Nate is down in the cellar. He’s cutting out heads on the scroll saw, heads and necks for four-wheeled horses. Each horse will have a string on the front. When the string is pulled, the horse will roll along, head and tail moving in graceful rhythm. Or so he hopes.
As he works, he pauses to wipe sweat from his forehead. His beard is dank; altogether he feels like a mildewed mattress. It’s a lot cooler down here than it is upstairs, though just as humid. Outside it must be ninety. In the morning the cicadas began their rasping songs well before eight.
“A scorcher,” Nate remarked when he’d encountered Elizabeth in the kitchen. She was wearing a light blue dress with a smudge on the back, at the level of the rib cage. “Did you know you have smudge on your dress?” he asked. She liked to be told about such lapses: undone zippers, unhooked hooks, hairs on the shoulders, labels sticking out of necklines. “Oh, do I?” she said. “I’ll change it.” But she’d left for work in the same dress. Unlike her to forget.
Nate wants a cold beer. He switches off the saw and turns towards the stairway, and it’s then that he sees the head, upside down in the square mud-pocked cellar window, staring in at him. It’s Chris Beecham. He must be lying on the gravel outside, his neck twisted at right angles so he can get his head down into the window well. He smiles. Nate motions upstairs, hoping Chris will understand and go to the back door.
When Nate opens the door, Chris is already there. He’s still smiling. “I was banging on the window,” he says.
“I had the scroll saw on,” Nate says. Chris gives no explanation of why he’s here. Nate steps back to let him in, offers a beer. Chris accepts and walks behind him to the kitchen.
“I took this afternoon off,” he says. “It’s too hot to work. It’s not like they have air conditioning.”
This is only the fourth or fifth time Nate has ever seen Chris. The first time was when Elizabeth invited him to Christmas dinner. “He knows hardly anyone,” she’d said. Elizabeth has a habit of doing that, inviting people to dinner who know hardly anyone. Sometimes these stray eggs for which Elizabeth plays hen are women, but more often they are men. Nate doesn’t mind. He approves, more or less, even though this is the kind of thing his mother would do if she thought of it. As it is, she runs more to letters than to dinners. Elizabeth’s waifs are usually nice enough, and the children like to have guests, especially around Christmas. Janet says it makes it more like a party.
Chris got a little drunk, Nate remembers. They’d had Christmas crackers, and Nate had found a prize eye in his, a plastic eye with a red iris.
“What is it?” Nancy asked.
“An eye,” Nate said. Usually it was whistles or small mono-colored figures. This was the first year anyone had found an eye.
“What’s it for?”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. He put it on the side of his plate. Somewhat later Chris reached across and took it and stuck it in the center of his forehead. He then began singing “The Streets of Laredo” in a lugubrious voice. The children thought he was funny.
Since then, Nate has come up from the cellar on several occasions to find Chris in his living room, having a drink with Elizabeth. They’ve been sitting at opposite sides of the room, not saying much. Nate has always poured himself a drink and joined them. He seldom turns down the chance for a sociable drink. One thing has puzzled Nate: although Elizabeth invites lame ducks for festive dinners, she rarely has people over for a drink unless their position at the Museum is either on a par with hers or higher. There’s no way Chris fits either of these categories. As far as Nate can figure out, he’s a taxidermist of some sort, a glorified custodian of dead owls. A technician, not an executive. Nate doesn’t rule out the possibility that Elizabeth and Chris are lovers — Chris wouldn’t be the first — but before this she’s always told him. Sooner or later. He’ll wait for that before believing. Things aren’t particularly good between them, but they’re still possible.
Nate opens two Carling’s Red Caps and they sit at the kitchen table. He asks Chris if he wants a glass; Chris says no. What he wants, instead, is to have Nate drive over to his place with him for a game of chess. Nate is a little taken aback by this. He explains that he doesn’t play chess very well, hasn’t played much for years.
“Elizabeth says you’re good,” Chris says.
“That’s because Elizabeth can’t play at all,” Nate says modestly.
But Chris insists. It will cheer him up, he says. He’s been feeling down lately. Nate cannot resist this appeal to his Samaritan instincts. He goes upstairs to their room to put on a clean T-shirt. When he comes down, Chris is spinning one of the beer bottles on the kitchen table.
“Ever play spin the bottle?” he asks. As a matter of fact, Nate hasn’t.
They take Chris’s car, which is illegally parked across the street. It’s an old Chevy convertible, once white, a ’67 or ’68 model. Nate’s grip on car models is slipping. He himself no longer has a car, having sold it to finance his scroll saw, his bench saw, his belt-disc sander and other necessary machines.
Chris’s car is missing a muffler. He exploits this aggressively, revving the engine like a thunder gun at each stoplight. They fart their way along Davenport, trailing clouds of noise pollution, gathering dirty looks. The top of the convertible is down and the sun, filtered through layers of spent exhaust, beats on their heads. By the time they reach Winchester and Parliament and Chris parks, again illegally, Nate is dizzy. He asks Chris, to make conversation, if there’s much prostitution around here. He already knows there is. Chris gives him a look of undisguised dislike and says yes, there is. “I don’t mind it though,” he says. “They know I’m not in the market. We pass the time of day.”
