It was not long before he had the kitchen clean — dishes washed and dried and put away, counters wiped down, moldy and decomposing food removed from the refrigerator and tossed out, floor mopped. And then he was off to the bathroom, scrub-a-dub-dub, and to the bedroom, where he hauled from the closet the portable Hoover he had picked up the previous spring at a flea market down in Catamount, his first vacuum cleaner, and even though it seemed to suck dirt weakly, as if through a single bent straw, he was proud of owning it and enjoyed using it — a good thing, too, as it took him nearly an hour to vacuum the entire trailer.
At last, his home was clean. It smelled like water and soap, looked symmetrical and square, felt smooth, cool and dry to fingertips brushed along the kitchen counters. His tooth went on aching, but the privacy it gave, the way the pain walled him in, somehow comforted him, and although several times he thought of aspirin — Why not, for Christ’s sake, Wade, do yourself a favor and take a couple aspirins, maybe even pack a second pair between your cheek and gum — he quickly dismissed the thought, as if ending his toothache, or even easing it somewhat, would expose him to a flurry of faces, voices and questions that he preferred not to meet right now. Or ever, for that matter. Although he did not like to think of the toothache’s lasting forever.
In the refrigerator there were three bottles of Rolling Rock and no other beverage. He had thrown out the curdled milk, and the orange juice had soured. He thought: if he drank all three beers, he would still be going to bed sober tonight. Good: he would drink all three: if there had been six or eight, he would have been forced to drink tap water. He cracked open one of the beers, took a long pull from it and poked through the permafrost of the freezer compartment, disinterring a package of baby lima beans and a chicken breast shrouded in several layers of Saran Wrap. Then he started a pan of rice, dropped the Baggie of baby limas into a saucepan of boiling water and melted a chunk of butter in a skillet. He held the chicken breast under warm running water to get it unwrapped and tossed it into the skillet. The food smelled good: domestic, orderly and constant — a warm bright spot in the middle of the cold dark forest.
By the time he sat down at the table to eat, it was after ten. He chewed slowly, carefully, with his left and front teeth only, and managed to avoid antagonizing the rotted tooth, which growled quietly in the right corner of his mouth’s cage.
The table, a card table, actually, with four folding chairs placed around it, was situated in the middle of the kitchen. While he ate his solitary meal, he looked down the length of the trailer and admired the place. Before sitting down, he had turned off all the overhead lights in the trailer — overhead lights always made Wade feel he was still at work in LaRiviere’s shop — and now to all appearances he was at home and there could have been two or even three moderate adults just out of sight in the living room having a quiet reasonable conversation about money, and in the near bedroom, his own, there could have been another such adult, reading in bed, maybe, the way his brother Rolfe liked to end his day, while in the farther bedroom a child did her homework. The bathroom door was ajar and the light was on, as if a woman who had just finished brushing her hair were touching up her lipstick before going out.
There was nothing wrong with this place that a little tender loving care could not fix, he thought, and he nibbled his lima beans with his incisors, like a rodent.
He got up and went for another beer, lit a cigarette and walked back to his bedroom and turned on the radio. He moved the tuner up and down a few times until he found the easy-listening station in Littleton: Carly Simon was singing about a man who really knew how to make love good, so good that nobody did it better.
Jesus, that woman knows things, Wade thought, and he strolled back to the table and sat down again. Then he saw that he was smoking without having finished his meal yet and hurriedly rubbed the butt out in the ashtray. He resumed eating and thought, Whoa. This man’s got to start thinking seriously about quitting cigarettes. Maybe this spring, after things settle down. The chicken was a little tough and dry, but it tasted fine to him, and as long as he cut it into tiny pieces and kept it on the left side of his mouth, he did not have any trouble chewing it.
Wade welcomed evenings like this; they were rare, and he almost credited it to the toothache. As if locked inside deep meditation, he was profoundly alone. His conscious mind, walled around by physical pain and the trailer and the snow and darkness beyond, was cleared of everything but the filmy shreds of a few simple fantasies, and though it was a long ways from happiness, it seemed as close to happiness as he had been able to get in weeks. Maybe longer. But he did not want to think about that right now; so he didn’t.
When he had finished eating, he cleaned his dishes, dried them and put them away, and while standing by the sink, looked past his reflection in the window at the darkness outside and smoked a cigarette all the way down and drank off the third bottle of beer. He turned the thermostat back to sixty and went into his bedroom, shutting off the lights one by one behind him. He undressed and draped his clothes neatly over the back of the chair, got into bed and switched off the radio and the bedside light.
It was at this point in his evening, in bed, his home cleaned, a dinner cooked and eaten, relaxed and content and physically comfortable — relatively little toothache pain — that he suddenly sat up straight in the darkness and clapped his hands loudly against one another, as if applauding his own performance. He turned the light back on and picked up the telephone and dialed his brother Rolfe’s number. Rolfe would understand, and he might have some useful information as well. Rolfe was a little weird, but he was plenty smart, and he was logical.
But, as we know, Wade’s conversation with his younger brother did not go quite as he hoped. Two or three minutes into it, Wade was once again going on about Lillian and Jill, the kind of story that always left him angry and exhausted. And his tooth was raging again. He finally hung up the phone and snapped off the bedside light.
In seconds, he was asleep and dreaming.
Hours later, Wade dreamed this: There is a baby in his arms, swaddled like Jesus, only it is not Jesus, it is a girl baby, but not Jill, either, thank God, because it is blue with the cold, and it may be dead. Oh no, do not let it be dead! he pleads, and he examines the tiny puckered face and discovers first with relief and then with irritation that it is a doll, one of those lifelike dolls, with its face all screwed up as if about to cry, and as Wade comes up from under the water to the hole in the ice, he breaks the surface and thrusts the doll out ahead of him and throws the thing right at his Pop, who is fooled and thinks it is a real baby; Pop sticks out his drunken hands to catch it, his pale eyes wide open with fear that he will drop it, but by the time Wade has climbed out of the freezing water to stand dripping in his underwear on the ice, Pop has discovered that it is only a doll Wade has brought him; he shoves it back at him and stalks off, heading for the distant shore, where Wade can see the trailer park and Pop’s old red Ford pickup next to the blue trailer at the end. Wade looks down at the thing in his arms and wonders whose baby is this, when he realizes suddenly that it is Jack Hewitt’s baby. A son! Imagine that! Jack had a son! God damn! Wade observes that there are no women in this dream and that the girl babies are dolls. There must be something wrong with that. Men do not have babies, women do. But what about men?