Selected Stories (35 page)

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, where it formed an eight-inch corridor between itself and the cot. She wore her pressed and mended blouse and her skirt. Her shoulders sagged with weariness and she seemed to have some difficulty in holding her head up; her hands hung limply between her knees. But her face was suffused with delight and anticipation as she watched him waking up to his breakfast.

His mouth writhed and he bared his blunt yellow teeth, and ground them together while he uttered a howl of fury. It was a strangled, rasping sound and she scuttled away from it as if it had burned her, and crouched in the middle of the bed with her eyes huge and her mouth slack. He advanced on her with his arms raised and his big fists clenched; she dropped her face on the bed and covered the back of her neck with both hands and lay there trembling. For a long moment he hung over her, then slowly dropped his arms. He tugged at the skirt. “Take off,” he grated. He tugged it again, harder.

She peeped up at him and then slowly turned over. She fumbled weakly at the button. He helped her. He pulled the skirt away and tossed it on the cot, and gestured sternly at the blouse. She unbuttoned it and he lifted it from her shoulders. He pulled down the sheet, taking it right out from under her. He took her ankles gently in his powerful hands and pulled them down until she was straightened out on the bed, and then covered her carefully. He was breathing hard. She watched him in terror.

In a frightening quiet he turned back to his cot and the laden chair beside it. Slowly he picked up the cup of coffee and smashed it on the floor. Steadily as the beat of a woodsman’s axe the saucer followed, the plate of toast, the plate of eggs. China and yolk squirted and sprayed over the floor and on the walls. When he had finished he turned back to her. “I fix everything,” he said hoarsely. He emphasized each syllable with a thick forefinger as he said again, “
I
fix everything.”

She whipped over on her stomach and buried her face in the pillow, and began to sob so hard he could feel the bed shaking the floor through the soles of his feet. He turned angrily away from her and got a pan and a scrub-brush and a broom and dustpan, and laboriously, methodically, cleaned up the mess.

Two hours later he approached her where she lay, still on her stomach, stiff and motionless. He had had a long time to think of what to say: “Look, you see, you
sick …
you see?” He said it, as gently as he could. He put his hands on her shoulder but she twitched violently, flinging it away. Hurt and baffled, he backed away and sat down on the couch, watching her miserably.

She wouldn’t eat any lunch.

She wouldn’t eat any dinner.

As the time approached for him to go to work, she turned over. He still sat on the cot in his long Johns, utter misery on his face and in every line of his ugly body. She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. He met her gaze but did not move. She sighed suddenly and held out her hand. He leaped to it and pulled it to his forehead, knelt, bowed over it and began to cry. She patted his wiry hair until the storm passed, which it did abruptly, at its height. He sprang away from her and clattered pans on the stove, and in a few minutes brought her some bread and gravy and a parboiled artichoke, rich with olive oil and basil. She smiled wanly and took the plate, and slowly ate while he watched each mouthful and radiated what could only be gratitude. Then he changed his clothes and went to work.

He brought her a red housecoat when she began to sit up, though he would not let her out of bed. He brought her a glass globe in which a flower would keep, submerged in water, for a week, and two live turtles in a plastic bowl and a pale-blue toy rabbit with a music box in it that played “Rock-a-bye Baby” and blinding vermilion lipstick. She remained obedient and more watchful than ever; when his fussing and puttering were over and he took up his crouch on the cot, waiting for whatever need in her he could divine next, their eyes would meet, and, increasingly, his would drop. She would hold the blue rabbit tight to her and watch him unblinkingly, or smile suddenly, parting her lips as if something vitally important and deeply happy was about to escape them. Sometimes she seemed inexpressibly sad, and sometimes she was so restless that he would go to her and stroke her hair until she fell asleep, or seemed to. It occurred to him that he had not seen her wounds for almost two days, and that perhaps they were bothering her during one of these restless spells, and so he pressed her gently down and uncovered her. He touched the scar carefully and she suddenly thrust his hand away and grasped her own flesh firmly, kneading it, slapping it stingingly. Shocked, he looked at her face and saw she was smiling, nodding. “Hurt?” She shook her head. He said, proudly, as he covered her, “I fix. I fix good.” She nodded and caught his hand briefly between her chin and her shoulder.

