And besides — Vi would be home soon. Any minute, really.
He stood outside the door, listening.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. It sounded like the world’s smallest blind man tapping his cane on the porcelain in there, feeling his way around, checking out the old surroundings.
‘Air in the pipes!’ Howard said in a strong, declamatory voice, and boldly threw the bathroom door open. He bent low, grabbed the broomhandle, and snatched it back out the door. He did not have to take more than two steps into the little room with its faded, lumpy linoleum and its dingy, mesh-crisscrossed view on the airshaft, and he most certainly did not look into the bathroom sink.
He stood outside, listening.
Scratch, scratch. Scritch-scratch.
He returned the broom and dustpan to the little nook in the kitchen between the stove and the refrigerator and then returned to the living room. He stood there for a moment, looking at the bathroom door. It stood ajar, spilling a fan of yellow light into the little squib of hall.
You better go turn off the light. You know how VI raises the roof about stuff like that. You don’t even have to go in. Just reach through the door and flick it off.
But what if something touched his hand while he was reaching for the light switch?
What if another finger touched his finger?
How about that, fellows and girls?
He could still hear that sound. There was something terribly relentless about it. It was maddening.
Scratch. Scritch. Scratch.
On the TV, Alex Trebek was reading the Double Jeopardy categories. Howard went over and turned up the sound a little. Then be sat down in his chair again and told himself he didn’t hear anything from the bathroom, not a single thing.
Except maybe a little air in the pipes.
Vi Mitla was one of those women who move with such dainty precision that they seem almost fragile . . . but Howard had been married to her for twenty-one years, and he knew there was nothing fragile about her at all. She ate, drank, worked, danced, and made love in exactly the same way: con brio. She came into the apartment like a pocket hurricane. One large arm curled a brown paper sack against the right side of her bosom. She carried it through into the kitchen
without pausing. Howard heard the bag crackle, heard the refrigerator door open and then close again. When she came back, she tossed Howard her coat. ‘Hang this up for me, will you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got to pee. Do I ever! Whew!’
Whew! was one of Vi’s favorite exclamations. Her version rhymed with P.U., the child’s exclamation for something smelly.
‘Sure, Vi,’ Howard said, and rose slowly to his feet with Vi’s dark-blue coat in his arms. His eyes never left her as she went down the hall and through the bathroom door.
‘Con Ed loves it when you leave the lights on, Howie,’ she called back over her shoulder.
‘I did it on purpose,’ he said. ‘I knew that’d be your first stop.’
She laughed. He heard the rustle of her clothes. ‘You know me too well — people will say we’re in love.’
You ought to tell her — warn her, Howard thought, and knew he could do nothing of the kind.
What was he supposed to say? Watch out, Vi, there’s a finger coming out of the basin drainhole, don’t let the guy it belongs to poke you in the eye if you bend over to get a glass of water?
Besides, it had just been a hallucination, one brought on by a little air in the pipes and his fear of rats and mice. Now that some minutes had gone by, this seemed almost plausible to him.
Just the same, he only stood there with Vi’s coat in his arms, waiting to see if she would scream. And, after ten or fifteen endless seconds, she did.
‘My God, Howard!’
Howard jumped, hugging the coat more tightly to his chest. His heart, which had begun to slow down, began to do its Morse-code number again. He struggled to speak, but at first his throat was locked shut.
‘What?’ he managed finally. ‘What, Vi? What is it?’
‘The towels! Half of em are on the floor! Sheesh! What happened?’ ‘
‘I don’t know,’ he called back. His heart was thumping harder than ever, and it was impossible to tell if the sickish, pukey feeling deep down in his belly was relief or terror. He supposed he must have knocked the towels off the shelf during his first attempt to exit the bathroom, when he had hit the wall.
‘It must be spookies,’ she said. ‘Also, I don’t mean to nag, but you forgot to put the ring down again.’
‘Oh — sorry,’ he said.
‘Yeah, that’s what you always say,’ her voice floated back. ‘Sometimes I think you want me to fall in and drown. I really do!’ There was a clunk as she put it down herself. Howard waited, heart thumping away, her coat still hugged against his chest.
‘He holds the record for the most strikeouts in a single game,’ Alex Trebek read.
‘Who was Tom Seaver?’ Mildred snapped right back.
‘Roger Clemens, you nitwit,’ Howard said.
Pwooosh! There went the flush. And the moment he was waiting for (Howard had just realized this consciously) was now at hand. The pause seemed almost endless. Then he heard the squeak of the washer in the bathroom faucet marked H (he kept meaning to replace that washer and kept forgetting), followed by water flowing into the basin, followed by the sound of Vi briskly washing her hands.
No screams.
Of course not, because there was no finger.
‘Air in the pipes,’ Howard said with more assurance, and went to hang up his wife’s coat.
She came out, adjusting her skirt. ‘I got the ice cream,’ she said, ‘cherry-vanilla, just like you wanted. But before we try it, why don’t you have a beer with me, Howie? It’s this new stuff.
American Grain, it’s called. I never heard of it, but it was on sale so I bought a six-pack. Nothing ventured, nothing grained, am I right?’
‘Hardy-har,’ he said, wrinkling his nose. Vi’s penchant for puns had struck him as cute when he first met her, but it had staled somewhat over the years. Still, now that he was over his fright, a beer sounded like just the thing. Then, as Vi went out into the kitchen to get him a glass of her new find, he realized he wasn’t over his fright at all. He supposed that having a hallucination was better than seeing a real finger poking out of the drain of the bathroom basin, a finger that was alive and moving around, but it wasn’t exactly an evening-maker, either.
Howard sat down in his chair again. As Alex Trebek announced the Final Jeopardy category
— it was The Sixties — he found himself thinking of various TV shows he’d seen where it turned out that a character who was having hallucinations either had (a) epilepsy or (b) a brain tumor. He found he could remember a lot of them.
‘You know,’ Vi said, coming back into the room with two glasses of beer, ‘I don’t like the Vietnamese people who run that market. I don’t think I’ll ever like them. I think they’re sneaky.’
‘Have you ever caught them doing anything sneaky?’ Howard asked. He himself thought the Lahs were exceptional people . . . but tonight he didn’t care much one way or the other.
‘No,’ Vi said, ‘not a thing. And that makes me all the more suspicious. Also, they smile all the time. My father used to say, “Never trust a smiling man.” He also said . . . Howard, are you feeling all right?’
‘He said that?’ Howard asked, making a rather feeble attempt at levity.
‘Très amusant, cheri. You look as pale as milk. Are you coming down with something?’
No, he thought of saying, I’m not coming down with something — that’s too mild a term for it.
I think I might have epilepsy or maybe a brain tumor, Vi — how’s that for coming down with something?
‘It’s just work, I guess,’ he said. ‘I told you about the new tax account. St. Anne’s Hospital.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s a rat’s nest,’ he said, and that immediately made him think of the bathroom again — the sink and the drain. ‘Nuns shouldn’t be allowed to do bookkeeping. Someone ought to have put it in the Bible just to make sure.’
‘You let Mr. Lathrop push you around too much,’ Vi told him firmly. ‘It’s going to go on and on unless you stand up for yourself. Do you want a heart attack?’
‘No.’ And I don’t want epilepsy or a brain tumor, either. Please, God, make it a one-time thing.
Okay? Just some weird mental burp that happens once and never again. Okay? Please? Pretty please? With some sugar on it?