Secrets & Surprises

Starley

His full name was Dickie Ray Starley, but he was Starley to everyone but his wife. She called him Dickie, and told close friends that even though it was a silly, little-boy name for a tall grown man, at least it was better than calling him Starley. She didn’t like Starley’s friends, and would have resented anything they called him. She liked Starley’s best friend, Donald, better than the rest, because years before, when their daughter Anita was four, and they were all together for a weekend at the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, he had been very attentive to Anita, brushing sand from her knees before she got on the towel, taking her by the hand and walking with her to the cold gray sand where the water washed in. Alice knew that Donald was nice to Anita not so much because he liked her, but because he liked Starley. She didn’t care what his motives were. Anita was very disagreeable that year. She had held her hand out to Donald, staring up at him and saying, “Kiss me here.” “Wrong side,” he said, and turned the hand over and kissed the palm. “It is not! You kiss the back of the hand! Now kiss it right!” He hated to be ordered around. The only way he knew how to deal successfully with kids was to tease them, and she didn’t want to be teased. She had no sense of humor. He told her about “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” and she squinted and said, “That’s awful. And it’s not true. Anybody can walk wherever they want.” “That’s true,” he said. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? Can you spell democracy?” He had few ways of getting back at her. He knew she was a poor speller.

Donald was not married. He had a son, Bobby, eight years old, living with his mother in North Miami, Florida. He did not get along with him any better than he got along with Anita, although he did not try to antagonize him. He brought his son gloxinia tubers, bubble-blowing liquid with a six-loop blower, a bird’s nest with a speckled blue egg broken into four neat pieces lying inside. He bought him a plastic bird to clip onto the nest, a flower pot for the gloxinia tubers, walked up and down the beach with him as he blew bubbles at the sea gulls, rushing them and shouting between each blow. At seafood restaurants he carefully picked through his son’s filet of sole for those tiny, invisible bones, worrying all through dinner that he might choke and die. Donald and Bobby were both Pisces.

Things started to change in Donald’s life the summer of 1976. He had a girl friend, Marilyn, who was excessively kind. She made a lobster stew that made his eyes water with pleasure, and when they walked down the street together, she held his hand. She wore perfume that smelled like spice. She had a son from her first marriage, named Joshua, who was a problem: wouldn’t eat fish of any sort, and sat at the table as Marilyn ate her boiled lobster and Donald ate his lobster stew (Marilyn liked plain things), crossing his eyes, shaping his hands into opening and closing lobster claws. He disapproved of Donald. He was fifteen years old and he built big rockets that he launched from a hilltop in the park on the weekends — rockets so big that they shook and whistled in a frightening way when they were ignited and took off in a split second and vanished from sight. Joshua demanded that his mother come along on these outings. With Joshua there, Marilyn was embarrassed to hold Donald’s hand. They would sit side by side, she calling out approval to Joshua, Joshua grinning like mad and jumping up and down as rocket after rocket disappeared. It was a perfect place to hold hands, but she wouldn’t.

In July, Donald had a two-week vacation, and Marilyn’s vacation (ten days) coincided with it. Joshua was in summer school because he had failed plane geometry, so they had every afternoon alone together. Donald had promised to go fishing with Starley on Chesapeake Bay, but he never got around to calling him. Joshua’s absence allowed them time to make love listening to music, go to the swimming pool in back of her apartment, walk slowly, holding hands, to the fish market for lobster.