It was that night, after he had fallen into that heavy first sleep on his return from the store, that he felt the warm firm length of her tight up against him on the cot. He lay still for a moment, somnolent, uncomprehending, while quick fingers plucked at the buttons of his long Johns. He brought his hands up and trapped her wrists. She was immediately still, though her breath came swift and her heart pounded his chest like an angry little knuckle. He made a labored, inquisitive syllable, “Wh-wha …?” and she moved against him and then stopped, trembling. He held her wrists for more than a minute, trying to think this out, and at last sat up. He put one arm around her shoulders and the other under her knees. He stood up. She clung to him and the breath hissed in her nostrils. He moved to the side of her bed and bent slowly and put her down. He had to reach back and detach her arms from around his neck before he could straighten up. “You sleep,” he said. He fumbled for the sheet and pulled it over her and tucked it around her. She lay absolutely motionless, and he touched her hair and went back to his cot. He lay down and after a long time fell into a troubled sleep. But something woke him; he lay and listened, hearing nothing. He remembered suddenly and vividly the night she had balanced between life and death, and he had awakened to the echo of a sob which was not repeated; in sudden fright he jumped up and went to her, bent down and touched her head. She was lying face down. “You cry?” he whispered, and she shook her head rapidly. He grunted and went back to bed.

It was the ninth week and it was raining; he plodded homeward through the black, shining streets, and when he turned into his own block and saw the dead, slick river stretching between him and the streetlight in front of his house, he experienced a moment of fantasy, of dreamlike disorientation; it seemed to him for a second that none of this had happened, that in a moment the car would flash by him and dip toward the curb momentarily while a limp body tumbled out, and he must run to it and take it indoors, and it would bleed, it would bleed, it might die. … He shook himself like a big dog and put his head down against the rain, saying
Stupid!
to his inner self. Nothing could be wrong, now. He had found a way to live, and live that way he would, and he would abide no change in it.

But there was a change, and he knew it before he entered the house; his window, facing the street, had a dull orange glow which could not have been given it by the street light alone. But maybe she was reading one of those paperback novels he had inherited with the apartment; maybe she had to use the bedpan or was just looking at the clock … but the thoughts did not comfort him; he was sick with an unaccountable fear as he unlocked the hall door. His own entrance showed light through the crack at the bottom; he dropped his keys as he fumbled with them, and at last opened the door.

He gasped as if he had been struck in the solar plexus. The bed was made, flat, neat, and she was not in it. He spun around; his frantic gaze saw her and passed her before he could believe his eyes. Tall, queenly in her red housecoat, she stood at the other end of the room, by the sink.

He stared at her in amazement. She came to him, and as he filled his lungs for one of his grating yells, she put a finger on her lips and, lightly, her other hand across his mouth. Neither of these gestures, both even, would have been enough to quiet him ordinarily, but there was something else about her, something which did not wait for what he might do and would not quail before him if he did it. He was instantly confused, and silent. He stared after her as, without breaking stride, she passed him and gently closed the door. She took his hand, but the keys were in the way; she drew them from his fingers and tossed them on the table and then took his hand again, firmly. She was sure, decisive; she was one who had thought things out and weighed and discarded, and now knew what to do. But she was triumphant in some way, too; she had the poise of a victor and the radiance of the witness to a miracle. He could cope with her helplessness, of any kind, to any degree, but this—he had to think, and she gave him no time to think.

She led him to the bed and put her hands on his shoulders, turning him and making him sit down. She sat close to him, her face alight, and when again he filled his lungs, “Shh!” she hissed, sharply, and smiling covered his mouth with her hand. She took his shoulders again and looked straight into his eyes, and said clearly, “I can talk now, I can talk!”

Numbly, he gaped at her.

“Three days already, it was a secret, it was a surprise.” Her voice was husky, hoarse even, but very clear and deeper than her slight body indicated. “I been practicing, to be sure. I’m all right again, I’m all right. You fix everything!” she said, and laughed.

