23
L
iz didn’t call back. Not Wednesday evening, not Thursday or Friday. This possibility had not occurred to Sarabeth, and its fulfillment lodged in her gut and began to grow, a noxious weed sprouting terrible new leaves by the hour.
The phone didn’t ring at all until late Friday afternoon, and it was only then that she understood the trade-off she’d made: in order to get voice mail (in order to be able to call Liz without the danger of speaking to her), she’d finally gotten rid of her ancient answering machine, but with it she’d also gotten rid of her ability to screen her calls.
Answer? The phone stopped after the third ring, and the decision was made for her. She waited awhile and then lifted the handset, pressed
TALK
, and heard the stutter tone. She called in and heard a message saying that the Paper Place was calling a second time to alert Sarabeth Leoffler that her prepaid order had arrived.
The phone was silent for the next several hours. When it rang again she was in bed, or not quite in bed but
on
bed, dozy, her overhead light still blazing. She let the voice mail get it.
“Uh, Sarabeth,” said a voice she recognized as Mark Murphy’s, strangely gravelly as it played back to her a few minutes later. “I’m calling about something nonprofessional, just a question for you, really, and if you get this by, like, ten-thirty, could you call me back? I’m on my cell. Thanks, bye.”
What was this? She felt a flutter of curiosity, the first flutter of any kind she’d felt in days. It was almost nine-thirty. Where was he? If at work, why ask her to call the cell? If at home, why ask her to call the cell? If neither at work nor at home, why call her at all? She punched in the numbers and waited.
“Sarabeth,” he answered after one ring. “Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for calling me back.”
“Sure.”
“The thing is—actually, can you hang on for a sec?”
“OK.”
“One sec,” he said, and there were loud voices that got louder as she held on. And then silence.
“Sorry about that,” he said, coming back. “Noisy bar.”
“You’re in a bar?”
“No, I’m outside a bar.”
“Oh. Ha.”
“Bunch of idiots watching hockey in there.”
“So why were
you
in there?”
“Sarabeth, Sarabeth,” he said. “Too many questions. I’m the one with the question.”
“So you said.”
“But—oh, can you hang on again for a sec?” This time he didn’t wait for her assent but did whatever he had to do without further comment. She had no idea what was going on, but she was very curious, almost unbearably curious.
“Sorry,” he said. “Another call came in.”
“What’s going on, Mark?”
He blew a raspberry. “Crazy night is all.”
She heard herself sigh. Was he drunk? Her curiosity began to shift, toward annoyance.
“Sarabeth,” he said. “This has not begun well. Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your address again?”
“My address?”
“It’s something I have to ask you in person.”
“What is this?” she exclaimed. “What’s going on? Are you drunk?”
“No,” he said. “Good question, fair question, but no. Can I come over?”
She looked around the room, certain it, she, the entire house, smelled to high heaven. “I’m in my sweatpants,” she said, and then regretted it.
“Not a problem. Is this OK? I’ll be fifteen minutes, twenty max.”
She gave him her address and then hung up and sprang into action, a cover-up job, since real cleaning wasn’t possible and she had to leave at least five minutes for her body. She kicked some of her discarded clothing under the bed, tossed the rest into the closet. She pushed open windows, ran for the kitchen, moved the piles of dirty dishes into the refrigerator and then back out and into the oven in case he wanted something to drink. Passing through the living room, she saw for the first time in days the array of objects still cluttering the floor. Fuck, she thought, but kept going. In the bathroom she took the fastest shower in history, no time for her hair, then dried off and put on a different pair of sweatpants, clean, and a pale green funnel-neck sweater for which she’d spent far too much last winter.
It had been ten minutes. She had another five or ten to go, and she hurried to the bathroom mirror, where she discovered that her hair was revoltingly dirty. She should have washed it—so what if it would have been wet when he arrived—but it was too late now. She brushed it and worked the impossible curls, then pumped on hair spray to get it to stay in place. Lipstick? Too studied for a woman in sweatpants. She felt tremulous and ran for the kitchen and a piece of bread, and she was wiping butter from her lips when he knocked a couple minutes later.
