“What curls?”
“Curls, wave, whatever you call it. Your hair’s got a nice shape to it. Just wondered whether it was natural.”
“Entirely,” I said.
“So tell me about Jimmy.”
“You want me to give you his life story? You have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Give me a chance,” he said. “Am I a good man? Probably not. A good father? Definitely no. However—” The waitress brought him a bowl of clam chowder. “Thanks, sweetie,” he said. “However, as I was saying, I am good at some things. I am a good poker player and a good listener. A world-class listener, in fact. So whatever you want to tell me, you go ahead. The way I figure it—” He reached across the table. For a minute I thought he was going to try to hold my hand, and as appalled as I was I didn’t take it out of his way. Instead he picked up the salt. “The way I figure, I need to do some listening and you need to do some talking. We’re going to get along fine.”
“James,” I said. “Well, James.” Then I stopped. “I don’t know what to say.”
“He was a smart kid?”
“Yes, very.”
“So tell me about that,” he said. “What was he smart about?”
So I started with the books James read, the subjects he followed. Mr. Sweatt gave a low whistle of approval. “And he had friends?” he asked.
“Plenty.”
“Plenty of friends,” said Mr. Sweatt. “So. Elaborate.”
He told the truth: he was a good listener. Mr. Sweatt was, in fact, a ruthless truth-teller. As bad a man as he might have been—and it wasn’t that I was revising my opinion of him, exactly—I don’t think he ever told a lie. Later I would find four postcards from him in a box marked Correspondence; they were badly spelled, clearly written in haste. Instead of using punctuation he merely left large spaces between sentences. I had seen one of them arrive; I hadn’t thought of the card since James had died. Truthfully, I hadn’t looked through any of those papers; I couldn’t believe I now had permission.
Mr. Sweatt listened, and I talked, and when I thought I’d talked myself out, he’d ask me a question that would get me going again. He was a tourist in his son’s life, an interested tourist, armed with just enough information to ask the right questions. He smoked cigarettes he rolled himself, smashed them out, and soon the ashtray was filled with the ends of them, tiny scorched bouquets.
A bald man walked by the table. Mr. Sweatt gestured with his coffee cup. “See that? Gimme another ten years, and that’s me.” He shivered theatrically. “That’s my fear, and afraid it’s my curse, going bald. My granddad on my mother’s side, he was bald, and they say that’s what counts. So far, I’ve been lucky.” He caught me looking at his hairline and said, “I’ve always had this high forehead. Same as it ever was, pretty sure. I keep checking.”
It was at that moment I began to like him a little better. In fact, he was going bald. I could see the shape of his skull, the shell-pink scalp, quite clearly when he crossed his arms on the table and set his face down on top, which he did every now and then, brooding or thinking. I never knew anyone else who would do that while you were talking to them. It made me want to brush his head.
“A high forehead is distinguished,” I said.
Cal was embarking on the sort of baldness that is most treacherous: the hair to the left and right of the center of his forehead was sneaking back, as if to secretly tryst behind the lock in the middle. Eventually he’d be left with a bare horseshoe path of scalp. He would notice it all of a sudden one day, and it would horrify him.
“So, more,” he said. “Tell me more.”
“What else?”
“What else is there?”
“Why don’t you answer this question for me: why are you here?”
“Well,” he said. He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“Money?” I said.
“Oh, money,” he said. “No. I’ll be straight with you. I’d thought maybe there was some money. But that was a later thought. I dunno. Maybe a smoke screen.”
“You must be desperate for it,” I said. “To ask that way.”
“No, what makes you think that? What do I have of Jimmy? Not a thing. A couple of letters maybe. I’m a businessman. People think that money is the hardest thing to ask for, but take my word for it: it’s the easiest. Now, you tell me, why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“ ’Cause people can tell you no and there’s no hard feelings, or they give it to you and it’s yours to spend. You ask for anything else in this world, and what happens? The answer might be no, or the answer might be a lie, or the answer might be a can of worms you don’t want to open. Ask for a compliment, ask for love, ask for an explanation or an apology—either you don’t get it, or what you get’s counterfeit. But money: if it exists, you might get it, and it’ll be as good as the money you get anywhere else. Look,” he said. “Jimmy was my family, and I never forgot that. If I’d died before he did, who do you think would’ve gotten my money?”
