Women and Men (57 page)

"Please don’t tell me you’ve heard it before," she said. She did not ask if he was coming to bed.

"But I have heard it before," he said.

"And you’ve heard your wife say she was moving because you wouldn’t; and you’ve heard the stereo blasting out the Beatles or Beethoven as you put your key in the front door and your heart fell because you felt it was your fault she was boozing, but you would never
tell
her it was your fault. And you heard her say
When you get back, we’ve got to have a talk;
but so what—so what?"

"But when I got back, she wasn’t there," he said.

"I really wouldn’t know," said Linda. She shifted in bed and raised up on an elbow. "She must have been there sometimes. Maybe she’s there now, for all I know."

"I’m going," he said.

"What a sucky date this has been," said Linda.

"Do you think he’s dangerous?" said John.

Linda laid her head down on the pillow. "He’s got a hammer," she said.

"He took a hammer?"

"It was right here on the bed table under the lamp, with the two Polaroid pictures of me."

"That was
his
hammer," said John.

"But I was using it."

"Listen, I really meant to staple those speaker wires for you."

"I’m glad you didn’t," said Linda wearily.

He moved out of the bedroom. "You creep," she called after him. "We’ve
had
that talk, so forget it. Lock the door on your way out."

He took the chain off, and as he was letting himself out Linda said, "He took one of the pictures."

"What?" said John across the dark space of the apartment.

Linda raised her voice. "He took one of the Polaroids with him when he called, but I was afraid he’d try to return it." John bet himself that Linda didn’t think he would go. He closed the door softly behind him and locked it.

In the elevator he was relieved. Linda would have to have the lock changed —and by another locksmith, not from around here. That was the answer— of course!—to how the Departed Tenant had gotten in. And the door didn’t lock by itself, so he had to have had a key to lock up when he left. The Departed Tenant had a friend who worked for the contractor, who was also the locksmith in the neighborhood, and he must have done the job or had it done by somebody who worked for him. The key must not have been registered if the Departed Tenant had gotten hold of a duplicate.

The story went on in his head. He came to the lobby door and leaned his head against the glass. It was cool against his forehead, and, staring at his shoes, he remembered again the snapshot in his inside pocket. The tension or whatever it was passed without a sound, and he imagined, there, with his eyes shut, that his hand on the doorknob felt the polite force of somebody on the other side, coming home.

The restaurant was still very much open. He’d been right about the sign. The pet shop and the checks-cashed place were shut up tight. He wanted it to be later. A couple passed, and both of them were chewing gum. He’d seen a girl running for a bus this morning chewing gum.

He approached the corner where his former route joined this one. He saw the bearded man in the big western hat, who might have been the Departed Tenant, cross the street in front of him and disappear, walking south. It had to be the same man, though he wore an army jacket, not the grimy white parka.

At the corner he turned south to follow the man, who stopped down the block at the pay phone. And John stopped, as if, at fifty yards’ distance, he was waiting to use the phone when the man was through, while the man was looking at him as if the call might go on for a long time.

Two large trucks came racing uptown side by side, and a cab was trying to get around them. The man at the phone seemed to be talking. Now he put the phone back on the hook and strode off. John stood watching until the man broke into an easy jog and turned west at the next corner. John went after him past the phone on its cement post and the wire-mesh trash basket.

At the corner he didn’t see the man. The man could not have made it all the way down the block, but he had been going in the direction of Linda’s place. John ran back along the pavement to the phone and dialed her. She wasn’t answering.

He needed to pack. He would scare Linda if he went back now. He made the turn at the next corner, wondering if Linda had put the chain back on. She had an excellent sense of humor. So did he.
Sometimes,
she said.

At the cafe-newsstand intersection the traffic light was turning red when he saw Linda. She was wearing her purple coat, and she was crossing the avenue half a block ahead of him. A cab passed, and then another.

He stopped, and then he went on. On the far sidewalk she looked around her—everywhere except behind her. And then she went into his cafe. He called to her, but she went on inside. The way she had looked around uncertainly, she hadn’t planned to go to the cafe. What
had
she planned for the evening?

He would surprise her, but when he crossed the avenue and came to the takeout window and saw that the Puerto Rican woman hadn’t come on yet, Linda was at the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk and shook her head at him, smiling.

"They don’t have a pay phone," she said.

‘They don’t?" he said.

‘There wouldn’t have been anyone home."

