S*E*V*E*N

The Random Noise of Love

“I got to tell you what this flippy husband of mine pulled tonight, Irene. I’ll wait till Joe brings the drinks in. Well, hey! The booze is here already, huh? Here’s to it. If you get to it and can’t do it, and so forth. Cheers. Joe, what I wanted to tell you and Irene was what Marty pulled tonight that made us a little late getting here. Anyways, he gets all ready, see, and we’re at the door, practically, and I get a look at the necktie he has on and I told him it’s all dirty around the knot, so he should go change it. What he does with a necktie, like a nervous habit, is all the time tightening the knot and they get cruddy looking all the time, and guess who has to go through them every so often and weed out the cruddy ones to send to the cleaners. So he goes back to change to a clean tie, and I wait and I wait and I wait, and finally I go charging in to find out what’s holding him up, and you know what I find? You wouldn’t believe it! Here is this nut I’m married to, sitting on the side of the bed in his underwear. It’s like he’s some kind of go-to-bed machine. When he takes off the tie it starts the machinery. Tie, shirt, shoes, socks, pants. So he looks up at me with this kind of dumb look on his face, and I ask him is he maye going to come over here to see our good friends Joe and Irene in his underwear? He gives a kind of a jump and looks at himself and looks around, and then he has to get back into his clothes again. Isn’t that the limit? On the way over here I say to him, boy, it’s really going to kill Joe and Irene about why we’re late, and he says to me, he says, ‘Glad, what’s the point in telling anybody?’ So I say to him, ‘Jesus, Marty, you got to have a sense of humor, haven’t you? When something funny happens what’s the point in not telling your practically best friends?’ I always say if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve had it, brother. Right? Right?”

When I push the button for her apartment, her voice comes over that tube thing. It makes her voice sound whispery and hollow and strange. “Yes?” And I seem to always just catch myself in time and say, “It’s Martin.” It sounds strange on my mouth to call myself Martin. It makes her glad for me to call myself that. And the way she says it, it becomes a different name. Mar-tin. Martin Harris. She says she doesn’t know any Marty Harris at all. She says she would not be in love with any Marty Harris. But she is in love with Marrr-tinnn. There are sweet little curves of the mouth, and she keeps her lips apart so that I can see the pink point of her tongue touch up there behind her upper teeth to make the t, and then drop to make the vowel sound, and then go back up again and flatten itself against the space behind her upper teeth to make the long nnnnn, the way she drags it out, in a kind of teasing, teasing in her own special way I never knew before. Like saying my name that way, over and over, after we have had love together, over and over, with a smiling look in her eyes, so that I know, just from her saying my name, that she wants us to do it again, as soon as I am ready, as soon as I can.

“Hey, you guys. Listen to this one. Yeah, right from the same place as always. Honest to Christ, I don’t know where that old joker out there gets hold of so many new stories alla time. Way the hell and gone out at the other end of Queens, the furthest account I’ve got and maybe the smallest. Marty, you used to cover that area, din’t you? You remember that Crandall that’s got the stationery store and looks like some kind of dignified bishop? Din’t he always have a joke every time you go check the tape and post his books? You know, I even wonner if that old bastid invents them. Somebody has to make up jokes. Anyways, here’s the one he tells me yesterday. There is this guy in a bar bragging to his buddies he can tell how old a woman is and what color hair she’s got even blindfolded. So they put up some money and he covers it and they go over to a cathouse and explain the bet to the madam. She goes along with it and they blindfold the guy and they bring in three hustlers, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The blonde is twenty and the brunette is thirty and the redhead is forty. They line them up without a stitch on. So this guy goes to the blonde first and gives her a good grope and... Hey, Marty! You heard it maybe? Where the hell are you going? Marty? Couldn’t you anyway answer me, you son of a bitch? You see that, you guys? What the hell is the matter with him lately. Should a guy just walk out on a joke, even if he has heard it? Shouldn’t he answer or apologize or something? What should it cost him. I tell you, I am getting goddamn tired of the way he’s acting lately. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah. The blindfolded guy, he gives the blonde a good feel, and then he says...”

Sometimes with Andrea, when we have made love solemnly and slowly, making it all last, when it is a second time, soon after the first, gentle, not so hungry, making it go on and on, there can be that feeling that right now, right here, you know all there is to know. You have found the secret to the whole thing. It is the way you wake up in the night sometimes with the answer to everything so clearly in mind you know that if you can write it down, it will change the world. But it fades away before you can capture it.

Sometimes it is like last Friday, when I figured that if I worked fast enough and hard enough I could cover every account on my sheet for that day, and get to her place by one thirty, and have from then until ten after five, the latest I could leave and still get back to the office in time to turn everything in.

But on the third from the last account they had put that new girl on the cash register. She had screwed up the tape and the department symbols and the totals. Even working through without lunch I didn’t clear it until after two o’clock. There were two more places to cover, and so I said the hell with it, and I saw a cab with people getting out, so I took the cab and I was holding Andrea in my arms at two thirty, saying her name and, for some fool reason, feeling like crying.

Last Friday, in all that dreamy gentle on-and-on of the second time, it wasn’t as if I were doing anything, or we were doing anything. It was like being in some kind of small boat on little waves in a long dream. While it was going on I could hear the whole city out there, all the nearby things, trucks and horns and things like that, and then things farther away, like sirens and airplanes and steamship horns. Under it all I could hear that great soft sound that is under all the other sounds, that muffled humming droning sound of some kind of a giant machine down there under all of the city. It had always been there, I guess, but I had never listened to it.

