For her part, Muriel had been married four times, counting the present arrangement. She’d pretty well forgotten the middle two husbands—tired men, tired under the eyes, in the blood, in bed—but the first had been a saint. Handsome, a saxophone player with wavy dark hair and a perfect little Ronald Colman mustache—and rich, too. His father owned a whole constellation of rental properties and a resort in the Catskills, with a lake and a casino and quaint little bungalows that looked as if they’d been lifted off their foundations in the English countryside and transported, lock, stock and barrel, to Gaudinet Lake. The shoulders on that man, Lester Gaudinet … she didn’t know why she’d ever divorced him. Of course, she had Willis now, and he was all right—if she kept after him. Still, as she sat through the long afternoons with a bottle of Petit-Sirah, clipping things from the newspaper, baking roasts and hams and pies enough for an army though she wouldn’t eat two bites herself and Willis, even with his appetite, couldn’t begin to make a dent in them, she couldn’t help pining, just a bit, for Lester Gaudinet and the lilting breathy rhapsody of his saxophone, and she couldn’t help feeling that at sixty-eight, life had begun to pass her by.
It was a close brooding morning in late September, and Willis was up at six, as usual, washing last night’s dishes, sweeping up, sneaking a half-eaten leg of lamb coated with a greenish fluorescent fuzz into the trash. He fetched the newspaper from the front lawn and was about to sit down over a cup of coffee and a slice of toast when he discovered that they were out of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. Each morning for her breakfast, which Willis prepared with care and trepidation before hurrying off to the job site, Muriel had two slices, lightly toasted and dry, of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread with a two-minute, twenty-seven-second egg, six ounces of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and three thimble-sized cups of espresso. If she was difficult in the evening, when all he wanted was to collapse in front of the TV with a tall scotch and water, she was impossible in the morning, crawling out of the blood-red cave of her insomniac’s sleep like a lioness poked with a stick, and he’d long since learned the survival value of presenting her with the placebo of a flawless breakfast. Willis squinted in vain into the cavernous depths of the breadbox and understood that he had a full-blown crisis on his hands.
A sunless dawn was breaking beyond the windows and it filled the kitchen with a sick hopeless light. For a moment Willis stood there at the counter, gaping round him as if he didn’t recognize the place, and then he got hold of himself and fastened on the thought of the twenty-four-hour Quick-Stop on the corner. Would they have it? Not a chance, he decided, mentally browsing the bright but niggardly shelves—beer they had, yes, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, candy, videotape, gum—but who needed bread? He could already picture the six stale loaves of Wonder bread stiffening in their wrappers, but he fished his Mets cap out of the closet, stepped out the front door and crossed the dewy lawn to the car, figuring he had nothing to lose.
Outside, as he stood fumbling with the keys at the door of Muriel’s car—they called it Muriel’s car because she’d insisted on buying the thing though she’d been raised in the city and had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life—he was struck by something in the air. What was it? There was a raw smell of the ocean, much stronger than usual, and the atmosphere seemed to brood over him, heavy, damp, the pull and tug of a thousand tiny fingers. And the birds—where were the birds? There was no sound except for the rattle of a truck out on the highway … but then he really didn’t have time to dawdle and smell the breeze and linger over the little mysteries of life like some loopy-eyed kid on his way to school, and he ducked into the car, fired up the mufflerless engine with a roar and shriek that set every dog in the neighborhood howling—and there was noise now, noise to spare—and rumbled up the road for the Quick-Stop.
