Augusta Played (15 page)

But as she put her lips to the gold mouthpiece and started to blow, she screamed instead, and jumped onto the chair.

“What is it?” Norman shouted, all of his defenses instantly mobilized. His first thought was,
Bellhop
.

“It's a mouse!” she screamed, pointing. “There! It went under the bed!”

Cyril, sitting on the bed, pulled his short legs up and screamed.

“You don't have to scream, Cyril,” Tom said, sharply.

“She said it went under the bed! It's under me! I can feel the bed shaking!”

“The mouse isn't shaking the bed,” Norman said, “you are.”

“It's the same difference, isn't it?” Cyril asked, in a calmer voice. “There's a bloody mouse under here, and I'm not coming down from the bed until he's gone. Cor!”

“Do
something!” Gus said to Norman.

“Are you going to stand on that chair for the rest of the afternoon?”

“If you don't do something, I am.”

Tom said to Norman, “Have you got any ideas?”

“I could buy a mousetrap.”

Tom shook his head. He had a broad, deeply grave face. It was easy to see why Cyril loved him. “The mouse is probably so frightened, it will never come out.”

“Maybe,” Norman said, grinning, “now is the time to build a
better
mousetrap. The world will beat a path to our door.”

“You wouldn't think it was so funny if you had seen it,” Gus retorted. “It moves so
fast.”
She turned around on her chair. “Look at Tweetie. He's upset too. He probably thinks where there's a mouse, there's a cat.”

“I to't I taw a puddytat,” Norman said.

“That's enough, Norman,” Gus said uncomfortably; she frequently said the same thing to Tweetie-Pie when Norman wasn't around.

“You should have heard yourself,” Norman said, looking up at her. “You said eek. E-e-k.”

Gus began to giggle. “I know,” she said, “it must be instinctive. I never thought I was the type to say eek.”

“Eek!” Cyril screamed. “There it is!”

A small bundle of brown fur skittered across the Persian rug and parquet floor toward the kitchen and crawled under the icebox, cowering. It made high, squeaking sounds, like a piccolo.

“I have it,” Norman said, snapping his fingers. “I just thought of the better mousetrap.”

Cautiously, Gus got down from the chair. She was still holding her flute and now she took it apart and put it in the case, by touch—she had to keep her eyes on the trembling brown bit under the icebox. She didn't want it sneaking up on her. But it stayed crouched under there even while Norman went into the kitchen and pulled a pot down from the pegboard. Then Norman stamped his foot on the floor, and the mouse, terrified, ran back into the other room. Norman threw the pot at the mouse—and missed. “Shit,” he said, as the pot flew off in one direction and the mouse in another.

“He's under the desk,” Tom said.

Norman threw the pot again. This time it banged against the wall under the desk, and the mouse dashed across the room toward the chair Gus had been standing on. She leaped onto the bed. Cyril clung to her skirt.

“I'm going to catch that mother if it's the last thing I do,” Norman said.

“Norman! It's only a little mouse.”

“Don't tell me you're feeling sorry for it! If that's the case, why are you up there? Do you plan to spend the rest of your life standing on our bed with Cyril?” Norman had hit his head on the edge of the desk retrieving the pot.

The mouse had a long thin tail like a piece of cord and it was twitching wildly. Suddenly Tom kicked the chair aside and the mouse, not knowing which way to run, froze for an instant, and Norman, falling flat on his face as he dived, clapped the pot over it.

Nobody said anything.

“I've got him,” Norman said.

Cyril asked the question that was on everyone's mind. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Gus,” Norman said, authoritatively, “come here.” She did.

“Get a sheet of cardboard from one of the shirts in my drawer.”

She did.

“Now slide it under the pot.”

She did.

“Careful!”

“I'm being careful.”

“Okay, now we've got him good.”

“Now what?” Gus asked. “That still doesn't answer the question.”

“Take the flippin' thing outside,” Cyril suggested.

“That's no good,” Tom said. “He'll come right back.”

“Well, we can't just—” Norman started.

“What?” said Gus.

“Kill it. We can't just kill it.”

