What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

  It blew for five days, and on the third day the river began to rise.

  “She’s up to fifteen feet,” my father said one evening, looking over his newspaper. “Which is three feet over what you need to flood. Old Dummy going to lose his darlings.”

  I wanted to go down to the Moxee Bridge to see how high the water was running. But my dad wouldn’t let me. He said a flood was nothing to see.

  Two days later the river crested, and after that the water began to subside.

  Orin Marshall and Danny Owens and I bicycled out to Dummy’s one morning a week after. We parked our bicycles and walked across the pasture that bordered Dummy’s property.

  It was a wet, blustery day, the clouds dark and broken, moving fast across the sky. The ground was soppy wet and we kept coming to puddles in the thick grass. Danny was just learning how to cuss, and he filled the air with the best he had every time he stepped in over his shoes. We could see the swollen river at the end of the pasture. The water was still high and out of its channel, surging around the trunks of trees and eating away at the edge of the land. Out toward the middle, the current moved heavy and swift, and now and then a bush floated by, or a tree with its branches sticking up.

  We came to Dummy’s fence and found a cow wedged in up against the wire. She was bloated and her skin was shiny-looking and gray. It was the first dead thing of any size I’d ever seen. I remember Orin took a stick and touched the open eyes.

  We moved on down the fence, toward the river. We were afraid to go near the wire because we thought it might still have electricity in it. But at the edge of what looked like a deep canal, the fence came to an end. The ground had simply dropped into the water here, and the fence along with it.

  We crossed over and followed the new channel that cut directly into Dummy’s land and headed straight for his pond, going into it lengthwise and forcing an outlet for itself at the other end, then twisting off until it joined up with the river farther on.

  You didn’t doubt that most of Dummy’s fish had been carried off. But those that hadn’t been were free to come and go.

  Then I caught sight of Dummy. It scared me, seeing him. I motioned to the other fellows, and we all got down.

  Dummy was standing at the far side of the pond near where the water was rushing out. He was just standing there, the saddest man I ever saw.

  “I SURE do feel sorry for old Dummy, though,” my father said at supper a few weeks after. “Mind, the poor devil brought it on himself. But you can’t help but be troubled for him.”

  Dad went on to say George Laycock saw Dummy’s wife sitting in the Sportsman’s Club with a big Mexican fellow.

  “And that ain’t the half of it—”

  Mother looked up at him sharply and then at me. But I just went on eating like I hadn’t heard a thing.

  Dad said, “Damn it to hell, Bea, the boy’s old enough!”

  He’d changed a lot, Dummy had. He was never around any of the men anymore, not if he could help it. No one felt like joking with him either, not since he’d chased Carl Lowe with a two-by-four stud after Carl tipped Dummy’s hat off. But the worst of it was that Dummy was missing from work a day or two a week on the average now, and there was some talk of his being laid off.

  “The man’s going off the deep end,” Dad said. “Clear crazy if he don’t watch out.”

  Then on a Sunday afternoon just before my birthday, Dad and I were cleaning the garage. It was a warm, drifty day. You could see the dust hanging in the air. Mother came to the back door and said, “Del, it’s for you. I think it’s Vern.”

  I followed Dad in to wash up. When he was through talking, he put the phone down and turned to us.

  “It’s Dummy,” he said. “Did in his wife with a hammer and drowned himself. Vern just heard it in town.”

  WHEN we got out there, cars were parked all around. The gate to the pasture stood open, and I could see tire marks that led on to the pond.

  The screen door was propped ajar with a box, and there was this lean, pock-faced man in slacks and sports shirt and wearing a shoulder holster. He watched Dad and me get out of the car.

  “I was his friend,” Dad said to the man.

  The man shook his head. “Don’t care who you are. Clear off unless you got business here.”

  “Did they find him?” Dad said.

  “They’re dragging,” the man said, and adjusted the fit of his gun.

  “All right if we walk down? I knew him pretty well.”

  The man said, “Take your chances. They chase you off, don’t say you wasn’t warned.”

  We went on across the pasture, taking pretty much the same route we had the day we tried fishing. There were motorboats going on the pond, dirty fluffs of exhaust hanging over it. You could see where the high water had cut away the ground and carried off trees and rocks. The two boats had uniformed men in them, and they were going back and forth, one man steering and the other man handling the rope and hooks.

  An ambulance waited on the gravel beach where we’d set ourselves to cast for Dummy’s bass. Two men in white lounged against the back, smoking cigarettes.

  One of the motorboats cut off. We all looked up. The man in back stood up and started heaving on his rope. After a time, an arm came out of the water. It looked like the hooks had gotten Dummy in the side. The arm went back down and then it came out again, along with a bundle of something.

  It’s not him, I thought. It’s something else that has been in there for years.

  The man in the front of the boat moved to the back, and together the two men hauled the dripping thing over the side.

  I looked at Dad. His face was funny the way it was set.

