8 Plus 1 (13 page)

When I lifted the receiver, I found that my father
had already picked up the downstairs extension. There was a pause and then he said: “I’ve got it, Mike.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. And hung up.

I stood there in the upstairs hallway, not breathing. His voice was a murmur and even at that distance I detected some kind of intimacy. Or did the distance itself contribute that hushed, secretive quality? I returned to my room and put a Blood, Sweat and Tears on the stereo. I remembered that my mother was out for the evening, a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. I got up and looked in the mirror. Another lousy pimple, on the right side of my nose to balance the one on the left. Who had called him on the telephone at that hour of the night? And why had he answered the call in record time? Was it the same person he’d been waiting for in Bryant Park? Don’t be ridiculous, Mike, I told myself; think of real stuff, like pimples. Later, I went downstairs and my father was slumped in his chair, newspaper like a fragile tent covering his face. His snores capsized the tent and it slid to the floor. He needed a shave, his beard like small slivers of ice. His feet were fragile, something I had never noticed before; they were mackerel white, half in and half out of his slippers. I went back upstairs without checking the refrigerator, my hunger suddenly annihilated by guilt. He wasn’t mysterious: he was my father. And he snored with his mouth open.

The next day I learned the identity of the girl at the bus stop: like a bomb detonating. Sally Bettencourt. There’s a Sally Bettencourt in every high school in the world—the girl friend of football
heroes, the queen of the prom, Miss Apple Blossom Time. That’s Sally Bettencourt of Monument High. And I’m not a football hero, although I scored three points in the intramural basketball tournament last winter. And she
did
smile at me a few weeks ago while waiting for the bus. Just for the record, let me put down here how I found out her name. She was standing a few feet from me, chatting with some girls and fellows, and I drifted toward her and saw her name written on the cover of one of her books. Detective work.

The same kind of detective work sent me investigating my father’s desk the next day. He keeps all his private correspondence and office papers in an old battered roll-top my mother found at an auction and sandpapered and refinished. No one was at home. The desk was unlocked. I opened drawers and checked some diary-like type notebooks. Nothing but business stuff. All kinds of receipts. Stubs of cancelled checks. Dull. But a bottom drawer revealed the kind of box that contains correspondence paper and envelopes. Inside, I found envelopes of different shapes and sizes and colors. Father’s Day cards he had saved through the years. I found one with a scrawled “Mikey” painstakingly written when I was four or five probably. His secret love letters—from Annie and Debbie and me.

“Looking for something?”

His shadow fell across the desk. I mumbled something, letting irritation show in my voice. I have found that you can fake adults out by muttering and grumbling as if you’re using some foreign language that they couldn’t possibly understand.
And they feel intimidated or confused. Anyway, they decide not to challenge you or make an issue of it. That’s what happened at that moment. There I was snooping in my father’s desk and because I muttered unintelligibly when he interrupted me,
he
looked embarrassed while I stalked from the room as if I was the injured party, ready to bring suit in court.

Three things happened in the next week and they had nothing to do with my father: First, I called Sally Bettencourt. The reason why I called her is that I could have sworn she smiled again at me at the bus stop one afternoon. I mean, not a polite smile but a smile for
me
, as if she recognized me as a person, an individual. Actually I called her three times in four days. She was
(a)
not at home and the person on the line (her mother? her sister?) had no idea when she’d arrive;
(b)
she was taking a shower—“Any message?” “No”;
(c)
the line was busy. What would I have said to her, if she’d answered? I’ve always had the feeling that I’m a real killer on the phone when I don’t have to worry about what to do with my hands or how bad my posture is. The second thing that happened was a terrible history test that I almost flunked: a low C that could possibly keep me off the Honor Roll, which would send my mother into hysterics. Number 3: I received my assignment from the Municipal Park Department for my summer job—lifeguard at Pool Number 38. Translation: Pool Number 38 is for children twelve years old and younger, not the most romantic pool in the city.

