Someone in the House (2 page)

Less vital, but nonetheless important, was the fact that my summer plans involved someone else. Kevin Blacklock was a friend and a colleague. Like me, he was an English instructor; like me, he was poor and ambitious. We had been working on a book. A high school English text doesn’t do a lot for one’s academic prestige, but it was work we both enjoyed and we hoped to make a little money out of it. We worked well together; at least we had, until Joe moved into my apartment and my life. I had not seen much of Kevin in the past months. He had accepted my repetitive apologies with amiable goodwill, remarking finally, with the smile that was one of his most attractive features, “I understand, Annie; I’ve been there myself. Forget the book for a while. We’ll go at it again next summer.”

You can’t help but be fond of a man like that. And you can’t leave him up the creek without a collaborator when he’s been so nice.

I tried to make myself believe my sense of responsibility to Kevin guided my final decision.

When I told Joe I wasn’t going with him, he just shrugged. “It’s up to you,” he said.

The decision having been made, I stopped worrying about it. Sure I did. I changed my mind five times a week until finally it was too late to get reservations. Life was hectic that last month. In addition to the usual end-of-term work, I caught flu and went around in an antihistamine fog for days. Joe was even busier than I, but as the day of our parting neared, he succumbed to a certain degree of sentiment, and we had a couple of really marvelous weeks. Hence the gourmet dinner, the last night, the final moments…How romantic.

It was romantic, at first. I had gone all out—flowers on the table, candles, champagne icing in a cooler I had concocted from the bottom of a double boiler. The total effect was pretty impressive.

I was not so impressive. I don’tthink my name was ever intended to be a bad joke—though I sometimes wonder why any woman would call a scrawny, redheaded infant Anne. My hair isn’t auburn or red-gold, it’s pure carrot color and it curls up into tight, wiry curls when the weather is damp. When I was the same size as the repulsive kid in the comic strip, my figure looked just like hers. As I got older, the basic shape didn’t change much, it just elongated. The crowning blow was when I learned I had to wear glasses. On that muggy May day, with four pots boiling on the stove, steam kept clouding the lenses so that my eyes looked like big blank circles.

Joe was late, so I had time to defog the glasses. There wasn’t much I could do about my hair. He didn’t seem to mind. He raved about the meal, as well he might have. The atmosphere was thoroughly domestic. After dinner Joe stretched out on the couch, with his head on my lap, and grumbled jokingly about how full he was.

This was not the first occasion on which I had vaguely sensed that domesticity and passion may be incompatible. I was tired. Six hours in a steaming kitchen had taken all the starch out of me. Piled up in the sink, awaiting my attentions, were all the pots and pans and dishes I owned. I could hardly ask Joe to help wash up, not on his last night, but I could see them in my mind’s eye, like a great swaying pyramid of grease, and the prospect only added to my monumental fatigue.

However, when Joe started making the usual overtures my interest awoke. It really did. My state of mind cannot account for what happened.

Suddenly, shockingly, I was submerged in a drowning tide of despair. Every negative emotion I had ever experienced melded and magnified into a great enveloping cloud. I was blind and groping in the dark, my mouth wry with the bitter taste of fear, my ears deafened by my own cries of pain. In subjective time it only lasted for a few seconds. When I came out of it I was clutching Joe with clawed fingers and my face was sticky with streaming tears.

My tender lover pulled himself to a sitting position and gave me a hard shove. I saw his face through a distorting film of water; it wore a look of pop-eyed consternation. His eyes rolled toward the door, as if seeking the nearest exit. Then his mouth set in a straight, ugly line and he lifted his hand.

“Don’t,” I gasped. “I’m all right. I…please don’t, Joe. Give me a minute.”

Joe slid back to the extreme end of the couch and watched stonily while I searched my disheveled person for a handkerchief. Of course I possessed no such thing. After a moment Joe got up and came back with a box of tissues. He did not sit down again. He stood watching while I mopped my face and my sweating palms and fumbled to find my glasses. I felt a little less naked and defenseless when I had them on.

Like a gentlemanly fighter awaiting his opponent’s recovery, Joe judged I was ready to resume the match. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he demanded.

“Nothing…now.” I pressed my hands to my head. “It’s gone. My God, it was awful. I felt so frightened, so…”

And there I stopped—I, with my supposed gift of moderate eloquence, I who was steeped in the accumulated wit and beauty of the long English literary tradition. I could think of no words that would describe that experience.

“Do you know what you said?” Joe asked. “Do you know what you did?”

Dumbly I shook my head. The words I wanted still eluded me; I could see them fluttering in the darkness of my mind like bright moths, escaping the net with which I tried to trap them.

“You kept saying, ‘Don’t go, please don’t leave me,’” Joe said.

I found words—the wrong words—stinging wasps, not pretty butterflies. “How very touching,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? This is touching too.” With a gesture worthy of Milady baring her branded shoulder, Joe pulled his shirt back. Bloody punctures spotted his chest.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I said feebly.

Joe sat down on the edge of the couch. He watched me like a man facing a dangerous animal, alert for the slightest sign of menace; but mingled with his apprehension was an unmistakable air of complacency.

“I didn’t realize you cared that much,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so before? You were so damned calm about it—”

“I don’t care that much.”

I might have put it more tactfully, but at the moment I was too worried about my own state of mind to care about Joe’s. I was remembering stories about amnesiacs and people who suffer from epilepsy—people with blank spots in their lives and no recollection of what they might have done during the missing moments.

