The Surrendered

TEN

DORA, HE THOUGHT, was more than all right. It wasn’t yet evening and Hector had just showered and was shaving and she was in his kitchen fixing them a dinner of pan-fried blade steaks and roast potatoes, singing an old tune his mother used to croon in her throaty, impure voice but that Dora intoned like a just-born nightingale:

From this happy day,

No… more… blue… songs…

Her voice was fizzy and girlish and despite the patent optimism of lyrics that would have ordinarily made him instantly contract into a leaden die he was instead humming along with her in a dusky key. His sound wasn’t half bad. When was the last time he had let his voice be an instrument? He was raised in a family that valued singing, and he had performed, briefly, in the church choir, being one of its youngest boys. He showed enough talent to feature in a few solos and liked music well enough but in fact he was drawn just as much by the bodily practice of it, the used-up sensation he would get in his throat and chest after the hours of rehearsal, that blood-warmed exhaustion; but he had to quit it after the priest one day asked him to sing privately in the vestry, the florid-cheeked old man kneeling before him and tightly embracing his legs and whispering into his chest that he was a right gift from God. You’re magnificence, dear boy, the padre said, with tears in his eyes. You’re a thing eternal. The choir leader opened the vestry door at that moment and at the next rehearsal she made him promise not to return. After that he only went to mass with his mother, and it was the last of his singing, formal and not, this nearly fifty years past.

He wiped his face of remaining streaks of lather and dabbed on some aftershave he’d just bought himself, and combed his close-cropped hair. Dora had cut it before his shower and it seemed darker and thicker than he remembered it and with the music of her woman’s voice and the smell of real cooking it seemed he was now in a wholly different life. There were already noticeable changes in his apartment. She was good about not leaving anything obvious of hers behind, such as jewelry or clothing, after he’d made it known that he preferred her not to. And yet there were clearly indications that he was no longer living by himself; the bed was made differently in the morning, with tighter corners than he ever bothered to make; his toothbrush and toothpaste were put away inside the medicine chest; his three pairs of shoes lined up neatly beside the door; and with each night she spent, another diaphanous layer of her presence seemed to settle upon him and everything else, this fine dust of her that he could almost taste on a spoon, on the rim of a glass.

For nearly two weeks now Dora had been consorting with him and they had already gone past the point in time he would have normally nudged her on her way. She was joyful and effortlessly kind to him and like a revelation these simple facts made him joyful, too, or something close to it, and he thought he should do whatever it took to preserve the feeling. He had come to appreciate her surprisingly optimistic spirit-who at Smitty’s ever spoke of life actual years hence, about such a thing as traveling, or taking a college class at night? Even if her cheerfulness were more a late-rigged buttress than any natural, inner girding, the product of one of the self-help books she always carried in her handbag, he certainly didn’t think less of her for it. So what if she believed that advice from a book could work. So what if she held herself to a standard far beyond any possibility of attainment. Isn’t that what every normal, decent person did? Maybe she drank too much, like the rest of them, but she was dogged in pursuing her interests, this better idea of herself, paddling furiously even if she wasn’t yet getting too far.

As a girl she was accidentally shot by her stepfather during a duck hunt-he was a drinker, too, a small-town Ohio banker with a temper as unknowable as heat lightning who sometimes made visitations to Dora or her sister late at night-and she told Hector that from time to time she was sure she could still feel the pellets the surgeon had to leave undisturbed in her neck and back for fear of paralyzing her; like an echo the pain was both angular and diffuse, and she suffered it all her life, though these days she said it arrived with certain kinds of weather, with the tides and the moon, with her female cycle, which had just gone intermittent.

She had been fine since spending time with him but just last night she was whimpering in her sleep and Hector could not wake her and in a ghoulish state with her eyes open wide but unseeing she’d crawled on top of him and moved her hips until he felt her wetness painting him. He already loved the ready pliancy of her flesh, the faintly damp hand of her skin, the confected, buttery odor of her scalp and hair, all these combining in an insuperable womanly embrace, which was to him a true summons to rest. To sleep. With her racked expression he wasn’t sure if he ought to comply but after he did she slept the rare and peerless slumber of the gratified dead.

But he had not slept as deeply. Since hearing of June he was being hounded again by an old nightmare, the iron obstinacy of it like a railway spike fixed through his gut. The nightmare was not about June. Instead, still reigning in his thoughts was the sentinel of Sylvie Tanner, looming naked before him, perfectly alive and beautiful, her skin aglow with a pure unrivaled shimmer.

I’m too warm, she would say, and his heart would begin to skip out of time.

Please don’t, he begged her.

Don’t worry, she’d answer. It’s okay. She would then scratch lightly at her shoulder, like she had an itch. But instead of simply scratching she would tuck her fingers beneath her fine skin and then, with no effort at all, no pain, peel it off as if it were a full-length glove. She’d do the same with the other arm, and then start in with her torso, pull it down with a terrible measure, down over her breasts, her belly, slowly skinning herself and revealing to him not blood and tissue but the charred ruins of her insides, all blackness and collapse.

