“Imagine growing up with those,” Vacuhhi said excitedly. “All the way through grammar and junior high school.”
“Does she know?” Collins said.
“Sure she knows. But she thinks they’re just flesh; she don’t think anything particularly about them. Like they were hands or something.”
Thisbe had come close now. “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Collins.”
“Same here,” he said. “But if you’re going to talk to me, put your coat back on.”
She did so, struggling with the sleeves. Neither man moved to help her; the two of them stood together, looking on.
“What do you do?” Collins asked.
“I’m a song stylist,” she said. “You know, like Lena Horne.” With her coat on and buttoned, she seemed quite ordinary. Her face was actually plain, plump enough to sag at the jowls; her skin was clean but not a good color. Much too pale. Her chin lines were indistinct. Despite her mascara, her eyes seemed small, almost malformed — bad eyes, he decided, and damn near crossed. Her hair was really her strongest point—not considering her mammoth breasts. But at least she was young. He could not help contrasting her with his wife, Louise, who was currently visiting her family in Los Angeles. This girl was fifteen years younger. Her red hair looked quite soft. He wondered how it felt to the touch.
“You could certainly do with another name,” he said.
She leered at him, a frightful smile made up of jagged teeth and white, expanded gums. Never, he decided, would she get anywhere. Chest or no chest. She had a gross, aggressive quality—or lack of quality—as if she were physically shoving herself forward. Wiggling, pushing, trying to get just one more step up. He felt oppressed by her.
Still, she did have an overabundant “visual appeal,” and in a hotel room, among ten or eleven men, she would be a sensation. Just exactly what he needed for the show after and above the public entertainment Guffy had already made his room available for this, and they had all chipped in money.
“I made up the name,” Vacuhhi said. “Don’t blame her.”
“Don’t you know who Thisbe was?” the girl demanded. Evidently she had read up on it. “She was in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“She was a wall,” he said.
“No, she wasn’t a wall. She was the girl in the play they did; she was separated from her lover by a wall.”
“Well,” he said, “what do you do? Get up and read?”
“I told you very clearly, I’m a song stylist in the manner of Lena Horne. You surely have heard of Lena Horne.”
“Get off it, Thisbe,” Vacuhhi said. To Collins he explained, “She does a bubble act, but it’s not like anything you ever saw in your life. Wait a minute and I’ll go get the bubble.”
He went out to the car and returned carrying a gigantic plastic bubble.
“Developed by the United States Navy,” he said, tossing the bubble down; it struck the living room floor and rolled without breaking. “A float, a marker float.” The bubble was transparent, but its texture was uneven; the rug and floor beyond it were magnified, distorted.
Thisbe said matter-of-factly, “I get inside the bubble.”
“You do?” Collins said, enthralled.
“Yes, I get in it. Of course, I can’t do it now. I can’t do it without removing my garments.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Yeah,” Vacuhhi said, “she really gets into it. It’s a tight fit, but she manages. There’s this aperture.” He showed Collins how a section of the bubble could be twisted loose. “It didn’t come that way originally; we altered it for her. She crawls into the bubble with nothing on—” He led Collins off where Thisbe could not hear. “And then they sort of boot her around, you get me?” He gave the empty bubble a shove with his foot and the bubble rolled across the living room, striking the far wall “Like that. Only she’s in it. She turns with it on account of it’s so tight in there.”
“How does she breathe?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s a bunch of tiny holes. You think you could use this for your entertainment program?”
“Yes,” he said, “I certainly can.”
Thisbe said, “But you guys have to be careful and not kick the bubble too hard. Sometimes I’m black and blue for weeks afterward, after a lot of you convention guys have kicked me around.”
After Thisbe and Tony Vacuhhi had departed, Hugh Collins began to dwell on the arrangement he had made, the acquisition of Thisbe for the entertainment of himself and his fellow optometrists.
Good lord, he thought, feeling weak. A girl who would get into a plastic float and allow herself to be rolled around on the floor would be willing to do anything.
This was going to be the best doggone convention yet.
12
Jim Briskin spent most of the next day getting his car back from the San Francisco police. They neither recognized him nor knew where his car was; according to a well-padded cop in a blue shirt, his car could be at one of several town-way depots. Along with a group of others in the same fix, he trailed off in search of his car. At one-thirty in the afternoon his car was found. He paid his fines and the amount virtually wiped out his cash on hand. He emerged in the midday sunlight blinking, shaken, and scathingly hostile to the San Francisco police department.
A punishment, he thought.
After he had eaten lunch in a downtown café, he got his car from the lot—this time he had taken it off the street—and drove, alone, to Golden Gate Park.
Under his shoes the lawns were wet. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down. Ahead of him was Stow Lake. In the center of the lake was an island connected to the shore by a stone bridge. At the peak of the island was a grove of trees, and a Jesus Christ cross, and an artificial fountain, the waters of which were pumped up and released. Ducks paddled in the water of the lake, small brown ducks, not the eating kind. Boats with children were here and there. At the boat house was a candy counter. Old men dozed on benches with their legs stuck out.
