Spooner (34 page)

Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. published two papers in the city and occupied most of the 400 block of North Broad Street, nine
blocks from Spooner’s hotel. He worked for the smaller paper, the
Daily News
, and arrived at the office on the seventh floor every morning in one of the three or four shirts he owned, all of them short-sleeved.
When a comment was made on his clothes he would say that he was still cooling off from all those years in Florida. Sometimes
he even opened the window near his desk.

These were the sorts of lies Spooner would tell all his life. He would as soon be caught naked in the hallway in handcuffs
and a diaper as have anybody know that he didn’t have enough money yet to buy a coat.

The paper itself was nothing like the paper he’d worked for in Florida, but editors were the same everywhere he went. They
were all like his friends’ wives: They liked him a little bit at first and then wanted him to go away. He had no way of knowing
what he’d stumbled onto at the time—he was not a student of newspapers, had never been an intern or a copyboy or a city kid
who grew up dreaming of his own byline—and there had even been a moment on the train ride up from Florida when he realized
that this was how it could all end up for him, making his living as a spectator, and he’d come pretty close to getting off
at the next stop and going back.

But then, in the way these things happen, one morning in that first spring in Philadelphia the elevator for reasons of its
own ran past his regular floor and did not stop until it reached the fourteenth, opening into the waiting room of the complex
of offices used by the paper’s columnists, and onto the spectacle of Jimmy Lester, the
Daily News
’s asthmatic gossip columnist, passed out and drooling on the waiting room couch, making rooting noises in his sleep, dressed
in monogrammed silk pajamas and Italian loafers, his tiny plump hand wrapped around the handle of a machete. Jimmy had once
attended a reception for Princess Grace of Monaco, gotten drunk and stepped on her dress—white dress, mud-ringed Italian loafers—as
she stood in the reception line, and rebuked by the princess herself, remarked that back in the days when she was a movie
star, Her Highness had blown everybody in Hollywood to get good parts, and moments later, as the princess’s private security
force was dragging him out, Jimmy had yelled words across the ballroom that would always strike Spooner as pretty much immortal:
“Gracie, you’ve got no class and you never did.” And even though Spooner still knew next to nothing about newspapers, and
less than that about being a reporter, he had experienced a strange summoning when he heard that story, maybe what a homing
pigeon feels on the way home, and now, presented with the legend in the flesh, the chubby, wet cheek pressed flat against
the machete blade, he knew for the first time in his life that he was in the right place.

Spooner had been getting paid now regularly for several months and had moved out of the hotel into an apartment on Eighth
Street just off Pine. The apartment had a fireplace and kitchen appliances. Spooner had brought in a mattress, a telephone,
a boning knife with an eight-inch serrated blade, and a chair. He checked out a company car over the weekend and drove it
to Florida, eighty miles an hour, down and back, and collected his dog. In Spooner’s life, no human had ever been as glad
to see him.

It was a homey spot, Harry and Spooner, the fireplace and the mattress, the telephone, but sometimes, particularly in the
morning, Spooner was lonely. He brought women up once in a while, but it was harder getting them out than getting them in
and he couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted from them anyway. On the weekends there were calls from Priscilla, usually
about money, and lately he couldn’t make up his mind about what he wanted from her either. She’d gotten tired of holding road
signs in Texas and was back in Florida these days, living with a tax lawyer, and off this news, he woke up one morning with
his mouth full of dog hair, hungover and smelling of a different kind of smoke than he usually smelled of in the morning—which
is to say real smoke, not barroom smoke—and, looking around, saw that he’d burned the chair in the fireplace, which more or
less cut his furniture in half.

For a while Priscilla called every weekend, usually at night, always about money and divorce. The tax lawyer was under the
impression that Spooner had accumulated some wealth during the trial separation, and wanted an inventory of his assets—Spooner
at least, was giving her the benefit of the doubt regarding whose idea it was.

It was fifteen minutes into one of these calls when Spooner, trying to change the subject, said, “How’s Pork?” and there followed
a silence at the other end as she covered the receiver, presumably consulting the tax lawyer before she answered.

Presently she came back with a flattened tone that was familiar to him from the years they’d lived together. “We had to get
rid of her,” she said. Just like that. The next moment, strangely, Spooner couldn’t hear. He wasn’t deaf—the words were clear
enough—but something had disconnected, and there was a sound in his head like breaking waves and then he looked around the
apartment and couldn’t remember the word for the refrigerator. “We’re moving into a new place,” she was saying, “and they
don’t take pets.”

The line went quiet, and when he got himself back together he said, “Where is she?” Thinking he could drive down again and
pick her up too.

