A Hole in the Universe (6 page)

Here she was again, getting all worked up over a situation that had gone on for years. Maybe Kiki was right. If Albert was really that unhappy, why didn’t he just up and leave?
But maybe that’s it,
Kiki had said in that last phone call.
Maybe he just likes using you for his dumping ground, then when he’s got it all out of his system he can just head back home and start over.

Dumping ground. Is that all she was, a dumping ground? What a disgusting thing to say, but of course, Kiki didn’t know the real story. No one did. Albert was just too decent and loyal to ever hurt his family. Every Sunday without fail, he spent an hour at the nursing home with his father, who didn’t even recognize him anymore. Once when he bent down to kiss the top of his father’s head, the old man slapped his face. Delores had never told Albert that last winter when he and his wife went to Aruba, she had brought flowers and homemade fudge to his father and watched the Mass on television with him. When it came time for her to go, the old man cried. He held on to her hand and wouldn’t let her leave.

Two women had just come into the store. They brought a box of colored paper to the register. They said they were starting a cleaning service and needed paper for their first mailing. Only one spoke English. She said her sister and her sister’s two grandchildren had just moved in with her. The sister’s husband had died last month, and the grandchildren’s mother and father were drug addicts. Delores asked the women if they wanted some names for their mailing list. They were all women who worked and could probably use help with the cleaning. Four of the names were her own sisters. Hearing this in translation, the badly bleached widow took Delores’s hand and squeezed it, the fierce grip belying her tiny frame. Before they left, Delores had written twenty names and addresses on a piece of store stationery.
That’s all it takes,
she thought, watching them go down the street, laughing, arm in arm. Now she felt good again. It never seemed to fail: whenever she got down in the dumps, along would come someone much worse off than she was.

She checked her watch: ten minutes to closing. Gordon was probably on his way to his brother’s by now. She wished Dennis hadn’t mentioned the cookout. Every time the phone had rung this past week, she had hoped it might be Gordon inviting her. God, he had looked so good the other night in regular clothes. But the minute she moved closer, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. He had actually cringed as if away from some foul odor or contagion.

She picked up the phone. If he was gone, she’d leave a message. Saying what, though? She had to be careful. He was always so uptight around her. Dennis said he was like that with everyone, but the other night he’d looked almost panicky. The poor guy, he was obviously afraid to be alone with a woman. He probably thought one wrong move would scare her off. She’d just have to be patient. But persistent, she vowed on the first number. She’d say she was going to the mall tomorrow and would he please call her if he needed anything or felt like going. If he did answer, she’d offer him a ride. She could say she had to drop something off at Albert’s house, which wasn’t far from Dennis’s.

“No!” She hung up the phone. She grabbed a rag and glass cleaner and scrubbed the front counter case. What Gordon Loomis needed most was a friend and not some lonely woman with too much time on her hands.

“Delores! Where’s my jacket? Damn it! It’s not here!” an irritated voice called.

“Oh, Albert!” She jumped up, smiling, then ran into the storeroom. “I didn’t hear you come in. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been waiting all day for you to call.”

“I can’t find my jacket.” He was searching through the boxes in his office. “Where the hell is it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. Here,” she said as he scaled a notepad across the room. “Let me look. If it’s here, I’ll find it.”

“Goddamn mess,” he muttered as she went through the boxes.

“You just need to sort through it, that’s all,” she said, looking behind the desk.

“I don’t have time!”

“Then I’ll do it. I told you I would.”

He stared at her, shaking his head incredulously. “Well, why haven’t you, then?”

“Because you told me not to.” She struggled to keep her voice steady. “That’s all for the Dearborn store. You said you wanted to keep the two places separate.”

“Well, you could organize it, couldn’t you? At least do something. Put it all in one place, but don’t let this happen!” He sounded so frantic that it was hard to be mad at him.

“Albert!” She touched his cheek, aroused as always by the late day stubble. For such a slight, fair-skinned man, he had a heavy beard. “What’s wrong? Listen to you. You’re a wreck.”

He sighed and hung his head.

