Time Travail (37 page)

“Last week, you mean? Too much to do over at
Beth’s.”

“Not this house.”

“Beth’s house?”

“The other house.”

“Which other house?”

“The house before her’s. Before this one. Why
didn’t you come? You told my mother. You would.”

I’d been prepared for it from the moment he’d
begun asking those questions down in the cellar about the old days
and then that questionnaire on her, one thousand blank sheets
inviting me to talk about it. I said I accepted a certain very
indirect responsibility for what happened that night forty years
ago even though I thought it would have happened anyhow some other
night if not that night: she’d already tried, remember her wrists
and did he really think she’d fainted on the edge of the subway
platform that day? It’s what I’d said to his mother a few days
later, I told him. She’d accepted the explanation. At least she had
nine years later. She’d even invited me over for dinner when we met
at the funeral.

“You didn’t go to her. Funeral.”

“Aunt Ruth’s funeral. You weren’t there. She
used to bake custard for you. You weren’t at the other funeral
either. Your mother told me that.”

“Why did you say. You’d come? Why didn’t you
come? I don’t mean to. Her funeral.”

“I was with a girl, I seem to remember.”

“What girl?”

“A girl. Who remembers a girl that long ago?
That was a million years ago. It’s late. We’re leaving tomorrow,
first thing in the morning. See you in two weeks.”

But it was Beth who left first thing in the
morning, by herself. That evening, she told me, her brother-in-law
had rung up. Her sister Martha had been hospitalized. So the
destination wasn’t Maine for two anymore but Phoenix, Arizona for
one. I wanted to go with her anyhow but she said it wasn’t
possible. She said she’d phone me every day.

As she packed her things I said, “You can’t
leave me here,” as to heartless desertion and she took that too for
lover’s hyperbole. She promised to phone faithfully every evening.
She also said that if it turned out that Martha wasn’t too bad
she’d try to come back as soon as possible. She cried. I tried to
tell her that maybe it wasn’t as serious as she thought.

Before she left she gave me instructions
concerning her houseplants and goldfish. A small sprinkle from this
yellow can for Oscar, once a day. Two waterings a day for the
potted hydrangeas, one for the others. I said, no problem. She
looked at me for a second and then wrote it down, lots of words
underlined three times. I felt a little offended at her lack of
confidence, handed the instructions back and said she could trust
me, I wouldn’t forget. She gave me the keys to her house.

After having made all that fuss about those
two weeks I didn’t rush over and tell Harvey it was all off. I’d
have to eventually of course, if only to get paid for the canceled
vacation, but didn’t feel like doing it that evening. Early next
morning I drove her to the airport. It was no social affair she was
going to but she had a new hairdo and a new low-cut dress, also
lipstick and bluish eyelids. She was hard to recognize. She refused
to let me see her off. She said it would give her the blues. When I
asked for her sister’s phone number she said she’d ring me every
day. If anyone else phoned I should say I was the neighbor watering
her plants. I should say I didn’t know when she’d be back.

After I dropped her off I drove to New York
to kill time. I shopped around for her birthday gift, leisurely, as
though it were a lifetime activity without deadline and fed
squirrels in Central Park. I didn’t want to go back to Forest Hill
and sleep alone in that house. I didn’t want to sleep in the other
house either. But I couldn’t sleep on a park bench.

I came back at half-past ten in the evening
and parked my car a long way from the house. I sneaked in shadow to
the door like a burglar. When I tried to unlock the door I found it
was already unlocked. I had the crazy joyous idea that Beth’s
sister had rallied and that somehow she’d returned and that we’d be
going to that beach after all. She was in bed waiting for me,
reading. The thought was protection as I advanced into the dark
living room.

I could see the faint glow of light from her
bedroom, reflected by the ceiling above the stairs. I called her
name as I went up. The light wasn’t coming from the bedroom but
from the guestroom. I groped into the dark bedroom and approached
the bed and got it all at once: that smell, those powerful naked
arms and that sleepy voice, “Harvey, honey, come on.”

