Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

  After the first unsettling glance, he kept his eyes on the road. He looked at the house again after he had brought the car to a stop near the front door. Then he licked his lips, turned to her, and tried to smile.

  “Well, we’re here,” he said.

  She was looking at him, not looking at the house at all.

  Harry had always lived in cities—San Francisco for the last three years, and, before that, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. But for a long time he had wanted to move to the country, somewhere in the country. At first he wasn’t too clear about where he wanted to go; he just knew he wanted to leave the city to try to start over again. A simpler life was what he had in mind, just the essentials, he said. He was thirty-two years old and was a writer in a way, but he was also an actor and a musician. He played the saxophone, performed occasionally with the Bay City Players, and was writing a first novel. He had been writing the novel since the time he lived in New York. One bleak Sunday afternoon in March, when he had again started talking about a change, a more honest life somewhere in the country, she’d mentioned, jokingly at first, her father’s deserted place in the northwestern part of Washington.

  “My God,” Harry had said, “you wouldn’t mind? Roughing it, I mean? Living in the country like that?”

  “I was born there,” she said, laughing. “Remember? I’ve lived in the country. It’s all right. It has advantages. I could live there again. I don’t know about you, though, Harry. If it’d be good for you.”

  She kept looking at him, serious now. He felt lately that she was always looking at him.

  “You wouldn’t regret it?” he said. “Giving up things here?”

  “I wouldn’t be giving up much, would I, Harry?” She shrugged. “But I’m not going to encourage the idea, Harry.”

  “Could you paint up there?” he asked.

  “I can paint anywhere,” she said. “And there’s Bellingham.” she said. “There’s a college there. Or else Vancouver or Seattle.” She kept watching him. She sat on a stool in front of a shadowy half-finished portrait of a man and woman and rolled two paintbrushes back and forth in her hand.

  That was three months ago. They had talked about it and talked about it and now they were here.

  He rapped on the walls near the front door. “Solid. A solid foundation. If you have a solid foundation, that’s the main thing.” He avoided looking at her. She was shrewd and might have read something from his eyes.

  “I told you not to expect too much,” she said.

  “Yes, you did. I distinctly remember,” he said, still not looking at her. He gave the bare board another rap with his knuckles and moved over beside her. His sleeves were rolled in the damp afternoon heat, and he was wearing white jeans and sandals. “Quiet, isn’t it?”

  “A lot different from the city.”

  “God, yes ... Pretty up here, too.” He tried to smile. “Needs a little work, that’s all. A little work. It’ll be a good place if we want to stay. Neighbors won’t bother us, anyway.”

  “We had neighbors here when I was a little girl,” she said. “You had to drive to see them, but they were neighbors.”

  The door opened at an angle. The top hinge was loose: nothing much, Harry judged. They moved slowly from room to room. He tried to cover his disappointment. Twice he knocked on the walls and said, “Solid.” Or, “They don’t make houses like this any more. You can do a lot with a house like this.”

  She stopped in front of a large room and drew a long breath.

  “Yours?”

  She shook her head.

  “And we could get the necessary furniture we need from your Aunt Elsie?”

  “Yes, whatever we need,” she said. “That is, if it’s what we want, to stay here. I’m not pushing. It’s not too late to go back. There’s nothing lost.”

  In the kitchen they found a wood stove and a mattress pushed against one wall. In the living room again, he looked around and said, “I thought it’d have a fireplace.”

  “I never said it had a fireplace.”

  “I just had the impression for some reason it would have one.. . No outlets, either,” he said a moment later. Then: “No electricity!”

  “Toilet, either,” she said.

  He wet his lips. “Well,” he said, turning away to examine something in the corner, “I guess we could fix up one of these rooms with a tub and all, and get someone to do the plumbing work. But electricity is something else, isn’t it? I mean, let’s face all these things when we come to them. One thing at a time, right? Don’t you think? Let’s .. . let’s not let any of it get us down, okay?”

