The Man in the Window (18 page)

When it was over, a calm passed through the little group, and they felt full and empty at the same time. Louis saw something move through their eyes, a question forming, and they exchanged looks, because it was beginning to dawn on them that they didn’t quite know what the hell was going on or what exactly they’d just been up to. Francine thought she’d just been holding Minky, yet Minky was over by the dogwood sharpening her claws on its trunk. And Bev and Kitty couldn’t figure out why they were so sweaty or how their underwear had gotten all hiked up and uncomfortable in their crevices. Bert’s legs were about to fall off; he felt like he’d run a mile. And Carl had the notion he’d been shooing away bees, because why else would he be flapping his hand around in the air?

Now they were less afraid of Louis. They’d danced away their panic, passed through the ring of fire which had surrounded him, and sensed that his terrible misfortune was not infectious. What had burned him would not burn them. And Louis, from within the ring, had felt the fire’s heat but had not been scorched. If he’d survived a fire, then surely he could manage a trip to the hospital, where in fact they had not been waiting sixteen years to torture him again. I must remember that, he told himself, and besides, what choice do I have, as the shooting pain in his right arm reminded him.

He thought, If these good neighbors extinguished the fire that threatened me, I can rely on them to get me to the hospital. Even Francine, for the moment, seems competent. Besides, the matter was really out of his hands. Bev and Kitty had gone off to fetch Bev’s car, and Bert and Carl were starting to help him down the front walk to the curb, and Francine was doing her arms up
and down in that maestro way Louis recalled from the days she used to burst helter-skelter into the hardware store thinking she was being purposeful, which was how she thought of herself at that moment, directing Carl and Bert down the walk and to the curb as if she thought that without her orchestration such a move might not be possible. Louis felt himself being pulled forward, under the influence of the same forces that had hurled him out of the window. The trip down the walk became an extension of that original event, the sense of plummeting, leaving his window, his bedroom, his house of self-confinement, farther and farther behind.

Bev drove up, doing at least forty, a feat since her driveway was only four houses down from the Malones’, and jumped the curb. Who could blame her, they were all excited, because the magnitude of the event had begun to dawn on them. Louis Malone had leapt out of his window and into their arms.

After Carl and Bert, under Francine’s careful direction, got Louis situated between them in the backseat of the Chevy wagon, Francine ran around to the front and shoved in alongside of Kitty and Bev. They were crazy if they thought they were going to leave her behind.

Bev started off, then braked to a lurching stop. “What about Gracie? Shouldn’t one of us stay behind in case she comes home?”

It was the right thing to do, of course, but no one volunteered. Miss going to the hospital? A silence, with everybody starting to feel bad, especially Carl because he was somewhat more morally inclined than the others, though he sure did want to make the trip to the hospital. They sat there squirming, thinking about how it would be for Gracie to come home to a house without Louis—one he had occupied steadily for twenty-four hours of every day for sixteen years, what the awful silence of that might feel like. She’d think he was dead, as in suicide dead, dead in the bathtub, or hanging dead in the stairwell, some just awful kind of dead, and Gracie didn’t deserve that. So just as they
were all about to volunteer simultaneously, as a disappointed but dutiful throat-clearing sound began to rise out of everyone in the car, Louis came up with a plan that satisfied them.

“We can drive by Donna Hodges’s and get Gracie. It’s on the way,” he said softly.

Of course. Yes. Perfect. Bev shifted the Chevy into drive, which wasn’t easy, since they were all crammed in there tighter than a rosebud.

“Donna lives on Oakley Crossing, doesn’t she?” said Francine after they’d gone a block.

“Yes,” said Bev. “And she has the most amazing hydrangeas. Isn’t that right, Bert?”

“That’s right,” Bert called from the backseat.

“Of course, it’s not hydrangea season,” said Bev, for the benefit of those passengers who were not as up on their gardening as she and Bert.

Francine thought about Oakley Crossing. She didn’t want to say it, but she hoped everyone knew that the Waverly police station was also at the end of Oakley Crossing, and they’d have to pass it before they took a left on Spring Street. Given the unusual circumstances, she felt that some sort of a police escort was called for. A motorcade was what she really had in mind—Francine Koessler riding in the main car right smack in the middle of a motorcade with flashing red lights. And flags would be good too, little ones flapping on the antennas. Wouldn’t that be something, going through the center of town like that?

