Losing It (42 page)

“What would
you
use it for?” Mr. Hopkins asked. He stood leaning on a dark-brown cane and the dome of his head was flaking.

“I just recycle the cardboard,” Donny said cheerfully. “I usually keep some of the wood. I’ve got so many little projects on the go. Sometimes I make wooden toys for the kids of friends. That sort of thing.”

“Do you want to
buy
the crate from me?” Mr. Hopkins asked, and then he coughed into a wrinkled grey handkerchief that he pulled from his drooping grey pants, gobbed up and coughed again. He looked at Donny with pressing eyes.

“No. No,” Donny said, trying to stay friendly and light. Trying to think of the right thing at the right time. “It’s just if you
want
me to take it off your hands.”

“I’ll sell it to you for twenty-five dollars,” Hopkins said.

“No. I’ll take it downstairs for you if you like,” Donny repeated. “Or I could just leave it right here. Your machine’s working. Nice and quiet.”

“You’ve got no dishes in it,” Hopkins said.

“I’m just running the cycle,” Donny replied.

“How do you know it’s working if you didn’t put dishes in it?”

Donny looked at him, grinned, knelt down, and started to collect his tools. “I don’t know how well it
cleans
,” he said. “That’s up to the manufacturer. But it’s hooked up. All wired and ready to go.” He closed his metal tool box, stood up again. It was a tiny, dark kitchen with warped counters, a sink full of dirty dishes, ashtrays on the countertop overflowing with cigarette butts. The curtains were ancient yellow chintz, evidence of a wifely presence from years ago, perhaps, or maybe a last feminine touch from the previous owners.

“You are not going to charge me the full hundred dollars,” Hopkins said. He had his chin out as if daring Donny to take a swipe at him. “There’s a scratch on the corner there. You did that!”

Donny looked at where the old man was pointing with his cane. There was a mark, but it wasn’t a scratch; it was a bit of glue stain left over from the manufacturer’s sticker. Donny told him, but he refused to believe it, said it was a bad scratch that ruined the value of the machine.

“You can just wipe it off!” Donny said. “Here. Have you got a rag?” He looked on the counter, in the dirty sink, on the stovetop. There was days-old soup and hardened remains of
spilled sauce and a topless, fuzzy jar of jam, but no rag, nothing to wipe with.

“I don’t supply the plumbing materials!” Mr. Hopkins said. “This is outrageous.”

Donny bent down and rubbed hard with his thumbnail until most of the alleged scratch had disappeared. Then he stood up again and said, “It’s just glue.”

“Well, you only worked on it an hour,” Hopkins said. “I’m not going to pay you a hundred dollars for only an hour’s work. Do you even have a university degree?”

Donny swallowed hard, ran his tongue over his front teeth, took a deep breath. “It would have been a hundred dollars if I’d taken three hours to do it,” he said calmly. “It’s a flat rate. When I install a dishwasher it’s a hundred dollars. You might find someone who’ll do it for less, but they might do a crappy job, too.”

“I’ll give you seventy,” Mr. Hopkins said. He shuffled a bit on his cane, appeared to be looking around Donny at the dishwasher to see if he might find some other supposed scratch or dent to bring the price down even further.

“It’s a hundred dollars,” Donny said quietly. “I quoted you the price, you agreed to it. It’s a flat rate, and I’ve done the work.”

“Seventy,” the old man said, and shook his head as if disgusted to have to pay that much. “And you can take the crate if you want it.” His lip was trembling, and his skin was chalky grey, the colour of death. It was probably a battle for him to stay on his feet that long.

“It’s a hundred dollars,” Donny repeated. “I’ll take the crate off your hands if you want me to, but I’m not going to buy it for thirty dollars. I dare you to get twenty guys with university degrees and have them hook up this dishwasher and see if one
of them –
one of them –
does it right without flooding your kitchen or electrocuting himself.”

“That,” Mr. Hopkins said, “is a bad attitude.”

He put his head down. He was reaching in his pocket, he was going to bring out his money, but Donny had suddenly had enough. He said, “Forget it,” and walked past the man, had to keep himself from upsetting the cane with his foot.

“Come on!” Hopkins said, and Donny could hear the rustle of bills behind him. “You’ll never get anywhere with that kind of attitude. Here’s seventy dollars, you’ve earned it!”

“Keep it,” Donny said. “Buy yourself a hooker!” and he slammed the door behind him, nearly broke the window.

It had been a while since he’d been jerked like that. He was angry driving, angry in the lumber store, he wanted to calm himself before he got to Julia’s, but he couldn’t. Not with breathing, not with soothing thoughts, not with roaring breakneck into traffic and leaning on his horn. He’d never get anywhere. Old Hopkins knew it and Donny knew it. He was pathetic. He had no hope. He’d be screwed and overlooked and forgotten every day of his life because he never got the hang of the right time, the right thing. He was disjointed, awkward and out of step, unco-ordinated; even when he was in the right time and doing the right thing it was because of a mistake, it wasn’t
really
what was supposed to happen.

When he got to Julia’s house she wasn’t there. No one was there. There was a sleek black Porsche on the road that he almost backed into, he was so angry and out of sorts. That was the kind of neighbourhood Julia lived in, black Porsches parked on the street. He got out of his truck and walked past the hazard tape to the door, looked at the first of the windows that
needed his attention, began to measure with undue precision – they were Julia’s windows, he wanted somehow for her to look at his work and think about him.