“You'll have to,” Tom said. “Unless you want to keep it. As a pet.”

“Tweetie wouldn't like that,” Gus said. Tweetie was already agitated, flapping dementedly against the bars of his cage.

“Oh God,” Norman said. “How are we going to kill it?” Tom looked worried, concentrating. “You can drown it.”

“In the Hudson? How the hell am I going to carry it way the hell over there? Suppose it gnaws through the cardboard. Mice have teeth, you know. They are noted for their teeth.”

“Be glad it's not a rat,” Cyril said. “We had rats in Bristol. They came off the ships.”

Gus shivered.

“You'll have to drown it in the—” Tom blushed.

“The loo,” Cyril said.

Norman looked at Gus. “Do you know anything else I can do?”

She shrugged.

“Okay. It's being very still in there, do you think it's all right? Could it have suffocated?” He tapped on the cardboard to see if the mouse would respond. There was a sound of scurrying from the underside. “I hope you know how to swim,” he said, talking to the mouse.

He carried the pot with the cardboard hat into the bathroom that wasn't much larger than a telephone booth, and Gus and the dwarves crowded in after him. Cyril whispered to Tom, loud enough for Gus to hear, “It's a jolly good thing we aren't any bigger than we are.” Gus felt the color rising to her cheeks. There was an aura of manic exuberance about the whole business. They were all laughing at the absurdity of the situation, even Norman. Gus raised the seat, and Norman, turning the pot upside down, lowered it to the toilet. Swiftly he pulled the cardboard away and the mouse dropped into the bowl. “Swim, you bastard, swim!” he yelled, laughing. He flushed the john.

25

T
HE
MOUSE
SWAM
as long as it could. It battled against the current in the bowl, but the flush made a whirlpool effect, and the mouse, scrabbling against the porcelain sides, squeaking hysterically, was sucked slowly under. The squeaks got higher and more hopeless-sounding. Its claws, trying to cling to the slick surface, were useless. The tiny, thin tail whipped frantically; it was never meant to function as a rudder. As if that tail was a cord being reeled in by some unseen giant hand extending from the sewer, the mouse went down the drain tailfirst, tugged by the undertow, staring helplessly up with bright, live eyes at the four faces leaning over the bowl. At the last, it stopped squeaking; only the whiskers, wetly drooping, quivered reflexively.

Afterward, no one knew what to say. They stood there listening to the water falling away through the apartment building's ancient plumbing system, wishing somehow the pipes would speak to them. New water filled up the bowl, and now there was no mouse in it. Gus raised her head and looked at Norman: there was horror on his face, though it was there only for an instant. It wasn't an expression that was natural to his temperament; it was unintegrated with his features, as if laid on with a spatula, a kind of stucco. Gus looked into his face, and it was as if she were seeing a fun-house reflection of her own. She ran out the room, tripping over Tom.

“Where are you going?” Norman said, coming after her.

“Out.” She grabbed her book and her shoulderbag, but he caught her and held her by the shoulders.

“I came home to spend the afternoon with you,” he said. “I thought we could watch the war on television together.”

“I'm sorry,” she mumbled. “I've got to get out of here.” She wrenched free and fled.

But where to? As a wife, she had fewer friends than she'd had when she was single. This was only partly attributable to men's interest in her being lessened by her sexual unavailability; it was also because she now had a “private life” and a “public life.” Before, she'd just had a life. Now there were a great many things in her life that belonged only to Norman and herself, and this meant she had less to talk about with other people. There was a new circumspection in her bearing. When she wrote letters to old friends in North Carolina, Norman skimmed them, peering over her shoulder at the let-tersheet in the typewriter, to make sure she had said nothing that he might mind other people knowing about. She didn't object to this because she was just as eager as he was that their marriage should be a success, and, as Norman said, if they did have any problems, presumably the people to solve them should be the people involved, not old friends in North Carolina.

The street was hot; the sun angled off the sidewalk like a billiard ball against the side cushion of a pool table and hit her full in the face. She loved the sensation of heat on her body, her shoulders under the cotton dress, like a massage. She began to relax. There was a phone booth up ahead, burning bright red in the summer sun, and on an impulse, she walked to it and dropped a dime in. She hardly realized whom she was dialing until she was halfway through the number. When he answered, she didn't know what to say.