Then all of my hearing turned back inward, away from the drone and the far things and the near things, back to the nearest thing of all, all the sounds of our gentle loving. Martin and Andrea. Andrea and Martin, making their magic thing. A little padded, secretive creak of bed and bedding. A small gritty sound of strands of her long blond hair caught between her cheekbone and the edge of my jaw as I rubbed my face across hers seeking her mouth. Bump of hearts. A humming of my blood in my ears, as when you listen to a seashell. A tiny husky whispery sound of the caress of her hands on my back. When she shifts slightly, a moist sound, repeated twice, as if her other lips are also kissing, also greedy. Then in a cant and change and deepening and reaching of her stroke, and in a harsher and faster huff-sigh, huff-sigh of her misty hot breath, she tells me that soon she will come.

Last Friday, as her arms tightened, as her breath began to reach and catch, over and over, I decided that this time it would be all for her alone, and I elbowed myself higher to look down upon the changing, growing strangeness of her small face, her eyes wide-staring, turning from side to side, mouth agape, tongue curled up and back, breath now snorting and whistling, her fingers digging small and hard into my back, thighs rolling farther open, knees higher.

I could feel my mouth smiling, and it was a great glory and a pride to bring her into it, to make her feel such a torrent of pleasure. I was a part of the great engine of the city, and I took her through all of it, through the ultimate clenching and bursting and kitten cries, and down into the softness that changed her sweaty face, back to the awareness of here and now and me, so that she looked into my eyes and whispered, “I love you so much. So much. So much.”

“Marty, honest to Christ, you are going to drive me out of my skull! Din’t you hear one word I was saying? Great! Maybe you recall the name Debbie. It means something to you? Good! Congratulations! Debbie is our daughter. I knew you’d remember her if you tried, Marty. In three days she’s fourteen. What she wants is a wiglet. A good one. From human hair, yet, hand tied. There’s a special sale. Thirty-two fifty plus tax. What I was asking when you had your ears turned off, I’ve got twelve fifty out of the house money. Can you come up with twenty more for this daughter you can hardly remember seeing around the house? Marvelous! Real generosity from practically a stranger to us all lately. Honest to God, I don’t know what’s happening to you lately. Last month you go to take off your necktie and you take off everything. Wednesday night you don’t come to bed and you don’t come to bed, and finey I come out to wake you up. But do I have to? No. There you are in your lounger chair, eyes wide open, and what are you watching? You are watching a big snowstorm and listening to a big loud hiss because the channel was off the air maybe almost an hour. Marty, you sit around here like a big lump of dead meat. If I tell you maybe the kitchen is in flames you would nod your head and smile and say ‘That’s nice, Glad.’ Can you talk to me? Do you want to talk to me? Is it trouble on the job, Marty? Is maybe that McCracken leaning on you again like two years ago over something that wasn’t your fault? Do you feel sick or anything? You should get a checkup. You eat and you don’t know what you’re eating. Do I hear you laugh anymore? Like never! Do you want to go anywhere, do anything? Excuses. Too tired. Honey, there is something wrong with your energy. We’re seventeen years married two months from tomorrow. You’re forty. I’m thirty-nine. That’s the prime of life, right? Hah! Are you still listening? Do I still have your attention, sir? Good. Thank you so much. You want to know how many times you come over into my bed in the last four months? Want to guess? Three times! I keep track. I put marks on the calendar. Such a great lover! What a big treat for me those times you do me a favor. Climb on, fall off, and the next minute a big snore. Listen, damn you, Marty, I am a normal healthy woman and I got normal healthy sex urges, and I am not about to retire from being a woman all of a sudden just because you stop being a man. Something has got to be wrong with you. All of a sudden you are a nothing, a lump. You are not even here anymore. So go to a doctor, because there are only two answers. I am not stupid, baby. I think it better turn out that you are sick, because if you’re not, then you are getting it someplace else. You turned forty years old six months ago. Seven months ago. So men get funny ideas when they’re all of a sudden forty years old. And it’s the springtime of the year. But don’t think I am going to be sweet and understanding if it comes out you’ve got yourself some cheap juicy little piece of ass maybe half your age you met servicing one of those accounts of yours. I swear before God and all the angels, Marty, if I found out you’ve been banging some young kid, I am going to show you what hell on earth is all about. And you better believe it. You hear me? You listening to me, Marty?”

Another strange and special part of being with Andrea is the feeling of being like one of those... I can’t think of what they call them. A long word. They go way off someplace and live with some native tribe and write down everything about customs and so on.

It is so magical and strange just to watch her, to watch all the woman-things she does. It is as if I’d never married Glad, never been married at all, never been with a woman at all, and had no idea of all the little things they do. Somehow, watching Andrea is like watching a little girl having a pretend party, filling little tin teacups with sand.

I got to her place at three yesterday, and she had to leave at four thirty for a get-together of a bunch of her girl friends from the place where she used to work. She said if I didn’t want her to go she wouldn’t. But I told her to go ahead. She should get out more, I think. What kind of a life is it for her, waiting around to see if I can finish up early enough to come by and make love with her before I have to turn in the day’s stuff at the office? Besides, she had already arranged to take that night off from her job where she works from six until two in the morning, cashier in an all-night cafeteria. That neighborhood is getting rougher. She has only one block to walk to the subway. Smart guys are always making a pass when they pay their tab. One of them could be sick in the head and wait outside for her. Or maybe some punks could come in and try to knock off the place, all zonkered up on speed, and she doesn’t open the cash drawer fast enough. And girls get raped on the subway. You keep reading about it. I keep thinking about those things and wish she didn’t have to work.

But I couldn’t swing it. I have enough trouble coming up with the sixty-five a month for the half of the rent that the girl she shared the apartment with used to pay. I don’t know why it seems strange to me that she should work. People work. When I was twenty-two I felt grown up. I was grown up. But she seems to be playing at being a grown-up. She’s a kid in a lot of ways. She’s got no sense of time or money. She is dumb especially about money, always running out before pay day. So she hits me for five or ten, and a few times it’s been twenty. She was trying to pay it back for a while, four dollars a week, but there was no point in taking it because she just ran out sooner.

