She punched the button to delete the message, hung up the phone, and turned out the light. Then she sat up and turned the light back on. She threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. She shuddered, although the room was hot and stuffy. How stupid she had been. What a fool she’d been.
She threw on her bathrobe and slippers and took the elevator down to the basement. She found the moving dolly stored there for new move-ins, and wheeled it back upstairs. The thirty-seven-inch plasma TV Rudy had given her for Christmas stood in its place on the far side of her living area. “A couple K.” Had he always been like that?
She yanked the TV’s electrical cord out of the wall socket, unhooked the cable, and hoisted the set onto the dolly. She pulled it into the elevator, through the front lobby, and out the front doors of her apartment building. She barely noticed that it was after midnight and she wore almost nothing under her robe.
How would anyone ever love her again? she thought, bumping the dolly down the front stairs. They’d find out, sooner or later, that she’d slept with him—indecent, unkind, ridiculous Rudy Fisch. They’d be walking down the street, she and her new love, and they would run into Rudy, bouncing along happily. “Who’s that?” the new love would say, and she’d be forced to admit it: “An old boyfriend.” Whoever was loving her until that moment would suddenly see her in a new light and think, Is that who I’m to follow? Does she have no standards at all? What does that say about me? No, it was impossible. Rudy Fisch had ruined her life forever. She felt as if he’d left her with some kind of horrible disease.
She had almost gotten the TV down the front steps of her building when she got stuck. She was hunched over as far as she could, but the dolly wouldn’t budge. Hell, she thought, just let it go. She was about to let it smash into fifteen thousand pieces, when, suddenly, there were feet on the other side of the dolly, and the television’s weight was being eased from her straining back. She looked up and saw a face attached to the feet. It was a man’s face. She knew him from the neighborhood, but in her overwrought state she couldn’t remember exactly where. She let go as the man took the dolly and eased it down the last step. “Funny time to be moving,” he said. He was wearing a pair of stained, baggy chef’s pants. They made him look like a half-dressed clown.
“Thanks,” Pru said. “I can get it.” She took the dolly from him and dragged it to the curb.
“Are you just going to leave it there?” he called after her.
“It belonged to my boyfriend,” Pru said, over her shoulder. “My ex-boyfriend.”
A battered old Chevy Impala sped by, slowed, then backed up. The Impala’s back fender hung at an angle. The car stopped and two young, lean guys got out. They nodded in a brisk, professional way to Pru, picked up the TV, and put it in the car’s trunk.
“Hey, wait a minute.” The man in the chef’s pants started to move, but Pru put up her hand. She said, “No, let them.” She felt like Sonny Corleone.
It was as if everything had been pre-arranged. The two guys got back in the Impala and drove away, Rudy’s TV peeking out of the trunk.
Suddenly, Pru was exhausted. She remembered the puzzled look on her mother’s face as Pru was opening the enormous box on Christmas morning. A television wasn’t considered a proper gift in the Whistler family. Rather, it was one of those necessities that couldn’t help being as awful as it was, like the toilet plunger. Still, Nadine was hopeful about what such a costly thing must mean. Finally, a serious prospect, for Pru. Not just another one of those losers she seemed to attract, like flies at a barbecue.
She stood in the neon light of the flashing Cluck-U Chicken sign, watching the Impala bounce away. She could feel the glare of the bantam rooster behind her, mocking her. It was a rather shallow victory, after all. Rudy would just buy another TV. But she would never get back what she had lost. Everything she thought she was working for, gone. No job, no boyfriend. And no babies, anytime soon. Her hands went to the belt on her bathrobe. Was she even dressed? She couldn’t remember.
The man in the stupid pants was still standing there, watching the Impala’s rear lights fade in the distance. “Do you think he’s going to be upset?” he said, turning to her.
“I certainly hope so,” said Pru. Her eyes and nose were beginning to burn. Oh no, she thought.
“Hey,” he said. He was looking at her with concern. She realized what a figure she must cut, out there in her robe and slippers, her glasses slipping down her nose, with its layer of grease. “Gee, I’m sorry,” he said gently. “You must have loved him a lot.”
“No.” Pru shook her head. “Not really. Not hardly at all.”
Then, to her horror, she burst into tears.
Four
Of course, she had cried when her father died.
She just hadn’t cried at the cemetery. While her mother and Patsy wept, without restraint and copiously, on either side of her, Pru’s attention had landed on a nick that ran down the left side of her father’s casket. The nick wasn’t there before, when they showed her the casket at the funeral home. Leonard wouldn’t have cared about it at all, himself. But Pru couldn’t hear a word of her father’s eulogy, she was so troubled by the thought of him going to the hereafter with a nick in a casket that had cost almost a thousand dollars. As her sister and mother sobbed and clutched at her hands, Pru sighed deeply. There
