Thirteen Phantasms (26 page)

He ate half of a third doughnut, but then suddenly felt sick, and he threw the remaining half into the trash. Eleven doughnuts left. He wondered if he could freeze them with any success at all in order to have a source when times were tough, like this morning. Amanda would find them though. Better to leave them in the garage.

He went out into the backyard and started hammering away at the greenhouse, and in about a half hour Amanda came out with a cup of coffee for him.

“You can be such a yo-yo,” she said, smiling at him. He felt like a creep.

“Fred Astaire,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“I meant that.”

“You wouldn’t believe the device I’ve figured out to shade the greenhouse,” he said, happier now. “All automatic. We can put in a switch and work it from inside the house. Let me show you what I’ve got in mind.” Together they walked toward the garage. Then Walt remembered the box of doughnuts lying in plain sight on the bench. “Tell you what,” he said, stopping abruptly “Let me put it together for you—a prototype. It wouldn’t mean anything now anyway.” He smiled at her and she shrugged.

“Whatever you say,” she said. “I’m going to run down to the nursery for potting soil and bedding plants. Want to go along?”

“Naw.” He waved the idea away. “I’m wasting daylight. You go ahead and buy mulch, or whatever it is. I’ll stay here.”

•

He worked for hours, as if work were a curtain he could draw across the morning’s mistakes. Amanda came and went, visiting nurseries, hauling flats of plants in from the trunk of her car. Walt wondered idly, more than once, if she was stopping at the mall when she was out, if shoe stores drew her as irresistibly as doughnut shops drew him. Shoes! He was damned if he was going to worry about something as insignificant as a shoe sole. Life was too full of authentic horrors.

Now and then he fetched tools out of the garage, but he avoided looking at the box on the bench. It made him uneasy, like a cocked gun, and at one point he considered just facing up to it, going in there and slamming it to pieces with a two-by-four and pitching it into the trash. That was crazy, though. It was just doughnuts. He put the thought out of his mind and went to work, cutting up redwood boards for window jambs.

But he found himself daydreaming about the box, picturing it there in the dark garage among the wood shavings and used slips of sandpaper. Suddenly he had a vision of himself dead, the long, unnumbered years passing away. Dust settled over the workbench and floor of the garage, covering the tools and scraps of wood in a gray layer as the dying sun turned in a red sky The mummified doughnuts lay there stiff and dry in their cardboard sarcophagus, painted with the fading doughnut logo from Lew’s All-Niter.

He felt suddenly weak. He realized that his hands were shaking so badly that he could hardly hold the hammer, and his head ached to beat the band. He turned on the garden hose and drank as much water as he could hold, and felt temporarily better. Going without lunch was what did it. You couldn’t eat sugar for breakfast and then try to get by on coffee for the rest of the day. Sooner or later you came down hard from that load of sugar. What in the hell had he been thinking about? He had very nearly had the D.T.’s there for a minute.

What he needed, he decided suddenly, was a hair of the dog. The idea was highly amusing. If nothing else, it would stop these abominable shakes. And anyway, eleven doughnuts lay there in a box on the bench, and there was no excuse for that if he didn’t eat them—or at least one or two. It was largely a matter of economics. The day-olds had been a damned good buy, or would be if he ate them. If he let them petrify, though, they were money down a rat hole. He was reminded instantly of Amanda and her half-price shoes. The difference was that he was going to
eat
the doughnuts, whereas Amanda would wear the shoes maybe once or twice and then lose them in the salad of shoes cluttering the closet floor.

And he had already binged that morning anyway; there was no use forming resolutions now. Tomorrow morning he would pack it in, give it up for good. In fact, he would announce it to Amanda, and that would cement it. That was a hell of a serious step, that kind of self-revelation in front of your wife. You couldn’t back away after that.

The few hours that the doughnuts had sat there hadn’t hurt them much. The sugar on the outside had melted, but all in all they had held up as well as anyone could expect. The jelly doughnuts seemed a little excessive right then, so Walt ate two of the glazed, and then went back out and drank more water out of the hose. His hands had steadied out, his head had quit throbbing, and he felt almost like working again. For a moment he wondered whether he shouldn’t fiddle with the photoelectric gadgetry like he’d promised Amanda, but clearly it was too late in the afternoon to start something that complicated.

