There Are Doors

His Apartment

The mailbox was full, and among its bills and ads he discovered a yellow ticket advising him that still more were being held for him at the post office. A little strawberry-shaped clock he had gotten in a drugstore clung to the door of his refrigerator, its display faithfully flashing the time and date—1:38, 4 15, 1:38, 4 15, 1:39, 4 15.

It was the middle of April; he tried to remember when Lara had left him, but could not. Her note lay on the coffee table, undated save for a light coating of dust. He read it again.

Her signature was exactly as he remembered it, its first A a continuation of the capital L. He did not read the postscript (which he called the PS), feeling that he would quite literally die, that his heart would somehow burst, if he did.

A paper lay under the coffee table. March 13th—thirty-three days since Lara had gone. A night in the hospital, or perhaps two. Say two nights in the hospital, a night in the hotel with North, a night in the hotel alone. That was four nights, for thirty-three days.

He switched on the television and chanced upon a feature story about the rush to file income tax returns. April 15th; this was the day you were supposed to file. Mechanically, he walked to the post office and got the rest of his mail. His form was there, and the store had sent his W2 already—it was in the pile of papers on the bedside table. The bed was still unmade, still rumpled from the night he had staggered into it with Lara and the day he had awakened alone.

He used the short form and had nothing to report but his salary; it was complete, sealed and stamped, in twenty minutes. He had not worn the overcoat when he went to the post office, and now he debated whether to wear it when he went out to mail his return. The packet of fifties was still in the right side pocket. He took it out, wondering what Internal Revenue would do if they knew he had it; no doubt profits had to be reported, even if they were the profits of buying several thousand dollars for a dime. The brown paper wrapper was still stamped PUROLATOR COURIER, still marked with a Chinese character and the symbols for ten cents by Mr. Sheng’s industrious brush. Where was Mr. Sheng now? And his nephew, Dr. Pille? On a different channel, in another show.

Taking Marcella’s bills out of his wallet, he folded them, bound them with a rubber band, and put them in the pocket of the overcoat. Slipping the paper wrapper from Mr. Sheng’s fifties, he crumpled it and tossed it into a wastebasket, and deposited the fifties in his wallet.

He felt like an international traveler—like James Bond—felt that he should have a small but deadly automatic tucked away somewhere, and several passports. He laughed at himself as he hung the coat in the closet, draping the muffler over its collar while he resisted, always resisted, the impulse to take out the Tina doll and study it, to kiss it perhaps, and comb its hair as the woman in the haberdashery had.

“Too old to play with dolls.” He spoke the words aloud, but softly.

Returning from the post office a second time, he felt cold despite the sweater-vest and stopped to buy a new topcoat. At his own store—the store where he worked, or at least where he had worked—he could have gotten an employee discount. But the topcoat was on sale, and his discount would not have made it any cheaper; the discount applied only to the full price, never to a sale price. His new topcoat was tan, like his old one.

Back at his apartment, he stripped the bed, showered, and changed clothes, discarding his scorched slacks. There was a musty shirt on the floor of his closet. He bundled it with the sheets and pillow slips, and the soiled shirt, socks, and underwear he had removed, and looked around to see whether Lara had left anything.

She had owned very little, now that he thought of it. Two dresses, but perhaps, since he remembered both as green, there had been only one, a single dress that could be worn differently at different times, with different pins and so on. He tried to recall what they said in Better Dresses—accessorized, that was it. It occurred to him that Lara would never have used that word and would not have liked it, and he realized that he himself did not like it now.

So that much of Lara remained with him. There was nothing else, not a scrap of clothing, not so much as a used lipstick or a comb. Had Lara smoked? No, it had been Fanny, she had smoked a lot, had been almost a chain smoker, he thought. The ashtrays in his apartment were empty, soiled only by dust.

He carried the dirty laundry to the basement and loaded it into one of the washers there, adding granulated detergent from a coin-operated machine. While the washer ran, he read a paper someone had left behind. Innocent people were dying in Africa. The comic page no longer carried Lolly; something new and ugly had been substituted.

The washing machine fell silent, displaying a sodden bundle of cloth. He stuck the bundle into a drier, set it on Delicate, and fed it quarters.

A syndicated columnist with a reputation for wit imagined her interview with the President following a nuclear holocaust. The crossword puzzle demanded seven letters meaning bear. The store was running a big sale on tape decks—his own department. Buy a tape deck at ten percent off, get your choice of any tape in the store for a dollar. He imagined they had been busy and wondered how they had made out without him. Discontinued home computers were on sale too, at forty percent of list.

He stuffed his dry laundry into a pillowcase and carried it back up to his apartment. One shirt and the socks were gone. He returned to the basement and checked both the machines; his shirt and socks were in neither. They had returned, he decided, in some way. North had bought that shirt and those socks in the hotel.

The sweater-vest was still hanging in the closet. So was the overcoat, crowded into the little alcove around the corner from the closet door. He could not find his hat. He had worn it in the car with Fanny, worn it to Mama Capini’s; he recalled hanging it on a peg. But he could not remember taking it from the peg when they left. Had he had it on when he ran into the furrier’s? He did not know, could not remember.

