Nine Inches

Kiddie Pool

IN A LIGHT RAIN, AT A LITTLE AFTER THREE IN THE morning, Gus Ketchell stood on his back stoop in slippers and shorty pajamas, holding a bulky cardboard box and staring uncertainly at his next-door neighbors’ garage.

Come on, he told himself. You can do this.

No one would ever know. The Simmonses’ house was dark, the old air conditioner wheezing away in the second-floor bedroom window. He pictured Peggy alone on the bed, snoring heavily, nearly comatose from the industrial-strength sleeping pills she’d been taking since Lonny’s sudden death a month ago. Gus could probably break down the front door with a sledgehammer, turn on every light in the house, and make himself a ham sandwich without disturbing her.

Gus’s own wife, Martha, was also asleep, but even awake she wouldn’t have registered his absence at this ungodly hour; aside from the occasional hotel room, they hadn’t shared a bed in years. There were no longer any dogs in the immediate neighborhood to sound an alarm, either, not since Fred DiMello had been forced to put down his ancient, slobbering basset hound last October. Fred had buried Sadsack in his backyard, and Gus often saw him staring forlornly at the circle of rocks he’d placed in the ground to mark the gravesite.

So the coast was clear. But still Gus hesitated.

He just didn’t like the idea of trespassing — breaking and entering, to be precise — even in a place so close to home, where he’d once been welcome. It would have been so much easier — so much more civilized — if he could just have rung the Simmonses’ doorbell in the morning and said, Hey, Peg, sorry to bother you, but I need a favor. And Peggy would have said, Sure, Gus, you name it. But why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee first?

Once upon a time, the Ketchells and the Simmonses had been those kinds of neighbors, back when everyone was young and their kids moved between the two yards as if they were all part of one big family. Lonny Simmons sometimes borrowed Gus’s wheelbarrow and extension ladder without asking; Gus did the same with Lonny’s ratchet set and Weedwacker. The Ketchells had an open invitation to swim in the Simmonses’ built-in pool, a bona fide luxury when it was installed in the early seventies, one of maybe a half dozen in the whole town. The two families barbecued together, went on camping trips, swapped babysitting, and took turns shoveling each other’s sidewalk when it snowed.

Somewhere along the way, though, it all went sour. The kids grew up and went away. Lonny filled his swimming pool with concrete, said the damn thing was too much trouble. Peggy got fat and haughty; she made some remarks that Martha hadn’t appreciated. There were grievances — a missing drill bit, a motion light that shined into a bedroom window. Gus and Lonny fell out of the habit of shouting jocular greetings to each other when they were both out in their yards. After a while, they stopped waving.

Nonetheless, relations between the two households had remained reasonably civil until about three years ago, when the Simmonses got a bee in their bonnet about the old oak tree in the Ketchells’ yard, which overhung both properties. Lonny and Peggy thought it was diseased and demanded that it be cut down before falling limbs damaged their precious garage. After a couple of tense discussions, Gus and Martha reluctantly agreed to get some estimates. They hadn’t even had time to make their initial calls when the mail carrier arrived with a registered letter containing vague threats of legal action if the tree was not cut down “with all due dispatch.”

A registered letter! From their next-door neighbors! Gus went ballistic. He scribbled a choice obscenity on the envelope and shoved it under the Simmonses’ front door, right back where it came from. From then on, it was War.

OF ALL the unpleasant memories, one particu­lar episode still rankled. Last July, Gus’s three-year-old twin granddaughters had come for a visit during a wicked heat wave, the worst of the summer. Knowing how hard it was to entertain three-year-olds in the best of circumstances, he had purchased an inflatable kiddie pool from Costco, the biggest one they had. It came with something called a “high-volume hand pump,” which Gus had been assured was “extremely efficient.”

With an air of grandfatherly self-assurance, he removed the heavy vinyl liner from the box and spread it out on the grass. Squatting in the merciless sun, he pumped without making any visible headway, until his right hand was too raw to continue, then switched to his left. When that gave out — the pool still lay as flat as a rug on the parched grass, billowing slightly at its edges — he had no choice but to continue blowing up the damn thing with his mouth, while two whiny, pink-cheeked girls in swim diapers and bikini tops looked on with increasing impatience, criticizing his technique and questioning his competence.

