Fruit of the Month (3 page)

“What does she look like?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Forget it.”

“I'm about ready for bed,” says Charlie, and he stands close behind me, his chin resting on top of my head. He lets all of his weight go and just hangs there swinging his arms. I lift them up and put his fingers, one by one, into my mouth. I suck on them greedily like a baby.

“Go then,” I say, because I want to watch the news on television. Our government, it seems, has approved funding for construction of the B-l bomber. Our president has said that we need not concern ourselves, that the bombs won't fall on
us
. I don't know what he's thinking of, but listening to this, and to Charlie in the bedroom already snoring, I feel suddenly prepared for anything that might happen in my life.

Peace and Passivity

For a moment it looks as if Susan might fall. She is making her way down the steps, which are narrow and flimsy and made of metal like a fire escape. Snow has fallen through the night, in huge wet flakes that beat against the roof and windows, so the steps are treacherous. She has slung her bag over her shoulder and grips the railing with both gloved hands as she makes her descent, kicking the snow from each step with a vicious swipe of her foot. With each kick there is the sound of an avalanche, a roar followed suddenly by silence. Another roar, another silence. Susan grits her teeth. Her determination might strike Tom as heroic if it did not make him sad. She refuses to use the front steps, which are inside, well-lit, and carpeted, because the downstairs neighbors, whom Susan and Tom haven't met, have not cleaned up the mess their dog made on the carpet a day ago. It smells. Susan won't clean it up herself, on principle, and Tom certainly is not about to clean it because, well, why should he? He is watching her now, from the kitchen window. The metal stairs run flush with the house at a steep diagonal, and he can see her as she passes. She doesn't know he is there. She thinks he is asleep. He pretended to be asleep and then, when she stepped out on the landing to lace her boots, he climbed out of bed and went to the window. He was touched by the fact that she took care not to wake him, that she dressed in the dark and shut the bathroom door before brushing her teeth. But he really wanted to see if she would kiss him goodbye, even though she thought he was asleep. To kiss a sleeping person, Tom thinks, especially if that person is your husband, is an act of faith and devotion, a form of prayer. So he lay there making grunting dream sounds and waiting. He felt like someone standing on a highway with his thumb out, waiting for a car that would not materialize.

Now she loses her grip on the icy banister and slips. There is a moment of terrible uncertainty: will she fall, or won't she? This is all Tom feels, the tension of the moment, but he feels it in his chest, in the region of the heart. He feels it as love. He reaches out as if to steady her, but his hand smacks the window, and by then she has regained her footing. She is a big girl, five seven, bigger than Tom. He is often reminded of a statue, a figure carved by an artist so in love with the male form that he endows even women with the attributes of men. She has broad shoulders, a wide back, a tight waist, and smooth hips. Her breasts are high and firm, like the pectorals of a body builder. Her thighs, when he lies between them, grip and rock him, and her flesh itself is of such substance that he cannot feel her ribs, or her heartbeat, through it. Lately he finds himself concentrating on her most delicate features, her lips and eyebrows, those two blonde tapered arches, with a nostalgia as acute as that felt by someone staring at a photograph of an absent lover.

Now she is sitting in Jeremy's car in the parking lot, drinking coffee out of a thermos. It must be coffee, because it is steaming. The car's interior is brightly lit. Everything else is in darkness. It is five o'clock in the morning. How long has Jeremy been sitting there, in a lit car with the engine off, freezing his butt? Tom doesn't like Jeremy. He calls him Germie. He doesn't like a man who wears a tank top in the middle of February and rolls his rs when he says “Roberto.” Roberto is Germie's lover, a tough cookie. It is clear that Germie is complaining about Roberto right now, because Susan is shaking her head and patting him maternally on the shoulder. If only Tom could hear her. How does she phrase her sympathy? He doesn't know. He could be on Mars, looking down at her.

