Small Changes (8 page)

“Jackson, Beth, etc. Be careful not to shake hands with him, Beth, or you’ll get a social disease. How come you’re home tonight?”

“Because I was fired last week, as I told you, if you ever listened. I’m working on a paper for one of my many incompletes.”

“Are we disturbing you then?” Tom took two quick steps in the direction of the room beyond.

“Disturbance is something I always like, along with interruptions and diversions and anything except work. Besides, I’m just typing the paper—if you can call it typing. Lennie hawked all his papers early and got back, so I sent him to the store.”

“Jackson, you order Lennie around too much. Just because he’s younger.” Soft voice from the doorway. She was only a few inches taller than Beth but fuller-bodied, with bittersweet chocolate hair frizzed around her ears and a heart-shaped plaintive face.

“Come on, Dorine.” Jackson screwed up his forehead. “But he can’t cook, you know. I cook, Tom here fixes things.”

“I’ve noticed that,” she said sharply, then looked embarrassed, seeing Beth. “Hello?”

Jackson introduced them, tilting back in his chair. His age was hard to guess, except that he was older. His eyebrows were raised a little habitually, cutting a sharp line across his forehead. His dark brown hair was long and straight, caught back in a rubber band, and under the overhead bulb a few silver hairs shone. A shadow of dark stubble emphasized the lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. The lines belonged. Gazing at him in a series of quick, cautious glances, Beth could not help but guess patience, suffering, an honest intelligence. His eyes were a light sandy brown, with the kind of gaze she kept finding herself tangling with involuntarily until she would again drop her own. He was so homely she found him attractive, and instantly suspected that such must be the case with many other women: dangerously homely. She found herself inclined to trust an attractive homely man over
an attractive handsome man, especially since she knew she had loved Jim with her eyes.

“Where’s kitty? Oh, here you are.” Dorine scooped up a dusty gray kitten from the desk. With piercing mews it skittered up her arm, clinging with tiny sharp claws. Kneeling on a daybed covered with a yellow and black Mexican blanket, Dorine caressed the kitten and watched Jackson peck at the keys. “You really don’t know how to type.”

“Inadequate again. Been at this since noon.”

“If you want me to, I’ll do a few pages while we’re waiting for Lennie to get back.”

With no pretense of reluctance, Jackson sprang up. “You’re saving my life. Meantime, I’ll get started on supper.”

Tom followed Jackson back through the rooms and Beth trailed after, looking right and left and up and down. The second room was larger but of a staggering disorder. From the central light socket a web of heavy extension cords wound among and under the furniture. Bright green jagged nudes on canvases were stacked against one wall and more leaned against the wall of the corridor beyond. Bookcases up to the ceiling. Records without jackets, cups with dregs of coffee, plates serving as ashtrays. Off a narrow corridor, one bedroom was relatively neat. “That’s my room,” Tom said over his shoulder. “The one that doesn’t stink.” Then a second room with a mattress on the floor and all other space taken up with canvases. Then three steps led down to the kitchen. The kitten chased after them, attacking her feet.

“You will notice that Dorine washed the dishes this afternoon,” Jackson said, running water into a pot.

“Is that good for them?” Tom walked past the sink, shaking his head. “Won’t they wear out?”

“By the by, Laverne called.”

Tom stopped abruptly. “When?”

“About five-fifteen.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“Sit you down, Beth my girl. Watch the master chef perform. I have to make a business call, just a quickie.”

As Beth sat at the round oak kitchen table, the kitten climbed her leg and rolled over in her lap. Jackson was cooking and paying her no attention. She felt awkward, parked there in a strange kitchen. Only the kitten perceived her,
seizing her hand in four dusty gray paws and beginning to gnaw. She finally thought of something she could say. “What do you call this kitten?”

He did answer her, although he did not turn around. “That depends, that depends. Named Orpheus because we fished him from a sewer.”

“What was he doing in a sewer?”

“Drowning.” Jackson paused with spoon lifted high, scratching himself slowly over his bare chest. “How he stank. Incredible for something so small.”

Still he faced the stove and said nothing more. Minutes crept over her. Something to say, something! “You’re a graduate student?”

“At B.U. I was out of school for years. I wouldn’t like you to think my hair was turning white in the struggle.”

“Why did you go back?”

