Distortions (17 page)

He has decided to go home early, to be there when his wife walks in, just to make her uneasy. He takes the afternoon off and buys things at a sporting-goods store he’ll need for his vacation. Then he stops in a gift shop and buys his wife a pretty little enamel box—a gift, to make her uneasy if she’s seen her lover today.
The saleslady is all smiles, asks if she should wrap it. He tells her it will have just as much impact in the bag. She frowns a little, in sympathy for the woman whose pretty present will just be handed to her in a bag. She wraps the little box carefully in pink tissue paper. As an afterthought, he stops at the florist’s and picks out a bouquet of assorted flowers for his wife’s mother. Just in case it’s a conspiracy. He goes into a phone booth at the corner and calls his lover to say that he’ll take her to dinner Friday. Not until then? Impossible. She’s a little angry, but she won’t leave him. She has been his lover for years and years. He goes back to the florist’s and sends her a bouquet of assorted flowers. The florist looks at him strangely. The man could at least make a joke of it—instead, he takes it personally that he has come back, that he didn’t complete his business the first time. He decides to find another florist in the future.

As he thought, she isn’t home. He knocks on her mother’s door. She is surprised to see him and asks if he’s sick. No—just home early. He’s put the flowers in a vase for her, and she seems very pleased. She tells him where to put them. She doesn’t know where his wife is and acts surprised that she’s not in the house. His son? He must be with her. He goes downstairs and waits. He looks at the day’s mail and reads the paper. The house is quiet and very empty; the cars that pass are monotonous. He can understand why his wife wouldn’t want to spend much time in the house. It’s depressing in late afternoon. He doesn’t blame her for not being there, but he blames her for her lover. The bag with the enamel box is at his side.

She comes in at five o’clock. His son is with her. She’s surprised to see him. His son is happy to see him. His son has a balloon.

“Where did that come from?” he asks his son.

“A man in the park gave it to me.”

“You’re not sick?” his wife asks.

“Just home early,” he says. He gives her the bag. “For you.”

She loves the little box. He can’t tell if she’s excited because he might know, or just surprised to see him, happy with the present. She goes into the kitchen.

“Did you ever see the man in the park before?” he asks his son.

“No.”

“How come you got a free balloon?”

“The man had it.” His son shrugs.

Late that night the phone rings. As usual, her mother has it on the first ring. She pounces on the phone—no chance for them to get to it first. And, as usual, whoever it is hangs up. That makes her mother nervous. She always opens her door and calls down the stairs that someone called and hung up. He feels like telling her that it was either her daughter’s lover or his own. Neither of them says anything, and the door closes. He has already asked his lover if she calls and hangs up and she has denied it. He suspects her anyway—everyone lies to him. He tells his wife he has run out of cigarettes. Does she need anything from the drugstore? He puts his clothes back on and drives to the drugstore, where there is a phone booth. His lover is angry: she tells him he thinks she is a fool. She has better things to do than call his house. She tells him
he
is bothering
her
. So it was his wife’s lover. He buys a carton of cigarettes and drives home. His wife is in her mother’s room; the door is open, but they aren’t talking. Or at least they’re not talking now that he’s coming up the stairs. He’s tired. His mother-in-law must be tired of the calls. His wife must be tired of the depressing house.

“I was telling her what pretty flowers you brought me,” his mother-in-law says.

“Who do you think was on the phone?” he asks.

“Who?” his wife says.

“That’s right,” he says. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” his mother-in-law says.

“Yes, you do,” he says.

She looks startled. His wife looks at him blankly.

“You know,” he says.

“Be quiet,” his wife says. “You’ll awaken Stevie.”

“He already knows, too.”

Whether his mother-in-law really knows or not, her expression, looking back and forth between them, makes him think she won’t be staying there much longer. There is, of course, the slim chance that his lover was lying.

W
hen Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided that it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty. She would tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, instead of letting it fall free, schoolgirlishly. She had met some of the teachers when she went for her interview, and they all seemed to look like what she was trying to get away from—suburbanites at a shopping center. Casual and airy, the fashion magazines would call it. At least, that’s what they would have called it back when she still read them, when she lived in Chevy Chase and wore her hair long, falling free, the way it had fallen in her high-school graduation picture. “Your lovely face,” her mother used to say, “and all covered by hair.” Her graduation picture was still on display in her parents’ house, next to a picture of her on her first birthday.