Hearing that laugh, seeing the pride and joy in her face, he could take nothing away from her. “Ahh …” he said, wonderingly.

She laughed again. “I can go, I can go!” she sang. She leaped up suddenly and pirouetted, and leaned over him laughing. He gazed up at her and her flying hair, and squinted his eyes as he would looking into the sun. “Go?” he blared, the pressure of his confusion forcing the syllable out as an explosive shout.

She sobered immediately, and sat down again close to him. “Oh, honey, don’t,
don’t
look as if you was knifed or something. You know I can’t camp on you, live off you, just
forever!
”

“No, no you stay,” he blurted, anguish in his face.

“Now look,” she said, speaking simply and slowly as to a child. “I’m all well again, I can talk now. It wouldn’t be right, me staying, locked up here, that bedpan and all. Now wait, wait,” she said quickly before he could form a word, “I don’t mean I’m not grateful, you been … you been, well I just can’t tell you. Look, nobody in my life ever did anything like this, I mean, I had to run away when I was thirteen, I done all sorts of bad things. And I got treated … I mean, nobody else … look, here’s what I mean, up to now I’d steal, I’d rob anybody, what the hell. What I mean, why not, you see?” She shook him gently to make him see; then, recognizing the blankness and misery of his expression, she wet her lips and started over. “What I’m trying to say is, you been so kind, all this—” She waved her hand at the blue rabbit, the turtle tank, everything in the room—“I can’t take any more. I mean, not a thing, not a breakfast. If I could pay you back some way, no matter what, I would, you know I would.” There was a tinge of bitterness in her husky voice. “Nobody can pay you anything. You don’t need anything or anybody. I can’t give you anything you need, or do anything for you that needs doing, you do it all yourself. If there was something you wanted from me—” She curled her hands inward and placed her fingertips between her breasts, inclining her head with a strange submissiveness that made him ache. “But no, you fix everything,” she mimicked. There was no mockery in it.

“No, no, you don’t go,” he whispered harshly.

She patted his cheek, and her eyes loved him. “I do go,” she said, smiling. Then the smile disappeared. “I got to explain to you, those hoods who cut me, I asked for that. I goofed. I was doing something real bad—well, I’ll tell you. I was a runner, know what I mean? I mean dope, I was selling it.”

He looked at her blankly. He was not catching one word in ten; he was biting and biting only on emptiness and uselessness, aloneness, and the terrible truth of this room without her or the blue rabbit or anything else but what it had contained all these years—linoleum with the design scrubbed off, six novels he couldn’t read, a stove waiting for someone to cook for, grime and regularity and who needs you?

She misunderstood his expression. “Honey, honey, don’t look at me like that, I’ll never do it again. I only did it because I didn’t care, I used to get glad when people hurt themselves; yeah, I mean that. I never knew someone could be kind, like you; I always thought that was sort of a lie, like the movies. Nice but not real, not for me.

“But I have to tell you, I swiped a cache, my God, twenty, twenty-two G’s worth. I had it all of forty minutes, they caught up with me.” Her eyes widened and saw things not in the room. “With a razor, he went to hit me with it so hard he broke it on top of the car door. He hit me here
down
and here
up,
I guess he was going to gut me but the razor was busted.” She expelled air from her nostrils, and her gaze came back into the room. “I guess I got the lump on the head when they threw me out of the car. I guess that’s why I couldn’t talk, I heard of that. Oh
honey!
Don’t look like that, you’re tearing me apart!”

He looked at her dolefully and wagged his big head helplessly from side to side. She knelt before him suddenly and took both his hands. “Listen, you
got
to understand. I was going to slide out while you were working but I stayed just so I could make you understand. After all you done. … See, I’m well, I can’t stay cooped up in one room forever. If I could, I’d get work some place near here and see you all the time, honest I would. But my life isn’t worth a rubber dime in this town. I got to leave here and that means I got to leave town. I’ll be all right, honey. I’ll write to you; I’ll never forget you, how could I?”

She was far ahead of him. He had grasped that she wanted to leave him; the next thing he understood was that she wanted to leave town too.