Early Autumn

CHAPTER 10

It was almost the first day of May and I was still there. Every morning Patty Giacomin made me breakfast, every noon she made me lunch, every evening she made dinner. At first Paul ate dinner with us, but the last week he’d taken a tray to his room and Patty and I had been eating alone. Patty’s idea of fancy was to put Cheez Whiz on the broccoli I didn’t mind that I used to like the food in the army. What I minded was the growing sense of intimacy. Lately at dinner there was always wine. The wine was appropriate to the food: Blue Nun; Riunite, red, white, and rose; a bottle of cold duck. I’d eat the eye of the round roast and sip the Lambrusco, and she’d chatter at me about her day, and talk about television, and repeat a joke she’d heard. I had begun to envy Paul. Nothing wrong with a tray in your room.

It was warm enough for the top down when I dropped Paul off at school on a Thursday morning and headed back to Emerson Road. The sun was strong, the wind was soft, I had a Sarah Vaughan tape on at top volume. She was singing “Thanks for the Memories” and I should have been feeling like a brass band. I didn’t, I felt like a nightingale without a song to sing. It wasn’t spring fever. It was captivity.

While I could get in my miles every morning, I hadn’t been to a gym in more than two weeks. I hadn’t seen Susan in that time. I hadn’t been thirty-five feet from a Giacomin since I’d come out to Lexington. I needed to punch a bag, I needed to bench press a barbell, I needed very much to see Susan. I felt cramped and irritable and scratchy with annoyance as I pulled into the driveway.

There were flowers on the kitchen table, and places set for two, with a glass of orange juice poured at each place. And the percolator working on the counter. But Patty Giacomin wasn’t in the kitchen. No eggs were cooking. No bacon. Good. My cholesterol count was probably being measured in light-years by now. I picked up one of the glasses of orange juice and drank it. I put the empty glass into the dishwasher.

Patty Giacomin called from the living room, “Is that you?”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Come in here,” she said. “I want your opinion on something.”

I went into the living room. She was standing at the far end, in front of the big picture window that opened out onto her backyard. The morning sun spilled through it and backlit her sort of dramatically.

“What do you think?” she said.

She was wearing a metallic blue peignoir and was standing in a model’s pose, one foot turned out at right angles, her knees slightly forward, her shoulders back so her breasts stuck out The sunlight was bright enough and the robe was thin enough so that I was pretty sure she had nothing on under it.

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

She said, “You like?”

I said, “You need a rose in your teeth.”

She frowned. “Don’t you like my robe,” she said. Her lower lip pushed out slightly. She turned as she talked and faced me, her legs apart, her hands on her hips, the bright sun silhouetting her through the cloth.

“Yeah. The robe’s nice,” I said. I felt a little feverish. I cleared my throat.

“Why don’t you come over and take a closer look?” she said.

“I can see an awful lot from here,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you like to see more,” she said.

I shook my head.

She smiled carefully, and let the robe fall open. It hung straight and framed her naked body. The blue went nicely with her skin color.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a closer look?” she said.

I said, “Jesus Christ, who writes your dialogue.”

Her face flattened out.

“What?”

“This is how it would happen on The Dating Game, if they were allowed to film it.”

She blushed. The robe hanging open made her seem less sexy than vulnerable.

“You don’t want me,” she said in a loud whisper.

“Sure, I want you. I want every good-looking woman I ever see. And when they point their pubic bone at me I get positively turbulent. But this ain’t the way, babe.”

Her face stayed flushed. Her voice stayed in the whisper, though it sounded hoarser and less stagey now.

“Why?” she said. “Why isn’t it?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s contrived.”

“Contrived?”

“Yeah, like you read The Total Woman and took notes.”

Her eyes had begun to fill. She had let her hands drop to her sides.

“And there’s other things. There’s Paul, for instance. And a woman I know.”

“Paul? What the hell has Paul got to do with it?” She wasn’t whispering now. Her voice was harsh. “I have to get Paul’s permission to fuck?”

“It’s not a matter of permission. Paul wouldn’t like it if he found out”

“What do you know about my son?” she said. “What do you think he cares? Do you think he’d think less of me than he does now?”

“No,” I said. “He’d think less of me.”

She stood without movement for maybe five seconds. Then she deliberately took hold of her robe and shrugged it back over her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She was naked except for a pair of sling-back pumps made of, apparently, transparent plastic “You saw most of it already,” she said. “Want to see it all?” She turned slowly around, 360 degrees, her arms out from her sides. “What do you like best?” she said. Her voice was very harsh now and there were tears on her cheeks. “You want to pay me?” She walked over to me. “You figure I’m a whore, maybe you’ll pay me. Twenty bucks, mister? I’ll give you a good time.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“Who’d tell Paul that you fucked his whorey mother? How would he find out you’d been dirty?”