“Richard?” she said. “It's me.”

He didn't reply.

“Did you hear that? I seem to have adopted your old habit. I mean it's me, Gus. Augusta. Your Gussie.”

His response was slow but welcoming. “Mrs. Gold,” he said. It still gave her a thrill to hear herself called that.

“May I see you?”

“Now?”

“If you aren't busy.”

“You can come here. Elaine is shopping. Elaine is almost always shopping, in case you never noticed. Is anything wrong?”

“No. Yes. I can't explain. It has to do with a mouse.”

“You don't have to say another word. I understand everything. The mouse ran up the clock. Weren't we going to meet under a clock?”

“Don't go away, Richard,” Gus said, flooded with an unexpected sense of elation. “I'll be there as soon as I can!” She ran for the subway. She knew the way because she had been to his apartment once before. When Elaine was shopping.

26

T
ELL
ME
,” Richard said, seating her on the couch, putting her book and bag on the coffee table, “what is this about a mouse? You look beautiful, you know. Gussie, Gussie, it's been a very long time since you let old Richard see you. Does this character you married treat you well? I don't trust intellectuals, myself. They're murder when it comes to music. I suppose he's big on sixteenth-century
canzoni?”

He was gazing at her romantically, his large, dreamy, dark eyes musing on her form; Gus was sure he didn't have the vaguest idea what he was saying—it was the automatic Richard, stalling while the Richard that lived inside the outer despairing handsome extravagant Richard carefully absorbed the fact that his Gussie was sitting on the couch in his apartment, half turned toward him.

“The truth is,” she said, “it isn't really because of the mouse that I'm here. Richard, did I ever seem to you to be neurotic?”

“Neurotic? I don't know,” he said, “I never thought about it. I guess you could be. I'm not sure I could tell if you were or weren't. What's neurotic?”

She blushed.

“I like the way you blush,” he said. “In fact, I'd rather just watch you blush than know why you're blushing. You might stop it then. In any case, whatever's the matter, it can't be very serious or you'd be thinner. You always lose weight when you're distressed. Elaine always goes shopping, did I tell you?”

She sighed and leaned back against the couch. Richard was looking at her exposed throat. She meant him to. It was rather nice once again to be sitting next to someone whose attention was fixed on her so intently, but how could she talk to him about Norman without being unfair to him
and
Norman? Then he started to kiss her throat; she waited a few moments before she told him to stop and sat up. “I'm going to make a Town Hall debut,” she said.

“You are? Terrific! When? Did you get in touch with my manager?”

“Yes,” she said. “It'll be a year from December. Norman says we'll have the money by then. Baker is helping me with the program.” She was talking rapidly—too rapidly, seeking to distract him. “I want to run the gamut from Bach to something so contemporary it doesn't exist yet. A première. There's a student at Juilliard, Dieter Schuyler. He's brilliant. He's writing a piece for me to close the program with.”

“You'll be magnificent,” Richard said, untying her scarf and stroking her hair. “I'll be there.”

“I know I'll be terrified.”

“The only time I'm not terrified is when I'm performing.”

“Uh,” she said, “I'm not sure how you mean that.” She moved to the end of the couch. It was a rich, cool living room, with zinnias in cut crystal vases and a record collection that spanned one wall from floor to ceiling. It was a living room that belonged in a magazine—not merely Upwardly Mobile but Arrived. Except for the well-stocked, well-used bar and the records, the family photographs over the bar and the fresh zinnias, there was little sign of human habitation. The living room wasn't intended for living. Real life was lived offstage, in the kitchen and the kids' room. But Gus appreciated the peace of this room, the lovely serene appointed stillness of it. Richard's profile was doubled in the floor-to-ceiling framed mirror on the wall at his end of the couch. From a certain perspective, his face was faintly owlish, with a beaked nose and large eyes and a pointed chin. “Richard,” she blurted, “am I bad in bed?”