Then it came to him that Amanda was driving around town without a jack in the trunk. It would be his luck entirely if she blew a tire and found herself stranded. Walking around to the garage, he looked out toward the front of the house. The Toyota was parked at the curb. He grabbed the jack off the benchtop with the idea of putting it away, and then headed down the driveway.

There was a woman’s voice just then, and he turned to find his neighbor out watering the lawn. “Hi, Sue,” he said, waving the jack cheerfully. “Water my lawn while you’re at it, will you?”

She waved back with the hand that was holding the hose, spraying water in his direction.

“Hey!” he said, jumping aside.

She laughed. “You asked.” She walked toward him, sprinkling the lawn on either side. “Is Amanda getting dressed up for the progressive dinner Saturday night?”

“Yeah,” Walt said, standing by the trunk. “Her birthday dress.”

“You wearing your birthday suit too?”

“You know I don’t go in for dirty talk,” he said to her.

“Seriously,” she said. “What kind of birthday dress? Nice? Evening wear?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Walt said. “Sort of.” He unlocked the trunk, and the lid popped open. “Some kind of dress. You know, all one piece.”

“A one-piece,” she said, nodding her head as if he were an idiot. “I’ll ask her myself.”

A shopping bag lay in the trunk. Walt looked away for a moment and then looked back at it, unbelieving. There was a shoe box in it. What did this mean, that she had been out hitting shoe stores all afternoon? He dropped the jack into the trunk and pulled the box out of its bag.

“Shoes!” Sue said, looking over his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

“Let me see.”

He pulled the lid off and held the box out. Inside was a pair of plain leather shoes, nothing fancy, but somehow, in some way that he couldn’t quite identify, they looked expensive as hell. There was no receipt this time. He looked into the bag, but there was nothing in there either.

He realized that his neighbor’s eyes were as wide as half dollars. “Ferragamo,” she said.

“Is that it?”

She nodded, looking at the interior of the box as if it held a diamond tiara.

“Nice, eh? Good shoe?”

“Man!” she said, and nodded again. “How much did you have to give for them?”

“What?” Walt said, not quite taking it in.

“I’m not being nosy, I just … Tell me how much? Bob is such a damned skinflint! I’m going to hold this over his head for years. Jeeze, I can’t believe a man would buy a pair of Ferragamos for his wife. Especially not her husband, if you know what I mean.”

“How much do you think?” Walt asked, alarmed now. Amanda had clearly lost her mind. “Take a guess.” He realized he was talking through clenched teeth and made an effort to relax.

“A thousand?”

“A thousand! Good God!” He reeled back against the car and sat down hard on the bumper.

“More?” she asked. “Or did you get them on sale? What’s wrong?”

“Yeah,” Walt said. “Nothing.” He felt faint. “I got them on sale.” He looked at the bag in the trunk. “At Nieman Marcus.”

“Still, they must have been plenty. I guess I don’t need to know exactly. They’re normally a four-figure buy, though. I know that much. Bob might buy them if they were half price.”

Walt shook his head as if it beat all, Bob’s being a tightwad. Bob was going to kill him, of course, spoiling Amanda like that. Maybe Walt would just come clean with him, admit that Amanda had a thing for shoes, and that it had gotten a little out of hand. He couldn’t, though. You didn’t rat on your wife. He would just have to brass it out if Bob said anything to him. Some men were tight-fisted, some weren’t. It wasn’t his fault if he had a generous spirit.

He put the shoes back in the box and shut the trunk. He sure as hell wasn’t going to wave them in Amanda’s face like he had that morning. It hadn’t done a nickel’s worth of good anyway. More likely it had led to this latest atrocity. He wondered if there was any hope for her after all. There was that TV ad from where was it?—Mt. Sinai Hospital—having to do with addictions therapy. What the hell had the number been? He couldn’t remember. Of course there was some little chance that she would be feeling guilty about now, wrangling with the ghost of Aunt Janet. Maybe she’d come clean if he just left her alone.

