The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (30 page)

He paused. The quiet settled all around us. I caught Chester’s eye. It was as if we both knew it was not the time to press.

A moment later Scott seemed to realize he was no longer speaking. He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter and spoke once more.

“The firing was so heavy at first that I kept my head down. When it started to lighten up, I was grateful, until I realized why,” he said. “My unit was moving back, away from me. I wasn’t in any shape to go with them. If I called out, I wasn’t sure they could get to me, and if they couldn’t, Charlie would sure know my location.”

Scott took a deep breath and shook his head.

“I had no choice but to lie there in the grass, pretend I was dead and hope that nobody came up close to check,” he said.

Scott glanced in my direction. It was difficult for him sharing this, but he was determined to do so.

“I don’t know how long I was there,” he said. “Nearly
thirty-six hours, someone estimated later. I was losing a lot of blood, so I went in and out of consciousness. I thought about my dad and about the junk business and how hard I’d fought to get away from it. Dying in that grass suddenly seemed so much worse than working in the store.”

He became uncomfortable as he tried to explain.

“God and heaven and all that sort of thing seemed really close to me out there,” he said. “So I prayed. I said, ‘Please get me home.’ I didn’t ask to be whole. I didn’t ask to be happy. I just pleaded for that one thing, ‘If you’ll just get me home,’ I promised, ‘I’ll stay and run that store for the rest of my life.’”

Scott hesitated, glancing up at Chester. “And I have.”

The silence at the table lingered. The summer breeze was the only sound in our ears, that and the distant cry of a mockingbird. The three of us sat, sharing that table and something just as tangible.

Unexpectedly, Chester burst into laughter.

“What do you know, Jane,” he said to me. “Scott Robbins is one of us.”

A
NJE HAD TAKEN
charge of Chester the minute we’d driven up to the doorway. We weren’t late, but she acted as if we were, fussing over Chester, who looked as happy and flushed with health as I had ever seen him.

“Thanks, Chester,” I told him, preempting any gratitude that he might have wished to express. “I had a wonderful Sunday with you.”

He laughed. “Don’t you forget it,” he said. “It was one of the best days of my life. It was the two of you that made it so.”

We were shooed away and he was taken to his room. Scott and I got back into the Beetle and headed downtown.

At the red light on the intersection, I pointed to the infamous spot on the divided highway. “That’s where I had my accident.”

Chester and I had both revealed our own personal vows and the stories behind them.

Scott glanced at the place and then back toward the Assisted Living Center. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he was thinking.

“It’s amazing that Chester saw me,” I said. “Even more so
when you think of him getting down here to save me and having the foresight to bring that butcher knife.”

Scott nodded. “That’s the way I feel about the patrol that had somehow missed the road and was wandering through the grass to stumble over me thirty-six hours after I was hit.”

The light changed and I turned onto the expressway.

“Do you think it was…like God?” I asked.

He gave me a faint little smile. “I’ve never said that aloud.”

“But do you think it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think it was God in the jungle. I think it was God getting Chester to that car. And I think it was God bringing you into my little store.”

“Maybe it wasn’t God back in the old days when I got such a thrill out of cheating you.”

He laughed and he reached over and laid his hand atop mine on the gearshift.

“Well, you know, Janey, I’ve been thinking about
all my worldly goods to thee endow,
” he teased. “Perhaps I can see about getting that made retroactive.”

It was a little joke, of course. A silly, intimate little girlfriend/boyfriend-type joke. Somehow it kind of thrilled me all over.

When I pulled into my parking spot in front of the store, he asked me to come in with him. It seemed very natural to do so.

We walked right past the counter area where our tête-à-têtes were commonly held, to the mezzanine stairs. Holding my hand in his own, we hurried up the oak steps. He didn’t bother to unhook the flimsy cord that held up the Private Keep Out sign. He just climbed right over it and helped me to do the same.

I just went rather naturally into his arms. I don’t know how long it had been since I had been kissed; really, sweet, soul-
searching, heights-reaching kissed. Maybe I never had been, or perhaps I had just forgotten what it was like. But at that moment, it was everything.

We continued up the stairs once more, only to stop at the landing and kiss again. This time our knees turned to jelly and we ended up sitting on the stairs, necking, only ten steps from his doorway.

Like a couple of hormone-driven teenagers, we were eager and hesitant. Both of us aroused, neither of us in our right minds.

Scott pulled away from me. Sweat was beaded up on his forehead and he was breathing heavily.

“Okay, Janey,” he said. “This is your call. Do we go upstairs and have sex or do we go downstairs and pretend this never happened?”

