Betty Blue

7

We didn’t start looking for a job right away-we were in no hurry. We spent most of our time on the terrace, talking to Lisa and Bongo, playing cards, reading. The afternoons succeeded each other, threaded together by an amazing calm-I’d never known anything that good. Betty was tanned to a golden turn, Lisa somewhat less so, since she worked during the day as a cashier in a department store. From time to time I’d play with Bongo in the vacant lot, chasing the birds away. Betty would watch us from the balcony. We’d wave at each other, then she’d disappear. Soon all I heard was the tapping of the typewriter-the little bell that rings when you come to the end of a line.

Actually, this worried me a little. She’d gotten it into her head to type my whole manuscript and send it out to publishers. She’d run herself ragged finding a typewriter. I’d written the thing for my own pleasure, not to throw myself to the lions-at least that’s the way I’d always looked at it-but Betty was preparing my entrance into the arena. I tossed a stick for Bongo to fetch, fretting about it all, but I didn’t let it get to me. I had other things on my mind-the evening’s menu, for example. It was something I’d happily put myself in charge of. A clever guy who has all day to ponder dinner can make miracles out of nothing. I even whipped up something special for Bongo-we’d become fast friends.

After putting dinner in the oven, I’d take him for a walk to meet Lisa. Betty kept typing with three or four fingers till the last rays of sunset, and this gave us quite a bit of time. She made a lot of mistakes and the corrections doubled her work, but I didn’t worry too much about it. Bongo would run ahead of me and people would just get out of the way. It was fabulous-I always found a seat on the bench at the bus stop. We hadn’t had an autumn that mild in a long time. Afterward we’d walk back to the house slowly, Lisa and I, me carrying her things, Bongo sprinkling the cars. She’d tell me about herself; I didn’t have much to tell. I found out that she’d married very young and that the guy had dumped her after two years. Not much was left of the marriage-just Bongo and the house, and the apartment upstairs that she rented out to make ends meet. We’d come to a nice agreement about that. There were a lot of things in it that needed fixing plumbing and electrical work-so we’d estimated that the work would come out to about three months’ rent. Everybody was happy.

In the evenings, we’d catch a movie on TV. We’d take it in, all the way to the end-the last commercial-then haggle about who was going to get up and turn the set off. You had to be careful not to fall on all the beer cans. If it was really too boring, we’d turn it off in the middle and get out the deck of cards, or just hang out in the apartment, the girls talking to each other while I played with the dials on the radio, trying to get something decent. Sometimes I’d feel like taking a walk. I’d get my jacket without a word and we’d weave our way through street after street, Bongo running between all our legs. The girls loved that. I told them it made me feel like a rat in a maze and they laughed. It’s true-we would turn right, then another right, or left… the scenery never changed at all. When we got home we were dead on our feet. Still, it was good for the digestion and made us hungry. By the time the door was closed we’d have already emptied the whole refrigerator onto the table. When Lisa felt tired we’d go upstairs, but we never went to bed until three or four in the morning. It’s hard to go to bed early when you get up at noon.

When we weren’t doing all this and she felt up to it, Betty would go back to her typing. I’d settle down on the terrace with Bongo’s snout across my lap, watching her decipher what was in the notebooks with a furrowed brow. I wondered what I’d done right to wind up with a girl like that-still, I knew that even if I’d been holed up at the North Pole, I’d have come across her sooner or later, trudging across the ice floe with the chill wind blowing around her neck. I loved to watch her. It made me forget all the shit we’d left behind. When I thought about it, I imagined a posse of cops hot on our trail, the burning bungalow hanging like a sword over our heads. Luckily I didn’t leave my address. I imagined the tenants in the shadows of the flames, making faces and screaming at us as we took off running with our suitcases in our hands like some yellow-bellied bank robbers. Now when I heard a siren in the distance I’d just take a swig of beer and in five minutes all was forgotten-all except this woman sitting a few yards from me who was the most important thing in my life. It didn’t bother me that the most important thing in my life was a woman, in fact it felt great-the feeling in the air had turned into something simple and carefree. Once in a while I’d get up and go cop a quick feel-see how she was getting along with it.

“Doing okay? Still into it?” I’d ask.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, if it turns out that no one publishes it…”

“What, are you kidding?”

“Look, it’s quite possible.”

“Oh yeah? Explain to me how that could ever happen.”

“Betty, it’s a tough world out there…”

“No it isn’t. All you have to do is know how to handle it.”

It was food for thought. I went back to the terrace and she went back to the typing, Bongo went back to my lap, and over my head the stars came out, chattering.

