The Baby Blue Rip-Off (10 page)

“Well then,” I said, rolling up imaginary sleeves, “let’s go into that kitchen and strike a blow for Women’s Lib.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s.”

I made the spaghetti. The noodle part, I mean. Got some water boiling in a big kettle and added some vegetable oil, just a drop, to keep the strands from sticking together, and stood and stirred and preened over the thing. Meanwhile Debbie was making a homemade sauce with an aroma an Italian would die for (or, if he was in the Mafia, kill for). She also took care of wrapping up the French bread in foil and shoving it in the oven.

Again, we didn’t say much as we made the meal, but we had a good time, bustling around together in the kitchen, in mutual effort. The meal was as enjoyable, and as silent, as its preparation. Debbie dimmed the lights in the kitchen, obscuring the contrast of shiny new appliances and ancient wall of cabinets, plopped a fat red candle down center-table, and lit it, sending a soft glow of light around the table as we ate. The candle was scented—strawberry, I think—it added much to the romantic atmosphere. All we lacked was some damn fool playing a violin.

After the wordless, candlelit dinner, Debbie shattered the mood with a flick of a light switch, and we were back in a kitchen again. I helped her clear the table (getting a raised eyebrow of wonderment) and went to the sink and got a sinkful of soapy suds going.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m washing the dishes. You dry.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“No big chivalrous deal. I’m just used to a bachelor existence, in which I have to do my own chores anyway. I can’t afford a live-in maid.”

She joined me at the sink, got a towel from somewhere, and I handed her the dishes one by one as I cleaned them. “Well,”
she said, “it’s a pleasant change from Pat. He likes me in the kitchen or in bed, and that’s about it.”

I shrugged. “I might be the same way if I were a married man. It’s pretty well instilled in our culture, don’t you think? We see our parents behaving in a pattern and we just fall into it ourselves after a time.”

“Even when we don’t like it?”

“Sure. Because it’s all we know.”

“I suppose you’re right. Mal?”

“Yeah?”

“What would it have been like?”

“What would what have been like?”

“Us. You and me. If we had gotten together instead of Pat and me.”

“I don’t know. Different than you and Pat, sure. But not like it would be now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I’d married you straight out of high school, I’d be a different person than I am right now.”

“You mean if you hadn’t bummed around like you did for those years.”

“I take some issue with the term ‘bummed,’ my dear. I worked. Did a little of everything. Construction and cop, and a reporter for a while.... That was the best, I suppose, that last one. Bummed is not the word. Bummer might be, for the short time I was involved in the Haight-Ashbury scene.”

“How heavy were you into that? Drugs, I mean.”

“Not very heavy. Got scared out before much happened... to me, anyway. Was doing grass, which is no big thing, and was just into speed when, fortunately for me but unfortunately for him, this friend of mine overdosed on the stuff.” I shuddered
at the involuntary image that flashed through my mind: my buddy Chuck, floating dead in his bathtub, his eyes two big, lifeless marbles, hair like so much dead seaweed. “It was a long time ago,” I said. I gave her a look that said I didn’t want to talk about that subject any longer.

But she pursued it just the same, in an oblique way, asking, “What made you do all that?”

“All what?”

“All of it... all those different jobs, and then the drugs....”

“I don’t know. I suppose it was just getting out of the service, after goddamn Vietnam. Coming home and having my folks die. Had nobody here in Port City, really—no relatives; most of my friends were moved away or married; I couldn’t see sticking around. So I took off and searched around, trying to find some way to make life...
mean
something, I guess. Same reason for the drug bit, too; some kind of half-ass search for meaning, for identity.”

She thought about that a second, then said, “Mal?”

“Yeah?”

“You think you’ll find it back here? In Port City?”

“No. I quit looking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I decided to quit wasting my time looking for the Holy Grail. There ain’t none. I decided to accept my lot in life as just another dumb animal who won’t ever understand a goddamn thing.”

“How come you never got married?”

“Don’t know. Maybe I’m gay.”

She smiled and said, “I don’t think you’d have much luck convincing me of that.”

“Well, maybe I just haven’t met the right girl yet. Maybe I never really got over you, Debbie.”

“Don’t be silly! Besides, I’ve heard about you.”

