Naked Came the Stranger (3 page)

Gilly: I am slow, today. Of course,
…
football.
The game with all the numbers. I just love those announcers. "Now the
Giants are in a three-four-five with an X-Y-Z and a split disc."
Ridiculous!

Billy: A split end. Gilly: Come again?

Billy: A split end, not a split disc.

Gilly: Well, I knew something was split.

Billy: A can of beer, a color TV, and Army against Notre Dame.
Like tomorrow. Now that's living!

Gilly: It's stupid, wasting a Saturday afternoon that way.
Billy: Oh come on. What's wrong with sports?

Gilly: I think games are for playing. I mean there's something
so absolutely dreary about a man lying around in an old T-shirt or
something, watching a football game all day.

Billy: He works hard, he deserves a little rest.

Gilly: Sure. But what women hate is that everything has to stop
while his highness watches the quarterback go in the
whatchamacallit.

Billy: In the pocket.

Gilly: Well, whatever he goes in. I mean, it's all supposed to
be so important.

Billy: It is. You just don't disturb a man when he's watching
football.

Gilly: Phooey. Billy: No, really.

Gilly: I think the best thing you can do for a man is disturb
him.

Billy: Ouch.

Gilly: Okay girls, let's all get out there tomorrow afternoon
and make him pay attention to us.

Billy: Hold, fast to your couches, men – your way of life
is at stake.

The old champ on the TV was telling the rookie to
steer clear of the greasy kid stuff. Ernie Miklos sat back and
pressed his chunky fingers against his forehead. Oh. For Ernie it was
a small hangover, a band of numbness stretched across the temples,
and that wasn't bad, not for Ernie. Usually he bombed himself out at
those neighborhood bashes. Last night, for some reason, the bar
wasn't the center of attraction for him. He kept thinking about the
way she had moved inside that dress.

He turned again to the TV and put the cold can of beer against his
forehead. A former football "great" on the pregame show was employing
stop-action to demonstrate how the guard pulled out of the line to
block for the halfback.

"Another great effort by an all-time great," the former great
said. "That's why Fuzzy's so… great."

Ernie glanced around the room, his room, done in cherrywood
paneling that had run 45 cents a foot. He started at the pictures
– his high school football team and the photo of seventeen men
wearing Marine Corps uniforms. "Iron Man Ernie Miklos" was what he
was called in those days, and to Ernie things had never changed. He
was the same man despite forty-one years, thinning hair and expanding
girth. Beside him were the weights and the exercise bench. He'd spend
thirty minutes lying on the bench pushing metal in the morning. The
thought of it today, though, forced him to rest his head back on the
head rest and prop both feet on the red leather ottoman. The pregame
show was ending, and it seemed pretty certain now that the rookie had
switched from the greasy kid stuff.

Ernie had reached that point in life where his Saturday afternoon
football game was more than welcome respite, it was his raison
d'être. This Saturday afternoon there was a small bonus.
Laverne had packed up the kids and retreated to her mother's
apartment in the city. He was left alone with his six-pack, his
Fritos, his memories. The garbage – the lawn, the leaves, the
yelling, the kids – that was locked out on this Saturday
afternoon. And for the moment he forgot about that woman in the dress
and concentrated on the game.

The phone rang. It took only one ring, mainly because Ernie's head
couldn't take more.

"Hello there."

Ernie waited for the voice to give him the weather – it was
that kind of voice, soft but mechanically so.

"Huh?"

"It's Gillian, remember?"

"You'll have to do better than that."

"You must have been more smashed than I thought," she said. "And
that doesn't seem possible. The party last night. You said you wanted
to drink beer from my… bra."

Oh yes. The one in the dress. Gillian? All he could remember at
the moment was that he had seen her at the Plaza West with some
woman, and that she had a sweet-working rump, and he hoped he'd see
her again, but didn't until he saw her at the party.

"Yeah," Ernie said, chewing off the rest of a mouthful of Fritos.
Army had just kicked off. "What's–"

"I have your cuff links," the voice said. "Or one of them anyway,
the one you lost outside."

"Cuff links?"

"In the garden," she said. "Remember? You were doing a lot of
talking. I think you were complimenting me in a sort of, well, basic
way."

