It was a good house, large, with a lot of wood showing. It was slightly underfurnished, with obvious blank spots in all the rooms and with here and there a dusty rectangle on the wall to show where a painting had been. I assumed the house was left over from the marriage, and that when the husband moved out he’d taken some of the furnishings with him.
Being on a corner lot, there was much opportunity for glass. An enclosed sun porch full of plants ran along the side of the house, and a big-windowed breakfast room was off the kitchen at the back. Also off the kitchen was a large open back porch; because of the crowd in the house, and because it wasn’t all that cold outside, the kitchen door to the back porch was left open, and there were always several people out there, getting some air.
Upstairs were four bedrooms, three of them open. The door of the fourth was locked, and since I hadn’t seen Max or Janet at all since I’d gotten here I guessed they were saying hello to one another in there. That such a pale girl should be so passionate as to abandon her own party for an hour in bed amazed me. And cheered me, too. Now that I’m Harry Kent, I thought, paraphrasing Bobby Fischer, I’ll be spending more time with girls.
One of the other bedrooms was full of children; the two little girls in identical pale blue dresses stood out at once from the crowd. Toys were being played with in here, a full mini-party was going on. The parents of these children were all downstairs, mixed with a very conglomerate crowd; Janet Kelleher seemed to have invited everybody she knew, including several of her high school students. The youngest guest upstairs seemed to be about three, and the oldest downstairs were a white-haired cheery couple who had to be in their sixties.
Food and drink were all downstairs, and all serve yourself. The food was spread on a sideboard in the dining room, and the liquor bottles were lined up on the kitchen table. I made occasional visits to both places, and was in the dining room, standing next to the cake, when a girl I’d noticed before came over and said, “You don’t seem to be having a great time.”
I looked at her. She was medium height, a trifle overweight, with a round-cheeked elfin face and long curling ash-blonde hair. She was wearing no bra, a fact that the pockets of her white blouse failed to conceal. I said, “I don’t?”
“You’re just standing around,” she said, and nodded at the glass in my hand. “With that drink.”
“Everybody’s just standing around,” I said. “With drinks.” I was a bit irritated, and also embarrassed that somebody had noticed I was alone.
“If you come talk with me,” she said, still good-humored despite my manner, “I won’t eat that cake.”
I frowned at the cake, of which I’d already had two slices. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Carbohydrates,” she said, and puffed out her cheeks.
“You’re big-boned,” I said, gallantly.
She laughed. “Come take me away,” she said, “before my bones get any bigger.”
So that’s how I met Marian James. We walked into the sun porch, sat down amid the philodendra, and she told me who she was while I told her who I wasn’t. Her name was Marian James, she was twenty-nine, childless, separated from her husband, and also a teacher at Amalgamated High. “History,” she said, and when I asked her what specialty in history she said, “American. That’s all the poor little bastards get in high school. We’re surrounded by people who think mathematics, gunpowder, public streetlighting and drama are all Wasp inventions.” Her husband she described as a “freak” who found domestic life too confining and who was now making a small living as a photographer and marijuana smuggler in Mexico. “Turn off, tune out, drop dead, that’s my advice to Sonny,” she said. “And my advice to you is, never trust a grown man called Sonny.”
My own self-description could have been equally as colorful, but I very carefully avoided the temptation. I felt uncomfortable telling Max’s lie about being a civilian employee out at Camp Quattatunk, though now that I’d been there I could at least refer to the place with some familiarity. And I assured her that Max and I were thinking of taking an apartment together in town. “For the convenience,” I said.
“You had some excitement out at the camp the other night,” she said.
Honey, I was some excitement out at the camp the other night, I thought, but what I said was, “Yeah, I read about it in the papers. I didn’t know anything about it at the time.”
“They blew up a fence or something?”
“One of the gates,” I said. “Not the main gate, one out by the storage compound.”
“The paper said they were Weathermen disguised as Army officers.” The skin crinkling around her eyes, she frowned a bit and shook her head. “Doesn’t sound right to me,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. And I was thinking that lies were supposed to be more colorful than the truth, not less. I was managing to lie myself into contention as bore of the year.
We went on like that. The Army hadn’t released details of what had been stolen, and she asked me about it, and I said I didn’t know either. She asked me if I personally knew the sentry who’d been attacked, and I said no. Oh, I was in top form, I had her on the edge of her chair. Ready to fall off asleep.
God, I needed a drink. “Refill your glass?” I said.
“I’ll go with you.”
So we went to the kitchen, where I was pouring bourbon when she said to somebody facing the other way, “Oh, Fred. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Harry Kent, from out at the Army base. Harry, this is Fred Stoon, he works at the-”
Stoon! I slapped the bottle down, staring in horror. The man was turning around, but I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was. And I didn’t need Marian to tell me where he worked. It was Stoon the prison guard! It was the one who escorted me to the warden’s office every time, the one who shifted his weight skeptically from foot to foot.
“Ulp,” I said. I slapped my hand over my mouth, turned, bowled my way through the crowd and out the kitchen door.
“-peniten- Harry?”
Maintain the fiction. There were four people on the back porch; I shoved through them, hand still clenched over my mouth, and flung myself like an old mattress across the rail. I hung there, draped, head down, and sensed the four people all drifting inexorably but somewhat urgently back into the house.
I was alone. I stared at the grass below me, noticing distractedly that the snow was starting to stick. It was coming down more heavily, too.
I’m doomed. It’s all over. I'm dead, I’m doomed.
A tread on the porch. My shoulders hunched, awaiting the ax.
“Harry?” It was Marian’s voice.
Slowly I raised myself, slowly I turned, step by step. Marian was alone, looking at me in some concern, saying, “You okay, Harry?”
The doorway behind her was empty, though the kitchen was full. I said, “I guess I'm okay now. I'm sorry, all of a sudden I really thought I was going to throw up.”
“Boy, you sure took off,” she said, and Stoon appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking out.
So the first time I kissed Marian James was to hide my face.
26
“I CAN’T MEET FRED STOON,” I whispered forcefully through the kiss. Our teeth clacked together painfully.
“Why?” She had a hell of a time pronouncing the ‘w.’
“Tell you later.”
She broke the clinch. Stoon had discreetly removed himself from the doorway again. Marian said, “You’ll tell me now. Come on, we’ll go to my place.”
“I can’t go through that kitchen. Once he sees me, it’s all over.”
She gave me a frank appraisal. “You’re weird, Harry,” she decided. “Come on.”
So we left the porch, walked around the outside of the house through the snow, went back in through the front door, found our coats in the welter on the bench, and left.