“Chizzy,” Kay repeated. “That’s it. Chizzy got into one of her cooking fits and started distributing food around the neighborhood again. You must talk to her about that, Howard.”
“I’d rather she distribute it than eat it… You look nice tonight, Kay. Is that a new outfit?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty color. Did you have supper after the concert?”
“No. Was I supposed to?”
“Chizzy said you missed dinner. You must be hungry.”
“Sorry, Howard. If you programmed me to be hungry, better check your computer. I’m not.” She removed her earrings as if they’d suddenly begun to pinch. “Do you want the rest of the report on Kay’s big night out? Well, Ben invited me to go dancing at a supper club and I refused. I didn’t feel like dancing and I didn’t want any more music. Or any more Ben either, for that matter. He was trying so hard to make me enjoy myself that he made me nervous. I came home alone in a taxi. If Ben wants to go dancing let him take his Ms. Quinn.”
“No one can please you anymore, Kay.”
“Then why doesn’t everybody simply stop trying?”
“Because we love you.”
“I don’t want to be loved. I want to be let alone.”
“All right. Good night, Kay.”
“Good night.”
He went out, closing the door quietly behind him. He had turned away for a few minutes and when he looked back again there was gray in Kay’s hair and she didn’t want anyone to love her.
He was halfway down the steps when Kay’s door opened again and she came to the head of the staircase.
“By the way,” she said in a cool dry voice, “next time you buy tickets for a concert, please remember that I prefer to sit a little farther back.”
“I didn’t buy the tickets.”
“They were waiting at the box office in your name.”
“Ben paid for them. My secretary merely made the reservations.”
“How sweet. I suppose she loves me too.”
“Most secretaries consider the boss’s wife a pain in the neck,” Howard said. “I don’t imagine mine is any exception.”
“Hurray. There’s nothing more bracing than a dose of good honest hate. It’s like a spring tonic.”
Another long silence fell over them like a mist net used to trap birds.
“Will you be going out with Ben another time, Kay?”
“If that’s what you have me programmed for. There’s probably a computer readout on your secretary’s desk right now with everything arranged but the weather. Maybe you could even do something about that too. I wouldn’t put it past you to try.”
“Why all this hostility, Kay?”
“Those people who stared at me at the concert tonight,” she said bitterly, “they were right. I should have been home crying.”
Shelley Quinn’s centerfold body was hidden under a pair of Ben’s pajamas and crumpled into his favorite lounge chair. Quinn was simultaneously eating an apple and combing her long auburn hair, still damp from a shampoo.
Ben noted that she didn’t appear particularly happy at his return. She looked at him over the top of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles he had never seen before. It was a solemn look, as if he had interrupted something very important.
She said, “Hi,” and put down the comb and the apple and turned off the radio. “All I could find to eat around here was an apple. Don’t you ever buy any groceries?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“And another thing, why do you live in a dump like this?”
“I like dumps.”
“I mean it, Benjie. You should build yourself a show-place, put up more of a front.”
“I like your front.”
“Be serious. Why do you want to live like this?”
“It suits me,” Ben said.
“I don’t see how it can suit you, listening to people walking around upstairs and the television blaring next door and cars coming and going all night.”
He didn’t try to explain that these were the very things that gave him privacy, more privacy than Howard had on his exclusive eight acres. Everyone knew where and how Howard lived. Nobody knew much about the tenant in the front apartment of the Vista del Mar, and nobody cared. The old apartment house was squeezed between a cluster of expensive oceanfront condos on one side and commercial development on the other. Both sides were fighting to tear it down and turn it into a parking lot. Meanwhile the card on the front mailbox was printed York, and underneath it the name Quinn written in green ink which was Quinn’s favorite color. Both names looked impermanent. A hundred had preceded them; perhaps a hundred would come later.
Ben went into the bedroom to hang up his jacket. Quinn’s clothes were strewn around the room as though she’d had some old school friends in for a slumber party. “This place is a mess.”
“I know. I’m collecting my laundry to take over to Mom’s. Moms are really great, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. I never had any.”
“Well, don’t feel bad. Sometimes they’re not so great. Would you like a drink, Benjie?”
“I would.”
“Me too. I’ll take a spritzer.”
“I thought you were offering to make me a drink.”
“No, I wasn’t. You’re always telling me to be precise, so I was. But what’s the use of me speaking precise if you don’t listen precise? All I said was—”
“Okay, okay, I make the drinks.”
“Good. I’m too tired. I’ve been working like a dog all evening.”
“Doing what, vandalizing my bedroom?”
“I was doing,” Quinn said, frowning, “exactly what you told me to. You said if I wanted to improve myself I should listen to discussion programs and make notes, write down words I didn’t know and stuff like that. So I did.” From the table beside her she picked up a notebook. “It was a real interesting discussion, all about sexual abrasions.”
“And what are sexual abrasions?”
“You know, kinky stuff.”
“The word is aberrations,” he said, and spelled it for her.
“It sure sounded like abrasions to me. Anyway, I was surprised to find out how innocent I am, considering. Listen to this one. A-i-l-u-r-o-p-h-i-l-e. Know what that means?”
“No.”
“It means a guy who gets turned on by cats. How’s that for a sickie?”
He handed her a glass of white wine. “Here’s your spritzer, minus the club soda we don’t have and the lemon we also don’t have.”
“Gosh, Benjie, you really should buy some groceries.”
“I will, any day now.”
“You probably have a lousy diet.”
“Probably.”
She took a sip of the wine, then returned to her notebook. “Here’s another dandy. P-e-d-o-p-h-i-l-e. I know what it means but I didn’t know there was a word for it. Did you?”
Ben didn’t answer.
“I asked you a question, Benjie. Did you know there was a word for a guy who gets turned on by little children?”
“Shut up.”
“Hey, you can’t talk to me like that; we’re not married. Here I spend a whole evening doing what you told me to and all you have to say is shut up.”
“That’s all I have to say — shut up.”
As if she were getting ready to slug it out, Quinn removed her spectacles and put the notebook back on the table. But by the time she unfolded herself from the chair Ben had disappeared into the kitchen. She followed him.
He was standing in front of the sink which had the only view window of the apartment. The night was clear and moonless. Strings of lights lined the breakwater and the marina walkways. There were lights also in the harbormaster’s office and the all-night café underneath it, and in a few of the live-aboard boats.
No matter what the weather, this window was kept open so that Ben could hear, during lulls in the traffic along the oceanfront boulevard, the waves smashing against the breakwater. The sound of this incessant attack excited him. It was the sound of war and there was no doubt who the winner would be. The concrete of the breakwater was already crumbling in spots and its exposed reinforcing cables and iron railings were rusting.