Black Maps (6 page)

It wasn't long before we started going out, and when he lost his job at Accurate Plastics and couldn't pay his rent, I took him in. I felt sorry for him, I guess, and maybe I even thought I was in love with him. I can't remember now. At any rate, he was only going to stay until he found a new job. But when he started working at the Remington plant, he asked if he could stay—just until he got back on his feet again—and I said yes. Then he lost that job too. For weeks, he looked for work, but then he started staying home, sitting in the La-Z-Boy and watching reruns of
The Honeymooners
and
I Love Lucy
. All he did was sit there and smoke cigarettes and drink beer. When I came home, he'd tell me he'd been out looking for work, but I knew better. Once I picked up his ashtray and counted thirty-seven cigarette butts, then asked him if he expected me to believe he'd been out looking for jobs all day. That was when he first asked me to marry him. “I love you, Gloria,” he said. “I won't ever be any good without you. If you just say yes, I'll be a new man. You'll see.” He'd caught me off guard, and I didn't know what to say. I just stood there a moment, looking at him, trying to think of something I could tell him. Then he turned and walked over to the picture window and looked out at the rain. “To hell with Roy,” he said. “When are you gonna forget about him? Do you think he lays awake nights thinking about
you
?” Then I said we shouldn't discuss such an important thing when we were tense and angry. “Let's talk about this tomorrow,” I said. And the next morning, at breakfast, I told him I needed more time to think about it. After that, he asked me every day for a couple of weeks, and I always said I didn't know yet. After a while, he stopped asking, at least in words. But every time I came home I could see the question in his eyes.

I was crying as I drove home that night, thinking one minute how sad Lenny would be when I told him my answer and then the next how that man leaned over the table and kissed that girl, like no one else was in the restaurant or the world. When I pulled into the driveway, I just sat there a minute, wiping mascara off my cheeks and trying to prepare myself. I didn't want to have to hurt Lenny, but even more I wanted everything settled; I wanted things simple, clear.

As soon as I opened the car door, I could hear that music again, and I knew Lenny was drunk. Whenever he drinks too much, he puts on Big Band music. It was the first thing he heard when he came home from Vietnam. As soon as he got his discharge at Fort Ord, he hitched a ride back to Little Rock with a buddy, and when he walked in the house, his mother was baking bread and listening to “Moonlight Serenade” on the hi-fi. She hadn't been expecting him for another week. After they hugged and kissed and cried, she gave him a slice of bread fresh from the oven and they sat in the kitchen and listened to Glenn Miller together. He'd never liked that kind of music before, but now he did, because sitting there, listening to those songs and eating that bread, he couldn't believe in the war anymore. It was just gone, a bad dream. He felt so happy he got up and danced right there in the kitchen with his mother, danced his idea of a waltz, both of them crying away.

I slammed the car door and started up the walk. Lenny was playing “In the Mood” so loud I knew he was in bad shape. Mrs. McDougal across the street had probably already called the police. I walked up the steps and put the key in the lock. Then I just stood there a moment, looking at the peeling siding Lenny had promised to scrape and paint, the broken shutters, the overgrown shrubs. Finally, I turned the key and stepped in. The living room was warm, all the lights on. I didn't see Lenny anywhere.

“Turn that thing down,” I yelled.

Lenny came out of the kitchen then, wearing a blue apron that was dusty with flour. His hands were white too and he held them out in front of him, like Frankenstein in the movies.

“Gloria,” he said. “You're home.”

“Lenny,” I said. “You're drunk.”

He wiped his hands on a corner of the apron, then turned down the record player. “No, I'm not,” he said. “I'm
plastered
.” Then he went back into the kitchen. After a second, I heard him kneading dough on the squeaky table. It was midnight, and he was baking bread. I set my purse on the end table and sat down on the old flowered loveseat. For a second, I thought of just blurting it out:
I don't love you. I don't want to marry you
. But I decided to wait, to build up to it so he wouldn't take it so hard.

