The Safety of Objects: Stories (6 page)

Jim Train

It is Jim’s idea to walk every day to and from the station. He thinks of leaving his new home, walking down the sidewalks, past the neighbors’ homes, over the small bridge to the train station as a pleasant thing to do, the kind of thing he imagines would keep a man alive.

“It gives me time to think,” he tells anyone who asks why he doesn’t just have his wife drop him off at the station like all the other men.

“I enjoy large thoughts,” he says to his wife one evening. “I need them now. My thoughts are my food,” he says. “I have to eat.”

Jim pops a section of a Ho Ho into his mouth; cream filling squirts out onto his lips.

“I understand,” his wife says, refusing to look at him. The sight of food in a person’s mouth makes her ill. “Good night.” She turns off the lamp on her side of the bed.

In the morning as he walks, Jim passes unoccupied cars, motors running, warming up, spilling thick exhaust out onto the sidewalks, into the air. He steers around them fully realizing that avoiding the smoke means nothing, toxicity surrounds him.

He weaves down the sidewalk, briefcase in hand, sweating lightly in his overcoat, feeling young, like a boy, looking forward to school and at the same time drawing out his walk so that inevitably he always arrives at the last minute.

On his way into town, he reviews his thoughts, which frequently come to him in the form of a speech. Each day he either adds or subtracts something so that by the time he reaches the station, he has relieved his mind to the extent that when the train pulls in and he squeezes himself into a seat, holding his briefcase on his lap—the weight and trapped heat lowering what is left of his sperm count—he quickly falls asleep.

Jim is a lawyer, as is everyone in New York City, or so it seems. His office is on the thirty-fourth floor of a large midtown office tower. Every morning his first activity after being greeted by his secretary—who bounds toward him, messages in hand, with all the good cheer of a well-bred retriever—is to close his door and call home.

“I’m here,” he says, as soon as either his wife or the housekeeper picks up the phone.

“Good,” the voice on the other end is trained to say. “Great,” Jim says. “Gotta go.”

Occasionally when he calls, there is no answer, and Jim gets nervous. His palms sweat, and he finds it difficult to breathe. He sits paralyzed at his desk and pushes the redial button every two minutes until finally someone picks up. It is all he can do to stop himself from hitting redial every minute, or thirty seconds. This did not happen years ago, before they moved out of town. After all, before, if his wife was not home, she was out there somewhere, perhaps walking just below his office window. Now, if she is not home, she is
truly
out there, easily miles from home, possibly in another state.

Each evening, well past eight, when all the offices are empty, Jim goes down the hall, leans back in the senior partner’s chair, and looks out over the Manhattan skyline. He relaxes for fifteen or twenty minutes and then on his way out he peeks into the hall, making sure the cleaning lady is at the far end of the floor, unzips his fly, and relieves himself into the large potted plant Patterson keeps by the door.

It is Jim’s rule that except in cases of extreme emergency, he is not permitted to pee between lunch and the end of the day. By eight o’clock he has collected a sufficient quantity of urine. It is his ritual, his salvation.

Since signing on with Flynch, Peabody, and Patterson, Jim’s lost count of how many plants he’s killed. Patterson’s secretary seems to think their death has to do with the lack of light, the poor quality of air in the building, or possibly a high concentration of lead in the drinking water. The associates make jokes about the horrible smell by Patterson’s door. In one the punch line is something about how it’s better to drop dead in your tracks than go dripping off like the old man, who in reality is hardly old.

*  *  *

“Not interrupting you, am I?” Patterson says as he walks into Jim’s office, laughing, fully aware that there is no such thing as the senior partner interrupting anyone. “You’re Flynch-Peabody’s Man of the Year.”

Jim doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He feels like a surprise contestant on a game show.

Patterson’s secretary comes in with a plaque the size of a coffee table. Patterson himself is grinning from ear to ear. A photographer rushes in and snaps a few pictures of Patterson and Jim standing with the plaque between them. Jim’s secretary carries in a large potted plant. Jim blushes deep red and feels his knees turn into rubber bands.

This is a joke, a bad joke, Jim thinks. This is Flynch-Peabody’s way of saying good-bye.

