Women and Men (55 page)

How did the piano sound in its new home?

She told him to listen for himself, and she played a hymn standing up; without the pedal it had the briskness of a march.

He stayed that night and the next night. She had the lock changed and gave John a key to the apartment and one to the street door.

He said he would keep them for an emergency. He wouldn’t use them. He wondered what emergencies he meant.

Walking home from her former apartment, he had felt that that was her part of the city—her city, though she had come to it not long ago. When she lived there, he had walked uptown and over, and it was a shade less safe than walking from the new apartment. This new route was crosstown, past a public school, then up two blocks, then crosstown. Both neighborhoods were new to him, both old, both more Hispanic than ten years ago; and if he occasionally phoned on his way home, he wasn’t checking to see if she was asleep or O.K., he was extending some happiness he had that she was there in that place.

On the new route, he passed a Spanish restaurant with a big guitar worked into its neon sign, unlighted on these dark, early mornings. The fancy plasterwork was like the facade of a Spanish restaurant in Linda’s old neighborhood; they had never eaten there. He missed the old route: the dilapidated stoops; a cleaner’s with a lighted clock and a gloomy poster that said "New Suede" above a sheep with long eyelashes, walking (or standing) happily in its sleep; an office building with a dingy marble lobby, where, behind two sets of doors, the watchman sat with his back to the street, reading his paper, a Thermos on the table beside him; then the rather nasty drugstore displaying a clutter of skin remedies and bottles of headache remedies and little propped-up advertisements and, seedy there in the light from the street, a bulky carton slightly used and askew, containing some prosthetic device. Then, a couple of doors down, past the meat market that had a rabbit and an unplucked bird hanging in the window at suppertime but nothing at three in the morning, there was the delicatessen with the powerful all-night cat lying on its side in the space between the plate glass and a crate of large, thick-skinned eating oranges, which were directly below a hook-load of bananas blanched to a sharp pallor by exposure to the solitary light of the streetlamp. He knew all these private landmarks, right down to the pay phone on a concrete post next to a steel-mesh trash basket. He missed that old route; it went only as far as the intersection, where the newsstand cafe was. From there on, his route home remained the same.

Two doors down from the brocade-curtained window of the Spanish restaurant was Linda’s new fish market, a pillow store on one side and a pet shop called Fin and Claw on the other. The white enamel fish trays, more vacant than the plate glass, seemed to slant more sharply than when they were full of gray and coral shrimp and white layers of fillet.

The restaurant people had gone home; the fish people would be getting up to go to the wholesale market across the river. The married people were traveling in their sleep, but together. He tried to imagine his one-time wife in Heaven. It was like failing to get a phone call through. He felt that Harry and his wife knew where she had ended up. How terrible, but he didn’t ask. He could imagine only real places like Hawaii, at the other end of the world, except Hawaii was very expensive.

Linda got mad one night going down in the elevator. "So what if you
did
kill her?" The door slid open, and suddenly they were facing the lobby and the superintendent, who was all dressed up, so the dark glasses he always wore looked different. "So what if you did kill her?"

John shushed Linda, and they all laughed.

"So what if you did kill her? That was her destiny. To leave you. And your destiny was to survive her."

The super watched them go out. Linda was mad, all right.

"I think of her in Hawaii," said John.

Linda laughed. "Don’t think of her at all," she said, going through her bag out on the sidewalk. She had locked herself out; but there was the super. But John had the keys.

One morning John and Linda were walking arm in arm into the cold, glaring winter sun. A truck in front of the fish market was unloading long boxes of glittering fat halibut, striped bass, red snapper, and silvery blues; the name in large red letters on the truck was not the fish market’s name. So the fish came to the fish people, he said, rather than the other way around. He knew she was looking at him as if seriously he were the village idiot, but more the way she did sometimes at the movies, so that, turning to see her amber eyes in the light of the screen looking at him—it was like opening his own this timeless morning to find her leaning above him, bare and warm, the sun on her neck and on her arm and in her hair. Seeing her was living.