Yesterday, I stayed there in her bed propped up on both the pillows against the headboard, with a comer of the sheet pulled across my middle. I watched her as if I was taking notes and taking pictures, getting it all down because it was something precious and rare and would never happen again.

When she came out of her shower to get ready to go and be with her friends, she was naked and all dried off. She took her hair out and gave me a little smile that said she was glad I was there and watching her. She sat on the bench in front of the dressing table, and lighted up her mirror. It is one of those mirrors with little frosted bulbs all the way around it, like actresses have. I bought it for her to celebrate two months of being in love.

Being in love started in that way nobody ever believes until it happens to them. She was new on the day shift at the cafeteria. It is one of the accounts I service. So she was just another blond girl in the city. Just there. On that account I pick up the old tapes and take a reading off the tape in the register and mark it with a check mark and my initials. You have to lift a little gate to expose the tape. I had to crowd into the little space with her and wait until she took the checks and money from a short line of people leaving, hitting the changemaker. I watched her hands on the keys. Small hands, very smooth skin, and short quick fingers. She smelled fresh and sweet. I could see the shape of her cheek, how glossy-smooth and straight her hair fell, with a kind of heaviness about it, like that thick silk that costs a lot of money.

Then there was no money to take for a little while, and I lifted the gate and initialed the running total and wrote it down. She didn’t know what I was doing, and she thought maybe it had something to do with her. She said, “Am I doing it wrong, mister?”

I turned, kind of leaning around her, and looked into her girl eyes for the first time, girl eyes about eight or ten inches away. Strange color eyes, not brown, not green, some crazy bronze color in between. Something moved somehow behind her eyes, maybe like a second pair of eyes behind them, suddenly opening to look out at me. It is something happening, like the world turning over and stopping at an angle you didn’t know about. She had asked me something, and I didn’t know what she had asked me. “What did you say?”

“Just... I guess is everything okay?”

“Yes. It’s okay. Fine.”

Like being trapped there, like our eyes got caught somehow, and I couldn’t move away.

“Girlie,” a voice said, “you going to give me some change sometime today?”

So that broke it and I went away. And work went slow that day. I kept coming up with bad totals. Her eyes looked up at me out of the column of figures. The next day I went way out of my way to go back there to eat lunch, so it was an hour and fifteen minutes lunch instead of twenty minutes I always take. I didn’t know what I ate or how it tasted, from watching her. I waited until there was nobody ahead of me or behind me when I paid. I had the right money, but I gave her a ten to make it last longer being close to her.

“When,” I said. I didn’t know where to take it from there. “When do...” The words got clogged up. Some idiot.

“Four o’clock,” she said. “Across the street?”

She did not let me see her eyes. Her face was pink, sort of. And I went roaring through the rest of the accounts. God, I was fast. But not fast enough. Sixteen minutes after four when I got there, and I had to walk-run, walk-run the last blocks, leaving the cab that got tied up in a crosstown mess, all the horns yammering. She was gone, I knew. But she wasn’t. She stood a little shorter than I thought she’d be. Smiled like I met her right there every day for years, and we went walking slowly together in the direction she turned.

There was one of those new mini-parks and an empty bench in the sun because the day was cool. I said my name, and she said she knew it because she asked. “Andrea,” she said. “I get called Andy, but I don’t like it much.”

“Then I don’t use it. What I want to say... Look, I’m getting bald. I should lose fifteen pounds, maybe twenty. I got a wife.”

“I saw the gold ring.”

“I got a daughter, closer to your age than I am.”

She laced the small fingers between mine. “So I should get up and walk away. Right? I know that. You should get up and walk away. Go ahead, Martin. Just try. Like I tried not waiting anymore when you were late. Just one more minute and I’ll go. Just one more minute after that. And then there you came, out of breath. Can you walk away?”

“No.”

“So something happens, and I don’t know what it is. I know it was too late to stop it the minute it started.”

“I’m a nothing. I’ve got this job a long time, scuffling around, keeping the books for little businesses. It’s all I know how to—”

“You got to stop knocking yourself, Martin. You knock yourself, and you hurt me somehow. I’m not so much you got to apologize.”

“Andrea. Andrea, I’m forty.”

“Let’s walk some more.”

“I got to go right now to get back in and turn in all this stuff.”

“How about after?”

“Where will you be?”

“Across the street from wherever you go to turn it in.”

“It could take an hour to settle up.”

“So?”

It was that day we counted, and so I gave her the makeup mirror on the two-month anniversary of the day it happened to us, when we got caught in it and couldn’t ever get out.

So now from the bed I can see the back of her and also the front of her at the same time in the mirror. She combs her hair first, biting her lip when she has to tug the comb through snarls. Both hands high, elbows out to the sides, one hand combing, the other holding the hair close to her scalp. It lifts her breasts when she reaches high. They are small breasts, but the part around the nipple is big. It is a color that isn’t pink or orange or tan, but like those colors mixed. I had forgotten about all the colors in the world, but since Andrea I see colors everywhere, as if they had washed the world and made it brighter.

She sits very straight to comb her hair, so that it makes the small of her back hollow. In the crease of her back just above the hollowed part I can see the little knobs of her spine. Lower down there are two dimples, one on each side. I see the small muscles slide and change over the smoothness of her shoulders and back as she combs her hair.

In the mirror I can see that her young belly is almost flat, just gently rounded. She sits so straight it makes her waist look even more slender than it is. That is because of the contrast to the white smooth weight of her hips and her behind, I think. The shape is as if you take a ripe pear and stand it upright on the heavy end, and then slice the stem end right off, about an inch down from the stem. That cut would come right at the narrowest part of her waist.