“You should be proud,” Patterson says, shaking Jim’s hand. “Not every man is Man of the Year. I never was. Don’t think I don’t know you’re here every night after everyone leaves. I have my spies.” He winks at Jim and then leaves.

“Congratulations,” Jim’s secretary says, still holding the potted plant, which must weigh at least forty pounds. “Where should we put it?”

“Take it home,” Jim says. “I have terrible allergies.”

His secretary carries the plant out to her desk, and Jim calls home again. The line is busy.

The shock of the award, the plant in particular, has left him weak. He’s still seeing the blue spots from the photographer’s flash in front of his eyes. There is no way he can work.

“Early lunch appointment, slipped my mind,” Jim says as he passes his secretary’s desk on his way out.

I am a self-made man, he tells himself in the elevator. He looks into the silver polish of the control panel and sees his reflection, distorted. I made you and I can break you, anytime I want. Something to keep in mind, buddy boy.

Jim takes a long walk, circling the block twice, picking up the power to go farther, then heading in the direction of the river. He thinks about his job, about the view from Patterson’s big chair, about how good it feels to finally let go when you’ve been holding it in all afternoon. Within a half hour, Jim is so fully revived that he marches back to the office.

There are police cars and fire engines everywhere. The street has been sealed off and is filled with people. Jim is panicked and dizzy. No one seems to know what the situation is. He finally spots his secretary, standing tall above the crowd.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she says.

“What’s going on?” Jim asks.

“Bomb threat,” his secretary says.

Jim sees Mr. Patterson leaning on a police car and goes to him.

“Train, Train, I’m so glad they found you,” Patterson says. “That’s it then, we’re all out.”

“Is there really a bomb?”

Patterson looks grim. “Could be,” he says. “Don’t really know. We’ve got a couple of difficult cases coming up, could be related. Remember Wertheimer?” Patterson says, referring to someone who was let go under strange circumstances a few months earlier. “Could be Wertheimer. You never know what a man will do.” Patterson nods, tapping his fingers to his head, indicating the possibility of insanity. Train nods vigorously along with Patterson. “Go home,” Patterson says. “Call it a day.”

Jim shakes his head. “My briefcase is inside. I’ve got calls to make.”

“Go on,” Patterson says, flicking his fingers as if shooing Jim away. “Go home.”

Jim lingers. He doesn’t want to go home. He wants to go to work. He is the Man of the Year. His plaque is up there on the thirty-fourth floor, just next to his desk. He has to decide where to hang it. Jim walks down Lexington Avenue to Forty-second Street, feeling rejected, disconcerted by the absence of his jacket and briefcase.

He thinks of a bomb and imagines it buried in Patterson’s plant, launching the tall tropical wonder like a missile. The plant crashes through a single window on the thirty-fourth floor as though heaved in anger. A second later all the windows blow out, and a ball of orange fire claims the floor.
Whoosh
, the world is up in smoke.

*  *  *

Jim takes the two-forty train home and walks up the sidewalks, warm and clear with afternoon sun. The streets are full of station wagons, carpools going in all directions. He has the clear impression from the looks drivers give him that the sidewalks are not intended for use by anyone except women with strollers and children under twelve.

He passes the spastic boy that he sees every evening, except in foul weather. The boy is never out in the mornings, and Jim imagines that because of his twisted shape it takes a very long time to get him dressed and fed. He stands in matching pants and shirt at the foot of his parents’ driveway, frozen in a bent, painful pose, giving Jim a clear idea of what a cast-iron jockey would look like if it were struck by a car or truck.

The boy sees Jim and waves. Jim waves back. He never speaks because he’s afraid the boy will talk to him and perhaps he won’t understand what the boy is saying and then it will get complicated and even more depressing, so he leaves it at the waving.

On this occasion Jim worries that perhaps he has confused the boy by coming home early and maybe the boy will do something like go inside expecting dinner to be served. Perhaps his mother will think his action is proof of her suspicion that he’s regressing and that he really is getting too old and difficult for her to care for and before supper she will call the institution and arrange for them to come and collect him by morning.

