WAGNER ARRIVED HOME INVISIBLY. Though this meant he had to wait for another arrival on whose heels he could enter the building, it was worth the trouble to evade the evening doorman, an effusive type who the night before had commented quizzically on Wagner’s return alone and after the dinner hour.
“Mrs. under the weather?”
The provocative question forced Wagner to produce an ungrammatical answer, something he detested doing, but he felt he had to respond quickly and decisively, and therefore could not afford to be impeccable with a man who habitually said “they was” and “he don’t.”
“We each have our own independent career.” His shrug was false, but the internal shudder was genuine.
“Yeah,” said Max the doorman, who seemed too young for what was most of the time a passive job, “but you always eat together.” By means of such particular observations he hoped to ingratiate the tenants, with an eye to holiday tips, and perhaps it was not the worst strategy—except of course in the case of someone with something to hide.
This was another menace against which invisibility was marvelously efficacious. But he should probably remember to show himself periodically. Tonight he slipped into the lobby unseen, just behind an elderly woman who was leashed to a small woolly white dog. The animal of course was aware of him, but luckily was so spoiled as to be aloof and, after a quick twitching of nostrils, dismissed him from further consideration.
Swinging back the door, Max asked, “Sugar’s bowels get settled down?”
“Just as I think so, he’ll let go, wherever he is,” said the old lady. Sugar led her around the corner to the northern wing. Funny, while Babe was with him, Wagner would have liked to own a pet, but had no such urge now he was alone and could be expected to want company: his old idea of having a dog or cat was related to his concept of family.
He stopped off at the alcove in which the mailboxes were mounted, prepared to wait or go away if it was occupied. But nobody was there, and he slipped in and quickly unlocked and unloaded his box. One practice he had changed since Babe’s departure: he had abandoned his old habit of discarding junk mail without opening the envelopes. Nowadays reading this stuff gave him something to do on entering the apartment.
The precedent, however, was to be broken this evening: the genuine first-class letters for once outnumbered the commercial importunities—which of course he could see only after he reached the apartment and became visible. (Using the elevator would have been too risky; anyway it was good exercise to climb the four flights of stairs.) Indeed, the only impersonal communication consisted of a pitch for a new dishwashing detergent, along with a discount coupon to be presented on the purchase of a box. Wagner opened this envelope first, prolonging the suspense evoked by a pink oblong unmarked except for his name, and postponing the displeasure he knew awaited him inside the letter bearing his sister’s return address. It was too soon for Nan, across the country, to have received the communication he had sent but a day earlier—even though in some ways it seemed long, long ago, for he had first become publicly invisible on the occasion of that mailing, and had done so many things since in consequence.
To read a message from a Nan who would naturally assume that her sister-in-law was still in residence had to be a painful experience, for though his sibling always addressed him exclusively, her only acknowledgment of his existence was so to speak reflected off his wife: tell me about Carla. He could not remember when Nan had last inquired as to his own state of being.
Finally, on the simulated elevation of a deep breath, he opened her envelope. For the first nine handwritten pages, in a small but almost painfully clear script, the letter proved to be not so bad as he had anticipated, consisting of but a dogged list of the recent activities of each member of her five-person family, over which his eyes could soar without ever coming in for a landing. Then suddenly, there it was, on the last quarter-page: “Please pass along my love to Carla. How she can put up with you, I can’t imagine. Must be charity, don’t you think?”
In some families, no doubt such sentiments would be affectionate chaff, but not here. Nan candidly disapproved of her brother; she still clung stubbornly to her conviction that he should have entered a profession, preferably law, but even university-level teaching would have met her minimal requirements. The trouble was that being six years his senior and of a much more assertive temperament than their male parent, Nan had taken over when their mother went into the lengthy illness from which she eventually died. It had to be admitted that Nan did everything well. At seventeen she was an excellent cook and a much more efficient housekeeper than Mother had ever been, and despite her new burden of work, remained the same honor student as before.
