Running the Bulls (15 page)

“I think you should be less forthcoming, Larry,” Howard suggested.

Someone, some teenaged chaperone, had dimmed the lights and now the music grew softer and more romantic. Howard wondered if he should ask Ellen to dance. He went to the beverage and snack table for yet another rum, thinking it would give him more courage. Then, he stopped by the deejay's booth and requested “It's All in the Game.” By the time Howard got back to his lookout behind the golfers, Ellen was gone. Frantic, he searched the faces along the wall, then returned to the door of the ladies' room. He was standing there, like a useless tampon, waiting, when the song began.
Many
a
tear
has
to
fall
but
it's all in the game.
He felt electric tentacles of pain shoot throughout his gut, his chest, his arms. Currents of longing. He needed to find her.

Just then Pete Morgan appeared with Abigail Reed hanging on to his arm for support. It was easy to tell that she was already drunk. When she saw Howard, she beamed.

“Imagine this dog never tracking me down once his divorce was final,” Abigail said. “And there I am in windy Chicago, still carrying a crush for him.” She whacked Pete on the arm and giggled. Pete, in turn, looked at Howard.

“Woof, woof,” Pete said, and winked. “Did you find Ellen?”

Howard shook his head. It was none of Pete's business.

“I gotta pee,” Abigail confessed. Like Brett Ashley on the train, Abigail Reed looked about to pass out. She pushed up on her tiptoes to kiss Pete's face and then sashayed into the ladies' room. Pete turned to Howard, a desperate look on his face.

“Quick,” Pete said, “before she gets back. Give me the key to your room.”

“Are you insane?” Howard asked. “Get your own room.” Does adolescence never go away? he wondered. Does it lurk in a corner of the brain, like a computer virus?

“Come on, for crying out loud,” said Pete. “I'm talking an hour or two, tops.”

Howard reluctantly shoved the keys into Pete's waiting palm.

“Don't do anything exotic with my pillows,” he said. Then, his mind back on Ellen, he wove his way in and out of the dancers until he found himself on the other side of the room. He assumed she had met up with someone from her teaching days and was chatting up a storm somewhere. Each time he saw reddish hair with a silvery shine to it, he examined the face just below. Not Ellen. Not Ellen. Not Ellen.
Once
in
a
while
he
won't call. But it's all in the game.
And then he saw her, in one of the last places he thought to look. Ellen was on the dance floor.

Dancing.

Howard stood for some time and watched the spectacle unfold. He knew the man who was dipping his wife, oh yes. Floyd Prentiss. Good old Floyd. Floyd had taught psychology at the college, and, like many psychologists, was in personal need of serious counseling. But there he was, smiling down at Ellen's face. Surely he didn't think he had a chance with Ellen O'Malley Woods? What bothered Howard was how Ellen was smiling up at Floyd.
Many
a
tear
has
to
fall.

Howard made his way back to the beverage table where he immediately ordered another rum. When the young bartender peered at him closely, Howard was taken aback.

“What?” he asked.

The bartender seemed embarrassed.

“It's just that, well, I need to make sure you aren't drinking too much, sir.”

“Give me a goddamn drink,” said Howard. When the young man made no move to do so, Howard leaned forward. “I'm riding in the nursing home courtesy van,” he whispered. “I just don't want these girls to know.” With this, the young man smiled and nodded that he understood. After all, every guy wants the babes to think he has his own wheels. It's in the male DNA. He quickly poured Howard a generous rum.

By the time Howard and his drink maneuvered their way back across the room, through the throng of sweaty dancers, there was no sign of Ellen at all. He even checked the metallic chair that had held her sweater, soft, white cloud that it was. The sweater was gone. Ellen was gone. Worse than this, Floyd Prentiss was also gone.