“A friend talked me into it.” He stirred the pot round and round and said nothing else for five minutes. Then he mumbled, “I was out of my mind. So was she. So was she.”

At least if she kept asking questions he answered something. “What are you studying?”

He did turn then and suddenly tousled her hair with his hand. “You’re out of
Alice in Wonderland
, all those questions. Political science—which is not science and neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.”

With his gesture and his way of talking mainly for himself he made her feel ridiculously young—as if she had looked out through his sandy eyes and saw herself on a par with the kitten. She held the kitten on her lap and gave up trying to talk to him. Finally Tom Ryan came back muttering to himself, and the third roommate, who was called Lennie, arrived behind a bag of groceries. Lennie was thin and bony, with a dark kinky beard, heavy glasses, and large sad nose, though his hands were well formed. Dorine stuck close to him. Jackson took out shrimp and carried them to the stove. By luck she would be able to eat everything. That was like a blessing on her excursion. It was a new and curious world. The men talked to each other as a kind of playing. Instead of slapping each other and poking and punching the way Jim and Frankie and Dan did, these men poked and tickled and slapped each other with words. Mainly she and Dorine sat on the sidelines and watched the words go by.

At supper everyone ate buffet style in the middle room. Apparently the first room at the entrance was Jackson’s, and the cot with the Mexican blanket was his bed. “But how can he have any privacy?” she asked Tom quietly.

“Aw, but now Jackson sleeps alone.” Tom smiled at something.

But that wasn’t what she meant. Privacy was precious to her. Never until Marie married had she had a room to herself, and even then nobody bothered knocking. The walls had been paper thin and she could always hear every cough and shoe dropped and flush of the toilet.

Lennie had put a blues record on the turntable. They did not have a phonograph but what they called a system, which had parts: turntable, speakers, amps. The music that emerged was rich. To listen to music that full was sensuous and electrifying: it was swimming music, it could almost be drowning. As they ate, from the open windows mild spring air sifted through the rooms rustling papers and swaying the matchstick bamboo blinds.

Lennie dug into the pockets of the army surplus jacket he had not removed. “Anyone for anchovies? Or fancy mixed nuts?”

“Hey, Raskolnikov, we’re going have to bail you out,” Tom warned but reached for the nuts. “Why boost anchovies? They taste like the canned food we give that miserable cat.”

“Because I love them.” Dorine took the can. “Thank you, sweetie. Why do you call him Raskolnikov?”

“Because he looks like a wild man hatchet murderer. Ask our dear neighbor downstairs. She faints at the sight of him.”

“Okay, Napoleon,” Lennie said. “Little and mean and crafty, a general nuisance and generally devious.”

“Now I may be little, I may be mean, but I’m an Irishman. And no Irishman was ever caught dead at a place named Waterloo. Unless he thought it was a urinal.”

Jackson looked at Tom sadly. “That, I think, is a joke you shoplifted from Phil.”

“One Irishman is like another. Just like people say about Chinese, they all look alike,” Lennie said.

“I’ll give you an easy way to tell us apart.” Tom started to grin. “I still have my head. Philip Francis Boyle’s is nailed to the wall of a certain lady collector—”

“Who am I?” Dorine chirped nervously. Something lurked
under the talk. Dorine was trying to get them away safely. “Sonia? Am I Sonia, if he’s Raskolnikov?”

Jackson came around with a bottle, refilling glasses. “You’re Lady Godiva. For your kind heart, of course.”

The jagged green nudes. They had bodies you could cut yourself on. Women of broken glass and metal: nothing like Dorine. She was soft and squishy and nervous to be liked, sitting there apologetic for taking up space.

“Who’s Jackson?” Lennie asked. “Socrates?”

“I fancy myself a Christ figure.” Jackson posed against the wall with arms outstretched. “For my saintly humility, my absolute Christian poverty, and my patience with all of you sinners.”

“No, man.” Ryan smiled. He had the look of a fox sometimes, a tame slightly seedy fox, perhaps one born in a zoo. His eyes saw a great deal out of the corners. She was not used to a man who observed people carefully. “I know the parallel. Tannhäuser.”

“Who?” Jackson looked blank.

“Jackson lacks culture, don’t you think?” Tom clucked to Lennie, who nodded sadly. “Tannhäuser was a knight who escaped after being held prisoner a long time in the Venusberg.”

