“She’s a bitch, Roy.”
“What?”
“She’s a bitch.”
“Oh come now.”
“That’s the horror, isn’t it? She’s a bitch. But you said it’s the same horror in every marriage. Is the woman always a bitch?”
“Oh my,” Pillow said. “Oh my.”
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Cook stretched the long phone cord from the third-floor landing to his window. He looked out to the street below, where Beth was vacuuming her car. He wanted to be sure she was still there, out of earshot. “That’s the horror, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“No? Listen. She kept attacking me last night. Said I didn’t know beans about commitment.”
“Mmm.”
“And when she had the chance to say something nice, she passed it up. She held back. It was obvious what she was doing. In sum—a bitch.”
“Mmm.”
“She overreacts to everything, she complains, she—”
“We do not accept bitches, Jeremy.”
“What?”
“The Pillow Agency does not accept them.”
Cook tried to clear his head. He wished he had had his morning coffee before calling Pillow. “What are you saying?”
“We don’t do bitches. You can’t save a marriage with a bitch in it.”
“But how do you identify them? How do I know your idea of a bitch is the same as mine?”
“Don’t do that, Jeremy. Don’t say we speak a different language. Don’t.”
“Hey. She’s vacuuming my car now,” said Cook, for she had opened the door to his Honda Coupe and was doing just that.
“There, now,” said Pillow. “That doesn’t sound like something that a bitch would do. That’s not bitch behavior.”
Cook marveled at Pillow’s concrete sense of this word. Pillow seemed to know what a bitch was the way Cook knew where his socks were. Cook kept his eye on Beth. She was hunched down, really going at it to clean the floor of his car, sucking up the trash of his private life.
“It’s a shame you won’t be able to thank her for the nice favor,” said Pillow.
“What? Why not?”
“Haven’t you read ‘Day Two’ yet?”
“No, I haven’t. I just—”
“Well, you know where to find it. Now, Jeremy, I must say something to you. You know I have fond feelings for you.”
Cook stifled a yelp.
“I do enjoy chatting with you,” Pillow continued, “but—how shall I say it?—you have been calling home rather a lot. Read ‘Day Two’ and …” Pillow stopped and said in a sharper tone, “You didn’t just get up, did you?”
“Well, actually—”
“You aren’t still in your pajamas, are you?”
“Of course not,” said Cook, yanking his hand out of his pajama bottoms, where he had idly been playing with himself.
“I hope not,” said Pillow. “It’s almost eight-thirty. Time to go to work. I’ll initiate our next contact, when it’s time for your date.”
“My date?”
Pillow was silent.
“What do you mean, Roy?”
“I’ve arranged a date for you,” Pillow said matter-of-factly.
“With a woman?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. What do you think we took that blood sample for? What did you think?”
“I didn’t think anything. I had no idea. Christ, Roy, I can’t buy this at all.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t do blind dates. It’s that simple.”
Pillow gave an indignant snort. “I wouldn’t call this a blind date, Jeremy. That would slight the research that has gone into it, wouldn’t you say?”
“But what’s the point?”
“Ah. Let me ask you this: What is the point of the Pillow Agency?”
“That’s easy. To drive me out of my mind.”
Pillow paused, as he did with all of Cook’s sarcasms, in sober consideration. “I don’t quite follow, Jeremy.”
“Okay, okay. The point is to save marriages.”
“Yes. Yes.” Pillow fell silent. Evidently he got stuck gazing on the beauty of this vision. “And to save them we must understand them. Marriage is … Well, what’s the etymology of ‘marriage,’ Jeremy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. Never mind. If we are to understand marriage, we must know who fits best with whom—an empirical question subject to experimental inquiry. The linguists on the staff normally cooperate in this endeavor by dating subjects I’ve selected for them. I hope you will cooperate, too.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Come again?”
“I won’t even come once, unless I do it by myself, because the answer is no.”
“You’ve managed to confuse me, Jeremy.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“If you say no, I’ll have to fire you.”
“What?”
“This aspect of our work is that important to me. I’m fond of you, Jeremy—very fond of you—but I’ll drop you like a rock if I have to.”
Cook wanted to bite the mouthpiece off the phone and spit it to the floor. “You’re a freak, Roy. Do you know that?”
“Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Jeremy.”
“You’re totally weird. You’re a dip and a doofus.”
“Mmm.”
“I hate working for you.”
“I shall be in touch about the day and time.”
“And you still owe me an apology, goddammit. For the way you reacted when I told you—”
“Shame on me,” Pillow said, so quickly that Cook barely understood him. “I was so nervous. I was afraid you would turn us down. Shame on me.”
“Nervous? But—”
“I’d followed your work for years, Jeremy. I was scared to death of you.”
“But you were mean to me. You acted like you wanted to withdraw the job offer.”