“No idea.”
“Jimmy! Of course. We were each other’s closest relatives.” He dribbled some coffee down his tie. “Damn,” he said, dipping his napkin in his water glass. “I can’t eat a thing without getting it all over myself. Well, I’ll never starve. I can just boil my clothing for soup.”
“So, money’s not why you came,” I said.
“No, no. I came back because I missed my family. I mean I guess now I’ve missed my family, my wife and my son, I’ve missed that chance. But there’s still my sister and my niece, and I should probably say hello to them before it’s too late.”
“Why did you leave in the first place?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said. “The tables have turned. Okay, I’ll answer your questions. But I want you to promise me something. I want to see Jimmy’s paintings, his photographs. I asked Caroline; she said you have them all. I thought maybe I could get one. She says there’s lots.”
That stopped me. I’d had an idea Caroline wasn’t speaking to him, and I couldn’t imagine what she’d think of me, lunching with the enemy. “Yes. You and Caroline talk often?”
“Not all that often. Every year, maybe. Every year she calls me up, we chat, and then I manage to say something wrong and she decides not to talk to me. This year.… Well, this year I guess I came in person to say it. She’ll come around, but about now I’m persona non.”
I relaxed, feeling safer. This transaction had felt illegal, but maybe the Stricklands wouldn’t have to know. Did he count as a friend, as James had specified in his will? Perhaps, I thought. I could give him a picture, a small one.
“I’ll bring some to the library Monday,” I said.
“No good. I’m leaving Sunday. Can’t I come over?”
Why not, I thought. “Okay. So. Why did you leave?”
He grabbed his coat. “Let’s go,” he said.
“What? Not now.” I looked at my watch. “I have to go back to work.”
“After work?” he said. “I’ll pick you up.” He took out his wallet to get money for the check. A snapshot fell out, a pretty girl in a dress.
“Who’s this?” I picked it up. “A girlfriend?”
“Girlfriend emeritus,” he said. “Gina. Retired as girlfriend some time ago, but still retains some of the rights and privileges of the position.”
“Like her picture in your wallet.”
He shrugged and reached further into the slot in his wallet. He extracted a small stack of pictures, then dealt them onto the table like a hand of solitaire. The last two were of Mrs. Sweatt, one alone, one holding a baby James.
“I keep ’em all,” said Mr. Sweatt. He stacked up his pile of pictures, his neat exosomatic memory, and put it away.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said. “Why did you leave?”
He smiled. “Boy, you are feisty. Okay. I left because my wife asked me impossible questions, and she never let me get away without answering. And if you want a better answer than th
at, you’re going to have to wait until—what, five o’clock?”
I sighed. “Five o’clock,” I said. “Sure.”
“I see Mr. Sweatt is charming you,” Astoria said to me. “He always charmed the girls.”
“Not me,” I said. “Not bloody likely.”
She smiled. “You know, he isn’t a bad guy. I know you might think he is, but Mrs. Sweatt wasn’t the easiest person to live with, plus a sick kid—a man gets scared of that sort of thing.”
“He wasn’t a sick kid,” I said.
“Peggy. He died at twenty. He was sick all his life. I’m not saying leaving was the right thing to do, I’m just saying these things aren’t black and white.”
Cal Sweatt showed up at five o’clock on the dot. “Astoria!” he said. “Glamorous as always. What’s your secret?”
“Library work,” she said. “It’s the fountain of youth.”
“This library is,” he said, smiling at me. “This library is fuller of pretty girls than Hollywood.”
“I’ll get my coat,” I said, trying to sound icy, because I didn’t want to encourage this sort of talk, especially with Astoria around. “Let’s get this over with.”
