy,” Bill said.

“What’s my sense of inadequacy?” Maureen said. Dark hair. Green eyes.

“Why you always fail. Why you can’t do anything right. Me too.”

“You too what?”

“I have the same problem. We share this problem.”

Maureen stood up, walked out. She looked like a model. Took her robe, cigarettes, beer.

“Bitch,” Bill said, staring into the mirror. “Stupid bitch.”

Maureen fell asleep in the living room, on the couch. Again, Bill thought. I was a jerk again. I must have been born a jerk. He rearranged the robe, to cover her.

Bill and Maureen stopped at the laundromat and left their clothes, went to the grocery store, stopped off at the library, went to the drugstore, picked up their laundry.

Maureen made stroganoff from a package that advertised itself as taking eight minutes. Bill sliced up the steak. Checked her progress. “Those sure are funny looking noodles,” Bill said. “They’re crooked.”

“These fine noodles …” Maureen said. “You’re gonna
love
these noodles.”

Bill read
Newsweek
until dinner was ready. Twenty minutes. They had candlelight and wine.

“I love these noodles,” Bill said.

Maureen left the house crying. Slammed the car door. She drove to her friend Jane’s house. Jane’s house smelled like soup. There was a cloth tea strainer on the counter, very brown.

“He wants to sleep around and you can’t,” Jane said. “What does he think, you don’t want to? The Neanderthal. Want some tea?” Jane got up. “Here, read this magazine. And this one. And this one.”

“Stay out of it,” Maureen said.

Bill took the mop from Maureen. “Not like that,” he said. “Like
this
.” He was showing her how to use a sponge-mop. He held the mop in his hands, a yellow handle, a yellow sponge.

“Like
that
?”

“You have to drag it so it’s flat on the floor, then you get
the whole surface, not just the front edge. The bottom surface.” He pulled the mop expertly across the linoleum, holding the handle at an awkward forward angle of 80 degrees.

Maureen ran into the closet and began screaming with laughter.

Bill opened the closet door and looked at the tears in her wet eyes, the shirt wadded in her fist. “Foolish?” he said.

Bill and Maureen sat on the carpet in the living room playing Black Tower until 6 a.m.

At the office a handsome young millionaire talked to Maureen. A client. He looked out the window as he talked, at parking lots fifteen stories below. Maureen typed, printed forms. Her boss was “in conference.” She missed lunch.

The young millionaire described in lavish detail his vacation which had been spent in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta and Cozumel. He talked about “little bars.” He intimated that he had had sex with beautiful women.

Maureen told Bill about the young millionaire when she got home. “He’s a jerk,” Maureen said.

Bill laughed.

“But he’s a millionaire.”

Maureen swirled an imaginary Tequila Sunrise and did
her young millionaire imitation, lifted her eyebrows and spoke through her nose:

“Oh yes, I own several tall buildings. I have eaten turtle eggs inside the turtle. Ahem. The inside of the turtle is hot and pink. My love life? Ha! It’s understandable you would be curious. I am a man of the world who has made love to an eye-guana, pretty thing. Of course you wouldn’t know … It wasn’t just any iguana—it was a bisexual iguana. After, we shared a cigarette. He said I was the best he’d ever had.”