Kitty, between Bev and Francine, sneaked looks at the rearview mirror, in which she could just see Louis’s covered face. He was sitting perfectly still, cradling his arm, Carl and Bert on either side of him. Bert rolled his window partway down and a puff of wind blew back a part of Louis’s scarf. Kitty caught a glimpse, and she winced and made a small sound. Louis’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. Both of them looked away.

“How you doing there, buddy?” Carl said to him. “How’s that arm doing?”

“Okay,” Louis said in a quiet voice. He could see everyone in the car lean slightly toward him: The women up front tilted their heads back, just a little, and the men next to him tilted theirs sideways. No one wanted to miss what he said.

“Hey Bev, watch the bumps,” Bert said to her. He’d seen Louis’s eyes squint when the car jostled.

“I’m trying to, honey. This isn’t a Mercedes.”

“Weren’t they the ones who had that commercial?” said Francine. “The one with the fellow shaving in the backseat while the chauffeur hit all kinds of potholes?”

“I think it was Chrysler,” said Kitty, looking at Francine. She was glad to look at Francine. She didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror anymore. Her chest still felt fluttery. She needed a cigarette. What was that she saw? Part of his nose? He could breathe through that? She thought she could hear him snuffling behind her, his breath warm and wet on her neck. “Yes,” she said again to Francine, her voice too loud, “definitely Chrysler.”

Everyone in the car nodded, and then Louis, seeing them, nodded too. Carl and Bert, seeing Louis, tacked on a few more nods. It went back and forth that way, nod for nod, until they all felt foolish and loose in the neck and brought the nodding to a close.

“That arm doing okay?” Carl asked again.

“Maybe we could kind of put some sort of sling on it or something,” said Bert. He did a quick scan of the interior of the Chevrolet for something suitable, and then his eyes came to rest on Louis’s scarf, which was, of course, the most suitable potential sling in the car. Bert swallowed once or twice, the spit suddenly thick and tenacious in his throat. “Really, I guess, though, they say you shouldn’t fiddle with an injury before you get to the hospital. Really should let the professionals take care of it. You’re holding on all right, aren’t you, son?”

“I’m fine,” Louis said, everyone in the car tilting toward him again as he spoke, listening hard. There was too much coming at him. He was out among them, among them but not one
of them. Their essence swelled his brain against the confining contours of his skull. Kitty’s aqua eyeliner, glittering sharply in the sun. Bev’s hair, sprayed with something unendurably redolent. Carl’s thigh against his own. When Louis looked, though, he saw a thin space, a knife-blade-thin distance between them, so he and Carl weren’t really touching. But Louis’s skin was so alert to the nearness of Carl that his nerve endings jumped the distance, sparked through his pants and across the thin gap, and then moved through Carl’s pants to Carl’s skin, so that in Louis’s mind the shock was more intense than actual touching. A lovely feeling, and dreadful. On his right, Bert swallowed. He could practically hear the thick spit tumbling down Bert’s throat. Francine belched surreptitiously. Louis knew it was Francine; he’d seen her cheeks bulge slightly as she tried to keep it in. But she had to release it, which she did with a deflating hiss between her slightly pursed lips. The sharp fumes wafted back to Louis and landed not in his nostril, of which he had only one, but on his tongue, where her partly digested grilled cheese sandwich and Diet Pepsi lived a second life among Louis’s quivering tastebuds.

Louis’s senses were filled with his five neighbors—and if they were already brimming in the first two minutes of a car ride with five very ordinary citizens of the ordinary town of Waverly, how in God’s name would he survive when they opened the car door and released him into the world? Bev swerved to avoid a boy on a tricycle, and a jolt of pain flashed down Louis’s arm, dominating and clearing his sensory overload. He sucked his breath through his teeth, focused on his pain, and was calm. When Francine belched again, he barely noticed, and when Carl shifted and brushed his thigh, Louis felt a surge, but it passed. For a few blocks he was almost normal, centered by his pain. He was not the recluse, the monster among five normal people. He was one of six neighbors out for a May car ride along the uneventful streets of their small town.

