Nine

Each night that week he went home to Barbara after hearing Mrs Madison interview police detectives, laboratory specialists and, finally, The Angel himself—who now claimed in a diffident, mysterious manner, “it was Mom’s fault.” Each time he said this, the prosecution cut him off. And each night, upon returning home, Mr Nice Guy expressed his perplexity to Barbara, who listened to his troubled questions. Such as, “How does a person get to that point? A hammer, honey, a hammer? A number seven ball-peen normally reserved for applying roofing tacks?”

Mr Nice Guy stopped himself short. The judge had lectured the jury that they weren’t supposed to discuss the case while the trial was ongoing, at the risk of being sequestered, so even with Barbara he tried to limit what he divulged. She, however, was curious.

“And this guy acts normal, right? I mean, looking at him and hearing him speak, he would pass for, you know, ordinary?”

“Yes … I would say so.” Mr Nice Guy decided not to mention an uncomfortable feeling he’d experienced lately. The last few days in the courtroom he’d had the distinct impression that The Angel was looking at him. Not staring openly, but pausing ever so slightly on him each time he cast his eyes in the direction of the jury box. When The Angel did this, Mr Nice Guy would smile, because it was his conviction that when things were going badly for someone, a dose of sunshine didn’t hurt. Yet each time he did so, something flashed across The Angel’s eyes; once, his feet shuffled under the defendant’s table; another time, the fingers on one hand moved and the side of his mouth tightened.

Well, he’s nervous, of course, Mr Nice Guy told himself. But now he asked Barbara, “Do you believe in Evil?”

He said this at the dinner table as he cut the chicken. Steam escaped his incisions as he worked his way around, then, with his guiding fork, gave a 30° tilt to sever a wing. One whack, it was off. Mr Nice Guy was deft at carving birds.

Barbara pointed. She always got to choose her piece first.

“Evil? Well, in the case of that guy, I’d say yes, I do. Killing your mother with a hammer ought to qualify if anything does.”

He helped himself to a thigh, then sat down, shaking out a paper napkin.

“By the way,” she said, “have you been putting coconut milk in my shampoo again?”

“Just a little, darling.”

“But I’ve told you not to! It’s a waste of money, I can live without that, and it comes running out of the bottle so fast it catches me by surprise and half of it goes down the drain anyway. Why do you sneak around in my things after I’ve expressly told you not to?” Barbara tweezered a serving from the salad bowl.

Mr Nice Guy tried to return to his subject. “Maybe there’s a reason, Raba, for what The Angel did. It might sound weird but I hope there is. Maybe it’s us, we just can’t imagine it. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a reason.”

“Oh Jerry,” she said, “why should you cook up an excuse for everything? You must be the last person around, really. Haven’t you noticed that everybody’s fed up with excuses? People are drawing lines.”

“Are those lines going to fix things?”

“Well—(she hesitated less than a second) contain them, maybe. You have to grant at least that much. Evil isn’t just an old-fashioned idea. Look around you, it’s really up-to-date. Some say it’s actually the wave of the future.”

This sort of talk triggered an instant reaction in Mr Nice Guy, set his fork waving in the air. He couldn’t help himself. (Since childhood he’d experienced an attraction for chicken-and-egg dilemmas, for the sound of trees falling in the forest. When exactly did the refrigerator light come on?) “So you draw a line, put it in its place,” he replied. “Then what? Isn’t making such a place like conceding that terrible things have to happen? A green light for misery? It’s defeat before we even start. But are we really so helpless? Why all this giving up, throwing in the towel, this sourfaced morosity? Whatever happened to can-do Americans, that’s what I want to know! Screwed up as things are, it’s a wide-open field for goodness out there. Why can’t we roll up our sleeves like our grandparents did? The eyes of the world are upon us! Why can’t we get off our butts?”

She sighed. “We can. But that doesn’t mean the Habers will speak to us.”

She was referring to the couple across the hall. It was an unpleasant fact: the Renfrows didn’t get along with their next-door neighbors. Mr Nice Guy could hardly believe this was happening to him. Yet everything he’d tried to improve the situation had failed. They were always busy when he invited them, and never asked him over to watch a ballgame or to feed their fish while they were away. His neighbors shunned him! Not so much as a little knock on the door for help opening a jar of pickles. He would’ve loved that.

Dan Haber hit his wife Becky. That was much of the trouble. Sometimes the Renfrows heard them fighting and once, when Becky began to scream, Barbara had called the police. “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” she exclaimed, clapping her hands on her head, tears leaking from her eyes. “We’ve got to stop it!” While waiting for the police to arrive she and her husband had pressed the Habers’ buzzer, which after considerable delay was answered. “There’s no problem,” he’d retorted, then promptly closed the door. When the police came they could do nothing because Becky, through swollen lips, insisted the same. She did not wish to file a complaint.