The man behind the counter gave a violent start when Willis stepped through the door but relaxed almost immediately—the store had been robbed once or twice a week for as long as Willis could remember, and he supposed they had a right to be nervous. He shuffled up to the counter, patting his pockets unconsciously to locate his wallet, keys and checkbook, and said, “Bread?,” making a question of it. The clerk was small, slight, dark-skinned, and he peered up at Willis in mute incomprehension, as if he’d been speaking another language, which in fact he had: Willis didn’t know what the man was—Pakistani, Puerto Rican or Pathan—but it was apparent that English was not his first language. “Pan ?” Willis tried, tossing out a nugget of the Spanish he’d picked up in Texas during the war. The man stared at him out of deep-set eyes. He must have been twenty-one—he’d have to be to work here—but to Willis, from the perspective of his accumulating years, the man was a boy, absurdly young, twelve, ten years old, a baby. The boy/man raised a languid arm and pointed, and Willis moved off in the direction indicated. Pasta, kitty litter, nachos … and there it was, sure enough—bread, sandwiched between the suntan oil and disposable diapers. A sad little collection of hot-dog buns, pita bread, tortillas and a single fortified nut loaf greeted him: there was no Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. What did he expect, miracles?
When he shuffled back into the kitchen, running late now, the fortified nut loaf tucked like a football under his arm, he had a shock: Muriel was up. There were telltale traces of her on the counter, at the door of the refrigerator and on the base of the coffeemaker. He saw where yesterday’s grounds had been flung at the trash can and dribbled down the wall behind it, saw where she’d set her cup down on the stove and where she’d torn through the cabinet in search of her pills and artificial sweetener; in the same moment the muted rumble of the TV came to him from the next room. He was fumbling with the espresso machine, hurrying, the framers due at seven-thirty and the plumber at eight, when she appeared in the doorway.
Muriel’s face composed itself around the point of her Scotch-Irish nose and the tight little pout of her stingy lips. She was short and busty, and the tips of her toes peeked out from beneath the hem of her nightgown. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.
He turned to the stove. A jolt of pain shot through his hips—there was weather coming, he could feel it. “We were out of bread, sweetie,” he said, presenting the side of his face to her as he spooned the eggs from their shells. “I had to go down to the Quick-Stop.”
This seemed to placate her, and she subsided into the living room and huddled over her coffee mug in front of the TV screen. Willis could see the TV from the kitchen, where he popped the toast, brewed the espresso and squeezed the oranges. A chirpy woman with a broad blond face and hair that might have been spun sugar was chirping something about weight loss and a new brand of cracker made from seaweed. Willis arranged Muriel’s things on a tray and brought them in to her.
She gave him a hard look as he set the tray down on the coffee table, but then she smiled and grabbed his arm to pull his face down, peck him a kiss and tell him how much he spoiled her. “Got to go, sweetie,” he murmured, already backing away, already thinking of the car, the road, the house by the ocean that was rising before his eyes like a dream made concrete.
“You’ll be home for lunch?”
“Yes, sweetie,” he murmured, and then he made a fatal miscalculation: he lingered there before the glowing ball of the TV. The weatherman, in a silly suit and bow tie and mugging like a shill, had replaced the chirping confection of a woman, and Willis lingered—he’d smelled the weather on the air and felt it in his hips, and he was briefly curious. After all, he was going to be out in it all day long.
It was at that moment that Muriel’s cry rose up out of the depths of the couch as from the ringside seats at a boxing match—harsh, querulous, the voice of disbelief and betrayal. “And what do you call this?” she boomed, nullifying the weatherman, his maps and pointers and satellite photos, the TV itself.
“What, sweetie?” Willis managed, his voice a small scuttling thing receding into its hole. The windows were gray. The weatherman blath
ered about wind velocity and temperature readings.
“This, this toast.“
“They didn’t have your bread, sweetie, and Waldbaum’s won’t be open for another hour yet—”
“You son of a bitch.” Suddenly she was on her feet, red-faced and panting for breath. “Didn’t I tell you I wanted to go shopping last night? Didn’t I tell you I needed things?”
They’d been together for two years now, and Willis knew there was no reasoning with her, not at this hour, not before she’d had her eggs and toast, not before she’d been sedated by the parade of game shows and soap operas that marched relentlessly through her mornings. All he could do was slump his shoulders penitently and edge toward the door.
