Where I'm Calling From (22 page)

“What time is it?” she screamed. “I’ve overslept! Jesus, oh my God! You’ve let me oversleep, goddamn you!”

She was wild. She stood in the doorway with her clothes on. She could have been fixing to go to work.

But there was no sample case, no vitamins. She was having a bad dream, is all. She began shaking her head from side to side.

I couldn’t take any more tonight. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m looking for something,” I said. I knocked some stuff out of the medicine chest. Things rolled into the sink. “Where’s the aspirin?” I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn’t care. Things kept falling.

After a lot of talking—what his wife, Inez, called assessment—Lloyd moved out of the house and into his own place. He had two rooms and a bath on the top floor of a three-story house. Inside the rooms, the roof slanted down sharply. If he walked around, he had to duck his head. He had to stoop to look from his windows and be careful getting in and out of bed. There were two keys. One key let him into the house itself. Then he climbed some stairs that passed through the house to a landing. He went up another flight of stairs to the door of his room and used the other key on that lock.

Once, when he was coming back to his place in the afternoon, carrying a sack with three bottles of Andre champagne and some lunch meat, he stopped on the landing and looked into his landlady’s living room. He saw the old woman lying on her back on the carpet. She seemed to be asleep. Then it occurred to him she might be dead. But the TV was going, so he chose to think she was asleep. He didn’t know what to make of it. He moved the sack from one arm to the other. It was then that the woman gave a little cough, brought her hand to her side, and went back to being quiet and still again. Lloyd continued on up the stairs and unlocked his door. Later that day, toward evening, as he looked from his kitchen window, he saw the old woman down in the yard, wearing a straw hat and holding her hand against her side. She was using a little watering can on some pansies.

In his kitchen, he had a combination refrigerator and stove. The refrigerator and stove was a tiny affair wedged into a space between the sink and the wall. He had to bend over, almost get down on his knees, to get anything out of the refrigerator. But it was all right because he didn’t keep much in there, anyway—except fruit juice, lunch meat, and champagne. The stove had two burners. Now and then he heated water in a saucepan and made instant coffee. But some days he didn’t drink any coffee. He forgot, or else he just didn’t feel like coffee. One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’d been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up that morning. At first, he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what?

In his furnished rooms, he also had a dinette set, a little sofa, an old easy chair, and a TV set that stood on a coffee table. He wasn’t paying the electricity here, it wasn’t even his TV, so sometimes he left the set on all day and all night. But he kept the volume down unless he saw there was something he wanted to watch. He did not have a telephone, which was fine with him. He didn’t want a telephone. There was a bedroom with a double bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, a bathroom.

The one time Inez came to visit, it was eleven o’clock in the morning. He’d been in his new place for two weeks, and he’d been wondering if she were going to drop by. But he was trying to do something about his drinking, too, so he was glad to be alone. He’d made that much clear— being alone was the thing he needed most. The day she came, he was on the sofa, in his pajamas, hitting his fist against the right side of his head. Just before he could hit himself again, he heard voices downstairs on the landing. He could make out his wife’s voice. The sound was like the murmur of voices from a faraway crowd, but he knew it was Inez and somehow knew the visit was an important one. He gave his head another jolt with his fist, then got to his feet.

He’d awakened that morning and found that his ear had stopped up with wax. He couldn’t hear anything clearly, and he seemed to have lost his sense of balance, his equilibrium, in the process. For the last hour, he’d been on the sofa, working frustratedly on his ear, now and again slamming his head with his fist. Once in a while he’d massage the gristly underpart of his ear, or else tug at his lobe. Then he’d dig furiously in his ear with his little ringer and open his mouth, simulating yawns. But he’d tried everything he could think of, and he was nearing the end of his rope. He could hear the voices below break off their murmuring. He pounded his head a good one and finished the glass of champagne. He turned off the TV and carried the glass to the sink. He picked up the open bottle of champagne from the drainboard and took it into the bathroom, where he put it behind the stool. Then he went to answer the door. “Hi, Lloyd,” Inez said. She didn’t smile. She stood in the doorway in a bright spring outfit. He hadn’t seen these clothes before. She was holding a canvas handbag that had sunflowers stitched onto its sides. He hadn’t seen the handbag before, either.