I broke loose and ran into the guestroom. I
saw him vague on the other side of the gauzy curtains. He was
leaning out of the open window. He had a compass and a folding
yellow yardstick in one hand and seemed to be measuring the night
with it. The big faded blueprint was unfolded on the windowsill. It
rustled in sudden wind like dead leaves. The curtains billowed and
the door slammed shut behind me.

“Get out,” he said, not turning around, in
the voice he used for Hanna.

“Like hell.”

He turned around slowly and peered at me.

“You’re on vacation,” he said definitively,
dismissing my image as something unreal. He turned back to his
measurements. I must have looked like a ghost to him as he did to
me through the gauzy curtain.

“You didn’t waste time,” I said. “Get
out.”

He scribbled on the blueprint. After a while:
“This isn’t. Your house.”

“The owner entrusted me with the key. So
out.”

He went on measuring with his back to me.
After a while:

“I’ll pay.”

“Out. Hanna too.”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“She said no. I told you that.”

“Fifty thousand dollars. For you.”

“You don’t dispose of other peoples’ property
like that. Don’t make me throw you out.”

He turned around, stared at me and passed
unsteadily through the veil of the curtain. He leaned against the
wall a few inches to the left of the window. Now he slowly let
himself down until he was in a sitting position, gaunt knees drawn
up. He still had the yellow yardstick in one hand, the compass in
the other. The curtains billowed white against the black rectangle
of the night. The blueprint on the sill went on rustling. His eyes
were closed but he talked, at great expense.

“It’s not property of hers. I want. She won’t
know. About it. How can she. Know about it? What I want she doesn’t
know. She has. It’s not even hers. Three days only. The house’ll.
Be just as. It was. Everything as it was. Except your
bank-account.”

“Not that again. You already owe me $14,220
back-salary.”

“Math wizard,” he whispered. “You’d get. That
too. The back pay. Right away. I won’t be needing you. Anymore
after this. You’ll get the fifty thousand. Plus the back pay. And
listen. All the salary to come. To October. How much is that? The
salary to come.” He was like a teacher mercilessly quizzing a dull
pupil.

“Nineteen thousand two hundred and seventy
dollars.”

“Rounding off. You left out. Thirty-five
cents. You’ll get that too. Every penny. Like on Friday. Plus the
fifty thousand. How much. Is that?”

I wasn’t going to answer. Anyhow he’d already
forgotten the back-salary. With the back-salary plus the salary to
October plus the fifty thousand it totaled up to $84,000.30. You
didn’t have to be a math wizard to figure that out.

Not just all that money, he said. As a bonus
he’d let me visit her once she was in the box. It wouldn’t be the
first time. This time a social visit in the living room with
himself and his mother.

Stop, he warned as I moved toward him. He
struggled to his feet. This was the old space, he said, nineteen
inches, all along the wall, the space of the other house, his space
to stand in and nobody could make him leave. I took another step
toward him. He retreated diagonally toward the window and said no,
don’t come any closer, I was trespassing on his space. This isn’t
your house, he said. Nothing here is. The space here belongs to me.
Where I’m standing, nineteen inches into this room. If you trespass
again. You bastard I’ll kill you. Have Hanna kill you. Don’t come
any closer.

But if I was stepping forward now it wasn’t
to intimidate him into leaving the house but to grab him because he
was retreating into what was supposedly the continuation of his
space but it was the blackness beyond the open window he was
backing into, partly shrouded by the curtain. Watch out for the
window, I yelled and then grabbed his wrists hard. He was trying to
yell himself: Hanna, Hanna, Hanna. It was the first time I’d ever
heard him call her in a voice of imploration. How could she
possibly hear his hoarse whisper at that distance?

But then I smelled her and my neck was locked
in the crook of her arm and I let go of his wrists.

“Tried to kill me, Hanna. Push me out of the
window. And trespass. Don’t strangle him. Yet. Promise you won’t.
Trespass. And she’ll let you. Go. Promise?”

“Lunatic.” I brought it up distorted past the
vise of her arm. Her arm tightened.

“Promise?”