“Heard what about me?”

“I got an aunt that lives over by you.”

“Oh?”

“And she’s told me about you. She’ll say, ‘You know what your old boyfriend’s up to now?’ And then she tells me. I know you sold a mystery book, too. I saw the article in the paper.”

“I didn’t know you’d stayed that interested in me.”

“Who says I was, silly. Maybe I just have a busybody aunt who likes to gossip.”

“Are you talking about Thelma Parker? Is she your aunt?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you do have a busybody aunt at that. Ole Thelma Parker spends half her waking hours giving me the evil eye.”

Debbie giggled. “She even has binoculars.”

“No kidding?”

“She told me you were seeing a girl who worked at the hospital. What was she, a nurse or something?”

“Nope. Dietician out there. She’s the one you can thank for my being so well trained into doing the dishes and such. A real liberated female, that one.”

“I’m jealous.”

“Jealous? Christ, girl, you’re the one who’s married! I’m a poor bachelor who gets it on maybe a dozen times a year if he’s lucky, and you’re a mother and the veteran of a well-worn marriage bed to boot. It’s not like you been sitting around in a chastity belt for the last ten years, waiting for me to come home from the Crusades.”

She laughed and took the last of the dishes from me, wiped it off, and stacked it with the rest on the counter. “I’ll put ’em
away later,” she said, and led me into the living room, back to the couch.

“I’m sorry, Mal,” she said, twining her fingers in my hair. “I can’t help being nosy about you. Can’t help wondering what you been up to all this time. And I can’t help wondering what it would’ve been like if things had worked out... different... with you and me.”

The shrill sound of the phone ringing out in the kitchen cut into our conversation.

Debbie rose to answer it, saying, “Be right back,” and headed out there.

I could hear her muffled voice, but couldn’t make out the words. She came back a few moments later, visibly shaken.

“It’s Pat,” she said.

“Yeah? Where was he calling from?”

“Downstairs. There’s a pay phone in the bar downstairs.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he knows you’re up here with me.”

This time he was right, wasn’t he? We had confirmed his suspicions; paranoia, as usual, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Does he have a key?” I asked.

“No. I had the locks changed after he left.”

“Then to hell with him. We won’t let him in.”

“He says he wants you to come down there and... fight him like a man.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“He says if you don’t, he’ll come up here and break the door down. He... he has a knife.”

Pat hadn’t changed much over the years, had he? He was still sending people around telling me about him and his knife.

“What’s he going to do?” I asked. “Stab down the door? I say the hell with him. Forget about him.”

“No. No, that’s not the way to handle him. I’m going down and talk to him. Maybe he’ll listen to reason.”

“Oh Christ, Debbie, get serious....”

“Let me try.”

“Debbie.”

“Please.”

“Okay. He’s your husband. Do it however you want.”

“Thanks, Mal.”

“For what?”

I followed her through the bedroom into Cindy’s room. I stood beside the squat brown heater and watched her open the door and disappear from sight, going down the stairs. Her footsteps made slow, steady clops.

I waited. Listened.

I heard Debbie’s muffled voice, but I couldn’t make out the words.

And then a sound I could make out: the sharp sound of a slap. And another recognizable sound followed right after: that of feet scurrying up the stairs, panic-driven feet.

Debbie slammed the door and looked at me, her face crimson on the left side from the slap, and said, “He’s so drunk he’s crazy. He says... he says come down and fight him like a man, or he’ll come up here and... and cut you.”

Well.

Looked like Pat Nelson and I were going to have our showdown at last. High Noon had taken over a decade to get here, but here it was.

I walked to the door and opened it. Descended the stairs, the walls claustrophobically tight on me. Down at the bottom, in a
pool of dim light from a twenty-five-watt bulb next to the tenant mailboxes, was Pat Nelson. I could smell the booze immediately, growing noticeably stronger as I neared him.

He was a mess. He was wearing a tee-shirt with booze soaked down the front of it; his blue jeans, too, were wet with liquor. He was tall, thin to the point of undernourishment, his cheeks still spotted with hints of acne; his hair was right out of the fifties: dyed blond greaser’s hair, with long dark skinny sideburns. His eyes drooped and his lower lip protruded, as if James Dean were the latest thing. His nose was pug, the sort a teenaged girl might find cute—which was his whole problem, really; he was somebody who’d been “cute” ten years ago and had tried to retain the image. He was what the phrase “callow youth” is all about, only he wasn’t a youth.