His watch said it was five o’clock. There was food in the apartment, but the things in the refrigerator had no doubt gone bad, sour milk, soft carrots. The margarine might be okay.

He decided he could not face the job of cleaning out the refrigerator (and the bread box, now that he came to think of it) that day. He would eat at Mama’s, and perhaps—

Perhaps something might happen.

His necktie was draped over the lampshade. He buttoned his collar and knotted the tie carefully; he made it a rule never to leave the apartment without a tie—there was always a chance he would run into one of the supervisors. He put on his jacket and his new topcoat.

When he had gone a block, he saw a man’s black sock in the gutter and stopped to pick it up. It was not one of his, but it reminded him that he had often seen clothing lost or abandoned, lying in the street. No doubt his shirt and his own socks were similarly lost and abandoned, lying in the snow of Lara’s city, the city that was so much like, and yet so much unlike, his own. The socks would be separated, he thought; they would be miles apart. No one would get any good from them, unless perhaps a child took one to make a puppet, and a tramp who did not care whether his socks matched chanced on the other. The shirt had been a good one, a real silk shirt. He hoped someone found it before it got run over, before it became a rag like the rags he had passed so often without thinking about where they might have come from.

One of Mama’s sons was at the cash register. He tried to decide whether it was Guido, the son he had talked with in the restroom; he could not be sure. All the sons had always looked much the same to him, glowering men with black mustaches that came and went like customers, full of meat sauce at one moment and gone the next.

“Sit anywhere ya want to,” the son called to him. “It’s pretty early yet.”

He took the table by the window where he had sat with Fanny for lunch. If he had indeed left his hat on a peg in Mama’s, it was gone now. He told the waitress, “I was in here around noon with a lady; she had a salad. I don’t know what it was, but it looked awfully good. Do you remember us?”

The waitress shook her head. “I don’t think I served you, sir.”

“She was—” he tried to remember how old Fanny had said she was. “—about twenty-three. Petite, curly black hair.”

“Probably Gina served you, sir. Gina looks a lot like me.”

“Then would you find her and bring her over here?”

“We got three salads, sir.” The waitress described them. “They’re all pretty good.”

“Find Gina,” he told her.

She left looking sullen, and he studied the license plates of passing cars. It was getting dark, but he could read some of them, and they were perfectly ordinary.

He looked through the pockets of his jacket, moved by the feeling that he had forgotten something. There was nothing in either side pocket, and only a handkerchief—the red one he had carried there for months—in the breast pocket. His checkbook was in the inside pocket, and he pulled it out and examined it. The last check he had recorded there had been written on March eleventh. It occurred to him that he had paid for the doll by check, and that the amount of the check had been large; but he could not remember how large, and he was not sure a check could be presented for collection by a shop in another world, a shop in a dream.

“ … not here,” the waitress announced to his elbow.

He glanced up at her. “I’m sorry?”

“I said Gina’s not here. I looked all over.” The waitress brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead and contrived to appear both hot and tired when she was neither. “Dinner’s just starting, too.”

“Can she do that? Just leave like that?”

The waitress leaned closer. “Gina’s screwing Guido. She can do any damned thing she wants.”

“Is Guido here?” He glanced toward the register. There was no one there.

“Nah, Guido’s gone. He don’t hardly ever stay for dinner. What’d you like?”

He ordered one of the salads, and she drifted away. After a minute or two, he returned his checkbook to his breast pocket, wondering what to do until his food came. He had eaten here for years, usually alone as he was now; surely he had done something. While Lara had lived with him, there had always been things to do, someone to talk with.

Mama Capini pulled out the empty chair and sat down. “Hey, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t get full at lunch? You should of said somethin’, I’d have got you some garlic bread.”

He asked, “Do you remember the girl I brought here for lunch, Mama?”

Mama kissed her fingers. “Sure. You gonna get married?”

“If she comes in, will you tell me?”

“Sure!”

“And remember Lara? Tell me if Lara comes in. Especially if Lara comes in.”

“Sure. You lookin’ for a date?”

“No, I’m just trying to find these people. And if the big man and his wife—that’s the lady in the red dress—come in, let me know about them, too.”

He dawdled over his salad for an hour and half, drinking an espresso and a couple of amarettos. He saw no one he knew, and nothing happened.

At last he paid the check. When he counted his change, it was just money; nor had he seen any bills with strange pictures in the drawer. The man at the register was the one who had told him Guido was crazy, bigger and older than Guido. As he trudged back to his apartment, he wondered vaguely where Guido had gone. Had Guido been drawn into the other world? If so, did he know it yet? Perhaps Gina came from there; if customers could walk through the door from another world, as Joe and Jennifer had, it seemed likely enough that a waitress looking for work might walk through it, too.

Back at the apartment he put on one of his favorite albums, but found that the music that had once charmed him was harsh and ugly now. He turned on the television. After an hour or so, he realized he had no idea what the show was or why he was watching it.