Community Service (3 page)

Unspoken communication was
key—it might help her a lot. At first she thought of music. She
could just have things playing, soft, romantic,
suggestive
things, when he was
around. Her mind wasn’t good at that sort of thing, song titles,
the names of bands, but she could at least think on it. This was
her first real opportunity in quite some time.

Scent now. That would bear some
thinking about. Food, yes, attention to the gentleman—that was very
much a yes. She could do all of that…she would give the man a beer
or two on a really hot day…that might help to break the
ice.

What a hopeful creature she was, or so
she thought in a moment of disgust.

It was never going to happen, was
it?

By the time Friday showed up, she was
firmly reminding herself to check out this Salvatore Doyle
character. Her clerk said something about the Parolee Employment
Assignment desk, but it didn’t ring a bell and it was all very
vague. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard of this Doyle fellow
somewhere, but in the end a harried Marion forgot all about it. It
was after five when she remembered and by then it was too late to
make the call.

When Saturday morning rolled around,
this time cloudy and overcast, she was still lying abed when the
front doorbell rang.

With a start, she sat bolt upright,
hand up to her throat and heart beating wildly.

The bell rang again.

It was funny how things worked
sometimes.

She’d just been having the most warm
and fuzzy dream about Mister Albert Wilson.

***

Since it was drizzling and fairly cold
for late May, Albert obviously couldn’t do much in the garden, she
told him.

She sat in the wing-chair and he
stood, hands swinging loosely at his sides, at the top of the two
steps that led into her sunken living room. She hadn’t even washed
the crust out of her eyes yet.

“
Would you like some
coffee, Albert?” She pursed her lips, getting up.

“
Of course you would.” She
indicated he should follow.

Leading him into the kitchen, she sat
him down at her breakfast alcove, and bustled about with the cups,
the coffeemaker, and the cream and sugar. They would needs
spoons.

“
You seem very quiet this
morning.”

“
Well, I mean—” He
chuckled in self-deprecating manner.

He cleared his throat.

Marion had hastily donned an old
T-shirt of Hank’s, left behind when he abandoned ship.

Under that was a fairly substantial
hot pink bikini bottom and she was also barefoot for now. He did
look at her feet from time to time, in a way his eyes had no
escape, and she was always finding things to say or questions to
ask. She wasn’t wearing a bra but Mister Wilson wasn’t ogling her
too badly and she was all right with the normal male visual
responses. She’d seen a few over the years. His eyes were nice when
he turned them her way.

Question: Why in the hell am I so
attracted to this man?

Answer: Propinquity. He was the only
one around. The only thing she could see, the only thing there was
to look at around here…unwelcome answers, every one.

It all sounded so
flimsy.

With the addition of a leather thong
around her left wrist, and a handful of Goth rings on her fingers,
it was surefire way to make old Albert think of her in some other
terms, rather than Judge Judy or whatever.

She was a person too, and showing him
a little intimacy—a little vulnerability. That’s what she told
herself.

“
There we go.” She brought
everything over on a tray.

She served him first, and then
herself. She nipped to the bathroom and quickly washed her face,
not taking too much time in there. When she came back he was
looking a little lost, perhaps even a little sad.

She sat across from him.

“
So what’s up for today,
Ma’am?” His big dark eyes regarded her, and then tore themselves
away.

“
Two things, and maybe
even three.” She sipped the scalding liquid carefully, the brain
fog only now beginning to fade. “One, we can clean out the garage
and throw out a lot of old junk. Two, depending on how much time we
have, we can make a start on the shed, or maybe the basement. I
don’t really care which.”

Albert, still uneasy with the
relationship, felt compelled to take a strawberry Danish, and bite
into it deeply. He just needed a moment to think, but that shirt
was terribly magnetic on the eyes.

He considered his words.

“
And three?”

“
Please call me Marion.”
She sipped again, not taking her eyes off his face.

Hmn. The man really could blush.
Interesting.

Without even looking at her, he just
gave an exaggerated nod and kept on eating that Danish.

If he dared to look, he might even see
she that she was blushing too.

Act Two

Piddling Along in
traffic

Marion was piddling along in a long
traffic queue, patiently waiting for her interchange, a mile or so
up on the right, wondering if there was an accident up ahead. But
likely not, it’s just that it was always this way on a
Friday.

It was the weekend again, much more
tolerable now that she had Albert to look forward to, and yet that
situation could not go on forever. She’d even considered calling
somebody somewhere and asking for a replacement for him.

Get me some stinking old
wino, please. I don’t care if he can mow a lawn or not.

It might get Albert out of her life
and out of her restless mind. It seemed unfair to either one of
them, or so she had decided. He really hadn’t done anything wrong.
No, it was her that had the problem.

She had a hunch it would feel dreadful
and that it would just backfire anyway. This would prey on her mind
for the foreseeable future…

She accepted the fact the man had a
bad back and his community service required light duties. She’d had
quite some time to observe him now. He really didn’t impress her as
a shirker. While never working hard, he’d cracked a sweat when the
situation called or it, and yet he was always careful not to
inflame old injuries.

