Late Stories (8 page)

“She could be. I wouldn't know.”

“We were told that almost everyone from your camp is supposed to be from Philadelphia.”

“That could be so. I am too. Where are you from?”

“Do you know her name?”

“Sure. Are you asking for it? Because I don't know if I should give it. It might be wrong to. She might not want it handed out. Ask Sid there—the assistant head counselor—the guy in the white tennis shirt. If he thinks it's okay, he'll give it.”

“Nah, I should probably forget it. It might be a nuisance, my asking, and what would be the use?”

“If you say so, pal. She's a helluva looker, I'll grant you that. And good game too. Your part, anyhow.”

“Yeah, I had a good day. You, also. The score wasn't even close, and you got a couple of singles.”

Going back, the camp director sat in the bed of the truck, with a cushion under and behind him. It was windy back there and he said “I have something to say. Can everyone hear me?” They all indicated they could. “I want to be honest. This won't be nice. It was an experiment, going to another camp to play, one I'm not going to repeat. You played lousy softball today. What's all you're practicing get you? You could have beat them. They didn't have a long-ball hitter and the last three innings their pitcher was throwing twice as many balls as strikes. Except you were swinging at all the bad pitches as if they were strikes. Phil did okay. Three cheers for Phil. But the rest of you? I was expecting a victory. Now what am I going to tell the campers in the mess hall tonight? We lost? We screwed up? We got creamed?”

“We did,” the team's captain said, “So I guess you have to. We can take it.”

“No, I want them to feel good and prideful about their camp and waiters and want to come back next summer. I'll put it in words that won't make it sound as bad as it was. That the opposing team—I won't even give out its name—had the home-field advantage and a cheering squad of girls to pump it up. I know; I know. I shouldn't be taking it so hard. Only a game, and so on, but I don't like to lose. Okay, somebody's got to. And even the great Babe himself struck out a thousand and one times in between belting Gargantuan home runs.”

He thought of the girl a lot afterwards, at least the first few years. And then once every third month or so, maybe, or even less: twice a year, right up till the time he met his wife. She was the only person this happened to with him. It wasn't that she was the only girl he ever had a crush on. But for some reason her face and expressions
and blond hair and way she wore it and even what she had on that day—the khaki shorts and a maroon T-shirt with her camp's name on it and leather sandals—stuck in his mind. Well, maybe the same images, once they got there, just repeated themselves over and over. He thinks that's how it usually goes.

His wife, who was eleven years younger than he, was several months pregnant with their first child when he told her about the girl. He'd kept it to himself that long—they'd been together for close to four years—because he thought she might find it a bit peculiar, his recalling for thirty years a girl he never met or talked or wrote to and who only gave him a couple of weak hand claps for having hit a triple and knocking in two runs and tying the score of an inter-camp softball game. And who didn't smile at him once and never looked his way again in the less than two hours she sat in the stands, at least so far as he saw. What prompted him to finally mention her was a nine-by-twelve-inch framed photo of his wife in the living room of her parents' apartment. The photo was taken the summer before she started college, which she did when she was sixteen and a few months. She looked in the photo so much like he remembered the girl looked at around the same age. Long blond hair, shape of her face, round cheeks, sort of almond-shaped eyes. The photo was always there, so lots of the times he saw it he thought of the girl. And one afternoon, as they were walking from her parents' building to the bus stop on Broadway to get to their apartment uptown, he said “You feel okay?” and she said “Sure, why wouldn't I?”

“We could take a cab if this is too much of a trudge for you,” and she said “It's good exercise. And I don't walk enough, which I should.”

“You know the photograph of you with your first cat that's always on the side table to the right of your parents' couch?”

“I look a little dumpy in it, don't I. At least my skin's clear, which
it wasn't always then, and Matilda looks so pretty and slim. I'd just brushed her.”

“You look beautiful in it. According to the photographs your folks have around the place, you were a beautiful baby and a beautiful toddler and a beautiful adolescent and teenager and now you're an exceptionally beautiful woman in every way.”

