“No. I ought to run. But let me sit here a little longer. Being with you is such a relief.”
“Why? It seems I make claims, like all the others.”
A little lightning of pain flickers across his chest, narrowing his scope of breath. Claims lie heavy around him, squeezing. Now a sexually unsatisfied mistress, another burden. But he lies, “No you don’t. You’ve been all gravy, Thel. I know it’s cost you, but you’ve been terrific.”
“Harry, please. Don’t sound so maudlin. You’re still young. What? Fifty-five? Not even above the speed limit.”
“Fifty-six two months ago. That’s not old for some guys - not for a stocky little plug-ugly like Ronnie, he’ll go forever. But if you’re the height I am and been overweight as long, the heart gets tired of lugging it all around.” He has developed, he realizes, an image of his heart as an unwilling captive inside his chest, a galley slave or one of those blinded horses that turn a mill wheel. He feels that Thelma is looking at him in a new way - clinically, with a detached appraising look far distant from the melting crazy look. He has forfeited something by not fucking her: he has lost full rank, and she is moving him out, without even knowing it. Fair enough. With her lupus, he moved her out a long while ago. If Thelma had been healthy, why wouldn’t he have left Janice for her in this last decade? Instead he used all the holes she had and then hustled back into whatever model Toyota he was driving that year and back to Janice in her stubborn, stupid health. What was there about Janice? It must be religious, their tie, it made so little other sense.
Two ailing old friends, he and Thelma sit for half an hour, talking symptoms and children, catching up on the fate of common acquaintances - Peggy Fosnacht dead, Ollie down in New Orleans she heard, Cindy Murkett fat and unhappy working in a boutique in the new mall out near Oriole, Webb married for the fourth time to a woman in her twenties and moved from that fancy modern house in Brewer Heights with all his home carpentry to an old stone farmhouse in the south of the county, near Galilee, that he has totally renovated.
“That Webb. Anything he wants to do, he does. He really knows how to live.”
“Not really. I was never as impressed with him as you and Janice were. I always thought he was a smartass know-it-all.”
“You think Janice was impressed?”
Thelma is slightly flustered, and avoids his eye. “Well, there was that one night at least. She didn’t complain, did she?”
“Neither did I,” he says gallantly, though what he chiefly remembers is how tired he was the next morning, and how weird golf seemed, with impossible jungle and deep coral caves just off the fairway. Janice got Webb, and Ronnie sweet Cindy. Thelma told Harry that night she had loved him for years.
She nods in sarcastic acknowledgment of the compliment, and says, returning to an earlier point in their conversation, “About being mortal - I suppose it affects different people different ways, but for me there’s never been a thinning out. Being alive, no matter how sick I feel, feels absolute. You’re absolutely alive and when you’re not you’ll be absolutely something else. Do you and Janice ever go to church?”
Not too surprised, since Thelma has always been religious in her way, it goes with her conventional decor and secretive sexiness, he answers, “Rarely, actually. The churches down there have this folksy Southern thing. And most of our friends happen to be Jewish.”
“Ronnie and I go every Sunday now. One of these new denominations that goes back to fundamentals. You know - we’re lost, and we’re saved.”
“Oh yeah?” These marginal sects depress Harry. At least the moldy old denominations have some history to them.
“I believe it, sometimes,” she says. “It helps the panic, when you think of all the things you’ll never do that you always thought vaguely you might. Like go to Portugal, or get a master’s degree.”
“Well, you did some things. You did Ronnie, and me, me up brown I’d say, and you did raise three sons. You might get to Portugal yet. They say it’s cheap, relatively. The only country over there I’ve ever wanted to go to is Tibet. I can’t believe I won’t make it. Or never be a test pilot, like I wanted to when I was ten. As you say, I still think I’m God.”
“I didn’t mean that unkindly. It’s charming, Harry.”
“Except maybe to Nelson.”
“Even to him. He wouldn’t want you any different.”
“Here’s a question for you, Thel. You’re smart. What ever happened to the Dalai Lama?”
In her clinical appraising mood, nothing should surprise her, but Thelma laughs. “He’s still around, isn’t he? In fact, hasn’t he been in the news a little, now that the Tibetans are rioting again? Why, Harry? Have you become a devotee of his? Is that why you don’t go to church?”
He stands, not liking being teased about this. “I’ve always kind of identified with him. He’s about my age, I like to keep track of the guy. I have a gut feeling this’ll be his year.” As he stands there, the rocking chair on the rebound taps his calves and his medications make him feel lightheaded. “Thanks for the nuts,” he says. “There’s a lot we could still say.”
She stands too, stiffly fighting the plushy grip of the sofa, and with her arthritic waddle steps around the table, and places her body next to his, her face at his lapel. She looks up at him with that presumptuous solemnity of women you have fucked. She urges him, “Believe in God, darling. It helps.”
He squirms, inside. “I don’t not believe.”
“That’s not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling.” She likes the sound of “darling.” “Before you go, let me see him at least.”
“See who?”
“Him, Harry. You. With his bonnet.”
