“Well, I’m not sitting here naked!”
A silence ensued. His hard-on had withered.
At last she said: “I guess I got you burned up again. I’m always putting my foot in it. I don’t know how to talk to boys.”
She sounded so contrite that Ralph, the eternal sucker for other people’s apologies, came down from his high horse.
“Look,” said he, “if every time you are inclined to say something impulsive you take a deep breath first, it might come out different. Secondly, other than that, you talk just fine to boys—at least to me. I can’t talk to a lot of girls: Imogene Clevenger for example. I guess you just have to find something in common to talk about when dealing with members of the opposite sex.”
“That’s the nicest thing you have ever said to me,” murmured Margie.
He noticed again her tendency to make it personal when his intent was to establish general principles. “Well,” he said, “it’s been nice talking to you, unless you have something else to discuss.”
“I never called up a boy before.”
“Now that I think about it, I’ve never been called up by a girl before.”
“You don’t think it’s too forward?”
Actually, he did think so, but she had enough troubles. “It’s like anything else, as long as it doesn’t become a habit.”
“The first classes start tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” said Ralph, groaning ritualistically.
“You hate school? But you always get good grades.”
“Only fair. The eighth grade was one thing; high school is another. I don’t look forward to algebra. Ordinary arithmetic was always my downfall. I never did learn how to divide fractions.”
“That’s my best subject,” said Margie, her voice taking on authority. “I’d be real glad to help you anytime. It’s really a trick, you know: you just think in terms of numbers instead of in words. Know what I did this summer? I took books in algebra and plane geometry from the library, and went through them. In fact, I got all the way to trigonometry, which I think you don’t get until the junior or senior year. It’s easy. I could explain it if you want.”
“You’ll have some job,” he said dolefully. He had not known of this gift of hers. In the eighth grade they had had different home rooms. He had not been aware that she possessed any virtues whatever. He admired people who could do things. Again it occurred to him that with a little grooming she could improve her appearance a lot. But now he began to believe that the result would not just get by but be positively pretty.
She might be a terrific girl when all was said and done. She already had brains and might well be on her way, with a little encouragement, to being downright beautiful. In the movies he had seen Jane Wyman among others play the mousy intellectual who was long ignored by the guy she worshiped and helped in class, and then one day he said: “Take off your glasses,” and she did and proved a knockout.
“If I can do it, you certainly can,” said Margie. “I’m just a girl.” However, there was nothing humble in her voice.
“Say,” said Ralph. “I was thinking of going down to Elmira’s for a Coke.”
Before he had a chance to issue an invitation, she said: “Now? Well gee, I don’t know if I can make it. I’m cool and comfortable, and I wanted to start this book on trig.”
To his amazement, proud fellow that he was, Ralph heard himself plead. “Tonight? Isn’t it soon enough for you that school starts tomorrow? You don’t want to be a greasy grind, do you?”
“You’re not just feeling sorry for me?”
“Goddammit,” said he, “you want to come or don’t you?”
“I warned you about cursing.”
She was not content just to bring him down; she had to walk all over him. Nevertheless, he groaned: “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.” She hesitated, then added: “I really like you, Ralph.”
“That’s nice.”
“I mean, really…. I care for you.”
“Likewise,” he blurted fearfully and slammed the receiver into its hook.
chapter 14
AFTER PAYING the check at Wong’s Gardens, Buddy had taken Naomi on a long aimless drive through the outskirts of the suburban area, here and there reaching roads that bordered small farms.
Now that he had abandoned his plan to murder her, he had an appetite for reminiscence, and proceeded to feed it, recalling Ralph’s walking through the cowflop, his own allergic reaction to alfalfa fields in bloom, and her cousin’s wife’s homemade bread, hot from the oven and spread with fresh-churned butter and peach preserves made from the fruit of their own trees.
“That’s the only real life, I guess,” said he. “You know: no phoniness.” He was driving at 25 mph.
“Do you think so?” asked Naomi.
“You don’t?”
She seemed startled by the question. “I have never been able to decide what is more real than anything else.”
