The Waiting Room (3 page)

"He's not old."

She sighed. "And that's another thing: Whenever we get into an argument, you try to change the subject. I don't like it. Arguments should be hashed out, they should be brought to a conclusion—"

"We aren't having an argument, are we? If we are, I wish we'd stop."

She said nothing.

"Leslie?" I coaxed.

She sighed again.

I said, "I like the way your chest heaves when you do that."

She grimaced. "That's a stupid thing to say at this point."

"At
what
point, for God's sake?"

"In the middle of a discussion."

"Discussion?
I thought it was an argument!" I chuckled. It was distinctly the wrong thing to do. She got up abruptly from the bed and started putting her clothes on. "What are you doing?" I asked.

She looked back at me. "I don't sleep with people who have ice for blood."

"I don't have ice for blood. I have blood for blood."

"Always the funny man," she quipped. She leaned over, picked her bra up from the end table, and put it on with her back turned. I said, "You don't have to turn away from me, Leslie."

"If your attention's going to be only on my heaving chest, then yes, I do."

"Well, okay," I said, feeling grimly playful—hoping it might, somehow, get her back into the bed—"my attention's on your bouncy bottom, how about that?"

She said nothing.

"Leslie?"

She turned her head. "This is a side of you I've never seen before, Sam, and I don't know if I like it. I'm going to go home now. Call me tomorrow. We'll talk." And while various futile protests stumbled from my tongue she silently finished dressing and left the apartment.

W
hen I was growing up in Bangor, I had a white mouse named Sparky. I kept it in a big wire cage that had a gerbil wheel in it, a water dish, and a dish for food. Sparky grew up in that cage, and when he got to be an old mouse and I knew he was about to kick off, I took him out of the cage and into a farmer's field. I was doing him a favor. I was giving him a taste of the wide-open spaces before death came along and gobbled him up. After all, there were probably ten thousand of his cousins in that field, and how many of them, I asked Sparky, would want to die in a damned wire cage?

But when I let him out of it, he spooked. He froze. He wouldn't budge. And at last I figured out why—he wasn't just
Sparky the white mouse.
He was
Sparky the white mouse who lived in a wire cage with a
gerbil wheel and a food dish and water dish
.
That
was Sparky's identity. And I'd tried to take it away from him.

It's kind of what the EL-HI Construction Company did on East 80th Street when that rotten old building came tumbling down. They pushed a lot of scared and shivering Sparkys out into the street.

Which was nothing new. People have been blasting buildings and tearing them down and burning them up for a long, long time.

And interrupting the traffic flow.

Everyone's got to have a place to live, you see. Not just to keep the rain away, and not just to put furniture and drapes and knickknacks in, and not just to repaint and have friends over, but because people are happy having walls around them and roofs above them. It's one of the things that make them who they are, and sometimes, after death has gobbled them up and all the friends have gone away, it's just about the only thing—besides their habits, like turning the TV on at seven-thirty, or making meat loaf and mashed potatoes on Thursday, or having a favorite chair to sit in, or calling Mother on holidays and on every second Saturday, or peeling potatoes, or fixing cars. Habits are comfortable things, at first, like a pair of soft suede shoes. Then they become things we need, then they become passions. And, after it's all done, they become a part of us, like our hair and fingernails.

And, like our hair and fingernails, exactly like our hair and fingernails, they last just about forever.

~ * ~

The second time I saw Abner, I was on my way to the unemployment office. It was the middle of March but still pretty cold in the city, so construction had ground nearly to a halt. I was on Second Avenue, and he was again across the street from me, coming out of the same Greek restaurant I'd seen him come out of several weeks earlier. He was wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve, as he had the first time I'd seen him, and again I called to him, "Hey, Abner. It's me. Sam Feary!"

He stopped, turned his head, looked wide-eyed at me, just as he had that first time. Then he shook his head, slowly at first, as if there were some kind of old engine inside him that he was cranking up, and then faster, more furiously.

After thirty seconds of this, he ran off.

I was pissed. We'd been friends, for God's sake. Sure it had been twenty years earlier, but so what? Twenty years, forty years, it didn't matter. I was one old friend calling across a New York City street full of strangers to another old friend, and I was not about to be ignored. If he was going to run off, I sure as hell was going to find out why.

So I went after him.

I lost him momentarily in the crowds on 42nd Street, but I saw him again, a couple of moments later, in a cab going west, slowly, because a traffic jam was in the making.

I watched as he leaned forward in his seat and his eyes settled on me.

And because I was very close to him, and could see him clearly, I muttered, "Good Lord, because it was hard to believe that it was Abner Cray I was seeing in that cab. What I was seeing was like a skinny caricature of Abner Cray, as if he'd decided that eating was passé. He leaned back in the seat, then an opening appeared in the snarl of traffic, and the cab shot forward into it, which ignited a deafening flare-up of shouted curses and blaring horns.

"Goddamn maniac cabbies!" one of the drivers yelled.

"You wanna kill someone?!" shouted another.

And the cabbie stuck his head out his window and yelled back, "It wouldn't be the first time!" then careened down East 42nd Street.

~ * ~

Let me tell you what I used to believe about death before
 
I went to Nam and while Abner and I were sitting in the Hammet Mausoleum twenty years ago, with Flora's bleached white skull between us, the yellow-orange light of six candles flickering on the walls, and both of us on the verge of being terminally spooked:

I believed that death was
it!
The end. Zilch. Limboland. I believed that if a truck fell over on me—
splat!
—then maybe I'd feel a second's worth of incredible pain, but I wouldn't feel anything else because suddenly I'd be beyond pain and feeling. There'd be a stinking, gooey mess on the sidewalk that some poor slob would have to scrape up and shuffle onto a stretcher, but "Sam Feary" would be nothing but a name that someone, a couple of years down the line, would have trouble remembering.

