“And disappointed,” Morgan said. “Don’t forget that. It was a keen disappointment.”
Myers giggled.
“If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you would not laugh,” Morgan said as he got to his feet. “You would not dare laugh! You would try to understand. You would plumb the depths of that poor soul’s heart and try to understand. But you are no writer, sir!”
Myers kept on giggling.
Morgan slammed his fist on the coffee table and the cups rattled in the coasters. “The real story lies right here, in this house, this very living room, and it’s time it was told! The real story is here, Mr. Myers,” Morgan said. He walked up and down over the brilliant wrapping paper that had unrolled and now lay spread across the carpet. He stopped to glare at Myers, who was holding his forehead and shaking with laughter.
“Consider this for a possibility, Mr. Myers!” Morgan screamed. Consider! A friend—let’s call him Mr. X—is friends with ... with Mr. and Mrs. Y, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Z. Mr. and Mrs. Y and Mr. and Mrs. Z do not know each other, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because if they had known each other this story would not exist because it would never have taken place. Now, Mr. X learns that Mr. and Mrs. Y are going to Germany for a year and need someone to occupy their house during the time they are gone. Mr. and Mrs. Z are looking for suitable accommodations, and Mr. X tells them he knows of just the place. But before Mr. X can put Mr. and Mrs. Z in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Y, the Ys have to leave sooner than expected. Mr. X, being a friend, is left to rent the house at his discretion to anyone, including Mr. and Mrs. Y—I mean Z. Now, Mr. and Mrs... . Z move into the house and bring a cat with them that Mr. and Mrs. Y hear about later in a letter from Mr. X. Mr. and Mrs. Z bring a cat into the house even though the terms of the lease have expressly forbidden cats or other animals in the house because of Mrs. Y’s asthma. The real story, Mr. Myers, lies in the situation I’ve just described. Mr. and Mrs. Z—I mean Mr. and Mrs. Y’s moving into the Zs’ house, invading the Zs’ house, if the truth is to be told. Sleeping in the Zs’ bed is one thing, but unlocking the Zs’ private closet and using their linen, vandalizing the things found there, that was against the spirit and letter of the lease. And this same couple, the Zs, opened boxes of kitchen utensils marked ‘Don’t Open.’ And broke dishes when it was spelled out, spelled out in that same lease, that they were not to use the owners’, the Zs’ personal, I emphasize personal, possessions.”
Morgan’s lips were white. He continued to walk up and down on the paper, stopping every now and then to look at Myers and emit little puffing noises from his lips.
“And the bathroom things, dear—don’t forget the bathroom things,” Mrs. Morgan said. “It’s bad enough using the Zs’ blankets and sheets, but when they also get into their bathroom things and go through the little private things stored in the attic, a line has to be drawn.”
“That’s the real story, Mr. Myers,” Morgan said. He tried to fill his pipe. His hands trembled and tobacco spilled onto the carpet. “That’s the real story that is waiting to be written.”
“And it doesn’t need Tolstoy to tell it,” Mrs. Morgan said.
“It doesn’t need Tolstoy,” Morgan said.
Myers laughed. He and Paula got up from the couch at the same time and moved toward the door. “Good night,” Myers said merrily.
Morgan was behind him. “If you were a real writer, sir, you would put that story into words and not pussyfoot around with it, either.”
Myers just laughed. He touched the doorknob.
“One other thing,” Morgan said. “I didn’t intend to bring this up, but in light of your behavior here tonight, I want to tell you that I’m missing my two-volume set of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic.’ Those records are of great sentimental value. I bought them in 1955. And now I insist you tell me what happened to them!”
“In all fairness, Edgar,” Mrs. Morgan said as she helped Paula on with her coat, “after you took inventory of the records, you admitted you couldn’t recall the last time you had seen those records.”
“But I am sure of it now,” Morgan said, “I am positive I saw those records just before we left, and now, now I’d like this writer to tell me exactly what he knows of their whereabouts. Mr. Myers?”
But Myers was already outdoors, and, taking his wife by the hand, he hurried her down the walk to the car. They surprised Buzzy. The dog yelped in what seemed fear and then jumped to the side.
“I insist on knowing/” Morgan called. “I am waiting, sir!”
Myers got Paula into the car and started the engine. He looked again at the couple on the porch. Mrs. Morgan waved, and then she and Edgar Morgan went back inside and shut the door.
Myers pulled away from the curb.
“Those people are crazy,” Paula said.
Myers patted her hand.
“They were scary,” she said.
He did not answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.
JERRY AND MOLLY AND SAM
As Al saw it, there was only one solution. He had to get rid of the dog without Betty or the kids finding out about it. At night. It would have to be done at night. He would simply drive Suzy—well, someplace, later he’d decide where—open the door, push her out, drive away. The sooner the better. He felt relieved making the decision. Any action was better than no action at all, he was becoming convinced.
