“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I think you were right. The Air Force, Mother, marriage—”
“They’re not real women,” Sam said.
“What?”
Sam thought that Richard had been staring at the two people he had been watching. A mistake on his part; Richard had just been glancing around the bar.
“Those two blondes on the bar stools. They’re men.”
Richard studied them. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Of course I’m sure. I live in N.Y.C., you know.”
“Maybe I’ll come live with you. Can I do that?”
“You always said you’d rather die than live in New York.”
“Well, are you telling me to kill myself, or is it O.K. if I move in with you?”
“If you want to,” Sam said. He shrugged. “There’s only one bedroom, you know.”
“I’ve been to your apartment, Sam.”
“I just wanted to remind you. You don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “A God-damned German.”
The barmaid picked up their empty glasses and looked at them.
“This gentleman’s wife is in love with another man,” Sam said to her.
“I overheard,” she said.
“What do you think of that?” Sam asked her.
“Maybe German men aren’t as creepy as American men,” she said. “Do you want refills?”
After Richard moved in with Sam he began bringing animals into the apartment. He brought back a dog, a cat that stayed through the winter, and a blue parakeet that had been in a very small cage that Richard could not persuade the pet-store owner to replace. The bird flew around the apartment. The cat was wild for it, and Sam was relieved when the cat eventually disappeared. Once, Sam saw a mouse in the kitchen and assumed that it was another of Richard’s pets, until he realized that there was no cage for it in the apartment. When Richard came home he said that the mouse was not his. Sam called the exterminator, who refused to come in and spray the apartment because the dog had growled at him. Sam told this to his brother, to make him feel guilty for his irresponsibility. Instead, Richard brought another cat in. He said that it would get the mouse, but not for a while yet—it was only a kitten. Richard fed it cat food off the tip of a spoon.
Richard’s daughter came to visit. She loved all the animals—the big mutt that let her brush him, the cat that slept in her lap, the bird that she followed from room to room, talking to it, trying to get it to land on the back of her hand. For Christmas, she gave her father a rabbit. It was a fat white rabbit with one brown ear, and it was kept in a cage on the night table when neither Sam nor Richard was in the apartment to watch it and keep it away from the cat and the dog. Sam said that the only vicious thing Alice ever did was giving her daughter the rabbit to give Richard for Christmas. Eventually the rabbit died of a fever. It cost Sam one hundred and sixty dollars to treat the rabbit’s illness; Richard did not have a job, and could not pay anything. Sam kept a book of I.O.U.s. In it he wrote, “Death of rabbit—$160 to vet.” When Richard did get a job, he looked over the debt book. “Why couldn’t you just have written down the sum?” he asked Sam. “Why did you want to remind me about the rabbit?” He was so upset that he missed the second morning of his new job. “That was inhuman,” he said to Sam. “ ‘Death of rabbit—$160’—that was horrible. The poor rabbit. God damn you.” He couldn’t get control of himself.
A few weeks later, Sam and Richard’s mother died. Alice wrote to Sam, saying that she was sorry. Alice had never liked their mother, but she was fascinated by the woman. She never got over her spending a hundred and twenty-five dollars on paper lanterns for the engagement party. After all these years, she was still thinking about it. “What do you think became of the lanterns after the party?” she wrote in her letter of condolence. It was an odd letter, and it didn’t seem that Alice was very happy. Sam even forgave her for the rabbit. He wrote her a long letter, saying that they should all get together. He knew a motel out in the country where they could stay, perhaps for a whole weekend. She wrote back, saying that it sounded like a good idea. The only thing that upset her about it was that his secretary had typed his letter. In her letter to Sam, she pointed out several times that he could have written in longhand. Sam noticed that both Alice and Richard seemed to be raving. Maybe they would get back together.
Now they were all staying at the same motel, in different rooms. Alice and her daughter and the baby were in one room, and Richard and Sam had rooms down the hall. The little girl spent the nights with different people. When Sam bought two pounds of fudge, she said she was going to spend the night with him. The next night, Alice’s son had colic, and when Sam looked out his window he saw Richard holding the baby, walking around and around the swimming pool. Alice was asleep. Sam knew this because the little girl left her mother’s room when she fell asleep and came looking for him.
“Do you want to take me to the carnival?” she asked.
She was wearing a nightgown with blue bears upside down on it, headed for a crash at the hem.
“The carnival’s closed,” Sam said. “It’s late, you know.”
“Isn’t anything open?”
“Maybe the doughnut shop. That’s open all night. I suppose you want to go there?”
“I love doughnuts,” she said.
She rode to the doughnut shop on Sam’s shoulders, wrapped in his raincoat. He kept thinking, Ten years ago I would never have believed this. But he believed it now; there was a definite weight on his shoulders, and there were two legs hanging down his chest.
The next afternoon, they sat on the rock again, wrapped in towels after a swim. In the distance, two hippies and an Irish setter, all in bandannas, rowed toward shore from an island.
“I wish I had a dog,” the little girl said.
