Cathedral

  The newspaper came to the house every day. He read it from the first page to the last. She saw him read everything, right down to the obituary section, and the part showing the temperatures of the major cities, as well as the Business News section which told about mergers and interest rates. Mornings, he got up before she did and used the bathroom. Then he turned the TV on and made coffee. She thought he seemed upbeat and cheerful at that hour of the day. But by the time she left for work, he’d made his place on the sofa and the TV was going. Most often it would still be going when she came in again that afternoon. He’d be sitting up on the sofa, or else lying down on it, dressed in what he used to wear to work—jeans and a flannel shirt. But sometimes the TV would be off and he’d be sitting there holding his book.

  “How’s it going?” he’d say when she looked in on him.

  “Okay,” she’d say. “How’s it with you?”

  “Okay.”

  He always had a pot of coffee warming on the stove for her. In the living room, she’d sit in the big chair and he’d sit on the sofa while they talked about her day. They’d hold their cups and drink their coffee as if they were normal people, Sandy thought.

  Sandy still loved him, even though she knew things were getting weird. She was thankful to have her job, but she didn’t know what was going to happen to them or to anybody else in the world. She had a girlfriend at work she confided in one time about her husband—about his being on the sofa all the time. For some reason, her friend didn’t seem to think it was anything very strange, which both surprised and depressed Sandy. Her friend told her about her uncle in Tennessee—when her uncle had turned forty, he got into his bed and wouldn’t get up anymore. And he cried a lot—he cried at least once every day. She told Sandy she guessed her uncle was afraid of getting old. She guessed maybe he was afraid of a heart attack or something. But the man was sixty-three now and still breathing, she said. When Sandy heard this, she was stunned. If this woman was telling the truth, she thought, the man has been in bed for twenty-three years. Sandy’s husband was only thirty-one. Thirty-one and twenty-three is fifty-four. That’d put her in her fifties then, too. My God, a person couldn’t live the whole rest of his life in bed, or else on the sofa. If her husband had been wounded or was ill, or had been hurt in a car accident, that’d be different. She could understand that. If something like that was the case, she knew she could bear it. Then if he had to live on the sofa, and she had to bring him his food out there, maybe carry the spoon up to his mouth—there was even something like romance in that kind of thing. But for her husband, a young and otherwise healthy man, to take to the sofa in this way and not want to get up except to go to the bathroom or to turn the TV on in the morning or off at night, this was different. It made her ashamed; and except for that one time, she didn’t talk about it to anybody. She didn’t say any more about it to her friend, whose uncle had gotten into bed twenty-three years ago and was still there, as far as Sandy knew.

  LATE one afternoon she came home from work, parked the car, and went inside the house. She could hear the TV going in the living room as she let herself in the door to the kitchen. The coffee pot was on the stove, and the burner was on low. From where she stood in the kitchen, holding her purse, she could look into the living room and see the back of the sofa and the TV screen. Figures moved across the screen. Her husband’s bare feet stuck out from one end of the sofa. At the other end, on a pillow which lay across the arm of the sofa, she could see the crown of his head. He didn’t stir. He may or may not have been asleep, and he may or may not have heard her come in. But she decided it didn’t make any difference one way or the other. She put her purse on the table and went over to the fridge to get herself some yogurt. But when she opened the door, warm, boxed-in air came out at her. She couldn’t believe the mess inside. The ice cream from the freezer had melted and run down into the leftover fish sticks and cole slaw. Ice cream had gotten into the bowl of Spanish rice and pooled on the bottom of the fridge. Ice cream was everywhere. She opened the door to the freezer compartment. An awful smell puffed out at her that made her want to gag. Ice cream covered the bottom of the compartment and puddled around a three-pound package of hamburger. She pressed her finger into the cellophane wrapper covering the meat, and her finger sank into the package. The pork chops had thawed, too. Everything had thawed, including some more fish sticks, a package of Steak-ums, and two Chef Sammy Chinese food dinners. The hot dogs and homemade spaghetti sauce had thawed. She closed the door to the freezer and reached into the fridge for her carton of yogurt. She raised the lid on the yogurt and sniffed. That’s when she yelled at her husband.

  “What is it?” he said, sitting up and looking over the back of the sofa. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He pushed his hand through his hair a couple of times. She couldn’t tell if he’d been asleep all this time or what.

  “This goddamn fridge has gone out,” Sandy said. “That’s what.”

  Her husband got up off the sofa and lowered the volume on the TV. Then he turned it off and came out to the kitchen. “Let me see this,” he said. “Hey, I don’t believe this.”

  “See for yourself,” she said. “Everything’s going to spoil.”

  Her husband looked inside the fridge, and his face assumed a very grave expression. Then he poked around in the freezer and saw what things were like in there.

  “Tell me what next,” he said.