It was Sunday. He got up from the kitchen table where he had been eating a late breakfast by himself and stood by the sink, hands in his pockets. Nothing was going right lately. He had enough to contend with without having to worry about a stinking dog. They were laying off at Aerojet when they should be hiring. The middle of the summer, defense contracts let all over the country and Aerojet was talking of cutting back. Was cutting back, in fact, a little more every day. He was no safer than anyone else even though he’d been there two years going on three. He got along with the right people, all right, but seniority or friendship, either one, didn’t mean a damn these days. If your number was up, that was that—and there was nothing anybody could do. They got ready to lay off, they laid off. Fifty, a hundred men at a time.
No one was safe, from the foreman and supers right on down to the man on the line. And three months ago, just before all the layoffs began, he’d let Betty talk him into moving into this cushy two-hundred-a-month place. Lease, with an option to buy. Shit!
Al hadn’t really wanted to leave the other place. He had been comfortable enough. Who could know that two weeks after he’d move they’d start laying off? But who could know anything these days? For example, there was Jill. Jill worked in bookkeeping at Weinstock’s. She was a nice girl, said she loved Al. She was just lonely, that’s what she told him the first night. She didn’t make it a habit, letting herself be picked up by married men, she also told him the first night. He’d met Jill about three months ago, when he was feeling depressed and jittery with all the talk of layoffs just beginning. He met her at the Town and Country, a bar not too far from his new place. They danced a little and he drove her home and they necked in the car in front of her apartment. He had not gone upstairs with her that night, though he was sure he could have. He went upstairs with her the next night.
Now he was having an affair, for Christ’s sake, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He did not want it to go on, and he did not want to break it off: you don’t throw everything overboard in a storm. Al was drifting, and he knew he was drifting, and where it was all going to end he could not guess at. But he was beginning to feel he was losing control over everything. Everything. Recently, too, he had caught himself thinking about old age after he’d been constipated a few days—an affliction he had always associated with the elderly. Then there was the matter of the tiny bald spot and of his having just begun to wonder how he would comb his hair a different way. What was he going to do with his
life? he wanted to know.
He was thirty-one.
All these things to contend with and then Sandy, his wife’s younger sister, giving the kids, Alex and Mary, that mongrel dog about four months ago. He wished he’d never seen that dog. Or Sandy, either, for that matter. That bitch! She was always turning up with some shit or other that wound up costing him money, some little flimflam that went haywire after a day or two and had to be repaired, something the kids could scream over and fight over and beat the shit out of each other about. God! And then turning right around to touch him, through Betty, for twenty-five bucks. The mere thought of all the twenty-five- or fifty-buck checks, and the one just a few months ago for eighty-five to make her car payment—her car payment, for God’s sake, when he didn’t even know if he was going to have a roof over his head—made him want to kill the goddamn dog.
Sandy! Betty and Alex and Mary! Jill! And Suzy the goddamn dog!
This was Al.
He had to start someplace—setting things in order, sorting all this out. It was time to do something, time for some straight thinking for a change. And he intended to start tonight.
He would coax the dog into the car undetected and, on some pretext or another, go out. Yet he hated to think of the way Betty would lower her eyes as she watched him dress, and then, later, just before he went out the door, ask him where, how long, etc., in a resigned voice that made him feel all the worse. He could never get used to the lying. Besides, he hated to use what little reserve he might have left with Betty by telling her a lie for something different from what she suspected. A wasted lie, so to speak. But he could not tell her the truth, could not say he was not going drinking, was not going calling on somebody, was instead going to do away with the goddamn dog and thus take the first step toward setting his house in order.
He ran his hand over his face, tried to put it all out of his mind for a minute. He took out a cold half quart of Lucky from the fridge and popped the aluminum top. His life had become a maze, one lie overlaid upon another until he was not sure he could untangle them if he had to.
“The goddamn dog,” he said out loud.
“She doesn’t have good sense I” was how Al put it. She was a sneak, besides. The moment the back door was left open and everyone gone, she’d pry open the screen, come through to the living room, and urinate on the carpet. There were at least a half dozen map-shaped stains on it right now. But her favorite place was the utility room, where she could root in the dirty clothes, so that all of the shorts and panties now had crotch or seat chewed away. And she chewed through the antenna wires on the outside of the house, and once Al pulled into the drive and found her lying in the front yard with one of his Florsheims in her mouth.
“She’s crazy,” he’d say. “And she’s driving me crazy. I can’t make it fast enough to replace it. The sonofabitch. I’m going to kill her one of these days!”
Betty tolerated the dog at greater durations, would go along apparently unruffled for a time, but suddenly she would come upon it, with fists clenched, call it a bastard, a bitch, shriek at the kids about keeping it out of their room, the living room, etc. Betty was that way with the children, too. She could go along with them just so far, let them get away with just so much, and then she would turn on them savagely and slap their faces, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it! I can’t stand any more of it!”
But then Betty would say, “It’s their first dog. You remember how fond you must have been of your first dog.”
“My dog had brains,” he would say. “It was an Irish setter!”
The afternoon passed. Betty and the kids returned from someplace or another in the car, and they all had sandwiches and potato chips on the patio. He fell asleep on the grass, and when he woke it was nearly evening.