“I didn’t think you heard me,” she said. “I thought you might be gone or something. But the woman downstairs—what’s her name? Mrs. Matthews—she thought you were up here.”

“I heard you,” Lloyd said. “But just barely.” He hitched his pajamas and ran a hand through his hair.

“Actually, I’m in one hell of a shape. Come on in.”

“It’s eleven o’clock,” she said. She came inside and shut the door behind her. She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she hadn’t.

“I know what time it is,” he said. “I’ve been up for a long time. I’ve been up since eight. I watched part of the Today show. But just now I’m about to go crazy with something. My ear’s plugged up. You remember that other time it happened? We were living in that place near the Chinese takeout joint.

Where the kids found that bulldog dragging its chain? I had to go to the doctor then and have my ears flushed out. I know you remember. You drove me and we had to wait a long time. Well, it’s like that now. I mean it’s that bad. Only I can’t go to a doctor this morning. I don’t have a doctor for one thing. I’m about to go nuts, Inez. I feel like I want to cut my head off or something.”

He sat down at one end of the sofa, and she sat down at the other end. But it was a small sofa, and they were still sitting close to each other. They were so close he could have put out his hand and touched her knee. But he didn’t. She glanced around the room and then fixed her eyes on him again. He knew he hadn’t shaved and that his hair stood up. But she was his wife, and she knew everything there was to know about him.

“What have you tried?” she said. She looked in her purse and brought up a cigarette. “I mean, what have you done for it so far?”

“What’d you say?” He turned the left side of his head to her. “Inez, I swear, I’m not exaggerating. This thing is driving me crazy. When I talk, I feel like I’m talking inside a barrel. My head rumbles. And I can’t hear good, either. When you talk, it sounds like you’re talking through a lead pipe.”

“Do you have any Q-tips, or else Wesson oil?” Inez said.

“Honey, this is serious,” he said. “I don’t have any Q-tips or Wesson oil. Are you kidding?”

“If we had some Wesson oil, I could heat it and put some of that in your ear. My mother used to do that,” she said. “It might soften things up in there.”

He shook his head. His head felt full and like it was awash with fluid. It felt like it had when he used to swim near the bottom of the municipal pool and come up with his ears filled with water. But back then it’d been easy to clear the water out. All he had to do was fill his lungs with air, close his mouth, and clamp down on his nose. Then he’d blow out his cheeks and force air into his head. His ears would pop, and for a few seconds he’d have the pleasant sensation of water running out of his head and dripping onto his shoulders. Then he’d heave himself out of the pool.

Inez finished her cigarette and put it out. “Lloyd, we have things to talk about. But I guess we’ll have to take things one at a time. Go sit in the chair. Not that chair, the chair in the kitchen! So we can have some light on the situation.”

He whacked his head once more. Then he went over to sit on a dinette chair. She moved over and stood behind him. She touched his hair with her fingers. Then she moved the hair away from his ears. He reached for her hand, but she drew it away.

“Which ear did you say it was?” she said.

“The right ear,” he said. “The right one.”

“First,” she said, “you have to sit here and not move. I’ll find a hairpin and some tissue paper. I’ll try to get in there with that. Maybe it’ll do the trick.”

He was alarmed at the prospect of her putting a hairpin inside his ear. He said something to that effect.

“What?” she said. “Christ, I can’t hear you, either. Maybe this is catching.”

“When I was a kid, in school,” Lloyd said, “we had this health teacher. She was like a nurse, too. She said we should never put anything smaller than an elbow into our ear.” He vaguely remembered a wall chart showing a massive diagram of the ear, along with an intricate system of canals, passageways, and walls.

“Well, your nurse was never faced with this exact problem,” Inez said. “Anyway, we need to try something. We’ll try this first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s life, isn’t it?”