He had yawned and smiled and said that he had overslept. Slept, she had said, not overslept. She had run her fingers along his jaw and rubbed it lightly, busily. He recalled finding a new part of her body during the night; he told her he wasn’t sure now exactly where it was, and they amused themselves by being slightly awed at this.

When they got up and got going, she talked a lot. She had woken by mistake while it was still dark, and she thought that he had to get home and it was her fault that he hadn’t. John watched her drink her orange juice and said he had certainly dreamed, but all he knew was that in one dream he was in bed with her, hugging her and listening to the piano.

Wow! She liked that. Linda put her orange juice on top of the piano and sat down and played a song fast. Except, she went on, in
her
dream—and she slowed down and looked fondly over her shoulder at him as she continued to play—in her dream they were high up off the floor and she hadn’t minded. John had the answer. "I was in your old bedroom, and you were in your new living room"—he pointed at the departed tenant’s handiwork—"and there’s a bed and a piano in each."

She played the song again, his presence evident in the sway of her shoulders. Hey, what time was it, she called, and went on playing. The phone rang, but she didn’t stop, and by the time John got there the person had hung up. He lay down on the bed for a moment and listened to the music in the other room, as if he were alone.

When they went out, the light was miraculous against the winter cold. He felt they were a couple. But then she said, "We make a good couple." What could he say? She started making conversation, and he hated himself —almost.

According to Linda, the former tenant had phoned her again to ask uncertainly if she had had trouble closing the bathroom window; she could get the super to fix the sash if she could find him.

When was this?

A couple of times: once when she was playing the piano before she left for the office, then yesterday as she came in the door.

So that was him this morning.

She wouldn’t be surprised.

Can’t go through life not answering the telephone.

She didn’t propose to.

But she hadn’t this morning.

But generally she did answer. Plus she’d had company.

"The Departed Tenant is nostalgic," he said. "He can’t seem to tear himself away."

"The Departed Tenant was heading for New Mexico originally," said Linda.

"Where was he yesterday?"

"He had to dig up an extra dime; he was in a pay booth."

"He talked an extra nickel’s worth?"

But the other morning the man was definitely calling from a home phone, Linda said. Bach was playing in the background, or a reasonable facsimile, and it got a lot louder for a moment, as if someone was turning the wrong dial.

"Or someone picked up a phone extension right by the speaker," said John.

"He’s staying in touch, I guess."

"With his old place or with you?"

"Maybe New Mexico will come to him," said Linda.

"I’d rather he went there," said John.

"But there would go my Departed Tenant out the window."

A week later, when John stopped at the all-night cafe on his way home, he was observed closely, provocatively, by a familiar man for whom the woman was pouring a cup of coffee when John came in. The man seemed tired. He was about John’s age, but his uneven, stubbly beard made him look older— maybe younger, too. He wore a broad-brimmed, high-crowned western hat and a white woolen parka that was extremely dirty. Except for a scar-like crease along his cheek above his beard, as if he had slept in a trench for days, his appearance agreed with Linda’s description of the Departed Tenant. The woman kidded John about being late, as if she kept track of him. She didn’t seem to know the fellow in the hat. It came to him, like the sudden leisure of insight, that the most powerful way for you to shadow anyone would be to have
him
follow you. The woman again said he was late, and she smiled at him. She had on a heavy, jacket-like sweater with a heavy, rolled collar of the same thick black wool coming up behind her neck under her rough, dark hair. He returned the renewed glance of the guy in the hat and was going to ask him what was on his mind, when he stood up and put some change beside his full cup. He had big hands that had knocked around and worked and seemed at rest and seemed the only thing certain about him. He moved past John to get to the door, and John smelled paint and something else milder to do with work. The woman plucked some muffins out from under the grill, talking over her shoulder to a broad-shouldered little man on the next stool whose every movement John could feel. The man was smoking a cigarette; he was not going anywhere. John sat for almost an hour and bought an early newspaper. The phone rang as the woman poured scrambled eggs into a small black frying pan. He paid for two coffees and left.