Formerly he would have been annoyed by this statement, finding it a subtle rejection of his point of view. Laverne would have agreed instantly, and then would have made it flatteringly personal: “Yeah, Bud, but I can’t see you as a farmer, wearing overalls and a bandanna.” But Naomi had actually listened to what he said, and done something with what she heard.
“Growing things,” said he. “Getting up at sunrise and going to bed at dark. That seems more natural. I don’t know. You get what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
“Maybe after a couple more good years I’ll sell the lot and buy a little farm, get away while the getting’s good, before the ulcers and heart attacks.”
“It’s certainly worth thinking about,” said Naomi.
“Free eggs and milk, anyway,” Buddy said, pursuing his sentimental fantasy. “Fresh air instead of carbon monoxide. You could can fruit and make jams and jellies.”
“I would be willing to learn.”
Without warning he felt a strange access of affection for her. “I know you would, Nay.” He took his hand off the steering wheel and briefly touched hers, which lay on the seat between them.
“Be good for Ralph too. Make a man out of him to be around animals.” He had said that seriously, but got the inadvertent joke and chuckled. “You know what I mean. I think he might be led astray if he falls in with the wrong crowd. I don’t see him developing leadership qualities living in this town. A dose of rugged individualism might do him good.”
Naomi listened gravely to these ideas, and whenever he turned to her, she nodded in respect. However, it was her habit seldom to express a personal opinion unless asked, and then it might well be not at all to his intended point, as now.
“What do you think, Nay?”
“Ralph,” said Naomi, “is a free spirit. He ranges far and wide.”
Buddy frowned and increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal. He felt like getting home now. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s been getting sneaky. When I caught him breaking that window he clammed up. When I was a kid and got in trouble I talked a blue streak. I’d say anything. That’s how I usually got off, even if they knew I was a bare-faced liar. At least I was open about it, see? Funny how most people will forgive you when they think they’ve got your number.”
When they reached home Naomi changed into her quilted housecoat, brought forth her sewing basket, and settled down in the living room to darn a pile of Ralph’s socks. However, after doing only the first pair, she squirted out the wooden egg, put it and the socks aside, and picked up a library book.
Buddy observed this with interest though ostensibly he was for once carefully reading the forward portions of the evening paper that he ordinarily rejected in favor of the used-car ads of his big downtown competitors. He discarded his own socks when they developed holes, which generally took a long time owing to his changing them daily and keeping his nails cut close. Ralph was not as diligent in pursuing either of these measures. Neither did he shower with re
gularity, as you could smell if you put a nose in the doorway of his room.
In an all-around mood of familial affection, Buddy dropped the paper and went to the master bedroom, where he felt beneath the pillow for his gun. He had it all worked out now about Clarence. After Naomi fell asleep he would go down to the basement and wait until the Negro arrived at the door. Trying to waylay him before he got that far would be impractical; prowling the streets by car or on foot, he might miss him if Clarence came by some furtive route, slinking through the shadows of back yards, guided by his jungle instincts. Of course Buddy had no reason to shoot him now, and no cover story for so doing, but being armed was wise in the event that Clarence took offense at losing the other half of his fee.
Thinking further along the same line, Buddy decided he was within his rights, and had the power besides, to demand that Clarence also return the advance payment.
He crossed the hall and, having opened the door on the right of the entrance to the bathroom and having thrown the light switch, illuminating the cellar floor at the bottom of the stairway, he went down the steep stairs. He was not a basement man by nature, had no workbench in the corner, no wood-turning lathe on which he made early-American reproductions from knotty pine, as did certain male neighbors; another had a ham radio and talked nightly to colleagues in Nevada and even Alaska.
At the bottom he unhooked the door to the outside. He also pulled it open, and was happy he had so done, because it resisted and squawked loudly. He left it ajar. Then he went upstairs, stripped in the bedroom and, carrying his robe over his arm, went into the bathroom and filled the tub. Ordinarily he was too nervous to bathe except by shower. The very thought of lying supine, bare rump on wet enamel, water at his nipples, caused him to quake with paranoia.