He had awoken hugging Dora’s legs, smothering his own face in her belly, as if to throttle himself in penance. She took his powerful grip for ardor and whispered that she ought to wash down there quickly but he only buried himself deeper and she let him, soon enough pulling and pushing him by his hair. He was more than glad; he wanted to be aligned with her good rhythms, to be her sightless, obliging implement. But could he devote himself to Dora, ongoing? Be good to her and adore her beyond his squalid little universe? He was almost certain he wanted to, and yet his fear of leaving her somehow in shambles ruled him, too, causing him to clam up in moments when he should have been sweetly generous, making him delay before meeting up with her, all of which, of course, only served to make her more unsure of herself than she was and seek his attentions all the more. Although she tried to hide her feelings he could see the welling anxiousness in her eyes, a grime of remorse freshly layering his heart whenever she peeped “It’s fine!” when he showed up thirty minutes late at Smitty’s, or said he had to get to work when he really didn’t. It wasn’t fine, not even close, it was rotten and cowardly and weak, and if such notions of his conduct hadn’t bothered him in years, they were bothering him now.

Yesterday he had tried to take a first small step toward being a respectable mate. Dora had been worrying about his fight with Tick, not mentioning it directly but sighing and saying again how it scared her when he got into fights, that she never wanted to see him hurt. He didn’t want to be hurt, either, not anymore, but it was giving-hurt that disturbed him most. Since the tussle with Tick he’d been thinking how pathetic it was for a fifty-five-year-old man to be so keen to mix it up, how sorry and shaming a picture, and then doubly so from the idea that Dora might have seen him that night standing over poor Tick, pummeling him monstrously and without pause. So at work he had roused Jung from his early-midday nap and told him they were going to drive to Teaneck, where Old Rudy lived. Jung naturally didn’t want to go, saying he had just over half the money together, and that in fact he was going to go there himself next week after he gathered the rest he owed. Hector knew that “gathering” meant “betting,” which would only end in more trouble, and like any comrade might he hoisted up the drowsy man by the collar and counseled him that partial payments were always accepted.

Jung cried out, “What, GI, you work for that old fuck now?”

“I’m working for you, friend.”

“Fuck that, I don’t want to go.”

“We’re going.”

“Don’t betray me, Rambo!”

“We’re going now.”

Jung saw that Hector was serious and relented, if unhappily, grabbing a fresh fifth of Chivas for the road. He cracked the seal and took deep slugs from it while Hector drove his fancy Lincoln coupe, heading them west on Route 4. Hector knew where the house was because he had been there once or twice, years back, to see Old Rudy’s daughter, and only child, Winnie.

Winnie was just twenty-six at the time, a statuesque, buxom woman with huge brown eyes and a sandbox of a voice and who was much like her father in the seismic potential of her temper. She was volatile and sexy and could be downright dangerous if she felt threatened or wronged, a notorious instance of her local legend being that she’d nearly gelded a two-timing boyfriend with a steak knife in a restaurant bathroom. Hector was forty then, as primed and handsome as a fellow ever was, fit for eternal bronze, and in a period of his life when he was bedding women with an almost pathological zeal. For a long time after leaving Korea he had isolated himself, existing, ironically, like some toiling monk, erasing himself and all his memories of the orphanage and June and Sylvie Tanner with unceasing hard labors, and, of course, drink. But eventually an oceanic surge of loneliness and desire roiled him and once he let himself go it was as if he were diving through endless, dense schools of women. He never meant to cause unhappiness or heartbreak but he couldn’t bear anything but serial connections, and with each union’s demise it was their angry tears and shouts that would echo in his head, causing him to move on only quicker.

In Winnie, Hector encountered someone as restive and inconstant and craving as he; she had a reputation for wildness and a stout appetite for sex, a nature that would have made Old Rudy proud if she were his son but instead drove him mad. For a whole week of nights she and Hector twisted furiously about each other in the sheets and it might have been more had she not driven on this very road, swervy and narrow, in a driving rain to pick him up at a job site out in Wayne. She never showed up. He didn’t much mind, figuring he’d see her the next night. He hitched a ride home with a coworker and the next morning he read about the accident in the newspaper, how a pickup truck skidded and flipped and somehow jumped the dividing median, landing squarely on an oncoming car. There was a photograph of the two vehicles with the article, the picture showing the entire front half of Winnie’s white Camaro crumpled all the way back to the trunk. Hector saw it and threw up in his cereal. When he showed up at the closed-casket wake Old Rudy asked him if he was the man she was driving to meet. When he nodded somberly, Old Rudy grabbed him by the throat with both hands and held on a few scant moments short of snuffing him, which at that point Hector, despising himself all over again, hadn’t minded, and hardly resisted, but a mourner who was an off-duty cop broke Old Rudy’s grip and shoved Hector out the funeral home door.