But Cal Sweatt didn’t want to get it over with. He wanted to look at every single photograph and painting.
“When did he do this one?” he asked, fingering a photograph of a thin couple in matching outfits.
I looked at it. “That one’s older, I think. He probably took that when he was fifteen or so.”
“Five years isn’t so old.”
“A fourth of his life,” I said, and Cal got quiet.
“You’re right,” he said. “What about this?”
I hadn’t been through any of this since James died. It was a snapshot of the library, nothing in the frame that would hint at the year. “I don’t know,” I said. He flipped to another picture. This one was a self-portrait, James in the bathroom mirror in the Stricklands’ house. He held the camera in one hand, squinting into it; the other disappeared out the bottom of the frame. I knew he was steadying himself on the basin, that his knees were bent so he could look in the mirror.
“This is hard,” Cal said. “I didn’t know how hard this would be. Look, you think I’m a terrible guy—”
“No—”
“Yes, you do, or you started out thinking it and that’s hard to shake. And you know, I get flip ’cause it’s easy.” He sighed. “No one will ever say that Calvin Sweatt didn’t take the easy way out, every single time. But—” He held on to the shot of James.
“But?” I said.
“But the easy way out isn’t always so easy. I’m getting old, starting to realize that. Why did I leave, you asked me. I left because it was the easy way out. Mrs. Sweatt was an unhappy person, you knew her, and I am pretty much a happy person, and this caused some spectacular fights.”
“Did you love your wife?” I asked.
“I loved her,” said Cal, “because I got used to her. I didn’t fall in love with her.”
“No?”
“It pains me to say this,” he told me, “but I’m not susceptible to love. Probably I’m immune.” He sighed. “That sounds so pessimistic.”
“Why are you immune?” I asked.
He took me by the hand and stroked my knuckles. It was a slow touch; I felt it in my stomach. “Well, people become immune to love like they become immune to any disease. Either they had it bad early in life, like chicken pox, and that’s that; or they keep getting exposed to it in little doses and build up an immunity; or somehow they just don’t catch it, something in ’em is born resistant. I’m the last type. I’m immune to love and poison ivy.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “You’re invulnerable.” He opened my hand and stroked the palm. This was not a good idea, to sit here and take his touch. I decided to concentrate on what he was saying.
“Not at all,” he said. “Not invulnerable at all.”
“What’s your Achilles’ heel?”
“Everything,” he said mournfully. “I am highly susceptible to almost everything.”
“To what precisely?” I asked.
“You’ll only use it against me,” he said. “Let’s see. Strep throat, sex, flea bites, companionship, pillow talk, whiskey, flattery, presents. Most of me thinks that’s pretty smart. I’m not convinced that love can offer me anything that the dynamite combination of sex, companionship, pillow talk, flattery, and of course whiskey doesn’t already supply.”
“There are some things,” I said. “So I hear.”
“Like what? Nausea, nerves, and stupidity? If I ever get a craving, I’ll just increase the whiskey dosage.”
I turned my hand over in his hand. He started to trace my thumb—the creases at the joints, the lump of bone where it met my hand. My thumb had never before seemed like such a complicated mechanism.
“Could you get used to me?” I asked.
“Peggy Cort,” he said, in a small, sad voice.
“Calvin Sweatt.” I closed my eyes. “May I ask you a favor?”
“Shoot,” he said.
“May I kiss you?”
I opened my eyes. His were closed. He didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and kissed his jaw, then his neck, then the edge of his mouth. Then his mouth itself. We still held hands, and I thought about slipping my hands from his to put to his face, and I cursed myself for thinking this much. Was he kissing me back? Yes, now he was. Now he was kissing me back. My eyes were still open. His still closed.
I leaned back. There was lipstick on his lips. What was it I liked about him? I examined everything. Not his coloring, sandy hair, and almost-blue eyes—James had gotten his pink-and-gold from his mother. Not his arched nose or straight eyebrows, not his heavy-lobed ears or curiously unlined skin. This is what I liked: one thin scar on his chin (a shaving accident, perhaps), and my lipstick on his mouth.