“Al! Honey, what is it? Come on, tell me.” She put her arms around him, pleased when he didn’t resist. “Come on, tell Doe-doe what’s wrong. You’re tired, aren’t you. Well, you just follow me in your car and I’ll have you fed and happy in no time,” she whispered, kissing his ear and sighing when he shivered against her.

“I can’t.” He pulled away. “Cheryl’s invited some people out to dinner.” He hurried into the front of the store. He opened the copy-room door, still looking for the jacket.

“You’re going out? Why didn’t you tell me? You said you’d call. I haven’t seen you in so long. I’ve just missed you so much.”

“I’m sorry, Delores. It just feels like everything’s coming down on me all at once, that’s all. I mean, here it is my one night to relax, but what does Cheryl care? I mean, after all, who am I?”

“Oh, Al.” She hugged him again.

He pulled away, almost pushing her back. “Not out here! What are you thinking? What if someone should come in?” He spoke out of the side of his mouth, his back rigid to the plate glass as if to a watching throng.

“It’s after six. I’ll lock the door.”

“And then what?” he said with such indignant, widening eyes that she thought he was joking.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, watching him. The first move had always been his to make. She had blundered horribly. “I . . . I just thought.”

“You just thought what? That all of a sudden I’m going to throw propriety and good judgment right out the window? Right out there on the street for all the world to see?”

Humiliated by his disdain, she closed her eyes.

“Come on, Delores. Get a grip. Please! Will you, please?”

She shook her head, held up her hand. She was fine. It was all right. Really.

“Look,” he said, hurrying to lock the door and turn out the lights. “It’s like I just said. I can only do so much. You know what my parameters are.” He went into his office, and she knew she had won. She followed quietly and unrolled the foam mat on the floor behind his desk, then took off her panty hose. He drew the bolt across the door and turned off the lights, talking while he undressed. “Instead of things getting easier, I have more pressure in my life right now than I’ve ever had. Ever! And I don’t see any end in sight. Not with the way things are going now, anyway,” he grunted as he lay down.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered, climbing onto him.

“I know you have.” He sighed with an impatient squirm, his signal for her to begin.

“I just get so lonesome lately.” She sat perfectly still.

“I know. I know you do. And I try. I do try. You know I do,” he pleaded with an anxious groan. With its urgency came displacement, a strange distance, as if this ache had little to do with her head.

“We never spend any time together.” The power was hers. She smiled through the darkness.

“But we are now . . . so let’s not waste a minute of it,” he gasped as she began.

“Talk to me, Albert. Please.” She leaned forward.

“Don’t, don’t stop.”

“Then talk to me. You know I like you to talk to me.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. And that feels good,” he whimpered, then moaned as she moved again. “That feels so good. You don’t know how good it feels. Nobody makes me feel like this.”

It was a technique from one of the manuals Albert had given her. She had a box full of them in a closet at home. She used to be proud of her ability to please him so completely, but lately her skills only left her feeling sad and empty. “Talk to me.”

“Oh . . .”

“Talk to me. Talk to me, Albert.”

“Yes. I will. I want to. I am. . . .”

“I said talk to me.” Her eyes were wide open. His choked, guttural cries rose up from the dark. The words, and feel, and smell of him didn’t matter. It was a voice she wanted, thick and deep with need, helpless with desire.
Gordon. Gordon. Gordon. Gordon,
beat the pulse in her brain.

G
ordon paused in his doorway before the ten-minute walk to the bus stop. He carried a small round watermelon in a plastic bag and a string-tied bakery box. What a luxury, what a privilege, to stand here staring through the thin glass of this door, his to open any time he wanted. The warmth of the late-afternoon sun made him smile as he watched a shabby old man hobble across the street. A small, matted dog limped after him.