As a boy of nineteen, he had come here with a notion which at the time had seemed illicit and lewd, not to say uncommon; he had arrived with a portable radio and a blanket, hoping to meet some pretty girl in a bright, colorful, laundered dress. Now those days, those desires, did not seem lewd; they seemed to him sad.
He thought, I can’t blame him. Any boy of seventeen or eighteen or nineteen with a grain of sense in his head would have done the same thing. I would have. How perfect Patricia was. What a wonderful woman for a boy to get hold of. For any man, he thought. But especially for a boy, aching to touch and hold a full-grown woman. A woman who wore a coat and rust-colored suit and whose hair was dark, long, soft to the touch. Once in a lifetime. It would have been lunacy to turn her down.
A dream, he thought. Fulfillment of a dream. A dream of pure life.
Anybody, he thought, who would call such a response a sin was either a hypocrite or a fool.
A fat, dangerous-looking squirrel was preparing to approach him. First the squirrel advanced and then retreated, his brush undulating. What sturdy hams the squirrel had. And the grip of his claws. Revolving, the squirrel again came in his direction, halting to rise up, clasping and unclasping his paws. He had a mean expression; he looked like an older squirrel, a veteran.
Jim stopped at the candy window of the boat house and bought a package of peanuts.
Once, years ago, when he and Pat had walked through the Park, a squirrel had followed them for blocks, hoping for a handout. But that time, alas, neither he nor Pat had had anything to give him. Now, if they were in the Park, they bought peanuts.
“Here,” he said, tossing a shelled peanut at the squirrel.
The squirrel scuttled after it.
Off on a slope a gang of kids in jeans and T-shirts were playing softball. Jim seated himself to watch. Eating the peanuts which he had bought for the squirrel, he enjoyed the noisy, disorganized game.
He thought to himself: I’m glad I’m not
in her shoes. I’m glad Rachael isn’t after me.
A baseball rolled across the grass and stopped at his foot. One of the kids cupped his hands and yelled. Jim picked up the baseball and tossed it. The ball fell short.
Christ, he thought. He could not even do that.
If he were in her shoes, he thought, he would be scared. Because Rachael was a tough little urchin, and she would not listen to the usual hocus-pocus, the verbal, clouds thrown up to protect the guilty. She knew Pat was guilty. She knew how her husband’s mind worked, how it had to work under the circumstances.
He thought of Jim Briskin, the nineteen-year-old kid, back in the early days, the kid mooning along the path by Stow Lake; his head was too big, too heavy, and his arms flapped foolishly. He was altogether a dopey kid. He was not good in sports, and his complexion was only fair; like Art Emmanual, he had a tendency to stammer, and when it came to girls, well, the truth of the matter was that at nineteen he had never done more than put his arm around a pretty, bouncy-haired high school girl in skirt and blouse. Once, at a dance, a girl had kissed him. Once—and what a once that had been—he had talked a girl (what was her name?) into sliding off her shirt long enough for him to see that it was true, it was all true; what they said was so—the source of immortality on earth, the source of everything warm and good and important in life, was somewhere inside a girls blouse, if the girl was fresh and pretty and as shy as that girl. But he did not count that; he still thought of himself as not having done more than walk a girl to the show and put his arm around her when the lights were down; the reaching into the girl’s blouse did not belong to him because he had gotten nothing, he had gained nothing permanent. For that, he realized, for that kind of moment to mean something, the woman had to be completely taken over. It was nothing to peek, to touch, to be present. That was a mockery. That was pain the like of which he had never again experienced.
At nineteen he had strolled around Stow Lake, hoping plaintively. He had strolled literally for months, in all varieties of weather, and one afternoon on a cloudy day, about four o’clock, he had come upon a girl and a man waxing a diminutive foreign car. The car was parked out of the sunlight—what little there was—and the two of them were working vigorously, both of them perspiring, both in cotton shorts and heavy gray sweaters.
As he passed, the girl had smiled at him and he had said, “A lot of work.”
“You want to help?” the man said.
So he took a chamois rag and helped. When the car (a French Renault) was shiny and the rags and wax cans were put away, the two of them invited him to come along with them and have a drink. They were a young married couple with a six-month-old baby; they lived in a housing development, and the man was an engineering student at Cal. They lived in Berkeley—so did he—and he hung around them, off and on, for almost a year. Then the husband, who, it developed, was queer, disappeared with a queer friend, leaving his wife and baby. And with her Jim Briskin had a long, involved, deeply experienced affair, his first affair, until all at once the husband came back, beating his chest with remorse, and the family re-formed.
Now, walking along, he smiled to himself. The illusions of youth. Joanne—her name was Joanne Pike—was about the sweetest, most considerate girl he had run across. She had never understood what ailed her husband, and when he returned, she simply wrote the interval off and made up with him.
And, he thought, Rachael probably would make up with Art. But she would not make up with Pat, and, he thought, perhaps she really would seek her out and do her harm.
At that thought he felt a slow, dreadful coldness grow inside him.