“Let’s go upstairs and have sex,” I answered. “We can go downstairs and pretend that it never happened later.”

He laughed. He slid one arm around my back and another behind my knees and lifted me up into his lap.

“I’d like to carry you to my bed,” he told me, “but I don’t think my leg could stand it.”

“Save your strength,” I told him. “You’re going to need it when we get there.”

We continued to kiss and grope and tease each other on the stairs. I loved sitting in his lap, feeling the hardness in the front of his trousers pressing urgently against my tush. I was eager to get a look at him naked. But he was in a better position to undo buttons and drag down zippers. By the time we made it across the threshold of his apartment, his shirt was hanging open and I was stripped down to diaphanous blue panties.

We made it to his bed eventually and were squirming passionately when I mentioned the word
condom
. It had the effect often seen in the great newspaper movies of the 1930s, where
the editor, upon hearing the hero’s latest communiqué yells out, “Stop the presses!”

He searched fruitlessly in the drawer beside the bed. Then he checked out the shelves in the bathroom. While I found the interruption of our romantic moment somewhat irksome, it was also endearing and reassuring.

“Found ’em,” Scott said, hurrying back to bed, where he tossed the small box of Magnums.

“Did you check the expiration date?” I asked him.

He nodded. “We still have time,” he said. “But I do think we ought to hurry.”

I laughed. And he laughed.

We went into each other’s arms once more, but it was without the mindless rush. We took our time, enjoying the moment, reveling in the experience.

I admit, it had been a while since I’d had sex. It wouldn’t have taken all that much to impress me. Scott managed it. It had obviously been a while for him, as well.

We were good together, neither of us really unsure about ourselves, both of us willing to take some chances. There is always excitement in newness, but especially so when trust and respect are already firmly established.

Afterward, exhausted, we lay in each other’s arms. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to luxuriate in the warmth of it all.

“That was great,” I told him for starters as I snuggled up close.

A moment later I was sound asleep.

When I awakened, it was very dark. Across the room a match sparked into life. In its faint glow, I watched Scott light a kerosene lamp.

“Don’t tell me,” I said as he carried the light to the beside table. “You haven’t paid your electric bill.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed next to me.

“I’ve got two bare bulbs overhead,” he told me. “Bright and harsh. I thought I might look better dimmer.”

“Dim guys are my specialty,” I assured him.

He leaned down and kissed me.

“The Janey Domschke I knew at Sunnyside wasn’t particularly interested in guys at all, especially not dim ones.”

“That Janey was only fifteen years old,” I said.

“Ah yes,” he said. “Innocent and virginal, young Janey had not yet discovered the sins of the flesh. And how good she was at them.”

“I don’t actually recall you being Mr. Conquest,” I pointed out.

He shrugged. “I was slow getting off the mark,” he admitted. “But I’m a real player now. Luring women up to my badly lit mezzanine apartment and driving them crazy with insatiable lust as I search for protective latex.”

“Insatiable?”

“Or maybe insensible?”

“More like incensed.”

“You’re thinking of that Strawberry Alarm Clock song, you know, about mad-candy disease, ‘incensed peppermint.’”

I groaned as if in pain, and then simultaneously, we broke into song.

“‘Who cares what games we choose? Little to win but nothin’ to lose.’”

Scott’s expression was stern. “Janey,” he said, “you’re gorgeous, but you can’t sing.”

I smiled. “What a lovely compliment,” I said. “I’ll be sure to pass it on to my plastic surgeon.”

“He probably can’t sing either.”

“Stop, you’re killing me.”

“What a way to die!”

It was three-thirty in the morning. We were both wide-awake. So we made sandwiches, took showers—one together and two separately—and we had more sex.

The dawn was seeping in through the windows when I thought about going home.

“What’s your hurry?” he asked as he came up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist.

In truth, there was none.

I was reluctant for the idyll to end. He seemed to feel the same way. I think we both worried that once we stepped back into the real world, into our real lives, what we’d shared together would all slip away like a pleasant dream that had you smiling when you awakened, but that you were never quite able to recall to mind.

So I didn’t go home. I put on yesterday’s picnic clothes, used his comb and toothbrush and wore only the lipstick, powder and blush that I carried in my purse.

He fixed a breakfast fit for ranch hands: sausage, eggs and toast. We ate at his little table next to the window with the street view. We decided we were a perfect division of the newspaper. I got the Metro and Style. He took the front section and Sports. But neither of us read much. We kept getting distracted by things we wanted to say, thoughts we wanted to share.

