Expensive People (34 page)

Ah, yes, and what else? It was a circus. People were interviewed, men at lunchtime, and housewives, someone from the City Council; a psychiatrist
(de rigueur),
the police commissioner (who was indignant).

Libby was afraid to journey out to Cedar Grove, and Nada argued with her over the phone. “But I'm having guests tonight!” she cried. She slammed down the receiver and sat without speaking for some time. I approached her, but she did not notice me. I wanted to ask her what she was thinking about. Was she afraid of the sniper? But I would protect her from him. Yes, I would protect her. Or was she thinking of something else altogether—of her dinner party or of some man in another city, of another life free from me? Was she thinking of what her life might have been if she hadn't married Father, hadn't given birth to me? I was near enough to embrace her, but I was never near enough to know what she was thinking.

“You shouldn't give that party tonight,” I said. “Mrs. Hofstadter has their house all locked up. She won't let Gustave go outside.”

“Oh, Bebe's crazy.”

“But we could stay home and sit upstairs and read or something. We could watch television—”

“We don't have television,” Nada said.

“Yes we do,” I said, but her gaze had already moved off me. She picked up the phone again and called someone else.

I went out to school. The awful sense of inertia and nausea that I had pushed back for so many days was pressing in on me again.

Nada had her party that night in spite of everything. She did the cooking herself. Could she cook? I don't know. She so loaded up her dishes
with spices and sauces and wine that the essence of the thing was irrelevant anyway. Everyone complimented her just the same. Everyone complimented everyone else no matter what. But that night something was wrong, for Father was very, very late, and they dawdled through cocktails (nine guests, the odd one being Mavis Grisell, who was still in town) and talked about the rumors concerning an enormous million-dollar home in Pools Moran that had no furniture at all and only mattresses in the bedrooms, and they joked about the sniper, and still Father didn't appear, so they went in to dinner. I listened part of the time. I didn't feel well. In fact, I felt very sick, but it was not a familiar sickness. It did not seem to have anything to do with my body.

I dragged myself out to do a little spying, out of a sense of duty more than anything else, and came down to the landing. I could see and smell the dining-room candles, and the dancing flames reminded me of that lovely, mysterious girl on the Bodys' diving board. The guests talked quietly and politely. I had no fear, as they might have had, that the sniper might shoot in upon them. Or could the other sniper show up? Where was Father? Had Father been hit driving home, or was Father himself somewhere oiling his rifle, his tongue between his teeth?

But Father did finally arrive. I heard the front door being thrust open and heard next a quick surprised
oh
from our guests. Father strode into the dining room. I could look right down on him as he passed. He marched to the table and said, “All right, all right, just look! If you want to know what's going on, what she's really like, what she's got in her, just look! Look at this!” And he tore open his rumpled white shirt to display his naked chest (no undershirt!), and there on his hairy, beefy flesh were dozens of red marks.

“Heels, gentlemen! High heels, ladies!” Father cried. That old buffoon wept, prancing around the table with his fake wounds displayed, while everyone sat and stared. Even Nada was totally upstaged. “When a man is down his wife leaps upon him with her high heels, sharp high heels, sharp as daggers! Ice picks! She does a dance on him, yes, she dances on his body, on his corpse, and he has to lie there and take it…”

I don't know how the guests managed to get out of it, how Nada managed to sit there with that small fixed smile of hers. I ran back to my room. I had no stomach for any more of it. Father's drunken bawling went on for a while after the last guest had escaped, and then I
must have fallen asleep. Later that night I woke to silence, except for a dog barking down the street. And what now?

That bare chest reminds me of a snapshot I have here in my desk drawer. I can find it easily enough—there's nothing in the drawer except snapshots and a few notes.