The neighborhood was run-down, but its vitality was everywhere. Day or night there would be women on their front steps, children playing on the sidewalks, music blasting from idling cars driven by handsome young men who never seemed to leave them. Life might be a struggle here, but its energy charged the air, blind and unstoppable, as relentless a force as the thrust of new green shoots from the brittle rose canes; the clump of errant daffodils that had pushed up through the scrubby grass; the vines of bittersweet strangling Mrs. Jukas’s shrubs. Even her gnarled, dying dogwood tree was half-alive with pink flowers on one side. He opened his door just as the old woman opened hers. Seeing him, she ducked back inside. She probably thought he was watching her house. It would give her little comfort to know this was the way prisoners awaited release from their cells for meals, work, visitors: they stood like this, staring, waiting.

As he came down the walk, a girl ran around the corner. It was the girl who lived across the street. She dove through Mrs. Jukas’s bushes and disappeared behind her house. He hesitated, then just kept going. He knew the drill well.
Nothing to see, nothing to know,
old Jackie McBride would whisper.
You don’t want to be here forever, do you?You’ve still got a chance, a life out there.

He started down the street for what would be his first trip of any distance alone into the world. Behind him, a car slowed and then drove alongside. He could only see the passenger, a young man with a curly black beard and small round sunglasses.

“Hey, buddy!” He stuck his head out the open window. Cupped in his palm was a badge. “A girl just run by here?”

“No, sir.” The automatic response, respectful—and blind.

“What do you mean? She just came around the corner!” He lifted the sunglasses to squint up at Gordon.

“I don’t know, sir. I just came out.” His heart raced. Imagine! How many times had he heard of this? How many times? Guys like him doing it right, all by the book—only to be trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Out from where?”

“My house. That’s where I live. Seventy-five Clover.”

“Yeah, all right,” the cop said, and the unmarked cruiser pulled into the street.

 

 

Gordon was the only passenger on the bus. His stomach felt a little queasy, so he got off at the first stop in Dearborn. He still had a mile-and-a-half walk to Dennis’s. Apparently, not many people in Dearborn rode the bus. They all had cars, two or three or even four, he thought, counting the garage doors now on an enormous yellow house high on the knoll above the street.

He remembered that his brother’s house was gray. He had wanted to go straight home that first day out of Fortley. Dennis had insisted they stop in Dearborn. He couldn’t wait for Gordon to meet the children. And to see his spacious, sunny house. “Mom got such a kick out of this,” Dennis had said with a click of the remote control that triggered a
whoosh
of flames through the birch logs in the fireplace. Gas, Dennis explained to his startled brother. “See this? She loved this.” With the touch of another button, skylights slid open like enormous eyes onto the starry night. Dennis had been a wonderful son. Gordon used to enjoy reading his mother’s letters filled with the details of his brother’s accomplishments and acquisitions. He couldn’t bear to read the ones written when she was depressed and struggling to understand how such a horrible thing could have happened. What had she done wrong? she would ask. How had she failed him? What could she have done differently? She’d tried her best, loved her two boys, raised them both the same, hadn’t he known that?

The watermelon bag thumped against his thigh. Just when he was sure he was lost, he came upon the black-and-gold DEARBORN COUNTRY CLUB sign and remembered that Dennis’s house overlooked the sixteenth hole. Dearborn was cooler than Collerton, he noted, entering the deepening shade of linden and maple trees. He kept looking behind him. The stillness seemed unnatural. There weren’t any sidewalks, but then there weren’t any people or even cars going by.

He was halfway up Dennis’s long front walk when the sprinkler system sputtered on, hissing out long watery arcs that swayed back and forth over him. He stepped back and waited for the spray to pass, then ran in a crouch, only to be drenched in the next wave. Head down, he clutched the cake box to his chest and darted off to one side to catch the lull. He started to run, then everything stopped with an eerie silence. The round black sprinkler heads retracted, disappearing like periscopes into the thick wet grass. Pollen-swirled water ran down the walk into the road.

“Gordon!” Lisa called from the French doors above. “Oh, you’re all wet!” She was laughing. Water dripped down his face and arms. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Come on,” she coaxed, gesturing him closer. “It’s all right. I turned it off.” She started to laugh again, then apologized as she led him into the big square kitchen. “But you just looked so . . . so helpless out there. Oh, Gordon.” She threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry. I’m just so happy and nervous, and I don’t know what else, but it’s just so wonderful to . . . to have you here!”