The Followed Man Page 13

  Later, after more warm water splashing and swimming, Ham was cooking the spareribs, turning them with giant tweezers and painting them with red sauce. Jane and Luke sat at the rim of the pool.

  Jane said, "Do you ever touch women? I mean do you ever sort of spontaneously reach out your hand and touch them?"

  "I'm afraid I'm getting on toward the dirty old man category," he said. "When I was young and pretty I did."

  "Old! Huh!"

  "Maybe I'm afraid if I touch them I won't be able to let go and I'll have to take them down and tear off their clothes and fuck 'em and eat 'em and in general act pretty unsocial."

  "You're only partly kidding," she said, giving him a long, deep, how-interesting look. Evidently she thought him tame enough, and in the circumstances, at least, she was probably right. His thinking was vague, a little circular, or perhaps spiral, because he couldn't quite come back to where he began.

  "No," he said, listening to himself with an interest that was at best fragmentary, "no, I guess I'm not totally kidding." Now, that sounded, in retrospect, pretty logical and intelligent. But what had he been going to say next? "Jane, Jane," he said, "I'm pretty well drunk and confused. I had something I was going to say that would have made you feel just right, but I'm absolutely fucked if I can remember what it was."

  He immediately forgot what he'd just said, and was surprised at her anger.

  "Why do you think you're so superior?" she said in a low voice. "You were going to tell me something that would make me feel good? Well, fuck you!" She slid into the pool and swam the twenty yards or so to the other side, where she turned without looking at him and floated on her back.

  He lay back and tried to remember what exactly had happened, but couldn't. Ham came over, climbed the steps to the deck and announced that the spareribs were done. If Jane would get the rolls and salad, they could eat. Then he recognized the antago­nism and said, "Oh oh, another goddam argument? Nixon's long gone, so what's it about this time?"

  Jane swam back and without a word climbed out, irritated that one of her buttocks had slid clear of the bikini, which she violently corrected and went toward the kitchen. There had been a red pimple on that white buttock, Luke observed cruelly to himself, a fairly angry sort with a good deal of—what was the word? Mass to it. It must have been kind of painful to sit on.

  Ham shook his head tolerantly and went to set the outside tres­tle table, where they ate, Jane still imperiously silent. Luke was a little unstable physically, though he had an appetite and ate a lot. They had white wine in large stemmed glasses which he drank, he thought, not quite at the swilling level.

  At one point he kept hearing little popcorn-popping sounds, lit­tle angry ticks and cracks he first thought were in his own head, but they came from an electric insect executioner on a pedestal, palely bluish on the inside, that fried moths and bugs at an alarm­ing rate. "Damn," he said. "Look at that mother eat its way through the cosmos!" Darkness was coming on, though it was still humid and hot. "Jane," he said, moving his head to the side to catch her averted eyes, "I love your spareribs! Did we have an ar­gument? I can't for the life of me remember any argument. Lis­ten! According to the Bible, Eve was a sparerib, though I don't ex­actly know what I'm saying. . . ."

  In the morning sometime he woke up in a strange room. It was not his room at the Biltmore. It was not the bedroom at home. When it became clear that it was a room in the Joneses' house an absolute avalanche of doubtful, possibly shameful memories fell upon him and crushed him down into the springs and stuffing. "Oh, God!" he said out loud. It seemed there were more and more things he'd said and done that wouldn't be good at all in re­trospect. Was it true that he'd shit into the aspidistra? No, and it was no use being flippant at this hour, whatever hour it was. It was true that Ham, good old good-natured Ham Jones, had gotten very angry when Jane had insisted on skinny-dipping in the pool at midnight. That was her word for it, and drunk as Luke was he could tell that she was trying to punish both of them, but why did he have to enter into a domestic squabble? Who did he think he was, anyway, some kind of superior idiot who could arbitrate twenty years of grievances?