We opened the store promptly at nine. Scott wanted to write a letter about political favoritism in the presidency.

“I read the president said he considered loyalty to be the most important trait he looked for in the people around him,” Scott told me.

“It’s a good quality,” I agreed.

“Yeah, it sounded okay to me, too,” he said. “Then it
stopped me in my tracks. That kind of committed single focus can be scary. I mean, Hitler’s supporters were absolutely committed and faithful.”

“So you’re going to compare the president with Hitler?”

He shook his head rapidly. “Far too incendiary and not anywhere near fair,” he said. “I guess you could say I’m writing about loyalty versus leadership. A truly forward-looking leader ought to seek out independent thinkers, not try to stifle their influence.”

As the sun came pouring in through the front windows, Scott pursued the clear expression of his thoughts and I sorted through boxes of costume jewelry.

We had a broad range of morning shoppers. Traffic in the store was up, and I took some personal pride in that. It was amazing what a generous amount of friendly, personal service could do for a business.

I sold some badly weathered and damaged picture frames to a young artist from the college, who said he’d heard about us from a friend who’d purchased a broken mirror the week before.

The fellow’s girlfriend, who was probably about eighteen but looked twelve, went crazy over my quilt display. She couldn’t actually afford to buy any of them, but I gladly spent forty-five minutes telling her what I knew about the styles and patterns.

Ramon Glasse, an interior decorator whom I had known for years, dropped in. His eyes lit up at the sight of me, and we hugged like old friends.

“So you have bought yourself this store,” he said. “It’s a very good one. Lots of quality inventory and priced very cheap.”

“Not as cheap as it used to be,” I warned him. “And I haven’t bought the place. I just work here.”

The expression on his face changed immediately. He was embarrassed for me to be caught employed.

I diffused any further sympathy by suggesting that the management was instigating new store policies and we would be willing to offer him a small professional discount on items he purchased for his clients in return for helping us establish our name. Ramon was completely amenable to that.

“I heard about your divorce,” he said, tutting sympathetically.

“I suppose it is still prime gossip at the club,” I said.

“Up until a week ago,” he told me. “Now the gossips have a new, more luscious tidbit.”

“Oh?”

“Gil Mullins has left his wife,” Ramon said emphatically.

“You’re kidding?”

“I never kid,” he assured me. “And the woman he left her for is an absolute nobody.”

“Young bimbo?”

“If only!” Ramon said. “That would be understandable. This woman is dumpy, middle-aged and wears knockoffs.”

“Who is she?”

“Some real estate woman,” he said. “You probably know her. Ann…what is it they call her?…Ann Roller Hind.”

“Ann Rhoder Hines!”

“Yes, that’s her! You do know her. Enough said then.”

He left laughing, happy and carrying a set of ceramic chickens that were kitchen canisters. The rooster was for flour, the hen sugar and the two little chicks, one brown and one yellow, were tea and coffee. I had unearthed them in a back room. And they were, in my opinion, four of the ugliest examples of arts and crafts on earth. But they were just the kind of eclectic fribble that Ramon would convince his customers they couldn’t live without. I made him pay through the nose for them.

We had a lull about one-thirty and I raced up to the mezzanine and threw together a salad from what flotsam I could find in Scott’s refrigerator. We shared it together behind the counter as Scott read the first draft of what he’d written from the screen of his laptop.

The man truly had a fine way with words. When he finished I gave him a well-deserved round of applause.

“You like it?” he asked.

“It’s great,” I said.

“It’s too long,” he said. “I need to whittle it down quite a bit. Keep all the meaning and cut out the wordiness.”

“Don’t you dare cut out that part about virtue,” I told him. “That was absolutely quotable. Let’s hear it again.”

He scanned through the document until he found the line I meant.

“If Goldwater were commenting on the policies of
this
Oval Office, he might remark that virtue taken to its extreme is as dangerous to our liberty as any vice.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow?”

“Yes, wow, and that’s my final word on the subject,” I told him.

He chuckled. “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “I want to try and get this finished today. The more timely it is, the better chance it has for getting in the paper.”

“For the local paper?”

He nodded. “Well, yeah. That’s where I’ve printed all of my stuff before.”

“I don’t think you should send it to them,” I told him.

“You don’t?”

“Why start locally?” I said. “It’s a national issue, send it out nationally. What are the top newspapers in the country, the
New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times?
Send it there first.”

“Why would the
New York Times
print a letter from me?”

“Scott, it’s a global village, right?” I told him. “The world is their readership. And it’s exactly what you say here. If they are good leaders, then they’ll want to fill their newspaper with independent thinkers.”