Jackson looked at Tom steadily and his skull seemed to harden and come forward in his face. “Not very original, man. That too is Phil’s baggage. Don’t you get weary of dressing up in other men’s ideas and other men’s wit?”

Tom looked young and sullen. “You take yourself too seriously. Phil only thought up calling her Venus. The Venusberg is a higher-level joke.”

“Who am I?” Beth asked. But Jackson was giving Tom that unwavering stare and Tom was acting out being unmoved and Lennie was looking worried. No one heard except Dorine, who smiled at her with a shrug. Almost immediately they broke up into the two couples, leaving Jackson. Fingers on her elbow, Tom led her to his room. “What was that all about?” she asked him.

“Oh, just a ball breaker Jackson was mixed up with. She left this guy Phil—a drunken would-be poet—for Jackson and then vice versa. You know her—that big loud-mouthed Miriam Berg. See, that was the pun that got to Jackson. To me it’s just a joke. You know how a woman like that makes
it. She gets her grants flat on her back.… Jackson too, he comes on like Abraham Lincoln. But he’s just a fringe academic character. The coffee shops are full of failures like him, all words and no publications. Pretensions and empty pockets and a résumé full of jobs like janitor and ditchdigger. Don’t let him fool you with the somber gaze and the big words.”

She understood she was to ask no more questions about Jackson or he would allow his jealousy—of what? Jackson’s presence? style? what Tom would call moral pretensions?—to annoy him into being unpleasant to her.

He had seized the wine bottle and taken it along, and now he poured more for each of them. He pressed the harsh red wine on her insistently. She had sat down in the only chair, a comfortable leather swivel armchair that seemed a different order of furniture from everything else in the apartment. Well, he had been married. “Did you bring this from your house when you moved?”

He nodded. “Pretty good chair, isn’t it? But why don’t you come over here with me?”

She hesitated. He was sitting back on the bed. So far except for gripping her elbow he had not touched her, and she had not sensed desire from him.

“Come on, you aren’t going to act coy now, are you? I mean, we’re both consenting adults and you don’t expect to be courted, I hope? You know why you’re here. Let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t know if that’s why I’m here. Maybe that’s why you asked me. But I came along because I’m curious about you and your friends.”

“Well, how do you expect to get to know me, sitting over there? Come on, don’t play games with me. I can’t take that. You’re interested or you’re not—no music is going to start to play or roses pop out of my ears. I’m not going to force you into anything. You want to or you don’t, and I’ll take you home. It’s your choice.”

People here went to bed with each other much more quickly than she would have permitted anything beyond kissing back home. In a way she was glad to be relieved of the responsibility of metering herself into doses, deciding if she could permit the hand on the breast through the sweater, the hand under the sweater, the hand on the thigh. Fear had
always been mixed with excitement, the fear of making the mistake. But to decide before she even knew someone that she was going to pop in bed with him—men had surely invented that rule. She felt no desire toward Tom. She could not imagine wanting to be touched on her body by someone she did not know well. However, there did not seem to be a great deal of choice for women here any more than there had been at home. Either she refused, and then she would never come here again and explore the new world that had opened—for she could just imagine appearing on the doorstep, hi, I’ve come visiting, can I stay to supper—or she accepted as an instant lover this strange foxy man sitting on the bed fixing her with his bright narrow blue eyes and waiting for her to deliver herself to him. She still knew no one in Boston. It might be months before anyone else noticed she was alive. Sighing, she got up and went over to sit beside him on the bed.

He kissed her a few times pleasantly and she was just beginning to think perhaps she could enjoy being with him when he left off and began to remove his clothes. So she got undressed too and they climbed into bed. She noticed that he did not have an erection. Once they were in bed he put his arms around her and began to caress her, but he began talking again, compulsively, bitterly talking.

“That was Laverne who called, my ex-wife. She says I can’t see my children this Sunday. Bonnie’s invited to a birthday party. Laverne makes out it would be this terrible deprivation, this social disaster, for Bonnie not to go. As if a four-year-old kid knows what a birthday party is. It’s the mothers who dig that sort of thing. Kids couldn’t care less, they end up throwing the cake at each other and fighting over the toys they’re supposed to give to the birthday boy. And she says my baby, Tommy, Jr., she says I gave him a cold last time. Which is a lousy lie.”