He was now however in a rare state of ease. For once he yearned to be vulnerably immersed in the engrossing element. He climbed in and slid down until his chin touched the surface of the water, his knees rising high and parting company to touch the lip of the tub on either side. At the angle, looking along the trough between the little mounds of his breasts, which had developed a plumpness in the months of Laverne’s meals and were now distorted by the water, he could not see his genitals over the rise of his belly.
He was in the attitude of a woman about to be penetrated. The conceit amused him; he jazzed the water in parody. It was a ridiculous position. He had assumed it only once before, then by accident, when Ballbacher knocked him to the blacktop. He scrooched back, sliding his spine up the cool slope, and at last saw his floating dick, drawn back, like a boy’s, inside its dunce cap of foreskin.
He decided now that Laverne would come out of her mood rather sooner than later. She was totally dependent on him, not only for bed and board, the alternative being a return to the drive-in, but also, more importantly, because of her insatiable appetite for sex. Buddy was the unique man who could feed that. Fucking was all she did, other than preparing him the occasional meal. The rest of her day was a blur of candy, movie mags, and radio serials. Unlike Naomi, she had no mind whatever.
Buddy began to develop quite a resentment against her, sitting there, and to relieve it scrubbed himself furiously with the bar of Camay gone snotty from lying in a Bakelite soap dish filled with water.
When he eventually stepped from the moist warmth of the bathroom into the cool of the hall, the time on the wrist-watch he took from the pocket of his robe was 10:20. In his congress slippers he went to the living room. Naomi was as usual reading in a cloud of smoke, but he took no offense.
“Time the boy is back, isn’t it?”
She smiled vaguely. “Ralph can take care of himself.”
“I don’t want him flunking out.”
“They don’t assign homework the first night.”
Again she showed she knew more than he supposed. Her apparent remoteness neither was due to, nor resulted in, ignorance. Suddenly he had the wondrous conviction that she could have listed by name every woman he had plugged in the last decade and a half, and then, without a word from him, explained away each encounter as having existed only in the malicious gossip of others.
She provided him with a secure castle from which to sally forth to spear the dragons. If you owned a wife with sex on the brain, you might end up with a nympho like Grace Plum…or Laverne, whose rebuff of him that afternoon now seemed suspicious, given her appetites. Was she getting it from somebody else?
Buddy padded back to the bedroom and lay down in the dark. Jealousy was the emotion most alien to his temperament. What he wanted, he took. What he could not have, he did not desire. He had no sexual imagination for movie stars or princesses. With women he was not jealous, but rather jealous-making. Thus he had always regarded that feeling as, like recumbent bathing, effeminate.
He had been true to Laverne because he had nothing left for anyone else. If that wasn’t love, what was? He had visited her at various hours, usually without warning. He had never seen a cigar butt or an extra glass. When the sheets showed stains, they were always those he himself had made on his last visit.
There was something wrong with Laverne if she needed more than what he gave her in abundance. Who could it be? The grocer’s delivery boy? A teen-aged punk? She had after all, wearing a cheerleader’s getup, worked in a drive-in that served nothing but hamburgers and hotdogs. Buddy considered it a disgusting perversity if a woman consorted with a male much younger than she. Men of course had a greater range, but Buddy himself was repelled by any suggestion of adolescence. Not till a female had put in at least two and half decades, preferably more, was her veneer of instinctive selfishness worn away; unless of course she married very young.
With Leo out of commission, and until Jack gave notice at school, if in fact he decided to come full-time on the lot, Buddy could not spare himself for a stake-out on Myrtle Avenue. He must hire a private detective to watch Laverne’s staircase, especially in the hours before noon, when he himself seldom visited, and again after midnight. He realized now that these periods would not agree with the schedule of a delivery boy. If fucker there was, he was someone older, and freer—freer than Buddy, free to make free with Buddy’s woman in a place for which Buddy paid the rent.
His policy being never supinely to suffer mockery, Buddy considered that he might have extra work for Clarence after all. This thought, with the memory of his bath, had the effect of a soporific, and he dozed off.