But she anticipated him, darting furiously at him and crying, “That’s right, leave me, go on off to work and leave me here, you son of a bitch!” She was in a mood, she could do anything, he knew it, and he shrank away from her as she changed course suddenly, jerked back from him and snatched up the breakfast tray in an explosion of crockery, cutlery and searing black liquid. “Toast!” she shrieked. “You call this toast!?” And then, as he watched in horror, the tray itself sailed across the room like a heat-seeking missile, sure and swift, dodging the lamp and coasting over the crest of the couch to discover its inevitable target in the grinning, winking, pointer-wielding image of the weatherman.
Later, after Willis had gone off to work and Muriel had had a chance to calm herself and reflect on the annihilation of the TV and the espresso stains on the rug, she felt ashamed and repentant. She’d let her nerves get the better of her and she was wrong, she’d be the first to admit it. And not only that, but who had she hurt but herself—it was like murdering her only friend, cutting herself off from the world like a nun in a convent—worse: at least a nun had her prayers. The repairman—in her grief and confusion she very nearly dialed 911, and she was so distraught when she finally got through to him that he was there before a paramedic would even have got his jacket on—the repairman told her it was hopeless. The picture tube was shot and the best thing to do was just go out to Caldor and buy herself a new set, and then he named half-a-dozen Japanese brands and she lost control all over again. She’d be goddamned and roasted three times over in hell before she’d ever buy anything from a Jap after what they did to her brother in the war and what was he, the repairman, an American or what? Didn’t he know how they laughed at us, the Japs? He hit his van on the run and didn’t look back.
It was 10:00 A.M. Willis was at work, the weather was rotten and she was missing “Hollywood Squares” and couldn’t even salve her hurt with the consolation of shopping—not till Willis came home, anyway. God, he was such a baby, she thought as she sat there at the kitchen table over a black and bitter cup of espresso. He’d been a real mess when she’d met him—the last wife had squeezed him like a dishrag and hung him out to dry. His clothes were filthy, he was drunk from morning till night, he’d been fired from his last three jobs and the car he was driving was like a coffin on wheels. She’d made a project of him. She’d rescued him, given him a home and clean underwear and hankies, and if he thanked her a hundred times a day it wouldn’t be enough. If she kept the reins tight, it was because she had to. Let him go—even for an hour—and he’d come home three days later stinking of gin and vomit.
The house was silent as a tomb. She gazed out the window; the clouds hung low and roiled over the roof, strung out like sausage, like entrails, black with blood and bile. There was a storm watch on, she’d heard that much on the “Morning” show, and again she felt a tug of regret over the TV. She wanted to get up that minute and turn on the news channel, but the news channel was no more—not for her, at any rate. There was the radio—and she experienced a sudden sharp stab of nostalgia for her girlhood and the nights when the whole family would crowd around the big Emerson console and listen to one program after another—but these days she never listened; it just gave her a headache. And with Willis around, who needed another headache?
She thought of the newspaper then and pushed herself up from the table to poke through the living room for it—if there was anything serious, a hurricane or something, they’d have a story on the front page. She was thinking about that, fixating on the newspaper, and she forgot all about the TV, so that when she stepped through the door, the sight of it gave her a shock. She’d swept up the broken glass, feeling chastened and heartbroken, but now the shattered screen accused her all over again. Guiltily, she shuffled through the heap of papers and magazines stuffed under the coffee table, then poked through the bedroom and finally went outside to comb the front lawn. No newspaper. Of all days, Willis must have taken it to work with him. And suddenly, standing there on the hushed and gray lawn in her housecoat and slippers, she was furious again. The son of a bitch. He never thought of her, never. Now she had the whole drizzling black miserable day ahead of her—TV-less, friendless, joyless—and she didn’t even have the consolation of the newspaper.
While she was standing there out front of the house, poking halfheartedly under the bushes and noticing how shabby a job the gardener had done—and he’d hear from her, by god he would—a big brown UPS van glided into the driveway with a gentle sigh of the brakes. The driver was a young man, handsome, broad-shouldered, and for a minute she had a vision of Lester Gaudinet as he was all those many years ago. Lester Gaudinet. And where was he now? God knew if he was even alive still … but how she’d like to see him, wouldn’t that be something?
