“Sally, we must get back to Jackson! My mother is dying in her little blue room!”
Sally snapped him a horrible face. “You go,” she scowled. “I don’t give a shit about your boring old mother. I’ve got big plans.”
“Oh Sally,” Freeman sighed. He looked at her with a husband’s sadness. Then he hesitantly stepped forward and held out his hand to the entertaining man. “I’m Freeman,” he said, enunciating his words as though it was deaf. Nothing happened. Freeman turned to Sally and put his hands on her shoulders. She was frail and her shoulders bent a little.
“Sally, come on now, I know you don’t want to see my mother die. We have to go, this afternoon, in the car.”
“Fine,” she said. “But I have to get him some clothes first. We’re going into town. We’ll be back around three.” And she took the entertaining man by the hand and walked him, like a toddler, into the road.
Freeman stood in the doorway and watched them. It was as though they had been blessed with a two-hundred-pound baby. His lips twitched once before he closed the door and went inside and started packing.
When Sally and the entertaining man returned later that afternoon they had a lot of bags, maybe about thirty, and many of them contained sequined dresses and high-heeled shoes. Freeman also noticed that Sally had gone to the hairstylist and that her fingernails were now red. When she passed him in the hall she did so with her nose in a snub, and she didn’t want to answer any questions. The entertaining man was dressed up nicely but his eyes refused to dilate.
THEY DROVE DOWN the highway in the squat yellow car, Freeman in the front, the entertaining man and Sally in the back. When they were about two hours from Jackson, Freeman folded down the roof and the air began gusting at them and Sally began to shriek, “My hair! My hair! You bastard! You animal!” And so Freeman hurriedly closed up the roof and drove on, accelerating. The sun was setting behind them in the west and everything was growing pink. Sally began talking to her man in whispers.
When they arrived at the house in Jackson it was dark. Freeman went up the stairs and found his mother lying in her bed, shrunken into a pale skeleton. It was as though there was a little something inside her clutching at her skin, trying to pull itself through her bones.
“Get in here with me, Freeman,” she said, and Freeman climbed into the bed and put his warm body under the covers and huddled and held her in his arms. He cried some salty tears while she barely breathed, then she fell asleep.
He arranged her hair into a spiral, then rose from the bed and left, closing the door with a slow, respectful turn of the handle. He went down the hall to his childhood room and there he found his wife sitting on the bed with the entertaining man in front of her. She was dressed in high heels and panties, and she was taking off his clothes, yanking his pants down over his thighs. Freeman stood at the door barely able to see because of the tears that were caught in his eyes, but he could smell the nudity.
“Oh, get lost Freeman,” Sally said.
Freeman closed the door and went downstairs into the den and lay on the couch. A fluffy little white dog ran into the room. He did not know his mother had bought a dog! It had a bell on underneath its chin and it jumped on the couch and ran across Freeman’s chest and began licking at his neck. It had the brightest, most enthusiastic eyes Freeman had ever seen, and Freeman laughed.
Suddenly Freeman heard a dull tone and with a start he jerked and bounded up the stairs. The little dog followed one step at a time.
“Mother!” he cried, but stopped before her room. In the doorway was Sally, her eyes wide and frightened, and the entertaining man, holding her hand, his eyes wide and frightened too. She tugged on his arm, then he tugged on her arm, then she tugged on his. They looked no more than six years old; a brother and sister at the zoo.
THE NIGHT OF RORY
THE MAN WITH the wide shoulders and the thin nose turned left down the street. The night was cold on his face and he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and walked to where the men would be; playing chess in the back of the store, the lights too bright, the smoke too thick, and he would be served the drink he wanted. Nobody had called him by name all week, and in a hundred years there wouldn’t be his wife or him or anyone he knew. At one point there were healthy Roman citizens looking up at the sky, and then there was him and one day no one.
One block away and already he could see the terrible sign, a white fluorescent. All he wanted was maybe two or three drinks but not to spend the night. At home his wife asked too many questions and talked too fast. He pushed open the door and the place was lit up like a gymnasium.
The historian was playing chess with a critic while a columnist looked on, and the man went right to the back and sat with them, their cigarettes dangling from their mouths like dicks. One man looked up mildly.
“Rory.”
That was that. The man said “rye” and the server walked away and behind the server was a woman in a red dress. She went to the bar and stood up straight, looking over at him.
He kept his eyes on the chess game. The drink came. He drank it down and still he kept his eyes on the game.
In a moment he finished and said good-bye, then ducked out past the woman into the street where the air was biting and his cheeks, only halfway down the block, were already pink and cool. In an instant the whole world could be gone and not in a way that anyone knew anything about. Couples were emerging from doorways into the night. It was the hour when people strolled and the sky was blue and you could still see the sky. He heard a clip-clopping behind him.
Stopping at a light he turned and the woman halted, suddenly looking down and pressing her hands over the fronts of her thighs.
“You shouldn’t have left when I came just for you.”
“Why not?” he said, but he knew why; because she had come just for him. His eyes were watering from the stench of her perfume, and the beautiful couple he had seen that morning with the smiling baby might lose their baby the next day in an accident and everything in their world would just be shattered, and here she was pulling on his arm, and she had no choice either.
The light changed and he turned to face the street. He thought, “I could plow myself into that windshield and they’d all be dead, the car overturned and five people dead.” Or maybe the beautiful couple with the baby would be fine the next day but six years down the road the baby would be snatched away or run over by a car and that would be the end of their happiness forever; everything changed and no reason for it.
