She looked at the candy box in his hand. Being on her hands and knees, she had to twist her neck to look up at him. Doc couldn’t tell whether there was suspicion and doubt on her face or only strained muscles from her position.
“Candy?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t—” she began, and then Fauna’s words crowded in on her with short punches. “What the hell,” she said. “Thanks.”
Doc was losing his poise. Suzy had straightened her neck and from her position she couldn’t see above his knees. Doc tried for lightness again, and he sounded clumsy to himself. “This is a formal call,” he said. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
“Do you think you can get in?”
“I can try.”
“There ain’t much room inside.”
Doc remained silent.
“Oh, for God’s sakes come on in!” said Suzy. She backed her head out of the opening.
Doc got down on his hands and knees. He threw the candy box through the firedoor, then crawled through the opening. He thought with amusement, A man who can do this with dignity need never again fear anything, and at that moment his trouser cuff caught on the door and pulled it closed against his ankle. He was all inside except one foot and he could not free himself. “I seem to be hung up,” he said.
“Hold it,” said Suzy. She straddled him and worked the cuff loose from the door corner. “I think you tore your pants,” she said as she backed off over his shoulders. “Maybe I can mend ’em for you.”
Doc’s eyes were getting used to the dim interior. A little light came in from the smokestack and met a little more that entered from the firedoor.
“It’s hard to see at first,” said Suzy. “I got a lamp here. Wait, I’ll light it up.”
“No need,” said Doc. He could see now and something in him collapsed with pity at the pretension of the curtains, the painted walls, and the home-built dressing table with its mirror and bottles. My God, what a brave thing is the human! he thought. And then Suzy brought his rising compassion crashing down.
“There’s a welder eats at the Poppy. Know what he’s going to do first any day he can? Bring his torch and cut windows in the sides.”
Her voice echoed with enthusiasm. “I’ll put in little window frames and some flower boxes with red geraniums,” she said. “’Course, I’ll have to paint the outside then, white, I think, with green trim. Maybe a trellis like in front. I got a nice hand with roses.”
Then she was silent. Constraint and formality sifted in and filled the boiler.
Doc thought in wonder, It’s not a boiler at all. Somehow she has managed to make a home of this. He said, “You’ve done a wonderful job here.”
“Thanks.”
He spoke his thought. “It’s a real home.”
“It’s comfortable,” she said. “I never had no room of my own.”[120]
“Well, you have now.”
“Sometimes I set in here and think how they’d have to blast to get me out if I didn’t want to come.”
Doc gathered his courage. “Suzy, I’m sorry for what happened.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t none of your fault.”
“Yes, it was.”
“I don’t think so,” she said with finality.
“I would do anything to—”
“Look, Doc,” she said, “you won’t let it alone, so maybe I got to rub your nose in it a little. It wasn’t no fault of yours, but it sure as hell give me a lesson. I had myself a bawl and now it’s done. There ain’t nothing for you to do. I don’t need nothing. Anybody’s sorry for me, they’re wasting their time. I ain’t never had it so good in my life. Got that? Well, don’t forget it! There ain’t nothing for you nor nobody to do ’cause I’m doing it all myself. If you can get that through your knocker, okay. If you can’t, you better take a powder.”
He said, “What a conceited fool I’ve been!”
Then silence hung in the boiler. Suzy broke it when she felt that his nose was sufficiently rubbed in it.
“Know what?” she said brightly. “They got a night class, typing, at the high school. I signed up. Next Saturday I get a rent typewriter. I can learn.”
“I’ll bet you can too. Maybe you’ll type my paper for me.”
“You’re going to write it after all?”
“I’ve got to, Suzy. It’s all I have. I’m a dead duck without it. I’m going to La Jolla Saturday for the spring tides. I’m glad. Are you?”
“Why not?” she asked. “I don’t like to see nobody kicked in the face.” She drew up formality like a coverlet. “You want I should make you a nice cup of tea? I got a Sterno stove.”
“I’d like it.”
She had the situation in hand now, and she talked on easily while she lighted the stove and put her little teakettle on to boil.
“I’m making good tips down at the Poppy,” she said. “Paid off Joe Blaikey in two weeks. Ella’s thinking about taking a week’s vacation. She ain’t never had a vacation. Hell, I can run the joint easy. ’Scuse that ‘hell.’ I don’t hardly never cuss no more.”
“You’re doing fine,” said Doc. “Could you tell me, without rubbing my nose in it, what you want in a man? Might help me—another time.”
“Tea’s ready,” said Suzy. She passed him the steaming cup. “Leave it steep a little longer,” she said. “Sugar’s in the cup on the dressing table.”
When he was stirring the sugar in she said, “If I thought it wasn’t a pitch you was making I’d tell you.”
“I don’t think it’s a pitch.”
“Okay then. Maybe what I want ain’t anywhere in the world, but I want it, so I think there is such a thing. I want a guy that’s wide open. I want him to be a real guy, maybe even a tough guy, but I want a window in him. He can have his dukes up every other place but not with me. And he got to need the hell out of me. He got to be the kind of guy that if he ain’t got me he ain’t got nothing. And brother, that guy’s going to have something!”
“Except for toughness, you’re kind of describing me,” said Doc.
“You keep out of this! You told me and I was too dumb to listen. You like what you got. You told me straight. I’d spoil it. Took me a long time to wise up, but I sure wised up.”
“Maybe what I said wasn’t true.”
“When you said it with your face it was true all right.”
Doc felt beaten. There was no anger in her tone, nothing but acceptance, together with an undertone of excitement. That was it, excitement, almost amounting to gaiety.
He said, “You know, Suzy, you sound happy.”
“I am,” said Suzy. “And you know who done it for me?”
“Who?”
“Fauna. That’s a hunk of dame! She made me proud, and I ain’t never been proud before in my life.”
“How did she do it?” Doc asked. “I need some of that myself.”
“She told me, and made me say it—‘There ain’t nothing in the world like Suzy’—and she says Suzy is a good thing. And goddam it, it’s true! Now let’s knock it off, huh?”
“Okay,” said Doc. “I guess I ought to be going.”
“Yeah,” said Suzy, “I got to go to work. Say, remember that guy you told me about that lived out where we went that night?”
“The seer? Sure, what about him?”
“Joe Blaikey had to pick him up.”
“What for?”
“Stealing. From the Safeway store. Joe hated to do it.”
“I’ll see what I can do. So long, Suzy.”
“You ain’t mad?”
“No, Suzy, but I’m sorry.”
“So’m I. But hell, you can’t have everything. So long, Doc. Hope you do good at La Jolla.”
When Doc crossed the street this time he hoped no one was watching. He went into the laboratory, walked to his cot, and lay down. He was sick with loss. He couldn’t think. Only one thing was sure: he had to go to La Jolla. If he didn’t he would die, because there would be nothing left in him to believe in, even to defend. He squinched his eyes closed and looked at the bright points of light swimming on his retinas.
120
“no room of my own”: Suzy’s lament ironically and meta phorically echoes Virginia Woolf’s pioneering feminist essay,