did it so seldom, but on this occasion it was like running through cooling lava. Still, by four o’clock I had finished the kitchen and was almost through with the living room, despite the periodic interruptions to phone Schultz and answer Wilton’s mute queries. I’d thought a hundred times about kicking Alice into gear and drifting down the hill to the restful anonymity of some Holiday Inn, but I hadn’t done it. For one thing, I had Billy’ s semi to shoot him with. For another, as long as Wilton was phoning regularly, I was in the classic double bind; he knew that I was there, and I knew that he wasn’t. Wherever he was, even if it was at a phone booth just down the hill, I wanted to keep him there.
At four o’clock, the phone rang. The boy was punctual.
I was on my sixth pot of coffee by then, and my synapses had permanent caffeine bridges between them. “Woo-woo, Wilton,” I said, “let me hear you respirate again.”
“Respiration,” he said calmly, “is a form of combustion.”
I hoisted the coffee cup and said, “Interesting.”
“It oxidizes the iron in your bloodstream,” he said. “Rusts it, so to speak. Rusting is also a form of combustion, as I’m sure you know.”
“I thought fire was supposed to be lethal,” I said. Through the window, I heard a premature cricket chirp by way of announcing its presence to a hungry starling.
“Then you haven’t understood me at all,” Wilton Hoxley said. “You disappoint me. Well, life is just a succession of disappointments. What we mean, conventionally speaking, by growing up is just the process of adjusting to disappointment.”
“I’m not all that disappointed,” I said.
He laughed, a sound like a gate slipping its latch. “Is that so? Are you happy about where you are in your life?”
I wasn’t. “I can handle it.”
“Are you happy,” he asked, “about whom Eleanor is sleeping with tonight?”
I tossed the coffee over my shoulder and onto my clean floor. “Are you happy about whom Mommy is sleeping with tonight?”
I could hear the friction of lips over gums. “There’s no question that you’re bright,” he said. “You were always bright. Such a bright boy, such a golden boy.”
“I had two feet,” I said nastily. “And while we’re at it, come and get me.”
“Now you’re trying to insult me,” Wilton Hoxley said. “That makes me suspicious, even though we’re old friends. Old friends should be able to talk. You know, it amazes me that you didn’t realize that we were friends. After all, we had Eleanor in common.”
“Eleanor was never common enough for you,” I said, and closed my eyes.
“A little cheap,” he said. “But then you’re a nonentity, a footnote.” Schultz’s unwritten paper flashed before my eyes in its full unpublished glory. “You don’t understand, do you? They’re playing with you, just as I am. I can play with you until the cat comes home, and you won’t figure it out, and Eleanor will still land in my lap. If I want her. Of course, I don’t want her.”
“You wanted her before,” I said. “My, my, Wilton, the lies you told.” He didn’t say anything. “The lies you told to Mommy.”
He hung up.
I was wetter than I’d been after my shower, but I barely felt it. I took my copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and put it on the back of the couch, trained Billy’s semi at it, and blew it into satisfying smithereens. Feeling marginally more secure, I toted the gun into the kitchen and poured more coffee. Anything that could put commas into Dreiser could put a few well-placed full stops into Wilton Hoxley.
At five the phone rang again. I decided, for once, not to obey. It rang twenty-seven times before falling silent. I sat on the couch, hoping it wasn’t a wrong number. I still wanted him on the other end of the phone. When it stopped, I called Schultz and gave him a progress report.
“Get out of there,” he said.
“Skip it. He’s getting crazy.”
“Simeon,” Schultz said. It might have been the first time he ever called me by my first name. “Simeon, speaking from a purely professional standpoint and evaluating him within the peripheries of any generally agreed clinical criteria, he’s already crazy. He’s been as loose as a bucket of moths for years.”
“I think you should get off the line,” I said. “He might be calling.”
“He’ll call at six,” Schultz said. “Not before. You’re going to stay in touch, right?”
“As long as the promise holds. I talk to you, and it ends there.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy,” Schultz said, hanging up.
It rang again precisely at six, and this time I picked it up.
“Why should I want Eleanor?” Wilton Hoxley said as though there’d been no interruption. “Eleanor, as beautiful as she is, is just a woman.”
“Whoa, Wilton,” I said. “Good for you. How come you never graduated?”
“And what’s a woman?” he continued. “A vertical storage system, and a temporary storage system at that. Their insides gurgle like coal running downhill. Ever put your ear up against Eleanor’s stomach? Gurgle, gurgle. Peristalsis at work. Women eat innocence, nice, photosynthetic plants that make sugar out of sunshine, and they eat dumb animals who think that people love them until they get their jugular veins cut as the first long step toward the table. Pigs are treated well, Simeon. You’ve obviously never spent any time around pigs.”
“I’m rectifying that now.”
“You can’t insult me. You’re not important enough. Pigs, as I was saying, are very intelligent, they learn to love the carnivore who tosses them their slops, they follow him around from place to place. To them, we’re gods. To us, they’re pork. The most beautiful woman in the world is just a mechanism for turning innocence into shit. The prima ballerina, dancing around on those torturous little shoes the French invented, looking lighter than air, is gurgling inside, turning some light-footed pig-have you ever seen how a pig walks on those tiny little hooves? — into shit. Sleeping Beauty, Odette the swan, they get offstage, the tutu comes down, and some poor dumb animal or some inoffending head of lettuce comes out, headed for the sewer. Women are a self-procreating system for turning the world into shit.”
“Right,” I said, gripping the semi with my knees, “and what do men live on?”
“Men,” he said, with real scorn this time. “Skip it. We want women to be different, don’t we? Don’t you want Eleanor to be different? And they’re not. That’s the tragedy of the world, and the ancient gods knew it. Women are just like we are. Remember Pandora?”
“Vaguely.”
“You persist in disappointing me. Pandora, say the Greeks, was the first woman. Another of Hephaestus’ masterworks, created to torment mankind throughout eternity.”
“Why would Hephaestus want to torment mankind?”
“Well, I’m really taken aback. I thought you were many things, but I never thought you were ignorant.”
“So sue me,” I said.
“You got the fennel, I believe, on several occasions.”
“I can buy fennel in the supermarket. Not that I use a lot of it.”
“I’m sure, Simeon, that you understood the fennel. Please say you understood the fennel. One can take only so much disillusionment in one dose.”
“How do you know I’m not tracing this call?”
“Because you’re alone. Because you wouldn’t think it was fair. Because there’s been no one at your house except that cretinous teenager who checked your mail and brought you that useless gun.”
“It’ll punch holes in you,” I said, suddenly doubting that it would.
“You have to aim it at me first. And you won’t get a chance. Pandora,” he said.
“Listen, Wilton,” I said, sweating buckets. “Stick Pandora in your ear. If she’s too big, find someplace she’ll fit.” I hung up.
I wiped my forehead on the way to the refrigerator for a bottle of Singha. At the moment I reached for the phone to call Schultz, it rang.
“You’re making me break the rules again,” Wilton Hoxley said, and there was a nervous edge to his voice. “You already know how dangerous that is.”