Pork, if you are interested in family sagas, was Harry’s mother. She bore him no resemblance, though, and was almost perfectly
round, a little balloon of an animal, which Spooner hoped had nothing to do with why Harry was always trying to fuck the basketball.
He’d bought her for five dollars when he and Priscilla were first married and living on St. Ann’s Street in New Orleans, brought
her home on a bus under his shirt, no more than a pound or two, feeling her shaking the whole way.

“This is the part you aren’t going to like,” she said.

“I already don’t like it.”

“Well, I couldn’t actually do it. We were taking her to the animal shelter, but I couldn’t do it, so we just stopped and let
her out beside the road.”

Spooner hung up without another word, still unable to match the refrigerator to the word
refrigerator
, and the next day sent Priscilla a check for a few hundred dollars, which was all he had, all there was in his account, and
then later that morning, gathering clothes for his regular visit to the laundromat, came across his boning knife in the sheets.
The knife had been missing for a couple of weeks and presumed lost. It was the only utensil in the place and the only tool,
and he used it to open cans and tighten screws and pick gravel out of the tread of his tennis shoes and cut the knots out
of Harry’s coat, and he held the knife in his hand a moment, as if he were sensing the balance, and then, glancing at the
refrigerator and again unable to think of what it was called, he stabbed it. Stabbed the refrigerator and left the knife there,
buried to the hilt, as a reminder.

Not that he needed one. For the rest of his life every time Spooner smelled Freon—an odor which you run into more frequently
than you might imagine—he thought of the round little dog standing along some two-lane county highway, watching the car disappear.
Other changes were that he could no longer keep ice cream in the apartment, and he quit thinking of himself as married.

A
woman came along now who was not the kind of woman who could be talked into leaving an old dog out beside the road. She showed
up late one afternoon at the newspaper office, emerging from the elevator in jeans and a clean white shirt, talking apparently
to someone still on the elevator, and while strangers wandered through the place all the time holding conversations with unseen
parties, they were not ordinarily in clean shirts. Ordinarily when the elevator opened what came out was someone tilted way
off the here and now—addicts of one kind or another, schizophrenics, community activists—some of them still without the laces
that were taken from their shoes at the Round House. Murderers, as a class, were overrepresented—one visitor in thirty, forty?—and
often came directly from the scene of the crime looking for the paper’s famous columnist of African extraction, who would
accompany them to the police station. At this time in Philadelphia, at least in certain neighborhoods of Philadelphia, there
was a certain cachet to having this columnist walk you into the Round House after you had killed someone, and beyond the prestige
there was the practical consideration that showing up with the press pretty much immunized you against a thumping at the hands
of the police, at least any thumping that would show.

Which is all to say that every time the elevator stopped at floor number seven and the bell rang and the doors opened, an
entire city room raised its eyes, all holding the same question: Is this person armed?

The woman who came off the elevator wasn’t armed—this Spooner knew instinctively, just as he knew she could not be talked
into abandoning an old dog by the side of the road. He would wonder later if these sorts of insights counted as love at first
sight.

He gaped openly at the woman from his desk—he was on the telephone at the time or he would have gotten up and found some excuse
to move close enough to sniff her—and not only wasn’t she packing, her shoelaces were tied and she had hair that shone and
an elegant bottom he could not stop picturing bouncing in a saddle, and in fact one evening twenty-five years later, sitting
in a pretty good restaurant, he would fall out of his chair trying to kiss it as she walked by on her way to the bathroom.

But that is further down the road. For now, a summary of the romance: Spooner became habitual with the woman with the elegant
bottom and took her out on romantic dates and one night set his hair on fire as he leaned over the candle on the table of
another pretty good restaurant to kiss her, and she said she thought it would be all right if they skipped the flammable parts
of the romance now and moved in together. Next they bought a little house on a shallow, clear lake in the New Jersey Pine
Barrens, and got married in a bank and had a baby girl.

For the first time in his life Spooner found himself content to be where he was, although over time this would come at a price,
the earliest sign being that sometimes he would catch some glimpse of Mrs. Spooner and the baby together and find himself
barely able to move, at the fear of losing what he had. The truth was, Spooner wasn’t wired much for getting what he wanted,
and had never given a thought to protecting what he had, in fact had never considered that any of it could be protected or
that it was even in his hands. Until the woman came along, and then the baby, he had always taken it for granted that anything
that fell into his lap would also fall through his lap, sooner or later.

Jobs, for instance. Spooner ran again and again into the same problem at the places he worked, connected in some way to the
matter of natural selection. That is to say that even though he was frequently willing to do his work and even sometimes to
follow instructions, he had no idea how to go about behaving as if a supervisor’s claim—not on his time, but on his person—did
not run uphill of human nature. Which over the years had led to the loss of a dozen jobs or so—in and out of newspapers—all
on the grounds of insubordination.