I woke up one morning wanting to get on with the plumbing. I kissed Betty on the forehead, borrowed Lisa’s car, and went to town to get supplies. A few of the pipes stuck out of the car on the way back, and when I got home and started unloading it, this woman suddenly showed up next to me. She was wearing a little gold crucifix.

“Excuse me, sir… you wouldn’t be a plumber, would you?”

“That depends,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, it’s about my faucet, my faucet in the kitchen. I’ve been trying to get a plumber for a month now, but nobody wants to come out to fix my faucet. You don’t know how bothersome…”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve been there myself.”

She stroked her crucifix and looked at the ground.

“You wouldn’t consider… it’s perhaps just a matter of a few minutes’ work…”

I thought it over for a second, looking at my watch like I was already overloaded.

“Shit, it would be tight… You live far from here?”

“No, no. Just across the street.”

“Okay, but let’s get going.”

She was around sixty, with a dress that came down to the middle of her calves. I followed her across the street. It was the house of a retiree who lacked for nothing-the tile gleamed and all was silent. She led me into the kitchen and pointed to the faucet. A little stream of clear water trickled gently onto the enamel. I went up and turned it a few times in every possible direction, then stepped back and sighed.

“Just as I thought,” I said. “The rotary has gotten caught in the valve and is botching up the equilateral. It happens all the time.”

“Oh no. Is it serious?”

“Could be worse,” I said. “Got to replace everything.”

“Oh my God. And how much will this cost?”

I did a little vague calculating in my head, then multiplied by two.

“Oh sweet Jesus!” she said.

“And that doesn’t include the labor,” I added.

“And when do you think you can do this…?”

“Right now or never. I don’t take checks.”

I ran back to the house and got together all the tools I could find. I told Betty what was going on. She just shrugged and dove back into the notebooks. Two seconds later I was back in the car. I double-parked, bought the faucet, and went back to the old lady’s house.

“I can’t be disturbed,” I said. “I’m used to working in silence. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

I holed up in the kitchen and went to work. One hour later I put my tools away, mopped up the last drop of water, passed Go, and went up to the teller’s window. Sister Mary Magdalen and Baby Jesus were in heaven-the kitchen was in perfect working order.

“Now, young man,” she said. “Don’t leave without giving me your telephone number. Knock on wood, I hope I won’t need you again, but…”

She walked me out to the doorstep and waved at me until I disappeared into the house. Not a bad day’s work, I thought.

That same night I was keeping an eye on dinner when the phone rang. Betty was setting the table. Lisa answered. She listened for a second, said a few words back, then put her hand over the receiver, laughing:

“Hey, get this, it’s the guy from the market down the street. He says he wants to talk to the plumber!”

Betty gave me the evil eye.

“I think you’re on call,” she said. “Must be something clogged somewhere…”

Word spread like wildfire. My phone number made the rounds with the speed of light. I wondered where the other plumbers-the real ones-were hiding, what with all those houses leaking all over the place, all those pipes clogging up. I was standing in line to buy a few yards of copper tubing and a right-angle elbow, when I happened to talk to a pro who told me that they didn’t want to bother with the little jobs. I’ll tell you something, the guy said, lowering his voice to a whisper, when somebody calls me up for a leak, if I don’t think I can wind up selling them a new bathroom, I don’t mess with it.

So I found my niche: five-second jobs paid for in cash. In a matter of hours I’d become a neighborhood celebrity. Expensive, but efficient. I knew where my power lay: somebody who has the flu can try to fight it, but somebody with a clogged toilet is at your mercy. I made as much money as I could. I overcharged. I had them all in a hammerlock.

For a couple of weeks it was pretty wild, but then it settled down. I stopped running around so much, booking all my jobs for the morning. Betty didn’t like me leaving, cap pulled down over my eyes and toolbox under my arm-it made her nervous. We even had a fight about it one night. I had come home totally wiped out.

I’d just done an emergency job for this military guy-uniform, white hair, blue eyes. It was my fifth job of the day and I was wasted. The guy led me down this long dark hall, his boots clacking on the floor, me following him all hunched over. The minute I got to the kitchen I was hit by this smell, like french fries and burned plastic, horrible. It was all I could do to stay there. It was something that happened every time I went into somebody’s house-this desire to turn tail and run. I stayed, though.

The guy was carrying a riding crop in his hand-he pointed it at the kitchen sink without saying a word. It didn’t matter-by the end of the day I didn’t care if people talked to me or not. It was more peaceful if they didn’t. I approached the sink, half holding my breath. There were three plastic dolls in it, mostly melted. The drain was clogged and everything floated in about two inches of oil. I opened the cupboard underneath to take out the garbage can and I saw that the drainpipe was completely corkscrewed, even melted in some places. I stood up.

“You did this with boiling oil?”

“Listen, I don’t have to answer you,” he whined. “Just do whatever needs doing and let’s get it over with quickly.”

“Hey, take it easy. It’s okay with me if you want to pour hot oil on your dolls. I see weirder things than that every day. It’s just that I have Io know if there might be something else besides grease and melted plastic in your pipe here. You’ll have to tell me.”

He shook his head fast and said no, then he left me alone. I took a cigarette break. At first glance it didn’t seem very complicated-just a drainpipe replacement-but of course things are never as easy as they seem. I went back into the cupboard and saw that in fact the drainpipe ran through two other cupboards before going into the floor. I saw that I was going to have a good time trying to get through all the crap.

I went out to the car to get a piece of drainpipe. I had all the basic sizes-they were strapped onto the roof and hooked to the bumpers at each end. Betty had rolled her eyes when she saw that. I’d found a whole bunch of them at this construction site during one of my nocturnal outings, and my profits had skyrocketed ever since. I grabbed a beer from under the front seat and chugged the whole thing before going back to work.

It took me an hour to remove the old pipe and another hour to install the new one. It drove me half crazy-down on all fours in the cupboards, smashing my head in every possible corner. I had to stop every once in a while to close my eyes for a minute. But I did the job. I leaned on the sink and got my breath back, smiling at the little disemboweled dolls. Come on, man, just hold on a little longer and your day will be over-think about the girls fixing you a drink. I grabbed the pipe, sawed off a good yard of it, and fitted it into the joint. I was putting my tools away when the guy in the khaki uniform showed up again. He didn’t even look at me, just stuck his nose in all the cupboards to check the installation. Guys like that make me laugh. I slipped the strap of my toolbox over my shoulder, grabbed my piece of drainpipe, and waited for him to come out of there.

He stood up, seized with agitation.

“What is this…?” he said. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

I wondered if maybe he’d burst a blood vessel in his brain while bending down under the sink. I stayed calm.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He tried to dig his eyes into my forehead. He must have thought he was still in the colonies, getting ready to chastise one of his slaves.

“Are you trying to pull the wool over my eyes? Your pipes are not regulation!”

“How’s that?”

“Yes… the length of pipe that you’ve put in, THERE-it’s a piece of telephone tubing!! It’s WRITTEN on it!”

It was news to me. It’s true I’d never paid much attention. Still, I didn’t let it shake me.

“You scared me,” I said. “No, seriously, don’t worry about it. It’s exactly the same pipe as the other kind. All the sinks in town are fitted with it, it’s been that way for ten years. It`s good stuff.”

“No, no, no. No good. It’s not REGULATION!!”

“Really, don’t worry about it…”

“Don’t try to swindle me! I want things done according to regulation.”

It always happens to you at the end of the day, just when you’re totally beat. Nobody’s willing to throw in the towel. I ran my hand through my hair.

“Listen,” I said. “I do my job, you do yours. I’m not going to ask you what kind of dynamite you use to take a hill. If I use telephone tubing it’s because I know what I’m doing.”

“I want a regulation installation, you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you. And I suppose that all the weirdness you do in the sink, that’s regulation, too. Look, just pay me and let’s forget about it. That thing’s not going to budge for twenty years, I guaran-”

“Nothing doing! You’re not getting one penny until you change it!”

I looked the old fruitcake right in the eye. It was clear I was wasting my time with him, and I wasn’t interested in overtime. All I wanted was to get back in my little car, roll down the windows, smoke a cigarette, and go home in peace, that’s all. So I walked up to the sink, bent my knee, and kicked the U joint with all my might. I managed to break off half of it. I turned to the guy.

“There you go,” I said. “Something’s wrong with your sink.

You’d better call a plumber.”

The old man hit me in the face with his crop-I felt a line of fire from my mouth to my ear. He looked at me, his eyes gleaming. I smashed him in the head with my pipe. He backed up into the wall and put his hand on his heart. I didn’t go get him his pills. I just split.

I felt my cheek burning all the way home. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a red-purple stripe. One corner of my mouth was swollen-it made me look even more exhausted than I was. It seemed to put into motion some process that made all the fatigue from the past few days show up on my face. I wasn’t a pretty sight. Caught in a traffic jam, I was able to recognize all my brothers in misery-we all looked alike. Same wounds, or almost. Every face ravaged by a week of meaningless work fatigue, privation, rage, and boredom. We crept forward a few yards each time the light turned green, without saying a word.

Betty saw the welt the minute I walked in. My cheek was all puffed up, glistening. I didn’t have the heart to make up a lie-I told her exactly what had happened. I poured myself a tall drink and she jumped on me:

“That’s what you get for clowning around all day long! It had to happen!”

“Shit, Betty. What are you talking about?”

“Spending your days on your knees under a bunch of fucking sinks, rubbing elbows with garbage cans, unplugging all sorts of shit, putting in toilets… you think that’s smart?”

“Who cares? It’s not important.”

She came up close to me. In a sugar-coated voice she said, “Tell me, do you know what I’ve been doing all these days? You don’t know? Well, I’ve been recopying your book! I’ve been at it day after day, and sometimes at night-it keeps me up nights, for your information!”

Her voice got more and more bitter. I poured myself another one and grabbed a handful of peanuts. She didn’t take her eyes off me.

“I am convinced that you are a great writer. Can you get that through your head at least?”

“Listen, don’t start up again with that. I’m tired. Being a great writer is not going to put food on the table. I think you’re working too hard on that thing. It’s giving you delusions of grandeur.”

“But God! Don’t you see that someone like you shouldn’t have to stoop? Don`t you understand that you don’t have the right to do that?”

“Hey, Betty… you gone nuts?”

She grabbed me by the lapels. I almost spilled my scotch.

“No, it’s you who’s nuts! You’re not with it at all! It makes me sick to see how you spend your time. What’s wrong with you? Why won’t you open your eyes?”

I couldn’t help sighing. The crummy day just wouldn’t end.

“Betty… I’m really afraid you think I’m someone I’m not.”

“No, stupid! I know who you are! I just didn’t know you were so thick! I’d rather see you out just walking around, gawking, anything-that would be normal. But instead you go out and deaden your mind with a bunch of sinks, and you think it’s very cool…”

“I’m doing a little fieldwork in human relations,” I said. “I’m trying to store up a maximum of infor-”

“Oh, cut the bullshit! I’ve already said that I want to be proud of you, to admire you, but I think the idea really bugs you! I think you’re doing all this to annoy me!”

“No, I’d never do anything to annoy you.”

“Well, it seems that way to me, I swear. I mean, Jesus, try to understand. You don’t have time to do a hundred different things with your life. Don’t think you’re going to get out of it with a few witty remarks. You’d be better off facing it once and for all: you’re a writer, not a plumber.”

“How can you tell the difference?” I asked.

We glared at each other across the table. She looked like she was ready to slit my throat.

“You’re going to give me a lot of work,” she said. “Yeah, you probably will-but for now there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m warning you, I’m not going to give in. I’m telling you it bugs me to live with a guy who comes home at seven o’clock at night, plops his toolbox on the table and sighs: ‘THIS REALLY GETS ME DOWN!’ How do you think I feel when in the afternoon I’m completely absorbed in your book and the telephone rings and some creep asks where you are because something just went blooey in his toilet bowl? I can almost smell the shit! How do you think I feel when I hang up? Some hero…”

“Look, I think you’re going overboard. I think it’s a good thing that there are plumbers. I can tell you I’d rather do that than work in an office.”

“Lord, don’t you understand anything? Don’t you see that with one hand you’re pulling my head out of the water and with the other you’re dunking me in again?”

I was going to tell her that it was a good metaphor for life in general, but I didn’t. I just nodded and poured myself a glass of water and went to drink it looking out the window. It was almost dark out. The writer wasn’t very sharp, and the plumber was dead. It was after this conversation that I started slowing down. I tried at least not to work in the afternoon, and things changed right away. Permanent good times came back between Betty and me-we recaptured the flavor of peaceful days, we winked at each other again.

The plumber had trouble getting up in the morning after the writer had gone to bed at three o’clock. He had to be careful not to wake Betty up-to heat the coffee without his face falling in it. He yawned, unhooking his jaw. It was only when he set foot on the street that he started emerging. The strap from his toolbox sawed his shoulder in half.

Betty was sometimes still sleeping when he came home. He would jump in the shower, then wait for her to wake up, smoking a cigarette at her side. He would look at the paper piling up next to the typewriter, listen to the silence, or play with a rolled-up pair of panty hose at the foot of the bed.

By the time Betty woke up the writer was deep in a session of self-introspection, a small dreamy smile on his lips. Usually they fucked, then had breakfast together. It was the good life for the writer. He felt just a bit tired, that was all, and when the sky was clear he liked to take a nap on the terrace, listening to the noise coming up from the street. The writer was cool. He never worried about money. His brain was empty. Sometimes he asked himself how he had ever managed to write a book-it seemed so far away now. Maybe he’d write another one someday, he couldn’t really say. He didn’t want to think about it. Betty asked him the question once, and he told her that he just might, but it made him uneasy for the rest of the day.

When he got up the next morning, the plumber had a serious hangover. He waited until his client turned around, then threw up in the shower stall. It gave him the willies. Sometimes he hated that fucking writer.