AL WAS ALMOST ALWAYS LATE WITH THE CHILD-SUPPORT check lately, and when it did come, it was often for less than the court had ordered him to pay. But what was she supposed to do about it? She had no money for a lawyer, and the very thought of getting mixed up with family court or whatever it was and all the riffraff there made her want to cry. She was alone with her son and broke and in a new neighborhood that she hardly knew. And dependent on Al, the least dependable man in the world even when they were still married! On occasion, she tried to call him at his home number, but every time she did, Estelle would answer and pretend that she had no idea of who was on the line. Dottie? she’d say. Dottie who? She wanted to reach through the phone and scratch the bitch’s eyes out, Dottie who! And she was a whore as well. Mrs. Mertis had told her, not without sour pleasure, that she’d seen the woman Al ran off with in Coney Island, in Scoville’s, sitting drunk at the bar with two greaseballs who had their hands all over her, Estelle, wasn’t that her name? A disgrace, and I had my daughter with me. Dottie thought about writing Al a letter, telling him about his slut of a wife, but ended up turning on the radio and sitting in the dark, smoking. After a month or so, she began talking to a neighbor, a man who lived a couple of doors away, in a frame house that badly needed painting. He seemed friendly enough, a nice man, really, who worked for Con Ed, and who, he confided to her, not in so many words, was unhappy in his marriage. He looked helpless and sad and resigned as he told her this. Just between you and me, he said. Dottie had met his wife a couple of times; she was much older than her husband, drab and worn out. The man never told Dottie why he was unhappy, save to say that he’d married two women, his wife and her mother, it was a curse. Once a week his wife would go out to Elmhurst to visit her mother, who was—maybe, the man said — half-crippled with arthritis. Her daughter would shop, do the laundry, clean the apartment, cook for the week sometimes, and stay overnight. When she returned, she’d be tired, tense, mad as hell, and she’d take it out on him! Nag, nag, nag him about his drinking, which wasn’t drinking, a couple of beers, maybe a ball or two of whiskey, I work hard for a living, for Christ’s sake. One evening, after she’d put the boy to bed, she was surprised to get a call from him. He was alone, maybe she’d like to come over for a drink — iced tea or ginger ale, if she liked, maybe play some gin. It would be nice to talk to an adult for an hour or two. But she knew very well that he liked her by the way he looked at her when they met. But she was only two doors away, the boy would be fine, she’d be there and back in no time. So she left, walking quickly to the side porch door of his house. And so their affair began, Dottie visiting for an hour or two, never more, on those nights that the man’s wife — Mrs. Sweetness and Light, he called her — was in Queens. After their first sexual encounter, on the linoleum floor of the closed-in porch, which occurred abruptly as she was leaving after her initial visit, he asked her, matter of factly, if she’d bring a bath towel the next time. They could, well, love each other, he said, on the rug in the living room, it would be more comfortable, especially for her. She was shocked and embarrassed, but the next time she brought the towel. He told her that he couldn’t soil the sheets and he couldn’t use one of his — his wife’s — towels, she’d look in the hamper immediately and start in with a million questions. So Dottie brought the towel each time, and watched him spread it on the living room carpet next to the sofa. He’d kiss her, grope her, help her down to the floor, take off her panties, and mount her. She would feel dirty and disgusted, but she went over every week. She felt that it was a duty that she had somehow assumed. Eventually, she’d take her underwear off before she went to the house, and there she’d stand, after dark, it was always after dark, waiting for him to open the porch door, her towel under her arm, naked beneath her skirt. Just another slut, like Estelle, just another whore, she thought. On many, perhaps most occasions, the man was too drunk to do anything but writhe on top of her, pushing his groin against hers, cursing his wife. She’d get up off the floor and go home, once laughing to herself in the street at the thought that she didn’t, at least, have to get dressed. One night, when she got back home, the boy was sitting in the kitchen in the dark, weeping convulsively in terror. It took her an hour to make him believe that she was really his mother and not the lady who had stolen Daddy. She told the man the story, told him that she just couldn’t do it any more, she liked him, but, well, if he had children he’d know. It’s O.K. with me, he said, drunk, you’re just like the old lady, anyway, a goddamn iceberg, no wonder your old man walked out on you. After that, when they met on the street, they barely nodded, although his wife would sometimes give her a small, frightened smile. Soon after the affair ended, the checks stopped altogether, and when she called, the operator said that the number was no longer in service, and that there was no new listing for that name. She called Al’s office and asked for his department head — the man she’d always talked to whenever she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get Al at work: he had always stepped away from his desk. He told her that Al had been, well, he’d been, ah, let go. For some small indiscretions. Concerning the petty cash account, he said, in a whisper. It was handled quietly, stayed in the company. She hung up and looked at the wall, then lit a cigarette. Petty cash, she said. Petty cash. Petty cash, you stupid stupid stupid.