He hadn’t seen the man since the wake, and as Hector parked in front of the large whitewashed Tudor, he wondered if Old Rudy would even recognize him now, as sick as he purportedly was.

“This is your last chance to be my friend,” Jung said, taking a last drink. “Let’s go back and Sang-Mee will serve us food. I pay.”

“Just give me the money now.”

Jung took out a wad of bills from the inner pocket of his jacket and Hector immediately plucked it from his hand. While Hector counted it, Jung cried, “If I had that, I could make what I owe real quick! Easy winners coming up. How I’m going to make the other half now?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“I’m gonna take it out of your pay.”

“What, you’re going to lay six dollars on the Mets? Let’s go. And leave the bottle.”

“I gotta stay here, GI. I hate seeing my money in somebody else’s hand.”

“Suit yourself,” Hector told him, suddenly thinking that Jung should stay behind, being that there was a slight chance Old Rudy had somebody-or two-like Tick with him. “Maybe you should keep it running.”

Jung’s face flashed with alarm, and as Hector walked up the slate path he heard behind him the muted thump of the car’s power locks. At the front door he rang the bell and a uniformed home nurse answered. Hector said his name, adding that he wasn’t expected, and when the nurse appeared again she opened the door and led him upstairs. The house was dim and chilly, the narrow Tudor windows dingy with water stains, the air musty with old carpeting and the lingering gas of reheated food. The bedroom door was wide open and even from the hall Hector could smell the antiseptic sickroom smell, then beneath it the old-flesh smell, the piss-and-half-wiped-shit-and-fungal smell of someone spoiling from within, and he almost turned around then to leave when a raspy, cold-blooded voice weakly called out: “What are you waiting for?”

Hector stepped in the doorway. Old Rudy was sitting up in bed, dressed in a gray hospital gown, a tube for oxygen strapped about his face. Beside the bed stood an air tank in its caddy and a rolling cart topped full of medications. A plastic bag of urine lay on the floor, a line from it snaking up underneath the sheets. His bony shoulders showed through the wide neck of the gown and his once-sturdy flesh had receded, his skin stretched back onto his frame like an artificial hide. He was a menacing physical specimen, this jagged piece of Irish-German rock, and had only been known as Old Rudy because of his prematurely gray hair. But now almost all the hair was gone, leaving just the fins of his temples, the shiny, translucent skin showing through. For a moment Hector wondered what his father, Jackie, would have looked like had he lived to old age. Would his wide, ruddy cheeks have shrunken like this? Would his hand have withered even more? Would he still insist that Hector stay at his side always, to be his best buttress and squire, to sing to in his larking, fanciful tenor?

“I figured you’d come around,” Old Rudy said, having to take a rushed extra half-breath after every fourth or fifth word. “You should make your move, before I croak.”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Oh yeah? What did you come for, then, to pay your respects? To wish me well?”

Hector showed him the thin brick of bills, saying it was from Jung and that the rest of it was coming but would be a little while. He placed the money on the rolling cart. Old Rudy didn’t look at it, or seem at all to care, breathing out with some effort through his mouth like Hector had already begun pressing a board against his chest. Old Rudy groaned, “You think I’m worried about a few thousand bucks?”

“Seems like two weeks ago you were.”

“Two weeks ago I was feeling like I wasn’t going to die right away. Now even when the piss flows out of me I’m sucking wind.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Everything,” he said, but before he could elaborate he was besieged by a long fit of nasty coughing. When he finally settled down, his eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and he gestured to a large lidded styrofoam cup on the cart. Hector gave it to him and Old Rudy took some sips through the straw, the drink the same color as the liquid in his catheter bag. He said wearily to Hector, “You don’t look much different than you did.”

“You’re not seeing my insides.”

“Fair enough,” he said, handing back the cup to Hector. His voice was hollowed out from the coughing, and his body seemed emptied, too, husklike, its weight hardly pushing back into the pillows. “How long has it been?”

“Maybe fifteen years.”

“You’ve been cleaning buildings since?”

“Other things, too. But pretty much.”

“That’s my doing, I guess.”

“I could have moved on, if I wanted construction work.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Hector said.

“How come?”

“I guess cleaning suits me, after all.”

“Do you remember what she looked like?” He meant Winnie, of course, and Hector began to realize that the old man had simply wanted to talk about her, and had thus reached out to him in the only way he knew how.

“I do.”

“You’re the last person who spent any real time with her,” Old Rudy said. “She and I just argued constantly. I stopped seeing her like everybody else did. Like you probably did.”

“She was very beautiful.”

“Was she? You’re lucky. The last time I saw her, I had to see her in the morgue. There wasn’t much left of her, above the chest. Really no face at all. You know how I identified her? She wore a ring of her mother’s, a sapphire with diamonds around. When I think of her now I just try to see her hand. It was colorless and pale but it was perfect. Maybe they washed her, but there wasn’t even any blood on it. You think they did that? You think they washed her?”