  “Women,” he said. He said, “That’s what the wrong kind of woman can do to you, Jack.”

  BUT I don’t think Dad really believed it. I think he just didn’t know who to blame or what to say.

  It seemed to me everything took a bad turn for my father after that. Just like Dummy, he wasn’t the same man anymore. That arm coming up and going back down in the water, it was like so long to good times and hello to bad. Because it was nothing but that all the years after Dummy drowned himself in that dark water.

  Is that what happens when a friend dies? Bad luck for the pals he left behind?

  But as I said, Pearl Harbor and having to move back to his dad’s place didn’t do my dad one bit of good, either.

  A Serious Talk

  VERA’S car was there, no others, and Burt gave thanks for that. He pulled into the drive and stopped beside the pie he’d dropped the night before. It was still there, the aluminum pan upside down, a halo of pumpkin filling on the pavement. It was the day after Christmas.

  He’d come on Christmas day to visit his wife and children. Vera had warned him beforehand. She’d told him the score. She’d said he had to be out by six o’clock because her friend and his children were coming for dinner.

  They had sat in the living room and solemnly opened the presents Burt had brought over. They had opened his packages while other packages wrapped in festive paper lay piled under the tree waiting for after six o’clock.

  He had watched the children open their gifts, waited while Vera undid the ribbon on hers. He saw her slip off the paper, lift the lid, take out the cashmere sweater.

  “It’s nice,” she said. “Thank you, Burt.”

  “Try it on,” his daughter said.

  “Put it on,” his son said.

  Burt looked at his son, grateful for his backing him up.

  She did try it on. Vera went into the bedroom and came out with it on.

  “It’s nice,” she said.

  “It’s nice on you,” Burt said, and felt a welling in his chest.

  He opened his gifts. From Vera, a gift certificate at Sondheim’s men’s store. From his daughter, a matching comb and brush. From his son, a ballpoint pen.

  VERA served sodas, and they did a little talking. But mostly they looked at the tree. Then his daughter got up and began
setting the dining-room table, and his son went off to his room.

  But Burt liked it where he was. He liked it in front of the fireplace, a glass in his hand, his house, his home.

  Then Vera went into the kitchen.

  From time to time his daughter walked into the dining room with something for the table. Burt watched her. He watched her fold the linen napkins into the wine glasses. He watched her put a slender vase in the middle of the table. He watched her lower a flower into the vase, doing it ever so carefully.

  A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

  In the driveway in the dark, he’d let one fall as he fumbled with the door.

  THE front door was permanently locked since the night his key had broken off inside it. He went around to the back. There was a wreath on the patio door. He rapped on the glass. Vera was in her bathrobe. She looked out at him and frowned. She opened the door a little.

  Burt said, “I want to apologize to you for last night. I want to apologize to the kids, too.”

  Vera said, “They’re not here.”

  She stood in the doorway and he stood on the patio next to the philodendron plant. He pulled at some lint on his sleeve.

  She said, “I can’t take any more. You tried to burn the house down.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. Everybody here was a witness.”

  He said, “Can I come in and talk about it?”

  She drew the robe together at her throat and moved back inside.

  She said, “I have to go somewhere in an hour.”

  He looked around. The tree blinked on and off. There was a pile of colored tissue paper and shiny boxes at one end of the sofa. A turkey carcass sat on a platter in the center of the dining-room table, the leathery remains in a bed of parsley as if in a horrible nest. A cone of ash filled the fireplace. There were some empty Shasta cola cans in there too. A trail of smoke stains rose up the bricks to the mantel, where the wood that stopped them was scorched black.

  He turned around and went back to the kitchen.

  He said, “What time did your friend leave last night?”

  She said, “If you’re going to start that, you can go right now.”

  He pulled a chair out and sat down at the kitchen table in front of the big ashtray. He closed his eyes and opened them. He moved the curtain aside and looked out at the backyard. He saw a bicycle without a front wheel standing upside down. He saw weeds growing along the redwood fence.

  She ran water into a saucepan. “Do you remember Thanks-giving?” she said. “I said then that was the last holiday you were going to wreck for us. Eating bacon and eggs instead of turkey at ten o’clock at night.”

  “I know it,” he said. “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry isn’t good enough.”

  The pilot light was out again. She was at the stove trying to get the gas going under the pan of water.

  “Don’t burn yourself,” he said. “Don’t catch yourself on fire.”

  He considered her robe catching fire, him jumping up from the table, throwing her down onto the floor and rolling her over and over into the living room, where he would cover her with his body. Or should he run to the bedroom for a blanket?

  “Vera?”

  She looked at him.

  “Do you have anything to drink? I could use a drink this morning.”

  “There’s some vodka in the freezer.”

  “When did you start keeping vodka in the freezer?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I won’t ask.”

  He got out the vodka and poured some into a cup he found on the counter.