  A bunch of things suddenly flew into her head, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, “when it rains, it pours. Hey, this fridge can’t be more than ten years old. It was nearly new when we bought it. Listen, my folks had a fridge that lasted them twenty-five years. They gave it to my brother when he got married. It was working fine. Hey, what’s going on?” He moved over so that he could see into the narrow space between the fridge and the wall. “I don’t get it,” he said and shook his head. “It’s plugged in.” Then he took hold of the fridge and rocked it back and forth. He put his shoulder against it and pushed and jerked the appliance a few inches out into the kitchen. Something inside the fridge fell off a shelf and broke. “Hell’s bells,” he said.

  Sandy realized she was still holding the yogurt. She went over to the garbage can, raised the lid, and dropped the carton inside. “I have to cook everything tonight,” she said. She saw herself at the stove frying meat, fixing things in pans on the stove and in the oven. “We need a new fridge,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. He looked into the freezer compartment once more and turned his head back and forth.

  She moved in front of him and started taking things off the shelves and putting stuff on the table. He helped. He took the meat out of the freezer and put the packages on the table. Then he took the other things out of the freezer and put them in a different place on the table. He took everything out and then found the paper towels and the dishcloth and started wiping up inside.

  “We lost our Freon,” he said and stopped wiping. “That’s what happened. I can smell it. The Freon leaked out. Something happened and the Freon went. Hey, I saw this happen to somebody else’s box once.” He was calm now. He started wiping again. “It’s the Freon,” he said.

  She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. “We need another fridge,” she said.

  “You said that. Hey, where are we going to get one? They don’t grow on trees.”

  “We have to have one,” she said. “Don’t we need a fridge? Maybe we don’t. Maybe we can keep our perishables on the window sill like those people in tenements do. Or else we could get one of those little Styrofoam coolers and buy some ice every day.” She put a head of lettuce and some tomatoes on the table next to the packages of meat. Then she sat down on one of the dinette chairs and brought her hands up to her face.

  “We’ll get us another fridge,” her husband said. “Hell, yes. We need one, don’t we? We can’t get along without one. The question is, where do we get one and how much can we pay for it? There must be zillions of used on
es in the classifieds. Just hold on and we’ll see what’s in the paper. Hey, I’m an expert on the classifieds,” he said.

  She brought her hands down from her face and looked at him.

  “Sandy, we’ll find us a good used box out of the paper,” he went on. “Most of your fridges are built to last a lifetime. This one of ours, Jesus, I don’t know what happened to it. It’s only the second one in my life I ever heard about going on the fritz like this.” He switched his gaze to the fridge again. “Goddamn lousy luck,” he said.

  “Bring the paper out here,” she said. “Let’s see what there is.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. He went out to the coffee table, sorted through the stack of newspapers, and came back to the kitchen with the classified section. She pushed the food to one side so that he could spread the pages out. He took one of the chairs.

  She glanced down at the paper, then at the food that had thawed. “I’ve got to fry pork chops tonight,” she said. “And I have to cook up that hamburger. And those sandwich steaks and the fish sticks. Don’t forget the TV dinners, either.”

  “That goddamned Freon,” he said. “You can smell it.”

  They began to go through the classifieds. He ran his finger down one column and then another. He passed quickly over the JOBS AVAILABLE section. She saw checks beside a couple of things, but she didn’t look to see what he’d marked. It didn’t matter. There was a column headlined OUTDOOR CAMPING SUPPLIES. Then they found it—APPLIANCES NEW AND USED.

  “Here,” she said, and put her finger down on the paper.

  He moved her finger. “Let me see,” he said.

  She put her finger back where it’d been. “ ‘Refrigerators, Ranges, Washers, Dryers, etc.,’ ” she said, reading from the ad boxed in the column. “ ‘Auction Barn.’ What’s that? Auction Barn.” She went on reading. “ ‘New and used appliances and more every Thursday night. Auction at seven o’clock.’ That’s today. Today’s Thursday,” she said. “This auction’s tonight. And this place is not very far away. It’s down on Pine Street. I must have driven by there a hundred times. You, too. You know where it is. It’s down there close to that Baskin-Robbins.”

  Her husband didn’t say anything. He stared at the ad. He brought his hand up and pulled at his lower lip with two of his fingers. “Auction Barn,” he said.

  She fixed her eyes on him. “Let’s go to it. What do you say? It’ll do you good to get out, and we’ll see if we can’t find us a fridge. Two birds with one stone,” she said.

  “I’ve never been to an auction in my life,” he said. “I don’t believe I want to go to one now.”

  “Come on,” Sandy said. “What’s the matter with you? They’re fun. I haven’t been to one in years, not since I was a kid. I used to go to them with my dad.” She suddenly wanted to go to this auction very much.

  “Your dad,” he said.

  “Yeah, my dad.” She looked at her husband, waiting for him to say something else. The least thing. But he didn’t.