“I don’t know,” Hector answered, recalling that it was he who most often washed the corpses in the Graves Unit, as it never much bothered him, initially with a hose and then, if necessary, with a bucket and rag. In fact it had heartened him to see them come clean, even as brutally ruined as they were, to leave them again, at least in one small way, pristine. Maybe that was mercy enough.

The home nurse came in to take Old Rudy’s vitals, before giving him a shot. Hector made to leave but Old Rudy waved at him to hold on. The nurse turned him over and swabbed a spot on his sunken rump and stuck him with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She checked his air and refilled his drink cup and changed out his bag and told him it was time to rest.

“Rest for what?” he said.

“For whatever you want, honey,” she answered, and then she left.

Old Rudy was fading fast and turned his head to Hector. “Tell your friend Jung not to bother with the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore. I won’t be around anyway.”

“Okay,” Hector said. “What about me?”

“What about you?”

“I want to be left alone,” Hector said, realizing that for the first time in years he was meaning we, as in he and Dora. Which was why he would have never asked before. “That’s all.”

“What, you think that’s up to me?”

“Isn’t it?”

“You’re crazy,” Old Rudy said, almost smirking at him now. “Who the hell gets left alone?”

In the car, Jung had been ecstatic with what Old Rudy let pass, but then berated Hector for not trying to claw back the money they’d brought after the dying man fell asleep.

If anyone could glide through the flak, slip past all disturbances, it was the estimable Jung, but Hector had to wonder if he and Dora could ever do the same. Some did get left alone, didn’t they? It seemed he and Dora had just broken into the clear. They were no more or less special than anyone else (well, maybe a little less), and maybe all it would take was for them to stay here inside Hector’s little rooms, one-to-one, hidden from further view.

Dora called out that the steaks would be ready soon and Hector strode to the bedroom holding only a hand towel to cover himself. She wolf-whistled after him. He almost blushed, unaccustomed to being naked before her in the light. In the bedroom, courtesy of Dora, were freshly folded clothes on top of the rickety thrift-store bureau, his usual T-shirts, but he decided to look for something better in the closet, which she’d also organized, hanging up even his dungarees and his several shirts. He would put on a proper one for her, and maybe for himself, too. It wasn’t half bad, to button oneself up in something clean and creased that didn’t smell of the unreachable corners of a bar and his own sloughed skin. Of course he normally laundered his own clothes, but he never paid attention to which mini-box of soap he’d get from the dispenser, and he noticed that Dora slipped a small white sheet into the dryer of their commingled things and now he smelled of lilacs, or what he thought were lilacs, the same waft as from the narrow side yard of his family’s house in Ilion, where his mother tended her flowering vines that exploded each spring in densely petaled ropes of white.

The smell of the steak and onions made his mouth water, and though Dora wouldn’t have minded his sitting down to the meal in his undershirt and shorts he decided to put on clothes he hadn’t worn in years. Maybe he would even take her out this Friday, somewhere other than Smitty’s; there was a new place on Lemoine where younger people drank colorful cocktails at the polished metallic bar, and though he’d normally steer miles clear of such a place he thought Dora might get a kick out it, and maybe he would as well. Visit the yuppie zoo. When it came to drinking, the day of the week never mattered before but now it seemed wrong somehow to do the same things over and over again, Dora herself suddenly complaining anew about the lack of a women’s room at Smitty’s, where she’d otherwise peed happily.

In the closet he found a secondhand suit given to him some years ago when he did some custodial work at a thrift store, still in its black plastic coverall. He held the suit jacket to his nose and didn’t like what he smelled but the trousers weren’t as funky. He couldn’t find a neck-tie or a decent belt but he had black shoes and when Hector stepped out into the kitchen Dora nearly dropped the spatula, as surprised as if he were a stranger come in from the street.

“My goodness, Hector,” she said, catching her breath. “How you clean up!”

“You don’t like?”

“Gosh, no, I like, I do. Come here.” She touched his shirt collar and ran her hand down the pressed crease of the sleeve. “You could be a businessman, just home from the office.”

“Yeah, but there’s no money in these pockets.”

“Let me see.”

Dora put the spatula on the table and stepped around him and slipped her hands into his trouser pockets. Her fingertips raked gently at his thighs and then with one hand she massaged him in the soft parts but just when he was coming alive the smoke alarm went off in the short hallway to the bathroom. The steak in the pan. He was surprised there even was an alarm, and while he went to take out the battery, Dora hustled over and took the pan off the heat.

“Oh, now look!” She was wincing and getting a little panicked, frantically scraping up the onions that had stuck to the pan. “This always happens in the end. Whatever I do. I ruin it.”

“No you haven’t.”

“I have! Look at the meat. It’s charcoal.”

“Just one side. Anyhow, it can be good well-done.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Not so.”

