“Well, you are one,” she said, but a sort of grudging amusement had crept into her voice. She snuggled in closer under my arm and said, “Just listen a minute, okay? Let me tell you how I’ve got it figured.”
“Go ahead,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had any pressing engagements.
“You would sell your car and, first off, pay back your folks. Quit your nickel-and-diming and just pay them back; be done with it. Get that Chinese statue off of your conscience once and for all. Wouldn’t that feel good? Then take some more of the money and go in with me on the truck. It works out just about fifty-fifty — slightly in your favor, even — between what you’d give Everett’s mom and what I would pay monthly.”
“But meanwhile, I’d have no car,” I told her.
“You’ll have the truck then, idiot!”
“We’ll have the truck,” I reminded her. “And you’ll be wanting to take it one place when I want to take it another.”
“Don’t we just about always go out on the same jobs together? And aren’t you tired to death of trying to get your work done in a little, toy, baby-sized car that doesn’t even have a rear seat?”
As she spoke, she was tracing a rip that ran across the knee of my jeans. Her fingertips hit bare skin and started coaxing at it. She said, “You could keep it at your place, if you like. And besides: we’ve been sharing it all along, more or less, when you stop to think.”
“Well, shoot, with thirty thousand dollars, maybe I should just go on and buy each one of us a truck or two apiece,” I said.
I was talking down into the top of her head, into her hair. It smelled of sweat. This got me interested, for some reason. Maybe she could tell, because she turned her face up, and next thing I knew, we were kissing. She had this very thin, hard mouth. I was surprised at how stirring that was. I wrapped both arms around her (not easy with the steering wheel in front of me), and she pressed against me, and I felt the little points of her breasts poking into my chest.
Then she drew back, and so I did too. I was relieved to see we were coming to our senses. (Or at least, partly relieved.) But what she was doing was shutting off the ignition. She dropped my keys in the cup of my hand, and her little face closed in on me again.
“You want to?” she asked me.
Her eyes had a stretched look, and she wore a peaky, excited expression that made me feel sad for her. I’d never really thought of Martine as a woman. Well, she wasn’t a woman; she was just this scrappy, sharp-edged little person. So I said, “Oh — um—”
And yet at the same time I was reaching for her once more, as if my body had decided to go ahead without me. I had her between my palms (every rib countable inside the baggy denim), but she was leaning across me to douse the headlights. Then she tore free and climbed out of the car, all in one rough motion. I got out, too, and followed her toward the house. The porch floorboards made a mournful sound under our feet. The first flight of stairs was carpeted, but the second flight was bare, and so steep that I had to tag a couple steps below her so as not to be nicked by her boot heels as we climbed.
The instant we had reached the third floor — one large attic room fall of a tweedy, dusty darkness — we were hugging again and kissing and stumbling toward her bed. Her bed had a headboard like a metal gate, white or some pale color, so tall it had to sit out a ways from the slant of the ceiling. It jangled when we landed on it. Martine breathed small, hot, bacon-smelling puffs of air into my neck while I fumbled with her overall clasps. They were the kind where you slide a brass button up through a brass figure eight. I don’t think I’d worked one of those since nursery school, but it all came back to me.
“Martine,” I said (whispering, though no one could have heard), “I’m sorry to say I don’t have, ah, anything with me,” but she said, “Never mind; I do,” and she rolled away from me to rummage through her overall pockets. Then she pushed something smooth and warm and warped into my palm: her billfold. That made me even sadder, somehow. But still my body went hurtling forward on its own, and it didn’t give my mind a chance to say a thing.
Not till later, at least, when everything was over.
And then it said, What was that all about?
Which Martine was probably wondering too, because already she was twisting away from me, rustling among the sheets and then rising to cross the room. A light flickered on — just the dim fluorescent light on the back of her ancient cook-stove. It showed her facing me, head tilted, clutching a bedspread around her with thin bare arms. She still had her socks on. Crumpled black ankle socks. Little white pipe-cleaner shins.
“Oh, Lord,” I said.
Her head came out of its tilt, and she said, “Well. I guess you want to get going.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, and I reached for my clothes. Martine turned and went off toward what must have been the bathroom, with the bedspread making a hoarse sound as it followed her across the floor planks.
I did call out a goodbye when I left, but she didn’t answer.
Back when Natalie and I were still married — at the very tail end of our marriage, when things had started falling apart — I happened to be knocked down by a car after an evening class. Ended up spending several hours in the emergency room while they checked me out, but all I had was a few scrapes and bruises.
When I finally got home, about midnight, there was Natalie in her bathrobe, walking the baby. The apartment was dark except for one shaded lamp, and Natalie reminded me of some pious old painting — her robe a long, flowing bell, her head bent low, her face in shadows. She didn’t speak until I was standing squarely in front of her, and then she raised her eyes to mine and said, “It’s nothing to me anymore if you choose to stay out carousing. But how about your daughter, wondering all this time where you are? Didn’t you at least give any thought to your daughter?”
Except my daughter was sound asleep and obviously hadn’t noticed my absence.
I looked, into Natalie’s eyes — reproachful black ovals, absorbing the glow from the lamp without sending back one gleam. I said, “No, I didn’t, since you ask. I was having too good a time.” Then I went off to bed. I fell into bed, still wearing my clothes, like someone exhausted by drink and fast women.
Every now and then, I think I might have an inkling why Ditty Nolan stopped leaving her house. It may have had something to do with those years spent tending her mother. “If you make me stay home for so long, just watch: I’ll stay at home forever,” she said.
“If you think I’m such a villain, just watch: I’ll act worse than you ever dreamed of,” I said. I said it during my teens. I said it toward the end of my marriage. And I said it that whole nasty Monday, which seemed, now that I looked back, to have lasted about a month.
Back at my place, I found two more messages from Sophia and another from Mrs. Dibble. Sophia’s voice was patient, without the least hint of annoyance, which made me feel terrible. Mrs. Dibble was all business. “I want you to call, Barnaby, as soon as you get in. I don’t care how late it is. Use my home number.”
So I called. What the hell. If she wanted to fire me, let’s get it over with.
It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but she must have been in bed, because she answered so immediately, in that super-alert tone people use when they don’t want to let on you’ve wakened them. “Yes!” she said.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Barnaby.”
A pause, a kind of shuffling noise. She must be sitting up and rearranging her pillows. “Here are your assignments for tomorrow,” she said. “Mrs. Cartwright wants you to help her buy a birthday present for her niece. Mrs. Rodney needs her mower taken in for maintenance. Miss Simmons would like a window shade hung. Mr. Shank has asked for—”