Conceivably, it could even have been a different car.
But I didn’t believe any of that. As I climbed the creaking, carpeted steps up to my door on the third floor, I knew in my bones someone was watching me.
The apartment was, of course, quite empty. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been. I dumped the mail on the living room coffee table and the groceries in the kitchen and went into the bedroom to change into a pair of comfortable furry slippers.
I then fixed dinner-diced, fried Spam stirred into scrambled eggs and peas, a glass of milk, and a half can of fruit cocktail for dessert-and settled down in a large, slightly bedraggled armchair to read the mail. I tend to do this every night and rather thoroughly at that. Catalogues, mailers, the free Town Crier, all of them get the same attention as the occasional letter and the morning Reformer. I even fill out the sweepstakes, idly wondering what I’ll say to Ed McMahon when he hands me my million-dollar check. Habits, now old, born of comfortable isolation. I hadn’t dropped by the Murphy’s after their dinner hour to avoid Martha’s cooking, which was indeed better than my own, but only because I wanted the evening to myself, as usual.
My wife Ellen died of cancer about eighteen years ago. We’d been married eight years-she’d been a teller at the bank I use to this day. She couldn’t have children, and for some reason we never thought of adoption, so we paid a good deal of attention to each other, going to movies a lot, planning picnics and day hikes for the weekends K th so, reading books aloud while she sewed or I built plastic airplanes for Murphy’s kids.
We had our run-ins, of course. Days when all we did was get in each other’s way. I would long for the bachelor life then, sensing how within reach it was. A divorce for us, after all, would have been a simple parting of the ways-no children, little property, still young. But we never did; it never got that bad, and it never lasted long.
The doctors said she died quickly. The whole thing took about four months from diagnosis to burial. But that was a long time for me, watching her die in slow motion, piece by piece. This was, after all, the woman I had undressed many times, scattering her clothes around the house. We’d made love with real enthusiasm, often on the spur of the moment. She’d been an extremely sensual woman.
So her death had been a catharsis of sorts, her slow and steady deterioration had been draining something vital from my core until at last, mercifully, by dying she released us both. For a long time afterward, I was alone-I needed no more companionship, no more emotional ups and downs. I was free to work, to read, to go to the movies utterly alone. I had come to realize that my home life, even with someone as accommodating as Ellen, had begun to echo the complexities of my job. Day in and day out, each twenty-four-hour cycle was a constant struggle, swimming against dozens of competing currents in an effort merely to tread water. Perhaps I’m a man whose ambitions are too slight, or maybe I lack the basic toughness most have to deal with a crowded life without respite. I could be just selfish. Whatever it is, by the time I snapped out of mourning Ellen’s loss and renewed my interest in the opposite sex, I was a confirmed bachelor, devoted to keeping at least one small part of my soul entirely to myself.
Which brings me back to my Realtor friend, Gail, the only reason I might have interrupted my monk-like solitude and scrambled Spam.
One of Brattleboro’s peculiarities is that it has become a retirement village for sixties flower children-“trust- fund hippies” and “granolaheads,” as we used to call them. Initially flocking to locally resented communes, attracted no doubt by the quaint woodsiness of the state, this vanguard of “creeping vegetarianism”-to quote one alarmed member of the Holstein Association-gradually grew older, cut its hair and, with values mostly intact, joined the homegrown establishment. The result was a leavening of the town, setting it apart from other has-been industrial centers. Mixed in with the beer dives and neocowboy bars were health food stores and vegetarian restaurants. Kids named Sheela, Alayna, and Charity ran up and down the streets, while their parents became business leaders and declared Brattleboro a nuclear-free zone. My fondness for this crowd wasn’t based on any Berkeley-born nostalgia, however. It was firmly attached instead to one of its leading citizens.
Gail Zigman had followed the above recipe word for word, arriving in Marlboro, near Brattleboro, in the mid- sixties to join a commune. Long-haired, free-loving, pot-smoking, and more involved in the lives around her than I’d ever been at her age, she eventually tired of communal life, moved into town and went through the gentle and predictable transformation from antiestablishment outsider to successful Realtor and selectman. She was also on every committee possible, from day-care to arts council to Ban-the-Bomb. She and I had been lovers for the past several years.
For two people supposedly committed Kdlyst to their community, we showed remarkable restraint regarding each other. Ours was a balancing act with both of us keeping the seesaw level. When one pushed for closer involvement, usually because of outside troubles, the other counterpushed. The irony was that life’s traumas, so routinely counted on to bring people together, forced us apart. We cared for one another and showed it as much as we dared, but our separate independencies had, over the years, become too valuable to give up. We were a perfect match, both too old and too self-centered to change our ways. Frank called us roommates without a room.
I threw out the junk mail, piled the bills on my desk, and picked up the phone.
“Hello, Joe,” she answered before I’d said a word.
“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re the only one I told when I’d be back.”
I liked that. “How was New York?”
“As usual; awful and lovely.”
“And your parents?”
“Awful and lovely. Dad gave me a ‘how-to’ book about finding a way out of mid-life crisis, and Mother and I had our annual boy-talk. You’d never have guessed I turned forty two months ago. How was your Christmas? And what’s Leo up to?” Leo was my brother, and an endless source of fascination for Gail.
“He’s dating a wild woman who dyes her hair green and drives a Corvette. She runs a Sunoco station she picked up in a divorce. According to Leo, she doubled the business the first summer because all she wore were grease-covered hot-pants and a halter top. Trade falls off in winter. I like her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ginny. She’s a tough thirty-five, which makes her Leo’s junior by a mile.”
“I’m your junior by a few years.”
“Yeah, but you don’t drive a Corvette or wipe a dipstick on your butt. This woman could be the death of him.”
“What’s your mother think of her?”
“She’s amused, but she won’t admit it.”
“Is this serious with Leo?”
“Good Lord, no. He’s more serious about her car. She’s just part of the package, and a rather athletic one at that, according to him. But you know Leo. He’s happy the way he is.”
“Seems to run in the family. What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Same as tonight-nothing.”
“You want to come over?”
“Now?”
“No, I’m sorry,” and I could tell from her voice that she was. “I meant tomorrow. I have homework to do tonight. But I do want to give you a squeeze.”
“You got a date.” I hung up the phone and sat there for a while, my fe K whft'›et on my father’s old rolltop desk. If ever there was loneliness, this is when it hit. Sexually, our arrangement was perfection-once we’d built up a hunger, we could always take care of it. But times of friendly noninvolvement, of watching television in one room while she read peacefully in the other, didn’t happen. Those belonged with memories of Ellen. Of course, that hadn’t been perfection either, any more than this was, but the rationalization didn’t comfort. It truly was a world in which every up side had a down.
I got up and turned on the television, filling the darkened room with a shimmering fluorescence. A cop show. Perfect. I went over to the window and looked down at the street. The Plymouth was parked near the corner.
6
