The Last Worthless Evening (14 page)

“The Zs are all old.” I watched her flicking ashes into my boot. “What happened to wastebaskets?”

“It has paper in it. What are we looking for?”

“Are you going to put it out in my boot?”

“The toilet.” She went there, through the examining room beside the files. When she came back, I said: “I don't know. Anything that'll help George. The poor fuck.”

She looked at me over a file. She was still standing, working at the top drawer.

“You're not a poor fuck,” she said.

“Neither are you.”

I was thinking about the endless money from her parents, but her eyes looking at me were brown and lovely, so I did not clarify.

I was in the Ps, still wearing one boot, when the sun shone on the windows behind Clark's desk and on its glass top, and the bow of his broken white boat. The sun was very low, and I had missed my run. When we finished, Paula's smoke lay in the air, and the sun was behind the houses and trees beyond the windows, a rose glow beneath the dark sky. In the car I said I would run before dinner, and Paula told me I was crazy, that I would twist an ankle or slip on ice or get hit by a car; I said I needed a run after an afternoon shut up in an office reading files, and she said It wasn't
all
reading files, and a drink would do as well. I have never run at night, for the reasons Paula gave, and I crossed the bridge over the Merrimack as the last glow of sunset faded to dusk, and stopped at Timmy's, where we stood at the bar and had two vodka martinis, and talked with Steve Buckland, the bartender, who has a long thick reddish-blond beard and is one of the biggest men I've ever known; he is also a merry one.

We had planned to go to my apartment and cook steaks and spend a quiet evening; she had her schoolbooks with her, and I was reading
Anna Karenina
, although I meant to watch a Burt Reynolds movie on television at eight. I had not told her this because she might have the discipline to go to the dormitory to study. I was going to glance at the paper after dinner and say, Oh:
Hustle
is on, then she would watch it with me, tensely for a while, but she would stop worrying about her work, and after the movie, because the television is at the foot of my bed, we would make love, and soon she would fall asleep studying beside me and I would read
Anna Karenina
until two or three, when I would sleep. But we had our third martini at an Italian restaurant south of town, and the young woman tending bar made them so well that we violated the sensible rule, whether we had one or not, about martinis, and drank a fourth. We shared a bottle of chianti with dinner; Paula eats well and does not exercise but is flat-bellied and firm. Of course, as she approaches thirty, six or seven years from now, her flesh will soften, then sag. We each drank Sambuco with three floating coffee beans, and she drank coffee. I didn't dare.

I do not record this drinking as some laurel for hedonism, but because the alcohol gave us a distance from the afternoon, as surely as air travel would have, and during dinner we were able to see clearly what had, in Clark's office, been blurred by names (I knew some of them), and ages, and ailments. We were talking generally about mortality and the distillation of its whisperings that we had confronted in the files, when Paula stopped talking, and stopped listening to me, though she watched me still as she twirled spaghetti in oil and garlic around her fork.

“Jesus,” she said. “He was a script doctor.”

And there it was, as though rising to the surface of a dream, the truth coming as it so often does in that last hour of drunkenness when all that is unessential falls away and suddenly you see clearly. Soon after that you are truly drunk and may not remember next day what it was that you saw. But we had it now, the truth—or a truth out of all the pneumonia, flu, strep throat, two cases of gout that had made me feel I was in the nineteenth century watching Anna Karenina's eight rings sparkle in candlelight, cancer and heart disease and strokes, an afternoon of illness and injury and their treatment recorded in Francis Clark's scribbled sentences that began with verbs:
Complains of chest pains. Took EKG
—a truth that seemed tangible and shimmering on the table between us, among the odors of wine and garlic and Paula's lipsticked unfiltered Gitanes in the ashtray: a number of girls and young women whose only complaint was fat, and whose treatment was diet and prescriptions. Speed, Paula said. That's what they get, so they won't eat. And downers so they can function. Which did not really mean he was a script doctor, for neither of us could recall whether the patients were fat or simply getting drugs. There was also the matter of his Wednesday nights, and I knew they involved a woman, or women, and believed Paula knew it too, though was too loyal to what her sex has told itself it has become to admit it, and she argued that both my age and my Greek heritage had combined to blind me as surely as the famous Greek motherfucker; that Lillian Clark's bitter and unhappy face and Francis Clark's Wednesday nights did not add up to adultery.