“What are you getting at?” she said.

“I have to be getting at something? All right; I am. I never told you something. And what I'm about to say is going to be okay. Sometimes when I look at that photo I'm reminded of a very pretty girl I once saw at her summer camp when I was sixteen and she was around the same age. She was very mature looking. Didn't act like the other girls she was with. Nothing loud or exaggerated about her. Quiet; self-contained, or so it seemed. Maybe she was even older than I. Maybe by a year. I never thought of that before. That sure would have stopped anything from happening, if it had ever come to that. Because I never met her—never even approached her, though I wanted to—but I also never forgot her. She looked like you in that photo. The blond hair. Long and light and combed back. The face; shape of it. Even the eyes.”

“So she also had my color eyes? They're fairly unusual, though maybe not for a Jewish blond.”

“That's true. Her camp was Jewish, like mine. But I never got close enough to her to see what color they were. I was talking about their shape. Even her long graceful neck—you know, swan-like, was like yours, and her cheeks. What I'm saying is I have no idea why I never forgot that face and what I described about it and the one glance and little smile she gave me—no, she didn't smile. Not to me, anyway. She did clap at me—a little clap, twice, very fast, from the bleachers she was sitting in with these other girls while she was watching a softball game between the camper waiters of my
camp in New Jersey and hers in Pennsylvania. I'd just hit a triple—a three-base hit—that I could have stretched into a home run if the camp director of my camp, who was coaching at third base, hadn't stopped me. I guess, being fair-minded, she was saying ‘good show' or something. But you're not really interested. And I'm getting the details of that day all mixed up. And why am I telling you it? Maybe telling you is wrong.”

“Why? It's all right. I like hearing about you when you were young. And telling me this could be you saying she set the standard for the type of woman you were physically attracted to later on.”

“It wasn't just physical,” he said. “It was her expressions too. She seemed smart and sweet and poised and serene. Like you are today and probably were at her age. Sixteen; seventeen. And I'd think the standard must already have been set if I was that immediately attracted to her, which never happened like that with a girl before. Though you could be right. I'm not saying you're not. Maybe it did all start with her.”

“Then let's say it's possible she confirmed, or reinforced, the type of woman you were attracted to from when you were even younger than sixteen, but in a big way. You liked blondes. From what you've previously told me of your love life, you always have, though that didn't keep you from also liking brunettes. Would I be wrong in saying that most of the women you've fallen for in your adult life have been blondes?”

“About half; yes.”

“Was she built like me too? You know, from what you can make out from that photograph and the one in my high school twentieth-year reunion book I've shown you, where I'm on the field hockey team.”

“I don't remember,” he said. “The body of a young woman wasn't as important to me then as the body of an older woman
became to me later on. If she had been a lot overweight, that would have been different. But she was lithe; trim. I remember her legs. She was wearing shorts. And a T-shirt, but I remember nothing about her breasts. I wanted to meet her. I thought of ways I could, but never got the chance. She left before the game was over. We lost, by the way. I even fantasized about going over to her during the game when my team was up. Or after the game, in the short time I'd have before the whole team had to get back on this old army truck to return to our camp. And introducing myself and somehow saying, without turning her off, that I had been looking at her and don't have much time to talk and could I write her at her camp and possibly continue the correspondence after the camp season was over? We'd been told that most of the campers and staff in her camp—she was a C.I.T.—”

“What's that again?” she said.

“Counselor in training. Almost everyone there was supposed to come from Philadelphia or somewhere in Pennsylvania.”

“What did you think would come from your letters to each other, if she had agreed to write you? If she lived in Pennsylvania and you were both sixteen—”

“I'd visit her,” he said. “Take a bus or train. It's not that far away, Philadelphia, if that is where she lived. Pittsburgh would have been out. But for her, if it was Philadelphia or a place in Pennsylvania a lot easier to get to than Pittsburgh, to become my girlfriend. And maybe the next summer she'd be a C.I.T. again, or junior counselor, would be more like it, at the same camp, and I'd be a waiter again at mine. It's possible, I might have thought, when I was thinking this girl and I would exchange letters and I'd go to Philadelphia or such to see her and maybe she could come once to New York, that we could coordinate our days off the next summer. That's how far and fast I let my imagination take me. Or I'd try to be one of the two
guest waiters at my camp, which was really what I was shooting for. You made a lot more money that way—no salary but much better tips—waiting on the visiting parents, and more days off.”