“Mallory,” he slurred, a near parody of a drunk, “you goddamn bastard, Mallory, put up your hands and fight like a man.”

I punched him once, right in his pug nose, and he went down like an armful of kindling wood.

I headed back up the stairs.

Behind me he was pulling himself back together, pulling himself back onto his feet like the Frankenstein monster coming to life for the first time.

“Mallory!” he shouted, and his voice echoed in the stairwell like somebody shouting down a crap hole. “Mallory, you goddamn bastard, what are you doing with my wife in there!”

And he scrambled up the steps, which I’d climbed about halfway, and I turned my head and saw the glint of his knife in his hand. When I turned, he froze, down two steps from me, and held the knife up for me to see and be scared of.

But it was just a little thing—shiny, probably razor sharp, but a real anticlimax, not much bigger than a pen knife. Oh, it could kill you, but I couldn’t see getting upset about it.

I was just high enough above him to be able to kick the thing out of his hand, and it went clumpety-clump down a couple of steps and lay there. Then I gave him a hard forearm across the chest, and he went clumpety-clump down all the steps and lay there. It wasn’t far enough a fall to hurt him bad, and he was too drunk to feel it, and after he’d looked up at me drunkenly for a moment, he went to sleep.

I walked to the top of the stairs, where I found Debbie standing in the doorway, her face ashen. But she said nothing.

We spent a quiet evening listening to old records that had been popular when we were in school, and when we talked, it wasn’t about Pat, but about old times and old friends, and sometimes about her daughter Cindy. We slept on the couch under a light blanket that protected us from the chugging air conditioner; it was cramped there on the couch, but Debbie was small and we made a nice fit, and neither one of us felt like sleeping in their bed—Pat’s and hers—though it never came up in conversation.

It wasn’t a good day for a funeral.

The morning sky was as clear and blue as the surface of a quiet lake. The sun was a cheerful yellow ball. A cooling breeze rolled in off the trees surrounding the cemetery. In those same trees, birds were chirping pleasantly, almost disrespectfully. By all rights it should’ve been miserable. Overcast. Maybe raining. But it wasn’t. It was beautiful. Not a good day for a funeral at all.

Which was okay, because Edward Jonsen had decided against it, anyway. Having a funeral for his mother, that is. He’d had no crystal ball to predict this nonfunereal day; he had just decided to spare all expense.

So there had been no funeral. The paper last night had said, “Graveside services” in lieu of anything else, and here I now was, watching Mrs. Jonsen get planted in the earth, a cold seed not expected to grow. The final resting place for Edward Jonsen’s mother was the family plot, next to her long-gone husband Elwood; her half of the stone had been inscribed years ago, with only the death date freshly chiseled in, unweathered. The casket was a black metallic thing, hardly lavish, but at least it wasn’t a pine box. The service consisted of three minutes of mumbling from some clergyman acquaintance of Jonsen’s.

There were, however, lots of flowers crowded around the graveside, and lots of friends, too: over twenty of them huddled
around the hole, looking irritated at the son’s lack of respect for his mother and her death. Most were elderly, peers of Mrs. Jonsen who had made a real effort to come out here, suffering the inconvenience out of a desire to say good-bye to a friend.

Next to Jonsen was an attractive woman of about forty who resembled Mrs. Jonsen a great deal. I took her to be Jonsen’s sister. She was a dark-eyed brunette and was dressed in black, of course, but with no hat and veil, and looked vaguely irritated herself. Whether with Edward Jonsen or just who, I didn’t know.

I was soon to find out.

Directly after the mumble-mouth minister dismissed the disgruntled flock, she approached me. “Are you Mr. Mallory?”

“I’m Mallory, yes,” I said, apprehensive. After all, her brother had pulled a gun on me just the day before.

“I’m Ann Bloom. Ann Jonsen Bloom. Edward is my brother, and....” She glanced over at the open grave. “... that sweet woman was my mother. Could I have a word with you?”