“Maybe you ought to see a doctor,” Joe said.

I had been thinking that myself. The fact that Joe suggested it made me want to do the opposite.

“You’re the one who needs a doctor,” I said, with a weak laugh. “You had better put some iodine on those scratches.”

“Yeah, sure. Listen, Anne—seriously—I mean—maybe you ought to get somebody to stay with you. I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

“Damn it, you don’t! I mean, if you think I’m implying—”

“Well, what are you implying?”

A few more inane exchanges of this sort and we were shouting at each other. The quarrel developed along the old familiar lines, and it ended as our quarrels usually did. But it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t blame Joe for holding back, nor was I my usual responsive self. To put it bluntly, we were both afraid—afraid that the whining, clawing thing would return.

I awoke from heavy, too-brief sleep to find that the room was gray with dawn and that Joe was no longer beside me. Sounds of emphatic splashing from the bathroom assured me of his whereabouts, so I dragged myself out of bed and went to make coffee. When I got my turn in the bathroom and contemplated my face in the mirror, I saw that my eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and almost as expressionless as those of my namesake.

Joe never needed much sleep, and the fact that we had made it through the night without another outburst had restored his equanimity. I was too sodden with sleeplessness and disgust to regard his irritating cheerfulness with anything stronger than lethargy. I fed him breakfast, making scrambled eggs in the last clean pan in the house, and drank three cups of coffee. Thus fortified, I hoped I could make it to the airport and back.

We had borrowed a car from one of my friends, so we could be alone together till the last possible moment. The drive passed in almost total silence. We were an hour early, but Joe wouldn’t let me wait.

“I hate standing around in airports saying the same stupid things over and over,” he said gruffly. “Get the hell out. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Right,” I said.

Awkwardly Joe put his arms around me and kissed me. He missed my mouth by a couple of inches. Before I could respond or return the embrace, he turned me around and gave me a little shove. I took two or three staggering steps before I regained my balance. When I looked back, he was striding toward the gate.

I went out and sat in the car. Planes kept landing and taking off. Finally a big silver monster lifted up, in a roar of jets, and I decided arbitrarily that it must be Joe’s plane. I watched it circle and soar until it was only a speck in the sky. The air was already warm and sticky. It was going to be another hot day.

III

I could have gone back to bed, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I had two nasty jobs ahead of me, so I chose what seemed like the least nasty. At least I could sit down while I read exam papers.

An hour later I was still staring at the first sentence of the first paper. It read, “John Keats was born in 1792.” Even the date was wrong. I was afraid if I picked up my red pencil to correct the date, I would start scribbling vituperative comments, so I just sat there, wondering how any college freshman could start an essay with “So-and-so was born…” Joe’s plane was nearing the coast by now. It was a good day for flying, not a cloud in the sky.

The knock at my office door came as a welcome relief. Even a student would have looked good to me then—except perhaps the imbecile who had written that exam. “Come in,” I said.

It wasn’t a student, it was Kevin, my abandoned collaborator and good buddy. He stood in the doorway, all six-plus feet of him, smiling. In his hand was a paper cup.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Bless you.”

“I won’t stay. I just thought—”

“Stay. I can’t face these damn exams right now; maybe a conversation with someone who knows how to speak and write English will make me feel better.”

Kevin sat down in the student’s chair beside my desk. “Joe get off all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Kevin nodded and looked at me sympathetically. With friendly dispassion, I thought to myself that he really was one of the best-looking men of my acquaintance, if you like the long, lean, aesthetic type—and who doesn’t? His thick dark hair curled around his ears and waved poetically across his high intellectual forehead. He had fantastic cheekbones, with the little hollows underneath that are supposed to bring out the maternal instinct in all womanly women. His nose was thin, with narrow nostrils that would be incapable of flaring; his sensitive mouth looked equally incapable of shaping cruel words. Despite the delicacy of his features, there was nothing effeminate about him. He was a good tennis player and swimmer; his body was as neatly modeled as his face, and when he moved, susceptible female students forgot what they had meant to ask him.

I started to feel better.

“He’s going to have a wonderful summer and get a lot done,” I said briskly. “So will we, right?”

Kevin’s long lashes (the man doesn’t have an ugly feature) fluttered and fell. “That’s what I came to tell you, Anne. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, after…It’s bad news for me, in a way, but maybe it won’t be for you; you could join Joe—”

“Oh, no,” I said, in tones of heartfelt woe. I had not realized until that moment how much I had counted on our summer project. Without it I had nothing to hang on to. I might even be weak-minded enough to chase after Joe. And that would be worse than deciding to go with him in the first place.

Kevin sat in silence, his mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. “I’m sorry,” he said, after a while.

“What happened?”

“It’s my parents. You remember I told you about them winning all that money?”

“What money?”

Kevin’s big beautiful brown eyes lifted to meet mine. He looked surprised; then he smiled.

“You were thinking about something more important at the time, I guess.”

“Wait a minute, I do remember.” Disarmed, as always, by his humility, I felt ashamed, and was able to dredge up the recollection of that conversation, months before. “The state lottery, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. Half a million dollars.”

“My God! That much?”

“Maybe I didn’t mention the amount. Of course a lot of it went in taxes. But that’s only the half of it. You know what they say about money begetting money? I don’t understand how Dad did it—I’m a financial moron myself—but apparently all he needed was a stake. He’s manipulated his winnings into a fortune, in less than a year. He didn’t tell me about it till a few weeks ago, and honest to God, Anne, when he gave me the grand total I had to sit down.”