In a few minutes, Lenny came out of the kitchen, still wearing his apron, and sat down in the La-Z-Boy next to the loveseat. I could hear the timer ticking away in the kitchen. He always lets the bread rise three times, thirty minutes a time. That meant it'd be at least an hour, maybe two, before he was done baking. I saw him sitting in the La-Z-Boy, waiting to take his bread out of the oven, while I slept in the bedroom alone, and I suddenly felt so sorry for him I thought I'd wait until tomorrow to tell him. But I knew I couldn't. I couldn't wait even one more night.

Doris Day was singing “Sentimental Journey” now. “What music,” Lenny said, nodding toward the record player. “You can just see all the people dancing. The whole country dancing.” He looked at me, woozy, and blinked his eyelids hard. “I'm making bread,” he said.

“I know,” I answered, and tried to smile.

He looked away then and sighed. “I thought you'd never get home,” he said. “The time, it's been moving so slow tonight.”

I didn't say anything. Lenny sighed again, then tapped a Winston out of the pack on the end table and lit it. Taking a long drag, he leaned his head back and exhaled slowly. Lately, his rash had started up his neck, and I wondered if one day it'd cover his face. I imagined his face raw and burned-looking, and I shivered.

Without looking at me, he said, “Hear anything interesting at work?”

For some time now, all we talked about was other people's conversations. It was easier than having our own. Sometimes, when I hadn't overheard anything interesting, I made something up, just to have something to talk about. But that night I didn't have to make anything up. I told him about the clay-eaters, just like I heard it, only I said it was two businessmen from Memphis who told me about them. Somehow, telling the story exhausted me. I wanted to go to bed and sleep.

“Clay?” he said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “Actual
clay
?”

“That's right. River clay. They dig it up right out of the banks of the Ohio.”

Lenny threw his head back like a wolf and laughed. Then he began to sing. “Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream, While above the Heavens in their glory gleam…” He laughed again, softer this time. “The beautiful Ohio,” he said, shaking his head. Then, his voice suddenly quiet, almost a whisper, he added, “Gloria, you're killing me. Don't you know that?”

I got up.

“Where are you going?” Lenny asked.

“I need a drink. I'll be right back.”

Switching on the kitchen light, I saw the crockery bowl on the table, a dishtowel over it and, beside it, the timer, ticking hard and fast like my heart. I opened the cupboard where we kept the liquor and took down a bottle of Evan Williams and poured myself half a tumbler, then filled it with cold water from the tap. I took a couple of long swallows there at the sink, and felt my insides burn.

“Gloria,” Lenny called.

“Just a minute,” I yelled back. I took a long, deep drink, then started back out to tell him it was all over.

Lenny's head was slumped down over his chest and his eyes were closed, so for a second I thought he'd passed out and I could go to sleep in peace. But then he lifted his head and, eyes still closed, said, “Blue Moon.” He pointed to the stereo. “People fell in love dancing to that song.”

I had to say something, but I didn't know what. For weeks I'd been trying to decide what I'd say—I wanted it to be something gentle but firm, affectionate but cool—but I could never concentrate enough to get the words right. My mind always slipped ahead to the morning after, when I'd wake up alone and sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and watching the sparrows play at the feeder outside the window. I saw myself sitting there, the room warm with sunlight, the birds making their quiet music, and I knew I wanted that moment more than anything.

I sat back on the loveseat and took another burning swallow of bourbon.

“Lenny,” I finally said. But then I found I didn't have any other words.

“What?” Lenny turned to look at me. He was chewing on his mustache.

I took another drink. “Nothing,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You were going to say something.”

“I've forgotten,” I said. “It'll come to me later.”

Lenny stood up then, swaying a little. He looked at me a moment, like he was about to say something, but he bit his lip and sat back down.

“Gloria,” he whispered. “Tell me.”

I looked down at my lap. Finally, I said, “I want to have a talk with you.” It was a simple sentence, but after I said it, I was out of breath.