“You are.”

“Okay, maybe I usually like it rare.”

“Oh damn!” She nudged him in the chest and he pulled her to him and they kissed long enough that their dinner was in danger of going cold.

She told him to sit while she made up their plates. She had roasted some potatoes and he was glad to see that the oven worked. She served steamed sliced carrots and peas, a bowl of which was set beside a stack of dinner rolls. The table itself looked remarkably nice; she had conscripted a white bedsheet as a tablecloth, folding it in half to cover the gouged and scratched wood veneer top. He couldn’t remember, but like everything else in his apartment he’d either bought it at a charity shop or found it on the sidewalk, and he would still pick things off the street if he thought he needed them, for the sake of cost, of course, but really more because he’d long attuned himself to the aesthetic of the broken-down, the used-up, the worn.

But now he wished the table legs weren’t so deeply scratched, that the chairs were less wobbly, that he had thought to paint the walls just once at least, rather than simply having moved in and squatted, all to match if only by half the simple, clean decency that was abounding with her presence: along with the food she’d picked a small bunch of wildflowers from the vacant lot down the street and had placed these in a glass. Paper napkins were folded in half and topped with silverware he didn’t recognize as his own, for she’d buffed out the water spots. His plates were a puke-colored earthenware but Dora now dressed these up, too, by arranging the potatoes and onions in the tuck of the steak, which she’d sliced thinly on an angle and then fanned in a semicircle. She made a quick pan gravy with butter and flour (did he really have flour in the cupboard?) and a little splash of the red wine he had picked up just for her, and as she spooned the rich dark sauce on the meat his mouth watered intensely enough that his tongue ached. He waited for her to sit and poured her a full glass of wine, and then he ate ravenously and unself-consciously, like an adolescent might, mashing the potatoes with his fork and slathering it on the meat and swirling it all in the sauce before wolfing it down.

“Is everything okay? How are the onions?”

“The onions are sweet,” he said.

“They look burnt to me,” Dora said. “How do you like the steak? Do you want more?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Dora sliced him some more, and she ate, too, but not half as exuberantly as Hector. She was enjoying the wine he’d bought her, which came in a regular-sized bottle, with a real cork; he could have spent less and gotten her four times as much of the jug wine she favored but the label was illustrated with a pen drawing of a duck nestled among reeds and it had reminded him of Dora, or at least the way she always seemed snugly reposed, even when perched on a barstool at Smitty’s. She nipped at the wine to start, as it wasn’t juice-sweet like her brand, but she was quaffing it now in deep, regular pulls, saying it was lively and tart on her tongue.

In deference to the meal, Hector was drinking beer instead of whiskey, and he was taking it with some gusto but with a different rhythm than the usual flooding pace he’d get into with Connelly and Big Jacks at the bar when it was a warm evening like tonight; no, he was drinking instead for the good crisp sensation in his throat, for the feeling of being cleaned out and restored, he was drinking for the reason that to sit down to a home-cooked meal with a kind and reasonable woman and not want to sprint away out of fear of disappointing her or trashing her already fragile life was a thoroughly bracing kind of pleasure. Before, when he didn’t normally remain in one place for more than six months, it didn’t matter, but once he saw he would be staying around in Fort Lee he had not allowed himself to slip into the saddle of anything resembling a domestic calm.

But now here he was, focused on finishing off the steak and gathering the peas and carrots in a pile on his fork like a man come rightly home. Was he finally getting old? His body was as ever mysteriously impervious, but his mind was, like anybody else’s, encumbered with time’s accruals, and if over the years he’d disappeared on more than a few women at this very point, excusing himself from a table at a restaurant or from a bench in the park in the middle of a conversation and never returning, never calling again, never offering a single indication that he was even still alive, he was feeling none of that weakness now. He cleaned his plate, and while Dora got him another can of beer he topped her glass with the last of the bottle, of which he was glad he’d bought two.

“Leave room for dessert,” she said. “I have a cherry pie.”

“You made it?”

“Oh, goodness, no. Who do you think I am, Julia Child?”

“You’re not doing too bad from where I’m sitting.”

Dora didn’t answer but was clearly pleased with how things were turning out. This morning when they awoke she had dressed quickly and muttered she’d see him “around” but Hector sensed she was lingering and uncharacteristically replied that they ought to have a real meal together and that’s when she offered to make them dinner. Again she was slightly testy and defensive when she appeared later with grocery bags in hand and before he could stop himself he’d kissed her for the dignity on her face and right after she put away the perishables they made love, with Dora turning her back to him while holding the creaky rusted handle of the old refrigerator, the door opening and closing a couple of times before she called out his name and he hers and they swooned to the floor. Afterward she was always sweet-mouthed and proper, and he would never have imagined how uninhibited she could be, with her language and her body and her outright aggression, her pinching and scratching at his thighs, his buttocks, even his privates. It was clearly unconscious on her part, but she was thorough, each time raising small welts and marks all over him, today just as the other days, the hot water of the shower mapping a dozen good stings.