Things changed at the end of the month when it turned out that Joshua had again failed plane geometry. By this time Donald was staying at her apartment most nights, so he was there when Joshua came home crying. The two of them stood in the hallway weeping. She tried to embrace him and he shoved her away. That made her cry so loudly that she bellowed. Joshua swore that he had done his best, that the teacher was a witch who punished a student even when he tried and failed. He said that he didn’t care about the two sides of an isosceles triangle, and he would stab himself in the heart with the point of a compass if he had to take the course again. He ran out, slamming the door. Marilyn went around the house, moving in patterns that made no sense, trying to round up all the compasses. They were all around the apartment: rusted compasses, compasses bent out of shape, compasses empty of pencils; they looked ugly and evil, like something the Nazis would use. She eventually found four of them and held them out to Donald, the metal instruments shaking in her hand louder than dice, and told him to bury them. He buried them under a mock orange bush near the swimming pool, dropping a stub of a pencil that had been in one of them on top of the grave as a marker. He had not buried anything since his pet turtle died when he was twelve. When he went back to comfort Marilyn, things started to come apart: he told her that she was a good mother, and she turned on him and said, “How can you give advice when you know nothing about parenting? When you haven’t seen your son all year, except for one day last December?” Later that week she went to see the school counselor. She came home and told Donald that Joshua was “disturbed” by their living together, that he would have to go. “You’re going to let a fifteen-year-old tell you how to live?” Donald said. “What would you know, when you have a child you completely ignore? If you loved that child, and if he was suffering, and if you could help him, and if you … if you ever cared enough to help him, then you’d know, you’d. …” She stood there, trembling. Lobster stew was bubbling on the stove. That night Donald had two hamburgers at a drive-in restaurant and went home and waited for her to call and apologize. She didn’t call that night or the next night, and each night when the phone did not ring, Donald went to sleep praying that Joshua would have to repeat the course. At night he would awaken, sweating, stomach heavy, having been fooled by some slight noise into thinking that the phone was ringing. With only three days of vacation left, knowing he had to get himself together, he did what he always did when he was in trouble or feeling blue — he called Starley. Starley had been his best friend in college; he had taught him how to take apart a carburetor, had patiently tutored him in logic. Starley had taught him, late in life, to whistle. After college, they had gone to New York together.

That night Starley and Alice met him for drinks at My Blue Heaven. They were late, so at the time Donald was to meet them, he crossed the street and went into the bar. He had almost finished his gin-and-tonic when they came in. He was sucking on the wedge of lime, and liking its greenness. The booths were padded in blue plastic, and there were silver-flecked blue Formica tabletops. Up near the ceiling were tiny twinkling blue lights. On the wall in back of the bar was a big cutout of Rita Hay worth, in a striped bathing suit; it had been stuck on a piece of board lettered “The One That Got Away,” which had formerly held the huge plastic fish that was now hanging at the other end of the bar, its snout pointed up the skirt of Marilyn Monroe, who was pouting and pushing her full white skirt down as if, unexpectedly, a wind storm had just started up between her knees. There was, next to this, an anatomically correct baby-boy doll, painted Day-Glo blue.

“None of this would have happened if you had gone to the beach for your vacation,” Alice said to Donald.

“I wanted to be with her. Her kid was in school. Everything was going fine until the little bastard flunked plane geometry.”

“Get him a calculator,” Alice said.

“Plane geometry isn’t the sort of course that a calculator would help in,” Starley said.

“Give me a light, Dickie,” Alice said.

He lit her cigarette.

“I don’t think this place is as funny as I used to,” Alice said. Nobody said anything.

“I’m in a bad mood, and I apologize for it,” Alice said. “All week I’ve been trying to give up smoking by smoking these cigarettes that are made of lettuce.”

“Why don’t you call Marilyn and see if she won’t come have a drink with us?” Starley said.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do we have to be here if he’s going to have a drink with her, Dickie? I’d feel awkward. I already feel sick to my stomach.”

“Then put that thing out.”

“I can’t. I need to smoke in social situations.”

Years before, in New York, Starley had told Donald that his only misgiving about marrying Alice was her chain-smoking. The smoke made him cough. At the wedding reception there had been little silver trays with pastel-colored Nat Sherman cigarettes.

They sat looking at the tabletop. The waiter was avoiding them. The waiter had apple-pink puckered cheeks like Howdy Doody.

“Do you think you would do us a favor?” Alice said. “Dickie and I haven’t been out to dinner in so long that I can’t remember it, and the sitter could only come for an hour tonight. Do you think you could go stay with Anita?”

“Alice!” Starley said. “He doesn’t want to be our baby-sitter.”

“That’s okay, Starley,” Donald said. “It doesn’t matter where I brood. You go out and have dinner. I’ll go over to your place and watch Anita.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.