***

The only light Ellen had left on was the porch light. Its small yellow beam seemed useless against the black night, a blob of yellow paint such as the ones in the mural. Was anyone's life real? Howard wondered, as he sat at the curb in the Aston Martin and waited for his wife to come home from the dance. All around him, in the houses up and down the street, he watched as yellow lights winked out, first downstairs, then upstairs, his former neighbors settling down for the night. He found his suit jacket in the passenger seat and spread it over his arms. In no time, he was dozing.

Howard heard the sound of the car first and opened his eyes to see round white lights appear at the end of the street. As the car drew closer, he saw that it was Ellen's gray Celica. It cut into the drive and eased up to the garage door, which had already been told to rise by Ellen's remote. Howard thought of tension rings just then, and Larry's sad pump. Things rising on command. He tossed off his jacket and sat up just in time to see the red taillights pull into the garage, the door of which then began to close. No thirty minutes here, just seconds. Before the door came fully down, Howard saw Ellen's delicate feet step out on the cement floor of the garage, her flat white shoes. She was home, all right. Cinderella, back from the ball.

He rang the doorbell, gently at first, and then he laid into it, as though it were an elevator buzzer and he'd been waiting all day to go up or down. Ellen opened the door a crack at first, as much as the chain guard would allow. When she saw it was Howard, she undid the chain and opened the door wider.

“What is it, Howard?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“You bet there's something wrong,” said Howard. He pushed the door wide open and strode on in. He headed first for the bar where he found a bottle of rum. He poured a tall glass of it, no ice. He took a nice gulp as Ellen came up behind him.

“My God, you're drunk,” she said. He spun around and glared at her.

“So now you're fucking Floyd Prentiss?” he shouted. “What are you giving up this time? Cigars?”

Ellen's face went white, which made her blue eyes even more spectacular.

“Get out of here, Howard,” she said. “Now.”

Undeterred, Howard headed for the sofa. By God, his name was next to hers on the mortgage papers, right where they had signed for the house, over thirty years earlier. It was still half his until the divorce was final. He was about to share this thought with Ellen when he saw the photograph on the coffee table. There it was, the same damn picture as at John's house, the Woods family having what they thought was just another merry Christmas. Howard grabbed it up in a flash and threw it against the wall. Glass broke. The frame bounced out onto the floor. He looked up to see Ellen on her way to the telephone. Howard cut her off. He grabbed the phone's cord and yanked hard. It held fast so he yanked again. Same thing. Funny, but in all those Hollywood movies a phone cord always ripped easily out of the wall the minute a star yanked on it. And it didn't seem to matter if it was big strong Mel Gibson or scrawny little Woody Allen. Howard gave up and tossed the phone down onto the floor. It hit with a thud, then lay still, its receiver off the cradle, its dial tone crying out for help.

“You were gonna call the cops?” Howard asked. He was as insulted as he was surprised.

“I was calling John,” Ellen said. “But I
will
call the cops if you don't leave.”

Howard stared at Ellen, at her lovely face, her bottom lip trembling a bit as she fought back tears. He could not remember her ever looking so beautiful, not even when she was in her twenties, not even how she looked that first night they had ever made love. Howard had rented them a room in Boston. He had been nervous when he signed the registration card, thinking the clerk would know he was lying. Mr. and Mrs. Howard J. Woods. He was twenty-five years old and scared as hell. It was April 2, 1957, and they were to be married in less than two weeks. Somehow, considering that, it seemed all right. And Ellen had been nervous, too. But love covers up for so much. Love unbuttons blouses with ease, unzips pants with the steady hand of a professional. They had been so much in love.

“Why?” Howard shouted at her now. “Why did you do it?”

Ellen seemed to have passed a point of caring. She threw a hand out and slapped his face, hard. Howard stepped back. He waited a second, enjoying the stunned look that had come to Ellen's own face. She put a hand to her mouth.

“Why,” Howard asked again, “did you cheat on me with Ben Collins?”

Ellen was crying now.

“Passion!” she screamed at him. “Don't you know what passion even means?”