At some point in the midst of this fiasco, Gus became aware of Lonny watching him from his own backyard. The cocky bastard was reclining shirtless on a lounge chair in the shade of a dogwood — unlike Gus, Lonny had retained a lean, youthful physique well into his golden years, and he liked showing it off — sipping a cold beer and casting sly glances in the direction of his garage, where he kept an air compressor that could have inflated the pool in seconds. Gus had used it numerous times in the past, effortlessly pumping up basketballs, bike tires, air mattresses, whatever. But he was damned if he was going to ask Lonny for help, and Lonny was damned if he was going to offer it. So Gus just kept on huffing and puffing and sweating, mentally cursing his neighbor the whole time. Finally, more than two hours after he’d begun, he turned on the hose and began filling the pool with water.

Well, Lonny was dead now, and the grandkids were coming for another visit. And that compressor was still just gathering dust in the garage, not doing a damn bit of good for anyone.

BALANCING THE pool box on his hip, Gus lifted the latch on the gate and slipped into his neighbors’ yard. A misty drizzle drifted across his face as he circled around the gas grill, onto the carpet of AstroTurf Lonny had laid on top of what used to be the swimming pool.

The Simmonses’ garage was detached from the house, set way back at the rear of the property. The original structure had barely been big enough to accommodate a car and a lawn mower, but Lonny had expanded it in the mid-eighties, turning the squat little box into an attractive and comfortable cottage, complete with a wood-burning stove, a stereo system, and a half bathroom.

He had conceived of the refurbished garage as a sort of clubhouse for his teenaged sons, and for a couple of years they’d actually used it that way, hanging out with their buddies, blasting heavy metal on the stereo, and turning themselves into expert Ping-Pong players. But it didn’t last; the boys got driver’s licenses, and their attention shifted to the world beyond their backyard. After his sons left, Lonny began spending more and more time in the garage himself, drinking beer and watching ball games, playing epic eight-ball tournaments against himself on the pool table he’d bought for a song when the Limelighter Café went belly-up. In recent years, Gus had often noticed the light on late at night and wondered what Lonny was up to. A couple of times this spring, he’d seen his former friend emerging from the garage at daybreak, looking rumpled and bewildered as he shuffled across the turf to his house.

Gus heard the branches of the oak groaning ominously in the breeze and couldn’t help looking up into the dark canopy of leaves that hovered over the garage like an enormous fist. Lonny had been deeply alarmed by the symphony of creaks and squeals produced by the massive limbs; he’d insisted to Gus that the whole tree was ready to come toppling over in the next big storm, trunk and all, as if it were no longer rooted to the ground.

But the tree’s still here, Gus thought. It was Lonny who had fallen, brought down by a massive heart attack during an afternoon nap in the garage. Gus would have considered it an ideal way to go — no suffering, no medical bills, no burdens placed on your loved ones — except that he’d been within listening range of Peggy’s hysterical shrieks upon finding the body and had witnessed the frozen look of devastation on her usually proud face as she followed the stretcher out to the ambulance.

The garage door was locked, but that wasn’t a problem — Lonny kept a spare key in a secret compartment at the bottom of a thermometer he’d mounted on the wall above his woodpile. Gus knew this because he and Martha had given Lonny the trick thermometer as a fiftieth-birthday gift, back in the days when everyone got along and the passage of time still seemed like cause for celebration.

THE FIRST thing that struck Gus as he stepped inside the garage was the smell of cigar smoke. Not a faint stale whiff of it but a concentrated gust, so strong that he expected to turn on the light and find Lonny leaning on the pool table, squinting at the cue ball through a cloud of grayish fumes from the El Producto clamped between his teeth.

