Weep for Me (6 page)

I knew why I looked like hell. It had been a miserable week end. The talk with Emily had shoved me a little
farther along that tangential path that had started on Wednesday.

I had spent the better part of the week end quarreling with Jo Anne as we had never quarreled before. Three times I made her cry, and watched her cry, and took a stolid, sadistic satisfaction in it.

Sunday night, out of remorse, I had tried to patch it all up as best I could, but a lot of damage had been done. Our arguments were over meaningless things. Whether we’d get a new car or a good used car for the wedding trip. How many people we’d have at the reception.

And whenever I had thought of Emily Rudolph, the little drums had started beating in my blood again. She had admitted she was attracted to me. But there wasn’t a thing I could do to give her what she wanted. Money was in the way. Money I didn’t have, and money somebody else would have.

When I kissed Jo Anne Sunday night and tasted salt on her lips, salt from the tears that had run down her face, tears that I had caused, I felt like smashing my fist against a stone wall.

When I had a chance I said, “Sorry, Sam.”

He didn’t look at me. “Skip it.” He was sore. You see, by yelling at him, I had hurt him with our bosses as well as myself.

“That was a damn fool thing to do,” I said. “Yelling like that.”

“Just drop the subject, Cameron. That’s all. Just drop the subject.”

I knew that bank. Five minutes after I yelled they’d know about it back in the safety-deposit vaults, know it up on the second floor. Ten minutes later the tellers two blocks away in the Chemical Trust and Exchange would know about it.

At eleven o’clock I picked a counterfeit twenty out of a deposit being made by a bar and grill. The depositor was highly indignant. He acted as though I were to blame for recognizing it. It didn’t matter to him that someone had passed it in his place. It was a crude job,
and he had been a little too tense as I was counting his deposit. My nerves were so on edge that I nearly blew my top again, caught myself just in time, and turned him over to Tom Nairn.

After lunch I decided that the thing to do was pick up some flowers after work and make a pretty abject call on Jo Anne. Poor kid, she rated it. I’d given her the world’s most sour week end.

I checked out fast and stopped in a florist shop on the way back to the apartment. I picked out three white gardenias. The man quickly twisted them into a corsage and put them in a little transparent box. They looked nice with the little drops of water on the white petals.

While I showered and changed, I left the gardenias in the icebox to keep them fresh. I was going to get all the discontent and nervousness and thoughts of Emily Rudolph out of my head. I wanted, badly, to be the same guy I had been just one week before. And I was going to fight myself back to that state of mind.

It was quarter of six when I went down the stairs with the box in my hand. Just as I went out the street door, a cab pulled up in front and Emily Rudolph got out. My heart gave a wild bound as I thought at first that she had come to see me. But the cab driver pulled two big suitcases, two little ones, and a couple of hatboxes out of the cab.

She saw me and said casually, “Oh, hello, Kyle.”

“What goes on?”

“I’m moving in. When I left Friday I noticed that there was no name on one of the mailboxes. So I saw the superintendent. At first he said he was saving it for somebody and then let me have it. It’s on the third floor, and it’s right above yours, Kyle.”

“Want I should lug that stuff up, lady?” the driver said humbly.

“I’ll take some,” I said, “and we can do it all in one trip. Got your key?”

“Yes. He gave it to me when I paid the rent.”

She took one hatbox. The driver took one big suitcase, one little one, and a hatbox. That left a big suitcase and
a little one for me. It was expensive luggage. The best. You could see that.

In order to carry them, I shoved the corsage box into my jacket pocket. I knew Emily had seen it. She put the hatboxes down and unlocked the door. It was almost like walking into my own place. The furniture was arranged the same, and it was just about as beat as mine. As she was nearer the top of the well, it was a lighter apartment.

She paid the driver. “Thanks, lady,” he said. “Thanks a lot.” He went whistling down the stairs.

For the first time Emily seemed a bit ill at ease. “I just happened to like the setup, Kyle. And I can afford it. The others I’ve looked at were too high.”

“Don’t apologize for becoming a neighbor. I like it”

“I don’t want you to think that it changes anything I said Friday.”

“I understand that.”

“Thanks for helping me, Kyle. I don’t want to hold you up. You’ll be late.”