Starley rolled his eyes dramatically. He stood up, and then Alice bumped out of the booth. She looked heavier. Her skirt was wrinkled. Mascara had smudged under one eye. The summer before, he and Starley had picked up a whore after a day of fishing on Chesapeake Bay, and while he went at it with her, Donald had sat drunkenly on the floor across the room, casting his line into her hair. There was a little plastic worm attached to the fishing pole, and once he missed and she reached down and pushed the thing off of her breast, saying, “Ugh! Make him stop!” “She says she wants you to stop, Starley,” Donald said. Then the whore started giggling, and Starley frowned at him. “She says she wants you to quit it,” he said. He was drunk. He was naked. Earlier (this was in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge) he had put his underpants on his head and marched around saying he was Ponce de Leon (Florida was on his mind; his son was on his mind). They played tag. The whore was easy to catch because she didn’t want to play tag in the first place, so she never really tried to get away. When she bumped into a table and nicked her shin, she refused to play anymore. They all sat around drinking gin-and-tonics. She flipped a coin to see who got her first. Whoever got “tails” got her. Much later the three of them stood, in towels, on the tiny balcony outside their room. In the parking lot a family was unloading their station wagon. There was a windblown mother, and a husband not quite as tall as she was who carried an infant in a baby seat, and a little girl, about five, who sat on the gravel and made demands as her father removed suitcases. The little girl started crying, and her mother fumbled her up in her arms, and they all marched into the Howard Johnson’s and disappeared.

Donald held the door of the bar open for Alice and Starley. He shook hands with Starley and kissed Alice on the cheek, and then he walked to Starley’s to baby-sit Anita, thinking all the way of the whore’s legs — kissing her scraped shin to make it well.

An hour later Donald was going out to eat chicken with a kid who had never liked him, his relationship with Marilyn over, the fan belt in Alice’s car squealing. Nothing he had ever done had made his own son like him. Joshua hated him, failed his course to get even with him, no kid ever liked him. He even had trouble making friends with other kids when he was a kid. Starley had been his first close friend. He drove, in the rush hour, brooding, wanting to put the silent Anita out of the car and go back to My Blue Heaven and make the waiter wait on him until he had had all the drinks he wanted.

Two summers before, the whore in the Howard Johnson’s had asked: “Were you guys in Vietnam?”

“No,” Starley said. “We’re too old.”

“Do we act like we were in Vietnam?” Donald asked her.

“How old are you?” she asked Starley.

He made her guess. She guessed wrong, by almost ten years.

“Thirty-five,” he said.

“You’re his age?” she said.

Donald nodded.

They were eating crabs. The crabs came in a black bucket, and the waitress rolled out thick paper on the table and gave them a pile of napkins, but no plates. The whore was having crab cakes, which were very expensive. As they drank beer she drank a Coke. She sipped it through a straw, like a little girl.

“How old are you?” Donald asked her.

“Twenty-three,” she said. She looked twenty-seven or-eight.

“Are you married?” she asked Donald.

“No,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked Starley.

He squinched up his face and waved his hand from side to side — a gesture that meant “so-so.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked him.

“One kid.”

“I’ve got a friend who’s a Vietnamese woman,” she said, “and she told me about soldiers who came into the village who pushed her down and one of them fucked her while the other one held the rifle underneath his friend, touching her asshole.”

She finished her Coke, sucking in mostly air. Donald thought that maybe she was twenty-three. It was just that she had sweated and not washed her face, and the make-up had caked on her cheeks.

“If you two want to do it again after dinner, you’ll have to pay me more,” she said. She looked into her empty Coke glass. “I guess it would have been only fair to tell you that before I let you take me to dinner.” She put her finger in the glass and brought out a piece of ice and sucked it. “I just didn’t think of it,” she said. “I honestly didn’t think of it.”

When it happened, Donald had just recently begun to feel happy — happy for the first time in months. (Marilyn never called; when he called her, she wouldn’t see him. Not any of the four times he called.) It was the first of November — the same day he had half a cord of wood delivered, which was stacked in what used to be a closet in the living room (door now removed). A fire was burning. Getting close to midnight, alone (but there had been someone earlier), having a cup of coffee that would keep him awake, but what the hell — the next day was Saturday — the phone rang. He crossed the room and picked up the phone and heard the voice of a stranger telling him, in a flat voice, that his friend Starley was dead.