She caught up with him now. He had crossed without even knowing it.
“Come with me please. I don’t want to be alone.”
He didn’t feel like going to her apartment. He avoided women but now he was following her to a neighborhood he hardly knew, dirty with immigrants and bicycles. Twice she turned nervously to point out places where she liked to eat but he was not impressed. He said nothing, just kept his eyes open.
She turned the lock in a door beside a bakery and he was walking up the narrow staircase before her. She had been anxious and let him up first, and the stairwell was dark and there was one blue light burning dimly at the top. When they reached the landing there were three doors and she squeezed around him and opened one up. The apartment had been done over in an oriental fashion. There were fans and umbrellas and colorful little china dolls and pillows printed with dragons and tiny orange fish in a big round bowl; he didn’t care. There was nothing about anything that seemed to him real and even when he fell on the couch it sunk with his body and she was lit up by a plastic orb that glowed. She went over to the window that was big and without curtains and leaned on the sill facing him. Haloed around her head and the top of her body were the lights from the night: airplanes with flashing blue and red signals zipping through the sky, other things spinning; a moon, a planet, bright stars. His eyes blurred thick and dizzy before the hairs that were tangled like wire and fur.
THE MAN FROM OUT OF TOWN
SINCE HIS FIRST day in town the man had been looking for a nice girl to spend good times with, but none of the girls would have him. He wasn’t sure why but suspected it had to do with his status. The waitress who served him corroborated this when she called him a bum, even though he was not living on the street and he had two suits.
Not until his roommate found out the cause of his sorrowful mood did he call up a girl he had known from the park and invite her over for a dinner of pork and mashed potatoes with nutmeg.
It was her high ass that mysteriously lifted itself up to her waist that caused the man to see what a nice girl she was, and how pleasant she would be to spend good times with. She also had a sweet smile and some pretty funny things to say, and whenever she laughed the sun would stream a last dying ray in through the window. Noticing all this the roommate kept playing good tunes, and by the end of the night the man and the girl were dancing together and she was laughing into his shoulder—a good sign.
In the morning she sat on the couch in his denim shirt and yesterday’s underwear, and her voice seemed deep when she said, “I’m going to be late for work.”
“It’s Sunday though.”
“Still,” and she looked out the window and the grayness of the day convinced her. Wandering into his room she found her suit and zipped it up and left his apartment with a good-bye shrug. Following her with his eyes as she walked to the bus stop, the man knew that this was not the girl who would be agreeable to spending good times with him. It was not easy to explain.
In the afternoon he walked down the boardwalk, drinking warm soda from a red and white cup that was waxy on the outside and gradually melting, when a man with a dog caught up to him and threw his arm around his shoulder and asked in a jaunty voice what the matter was.
The man, who was new in town, was startled because he did not expect city people to care about each other, but he answered saying, “It’s that the woman who came over last night seemed to really like me, but she left this morning without making plans to see me again.”
“I know what it’s like. I thought it must be women that were troubling you because of that troubling look on your face. You ought to come to where I work tonight, because there are plenty of pretty ladies where I work.”
“Where do you work?”
“At a dance club.”
“Oh no,” said the man who was from a small town. “I don’t mean that I want to pay a woman to take off her clothes.”
That night as he sat in a booth by the wall, a tall voluptuous woman with red hair went and sat across from him. When she spoke her voice was tiny and girlish, and when he spoke back her eyes lit up, knowing a good man when she saw one. If he found her interest in him any consolation he did not show it, and continued to order drinks that cost seven dollars.
“Let me put that next one on my tab,” she said, and adjusted her body in such a way that her breasts raised themselves parallel to the table. The man did not fail to notice this.
“Would you like to come home with me tonight?” he asked. Growing suspicious, she said, “I thought you were a different sort of man, that’s what Henry told me, and now you ask me the question everyone asks.”
“I’m so ashamed,” he responded sincerely. “I didn’t mean it that way, but I don’t like being alone, and you seem like a kind woman who would be a pleasure to spend good times with, even just talking.”
She found this genuine enough and was touched that there was nothing of the brute in him; perhaps Henry was right. Even her so-called sisters, whom she hastily consulted in the back room, gave approving nods when they saw his modest eyes looking mainly at the fixtures.
The apartment was sticky because of the heat, and it wasn’t long before they were lying in their underwear on his bed, and he was telling of how he had become a widower so young, which was a lie for he had never been married, or even in a real relationship twice. Since she had noticed him not noticing the dancers when she returned to the back room to get her clothes, she believed what he was saying, every word of it. There were simple ways some women had of telling a good guy from a bad, and her way was as stupid as any.
Quite soon she found herself giving him head and was trying her best because he seemed so patently not to be enjoying it. When he laid her he did so with great care and the air of a depressive, which made her trust him all the more.
It wasn’t three weeks before they decided to live in an apartment together, which caused tension between the man and his roommate until a replacement was found.
Their life together was a gentle life of great delicacy and consideration, as they both felt sorry for the man, and he was also harboring a great confusion at his sorrowful mood not being alleviated by the presence of this woman with the red hair.
Since in their hearts they both expected her to become pregnant, when she eventually did it was no great surprise. He merely stroked her arm as she lay at the base of the bed and cried about money. “I must go live with my sister,” she told him. There was no part of her that was enthusiastic about living the life of a dancer with a young child. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked.