“Here,” Charles says. “This is to celebrate the new car.”
“What’s this?” Pete says. “Hey! Turtle Wax!”
Charles nods.
“I knew you didn’t really forget. Say, thanks a lot. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Charles says.
“Come on.…”
“Really, it’s a present.”
“Hell,” Pete says. “My own son couldn’t have given me anything I wanted more.”
Pete puts the bag on the hall table, puts on his coat and walks outside.
“She’s much worse,” Charles says.
“She’s out of her goddamn mind, to be honest with you. She gets up and flips around like a fish when I’m not there. Not that water ever touches her. I have to do that once a week. Throw her in. What else can I do?”
“Christ. Have you spoken to a doctor?”
“No. I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“What are they going to do but take her to the hospital? Then what happens? I’m there all the time, the house is like a tomb.…”
“What if she does something to herself?”
“She’d forget what she was doing if the knife was poised at her heart. Really. You can’t imagine what bad shape she’s in.”
“I think I get the idea.”
“I’m not calling any doctor,” Pete says. “I’m not going to run back and forth to the hospital. They don’t do anything for her there, anyway. Put her in a room with a murderer.”
“How do you know that?”
“That foreign broad told me she was a murderer. Showed me all these photographs of kittens and puppies, one hand showing the picture, the other clutching her throat.”
Charles sighs. They are standing in front of Pete’s Honda Civic.
“You know what my consolation is?” Pete says. “You want to know what my one consolation is?”
“What?”
“That car,” Pete says. “Well. It’s very nice.”
“That car must get a thousand miles to the gallon. I get in that in the morning and just leave the past behind.” Charles smiles.
“I do. You don’t believe me?”
“Sure.”
“Sure is right That thing gets a thousand miles a gallon.” Charles stares at the little white car.
“Looks like a whale, doesn’t it?” Pete says. “Friendly like a whale?” Charles resumes his smile. “Wait till I take that wax to her. Some shine.” Pete unlocks the car. “Take a sit,” he says. Charles sits in the car. His legs are cramped. “What a beaut,” Pete says. Charles gets out.
“So what brought you by?” Pete says.
“Just wanted to give you the Turtle Wax.”
“Jesus, that’s very nice of you. When I saw you standing there I thought: he’s come to tell us he’s getting married.”
“What? Why would you think that?”
“I thought for sure. I don’t know.”
“I’m not getting married,” Charles says.
“If you were my own boy I’d pry,” Pete says. “Ask what happened to that California honey.”
“She went back. She’s a lesbian, anyway.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding me. How’d you meet one of those?”
“Long time ago. When she wasn’t.”
“No kidding,” Pete says. “Must make you feel bad.” Charles shrugs.
“Whew,” Pete says. “Glad I don’t know her.” He shakes his head sideways.
“I guess I’ll be getting home,” Charles says.
“Don’t bother to go back in,” Pete says. “She’ll have all her clothes off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every time you have — I don’t mean you, I mean anybody — anybody has a conversation with her and they turn their back, she’s as naked as a jay.”
“Pete, you’re going to have to do something.”
“I’m sitting tight. I know eventually I will.”
“Well. Call if you need me.”
Pete nods. Charles shakes his hand.
“See you,” Charles says.
Pete stands on the sidewalk waving as he pulls off. He waves back, and lets out a long sigh when he turns off their block. His father is dead, his mother is crazy, Pete is all alone. He puts on the radio for the appropriate song. It is “Rocket Man” by Elton John. He listens to the radio and worries all the way to Wicker Street. Once again there is no parking space on Wicker Street. He parks on the same street he parked on the night before and cuts through an alley to Wicker Street, holding the tulips, in their white bag, inside his coat for extra warmth.
Laura opens the door wearing a black sweater and a long gray skirt. He is so surprised by how beautiful she is that he forgets to hold out the bag of tulips.
“Hi,” she says.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. “These are for you.”
“Oh, thank you.”
He walks into the apartment. Incense. He watches her put the bag on the floor and pull it apart at the top. “Tulips! They’re beautiful!”
“They’re in a thing. A container. So they won’t die or anything.”
“Thank you, Charles. It’s so gray out. These will be beautiful.” She looks around for a place to put them, settles on the coffee table.
“Your roommate studying again?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really have a roommate?”
“You don’t believe I have a roommate?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. She’s at the library. She studies there until midnight. Sometimes later.”
“Did I make you mad?”
“No,” she says. “It was just a foolish question.”
“What’s that on the stereo?”
Damn! He was going to bring her records. He was right in the store and he forgot. “Keith Jarrett.”
“Beautiful,” he says.
He sits on the sofa. The two black lines have not yet done in the rainbow. “Would you like a drink?”
“Yes,” he says.
She goes into the kitchen and takes a bottle off the counter and pours scotch into a glass. She drops in an ice cube. “Just scotch, or water with it?” she says. “Just scotch.”
“I might have a job,” she says, handing him the glass. There is writing on the glass: Hot Dog Goes To School. A dog, knees crossed, is beaming. He holds a piece of paper that says 100 %.
“A job?”
“A job selling cosmetics.”
“Oh. Would you like that?”
The perfume in his mother’s room … Pete throwing his mother in the bath.… “It’s a job.”
“When will you hear?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Then you have to wait home for the phone call?”
“Yes,” she says. “You’re not very subtle about playing detective.”
“If you’re here I can call and say good morning. I like to hear your voice.”
She sighs. He looks at the window — the cracked glass. A nightmare: he had some nightmare about that glass. He takes her hand.
“If I’m not all smiles it’s because I just visited my mother,”
“How is your mother?”
“Loony.”
“But, I mean …”
“She’s loony and well cared-for. She’s stopped bathing, and I think she’s stopped getting out of bed.”
“What is your stepfather going to do?”
“That’s a funny way to think of Pete. I always think of him as Pete.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing, he says. Unless she gets unmanageable.”
“That’s so awful,” Laura says.
“I shouldn’t tell you my problems. You’ve got enough of your own.”
“I’ve got a job, probably. What problems do I have?”
“You’re feeling good now?” he says, his mood lifting.
“No. Heavily ironic.”
“Oh,” he says.
“Would you like another?”
He gives her the empty glass. The ice cube hardly melted at all. It is the last scotch he will drink.
He looks at her standing in front of the kitchen counter, pouring. He stares at her ass.