Though offered scholarships to glamorous campuses, she went on to attend the local university, so she could live at home and maintain care of her otherwise helpless menfolk, then in the interests of the same responsibility endured an overlong engagement to a successful young corporation lawyer. She married only after their father died and Wagner obtained his BA. She assured her brother she would have stayed on had he gone to graduate school. But he told her that such was his principal reason for not doing so. The one reward Nan could never earn from him was not gratitude, which he could allow, but rather forgiveness. The constant emotion he evoked in her appeared to be resentment. They rarely spoke together on the telephone, and had never met since she and the lawyer moved to the other coast and produced three children, in addition to which Nan sold real estate and was involved in the many other activities enumerated in the quarterly newsletters, which Wagner not even in palmier days did more than scan. As to the admired Babe, his wife had had no more interest in Nan than he had.
He now took Nan’s pages to the bathroom, where he tore them into bits which he flushed down the toilet. Only by such means could he hope to withstand the impulse to reply spitefully and thus nullify the effect he had hoped to create with the almost serene message of his previous letter, in which with all his literary talent he had contrived to make Babe’s departure seem to be the product of their collaborative and amicable best judgment and not really a separation so much as the establishing of alternative residences which they might well, according to the prevailing winds and their respective professional responsibilities, occupy together or severally. The point was not to let the world define the limits or for that matter the expanse of their association. That he knew before the fact that not only would such a picture immediately be seen by Nan as a false one, but also the style in which it was painted would infuriate her, went without saying. Whenever Wagner wrote to his sister, his real statement was a rejection of her values.
Now for the matter of the pink envelope, unstamped and still warped from having been folded into a form slender enough to be inserted into the slit of the mailbox. Wagner knew it was technically illegal to place anything that did not bear a stamp into any receptacle for which the Postal Service was responsible, even these personal boxes in the lobby of a private apartment building. In practice he had never even heard of an attempt to enforce this law, so it stayed a mere curiosity.
“Dear F. Wagner,” began the pink note he took from the envelope,
I have just learned, quite by accident I assure you, that like me tho for a quite different reason, you too are living alone and lonely at the present time. I’ve just got a bright idea: why don’t we combine forces for dinner tonite? At my place. I’m buying, but I wouldn’t be offended by a bottle of wine. It’s now 4:10. I’ll wait till 8 for your reply, phone or in person preferably.
Your neighbor,
SANDRA BARROWS (formerly Elg)
Wagner wondered whether it might not be bad taste for her so quickly to replace her husband’s name with, presumably, that by which she had been known as a maiden. He thought about that so as to avoid reacting to the surprise of the invitation. He never liked being taken socially unawares; he usually tried to contrive a nonchalance on such occasions. For example, he had first seen Babe in a supermarket. He had been attracted by the sheen of her hair. But then when he saw the ivory ovoid of her face he was put off slightly, not by her features but rather her expression as she pondered on the oranges. However, having at last rejected this fruit in favor of Anjou pears—to Wagner a somewhat incongruous alternative, since the replacement was not in the citrus family—she rounded off her chin and retracted the nose which had been slightly extended, and Wagner’s judgment too was altered. She was not pretty, but she might be beautiful. She was certainly beautiful to him: when he was so convinced, he cared little for the tastes of the world if they were at variance with his own, and he did not know that they were. But having made this assessment, he had selected his own three tangerines and moved on. It was three aisles later on, at the frozen-dinner case, that he was spoken to by someone who turned out to be the young woman he had noticed in the fruit department.
“Are those really nourishing?” The question referred to the cold, hard package he was at the moment extracting from a stack of same on the freezer shelves.
He was much taken with her voice. In those days Babe was in the habit of giving arbitrary, soprano emphasis to certain words. Formal analysis might deny any special meaning to the results of such a practice: for example, he should not have said his selecting the Down Home Meat Loaf implied that he was authenticating the product as to its nutritive content. But the musical liquidity with which she pronounced “really” was irresistible.
“I never have thought about that,” he answered. “I just buy it because it tastes better than the other dinners. And the little compartmentful of cherry pie isn’t bad.”
“I don’t know,” said she. “I really hate to let some company choose the entire menu for the dinner I’m going to eat alone.”