  “I wish you’d just be quiet,” she said.

  She turned and went outside.

  He jumped down the steps a minute later and drew a breath of air and they both lighted cigarets. A flock of crows got up at the far end of the meadow and flew slowly and silently into the woods.

  They walked toward the barn, stopping to inspect the withered apple trees. He broke off one of the small dry branches, turned it over and over in his hands while she stood beside him and smoked a cigaret. It was peaceful, more or less appealing country, and he thought it pleasant to feel that something permanent, really permanent, might belong to him. He was taken by a sudden affection for the little orchard.

  “Get these bearing again,” he said. “Just need water and some looking after’s all.” He could see himself coming out of the house with a wicker basket and pulling down large red apples, still wet with the morning’s dew, and he understood that the idea was attractive to him.

  He felt a little cheered as they approached the barn. He examined briefly the old license plates nailed to the door. Green, yellow, white plates from the state of Washington, rusted now, 1922-23-24-25-26-27-28-2934-36-37-40-41-1949; he studied the dates as if he thought their sequence might disclose a code. He threw the wooden latch and pulled and pushed at the heavy door until it swung open. The air inside smelled unused. But he believed it was not an unpleasant smell.

  “It rains a lot here in the winter,” she said. “I don’t remember it ever being this hot in June.” Sunlight stuck down through the splits in the roof. “Once Dad shot a deer out of season. I was about—I don’t know—eight or nine, around in there.” She turned to him as he stood stopped near the door to look at an old harness that hung from a nail. “Dad was down here in the barn with the deer when the game warden drove into the yard. It was dark. Mother sent me down here for Dad, and the game warden, a big heavyset man with a hat, followed me. Dad was carrying a lamp, just coming down from the loft. He and the game warden talked a few minutes.

  The deer was hanging there, but the game warden didn’t say anything. He offered Dad a chew of tobacco, but Dad refused—he never had liked it and wouldn’t take any even then. Then the game warden pulled my ear and left. But I don’t want to think about any of that,” she added quickly. “I haven’t thought about things like that in years. I don’t want to make comparisons,” she said. “No,” she said. She stepped back, shaking her head. “I’m not going to cry. I know that sounds melodramatic and just plain stupid, and I’m sorry for sounding melodramatic and stupid. But the truth is, Harry .. She shook her head again. “I don’t know. Maybe coming back here was a mistake. I can feel your disappointment.”

  “You don’t know,” he said.

  “No, that’s right, I don’t know,” she said. “And I’m sorry, I’m really not meaning to try to influence you one way or the other. But I don’t think you want to stay. Do you?”

  He shrugged.

  He took out a cigaret. She took it from him and held it, waiting for a match, waiting for his eyes to meet hers over the match.

  “When I was little,” she went on, “I wanted to be in a circus when I grew up. I didn’t want to be a nurse or a teacher. Or a painter. I didn’t want to be a painter then. I wanted to be Emily Horner, High-Wire Artist. It was a big thing with me. I used to practice down here in the barn, walking the rafters. That big rafter up there, I walked t
hat hundreds of times.” She started to say something else, but puffed her cigaret and put it out under her heel, tamping it down carefully into the dirt.

  Outside the barn he could hear a bird calling, and then he heard a scurrying sound over the boards up in the loft. She walked past him, out into the light, and started slowly through the deep grass toward the house.

  “What are we going to do, Emily?” he called after her.

  She stopped, and he came up beside her.

  “Stay alive,” she said. Then she shook her head and smiled faintly. She touched his arm. “Jesus, I guess we are in kind of a spot, aren’t we? But that’s all I can say, Harry.”

  “We’ve got to decide,” he said, not really knowing what he meant.

  “You decide, Harry, if you haven’t already. It's your decision. I’d just as soon go back if that makes it any easier for you. We’ll stay with Aunt Elsie a day or two and then go back. All right? But give me a cigaret, will you? I’m going up to the house.”