Sometimes I think how really pleasant it would be if all of that dreck had turned out to be what really happens when the curtain comes down.

~ * ~

Abner was never a classic nerd. Even in high school he knew enough not to wear white socks with black shoes, slide rules baffled him, and he wasn't abysmally clumsy, although, after gym class when he was putting his jeans on, they usually had a hole in the knee that he'd get his foot stuck in and he'd hop about, on the verge of a fall, until he found a wall to steady himself against. But at heart, he was a nerd. His view of the world was nerdish. He was convinced that as complex as it was, as baffling and unfair and unjust as it seemed to be, there was a niche somewhere in it for him, and because it was his
right
—as
a creature of the universe—he would find that niche and fill it. And once he'd filled it, the world and its complexity and injustice could pass him by and that would be all right. He'd be comfortable, he'd be set.

I believe that he still thinks that way, though he's not so passionate about it. He used to be a photographer, for instance, which was why he came to New York several years ago, to do a big photo book on all that was wonderful about Manhattan. Now he shrugs and says, "Hell, there's just too much to photograph, Sam."

~ * ~

The tumbledown beach house on Long Island, where Abner is now, was owned by Art DeGraff. Art went to school with Abner and me in Bangor, twenty years ago, and I thought he was a slime-ball right from the start. He was a great actor and had lots of charm, but he smiled too much, as if some invisible layer of mud had made his smile stick on his face.

Art married Abner's cousin Stacy in 1975. It broke Abner's heart, and nearly killed Stacy because, after they were married, she learned that beneath his stiffly smiling exterior, Art liked to beat people up, women especially. Abner said that Stacy called it a "character flaw," which made him smile sadly and made my blood boil. Whatever it was, it gave Stacy a lot of pain.

The beach house on Long Island has fifteen rooms, five on the first floor, seven on the second, and three in the attic. It's a very big place, at least one hundred years old, and when the wind off the ocean is strong enough, it shimmers and shakes and complains so loudly that you have to shout to be heard above it.

For a while, Abner lived there. Madeline, too. You'll meet Madeline by and by.

There have been several fires in the house. One, in 1943, was started by a hobo who broke in one frigid winter night and tried to keep warm by building a campfire in the middle of the living room floor. It killed him and blackened the ceiling, but the house survived. In 1962 a family of four who'd driven up from North Carolina and had no place to stay broke into the house and set up housekeeping. It was late fall, and they were sure that no one was going to be using the house for a while—all its doors and shutters were locked, a thick tangle of dead weeds surrounded it, and the nearest neighbors were a good mile off, blocked by a stand of trees—so they unloaded what few pieces of furniture they had in their rattletrap pickup truck, put up curtains, and made ready to wait out the coming winter.

Two days later three of them died when the wood stove in the living room cranked out carbon monoxide as they slept. The youngest of them, a six-year-old boy named Frankie, survived, no one has ever figured out how.

In 1970 the house was left to Art DeGraff by his Aunt Carol. She'd inherited it from her Aunt Bernice ten years earlier. Aunt Carol also died at the house. She'd been leaning against an attic window frame when it gave way and she fell thirty-five feet to the ground. She weighed close to three hundred pounds, so no one blamed the window frame. And it wasn't the fall that killed her. She died several days after the fall when a fat embolism broke free of her fractured right leg, made its way to her heart, and stopped it cold.

No one, not even Abner, maintains that the beach house is a happy place, if it can truthfully be said that any house, all by itself, is happy or unhappy. But it is a place to
be
, it
has walls, several dozen of them, and roofs, three of them, and it certainly must have its hidden charms, too, because whenever I was there, it was awfully crowded.

~ * ~

I met Leslie the day my boa constrictor died, so I was in a pretty foul mood. I have a tendency to grow very attached to people and pets, and though that boa constrictor had been a dismal conversationalist, he was loads of fun to have hanging around.

I was on my way by taxi to Queens and the possibility of construction work (I had a '68 Chevy Nova that was continually in for one repair or another; I have since given it up). On the corner of East 74th Street and Park Avenue, the taxi stopped. I leaned forward and tapped on the Plexiglas partition. The driver opened it a crack.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Earning a buck," he answered, then my door opened and a tall, stunning, dark-blond-haired woman of twenty-nine or thirty, dressed in a long earth-colored wool skirt and bulky beige sweater, stuck her head in, said, "Oh, sorry," and started to back away.

The driver called, "Where you going, miss?"

"I'm going to Queens," she answered. She had an air of quiet authority about her. I liked it. It seemed to fit her.

"Where in Queens?" the driver asked.

"Mission Boulevard."

"Uh huh." I could tell that he was fighting to keep his patience. "Whereabouts is that?"

"It's in Queens," she answered, and slid in next to me. She smiled congenially, nodded, said, "Hi."

I nodded back. "Yeah, hi," I said, and found that my foul mood over the death of my boa constrictor was beginning to fade.

"We've established," said the driver, "that Mission Boulevard is in Queens. What I need to know is, is it in Jackson Heights, or Flushing, or—"

"Oh," she cut in, "yes. Sorry. It's in Jackson Heights."

"Thanks," said the driver, and pulled away from the curb.

She nodded at me, once more repeated "Hi," and smiled congenially again. What impressed me most about her at that moment, as she smiled, were her teeth, which looked perfect, her high cheekbones--which suggested that she was Indian, though she isn't—her ruddy, even complexion, and the way her entire face got involved in her small, congenial smile, so I did not doubt for a moment that it was genuine. I found myself rapidly warming to her.