“Would you like coffee?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll make us a pot. I can do that.”

“I prefer tea,” she said. “Coffee makes my heart race.”

“I can make tea, then.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

But he couldn’t make tea, for he had none, and he’d run out of coffee as well. The cupboard was barren, save for a few sugar packets and take-out cups of jelly, a rusty tin of oatmeal. The oatmeal was the only thing he ever made for himself these days, and a sorry sight, but only because he wanted now to do something for her. Perhaps he’d not been exactly selfish all these years, but when was the last time he’d gone out of his well-rutted way for the sake of another? Hector knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was as unsociable as he, but the crabby fellow actually answered, and, though suspicious, eventually gave him two bags of Lipton, not waiting for Hector’s thank-you to slam shut his door. Hector put the water on and while it boiled he brought their chairs outside to the cracked patio, as the small apartment had become quite warmed from the cooking. It was balmy outside but still cooler than the kitchen, and he set a folding TV table between them and brought out their plates and tea. He opened the second bottle of wine for Dora and another beer for himself and they ate their slices of pie while watching some children playing hide-and-seek in the weedy courtyard of the complex.

A girl of five or six ran over and crouched behind the low brick wall that marked the border of the patio, theatrically shushing them with a finger to her lips. The seeker ran over to them immediately and found her out and the little girl must have believed herself betrayed because she made a sour face to Hector. He made one back, but with silliness, his eyes crossed, his front teeth bared. The two girls ran off, giggling.

“We’re like an old married couple,” Dora said, careful to mock the idea in case he took it wrongly. Hector didn’t reply but in fact he had thought it, too, recalling how his folks in their best times would enjoy sitting together on the porch of their house, wryly and good-naturedly commenting on the children’s games and pouring gin-spiked lemonade for each other into tall glasses of chipped ice. Among the children there was a competition to get a sip from Jackie’s glass, which he’d offer to the winner of whatever game they were playing, every now and then letting one of them down the rest of it, which inevitably turned into a competition unto itself. It was an age of such things, when they were all together during the war, his father 4-F, and at least in the private realm of the house at ease in his skin as he never was at the factory or in the pubs. His mother was in her prime beauty then, as lovely as any woman in town, but too young and naïve to know its measure, and she wore her splendor like an ill-fitting crown, half-embarrassed by the effect she’d have on perfect strangers on the street or at the green market.

“Dinner was real good,” he said to Dora.

“You’re being charitable. My mother certainly wouldn’t have thought it up to snuff. I bet you have women cooking for you all the time.”

“Yeah? How many have you seen hanging around here?”

“Well, you’ve just asked them to be scarce, I’m sure. At least for these couple weeks, right?”

“I suppose,” Hector said, going along with her. “And maybe next week, too.” And while this clearly pleased her plenty he also immediately wished to take the utterance back. He’d promised himself not to speak with her of anything outside a day in the future, even as he caught himself thinking more and more of times ahead, picturing some nice places they could escape to, some rustic fantasy, how they might drive in her car to a cold clear lake in the woods and hole up in a cabin like a pair of fugitives, eating whatever they could catch, drinking from a stream, feathering their bed with garlands of young ferns.

She clinked her wineglass to his beer and for a while they drank without talking as evening began to descend. It was an almost gracious feeling, as if they were taking the air in a park, as if he were a decent man and she a more than decent woman and the next day was a prospect they neither feared nor dreaded nor were already trying to forget. Perhaps they were even drinking for the sheer pleasure of it, for the easy communion and ritual, though they had little prior experience and were likely confusing the good feeling with the gentle weather and peachy light that was a world distant from the sorry pit that was Smitty’s.

In fact, Hector was thinking how they might not go back there for a while; they’d already skipped a couple of nights in the last week, which was noted by the fellows with mentions of how they’d gone AWOL, and also a few unmistakably pitying looks, and it had struck him on entering that being with Dora had reanimated his sense of shame. He could see the old picture of himself at his spot at the bar, vainly stuck in the hard amber of his gruffness, his solitude, his strangely sound physical being, these integuments only momentarily breached whenever he was called out to fight (or, more rarely, fuck). Conversely, it was no surprise that he was feeling a little vulnerable again, as though there were a rent in his chain-mail vest, a newly opened seam along the underbelly that neatly paired with a very real scar of Dora’s, a shiny inset line where she’d torn herself in youth, slipping through a deer fence. Whenever he brushed or touched her there she flinched and somehow he’d feel a nervy tickle of phantom pain and be renewed in his resolve that he would try his best not to bring her any heartache.

“I was thinking again about that woman,” she said, peering down into the wine in her glass. “You know, the one who sent that man to talk to you at Smitty’s?” She pretended to search her mind for the name. “Was it June? Yes, that’s right, isn’t it? June Singer. What was it that she wanted?”

