Women and Men (54 page)

He doesn’t want to get around her. "But
is
weight slow?"

"It’s steady," she guarantees. "It’s steady?" she asks the void.

"That’s what I was thinking in the shower."

"We had a great one. Slow as weight itself," she says. "Do you ever feel," she wonders, "that we fit into a large life that doesn’t much know us but—holds us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?"

"Well, let’s not tell it about us," he seems to agree, and she puts an arm on his shoulder and frowns.

"It is beyond understanding us," she pontificates softly.

"It’s still fun being here," he is going to say but instead out comes, "I think I have to go and ask it a few questions. It’s fun being here, Jean."

"It is," she agrees; and feeling her legs across his all over again, he finds that she doesn’t yet know what she wants of him, so he brings the question inside himself, switches the sexes to protect the innocent, and now sees he’s had the question in him all along. To be sure, it’s shared, but at the moment he was here first.

the departed tenant

It was a distance from her place, but he often walked home. The hours were insane to be leaving her. What did he think he was doing? Along the glowing, blank streets, where the cab at 3
A.M.
or some face, above a wind-breaker, of a man going on early shift at five had less than nothing to do with him, he imagined he was married and bound home to his wife. He could imagine this because he had been married. Yet when he had been married, he hadn’t been unfaithful in this way. Unfaithful? But he wasn’t married now.

Sometimes he stayed overnight, but sometimes he didn’t. But he liked staying overnight with her, so that when he didn’t stay, it lingered, like a bad time. It wasn’t a bad time, but you might call it a bit dumb. But it was his life.

She didn’t much question these departures in the middle of the night, except to complain a little and maybe make a joke. Like did he have a paper route? Was he moonlighting as a milkman? There
are
no milkmen any more, he told her. Did he have another girlfriend, a daytime girlfriend he went home for? You’re my daytime girlfriend, he said. But that’s the point, she said— you’re not spending the night tonight. Oh, but I do, he said. Oh well, she said. Because it wasn’t worth arguing about.

She might switch on the little globe-shaped light beside the bed and get up and pull on her bathrobe and hug it around her while he put on his clothes, which had been lying on the floor, or on a chair, or once—his socks—on the keys of the upright piano she kept in the bedroom. The bedroom was bigger than the living room; she thought she wanted to move. Sometimes she stayed in bed while he dressed, and told him sleepily that she’d had a good time with him. Then the darkness and slight strain of what he was doing, going home when they could have been sleeping, seemed to make her say less than she wanted to say, as if, in ‘he dark, she mustn’i. even ask his name or he would vanish; and so there were words in the air between them, and perhaps it wasn’t clear who was thinking
t
m. What on earth did he think he was up to? What
was
this? Who did he thinK he was, doing this to himself? Really to her was the equally unspoken reply; to her, if anyone.
(Forget it, pal, she 11 survive
was surely in both their minds.) One time she laughed and said, Well, did he have a wife he hadn’t told her about? No, not one he hadn’t told her about.

He said, "I only have two bodies. How’s that for fidelity? Mine and yours."

"Well, I should think so," she said quickly, without feeling. But generally she was easy on him when she was with him. She was smart; in fact, she was artistic. She had a happy influence on him.

When he got dressed in the dark, he might find himself back on the bed for a moment or two, the covers and his coat between them, his mouth on her cheek, her eyelid; her mouth, thank God, smiling in the shadows while he told her the same things he had told her before, but now he was dressed.

They went on like this all through the fall, and while he wondered, listening to her play the piano, he knew that eventually she would act if he did not. They were shadowed by a sense of humor which sometimes seemed a longer shadow of events.

She knew what he had done, or what he meant when he said it, which he did at length. She had heard all about it, and she listened with such attention that she might have been taking him literally. He said quite seriously—so she had to smile—that he had killed his wife. All right, not killed—merely destroyed. Yet not her but her life. Or their life. That is, by not leaving her. (She had left him.) He said all this as if he would recall, and recall in order to amend. But this long crime against womanhood, this murder, had it not required an accomplice? he was asked—asked more than once, and once in her dark, lovely bedroom.

An accomplice? She meant his wife, of course.

