“Neon. Gymnastic neon, I think.”
“Neon. Isn’t that pretty. Off, on. One, two.”
“You don’t find it a bit troubling?”
“Not one tiny bit.”
/g/
“I don’t know,” Lang said. “I just don’t know what’s with these freakin’ locks.”
“You have to jiggle the key sometimes. Sometimes Candy and I have to jiggle it.”
“You’re telling me,” Lang muttered. He got the door open.
Misty Schwartz’s second-floor apartment looked a lot like Lenore’s room, except it was a bit smaller, and had only one west window, and was definitely much tidier. Lenore looked around, then up at the ceiling that was her floor upstairs.
“You must be very neat,” she said.
Lang was hanging up their coats. “I was a boy, and I’d make my bed, and here’d come my Daddy with a Kennedy half-dollar, and he’d flip it onto the bed, and if the thing didn’t just bounce right back up onto my Daddy’s thumb with the Kennedy head back on top I had to make the sucker up all over again.”
“Geez.”
“Look, you maybe want a can of wine?” Lang said, making motions toward the door of the apartment. “I got some wine downstairs, in the Fridgidaire. It’s next to your soda water, you might have seen.”
“A can of wine?”
“They were on sale.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Lenore said. She smoothed out her dress from the hairy ride on the Inner Belt in Lang’s new Trans Am. A plane came in very low now, and for a moment everything seemed to slow way down, in the noise. Lang stood by the door, looking at her. Lenore could see the way the bright light from Misty’s overhead fixture hit off Lang’s eyes, hitting and breaking up like there were chips of mint in his eyes. Lenore felt the back of her neck with her hand.
As Lang smiled and turned to go she said, “Look, why not. I’ll try a can, or some of your can, whatever. Why not try some wine,” she said.
“Well that’s just fine,” said Lang. “You can warm up that old TV, if you want.” He went out and left the door open.
That old TV was a huge white sail of a screen that curved predator-like over a squat mahogany box. Inside the box a projector pointed like a gun at the screen’s breadbasket. Lenore hit a red button on the box, and an enormous head filled the screen, and there was volume. She hastily turned the thing off, and the screen drizzled and was blank again. The head had been someone from “Dallas,” though, Lenore was pretty sure.
When someone has the same general kind of room you do, it’s usually very interesting to see what they’ve done with it. In Misty Schwartz’s case it wasn’t quite as interesting as it might have been. Lenore didn’t know Misty very well; there had been some unpleasantness over a phone bill, on the Tissaws’ central kitchen phone, a few months ago, and Lenore had since been down to Misty’s place only once or twice, when she had to borrow necessities. Candy Mandible, who had borne the brunt of the phone bill unpleasantness, had said that the only reason Misty Schwartz wasn’t a lesbian was that she had never seen her own face in the mirror. Lenore thought that made no sense at all.
Which didn’t keep her from really not caring too much for Misty’s apartment, though: a room in which lines of steel and a certain kind of grainy white burlap fabric predominated. There was a chair made of white burlap cushions collected and given shape in a frame of polished metal bars. A clear glass table with the same kind of metal frame. At right angles a small couch of the same material as the chair. On the wall a painting of a plain pale orange square against a white background; also a picture of Misty Schwartz and some man on a black statue of a sperm whale, the kind of whale with those jaws. The man was down lying in the jaws, with his arm back over his forehead like Pauline in Peril, and Misty was riding on the thing’s back, pretending to give it the whip, her mouth and eyes open wide. The photo was right flush up next to the painting. That was it for the walls, except for the television screen, which was pretty clearly a Lang addition.
Lenore looked for evidence of Lang. By the bed — a bed tightly made; Lenore thought about trying the thing with the half-dollar and decided against it — was a duffel bag, stuffed full and with some of its contents vomited out onto the floor around it, which fact was partially hidden by a carefully folded blanket Lang had placed over most of the scene, as if he had been in a hurry. On the bed were some new shirts and white socks, all still in their store plastic. But that was all. On the whole it just didn’t seem like a Lang sort of room, to Lenore, at all.
“This just doesn’t seem like your kind of room,” Lenore said to Lang when he came back with his hands full of cans and glasses. She watched him put everything down carefully on the glass table.
“Well it’s a inexpensive room, and no bugs, and the neighbors are tough to beat.” Lang grinned.
“I just mean decor-wise. I just can’t picture you really living in a room with Swedish furniture and paintings of squares.”
Lang hunkered down on the couch and looked for a second over at the blank white television screen. “And so what kind of decor do you picture me in the middle of?” He closed his eyes and popped the top off a can of wine.
Lenore ran her hand along the mantle of Misty’s cold fireplace. “Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled to herself. “Smoky leather. Leather chairs. A leopardy rug, with maybe a snarling bear’s head on it. Lascivious calendars and posters…” She turned. “Maybe some expensive stereo stuff with its control-knobs all gleamy in an overhead light whose brightness you can adjust by turning a dial…”
Lang laughed and hit his knee with his fist. “Undamncanny. You just largely described my old college room.”
“Did I.”
“Forgot the animal heads on the walls, though.” Lang manipulated his eyebrows at her.
Lenore laughed. “The animal heads,” she said. “How could I.”
“And the mirrors on the ceiling…” Lang looked down and came back up holding a big glass. “A little vino?”
Lenore came over to the couch.
“Couldn’t find any damn wine glasses, so I used these. I hope it’s OK to just take glasses, if we wash them out after.” They were Road Runner glasses that Candy Mandible had gotten in some sort of fast-food restaurant promotion.
Lenore took a glass of wine. “It’s OK. They’re Candy’s. She’s pretty generous with her stuff. As I’m sure you know.” She sat down in the white chair, carefully pulling the back of her dress down so the skin of her legs wasn’t touching the burlap cushion. She crossed her legs.
“I figured they were either hers or yours, or poor old Misty Schwartz‘s,” said Lang. “And I didn’t think that poor girl needs any glasses about now.” He leaned back on the couch. “Sent her a card, by the way, in the hospital, saying who I was, about the room, saying I hoped she got better and all.”
“That was pretty nice of you,” Lenore said, picking the glass up from the table. The wine was yellow and sweet and so cold it hurt Lenore’s teeth. She put her glass back on the table and got a bit of a tooth-shiver from the sound of glass on glass, on top of the cold of the wine.
“Nah,” said Lang, crossing his leg over so his ankle was on his knee and holding onto the ankle with one big hand. Lenore looked at his shoe and his hairy ankle.
“Nah,” said Lang. “Just polite, is all. Melinda Sue had a similar thing happen to her, except I guess not as bad. Woman was still slathered to hell in Noxzema for a week.”
“Sounds horrible.”
“Should tell your sister to watch out, not get burnt.”