“It was very brave of you to try to do something,” she says.
“Hughie?” I ask.
“Same as me.” Joe’s mouth is a tiny box of pain. He winces as he speaks. “Pretty banged-up, but he’ll live.” He looks at me the way a thousand guys in a thousand broiling buildings have cut their eyes at me over thousands and thousands of hours. “Hal, what do we do now?”
I feel like my left front tire the morning a shouting longshoreman named Mike, stoked with bennies and too little sleep, sliced it into neat piles of jerky with a busted Coors bottle and a bowie knife. He thought I’d sold him out on a contract.
I’d tell Joe to quit, to walk the fuck away, but I know what he’d say: My pension, Hal. For Carla. For the girls.
A light sneeze’d blow his pension away, but he doesn’t want to hear that.
Crazy for trying, crazy for crying.
Missy’s whispering now, “Things’ll be fine.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“We’ll work it out,” she says. She strokes his face with the Kleenex.
Carla shakes a yellow Bic lighter. It’s stubborn at first, then a flame pops out. She tilts her head, and I get the wild idea she’s praying. Asking for a miracle. It’s the wrong idea. Her cigarette kindles like the Queen of the Fireflies. “Damned ratty-nosed bastard,” she mutters.
I want to drive somewhere, with the radio low. I want very much to do nothing. I want to touch Missy’s hair.
Joe groans.
I give his arm a squeeze. For a moment, glancing at Missy, I hold him; my gesture doesn’t feel routine. She’s busy with the tissue, looking up my way and smiling, like it’s a real fine night.
Bliss
Frederick Becker had lived near Griffith Park in a grimy, sparsely furnished apartment for three weeks now, with only a week to go. He had a rocking chair and a lamp. He had a stove — an evil-looking thing, sheathed in hard, black grease, smelling of gas, waiting to explode in the corner, he was sure. He hated going near it. For eight years, Ruth had fixed his meals. He’d never learned to do more than set an oven, pull up a seat, and watch a frozen turkey sweat until he could eat it.
Roaches, tough as old toenails, scooted across his sticky orange carpets. The damn bugs here were big enough to nudge the books from his shelves. He imagined them laughing, wildly wringing their antennae, at the meager fare he fed his mind with these days. Mickey Spillane. Perry Mason. Just this morning he’d sold his broken-spined Wittgenstein (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) to a half-price bookstore down the street.
Philosophy was too thick a tongue just now; these days, whenever he opened his mouth, it was all he could do not to scream.
An old freezer, a recliner missing half its stuffing, a palm-sized transistor radio, and several unstretched canvases rounded out the apartment’s decor.
This evening, after eating his instant rice and Birds Eye peas, he switched on the radio. Kennedy again — the man was getting tiresome — warning Khrushchev out of Cuba. “I promise you, the Commies won’t bite,” Frederick said aloud to his dying yellow ivy plant. “Our missiles are bigger than theirs.” The ivy dropped a leaf. He lit a Chesterfield, unstuck a window. Houston slipped, volatile and dolorous, into the room, a faint scent on its breath of freshly mown grass, cow shit (the rodeo was in town), and car exhaust.
Hoffmann, Frederick’s tortoiseshell cat, rubbed his matted fur on the telephone receiver. Frederick dialed Ruth’s number, wondering if he should have mixed himself a drink first.
Of course, she was angry when she answered.
“Rough day?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.
“What do you want?”
“I was hoping to say goodnight to Robbie before the Sandman comes to visit.
“I sent him to bed early. He was a little monster all night. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sit still for his bath.”
Hoffmann chased a fire ant through the kitchen. Frederick rubbed his sleepless eyes. The whisper of a headache — sparklers, spitting hotly — sprinkled his vision. “Ruthie, is he still awake? Can I speak to him?” He tried to grasp the Dewar’s, just out of reach on a counter, without pulling the phone cord out of the wall. His throat, his brain, winced with need.
“No. I don’t hear anything now,” Ruth said. “Maybe he’s down finally.”
“That’s no way to treat him, Ruth.”
“His routine’s disturbed,” she said. Scolding, like a nun. “He keeps expecting Daddy to walk through the door.”
“All right, all right, I’ll come by tomorrow and he and I can rip the heels of your shoes off together. Something happy like that.” Always, in uncomfortable conversations, Frederick tried to make a distancing joke. He knew this about himself and attempted to relax more with people, especially those he loved. But Ruth … Ruth was so damned hard.
From his window he could see the park, the sculpture garden with its bright green benches, its steel birds and beasts, ceramic animals. Beyond the park’s brittle willows was the hospital Ruth had rushed him to one night when he’d accidentally cut his arm with an X-Acto knife. “What about Hoffmann? Please?”
“Hoffmann’s your problem. I hate that cat. You found him, you keep him.”
“I can’t take him to Manhattan, Ruth. He was born for this humidity.”
“Well, you should’ve planned your exit a little better.”
Now Hoffmann was batting the wilted ant around a stack of Frederick’s papers: sketches, letters, the rough draft of the catalog preface for his buddy, Mark Jarvis — Frederick’s last official business as a citizen of Houston.
“I didn’t plan any of this, honey, you know that — ” He didn’t finish the thought; he’d only make a mess, much worse than the one Hoffmann had just made of his work. Besides, he was lying, and he knew Ruth knew it.
“Whatever,” she answered bitterly.
She hadn’t responded to his little slip. The word “honey” had startled him, filling his mouth, as surprising as his memories, attaching now to meals they’d shared together in the old days. She’d always made the most wonderful Italian sauces, Frederick recalled, with bacon or prosciutto. Now, as they talked, he tasted her pasta carbonara.
They agreed on a time for his visit tomorrow with Robbie. The moment he hung up, he went for the Scotch. This was the last bottle he’d buy. Ever. As soon as he got to New York, he’d flush his system, disappear into his paintings and Bliss, the new art journal he’d recently been hired to edit.
The booze steadied his hands. The glimmers in his eyes subsided. He considered unplugging the phone. His number was one digit different from a suicide-prevention hotline’s. Each night he was assaulted by misery, as sharp and immovable as Mark’s statues in the park, but he left the damn thing alone. Robbie might wake, sick, in the middle of the night. Or Ruth’s heart, wrapped in rancor as tight as tinfoil, might warm up a little. If not, he figured he could live with the agonizing wrong numbers another week.
Marlon Brando yelled from down the block. Next to the corner superette where Frederick bought his snacks, a second-run theater was screening Elia Kazan movies all month. The ushers left the back doors open in the city’s summer broil; the actors’ voices soared above the ratcheting sounds of crickets, just gearing up in the park.