Thelma kneels, there in her frilled and stagnant dim living room, and unzips his fly. He feels the clinical cool touch of her fingers and sees the gray hairs on the top of her head, radiating from her parting; his heart races in expectation of her warm mouth as in the old days.
But she just says, “Just lovely,” and tucks it back, half hard, into his jockey shorts, and rezips his fly and struggles to her feet. She is a bit breathless, as if from a task of housework. He embraces her and this time it is he who clings.
“The reason I haven’t left Janice and never can now,” he confesses, suddenly near tears, maudlin as she said, “is, without her, I’m shit. I’m unemployable. I’m too old. All I can be from here on in is her husband.”
He expects sympathy, but perhaps his mention of Janice is one too many. Thelma goes dead, somehow, in his arms. “I don’t know,” she says.
“About what?”
“About your coming here again.”
“Oh let me,” he begs, perversely feeling at last in tune with this encounter and excited by her. “Without you, I don’t have a life.”
“Maybe Nature is trying to tell us something. We’re too old to keep being foolish.”
“Never, Thelma. Not you and me.”
“You don’t seem to want me.”
“I want you, I just don’t want Ronnie’s little bugs.”
She pushes at his chest to free herself. “There’s nothing wrong with Ronnie. He’s as safe and clean as I am.”
“Yeah, well, that goes without saying, the way you two carry on. That’s what I’m afraid of. I tell you, Thelma, you don’t know him. He’s a madman. You can’t see it, because you’re his loyal wife.”
“Harry, I think we’ve reached a point where the more we say, the worse it’ll get. Sex isn’t what it used to be, you’re right about that. We must all be more careful. You be careful. Keep brushing your teeth, and I’ll brush mine.”
It isn’t until he is out on Thelma’s curved walk, the door with its pulled curtain and bevelled glass shut behind him, that he catches her allusion to toothbrushing. Another slam at him and Janice. You can’t say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI. The robin is still there, on the little lawn. Maybe it’s sick, all these animals around us have their diseases too, their histories of plague. I
t gives Rabbit a beady eye and hops a bit away in Thelma’s waxy April grass but disdains to take wing. Robin, hop. The bold yellow of dandelions has come this week to join that of daffodils and forsythia. Telltale. Flowers attracting bees as we attract each other. Our signals. Smells. If only he were back in her house he’d fuck her despite all the danger. Instead he finds safety inside his gray Celica; as he glides away the stillness of Arrowdale is broken by the return of the lumbering yellow school buses, and their release, at every corner of the curved streets, of shrilly yelling children.
THE TOYOTA TOUCH, a big blue banner says in the display windows of Springer Motors over on Route 111. 36 Months / 36,000 Miles • Limited Warranty on All New Models, a lesser poster proclaims, and another All-New CRESSIDAS • Powerful New 3.0-Liter Engine • 190 Horsepower • 4-Speed Electronically Controlled Overdrive Transmission • New Safety Shift Lock. Nelson isn’t in, to Harry’s considerable relief. The day is a desultory Tuesday and the two salesmen on the floor are both young men he doesn’t know, and who don’t know him. Changes have been made since last November. Nelson has had the office area repainted in brighter colors, pinks and greens like a Chinese tea-house, and has taken down the old blown-up photos of Harry in his glory days as a basketball star, with the headlines calling him “Rabbit.”
“Mr. Angstrom left for lunch around one o’clock and said he might not be back this afternoon,” a pudgy salesman tells him. Jake and Rudy used to have their desks out in the open along the wall, in the direction of the disco club that failed and when the Seventies went out became an appliance-rental center. One of Nelson’s bright ideas was to take these desks away and line the opposite wall with cubicles, like booths in a restaurant. Maybe it creates more salesman-customer intimacy at the ticklish moment of signing the forms but the arrangement seems remote from general business operations and exposed to the noise of the service garage. In this direction, and behind toward the river and Brewer, lies the scruffy unpaved area of the lot Harry has always thought of for some reason as Paraguay, which in reality just got rid of its old dictator with the German name, Harry read in the papers recently.
“Yeah, well,” he tells this fat stranger, “I’m a Mr. Angstrom too. Who is here, who knows anything?” He doesn’t mean to sound rude but Thelma’s revelation has upset him; he can feel his heart racing and his stomach struggling to digest the two bowls of nuts.
Another young salesman, a thinner one, comes toward them, out of a booth at the Paraguay end, and he sees it’s not a man; her hair being pulled back tight from her ears and her wearing a tan trench coat to go out onto the lot to a customer fooled him. It’s a female. A female car salesman. Like in that Toyota commercial, only white. He tries to control his face, so his chauvinism doesn’t show.
“I’m Elvira Ollenbach, Mr. Angstrom,” she says, and gives him a hard handshake that, after Thelma’s pasty cold touch a half-hour ago, feels hot. “I’d know you were Nelson’s dad even without the pictures he keeps on his wall. You look just like him, especially around the mouth.”