“It … wasn’t a definite date, anyway.”

She was under control again. She looked amused. It seemed as though she knew, somehow, what a miserable week end I had given to Jo Anne, and why I was taking her the flowers. Her dress was of a soft gray material with tiny flecks of white. Her hat, of white wool in a coarse knit, was identical to the green one she had worn Friday. No watch, ring, bracelet, clip or pin.

I went down three steps and looked back, expecting to see her in the doorway. But she had closed the door so quietly that I hadn’t heard it.

Out on the sidewalk again, I took the transparent box out of my pocket. It had become slightly crushed. I tried to straighten it out, but made it worse. By the time the bus dropped me at the Clark Street corner, the edges of the petals were rimmed with the faint brown that meant that the man had sold me flowers that were not sufficiently fresh. I tossed the box on top of a trash barrel beside the grocery store on the Clark Street corner.

They were at dinner. I should have phoned. Ed insisted that I pull up a chair. Mom went out and brought
in a plate apologetically, because there wasn’t much on it. There was a happy look in Jo Anne’s eyes. I tried to tell myself that things were as they had always been, and yet, sitting with her family, I felt like an impostora guy who happened to look just like Kyle Cameron, but who had changed in some immeasurable way.

I watched the TV news again with Ed until the dishes were done, and then walked with Jo Anne to the neighborhood movies.

I sat in the darkness beside her, our shoulders touching, her hand warm and faintly sticky in mine. The movie was about a batch of madly gay people at some sort of resort. Jo Anne liked it. I watched them on the Technicolor screen, all the incredibly seductive women, all the bronzed long-jawed men. It made me remember, for no good reason, a line drawing in one of the old history books in school, in a chapter about feudal days. A big banquet was going on in the castle and the serfs were huddled around, staring in, looking mean and hungry and tired of it all. Now, suppose those serfs could really believe that with a couple of breaks here and there, they could work their way up to be one of the barons. They’d probably be looking in the windows, grinning, snickering, nudging each other, just like the people around us in the dark movie house.

“This stinks,” I said, too loud.

A woman in front of us turned around and said, “Shush, you!”

Jo Anne felt me go tense and she squeezed my hand. I settled back. She whispered, “We can leave if you want to.”

“Maybe it will get better.”

But from then on she didn’t seem to enjoy it so much. A couple of times I glanced at her and saw that she was watching me. It was too dark to read her expression.

On the slow walk back to her house, she said. “It wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“No. Leave us leap into our Hispano Suiza and swim at the Riviera under the Mediterranean moonlight. With a picnic lunch of caviar and crumpets. Don’t soil your
little white hands, darling. Let the servants make up the lunch.”

She took my arm, gave me a little tug. “Kyle! You kind of scare me when you talk like that. I don’t understand you.”

“I guess I just don’t like movies like that any more, honey. They’re not real.”

“Well, goodness! Of course they aren’t! Everybody knows that.”

“They know it before they go and after they come out. But while they’re in there, they have to believe it’s real. That’s why they go. If their life was any good, they wouldn’t have to go. They wouldn’t have to pretend.”

“Do you think our life is no good, Kyle?”

“You’re putting words in my mouth. Our life is fine.”

“You don’t made it sound fine. You make it sound … kind of little and unimportant. Are you in some kind of trouble at the bank, Kyle?”

“Of course not,” I said angrily.

“Oh, Kyle! Let’s not quarrel. It was a dreadful week end.”

“I know it was. That’s why I came around tonight, honey. I thought maybe I could fix it up. I’m not doing so good, I guess.”

She hugged my arm close to her. “Everything will be all right. Really it will.”

And she was my good girl again. Girl I’d taken to dances, to movies. Girl of the sunny blue eyes, and much joy, and sweetness on her lips. I had it back now, and I was going to hold onto it. I had to hold onto it. Because it made that bronze grille bearable, made the brown-bag lunches taste good, made me want the marriage.

So on the porch, on the dark porch, while the TV chattered and yelped in the darkened living room, I put my hands on her waist, knowing as I did it that I was thinking of my hands on Emily’s waist. Jo Anne was not the same. There was a tiny roll of fat just above the sturdy line of the hips. There was no heat to sear my palms. I pulled her so hard against me that she gave a tiny gasp of surprise before I began to hurt her mouth
with my lips. I released her suddenly. She put the back of her hand to her lips as she took an uncertain backward step. “Well!” she said.