  Yet he was fascinated and not quite embarrassed enough when Jane stripped off her yellow bikini, revealing a white one beneath that was untanned skin, except, of course, for her light brown tri­angle of pubic hair. She had undressed in the living room, and it struck him that a bikini, small as it was, actually did cover an awful lot, because without it she assumed power. Her sarcasm, none of which he could remember, was directed mostly against him, and that also angered Ham because one shouldn't treat a guest that way. Her breasts had blue veins in them, and seemed vulnerable, milk white but authoritative in their heaviness and their eye-like wide brown nipples that moved as she yelled.

  He supposed it was not entirely his fault, actually, that he found himself wrestling with both husband and wife, ostensibly trying to keep them from hurting each other. He was lucky he wasn't killed.

  Oh, God, that rolling around on the shag carpet, wall to wall. He moved and the sheets stung the raw scratches on his ribs. There were bruises, too, one from the corner of the marble-topped coffee table. Once he grabbed Ham by one of his hairy kidney rolls, a texture like fresh bread. But Ham had finally snuck a quick slap across his shoulder that caught Jane on the side of her face and then there were no more cries of "bitch!" "cocksucker!" "bastard!" and the like, but tears and moans and sobs from both Jane and Ham. It was then Luke Carr, priest, psychiatrist, medi­cine man, counselor, tearful himself, evidently conducted some kind of therapy session complete with weeping confession, abject apology, birth trauma, self-flagellation, kissing, feeling and hug­ging. . . . The portentous sentiments contained in Reverend Doctor Carr's sermons and admonitions burned shamefully at the edges of the alcohol shadow that lay ominously across his memory.

  It was also his idea that they should, after all, do what Jane wanted and go skinny-dipping in the tepid pool in the light of a hazy moon. Chlorine therapy, or something. And it was there that Gail, their daughter, returning from somewhere, found them all palely floating.

  "What in hell happened to the living room?" she asked.

  "We had a little argument, dear," Jane said, submerging all but her head.

  "Jesus! Well, good night!" Gail said.

  Other moments would emerge later, he supposed. He held his head in both hands, as if it were a vase. Physical and mental pain too often occurred together. Wounds (non-fatal ones) were all right in sports, work, or war but he couldn't stand the ones he had now.

  It was eight o'clock. He tried to think that his pain and embar­rassment might indicate that he was getting used to the deaths. He did care about his life now, whether he knew it or not, and he must get away from all these people. Maybe he could leave a note and sneak out before the Joneses woke up to their own pain. He would go and hide, change his name, disappear.

  His toes nearly disappeared in the thick carpet. This was a guest room, with the ever-new and moribund look of guest rooms. All naps were unworn, all the little pictures were straight, there were no cobwebs, no worn trails, no dents, no scratches. The connect­ing bathroom gleamed with onyx tile and chrome; the toilet seat was covered in thick mauve pile, the purple towels were two fuzzy inches thick on their silver rods and rings, the shower curtain was frosted glass. Though he liked warmth and hot water as much as anyone, bathrooms had always offended him a little because they seemed to imply a worshipful horror of piss and shit that he couldn't quite manage to understand, even in himself. The power of shit— God knew he'd had his hands in it often enough. People, people. He always made a hurtful fool of himself.

  He took a shower, his scratches raw, and put on his clothes. Shem's knife was a hard, utilitarian lump in the pocket of the light pants. He hoped the Joneses were not up, but to leave without seeing them would cause its own complications, and unless he went out a window he would have to pass the kitchen. They, too, must be mortified by all that had happened last night.<
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  As he came to the kitchen Ham called, "He's up! He's up!" and came out and grabbed him above the elbows. Ham was dapper in white tennis shorts, sneakers and tennis sweater. "We heard the shower going so we knew you were a survivor! Didn't we tie one on for sure? Come and have some coffee, Sport!" And pulled him into the kitchen. Jane was still in a robe, one cheek darker than the other, but aside from that she looked pretty fresh.

  "What a blast!" she said, her fingers at her temples. "Gail sure thought us old crocks were out of our gourds!"

  "Us old crocks were out of our gourds," Ham said. "But that's our goddam privilege, right?"

  They gave Luke coffee, and tomato juice with secret ingredients in it that he identified as Worcestershire sauce and probably vodka.

  "Too bad about the quarreling," Ham said brightly, a little bleary in the eyes if one looked too closely. "But so it goes, huh? Nothing serious. We're all friends here, right?"