Starley and Alice had been having a party — a party to which Alice had invited her important friends and to which Donald had not been invited — and Starley went out to get ice cubes. They were drinking mint juleps. (This gets crazier: they had all brought beach towels, were sitting around wrapped up in them with the heat turned up, pretending they were Arabs in the desert.) It was nine o’clock, around there, and Starley said they were running out of ice. (Correction: Alice said they were running out of ice, for which she will never forgive herself; yes, she realized that he, too, would eventually have noticed it. But if he had noticed five seconds later — probably one second later — the truck that went out of control would have passed that stretch of street Starley was crossing.) Starley had put on his black jacket and taken Alice’s scarf and, cold as it was, decided that the store was two blocks away, so he’d walk. (Alice, later, was sure that he had opened the door of the Fiat — his car was in the garage — and looked for the key under the floor mat — the one time she had left her key in the kitchen instead of in the usual hiding place. She was sure that he had tried to drive, had not found the key, had then and only then decided to walk. If he had taken the Fiat, he would be alive.)

The truck, a United Van Lines truck, its brakes not working properly as it came down the hill, and then the ice patch that threw it off course, right into him, on his way to buy ice cubes…

Donald heard all this when he picked up the phone. He could not really focus on the fact that Starley was dead; he could think only of himself, and the guilt he felt thinking, Hey — he’s dead and I’m alive. The guilt he felt thinking that if he had been invited to the party, he would probably have been the one to go for ice.

After Donald put down the phone (the anonymous voice having said, two times: “Come to the hospital for what?”) and he was standing there, disbelieving, the memory of the summer before with the whore making him smile and encroaching on his sorrow, the phone rang again. It was the woman who had been at his house earlier. It was Susan with her lovely, soft voice, calling to tell him she loved him. A few seconds after she hung up, wandering through his apartment, Donald was not clear what he had said to her. He knew that he should call her back, but he had no time. He was on the road, sad but full of purpose, an hour after both phone calls, headed for North Miami.

The drive took several days. The last night before he got there, he slept in a Howard Johnson’s, wanting to indulge all his maudlin instincts and be done with them. But this motel was not like the other one. The only room they had had one twin bed, and the room they had rented on the fishing trip had been much larger, with two double beds. This motel was loud. People in the next room sang along with a singer on television, other people joined them, they had a party. Donald stood staring out the window (no balcony off this room) at the pool, flat and blue, just a little too far away to be inviting, the night a little too cool for swimming.

From a phone booth on the highway that afternoon he had called his boss. His boss had met Starley at a party at his apartment once, but said he didn’t remember him.

“I flipped,” Donald said. “It made me realize that while I was alive there were things I had to do. Please don’t fire me.”

There was static on the line; a bad connection. His boss was placating: of course he wouldn’t fire him, but when did he think — (cars roared by). They hung up, both joking about Florida oranges.

He had tried to call Joanna from another phone later on, to say he was coming. There was no answer. He tried to call Susan, but of course she was at work, no answer there either. With the back of his arm he wiped the sweat off his forehead. What the hell had his boss been joking about — what was funny about Florida oranges?

Joanna’s house was only a ten-minute drive from the highway. It was a small pale-green house. The lawn was full of exotic bushes. In front of the house a pink 1955 Cadillac convertible was parked. The upholstery inside was white, in perfect condition. Whose was it?

He went up the walk and knocked on the doorframe of the screen door. A girl came to the door when he knocked.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Does Joanna still live here?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“I’m Bobby’s father.”

“What do you mean?” She looked confused. She put her face closer to the screen. Her eyes were large, like Anita’s. She was prettier. Older.

“I’m his father. I came to visit him.”

He snapped his arms into his sides. He had been standing there like a bear, leaning forward, arms away from his body.

“What does he look like?” she said.

“He has medium-length brown hair. He has braces. Wait a minute — he was getting braces when I was last here, but I don’t know if he got them. He looks like me. Don’t you see the resemblance?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”

“Who are you?” Donald said. “Where are they?”

