24
Varney awoke and his arm moved quickly but silently, his hand sliding into the space between the mattress and springs where his gun was hidden. As his fingers touched the grip, he already knew it had been another mistake. The soft, rustling sound he had heard was only Mae’s small bare feet padding across the floor to the bathroom. He turned his eyes in that direction just as the door closed softly.
In a moment he heard the shower running. He rolled over and stared up at the old light fixture on the ceiling, slowly reversing the perspective of his thought so that he was up with the half globe looking down on the bed at himself. Was Varney happy? This seemed to be what other people referred to as being happy. He tried to feel it, to feel anything, but he caught himself calculating again, enumerating the things he now had, and insisting to himself, “That is good. And that is at least okay. And that is something I sort of like . . .”
He had never lived with a person who was female since he had left his mother’s house, eleven years ago. At the moment it was not as bad as he knew it would have been if the woman had been confident enough to let her true nature show. Since she had come here, Mae had been on tiptoe, just like this morning, slipping lightly and quietly from one place to another, always on the periphery, where she wouldn’t be too obtrusive and get on his nerves.
She almost lived out of the black overnight bag, taking a few of her belongings out of it, putting them back when she was finished, and pushing the bag under the bed. She kept the apartment neat and clean without ever appearing to touch anything that belonged to Varney, and she had quickly gotten used to his preferences.
Varney didn’t mind listening to her talk, because she had a pleasant, musical voice, but he didn’t like having to give her long answers. He had spent so much of his life alone that he had never developed the habit of talking just to fill up silences, and he didn’t feel any need to deliver a running inventory of every thought that entered his mind. But he understood that women needed to do that, so he let her. The surprise was that she had learned to accept the little he said as sufficient. He knew she was on her best behavior. He could tell that in bed, if no other way, because she even talked there. Everything he did was wonderful, every time was the best ever, and nothing was ever too much or not enough. She was always ready, always watching him closely without seeming to. Varney waited: she couldn’t possibly be as perfect as she seemed to be.
Varney had always been good at observing people, so that he would know how to behave the way they expected him to. Mae, it seemed, was good at the same thing. Probably he was not as good at it as Mae. But he had watched other women closely at all stages of relationships, and he knew what was probably coming. He remembered talking to Coleman Simms about women once when their two female companions had gone to the ladies’ room.
“You offer them a drink, but they say no,” he had said. “So a minute later, they reach over and drink yours. You offer again, and they say no, and look at you as if you must be deaf.”
Coleman nodded. “She don’t want a drink, kid.”
“Then why—”
“Because they’re like that. What she wants is not a drink. She wants an easement.”
“What’s that?”
“The right, like a legal right, to drink yours when she feels like it. It tells her something she wants to know, maybe tells other women she claims you or something.” He shrugged. “If you don’t like them, stay away from them and get a dog.”
Varney knew that if he let things go on very long, Mae would get comfortable and begin to do things like that. She would begin bringing possessions in here, moving things around and cluttering everything up. She would have to revert to her nature at some point. He guessed that the past three weeks must have been what a honeymoon was like. Both people were still being very careful, scared to death they were going to make a mistake and fart.
Mae slipped out of the bathroom, holding her hair dryer in her hand. He could see the alert, questioning look in her eyes. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said. “I wanted to get an early shower so I’d be out of your way when you finish your exercises.”
He was almost angry at the falseness of it, but he reminded himself that she was trying to please him. “Relax,” he said. “I wanted to get up anyway.” He put on his shorts and a sweatshirt and began his routines. Before he had worked up much of a sweat, she had pulled her bag out from under the bed and had the strap over her shoulder. She walked to the door and said, “I’ll be back at six.” She paused. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Between crunches, he said, “I heard you.”
“If you don’t want me to—”
“No,” he said, as he dropped to the ground for his first set of push-ups. “No problem.” He heard the door close and went back to counting. When he reached fifty, he went to the closet and moved aside the hangers so he could do his pull-ups.
He couldn’t blame her for being so careful. All these clothes he had to push aside, he had bought so she would be in a good mood. That was another thing about women that he had learned from careful observation. They had all these strange things about them that made little sense. They liked clothes so much that they sometimes bought new ones they never even wore, just kept them in a closet to make them feel good, as though it made a difference. They all thought they were fat, and even if they knew they were thin, they harbored some suspicion that they were fat inside, and were just managing to hide the truth by being thin. Even then, they had to hear people tell them they weren’t fat, so they’d know they hadn’t been caught yet.
They also liked to say that other women who weren’t very attractive were beautiful. He was not sure why they did that, since they never let on that they knew they were lying. He had tried out theories. One was that if they established an unappealing woman as the standard, then they would be, by comparison, breathtaking. Another was that they all knew perfectly well what all men looked at and how they felt about it, but were trying to be subversive, insisting that the system wasn’t fair, and therefore that they could obliterate it by mere denial. None of his hypotheses had been quite satisfactory when applied to even one woman on all occasions. There were a great many oddities. But Coleman’s words came back to him: “If you don’t like them, stay away from them.” It was still astounding to Varney that a man who seemed to know so much about people had been stupid enough to get himself killed.
Varney looked up at the closet ceiling as he did his pull-ups, and once again focused on the square up there. It was an access hatch to the attic—not an attic, really, just a crawl space with bare two-by-fours and insulation. At the top of a pull, he held himself with one hand and pushed up with the other to see how quickly he could open it. Then he did another pull-up and closed it again. He had hidden his extra guns up there, where no casual visitor would find them. When he had finished his second set of push-ups and his crunches and sit-ups, he went out for his run. He completed his usual course to the high school and around the track, then came back and showered.
He tried to keep himself from feeling annoyed that Mae had gone out alone. He would have liked to walk somewhere with her and buy her lunch and listen to her talk. That thought brought back a dull worry. He had only brought with him the cash hidden in his house in Buffalo when he had left, and that had amounted to twenty thousand. The used car he had picked up had cost him eleven, and paying for Mae for two weeks had cost him most of the rest. He owed Tracy about four thousand for various expenses, and he didn’t exactly have it where he could easily reach it.
He should just get into the car right now and drive away. These people were taking advantage of him. Tracy was charging him outrageous rent for living in this ratty apartment that had been vacant so long it had smelled musty, and outrageous fees for getting Mae to dye and cut his hair and get him a pair of clear glasses and help him pick out different clothes. She had implied she wasn’t taking any of the money he was giving her for Mae, but he didn’t believe her. He had asked Mae about it, and she had just avoided his eyes uneasily and said, “Tracy takes care of me okay.” He should walk away from this place.