By now they had reached the bus shelter on Broadway. The bench inside was filled. He said “Should I ask someone to get up so you can sit?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Standing's good for me too. So what did you end up doing the next summer?”

“I got a job as a busboy at Grossinger's. I told them I was eighteen, and being a big kid, they believed me. And I guess they weren't that choosy for such a job. The summer after that, I was legitimately eighteen and in college, and worked as a waiter and made a bundle.”

“You never went back to your camp?”

“No. I guess I went where the money was and where there was more potential for work.”

“So you didn't even try to be a guest waiter at your camp?”

“I don't remember. Probably not. The busboy job came up and I was told if I did well at it there'd be a good chance for a waiter's job the next summer and also during the Jewish holidays, which was when you really cleaned up.”

“It seems, then, that you and this girl weren't meant to get together,” she said. “I mean, if you truly wanted it to happen, you would have gone back to your camp as a guest waiter, if you could get the job—made, I would think, about as much as you would as a busboy at Grossinger's—and in some way sought out the girl.”

“How? By just going to her camp and looking for her? Or playing on the softball team again against her camp's team, if there was going to be a rematch, and hoping she'd be there? I don't even know if a guest waiter was allowed to play on the camper-waiter's team.”

“Then by trying to get a job at her camp as a guest waiter, if they had them.”

“I never thought of that,” he said. “And it's getting a bit farfetched. Because what were the chances of her returning there? Good? Only so-so? I don't know. And by then she might have had a boyfriend, if she already didn't when I first saw her. And I'd lost some of my interest in her, which would have been natural, or had become in one year more of a realist. Something. Maybe all those. By the way, what I also never told you is that when I first saw you at the party we met at, but before I went over to introduce myself, I actually thought for a few moments you might be her.”

“But you never asked me if I went to a camp in Pennsylvania when I was a girl. And she has to be considerably older than I. Ten years.”

“I thought her looks might have stayed that young. It's possible. Forty could look thirty. But it was just something that flashed through my mind then, or whatever it did, and I quickly knew was impossible. But I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“Sure you should have,” she said. “And long before. It's interesting. And if this girl was instrumental in being the prototype for the women you were later attracted to—”

“Her expressions too. Just by her face she seemed very bright and cheerful and self-contained, as I think I said, and mature. So it wasn't just her good looks that first attracted me to her, as it wasn't with you.”

“I'm glad. And what I started to say was that I'm grateful to her, if she was even remotely responsible for you being drawn to me at that party. You came over, we got to talking, found we had lots in common, started seeing each other, married, and the rest.”

“So it all doesn't sound too silly to you?”

“Not at all.”

He stepped out into the street and saw their bus coming. “There's our bus.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm getting tired.”

“It looks crowded. If all the seats are taken, would it be all right with you if I ask someone to get up and give you his seat?”

“Yes, thanks. I could never ask anyone that myself.”