“Maniac.” Tightened more, but she knew better
than anyone else they were true, the definitions she was trying to
choke off.

If I didn’t promise, she’d snap my
neck-vertebras like a rat, he wheezed jubilantly.

“I … promise,” I wheezed as her arm tightened
even more. My voice was like his now, a wheeze.

“Promise what?” His voice sounded more
bewildered than menacing.

He’d forgotten. I’d forgotten too. Old
men.

“I … promise anything … you like.”

Promise I’d never trespass again, he said
triumphantly as though it had suddenly come back to him why we were
fighting.

I promised I’d never trespass on his space
again. Hanna let me go. But I knew I wasn’t free. They’d sequester
me here, tie me to a chair for four days, while the sensor lenses
worked away and he stored her up exclusively.

At that moment the phone rang.

Before Hanna could head me off I lunged for
it and implored: Beth, Beth, as though calling for help, as Harvey
had done with Hanna a minute before. I held up my hand in warning
for Hanna not to move toward me and stepped back with the phone and
Beth’s alarmed voice in it: what was the matter? what had
happened?

“You, Beth, your voice, I’m so happy to hear
your voice, Beth, you have no idea.”

Why was I yelling? her distant voice wanted
to know. Why had I yelled ‘Beth! Beth!’ without knowing who it was?
How could I be sure who it was? Suppose it had been someone else?
She’d told me not to do that. A neighbor wouldn’t have done that.
Remember, I was the neighbor who watered her plants. Had I done
that? The plants? Was I sure everything was all right?

I switched the speaker on so that they could
hear her answer to the question I was going to ask her. I said I’d
watered her plants, the hydrangeas twice, and fed Oscar from the
yellow box, and that everything was all right except that, coming
back an hour ago, I’d seen the police investigating a house in the
neighborhood that had been broken into and I’d thought: what would
I do if it happened here and I saw a burglar or two burglars in the
house, what would I do, Beth?

You’d run out and call the police, naturally.
What a funny question. You sound funny. Was everything really all
right?

I switched the speaker off and assured her
that everything was fine. How about her? When she said everything
was okay, not sounding that way though, I said that if everything
was okay then she should fly back tomorrow and we’d leave for Maine
right away.

She said that no, everything wasn’t okay,
everything was terrible actually. She couldn’t leave Martha. She
was calling from the hospital and would have to hang up now.
Somebody else wanted to phone.

I asked her to give me her home number.

Her distant voice said that she was at the
hospital most of the time. She was scared of getting calls when she
was at Martha’s. It might be the hospital. She’d call me every day
like she’d promised.

But suppose somebody called here for
something urgent? Or an emergency came up? Like burglars breaking
in. Or suppose I had a heart attack. She’d want to know that,
wouldn’t she?

I was hiding something, her voice said. Was
something wrong with my heart?

I assured her that everything was under
control here including my heart except when I thought of her. That
was as far as I dared go with love talk with those two in the room
glowering at me. From her end, though, she could have been a little
more loving, it seemed to me. It must have been the hospital
atmosphere.

I kept at it until finally she agreed to give
me her sister’s home number. She said that it had to be for a real
emergency. I burrowed in my pocket for a scrap of paper and came up
only with a dollar-bill. I scribbled the number in the soiled
margin and whispered that I loved her.

She said she loved me too. I shouldn’t invite
that Hanna over.

A click and buzz in my ear.

Cunning, I didn’t hang up immediately. I
stared with horrified eyes at the dark window behind them. When
they both looked that way I dodged and ran past Hanna then down the
stairs and out of the house. In the moonlight I ran to the back of
the house and the window.

Harvey stood above me, framed, staring
moonward. He was still looking for whatever I’d pretended to have
seen in the night. I called out that if they weren’t out of the
house in five minutes I’d phone the cops. Beth Anderson, who was
the owner of the house, every square inch of it, said I should do
that, they’d heard. I had to repeat it much louder before he looked
away from the moon and down at me. Then I ran out into the
street.

From the safe end of the street I saw them
leaving the house. Harvey was leaning on her. He was holding the
compass, the blueprint and the yardstick.