Pinball, 1973 (6 page)

“But that’s nothing you want to hear about. I don’t even want to hear about it. Who’d want to use dishes from someone who left you with bad feelings, right?”

The next day, a cold rain fell from morning on. A fine rain, but it penetrated my raincoat and got my sweater wet all the same. The rain made everything dark and slick. The oversized trunk I carried, the suitcase she carried, her shoulder bag, everything. The taxi driver even growled, Would we be so kind as to not put the luggage on the seat?

The taxi was stuffy inside from the heater and cigarette smoke, and an old enka ballad crooned out of the car radio. A real oldie from the days of pop-up turn signals. Groves of leafless trees that might have just as well been undersea coral stretched out their damp branches from both sides of the road.

“You know, from the very first sight of it, I never did like the look of Tokyo,” she said.

“Really?”

“The soil’s too dark, the waterways are polluted, no mountains. How about you?”

“I never paid much attention to the scenery myself.”

She let out a sigh and laughed. “You, I just know you’re a survivor.”

Her luggage safely deposited on the station platform, this was the part where she got to tell me many thanks.

“I can manage it from here, thanks.”

“Where you heading?”

“Way up north.”

“Cold, I bet.”

“It’s okay, I’m used to it.”

As the train pulled away, she waved from the window. I raised my hand as far as my ear, but by that time the train had gone. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I buried the hand in the pocket of my raincoat.

The rain continued on into the night. I bought two bottles of beer at the neighborhood liquor store, and poured myself a drink in one of the glasses I got from her. I felt as if my body was going to freeze clean through to the core. On the glass was a picture of Snoopy and Woodstock playing atop the doghouse, and over that, this caption:

HAPPINESS IS A WARM FRIENDSHIP

* * *

I woke up after the twins were sound asleep. Three AM. An unnaturally bright autumn moon shone through the window of the john. I sat down on the edge of the kitchen sink and drank two glasses of tapwater, then lit a cigarette on a burner of the stove. Out on the moonlit golf course, the autumnal droning of the insects overlapped in layers across the turf.

I picked up the switch-panel the twins had stood by the side of the sink, and looked it over. No matter how you turned the thing over, front or back, it was nothing but a meaningless piece of fiberboard. I gave up and put it back where I’d found it, brushed the dust off my hands, took a puff on my cigarette. Everything took on a blue cast in the moonlight. It made everything look worthless, meaningless. I couldn’t even be sure of the shadows. I crushed out my cigarette in the sink and immediately lit a second.

I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy consideration, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago.

I went back to bed and snuggled in between the twins. Their bodies, each tracing a gentle curve, their heads facing outward, breathing lightly, asleep. I pulled the blanket over me and stared up at the ceiling.

She closed the bathroom door behind her. Presently there was the sound of the shower.

The Rat sat up in bed, unable to collect his thoughts, put a cigarette to his mouth, and looked for his lighter. It wasn’t in the pocket of his trousers on the table. Couldn’t even find any matches. He rummaged through her purse, but no luck. He had no other choice but to turn on the room light and search through all the desk drawers, at last coming up with an old book of matches bearing the name of some restaurant somewhere.

Over the back of the rattan chair on which she’d laid her neatly folded stockings and underwear was draped a finely tailored dress of a mustard color.

And on the night table, alongside a lady’s wristwatch, was a Baggagerie shoulder bag, not new, but well cared for.

The Rat sat himself down in the rattan chair opposite and, cigarette still in his mouth, gazed absently out the window.

From his apartment up in the hills, he could take in the random scatter of human activity enveloped in darkness below. From time to time, the Rat would put his hands on his hips, like a golfer standing at the brink of a downhill course, and fix his attention on the scene for hours on end. The slope was dotted with patches of houselights, sweeping down in a slow descent that began from below his very feet. There were dark clumps of trees, small rises in the land, and here and there the white glare of mercury-vapor lamps gleaming off private pools. Where the slope leveled off, an expressway snaked through; a waistband of light cinched across the earth, and beyond that maybe a mile of flat urban sprawl stretched to the sea. The dark sea, so obscure you couldn’t make out the water from the sky. And out of the midst of that darkness would surface the orange glow of the beacon, only to vanish. Through all these distinct strata descended a single dark fairway.

