The Collected Stories (11 page)

He didn't come the following Thursday either. Girard said sadly, “He must've run away, John.”

I had to give him up after two weeks' absence and no word. I didn't know how to tell the children: something about right and wrong, goodness and meanness, men and women. I had it all at my fingertips, ready to hand over. But I didn't think I ought to take mistakes and truth away from them. Who knows? They might make a truer friend in this world somewhere than I have ever made. So I just put them to bed and sat in the kitchen and cried.

In the middle of my third beer, searching in my mind for the next step, I found the decision to go on
Strike It Rich.
I scrounged some paper and pencil from the toy box and I listed all my troubles, which must be done in order to qualify. The list when complete could have brought tears to the eye of God if He had a minute. At the sight of it my bitterness began to improve. All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.

As always happens in these cases where you have begun to help yourself with plans, news comes from an opposite direction. The doorbell rang, two short and two long—meaning John.

My first thought was to wake the children and make them happy. “No! No!” he said. “Please don't put yourself to that trouble. Virginia, I'm dog-tired,” he said. “Dog-tired. My job is a damn headache. It's too much. It's all day and it scuttles my mind at night, and in the end who does the credit go to?

“Virginia,” he said, “I don't know if I can come anymore. I've been wanting to tell you. I just don't know. What's it all about? Could you answer me if I asked you? I can't figure this whole thing out at all.”

I started the tea steeping because his fingers when I touched them were cold. I didn't speak. I tried looking at it from his man point of view, and I thought he had to take a bus, the tubes, and a subway to see me; and then the subway, the tubes, and a bus to go back home at 1 a.m. It wouldn't be any trouble at all for him to part with us forever. I thought about my life, and I gave strongest consideration to my children. If given the choice, I decided to choose not to live without him.

“What's that?” he asked, pointing to my careful list of troubles. “Writing a letter?”

“Oh no,” I said, “it's for
Strike It Rich.
I hope to go on the program.”

“Virginia, for goodness' sakes,” he said, giving it a glance, “you don't have a ghost. They'd laugh you out of the studio. Those people really suffer.”

“Are you sure, John?” I asked.

“No question in my mind at all,” said John. “Have you ever seen that program? I mean, in addition to all of this—the little disturbances of man”—he waved a scornful hand at my list—”they
suffer.
They live in the forefront of tornadoes, their lives are washed off by floods—catastrophes of God. Oh, Virginia.”

“Are you sure, John?”

“For goodness' sake …”

Sadly I put my list away. Still, if things got worse, I could always make use of it.

Once that was settled, I acted on an earlier decision. I pushed his cup of scalding tea aside. I wedged myself onto his lap between his hard belt buckle and the table. I put my arms around his neck and said, “How come you're so cold, John?” He has a kind face and he knew how to look astonished. He said, “Why, Virginia, I'm getting warmer.” We laughed.

John became a lover to me that night.

Mrs. Raftery is sometimes silly and sick from her private source of cheap wine. She expects John often. “Honor your mother, what's the matter with you, John?” she complains. “Honor. Honor.”

“Virginia dear,” she says. “You never would've taken John away to Jersey like Margaret. I wish he'd've married you.”

“You didn't like me much in those days.”

“That's a lie,” she says. I know she's a hypocrite, but no more than the rest of the world.

What is remarkable to me is that it doesn't seem to conscience John as I thought it might. It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning.

Of course we must be very careful not to wake the children or disturb the neighbors, who will enjoy another person's excitement just so far, and then the pleasure enrages them. We must be very careful for ourselves too, for when my husband comes back, realizing the babies are in school and everything easier, he won't forgive me if I've started it all up again—noisy signs of life that are so much trouble to a man.

We haven't seen him in two and a half years. Although people have suggested it, I do not want the police or Intelligence or a private eye or anyone to go after him to bring him back. I know that if he expected to stay away forever he would have written and said so. As it is, I just don't know what evening, any time, he may appear. Sometimes, stumbling over a blockbuster of a dream at midnight, I wake up to vision his soft arrival.

He comes in the door with his old key. He gives me a strict look and says, “Well, you look older, Virginia.” “So do you,” I say, although he hasn't changed a bit.

He settles in the kitchen because the children are asleep all over the rest of the house. I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go.

“I didn't like the army much,” he says. “Next time I think I might go join the Merchant Marine.”

“What army?” I say.

“It's pretty much the same everywhere,” he says.

“I wouldn't be a bit surprised,” I say.

“I lost my cuff link, goddamnit,” he says, and drops to the floor to look for it. I go down too on my knees, but I know he never had a cuff link in his life. Still I would do a lot for him.

“Got you off your feet that time,” he says, laughing. “Oh yes, I did.” And before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got onto me right where we were, and the truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions.

