The party had hardly been going an hour and already Andy Stafford had drunk too many bottles of beer. Claire as usual had wanted to be at a table at the front, to see everything that was going on, but he had insisted on getting as far away as he could get from that band-Glenn Miller types, average age a hundred or so-and now he was sitting on his own, glowering at his wife where she was dancing with that son-of-a-bitch Joe Lanigan. The baby was in her bassinet at his feet, though he did not understand how she could sleep with all the noise going on. Claire had said he would get used to the kid in time, but the months had passed and he still felt that his life had been invaded. It was like when he was a kid himself and his cousin Billy came to live with them after his old man blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. The baby was always there, just like cousin Billy had been, with his farm boy’s big hands and straw-colored eyelashes, watching and listening and breathing on everything.
Joe Lanigan was a trucker like Andy, a big, freckle-faced Irishman with a boxy head and arms as long as an ape’s. He danced like a hillbilly, lifting his knees high and lunging down sideways until his fist with Claire’s hand folded in it almost banged on the floor. Andy eyed them sourly. Claire was talking nonstop-what about?-and grinning in that way she did when she was excited, showing her upper gums. The number came to an end with a brassy shout from the trumpet, and Lanigan stepped back and made an exaggerated, sweeping bow, and Claire pressed her clasped hands to her breast and put her head to one side and batted her eyelashes, like she was some heroine out of the silent movies, and she and Lanigan both laughed. Lanigan went back to his table, where that sidekick of his whose name Andy could not remember, a little fat guy with slicked-back hair who looked like Lou Costello, was sitting with a couple of pizza-waitress types. As Lanigan sat down he glanced back over his shoulder at Claire making her way between the tables toward Andy, smiling to herself, and he said something, and the fat guy and the two broads laughed, and the fat guy looked across at Andy with what seemed a pitying sort of grin.
“Oh, I’m dizzy!” Claire said, arriving at the table.
She sat down opposite him and swung her knees in under the table and lifted a hand to touch her hair, still being the movie star. She did not seem dizzy to him. Her blouse had damp patches under the arms. He stood up, saying he was going to get another beer, and she asked in her sweetest little voice if he did not think that maybe he should take it easy, and even though she made herself smile as she said it he scowled at her. Then she said that since he was up he could get her a glass of punch. As he was walking away she leaned forward eagerly and peered into the bassinet with another one of those loony smiles of hers.
He knew he should not do it, but when he had got the drinks he made a detour that would bring him past Lanigan’s table. He stopped and said hello. Lanigan, whose back was to him, made a show of being surprised, and swiveled his big square head and looked up at him, and asked him how he was doing, and called him pal. Andy said he was doing all right; he was being friendly, not making any big point about anything. The others, the two women and the fat guy-Cuddy, that was the little creep’s name, suddenly he remembered it-were watching him from across the table; they seemed to be trying not to grin. Cuddy’s womany little pursed-up mouth twitched at one side.
“Hey, Cuddy,” Andy said, still keeping it light, keeping it calm. “See something funny, do you?” The fat man raised his eyebrows, which were heavy and black and looked painted on. “I said,” Andy repeated, making his voice go hard, “do you see something funny?”
Cuddy, too near to laughter to risk answering, looked at Lanigan, who answered for him. “Hey, hey,” he said, lightly laughing himself, “take it easy, Stafford. Where’s your Christmas spirit?”
One of the women giggled and leaned sideways to the other one until their shoulders met. The one who had laughed was large and blowsy, her big front teeth flecked with lipstick; the other was thin and Spanish-looking, showing a bony expanse of broiled chicken breast in the loose V-shaped neck of her blouse.
“I’m just asking the question,” Andy said, ignoring the women as if they were not there. “Do either of you guys see anything funny around here?”
People at nearby tables had turned and were staring at him, all of them smiling, thinking he was making some joke. He heard someone say, Look, it’s Audie Murphy, and someone else gave a stifled shout of laughter.
“Listen, Stafford,” Lanigan said, starting to sound nervous, “we don’t want any trouble, not here, not today.”
Where, then, Andy was about to ask, and when? but felt a touch on his arm and turned quickly, defensively. Claire was beside him, smiling. In her bright little baby-doll voice she said:
“That punch is going to be warm before I get to taste it.”
He did not know what to do. People three tables away were looking at him now. He saw himself as they would see him, in his white shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, with that glass of pink stuff in his hand and a nerve jumping in his cheek. Lanigan had turned sideways on his chair and was looking up at Claire, signaling to her silently to take her little man away and keep him out of trouble.
“Come on, honey,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”
When they were back at their table Andy’s left knee began to twitch up and down very fast, making the table vibrate. Claire was pretending nothing had happened. She sat with her chin propped on a crook’d finger, watching the dancers and humming, and weaving her shoulders to the rhythm. He imagined himself snatching the punch glass from her hand and breaking it on the edge of the table and thrusting the shattered rim into her defenseless soft white throat. He had done it once before, long ago, when he slashed the face of that high school prom queen who had laughed at him when he had asked her to dance, which was another reason for him never to go back to Wilmington.
JOSH CRAWFORD WAS IN ALMOST A LIGHTHEARTED MOOD TODAY. HE liked to savor the fruits of his success, and the sight of his staff disporting themselves amid the greenery in this glass pleasure dome was sweet to him, he who these days had to taste so much of bitterness. He knew there would be few more such occasions; this might even be, for him, the last. The air around him grew thinner by the day; he sucked at it in a kind of slow panic, as if he were slowly sinking underwater with only a tube to breathe through that was itself becoming increasingly fine, like one of those glass tubes he remembered from his school days, few and long ago though his school days had been-what were they called, those tubes? He found in a strange way comical the process of his accelerating dissolution. His lungs were so congested he was swelling up and turning blue, like some species of South American frog. The skin on his legs and feet was as taut and transparent as a prophylactic; he joked with the nurse when she was cutting his nails, warning her to be careful not to puncture him with the scissors or they might both end up in trouble. Who would have thought that time’s betrayal would strike him as funny, at the end?
He rapped his knuckles now on the arm of the wheelchair to make the nurse stop pushing and attend him. When she leaned down from behind him and put her face beside his he caught her pleasing, starchy smell; he supposed it must in part be a smell he was remembering from his long-dead and long-forgotten mother. So much of his concern now was for the past, since there was so little of the future left to him.
“What’s the name of those things that chemists use,” he said hoarsely, “those thin glass tubes that you put your finger on the top of to keep the liquid held inside-what do you call them?”