This overture by the Renfrows poisoned all relations with their neighbors thereafter. The Habers even refused to acknowledge their greetings when they passed in the hallway or stairwell. Mr Nice Guy was determined to patch things up, all the more since the Habers were Jewish, and he recalled an incident which niggled in back of his mind, which he’d never told Barbara for she would say it had no bearing, concerning a time when he was a teenager and a bunch of guys had given their friend Sandy Ursel a joke birthday card. They’d signed it with names like Joe Maimonides, Saul McDonald and (his writing) Moses Renfrow. They’d thought it would be funny. But when Sandy opened the card, read the signatures, he didn’t smile. He looked up at his friends and suddenly his face was different than it had ever appeared before. He laughed in an odd high voice—still without smiling—and abruptly left. Young Mr Nice Guy didn’t see why. What was the big deal? Couldn’t they have fun? But as an adult it was partly this memory that sent him to the Habers’ door with fresh-baked oatmeal cookies on Rosh Hashanah.

“What?” said Dan Haber. “What do you mean?” He looked down at the plate that had been pushed into his hands.

“I just thought it would be nice for the holiday.”

“Uh … oh.” His forehead creased. “Well, thanks.” He shrugged, then shut the door in Mr Nice Guy’s face. Turning back to his wife, he said, “I don’t get it. What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” said Becky, watching him from the edge of the living room carpet, her hands on her hips. “Why can’t they leave people alone?”

After the cookies, the Habers still didn’t speak to the Renfrows in the hallway or stairwell.

“But he nods to me sometimes,” Mr Nice Guy insisted. “She did too, last week.”

Barbara threw up her hands. “Wow! What a breakthrough! In your case, Jerry, the more time passes, the more I think it’s like you’re fighting the force of gravity. Go ahead and try. Go on, jump as high as you like. But I have to tell you—in the end you’re going to come down.”

He smiled back at her. “My dear, gravity’s on our side, it keeps us close to the sun.” Affectionately, he ran his hand along the thin limb of the potted sapodilla he kept near the kitchen windows where it had the most light. “And the sun’s good for us.”

“Honey, you don’t even know if that tree will survive.”

He lavished much attention on his little sapodilla, spoke to it encouragingly, played it Vivaldi CD’s and on occasion surprised it with treats of fresh chicken manure and mineral water. His aim was to tap its sap one day, sink his fingers in its beautiful white-gummy chicle. He’d always dreamed of making his own perfect blend.

Aside from moral dilemmas, chewing gum was Mr Nice Guy’s chief vice. Though he regularly consumed commercial brands—a straight-on spearmint man, having long outgrown fruity flavors and inferior mints and the abomination of cinnamon (even if he did appreciate the occasional anise stick: the Italians made a good one)—he also spent hefty portions of his income on importing coagulated lumps of pure chicle resin from Mexico, Malaysia and Indonesia. These were special. These he took back to his room, hands trembling and saliva welling uncontrollably as he carefully unpeeled the foil, sliced off a piece and wrapped it in a freshly plucked mint leaf (he never, never cut his chicle with sugar), then bit down as hard as he could.

What joy! And relief. The joints of his knuckles, his innerdeep bowels, the outermost round of his kneecaps suddenly felt better. Soothed. He chewed and chewed. For a time the back of his neck prickled and the muscles relaxed so deliciously that his head tilted up, the world assumed a different angle, and he contemplated finer possibilities, the Optimal.

After considerable trouble and expense, he’d procured a sapodilla of his own—not just any sapodilla, but of the choicest chicle-producing region in the world, delicately transplanted by natives near Lake Hzá, Guatamala. He loved this little tree, watered it assiduously during what would have been the rainy season, and to approximate a more radiative climate, circled the tree’s pot with the same reflective material as the underwear of astronauts. “Shine me a little more!” he had been heard to beseech his window, the world beyond.

Some lucky day, he believed, he would get to take his knife and bleed the tree.