  He moved closer to her then and thought they might embrace. He wanted to. But she did not move; she only looked at him steadily, and so he touched her on the nose with his forefinger and said, “I’ll see you in a little while.”

  He watched her go. He looked at his watch, turned, and walked slowly down the pasture toward the woods. The grass came up to his knees. Just before he entered the woods, as the grass began to thin out, he found a sort of path. He rubbed the bridge of his nose under his dark glasses, looked back at the house and the barn, and continued on, slowly. A cloud of mosquitoes moved with his head as he walked. He stopped to light a cigaret. He brushed at the mosquitoes. He looked back again, but now he could not see the house or bam. He stood there smoking, beginning to feel the silence that lay in the grass and in the trees and in the shadows farther back in the trees. Wasn’t this what he’d longed for? He walked on, looking for a place to sit.

  He lighted another cigaret and leaned against a tree. He picked up some wood chips from the soft dirt between his legs. He smoked. He remembered a volume of plays by Ghelderode lying on top of the things in the back seat of the car, and then he recalled some of the little towns they had driven through that morning— Ferndale, Lynden, Custer, Nooksack. He suddenly recalled the mattress in the kitchen. He understood that it made him afraid. He tried to imagine Emily walking the big rafter in the barn. But that made him afraid too. He smoked. He felt very calm really, all things considered. He wasn’t going to stay here, he knew that, but it didn’t upset him to know that now. He was pleased he knew himself so well. He would be all right, he decided. He was only thirty-two. Not so old. He was, for the moment, in a spot. He could admit that. After all, he considered, that was life, wasn’t it? He put out the cigaret. In a little while he lit another one.

  As he rounded a corner of the house, he saw her completing a cartwheel. She landed with a light thump, slightly crouched, and then she saw him.

  “Hey!” she yelled, grinning gravely.

  She raised herself onto the balls of her feet, arms out to the sides over her head, and then pitched forward. She turned two more cartwheels while he watched, and then she called, “How about this!” She dropped lightly onto her hands and, getting her balance, began a shaky hesitant movement in his direction. Face flushed, blouse hanging over her chin, legs waving insanely, she advanced on him.

  “Have you decided?” she said, quite breathless.

  He nodded.

  “So?” she said. She let herself fall against her shoulder and rolled onto her back, covering her eyes from the sun with an arm as if to uncover her breasts.

  She said, “Harry.”

  He was reaching to light a cigaret with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigaret, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.

  “Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.

  BICYCLES, MUSCLES, CIGARETS

  It had been two days since Evan Hamilton had stopped smoking, and it seemed to him everything he’d said and thought for the two days somehow suggested cigarets. He looked at his hands under the kitchen light. He sniffed his knuckles and his fingers.

  “I can smell it,” he said.

  “I know. It’s as if it sweats out of you,” Ann Hamilton said. “For three days after I stopped I could smell it on me. Even when I got out of the bath. It was disgusting.” She was putting plates on the table for dinner. “I’m so sorry, dear. I know what you’re going through. But, if it’s any consolation, the second day is always the hardest. The third day is hard, too, of course, but from then on, if you can stay with it that long, you’re over the hump. But I’m so happy you’re serious about quitting, I can’t tell you.” She touched his arm. “Now, if you’ll just call Roger, we’ll eat.”

  Hamilton opened the front door. It was already dark. It was early in November and the days were short and cool. An older boy he had never seen before was sitting on a small, well-equipped bicycle in the driveway. The boy leaned forward just off the seat, the toes of his shoes touching the pavement and keeping him upright.

  “You Mr. Hamilton?” the boy said.

  “Yes, I am,” Hamilton said. “What is it? Is it Roger?”

  “I guess Roger is down at my house talking to my mother. Kip is there and this boy named Gary Berman. It is about my brother’s bike. I don’t know for sure,” the boy said, twisting the handle grips, “but my mother asked me to come and get you. One of Roger’s parents.”

