Women and Men (56 page)

"Some Departed Tenant," John said.

"Not mine," she said from the kitchen.

"Yours hasn’t departed," said John.

"Any day now," came the answer, as the refrigerator opened and closed.

"He calls when I’m not here," said John, sitting down at the piano. "It’s uncanny: he only calls when I’m not around."

Linda pounded something. "I told him enough was enough, I was going to speak to you."

"In this day and age you said that?" said John. But Linda said that she had said a bit more than that, actually. She had said John had a temper.

"He misses this place," said John, and played the first notes of a song which were also the first six notes of a scale. "And for a Departed Tenant who’s sticking around, that’s heavy."

Linda came out into the living room to smile at him. She had an apron on over her bluejeans, and he knew there was a joint in her apron pocket, because he had felt it there not long ago. Lately he wasn’t sure what was going on. She gave him some respectful warmth that he didn’t quite know what to do with, because it was as close as his body and as separate as his clothes, as if he had a new authority that still wasn’t power. He just wasn’t sure what was going on.

She had a hammer in her hand. She was going to staple in the wiring for a second set of stereo speakers in the bedroom; dinner could be ready in ten minutes whenever they wanted it. John said he would staple the wiring, but Linda said he didn’t have to, and they sat down and smoked instead. He read her mind and asked her if she loved him. She said that was her line, why had he said it, what did he mean? He said very very softly and, he thought, humorously, "Oh shut up." She didn’t quite love it, he saw.

The next night they went to the Spanish restaurant for dinner. He was going away the following afternoon. They finished a bottle of wine, bickering a bit over whether they were splitting the check or not, then speculating whether the shrimp and mussels and the pale rings of squid came from the fish market next door, and then arguing about which way the neon guitar was pointing. He had reached for his wallet and paused, distracted, his fingers in the inside pocket of his jacket. She laughed in a more silly, distantly silly, way than he had heard her laugh before. She said if he would let her pay her share of the check she would let him pay half the rent. This set her off again; it was more than giggling; the tears shook themselves out, laughter tears—his grin got fixed—and when she calmed down she asked him like a little girl did he
have
to go to Houston? Couldn’t he put her in his pocket and take her along? Couldn’t he put off the trip?

Oh, he really couldn’t, he said, laughing with her.

What, not till sunrise, my darling? she said.

Oh, certainly till sunrise; maybe the Departed Tenant would call.

Oh, he never, never would call when John was there. The giggling began again.

Man sounded like the refrigerator light. There only if you opened the door.

She never opened any door for that creep .

Didn’t favor degenerates?

A select few only, she said (as a microphone got touched); degenerates could be fun even when they were not very observant.

The waiter came back with the change.

Did she mean degenerates who forgot which way
la guitarra
pointed?

Since he insisted.

Well, there she was definitely wrong, so they rose to go out and look at the sign and settle the issue.

The tip lay in the waiter’s little oblong change tray. The waiter gave out menus at another table and turned his head to say goodnight. But now, without warning, the live music began with a beat of chords. A smiling man and woman in black now struck such a proud, harsh dance out of their instruments that John didn’t quite identify what was odd about the couple. He took Linda’s hand and with his other hand on the small of her back drew close, and they swayed for a few moments and turned and turned again under the tolerant eye of a couple who were eating their meal a few feet away, until a waiter approached with what looked like dinner for half a dozen people, and that was that, as far as the dancing was concerned. John looked back at the guitar players, who were still smiling, and it was not until he and Linda got back to her place that they realized they had neglected to look at the sign. She said it didn’t matter, which made him wonder if that had been after all the thing degenerates weren’t observant about.

"Anyway, I did notice that the woman was left-handed," said John.

"I think it was the man," said Linda, hanging up her coat.

"No, he was on our right."

"Oh,
you re
right," she said shortly.

"What?"

"You win, friend," she said. He couldn’t believe it, but she walked away irritated. He thought of leaving; he thought of the elevator coming up to meet him and of the crazy sign by the button panel that said, "After u
P.M.
Return Elevator to First Floor."

"Hey, wait a minute," he called after Linda. But then he kept whatever it was to himself. He remembered the guitars were pointing toward each other, and the man was on their right, therefore fingering with his right hand and strumming with his left.

Had Linda been getting along with John even at the restaurant? He was deciding whether he liked all this, when the phone rang and he stayed where he was. If you fingered with your right hand, then you were a left-handed guitarist. So why had Linda said, "You win"?

He heard her say in the bedroom, "You’re
not
my friend, but I
will
say goodbye. Please don’t call any more, O.K.?"

John felt the very slightly delayed "O.K.?" in his heart. "Just don’t call," said Linda in the bedroom, but he didn’t hear the phone go down. Then he did.

"Just tell him not to phone," John said.

"I did."

"You were a bit polite. You said, ‘Please don’t call any more’ and then you added ‘O.K.?’ like you were asking permission."

John went and looked at her. She was sitting on the bed. "Listen," she said,
"he
hung up on
me."

"He should be apprehended if he hangs up on you," said John. "We should call the authorities."

Linda went past him into the living room, into the kitchen. She came out again and went and sat at her piano, her shoulders slumped. She got up and took something from the top of the piano and brought it to him; it was a color photograph of herself. She said, gently, that he hadn’t seen it, which gave him a shiver, because she didn’t know he had another one just like it in his pocket. It was a Polaroid—with that flat accuracy that looked too accurate. She was always beautiful, but here she looked as if she were hanging around waiting to be photographed for a commercial. His arm went around her shoulders. They stood there admiring her picture—anyway, he was admiring it. She was in her office at the radio station, and behind her was a blurred chart that, he knew, showed what music was going to be played during the next two or three months. In her posed composure, in some sign in her eyes and the set of her face, John felt that she wasn’t making as much money as the person taking the picture. What was she saying in showing him this Polaroid photograph here, now, at this awkward point?