I look at her, memorizing her, looking across this ten feet of afternoon light, and seeing such a total ripeness, all the hip-ripe, breast-ripe, mouth-ripe, thigh-ripe warmth and moisture and smoothness of her, all so totally woman, that it is strange to remember how, such a short time ago, thirty minutes maybe, after we had made love in a hungry, grinding, straining way, she had slowly sagged into a total drowsy relaxation, and I had studied her hand and arm where they lay in the window light, thinking that the slack resting fist was a child’s hand, resting after play. The wrist had looked so small, so touchingly fragile. And the forearm was slender as a child’s, all the tiny golden hairs so fine fine fine, lying in a perfect pattern.

Her body is very fair, and the places the sun has never touched are the impossible marble white of the natural blond. On all the rest of her there is a faint overtone of gold, a memory of all the summers and the swimming. Often when we are quiet, when we are asprawl with hearts and breathing slowing, I have looked down the length of our bodies, seeing my coarse-textured, swarthy, hairy, flabby ugliness next to the glory of her, and felt shamed and humble that such an animal could be allowed to give her pleasure, that that short, thick, sallow worm down there, soft and dead in its nest of harsh dark hair, could have been welcomed so many times in all its thick, vulgar, arrogant, throbbing rigidity into the sweet, tight, flowing depths of her.

So I count the flaws in her perfection, looking for a confidence, a justification. Pale freckles on the tops of her shoulders from a time when she got too much sun. Three moles. A small brownish one centered on the back of her left thigh, perhaps two inches below the crease of the overhang of the left buttock. One smaller and quite black, an inch below her belly button and off to the left. A small tan one on the inside of her right elbow, on that very satiny skin texture near where the funny bone is. Two scars. A little white triangle below the left corner of her mouth, where a stone struck her when she was nine years old. She was riding her bike. A truck threw the small stone from its big tires. A little white ridge of appendix scar. On both feet the smallest toe is pinched in and malformed by the pinch of pointed shoes, the forward pressure of high heels. A crooked eye tooth, slightly gray in contrast to the others because the nerve is dead or dying.

She has told me of other imperfections, of things she cannot change. She would like to be taller. She thinks her neck is too short. She does not like her earlobes. If she does not work at it all the time, her scalp gets too dry and there are little flecks of dandruff. She yearns for slightly larger breasts, smaller hips and thighs. She wishes her upper lip were fuller, to match the underlip. She wishes her eyelashes were thicker and longer.

I cannot see these imperfections she lists, and the little things I have counted are more endearing than a total flawlessness would be. In one of the inventories of love, sometimes I count each one of the ten flaws with my lips, in solemn order, kissing each one, and then going backward through the list to end at the crooked tooth.

Her skin is so fine that the blue veins show through it at wrists, temples, the inside of the elbows, backs of the knees, ankles, undercurve of breasts — the veins of the left more visible than those of the right one. And these blue veins are another inventory to make, exactly as the first one is made, though sometimes incomplete because she becomes too greedy to wait for all of it, to wait through the slow ceremony of it, insists that we couple and begin the heavy rocking rhythmic ride toward the place where the world goes blind and loud.

So now she has put the comb aside and has picked up her hairbrush. There is a burring, whisking sound as she makes each long stroke, holding her head tilted sidelong, dipping it into the beginning of each stroke. It gleams under the brush strokes, a healthy glossiness of healthy female creature. Then she picks up a spray can, and with quick little pressures on the valve — hish hish hish — moving the can to and fro, she sprays her hair. The next spray, for under her arms, makes a longer hisssssh, one for each armpit, changing the can from hand to hand, the free hand high, with graceful tilt of wrist.

She leans closer to the lighted mirror, pats at her hair, pulls her lips away from her teeth in a grimace of inspection. She stands up, gives her hair another little shake, and smiles toward me, but it is an absentminded smile, turning at once to a small thoughtful frown, and I know she is wondering what to wear. When she turns in profile to go over to the chest of drawers, the mirror lights shine through her hair, turning it from pale blond to silver. And below the slope of her belly the same light shines through the springy little tuffet of pubic hair of a coppery-tan color. She walks at a slight angle away from me toward the chest of drawers, and I watch the complex working of the interwebbed fatty muscles of her small buttocks, the right side clenching as the hips swing to the right and the right leg takes her weight, the left softening as the slender leg swings into the next padding step. She pulls a drawer open and with her tongue she makes the little tick-tick sound of her annoyance.

She lives in a welter of small confusions, of a careless disorder. She lives amid coffee cups, cigarette bums, forgotten laundry, food drying on the dishes, clothing tossed onto chairs and tables and onto the floor, shoes heaped in a closet pile so that when she finds the one she wants she has to kneel and dig through the heap for the other one, the mouth making that tick-tick sound of frustration.

She finds the panty hose she wants to wear, tucks them between her knees, and holds them there while she paws through the drawer and finds a yellow bra. She goes back to the bench and puts the panty hose on the bench while she puts her arms through the bra straps and bends forward from the waist to hammock her breasts into the delicate fabric, her pale hair swinging forward. She straightens and cranes her arms back to fasten the bra snaps, one hand reaching down from above, one up from below. Then she rolls and works her shoulders like a boxer to settle the feel of the bra upon her. She sits on the bench, shakes out the panty hose, turns it in the right direction, and bends over and works her feet into the stocking feet. She pulls each leg up carefully, and when both stretch legs are smooth and taut to above her knees, she stands up and pulls it up the rest of the way, doing a little swing and grind of her hips, snapping it at the waist, smoothing it with her hands.

She sits on her heels at the closet door and makes ticking sounds until she has both matching shoes, a pair of tall yellow shoes. She slips them on there and takes a shift from the hanger and comes walking back toward her dressing table. Her heels make a solid clacking sound on the worn boards of the floor, a muffled sound on the dusty rug. She puts the shift on, careful about the way she gets her head through. It is a fine-knit weave, a yellow more pale than her shoes but darker than her hair. It has a white shawl collar in a coarser weave. She works her shoulders again, pats at herself, thumbs the heavy spill of her hair back. She sits again on the bench and looks at herself in the mirror. With the spray can she fixes a place at her temple.