Is this chick kidding him? She is a thin taut young woman, overexercised the way so many of them are now, with deep bony eyesockets and a deep no-curves voice and thin lips painted a pale luminous pink like reflecting tape and a neck so slender it makes her jaws look wide, coming to points under the lobes of her exposed white ears, which stick out. She wears gold earrings shaped like snail shells. He says to her, “I guess you’ve come onto the job since I was last here.”
“Just since January,” she says. “But before that I was three years with Datsun out on Route 819.”
“How do you like it, selling cars?”
“I like it very much,” Elvira Ollenbach says, and no more. She doesn’t smile much, and her eyes are a little insistent.
He puts himself on the line, telling her, “You don’t think of it usually as a woman’s game.”
She shows a little life. “I know, isn’t that strange, when it’s really such a natural? The women who come in don’t feel so intimidated, and the men aren’t so afraid to show their ignorance as they would be with another man. I love it. My dad loved cars and I guess I take after him.”
“It all makes sense,” he admits. “I don’t know why it’s been so long in coming. Women sales reps, I mean. How’s business been?”
“It’s been a good spring, so far. People love the Camry, and of course the Corolla plugs right along, but we’ve had surprisingly good luck with the luxury models, compared to what we hear from other dealers. Brewer’s economy is looking up, after all these years. The dead industries have been shaken out, and the new ones, the little specialty and high-tech plants, have been coming in, and of course the factory outlets have had a fabulous reception. They’re the key to the whole revival.”
“Super. How about the used end of it? That been slow?”
Her deeply set eyes - shadowy, like Nelson’s, but not sullen and hurt - glance up in some puzzlement. “Why no, not at all. One of the reasons Nelson had for hiring a new rep was he wanted to devote more of his own attention to the used cars, and not wholesale so many of them out. There was a man who used to do it, with a Greek name -“
“Stavros. Charlie Stavros.”
“Exactly. And ever since he retired Nelson feels the used cars have been on automatic pilot. Nelson’s philosophy is that unless you cater to the lower-income young or minority buyer with a buy they can manage you’ve lost a potential customer for a new upscale model five or ten years down the road.”
“Sounds right.” She seems awfully full of Nelson, this girl. Girl, she may be thirty or more for all he can tell, everybody under forty looks like a kid to him.
The pudgy salesman, the one who’s a man - a nice familiar Italian type, Brewer is still producing a few, with husky voices, hairy wrists, and with old-fashioned haircuts close above the ears - feels obliged to put his two cents in. “Nelson’s really been making the used cars jump. Ads in the Standard, prices on the windshield knocked lower every two or three days, discounts for cash. Some people swing by every day to see what’s up for grabs.” He has an anxious way of standing too close and hurrying his words; his cheeks could use a shave and his breath a Cert or two. Garlic, they use it on everything.
“Discounts for cash, huh?” Harry says. “Where is Nelson, anyway?”
“He told us he needed to unwind,” Elvira says. “He wanted to get away from the calls.”
“Calls?”
“Some man keeps calling him,” Elvira says. Her voice drops. “He sounds kind of foreign.” Harry is getting the impression she isn’t as smart as she seemed at first impression. Her insistent eyes catch a hint of this thought, for she self-protectively adds, “I probably shouldn’t be saying a thing, but seeing as you’re his father…”
“Sounds like a dissatisfied customer,” Rabbit says, to help her out of it.
“Toyota doesn’t get many of those,” the other salesman crowds in. “Year after year, they put out the lowest-maintenance machines on the road, with a repair-free longevity that’s absolutely unbelievable.”
“Don’t sell me, I’m sold,” Harry tells him.
“I get enthusiastic. My name’s Benny Leone, by the way, Mr. Angstrom. Benny for Benedict. A pleasure to see you over here. The way Nelson tells us, you’ve washed your hands of the car business and glad of it.”
“I’m semi-retired.” Do they know, he wonders, that Janice legally owns it all? He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
Benny says, “You get all kinds of kooky calls in this business. Nelson shouldn’t let it bug him.”
“Nelson takes everything too seriously,” Elvira adds. “I tell him, Don’t let things get to you, but he can’t help it. He’s one of those guys so uptight he squeaks.”
“He was always a very caring boy,” Harry tells them. “Who else is here, besides you two? Talk about automatic pilot -“
“There’s Jeremy,” Benny says, “who comes i
n generally Wednesdays through Saturdays.”
“And Lyle’s here,” Elvira says, and glances sideways to where a couple in bleached jeans are wandering in the glinting sea of Toyotas.
“I thought Lyle was sick,” Harry says.
“He says he’s in remission,” Benny says, his face getting a careful look, as maybe Harry’s did when he was trying not to appear a chauvinist in Elvira’s eyes. She for her part has suddenly moved, in her spring trench coat, toward the bright outdoors, where the pair of potential buyers browse.
“Glad to hear it,” Harry says, feeling less constrained and ceremonious talking to Benny alone. “I didn’t think there was any remission from his disease.”
“Not in the long run.” The man’s voice has gone huskier, a touch gangsterish, as if the woman’s presence had constrained him too.