Among all the people in the world, Pat was the most precious to him, and he wondered if he was supposed to protect her from Rachael. He wanted to take care of her, protect her, and be responsible for her. Even last night. Even at the time when he had sat on the edge of the bed listening to her as she lay stretched out in her nylon slip, looking down at her and hearing her account of what she had done and why, hearing how she had gone to bed with somebody else.
What a mess it was. But they were in it now; they were in it to stay.
13
At three-thirty in the afternoon, Art Emmanual, in a sport coat and pastel slacks, his shoes shined, his hair oiled and combed, entered the McLaughlen Building. He pressed the elevator button. With rumblings and clankings the elevator, the iron trap of scroll-work and springs and cables, descended to the lobby. Three men and a woman, in business suits, stepped off and went past him, out of the building. He entered the elevator, started it up, and ascended to the top floor.
Ahead of him was the barren, unpainted hallway. To his left was the high-ceilinged front office of the station, and at her desk Pat sat typing. Her hair was tied back in braids; she wore a jacket and a blouse with buttons running up the middle.
“Hi,” he said.
Startled, she stopped typing. “Hello.” On her face was an expression of fear.
“I thought I’d drop by,” he said. “H-h-how are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Did you get home all right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Standing, she came toward him. She wore a long skirt and low-heeled slippers. “What did Rachael say?”
“She was in bed.” He shuffled his feet. “She d-d-didn’t say much. She knew we went somewhere. I don’t think she knows, though. What we did, I mean.”
“Really?” Pat said.
He said, “I thought maybe you could get off for coffee.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think you ought to come here. I might as well break it to you now.” Taking him by the elbow, she led him down a hall and into a small back room. “I’m engaged to the station business manager, Bob Posin. He’s around somewhere. So you go on home.”
Abashed, he said, “Yeah? I didn’t know that.”
Now she was aware of his sport coat. “That’s a good coat for you. I’m not so sure about the slacks.”
He said, “You always dress real good.”
“Thank you, Art.” She was preoccupied. Then she smiled a thin, worried smile and said, “Look, you go on home or wherever you were going. I’ll try to call you sometime this evening. Or maybe that wouldn’t be so good.”
“I can call you,” he said, with hope.
“Would you do that? I’m sorry about now, but when you know somebody who works in an office, you want to be pretty careful about dropping in on them. You understand.” She passed by him, then, her long skirt swirling. “Goodbye, Art,” she said.
As he left the station, she was back at her desk, involved in her typing.
Anguish, he thought to himself.
Going down by the elevator, he experienced all the misery possible, the pain went with him all the way to the ground floor and out onto the sidewalk. He carried the pain block by block as he walked aimlessly. The pain was there as he got into a bus and rode out toward Fillmore Street. At Van Ness he got off the bus, and the pain was right there. He knew it would not leave; it would have to recede gradually, over a period of weeks. It would have to wear out of him; he could not shake it.
Stopping by Nat’s Auto Sales, he said, “How about a car?”
“No,” his brother said, painting the tires on a Chevrolet. “Ask me tomorrow. I’m getting in a couple of turkeys on trade. Maybe you can have one.”
“I want a clean car,” he said angrily. “Not some old broken-down turkey.”
Nat said, “Go to Luke.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said, and went on.
At home he threw himself down in the living room to read the paper. Rachael was nowhere around; probably she was shopping. The texture of the paper hurt his hands. Rough texture…his flesh crawled. Sensitive, he thought. He could not bear to hold anything. Throwing the paper onto the floor, he went outside onto the front walk; he went past the gate and down the sidewalk. At the corner he stood watching the people and cars.
When he returned to the apartment, he found Rachael
in the kitchen. Unloading a brown paper bag—taking out soap and tomatoes and a carton of eggs—she said, “Where were you?”
“Nowhere,” he said.
“Did you go see her?”
“N-no,” he said. “What do you mean? Pat?”
“She’s probably down at the station,” Rachael said. “If you want to go see her.”
“I know,” he said.
“What’s she like?” Rachael said. She gave no sign of hostility; her manner was placid but, he thought, unusually deliberate “I’m kind of curious. She’s almost the same size as I am. I think she’s a twelve. Did you get a look at her without anything on?”
“I don’t know!” he said evasively.
“You don’t?” She stared at him.
“Ff-forget it,” he said. “Sure I got a look at her. And that wasn’t all I got.”
Rachael went into the other room and put on her coat.
“Where you going?” he said.
“Out. For a walk.”
“When’ll you be back?”
“We’ll see,” she said. The door closed and she was gone.
Feeling angry and ridiculous, he began putting away the groceries. For the first time it occurred to him that she might walk out and not come back; she was capable of doing anything she thought was right. He worried about her and about their marriage, and then he worried about dinner. Was she coming back for that?
By five o’clock he was convinced that she was not coming back. She had been gone an hour. Opening a can of soup, he fixed dinner: soup and a sandwich and a cup of coffee. While he sat alone at the kitchen table, he heard steps on the front walk; he put-down his spoon and hurried into the living room.
Jim Briskin was coming down the stairs. “Hello,” he said, as Art opened the door. “Where’s your wife?”
“Out,” Art said. “She’ll be back.”