She bends forward, and using the fingertips of both hands, she rubs a cream of some kind into her face, rubbing so strenuously she pulls the flesh of her face this way and that, like the funny faces a child makes. She wipes the residue of the cream off with tissue. She paints her mouth silver pink, using a little brush and two shades of lipstick. She opens a little flat tin and, using her fingertip, rubs a faint blue green smudge onto her upper lids. With a little brush and careful strokes she thickens and darkens her lashes. With a special pencil she darkens her brows and makes little up-slanted marks at the outside comers of her eyes. She touches herself then with the stopper from the perfume I bought her. Socket of her throat, behind her ears, insides of her wrists and her elbows, between her breasts, the backs of her knees.

She backs away and looks at herself intently, turning her head this way and that. She makes a social smile. She turns and looks back over her shoulder at herself, smoothing the back of the short shift down over her hips with the backs of her hands.

“Will I pass, Mar-tinn?”

“Beautiful. Lovely. Gorgeous. Fantastic. Pick any word, honey. Take them all.”

“You know what you are? Easy to please, huh?”

She bends over me and holds her cheek against mine. She does not want to kiss and spoil her lipstick. She makes a little humming, purring sound in her throat and, in mischief, walks her fingers down my chest and belly, slips her hand under the corner of the sheet.

“Hmmm. You better save that one for me, mister.”

She moves back out of my reach. Looks at her watch. “Late already. Hey, try the door to make sure. Sometimes it sounds like it locks when it doesn’t.”

So she is gone, but the scents and tastes of her are still in the apartment. All the things she touches and uses. Dear things, because they are hers. I get up after a little while and pick up the things she dropped and forgot, her woolly old slippers, one of them so far back under the bed I had to kneel and look under to find it. The little pink robe she was wearing when she let me in. I pick up other things, put them away, tug the rug straight, turn out the lights around the mirror.

I go in and take a shower, sudsing away the small acids and oils and pungencies of lovemaking, rinsing away the distinctive and personal odor of her. The shower curtain is yellow, her favorite color. It is plastic, with drawings of big wide-eyed green fish on it. There is a rip in the shower curtain, mended with tape that has begun to peel off. I use her oval bar of pale blue soap, finding a single hair, long and thin and fine, imbedded in it. I use her damp bath towel, watching myself in her steamy mirror, and when I am dry I hang it neatly on the towel bar, squaring the comers, making the ends come out even.

Soon I have my clothes on. It is time to leave. Time to pick up the thick scuffed dispatch case with the weight of the adding machine in it and go turn in my accounts. But I sit for a little while on the bench in front of the dressing table mirror. I do not turn the mirror lights back on. I have the feeling that I am not there, that the bench is empty, that I can see right through where my body should be and see the wall over there. It would be like this if you came back from death to visit a certain place.

I left and tried the door. It had not locked. I slammed it and it locked. I went down the three flights of stairs and out of the foyer onto the sidewalk. For one strange and almost frightening moment I did not know which way I should turn to walk to the office. But how many times have I done that in the past four months. Fifty? Sixty? Turn left and go to the comer and turn left again...

“Come right in, Harris. Sit down. No, in this chair right here. You been with the company nineteen years. Know what that means to me and to you? It means I’m talking to you. If you were a six-year man or seven, or even ten, I wouldn’t call you in here. I wouldn’t talk to you. You would have been out in the street on your ass two or three weeks ago. I got to find out if you think maybe this is some kind of civil service job, you put in nineteen years and coast the rest of the way. Do you think that’s the way it is?”

“No sir. I...”

“What we provide our clients with is total service, Harris. Total bookkeeping, accounting, and tax service, and it isn’t like a franchise. It isn’t like a monopoly. There are a hundred other outfits out there doing the same thing and trying to do it as good as we do it. They are trying every day to pick off our clients. If we don’t do the job they expect, we lose them overnight. I admit freely, openly, willingly, I was wrong two years ago about you. Those records were doctored after they left your hands, and thank God we could prove it, or we’d still be scuffling around with the I.R.S. This time is different, Harris.”

“I want you to know that—”

“Shut up! When I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask a question. You’re dogging it. You’re turning in garbage. I ask the girls. They say it used to be a pleasure, practically, to cross-check what you turned in, it was so clean. Now going over your crap gives them such a pain in the ass they try to duck you and work on somebody else. More and more you are making stupid, stinking, dumb-ass mistakes in simple arithmetic even. Two weeks ago somehow you left out two whole tape totals on Acme Star. All of a sudden their gross is down by a third from what it has been running month in, month out. How could you keep from noticing it on the totals and in the summary? Why the hell didn’t you check back and find out what was wrong? No. Don’t talk. Those are not questions I want answered. This goes all one way. I talk and you listen. Harris, all of a sudden you’re too important for the little things in life. What does it cost to say hello? To use a man’s name? To smile, maybe. To ask about his kids? Three times I’ve had to take Harry off soliciting new accounts and send him to kiss the ass of one of your clients because you pissed somebody off. Harris, they don’t like it, a man comes in at a dead run, wants all the figures right now, races through the job, and runs out like a thief. You don’t talk to anybody around here anymore. No smile. No time for coffee.”