Her voice was shaking and clogged. She was crying.

“You’d tell him when there was a good occasion. Or you’d tell his father and his father would tell him. And besides there’s this woman I know.”

Patty Giacomin pressed against me. Her shoulders were heaving, she was crying outright. “Please,” she said. “Please. I’ve been good. I’ve cooked. I pay you. Please, don’t do this.”

I put my arms around her and patted her bare back. She buried her face against my chest and with both hands straight at her sides, stark naked except for her transparent shoes, she sobbed without control for a long time. I patted her back and tried to think of other things. Carl Hubbell struck out Cronin, Ruth, Gehrig, Simmons, and Jimmy Foxx in an all-star game. Was it 1934? The crying seemed to feed on itself. It seemed to build. I rested my chin on the top of her head. Who played with Cousy at Holy Cross? Kaftan. Joe Mullaney? Dermie O’Connell. Frank Oftring. Her body pressed at me. I thought harder: All-time all-star team players I’d seen. Musial; Jackie Robinson; Reese; and Brooks Robinson. Williams; DiMaggio; Mays; Roy Campanella; Sandy Koufax, left-hand pitcher; Bob Gibson, right-hand, pitcher; Joe Page in the bullpen. She was crying easier now.

“Come on,” I said. “You get dressed, I’ll take a cold shower, and we’ll have some breakfast.”

She didn’t move, but the crying stopped. I stopped patting. She stepped away and squatted gracefully to pick up the peignoir. She didn’t put it on. She didn’t look at me. She walked away toward her bedroom.

I went into the kitchen and stood at the open back door and took in a lot of late April air. Then I poured a cup of coffee and drank some and scalded my tongue a little. The principal of counterirritant.

It was maybe fifteen minutes before she came out of the bedroom. In the meantime I rummaged around in the kitchen and got together a potato-and-onion omelet. It was cooking when she came into the kitchen. Her makeup was good and her hair was neat, but her face still had the red, ugly look faces have after crying.

“Sit down,” I said. “My treat this morning.” I poured her coffee.

She sat and sipped at the coffee.

I said, “This is awkward, but it doesn’t have to be too awkward. I’m flattered that you offered. You should not consider it a negative on you that I declined.”

She sipped more coffee, shook her head slightly, didn’t talk.

“Look,” I said. “You’ve been through a lousy divorce. For sixteen years or more you’ve been a housewife and now all of a sudden there’s no man in the house. You’re a little lost. And then I move in. You start cooking for me. Putting flowers on the table. Pretty soon you’re a housewife again. This morning had to happen. You had to prove your housewifery, you know? It would have been a kind of confirmation. And it would have confirmed a status that I don’t want, and you don’t really want. I’m committed to another woman. I’m committed to protecting your son. Screwing his mom, pleasant as that would be, is not productive.”

“Why not?” She looked up when she said it and straight at me.

“For one thing it might eventually raise the question of whether I was being paid for protecting Paul or screwing you, of being your husband substitute.”

“Gigolo?”

“You ought to stop doing that. Classifying things under some kind of neat title. You’re a whore, I’m a gigolo, that sort of thing.”

“Well, what was I if I wasn’t a whore?”

“A good-looking woman, with a need to be loved, expressing that need. It’s not your fault that you expressed it to the wrong guy.”

“Well. I’m sorry for it. It was embarrassing. I was like some uneducated ginzo.”

“I don’t know that the lower classes do that sort of thing much more often than we upper-class types. But it wasn’t simply embarrassing. It was also in some ways very nice. I mean I’m very glad to have seen you with your clothes off. That’s a pleasure.”

“I need men,” she said.

I nodded. “That’s where the bucks are,” I said.

“That’s still true,” she said. “But it’s more than that.”

I nodded again.

“Women are so goddamned boring,” she said. She stretched out the or in boring.

“Sometime I’ll put you in touch with a woman I know named Rachel Wallace,” I said.

“The writer?”

“Yeah.”

“You know her? The feminist writer? Well, that’s all right in theory. But we both know the reality.”

“Which is?”

“That we get a lot further batting our eyes and wiggling our butts.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Look where it got you.” With a quick sweep of her right hand she knocked the half-full cup of coffee and its saucer off the table and onto the floor. In the same motion she got up out of her chair and left the kitchen. I heard her go up the short stairs to her bedroom and slam the door. She never did try my potato-and-onion omelet. I threw it away.