“You look like you were hit by a bus,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Yes, you were hit by a bus?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Peggy Cort, I could get used to you.”
And I decided to take this to mean he could love me.
Some men—well, one man I knew, anyhow—get braver in bed, the way they get braver fixing a car, or showing you how to shoot billiards: sex is man’s work, even a woman’s body is man’s work, and you won’t ever be as good at it as he is but he’ll pass along some tips anyhow. Cal Sweatt, however, got shyer, looked more like his son, more like my James, every moment. He snuck his hand between my legs, over my skirt, to rub me there, but I wasn’t wearing the clothing for it; mine was a stiff, unyielding straight brown skirt; something gossamer and flowered and loose would have been better for that almost-furtive maneuver. Still, I whispered in his ear, “That’s nice.”
“It is?” he said, his voice full of surprise.
I pulled him closer to me, and he moved his hand around my back; I felt his fingers find the waistband of my skirt, pull my shirt from it, snake down past the bridge of elastic between the back belt loops.
I was not in my body, I was somewhere just behind it, as if I were pushing an empty shopping cart through a bright supermarket, taking anything I wanted from the shelves and throwing them into the basket, knowing someone else would pay the bill, knowing the things would never fill the cart.
He said into my ear, “Should we be doing this?” and since he put it that way, a question, I said Yes.
You might think, living alone so long, so seldom touched, I wouldn’t know what to do. But I did. Alone in my bed, I’d sometimes tested on myself. I ran a tentative hand along my collarbone; then a confident hand; then somewhere between. There wasn’t an inch of skin I hadn’t skimmed my fingers along, wondering would someone else like this? I thumbed my ears, traced the outer trough with just a fingernail; I strummed my belly; outlined my own nose, mouth, as if they were places on a map I longed to visit, a homeland I had not seen since childhood.
Some lonely untouched people might get used
to it, decide they could do without. Not me. I learned to touch myself tenderly to give myself what I could not ask others for. I stroked my own cheek; late at night, I brushed the hair off my own tired, worried forehead.
I knew in what order to caress a face, a back. I knew what would be expected, and what surprising. I remembered: there is bone, and there is skin, and muscle, and other things. You must always remember this, encountering a body, the same way you must remember when you walk around Cape Cod that there are trees, and also dunes so vast that while walking in them you cannot see the ocean or road; there are roads, and the ocean, and the bay, scrubby forests full of things that scratch, and bogs. It may seem impossible to dress in readiness for all these things, but you can, as long as you are mindful.
When I woke up the next morning, Cal was still asleep, turned toward me. If he thought that was just a high forehead, he was even more of an optimist than he claimed.
Late last night he’d asked, “But what do you really think of me?” and I’d answered, “I think I’ve never met a nicer man with fewer morals.”
Then he was awake. His eyes were a little crusty. He put his hand to my cheek, and for that moment things were lovely, and then he said, “Heya, kid. What time is it? I gotta get to Albany tonight.”
And I walked to the bathroom, shut and locked the door, turned on the shower, realized what I’d done—in this order, this order precisely—pulled off the sheet I was wrapped in, folded it carefully, and got in the shower and began to cry in a way I am quite sure I have never cried before.
I pounded the walls of the bathtub, sat down in the tub, hit my knees. I couldn’t get enough air; I tried to eat it, bite down into it. My mouth filled up with water. Finally I curled up in a ball beneath the shower, as if the water had driven me there, as if I had no choice but to stay.
I’d like to say that, at that moment, I was crying for James, that I’d fully realized his absence by sleeping with the man who, all things considered, might be expected to be most like him, but who was nothing like him at all. I’d like to say that, as I cried, I completely forgot about that balding man outside the door, who knocked once or twice, politely, as if he were overhearing a domestic dispute that he wasn’t sure he should interrupt.