  "All friends," Luke said.

  "Jesus," Ham said. "Didn't we tie one on?"

  "Sozzeled, absolutely," Luke said.

  "Mashed, squashed, pie-eyed," Ham said.

  "All bent out of shape," Jane said.

  "Yeah, you better believe it!" Ham said.

  9.

  In the next few days, out of some sort of penance, Luke be­lieved, he went through things, chose and discarded, packed and transported, and finally all of those possessions he had saved for some vague future use took up a space in Joe the Mover's ware­house about the size of a small room. He sold hundreds of ephe­meral books to a secondhand book jobber, selling them because he couldn't just throw them away. He borrowed a battery charger from the local service station, got the Hornet running and sold it at a loss to the dealer Helen had bought it from. He gave clothes, toys and other things to the Salvation Army and to neighbors. The number, the sheer bulk, the complexity, the horrendous ini­tial expense, of the machines, utensils, implements, equipment, furniture, vestments, supplies contained in his house amazed him; if all the houses on his street, in the town and across the vast coun­try were so crammed with goods, what had happened to necessity and use in his civilization? And yet the discarding was hard—with each choice a surprisingly deep dismemberment occurred: wouldn't he ever have a use for an electric food processor called a Cuisinart? He could not see his life ahead of him, and so he didn't know, but instinct told him to discard, sell, divest himself of possessions.

  Now that daydream of years ago came back as reality, a wish that had been cursed as it was made. What did a man need? His eyes and ears, his good arms and legs. Some clothes. A good knife. A horse (his beat-up station wagon). But when you got into horses the world began to get complicated again, with saddle and bridle, blanket and cinch and other tools and tack.

  Until he had some idea of where he was going, how could he put anything into his car except his toothbrush, which was worn out and should be replaced anyway?

  He stood alone in the kitchen, the house bare of those things that had been personal, except for a couple of suitcases of clothes that were seasonal and a few cardboard boxes full of working pa­pers, a few books, one dictionary, pens and pencils and note­books, a few things that were unclassifiable as to need, such as a clipboard, an ashtray Gracie had made for him in second grade before she stopped condoning his smoking, a stapler—a birthday present from Johnny—and his typewriter. From one of the card­board boxes he took an address book and looked through it. It was an old one, not kept up to date very well, many of the ad­dresses surely obsolete. At one time it had seemed to him that he had many friends, maybe too many, before they had scattered to far places. What had happened to Dick Knight, who had, at least as of ten years ago, been teaching at a college in northern Califor­nia? Or Dick Mulner, who when last heard from was running for Congress from Marin County, whatever district that was in? Or, to keep on with Dicks, Dickie Greenblatt, who took over his father's woolen mill in New Hampshire? Other couples—John and Rose, Jerry and Vera, John and Lois, Weldon and Dot, George and Fu-miko, Nathan and Angela. How attractive all the young wives were, and Helen was: there was a season when all the women wore simple dresses called chemises, which showed how young and slender and graceful they were. He was in love with all of them, as if all their variousness of height and color were somehow invested in Helen's own vividness at night when he made love to her. They were all pregnant or not, nursing or not, and the whole race seemed beautiful then. Wives were named Fern, and Fran and Pat. In those days he and Helen, or any of their friends, could have packed all of their belongings into a small U-Haul trailer and been gone. Which happened, though none of them thought of loss then. They seemed to have no secrets from each other, none at all, though there was much tact between men and men, women and women, men and women. Small strangenesses and quirks that surely would later become irritating or even ugly were then, within the tense purity of youthful flesh, merely interesting oddi­ties of character. Many were now divorced. Some were dead, some insane, whether ambulatory or not. Or had been when last heard of. But they had all been so valuable in their equality and potential. Then, as he had moved from place to place, from more or less regular jobs to his present independence from one place of work, most of those old friends had faded into their own lives, in near or distant places. Most of them were as unsure of his present state and address as he was of theirs, he knew. Some still sent Christmas cards or an occasional note, but in their communica­tions was the feeling of how long ago it had all been, how the years had gone, how amazing it was that time had flown so quickly and left them older, established in other worlds.

