The room is gray and damp and smells to Bob of the death of men and of their debts. Everywhere he looks he sees something that reminds him of male helplessness and ineptitude — the framed pictures of Jessica on horseback, on water skis, in her Holy Communion dress, pictures of a girl gone north to Connecticut with her mother because her father, the fool who snapped the pictures, was too loud, too selfishly obsessed with becoming rich, too insensitive to anyone’s pain but his own. And the room itself, with its department store decorations, huge, ornately framed pictures of New England villages and covered bridges in autumn hung above the long, low sofas and marble-topped tables, the pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, the neo-colonial wet bar with thirty different kinds of liqueurs underneath, everything in the room expensive, ready-made, impersonal — Bob sees it clearly now, all for show.
All for nothing, Bob thinks. His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because they were empty. But he never believed that it would all come to this, to nothing. Actually, he had envied his brother’s show, had thought that the appearance of confidence, knowledge, wealth and power would somehow over the years demand or create the reality, and Eddie would in fact be confident, knowledgeable, powerful and wealthy. Bob thought that was how you became those things. You created an outer man you could admire, and then after a time, over years, the inner man gave in to the pressure of the outer and fell into line, and from then on, the two marched in step together, like brothers. And when one died, the other died with him.
But here is Bob, living on alone, and if he feels more like a child than a man, it’s the women who make him feel that way, he thinks, his wife, his sister-in-law, his friend’s girlfriend. What he believes he needs to induce these women to make him feel like the grown man he’s become is money, and he has none, or sex, and after last night with Honduras, he hasn’t much of that, either. Since the birth of Robbie last fall, a shadow has fallen between Bob and Elaine, so that they rarely make love now, and when they do, it’s perfunctory and routine, a polite form of exchange. Elaine grew fat during the pregnancy and stayed thick in the hips and belly afterwards and started to speak of her body as if it were not hers but belonged instead to a pathetic, neglected, insecure friend. Anything that pointed to its existence distressed her, and sex most emphatically pointed to the existence of her body. And for Bob, the birth of his son has resulted, oddly, in his feeling outnumbered and alienated from his entire family — the three children and mother became one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet passing accidentally through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. That is not the kind of man who strolls through his house feeling sexy.
Bob remembers that the last time he felt truly sexy, which is to say, the last time he felt like an adult male instead of a boy inside an outsized body, was with Marguerite, before he went out there with the gun, of course. If only he could see her now, tall and mocha-colored, with her soft, Southern voice licking him all over, if only he could lie with her in a darkened room and tell her about Eddie and how strange the idea of going on alone without him makes him feel, then he would be able to understand it all, Eddie’s death and life and the suicide that’s made one the expression of the other. He would be able in the telling to learn how he is different from Eddie, as one man is different from another and not as a child is different from an adult.
But it’s too late now for him to talk to Marguerite. He ruined that possibility the last time he saw her, that afternoon in October when he nearly went crazy with a gun in his hand. She hates him now, Bob is sure. She probably hates all white men now, he thinks, and then he winces, for he is once again thinking of them both in terms of color, which he cannot seem to avoid doing, even though every time he does it, he loses sight of her face and voice and almost forgets her name. It’s not that he believes there is anything morally wrong with this; it’s that he’s genuinely frustrated, feels deprived, experiences a loss when it happens.
Maybe if he called her on the telephone and chatted for a few minutes about trivial things, for old time’s sake, say, just to catch up, say, he would be able to read her voice well enough to know whether, if he asked her to meet him, she would say yes, sure, why not? He will not ask her to meet him if she is going to say no. Then it would be like talking to all the other women he’s talked to this morning, and it’s specifically to counter the effect of those conversations that he is deciding now to call Marguerite Dill.
He can’t remember her number and has to look it up in the telephone book in the kitchen, which he finally locates under a stack of old newspapers on the table. It’s almost twelve-thirty, he notices, and a weekday. She won’t be home. He says this to himself with relief, which surprises him. But then she answers the phone, says, “Hello?” and he’s so glad to hear her voice, so thrilled by its familiar, buttery tone, that he cannot speak.
She repeats, “Hello?”
He opens his mouth, wets his lips with his tongue, but says nothing.
“Who’s there? Hello?”
“Marguerite, it’s me, Bob. I …”
She’s warm and quick, a kind, friendly, intelligent woman who takes the initiative in the conversation, as if she knows that to do otherwise would threaten Bob and make the conversation difficult. She asks him questions, where has he been living since he left the store, what kind of work has he been doing, how is his family, and she succeeds in conveying with the form and tone of her questions the clear impression that she now regards him as a dear, old friend.
Bob responds as he must, as a dear, old friend. “Well, I was in town … and I wanted to say hello. My brother … Eddie, he died.”
Marguerite is shocked, saddened, full of pity for everyone. “You must feel awful!” she exclaims. “Daddy’s going to be sad to hear this. He was right fond of your brother, you know. He hated leaving him when the store closed up,” she says, adding, “That’s how come you managed to catch me now. I come home at lunchtime to check on Daddy, ’cause he’s here alone now. He’s fine,” she says, as if Bob has asked after the old man.
“Good, that’s good. Give him my regards. Listen, Marguerite, I really wanted to talk to you … to apologize for … well, for the way I acted there, back in October, you know. I … I was under a lot of pressure, a hell of a lot of pressure, and, well, I guess I kinda lost it for a while, you know?”
She is sweet and forgiving. He needn’t apologize, she understands, though maybe she didn’t really understand it all as well then. But what with the new baby coming, and what with his troubles with Eddie and the store, after that robbery … which reminds her, she says, her voice brightening. “You remember that man, husband of my cousin, the one you chased over here?”
“Yeah, listen, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I want to apologize to you about, that more than anything else. I mean …”
“No, no, no! You were right about him! That one, he’s a bad man, all right. He got himself arrested by the police up in North Carolina about a month ago. My cousin told me all about it. Robbing a liquor store, just like he was robbing yours, and turned out he told the police up there everything.”
Bob is dumbfounded. “What? What do you mean?”
“Leon, that’s his name, Leon Stokes, he admitted robbing a whole bunch of liquor stores, including yours, most of them in Florida and Georgia. They found some drugs in his car, and I guess they made some kinda deal with him on who sold him the stuff or something, because he’s in jail now. But only for a couple years for robbing the liquor store in North Carolina, because he had to witness at a couple other big drug trials up there and in New York. So you were right.”