“Oh,” said Wagner, “but now you’re no longer speaking about nourishment.”
“I don’t care,” said she, presenting him with her full face, her candid brown eyes just below the forehead-fringe of precisely cut bangs. “I just wanted to say something.”
This confession startled Wagner to the degree that, though it seemed as if it might well lead to the realization of the stillborn fantasy he had undergone at the fruit bins, he was now disconcerted.
“I’m glad you did then,” said he. “It’s nice to do something one wants to do and not be punished for it.” It was a statement that had no intentional purpose: it represented mere nervous gaucherie; he had of course not been at all prepared to be spoken to by anybody on this occasion, let alone by her.
Yet her assessment of it was honorific. “Then I was right,” she said, with a movement of mouth that he learned in time was her version of a grin. “You have a sense of humor.”
Nevertheless he still had no self-command. “Thank you.” He produced a niggardly smile. He closed the case, but then immediately opened it in courtesy, offering the door to her.
He was actually moving away when she asked, holding the freezer door open, “What about the Sauerbraten with Red Cabbage and Potato Pancake?”
He turned back. “That comes with the apple strudel, which stays awfully soggy if you don’t heat it longer than their directions say. If you do, the meat gets dried out.”
“You never thought of taking the strudel out and heating it on its own?”
“It’s not worth that much to me,” said Wagner. “Fact is, I don’t even like strudel when it isn’t soggy.”
Now the woman whom he eventually knew as Babe laughed outright. For a moment he worried about the kind of person who would even see that confession as humorous. But to his relief, she did not. Apparently she had laughed, the way people do, because she shared a particular prejudice.
“I hate strudel,” she said with enthusiasm.
“A meeting of minds,” Wagner lamely observed.
Carla shrugged. Without warning she turned all but indifferent. She showed him a slight frown, took from the freezer case not the Sauerbraten but rather the worst of all available frozen dinners, the Filet of Fish: if heated sufficiently to crisp the breading, the fish would be much overcooked, not to mention that the garnishes did not inspire respect: so-called Spanish rice, flecked with pimiento and something green, and a paste made of yam surmounted by several miniature marshmallows: dessert was butterscotch pudding, not that different in color from the mashed yam and not quite as sweet.
Wagner returned the shrug, though with her back towards him she would not have seen it. “Fair enough,” said he, turned, and began to push his cart away. But then he remembered a detail that stopped him.
Carla had no cart nor even one of those hand-baskets. It looked as though all she was buying was the fish dinner. She carried nothing else.
Wagner wheeled back to her. “Did you lose those pears I saw you take?” He had an impulse of panic: she wore a baggy coat, perhaps was shoplifting the fruit.
“Had second thoughts,” she said. “I don’t like pears. I’m awfully cranky about food. I used to drive my mother crazy: wouldn’t eat most of what she put on the table.”
“I usually ate it, or some anyway,” Wagner eagerly admitted. “But I rarely liked it.” This was not an appropriate place to say that the meals prepared by his sister had been an immense improvement.
“On the other hand,” Carla said, “I can be a glutton if it’s something I like.”
Wagner asked what would fall into that select category. He was cautious about listing his own favorites first, afraid that she would shoot them down, diminishing the affinity that seemed to be in the air.
“They change from time to time,” was however all she would say, and the statement was certainly borne out through the subsequent four years spent in her proximity.
... Sandra formerly Elg was well-upholstered, upstairs and down, though bisected by a conspicuously small waistline. He was not quite sure what she wanted of him. If it was sex, he might have a mauvais quart d’heure. He could not envision having any desire for her, and a man was not expected to be able gracefully to extricate himself from the grasp of a lustful woman: it would seem to go against nature’s design. The only two possibilities were: professing to either inversion or intimate disease. Cal Cavanaugh, Wagner’s old college friend, had claimed as an undergraduate to have been sexually importuned by his own stepmother; when he pretended to be attracted exclusively to his own kind, she threatened to inform his father unless Cal submitted to her cure, so he had no choice. Wagner might have believed this story had Cavanaugh not been an established Munchausen, with a ready tall tale on any theme, and had not their current assignment in French been Phèdre. However, like so many of Cal’s imaginative constructions, it seemed sound in its approach to human character. It was Cavanaugh, with his sense of things that might even be called Balzacian, who should really have written novels. Yet Cal sold real estate, and insurance, in a little town too remote to be called suburban, and had a sizable family and no regrets. Unfortunately for Wagner’s purposes, Cal had long since become a bore who no longer even told tall stories.
