Juice (4 page)

Neats ft. oil

? He remembered: Dave had adopted another dog, a long-haired red mutt. A total of four now. And neat's foot oil. Baseball gloves. What is a neat? Like a gnat? Like a nit? Like a knot? Like a net? Like a newt? Like a nate? Not like a nate; I hope not. Like a knight? Like a note? Like a naught? Like a knout? Why can't she do this? No neateries in the neighborhood?

“Harold,” he said. “Just one more. No bitters. A drop of neat's foot oil.”

“Sir?”

“Another.” Harrison dropped a five-dollar bill on the bar.

Harold served him.

“Harold,” Harrison said, “are you a good man?”

“Am I what?” Harold looked worried.

“A good man. Do you dream of the perfect Sazerac?”

“I don't drink,” Harold said.

“Beside the point. Have you ever invented a new drink? Intoxicated a barful of men in twenty minutes?”

“We try to keep them sober,” Harold said. “Sometimes it takes a good man to do that.”

Harrison laughed. “Good. Your point, sir, is well taken. I may speak for my colleagues in saying that there is no one on this bank who would dare contradict you. Are you surrounded by incompetents? Do you know that the word ‘nincompoop' comes from incompetent?”

“There's Larry,” Harold said. “He cleans up. He's pretty sloppy.”

“Larry. Yes,” Harrison said. “I too have a Larry who cleans up. Not sloppy though. Oh, no. What is a neat?”

“A neat?” Harold shook his head. “I don't know.”

“I advise you to find out,” Harrison said. “These are complex times. Important decisions hang on hairs.”

“Yessir,” Harold said. He took the bill and brought change.

“This will hold me,” Harrison said. “In forty minutes, with luck, I'll be home, bearing
and neat. Thank you, Harold. You have sustained me through a rare moment of weakness.”

He left Harold a half dollar and walked away, steadily, firmly, happily.

He was off the twenty-mile stretch of highway when the third drink took hold. Some of the taste backed up in his mouth. He swallowed twice. This part of the drive, in an open car, was best. The highway followed the ridge, and now he had a long descent, five miles of slow wheeling along curved roads, through purple hills and sloped, checkerboard farmland. One town, Ashford, halfway along, and the rest was more like flight than driving.

He tried the radio. News, guitars, chanteuses with personality, an advertisement for a laxative, the genteel words, the friendly voice. He turned it off. He passed estates, farms, barns, flocks of sheep, station wagons in the driveways. To his right was the setting sun; to his left a run of color on a hillside: yellow-green to blue-green to an almost bright purple.

He was relaxing now, readying himself for the onslaught of children, for the excitement of his wife. He let himself slide gently forward in the seat. He was approaching Ashford. Population 2,500; one mill; farms and stores; no smog. Homes: $6,000 up. Back yards, children, chickens. Dogs. A movie. Probably a homemade still somewhere. Probably a town drunk. Speed limit 35 m.p.h. Harrison was at 55, as usual; he had never been stopped. He breezed down the hill toward the one intersection, an intersection he liked, too good to believe: Main Street and Lewis Avenue. The green light was with him. The green light was always with him, he reflected; his had been that kind of life. He set a cigarette between his lips and pressed on the lighter. Cop on the corner; woman with groceries; old man sitting on doorstep; workman with lunchbox, corduroy pants. He withdrew the lighter, dropped it, said, “Damn,” and, keeping the wheel steady on the straightaway, bent to grope for it. He found it, and the tip of his index finger closed over the glowing wire, and he said something far more colorful than damn, and dropped it again, and peered down in great annoyance.

When the jolt came the bone of his upper arm was crushed against the steering wheel, and the pain was sharp and frightening. His head jerked toward the windshield. It took him some time to stop the car. He was sick, and afraid of fainting, not so much from the pain in his arm—it was still excruciating—but from another pain now, mounting and terrific, a pain for which he knew, even in that first instant, there would be no balm ever.

At the moment of impact he had sensed blankly what was happening; now the blankness was gone, and he knew that it had happened. He had struck down a pedestrian. He had entered another world. He was terrified.

2

Having, in a burst of domestic tourism, inspected appreciatively her bedroom (redwood, composition floor), living room (stone and redwood, composition floor, Mondrian windows, center fireplace), and workroom (redwood, stone floor, clearstory windows), Helen Harrison repaired to the patio. It was not a true patio; it was open to the west. On the flagstones were four chaise longues, two canvas sling chairs, a round wooden table, and three smaller metal tables. On the tables were ash trays and books, both used. Rolled tightly against the east, or rear, wall of the patio was a gaudily striped awning; on rainy days the awning was snapped to grips high on the north and south, or side, walls, and protected the patio. The awning had become less waterproof every year.

The isolated patio was open to the west because sunsets here were impressive. The Harrisons ate later and later as spring and summer aged, primarily because they enjoyed the lonely recreation in watching a sunset, and incidentally because they enjoyed a variety of native apéritifs. When the mood was upon her—not often—Helen sunbathed on the patio. Joe would come home, not find her downstairs, go quietly out to the patio, and watch her silently, marveling, still, after thirteen years. He would break the spell deliberately: “Is he gone?”

Naked before him, and almost breathless, Helen would ask, “Who?”

“Young Sorel,” Joe would say carelessly. Or: “That Tom Jones fellow.”

“Oh, him.” She would walk to him and kiss him, and pick up her robe. “I told him you were an old bear and you wouldn't understand about love and all, and you'd probably call a cop. So he went.”