  Then came a crisis of loss, in which his vision shattered. The sunlight on the counters turned prismatic, and the windows cracked silently without falling from their frames. The house was full of empty closets and drawers, which changed its basic echo, even that of his own pulse. The bodies of his family were not here and he would never hear their voices.

  On Wednesday he went to the closing at the savings bank. Ham was there, and Luke's lawyer for this occasion, an older man named Lewis who was partly deaf, and Glennis and Clifford Ruppert, both in their late thirties, and their lawyer, and an officer of the bank. Ham's commission was surprisingly large, but evidently the standard one. Insurance, taxes, water and so on would be pro­rated, Luke paying through the second week of June and then no more. He would receive $244.53 every month for twenty years, a sum and a time which once would have seemed large and long.

  Afterwards Ham reminded him to terminate the electricity and telephone, and to get his deposit back. They walked out onto the street with Clifford Ruppert, a soft, balding man with protuberant brown eyes. His wife, whose name Luke had already forgotten, had to do some shopping nearby, so Ruppert suggested that they have a drink on it. They went into the chilled darkness of a bar and sat in a leather or Naugahyde booth in the slowly lightening gloom.

  "So everything's about concluded," Ham said. "A pretty good deal for all, I'd say."

  "I'll go along with that," Ruppert said. A waitress came and Ruppert supervised the ordering of drinks. He had been looking at Luke with an intensity that implied a question he wanted to ask but didn't yet know how. When his Scotch came and he'd taken a couple of good swallows, he said, "So you've got everything stored or sold and what you need is all packed in your car, right?"

  "Right," Luke said.

  "So you can just slide behind the wheel, turn the key and go wherever you want!" He shook his head, curious and eager, his big eyes gleaming with envy.

  "I've got a little unfinished business here and there," Luke said.

  "Your article. Right," Ham said.

  "Yeah, there's always something," Ruppert said. "Sometimes if I think about all the things I've got to do I get depressed. I mean from the IRS to getting the oil changed and a lube job to a haircut to insurance to filling out forms or getting somebody to fix some­thing or honor a warranty or if it isn't one thing it's another." But he was still looking at Luke with envy, and it was those main r
e­sponsibilities of wife and family that he considered being free of. The sheen in those soft brown eyes was moist and libidinous, a quality that could not be hidden for a moment. Ah, the easy and willing young women of a generation he had missed out on by a few years! Maybe Luke was being unfair to this husband, but Rup­pert was of the age to hear that music, those distant, slippery, liq­uid notes, and young enough not to divine the truth about grant­ed wishes.

  By four in the afternoon he was back again at the house he no longer owned. Ham had asked him to come for dinner, but he'd lied and said he had to leave town this afternoon. On the way back he'd stopped at the Post Office and told them to hold his mail in General Delivery until he had an address, but there was today's mail in his mailbox. He immediately recognized the elite typeface on a stamped envelope. This time the postmark was Wellesley, MA. He looked up and down the street, across lawns, then all around once more as he closed the kitchen door. Wellesley was too close; the exercise was suddenly more than literary. In the house he found a place by the hall telephone where he couldn't be observed through any window as he opened the envelope.

  Dearest Lukie-Dukie,

  You prickie-wickie I have got you in my sites and I am going to pull the trigger-wigger.

  Mr. Death

  His revulsion was somewhat postponed until he read the note again. The mind revealed here was frightening and boring at the same time, talentless and needful, banal and self-satisfied, and it came to him with an absolute clarity he hoped was not permanent that the only thing to do with a being that bored and frightened at the same time was to kill it.

  This was the third note; the reality of the Avenger increased. Presumably the police were there to cope with this sort of thing, but he had dealt with the police on other matters and he didn't want to get involved with them now. If he must be alone he would be alone, free, singular, responsible to no one. Either this blob was seriously going to try to kill him or was just being creative. He had no idea who it might be and therefore neither would the police, who would have to wait until further developments, such as an ac­tual attempt on his life. Well, he would wait for that alone, without the cop-civilian dialogue he could, if he wished, write out before­hand in his mind.