There was no lack of good reasons why Wagner should have refused the invitation of Sandra now Barrows, perhaps foremost amongst them his weariness owing to the taxing events of the day—becoming invisible certainly took some energy both physical and psychic, added to which expenditure must be the demands made on the nerves by the two episodes in the bank, the second of which had been unusually stressful. Then he had had abrasive moments with both Jackie Grinzing and Gordon the glorified office boy, who however was a published poet—and now, that his reaction to Wagner’s remarks was examined in cold blood, pretty likely to be queer.
No doubt Wagner found himself dining with Sandra because on this evening she was the only person extant who knew of his domestic plight and still approved of him to the degree that she would ask him to her home; that she might have selfish designs on him did not alter the foregoing truth. Mutual back-scratching is no perversity in this world of ours.
It was understandable that Sandra began by talking about her own marriage, and what she said was instructive. Though hers had been terminated by chance, she revealed it to have been no more trouble-free than his own. As it turned out, her late husband had never been more than a fake, and to a degree not even she had suspected until he was dead. For example, he had never been a racing driver. Nor, despite a gaudy military decoration he had once shown her as that of an award for bravery under fire, had he ever been under arms. He had once been tried and found guilty in a court of law for his role in a confidence scheme and given a suspended sentence. This, with other depreciatory information, had been furnished Sandra by her spouse’s elder brother, and it seemed true enough, for not only was it in accord with what Sandra knew as facts, but her brother-in-law, a modest high-school teacher, had nothing to gain by unjustly disparaging his dead kin. Indeed, he had, in an offer that must be called saintly, vowed to do what he could to help the widow meet some of the many unpaid bills left behind by the fraudulent one.
“Of course I refused,” Sandra said over the main course, which throughout her monologue she never touched. “The poor man obviously needs every cent from his little salary. Turns out he’s got three kids. You know Miles never mentioned a brother?”
“Miles Elg,” said Wagner, who was eating with a better appetite than he had had even at A Guy from Calabria. If he dined away from home often enough, he might begin to recover the weight he had lost since Babe left. Funny: he recognized what he was chewing as none other than the Down Home Meat Loaf that had been a regular feature on the weekly menu since his bachelorhood and through the time of Babe, but nowadays he could hardly swallow two forkfuls of that which he thawed for himself. “Interesting name.” He felt an obligation to say something favorable about the late Elg, whom he had known only as Sandra’s companion on a handful of chance meetings in hallways or lobby, during the less than two years in which the Elgs had been fellow residents of his.
“The real one was Milton Alger,” Sandra now told him, blinking her eyes as if to relieve the burden of the heavy makeup on the lids. Her scent had been used too lavishly, as well, and apparently not only on her person but sprayed throughout the living-dining room, obliterating any aroma that might have emanated from the food. Wagner was not displeased: the smell made the place seem homey—not with respect to the apartment he had shared with Babe, who eschewed the use of perfume for the reason that it gave her a headache, but with memories of his childhood home, for his mother, a feckless cook who often burned dinner, was wont lavishly to distribute sweet-smelling sprays throughout the house.
“Miles,” Sandra went on, “couldn’t leave anything as it was. Maybe he could have, had anything he was associated with been a genuine success, but that never happened.”
She paused for a swallow, not a sip, of the red wine Wagner had brought. He himself had never honored the Down Home Meat Loaf with wine, but he realized he had been wrong: there was a nice wedding of tastes here, something his hostess had yet to experience, at least at this meal, for while she was on her second glass—after probably three vodka-rocks, anyway, the last in accompaniment of the first course, that shrimp cocktail that comes, already ketchup-sauced, in its own thick flutelike glass—she had not put a fork in the plate before her.