Talk

H
e hasn't talked to anyone today. I haven't talked to anyone today. It's not that I haven't wanted to. It's not that he hasn't wanted to talk to someone, but he just never had the chance to. He only realized he hasn't talked to anyone today when he sat down on the bench he's sitting on now. In front of the church across the street from his house. I like to sit on it after a long or not-so-long walk around my neighborhood. I usually take the same route. Almost always end up on the same bench. One of the benches in front of the entrance to the church. It's now 6:45. Closer to 6:47. I haven't talked to anyone today since I woke up more than twelve hours ago, rested in bed awhile, exercised in bed awhile, mostly his legs, and then got out of bed and washed up and so on. Did lots of things. Brushed my teeth, brushed my hair, dressed, took my pill, let the cat out, let the cat in, gave the cat food, changed its water, let the cat out again, made myself breakfast, ate, got the newspaper from outside before I made myself breakfast and ate, same things almost every morning soon after waking up, same breakfast, coffee and hot cereal and toast, maybe blueberry jam and butter on the toast every third or fourth day instead of butter and orange marmalade, same newspaper, different news but some of it the same, same cat, same water bowl for the cat, same kibble in a different bowl for the cat, same plate for the cat's wet food and same wet food till the cat finishes the can in about three days. Then I shaved, did some exercises with two ten-pound barbells, one for each hand, curls, he thinks they're
called—the exercises—and so on. No one phoned. The classical music radio station was on when I shaved and exercised and after he was done exercising he turned the radio off. Then he sat at his work table in his bedroom. I could use one of the other two bedrooms in the house to work in or the study his wife used to work in, but I prefer this room, the master bedroom they used to call it to distinguish it from the other bedrooms, the room that was once their bedroom but is now only his since his wife died. She didn't die in that room. She died in one of the other bedrooms. He had a hospital bed set up for her in that room more than a year before she died and she died in that bed. She was unconscious for twelve days in that bed before she died. Do I really want to go into all this again? Just finish it. She was lying on her back in a coma, when she opened her eyes, or her eyes opened on their own, and her head turned to where he was sitting on the right side of the bed and she died. He closed her eyes with his hand. Her eyes struggled to stay open and then, after he closed them a second and third time, they stayed permanently closed. The day after she died I had the hospital bed removed. He bought a new bed for that room a week or two later so his older daughter could sleep in that room again when she visited him. But I was thinking before about my not talking to anyone today. I haven't. He hasn't. Talked to anyone today. No opportunity to, as I said. He could have made the opportunity to, I suppose, but he didn't. I didn't go out of my way to talk to anyone today, he's saying. He likes these kinds of conversations to happen naturally. He'll be in the local food market, for instance—not to bump into people he knows from around the neighborhood or initiate small talk with employees behind the food or checkout counter or with shoppers he doesn't know—but to buy things, mostly food for himself and his cat—and he'll bump into someone he knows. Hi, hello, how are you? And so on. Maybe
with someone whose hand he shakes, back or shoulder he pats, cheek, if it's a woman, he kisses. Someone who most of the time stops his or her shopping to talk to me, and whom I like to talk to too. Am I being clear? He thinks so. Anyway: that didn't happen today. It's happened plenty of times in the almost twenty years he's lived in the house and been going to that market. But I didn't go to that market today. No market, and he rarely sees anyone he knows at any other market. He did, after writing in his bedroom for about three hours, go to the Y to work out. I often see someone I know from the Y in the fitness room, or whatever that room with all the resistance machines, he thinks they are, is called. Fitness center. I should remember that by now. Fitness center. Fitness center. And sometimes he sees two or three people there he only knows from the Y and have a brief conversation with them or just say “Hi” or “Hello” or “How you doing?” to. And he has, in the local market a few times—the one he almost always goes to because it's so close and the prices aren't that much higher than the big chains and they get you out fast because they have lots of working checkout counters for a store its size and just about all the checkout clerks know him—bumped into people he knows only from the Y and chatted with them. Though for the most part these chats are shorter than the ones he might have with the same people in the Y, and one or the other of them will usually say something like “Funny to see you here after seeing you so many times in the Y” or “I almost didn't recognize you out of your gym clothes.” As for the weight room in the Y, which is right next to the fitness center, he has fewer conversations there than he does with people in the fitness center, since there are much fewer people working out in it. They also seem more serious and involved in their workouts. But he's still had a few conversations there when both he and the other person working out took a minute-or-so