Passion.
This was the wrong thing to say to Howard Woods. This was red to a bull. Jesus, but he'd come to hate people with passion. People who are kites, always flying high, always dropping their kite tails for the followers to grab. Howard glared at Ellen.

“You want a little passion, sister?” he asked. “Well, pucker up, 'cause here it comes!”

Howard reached out to grab Ellen's arm, but she pulled away from him and ran for the den. He caught her just as she tried to open the sliding glass door that led to the patio. He pulled her toward him then, into his arms, feeling the instant warmth of her body. He had missed her so much. He knew he should tell her this. He should say the words aloud, if only his anger would let him. He put a hand under her chin, tried to tilt her head back for a kiss, but Ellen dodged his lips by turning her face. He kissed her hair instead, hair that smelled clean and sweet, the way Ellen's hair always smelled. With his free hand, he found her breast, round and soft beneath her cotton blouse. Ellen's soft, warm breasts. She had nursed all three children, having read horror stories about baby formulas. Howard had grown accustomed back then to seeing dark, wet spots on Ellen's blouses. And then jealousy burned into him, bringing those images that he hadn't been able to wipe from his mind. Ellen and Ben Collins, a goddamn kite, if ever there was one.

“Is this what Ben did?” he shouted at her. His hand began to knead her other breast, rougher now. Ellen pushed him away.

“Howard, stop this,” he heard her say. “You're drunk.”

So Howard did. He stopped, his hands falling away, useless hands now. The hands of a retired man. Hands without a job, other than to swing a golf club, lift a fork of food up to his mouth, maneuver the remote control for the TV set. Hands without Plan B. He looked at Ellen and saw tears running down the sides of her face. She wasn't openly crying. The tears were coming from somewhere down deep, somewhere unstoppable, a place that was so hurt by his actions of the past few days that it would take lots of time to heal itself. He wanted desperately to say something about how much he loved her, to explain how much it hurt to think she had betrayed him. How much it
hurt.
He wanted to say it kindly, to let her know he was in pain, and, therefore, he was in trouble. But he didn't say any of that.

“I'm sorry, Ellen,” Howard said. But he knew it was too late. He knew
her.
He knew he had just crossed one of those invisible lines that each and every person paints around themselves in order to live. Emotional boundaries.

“I can't take your self-righteous punishment anymore,” Ellen said. Howard could only nod, for he understood. If the shoe were on the other foot, he'd feel the same way, too. But the shoe wasn't on the other foot. And that was the problem.

Ellen said nothing more as she followed him to the door. Howard stepped outside onto the porch. He paused there without turning to face her, hoping the right words would finally come to him. They didn't. They came, instead, to Ellen.

“If you can't truly forgive, Howard,” he heard her say, “don't come back to this house again.”

Howard heard the door close and lock behind him. The dead bolt this time. He stood staring out at the street. In the stream of porch light, he could see the bed of irises that came up every spring, unasked. Ellen had planted them ages ago. He saw the cement turtle, a gift he had bought for her birthday ten or more years earlier. And there was the weathered birdhouse hanging from a lower branch of the elm. John had put that up while he was still in grade school. A lot of families had been hatched in that wooden box. And what was Howard's own house, what were all those houses of his neighbors, but
wooden
boxes
?

Behind him, the porch light went out. He felt an intense loneliness to see its warm yellow beam disappear. He made his way in the darkness past the bed of irises and the cement turtle, careful not to hit his head on the hanging birdhouse. His little car was still waiting for him at the curb. The cool night air had seeped in through the crevices around the canvas top and now Howard shivered as he slid behind the wheel. He found his jacket, rumpled on the seat, and put it on. Somehow, he couldn't bring himself to start the car, not yet. Instead, he sat staring at the house on Patterson Street. When the yellow glob of downstairs light went out, he waited, still. He waited for at least an hour after the upstairs light went out, the yellow glob that had been
their
bedroom. Then, he found the strength to turn the key in the ignition.