“She may be unhappy for a
to
tally different reason,” she said, waving a cool and hardened chunk of garlic bread. “Something that has
noth
ing to do with a man.”

“Right,” I said. “One morning she woke up and looked under the hood of her Porsche and found an engine there instead of God.”

“I knew you'd see the truth. You don't know how hard it is to be a rich woman.”

“A rich lovely woman.”

“Yes.”

“A rich lovely sensual woman.”

“With a balding Greek for a lover. Yes.”

“It runs in my family.”

“Why don't I ever meet them?”

“Saturday.”

“This Saturday?”

“There's a Greek dance.”

“Will you teach me how, before we go?”

“I don't know if WASPs can learn it.”

We left the epiphanic phase with Sambuco, and had a second one, and I drove carefully home, turned on the eleven-o'clock news, found that I could not understand it and was drinking a bottle of Moosehead beer; so was Paula; then I remembered bringing them to the bedroom. I turned off the television and lights and we undressed and got into bed and talked for a while, about snow I believe, or rain, and forgot to make love. I woke early, at eight-fifteen, with a hangover, and got the
Boston Globe
from the front steps, and after aspirins and orange juice and a long time in the bathroom with the paper, I ran ten miles and returned sweating and clearheaded to the smells of dripping coffee and the last of Paula's Gitanes.

Beverly Strater lived on the second floor of an apartment building that had been a house, and the front door did not unlock from inside her apartment. About ten years ago, in this town, that would have been customary, but whatever was loose in the land had reached us too, a city of under fifty thousand where old people living in converted factory buildings, renting good apartments for small portions of their incomes, boasted of the buildings' security. Beverly Strater was neither old nor young, and had the look about her of a divorcee whose children had grown: that is, she looked neither barren nor discontented, had a good smile and some lines of merriment in her face, and a briskness to her walk and gestures that seemed to come from energy, not nerves. I had simply climbed the stairs and knocked on her door, and I wished she were not so accessible; I did not think she could afford thieves, and she was certainly not too old to discourage any aesthetic considerations a rapist might have. She dispelled my worries before I mentioned them, as, over tea in her kitchen, she told me about Francis Clark's gun, and that she kept a loaded .38 at her bedside, and took it with her when she went places that would keep her out after dark. Her husband had taught her about guns, and it was his revolver she had now; she had reared three children and gone back to nursing six years ago, after he died. Because of her husband's attitude— and her own—about guns, she had not thought it unusual of Dr. Clark to own one and keep it in his office. Sometimes he left the office after dark, always in the winter months of short days, and she assumed he armed himself before walking to his car.

“It's just the times,” she said. “And you see, poor man, he was right.”

In winter I am condemned to sit in rooms of smoke. Beverly was filling the kitchen, and her lungs too, and watching her inhale, I shuddered. Or perhaps I shuddered at the image of Clark putting a .45 in his pocket to walk out to his car, and Beverly's seeing that as something of no more significance than wearing a hat or a pair of sunglasses. Yet I liked her. She was one of those women whom, if I had children, I would trust to care for them. I liked her stockiness, which reminded me of my mother, who was at that time visiting Greece, and reminded me also of women in a Greek village, not of a stout American. I have never held a gun, and would be frightened if I did, and as I was about to tell her that, I thought of something else, of the fear and anger I would feel if anyone pointed a gun at me and what I would do if I could get that gun from him, and I said, “It may have got him killed.”

“That's true too. My husband always said: Don't ever use it for a bluff. He meant—”

“I know what he meant. Did he ever use it?”

“Oh, Lord, no: he was a mailman. He had a spray for dogs. The gun was to protect our home at night.”