Well, nobody had caught him, nobody had put him in jail for it. So forget, forget, forget.

And, naturally, his girlfriend was right, but he shook his head, staring at the ceiling in the dark room. Her hand found his face and covered it firmly. "You see, they changed the law. We’re on the honor system now. You punish yourself."

"Don’t want to be on the honor system," he muttered, but she didn’t change the subject.

"John, you’re still half married."

He looked through her fingers into the darkness and made a satisfied sound; the hand upon his face was delicious. He kissed the hollow of her palm and turned to look her in the eye.

She asked if he minded her calling him half married. He touched her mouth and he remembered that she had said he hadn’t really thought about that old marriage of his. Think about it, forget it, think about it, forget it, she seemed to be saying. They listened to a neighbor’s stereo drumming deeply, distantly. She gave his forehead a long, soft kiss, which was like when she whispered in his ear, whispered until the finest-spun words became breath.

Once, on the way home, from streetlamp to streetlamp, past gentle, lurid light, past probes of flashing cabs winging downtown over potholes and heaves of the avenue, he thought that he had not really been married after all. Across the street, the blonde prostitute who was always zipped tight into the bright colors of her costume stood dark-eyed and pale at the entrance to an alley, so that she looked like she had the key to its high iron gate. His hands were cold, and he stopped for coffee in a place he had passed many times—a little hole-in-the-wall newsstand cafe. Why had he wanted to stop there? Nothing much—it was at the intersection where he turned.

He would come along in the middle of the night before dawn, following a coastline, and then, across the street, through the sidewalk service window, he would see a woman pouring coffee from a glass pot that seemed to hang from her knuckles. Three or four men leaned on their elbows at the cramped counter inside. A nurse in white stockings and a dark coat would come along—or, once, an off-duty cop with his satchel—and stop at the window and pick up a paper if the early papers were out, fold it, and hand the money through. The woman, who looked Puerto Rican, was framed in the service window and gave change or passed out a pack of cigarettes, and she might pause and look out across the avenue. At this intersection he would turn and walk the rest of the way home crosstown. But this one night he went in and took the remaining stool at the counter. There wasn’t much room inside. Someone must have been right behind him in the street, because the woman went to the window with a brown paper bag. She must have had it ready. She handed it out to a man who wore a knitted face mask. The man laughed at something she said, and she came back to the counter and poured John a cup of coffee, assuming with a smile that that was what he wanted.

A cup of coffee was a cup of coffee. Yet staying overnight with his girl wasn’t staying overnight unless he had breakfast with her. So didn’t he like her, that he had left her and come here for coffee on the way home? The coffee was almost strong; it was rich and had a faint, natural sweetness to it.

His girlfriend slept easily. Once, he had phoned her on the way home and she was already asleep and brought the phone slowly to her ear while he imagined her dark bedroom and the dark living room beyond it. He had left her there in the middle of the night. But he loved her and he loved having breakfast with her. She talked of moving. He thought of a better life. She had said at the very beginning that he was her other body. Well, she was his. They had met at a fund-raising party given by her radio station. Her name was Linda.

He kept her to himself. He did tell his friend Harry how he had danced in a deserted subway station with her and had spent the night in a tent on a small mountain in New Jersey in order to prove to her that New Jersey did have mountains. And one Sunday at the pier he had slowly—keeping an eye on her—drawn a pencil out of his jacket pocket and surprised himself by doing a picture of her. He never drew—he couldn’t draw at all. "You see?" she had said.

"Linda sounds pretty and she sounds nice," Harry said. "When am I going to meet her?"

Harry lived forty minutes upriver by train. John and Harry met at the gym, where they put on the gloves but seldom boxed. Light gloves for the punching bags. He and Harry had reached a point of skill at which they could talk while working the speed bag, one resting, the other working, snapping the small black Everlast bag up against the circular platform it hung from. It sounded like tap dancing when the timing peaked, the hands went faster and faster, the bag twice as fast.

Harry was much heavier and had a full English mustache. He told jokes while he worked out. Sometimes it was an awful joke you wouldn’t repeat except to someone you were very sure of. All the time, he went on striking the bag in front of him, single-punching, side-slapping, or double-punching fast after the bag hit up against the far side and before it hit the near side again.