“What’s so surprising?” I asked harshly. “Haven’t we got old enough to give up kid-style kissing?”

“I guess … it just wasn’t like you. You act strange, Kyle.”

“Jo Anne. Listen to me. Why don’t we do this? Buy the car now. Go out of town. Get married. Don’t tell anybody. We can go through a ceremony again in July or August, whichever it’s going to be. Between the two marriages, you can come to my place, or we can go to motels, or something.”

“That sounds … sort of shabby, Kyle. Sneaky.”

“Maybe it’s important that we do it. More important than you know, Jo Anne.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Kyle?”

“That I … I don’t know what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Poor dear. Being a nervous bridegroom. Wanting to get it over. That’s what the trouble is.”

“Will you do it?”

“No, Kyle. I won’t.”

I stood for long seconds. I kissed her lightly. “See you Wednesday, darling,” I said.

“Saturday we can inspect Hilson Gardens. I’m excited about that. Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

I caught a bus and rode back down to my corner. It was almost eleven-thirty. I went into my room and stood in the darkness, looking up at the ceiling, my head cocked to one side, listening. I could hear no sound. She would be sleeping. How did she sleep? Palms flat together under her cheek, knees drawn up like a child? Or sprawling, tousled, heavy-breathing? I knew that I would hear her when she walked. The previous tenants had been heavy-footed, annoying. The layout of the two apartments was identical. I would be able to listen, trace her little routines, learn more about her.

After I undressed and went to bed, I lay rigid, staring up at my ceiling. With an eight-foot ceiling, with her
couch the same height as mine, she was eight feet directly above. What was she wearing? Nightgown, pajamas, nothing? I got up after a time and turned the light on again. I looked at Jo Anne’s picture on the table, the picture I had put out of sight for Emily’s visit. Jo Anne was entangled in my life in so many ways. A thousand snapshots. Probably twenty gifts from her. Belts, tie clips, wallets, fountain pens.

I looked at the ceiling again, where Emily’s bed was. I doubled my fist and hit myself on the thigh, as hard as I could. It knotted the muscles of my thigh, and I limped back to bed, to lie sweating in the darkness. Once, when I was a little kid, I fell into Palmer Creek in the early spring. The water ran deep and fast and black. I was all bundled up. The kids ran along beside the creek, screaming and crying.

This was like that. This was that same helplessness. Who would haul me out this time, give me a hot bath, rub me with harsh towels, give me the brandy that almost made me sick, and then made everything swimmy and bright-colored?

In my dreams she came to me, and she was a sleek black mare. I rode bareback on the shining pelt, my legs clamping the hard writhe of muscles. The world tipped and the mare ran down an endless steepness, faster and faster and faster, out of control, running with a swiftness that was first a horror, and then an aching deliciousness.

In the morning I left earlier than usual. As I opened my door, I heard, in the apartment above, the rushing, droning sound that meant she was showering. During breakfast and on the walk to the bank, under gray clouds that swept low over Thrace, I saw her shower stall as a brightly lighted shadow box in the back of my mind, with Emily Rudolph standing, eyes closed, face upturned to the whip of the needle spray.

At the bank Sam Grinter gave me a curt nod. Paul Raddmann, Nairn, and Pritchard were polite, almost formal. Hell with them. I did my work.

I
did not see her on Tuesday or Wednesday, and had no occasion to phone her for an M balance. On Wednesday, with Jo Anne, I made a great effort to pretend that nothing had changed for me. It worked. I think she had a happy evening. But the effort left me feeling, when I left her, full of suppressed violence.

Thursday I got back to the apartment at quarter after five. I stood at the door and listened. I stood without moving until I heard her come up the stairs at twenty-five minutes to six.

As she reached the second floor I opened the door. My smile felt as if it had been slapped across my mouth with a stiff brush.

“Wanted to check and see if you’re comfortable,” I said.

She was in the navy outfit in which I had first seen her. She carried a bag of groceries in one arm. “I like it,” she said.