“He was trying to enhance his life,” Wagner said, making something between a statement and a question.
“That’s putting the best face on it,” said Sandra, whose décolletage was not now as immodest as it had been while her spouse was alive. “He could just simply be called a goddamn phony.”
Her basic emotion might be bitterness and not simply self-pity, and it caused Wagner to reflect on his own emotional response to Babe. No, he would have to stick with feeling sorry for himself: he could not selfishly disparage her motives to succeed professionally in the absence of the detrimental effect he had had on her self-determination even though (as she had admitted) wishing her well.
Sandra put her glass down for a change and, with extra feeling, looked across the table at him. “I don’t enjoy talking ill of the deceased, Fred, but a lot of these things I never knew earlier, and the things I did know about I seldom mentioned just so as to keep the peace. So if I kept silent now, I wouldn’t ever be able to have my say. It’s just not fair.”
“You’ve got the right, Sandra,” said Wagner. “You say anything you want.”
She took more wine. As yet she had shown no effect from the alcohol. “People think Miles died in a car crash. He didn’t. He was in a hotbed hotel with a whore, and there was a toilet just over the room they were in, which some drunk put too much paper into, and it overflowed when he flushed it. This had happened once too often, and the ceiling collapsed, coming down on Miles. He was on top at the time, so cushioned her from the worst of it, but she got a broken leg and some bruises. And you know what? She got a shyster lawyer who’s filed a suit against the hotel and also the estate of Miles Elg—which means me, in effect.”
Wagner now sipped some of his own wine. He had had but a quarter-glass thus far, and not even half a vodka martini. The warmth he felt could hardly be from booze. Unexpectedly he was enjoying himself, in spite of Sandra’s woe: but wasn’t life like that?
“I seriously doubt,” said he, “that the case will actually get into court. The law is often foolish, but there’s a limit.”
Sandra went on after taking more wine. “That’s the least of my worries. The laugh’s on the bitch: Miles doesn’t have an estate. All he left was unpaid bills.”
Wagner wondered whether she would eventually get around to putting the bite on him for a loan. The fact was he had more funds at this time than he had ever before possessed. Babe was self-sustaining, indeed she had refused his offers of money: had her inheritance and then the salary paid her by Guillaume. She assertedly lived in a modest apartment at an address she kept secret from him. He had the phone number, and he forwarded to the gallery any mail that came for her. He had no urge to follow her home from work: she claimed to live alone; he did not want to catch her in a lie.
“Uh,” he said now, “I’m not rich, but if you could use a little something to tide you over...”
“Well, aren’t you nice,” said Sandra, “but you see, I’m no worse off now than when Miles was alive. In fact, I’m financially better off. I supported the fucker! Forgive me for using the vernacular, but I’m not just being foulmouthed for its own sake. That’s the only word I can use for him, because that’s all he could honestly do, but he was a genius at it. I’ll grant him that. It was natural for him to die in the saddle.”
Wagner was not disconcerted by this information. He certainly felt no rivalry with the late Miles Elg, perhaps because Babe had thought the man so vulgar, everything she detested: i.e., tall, tanned out of season, conspicuously fit. She liked ugly bad-skinned runts like Siv Zirko—this bitter reflection appeared from nowhere.
“Isn’t it odd then that he would have gone to a prostitute?”
Sandra snorted. “I just call her whore. She’s somebody’s wife. Miles never paid for sex. He didn’t have to, for God’s sake. Everybody was after that schlong of his. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have asked for pay from some.” She breathed deeply and looked down at her plate, but still did not touch its contents. When she raised her head she was in another mood. “But I’ve been doing all the talking, Fred. Don’t you want to tell me your troubles?”
“I’ve been trying to keep them secret around here,” said Wagner. “Would you mind telling me who told you?”