He had already had to fib the day after the man first appeared and tell Dora that June was just someone he’d met in the war and later worked for, doing odd jobs and chores, which is what she had asked him to do again.

“She won’t come around,” he told her now. “I said I wasn’t i nterested.”

“Seems like she could get anybody to do odd jobs. Why should she ask you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, which he didn’t, though it was only because he had refused to let any part of his mind alight on her. There were entire worlds of reasons for her to have sought him out, the most immense of which was what finally happened at the orphanage, and with Sylvie Tanner. But there was nothing but blackness to go over again. Of course he had been with June even afterward, a very brief and strange period that led to his bringing her over, as his legal bride, though once landed they had just as quickly separated, neither in the least inclined during the past twenty-six years to do anything but wholly forget the other existed.

“You must have been important to her somehow,” Dora said. “A woman wouldn’t send somebody otherwise. She would have found somebody else. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

She finished what was left in her wineglass and then filled it up again. “It doesn’t matter to me. You don’t have to say any more. I don’t care how many women you’ve had in your life. Past or present.”

“Present?”

“I’m just telling you I don’t care at all.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Well, I’m just telling you. You’re not the only one with options, you know. I work with lots of people at the furniture store. Most of them are men.”

“I’m sure they are.”

“The manager even asked me out the other day, right out of the blue. I’ve worked with him for years. He said I was looking ‘vivacious’ these days. He’s okay, I guess, but to be polite I said I had to think about it. What do you think about that?”

“I guess you ought to do what you want.”

“That’s the question for us, isn’t it?”

When he didn’t say anything Dora got up and asked him if he would like another slice of pie.

“Sure,” he said. “But I’ll go get it.”

“I’m going inside anyway, for my shawl. It’s suddenly getting cooler. Like a storm is coming.”

“I’ll move everything back inside.”

“No, I like the air. Let’s stay out here as long as we can. Okay?”

“Okay.”

As she passed him he hooked her thigh with his hand and drew her close, a brackish-sweet air from their earlier exertions filtering through the thin muslin fabric of her skirt. The scent of them was heavy and he breathed it in deep, to let it etherize him, though it worked the opposite effect. He cupped her broad bottom and she responded by pressing his face into her belly, pinching the roots of his dark thick hair between her fingers.

“I want to stay here with you,” he said. “Nothing else.”

“You don’t have to say that. I’m a big girl.”

“I’m not saying anything I don’t want to.”

She leaned down and pecked him lightly and he kissed her back with a force and fullness that seemed to draw off all her blood and then fill her up again, her cheeks and neck flushed, dewy. His mouth peppered the patches of color on her pale skin, taking in her ear and then her throat, gliding down to the soft flesh above her breastbone and resting there while he guided her leg until she sat straddling him in the rickety chair, which creaked loudly and sharply.

“We’re going to break it,” Dora said, backing off slightly.

“You can fall on me.”

“Aren’t those children still around?”

“They all went inside,” he said, but only because there were no more reports of their play. She didn’t look around, either. Her long skirt tented their legs and while kissing him she reached beneath and unbuttoned his trousers and raised herself just enough to shift them down. Her own underclothing was in the way and he tugged at it and she simply pulled it to the side, clearing a way, recalling to him again what he liked best about her, her plain good sense and lack of put-on shame and fundamental ease with her body.

“Can I tell you something?” she said.

“Uh-oh.”

“I don’t have to. I can shut up.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you know you are a very good-looking man? It’s hard to see it because you don’t wear it easily. But, honestly, you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, much less known. Only the funny-looking ones have ever gone for me. I guess poor Sloan was the last example. And there you were, every night at Smitty’s, with no one to appreciate you. You don’t know any of this, do you?”

He didn’t answer, because it was always easier not to say that he did know it, and had known so all his life, how he was sorry for the specific misery his appearance had brought him and others, and for what? For the great sum of nothing.

“Now I’ve killed the mood.”

“No, you haven’t,” he said, pulling her closer.

“You like it out in the open air, don’t you, mister?” she whispered, hovering above the now high-angling press of him.

“Must be your fault.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, teasing him, slowly spanning him, like a blind, knowing snail.

“You’re ready yourself,” he said.

“I was going in for more pie.”

“You can go.”

“I will.”

But she didn’t, nor did Hector stir a hair, both of them content to linger in the half-light. They could not know that their pose from any distance appeared to be as chastely still as sculpture. Desire in Middle Life. And it was in this marble calm that Dora took on a sudden shine, her skin and hair lustrously abloom with the wondrous feed of stopped time, her heart as well as her mind momentarily unburdened of their accreted regrets, self-lashings, those long-ingrained gravities, so that it seemed to Hector that she was thusly gliding above him at a tiny but still measurable remove, which was in fact a blessing; he could handle her quite near, though much closer and he might panic, maybe cut and run. And he didn’t wish anymore to do that.