He found himself in the garage again. A thousand bucks! That was sheer insanity. You could buy two cows for that kind of money, one for each foot, and get change back, too. He opened the doughnut box and pulled out another glazed. It tasted like cardboard to him, but he ate it anyway, to prove a point, and then ate another. He closed the box back up and pushed it away. Feeling a little queasy, he plastered on a smile and went in through the kitchen door. Amanda was chopping up vegetables at the counter, putting together a salad.

“Build the prototype?” she asked.

“No. No time for it. I pounded nails all afternoon. How about you?” She looked nice, fixed up as if to make an evening out of it. There were a couple of steaks marinating in a pan and a bottle of champagne in the ice bucket. But Walt couldn’t see anything but the shoes, looming in his mind like the ghost at the feast.

There was no question of him eating. He realized he was nauseated. Automatically he thought about the doughnuts, about how many he had eaten that day. What?—Six? Eight? More like ten.

“Something wrong?” Amanda asked. “You don’t look too good.”

He nearly blurted it out right there. Clearly she was setting in to butter him up with the steaks and champagne and all. And what after that? An intimate evening in front of the fire? He half wished he hadn’t found the shoes at all. Or eaten those last two doughnuts, which were playing nine ball in his stomach.

“I’m … not feeling too well,” he said. “Touch of the flu, I think.” A wave of nausea struck him, worse this time. “I’ll head upstairs. Lie down for a minute.”

“Should I put the steaks away?”

“What? I don’t care,” he said angrily. “Turn them into a pair of shoes.” He bolted for the stairs, barely making it to the bathroom in time. He was sweating and shaking again when he sat down on the edge of the bed, but after a few minutes of resting he felt better. He could hear kitchen sounds down below. Amanda had switched on the stereo, some kind of lazy-man’s jazz.

“You coming down?” Her voice sounded froni the bottom of the stairs.

He got up slowly, anticipating a bad stomach. He was all right, though. Too damned many doughnuts; that was the long and short of it. Well, that was it. That was the end. He was taking the pledge. Cold turkey. On the wagon. Tick-a-lock, doors and windows. He went back downstairs, full of determination.

Amanda was dancing in the kitchen, tossing the salad with a flourish of the wooden utensils. She was obviously high on shoes. She had gone on a bender herself, but shoes, unlike doughnuts, didn’t make you sick with nausea and regret. He watched her until she saw his face and stopped.

“What?” she said.

“You know damned well what.”

“Suppose you tell me anyway.”

“Suppose you tell me.

“Let’s see … ” She waved the salad spoon in the air and squinted, as if she could see a thought balloon forming over her head. “I give.”

“The shoes.”

“What shoes?”

“You know damned
well
what shoes!” he shouted, flying into a rage. “Don’t
bait me
. You’ve got a problem. A big one. How much, a thousand?”

“Guess.”

“Guess! I don’t have to guess. Sue told me. A thousand dollars! No human being on earth needs a thousand-dollar pair of shoes. It’s obscene. I don’t care whose Aunt Janet corked off and left you money. You’d better rein it in.” He nodded his head at her.

“Or what? What if I don’t ‘rein it in’?”

Speechless, he looked around the kitchen for something to vent his fury on, something to smash up, maybe. Something to crush. He grabbed the champagne bottle by the neck, tore off the foil, untwisted the wire, and yanked the cork out. Then, his hand trembling, he poured his glass full, the bubbles rushing down over the side. Upending the glass, he downed the champagne at a gulp.

“You’re really ticked off,” Amanda said to him, smiling. Apparently she thought it was funny.

He stood there breathing.

“They’re Sue’s shoes.”

“What?”

“The shoes in the trunk,” Amanda said. “They belong to
Sue
, dummy. Bob bought them for her, believe it or not. She brought them over to show me today, and as a sort of joke we put them in the trunk.”