He showered, shaved, put on slacks and a clean shirt. He felt rested but sluggish. He dressed and he thought of Jill. He thought of Betty and Alex and Mary and Sandy and Suzy. He felt drugged.
“We’ll have supper pretty soon,” Betty said, coming to the bathroom door and staring at him.
“That’s all right. I’m not hungry. Too hot to eat,” he said fiddling with his shirt collar. “I might drive over to Carl’s, shoot a few games of pool, have a couple of beers.”
She said, “I see.”
He said, “Jesus!”
She said, “Go ahead, I don’t care.”
He said, “I won’t be gone long.”
She said, “Go ahead, I said. I said I don't care.”
In the garage, he said, “Goddamn you all!” and kicked the rake across the cement floor. Then he lit a cigaret and tried to get hold of himself. He picked up the rake and put it away where it belonged. He was muttering to himself, saying, “Order, order,” when the dog came up to the garage, sniffed around the door, and looked in.
“Here. Come here, Suzy. Here, girl,” he called.
The dog wagged her tail but stayed where she was.
He went over to the cupboard above the lawn mower and took down one, then two, and finally three cans of food.
“All you want tonight, Suzy, old girl. All you can eat,” he coaxed, opening up both ends of the first can and sliding the mess into the dog’s dish.
He drove around for nearly an hour, not able to decide on a place. If he dropped her off in just any neighborhood and the pound were called, the dog would be back at the house in a day or two. The county pound was the first place Betty would call. He remembered reading stories about lost dogs finding their way hundreds of miles back home again. He remembered crime programs where someone saw a license number, and the thought made his heart jump. Held up to public view, without all the facts being in, it’d be a shameful thing to be caught abandoning a dog. He would have to find the right place.
He drove over near the American River. The dog needed to get out more anyway, get the feel of the wind on its back, be able to swim and wade in the river when it wanted; it was a pity to keep a dog fenced in all the time. But the fields near the levee seemed too desolate, no houses around at all. After all, he did want the dog to be found and cared for. A large old two-story house was what he had in mind, with happy, well-behaved reasonable children who needed a dog, who desperately needed a dog. But there were no old two-story houses here, not a one.
He drove back onto the highway. He had not been able to look at the dog since he’d managed to get her into the car. She lay quietly on the back seat now. But when he pulled off the road and stopped the car, she sat up and whined, looking around.
He stopped at a bar, rolled all the car windows down before he went inside. He stayed nearly an hour, drinking beer and playing the shuffleboard. He kept wondering if he should have left all the doors ajar too. When he went back outside, Suzy sat up in the seat and rolled her lips back, showing her teeth.
He got in and started off again.
Then he thought of the place. The neighborhood where they used to live, swarming with kids and just across the line in Yolo County, that would be just the right place. If the dog were picked up, it would be taken to the Woodland Pound, not the pound in Sacramento. Just drive onto one of the streets in the old neighborhood, stop, throw out a handful of the shit she ate, open the door, a little assistance in the way of a push, and out she’d go while he took off. Done! It would be done.
He stepped on it getting out there.
There were porch lights on and at three or four houses he saw men and women sitting on the front steps as he drove by. He cruised along, and when he came to his old house he slowed down almost to a stop and stared at the front door, the porch, the lighted windows. He felt even more insubstantial, looking at the house. He had lived there—how long? A year, sixteen months? Before that, Chico, Red Bluff, Tacoma, Portland— where he’d met Betty—Yakima . . . Toppenish, where he was born and went to high school. Not since he was a kid, it seemed to him, had he known what it was to be free from worry and worse. He thought of summers fishing and camping in the Cascades, autumns when he’d hunt pheasants behind Sam,
the setter’s flashing red coat a beacon through cornfields and alfalfa meadows where the boy that he was and the dog that he had would both run like mad. He wished he could keep driving and driving tonight until he was driving onto the old bricked main street of Toppenish, turning left at the first light, then left again, stopping when he came to where his mother lived, and never, never, for any reason ever, ever leave again.
He came to the darkened end of the street. There was a large empty field straight ahead and the street turned to the right, skirting it. For almost a block there were no houses on the side nearer the field and only one house, completely dark, on the other side. He stopped the car and, without thinking any longer about what he was doing, scooped a handful of dog food up, leaned over the seat, opened the back door nearer the field, threw the stuff out, and said, “Go on, Suzy.” He pushed her until she jumped down reluctantly. He leaned over farther, pulled the door shut, and drove off, slowly. Then he drove faster and faster.
He stopped at Dupee’s, the first bar he came to on the way back to Sacramento. He was jumpy and perspiring.
He didn’t feel exactly unburdened or relieved, as he had thought he would feel. But he kept assuring himself it was a step in the right direction, that the good feeling would settle on him tomorrow. The thing to do was to wait it out.
After four beers a girl in a turtleneck sweater and sandals and carrying a suitcase sat down beside him. She set the suitcase between the stools. She seemed to know the bartender, and the bartender had something to say to her whenever he came by, once or twice stopping briefly to talk. She told Al her name was Molly, but she wouldn’t let him buy her a beer. Instead, she offered to eat half a pizza.