It was as if they were in bed, quiet with their shared secrets. But they couldn’t get there for the time being. They were mad at each other, but he had his arm around her, and she must know he was breathing the fine odor of her face. Linda had a mole under her eye high on one cheek, and in the picture it looked like a perfectly applied beauty spot. Her dark-red turtleneck sweater with the silver horse he had given her pinned on the side seemed as permanent as the camera’s light. Didn’t he want to go to bed with her? He didn’t know how she felt. But elsewhere, apart from the phone calls and the restaurant and anything bad in the past, they did always want to love each other; they always had wanted to.

Linda was looking at him as he stared at the photograph.

A woman knows how to wait, he had told Harry. You said it, replied his friend, but she’s a beautiful girl, so look out—someone else will marry her if you don’t.

What about
her
marrying
them?

Sure, sure, that could happen, too. Let’s set a definite date for a weekend.

The Polaroid held them there, in the middle of Linda’s living room. She said the picture really captured her; she joked about the dumb look on her face. What she then broke to him quietly, while they looked at the photograph, was that the Departed Tenant had not only not finally departed but had visited this apartment recently at least twice, she thought.

He what? But the lock had been changed. What did he get?

Well, actually, he
left
something.

Linda went to the loft bed that she hadn’t yet decided what to do with. She reached up and put her hand on a quilt folded at the foot of the bed. She lifted a corner of it—diamond-checked, dull green and white, with ribbons sticking out here and there.

What had he left the second time? Had he improved on the quilt? Was he getting ready to move back in?

Linda didn’t think that was funny. She had asked the super with his perpetual dark glasses if he had let the former tenant in, and he had opened his mouth wide; he seemed mad at her suggesting such a thing, but
he
was the sinister one—he smiled all the time. John said maybe he was remembering what Linda had said getting out of the elevator: ‘7’ra the sinister one. He heard you call me a murderer."

Linda shrugged. She had asked about the Departed Tenant. The super said there had been four of them, sometimes more; he would see someone he never saw coming in downstairs and would know they were going to that apartment. One girl was a waitress at the rock club next to the church; one of them made jewelry out of junk and sold it in the street. There was a tall girl from upstate who had a bicycle and drove a cab sometimes. Two of the boys were housepainters, carpenters—when they worked. Then for a while there was just him and the girl with the bike. The super would see them with their groceries, and once, when he was putting out the trash, he looked up and saw the two of them at the window of the apartment. Then lately there was just him, the super was a hundred percent certain. He’d seen him the other day. He was waiting for a friend of his who was working on that brownstone that was being redone. The super would speak to him if he saw him again.

John asked if Linda had told the super about the bathroom window.

Oh, he had fixed it; and incidentally, there was no way the Departed Tenant could have gotten in through a window five floors above an alley, no fire escape, no ledges to speak of—

And carrying a quilt!

And carrying a quilt. To lay folded on the loft bed that he had made a point of saying he was giving to Linda, which was worth something to the room beyond the three hours’ labor and the lumber that went into it. He wasn’t going to make her pay for the loft bed and he wasn’t going to take it down.

But he came a
second
time.

This time he
took
something.

It was getting later, and Houston seemed not so far away as the airport John had to get to tomorrow afternoon to fly to Houston. Houston was why they had had dinner at the Spanish restaurant tonight. The quilt was in his hand, the bed just above eye level; Linda was looking at him, the window behind her.

The Departed Tenant had taken
two
things, as a matter of fact.

John was asking just when was this second visit, but in his thoughts he put the last couple of weeks together—himself the least vivid neighbor in these places where the man with the crease on his cheekbone got up and left, and he sat down in front of the other man’s coffee, so that a woman with improbable blue eyes could tell John a couple of times that he was late, and take the coffee away, and another woman, with amber eyes, could look at him with concerned anger, he thought, while he looked at her photograph with some anguish against his heart. She had said, "O.K.?," as if to ask leave of the Departed Tenant, who had apparently been breaking into this pad of hers, where not only had the piano that had been in the old bedroom moved into the new living room but there was a bed high off the floor as well, and now a quilt. He didn’t like hearing her talk to the guy, but as for his real anguish, it wasn’t here in this place; John had left it somewhere else.

He heard himself saying to her that maybe he ought to move, too.

"What’s that got to do with that man getting in here?" said Linda.

"It’s how I feel when I go back to my own place," he said, and his heart was thick as a hundred sounds at once.

"Stop smiling," she said. "Or tell me what it is."

"What did he get away with?"

"You couldn’t care less," she said extravagantly.

He laughed, and she said that when he got back from Houston they’d have to have a talk. He said he’d heard that before. He bobbed his head sideways at the bed above them—an unspeakable crudity, at this moment, that sent her into the bedroom.

He turned out the lights and put the chain on the door. He went in expecting her to be sitting on the bed or lying down staring at the ceiling. She was standing beside her bureau, absorbed in a magazine. He held her shoulders and looked at the article she was reading, and asked what the intruder had gotten away with. She put the magazine down and didn’t speak until she was in bed. He had watched her, and now he stood there with his clothes on.

The neighborhood led to her front door and through it. And out again, home again, he envisioned, and he also saw that—after her apartment had changed again, a third apartment, a fourth apartment, and he was walking home in one new way after another, but always through the intersection where the Puerto Rican woman with the blue eyes sometimes had the night shift and once, well after dawn, was being helped by a little girl who had her hair in two braids—he would himself move to a new apartment, so that between his place and Linda’s there was no point in passing through that intersection.