The Waiting Room (16 page)

~ * ~

I stayed at the beach house that night, despite Abner's halfhearted objections. He gave me a small square room down a short hallway from the kitchen. It faced the ocean, and was sparsely furnished—a black wrought-iron twin bed, a battered oval night-stand, a tarnished brass wall lamp, a small wood-framed picture above the bed. The room was painted a bright yellow. Abner said, "It's a pretty restful color with the light off, Sam. And you can hear the ocean. If you get to sleep right away, you should be all right." He paused. "Do you want anything?"

I sat on the bed. Its dull blue comforter had a slightly damp feel; the mattress beneath was soft and lumpy, as if it had seen a good many years of use. I looked up at Abner. He was standing near the door; he was obviously in a hurry to leave. "Anything?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Sure. To help you sleep. You know, sleeping pills. Do you want any?"

I shook my head, started to say
No, thanks
. He interrupted, "I'd recommend it, Sam. And I'd recommend something strong, too. Something that'll knock you out good."

Again I shook my head. I patted the bed. "This feels comfortable enough," I lied.

He smiled. "You think you're pretty tough, don't you, Sam?"

"No. I don't." It was the truth. "But I can sleep without help. I did it in Nam, I can do it here."

He shrugged again. "Whatever you say." He went to the door. "I'll see you in the morning."

"Sure," I said.

He left. The door stayed open.

His footsteps faded down the hall. I leaned back so I was supporting my weight on my elbows, put my feet up, and turned off the light over the bed.

"Abner?" I heard. The sound seemed to come from the other end of the hallway he had just gone down. "Abner?" It was a woman's voice, and there was a strong whisper of urgency in it.

I got up, went to the door, and looked to the right, toward the kitchen.

"Abner?" I heard again. I saw his shadow cast obliquely across the stove and sink, and I guessed that he was near the door that led to the beach.

"Abner?" I heard again.

His shadow grew fatter.

"Abner?"

He appeared. He was standing sideways to me, facing the kitchen wall. He had his hands raised to waist level, as if he were preparing to hug someone, and a little smile was on his lips—a smile, I guessed, of thanks, and disbelief.

He said, hardly above a whisper, "Phyllis?" and took a step closer to the wall, raised his hands higher. "Phyllis?" he said again.

An arm appeared from that wall—first the hand, then the wrist, the forearm. The hand clawed desperately in the air and Abner grabbed it and held tight to it. Then he tugged hard, as if he were fishing and pulling an eel in, and the opposite shoulder appeared, then the arm, the hand, which he also grabbed and tugged on, murmuring, "Phyllis, Phyllis!" all the while.

A woman's naked torso came out of the wall. Then her legs, her feet.

The head was last. It came out of the wall at a hard backward angle, as if something inside the wall were holding the long dark hair and it was an awful struggle for her to free it.

I heard a long, low groan that was clearly a mixture of great pain and pleasure. I didn't know whom it had come from. It could have come from them both.

They embraced. It was a hard and wonderfully close thing, the kind of embrace that is so much more than two bodies merely touching. The kind of embrace that is the happy mingling of two souls.

"Oh, my God, Phyllis, Phyllis!" Abner whispered.

"Abner, my love!" she murmured into his shoulder.

There was silence then. They continued embracing.

She had her face turned my way; her eyes were closed. She opened them, leveled her gaze on me. She mouthed the word "Please" at me. Then, "Leave us alone."

And I backed quietly into the bedroom and closed the door gently behind me.

~ * ~

She was a tall black woman, nearly as tall as Abner. Her eyes were large, her face an exquisite oval, and her body perfect.

~ * ~

I slept very little that night. I lay on my back on that soft and lumpy bed, with the light off, and I let the hours slide by. Now and again, a sound of pleasure drifted down the hall to me from the kitchen. Once, toward the end of the night, I said, "I'm happy for you, Abner," then I turned over and shivered at what I had witnessed.

When the beginnings of daylight were filtering through the window, I was awakened by a scream. I pushed myself up on my elbows. "Abner?" I whispered.

"No!" I heard.

"Abner?" I said aloud.

Nothing.

"Abner?" I called.

He appeared in the doorway. His face was red and puffy, as if from weeping. "Go back to sleep," he said, voice trembling. "Everything's all right."

"Are you sure, buddy? I heard a scream."

He nodded. "Yes," he said. "I'm sorry if I woke you."

"You're sorry you woke me? Don't be dumb. Just convince me you're all right so I can go back to sleep."

He nodded. "I'm all right, Sam." And he disappeared down the hallway.

I
slept through the morning and into the afternoon. The soft and lumpy mattress had proved to be comfortable enough after nearly three days without sleep, and it was at about one in the afternoon that Abner woke me.

He said, standing over me while I struggled out of sleep, "She was here, Sam. Phyllis was here."

I swung my feet to the floor, put my elbows on my knees and my head down. I felt a headache starting. "Yes," I whispered. "I know. I saw her."

He sat on the bed and glanced at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I guessed that he was grinning. He looked away. "What do you think?" he asked,
his voice low,
as if he were embarrassed. He looked back and repeated, his voice louder, "What do you think?"

"Think of what?"

"Of her. Of Phyllis." He chuckled self-consciously. "Isn't she something?"

"Abner, I'm not awake yet."

"I've never loved anyone the way I love her. I know how corny that sounds—"

"My God, Abner." I looked him squarely in the eye. "The woman is dead! Phyllis is
dead
!"

