“Good night.”
Steve drank another beer alone. Then he took the elevator up to his room. He lay down on the bed without undressing. He didn’t want to go to sleep because he had a lot of things to think about and going to sleep was final. It was burying an old day. In the morning it would be resurrected; it wouldn’t be a new day, it would be the same one, freshly painted and primped like an old floozy. Only the children, the near-sighted, the anemic, could fail to see last year’s grime beneath the cracking powder, and smell the sweet sickly decay beneath the perfume.
He turned over on his back and clasped his hands behind his head. The ceiling light was brown but immediately above his bed there were several black marks on it like the toeprints of a man’s shoe. He was too tired to feel much surprise that someone should have tiptoed across his ceiling, but he wondered how it could be done. Suction shoes? Stilts?
No, that wouldn’t be it. Perhaps the marks weren’t shoe prints. Something else than that? A fly swatter.
That was it, a fly swatter. Someone (a man? woman?) had stood on the bed and slapped at the ceiling with a rubber fly swatter.
He felt pleased with himself for figuring this out, but somewhat disappointed, too. It would have been interesting to go on thinking about someone tiptoeing across the ceiling. It would have excluded other thoughts.
But now he became acutely aware that the green lampshade was the color of Beatrice’s dress. (I’ll phone Beatrice, I’ll make it up to her, not that I did anything. I’ll take her out sometime; she is very clean and kind.) The light itself reminded him of the shiny pendant Doris had worn around her neck. (I wonder what will happen to her. She was not like Martha, but all the time I kept thinking of Martha.)
The shiny pendant began to waver, gently at first, then faster and faster until it spun and whistled and burst of its own energy, scattering stars of steel. He stood in a glass rain and watched the blowing bones, the leaves of skin, the twigs of hair.
Out of the bomb-hole in the earth Martha came. She didn’t see him, she passed by.
“Martha! Martha, it’s me!”
She didn’t hear him, there was too much noise. He followed, but he couldn’t catch her. He kept stepping on soft, warm, sticky things like little animals newly born and newly dead.
She didn’t look around, she didn’t see him doing all his wonderful tricks for her. He stood on his head, he clapped his hands, he pirouetted on his toes like a ballet boy, he took off his clothes, he jumped, he cleared a hurdle six feet high, he burned his wrist with a cigarette, laughing; he screamed and screamed.
Someone was pounding on the door. He got off the bed. He went over to the door and said, without opening it, “Who is it?”
“Everything okay in there?” a man’s voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Lady next door phoned down she thought you was being murdered.”
“I must have been dreaming.”
“Okay then.”
There was a sound of receding footsteps. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. His wrist was sore where he’d been lying on it and his throat was raw from shouting in his sleep.
He lit a cigarette and sat down in the chair beside his bed. He was shaking with relief that his dream was over. No bomb, no Martha, no burned hole in his wrist. He knew there wasn’t a chance that he’d resume the dream if he went back to sleep, but he sat in the chair for an hour before he finally undressed, put on his pajamas and went to bed.
Chapter 8
The next morning he woke up with a plan laid out in his head. Like most of the ideas that came to him early in the morning and that later turned out unfortunate, this seemed to be a good one. He would go and see the house that Martha lived in. Not Martha herself — he was no longer interested in her; she bore practically no resemblance to the girl he’d been engaged to. She was a matron now, she looked like one, she talked like one, she dressed like one, and she had that exasperating air of smugness found in the best matrons. It was a class he didn’t care for.
No, it was not Martha he wanted to see. It was the house itself. He liked houses, he was interested in houses. Once he wanted to be an architect; what was so funny about going to see a house instead of a woman?
Right after breakfast he took a cab out to Balby Point. On special dates with houses you couldn’t very well take a bus, so he sat back in the cab and watched the people on the streets who didn’t get ideas in the very early morning.
Balby Point was the section of the city where every Sunday afternoon the $4,000-a-year people drove around to see what kind of homes the $40,000-a-year people had built for themselves. Most of the houses were in the Colonial tradition, rambling, inconvenient, with unexpected steps and Hepplewhite furniture in the drawing room which haughtily denied the old gas stove in the kitchen and the broken spring in the maid’s bed. They were staunch, conservative people who considered that pampering a servant was the first step toward communism.
But there were a few modern American houses. People weren’t accustomed to them yet and they still looked more like magazine illustrations than places where human beings lived.
Steve paid off the cab driver at the corner of Gilchrist and Jane. (Pearson, Charles H., 132 Gilchrist Ave., Hum. 5-2366.) He began to walk slowly up the hill. There were only four houses on the street and he couldn’t miss the Pearsons’. It was at the top of the hill and it was the only house that had corner windows set in glass bricks. It was perfectly square and flat (they’ll probably have trouble with the roof leaking, I hope). He might have been seeing it from the wrong angle but the place looked a little cockeyed to him. He wondered whether it was wise to try and build a perfectly square house on a hilltop.
The garage was a couple of hundred yards from the house, with servants’ quarters built above it. There was room for three cars, but the doors of the garage were shut and there didn’t seem to be anybody around.
He stepped onto the driveway, his shoes scrunching against the white pebbles. The driveway, bordered by a low cedar hedge, swooped up the hill, jogged off toward the garage, and then up the rest of the hill in an erratic, but dashing, course to the front door of the house.
He stopped suddenly. Now was the time to go back. He had seen what he wanted to see, he had it out of his system. The house was just what he had imagined it to be, a rather badly planned modern. It was time to leave.
He leaned down and picked up a pebble from the driveway. He meant to throw it idly over the hedge for the sake of something to do or because pebbled driveways annoyed him. But when the stone left his hand, it swung viciously through the air and hit a window of the garage. The window cracked and its smooth face wrinkled as if suddenly overcome by age.
Someone shouted, “Hey! Hey, you!”
He turned and saw a man hurrying toward him across the lawn, lugging a garden sprinkler. The sprinkler hampered his progress but it didn’t seem to occur to him to put it down. He was tall and spare, with a bald head that glistened in the sun like an egg in isinglass.
He said, breathlessly, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
Steve looked surprised. “Who, me?”
“You broke a window. I saw you.”
“Did I?”
“You can’t go around breaking windows.”
“I didn’t try to break the window. I was aiming at the door.”
“Well, what in hell are you aiming at anything for? This is private property. I’ve a good notion to report you. I’m the one that’s going to get blamed for that window.”
“Well, I’m sorry for that,” Steve said honestly.
“She’ll think I did it as sure as God made little green apples.” Brown threw the sprinkler on the lawn. “I get blamed for everything around here. If a couple of bugs get on her flowers, she thinks I had them imported especially from South America.”