“Mrs. Willis Blythe?” The man had crossed the lawn and he stood at her elbow now, a parcel tucked under his arm.
“Yes,” she said, and the wind came up and took her hair out of its bun.
The man held out a clipboard to her, pages flapping. “Sign here,” he said, handing her a pen, and she saw a list of names and signatures and the big red X he’d scrawled beside the space for her name.
She took the clipboard from him and smiled up into his sea-green eyes, into Lester’s eyes, and she couldn’t help trying to hold on to the moment. “Rotten day,” she said.
He looked tense, anxious, looked as if he were about to lunge out of the blocks and disappear down a cinder track. “Hurricane weather,” he said. “Supposed to miss us except for some rain later on—that’s what the radio says, anyway.”
She held the clipboard in her hand still and she bent forward to sign the form, but then a thought occurred to her and she straightened up again. “Hurricanes,” she said with a little snort of contempt. “And I suppose it’s called Bill or Fred or something like that—not like in the old days, when they had the sense to name them after women. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
The UPS man was shuffling his feet on the spongy carpet of the lawn. “Yeah,” he said, “sure—but would you sign, please, ma’am? I’ve got—”
She held up her hand to forestall him. God, he was handsome—the image of Lester. Of course, Lester had the mustache and he was taller and his eyes were prettier, brighter somehow … “I know, I know—you’ve got a million deliveries to make.” She gave him a bright steady look. “It’s women that’re like hurricanes, they used to understand that”—was she flirting with him? Yes, of course she was—“but now it’s Hurricane Tom, Dick or Harry. It just makes you sick, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”
“Okay, okay already, I’m signing.” She inscribed his delivery sheet for him in the neat geometric script she’d mastered in parochial school in another age and then turned her coquette’s smile on him—why not, was she so old it was impossible? Not in this world, not with the things that went on on TV these days. She touched his arm and held it a moment as he handed her the package. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re so handsome, do you know that?”
And then he stood there like an oaf, like a schoolboy, and he actually blushed. “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “I mean no, I mean thank you,” and then he was darting across the lawn with his clipboard flapping and the wind took her hair again. “Have
a nice day!” she called, but he didn’t hear her.
Inside, she examined the package briefly—The Frinstell Corporation, the label read—and then she went into the sewing room to fetch her scissors. The Frinstell Corporation, she thought, running it over in her mind, and what was this all about? She was forever clipping things out of magazines and sending away for them—once-in-a-lifetime offers and that sort of thing—but Frinstell didn’t ring a bell. It took her a moment, the scissors gleaming dully in the crepuscular light of the kitchen, and then she had the tape slit up the seam and she was digging through the welter of tissue paper stuffed inside. And there—oh yes, of course—there was her genuine U.S.-Weather-Service-Approved Home Weather Center mounted on a genuine polished-walnut veneer plaque—thermometer, barometer and humidity gauge all in one—with a lifetime guarantee.
It was a pretty sort of thing, she thought, holding it up to admire it. Polished brass, good bold figures and hash marks you didn’t need binoculars to read, made in the U.S. of A. It would look nice up on the wall over the fireplace—or maybe in the dining room; the walnut would match the color of the dining set, wouldn’t it? She was on her way into the dining room, the genuine Home Weather Center in hand, when she noticed that the barometer needle was stuck all the way down in the left-hand corner. Pinned. She shook it, patted the glass lens. Nothing. It was stuck fast.
Suddenly she couldn’t help herself—she could feel the rage coming up on her, a rage as inevitable and relentless as the smashing of the sea on the rocks—and how many pills had she swallowed and how many doctors, not to mention husbands, had tried to quell it? The Frinstell Corporation. Cheats and con artists, that’s what they were. You couldn’t get anything anymore that wasn’t a piece of junk and no wonder America was the laughingstock of the world. Not ten seconds out of the box and it was garbage already. She was seething. It was all she could do to keep from smashing it against the wall, stamping it underfoot—dope addicts, hopheads, the factories were full of them—but then she remembered the TV and she held on till the first hot wave of fury passed over her.