He gripped my knee hard. "Sam, we're
all
dead in one way or another. If we're not physically dead, if our blood still pumps and our sweat still flows, if we can scarf down a Big Mac, is that supposed to mean that we're
alive
?
Shouldn't
alive
mean something else, something deeper and more spiritual?" His grip on my knee strengthened. He nodded at it. "You can feel that, right?"

I sighed. "Abner, I'm sorry, but this is bullshit! If that hurts you—" I shook my head. "If it hurts you, then I'm sorry." My headache was getting worse by the second.

He smiled a little. "No," he said, "it doesn't hurt me, because I know you're wrong." He nodded again at his hand gripping my knee. "You're probably convinced, like everyone else, that because you can feel that, because, if I squeezed hard enough, you'd feel
pain
,
that that means you're
alive
."
His grip loosened.
"
Phyllis
feels pain. She feels it every second of the day. You might say that every moment for her here, in this house, she's
alive
with pain." His smile broadened as if he had suddenly stumbled upon some great truth.

I glanced at him. "Do you remember Susan Burdorf, Abner? She went to high school with us, in Bangor."

He clasped his hands in front of his knees, lowered his head. "You simply can't understand how I feel, can you, Sam? You refuse—"

I cut in, "Do you remember you had the hots for her? Do you remember you used to write her this really awful love poetry?
I
remember, because you were just about impossible to be around that entire school year; you had your damned tongue hanging out all the time, and a hard-on the size of a baseball bat."

He stood abruptly, whirled around, and said tightly, his temper on a very short fuse, "That wasn't love, goddammit! That was biology! Don't try to cheapen what Phyllis and I have, Sam, because we have something very, very special—"

I looked up at him and let out a long, weary sigh. "I need some aspirin. I feel like shit."

"You think this relationship Phyllis and I have is . . . perverse, don't you, Sam? Admit it."

I looked down at the floor. I whispered, half to myself, "Well, for God's sake, it's not
going
anywhere, is it?"

He laughed quickly, mockingly. I looked at him, surprised. He shook his head: "It doesn't .have to
go
anywhere, Sam. Why the hell do relationships have to
go
anywhere? That's a trap. That's a stupid, lousy trap. A relationship
is;
it's like ice cream—you have it, you enjoy it, but it doesn't have to
go
anywhere."

I stood again, fought back the expected wave of dizziness and nausea and pushed past Abner to the doorway. I stopped there, supported myself with my hands on either side of the door frame and my back to Abner. "Just tell me where the damned aspirin is, would you?"

"Sam, I love her. I love her more than I thought I could love any woman."

"Yeah. I'm happy for you," I said. "Invite me to the wedding," and I stumbled down the short hallway to the kitchen.

~ * ~

We had a picnic behind the beach house that day. It was a pretty ludicrous affair. Abner was dressed—for effect, he said—in gray knee-length shorts, ankle-high sneakers, a pink long-sleeved shirt, and a ragged red plaid sports coat. He had gathered up some driftwood and started a little fire with clumps of newspaper. We used the grating from a rusted hibachi we found on the beach to cook chicken hot dogs and reheat leftover artichokes in a pan of water. He'd also driven to a deli several miles away and bought a six-pack of Michelob.

We ate seated cross-legged, facing each other on the sand halfway between the house and the ocean. My headache from an hour before was still lingering around the back edges of my brain, but as I ate, the food—awful as it was—eventually overcame what was left of it.

"That little kid's down there, right, Abner?" I said through a mouthful of chicken hot dog. I nodded toward the sand and took a long swig of the Michelob. "That little kid flying the kite?"

Abner was busy with an artichoke. He stuck a leaf into his mouth, scraped the meat off, looked satisfied. "I try not to think about it," he said.

The day was on the uncomfortable side of cool. I was wearing the dress pants and the tweed sports jacket, but a brisk wind was making me shiver. I took another swig of the beer; Abner hadn't put it in the refrigerator, so it was warm. "What do you mean, you don't think about it?" I drained the bottle, stuck it neck-first into the sand beside me, gobbled down half the hot dog, put some Gulden's Spicy Brown Mustard on the rest of it, gobbled that down, then got another bottle of beer. "You
have
to think about it. He was someone's little boy. I'm surprised" —another swig of beer; I realized I was trying to get drunk--"I'm surprised his mother hasn't come looking for him." I eyed Abner suspiciously. "She hasn't, has she?"

He shook his head while he gnawed at another artichoke leaf. "No. No one's come looking."

I nodded at what was left of the six-pack of Michelob in the sand between us. "Aren't you going to have a beer, Abner?"

"Don't drink;" he said, and worked at another artichoke leaf. "You know, Sam, there are a lot of injustices in this world. What happened to that little boy is an injustice, for instance—an obscene injustice. But sometimes, justice does get done. It really does. If we just . . . help it along a little." He smiled secretively.

I said, "If you're trying to tell me something, Abner, why don't you just spit it out."

He shrugged. "I don't know," he said, and his tone became casual, that secretive smile reappeared. "Take murder, for instance." Another shrug; he was trying very hard now to look casual. "I don't mean the murder that's done on the spur of the moment, out of passion—something like that is really kind of an accident of emotion, don't you think? And we're all capable of it. I mean the other kind of murder. The one that's done by a murderous
soul
. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, Sam?"

"I'm not sure," I said.

"Of course you understand. You were in Viet Nam; you probably saw lots of people who got a kick out of murdering other people. "

I shook my head. "Not ‘lots' of people, Abner. Some. A few. They usually got theirs in the end, though. "

His smile broadened. "Yes, I'm sure they did." He took another bite of artichoke leaf, murmured, "This is very good, don't you think?" paused and continued, "Phyllis was murdered, Sam. I'm sure I've told you that."

"No," I said. "You haven't."