“It’s good of you to say that,” he said, and got up. “You better go up now.” But she 204
didn’t follow his suit. “You ought to know why you’re not doing it.” “I should?”
“Yes. If you do things and can’t explain them-like you said-that might be okay because they still get done. But if you decide not to, you ought to know why.”
“All right,” he said. He nodded toward the dining room, where the money still lay in the silver dish. “It’s the money. You’re too young to be off whoring.”
“I won’t take it,” she said promptly.
“I know you won’t. That’s why I won’t. I want you to take it.”
“Because everybody isn’t as nice as you?”
“That’s right.” He looked at her challengingly.
She shook her head in an exasperated way and stood up. “All right. But you’re a bourgeois, you know that?”
“Yes.”
She came over and kissed him on the mouth. It was exciting. He could smell her, and the smell was nice. He was almost instantly hard.
“Go on,” he said.
“If you reconsider during the night-”
“I won’t.” He watched her go to the stairs, her feet bare. “Hey?”
She turned, her eyebrows raised.
“What’s your name?”
“Olivia, if it matters. Stupid, isn’t it? Like Olivia DeHaviland.”
“No, it’s okay. I like it. Night, Olivia.”
“Night. ”
She went up. He heard the light click on, the way he had always heard it when Mary went up before him. If he listened closely, he might be able to hear the quietly maddening sound of her sweater against her skin as she pulled it over her head, or the snap of the catch that held her jeans nipped in to her waist . . .”
Using the Space Command module, he turned on the TV.
His penis was still fully erect, uncomfortable. It bulged against the crotch of his pants, what Mary had sometimes called the rock of ages and sometimes the snake-that-turned-to-stone in their younger days, when bed was nothing but another playground sport. He pulled at the folds of his underwear and when it didn’t go down, he stood up.
After a while the erection wilted and he sat down again.
When the news was over, a movie came on-John Agar in Brain from Planet Arous.
He fell asleep sitting in front of the TV with the Space Command module still clasped loosely in one hand. A few minutes later there was a stirring beneath the fly of his pants as his erection returned, stealthily, like a murderer revisiting the scene of an ancient crime.
205
December 7, 1973
But he did go to her in the night.
The dream of Mr. Piazzi’s dog came to him, and this time he knew the boy approaching the dog was Charlie before the bitch struck. That made it worse and when Mr. Piazzi’s dog lunged, he struggled up from sleep like a man clawing his way out of a shallow, sandy grave.
He clawed at the air, not awake but not asleep either, and he lost his sense of balance on the couch, where he had finally curled up. He tottered miserably on the edge of balance for a moment, disoriented, terrified for his dead son who died over and over again in his dreams.
He fell onto the floor, banging his head and hurting his shoulder, and came awake enough to know he was in his own living room and that the dream was over. The reality was miserable, but not actively terrifying.
What was he doing? A sort of gestalt reality of what he had done to his life came to him, a hideous overview. He had ripped it right down the middle, like a cheap piece of cloth. Nothing was right anymore. He was hurting. He could taste stale Southern Comfort in the back of his throat, and he burped up some acid-tasting sour stuff and swallowed it back.
He began to shiver and seized his knees in a futile effort to stop it. In the night everything was strange. What was he doing, sitting on the floor of his living room and holding his knees and shaking like an old drunk in an alley? Or like a catatonic, a fucking psycho, that was more like it. Was that it? Was he a psycho? Nothing sort of funny and whimsical like a fruitcake or a dork or a rubber crutch but an out-and-out psycho? The thought dumped him into fresh terror. Had he gone to a hoodlum in an effort to get explosives? Was he really hiding two guns out in the garage, one of them big enough to kill an elephant? A little whining noise came out of his throat and he got up tentatively, his bones creaking like those of a very old man.
He went up the stairs without allowing himself to think, and stepped into his bedroom. “Olivia?” he whispered. This was preposterous, like an old-time Rudolph Valentino movie. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t even sound sleepy. “The clock was keeping me awake.
That digital clock. It kept going click. I pulled the plug.”
“That’s all right,” he said. It was a ludicrous thing to say. “I had a bad dream. ” The sound of covers being thrown back. “Come on. Get in with me.”
“I-”
“Will you shut up?”
He got in with her. She was naked. They made love. Then slept.
In the morning, the temperature was only 10 degrees. She asked him if he got a 206
newspaper.
“We used to,” he said. “Kenny Upslinger delivered it. His family moved to Iowa. ”
“Iowa, yet,” she said, and turned on the radio. A man was giving the weather. Clear and cold.
“Would you like a fried egg?”
“Two, if you’ve got them.”
“Sure. Listen, about last night-”
“Never mind last night. I came. That’s very rare for me. I enjoyed it. ”
He felt a certain sneaking pride, maybe what she had wanted him to feel. He fried the eggs. Two for her, two for him. Toast and coffee. She drank three cups with cream and sugar.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked him when they had both finished.
“Take you out to the highway,” he said promptly.
She made an impatient gesture. “Not that. About your life. ”
He grinned. “That sounds serious.”
“Not for me,” she said. “For you.”
“I haven’t thought about it,” he said. “You know, before”-he accented the word before slightly to indicate all of his life and all of its parts he had sailed off the edge of the world-“before the ax fell, I think I must have felt the way some condemned man feels in the death house. Nothing seemed real. It seemed I was living in a glass dream that would go on and on. Now everything seems real. Last night . . . that was very real. ”
I’m glad,” she said, and she looked glad. “But what will you do now?”
“I really don’t know.”
She said: “I think that’s sad. ”
“Is it?” he asked. It was a real question.
They were in the car again, driving Route 7 toward Landy. The traffic near the city was stop and go. People were on their way to work. When they passed the construction on the 784 extension, the day’s operation was already cranking up. Men in yellow hi-impact plastic construction hats and green rubber boots were climbing into their machines, frozen breath pluming from their mouths. The engine of one of the orange city payloaders cranked, cranked, kicked over with a coughing mortar-explosion sound, cranked again, then roared into a choppy idle. The driver gunned it in irregular bursts like the sound of warfare.
“From up here they look like little boys playing trucks in a sandpile,” she said.
Outside the city, traffic smoothed out. She had taken the two hundred dollars with neither embarrassment nor reluctance-with no special eagerness, either. She had slit a small section of the CPO coat’s lining, had put the bills inside, and had then sewed the slit back up with a needle and some blue thread from Mary’s sewing box. She had refused his 207
offer of a ride to the bus station, saying the money would last longer if she went on hitching.
“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a car like this?” he asked.
“Humh?” She looked at him, bumped out of her own thoughts.
He smiled. “Why you? Why Las Vegas? You’re living in the margins same as me.
Give me some background.”
She shrugged. “There isn’t much. I was going to college at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham. That’s near Portsmouth. I was a junior this year. Living off campus. With a guy. We got into a heavy drug thing.”
“You mean like heroin?”
She laughed merrily. “No, I’ve never known anyone who did heroin. Us nice middle-class druggies stick to the hallucinogens. Lysergic acid. Mescaline. Peyote a couple of times, STP a couple of times. Chemicals. I did sixteen or eighteen trips between September and November.”