“That’s because—”

“Don’t you listen to anything? I don’t want to know about any ‘because.’ I don’t want to hear any personal problems. What I pay for is your time on the job. Off the job you can paint yourself blue and run about naked. On my time you perform. I don’t care what your problem is. I don’t care if you are supporting a bookie, or you got three wives, or you’re writing a Broadway play, as long as it all happens on your time. If you got any kind of ideas about seniority, you can forget all that shit. You got no contract and no union. You are getting just one break, and listen close while I spell it out. Starting tomorrow you are going to give me one perfect month, Marty. One single complaint about anything and you are out on your ass. And when that month is over, I am going to ask for another perfect month. Then someday I will tell you when you’ve earned the right to make one very small mistake and still stay on the job. If I shove you out on the street, I am not going to write a jerk letter saying how great you are. Anybody asks me, I’ll say you turned into dead wood and we sawed you out of the tree. I run this thing hard-nose. I pay good, and I push hard. I don’t want any comments. Just pick it up out of the chair and take it out of here, and keep telling yourself you got a last chance you sure as hell don’t deserve, the way you’ve been fucking up.”

Her hand is under the nape of my neck. I am looking at the ceiling. Her face is shoved into the nape of my neck. I feel the slack weight of her thigh across my stomach, and the weight of her right arm on my chest, the relaxed fist resting on the black, matted hair of my chest. She makes small hiccup sounds from time to time. They are the little dry sobs that remain from all the tears.

I want to get up and go over to the kitchenette and move the pan, or whatever it is, out from under the dripping faucet. Ploik, ploik, ploik, ploik.

Maybe it is better to think about the faucet than it is to think about twenty-five hundred dollars. Probably two ploiks a second, a hundred and twenty a minute. So ten minutes would be twelve hundred. Twenty minutes would be twenty-four hundred. Twenty minutes and fifty seconds for twenty-five hundred ploiks.

There is another way of not thinking. I stroke her back and turn slightly toward her. But she pushes herself up. She is between me and the wall. She kneels and sits back on her heels, staring down at me. Her little face is puffy, blotched red and white from all the crying. She snuffs and wipes the back of her hand across her nose and lip.

“My brother isn’t kidding me, Martin. He wouldn’t do that. He loves her too, because she was our grammaw and she brought us up, the four of us kids. Now she’s got the arthritis so bad she can’t even dress herself or feed herself. Joe’s wife has to do it, and now she’s going to have another kid. So like he said on the phone, he went out to the state place for old people like that, and it made him sick, it was so bad. He won’t put her out there. He’s found this place where if we come up with ten thousand dollars, they take her into this rest home for life. Like an annuity or something. He can scratch up twenny-five hundred and so can Ruthie out in California and so can my brother Lew. If I can send twenny-five hundred then she can go into the rest home. And if I can’t, then I got to go back there and take care of her, for as long as she lives, and the seventy-five hundred gets set aside for expenses, for me and my grammaw to live on. But I can’t face going back to that cruddy little town, not after dreaming about getting away from there forever.”

“I know. I know.” _

“Do you know? That rotten wind comes down out of Canada and turns you blue. The best place to shop is Sears catalogue. No movie, nothing. Oh Jesus, Martin, I gotta send that money.”

There’s no good way to tell her that five months ago I could have come up with twenty-five hundred dollars. I could have taken it out of joint savings, hoping Glad wouldn’t find out. But the five months of us, of little loans and gifts and half the apartment rent, have nibbled it down and down. I know the balance by heart. $744.21.

She knee-walks to the foot of the bed and steps off. No sound of her bare feet on the rug. But a pat-flap sound on the boards, and then the creak of the bathroom door closing, click of the latch. Sound of water running. Then a sound of flushing. Silence. Ploik, ploik, ploik.

She comes out in her robe. She has scrubbed her face and tied her hair back. She stands by the bed looking down at me.

“Martin? You said everything would be okay for us, didn’t you? You said you could take care of us. No matter what. Didn’t you say that?”

The words come sliding out of my throat, oiled words, too easy. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the money. You don’t have to worry. I can get it.”

Her smile starts, then fades into skepticism. “When? I’m sorry, but I’ve got to know when. I’ve got to see the money. Going back there is like dying. When are you going to give me the money?”

“Soon.”

“Tell me what day!”

“Real soon, Andrea.”

“I guess you better go now. You’ll be late.”

Leo acts strange and uncomfortable. He says he wants to talk to me after I’ve finished the check-out. He says we can go down the street for some coffee. Familiar place, but a long time since I had been in there.

He lights a cigarette and puts a lot of sugar in his coffee and says, “The bookkeeper at Kash-Way called up at two o’clock. Myra says if she’d taken the call she could have covered. But that Pritchard bitch took it and went running to the old man. What Kash-Way wanted to know, how long do they have to wait before you show.”

I think back. I am confused. It takes me a little time to remember. It was supposed to be done over two weeks ago. But I couldn’t finish up that day. I went to see Andrea. Then when the girl went down my list I told her Kash-Way was changing their reporting period. I turned the folder in and forgot to add it to the list the next day and the next. Forgot it entirely.

“He pulled the file and sent Walker out there.”

“Was he sore, Leo?”

He reaches into his pocket and takes out the white sealed envelope with my name typed on it. M. Harris. “Jesus, Marty, I’m sorry as hell. He ran the final check for you. It’s in here, with all the deducts. It goes through the end of the week, through tomorrow.”

I tear off the end of the envelope, blow it open, peer down into it and read the amount. Not enough. Only one check.

“What about the pension thing? Don’t I get back just what I put in if I get fired? No matching funds or anything and no interest. But it’s mine, what I put in.”

“The way it reads, you get the check at the end of the quarter following the quarter in which employment is terminated. It’s an escrow thing, with the money invested. It should help out. Maybe four grand or five even, the years you’ve been covered.”

“Leo, you want to buy my pension money?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Three thou. We draw up a legal contract. It’s got to be five, anyway. It’s a big return for four months. You swing a loan and you come up like roses.”

“What’s the matter with you, Marty? Aren’t you listening? After nineteen years you got fired.”

“I know.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth it?”

“The blond piece of ass from the cafeteria. Young stuff. Rothstein seen you with her once and followed you back to her pad.”

“Bug off, Leo. Drink your coffee and go.”