John filled Linda in on her new neighborhood. A mugger had been going around spraying Sentinel in the eyes of women late at night, as if they were attacking him. They couldn’t remember what he looked like afterward. John had learned about this in a cafe a block beyond the public school one afternoon. Two men on a draped staging were steaming the front of a town house across the street. It had been a rooming house for decades and was being gutted. A woman in a wheelchair had entered the cafe talking not quite to herself, and she stopped at his table by the window and cheerfully called for her cup of tea. She wore dark glasses and had a streak of green through her dyed brown hair. She had been talking when she came in, and she divided herself between calling like a deaf person to the nodding Oriental behind the counter and quietly telling John what this counterman, Ralph, was thinking. A fat boy in a painter’s cap wearing white overalls with white paint stains on them looked up from his magazine and said, "Nirma was reminding Ralph of all the crazy no-goods who had lived in that block and in that brownstone they were looking at across the street; her husband was contractor for the extensive work being done on the house; it had been bought by two men who designed ladies’ shoes." Finally, John asked the man, Ralph, behind the counter if all Nirma said was true, but Nirma had apparently concluded the conversation, because, turning her wheelchair around, she rolled to the door and then was helped out by the boy in overalls, who had gotten up from the counter to leave with her.

"I know her husband," said Linda that night. "He’s the local locksmith. What were you doing here in the middle of the afternoon?" They got in bed and Linda turned off the light.

"Becoming a degenerate, of course."

Well, it was about time, she said, and got on top of him and pinned him. As a matter of fact, Nirma’s husband was a licensed electrician, did moving, and had a free-floating crew of guys working for him.

"One of them helped to float his wife out of there this afternoon," said John.

Linda laughed, and murmured, "She don’t need no help, honey." There was something in the words, something missing.

"Hard to believe that’s his wife," John said.

"You haven’t seen
him,"
came the words in the dark, and here it was again, a quizzical harshness as clear as the touch that accompanied the words. Then her touch became as light and hard as ever. She could bear down on his head to massage the hair by its roots off his brain in the dark room; meanwhile, some soft spot around his stomach found another touch of hers so light-fingered it was hairlike and, growing here and there all over his body, felt good.

Languorously, softly, and so slowly that he heard his lips part, he asked if there had been further word from the Departed Tenant. She moved her hands and clasped him in her arms. (He could put his hands over her eyes when she was playing the piano and she would go on playing.) Yes, she said, to tell the truth, she had heard from the Departed Tenant, again calling to say that he would be glad to fix her bathroom window himself; the super, according to the Departed Tenant, was a nice guy but he didn’t do spit, and he wasn’t there a whole lot, because he had two other buildings, if not three, because he needed the cash flow, y’know. John could hear the very voice of the man. But the completeness of Linda’s love at this moment made the intentions of the Departed Tenant only a passing mystery, like her humor. For her humor had taken a turn. It sounded like a private joke that might be with John or against him.

Was she getting ready to turn away from him? Not possible. The next evening she told an odd story or two about the neighborhood, and the way she talked seemed unlike her; she sounded as if she were making up what she told him, but she wasn’t.

Nothing like getting to know your new neighborhood. Well, now, she said, an unusual body had been hidden on the canvas-draped staging that the men had been using to work on the brownstone. John asked what was unusual about it. Oh, it turned out to be only sleeping, she said. He asked if it had all its limbs. As far as they could tell, she guessed; it didn’t breathe for quite a while, but it must have been saving its breath, because it was quite a presentable body and finally it decided to breathe. And move on? he asked, in the living room, hearing her in the kitchen. It was one of those no-goods the locksmith’s wife gave tidings of, said Linda.