“I ran into your ex,” Sandra said. She wore large gold circlet earrings that bounced when she spoke on an ascending note. Wagner had never been a good judge of whether red hair was genuine or dyed. He was trying to divert his attention from Sandra’s encounter with Babe. “She came in for tea where I work.”
“A restaurant?”
“The Tally Ho English Lounge of the Hotel Pierce,” said Sandra. “They serve sandwiches and drinks except from three to five daily, P.M., when we have our teatime, which is famous around town, with an assortment of little canopies and petty fours. The waitresses dress up like Elizabethan barmaids.”
Wagner was just trying to picture Sandra in such a costume when she elucidated. “I play harp there.”
He was impressed. “Golly. I’ll have to drop in, but you say it closes at five?”
“Just teatime. I continue on till eight, throughout cocktails. Today’s one of my days off, because I work weekends.”
“You’re a harpist.”
“That’s right. I keep the instrument at the Lounge. It’s too bulky to bring back and forth. Else I’d give you a private recital.”
He had postponed the question as long as he could. “I suppose Babe was not alone.”
“Babe? Oh, your wife?”
“Sorry,” said he. “Carla.”
“That’s all right,” Sandra said. “I was Kiddo. But that wasn’t really a nickname of my own. Everybody was Kiddo to Miles, male or female, or for that matter, a dog or cat.” Her eyes quickly filled with tears. “Excuse me,” she said, dabbing at her face with the paper napkin. “Worthless though he was, he was an awful lot of fun to be with, sometimes, and I miss the hell out of him.”
Wagner’s feelings of well-being were now in question. He did not belong here, at an end-of-table that was the rightful place of another man. He could never be a substitute for Miles Elg—not that he would necessarily want to be, though it was true enough that he found Elg’s amorality not unattractive: it was not rare for such characters to have a concomitant verve of the kind to which Sandra had just referred. Whereas people with his own sense of responsibility tended to be sentimental, which in practice often meant melancholic. Were the situation reversed, with a living Elg’s having usurped his own place at table, one could be sure that the charming scoundrel would not feel inadequate though Babe despised him. Wagner even had the advantage: he was liked by Sandra.
“Forgive me, Fred,” she asked, lifting both hands with all their rings, the crumpled napkin in the left. “No more, I promise. It’s not fair to you. Please go on. I’m interested, believe me.”
Wagner swallowed the rest of the contents of his glass. Sandra immediately refilled it and topped off her own.
“The facts are simple enough,” said he.
“By the way,” Sandra said, “she came into the Lounge with a woman, not a man. Their table was nearest the harp; they had cinnamon tea and toast. I stopped by on my break, and she told me she didn’t live here any more.”
“Carla left supposedly so she could be on her own, whatever that means.” Using her proper name transformed Babe into a stranger, whatever he meant by saying “whatever that means,” for obviously her intent was clear enough: to escape from him. “She works at an art gallery. She knows a good deal about the subject, majored in art history. I guess she’s always wanted a gallery of her own. Recently she inherited some money. Not a fortune, but apparently enough in her view to make a start. She’s still at the old place, but is preparing the ground for the new enterprise. After all, she’s got to find the right space. But most importantly, a gallery can’t get going without artworks. Any artist already established naturally has a gallery. She needs a few people of that sort, so she can afford to launch the unknowns.” Considered in this light, nothing could have been more reasonable than her eating dinner with Zirko. Wagner realized his explanation was meant more for himself than for Sandra, who in fact, with wandering eyes that were still retaining tears, gave evidence that his remarks had failed to distract her from her memories.
He decided to be dramatic, forgetting briefly that the account of his own role could hardly be literal. “Still, it was quite a shock to run across her having dinner in a restaurant with some guy I had never seen before. He turned out to be a famous artist, though, so it was not personal.”
He had now caught Sandra’s interest. She smiled. “Probably a fag.”
Wagner was jealous of what he saw as his own peculiar right to speak ill of Zirko and therefore now defended his enemy. “Oh, no. He’s world-famous.”
“All the more reason, then,” Sandra said smugly. “That’s the normal thing, not the exception.” She divided between their glasses what was left in the wine bottle.