The night before, just as the snow was beginning to fall, they had driven to the mall to get Tom some underwear. He has been putting on a little weight, and he read in Ann Landers that tight underwear can cause sterility in men. Susan made a joke, about cheap, effective birth control, that stung him. She agreed to go along on the condition that while he was in Sears shopping she would stay in the arcade and circulate her petition, against a buildup of the U.S. military presence in El Salvador. In Sears, he bought the underwear and a bag of milk chocolate stars. He ate them before going out to meet her. She was sitting on a bench, gesturing and talking to a child in a stroller. For a minute Tom thought she was trying to get the child to sign her petition, but then he saw how miserable she looked and that she had crumpled the petition into a ball. “If there's a war,” she was saying to the child, “and your daddy goes away and never comes back, it won't be my fault.” The child giggled. Susan shrugged and got up.

“First of all,” she said in the car, “I'll bet you nine out of ten of those idiots in there never even heard of El Salvador much less Alexander Haig, and then the manager comes up to me and says if I don't stop soliciting he can have me arrested. Soliciting! Then I asked him if he would sign anyway, as long as I had him interested, and he crumpled it up. I could have
him
arrested.” She was driving a little crazily, skidding on turns and braking so suddenly he had to brace himself. “I got six pairs of Fruit of the Loom,” he said, in an effort to calm her. He unwrapped the package and held them up, but she wasn't paying any attention. She was swearing at a driver who had passed and cut her off at an intersection. “Goddamn ignorant asshole,” she said.

Tom stared at the labels on his underwear, at the tiny bright clusters of fruit. It hadn't always been like this; when they were married, a year and a half ago, she was still in school, in classics. At night she read Latin aloud in her study, a corner of the living room she had roped off with a tapestry. Often he would creep up behind it and listen, barely breathing, his cheek brushing against the coarse grain of the cloth. Her voice was husky and melodious, and the strange fluid sounds of the dead language filled him with awe. He confessed to her once that he did this, that he listened, that her facility stunned and moved him. She seemed put off. She began to read in a whisper. Later, as she became more and more political, as the El Salvador thing became, as she put it, an imperative, he blamed himself.

Home from the mall, she announced it was bedtime. She said Jeremy would pick her up at five in the morning and they would drive to Chicago for the workshop and rally. Tom hadn't known anything about a workshop, It was one and a half days long, she explained. It was organizational. Tom said he thought she was already pretty well organized; wherever he went he saw posters with her name and number printed on the bottom. People called, and she directed them to meetings, arranged car pools, and raised money for speakers. She was hardly ever home. When she wasn't home and the telephone rang, Tom didn't answer it. He was tired of the words “El Salvador.” El Salvador was two thousand miles away. When Susan said this,
two thousand miles
, she made it sound like next door, like she could look out the window and see it. She was increasingly preoccupied. She had lost her sense of humor. He joked with her now. “Don't do anything with Germie that I wouldn't do myself,” he said. Susan yanked off her socks and climbed into bed and curled up facing away from him. She was flexing her feet, arching them, then pulling them taut. The pressure of her toes against his thigh aroused him, and he turned to her and began making love to her, coaxing her. He felt some resistance, but he had learned to recognize in it an aversion not to himself but to pleasure, as if her pleasure were a slap in the face of the world's pain, so he kept on. Her face was wet. When she came finally it was with a vengeance, with a hoarse grieved sound like a battle cry. Her eyes were open, staring past him. He bent closer and whispered. “Peace,” he said.

Now she and Jeremy have driven away. The apartment is cold; the heat was turned low for the night. Under his bare feet the linoleum is gritty. He can go back to bed and sleep until work, or he can put on a robe and slippers and drink coffee in the kitchen with the television on. What kinds of shows are on so early in the day? He switches on the set, and stands in the chilly darkness waiting for the picture. At last it appears, a gray aureole rimmed with black, a bull's eye. He turns the volume up until the room hums with static, with an otherworldly sound like an intergalactic message. For the first time his nakedness begins to get on his nerves, and he goes into the bedroom and puts some blue jeans on, and some boots, and his leather bracelet, and then he flops down on the bed and falls asleep. He is wakened by
Good Morning America
in his kitchen. He has left the set on full volume. The noise is enough to blast the cockroaches out of the walls. Sure enough, a door slams below and the new neighbor comes charging up the steps and starts banging, on the door. Tom doesn't get up right away. He will wait until the yelling begins, so he will know what to expect, a man or a woman. It's a woman. He goes into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange juice, and then he carries the orange juice into the living room and opens the door. Before him stands the neighbor he has never seen. She has dark hair parted on the side and pinned carelessly in back like a flower. She would be pretty if she were smiling.