Jim has the urge to go back down the block and explain his arrival, but the idea of explaining is too exhausting and he resigns himself to feeling guilty.

Jim’s key doesn’t open the door. Instantly, he’s afraid that he has walked to the wrong house, he has forgotten his own address, he will become like the spastic boy and stand frozen at the end of the driveway until someone, his wife he hopes, drives by and recognizes him.

He goes from the kitchen door to the front door and back again. He jumps up and looks in the window and feels comforted when he sees his loafers lying empty in the hall. The familiarity of his belongings and the sensation of being separated from them make him that much more determined to get inside. He breaks the key in half trying to work the lock open.

“Shit,” he says.

“Hello?”

He hears his neighbor’s voice through the bushes at the end of the driveway.

“Is someone there?”

He doesn’t answer. He sits on the steps as though he’s been sent out as punishment. He is alone in what he thinks of as the middle of nowhere. For five minutes he just sits there, his knees up to his chest, poking the plastic ends of his shoelaces into the eyelets on his shoes, resting.

This would never have happened on Eighty-seventh Street. He would have gone downstairs and gotten the extra key from the super. He would have run around the corner to the Pearlmans’ and waited there in the comfort of their living room. Jim is living in the past, a place where his memory tells him life was easier, almost effortless.

Jim removes his tie and goes into the backyard in his pink oxford-cloth shirt and gray flannel pants. He relieves himself in an azalea bush, but it is boring, like being on a camping trip. Little green shoots are poking up all over the yard. His children have left a trowel and a hand rake in the dirt by the driveway, and it occurs to Jim that weeding will make him feel better; it will divert his anxious energy. It will make him a farmer, a man he has never been before.

He gets down on his hands and knees and begins digging, pulling green things out of the dirt. He makes three stacks of weed balls and is in the process of making a turban out of his shirt when a car pulls into the driveway. He runs around the side of the house, joyous that his family has returned, his shirt wrapped loosely around his head, the sleeves hanging down like floppy ears.

Bill’s Repair Man looks at him as though there’s some sort of a problem. His expression causes Jim to look down at himself. He’s covered with dirt. Clumps of soil are embedded in his chest hair. His gray flannels have grass stains unlike any seen in detergent commercials. One pant leg is ripped open at the knee, the skin under it raw, from when Jim accidently kneeled down hard on a buried rock.

“Doing a little planting?” the repair man asks.

The name sewn on his uniform says Bob even though the truck says Bill. Jim figures that Bob must work for Bill, perhaps they’re even related.

“Weeding actually,” Jim says, relishing the sensation of explaining himself to a guy with his name sewn on his shirt who clearly doesn’t know putting in from taking out, planting from weeding.

“I’m here to fix the hot water heater,” Bob says.

“There’s a little difficulty with the door,” Jim says. “My key broke off in the lock.”

“Which door?” Bob says.

Jim points up to the kitchen door, and the repair man takes his toolbox out of the truck. Jim follows him up the stairs. Just as they’re getting the door open, Jim’s wife pulls up in the car. Susan seems surprised by the sight of him, and Jim’s not sure if it’s because he’s home hours earlier than usual, or if it’s the shirt on his head and the dirt on his chest that have thrown her off guard.

“Daddy!” His daughter Emily hurls herself at him, hugging his knees.

“Did you bring me anything?” his older child, Jake, asks.

“Just me,” Jim says.

Jake makes a face. He sees the weeds that Jim dug up lying in a heap by the driveway.

“You’re in trouble now,” Jake says.

“You idiot,” Susan screams as she rounds the edge of the car and looks into the backyard. “You dug up my marigolds.” She runs through the yard shouting. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you insane?” Jim charges down the steps and into the yard. He’s almost willing to kill Susan to keep the neighbors from hearing her.

“Be quiet,” he says loudly. “Be quiet.”

“You ruined my garden, you fool,” Susan screams and then stands silent in the middle of the yard, her arms crossed over her chest.

Bill’s Repair Man comes out of the house to get something from his truck. He’s grinning and Jim has the urge to punch him, but his children are staring at him, waiting to see what an adult does after being completely humiliated.