One day in August, in a quiet little suburb hot with cars and zoned for parks, I, Charles C. Charley, met a girl named Cindy. There were lots of Cindys strolling in the woods that afternoon, but mine was a real citizen with yellow hair that never curled (it hung). When I came across her, she had left the woods to lie around her father's attic. She rested on an army cot, her head on no pillow, smoking a cigarette that stood straight up, a dreamy funnel. Ashes fell gently to her chest, which was relatively new, covered by Dacron and Egyptian cotton, and waiting to be popular.

I had just installed an air conditioner, 20 percent off and late in the season. That's how I make a living. I bring ease to noxious kitchens and fuming bedrooms. People who have tried to live by cross ventilation alone have thanked me.

On the first floor the system was in working order, absolutely perfect and guaranteed. Upstairs, under a low unfinished ceiling, that Cindy lay in the deadest center of an August day. Her forehead was damp, mouth slightly open between drags, a furious and sweaty face, hardly made up except around the eyes, but certainly cared for, cheeks scrubbed and eyebrows brushed, a lifetime's deposit of vitamins, the shiny daughter of cash in the bank.

“Aren't you hot?” I inquired.

“Boiling,” she said.

“Why stay up here?” I asked like a good joe.

“That's my business,” she said.

“Ah, come on, little one,” I said, “don't be grouchy.”

“What's it to you?” she asked.

I took her cigarette and killed it between forefinger and thumb. Then she looked at me and saw me for what I was, not an ordinary union brother but a perfectly comfortable way to spend five minutes.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Charles,” I said.

“Is this your business? Are you the boss?”

“I am,” I said.

“Listen, Charles, when you were in high school, did
you
know exactly what your interests were?”

“Yes,” I said. “Girls.”

She turned over on her side so we could really talk this out head-on. I stooped to meet her. She smiled. “Charles, I'm almost finished with school and I can't even decide what to take in college. I don't really want to be anything. I don't know what to do,” she said. “What do you think I should do?”

I gave her a serious answer, a handful of wisdom. “In the first place, don't let them shove. Who do they think they're kidding? Most people wouldn't know if they had a million years what they wanted to be. They just sort of become.”

She raised a golden brow. “Do you think so, Charles? Are you sure? Listen, how old are
you
?”

“Thirty-two,” I said as quick as nighttime in the tropics. “Thirty-two,” I repeated to reassure myself, since I was subtracting three years wasted in the army as well as the first two years of my life, which I can't remember a damn thing about anyway.

“You seem older.”

“Isn't thirty-two old enough? Is it too old?”

“Oh no, Charles, I don't like kids. I mean they're mostly boring. They don't have a remark to make on anything worth listening to. They think they're the greatest. They don't even dance very well.”

She fell back, her arms swinging on either side of the cot. She stared at the ceiling. “If you want to know something,” she said, “they don't even know how to kiss.”

Then lightly on the very tip of her nose, I, Charles C. Charley, kissed her once and, if it may be sworn, in jest.

To this she replied, “Are you married, by any chance?”

“No,” I said, “are you?”

“Oh, Charles,” she said, “how could I be married? I haven't even graduated yet.”

“You must be a junior,” I said, licking my lips.

“Oh, Charles,” she said, “that's what I mean. If you were a kid like Mike or Sully or someone, you'd go crazy. Whenever they kiss me, you'd think their whole life was going to change. Honestly, Charles, they lose their breath, they sneeze—just when you're getting in the mood. They stop in the middle to tell you a dirty joke.”

“Imagine that!” I said. “How about trying someone over sixteen?”

“Don't fish,” she said in a peaceful, happy way. “Anyway, talk very low. In fact, whisper. If my father comes home and hears me even mention kissing, he'll kill us both.”

I laughed. My little factories of admiration had started to hum and I missed her meaning.

What I observed was the way everything about this Cindy was new and unused. Her parts, visible or wrapped, were tooled for display. All the exaggerated bones of childhood and old age were bedded down in a cozy consistency of girl.

I offered her another cigarette. I stood up and, ducking the rafters, walked back and forth alongside the cot. She held her fresh cigarette aloft and crossed her eyes at it. Ashes fell, little fine feathers. I leaned forward until I was close enough for comfort. I blew them all away.

I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small per-adventure?

I relit her cigarette. Then I said, with no pacing at all, like a person who lacks aptitude, “What do you think, Cindy, listen, will you have trouble with your family about dating me? I'd like to spend a nice long evening with you. I haven't talked to someone your age in a long time. Or we could go swimming, dancing, I don't know. I don't want you to have any trouble, though. Would it help if
I
asked your mother? Do you think she'd let you?”

“That'll be the day,” she said. “No one tells
me
who to go out with. No one. I've got a new bathing suit, Charles. I'd love to go.”