“We’ve been friends a long time. Look, you got to get yourself sorted out. I mean it. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

He looks at me and then he gets up quick and moves back. It showed on my face, probably, how much I wanted to smash his mouth and his eyes. “You poor bastard,” he says, and he leaves.

“Marty, honey, I’m sorry! You’ve got to try to have some understanding, too. Look at me. I’m a housewife and a mother, and the whole thing, everything I am, kind of hangs on you and your job. And there should be some trust between people married so long, right? So what you should understand is that when I find out you got fired over a week ago, and I find it out like by accident, who should blame me for going up like a rocket? Marty, darling, I said terrible things to you. Don’t you understand it was because I was upset? I was scared, darling. I’m still scared. I can’t help it. You know what my old man was like, the way we had to live because he was a bum. So a job is important, sure. But we can always make out somehow. People always make out somehow. Do you see anybody starving to death on the street lately? Marty, my God, look at me at least. And listen. There’s more, isn’t there? More than just the job. So all right. So we can put everything back together again, you and me, like the old days. Marty, I don’t care what it is, but if you just keep sitting there like that and not telling me anything, and the tears running and running down your face, Marty... my heart will break right in two. Right in two.”

I am sitting in an old wing chair, part of the furnishings of her furnished apartment. She is wearing a man’s T-shirt with a ripped shoulder and with some kind of college or high school seal printed on the front of it, in blue that is now so faded it cannot be read. She has fastened her hair back out of the way with a wide red rubber band. She missed some pale strands, and when they tickle her cheek, she blows out of the corner of her mouth at them.

She has taken the drawers out of the chest of drawers and put them on the bed. She is selecting the things she wants to keep and putting them in her two suitcases and in two cardboard cartons I am to ship for her.

It is a gray day, thick, hot, with a taste of acid and oil in every breath. The room lights look orange against the gray. Her arms and legs and face are sweaty, so that there are highlights on them from the window light or the light bulbs.

She looks at a pleated tan skirt for a long time and then drops it onto the discard pile near the foot of the bed.

“When you’re not sure,” I say, “make another pile. I can send those along too.”

“Good old Marty. Nothing is too much trouble.” The “Marty” is punishment. We both know that. But I have not called her Andy in retaliation. She looks over at me. “You can do anything except get me that money.”

“I tried to find a way.”

“Sure. I know. You tried.”

She continues sorting and packing. We had said goodbye. I had stayed there with her all night and the night before. The bodies had said good-bye to each other, very sweetly at first, and then in a straining, sweaty bitterness, demeaning each other.

She straightens up from sorting her shoes, wipes her forearm across her forehead, and frowns at me. “I didn’t know you were going to lose your job. I didn’t know you were goofing off. I didn’t know you were running here to screw me when you should have been working. I wouldn’a let you do that, Marty. I thought you were a man. I thought you could handle things. You come through to me now like some kind of puppy-sick kid. What happened to you, Marty?”

It is a good question. Why should everything that means anything in all the world narrow down to a hundred and ten pounds of bare girl, to the blindness that lasts ten seconds when she spasms and gasps and leaps? Why should I be forty blocks away from her and suddenly have such a twisting, shifting thing happen in my gut, like a fountain of steaming oil, turning me weak and dizzy, making everything around me so unreal that I have to come across those forty blocks as quickly as I can, moving through the paper city, up the cardboard stairs, right to the only reality left, the warm, smooth, young flesh under my hands, the sweet breaking mouth hungry under mine, the girl eyes dazed and glazed with all her wanting?

It is a good question and I have no answer I can give her. She is still frowning at me when the telephone rings.

She sits on the comer of the couch, legs crossed, picking the phone up from the end table. “Yes? Oh, Velma! Hey, I thought it would be the phone company about turning off the service. Yeah. I told them. I’m packing, sure. What else? It leaves at three fifty. An express bus. It’ll drop me off at Milwaukee sixty miles from home, but my brother Joe is driving over to meet me. What’s on your mind, Vel?”

I watch her face as she listens. She looks over at me, and there is for an instant the evasive look of the guilty child, and she hitches herself sideways on the couch, pulling her legs up, facing away from me.

I listen. I am an international spy, cleverly putting together the small secretive comments she makes as she listens.

“I didn’t want that you should... Okay, okay, so you did... Sure, I knew. I mean if you got the picture, I couldn’t hardly miss it... You’re kidding!... What made you think he’d go for it?... Oh Christ, so I’m a movie star already... No, dear. I’ll tell you one thing. Promises don’t mean a hell of a lot... If it’s for real, why the hell not? What could I lose?... Yeah. The ticket is good for thirty days or something. I can’t get Joe now, but I could get him early in the morning before he leaves... When would all this... Well, you are some great little arranger, aren’t you, honey?... I know where it is... If you wouldn’t mind, yes, I’ll see you there... Of course, I’m nervous! What do you think?... Vel? Thanks, honey. From the bottom of my heart. What?... No, I mean whether it works out or doesn’t, thanks for the try... Sure... See you.”

She hangs up and sits very still, looking into a comer of the room and nibbling at the edge of a thumbnail.

“What’s up?”

“Maybe I’ll take the bus tomorrow instead.”

“Who’s Velma?”

“A girl. She used to work at the place I used to work. I ran into her last week and told her my sad, sad story. Then she was in the place the night before last, my last night working. I’m meeting her later on today.”

“Why?”

“She’s got a friend that maybe can loan me the money to send Joe.”

“A man?”

“You shouldn’t ask so many questions, Marty.”

“And when she came in the other night she had the man with her?”

“Look. It’s my problem, right? You couldn’t do anything about it. So you don’t get to ask questions about how I take care of it.”

I am standing directly in front of her and she is looking up at me, her eyes wide and startled. Suddenly she stands up into my arms. I hold her. She trembles and makes a single coughing sob.