  She said, “Are you just going to drink it like that, out of a cup?” She said, “Jesus, Burt. What’d you want to talk about, anyway? I told you I have someplace to go. I have a flute lesson at one o’clock.”

  “Are you still taking flute?”

  “I just said so. What is it? Tell me what’s on your mind, and then I have to get ready.”

  “I wanted to say I was sorry.”

  She said, “You said that.”

  He said, “If you have any juice, I’ll mix it with this vodka.”

  She opened the refrigerator and moved things around.

  “There’s cranapple juice,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said.

  He drank the cup of cranapple juice and vodka. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the big ashtray that always sat on the kitchen table. He studied the butts in it. Some of them were Vera’s brand, and some of them weren’t. Some even were lavender-colored. He got up and dumped it all under the sink.

  The ashtray was not really an ashtray. It was a big dish of stoneware they’d bought from a bearded potter on the mall in Santa Clara. He rinsed it out and dried it. He put it back on the table. And then he ground out his cigarette in it.

  THE water on the stove began to bubble just as the phone began to ring.

  He heard her open the bathroom door and call to him through the living room. “Answer that! I’m about to get into the shower.”

  The kitchen phone was on the counter in a corner behind the roasting pan. He moved the roasting pan and picked up the receiver.

  “Is Charlie there?” the voice said.

  “No,” Burt said.

  “Okay,” the voice said.

  While he was seeing to the coffee, the phone rang again.

  “Charlie?”

  “Not here,” Burt said.

  This time he left the receiver off the hook.

  VERA came back into the kitchen wearing jeans and a sweater and brushing her hair.

  He spooned the instant into the cups of hot water and then spilled some vodka into his. He carried the cups over to the table.

  She picked up the receiver, listened. She said, “What’s this? Who was on the phone?”

  “Nobody,” he said. “Who smokes colored cigarettes?”

  “I do.”

  “I didn’t know you did that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  She sat across from him and drank her coffee. They smoked and used the ashtray.

  There were things he wanted to say, grieving things, consoling things, things like that.

  “I’m smoking three packs a day,” Vera said. “I mean, if you really want to know what goes on around here.”

  “God almighty,” Burt said.

  Vera nodded.

  “I didn’t come over here to hear that,” he said.

  “What did you come over here to hear, then? You want to hear the house burned down?”

  “Vera,” he said. “It’s Christmas. That’s why I came.”

  “It’s the day after Christmas,” she said. “Christmas has come and gone,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see another one.

  “What about me?” he said. “You think I look forward to holidays?”

  THE phone rang again. Burt picked it up.

  “It’s someone wanting Charlie,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Charlie,” Burt said.

  Vera took the phone. She kept her back to him as she talked. Then she turned to him and said, “I’ll take this call in the bedroom. So would you please hang up after I’ve picked it up in there? I can tell, so hang it up when I say.”

  He took the receiver. She left the kitchen. He held the receiver to his ear and listened. He heard nothing. Then he heard a man clear his throat. Then he heard Vera pick up the other phone. She shouted, “Okay, Burt! I have it now, Burt!”

  He put down the receiver and stood looking at it. He opened the silverware drawer and pushed things around inside. He opened anoth
er drawer. He looked in the sink. He went into the dining room and got the carving knife. He held it under hot water until the grease broke and ran off. He wiped the blade on his sleeve. He moved to the phone, doubled the cord, and sawed through without any trouble at all. He examined the ends of the cord. Then he shoved the phone back into its corner behind the roasting pan.

  SHE came in. She said, “The phone went dead. Did you do anything to the telephone?” She looked at the phone and then picked it up from the counter.

  “Son of a bitch!” she screamed. She screamed, “Out, out, where you belong!” She was shaking the phone at him. “That’s it! I’m going to get a restraining order, that’s what I’m going to get!”

  The phone made a ding when she banged it down on the counter.

  “I’m going next door to call the police if you don’t get out of here now!”

  He picked up the ashtray. He held it by its edge. He posed with it like a man preparing to hurl the discus.

  “Please,” she said. “That’s our ashtray.”

  He left through the patio door. He was not certain, but he thought he had proved something. He hoped he had made something clear. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example.

  He stepped around the pie in the driveway and got back into his car. He started the car and put it into reverse. It was hard managing until he put the ashtray down.

  The Calm

  I WAS getting a haircut. I was in the chair and three men were sitting along the wall across from me. Two of the men waiting I’d never seen before. But one of them I recognized, though I couldn’t exactly place him. I kept looking at him as the barber worked on my hair. The man was moving a toothpick around in his mouth, a heavyset man, short wavy hair. And then I saw him in a cap and uniform, little eyes watchful in the lobby of a bank.

  Of the other two, one was considerably the older, with a full head of curly gray hair. He was smoking. The third, though not so old, was nearly bald on top, but the hair at the sides hung over his ears. He had on logging boots, pants shiny with machine oil.