Bugged by history, I talked Mister Rogers, the
teacher, into allowing me some extra work to rescue my mark and I stayed up late one night, my stereo earphones clamped on my head so that I wouldn’t disturb anyone as the cool sounds of the Tinted Orange poured into my ears. Suddenly, I awoke—shot out of a cannon. My watch said one-twenty. One-twenty in the morning. I yawned. My mouth felt rotten, as if the French Foreign Legion had marched through it barefoot (one of my father’s old jokes that I’d heard about a million times). I went downstairs for a glass of orange juice. A light spilled from the den. I sloshed orange juice on my shirt as I stumbled toward the room. He’s there: my father. Slumped in his chair. Like death. And I almost drop dead myself. But his lips flutter and he produces an enormous snore. One arm dangles to the floor, limp as a draped towel. His fingers are almost touching a book that had evidently fallen from his hand. I pick it up. Poetry. A poet I never heard of. Kenneth Fearing. Riffling the pages, I find that the poems are mostly about the Depression. In the front of the book there’s an inscription. Delicate handwriting, faded lavender ink. “To Jimmy, I’ll never forget you. Muriel.” Jimmy? My father’s name is James and my mother and his friends call him Jim. But Jimmy? I notice a date at the bottom of the page, meticulously recorded in that same fragile handwriting—November 2, 1942—when he was young enough to be called Jimmy. By some girl whose name was Muriel, who gave him a book of poems that he takes out and reads in the dead of night even if they are poems about the Depression. He stirs, grunting, clearing his throat,
his hand like a big white spider searching the floor for the book. I replace the book on the floor and glide out of the room and back upstairs.

The next day I began my investigation in earnest and overlooked no details. That’s when I found out what size shoes, socks, shirts, etc., that he wears. I looked in closets and bureaus, his workbench in the cellar, not knowing what I was searching for but the search itself important. There was one compensation: at least, it kept my mind off Sally Bettencourt. I had finally managed to talk to her on the telephone. We spoke mostly in monosyllables. It took me about ten minutes to identify myself (“The fellow at
what
bus stop?”) because apparently all those smiles sent in my direction had been meaningless and my face was as impersonal as a label on a can of soup. The conversation proceeded downward from that point and reached bottom when she said: “Well, thanks for calling, Mark.” I didn’t bother to correct her. She was so sweet about it all. All the Sally Bettencourts of the world are that way: that’s why you keep on being in love with them when you know it’s entirely useless. Even when you hang up and see your face in the hallway mirror—what a terrible place to hang a mirror—your face all crumpled up like a paper bag. And the following day, she wasn’t at the bus stop, of course. But then neither was I.

What I mean about the bus stop is this: I stationed myself across the street to get a glimpse of her, to see if she really was as beautiful as I remembered or if the phone call had diminished her loveliness. When she didn’t arrive, I wandered
through the business district. Fellows and girls lingered in doorways. Couples held hands crossing the street. A record store blared out “Purple Evenings” by the Tinted Orange. I spotted my father. He was crossing the street, dodging traffic, as if he was dribbling an invisible ball down a basketball court. I checked my watch: two fifty-five. Stepping into a doorway, I observed him hurrying past the Merchants Bank and Appleton’s Department Store and the Army-Navy Surplus Supply Agency. He paused in front of the Monument Public Library. And disappeared inside. My father—visiting the library? He didn’t even have a library card, for crying out loud.

I’m not exactly crazy about libraries, either. Everybody whispers or talks low as if the building has a giant volume knob turned down to practically zero. As I stood there, I saw Laura Kincaid drive up in her new LeMans. A quiet, dark green LeMans. Class. “If I had to describe Laura Kincaid in one word, it would be ‘class,’ ” I’d heard my father say once. The car drew into a parking space, as if the space had been waiting all day for her arrival. She stepped out of the door. She is blond, her hair the color of lemonade as it’s being poured on a hot day. I stood there, paralyzed. A scene leaped in my mind: Laura Kincaid at a New Year’s party at our house, blowing a toy horn just before midnight while I watched in awe from the kitchen, amazed at how a few glasses of booze could convert all these bankers and Rotary Club members and Chamber of Commerce officials into the terrible kind of people you see dancing to Guy Lombardo on television while the camera
keeps cutting back to Times Square where thousands of other people, most of them closer to my age, were also acting desperately happy. I stood there thinking of that stuff because I was doing some kind of juggling act in my mind—trying to figure out why was she at this moment walking across the street, heading for the library, her hair a lemon halo in the sun, her nylons flashing as she hurried. What was her hurry? There was barely any traffic. Was she on her way to a rendezvous? Stop it, you nut, I told myself, even as I made my way to the side entrance.

