The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (19 page)

The place is neat and arranged in a more or less orderly way, however, and the man seems comfortable there. He strolls from the kitchen to the living room and peeks into the three small bedrooms that branch off a hallway behind the living room. “Nice place!” he calls to the woman. He studies the framed pictures of her three children arranged as if on an altar atop the buffet. “Nice-looking kids!” he calls out. They are. Blond, round-faced, clean, and utterly ordinary-looking, their pleasant faces glance, as instructed, slightly off camera and down to the right, as if they are trying to remember the name of the capital of Montana.

When he returns to the kitchen, the woman is putting away her groceries, her back to him. “Where’s that beer you bribed me with?” he asks again. He takes a position against the doorframe, his weight on one hip, like a dancer resting. “You sure are quiet today, Sarah,” he says in a low voice. “Everything okay?”

Silently, she turns away from the grocery bags, crosses the room to the man, reaches up to him, and, holding him by the head, kisses his mouth, rolls her torso against his, drops her hands to his hips and yanks him tightly to her and goes on kissing him, eyes closed, working her face furiously against his. The man places his hands on her shoulders and pulls away, and they face each other, wide-eyed, amazed and frightened. The man drops his hands, and the woman lets go of his hips. Then, after a few seconds, the man silently turns, goes to the door, and leaves. The last thing he sees as he closes the door behind him is the woman standing in the kitchen doorframe, her face looking down and slightly to one side, wearing the same pleasant expression on her face as her children in their photographs, trying to remember the capital of Montana.

5

Sarah appeared at my apartment door the following morning, a Sunday, cool and rainy. She had brought me the package of freshly laundered shirts I’d left in her kitchen, and when I opened the door to her, she simply held the package out to me, as if it were a penitent’s gift. She wore a yellow rain slicker and cap and looked more like a disconsolate schoolgirl facing an angry teacher than a grown woman dropping a package off at a friend’s apartment.

I invited her inside, and she accepted my invitation. I had been reading the Sunday
New York Times
on the couch and drinking coffee, lounging through the gray morning in bathrobe and pajamas. I told her to take off her wet raincoat and hat and hang them in the closet by the door and started for the kitchen to get her a cup of coffee, when I stopped, turned, and looked at her. She closed the closet door on her yellow raincoat and hat, turned around, and faced me.

What else can I do? I must describe it. I remember that moment of ten years ago as if it occurred ten minutes ago. The package of shirts on the table behind her, the newspapers scattered over the couch and floor, the sound of windblown rain washing the side of the building outside, and the silence of the room, as we stood across from one another and watched, while we each simultaneously removed our own clothing, my robe, her blouse and skirt, my pajama top, her slip and bra, my pajama bottom, her underpants, until we were both standing naked in the harsh, gray light, two naked members of the same species, a male and a female, the male somewhat younger and less scarred than the female, the female somewhat less delicately constructed than the male, both individuals pale-skinned with dark thatches of hair in the areas of their genitals, both individuals standing slackly, as if a great, protracted tension between them had at last been released.

6

We made love that morning in my bed for long hours that drifted easily into afternoon. And we talked, as people usually do when they spend a half day or half a night in bed together. I told her of my past, named and described the people whom I had loved and had loved me, my ex-wife in New York, my brother in the Air Force, my mother in San Diego, and I told her of my ambitions and dreams and even confessed some of my fears. She listened patiently and intelligently throughout and talked much less than I. She had already told me many of these things about herself, and perhaps whatever she had to say to me now lay on the next inner circle of intimacy or else could not be spoken of at all.

During the next few weeks, we met and made love often, and always at my apartment. On arriving home from work, I would phone her, or if not, she would phone me, and after a few feints and dodges, one would suggest to the other that we get together tonight, and a half hour later she’d be at my door. Our lovemaking was passionate, skillful, kindly, and deeply satisfying. We didn’t often speak of it to one another or brag about it, the way some couples do when they are surprised by the ease with which they have become contented lovers. We did occasionally joke and tease each other, however, playfully acknowledging that the only thing we did together was make love but that we did it so frequently there was no time for anything else.