“It's seven o'clock in the morning,” she says. “Could you turn that down please?” Tom admires her control. He can see that she is on the verge of some kind of collapse. She could be the lady in the Anacin-3 commercial, except that under her robe she is naked. He knows she is naked because otherwise she would never have buttoned her robe so meticulously; it has tiny pearl buttons from bottom to top, like those of a bridal gown. “Please,” she begs. Someone on
Good Morning America
is yelling about bed-wetting. Tom has to think fast. He puts his finger to his ear, smiles, shakes his head, puts the finger on his neck, shakes his head some more, and opens his mouth wide. The neighbor squints. Her confusion is charming. She peers into his open mouth as if searching for a clue. Tom can see the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes. She is twenty-eight perhaps, older than Susan and smaller, naturally. Her face suddenly brightens. “Oh,” she says. “That's
loud. Loud.”
She accompanies the word “loud” with a grandiose gesture toward the kitchen, and then she claps both hands over her ears and says it again.
“Loud.”

Tom fakes a look of surprise and recognition. He hands her the glass of orange juice and dashes for the television, switching it off. The silence is heavenly. In the living room his neighbor is nodding and gulping the orange juice. She hands him the glass, emptied. She points at her chest and yells,
“Carmen.”
What a beautiful name. Tom has never heard such a sad and lovely name. It suits her. She repeats it. “Carmen.” He grins and bows. When she is gone, when she has navigated the steps past the smelly black lump that is her dog's fault, he slams the door mightily.

This is what Tom does at work. He sits at a small table inside a small office in the topmost floor of a decaying building at the university. The building is called January. The office was originally intended to be a darkroom, and in fact was a darkroom for several years a long time ago. Black paint covers the windows. When Tom is inside with the door closed, a tiny red light blinks on in the hallway, assuring the world of his presence. He has to work at the table because the counter space is occupied by two large flat sinks and a collection of vials, glass platters, and obscure photographic equipment. On a shelf above the counter are some chemicals in squat brown bottles. Some of the bottles are marked “Poison,” with a tiny skull and crossbones on the label. There is a box of measuring spoons, a ladle, and a half empty jar of Pond's Cold Cream. For this reason Tom suspects that the photographer was a woman. The presence of the ladle mystified him until he found, in a cabinet under the sinks, a hot plate and an envelope of instant soup. A white lab coat hangs from a hook on the door on the inside. In the pocket of the coat is a small black plastic comb of the sort you see on drugstore counters. Tom has studied the comb for further clues to the identity of the photographer, a hair perhaps, red or blonde. He found nothing. He has been instructed not to disrupt the placement of the objects in the room, as if its occupant might someday return.

Tom's employer is a sociologist whose research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The nature of the work escapes him. Each week the sociologist brings him a list of numbers to be punched into a calculator. It is important that he enter each set of numbers twice, or until the sums match exactly, to avoid the possibility of error. Once this has been accomplished Tom performs a variety of statistical tests, following the instructions from a book the sociologist has given him. He prints the results in a spiral notebook with a romantic scene depicted on its cover—a couple silhouetted by a sunset on a beach. Perhaps the sociologist was at one time in love with the photographer. Perhaps he is still in love with her. On Friday evenings he opens the notebook and checks Tom's figures, and then he rips the page out and takes it away with him.

The funny thing about this job, Tom has decided, is that it requires no thinking at all but such absolute concentration that if he does start thinking about something, about anything, he will get himself in trouble. He will punch in the same number twice, or repeat a step in an equation, or press a key next to the one he intended to press. Ordinarily things go as well as can be expected. Tom allows himself only the most fleeting of sensations; a pang of hunger, an appreciation of the smooth concave surfaces of the calculator buttons under his fingertips. At the end of each day, stepping from January Hall into the fresh transparency of night, he feels buoyant and lucid as a person who has been coaxed into a trance and made to forget his troubles.