“Bobby’s gone over to a friend’s house. I’m waiting for him to get back. Your wife is playing volleyball.”

“Where?” he said.

“Do you know the Orrs?”

“No.”

“She’s there.”

They stood facing each other. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was about to light the filter.

“It’s to surprise them,” he said. “They didn’t know I was coming.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Wrong end,” he said, reaching out to touch her hand before she could touch the lighted match to the cigarette.

The television was on, but she had turned down the volume before opening the door. Red Skelton was gesticulating, his face expanding and contracting as if it were made of putty.

“If you’re going to be here,” she said, “I might as well go.”

He nodded. She was going down the walk when he remembered about paying her. She turned around when he called after her and cocked her head. “Pay me?” she said. “Joanna’s my friend. I watch Bobby and she watches my daughter.”

“You have a daughter?” he said.

“Yes. I have a four-year-old daughter.” She smiled, deciding to be more friendly. “Her father is watching her. They went to the beach. I just live three streets over.”

She waved. She went out to the car and started it. The radio came on when the car started. It was a fine car: in perfect shape, motor idling quietly, paint sparkling. She waved again. Donald waved. She was gone.

He walked into the kitchen to look for a drink, realizing that he was not only tired but depressed. Depressed that he didn’t know one friend of Joanna’s and that the one he had just met was by accident. Maybe it wasn’t one of her close friends. How could she be a close friend if she didn’t even know that Joanna had never married. But maybe Joanna had told people she was divorced, for Bobby’s sake. For Bobby’s sake he would have married her, but she wouldn’t do it. They had argued about it, but he couldn’t change her mind. She lived in an apartment in New York with three other girls — a tiny apartment on the East Side. When she was three months pregnant she started bleeding. She called the doctor and he told her to go to bed. She and Donald jogged around Central Park. They danced the Virginia reel in his apartment as best they could, because that apartment was only slightly larger than hers. They sat in a bar and she said, “Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” The bleeding stopped. They jogged again, every night for a week, running like maniacs. Bobby was born six months later, in Florida. She had gone there because she had friends in Florida, and because he would not stop pestering her to marry him. Bobby was born one week before Donald’s birthday. One of her friends called him at work to tell him. Ironically, after she described the baby, she said, “Everything’s okay.” She told him that Joanna did not want to see him, that when she was ready she would call. No call.

Most houses that look small outside are a little larger inside. This one was not. He found rum to drink and walked around the house sipping it. He went from the kitchen back to the living room to the bedroom adjoining it and went in. It was her room. There was no bedspread, and the bed was made with white sheets. He sat on it, realizing how tired he was, then got up and smoothed out the wrinkles. The room was almost empty. There was a wicker chair in front of a big antique mirror, an ugly high white-painted dresser. He walked out and into Bobby’s room. There was a pile of clothes on the floor. On his dresser was a letter. It was addressed to someone named Robert Winter. It could have been anybody. Robert Winter lived in Pennsylvania. Who would Bobby know in Pennsylvania? He looked in the bathroom (Jean Naté on the glass shelf above the sink, a sand dollar, a tube of toothpaste, coiled like a snake), then walked exactly three steps and went back to the kitchen, where he put down his drink because he didn’t want it, and stepped down one step into the living room. He hoped that Bobby would come home first. Then she would be cordial if Bobby was glad to see him. If she came first, there was little chance of her being friendly. On a table by the sofa was a pile of pictures. Most of them were of Bobby, in uniform, playing baseball. There was one of her father hugging Bobby, in the snow, outside his big house in Massachusetts. Probably they had gone there for Christmas. There was one of Joanna in a long yellow skirt and a white blouse, and she was standing stiffly, as she always did in photographs. She looked as if she was going out for a big evening. Who was she going with? Robert Winter?

“Starley,” he had said, years ago in New York, “Joanna is pregnant and she won’t marry me.”

“I wouldn’t marry you either,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I’m a man.”

“Christ — what are you joking about? This is serious. She’s going to have a baby, and she won’t get married.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re sorry she won’t marry me, or what?”