Here it is. A photo of Father taken in Miami, many years ago. He is sitting squat on a beach blanket, under a lollipop umbrella, and that woman beside him must be Nada. She looks quite thin. Yes, this is an old snapshot, dated January 1948. Before my birth! Imagine Father and Nada, before my birth, in the Miami sun, and knowing nothing at all of what is coming: that's why Father is sitting so confidently, a cigar in his fingers, his big broad almost muscular chest posed for the camera, and Nada, dear Nada, is less confident, for she stares through her sunglasses at the camera as if it were a gun. Beside him, my mother looks small. I had never noticed that she was a small person; when I “saw” her in any public sense she was always in high heels. She is wearing a dark bathing suit, her hair is long. It makes me dizzy to think that the world of January 1948 was a world in which I did not even exist, I was not even a tiny seed in that woman's body—imagine me, not having existed! Imagine! I always start to weep, looking at this photograph. I hate my weakness but I can't help it. Because it is like staring up at the light from stars that are no longer there but have passed on in their mysterious orbits or exploded and turned to dust.

The universe is encrusted with the dust of things no longer with us.

Next day I went to school, and then I did an extraordinary thing: I went out to the Main Street of Cedar Grove, which was also the Main Street of the city, and took a bus downtown. Downtown I wandered
around a while in my usual daze and went to see a movie. The movie house was ancient and very large, and its offerings were advertised by shabby posters set out upon the sidewalk. A few bums stood around. I went inside the theater, hoping for a pleasant, cool darkness, but it was an ordinary warm darkness filled with people who did not smell very clean. The first movie was in black and white; don't ask me what it was about. Soldiers, music on the battlefield, shots of airplanes dropping bombs. When someone died I did not know whether to despair or rejoice because I could not remember who were the Americans, who were the enemy. Another movie, in technicolor, dealt with the horrors of a mad doctor's laboratory, secret beneath his Tudor house. One scene showed a woman being nailed inside a barrel, I don't know why; much blood. And yet another movie came on—what a wonderful theater! It was an Italian movie with subtitles but I liked it best, not having to understand the words. Actors in muted shades of gray, silhouetted against cloudy skies, walking about on an island. Hair blew in the wind. Eyes squinted. It occurred to me that Father and I had seen this movie one evening a few light-years ago. But still I did not understand it.

When I came outside the sunlight bothered me. It was late afternoon, and the sun slants in an unpleasant way in our part of the globe at this time of day. I walked squinting past a newsstand and saw a headline that brought my eyes open wide:
SNIPER CONFESSES.
I stood trying to read the story while hands moved in, hurried and impatient, letting dimes fall in the slot and snatching out papers, and finally it seemed to me only right that I buy a paper myself, it was the only honest thing to do.

Then I took the paper out tenderly and unfolded it, and there it was:
SNIPER CONFESSES.
The sniper turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents and his older sister. They were all Baptists and, believe it or not, the sniper was characterized as a “devoutly religious man.” He himself said, “I don't know why I did it. I don't know.” His photograph showed an apologetic little man with wild eyes.

My brain reeled. I waited in a large, loose crowd for a bus, and inside I opened the paper and read feverishly. Yes, yes. But didn't they know he was lying? He had walked into a downtown police station to confess. His mother did not believe his story and refused to see him. His father and sister swore that he had been home when all the shootings
had occurred. A neighbor lady said suspiciously, “He was always real quiet and kept to himself, but there was something funny about him …”

Nada wasn't home when I got there; neither was Father. Libby hadn't turned up for days. Nada was out for cocktails or in bed with someone somewhere, and Father was drinking or maybe not drinking at all, but freshly shaven, spruced up, sparkling and jovial at a board meeting—who could tell? I felt how alone I was in this house and how alone I had always been, whether out running down the lane or jostled about on a city bus or safe at home in my own house.

In Nada's room things were scattered. As usual, the bed was unmade. An odor of powder and ink distracted me from what I was trying to figure out: but yes, there it was—inside her closet lay a suitcase, opened, but with nothing in it. I was not surprised by any of this. It registered upon my mind that the suitcase was there and she had not left yet.