“Does that have a hidden meaning or something?” Lloyd said.

“It means just what I said. But you’re free to think as you please. I mean, it’s a free country,” she said.

“Now, let me get fixed up with what I need. You just sit there.”

She went through her purse, but she didn’t find what she was looking for. Finally, she emptied the purse out onto the sofa. “No hairpins,” she said. “Damn.” But it was as if she were saying the words from another room. In a way, it was almost as if he’d imagined her saying them. There’d been a time, long ago, when they used to feel they had ESP when it came to what the other one was thinking. They could finish sentences that the other had started.

She picked up some nail clippers, worked for a minute, and then he saw the device separate in her fingers and part of it swing away from the other part. A nail file protruded from the clippers. It looked to him as if she were holding a small dagger.

“You’re going to put that in my ear?” he said.

“Maybe you have a better idea,” she said. “It’s this, or else I don’t know what. Maybe you have a pencil?

You want me to use that? Or maybe you have a screwdriver around,” she said and laughed. “Don’t worry. Listen, Lloyd, I won’t hurt you. I said I’d be careful. I’ll wrap some tissue around the end of this.

It’ll be all right. I’ll be careful, like I said. You just stay where you are, and I’ll get some tissue for this.

I’ll make a swab.”

She went into the bathroom. She was gone for a time. He stayed where he was on the dinette chair. He began thinking of things he ought to say to her. He wanted to tell her he was limiting himself to champagne and champagne only. He wanted to tell her he was tapering off the champagne, too. It was only a matter of time now. But when she came back into the room, he couldn’t say anything. He didn’t know where to start. But she didn’t look at him, anyway. She fished a cigarette from the heap of things she’d emptied onto the sofa cushion. She lit the cigarette with her lighter and went to stand by the window that faced onto the street. She said something, but he couldn’t make out the words. When she stopped talking, he didn’t ask her what it was she’d said. Whatever it was, he knew he didn’t want her to say it again. She put out the cigarette. But she went on standing at the window, leaning forward, the slope of the roof just inches from her head.

“Inez,” he said.

She turned and came over to him. He could see tissue on the point of the nail file.

“Turn your head to the side and keep it that way,” she said. “That’s right. Sit still now and don’t move.

Don’t move,” she said again.

“Be careful,” he said. “For Christ’s sake.”

She didn’t answer him.

“Please, please,” he said. Then he didn’t say any more. He was afraid. He closed his eyes and held his breath as he felt the nail file turn past the inner part of his ear and begin its probe. He was sure his heart would stop beating. Then she went a little farther and began turning the blade back and forth, working at whatever it was in there. Inside his ear, he heard a squeaking sound.

“Ouch!” he said.

“Did I hurt you?” She took the nail file out of his ear and moved back a step. “Does anything feel different, Lloyd?”

He brought his hands up to his ears and lowered his head.

“It’s just the same,” he said.

She looked at him and bit her lips.

“Let me go to the bathroom,” he said. “Before we go any farther, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Go ahead,” Inez said. “I think I’ll go downstairs and see if your landlady has any Wesson oil, or anything like that. She might even have some Q-tips. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. Of asking her.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll go to the bathroom.”

She stopped at the door and looked at him, and then she opened the door and went out. He crossed the living room, went into his bedroom, and opened the bathroom door. He reached down behind the stool and brought up the bottle of champagne. He took a long drink. It was warm but it went right down. He took some more. In the beginning, he’d really thought he could continue drinking if he limited himself to champagne. But in no time he found he was drinking three or four bottles a day. He knew he’d have to deal with this pretty soon. But first, he’d have to get his hearing back. One thing at a time, just like she’d said. He finished off the rest of the champagne and put the empty bottle in its place behind the stool. Then he ran water and brushed his teeth. After he’d used the towel, he went back into the other room.

Inez had returned and was at the stove heating something in a little pan. She glanced in his direction, but didn’t say anything at first. He looked past her shoulder and out the window. A bird flew from one tree to another and preened its feathers. But if it made any kind of bird noise, he didn’t hear it.