“Sarabeth,” he said from the doorstep. He was unshaven, untucked, unsmiling. She’d forgotten the porch light, and all was black behind him. She permitted herself a quick glance at the Heidts’: no sign of life.
“Sorry,” she said, flicking on the light. “Come in.”
In his shop the ceilings were about twenty feet high, and while she’d known he was tall, she hadn’t known quite how tall. He came in and instantly made of her house an elves’ hut. He was seriously tall, taller even than Billy, who was six feet two. She led him to the sitting area and waited for him to choose the couch before settling into a chair herself. His giant knees nearly touched the coffee table.
“So,” she said. “You have a question.”
He rubbed his bristly cheeks, then spread his arms along the back of the couch. Hollow cheeks, a twitch in his eye: he looked terrible.
“Got a beer?” he said.
“You couldn’t have asked the bartender that?”
A tiny smile flitted across his lips. “That’s not the question.”
“It’s
a
question.”
“There you go. I’ve always found you to be very insightful.”
She went to the kitchen for a beer. For herself she got a glass of tangerine-grapefruit juice. She’d been on a tangerine-grapefruit juice kick for several days. Her pee had started to smell of it.
He’d left the couch and was squatted at the spread of stuff on her floor. “Having a garage sale?”
She held out the beer, and he stood and took it, then went back to his seat. She remained standing.
“This is very hard for me,” he said.
“I’m intrigued.”
“Do you think—” He stopped and sighed hard. “Do you think there’s such a thing as evil?”
He was perfectly serious. He watched her as he sipped from the beer bottle, watched her as he put it on the coffee table. After a while she returned to her chair. Her juice glass felt cold, and she reached it toward the coffee table, then changed her mind and set it on the floor at her feet.
She said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, I’ve-given-it-a-lot-of-thought-and-haven’t-figured-it-out? Or I don’t know, it-doesn’t-interest-me-I-don’t-care?”
“Don’t know that either.”
He reached for his beer. He sat looking straight ahead, rolling the bottle back and forth between his palms. She knew she was in his peripheral vision, knew he was highly aware of her presence. She really didn’t think he was drunk, but he was something.
Had
he meant to touch her, the other day at his shop? She saw herself lying on the couch, exactly where he was now: an hour ago, all afternoon, most of yesterday. It was almost as if she’d left an imprint, almost as if he were sitting on her, and with this idea came an intense longing to be fucked.
He looked over at her. “What’s with your hair?”
“My hair?” she said, her face warming. “Nothing is with my hair. My hair is very much alone. Well, my head is sort of with my hair, but you couldn’t really say they’re together.”
“Sarabeth, what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
He scooted toward her. “I went to SFMOMA today—I was playing hooky. And there was this thing in the gift shop that made me think of you, this necklace—different-colored puff balls on a thin cable.”
“I’m flattered.”
“No, it was cool—it made me think of you lampwise, not jewelrywise. Like it could be a pull.”
“Oh.”
“But it had a name. I mean, a little card near it. And guess what it was, guess what it was called?”
She shrugged.
“It was a Fudabi Schmuck.”
She giggled; she was feeling odd, almost high. “What does that have to do with evil?”
“I don’t know—I guess it made me think of Hitler.”
“He was definitely a Fudabi Schmuck.”
“The biggest,” Mark said. And then, “I really want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day we met.”
“Mark, don’t.”
“Don’t kiss you?”
“Don’t say you want to.”
“Too late.”
She stood and backed away from him. Her heel knocked against something, and she looked down as one of the silver candlesticks fell over. She said, “You’re married.”
He shrugged, then held up his palms as if to say he couldn’t deny it.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s going on with Mary?”
“Maud is going on with Mary. And Mary is going on with Maud. They’re going on and on and on.”
“And you feel left out.”
He tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. His knees were splayed, and the crotch of his jeans had an inviting roundness to it. She looked at his Adam’s apple, watched it bob and then go still.
