The man asked what address I was at, and then he went off for a while. When he came back, he said, “Yes, sir. The helicopter is ours; we sent it out on a call.”
“Well, in that case,” I told him smartly, “you should know how to call it back in.”
And I hung up, all dignified and haughty. Then the four of us collapsed into giggles. Then a car pulled up out front, and a flashing light revolved across the ceiling.
It was the very last moment that the world in general thought well of me.
In midafternoon, Sophia phoned. I was back in bed but not asleep. Still, I let the machine answer for me. “Barnaby, it’s me,” she said. “I’ll try you again later. Just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi,” she wanted to say. “Pulled off any more grand thefts lately?”
I got up and went to pee. Ran water over my toothbrush but replaced it in the rack without brushing, as if I were still a kid trying to hoodwink my mother.
Mrs. Dibble phoned again. “Well, I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she started out. “You are seriously disappointing me, Barnaby. Call when you get this message. Mrs. Morey wants her grill tank filled. Martine says to remind you she’ll need a ride to the Alford job. Also, Mrs. Hatter would like to arrange for regular hours with you, starting tomorrow.”
I couldn’t even remember what Mrs. Hatter looked like, she used our services so seldom. Maybe she’d had a stroke or something. Well, tough luck. I started kicking through the clothes on the floor, trying to find my sneakers.
While I was drinking my coffee, two more people left messages. Mrs. Figg wanted me to know that I had ruined her entire morning, and Natalie asked if I could shift next weekend’s visit to Sunday. It seemed Opal had been invited to a birthday party on Saturday. “I wouldn’t bring it up,” she said, “except the birthday girl’s from the popular crowd, and it means a lot to Opal that she was included.”
Yeah, right; it meant more than a visit from her own father. Fine, I thought. I just won’t go at all.
By this time I was starting to feel I had died or something, listening to so many phone calls without picking up. So I grabbed my car keys and left the apartment. Went off to Mrs. Figg’s to face the music.
It was hot as blazes out. I practically needed oven mitts just to work my steering wheel. I drove badly, zipping through yellow lights and honking at any pedestrian dumb enough to assume I would give him the right-of-way.
“If I’d wanted a worker who didn’t show up,” Mrs. Figg said when she opened the door, “someone I needed to nag about every little task, why, I could rely on my own son, for heaven’s sake.” She scowled into my face, pursing her raisin mouth — not an old woman, but a dried-up, drained-out one with a grudge against the universe. She went ahead and gave me her list, though, because who else could she get to do it? Most of our employees refused to deal with her anymore.
I went to the cleaner’s first and picked up her husband’s shirts. Ordinarily I’d have held my breath the whole time I was inside (the cancer is just swarming at you in those places), but today I took big, deep gulps of the chemical-smelling air while I waited. I wondered what Mrs. Figg had done that made her permanently unwelcome there.
At Ed’s Electronics (where she had hit a salesman with her pocketbook, I happened to know), I collected her tape recorder from Repairs. Then I went to the pharmacy and the hardware, and I was done. But when I got back to Mrs. Figg’s, what did she point out? The tape recorder’s earphone pads were still in need of replacement. “If I’d wanted the kind of worker who did things any which way—” she began, but I was already wheeling around and stomping off. Went to Ed’s Electronics again and raised such a stink, Mrs. Figg looked like a model customer by comparison. Then I drove back to her house and all but threw the pads in her face.
At Mrs. Morey’s, I headed straight for the patio and unhooked the propane tank from her grill. “Wouldn’t you like to see what I just persuaded to bloom?” she asked, trailing behind me, but I said only, “Mmf,” and set off for my car as if I hadn’t quite heard her. Got the tank filled at the gas station, reached into my pocket for my billfold, and came up with two earphone pads in a little plastic pouch. I guess they’d been clipped to the receipt and somehow worked themselves loose. Well, too late now. I tossed them in the trash bin.
At home, I found three more messages on my machine. Sophia said, “Hello, sweetie. Call me at the office, will you?” Mrs. Dibble said, “I wish you’d get in touch. Where are you?” And then Sophia again: “Barnaby, why haven’t you phoned? Do you want me to bring supper tonight? Or not. I’ll wait to hear.”
I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the bar. Then I polished off the last of the milk, drinking straight from the jug, and threw the jug in the wastebasket, even though it was the kind you were supposed to recycle. After that, I switched on the TV and watched a talk show, the outrageous type of show where everybody tries to confess to more unpleasantness than the next person. I had to sit on the bed to watch, since my chair had turned to glue in the humidity. Even my sheets felt sticky. Overhead, the Hardesty kids were carrying on a thin, shrill squabble, and their mother must have been tuned to her soaps, because at every pause in my own program, I could hear hers murmuring away.
This was the first weekday afternoon in months that I wouldn’t be going to Mrs. Glynn’s. The thought gave me a sort of wincing sensation. I fell back against the pillows and covered my eyes with one forearm.
I might have slept a little. When the phone rang again, the evening news was on. “Hey Gaitlin,” my machine said. (Mar-tine’s little raspy crow voice.) “Pick up, will you?”
I rolled over and reached for the receiver. I said, “What.”
“Why aren’t you here? It’s ten till seven! You promised you’d give me a ride!”
“I did?” I said. “Where’re we going?”
“Sheesh! Mrs. Alford’s. We’re clearing out her kitchen for the painters.”
I said, “Can’t you do it alone?”
“Duh, Barnaby. I don’t have any wheels, remember? What’s with you? I hope you’re not hung up on that Mrs. Glynn crap.”
“Oh,” I said. “You heard. Great. It must be all over town.”
“She’s crazy; don’t you think everyone knows that? Now get yourself on down here. We’re running behind.”
I said, “Well, okay.”
It might not be a bad idea, I decided. Sophia wasn’t going to wait by her phone forever. She’d come by in person, sooner or later, and I just didn’t feel like facing her right at that moment.
Martine was standing out front when I pulled up — leaning against a parked car and eating pork rinds from a cellophane packet. She had on her usual overalls and what looked to be a man’s sleeveless undershirt, so worn it was translucent. “At this rate, we won’t finish work till midnight,” she said as she got in.
I said, “You’re welcome,” and she said, “Oh. Thanks.”
Then she slouched down in her seat and braced her boots against the dashboard and went back to eating her pork rinds. She held the packet toward me, at one point, but I shook my head.
Clearing a kitchen for painters wasn’t that big a job. I could easily have done it alone. But we were dealing, I guess, with Mrs. Alford’s private little affirmative action program, because her first words when she opened her door were, “Oh, I just love to see what young women can get up to nowadays!”