  “Auctions are fun,” she said.

  “They probably are, but I don’t want to go.”

  “I need a bed lamp, too,” she went on. “They’ll have bed lamps.”

  “Hey, we need lots of things. But I don’t have a job, remember?”

  “I’m going to this auction,” she said. “Whether you go or not. You might as well come along. But I don’t care. If you want the truth, it’s immaterial to me. But I’m going.”

  “I’ll go with you. Who said I wouldn’t go?” He looked at her and then looked away. He picked up the paper and read the ad again. “I don’t know the first thing about auctions. But, sure, I’ll try anything once. Whoever said anything about us buying an icebox at an auction?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “But we’ll do it anyway.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “But only if you really want to.”

  He nodded.

  She said, “I guess I’d better start cooking. I’ll cook the goddamn pork chops now, and we’ll eat. The rest of this stuff can wait. I’ll cook everything else later. After we go to this auction. But we have to get moving. The paper said seven o’clock.”

  “Seven o’clock,” he said. He got up from the table and made his way into the living room, where he looked out the bay window for a minute. A car passed on the street outside. He brought his fingers up to his lip. She watched him sit down on the sofa and take up his book. He opened it to his place. But in a minute he put it down and lay back on the sofa. She saw his head come down on the pillow that lay across the arm of the sofa. He adjusted the pillow under his head and put his hands behind his neck. Then he lay still. Pretty soon she saw his arms move down to his sides.

  She folded the paper. She got up from the chair and went quietly out to the living room, where she looked over the back of the sofa. His eyes were shut. His chest seemed to barely rise and then fall. She went back to the kitchen and put a frying pan on the burner. She turned the burner on and poured oil into the pan. She started frying pork chops. She’d gone to auctions with her dad. Most of those auctions had to do with farm animals. She seemed to remember her dad was always trying to sell a calf, or else buy one. Sometimes there’d be farm equipment and household items at the auctions. But mostly it was farm animals. Then, after her dad and mom had divorced, and she’d gone away to live with her mom, her dad wrote to say he missed going to auctions with her. The last letter he wrote to her, after she’d grown up and was living with her husband, he said he’d bought a peach of a car at this auction for two hundred dollars. If she’d been there, he said, he’d have bought one for her, too. Three weeks later, in the middle of the night, a telephone call told her that he was dead. The car he’d bought leaked carbon monoxide up through the floorboards and caused him to pass out behind the wheel. He lived in the country. The motor went on running until there was no more gas in the tank. He stayed in the car until somebody found him a few days later.

  The pan was starting to smoke. She poured in more oil and turned on the fan. She hadn’t been to an auction in twenty years, and now she was getting ready to go to one tonight. But first she had to fry these pork chops. It was bad luck their fridge had gone flooey, but she found herself looking forward to this auction. She began missing her dad. She even missed her mom now, though the two of them used to argue all the time before she met her husband and began living with him. She stood at the stove, turning the meat, and missing both her dad and her mom.

  Still missing them, she took a pot holder and moved the pan off the stove. Smoke was being drawn up through the vent over the stove. She stepped to the doorway with the pan and looked into the living room. The pan was still smoking and drops of oil and grease jumped over the sides as she held it. In the darkened room, she could just make out her husband’s head, and his bare feet. “Come on out here,” she said. “It’s ready.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She saw his head come up from the end of the sofa. She put the pan back on the stove and turned to the cupboard. She took down a couple of plates and put them on the counter. She used her spatula to raise one of the pork chops. Then she lifted it onto a plate. The meat didn’t look like meat. It looked like part of an old shoulder blade, or a digging instrument. But she knew it was a pork chop, and she took the other one out of the pan and put that on a plate, too.

  In a minute, her husband came into the kitchen. He looked at the fridge once more, which was standing there with its door open. And then his eyes took in the pork chops. His mouth dropped open, but he didn’t say anything. She waited for him to say something, anything, but he didn’t. She put salt and pepper on the table and told him to sit down.

  “Sit down,” she said and gave him a plate on which lay the remains of a pork chop. “I want you to eat this,” she said. He took the plate. But he just stood there and looked at it. Then she turned to get her own plate.

  Sandy cleared the newspaper away and shoved the food to the far side of the table. “Sit do
wn,” she said to her husband once more. He moved his plate from one hand to the other. But he kept standing there. It was then she saw puddles of water on the table. She heard water, too. It was dripping off the table and onto the linoleum.

  She looked down at her husband’s bare feet. She stared at his feet next to the pool of water. She knew she’d never again in her life see anything so unusual. But she didn’t know what to make of it yet. She thought she’d better put on some lipstick, get her coat, and go ahead to the auction. But she couldn’t take her eyes from her husband’s feet. She put her plate on the table and watched until the feet left the kitchen and went back into the living room.