Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

35

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Max and I took an apartment together in town.

He had mentioned the idea before, but we hadn’t done anything about it, and when he brought it up again on Saturday, the day after the third abortive attempt to rob the bank, I spoke with him frankly about my feelings of ambivalence toward him. He had, after all, broken a promise to me to keep a secret of mine, and he had also come on a bit heavily toward my girl friend during the Dombey dinner party.

He said, “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Why I talked to Phil is, we got a very delicate arrangement here, and I think it’s a bad idea if we start keeping secrets from one another. You’d explained the situation to me in a way that I had to go along with, and I figured I could pass it on to the others and they’d go along with it, too. And they did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d do that?”

“Argue with you? You were terrified, man, you figured if the boys found out it was all up. So I kept you calm, and I carried your message, and it worked out.”

It all made sense, and I believe it was all basically true, but I also remembered that the vote to keep Marian and me alive had not been unanimous. On the other hand, I also remembered that it was Max who’d told me that. And it had, after all, worked out. “But what about Marian?” I said.

“I come on to all the girls, man,” he said. “They expect it. But I’m not gonna steal your chick. Ask her yourself.”

All right, he wasn’t. I knew Marian, and I knew Max wouldn’t steal her even if he wanted to. So that was also okay.

If you wait to make friends exclusively with people that you don’t have to feel ambivalent about at all, you won’t have many friends. “So we’ll take an apartment,” I said, and on Monday we did, using the previous day’s local newspaper.

The first place we looked at was a pleasant enough apartment, but the landlady was a compulsive talker, and her talk was limited almost exclusively to questions-“You boys born around here?” “Do you know Annie Tyrrell, works at the Officers’ Club out to the Camp?” and so on-and both Max and I agreed at once that she’d drive us crazy within a week. There weren’t enough lies in the world to satisfy her craving for answers, and God knows we didn’t have any truths to tell her.

At the second place, an attic apartment in a private home with a tacked-on outside staircase to give the place a separate entrance, the landlady didn’t talk too much at all. In fact, she very nearly talked too little; we were on the verge of taking the place when she let it drop that her husband was a guard over at the prison. “Sorry, lady,’’ Max said, as we left her attic with orderly haste, “but heights give me nosebleed.”

The third one was it. The block was neat, quiet, residential-very like the one around the Dombey’s house, but without that giant prison wall across the street. The house had an enclosed front porch full of mohair furniture, and the woman who responded to our ring, a frail faded skinny lady in her fifties, told us her name was Mrs. Tutt. She spoke in a failing voice, her brow was furrowed with anxiety, she constantly washed her hands together or clutched her bony elbows, and she seemed ever to be on the edge of telling us the reason for her despair. When I mentioned the ad for the furnished apartment, she said, “Oh, yes,” speaking so mournfully I fully expected her next to say that unfortunately it had just burned to the ground.

But she didn’t. Instead she said, “I’ll show it to you,” and came out of the house to lead the way around to the driveway and back toward a simple white clapboard one- car garage. “We don’t have a car any more,” she said mournfully, “since Roderick had the accident.”

I felt I didn’t want to ask any questions.

The garage was the apartment. It stood at the rear of the property, flanked by a nicely green back yard, and it had been converted to living quarters, but not very much.. It still, for instance, had its original overhead door; basically, one entered the place by lifting the living room wall.

Inside, a plywood platform had been built over the original concrete flooring, with plumbing and electric wiring in the underneath space. Green-flecked indoor-outdoor wall-to-wall carpeting covered the living room plywood, which bounced gently beneath our feet, like a discreet trampoline.

“Elwood’s quite a handyman,’’ Mrs. Tutt said, and washed her hands in despair.

The living room walls were cheap maple paneling. With the door up, nothing showed of the front wall but a length of rope dangling from one corner of the cardboard* like dropped ceiling. Max pulled this rope and the wall door descended, revaling a paneled interior.

Mrs. Tutt said, “In the summer, you could leave that open and have a nice breeze.’’

The furniture in the room seemed to have come from some motel’s bankruptcy sale: sofa, chairs, end tables, coffee table, all repeating the maple-tone motif of the paneling. Washed-out prints of Caribbean-scene water- colors were spotted around the walls, including two fastened to the wall door.

Max and I explored deeper. The one bedroom was seven feet long and six feet wide. Grayish paneling, blue-flecked indoor-outdoor carpet, one window in the side wall. A double bed, a maple dresser, a maple chair. Behind a line of louvered doors in the end wall were closets.

The bathroom. Three feet by four. One window. Toilet, sink and shower, all basically built on top of one another. Lavender tile.

The kitchen. Avocado sink, avocado stove, avocado refrigerator. Yellow formica counter, the size of a pizza box. A wallpaper of avocados on a yellow background. Yellow metal cabinets. An extremely narrow window over the extremely narrow sink. Floor-space the size of an airmail stamp, covered in yellow vinyl tile.

“Elwood laid it all out himself,” Mrs. Tutt told us, and through her despair a note of pride could be heard in Elwood’s accomplishment. “He didn’t have no architect to help him or nothing.”

“Mm hm,” I said, and Max said, “Is that right?”

Mrs. Tutt became silent. She had shown us everything, she had regaled us with her store of anecdotes-Roderick, Elwood-and now there was nothing left but our decision. Clutching her elbows, hunching her shoulders, she gazed dismally at us.

Max glanced at me. “What do you think?” he said.

I looked around. It was amazing; here in this small upstate New York town, far from the world, thirty years of family-handymanism, of do-it-yourselfitis, had reached its apotheosis in this one-car garage. “It’s,” I said, “the ugliest thing I ever saw in my life.”

“Right,” he said.

“So we’ll take it,” I said.

“Right,” he said. He turned to Mrs. Tutt. “We’ll take it.”