The ride was a little too uneventful for Francine. She’d been reaching her arm out the window and waving to the crowds as
she passed by in the lead car of the motorcade of her imagination. The crowds consisted of two old men gabbing on the corner of Rutledge and Park, a woman pushing a stroller down Yale, the child on the tricycle Bev nearly ran over, and a dubious-looking teenager fingering his ear as he rested against the handle of a lawn mower. The two old men waved back, but that was it for crowd response. The Chevy definitely needed a police escort. She decided to broach the subject.

“You think maybe,” she said to no one in particular, “we should stop by the police station after we pick up Gracie?”

“Whatever for, Francine?” asked Kitty.

“Well, to report the accident,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to report accidents?”

“Car accidents,” said Bert.

“Oh,” said Francine, her hopes for police motorcades and flags on antennas fading.

“Or suspicious accidents,” said Carl, although he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. “And there wasn’t nothing suspicious about this accident, was there?” Carl had intended the question to be rhetorical, but then everybody got to thinking, and a quiet fell over the interior of the car.

Louis looked down at his knees. Of course the accident was suspicious, he knew that better than any of the five witnesses. Would they bypass the hospital now and take him directly to the police station for interrogation? Under the bright lights, asking him a question, then pressing their fat thumbs on his broken arm if he hesitated.…

“So talk to us, buddy. What were you doing climbing in the window of the Malones’ house?”

“I wasn’t climbing in, I was—”

“Don’t give me that bull, you were breaking into that house.”

“That’s not true!”

They tugged at his scarf. “Oh yeah? If you’re not a burglar, whatcha doing hiding your face? What do you say we get a good look at you, creep.” The hands reaching for him…

Bert brought him back. “Say, Louis,” he said gently. “How is it you fell out that window?”

Louis still looked at his knees. Bert used the word
fell
. But he meant it to cover all sorts of words, including the suspicious ones,
like push
or
jump
. Did someone push you, Louis? Gracie, even, did she finally break after all these years, suddenly and irrevocably tire of your unending eccentric presence and come up behind you as you stood before your bedroom window, and give you the shove you probably deserved? Or did someone else push you, a citizen of Waverly who’d cracked under the strain of your hidden thereness, who wanted to see you, damn it, after all these years, who wanted your ass out of the house and in the daylight where we can keep an eye on you, because who knows what you’ve been up to all this time, there’s such a thing as too much privacy, so if you’re going to be among us, then be among us, out the window you go, neighbor, enough is enough. Or did you jump, Mr. Louis Monster Malone? That’s probably what happened, isn’t it, because who among us, if for one terrible moment we became you, lived within your skin, the unimaginable skin beneath your hat and behind your scarf, who among us would not run to the nearest window and hurl ourselves out of it?

Louis felt the intensity of their wild surmises build around him. They had to know, but what could he tell them, since he didn’t know himself. He’d been at the window, watching, content to watch, even. He had not been predisposed to go out the window, but the moment had suddenly changed, as it does when you are pushed, as it does when you are standing at the edge of a cliff and you are overwhelmed by a thought you had not had a second before: I could jump, you think. Or perhaps he had merely stood by the window and, of its own accord, the house shifted all of its molecules for him, moved itself back a foot or two but did not take him with it, so that where there had been a floor and a wall with a window, there was only air—everything that was in front of Louis was suddenly behind him. Down he went, reentering the world through no effort of his own. But would
they understand this? Louis lightly touched his broken arm, and the whisper of pain cleared his head so that he might answer the looming question.

He said, “The storm window, you see. The screens.” His listeners craned toward him. “The one in my bedroom always sticks, you know.” His listeners nodded as if they did know, as if they’d watched him every year during the window-changing seasons, struggling with the screens. They were rooting for him, they wanted his answer to succeed, to be within the realm of ordinary experience and not be some strange, complicated reclusive mishap. “I put my knee on the windowsill,” said Louis, “which I shouldn’t have.” They were behind him now, they’d all done foolish, dangerous things within the household, hadn’t they? “And I wasn’t paying attention…” Who among us has not been guilty of that sin of omission? “And I gave the screen a yank, and the next thing I know I’m out the window.”