“But I don’t love you,” I said to Noel. “Don’t you want to live with somebody who loves you?”
“Nobody has ever loved me and nobody ever will,” Noel said. “What have I got to lose?”
I am in the park to think about what I have to lose. Nothing. So why don’t I leave the park, call him at work, say that I have decided it is a very sensible plan?
A chubby little boy wanders by, wearing a short jacket and pants that are slipping down. He is holding a yellow boat. He looks so damned pleased with everything that I think about accosting him and asking, “Should I move in with Noel? Why am I reluctant to do it?” The young have such wisdom—some of the best and worst thinkers have thought so: Wordsworth, the followers of the Guru Maharaj Ji . . . “Do the meditations, or I will beat you with a stick,” the Guru tells his followers. Tell me the answer, kid, or I will take away your boat.
I sink down onto a bench. Next, Noel will ask me to marry him. He is trying to trap me. Worse, he is not trying to trap me but only wants me to move in so we can save money. He doesn’t care about me. Since no one has ever loved him, he can’t love anybody. Is that even true?
I find a phone booth and stand in front of it, waiting for a woman with a shopping bag to get out. She mouths something I don’t understand. She has lips like a fish; they are painted bright orange. I do not have any lipstick on. I have on a raincoat, pulled over my nightgown, and sandals and Noel’s socks.
“Noel,” I say on the phone when I reach him, “were you serious when you said that no one ever loved you?”
“Jesus, it was embarrassing enough just to admit it,” he says. “Do you have to question me about it?”
“I have to know.”
“Well, I’ve told you about every woman I ever slept with. Which one do you suspect might have loved me?”
I have ruined his day. I hang up, rest my head against the phone. “Me,” I mumble. “I do.” I reach in the raincoat pocket. A Kleenex, two pennies, and a pink rubber spider put there by Beth to scare me. No more dimes. I push open the door. A young woman is standing there waiting for me. “Do you have a few moments?” she says.
“Why?”
“Do you have a moment? What do you think of this?” she says. It is a small stick with the texture of salami. In her other hand she holds a clipboard and a pen.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and walk away. I stop and turn. “What is that, anyway?” I ask.
“Do you have a moment?” she asks.
“No. I just wanted to know what that thing was.”
“A dog treat.”
She is coming after me, clipboard outstretched.
“I don’t have time,” I say, and quickly walk away.
Something hits my back. “Take the time to stick it up your ass,” she says.
I run for a block before I stop and lean on the park wall to rest. If Noel had been there, she wouldn’t have done it. My protector. If I had a dime, I could call back and say, “Oh, Noel, I’ll live with you always if you’ll stay with me so people won’t throw dog treats at me.”
I finger the plastic spider. Maybe Beth put it there to cheer me up. Once, she put a picture of a young, beautiful girl in a bikini on my bedroom wall. I misunderstood, seeing the woman as all that I was not. Beth just thought it was a pretty picture. She didn’t understand why I was so upset.
“Mommy’s just upset because when you put things on the wall with Scotch Tape, the Scotch Tape leaves a mark when you remove it,” Noel told her.
Noel is wonderful. I reach in my pocket, hoping a dime will suddenly appear.
Noel and I go to visit his friends Charles and Sol, in Vermont. Noel has taken time off from work; it is a vacation to celebrate our decision to live together. Now, on the third evening there, we are all crowded around the hearth—Noel and Beth and I, Charles and Sol and the women they live with, Lark and Margaret. We are smoking and listening to Sol’s stereo. The hearth is a big one. It was laid by Sol, made out of slate he took from the side of a hill and bricks he found dumped by the side of the road. There is a mantel that was made by Charles from a section of an old carousel he picked up when a local amusement park closed down; a gargoyle’s head protrudes from one side. Car keys have been draped over the beast’s eyebrows. On top of the mantel there is an L. L. Bean catalogue, Margaret’s hat, roaches and a roach clip, a can of peaches, and an incense burner that holds a small cone in a puddle of lavender ashes.
Noel used to work with Charles in the city. Charles quit when he heard about a big house in Vermont that needed to be fixed up. He was told that he could live in it for a hundred dollars a month, except in January and February, when skiers rented it. The skiers turned out to be nice people who didn’t want to see anyone displaced. They suggested that the four stay on in the house, and they did, sleeping in a side room that Charles and Sol fixed up. Just now, the rest of the house is empty; it has been raining a lot, ruining the skiing.
Sol has put up some pictures he framed—old advertisements he found in a box in the attic (after Charles repaired the attic stairs). I study the pictures now, in the firelight. The Butter Lady—a healthy coquette with pearly skin and a mildewed bottom lip—extends a hand offering a package of butter. On the wall across from her, a man with oil-slick black hair holds a shoe that is the same color as his hair.
“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too,” Dylan sings.
Margaret says to Beth, “Do you want to come take a bath with me?”
Beth is shy. The first night we were here, she covered her eyes when Sol walked naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.
“I don’t have to take a bath while I’m here, do I?” she says to me.
“Where did you get that idea?”
