“He’s human, Mark.”
“Now, listen to me, sweetie. You listen to me. I’m about to tell you something. Of course he’s human, but so is the garbage man and the cleaning woman. I’m about to tell you something very interesting. When I was in school, there was a meatball just like Mackham. Nobody liked him. Nobody spoke to him. Well, I was a high-spirited kid, Marcie, with plenty of friends, and I began to wonder about this meatball. I began to wonder if it wasn’t my responsibility to befriend him and make him feel that he was a member of the group. Well, I spoke to him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was the first person who did. I took a walk with him. I asked him up to my room. I did everything I could to make him feel accepted.
“It was a terrible mistake. First, he began going around the school telling everybody that he and I were going to do this and he and I were going to do that. Then he went to the Dean’s office and had himself moved into my room without consulting me. Then his mother began to send me these lousy cookies, and his sister?I’d never laid eyes on her?began to write me love letters, and he got to be such a leech that I had to tell him to lay off. I spoke frankly to him; I told him the only reason I’d ever spoken to him was because I pitied him. This didn’t make any difference. When you’re stuck with a meatball, it doesn’t matter what you tell them. He kept hanging around, waiting for me after classes, and after football practice he was always down in the locker room. It got so bad that we had to give him the works. We asked him up to Pete Fenton’s room for a cup of cocoa, roughed him up, threw his clothes out the window, painted his rear end with iodine, and stuck his head in a pail of water until he damned near drowned.”
Mark lighted a cigarette and finished his drink. “But what I mean to say is that if you get mixed up with a meatball you’re bound to regret it. Your feelings may be kindly and generous in the beginning, but you’ll do more harm than good before you’re through. I want you to call up Mackham and tell him not to come. Tell him you’re sick. I don’t want him in your house.”
“Mackham isn’t coming here to visit me, Mark. He’s coming here to tell me about the letter he wrote for the paper.”
“I’m ordering you to call him up.”
“I won’t, Mark.”
“You go to that telephone.”
“Please, Mark. Don’t shout at me.”
“You go to that telephone.”
“Please get out of my house, Mark.”
“You’re an intractable, weak-headed, Goddamned fool!” he shouted. “That’s the trouble with you!” Then he went.
She ate supper alone, and was not finished when Mackham came. It was raining, and he wore a heavy coat and a shabby hat?saved, she guessed, for storms. The hat made him look like an old man. He seemed heavy-spirited and tired, and he unwound a long yellow woolen scarf from around his neck. He had seen the editor. The editor would not print his answer. Marcie asked him if he would like a drink, and when he didn’t reply, she asked him a second time. “Oh, no, thank you,” he said heavily, and he looked into her eyes with a smile of such engulfing weariness that she thought he must be sick. Then he came up to her as if he were going to touch her, and she went into the library and sat on the sofa. Halfway across the room he saw that he had forgotten to take off his rubbers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve tracked mud?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It would matter if this were my house.”
“It doesn’t matter here.”
He sat in a chair near the door and began to take off his rubbers, and it was the rubbers that did it. Watching him cross his knees and remove the rubber from one foot and then the other so filled Marcie with pity at this clumsy vision of humanity and its touching high purpose in the face of adversity that he must have seen by her pallor or her dilated eyes that she was helpless.
The sea and the decks are dark. Charlie can hear the voices from the bar at the end of the passageway, and he has told his story, but he does not stop writing. They are coming into warmer water and fog, and the foghorn begins to blow at intervals of a minute. He checks it against his watch. And suddenly he wonders what he is doing aboard the Augustus with a suitcase full of peanut butter. “Ants, poison, peanut butter, foghorns,” he writes, “love, blood pressure, business trips, inscrutability. I know that I will go back.” The foghorn blasts again, and in the held note he sees a vision of his family running toward him up some steps?crumbling stone, wild pinks, lizards, and their much-loved faces. “I will catch a plane in Genoa,” he writes. “I will see my children grow and take up their lives, and I will gentle Marcie?sweet Marcie, dear Marcie, Marcie my love. I will shelter her with the curve of my body from all the harms of the dark..” THE BELLA LINGUA