Harry invited him to come up with Linda for the weekend. He asked Harry for a rain check. Sure; it rained all the time up at their place, Harry said. John laughed, and Harry said it was all very well for John, who wasn’t always tied down to his office, but a weekend for him was a weekend. Harry was not a friend to tell you what you should do; but " ‘John and Linda’— that sounds pretty good," he said, and just at that moment the member of this mythical couple who was present was overtaken by a yawn so true and deep, opening across the eyes and the spine, across the shoulders and cheekbones, that he flubbed his timing and sent the speed bag glancing off, and stepped back to complete his yawn, which then seemed to find further depths in him, while Harry stopped the bag and took over. He got going at once. "She cutting into your sleep?" he said, going about his work and grinned at some still point in the midst of his target’s blur until he suddenly finished off his sequence with a smash that practically blew the bag off its swivel.

Harry wouldn’t volunteer advice, but he cared about John, and he listened. "I’ve known you a long time; if she says you’re still married, she’s probably right."

"Then I’m a bigamist," John said and laughed. Harry was a lawyer.

"The worst kind. They can’t do nuthin’ to ya."

"That’s what you think," said John.

John told Linda what Harry had said, and knew he shouldn’t have.

"Harry and his wife knew her," she said, and, in a catch of her breath, she was about to go on, but she thought a moment, distracted in the dark when John moved. "I wonder where she is," she finally said.

"Don’t," said John, wondering if she thought he knew.

"She’s better off where she is," came the voice in front of him in his arms.

"You make it sound like Heaven," he said.

But then she unbent a leg and stretched it, his thigh against hers. She snuggled back against him. "We can’t all be in Heaven," she said, yawning.

"Then there’s the real bigamist you read about in the paper, who really and truly has a double life; and that is a lot of life," he said, as she listened in the darkness of her bedroom.

"I don’t believe it," she said.

Linda found another apartment. It gave him pause. She couldn’t wait to get out. The new apartment was a dozen or so blocks uptown and would be better in every way except the rent was more. John was going to help her move. Then, a week before the end of the month, she got a call from the departing tenant at the crack of dawn to say, with humor, that he had already departed. She phoned her new super and decided at once to take the day off and clear out. She called John and told him not to change his plans, she had phoned some friends of hers—a couple with a van.

They came over, and the job got done in three trips; the move was all finished by mid-afternoon. Just as they were sitting down to have a beer the phone rang; it was the former tenant, asking if everything was cool. Thanks again, he was told.

For the time being, only the large kitchen needed a paint job. And that was where Linda was standing all by herself, thinking, when, at six-thirty, John found the front door unlocked, pushed it open, and politely touched the buzzer. He had seen the place once already but not in its present mess. She came out to greet him. He gave her a kiss on one tired cheek. Her stomach made a hungry sound. They gave each other a lot of little kisses, and she was so friendly holding him that he could feel words forming in her mouth. Her arm lay along his shoulders; she thanked him for sending over the plant, which he saw out of the corner of his eye near the piano—a heroic plant, large-scale and formidable, with a very simple Latin name he had forgotten.

She was happy with the bare brick wall across from the piano. Did she need another table in the living room? Well, he said, what about one of those swing seats that hung from a chain bolted to the ceiling? She laughed at that. Keep the furniture off the floor as much as possible, he said. They contemplated the loft bed in the corner of the living room by a window. The former tenant had built it, but he hadn’t tried to get any money for it or for some beautifully made bookshelves with sliding panels. He said he had to give up the place because the landlord wouldn’t let him sublet. Linda had acquired an official, though obsolete, street sign marking an intersection near her old apartment. The steel-framed, blue-background style signaled a neighborhood of fire escapes and steeples and great quantities of flowers passing on a horse-drawn wagon, all of which John recalled as clearly as he had heard the man on the wagon calling up to the windows, a man in a cap—though that horse-drawn wagon creaking down a city block without a lot of parked cars was much less his to remember than his parents’, who didn’t live in the city now. Linda’s street sign was a collector’s item: where had she found it? Oh, her friend with the van had given it to her.