But all he saw, when his groping hand finally found the switch, was a large open room, the geography of which was instantly, and deeply, familiar. The workshop along the left wall — the wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers all neatly suspended from the pegboard. Some metal storage shelves full of paint cans, power tools, and miscellaneous crap. Beyond that, the old refrigerator where Lonny kept the beer he bought by the case at the Liquor Warehouse. The bathroom in the corner, just past the snowblower, which was covered for the season with a brown plastic tarp.

In the middle of the garage, Lonny had created a makeshift den, a few pieces of cast-off furniture — foldout sofa, easy chair, end table with a little portable TV on it — arranged in a semicircle around the Franklin stove. The game area filled the remaining space: Ping-Pong table, pool table, foosball. The whole place gave the impression of a finished basement that had doggedly burrowed its way above ground.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, it gradually occurred to Gus that the garage must have remained untouched since the day of Lonny’s death. He told himself to stop gawking, to just inflate the pool and get the hell out, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move. He felt a small hard ball of grief rise up from his throat, growing as it moved, then burst out of his mouth in a series of sobs that shook his whole body.

“Oh, Lonny,” he heard himself cry. “Oh, Jesus.”

FEELING A bit shaky, Gus sat down on the easy chair and tried to get hold of himself. He wasn’t sure what it was about being here that upset him so much. He wasn’t a superstitious man, didn’t believe in ghosts. Nor did he have any kind of sentimental attachment to the garage itself. Except for one long-gone summer, he had rarely set foot in here for more than a few minutes at a time.

It must have been 1989, he thought. That was the year Martha got laid off from Honeywell, and things got tense between them. Lonny wasn’t working, either. He was recovering from knee surgery and was bored out of his skull, puttering around the house all day.

For a short time — a month, maybe just a couple of weeks — Gus had fallen into the habit of joining Lonny in the garage after supper and staying for several hours, not heading home until he was pretty sure that Martha was asleep, or at least too tired to pick a fight.

What had he and Lonny done on those lazy summer nights? Watched the Yankees, drunk beer, knocked the balls around on the pool table. Listened to country music, which Lonny loved (he had driven an eighteen-wheeler as a young man and considered himself an honorary Southerner) and Gus usually hated. But for some reason, he didn’t mind it so much in Lonny’s garage, all those songs about hard luck and heartbreak, how everybody got their share.

A couple of times, though, late at night, they got to talking, man-to-man, about more serious subjects — the deaths of their parents, their worries about their kids, the everyday indignities of walking around in an aging body, what their lives added up to more than halfway down the road.

And they talked about their marriages, too, something they had never done before. Lonny complained bitterly about Peggy — how she’d let herself go and lost her sense of fun, how critical she’d become of everyone they knew, as if she’d somehow been promoted to a higher station of life. On top of everything else, their sex life had gone down the tubes. She practically made him beg for it; he was lucky if they had relations once a week.

“I don’t know what happened,” he confessed. “She used to love it, used to put these little notes in my lunch box.”

The notes weren’t dirty, Lonny explained. I can’t wait for bedtime, she’d write, or You are entitled to a free gift. Details at eleven. Just cute little things like that. But man, they sure got him going.

“Now I’m lucky if I get a sandwich,” he said, grimly scrutinizing his cigar. Gus must have been thrown off by Lonny’s candor; he must have felt obligated to confide a secret of his own. Or maybe he just needed to unburden himself. Whatever the reason, once he got started on the subject of Martha, it all came tumbling out. Her frustration with him, with the fact that, intelligent as he was, he was never going to amount to anything more than shipping supervisor at Precision Bearings. For years she’d been bugging him about going to night school, taking some courses in computers or accounting, but he always had some excuse. And now — it was as if both of them had woken up on the same gray morning and realized the same thing — it was too late. They’d turned a corner. Their lives were their lives. Nothing was going to change.

“It wasn’t so bad when she was working,” Gus explained. “But now that she’s home all day, she broods about it.”

After years of stoical silence, Martha had turned into a fountain of complaints. She wanted to travel, drive a nice car, to own a vacation house on the water, to look forward to a fun and prosperous retirement, but it wasn’t gonna happen. Because of him — his passivity, his cowardice, his willingness to settle for second best. He could see the disappointment in her face every time she looked at him, and it had done something to his head. Well, not just his head.