"I hope not," he said. "I should get a machine."

They looked each other in the eye. He invited her in for coffee. "How did you wind up behind me?" she said. "Your face looks funny."

He didn’t like that. "I went down to my old pay phone to phone you."

"Why’d you do that?" she asked. "I was trying to catch up with you."

"Did you phone the police?" John asked.

Of course not; the Departed Tenant wasn’t dangerous. He had been phoning earlier, when John was there, to tell her he had reclaimed his hammer, he needed it, he was on his way at last.

"With his master key," said John. But he didn’t know.

She was having the lock changed tomorrow. John told her to see if she could have the key registered. She had thought of that.

"Fair exchange—a quilt for a hammer."

"Not a great quilt, but after all the hammer was his to begin with," she said, and she kissed him very lightly. He felt his heart race.

"The quilt went with the bed," he said.

"It stayed," said Linda.

"He must like you a lot to leave you the quilt."

"I think he liked
her
a lot. The girl from upstate. The quilt went with the bed."

"But not the hammer," said John. "Hammers are expensive if you’re an itinerant carpenter going to New Mexico."

"I think he loved her," said Linda.

"Will he show people your picture on his way west?"

"What would he say, I wonder?" said Linda.

John produced the picture from his inside jacket pocket. She looked from the picture to him and back again. She was pleased. "I knew it," she said, surprised. She put her hand on his shoulder, and they both looked at the photograph. "This makes better sense," she said. "When I left for work yesterday, there were two pictures. Now they’re all accounted for."

"If that guy
had
taken one—I mean as a souvenir—there would still have been one left for me," said John. "By the way, the hammer certainly wasn’t on the bed table, so the Departed Tenant must have been and gone."

"What were you doing in my apartment in the middle of the day?"

"I’m a degenerate," John said. "But you gave me the keys."

"I’m particular who I give them to," she said. "Didn’t you know that? No wonder you’re not married."

"Not even half married?" he asked.

She touched his hand. "No, not even half married. Unless it’s someone I don’t know about."

They decided not to have coffee after all. On the way back to Linda’s they discussed the Departed Tenant. Had he really, as he’d said, hoped to keep the apartment and sublet it to someone but couldn’t get permission? Whatever had been going on, they agreed that he had meant well. They agreed that he had moved out of the apartment because he had to.

Larry

The word one heard was "homework," heard sitting at one’s somewhat small but new and not-cheap old-fashioned roll-top desk, the only word one heard aware that one’s mother was leaving was "homework," not "housework." Her last sentence
(oration
in
espahol,
a language for New York and for today, one’s father has assured one, for today’s complex horizons while the bilingual subway skips the horizon and goes under it) was heard only in that last word "homework." Like she’s been speaking in some next room.

Well, she had been. And with one’s erstwhile father. But like soundproofed with the door closed, and she seemed to throw it open for that last word
homework
which now therefore (though no echo) felt chock-a-block with
housework,
the code-word key-word clearing the voice-print of one’s mother’s ongoing discussion if that was the right word with one’s father who was in the habit of settling pre-contract differences with her out of court until it was too late for any kind of contract. Except, well, you know, a contract. Marriage contract. For a kind of new marriage.

Upon which both together seemed to laugh and she said low in this direction not the phone’s, "Oh Marv you know what I’d
really"
—succeeded by a murmur, and if not any more a liquor snicker or a courting snort at least a fickle chuckje and a pretty heavy sigh—"You look radiant!"—that came together into Jne untranstonguable impact in the next room the sincerity of which one did not wish to witness, having failed oneself to receive the incoming phone call (failed to make it one’s own, failed to will that it be from Amy), while forced to witness one’s parents in the next room in any case or along any curve clothed or unclothed, because one had acknowledged one’s existence by answering the "homework"-ending sentence "Yeah" (the cornerstone of one’s active vocabulary yet not one’s private).