There are days, and this was one of them, when I cannot bear the company of my countrymen. I wished Paula were not at classes. My God, you can stay more or less happy doing your work and enjoying the flesh and the company of friends until you get a glimpse of the way people perceive the world. Once in a psychology journal I read an article on suicides in New Hampshire during the decade from 1960 to 1970; there were graphs showing that suicides by women were on the rise; the two authors did not mention it, but I noticed that suicides by both women and men increased each election year. My own notion is that my neighbors to the north were incurably shocked to see the evidence of what the majority of people were not simply content with, but strove for. I often feel the same, and conclude that most of us are not worth the dead trees it takes to wipe our asses one summer. I was feeling this now, watching Beverly's motherly face talking about life as though it were lived in a sod hut in Kansas in 1881 or in a city slum where teenaged criminals routinely sacked apartments.

I asked her about Wednesday nights. She was truly surprised, and she remained so, went from surprise to puzzlement and was still frowning with it when I left. Before doing that, I asked her about the girls and young women on diets. She answered absently, still trying to understand the Wednesday nights: A few, she said. He wasn't a
diet
doctor, but there were a few patients—girls—who came to him with a weight problem. I have noticed that women of the working class call each other girls, as men say “the boys.” I asked only one more question, at the door: “Were they really fat?”

“If they weren't, they
thought
they were. It's the same thing, isn't it?”

Paula and I met for lunch in my office, then went to Clark's. Because she does not exercise, she still had a hangover. In front of the filing cabinet, she touched me, but I shook my head, starting to explain, but then said nothing, knowing I was too despondent to give meaningful words to my despondency and my dread, so muted that it was lethargic, as impossible as that sounds. But it was lethargic, my dread, and it made me think of summer and lying on the beach in the sun, so that I wanted to lie on the floor and sleep, for I was beginning to know that in simply trying to save George Karambelas I was going to confront nothing as pure and recognizable as evil but a sorrowful litany of flaws, of failures, of mediocre hopes, and of vanity. We wrote the names and addresses of the twelve, and Paula said That's what Jesus started with, and I said So did Castro, and at the sound of my voice, she said, “Are you all right?”

She stood at Clark's desk, holding the notebook, and looking at me in a way that would have been solemn if it weren't tender too.

“Sure,” I said. “Let's start.”

We did, in midafternoon, in the low winter sun of that Tuesday. The sun lasted through Wednesday, and that night we lay in the dark and watched snow blowing against the windows and listened to Alicia de Larrocha play Chopin Preludes. We spoke to one woman on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, three on Thursday, and two Friday; then we did not need the other three. Paula rescheduled some of my appointments, mostly for tax returns and wills, work that could wait, though I felt like a gambler when we changed the appointments for wills, and since the gamble did not involve me, I felt a frightening sense of power I did not want. Wednesday morning we brought the key back to Lillian; Paula wanted to see her. But Teresa answered the door and said She is busy, and I gave her the key, looking at her brown eyes and thinking of her making Lillian's bed, and cooking her meals, and cleaning her house.

The first woman was a florist, or she worked in a florist's shop, and she took us to the office at the rear of the store and gave us coffee while the owner stayed in front with his flowers. Ada Cleary was twenty-five years old, one of those women whose days for years have been an agony about the weight of her body, or how much of it she could pinch. She looked at Paula, with polite glances to include me, as she spoke of her eight years of diets. I could not see the results, since I did not know what she had looked like before she had started seeing Clark a month ago. What I saw was a woman in a sweater and skirt, neither fat nor thin, but with wide hips and a protrusion of rump that looked soft enough to sink a fist into; I did not dare look at her legs, though I tried to spy on them but was blocked by the desk she stood behind. Her cheeks, though, were concave, and the flesh beneath her jaw was firm, and her torso looked disproportionate, as though it were accustomed to resting on smaller hips; or, the truth, it had recently been larger. Dr. Clark was very nice, she said, very understanding. And for the first time she was able to say no to food. It was the drugs.