Then one hot night, a Saturday in August, we were lying in bed atop the tangled sheets, smoking cigarettes, and chatting idly, and Sarah suggested that we go out for a drink.

“Out? Now?”

“Sure. It’s early. What time is it?”

I scanned the digital clock next to the bed. “Nine forty-nine.”

“There. See?”

“That’s not so early. You usually go home by eleven, you know. It’s almost ten.”

“No, it’s only a little after nine. Depends on how you look at things. Besides, Ron, it’s Saturday night. Or is this the only thing you know how to do?” she said and poked me in the ribs. “You know how to dance? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, sure … sure, but not tonight. It’s too hot. And I’m tired.”

But she persisted, happily pointing out that an air-conditioned bar would be as cool as my apartment, and we didn’t have to go to a dance bar, we could go to Osgood’s. “As a compromise,” she said.

I suggested a place called the El Rancho, a restaurant with a large, dark cocktail lounge and dance bar located several miles from town on the old Portsmouth highway. Around nine the restaurant closed, and the bar became something of a roadhouse, with a small country-and-western band and a clientele drawn from the four or five villages that adjoined Concord on the north and east. I had eaten at the restaurant once, but had never gone to the bar, and I didn’t know anyone who had.

Sarah was silent for a moment. Then she lit a cigarette and drew the sheet over her naked body. “You don’t want anybody to know about us, Ron. Do you?”

“That’s not it… I just don’t like gossip, and I work with a lot of people who show up sometimes at Osgood’s. On a Saturday night especially.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You’re ashamed of being seen with me. You’ll sleep with me, all right, but you won’t go out in public with me.”

“That’s not true, Sarah.”

She was silent again. Relieved, I reached across her to the bed table and got my cigarettes and lighter.

“You owe me, Ron,” she said suddenly, as I passed over her. “You owe me.”

“What?” I lay back, lit a cigarette, and covered my body with the sheet.

“I said, ‘You owe me.’ ”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sarah. I just don’t like a lot of gossip going around, that’s all. I like keeping my private life private, that’s all. I don’t
owe
you anything.”

“Friendship you owe me. And respect. Friendship and respect. A person can’t do what you’ve done with me without owing her friendship and respect.”

“Sarah, I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I am your friend, you know that. And I respect you. I do.”

“You really think so, don’t you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

She said nothing for several long moments. Then she sighed and in a low, almost inaudible voice said, “Then you’ll have to go out in public with me. I don’t care about Osgood’s or the people you work with, we don’t have to go there or see any of them,” she said. “But you’re gonna have to go to places like the El Rancho with me, and a few other places I know, too, where there’s people
I
know, people
I
work with, and maybe we’ll even go to a couple of parties, because
I
get invited to parties sometimes, you know. I have friends, and I have some family, too, and you’re gonna have to meet my family. My kids think I’m just going around barhopping when I’m over here with you, and I don’t like that, so you’re gonna have to meet them, so I can tell them where I am when I’m not at home nights. And sometimes you’re gonna come over and spend the evening at my place!” Her voice had risen as she heard her demands and felt their rightness, until now she was almost shouting at me. “You
owe
that to me. Or else you’re a bad man. It’s that simple, Ron.”

7

The handsome man is overdressed. He is wearing a navy blue blazer, taupe shirt open at the throat, white slacks, white loafers. Everyone else, including the homely woman with the handsome man, is dressed appropriately—that is, like everyone else—jeans and cowboy boots, blouses or cowboy shirts or T-shirts with catchy sayings or the names of country-and-western singers printed across the front, and many of the women are wearing cowboy hats pushed back and tied under their chins.

The man doesn’t know anyone at the bar or, if they’re at a party, in the room, but the woman knows most of the people there, and she gladly introduces him. The men grin and shake his hand, slap him on his jacketed shoulder, ask him where he works, what’s his line, after which they lapse into silence. The women flirt briefly with their faces, but they lapse into silence even before the men do. The woman with the man in the blazer does most of the talking for everyone. She talks for the man in the blazer, for the men standing around the refrigerator, or, if they’re at a bar, for the other men at the table, and for the other women, too. She chats and rambles aimlessly through loud monologues, laughs uproariously at trivial jokes, and drinks too much, until soon she is drunk, thick-tongued, clumsy, and the man has to say her good-byes and ease her out the door to his car and drive her home to her apartment on Perley Street.