"If the old man is upset," Ernie said, "tell him I was bombed out,
smashed, you know…."

"It's not that." Gillian looked across the room at Bill. He was
reading. "It's just I thought you might want it back. I mean it looks
like it might be something special, as though it were made specially
for you."

Ernie wished the lady would get to the point. Notre Dame was on
Army's fourteen-yard line and he had no idea how they got there.

"If you want to know the truth," he said, "I took it off a dead
nigger in Hempstead."

"That's just fine," Gillian said – a wince her only
reaction. "When would you like me to bring it over? I mean when would
be the best time?"

"My wife's in New York now," Ernie said.

"Now it is then," she said.

Bill hadn't looked up from his reading. Gillian brought her
fingertips to her mouth, blocked a manufactured yawn, went upstairs
to change. The pink slacks, the halter with the white ruffies, yes.
The pony tail as is. When she left, Bill was making a gimlet in what
he would probably always call the rumpus room. And while all this was
happening, Ernie Miklos was looking into a dead telephone receiver.
He didn't even see Notre Dame make the game's first extra point.

"Aren't you going to offer a good Samaritan a drink?" Gillan was
saying.

"It's over there."

On any other occasion the tailored pink slacks would have been at
least distracting. But Ernie had the head. And the Irish were leading
ten-zip. The bar was done in Early American. Laverne liked it and
Ernie hated it. The only bar in the Western Hemisphere that Ernie
couldn't stand. Who ever heard of an Early American bar? Ernie often
thought he would like to take an Early American match and destroy it.
Right up to the Early American refrigerator with the golden
eagle.

"You could drink it up here," Ernie said. Ernie sighted in on the
sweet-working rump. "That is, if you like football."

"Only football players," she said, thinking, even as she said it,
that it was almost as trite as it was untrue.

"You could bring the olives with you," Ernie said. "Or do you take
onions?"

"A twist ordinarily," she said, "but an olive will do." Ernie did
the mixing. He spilled the Vermouth when Harvey Jones dropped the
pass deep in Notre Dame territory.
That son of a bitch.
Gillian accepted the dripping glass and dropped into the overstuffed
chair. She pulled her legs up under her, tucked them in. Army was
punting and Ernie slammed his fist into the armrest of her chair.

Laverne would never have come into the room while he was watching
a big game. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was the hangover. Whatever
the reason, Ernie was having trouble focusing on the set. It was like
that time one of the curtains was flapping in the wind – it was
a distraction without being an interruption. He could feel her eyes.
What in the hell was she up to anyway? The first commercial he turned
quickly to meet her look. Too quickly. The pain came back.

"Oh God," he said.

Gillian went to the ice bucket and picked up an ice cube. She
walked back to Ernie and held it against his forehead. Ernie began to
feel his breath quickening.

That damn ice cube. Had he said anything about ice cubes last
night? No. He couldn't have. The cube in Gillian's hand was melting,
sending small rivulets of water into the edges of his eyes. Ernie's
pulse was throbbing now, and what happened next was more instinct
than design.

Army was driving and Ernie was too. His eyes went to the TV and
then back to Gillian. A Christian Scientist with appendicitis.
Gillian watched it as it happened. She knew she had aroused the
creature in the torn paint-spattered T-shirt. Well, she told herself,
that's what you wanted, wasn't it? That's what you wanted. She saw
the Marine Corps tattoo barely visible beneath the sleeve on his
right arm. So what did you expect, she asked herself,
candlelight?

Ernie didn't bother to talk. He merely grabbed out for Gillian,
pulled her across the armrest into his lap and bit into her neck.

"No marks," she squealed. "Don't leave marks."

"Don't give me any of that shit," Ernie said.

"All right, armchair quarterbacks," the voice on the television
was saying, "what would you do? Go through that same hole again or
try for the end?"

Gillian began to fight back, stiffly, ineffectually. She felt her
fingernails gouge through the flesh of his back. He didn't seem to
feel it. If he did, it only increased his ardor. Her body went limp
then, and as their mouths met and then their tongues she gave it up
and began to play the game Ernie's way.

