“And what kind of a job would I get?” she said. “What is there to do in Vermont but be a waitress in some diner? All winter it’s horrible — cold and snowy.”
“At least there aren’t gutters to get clogged,” he said.
“Put yourself in a barrel,” Horton said. “Roll through the snow. Have him push you along with a stick.”
“I think you ought to come with us, Horton. In case we get snowed in and get bored.”
“Oh no,” Horton said. “Put my ideas into practice, and half of them would kill you.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I believe I have some business to transact in a half-hour. Think I’ll just go into the bathroom and tidy myself up.” Horton shook his head. “You know I dated a lady for a spell who used to say that? It meant she was putting in her diaphragm.” He carried his plate to the kitchen. “Tidying herself up. Yes indeed,” Horton said, walking through the living room to the bathroom.
“Hey, Horton,” Spangle said. “What about the music? When’s your buddy getting out of the hospital?”
“That’s the rest of the story. The lady ran off with my friend. He’s already out of the hospital, and she’s off with him somewhere, and both of them embarrassed to face me. I joke all the time because I have such a sad life. She’s probably tidying herself up about now. Here I stand, all alone, combing my hair.” He closed the bathroom door.
Soon after Horton left she asked Spangle to leave too, but he told her that he wanted to stay, and she didn’t press him to go. He had been staying with his brother, in some painter’s apartment in the West Village. His brother had a date that night, and had asked him to get lost. The painter was out of town for a week, gambling in Atlantic City. Jonathan had been sleeping in the painter’s bed, and he had been sleeping in a hammock in the kitchen. Instead of wallpaper in the kitchen, the painter had tacked up stills from old movies, and when Spangle couldn’t sleep, his eye would wander over the walls to pictures of Debbie Reynolds behind the microphone in “Singin’ in the Rain,” Sandra Dee in a modest bathing suit, Annette Funicello in her Mouse-keteer costume, Kate Smith singing, Sissy Spacek at the dance in Carrie, Esther Williams on the edge of a diving board, Joan Crawford behind a desk working for Pepsi, Mae West, Britt Ekland, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, glossy picture after glossy picture, pinned to the wall with yellow push-pins. None of the painter’s work had been put up in the apartment. It was all at his studio in SoHo. Jonathan had been there, and he had said it was filled with mannequins and pinball machines, pictures stacked everywhere, racing forms on the floor, a one-armed bandit on the tank of a broken toilet, a geranium growing out of the toilet bowl. The painter hated to paint in the summer, and would go to the studio just to play with the machines and water the plant. He had recently met a woman who admired his work and had a condominium in Atlantic City, and he had started going there and gambling when her husband wasn’t around. Gambling was a new kick. Before that, it had been weight-lifting. Before that, snuff films. James Wright’s poetry. Homosexuality.
Spangle had not thought for a long time about the bomb exploding. Looking at Esther Williams or Mae West before he fell asleep seemed the perfect antidote. You could not look at Mae West and close your eyes and worry about a bomb exploding. Other things, but not that.
Lying in limbo in the hammock, he had thought a lot about Nina, and about how he would like to try again with her. (He had realized the appropriateness of the hammock right away, and had told Jonathan to put his quarter away: no need to flip for the bed.) Not that Cynthia had done anything wrong, but they were beginning to seem like an old married couple. She was even getting tolerant of his nightmares, soothing him perfunctorily. She had stopped complaining to him, and he had stopped complaining to her. The realization that he did not have a private, separate existence from her began to bother him. He liked Madrid because she had not seen it. He was nostalgic for Vermont for the same reason. They had been to Vermont together a couple of times in the summer, but she had never seen the Vermont of frozen winters and deer hunters and bare trees by the river. She had never known what it felt like to have a house full of lights and music and people, a house full of constant activity, while outside snow fell silently, mounds of wet, silent snow, covering bushes and piling on roofs, rising as high on top of the hanging bird-feeder as the feeder itself. If he had it to do over again, there would not be quite so many people. There would be just as big a house, though, even if part of it had to be closed off. He had torn down walls and sanded floors and glazed windows, and as fast as he had worked, Bobby had written poems about it all. Coming back to the States, on the plane, he had read one of Bobby’s poems in a magazine. Crazy Bobby — everything had been an inspiration to him. It was a standing joke with his friends that he could turn anything into a poem: Once he had put the light on in the car and taken an index card out of the glove compartment as they waited on a flooded road in Boston for AAA to come tow them out. The runs they used to make from Vermont to Boston, when it was absolutely necessary to see Night of the Living Dead or eat kosher food. Impossible to believe that he had lost touch with so many of those people. Maybe Cynthia would just let him go. The hammock could metamorphose into a huge basket, and he could be set among the bulrushes, and free of her, he would be saved by someone or something else. But it was hard to imagine finding a new person to love when he was still attached to so many people from the past. In Madrid, he had thought of Cynthia, not of going back to the States to try to find a new girl. It amazed him when that sort of thing happened. It amazed him that Nina’s lover, John, could just go over to his friend Nick’s apartment, and that Nick’s girlfriend would have brought her friend along, and that friend would be Nina. That they would joke and talk. That he would end up taking her to dinner that night, and the next night, too; and that then they would go to her apartment. She said that he was so curious that he had even gone through the medicine cabinet. Just like that, you could walk into somebody’s life? He was nowhere near John’s age, and he was the one who felt old: He was the one who couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.
Nina had gone into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He went into the kitchen and decided to make coffee and try to get his head straight. If she was letting him stay, he should at least try to take her problems seriously. He wondered if he had really offended her by saying that if it hadn’t been her it would have been somebody else. Because he couldn’t imagine her with some middle-aged man, a man with money, who worked at a fancy job and had a fancy house in the suburbs. Lemon lilies on the front lawn. Sprinklers on the putting green at the country club. Was Nina getting old? Was that why that life had started to attract her? He had asked her that, and that had been the wrong thing to say, too: Even if she found it attractive, she said, she wasn’t going to get it. And if she had ever had a chance, it was gone now. He was guilt-stricken and he had admitted that he was a coward, and he was right back there now, wasn’t he? She had been red in the face, about to cry, and then she had sighed and stomped off to the bathroom. She took showers the way other people got drunk or smoked until they were stoned. She would be reincarnated as a water nymph. He could be adrift in the bulrushes and she could be bathing there, and swim after him. Where would the myth go from there? Bobby would have been able to guess, in one of his poems. He always used to imagine beautiful situations that worked out perfectly. Or at least that was the way he had read Bobby’s poems, and it had taken a long time to figure out that Bobby wasn’t smiling because he was flattered, but because of the way he, Spangle, almost always misunderstood them. Spangle had had no ear for irony. Cynthia said that, too. She said that she couldn’t imagine how he had ever passed freshman English. “How can anybody be smart about life when they don’t understand literature?” she had asked him. “What happens to characters happens to characters, and what happens to you and me happens to you and me,” he had said. She had asked him, then, if he was speaking ironically. Maybe not ironically, but humorously? He dodged the question. Probably she was smarter than he was. Probably that was the truth.