“What’s the cross-examination?” he said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

They were walking past the reservoir, where he and Joanna had run the week before.

“Give her time, she’ll change her mind.”

He took big steps when he walked. Donald took big steps with him.

“What do you want to get married for, anyway?” he said.

Four months later Starley was married to Alice.

He sat quietly with his hands in his lap until he heard her car in the drive — the VW she insisted on driving, even though he had patiently explained each time he saw her how unsafe a car it was. He fidgeted, not knowing whether to get up and open the door, or just sit there. Either way, he would probably frighten her. While he sat thinking, he lost the opportunity to move. She opened the door a crack, put her head around the corner, and her eyes met his.

“Oh God,” she sighed. “I wondered why the door was hanging open.”

Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She was carrying a tennis racket. She had on white shorts and a black T-shirt. She wiped her hair out of her face.

“Okay,” she said. “What are you doing here? I assume it got too cold for you up north.”

“It did,” he said. “It really did.”

“Where’s Deena?” she said.

“Is that her name? The woman with the four-year-old daughter?”

“She didn’t have her with her, did she? Am I crazy or something?”

“No, she … she told me. She said she had a daughter. I didn’t know her name.”

“Deena,” she said. “Now, what are you doing here?”

She sat in a wicker chair. He thought, If I can still be so attracted to her, I can’t love Susan. If I had reached Susan on the phone, what would I have said?

“Who’s Robert Wilson?” he said.

“I don’t know. Who?”

“Isn’t that his name?” He got up and went to Bobby’s room. He came back. “I mean Robert Winter,” he said.

“A friend of his who moved to Pennsylvania,” she said. “Did you count the silverware to make sure it was all there too?”

“Joanna,” he said. He locked his fingers together. “Do you remember Starley?”

She sighed, obviously exasperated. They had all been constant companions in New York; the three of them — later the four of them — had gone dancing together at night.

“He died,” he said. “He was run over by a truck.”

Her mouth came open. She slowly pulled the rubber band out of her hair and rubbed it into a ball between her fingers. “Starley’s dead?” she said. “I just got a letter from Starley.”

“No you didn’t. What would he write you a letter for?”

“He wrote me.” She shrugged.

“What did he write you?”

“Stay here,” she said. She crossed the room, stepped up, turned into her bedroom.

“What is it?” he said, following her.

The letter was about a picture that Starley could get her a print of from the National Gallery of Art. She must have written to ask him if he could get it. At the end of the letter he had written: “P.S. Why don’t you let bygones be bygones and marry him, Joanna? He shacks up with one dreary woman after another, the latest of which dumped him because her fifteen-year-old son wouldn’t do his math homework as long as she had him around.”

“Imagine thinking that after all this time I’m going to marry you,” she said. “When I knew you I was eighteen years old, and I thought that you were hot stuff. I thought New York was a big, impressive place. I was eighteen years old.”

Past her, outside the window, was a bush with bright-green leaves and lavender flowers that looked very bright in the half-light.

“That’s pretty,” he said, pointing over her shoulder. “What kind of bush is that?”

“Hibiscus,” she said. “But look — what are you doing here?”

He was sitting by her on the bed. Her skin was cool, on top of her arm where his arm touched hers. The bed linen was cool, too, because the window had been open and the bush outside had shaded it from the sun. It was summer in Florida, and winter back north. He was holding her hand. Years ago he had held her hand when she was eighteen. He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. He picked up the letter with the other hand and dropped it to the floor.

“Starley’s dead,” he said. “A truck hit him. It was an accident.”

He was surprised to be saying out loud what he had been thinking for days. In the apartment she had shared with the three other girls in New York they had gotten used to whispering, in the bedroom, behind the closed door (a sign that her roommates were to stay in the living room or, preferably, go out). They had whispered, she had whispered that she loved him.

He ran his hand along the sheet, then rested it on top of her leg. As he tried to clear his mind he heard the hum of the highway, the faint static that had made it difficult to talk when he made the phone call earlier. He was talking to himself, but she was answering him.

“Wait,” he said, his voice no louder than the sound his hand made stroking the sheet. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait.”

“Wait for what?” she whispered.