“Not true in this case! In fact, this man, who’s named Siv Zirko, is quite a, uh”—he at last found an inadequate term—“ladies’ man.”
“If that’s so, then why weren’t you more worried?” The question was affectionately derisive; she was gently baiting him.
He opened his hand. “All right. I was worried. I tell you I wasn’t sorry when they had a fight and Babe left the restaurant in the middle of the meal.”
“You were sitting there watching all of this?”
“I was quietly eating my own dinner. Am I to go away hungry just because my estranged wife comes to the same restaurant?”
“Know what Miles would have done?” Sandra asked.
Wagner said resentfully, “Oh, sure: beat up the other guy.”
Sandra smirked, her earrings dancing. “Are you kidding? He was as yellow as they come. He backed down from guys half his size. Naw. He would have gotten hold of me later on in private and slapped me silly.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I told you he was a bastard. Not that I condone that, but it did serve to get it out of his system.”
Obviously he and she were in different traditions. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s not my style.”
“Maybe it should have been? At least it shows you care.”
“I’d like to think there are”—he had been about to say “better ways,” but that would not have been considerate if Sandra, in her bereavement, missed the loving punches of yore—“there are other ways to show affection.”
Sandra moved her chair back and rose. “Oh, affection,” she said contemptuously. “I’m talking about passion.” She went, in a not altogether straight line, to the secretary desk, the bookshelves of which served her as liquor cabinet. She opened the mullioned glass doors and considered the several bottles therein. In Wagner’s boyhood home, such a repository held the twenty-five volumes of an encyclopedia his mother had purchased inexpensively, one book per week, at a supermarket; this reference work was never opened by anybody, for he trusted only the encyclopedias at school.
Sandra turned and spoke over her substantial right breast. “What is your pleasure?”
“Nothing, thanks. I’ve got enough wine to get to the end of the meal.”
“I’m not much of a wine drinker. Not enough pizzazz, you know?” She reapplied herself to the cabinet, selected a bottle, and returned to the table. She half-filled her wine glass with an amber fluid. A whiff of the unpleasant odor, even without looking at the label, told Wagner it was Scotch.
She indicated the bottle. “Sure?”
“I’m no drinker,” he said. He had cleaned his plate. He now saluted her with his glass and swallowed the remaining spoonful of wine.
He expected Sandra to gulp the whiskey, but he was wrong. She took only a modest sip. Holding the glass, she fixed him with a flushed eye. “No doubt you’re aware I’m somewhat...” She fluttered her hand. “No.” She waved off his ritualistic protest. “No, I am. That doesn’t mean I talk through my hat, though. It does give me the nerve to say you may be too nice a guy for that woman you were married to.”
“Are,” said Wagner.
“Are married to, OK. I see you still have hope of patching it up. But frankly that’s never going to happen unless you change drastically.” Sandra took another gingerly sip of the Scotch. Wagner disliked the smell, which seemed to him to be akin to the odor emitted by the transformer of an electric train, remembered over the years.
She gently shook the glass at him: the whiskey was un-iced. “I know I’m talking out of turn, but what good is booze if it doesn’t come to that?” It sounded as though it might have been a bon mot of the late Miles. She grinned brilliantly. Perhaps her teeth were capped; entertainers after all had to meet a certain public standard. “She’s a little cold-blooded snob. OK, so she’s educated. Does that make her better than you? You’re quite cultivated yourself, for gosh sake. That girl’s just got a lot of bitch in her, Fred, and you’ve got to—”
“I can’t listen to this,” said Wagner, rising, catching the paper napkin before it slid to the carpet. “Thanks for dinner, Sandra. I really enjoyed it.”
“Now, come on...”
“I’m sure you mean well, but I can’t listen to such abuse. You wouldn’t want me to attack your late husband.”
Sandra smiled with an open mouth. “There’s nothing you could say that would be too bad about that son of a bitch.”
“You don’t mean that. You loved him.”
“What’s that got to do with it? That doesn’t alter the fact he was a shit.”
“Well, Babe’s not,” said Wagner. “She has a right to live as she wishes. I have nothing to criticize her for.”