Her heart pounded. She went and straddled one of his legs, then sat and kissed him, kissed him, the warmth of his lips, the taste of beer, his heat—
She was insane. She scrambled off and said, “You have to leave.”
She could see that he’d begun to get hard. He stood and swiped at his erection, ran his hand over his chin. He gave her a broad, collusive smile, but he couldn’t keep it going; it melted off him and he was simply unhappy. Back to him she went, and on tiptoe she kissed him again, moving her lips until his moved again, too. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and then she made for the door and opened it, and after a moment he raised his eyebrows and gave her a little wave and left.
She thought about it, for days. Picturing his forearms, she thought about it. Picturing the fade on the thighs of his jeans.
As an antidote she went to movies. She even sat through a documentary about the politics of famine, the longest 107 minutes of her life. She was shallow, callous; she couldn’t deny it. As if to make sure there could be no doubt, she went straight to Walgreens afterward and spent an hour reading gossip magazines.
Then she forgot a staging.
“Uh, honey?” Jim’s message said. “That condo?”
It was Wednesday morning, the day before the open house; she was beyond screwed. Her mover was busy, so she went to her storage unit, gathered everything she could fit in her car, and sped to the condo building, where the loading zone out front was occupied by a painter’s truck.
Just what she needed.
She parked around the corner, grabbed what she could carry, and headed back to the building. At least Helen’s furniture was bland rather than garish. And the rolltop desk might turn out to be a lot lighter than it had looked. It might even come apart.
Helen had left the place spotless, though there was a closed-in 409 smell that Sarabeth would have to banish. She dumped her stuff, took a very brief peek at the desk, and went back to her car for the rest of what she’d brought.
DIAMOND PAINTING
, said the writing on the side of the painter’s truck. Were they going to park there all day?
Back upstairs, she began by taking down the Impressionist posters, and right away the living room looked better. Into a closet they went, along with Helen’s cheerful Marimekko throw pillows, which Sarabeth felt sure had not been in the condo two weeks ago. (Had Helen bought them for the sale? Did she not understand staging?)
In the bedroom, she took Helen’s unfortunate nylon-backed bedspread off the bed and replaced it with her own nice ivory matelassé coverlet. She tried different combinations of shams and pillowcases. Was she brave enough to face the desk?
It was in the corner. The top was rolled up to reveal a warren of cubbyholes—empty, thank God. The writing surface was slanted, with a little tray at the bottom to catch pencils and pens. The base was made of two banks of drawers, also thoughtfully emptied.
Standing at one end, she hooked her fingertips under the half-inch lip and tried with all her might to get the desk even a couple inches off the floor.
She was ruined. What was she going to do? Whom could she call? Not Jim. Nina was at work. She couldn’t call Mark, ha-ha.
She locked up and went downstairs. There was a little Mediterranean food shop on the corner, and though it was barely 11:00 a.m. she got herself a falafel pita and sat eating it on a low wall. Leaving the desk in the bedroom was the only option, but the more she considered it, the worse it seemed. People would take one look in there and think: no. Jim would take one look and fire her.
Honey,
she could imagine him saying.
I’m really sorry, but we are over.
She bit off another mouthful. The cool chunks of cucumber were soothing next to the hot, oily falafel.
Back she went. On the second floor, the painters had stretched a tarp from the stairwell all the way to the open door of the unit where they were working. They were responsible painters, then. She’d seen some who left so much paint on the access, they could have billed for it.
She had forty dollars in her wallet. Would painters be insulted if they were asked to help move a piece of furniture for forty dollars?
Slowly, in case she changed her mind, she moved toward the open doorway. It seemed rude to place herself where she could see in, so she stopped short and reached around for the door, knocking as best she could given that the door moved as soon as her knuckles touched it. She waited and then tried again, this time knocking on the outside wall.
She heard footsteps, oddly uneven footsteps: first the sound of a hard shoe, then a soft thump, then the hard shoe again. This did not exactly jibe with a painter, and when someone appeared it was not a painter, it was Peter Something, in a pressed white shirt and khakis, and a cast on one leg.