Pearl Gray Homburg
WHEN HE WALKED INTO HIS APARTMENT THE AIR FELT different, something was off. Then he saw, on the scarred drop-leaf table in what he jokingly called the dining room, a pearl gray homburg, its brim and crown soiled, its black grosgrain band sweat-stained and discolored. Draped over the back of one of the creaking library chairs he’d bought from the Salvation Army was Elaine’s long flowered skirt. He sat at the table and lit a cigarette, what the hell are these doing here? The hat? He got up and went into the living room to get an ashtray and saw, on the studio couch, a neat pile of change. The bowl, hand-thrown, as Elaine had noted, that she’d bought on Eighth Street for him to keep his change and keys in, was gone. She’d been in the apartment, but what was going on? Or maybe it was Jenny who’d been in the apartment, but he’d never given her keys. At that moment, he realized that Jenny had told Elaine that he’d been seeing both of them. He could imagine her face, screwed up in false anguish, as she’d asked Elaine to please understand, she was sorry, really sorry. It must have been an acute pleasure for her. He knew, then, that Elaine had taken everything that she considered hers, not just the bowl. Her clothes, of course, would all be gone, save for the skirt, but what else had she taken? Two hours later, after he’d checked, he had made a mental list of the missing items, which he then carefully transferred to a notebook: A 1960 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses, without a dust jacket; a Lamy combination pen-and-pencil in gray matte finish, with extra ink refills and leads; a heavy black woolen sweater with a shawl collar that a junkie friend of hers had stolen; a ten-inch Revere Ware skillet; a black-and-white-striped apron from Pottery Barn; a pair of porcelain egg coddlers; an oven mitt; a set of four wooden cooking spoons; a plastic lazy Susan; a Kent hairbrush; a loofah; an unopened package of Hanes briefs; a tobacco-colored suede jacket from B. Altman; a nickel-plated Zippo lighter; a paperweight of highly polished petrified wood; a Richard Avedon photograph, framed in chrome, of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; three LP’S: Sonny Rollins’s Newk’s Time, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and Dexter Gordon’s Our Man in Paris; and paperback copies of The Sacred Fount, Pierre, The Confidence Man, The Plumed Serpent, and García Lorca’s Selected Poems. And, along with her flowered skirt, she’d left, at the back of a drawer in the little room he hopefully called his study, a black French garter belt and a pair of tangled off-black nylons. Was this by design, and how could he tell? The gray homburg, though, gave him an eerie feeling, as if the hat had a malign, extravagant power to do him harm. He wouldn’t touch it, not yet, not even to throw it out. He made himself a drink — she hadn’t taken the J.W. Dant anyway — and sat on the couch. It had to have been Jenny, the horny bitch, who’d told her. Her best friend, of course. How pleased she must have been to stab Elaine’s ego. They’d known each other since high school in Midwood, they even looked alike, had got stoned together, found the Village together. They were built the same and often shared each other’s clothes, even shoes and underwear, so Elaine said. He recalled the night they’d come into the bar together, both in black gabardine suits and black sunglasses, their black hair pulled back into chignons; for a brief moment, he couldn’t tell one from the other. He lit another cigarette, and said, aloud: So, I got bored with Elaine and started fucking her double, what a champ, they even look alike naked. About a week later, he went into the bar and saw Elaine, sitting over a pink gin and talking with Louie, the day bartender. He sat down next to her and ordered a draft beer. What the hell was that all about? he said, you even took a fucking oven mitt? And what’s with that weird filthy homburg? You left your print skirt, too. I threw it out! She turned on her bar stool so that her knees touched his thigh. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elaine, even the goddamn bowl you bought me for my change, Jesus, that’s really small. And the hat! What is with the hat? Are you crazy? she said, are you going crazy? I’m Jenny, look. Look, I’m Jenny. I don’t know anything about hats or skirts, you ought to get back to work on whatever it is you were working on, get back to work. He was looking at her full in the face, she was Jenny, sure, probably, she was Jenny, of course. She was Jenny, she looked just like her. You can have your skirt back if you want, he said. I only said I threw it out. He wanted to ask her about the meaning of the hat on the table but he knew that she’d lie to him.