He had also gotten a lot done. As
spring wore into summer, all of her perennials were up, in full
bloom, and all the shrubs were fully in leaf, and the bedding
plants that she had picked out and they had planted together,
Marion getting down on hands and knees beside him, were taking just
fine.

Marion was enjoying her
garden again, taking pride in the simple accomplishment and getting
her hands dirty in the process. Her legs were tanning up nicely,
and she had a bit of colour in her cheeks that she hadn’t seen much
of in recent years. She had a glint in her eye when she looked in
the mirror now, a guilty glint perhaps, but it was
there
and she was going
to make sure it didn’t go away again anytime soon.

She even started to think of men other
than Albert, and she even began masturbating again.

Her sex life had improved, compared to
the way it had been before, when she had to sort of remind herself,
sometimes as much as two or three weeks apart it had been
getting…but of course in order to turn someone else on, you had to
be able to turn yourself on.

You had to be able to think and
respond in those terms, and she had been in the habit of
self-denial, a kind of remorseless self-sacrifice on the altar of
respectability.

She had been hiding from
herself.

What, was she thinking of running for
Congress or something?

Yeesh.

That was never in the program. Her
life was not a Norah Roberts novel.

That whole notion, entertained from
time to time and not just by her, but some real, die-hard (or
blow-hard) political types, flattering intellectually as it was,
was just sublimation for something else, pure and simple

Oh, she had her own
self
figured out by this
time, and pitied those who didn’t.

Albert had been sick the week before.
She had definitely found herself at a loose end, with nothing to do
and no one to really talk to; except her sister in Rhode Island.
She’d even tried calling, but Peg was out and her husband Don, whom
Marion had met at the wedding and once or twice since, wasn’t in a
talkative mood. That wasn’t much good.

That day, Marion found
herself in some zombie-like state. She recognized herself, halfway
across town, on some impulsive shopping trip, and going into a
lingerie store, one of the classier ones, and buying an armload of
frilly things. Some of which were innocent and some not so
innocent, thinking of
him
all the while.

Argh.

She remembered being so
grateful, coming out the door, that the sales clerk, about
twenty-five years her junior, didn’t ask if it was her
fucking
anniversary
or
somebody’s birthday
or something.

So it went on, from weekend to
weekend. Albert would show up, and she’d make him a cup of coffee,
and then they would go out in the yard. He had treats, pastries or
cake, heavy on the icing, at ten o’clock. She always had something
ready for him. She was tempted to offer him leftovers in a
Tupperware container. Marion knew so little of his circumstances.
She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to ask certain
questions.

He was apparently single, but she
couldn’t be certain without obvious prying…what a pretty pickle she
was in.

She became less shy. Rather than
retreat back into the house and drool from behind a crack in the
curtains, she had helped him dig up a small vegetable garden, much
neglected since Hank left four…no, five years ago now. Five and a
half to be exact. Slowly she was coming out of her shell with
Albert, painfully slowly as it was. She enjoyed supervising him as
he worked, and then he would pass the time with small talk and
gentle humour.

Albert took it all in stride, and when
she could no longer help herself, Marion would go in the house and
take a shower, with the window open, humming or singing to herself,
in the full knowledge that he was just on the other side of that
wall, planting a shrub or edging the lawn or hosing down the
driveway.

She was also aware of the
passage of time. She only had
so much of
it,
and she sensed that Albert thought
there was some huge social gulf between them. If only the man would
make a move.

All he had to do was ask.

Of course, he was desperately poor.
What in the hell did she expect, anyways?

All of this was madness, and yet it
wouldn’t go away.

Marion found herself going back over
the weekends and counting up the man-hours in her head.

One of them had better make a move,
and pretty damn soon, otherwise it just wasn’t going to
happen.

However it all turned out, she was
kind of grateful to Albert, for reminding her of something very
important. It looked to be turning out all too badly, in other
words much ado about nothing.

She was a woman,
and
Woman,
with a
capital ‘W,’ was a sexual being by her very definition.

What a terribly frustrating state of
being it could be sometimes.

More than anything she dreamed of
being held in those strong arms, looking into those warm brown eyes
and feeling safe. Feeling wanted—desperately needing to feel like
someone really needed you.

Marion wanted so desperately for
someone to love her, and it was only now that the true cost of her
professional success was brought home.

Was that the real reason she and Hank
had problems?

She found she no longer cared, but it
was certainly a possible factor.

She was a desirable commodity for a
certain segment of the male population, and the one man she really
liked, for reasons she herself could not fathom, seemed blind to
her.

To all others, she would
be perhaps desirable but unapproachable. Worse, she would be an
asset, a trophy, an
accoutrement.
She wasn’t interested in the role.

A terrible kind of frustration was
building inside of her, and she had no outlet.

Deep in the gut was the knowledge that
this could quickly turn to self-hatred, and yet there didn’t seem
to be much she could do about it.

It was another ten or twelve minutes
to get home from here, always with that thought in the back of your
mind that the house would be cold and dark and you didn’t have a
friend or even the prospect of a friend in the world and that a
girl really was on her own sometimes.

Your thoughts just wouldn’t leave you
alone sometimes.