By the time Howard Woods arrived back at the Holiday Inn, the huge parking lot was almost empty. Pete Morton's car was gone. The dance was long over.

“If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly…”

—Lady Macbeth,
Macbeth

Ellen Woods didn't bother to mail the marriage dissolution papers to Mike Harris. Apparently, or as Howard Woods saw it, she so distrusted the United States Postal Service to deliver the divorce agreement back to Harris & Page that she drove them over to the law firm herself. On Monday morning Howard had innocently called Mike's office to inquire as to whether the divorce decree had, indeed, been returned. His hope was that he would then get up the courage and decency to tell Mike to just put those papers aside for the time being. “Maybe I'm a bit too rash,” that's what he intended to tell his lawyer. But before he could utter one word of those sentiments, he was informed that the divorce papers were already signed and returned. In person. Courtesy of Ellen Woods, née O'Malley. Howard felt such a tingle in his legs, a bolt of electricity right behind his knee caps, that he quickly sat down on the edge of the bed, his Holiday Inn pallet. The springs hissed just to receive him.

“The receptionist said she dropped them off this morning,” Mike Harris was now saying. “Didn't say a word, just turned and walked out.” Howard was certain that his heart was going to explode inside his chest, splatter the pineapple lamp, the flimsy curtains, the worn rug.

“She must have said
something,”
he insisted. He imagined the blasted receptionist sitting, as usual, with her silly head up her ass, missing important clues that Ellen had no doubt tossed all about the office. “Was she at all upset?”

He heard Mike sigh, all the way from Harris & Page, a lawyerly sigh that could cost anywhere from fifty dollars upward.

“Look, do you want to talk to Gloria yourself?” Mike asked. “I'm not Oprah, for Christ's sake.”

“Gloria?” For an instant Howard feared that Ellen had hired Gloria Allred, that short, little power lawyer who was always on TV with some wronged female at her side. He flopped onto his back, to even more hissing from the springs. From this new vantage point, he noticed a large crack inching across the ceiling. The way his luck was running, all the furniture in the room above him was likely to come crashing through the floor one night, brittle chairs and cheap lamp shades, all bouncing off the top of his head. And there would be no padding there on his head, no cushioning. Just that morning Howard had noticed that his little bald spot, like the worn patch on an inner tube, had grown somewhat larger, like a pinkish open mouth, laughing at him.

“Gloria, my receptionist,” said Mike. He sounded as if he were trying to maintain his patience. Funny, but Mike had been patient enough while Howard sat and filled out the divorce papers. Patient to the tune of two hundred bucks an hour.

“No,” said Howard. “I don't want to talk to Gloria. What does this mean?”

“Well, it means all you need to do now is come back and sign these things yourself,” said Mike. He was almost humming. Do divorce lawyers rejoice over divorce, Howard wondered. “Then it's just a matter of filing it, and you're a free man, dude.”

Howard hung up. The ceiling with its crack seemed to go swirling around. He feared gravity might let go its hold on him, let him fly off into space, a retired, divorced man, about as useful as space junk. This was not how he had imagined things turning out, not even close. Ellen would plead until, his ears eroded from the blast of it all, he would break. He would forgive her. He would take her back. He would go home.

Provided.

He would want full details of every moment that had passed between her and Ben Collins, every kiss, every caress, every whisper, every lick. All of it.

The bastard.

The dirty, dirty,
dirty
bastard.

And now this. It would appear, even to a retired cuckold, that he'd pushed it a tad too far, the trip to her house on Saturday night being the
coup
de
gr
â
ce.
He imagined a long line of dominos, toppling, each one taking the one in front of it down, a mindless, unstoppable stream of action. Anxiety now set up housekeeping in Howard's interior. Muscles ached and pounded and beat away at his chest plate. Ellen had signed the divorce papers and returned them, bright and early, like that smart little pig who got up at dawn to outwit the wolf. Howard had imagined those papers as a weird kind of souvenir, something he and Ellen would keep and be amused with for years, a tangible symbol of how close they had come to losing each other. Now it was a reality. It was happening. So be it.