It was getting cold, so he went back to the truck to put on a jacket and got the plywood while he was there. He measured and sawed with grim efficiency, looking around every so often in case she arrived, in case it suddenly became the right time. But it didn’t. He could’ve simply nailed the boards in, but he screwed them instead because it was more secure, more meticulous … even though she’d never notice the difference. It was an absurd, hopeless little detail.

Some kids came by and stared from behind the yellow tape and a cat investigated him when he was in the backyard. It took him nearly two hours and he would charge Julia one hundred and twenty dollars, which was fair, since the lumber had cost sixty-five. He was giving her a break on his hourly rate. It wasn’t her fault that her house had burned down, that she used to be goddamn gorgeous, that she’d married stupidly – lots of women did that. Donny wasn’t going to say a thing. He’d just look at her and maybe, maybe she’d see somehow that he was a decent guy, a fair guy, with a good heart and strong hands, and he wasn’t educated but he knew a thing or two, he wasn’t stupid or full of himself. What was wrong with all that?

Nothing except the timing, which he would never get right.

36

J
ulia looked at the caverns and craters in her face, the gaping pores, the sickly age marks, the dried, shocked, drained, ravaged, pale, washed-out, horrible skin exposed in the mirror before her. She was sitting in Brenda and Doug’s guest bedroom, at the little girls’ mauve vanity in the corner with the chipped pink ballerina music box and the tarnished antique silver comb-and-brush set. Matthew was somewhere; perhaps Brenda was feeding him. He seemed to have made himself completely at home. If Julia really set her mind to it, she could say where he was, and what time it was, and whether or not she’d eaten dinner herself. But she didn’t set her mind, she let it fall and float in the ugliness of the present moment. It was the only way she could think of it: the desperate ugliness of this reality. Her plain, unadorned, abandoned face. She used to be pretty, she knew it; she used to restrain herself in her choice of clothing, in her presentation, since she didn’t want to be judged just by the lustre of her skin and hair, the symmetry and fashionableness of her face, the size and shape of her breasts. It was her mind she wanted to count.

Her mind! Where was her mind? What was she thinking when her husband was clogging up the drain with his body hair? When he was parading around in women’s clothing? Some of it must have been hers, she realized suddenly – her purple slip, of course, and other things too had gone missing. Where was her mind when he was carrying on with some undergrad “poetical and sexual anthropologist,” whatever that was? All her brain cells were dripping out through lactation, they were sliding into Matthew’s hungry mouth, she was drifting along in a dopey fog and had to have a friend show her
on the Internet
exactly what her husband was up to.

He hadn’t called. Everyone else had. Julia had asked Brenda to make a few discreet inquiries, and now the stories were pouring in – a dozen friends connected to the department had phoned to report that Barbara Law had seen him running through the halls in drag, that he’d been drunk and incoherent in front of his students, that Sienna Chu was fucking half the department, that she was bisexual, that no one had seen her. That Bob had bolted, no one knew where he was either. That he’d run off with Sienna, that they were driving to the States, that the bitch had gone to New York with him last weekend to the Poe conference, everyone knew …

Everyone! It was common knowledge. Bob and the slut had been carrying on for ages, Julia was the last to realize. And the Poe conference! Bob had pretended that he wanted Julia to go, but it was going to be so intense – his word,
intense
; now she knew what he meant.

The phone rang downstairs and Julia stiffened. She waited while Brenda answered. There was the smell of cooking from the kitchen, something garlicky. Something that Bob, if he were here, would wolf down between long gulps of red wine
while carrying on three different conversations and laughing, lecturing, pausing to chat up the hostess, tell her what an extraordinary culinary gift she had and ask her, in front of everybody, if her juices were always this succulent … and get away with it. Why did people always forgive him?

Footsteps on the stairs. Julia glanced again in the mirror, saw how utterly plain and blown apart she looked, her eyes so small, hair limp, the life siphoned from her face. There was a knock at the door. She wiped her eyes, said, “Uh-huh,” and the door opened. It was Doug, short and bony, who had a thick beard and a quick laugh and eyes too penetrating for the moment. Julia didn’t want to be looked at that deeply.

Doug said, with gentleness, “Dinner’s ready. Come and have something to eat.”

“Did someone call?”

“Brenda took it,” he said, and he didn’t say more.

She hated herself for asking. But she asked anyway. “Was it Bob?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so,” he said.

Julia followed Doug down the stairs. Brenda had seated Matthew in a brand-new high chair in the kitchen. She’d bought it the year before when she was pregnant for the first time, and kept it despite the miscarriage. Then she’d gotten pregnant again in June but had lost that one as well. Julia had been a pillar during her disasters, and she realized ruefully that it was good in a way for Brenda to have this disaster of Julia’s to deal with. Brenda was being magnificent: cooking the pasta and sauce, stepping over joyfully to spoon some mushed broccoli into Matthew’s waiting mouth, singing along with the radio.

“Are you
famished?”
Brenda asked when she saw Julia. Then without waiting for a reply she said, “Food will help. It always does. Doug, could you pour the wine?”

“Oh,” Julia said. “I left my glass upstairs.” She’d been drinking all afternoon. Brenda said it didn’t matter. Julia accepted a new glass of wine, sipped a bit, and sat with Doug and Brenda in their cheerful little kitchen. Doug was being clumsily conscientious: getting up to retrieve missing pieces of cutlery, leaning over Brenda to get the breadboard, trying to be an attentive husband.

“I ran into someone from my high school the other day,” Julia heard herself blurt, apropos of nothing. “He’s a carpenter now. He used to -” She stopped. It was pointless. Why was she talking about this?