A river.

* * *

The Rat met her for the first time at the beginning of September, when the sky still held a hint of summer’s brilliance.

He had been looking through the local newspaper’s weekly “White Elephant” corner in the classifieds. There among the toddler’s playpens and linguaphones and kiddy bikes, he found an electric typewriter. A woman answered the phone, her voice very businesslike, “Well, yes, it has been used for one year, but it still has a year left on the warranty. Monthly payments not acceptable. Could you come down and pick it up yourself?” The terms settled, the Rat got in his car and headed out to the woman’s apartment, paid the money, took the typewriter. The price was almost exactly what he’d earned working at odd jobs over the summer.

Slender and on the small side, the woman wore a pretty little sleeveless dress. A whole array of potted ornamentals of various shapes and colors lined the entryway. Neat, prim face, hair tied back in a bun. Her age? Doubtless he would have agreed with anything between twenty-two and twenty-eight.

Three days later he got a phone call, the woman saying she’d found half a dozen ribbons for the typewriter, if he’d care to have them. And when he went to pick them up, he’d invited her to J’s Bar and treated her to a couple of rounds of cocktails in return for the ribbons. He really didn’t get that far talking to her.

The third time they met was four days after that, at an indoor pool in town. The Rat drove her home and slept with her. The Rat really didn’t understand why things ended up like that. He couldn’t even remember who came on to whom. Maybe it was all in the way the air was flowing.

After a few days had passed, the relationship with her began to swell within him, making its presence known like a soft wedge driven into his daily life. Ever so slightly, something was starting to get to the Rat. Every time the image of her slender arms clinging round his body came to mind, he’d feel some long-forgotten tenderness spread through him.

He got a clear impression that she, in her own little world, was striving to build up a perfection of sorts. And the Rat knew that it was more than your ordinary effort. She always wore the most tasteful of dresses, which never attracted undue attention, and pretty underwear – nothing frilly, but smart. She put on eau de cologne with the scent of morning vineyards, carefully selected her words when she spoke, abstained from asking superfluous questions, smiled with that “practiced look” she learned from constant scrutiny in the mirror. And each of these things, in their own little way, made the Rat sad. After seeing her several times, the Rat had guessed her to be twenty-seven. And he was right on the nose.

Her breasts were small, her slender body free of excess flesh and beautifully tanned – though she’d deny having wanted to get a tan, really. High cheekbones and thin lips bespoke a good upbringing and an inner core of strength, yet behind all the shades of expression animating her face, what showed was an utterly defenseless naivete.

She’d graduated from the architecture department of an art school and was working in a planning office, that much she’d told him. Birthplace? Nowhere hereabouts. Came here after graduating. Once a week she’d swim at the pool, and on Sunday nights she took a train to her viola lessons.

Once a week, on Saturday nights, the two of them would get together. Then all day Sunday, the Rat would loll about while she played Mozart.

Down with a cold for three days, a backlog of work awaited me on my return to the office. My mouth was all raspy and dry; I felt as if someone had gone over my whole body with sandpaper. Pamphlets and papers and booklets and magazines had piled up around my desk like anthills. My partner came in, mumbled some inquiry after my health, then went back to his own room. The office girl brought in a cup of hot coffee and two rolls as usual, set them on the desk, and vanished. I found I’d forgotten to buy cigarettes, so I bummed a pack of Seven Stars off my partner, pinched the filter off one and lit the other end. The sky was overcast just to the point where you couldn’t tell where the air ended and the clouds began. Everything smelled as though someone had been trying to burn damp leaves. Or else it only seemed that way because of my fever.