“So he went,” Joe would repeat “Things aren't what they were when I was a boy.”

“I know. The broughams, and the snow in the streets, and the overcoats with beaver collars.”

“You're dazzling,” he would say. “You know what Ben Franklin always said.”

“What?”

“He advised young men to accumulate experience with older women. Their bodies, he said, wrinkle and sag much more slowly than their faces. And of course they're accomplished. They have put away the things of their childhood, like modesty and ineptitude.”

“You rogue. You scoundrel.”

“Foiled again,” he would say, smiling. “And now, cousin, a pint of sack, as you love me.”

“Drink, drink, drink. This intolerable deal of sack to a pennorth of—if you were half a man—”

“—you'd need two of me,” he would finish fondly, and she would accept the compliment, touching him lightly on the face, and go to prepare the drinks.

Today, this evening, waiting for Joe, Helen was clothed. She wore a cream blouse (sleeves rolled), brown slacks, and dirty tennis shoes. The ice, liquor, and mixers rested in the shade of the round table. The sun was a diameter above the hills, and the day had begun to fade to purple. The house was on a hilltop; from the patio she could see perhaps fifteen miles. Most of it was rolling country; a few ravines, a few sparsely timbered hillsides. To the south lay a plateau, some of it tilled. Nature's green, Helen decided, did not harmonize with Nature's purple. Other evenings, when the sunset was a brighter red, the land displayed unimaginable tints: peacock blues and yellows, umbers, russets, thin crimsons, flashes of orange. But not today.

She had brought sunglasses and a book; they lay neglected. Helen was pensive. Helen was periodically (three or four times a year) depressed by a wholly natural feeling that “things were too good.” Joe had told her many times that this was a curiously religious feeling. Original sin, he believed, was so strong a tradition that most of us were unable to tolerate pure enjoyment. It was generally felt (but rarely said) that some punishment ought to accompany any pleasure. Lacking other means (hives, flagellation), Helen fell back on an obscure condemnation of an equally obscure guilt. Her fits of expiation lasted, at their most murderous, for anywhere from five minutes to a quarter of an hour, and were usually followed by an extravagant dinner.

Helen knew that her attacks were senseless. Normally she felt no great lacks, no great inadequacies. There were, of course, attributes and experiences that she did not have, and would not have: a reflective mind, familiarity with far places, a professionally viable talent, a long spell of living dangerously (a moll, or a frontier wife); but these she did not want, and would not want. What she had was enough, and more than she had hoped for. Sally and Dave were healthy and intelligent; initiative had been encouraged. They were not simply adventurous; they were confidently eccentric, which was some comfort in a time when you could see your neighbors settling gummously into a series of transparent molds, like bad soufflés in Pyrex casseroles. The Harrisons' home was all they had wanted, built for them by an architect of their choice. The house fitted them. It looked, as Joe had once said, not only lived-in, but born-in and died-in. The children had done their own murals—ghastly—and painted them over every March, revealing newer—ghastlier—talents. The walls of Helen's workroom, which was Joe's office as well, consisted almost wholly of numbered cabinets, which simplified their lives enormously. One of them would remember that Helen's gardening gloves were in 18; that the Menuhin program had been tossed into 12; that Joe's short stories (three; unpublished; Maupassant) lay, as they should, in 1. A rabbit's foot and four unopened decks of cards were in either 7 or 8; two Christmas ties that Joe had never worn were in 14. What paintbrushes were not in the basement were in 13, which was consequently never opened. In 6, three sets of military brushes and the 1955
Who's Who.
In 10, dance programs from Helen's school and college days. They came out with each newfound wrinkle, and Helen pawed through them, remembering desperately: “Charlie Lindstrom! I wonder whatever happened to
him? There
was a man. Those nights on the beach.”

Joe would look up, irritated. “It says here that the sea horse lays twelve thousand eggs.”

“Thick dark brows, he had, and a tiny little cleft in his chin, and the warmest eyes.”

“The Wendigo,” Joe would say. “The Abominable Snowman. Whatever became of Fatty Arbuckle?”

They had it all, really: a better home and garden (twenty acres), the children, the work, the friends. The friends were various, and few were “business” friends. Even fewer were “neighborhood” friends; there was no neighborhood. This was the country, the valley, and this was an age of highways, thruways, speedways, freeways; anyone within sixty miles of them could come to dinner. Perhaps twice a year the Harrisons gave a large party, seventy-five or a hundred guests crowding the living room, crowding the patio, crowding the kitchen, crowding. Otherwise their guests were two, or four, or rarely six (the heavy oak table, almost medieval, requiring no cloth, was Joe's idea; it seated eight comfortably), and the evening was food, drink, and talk, and now and then a little music. No games. The Harrisons did not like games.

Among their friends were a rancher; a painter; odd executives; stray musicians; newspapermen; a writer, “Hollywood,” female, and a writer, “serious,” male, each of whom was coming more and more to wish he were the other; the secretary of a Hollywood labor union; a colonel—one of Joe's old officers—who was a quiet disciple of Henry George; a professor of crystallography; a fair-to-middling actress whom Helen had known in college; a man named Stearns whom Joe had heard, at a P.T.A. meeting, display, within half an hour, unseemly and witty irreverence for the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Congress of the United States, the President's cabinet, Russian literature, French literature, English painting, German cooking, Chinese philosophy, and Cecil B. DeMille: these and their wives, husbands, mistresses and lovers of the moment were the Harrisons' friends.