I started with a chisel in a few places that seemed strategic, but it turned out I didn’t completely understand the subtleties of the mechanism-I couldn’t quite figure out where certain springs came from, or went to. Betty suggested we turn the couch upside down.
“No,” I snarled.
It wouldn`t give. A trickle of sweat ran down my back. What I really wanted to do was smash the whole thing to pieces, but Betty was watching. There was no way I was going to let myself be beaten by a damn Hide-A-Bed. I got back on the floor and looked underneath. I followed the iron rods with my fingers. Suddenly I felt something strange. I stood up scowling and threw off the cushions to see what it was.
“Maybe you better go wake the people next door,” I said. “I’m going to need a blowtorch.”
“Is it really that complicated…?”
“No, it isn’t complicated. They’ve just soldered ten inches of this thing together, that’s all…”
In the end we spread a few cushions on the floor. We put together a sort of bed that reminded me of giant ravioli covered with a striped sauce. Betty gave me a sidelong glance to see what I thought. What I thought was that we were going to have trouble sleeping on it, but if it made her happy-if this is what it took-it was okay by me. I was starting to feel at home there, and it was kind of fun to have to spend our first night sleeping on the floor. It was ridiculous, but there was a certain kind of cheap poetry about it, the kind you find in supermarkets. It reminded me of when I was sixteen-hanging out at surprise parties, content with only one pillow and half a girl. I could see how far I’d come: now I had a bunch of pillows, and there was Betty undressing in front of me. All around us the town was asleep. I took a minute to smoke one last cigarette by the window. A few cars passed by without a sound. The sky was perfectly clear.
“It seems like everybody just got their motors tuned up,” I said.
“Who do you mean?”
“I like this place. I bet it’s going to be nice out tomorrow. You won’t believe this, but I’m dead.”
The next morning, I woke up before her. I got out of bed without making a sound and went out to buy croissants. The weather was so nice I could hardly believe my eyes. I did some shopping. I came home casually with a bag under my arm and stopped on the way to pick up the mail that they’d slid under the door at the store. Nothing but fliers and coupons. As I leaned over to get it, I noticed the layer of dust on the showroom window-I made a mental note of it.
I walked straight into the kitchen, unloaded the things onto the table, and got down to work. It was the coffee grinder that woke her. She came in, yawning in the doorway.
“The guy who sells milk is an albino,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Imagine an albino in a white coat with a bottle of milk in each hand.”
“It makes my blood run cold.”
“Me too. Exactly.”
While the water was heating for the coffee, I got undressed in a hurry. We started off along the wall, then circled over toward the cushions. The water evaporated in the meantime. This is how we burned our first saucepan. I ran into the kitchen, she into the bathroom.
Around ten o’clock we put the cups away and got the crumbs off the table. The house faced south-we had good light. I scratched my head and looked at Betty.
“Okay,” I said. “Where do we start?”
It was the end of the afternoon before I sat down in a chair again. A horrible bleach smell hovered in the house, so thick that I wondered if it would be dangerous to light a cigarette. The light ebbed, slowly. It had been a beautiful day, but we hadn’t even put our noses outside. We had stalked the smell of death to the farthest corners-through the closets, along the walls, under the plates-with special attention to the toilet seat. Never could I have imagined that kind of cleaning. There was no trace left of the old woman-not a single hair, not one piece of lint, no trace of a glance left hanging amid the curtains, not even the shadow of a breath; everything was wiped away. I felt like we’d killed her a second time.
I heard Betty scrubbing in the bedroom. She hadn’t stopped for one second. She’d held her sandwich in one hand and done the windows with the other. The look on her face reminded me of Jane Fonda in
What really got me, though, was what happened after I’d hauled the mattress downstairs. I’d worked up quite a sweat with it in the hall, turning it every which way for a long time before I realized that it was hooked on the light fixture in the ceiling. I had laid it down next to the garbage cans on the street, then gone back up to clean a few more things-whip the old mop around a little more. When I allowed myself to sit down after all that, I did it with no shame. I’d had it up to here by then, frankly. Betty had to know about it right away, it couldn’t wait. She’d asked me to call and I told her, What the hell difference does it make, why call now, and she said, Why wait…?
So I took the phone and turned it toward me. The house shined like a new penny. I called Eddie.
“Hi, it’s us!… Just get back?”
“Yeah. Everything okay down there?”
“We’re doing a major cleanup. We’ve moved the furniture around a little…”
“Fine. Great. Tomorrow I’m going to put all your stuff on a train…”
“Thanks, great. Listen… Betty and I were wondering if we could do a little painting in the kitchen… one of these days, I mean…”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Great, That’s good news. Actually, we’ll probably get on it pretty soon. Right away, even…”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I thought. Listen, while I’m at it, I wanted to talk to you about the wallpaper in the hall. You know, the sort of flowered…”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Nothing. Just that maybe someday if it turned out that we could sort of replace it with something a little brighter. You don’t see something in a blue there? What do you think of blue…?”
“I don’t know. What about you? What do you think?”
“It’s a lot calmer.”
“Look, do whatever you want. I can’t see any problem.”
“Okay, cool. I’m not going to bug you about all this, you see, I just wanted your okay, you know what I mean…”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“Yeah, good.”
“Okay…”
“Wait. I forgot to ask you something else…”
“Hmm?”
“Well, it’s Betty. She wants to break through a wall or two.”
“…”
“You there? You know how it is when she gets an idea into her head. Listen, it’s no big deal-just a couple of little walls, not big walls. It’s not like a big job or anything, not what you think. Just puttering, you know…”
“Right, puttering. That’s not puttering anymore. Breaking down walls, that’s a notch above puttering. You guys make me laugh…”
“Listen, Eddie, you know me. I wouldn’t bother you with all this if it wasn’t important. You know how it is, Eddie. You know how a grain of sand can change the whole world. Imagine that this wall is like a barrier between us and a sunny glade. Wouldn’t it be like slapping life in the face to let ourselves be beaten by a silly little barrier? Wouldn’t that really worry you, to miss out just because of some stupid little bricks? Eddie, don’t you see that life is full of terrifying symbols?”
“Okay. Do it. But go easy…”
“Never fear. I’m not crazy.”