Lenny looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “I'd like us to have a baby,” he said. “I want us to be a family. I want to do all the things families do. I want to push our baby down the aisles of Safeway in a shopping cart. Get Christmas cards made from a photograph. Sit in the barbershop while he gets his hair cut. And every year on his birthday draw a line on the doorjamb to show how much he's grown.” He looked back at me. “After we die, there'll be nothing left of either of us.”

That was the one way Lenny was like Roy—he wanted a baby too. I'd told him time and again that I was too old but he never listened. It wasn't that I didn't want a baby. I'd wanted to have one with Roy, but he had something wrong with him. His sperm count was okay, Dr. Phelan said, but for some reason they moved too slow. Dr. Phelan even removed a varicose vein from his testicle, figuring it was making his sperm too hot to move fast enough. But that didn't do anything either. Every now and then I wonder if he ever got that dropout pregnant. Sometimes I hope he did, and sometimes I don't.

I looked at Lenny, his sad face. “We talked about this before,” I said.

Lenny stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “No, we haven't. Not really. I've talked, but you haven't.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Lenny looked at me. “Just what are you so scared of?”

I started to get up. “Maybe we should talk about this when you're not drunk.”

“I'm not drunk,” he said, taking my arm.

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay, so I'm drunk. What's your excuse?”

“
Please
,” I said, but I wasn't sure what I was begging for.

“Okay,” Lenny said and let go of my arm. “Just sit down. I won't say anything more about a baby.”

I sat down. The stereo was playing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

“Can we turn that thing off?” I said. “Can't we just sit here in quiet?”

Lenny got up and switched it off. Then he turned to face me. “I was hoping,” he said, then closed his eyes and swallowed hard, “I was hoping we'd do some dancing tonight. I was hoping this would be the night. I even bought some champagne and”—he gestured toward the kitchen—“I'm baking bread.”

He looked so sad standing there that I closed my eyes, and for some reason I found myself thinking back to a day years ago when I was still in high school, long before I'd even met Roy. I was sitting in a dark classroom staring at the slides Mr. Moffett had taken that summer in Spain. There were castles on high cliffs, cathedrals, goatherds leading their flocks beside mountain roads, white houses with red tile roofs, markets full of tapestries, sheep's heads, fish, and pots, and dancers in red and black whirling under colored lights—so many amazing and beautiful things. I remembered imagining myself standing on a castle parapet, looking out over hills of olive trees, the wind whipping my hair off my forehead. Someday, I vowed, I'd go there. Even the names Mr. Moffett recited in the darkness made me ache to be there: Salamanca. Jaen. Torremolinos.

I opened my eyes and looked at Lenny. “I don't know what to say to you,” I said. “I really don't.”

“I'm going to get a job,” Lenny said. “Really, I am. I've decided to go into refrigeration. Appliance work. I could take a couple of courses. There're lots of jobs. Small engine repair. Things are breaking down everywhere and I could fix them.”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “That's not what I'm talking about.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took another swallow of the bourbon. “Don't make me say it,” I said.

“Okay,” he answered. “Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about Roy and his little sweetheart, okay? What do you think they're doing right now?”

“Lenny,” I said. “Stop.”

“Do you think maybe they're dancing and drinking champagne and—”

“Please stop,” I said.

“Stop what?” he said, swaying before me. “Breathing?”

“Don't you talk to me like that,” I said, and shook my finger at him. Then I felt foolish, like a schoolteacher scolding a little child.

Lenny hung his head. “Gloria,” he said. Just my name, nothing else.

“It's late,” I started to say.

Lenny looked up then. His face was wet. “Don't leave me,” he said.

The day Roy left, I was already late for work but I went into the kitchen where he was packing and reminded him to take some silverware or some of the beer glasses he liked. He was just piling things into a Jack Daniels box. I remember telling him he should wrap the glasses with some newspaper; that way they wouldn't break. And all the time I'd wanted to say,
Please don't go
.

I said yes. He held me against him, and I said, “Your apron…the flour,” but he said, “It doesn't matter” and kissed me. Then he said, “Let's take the champagne to bed.” I said, “But the bread…” and he said, “Let it keep rising.”