“Tell me!”

“No. I’m not going to tell you, Martin.”

“Please. Please.”

She turns out of my arms and moves away, turns toward me, fists on her hips. “What you want most in the world is to have me stay right here. I think maybe I can. I sort of love you. You know that. Not like before. If you don’t ask me about anything, I think it will be okay if you come here. You could get some kind of a job, maybe. It wouldn’t have to be so much. You could stay here with me, even. I could sort of... take care of you. If it all works out. But don’t ask me about things, okay? Not ever. Not where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Okay, Martin? Okay, honey?”

I know it is the same day but I am not sure how much later it is, and I do not know why I have walked over to Tenth Avenue to Speedy Parcel. Somewhere in my mind I know why I am there, but I cannot remember the reason.

I go in and go back through the gate, all of it a familiar part of my life, and back to the little office in the far comer. The door is open, and Floss is behind her old oak desk. Eight years of working this account, coming in once a month, kidding around with Floss and with Mr. Baum. She is in her fifties, with blue hair and a round, wrinkled little face, and a deep voice. She says funny, bitter things.

“Jesus Christ! Marty! Sit down before you fall down. You look terrible. Marty, I heard they fired you. Honest, I couldn’ta felt worse about anything. You find a job yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You want a job, you gotta first shave, get a haircut, put a clean shirt on, and get that suit pressed. Cleaned and pressed.”

“I guess I haven’t been looking too hard, Floss.”

She stares at me with concern in her eyes. “What did you hit yourself with, Marty? Booze, pot, horses, broads? For the last five six months you worked us, you weren’t worth a shit. You know that, huh?”

“I know. I sort of lost control of things.”

“You want a job?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so! Meanwhile you live off your portfolio, huh? You close the country estate and fire the servants, huh? Listen, if you mend a fence here, there’s a chance. Remember how always you and Mr. Baum used to kid around every time, about who was getting balder and fatter? About getting half rates on haircuts? Then you came in like five months ago and he comes in and gives you the needle and you looked up at him like you never seen him before in your life and you told him you were busy and behind schedule. Marty, that really pissed him off. What you could do, you get yourself cleaned up good and come in and apologize, and try kidding a little bit. Careful, until you see how he takes it, and then ask him if there’s anything here. Because there is, in dispatching and route control. You could pick it up in a week. The guy we got to replace Kramer, in a lifetime he couldn’t learn how. Marty, this is for old times’ sake. Don’t try it unless you got yourself straightened out. Unless you got rid of whatever turned you into a slob.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars, Floss.”

“What? What does that mean? You stole it? Marty, God help you, that’d cook any chance here, because people got to be bonded. You know that.”

I feel impatient with her. “No. I’ve got to get twenty-five hundred dollars. It’s very important.”

“You’ve lost me somewhere, Marty.”

I know why I have come to see her. There was never less than five thousand cash on hand in all the eight years I serviced the account. “Not any more than that. Just twenty-five hundred even.”

“Are you asking for a loan, for God’s sake?”

There is a spindle on her desk. I see my hand go out slowly and pick it up and I see my other hand pull the papers off the spindle. The round hardwood base fits against the heel of my hand. The spindle sticks out between my middle and ring finger, six inches long and sharp.

In a husky whisper she says, “Marty! No, honey. No.”

“Bring the cash box out of the safe like always, Floss.”

She sits straight and folds her hands and puts them on the edge of the desk. I look at her throat because I cannot look at her eyes. “Marty, I know you. You are a nice guy, Marty. I can loan you maybe thirty dollars out of my purse. You want to stick me with that thing, go ahead. Do me the favor, please. Because if I am so wrong about somebody I know so long, then I do not care to hang around this cruddy world. If you can do it, we’re both dead. Come on, Marty. It doesn’t take much guts to stick an old lady.”

I have been holding the base so tightly my fingers hurt. I watch my hands as they put it back on the desk and pick up the papers and put them back on the spindle where they belong.

As I am walking out I hear her saying, “Marty? Marty?” I know she is following me. After I am on the street I do not hear her anymore.

I am back at the apartment. Andrea is not there. I try the door, and she forgot to make sure it locked. It is dark. I turn all the lights on, every one there is.

The corners of the mirror in the bathroom are still misted. There are still droplets on the inside of the yellow curtain. There are humid scents of her, of perfume, sprays, lotions.

I sit on the dressing table bench and I can see myself in the mirror. Swarthy stranger with a black shadow of stubble, mild brown eyes, receding hairline, a torso city-soft under the clothing. Tie pulled down, the knot greasy. Ring of black around the collar of the soiled white shirt. Under the clothing are varicosities, a chronic chest rash, recurring problems with piles, a tendency toward high blood pressure, an increasing shortness of breath these past couple of years.

After a little while I make certain that the doors and windows are all closed. I take pieces of her clothing from the discard pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and I soak them in the kitchenette sink and tuck them into the gaps under the doors and on the window sills. I recognize familiar things, the little pink robe, a scarf I bought her.

It takes me a long time to figure out the best way to support myself at the right position, and at last I try the dressing table bench. If I take out the center divider of the small oven and put a pillow in there, I can lay on my back along the bench with my head on the pillow. I remember to blow out the little pilot light first.

So I am comfortable, and I can hear the random sounds of the city, the random sounds of love over the nearby whisper of the burners. I wedge my thumbs under my belt to keep my hands resting on my belly. The deep constant noise of the city merges with the hissing and with other small noises, the sound of her hairbrush, the sounds of the spray cans she uses, the sound of a palm sliding along flesh in a slow caress, the rustling of bedding, the whistling of her eager breath, and her sated cozy sighings.

There is something I have forgotten. Some small thing. Unimportant. It slides into my mind and slips away, like a piece of paper fluttering down, passing through a narrowing beam of light. Unimportant. I’ll remember it another day.