“Between the sheets,” he told Lonny. “You know. It’s not working like it’s supposed to.”

“Ouch.” Lonny gave a sympathetic wince. “That’s a tough break.”

And of course Martha held that against him, too. He didn’t get it. She claimed to have lost respect for him as a man, but somehow still expected him to perform like one.

“At least she’s still interested,” Lonny pointed out.

“Lotta good it does me,” muttered Gus.

All these years later, Gus wasn’t quite clear why he and Lonny had stopped spending their nights together in the garage. All he remembered for sure was that Martha had gone back to work the following September — she found a secretarial position at Merck, a job she’d keep until retirement — and their marriage slowly returned to an even keel. She stopped complaining, lost interest in making him accept responsibility for her unhappiness. His “problem” had continued, but after they moved to separate bedrooms, it no longer seemed to upset her so much.

GUS HAD the compressor warming up and the deflated pool spread out on the cement floor when he suddenly became aware of a hitch in his plan, such an obvious one that he was embarrassed not to have considered it until now: if he inflated the pool in here, he’d never be able to get it out. Lonny’s garage was equipped with a roll-up door wide and high enough to admit a car, but Gus hadn’t seen it in its raised position for years, not since the day the pool table had been delivered. Lonny had apparently decided to treat the big door as if it were a wall, blocking it up from the inside with an impressive collection of junk. It would have taken a half hour of hard labor just to clear a path to the handle, and Gus would have to put everything back when he was finished.

No, the only practical way in and out of the garage was the regular door, maybe seven feet high by three feet across; the kiddie pool had a nine-foot diameter. After a moment’s thought, he arrived at what seemed like a reasonable solution. All he needed to do was drag the pool liner directly outside the door, with the air valve facing in; that way he’d be able to inflate it from the doorway without exposing himself to the rain — it had gotten quite a bit heavier in the past few minutes — and without removing the compressor from the garage.

The plan would have worked perfectly except that the electrical cord on the compressor turned out to be too short. Gus checked all the obvious places — the drawers on the worktable, the tool chest, the storage shelves — before his gaze finally landed on a fat orange extension cord, neatly coiled, resting on the card table where Lonny kept his record player, a clunky wood-veneer Kenwood that had to be at least thirty years old. At Folsom Prison was on the turntable, and Gus couldn’t help smiling. That was Lonny’s favorite record, and it seemed like a blessing that it should have been the last music he had ever heard.

A handful of familiar, timeworn albums were stacked on the table, a rogues’ gallery of men in cowboy hats. Gus flipped through the collection — Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tom T. Hall — the essential sameness of the portraits making it that much more jarring when he reached the bottom of the pile and found himself looking at a hazy, romantic photo of a woman with an elaborate fifties hairdo sniffing a spray of flowers.

Bouquet, the cover said. The Percy Faith Strings in Stereo.

A startled laugh escaped from Gus’s mouth, followed by an odd feeling of relief, the sense of a small mystery being solved long after he’d stopped wondering about it.

SHORTLY AFTER he’d retired from Precision, Gus returned from his annual physical with a free sample of Viagra that had been urged on him by his doctor. When he sheepishly mentioned this to Martha, she surprised him with a willingness to give it a try.

“I’ve missed all that,” she told him.

“Me, too,” he said.

They tried not to make too big a deal about it, taking the plunge on Saturday night after a pleasant dinner at Applebee’s and a game of Scrabble. They went upstairs and undressed in the dark, shy as newlyweds, before slipping under the covers. For a few seconds, as they pressed against each other in a tentative, slightly anxious embrace, Gus imagined that things would be better between them from now on, that they’d found a cure for what ailed them, the real problem lurking at the bottom of everything else.

This feeling of optimism lasted only long enough for his vision to adjust to the darkness, at which point his wife’s face came slowly into focus. Her eyes were wide-open, and she was staring up at him with an expression of such profound sadness that Gus felt all the air go out of him.