It didn’t matter how Ellen looked now; the students laughed at her behind her back. They laughed behind all the teachers’ backs. They don’t like me, Ellen thought, and she didn’t want to go to school. She forced herself to go, because she needed the job. She had worked hard to get away from her lawyer husband and almost-paid-for house. She had doggedly taken night classes at Georgetown University for two years, leaving the dishes after dinner and always expecting a fight. Her husband loaded them into the dishwasher—no fight. Finally, when she was ready to leave, she had to start the fight herself. There is a better world, she told him. “Teaching at the high school?” he asked. In the end, though, he had helped her find a place to live—an older house, on a side street off Florida Avenue, with splintery floors that had to be covered with rugs, and walls that needed to be repapered but that she never repapered. He hadn’t made trouble for her. Instead, he made her look silly. He made her say that teaching high school was a better world. She saw the foolishness of her statement, however, and after she left him she began to read great numbers of newspapers and magazines, and then more and more radical newspapers and magazines. She had dinner with her husband several months after she had left him, at their old house. During dinner, she stated several ideas of importance, without citing her source. He listened carefully, crossing his knees and nodding attentively—the pose he always assumed with his clients.
The only time during the evening she had thought he might start a fight was when she told him she was living with a man—a student, twelve years younger than she. An odd expression came across his face. In retrospect, she realized that he must have been truly puzzled. She quickly told him that the relationship was platonic.

What Ellen told him was the truth. The man, Sam, was a junior at George Washington University. He had been rooming with her sister and brother-in-law, but friction had developed between the two men. Her sister must have expected it. Her sister’s husband was very athletic, a pro-football fan who wore a Redskins T-shirt to bed instead of a pajama top, and who had a football autographed by Billy Kilmer on their mantel. Sam was not frail, but one sensed at once that he would always be gentle. He had long brown hair and brown eyes—nothing that would set him apart from a lot of other people. It was his calmness that did that. She invited him to move in after her sister explained the situation; he could help a bit with her rent. Also, although she did not want her husband to know it, she had discovered that she was a little afraid of being alone at night.

When Sam moved in in September, she almost sympathized with her brother-in-law. Sam wasn’t obnoxious, but he was strange. She had to pay attention to him, whether she wanted to or not. He was so quiet that she was always conscious of his presence; he never went out, so she felt obliged to offer him coffee or dinner, although he almost always refused. He was also eccentric. Her husband had been eccentric. Often in the evenings he had polished the brass snaps of his briefcase, rubbing them to a high shine, then triumphantly opening and closing them, and then rubbing a little more to remove his thumbprints. Then he would drop the filthy cloth on the sofa, which was upholstered with pale French linen that he himself had selected.

Sam’s strange ways were different. Once, he got up in the night to investigate a noise, and Ellen, lying in her room, suddenly realized that he was walking all over the house in the dark, without turning on any lights. It was just mice, he finally announced outside her door, saying it so matter-of-factly that she wasn’t even upset by the news. He kept cases of beer in his room. He bought
more cases than he drank—more than most people would ever consider drinking over quite a long period. When he did have a beer, he would take one bottle from the case and put it in the refrigerator and wait for it to get cold, and then drink it. If he wanted more, he would go and get another bottle, put it in the refrigerator, wait another hour, and then drink that One night, Sam asked her if she would like a beer. To be polite, she said yes. He went to his room and took out a bottle and put it in the refrigerator. “It will be cold in a while,” he said quietly. Then he sat in a chair across from her and drank his beer and read a magazine. She felt obliged to wait there in the living room until the beer was cold.

One night, her husband came to the house to talk about their divorce—or so he said. Sam was there and offered him a beer. “It will be cold in a while,” he said as he put it in the refrigerator. Sam made no move to leave the living room. Her husband seemed incapacitated by Sam’s silent presence. Sam acted as if they were his guests, as if he owned the house. He wasn’t authoritarian—in fact, he usually didn’t speak unless he was spoken to—but he was more comfortable than they were, and that night his offer of cigarettes and beer seemed calculated to put them at ease. As soon as her husband found out that Sam planned to become a lawyer, he seemed to take an interest in him. She liked Sam because she had convinced herself that his ways were more tolerable than her husband’s. It became a pleasant evening. Sam brought cashews from his room to go with the beer. They discussed politics. She and her husband told Sam that they were going to get divorced. Sam nodded. Her husband had her to dinner once more before the divorce was final, and he invited Sam, too. Sam came along. They had a pleasant evening.

Things began to go smoothly at her house because of Sam. By Christmas, they were good friends. Sometimes she thought back to the early days of her marriage and remembered how disillusioned she had felt. Her husband had thrown his socks on the bedroom floor at night, and left his pajamas on the bathroom floor in the morning. Sam was like that sometimes. She found clothes scattered on the floor when she cleaned his room—socks
and shirts, usually. She noticed that he did not sleep in pajamas. Things bother you less as you get older, she thought.

Ellen cleaned Sam’s room because she knew he was studying hard to get into law school; he didn’t have time to be fussy. She hadn’t intended to pick up after a man again, but it was different this time. Sam was very appreciative when she cleaned. The first time she did it, he brought her flowers the next day, and he thanked her several times, saying that she didn’t have to do it. That was it—she knew she didn’t have to. But when he thanked her she became more enthusiastic about it, and after a while she began to wax his room as well as dust it; she Windexed the windows, and picked up the little pieces of lint the vacuum had missed. And, in spite of being so busy, Sam did nice things for her. On her birthday, he surprised her with a blue bathrobe. When she was depressed, he cheered her up by saying that any student would like a teacher as pretty as she. She was flattered that he thought her pretty. She began to lighten her hair a little.