  “But he’s all right?” Hamilton said. “Yes, of course, I’ll be right with you.”

  He went into the house to put his shoes on.

  “Did you find him?” Ann Hamilton said.

  “He’s in some kind of jam,” Hamilton answered. “Over a bicycle. Some boy—I didn’t catch his name—is outside. He wants one of us to go back with him to his house.”

  “Is he all right?” Ann Hamilton said and took her apron off.

  “Sure, he’s all right.” Hamilton looked at her and shook his head. “It sounds like it’s just a childish argument, and the boy’s mother is getting herself involved.”

  “Do you want me to go?” Ann Hamilton asked.

  He thought for a minute. “Yes, I’d rather you went, but I’ll go. Just hold dinner until we’re back. We shouldn’t be long.”

  “I don’t like his being out after dark,” Ann Hamilton said. “I don’t like it.”

  The boy was sitting on his bicycle and working the handbrake now.

  “How far?” Hamilton said as they started down the sidewalk.

  “Over in Arbuckle Court,” the boy answered, and when Hamilton looked at him, the boy added, “Not far. About two blocks from here.”

  “What seems to be the trouble?” Hamilton asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. I don’t understand all of it. He and Kip and this Gary Berman are supposed to have used my brother’s bike while we were on vacation, and I guess they wrecked it. On purpose. But I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what they’re talking about. My brother can’t find his bike and they had it last, Kip and Roger. My mom is trying to find out where it’s at.”

  “I know Kip,” Hamilton said. “Who’s this other boy?”

  “Gary Berman. I guess he’s new in the neighborhood. His dad is coming as soon as he gets home.”

  They turned a corner. The boy pushed himself along, keeping just slightly ahead. Hamilton saw an orchard, and then they turned another corner onto a dead-end street. He hadn’t known of the existence of this street and was sure he would not recognize any of the people who lived here. He looked around him at the unfamiliar houses and was struck with the range of his son’s personal life.

  The boy turned into a driveway and got off the bicycle and leaned it against the house. When the boy opened the front door, Hamilton followed him through the living room and into the kitchen, where he saw his son sitting on one side of a table al
ong with Kip Hollister and another boy. Hamilton looked closely at Roger and then he turned to the stout, dark-haired woman at the head of the table.

  “You’re Roger’s father?” the woman said to him. “Yes, my name is Evan Hamilton. Good evening.” “I’m Mrs. Miller, Gilbert’s mother,” she said. “Sorry to ask you over here, but we have a problem.”

  Hamilton sat down in a chair at the other end of the table and looked around. A boy of nine or ten, the boy whose bicycle was missing, Hamilton supposed, sat next to the woman. Another boy, fourteen or so, sat on the draining board, legs dangling, and watched another boy who was talking on the telephone. Grinning slyly at something that had just been said to him over the line, the boy reached over to the sink with a cigaret. Hamilton heard the sound of the cigaret sputting out in a glass of water The boy who had brought him leaned against the refrigerator and crossed his arms.

  “Did you get one of Kip’s parents?” the woman said to the boy.

  ‘His sister said they were shopping. I went to Gary Berman’s and his father will be here in a few minutes. I left the address.”

  “Mr. Hamilton,” the woman said, “I’ll tell you what happened. We were on vacation last month and Kip wanted to borrow Gilbert’s bike so that Roger could help him with Kip’s paper route. I guess Roger’s bike had a flat tire or something. Well, as it turns out—”

  “Gary was choking me, Dad,” Roger said.

  “What?” Hamilton said, looking at his son carefully.

  “He was choking me. I got the marks.” His son pulled down the collar of his T-shirt to show his neck.

  “They were out in the garage,” the woman continued. “I didn’t know what they were doing until Curt, my oldest, went out to see.”

  “He started it!” Gary Berman said to Hamilton. “He called me a jerk.” Gary Berman looked toward the front door.