“Martha,” he said. “Honey?”

She started at the sound of his voice, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” she muttered in an unconvincing voice. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s fine,” she repeated, in the clipped, slightly annoyed tone she would have used if a waitress had spilled a drink in her lap. “Don’t worry about it.”

Confused, but trying to make the best of it, Gus pressed on to the finish. Martha kissed him on the cheek — he was grateful for the kindness — then immediately turned onto her side, facing away from him. He wanted to say something, to get some reassurance about what had just happened, but he didn’t know where to start, and she wasn’t helping him. He lay beside her for a long time, until her breathing turned soft and regular, then got up and shuffled across the hall to his son Mark’s old room, where he’d been sleeping for the past several years. He felt pretty downhearted at first, but upon reflection, he decided that they’d taken a real step forward. It was foolish to imagine that they could fix their marriage in one night. They’d probably have to work at it for a while. But at least the pill had done its job, and they were officially unstuck from their rut.

Their anniversary was coming in a few weeks; that would be a good time to try again. This time he would do it right — flowers, a nicer restaurant, and then at home, soft music and champagne. They could dance a little beforehand; that had always gotten Martha in the mood.

One step at a time.

In the morning he went down to the TV room to look for the old album she loved so much, the one they used to play sometimes when the kids were asleep. But he couldn’t find it, despite the fact that all the LPs were neatly alphabetized, everything in its place. The absence of this one particu­lar record disturbed him, as if it were a symbol of all the romance that had vanished from their marriage.

“Honey,” he said at breakfast, “have you seen Bouquet?”

“Bouquet?”

“The Percy Faith record? The one with ‘Tenderly’ on it?”

“Not recently,” she said, not even glancing up from The Star-Ledger. “Why?”

After a brief hesitation, he spelled out his plans for their anniversary, and how the Percy Faith record might fit into them.

“I want it to be a special night,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t been trying hard enough.”

Martha put down the paper. There was a tenderness in her gaze that he hadn’t seen for a long time. She reached across the table and took his hand.

“You know what?” she said. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

THE LONGER Gus contemplated the album cover, the more puzzled he became. There must have been some kind of reasonable explanation for how it migrated from his TV room to Lonny’s garage, but for the life of him, Gus couldn’t imagine what it might be.

One thing was certain: there was no way Lonny had purchased his own copy of Bouquet. From the beginning, he had mocked Gus’s fuddy-duddy taste in “elevator music” with every bit as much disdain as Gus’s own children had. No, Lonny must have borrowed the Percy Faith album at some point in the misty past, but when? And why? And even if he had — which in itself seemed pretty unlikely — why hadn’t he returned it? Why was it sitting out on a table in the garage, along with a bunch of country-and-western records?

While he pondered these questions, Gus tipped the album cover, letting the record come sliding partway out of its sleeve, as if the grooved black vinyl might offer some helpful clues. But something else fell out as he did so, a Polaroid that landed faceup on the table, an image so utterly unexpected that Gus barked a harsh chuckle of amazement at the sight of it.

In the photo, Martha had been surprised in the act of clipping a pink rose from a bush in their backyard. She looked radiant, but this effect wasn’t a product of youth (she appeared to be around fifty in the picture) or beauty (though she’d aged well, Martha had never been the kind of woman a stranger would have described as “pretty”) but of surprise itself. Her eyes were bright with pleasure and her mouth was slightly open. Gus could almost hear her saying Hey! in a playfully scolding tone.

You could see the chain-link fence in front of her and Gus’s toolshed in the back, which meant that the picture had to have been taken from the Simmonses’ backyard. Gus’s hands trembled as he turned the photo over. What he saw on the flip side was somehow even harder to fathom than what was on front: a simple invitation in his wife’s graceful Catholic-school cursive, the same handwriting he saw when she sent him to the store to buy broccoli, flank steak, Grape-Nuts, Lysol.

Gimpy, she had written. Will you dance with me?