This happens twice in one week and then three times the next—at the El Rancho, at the Ox Bow in Northwood, at Rita and Jimmy’s apartment on Thorndike Street, out in Warner at Betsy Beeler’s new house, and, the last time, at a cottage on Lake Sunapee rented by some kids in shipping at Rumford Press. Ron no longer calls Sarah when he gets home from work; he waits for her call, and sometimes, when he knows it’s she, he doesn’t answer the phone. Usually, he lets it ring five or six times, and then he reaches down and picks up the receiver. He has taken his jacket and vest off and loosened his tie and is about to put his supper, frozen manicotti, into the microwave oven.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Okay, I guess. A little tired.”

“Still hungover?”

“Naw. Not really. Just tired. I hate Mondays.”

“You have fun last night?”

“Well, yeah, sorta. It’s nice out there, at the lake. Listen,” she says, brightening. “Whyn’t you come over here tonight? The kids’re all going out later, but if you come over before eight, you can meet them. They really want to meet you.”

“You told them about me?”

“Sure. Long time ago. I’m not supposed to tell my own kids?”

Ron is silent.

She says, “You don’t want to come over here tonight. You don’t want to meet my kids. No, you don’t want my kids to meet
you
, that’s it.”

“No, no, it’s just… I’ve got a lot of work to do…”

“We should talk,” she announces in a flat voice.

“Yes,” he says. “We should talk.”

They agree that she will meet him at his apartment, and they’ll talk, and they say good-bye and hang up.

While Ron is heating his supper and then eating it alone at his kitchen table and Sarah is feeding her children, perhaps I should admit, since we are nearing the end of my story, that I don’t actually know that Sarah Cole is dead. A few years ago, I happened to run into one of her friends from the press, a blond woman with an underslung jaw. Her name, she reminded me, was Glenda; she had seen me at Osgood’s a couple of times, and we had met at the El Rancho once when I had gone there with Sarah. I was amazed that she could remember me and a little embarrassed that I did not recognize her at all, and she laughed at that and said, “You haven’t changed much, mister!” I pretended to recognize her then, but I think she knew that she was a stranger to me. We were standing outside the Sears store on South Main Street, where I had gone to buy paint. I had recently remarried, and my wife and I were redecorating my apartment.

“Whatever happened to Sarah?” I asked Glenda. “Is she still down at the press?”

“Jeez, no! She left a long time ago. Way back. I heard she went back with her ex-husband. I can’t remember his name, something Cole. Eddie Cole, maybe.”

I asked her if she was sure of that, and she said no, she had only heard it around the bars and down at the press, but she assumed it was true. People said Sarah had moved back with her ex-husband and was living for a while with him and the kids in a trailer in a park near Hooksett, and then, when the kids, or at least the boys, got out of school, the rest of them moved down to Florida or someplace because he was out of work. He was a carpenter, she thought.

“He was mean to her,” I said. “I thought he used to beat her up and everything. I thought she hated him.”

“Oh, well, yeah, he was a bastard, all right. I met him a couple times, and I didn’t like him. Short, ugly, and mean when he got drunk. But you know what they say.”

“What do they say?”

“Oh, you know, about water seeking its own level and all.”

“Sarah wasn’t mean, drunk
or
sober.”

The woman laughed. “Naw, but she sure was short and ugly!”

I said nothing.

“Hey, don’t get me wrong,” Glenda said. “I liked Sarah. But you and her … well, you sure made a funny-looking couple. She probably didn’t feel so self-conscious and all with her husband,” she said somberly. “With you, all tall and blond, and poor old Sarah… I mean, the way them kids in the press room used to kid her about her looks, it was embarrassing just to have to hear it.”