“C’mon and sit down,” said Sandra. “I’ll give you some dessert in a minute, and coffee.” She raised her right hand. “I won’t say anything more on the subject. Promise.”
He had nowhere else to go except home, where it would still be early enough to feel guilty about not getting out his manuscript and rereading it hopelessly. Therefore he sat down, and, as good as her word, in a moment his hostess had gone back to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of pecan pie.
“Water’s on,” said she. Then, having poured herself more Scotch, “OK, she had her reasons. You can tell me, Fred, you know that: were you having troubles?”
He shook his head, chewing a forkful of pecan pie; it had been frozen and even now was only partially thawed. Finally he said, “I’m not that crazy about my job, which is writing, but not the kind of writing I really want to do. I guess I talk about that a lot, but I just can’t seem to sit down and write when I’m home. I’m always too exhausted, and the ideas that come to me easily at other times vanish completely when I actually have to put them down on paper.”
Sandra made a glittering, dismissive gesture with her free hand, which was even more beringed than the right. “Forget about that. What I meant was sex. Did you have trouble giving satisfaction?”
Wagner could not believe the question was as he heard it. Chewing, especially on some substance like the cold nuts of the pie, could alter sounds considerably. His response was therefore limited to a trace of a smile.
“Because,” Sandra went on, after so short a pause that he would not anyway have had time to answer, “it wouldn’t necessarily be your fault. I don’t automatically blame the man, like some girls I’ve known.”
Wagner made a movement with his head. Once warmed by the mouth’s natural heat, the pie was intensely sweet and impeded him from speaking, which was no doubt just as well.
An anguished shriek was heard from the kitchen.
“That’s the water,” Sandra said and got up. As she passed her guest she touched his shoulder, whether in friendship or merely to catch her balance, he could not have said.
When she returned with the cup of coffee and the cream-and-sugar tray and saw that he had finished the pie, she took away the dish and the Scotch bottle, then asked him to move slightly back. Reaching under the top of the table, she did something that made its legs slowly collapse and seize rigidly again only when it had reached the height of a coffee table.
“It’s convertible,” Sandra said. “You’ve got to have things like that to eke out the room in such a tiny apartment. Else you’d have to eat at the kitchen counter.”
“Yes,” said Wagner, “that’s what we’ve always done.” He had thought it nice and cozy, but he realized that if he confessed as much to Sandra she might think him soft.
“We can sit here now,” said Sandra, indicating the adjacent sofa.
Wagner would have preferred to keep his chair, which was still in reach of the now stunted table, but he did not wish to offend. He sat down on the sofa.
Sandra retrieved the Scotch bottle from the floor, leaving behind the plate from which he had eaten the pie. “Won’t you join me now?”
“No thanks,” Wagner said. “I never drink much. I have a low tolerance for alcohol.”
“So have I,” said Sandra, pouring whiskey into her glass. “That’s why I drink.” Apparently this was not intended to be a joke, for she turned to him, glass in hand, and said soberly, “You might have medical problems.”
“I just can’t drink much without feeling it more than I like to.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Sandra. “I meant the sex thing.”
Wagner actually asked, “What sex thing?”
She gestured airily with her left hand while drinking from the right.
After an instant it occurred to him that she was referring to impotence, and he said heatedly, “There’s nothing wrong with me!”
She smiled benignly. “Except the woman.” She stood up and stepped before him, bent, and took his hand.
Sandra led him into a fancy bedroom, a place of satin coverlets and skirts on the vanity, and alternately undressed him and herself. Wagner had no taste for this enterprise, but it was now too late to become invisible without causing more trouble than he was having. Given the situation, he would have liked to be impotent at this moment, but Sandra simply would not permit it. Though having subordinated herself to her husband, she had become, perhaps in overcompensation, almost tyrannically assertive. In any event, she had her way with Wagner and, inconveniently for him, she found the result so satisfactory that even while he was still engulfed, she enthusiastically anticipated their ever more intimate association.
It was obvious that from now on he would do well never to be visible in the public areas of the building.