break from the weights and were standing close enough to talk to each other. Like one a few days ago. “I always see you with a book. What are you reading now?” this person asked him, or said something like it: a man; very few women work out in the weight room. Someone he'd seen several times before in both rooms but never spoke with or even said “Hi” to but might have smiled or nodded at. He held up the book so the man could see the cover. “
Gilgamesh
?” the man mispronouncing it the same way he once did till his wife corrected him. “Never heard of it. From the cover, it looks like it could be a fantasy or horror novel.” “In a way it sort of is,” I said. “But it's a new or relatively new translation of an epic poem, maybe the oldest literary work, or oldest one found so far. With a long introduction as interesting as the work itself, and with great notes.” “What's it about?” He gave a brief synopsis of it, based on the introduction, since he was only a third of the way into the poem. And then—“This might give you a laugh”—why he bought it. “The oldest work—a classic—and the only one in my family never to have read it? My older daughter, who graduated college eight years ago, read it when she was nine or ten and took a special humanities course in grade school. And I was in a bookshop last week, the Ivy on Falls Road, looking for something to read. I always have to have something to read—at home; if I take a walk and think I'll stop to sit and rest. Even here between sets on the sitdown resistance machines for a minute or the stationary bike if it doesn't have on its TV screen something especially good on the movie channel—and saw it. In the store, this book, and remembered I'd never read it but for many years wanted to. But I've told you more than you probably wanted to hear, and you want to get back to your weights.” “No,” the man said, “it's interesting.
Gilgamesh
. I'll remember,” and we both resumed our workouts. That's how the conversation went, sort of. I know I went on too
long. He often does most days because he gets to talk so little. But today there wasn't anyone he knew at the Y to say even a word to, which was unusual. Most times, someone at the front desk there, after he slides his key through the bar code recorder, or whatever that piece of plastic on his key ring is called, and his name and photo appear on the monitor and an automated voice says “Access granted,” someone behind the desk will look at the monitor and say “Have a good workout, Mr. Seidel,” and he'll say “Thank you.” But the one person behind the desk—usually there are two people there—was folding clean towels for members with the more expensive plan and more elaborate locker rooms, and didn't look up. He went into his locker room. Sometimes there's someone there I know from the Y and we'll talk a little. But the room was empty when I first got there and then after my workout. Sometimes, though this doesn't happen much, he might talk with someone in the shower room after his workout, but the one guy showering there today was someone he knows doesn't want to talk. I've seen him in the locker room and shower and at the front desk checking in dozens of times. Never downstairs in the fitness center or weight room. He seems to only come to the Y to swim. And I never saw him communicate with anyone. I don't even think the people at the front desk say “Have a good day” to him, or if they do, he doesn't answer them. First thing the guy does when he gets to the locker room is put his athletic bag on a bench and go around the room closing every locker that might be even just slightly open and make sure every bench is aligned with the banks of lockers. Then he'll walk around the room again and pick up any trash he sees on the floor—tiny pieces of paper, thread, part of a broken shoelace, for instance—and drop it into a trash can there. Then he'll undress and get into his swimsuit and lock his locker and go to the pool with his towel and in his shower
slippers. I said hello to him a few times, but gave up. He looked right past me as if I hadn't said anything or he hadn't heard. Today I avoided looking his way once I saw who it was. I feel he doesn't want to be looked at either. I could have gone to the small food shop at the Y and ordered a sandwich to go—chicken or tuna fish salad on rye toast with tomato and lettuce and once each a powerhouse and grilled chicken sandwich, which weren't good—and while it was being made by an employee in back, exchanged a few words with the shop's owner about a number of things. The owner just takes the orders and rings them up and serves the food if anyone's sitting at one of the two tables there, which I've never done. The owner likes to talk. A few days ago it was strawberries. He said he grows them in his garden and they're very small this year, he doesn't understand it. I told him my