He awakened easily, with an awareness of duty and yet a peaceful sense that he could perform it well. He put on the bedside lamp and compared his watch with the clock on the dresser. By compromise it was ten to eleven. Naomi would be coming to bed soon. Therefore he got into his white pajamas with the blue stripes and piping. One of the niceties of their marriage was that, from the first, they never displayed themselves to each other in less than underwear, and for many years not even in the final layer of that, she wearing at least a slip, and he a T-shirt above his drawers.
It was an unusual intimacy for him not to tie the fringed belt of his maroon robe. He did not do so now as he entered the hall, turned towards the living room, decided to check the basement door again—he had left it barely ajar; it might yet squeak or shudder at Clarence’s brute pressure—reversed himself, and opened the door giving onto the cellar stairway. He closed it behind him on the first step. Reaching the second, he felt himself detained.
An end of his loose belt was caught in the jamb. One gentle yank would not serve. He gave it another, this time applying sufficient force to free the belt but also enough to dislocate his center of balance. He fell backwards down the stairs.
Naomi was wont to work on Mary Joy’s diaries in the morning after Buddy went to the lot and, during the body of the year, Ralph to school. In summer, with Ralph usually around the house or yard till noon, she wrote late at night, waiting for Buddy to fall asleep, which with his clean conscience he did quickly, then rising to go to the secretary desk in the living room. Buddy drank little of any beverage; it was rare indeed for h
im to go to the toilet in the wee hours. He seldom stirred in bed or even breathed heavily. He was as polite when asleep as when awake.
He was indeed the perfect husband of legend. Naomi knew herself as no housewife to match. In the kitchen she could barely boil water. As laundress in earlier years she usually pressed more wrinkles into a shirt than she ironed out. Buddy calmly began to take his linen to the Chinese. Long ago he had suggested hiring a woman to clean, but Naomi dissuaded him: a pointless cost, vacuuming soothed her, polishing filled the void. In truth, if cleaning had been done at all in recent years, her sister Gladys, with the zeal of the mindless, had done it when she stayed over.
Neither was Naomi motherly by nature. In the irony of life, Gladys, who was childless, had the maternal instincts. She had cooed at Ralph as a baby, and even regarded it as a privilege to change his diapers, the more soiled the better. But then when they were girls it had been Gladys, two years older, who had wanted to mother Naomi through the onset of menstruation. Gladys was not simply immune to physical disgust; she seemed to delight in experiences which would have evoked it in others. Thus her unwitting example had suggested many scenes in the diaries of Mary Joy.
If the truth be known, Gladys was actually rather masculine in that. The Diaries were successful because men doted on what was loathsome. Buddy was the sole exception, owing no doubt to his many feminine qualities; he was gentle, generous, tolerant, and behind his mask of jolly vanity, riddled with self-doubt. His sexual drive was, mercifully, weak.
Naomi had had only one man in her life. If, when she was a girl, a tramp exposed himself, she calmly looked the other way. If, when dancing, in her high school years, a boy pressed his ridiculous bulge against her abdomen, she backed off. If a tongue was intruded into a polite goodnight kiss, she bit it; if a hand got fresh, she slapped the attendant face. Though a virgin she was well aware of vulnerability of testicles and was not hesitant to cock a knee.
Even with Buddy, to whom she had given her heart immediately because that was all he had requested in his shy courtship, she had been none too keen to share a bed. But when he appeared, that first night of the honeymoon they took at home in the little flat, because he had just been hired by the local Essex agency, after he had pulled the Murphy bed from the wall and gone discreetly into the kitchen while she used the bathroom and pulled on the same flannel nightgown she had worn for some years as a maiden (it was January and the coal-oil heater exuded more stink than warmth), after she had climbed in and covered up with the gray U.S. Army surplus blankets, Buddy came out, attired—well, she could not resist him in brown derby, a huge red bow tie with white polka dots, a suit of long underwear, and rubber knee boots. He carried a ukulele, which he strummed to no tune, and was singing, abominably, “The Yanks are coming…”