I wonder if he’s big all over.
The hands and the feet. You always look at the hands and the feet.
or seep like smoke between the tables
I could make room for him.
Hon, they’d have to take something out of you to make room for what he’s got.
until at last they reached him and he would acknowledge them with a thin smile, and they would giggle some more and look away, or perhaps hold his gaze for a time with a look that spoke of tainted promises.
Sometimes he had taken them up on the offer made, and had usually regretted it. The last time it happened, he had accompanied the woman back to her little house in Saco, so neat and feminine that he instantly felt even more out of place than usual, afraid to move for fear that he might dislodge a china doll from the congregation of pale faces that seemed to gaze at him from every shelf, every ledge. She undressed in her bathroom and entered the bedroom wearing only a too-tight bra and black panties, a little fat spilling out over the straps at her back and the elastic at her waist. She was holding a cigarette, and she placed it in her mouth as she pulled back the sheets on the bed, undid the clasp of the bra, and slid it down her arms before hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her underwear and stepping out of them without once glancing at him. She climbed into the bed, drew the sheets up to her waist, then smoked her cigarette as he removed his own clothing, his face burning with shame and self-loathing.
He saw in her eyes not lust or need, not even curiosity, but merely the prospect of the temporary alleviation of her boredom with herself and her own desires. She took a last drag on the cigarette before she stubbed it out in the ashtray on the nightstand and pulled back the sheet, inviting him to join her. As he climbed into bed beside her, he heard the springs creaking beneath his weight, smelled the stale odor of smoke upon the pillows, felt her nails already raking five white trails along his thigh as her hand moved toward his sex.
He left her snoring, the china dolls watching him impassively as he slipped through the house, his shoes in his hands. He tugged them on as he sat on her porch steps, then called a cab from a pay phone and returned to the Old Port. On a bench by the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal he waited until light dawned, then walked down to Becky’s diner on Commercial and ate breakfast with the fishermen, working his way methodically through a plate of eggs and bacon, keeping his head down so that he would not catch the eye of any other diner. And when Thorson’s ferry drew toward the dock, carrying those who had jobs in the city, Joe Dupree was waiting for it, barely nodding at those who disembarked, until at last the boat was empty. He took a seat at the back of the ferry and when no further passengers appeared, Thorson started the engine and carried Joe Dupree away from Portland, the wind wiping the smell of perfume and booze and cigarettes from his clothes and hair, cleansing him of the proof of his sins.
Since then, he had not returned to the bars of the Old Port, and now drank little. He could see the surprise in the faces of the wait staff and in the smile of Dale Zimmer when he rose to greet the woman who now sat across from him. He didn’t care. It had taken him the best part of a year to work up the courage to ask her out. He liked her son. He liked her. Now she was saying something, but he was so lost in himself that he had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said, it’s hard to do anything in secret here. Seems like everyone knows your business before you do.”
He smiled. “I remember Dave Mahoney-he was heading on for seventy years of age, the old goat-got himself all worked up over a widow woman named Annie Jabar, who lived about half a mile down the road from him. Nothing had happened between them, nothing more than glances over the bingo table at the American Legion, I guess, or hands almost touching across the shelves at the market, but she was coming on to him, without a doubt. So one day Dave takes it into his head to do something about it. He puts on his best jacket and pants under his slicker, and heads out in the rain to walk down to Annie Jabar’s house. When he got there, she was waiting for him.”
He shook his head in amusement.
“Who?” asked Marianne. “The widow woman?”
“Nope. Dave’s wife. Don’t know how she did it, but she got there before he did. I figure she must have sprinted through the woods so that she’d be waiting for him, and she wasn’t much younger than Dave. She had a gun too, Dave’s varmint rifle. Dave took one look at her, turned around on his heel, and headed straight back home. Never again looked at the widow woman, or any other woman except his wife. She died a couple of years ago, and I heard tell that Annie Jabar might have hoped that she and Dave could get together now that his wife was gone, but far as I know he’s never gone next to near her since that day his wife confronted him and made him look down the barrel of his own rifle.”
“He loved her, then.”
“Loved her and was scared half to death of her. Maybe he figures she might still find a way to get back at him from the next world if he steps out of line, or maybe he just misses her more than he ever thought he would. I talk to him sometimes and I think he’s just waiting to join her. I think he realized how much she loved him when he saw that she was prepared to shoot him rather than let another woman take him, even at seventy years of age. Sometimes maybe you have to love someone an awful lot to be prepared to kill them.”
His attention was distracted momentarily by movement close to the door, so Dupree did not see the look that passed across Marianne’s face. Had he done so, their evening together might have come to an abrupt end, for he would have felt compelled to question her about it. Instead, he was watching a bulky man in a red-checked shirt, accompanied by his equally bulky wife, approaching the exit. As they left, the man gave Dupree a nod that was part acknowledgment, part dismissal. Marianne glanced over her shoulder, grateful for the distraction, and the man smiled at her before his wife gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs with her elbow that nearly propelled him through the door.
“Tom Jaffe,” said Dupree.
“His father runs the construction business, right?”
“That’s right. He’s near sixty-five himself now, but still won’t hand over the running of the business to Tom. Doesn’t trust him. Tom still believes he’s the Great White Hope. He was valedictorian the year I graduated from high school. Liked to think of himself as an orator.”
“How was his speech?”
“Terrible. It was basically an extended ‘Screw you’ to everybody he’d ever known. Somebody tried to run him over in the parking lot afterward.”
“Maybe it was just a misunderstanding.”
“Nope. I went around for a second try after I missed him. He could run, I’ll give him that.”
She laughed then, and for the first time, Dupree began to relax. The little restaurant filled up as the evening progressed, but there was never anybody left standing, waiting for a table. They talked about music and movies, and each spoke a little of the past, but not too much. In Joe’s case, his reticence was a result of embarrassment, shyness, and a feeling that his life on the island would seem somehow parochial and isolated to this woman with a soft southern accent, a young son, and a firsthand knowledge of places far from this one.
But the woman? Well, her reason for silence was different.
She spoke little of her past, because all that she could give him in return was lies.
They were on dessert when the restaurant door opened and Sally Owen entered. She was one of the bartenders at the Rudder, and had been for as long as Dupree could remember. Rumor was that, when she was younger, she once dragged a guy across the bar for not saying “please” after he’d ordered his drink. She was older now, and a little calmer, and contented herself with shooting dark looks at the ruder customers. Now she walked quickly up to their table and spoke to Joe.