Afterward, while Dora slept in the bedroom, he found himself cleaning up the apartment. They had started early and it wasn’t even dark yet, just past eight o’clock. She always dozed a little after sex. Plus, she’d had a whole bottle of wine, and the better half of a second. He’d drunk plenty himself but as usual he remained more lucid than he preferred to be, the beer more like coffee to his system, arresting nothing useful (like memory), and blotting only his already paltry need for sleep.

He quietly washed the soiled dishes and pots they’d left in their haste to get to the bed, then swept the floors and polished the counters and the stovetop. From his job he had all the supplies one might need, but since living here he had never once bothered to clean the place thoroughly. Once or twice a month he’d make a cursory pass with a sponge and broom. No one had ever visited before, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway, but mostly the apartment was messy because he no longer registered the layers of grime and dust. For if you suspected you were immortal, if you were afraid you might never be extinguished, the evidence of which had accrued enough over the years to convince him to almost believe its truth-the way his wounds, even the seemingly grave ones he’d suffered during the war, healed with a magical swiftness; that he had aged in a way that appeared to the eye as if there were no other time except this one, no prior or future state-the concern for something like cleanliness, strangely enough, receded.

But Dora, thank goodness, was solely of this world, and for her sake he moved on to the living area, mopping the coffee table with a rag and knocking the seat cushions of dust outside on the patio. In the bathroom he wiped the sink basin and mirror and brushed out the toilet and then vigorously scrubbed the tub twice of its scum, the second time with a fresh rag, for she’d surely enjoy a bath in the morning. He could at least be an attendant, make things serviceable and pleasant for her, if not grand. He did such work at the mall, but there was a satisfaction in doing the same for Dora that made him think his own best usefulness was in these small, unheroic tasks, that his destiny in this realm was to take the form of the most minor of tools, a not solely metaphorical stain scrubber, or hammer, or rag. That contrary to what his father had always fantasized for him in his too proud and envious way, the ideal scale of his labors would be thusly unreported and fleeting, spot-small.

And the realization left Hector awash in the feeling that he was finally doing something right, something decent, and he quietly donned the clean T-shirt and trousers from on top of the bureau, careful not to disturb Dora from her downy wine-imbued slumber. Let her abide. He now had a good mission; headed for the bodega off Broad, he would buy some things for her, purchase not his usual canned spaghetti and pork and beans and box of saltines but what he thought Dora might fancy when she awoke, some fresh eggs and bacon and Portuguese sweet rolls and tea. He’d buy some jam as well, maybe a couple of flavors, even three. And on the way back he’d stop, too, at the liquor store for a bottle of wine for her and a six-pack of beer for himself, in case another thirst caught them in the middle of the night, or after breakfast. He checked the meager cash in his other trousers (he didn’t own a wallet) and went hunting for bills and coins strewn loosely about the apartment-nearly twenty-two dollars in sum-and went out into the Fort Lee night, his pockets bulging with the scrounged change.

The skies were clouded over and where the streetlights had burned out it was pitch-dark. In the small brick row houses the older folks were turning in for the evening, their upstairs rooms lamped with bed-table lights or the colder flicker of television, the cast beams striping the tiny front yards and walks as if they were a miniature tabletop landscape, all of them stitched together by the line of mature if stunted trees growing in the median and the parked cars fitting exactly on the block in a serendipitously bespoke measure. It was mostly serene save for the droning air-conditioning units and the hidden cadres of urban locusts, whose competing songs on certain unbearable nights felt more like waves of heat than sound. On the main avenue there was disco music and thumping jungle-like music and the reports of traffic and people calling out of cars toward the grimy storefronts, where neighborhood youth accosted in fair share one another and the indifferent beat cops and the young immigrant couples in love, the bums rooting in the wire trash barrels for the dregs of beers and take-out food, all of them content in the now fast-cooling air. And had they carefully regarded the broad-shouldered man in the white T-shirt and dungarees stepping into the overbright bodega, his scarred, battered hands selecting from the shelves the fruits of this most modest human errand (the kind he’d avoided for decades), they might still have agreed that he was indeed cut from an antiquated cloth, this long-lost bolt of hero blue.

But of course he wasn’t.

After he paid for the jams and some fresh hot fried bread he went to the liquor store across the street and spent what was left, and when he stepped outside again, laden with her morning repast, the briefest light rain drifted down. Then it was gone. The warmed, dampened sidewalks reminded him of certain sweet hours of childhood-well before he was much of a man, well before anyone (the neighborhood girls, the married women, the barmen) had found him out-when the summer torrents would interrupt the furious play of the street and they’d have to wait beneath the sagging porches for its sheets to roll past before they skipped back out, the smell of the damp concrete enveloping them in an odor earthen and stony but still creaturely, alive; he would have the sensation that he was on the broad back of an immense being, as unregistered as any sated flea, and he felt the same way now, virtually bodiless, happily ignored, free to go his unsung way.