I went down to the basement and hunted up, in a cardboard box no one had bothered to unpack for the last two moves, a pair of Father's old hunting boots. Don't ask me what he was doing with hunting boots. I put these on right over my shoes and the fit was about right. I stomped around, testing them. Our basement was very large and rather damp, divided up into several sections: a kind of apartment, filled with unwanted furniture and various junk, a pool table with a stained top, and lesser rooms filled with things like a freezer, washer and dryer, cases of food in tin cans. I saw no signs of life in the basement. A mist seemed to rise up about me, suggested perhaps by the damp air and a leaking pipe that had sent a rivulet of water across the floor. I went upstairs with the boots still on and had the idea that as I ascended I would be walking up out of the drizzle that surrounded me. But the drizzle was deeper than I imagined.

Now the next thing I did was to peek cautiously into the kitchen. No one was there. I went to get my rifle and returned to the kitchen, which I haven't described for you, but no matter, I am past describing it. I did not see anything as I sat out there. I could have been sitting in a country
cemetery or down in a sewer, beneath a Christmas tree, anywhere— wherever I sat there was the drizzling vacuum. Consider me sitting there with my rifle, a child of eleven, pale, overwrought and yet curiously quiet, much too quiet, and you have penetrated one of the opaque secrets of life: how do these things happen? You ask with chaste dismay how they could have been allowed to happen, and this is the answer—just this simply!

But don't get the impression that I was thinking anything like that. I was not thinking at all. I was in a suspended state some call waiting, when they see it from the outside. I was “waiting” in the way the frog (a statue that was also a sprinkler) on the lawn across the street is “waiting”—that is, I just
was.
I wasn't existing in addition to anything else. And then, when the door did finally open (hours later), I remained in the same state as if I knew it wasn't yet time for me to act. My body has always known what it planned before my brain has caught on.

I heard Nada running up the front stairs. Was anyone with her? For some reason I did not think so. (This turned out to be right.) So I reached for the telephone with my cold steady hand and dialed Gus-tave's number. It never occurred to me that Gustave might not be in. I felt no relief or surprise when he answered, “Hello?” in his cautious voice. Always a shy child, I nevertheless blossomed like a depraved flower in the tension of this moment: you should have heard me talk to poor Gustave! I talked about my mother and father, their fight of the evening before. I talked about my math class. I asked him how he was, had he heard anything more about the sniper? And we chatted casually but aimlessly, the way children do over telephones, Gustave sighing occasionally to indicate that he had better things to do but not really wanting to hang up.

You are going to be skeptical about my timing. But the timing seems clever only because it turned out well. It might not have turned out well, whereupon it would have been bad timing, but, as you'll see, it turned out very well. At a mysterious instant I suddenly cried out to Gustave, in the midst of a conversation about math, “Did you hear that? Somebody shot a gun right nearby!” And I slammed the receiver down. And, losing no time, I ran out the back door with my rifle, heavy and ludicrous in Father's boots, and around the house away from the driveway—which was too open—so that I could inch along between
our evergreens and the wall of the house. Near the front, at the corner, I waited for only a few seconds, and then the front door opened and Nada appeared on the walk with her suitcase. Her car was parked out at the curb and the driver's door was half open. But of this I took little notice, and indeed I hardly took notice of Nada herself, as if she no longer existed for me, except to raise the rifle and fire at her, the barrel of the gun swerving up to bring the telescope to my eye as if some terrible force were sucking it from me. And I didn't need to see what happened because I knew.

At such moments you think of nothing. Nothing. Things come at you—low-hanging branches, doors, and you duck or reach out your hand appropriately and take hold of them or fend them off. They come singly and so you can handle them. I ran back alongside our house, through the dense shrubs, to a spot that had caught my eye earlier: a long bank of shrubs that screened us from our neighbors, or screened our neighbors from us. The soil was dark and rich and moist; lawn men had tilled it just the other day. I stood on the lawn and plunged the barrel of the rifle into the soft soil, on our neighbor's property now, and nosed it in with desperate strength. In the end I had to scoop up dirt with my fingers to cover the gun, and then I had to pat and smooth everything over, but finally it was hidden, and then, still without thinking, I ran back to the house and sprinted into the kitchen where the telephone was ringing.