He studied the photograph for a long time, absorbing the unpleasant truth in his wife’s joyfully startled expression. Once again his mind was forced back fifteen years, to that tense, awkward summer when Martha had lost her job and Lonny had undergone surgery for a torn ligament. It was humiliating to think that the betrayal was already under way on those nights when Gus had bared his soul in the garage, but even more awful, in a way, to think that it wasn’t, that “Gimpy” had made overtures to Martha only after learning of Gus’s inability to perform in the bedroom.

But if that was when it started, when had it ended?

They must have broken it off at some point before the oak-tree dispute, he thought, because Martha had stood by his side through the whole ordeal. If anything, she’d seemed angrier at the Simmonses than he had. The memory of Lonny’s death was still fresh in Gus’s mind, and he had no recollection of Martha’s reacting like a heartbroken lover. She’d been shocked and saddened by the news of their neighbor’s passing, but not excessively, and no more than Gus had. They had decided, as a couple, not to attend the wake and had instead written a polite note of condolence to Peggy. It was Gus — not Martha — who had woken up on the morning of the funeral overcome by feelings of guilt and sadness. At breakfast he told her they really should go to the cemetery to pay their respects.

“It’s the least we can do,” he said. “He was our friend for a long time.”

“You go ahead,” she told him. “I just don’t feel like I’m welcome there.”

Gus considered making an appearance on his own, but in the end he stayed away, haunted all day by the feeling that he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. He burst into tears twice, once in the shower, and again at CVS, while waiting for a prescription to be filled. Martha, on the other hand, seemed strangely composed, as if it were a day like any other. Gus had felt almost relieved that evening, stepping into the house after his ritual two-mile walk around the high school track, to find her sobbing like a lost child at the kitchen table, a half-peeled potato in her hand. He tried to embrace her and tell her it was okay, but she asked him not to touch her.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.”

THE RAIN was coming down full force now, battering the garage from all sides, as if someone were spraying a fire hose against the walls and dropping bucketloads of gravel on the roof. He’d been so distracted by the Polaroid that he’d forgotten all about the kiddie pool, which was still lying outside the garage, awaiting inflation. He opened the door, startled by the force of the storm, and began hauling it in, flapping the plastic to drain the rainwater that had puddled on its surface. It seemed amazing to him now — amazing and pathetic — that all he’d wanted from this night was to fill the damn thing with air while no one was looking.

He folded the liner as carefully as if it were a flag, then laid it back in its box, thinking as he did so that what really got to him wasn’t that he’d been cheated on by his wife — that could happen to anyone. What really bothered him was that he could have spent so much time on earth — he was sixty-eight years old, for God’s sake — and understood almost nothing about his own life and the lives of the people he was closest to. It was as if he were still a child, a little boy sitting at the big table, listening to the grown-ups talk in their loud voices, laughing whenever they did, without having the vaguest idea of what was supposed to be so funny.

Well, at least now he knew the right questions to ask. All he had to do was go home and wait for Martha to wake up and come downstairs. He could show her the picture and demand that she tell him everything, the whole sorry history of her deception. But the thought of doing that just then — of leaving the garage and trudging back across Lonny’s yard in the pouring rain to have a conversation that was going to break his heart — suddenly seemed impossible, way beyond his strength. It was close to five in the morning, and he was just too tired.

Instead of going home, he turned off the light and climbed into the sofa bed. The mattress was thin and lumpy, but it felt good to be off his feet. He didn’t mind that this was the bed on which Lonny had died, the bed his wife had shared with another man. Right now, it was just a place to rest. He drew the sheet up to his chin, closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to come.

Everything would have been fine if it weren’t for the oak tree rustling and scraping overhead, groaning as though in pain. A few times Gus thought he heard a distinct cracking sound, as if one of the big limbs were splitting off from the trunk, about to come crashing down through the roof. He pulled the sheet all the way over his head and began humming to drown out the noise. It wasn’t a song, just a random succession of notes — hum dee dum dee dee dee do — and he couldn’t help wondering if Lonny had done something similar near the end of his own life, on those nights he’d spent in the garage. Because he was an old man, and he was scared. Because he was alone out here, and no one was coming to comfort him.