The library is three stories high, all the stacks and bookshelves built around an interior courtyard. I halted near the circulation desk with no books in my arms to check out. Feeling ridiculous, I made my way to the bubbler. The spray of water was stronger than I expected: my nostrils were engulfed by water. For some reason, I thought of Sally Bettencourt and how these ridiculous events kept happening to me and I ached with longing for her, a terrible emptiness inside of me that needed to be filled. I climbed the stairs to the third floor, my eyes flying all over the place, trying to spot my father. And Laura Kincaid. And knowing all the time that it was merely a game, impossible, ridiculous.

And then I saw them. Together. Standing at the entrance to the alcove that was marked 818 to 897. Two books were cradled in her arms like babies. My father wasn’t looking at the books or the shelves or the walls or the ceilings or the floor or anything. He was looking at her. Then, they laughed. It was like a silent movie. I mean—I saw
their eyes light up and their lips moving but didn’t hear anything. My father shook his head, slowly, a smile lingering tenderly on his face. I drew back into the alcove labeled 453 to 521, across from them, apprehensive, afraid that suddenly they might see me spying on them. His hand reached up and touched her shoulder. They laughed again, still merrily. She indicated the books in her arms. He nodded, an eagerness in his manner. He didn’t look as if he had ever snored in his life or taken a nap after dinner. They looked around. She glanced at her watch. He gestured vaguely.

Pressed against the metal bookshelf, I felt conspicuous, vulnerable, as if they would suddenly whirl and see me, and point accusing fingers. But nothing like that happened. She finally left, simply walked away, the books still in her arm. My father watched her go, his face in shadow. She walked along the balcony, then down the spiral stairs, the nylons still flashing, her hair a lemon waterfall. My father watched until she disappeared from view. I squinted, trying to discern his features, to see whether he was still my father, searching for the familiar landmarks of his face and body, needing some kind of verification. I watched him for a minute or two as he stood there looking down, his eyes tracing the path of her departure as if she were still visible. I studied his face: was this my father? And then this terrible numbness invaded my body, like a Novocain of the spirit, killing all my emotions. And the numbness even pervaded my mind, slowing down my thoughts. For which I was grateful. All the way home on the bus, I stared out the window, looking
at the landscapes and the buildings and the people but not really seeing them, as if I was storing them in my mind like film to develop them later when they’d have meaning for me.

At dinner, the food lay unappetizingly on my plate. I had to fake my way through the meal, lifting the fork mechanically. I found it difficult not to look at my father. What I mean is—I didn’t want to look at him. And because I didn’t, I kept doing it. Like when they tell you not to think of a certain subject and you can’t help thinking of it.

“Aren’t you feeling well, Mike?” my mother asked.

I leaped about five feet off my chair. I hadn’t realized how obvious I must have appeared: the human eating machine suddenly toying with his food—steak, at that, which requires special concentration.

“He’s probably in love,” Debbie said.

And that word
love.
I found it difficult to keep my eyes away from my father.

“I met Laura Kincaid at the library today,” I heard my father say.

“Was she able to get a copy of the play?” my mother asked.

“Two of them,” he said, munching. “I still think
Streetcar Named Desire
is pretty ambitious for you girls to put on.”

“The Women’s Auxiliary knows no fear of Tennessee Williams,” my mother said in that exaggerated voice she uses when she’s kidding around.

“You know, that’s funny, Dad,” I heard myself saying. “I saw you in the library this afternoon and was wondering what you were doing there.”

“Oh? I didn’t see you, Mike.”

“He was supposed to pick up the play on my library card. But then Laura Kincaid came by …” That was my mother explaining it all, although I barely made out the words.

I won’t go into the rest of the scene and I won’t say that my appetite suddenly came back and that I devoured the steak. Because I didn’t. That was two days ago and I still feel funny about it all. Strange I mean. That’s why I’m writing this, putting it all down, all the evidence I gathered. That first time in the park when he was sitting there. The telephone call. That book of poetry he reads late at night, “To Jimmy, I’ll never forget you. Muriel.” Laura Kincaid in the library. Not much evidence, really. Especially when I look at him and see how he’s my father all right.