Well then, ‘‘ Yeah," one answered, letting it slide off into the other things to be said to one’s mother or for that matter to one’s father if one had found the thoughts to go with those things. Not "Yeah, Ma" or "Yeah, Mom," which she, naked or dressed, nude or unnuded or denuded, objected to, but not "Yeah, Susan" (which she wants) either, because one does not feel right saying "Susan," which one’s Dad quite understands, and which one undertook to explain to him one Sunday morning amid much nodding of heads, first his, then one’s, then his and his again and yet again, then out of pity one’s own —out of pity or in time to Dad’s rhythm, one’s own head together or not quite, yet not with his then or now because often these days of raised consciousness he is too busy nodding, naked with one’s mother nodding, nodding, naked together spooning yogurt together, spooning, dripping a blob of white-filmed apricot like it had a cottony mold on it off the end of his yogurt spoon, nodding so as to transcend one’s own "Yeah" in answer to one’s mother’s mysterious
oration
depicting the life of her leader like that explained fathers and husbands, climaxed by the word
homework,
not
assignment.

But one says
assignment
—one is in the big league if not big time, no longer in high school where
assignment
was also said, but college, for one is on the production-possibility frontier fully employed trading off guns and butter or highways and housing along all the points between no butter and all guns (dry) and no guns and all butter (sticky), the frontier (also called product-transformation curve) along whose arc are targeted all the points of well-oiled trade-off whereby one may surrender so many guns to get so much added butter or produce ten less butters to get two more guns, and on this menu of choices, this curve of output pairs—two million tons of food to fourteen million tractors, four million to twelve, six to ten—on this range of combinations, a week or more may be spent in the big time, the big league, firing one’s rounds of animal fat (leading one’s moving target) while spreading one’s arms as wide as there’s bread to spread them on, staying busy on the production-possibility frontier, not falling away inside it where point U marks the warning flash for Unemployed Resources, big lag, let’s say.

For one is in college, one is in the flow now, one can split one’s mind and, for a second, step outside the Gross National Product of which one is fast becoming a part and see that GNP equals Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure and see that if Net National Product is GNP less Depreciation, that’s what one may also be joining, for, big time or not, one feels the onset of time’s warp, and if one’s tennis forehand is improving one yet feels a depreciation in, as one’s father will say over his cocktail-hour joint, the quality of life, one sees this concretely and without bullshit in the cracked handball wall against which one lashes one’s forehand or in the new distance from any such wall when one is at the Manhattan apartment of the revised junta and not in Port Adams though this has to do with the changed equation between one’s married parents, and apparently not to do with what is no less true, that one is in college not high school any more with its occasional substitute teachers yet only in truth
a potential
continuum of substitute teachers, for one enjoyed modular classes in Port Adams, yes the school was often better not worse than what one’s got now in the big league so that one is inclined, like one of those lines the man calls a curve, to shoot up one’s arm saluting the schlock of collective education and when recognized by the amazing short man in the black shirt up at the blackboard ask a very general question about the point of it all.

But one is only inclined.

The short man at the washed blackboard—one has described him to Amy when she phoned from work and got one out of one bed or another—Manhattan or Port Adams. The phone’s voice so warm that Amy’s employee cheek seemed pillowed on one’s own—even on one’s own breast, or chest, patiently listening to one’s unemployed description of the amazing Professor Roger Rail until this employed twenty-three-year-old older woman radiant Amy warming one’s whole body from cheek to pyjama pants must say, "Got work to do, Larry —oh by the way, babe"—asking for information
de pronto
(suddenly)—
de repente!
(suddenly)—
impulsivamente,
Latin passion oh beautiful Amy Hispanic heat
sin la reflexion debida
—"oh by the way, babe" (she says), "what’s the name of that nice newspaper guy who’s taking you to the game?"—but not before one has made her outgoing laugh come in along the phone wire bathing the whole side of one’s somewhat unshaven face, for one has been describing Professor Roger Rail. Assuredly an amazing customer the man in the black shirt at the washed blackboard who starts to write upon that tabula rasa only to abort his
oracion,
stop his chalk, lean on it and push pensively off into the vertical space just off its surface, and give the assignment for next time, which means the next day that one and one’s fellow classmates with him in Economics meet, but not always the next day from this, he not in a suit but in black shirt and long black sleeves so his white hand fingering his chalk looked there like the pale bald tonsure his scalp makes against the bristling black or dark of his remaining hair. The bald area is time, a time in his life, yet one that has now passed and is surrounded by the hair remaining. He is the medium of exchange here, he is the potential speed with which one’s class leap through the many used but virgin copies of the sacred text, he moves before one a bound variable furnishing the classroom with his unavoidable circulation, he is the velocity of circulation multiplied by M, which stands for one thing suddenly with one oneself and another (Money) with Rail—who thinks in other velocities but not this that one has oneself begun to dream.