After dinner that night Mr Nice Guy talked to his mother on the phone, attempting to persuade her to let him buy a whirlpool for her feet, and as soon as he hung up it rang under his hand; it was Garson calling to gripe about the dogs again. Barbara curled on the couch and scanned the newspaper, the freshest crimes and calamities, mysteries of severed hands being sent through the mail, the obituary of yet another jazz great. Where did they all come from? she wondered. There seemed to be so many. It would be a relief when they were all gone, and you didn’t have to read about the death of another jazz great. With a snap she folded the newspaper, looked up—her husband was still talking—and reached for her book, The Memoirs of Eli Secreast. For her job she was trying to get through this tome, which was as fat as a brick and very slow going. Life on the American prairie with families of fourteen children eating corn mush. Blizzards, and feuds over rainwater. She began a chapter entitled “Locusts” but soon her thoughts drifted to her irritation at Mr Nice Guy’s mother: how sick she was of hearing about that woman’s feet! For God’s sake, one of her toes received more attention than many a courtesan! Barbara remembered herself, tried to focus on the page, “it was then that I began to fabricate my own toys out of the plentiful sod”, but soon her mind wandered again, this time to the image of a young colleague at the Secreast Museum. An eager one.

Reggie was his name. For his training period, he had asked to be assigned with her. Now he accompanied Barbara every day on her tours. That morning, while they were attaching themselves to an elastic leader to take a group of children into the caves, he had given a strange little performance. Barbara was explaining to the visitors how to hook the snap on their belt loops, when Reggie, who had also connected himself to the elastic band for the demonstration, added, “Make sure it’s on good!” He stepped back, stretching the elastic, then reached out and plucked it. Doingg. “See? That’s how it should be.” The children laughed and affixed their belts, began stretching among themselves, giggling, testing, doingg, doingg. Reggie moved further away from Barbara, then further—he flashed a smile as she watched him, and took a little hop, stretched even more, now all the way across the room. She kept waiting for the SNAP, but it didn’t come; with a nervous laugh, she plucked it once, too, as if to show him she didn’t care: Teek! Very tight and high-pitched now. One more step …

“How about this one?” he called to her, smiling, and like a dare, plucked again: Tik!

At home that evening, reliving the events in her mind, Barbara suddenly felt nervous.

“Garson, everybody’s counting on you,” Mr Nice Guy was pleading on the phone, “come on, be a sport.”

Barbara blinked once, then let the book slide to her knees, and closed her eyes.

In the years since her marriage to Mr Nice Guy and in her gradual enjoyment of his very understanding attitude, she’d had occasional crushes. She’d met men more handsome, or hotter, as well as richer, or more clever. Once she’d even surprised herself with an infatuation for a woman who sold Scandinavian furniture. In the last year or so, though, she’d decided to be with no one except him. It was a clear preference. Her curiosities satisfied, she knew with a certainty that some might have envied that the destinations she wanted most, she would find with her husband. (The pizza boy had been unplanned, an incident she regretted even as it was happening, and despite appearances it had little to do with sex: rather, it was about weakness, a way to indulge and spite herself at the same time, because for several weeks she had been trying to diet, trying heroically to take charge and lose some extra pounds she’d put on, but that afternoon had caved in to a craving for a Green Pepper and Onion Special, exactly what she shouldn’t do. Suddenly she couldn’t stop herself and when he delivered it and started flirting with her a little, in her broken state of mind she acted on an impulse and gave him more than he bargained for—all, however, part of the same irresistible downward spiral of abandonment to what she knew she shouldn’t. Basically, the boy was just extra cheese.)

But Reggie was different. She couldn’t put her finger on precisely why. It wasn’t just the handsomeness of youth, though it was true that Reggie was as shiny as a new penny, with chestnut eyes, a mouth that was downright pretty, an angular build, and slender muscled buttocks. No, all that wasn’t the reason. There were plenty of handsome men out there. (Well, not that many.) But it took more than that, much more.

With eyes shut she pictured him again, flirting with her in front of the schoolchildren. He literally pranced! She’d found herself laughing and staring: he showed off, flicked his brown hair, displayed not just a charm but a vanity, too, and a certain presumption (mature? certainly not!). She saw his limits. But somehow they didn’t seem to matter so much. They even brought something appealing.

Barbara opened her eyes. Her husband’s voice talked on and on. Trying to conciliate Garson. Its sincere tone reminded her of his song,

If I ain’t so smart

There’s always heaven above …

Actually she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so apprehensive. I really do want one man, she told herself. Don’t be stupid. Act on what you know.

Barbara believed that she’d learned the nature of her ability to love. Of love, period. She had tested limits. It was easy to enjoy someone’s good side, but that had nothing to do with it. Love did not need only assets. Love was more than toleration of the other’s maddening habits (and he had many of them!). No, the real measure was the endearment of faults. That was how she knew she loved Jerry, for indeed she did love what she believed to be his blindness about the world, his readiness to lose while doing whatever he could, and even his uncanny ability—especially that—not to notice that he’d lost.

Tears came to her eyes. Faults were the stuff of love, she thought.