***

The morning held more surprises, like a toilet that suddenly backs up and, at its own inclination, begins to spew shit all over the place. Ellen had been busier than just dropping papers off at a legal firm. She went so far as to write a letter to Howard Woods, which Patty Woods was kind enough to deliver for her. Patty knocked several times on the motel door, ice clanking down from the ice machine as if in accompaniment, before Howard managed to get a towel to stay wrapped about his waist long enough to answer. When he saw it was Patty, and not Larry or Wally playing some preadolescent trick on him, Howard asked for time to get dressed.

“I'm still dripping from the shower,” he told her before he closed the door and pulled on his pinkish golfing pants. Patty was leaning against the ice machine when Howard finally opened the door and let her in. At first, she seemed amused by the room as she walked slowly about, examining things.

“It's not home,” said Howard, as he arranged a stack of books on the desk, “but it'll do.” Patty smiled.

“It reminds me of my old room back at college,” she said. “And how much I wish I were still there, my whole life ahead of me.”

Howard said nothing. He had assumed this was why she had come, to talk about the sadness that had washed up in her own marriage, another toilet backing up, another landfill exploding. But he was wrong. She had come with a letter from Ellen. An
epistle.
Howard motioned her to the only Holiday Inn chair, a lumpy thing sitting in a spray of sunshine that had broken through the grimy window. He tore open the letter. Ellen's neat handwriting was immediately recognizable, an old-fashioned kind of cursive you rarely see these days, swooping tails on the Ss, fancy loops and curls on all the capital letters. She cut to the chase.
I
would
like
for
you
to
remove
your
belongings
from
my
home
no
later
than
Saturday, June 27. If this isn't done, I will be forced to ask the authorities to intervene. Until then, you are forbidden to enter this house for any reason. I have spoken to counsel and find that I am within my rights to ask this of you. Thank you. Ellen O. Woods.

Howard folded the letter and slid it back inside the envelope. He looked at Patty, who smiled weakly.

“Do you know what it says?” Howard asked. She nodded. No words were spoken for some time as Howard stared at the grime on the window, a gray film that seemed to be caught between the two plates of glass, uncleanable now. Trapped. Out on the street a brownish bird, what he assumed was a sparrow of some kind, flew up from the sidewalk and disappeared into the upper part of the huge Holiday Inn sign. Howard had seen the sparrow before, busy, bustling, and assumed there must be eggs by now in its nest. A new family, waiting to be born. Then he remembered that he had company. He looked back at Patty and tried to smile, to put on a brave face for this daughter-in-law that he loved as his own child. She had picked up his copy of
The
Sun
Also
Rises
and was thumbing through it, waiting, perhaps hoping, for Howard to speak. But he couldn't. He was simply too dumbfounded.
How
did
it
get
to
this
, and this
fast
?
is what he kept asking himself.

“She also wants to let you know that she'll be taking Eliot to Chuck E. Cheese's for his birthday lunch,” said Patty. “And that you're to pick him up for dinner at our house.”

Howard nodded that he understood. Message delivered. He walked over to the mirror and peered into it. What he had left of his hair was still wet, and now it sat like a grayish rag on his head. He combed the strands over to one side and studied them a bit. He wanted to laugh out loud, a gleeful burst of joy. Patty came and peered into the mirror herself, as if hoping to see what was entertaining him so. But how do you tell someone still in his or her thirties how outrageously funny it is to see a man who looks just like your father, a gray rag sitting atop his head, peering at you from within your own mirror? You can't. So you don't. Instead, Howard turned to Patty and gave her his second smile that day.

“You theater people know anything about hair color?” he asked.

***

The girl at the drugstore wanted to show him every product on the market that would change the natural color of a man's hair for just a few dollars. Howard wasn't interested.

“I'm looking for Greek Formula,” he told her. She stared, a snippy smile appearing at the corners of her mouth.

