Arthur sat beside me, slapping the paper down on the counter. “He’s still at large,” he said.
“Bad Billy?” I leaned over and read the headline. He must have altered his appearance. There were several photos of Bad Billy with different hair styles and mustaches and beards. “Which one do you like best?”
Arthur took a look. “He makes a good blond,” he said.
The food arrived with a pot of jelly and the waitress topped up the coffee and dumped out some creamers that she had in the pocket of her apron.
“You shouldn’t sleep in your van,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Bad Billy’s not into guys.”
“What about that Borden guy?” I said.
“Ah, Borden.” Arthur shook the paper out and folded it back.
“You should be careful.” I poured an extra creamer into my coffee, which turned it a dreary gray. “Sometimes it’s hard to know how to be careful.”
Arthur lowered his eyebrows dramatically. “I could be Bad Billy.”
I sighed and sipped my coffee. “You make a good blond,” I said.
After breakfast, Arthur set up on Fore Street. Soon it would be lunchtime and the businesspeople would be stalking the streets in suits. He started tuning his violin. I lit a cigarette. I’d actually filled out the application for the bookstore.
“I could get you a waitressing job,” offered Arthur, “at a Mexican restaurant. I know the owner.”
“I don’t want a job,” I said. “But thank you.”
He finished tuning his violin and adjusted the case. I put in a dollar. “For good luck,” I said. I began to leave.
“Can I see you later?”
“When are you off?”
“It doesn’t really matter. I’d like to be here when the offices let out, but it’s Monday night so there’s no point waiting for the bar crowd.”
“How about seven?” I said. “That’ll give me a chance to get some stuff done.”
Arthur nodded. He looked happy.
The bookstore was busy at lunch hour. There was a line at the register, which was manned by my old friend. I went past the line and stood smiling until she looked up at me. She glared in a way that was calculated to make me feel insignificant.
“Can I drop this off?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” she said. “But we’re not hiring.”
The phone was ringing when I got home. I thought I’d missed it, but then it just started ringing again. I knew it was Boris.
“Where were you?” he said, instead of hello.
“In Portland. I had to drop off an application at a bookstore.” There was a moment of silence. “Boris,” I said, “what’s wrong?”
Boris was having a bad time of things. His last novel, Rupert on the Beach, had been rejected by his old publishing house. Apparently, they had been sitting on it for close to a year before finally deciding against it. I hadn’t even realized that Rupert was under consideration. Boris was such a literary fixture that I’d assumed, as had Boris, that the book would automatically be accepted.
“There’s a new editor,” said Boris, despairingly, his voice surprisingly clear on the phone.
“Oh, Boris.” I was genuinely sympathetic, although glad for the distance between us.
“He says he can’t identify with Rupert. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because he is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD and has never done a DAMNED THING except go to COLLEGE and read the COMIC BOOKS.”
Boris was so upset that he was misplacing articles. “What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? I am almost done with the first draft of The Little Vagrant. This little PUNK seems interested in that.”
“But they’ve already given you the Rupert advance.”
“I know,” said Boris. For the first time he sounded truly old and defeated.
Boris was under so much pressure that he had no time to visit me. In fact, Ann had agreed to move in with him temporarily just to cook and clean and keep an eye on things, while Boris shifted from desk to coffee maker to bathroom in his socks and boxers, reddish tufts of hair now matted to his skull, a strong odor of despair surrounding him that smelled much like gamy stew.
Boris had decided to return to Rupert on the Beach because the thought that it might not be of interest was truly terrifying, since Rupert was actually Boris, thinly disguised, and the plot was a clunky stringing together of Rupert’s musings as he stood solidly on the beach staring out at the waves. Sometimes Rupert thought of childhood experiences—his mother peeling potatoes and how hungry Rupert felt. Sometimes Rupert defined things in a new way—love grips you like a vise, then caresses you like a silk scarf, then bangs you on the head like an anvil. Sometimes Rupert recalled his coming to America—there was a scene where he, a young boy in a gray wool cap with a dirty face, stood at the prow of a ship filled with babushkaed women and mustached men, and how they cheered as they sailed past the Statue of Liberty. This last scene was not from Boris’s life (he actually stepped off a plane in Dallas/Fort Worth in 1972) but rather purloined from Hollywood. No, this young editor was not a raging philistine—despite his having gone to college—but was probably just a careful editor who, most importantly, had bothered to read the book.
I spent the day exploring the unexplored corners around the house with a sponge and Lysol. In the cabinet beneath the sink I had uncovered an unsprung trap, the bait gone. The trap was the usual spring-locked mouse variety, but was so large that it seemed intended for possums. I closed the cabinet and looked around, but I was quite alone. Later, when I was on my knees scrubbing the baseboard by the front door, I saw something—a dark shadow—slipping like a bead of mercury along the kitchen counter. The shadow disappeared behind the microwave. I took the broom and used the handle to edge the microwave away from the wall. There was a crack in the wall there. I don’t know how something large enough to occasion the trap could slide through the crack, but it must have had rubber bones or the ability to turn into mist like a vampire. I shuddered. It was only six o’clock. I’d be early to pick Arthur up, but there was nothing left to do but unload the last of the groceries that were sitting on the counter. The kitchen cabinets were still airing out, filling the kitchen with a lemon odor that smelled nothing like a lemon and more like a hospital.
I parked up on Middle Street, a few blocks from where Arthur had set up. The temperature had dropped considerably and the cold air excited me. I bought a pair of gloves at a store specializing in South American goods. The gloves cost five dollars and made my hands look like Muppets. The cold air pricked my nostrils and I clumsily pulled at the lapels of my jacket. By the time I reached Fore Street—where the bars were” my eyes were tearing.
I stopped at the corner of Exchange Street. I couldn’t navigate my handbag with the crazy gloves and needed a Kleenex. When I looked around the corner of the building, Arthur was standing in the same spot I’d left him in, violin hanging casually in one hand, bow in the other. He was talking to a woman. She could have been anyone, a friend or some interested fan, but something in me knew better. And then she walked right past me. For one short moment I was presented with her profile, and then her back, which I studied until she disappeared down Milk Street. Arthur had described his girl-friend—her long blond hair and thin face—but he hadn’t mentioned her striking cheekbones, her heavy lips, and her swagger that clearly announced that she knew men wanted her. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that she was almost six feet tall, that her confidence projected all around her in an intrusive, sexual aura. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that she must have been at least ten years older than he was, that she was one of those people who was not ravaged by drugs but rather seemed to have been preserved by them, as if the various chemicals had leached into her internal organs, pickling them, rendering them immune to the attacks of free radical cells and aging.