younger daughter put in a number of strawberry plants two years ago, I got nothing but a few tiny ones last year, but this year they're all over the place and big, “What can I say?” And he once told me, when I asked, how to get the shells off hard-boiled eggs without taking any of the white of the egg with it. “Boil them for thirty to forty minutes. Infallible, and perfect for deviled eggs.” But he didn't want to order any kind of sandwich today. He still has in the refrigerator, and it's probably still good but a little soggy, half of the chicken salad wrap he got from him yesterday. What were some of the other opportunities to talk today? And by talking, I mean to someone, a human being, not the cat. He talks a lot to his cat. Actually, it's his younger daughter's, but she lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, the cat likes to run around outside, so he's taking care of it for the time being. “Hey, little guy, want something to eat?” Talk like that. “Want to go outside, Rufus?” “Go on, go on,” when he's half in and half out the door. “I don't want to catch your tail, and you can come back whenever you want.” “It's getting dark, Rufus. Want to
come inside?” “Come inside, Rufus. Don't make me have to chase you.” “You here to help me with the weeding?” Because sometimes when I'm weeding outside, he'll lay down on his stomach beside me and pull a weed out of the ground with his teeth and play with it or try to pull one out of my hand that I just got out of the ground. Also, sometimes when I talk to him it seems he talks back to me with a couple of meows. And when he's at the front door and I let him in, he always meows in a sound he uses no other time as he scoots in or walks past me, as if saying thanks to me for opening the door. He never meows, though, when I open the door to let him out. When he wants to go out he'll stand silently facing the door or stand up on his back paws and scratch the door with his front ones till I let him out. If I don't want him out, he'll walk quietly away from the door after about two minutes. But no other opportunities to talk to someone today? Can't think of any. Usually, during his late-afternoon walks, he'll see at least one person walking his dog and he'll say more than “Hi” or “Good evening” to him. He'll ask the breed of the dog, for instance, and if he asked it the last time but forgot it, he'll say “I forgot what you told me your dog's breed is” or “your dogs' breed is,” since several people in the neighborhood have two dogs of the same breed, and one couple has three, and walk them together. I've also asked this person or couple what the dog was originally bred for. Not that I'm really interested, but it gives me a chance, if it was a day I hadn't talked much, to talk more. “Hunting foxes?” “Herding sheep?” “Going after moles or other burrowing animals like that in holes?” He once joked, and regretted it right after, for the guy didn't seem to find it funny, “Catching Frisbees?” But in his walk today he saw no one he's talked to or just said hello to before. Saw no one, period. Oh, people in cars, and a jogger, but she came up behind him without him hearing her and was past him before he
could even wave. Maybe when he gets home he'll call his daughters and, if they're in, speak to them. Although it doesn't have to be in their homes. With their cell phones, they could be anywhere: walking on the street; having a drink in a bar. He speaks to them almost every night around seven. Seems to be a good time for them. They're done with work for the day, haven't started dinner. They call him or he calls them. But that's the kind of day it's been. Where he hasn't yet said a word to anyone. Not one, and it makes me feel kind of strange or odd. It's true. It does. Both of those. But enough of that. Maybe, really, it's better not to dwell on it. If his wife were alive and still relatively healthy, or just not as sick as she was the last five years of her life, he would have spoken to her before he left the house. That would have been nice. “I'm going out for a walk,” he would have said; “like to join me?” If she didn't, or couldn't because she was still working in her study or something else, then when he got back she might say, as she did a lot, “See anything interesting?” or “Meet anyone on your walk?” Or just “Did you have a good walk?” Or he might volunteer: “I had a good walk. Farther than I usually go. Saw some beautiful and unusual flowers. Our neighbors, especially the church, really take care of their properties. But for the first time in a long time I didn't see anyone else outside except a fleet-footed jogger, who ran past me before I could even say hi to her. And of course people in the occasional passing car, but they don't count.” Or if she were too weak to walk and didn't want to be pushed around the neighborhood in her wheelchair—“People stare; I don't like it”—he'd say “All right, then, if I take a brief walk by myself? And I'll make it quick. I won't stop to talk to anyone.” “Why should I mind?” she said a number of times. “Get out. You need a break. And talk all you want.” “So you'll be okay here alone?” and she always said “I told you. I'll be just fine.” But he shouldn't think of himself as odd