"He's in there; he's in there!" The voice from the TV seemed to
come from another world. "And, fans, it's all knotted up."

Sixty-eight thousand fans were screaming in the stadium. But on
Barnacle Drive in King's Neck at the home of Ernie Miklos there was
only quiet. Gillian had disengaged herself, risen. She looked at
Ernie and reached down to touch him gently. He didn't stir. So that's
it, Gillian thought. It's over in less than a minute and already it
is as though nothing had happened. Ernie didn't acknowledge her
presence in any way. He was watching the set again, watching Army
kick off to Notre Dame.

Ernie was dozing when Laverne called from downstairs.

"Isn't it over yet?" she said.

Ernie rubbed his eyes, and all he could see was the face of Walter
Cronkite. His hangover was gone and so was Gillian. He could hear
kids running across the kitchen floor and the sound of the dishwasher
being activated.

"You couldn't even wash the goddam dishes." Laverne was
yelling.

He came downstairs then and she asked him whether the game had
gone into extra innings. Laverne never knew when the baseball season
ended and the football season began and Ernie never bothered to
explain it to her. What was the use? What in goddam hell was the use?
He returned to complete consciousness as he went back upstairs, and
wondered vaguely what had happened to Gillian. His T-shirt was on the
floor. The only trace of his visitor was the empty cocktail glass. He
shoved it into his desk drawer and went into the bathroom. His eyes
were puffy. He turned around to look at Gillian's brand on his back.
Goddam broads who scratch. They should all be declawed.

"I'll be right down," he shouted from the bathroom door. He turned
on the shower.

When Ernie finally crawled into bed, he was played out. Still,
sleep came hard. Laverne was suspicious when he put on pajama tops.
Ernie never wore pajama tops, even in winter. In fact, the only
reason he wore pajama bottoms was that Laverne had made it a
condition for sharing the same bed. Sometimes now he wondered why he
had ever wanted to share the same bed. They'd been married fifteen
years but sometimes, on nights like this one, Ernie felt he had been
born married. Born married. He remembered his father used to say
something like that – exactly that, as a matter of fact,
whenever he got high on boilermakers. That had been his father's
salvation, those boilermakers on payday at the bar across the street
from the paymaster's shack at the zinc works. Ernie sometimes thought
about Donita, Pennsylvania, and how far he had come from that. It was
only four hundred miles but it was a whole other world.

Donita was one of those mill towns that edge the Monongahela River
on its flow to Pittsburgh. Like all those towns, it was dirty and its
people were poor, not so much in money as in spirit. The mill did it
to the town. Its people were a potpourri of Polish immigrants, Irish
and Negroes. The parents worked, got drunk, reproduced, died young,
figured on the same life for their children, only hoping it might
happen somewhere else than Donita.

The Donita football teams were the terror of the state, and Ernie
Miklos was the terror of the team and this was his salvation. Lying
there late at night, listening to the snores of the stranger who
shared his bed, Ernie liked to think back and remember those days,
the days of his escape. It was about the only time all day anyone
would let him think.

Ernie's father had liked to sing; he had never forgotten his
father's voice, especially when he'd had one or two. He had the soul
of a poet, Ernie felt. But the mill in those days was the beginning
and the end. The town was built around the mill and had never been
broken up into sections for slums or ethnic groups. The money people,
the mill owners, lived eighteen miles beyond town limits and everyone
else lived in town. Ernie's house was just a spot somewhere midway
between abject poverty and blind hope. There were nine children in
that house and Ernie had always been the favorite. He was the second
of two sons; the older boy had died of consumption.

Ernie never disappointed his father, and that was important to
him. Those days after the football games and his father hitting him
across his back and the girls waiting for him to come by. Ernie had
gotten laid when he was thirteen, by Sonia, who fucked for three
cents. Three cents. God, what she would have done for a dime. The
boys used to save milk bottles for the refunds and it was always a
big day when you could carry three of them over to Jake Rubenstein's.
Everybody hated old Jake. Not because he always kidded about them
bringing in
three
milk bottles. But because he was a Jew.
Ernie delighted in tormenting Jake's son, Harvey, but Ernie never
started a fight. It would have been no fight and Ernie was never that
much of a bully when he was in high school.