I took a deep breath, and broke up the anthill closest at hand. Every item was stamped RUSH across the top and marked underneath with a deadline in red felt-tip pen. Luckily, that was the only RUSH anthill. And even luckier, there was still a couple of days left to go on them. The rest had deadlines from one to two weeks later, no problem if I farmed out half of it for rough translation. So one by one I started in on the booklets and brochures, restacking them in the order I finished them. A process that left an anthill of far less stable configuration than before. It looked like a newspaper graph by sex and age of constituent support for the cabinet. And it wasn’t just the shape that was strange, I might add; its contents were as thrilling as a cross-section of random topics.

1. Charles Rankin, Scientific Puzzle Box: Animals.

From p. 68, “Why Cats Wash Their Faces” to p. 89, “How Bears Catch Fish.” Finish by Oct. 12.

1. American Nursing Association, ed., Talking with the Terminally Ill. All 16 pp. Finish by Oct. 19.

2. Frank de Seto, Jr., Tracing Authors’ Illnesses. Chapter 3, “Authors and Hay Fever.” All 23 pp. Finish by Oct. 23.

3. Rend Claire, Le Chapeau de Paille d’Italie, English trans. scenario.

All 39 pp. Finish by Oct. 26.

The real shame was that the clients’ names were never written anywhere. I could scarcely imagine who, for any reason, would want to get these things translated (and as RUSH jobs, no less). Perhaps some bear had stopped in its tracks before a stream in expectation of my translation. Or maybe a nurse was waiting wordlessly in her vigil over a terminally ill patient.

Photos of a cat washing its face with its paw lay before me on the desk as I drank my coffee and chewed one of the rolls to a pulp. It tasted like papier-mâché. My head had begun to clear a bit, but my extremities still tingled with fever. I took my camping knife out of the desk drawer, spent forever carefully sharpening six F pencils, then slowly got down to business.

I put on some old Stan Getz, and was at it until noon. The band was top notch – Stan Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Rainey, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. I whistled along with the tape through the whole Getz solo on “Jumping with Symphony Sid” and felt worlds better.

During lunch break I headed out to a crowded little eating spot five minutes down the hill from the office for some fried fish, then stood outside a hamburger stand while I drank two orange juices. Next I stopped by a pet shop, and played with some Abyssinians for maybe ten minutes, sticking my finger through a gap in the glass. Your regular lunch break.

Back at the office, I lazily glanced over the morning paper until the clock struck one. Then I sharpened my six pencils again for the afternoon, pinched the filters off the rest of the Seven Stars, and laid the cigarettes out on the desk. At which point, the office girl brought in a cup of hot green tea.

“How d’you feel?”

“Not bad.”

“And work?”

“Getting there.”

The sky was still relentlessly overcast. If anything, the gray had grown a shade deeper than in the morning. When I stuck my head out the window I got the distinct impression it was about to rain. Autumn birds were in flight across the sky, and everything hung heavy with that dull metropolitan drone (a combination of the rumble of the subway, the sizzle of hamburgers, the roar of traffic on the elevated expressways, car doors slammed shut or flung open, countless assorted noises like that).

I closed the window, put on a cassette of Charlie Parker playing “Just Friends,” and resumed translating from the section “When Do Migratory Birds Sleep?”

When four o’clock rolled around I wrapped things up, handed over my day’s worth of translations to the girl, and left the office. I decided to wear the lightweight raincoat I made a habit of keeping at the office so as not to carry around an umbrella. At the station I bought an evening paper, and was jostled about the better part of an hour in a crowded train. Even the inside of the train smelled like rain, but so far not a single drop had fallen.

It wasn’t until I’d finished shopping for dinner at the supermarket by the station that it finally began to rain. Little by little, misty fine droplets you could hardly see turned the pavement at my feet rain-gray. After checking the bus schedule, I dodged into a nearby coffee shop and ordered a coffee. The place was crowded, and everything smelled once and for all like real rain. The blouse the waitress was wearing, the coffee, everything.

As the streetlamps around the bus terminal began to flicker on in the twilight, buses slid back and forth between the lights like giant trout navigating a current. Each bus filled with commuter types and students and housewives; each disappeared into the gloom. A middle-aged woman dragged the dark shape of a German shepherd past the window. School kids went by bouncing a rubber ball. I put out my fifth cigarette, and took one last sip of cold coffee.