“Would we be talking about
Grecian
Formula, by any chance?” she wondered. He felt like slapping her.

“Whatever,” he said. It was the kind of hair color that Larry Ferguson used, the first in the group to fall by the wayside. And then Wally had taken it up. Howard even suspected that this magical box was the true reason Pete Morton wasn't sprouting any gray hairs, but Pete would be too proud to admit it. Howard was last to fall, but he was ready. His only concern was that he not look like other men in their sixties, men like Larry, and Freddy the Mattress Mogul, and Floyd Prentiss—
the
bastard
—who colored their hair one solid color, as if they were painting a chest of drawers. Men who looked as if a black beret crouched atop their wilting heads.

“Here,” the clerk said, and handed him a box that said
Grecian
5.
The color was Medium Brown. “This is what you need. It targets only the gray areas. It'll look more natural.” She was trying very hard not to study the hairs on Howard's head as she said this. “Shannon will ring you up, over there.” She pointed at the cash register and then disappeared, as if he had only dreamed her.

***

When Howard pulled the little Aston Martin into John's drive, he was humming. There was a panic lying just beneath the hum, it was true. But at least to the ears of the outer world he was humming. He saw Patty's car already there, pulled up close to the garage door. Good. She had done just as she promised. She had gone straight home to wait for him. She opened the door on his first ring. He held up the brown paper sack that contained his purchase. Patty gave it a quick look.

“I hope you didn't get blond,” she said.

“Medium Brown,” said Howard. “The salesclerk helped me. Think you can work your magic in time for my golf game? We tee off at one o'clock.” Patty stepped back, allowing him passage.

“This way to the alchemy room,” she said, and pointed to the kitchen.

Howard went straight to the chair Patty had positioned in front of the sink. He had many questions for her, and none of them had to do with alchemy.

“What did Ellen say?” he asked, as Patty put a towel about his neck and shoulders. She had already donned the thin plastic gloves that came with the formula. As Patty worked the dark liquid through Howard's hair, she thought about his question.

“On the one hand, she wishes now she'd never told you,” Patty said. Howard thought about this. How the hell could there be
any
other
hand? Patty soon answered his question. “On the other hand,” she went on, “Ellen says that people often get married in their youth and then fall asleep. When they wake up years later and open their eyes, they realize they don't even know that person they fell asleep with.”

This infuriated Howard. Ellen probably knew Ben Collins all right, when she woke up next to
him
in some seedy bed in Buffalo. What was happening to people? Did Cro-Magnon brides and grooms wake up one day to realize that they didn't want to hunt and gather as a team anymore? No, and that's because Cro-Magnons didn't have Phil Donahue, and Sally Jessy, and Rosie, and Maury, all those psychobabble gurus like Deepak Chopra telling them how to get in touch with their inner feelings. Inner feelings were meant to stay inside, damn it. That's why they're called
inner
in the first place.

“What else?” Howard asked. He heard the bottle in Patty's hand squirt viciously and felt a cold dab of the hair coloring hit the side of his temple.

“Oops,” said Patty, and wiped it off with a towel. “That was about it. She wants to be alone for a while, so she can think.”

“I see,” said Howard, as brown formula, the color of shit, ran down the side of his face.

***

“Well, what's it gonna be?” Pete Morton wanted to know. He stood waiting, the quarter poised on his thumb. It was just a few minutes past one and a perfect day to play, considering that only one other twosome was on the golf course. “Heads or tails?” Howard took a deep breath. He rearranged the new hat he wore on his head. He looked at Pete.

“It's gonna be heads, Pete,” Howard said. “But then, you already knew that.”

It wasn't until after they'd played the sixth hole and Pete had knocked the ball,
thunk,
a couple hundred yards or more straight down the fairway, and Howard had sent it,
tink,
into the patch of willow trees, that Pete brought up the new hat. They were standing side by side, two grown men, basking in the same old victory, the same old failure.