Nate wants to get out of this. He wants to say he has a headache, a backache, any sort of ache severe enough to spring him. He isn’t feeling up to having a chess game in ninety-degree weather with a man he barely knows. But Chris is now brisk, almost businesslike. He marches them across the street and lets them into his apartment building, marches them across the stained mosaic-tile entryway and up the stairs, three flights. Nate, panting, lags behind. In the face of such certainty he hesitates to offer his dim excuses.
Chris unlocks his door and goes in. Nate, plunging, follows. The apartment is cooler; it’s wood-paneled, must once have been intended for the semi-rich. Although it has two rooms, a wide arched doorway between them makes it seem like one. It smells of darkness: corners, dry-rot, a chemical smell. The chess table is already set up, in the room that also contains Chris’s bed. There are two chairs, placed carefully on opposite sides of the chessboard. Nate realizes that this invitation was not a spur-of-the-moment whim.
“Want a drink?” Chris produces a mickey of Scotch from the glass-doored cupboard, pours some into a small tumbler decorated with tulips. Jelly jar, Nate thinks; he recognizes it from ten years ago. The Scotch is bad but Nate drinks; he doesn’t wish to antagonize. Chris, it seems, will drink from the bottle. He sets it beside the chess table, gives Nate a peanut butter jar lid for his cigarette ashes, takes a white pawn and a black one from the table and shuffles them behind his back. He holds out his fists, huge, thick-knuckled.
“Left,” Nate says.
“Tough luck,” Chris says. They sit down to play. Chris opens with an insulting attempt at fool’s mate, which Nate counters easily. Chris grins and pours Nate another drink. They settle down to play in earnest. Nate knows Chris will win, but out of pride he wants this victory to take a decent amount of time. He plays defensively, grouping his men in tight clumps, taking no chances.
Chris plays like a Cossack, swooping forward, picking at Nate’s outposts, retreating to puzzling new positions. He jiggles one foot against the floor impatiently while Nate ponders his moves. They’re both sweating. Nate’s T-shirt sticks to his skin; he’d like an open window, a draft, but it’s hotter outside than in here. Nate knows he’s drinking more bad Scotch than he should, but the game is getting to him.
Finally he makes a good move. Chris will either have to take his Queen’s Knight and lose his own knight, or he’ll lose a rook. Now it’s Nate’s turn to sit back and stare intimidatingly while Chris worries his choices. Nate sits back, but instead of staring he tries to keep himself from wondering what he’s doing here, which would be bad for his game.
He glances around the room. It’s almost bare, yet manages to give the impression of disorder. It isn’t the objects in the room that do this, but their relation to each other. Nothing seems to be in the right place. The table beside the bed, for instance, is about a foot too far away from it.
And on the table, which is otherwise empty, is something he now knows he was meant to see. It’s a little fish, silver, with blue-enameled scales. He’s last noticed it hanging on a chain around Elizabeth’s neck.
Or one very like it. He can’t be sure. He looks at Chris and Chris is gazing at him, the muscles of his face rigid, his eyes still. Fear shoots through Nate, the hairs on his arms rise, his scrotum contracts, the ends of his fingers tingle. He thinks: Chris is drunk. He finds himself wondering whether Chris really has Indian blood in him as Elizabeth implies, he’s never been able to place that slight accent; then he’s appalled at himself, falling into a cliché like that. Besides, Chris has hardly been drinking at all, it’s he himself who’s killed three-quarters of that poisonous mickey.
If he’s right, if he’s been brought here on (he now sees) the shabby pretext of a chess game, just to witness this object, this hostage which may or may not belong to Elizabeth, his options are limited. Chris knows he knows. Chris is expecting Nate to hit him. Then Chris will hit Nate and they’ll have a fight. Smashing the chess table, rolling among the light puffs of dust that colonize Chris’s floor.
Nate deplores this solution. The question is: Is Elizabeth a female dog or a human being? It’s a matter of human dignity. Why fight over Elizabeth, who presumably can make her own choices? Has made them. Whoever wins, the fight would settle nothing.
Nate could pretend he hasn’t seen the silver fish, but it’s gone too far for that.
Or he could ignore it. Even to himself this would look like cowardice.
“Made your move?” Nate says.
Chris captures the Queen’s Knight, stares at Nate, his chin out, tensed, ready. Any moment he may spring. Nate thinks: Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s crazy enough to have bought another fish and planted it there. Maybe he’s fucking insane!
Instead of taking the white knight, Nate tips over his own king.
“You win the game,” he says. He stands up, scoops the fish off the table.
“I’ll return this to Elizabeth for you, shall I?” he says, gently, affably.
He walks to the door, expecting at any moment to feel fists on his back, a boot in his kidneys. He takes a taxi back to the house; the driver waits outside while he gathers enough loose change from the surfaces of their room to pay him.
He places the silver fish carefully on the night table, beside his scattered pennies. She should have told him. It isn’t friendly, the fact that she hasn’t told him. The first time, she told him and they both cried, holding each other closely, consoling each other for some violation they felt as mutual. Then they discussed their problems, sitting up till four in the morning, whispering across the kitchen table. They promised reforms, repairs, reparations, whole new sequences of events, a new order. And the second and the third time. He isn’t a monster, he’s always stifled his outrage, he’s forgiven her.
The fact that she hasn’t told him this time means only one thing: she doesn’t want to be forgiven. Or, put another way, she no longer cares whether he forgives her or not. Or, it occurs to him, she may have decided it isn’t his right to forgive.