*
The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman — the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.
Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.
“Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.
“To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”
*
I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.
“This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.
*
The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool — the kind fishermen use — instead of the muddy ground. It is September — mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds — not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to me? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”
“I know,” he says.
*
The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.
I demand attention from Jon, at his desk at work, his legs now up in the lotus position on his chair to offer the dog his fine resting place.
“Jon, Jon!” I say, and dance across the room. I posture and prance. What a good lawyer he will be; he shows polite interest
“I’ll set us on fire,” I say.
That is going too far. He shakes his head to deny what I have said. He leads me by my wrist to bed, pulls the covers up tightly. If I were a foot lower down in the bed I would smother if he kept his hands on those covers. Like grape jelly.
“Will there be eggs and bacon, and grape jelly on toast, for breakfast?” I ask.
There will be. He cooks for us now.
*
I am so surprised. When he brings the breakfast tray I find out that today is my birthday. There are snapdragons and roses. He kisses my hands, lowers the tray gently to my lap. The tea steams. The phone rings. I have been hired for the job. His hand covers the mouthpiece. Did I go for a job? He tells them there was a mistake, and hangs up and walks away, as if from something dirty. He walks out of the room and I am left with the hot tea. Tea is boiled so it can cool. Jon leaves so he can come back. Certain of this, I call and they both come — Jon and the dog — to settle down with me. We have come to the end, yet we are safe. I move to the center of the bed to make room for Jon; tea sloshes from the cup. His hand goes out to steady it. There’s no harm done — the saucer contains it. He smiles, approvingly, and as he sits down his hand slides across the sheet like a rudder through still waters.
Hale Hardy and the Amazing Animal Woman
Hale Hardy went to college because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, and he quit because he couldn’t see any reason to stay. He lasted one and a half years. He did not exactly quit; he was thrown out. When that happened he went to visit his sister Mary, who was living with another girl, Paula, who was being supported by some dude. Hale didn’t know the dude’s name, or why he was supporting her, or why his sister was living there. He just went.
The sunsets he saw from the dining-room window knocked him out. It got so he’d pull a chair up to the window and wait for them, starting about one in the afternoon. He had a long wait, so he read. Sometime during the winter his former English teacher sent him Lolita in care of his parents, and they sent it on. That book put women in his mind. He thought it might be a good idea to pick up some woman and drive across the country with her — take some woman to the Grand Canyon. Eat ice cream with some woman, peering into the Grand Canyon. If they sold ice cream there. They probably did. They sold ice cream at the Alamo.
He couldn’t keep one thought straight in his mind: first he’d be thinking about scoring some woman, then he’d be thinking about how good ice cream tasted, especially his favorite, French vanilla. Then he’d get up and eat — there was never ice cream in the place his sister was living, but there was a lot of other stuff — and then he’d sit down and wait for the sunset, trying to get through that long book, bogging down every few pages. He thought about writing his teacher. She couldn’t have been much older than he was. He always thought she liked him. She called everybody by their last name, but she called him Hale. She had big blue eyes. Nothing else about her was big. Would his skinny teacher be pleased to get a note from him? If he didn’t write, would he ever hear from her again? Yes; a postcard during the summer, from Seattle, Washington, saying that she was sailing around in a boat, which sure beat teaching. His mother forwarded that postcard with a comment: “If these are the people who are supposed to guide you, no wonder!!!” His mother put three exclamation points after everything; how much they were paying for heat, who was getting married, how many stray cats there were in New York City. Mary had nothing to do with their mother. Mary did not even refer to her by name; it was always “that wasted life.” He agreed that his mother’s life had been wasted, but he didn’t hate her for that the way Mary did. He just didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t understand why such a sensible woman would name him Hale Hardy, though. And that was his mother’s idea, not his father’s, because he had checked. Why didn’t she go through with the joke and give him N for a middle initial? What was she thinking of? His mother said that she had no way of knowing that Harold would get turned into Hale. That was partly Mary’s fault, because when she was little she had trouble pronouncing Harold; it came out “Hal,” got changed to Hale.
He was not very hale and hearty, probably his body’s rebellion against such a nickname. He spent a lot of time reading Adelle Davis, trying to get together. Adelle never said what everybody was supposed to get together for, though. Let’s Stay Healthy for Our Trip to the Grand Canyon.
There was a woman who came to clean whose name was Gloria Moratto. She was a woman in her thirties, hired by Paula’s husband (turned out he was letting Paula use the house willed to him by an uncle). He told Paula that Gloria was pitiful. He felt sorry for her. Paula said that when her husband didn’t know what to make of women he just gave in to them. Hale couldn’t understand why she needed the job. She always had so much money. Money was stuffed in her purse, which she carried unfastened, and money fell out of her big apron as she cleaned, and she stuffed it back in the pockets the way people stuff used tissues away, hoping no one will notice. But it was easy to see why Paula’s husband took pity on her: Gloria Moratto was indeed a sorrowful creature. Her large body was carried by small, narrow feet, and it rose up precariously, like a funnel. Her shoulders were very wide; on a man they would have been comforting. The most amazing thing about her was her head. It was big, accentuated by curly black hair bushing around it. Her eyes were big. Her mouth. But you could hardly see either because of the curly black hair. One time when Gloria came she had streaked her hair; the white and black was astonishing, like a skunk. He thought of her, then, as an animal, and watched with fascination as she did her work. He imagined that this huge, strangely shaped woman would be capable of building a beaver dam. She vacuumed, polished, scrubbed, dusted, carried away trash, put things in their proper places, washed dishes, did the laundry. This amazing animal woman came every Friday and worked all day.