“Yes! That’s the devil of it. That’s what insecurity does. I was convinced that the Pillow Agency was so beneath you, and you were so … so exalted, that when I saw that little bit of tarnish on you, yes, I became mean. I thought, ‘Why, I’m not as bad as I thought I was. He’s the bad one.’ I became unkind. Then, over the weekend, I gave myself a good talking to and sorted things out. When you reported for work Monday morning, I was the happiest of men.”
“Good God,” said Cook. “I had no idea.”
“Insecurity, Jeremy. The family of civilized man is bound in a chain of events linked by insecurity.”
“But why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“You’re right, I should have, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Pillow was chock-full of anguish. “I was ashamed to. Oh, shame upon shame! Such a fraud! Such a hypocrite! Here I am preaching communication, and I can’t even—” He broke off. “I can’t—” The next sound was Pillow’s phone rattling into the cradle.
Cook hung up the phone and carried it back to the table on the landing. Pillow wouldn’t have to worry about any more phone calls from him for some time.
He took another look out the window. Beth had finished vacuuming and was coiling up the extension cord as she headed back to the house. What an odd thing to do, Cook thought—vacuum his car. Was she often moved to spontaneous charity like this? Did that mean she was not a bitch? Or was she a bitch and a snoop too? And what had Pillow meant when he said Cook wouldn’t be able to thank her?
He went to The Pillow Manual and popped the second seal. There was his answer:
DAY TWO
Watch. Say nothing.
“Okay by me,” Cook said aloud to himself. “I mean, what the hell, hunh? Why not? You bet. Hey, go for it.” In anticipation of his day of speechlessness, he continued talking to himself in this idiotic vein while he showered and dressed for breakfast.
“It’s useless,” said Beth. “Save your breath.”
“What do you mean?” said Dan.
“He’s not talking.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Part of the routine, I guess.” Beth bent close to Cook, who was seated at the kitchen table, and said loudly, “Part of the routine—right, Jeremy?”
Cook leaned back a bit from the force of her voice and nodded. He had been using nonverbals with her all through breakfast. He hoped they were allowed.
As she carried her dishes to the sink, Beth said, “By the way, Jeremy, I ran the vacuum cleaner through your car. I figured since I had it out I’d go ahead and do it. I hope that was okay.”
Cook nodded and gave her a smile.
“I’m afraid I accidentally vacuumed something out of the little tray in front. It was metal—I could hear it go up the tube. Was it something important?”
Cook’s smile faded.
“It is important, isn’t it?” she said. “Hell, I’m sorry. I’ll fish it out of the bag. I should be able to find it in there. What is it?”
Cook shook his head. The one-year anniversary of Paula’s exit from his life was coming up in a week. He had been waiting until then to part with this little relic—a tiny heart-shaped earring of hers that had been rattling around in the tray for fifty-one weeks. He might as well let it go now.
Beth was looking at him curiously. He shook his head again. She shrugged and turned to the sink.
“Okay,” Dan said. Cook had observed that this was his favorite transition word. He sat down at the table and looked at Cook. He seemed about to speak to him, but then he turned toward Beth. “Honey, you forgot Robbie’s Hershey Kisses. He looked through his lunch in the car and said they weren’t in there.”
“I couldn’t find any,” Beth said. “I thought he took them with him.”
“Nope,” said Dan. “He was pretty upset. Dessert’s important to him.”
“I know that. But they’re just not here.”
Cook’s face was buried in his coffee cup. The brutal truth was that in the course of his long night of tape transcription he had plundered the Hershey Kisses, emptying the bowl in the living room into his pockets before going up to his room, and then tiptoeing back down later for the half-full bag in the kitchen.
Dan was looking at Cook as if he were a sculpture. “This is neat. You going to just hang out and watch us?”
Cook nodded.
“We just go about our business?” Cook nodded.
“How long you gonna be like this?”
Cook thought. He made a circle by bringing his cupped hands together. He made this circle rise from a point to his left, just below the table, in an arc that ended below the table again to his right. He felt like a dumb Indian in a dumb movie.
Dan’s grin grew as Cook’s little sun rose and set. “Great,” he said. “Okay. Let me bring you up to date. I just took Robbie to school. This is his last week. Beth’s got a couple parent conferences this afternoon. Me? I’m here, at your service.” Dan’s smile faded a bit as he ran out of gas. He looked at Beth. “You know, I have this urge to tease him. I can’t take him seriously like this.”
“I know,” Beth said over her shoulder. She rolled the portable dishwasher from the sink into a little storage closet. Its wheels screeched horribly.
Dan scooted his chair back from the table. “Okay. I’ve been wanting to clean up the basement. That’s the plan.” He stood up.
Beth turned around. Her face was blank but her mouth was slightly open.
Dan seemed to sense something was amiss. His motions suddenly became less fluid as he eased away from the table and headed for the basement door.
“You’re kidding,” Beth said.
“Me?” said Dan, stopping. He looked at Beth. “I’m not kidding. It’s a mess down there.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head. “You overwhelm me,” she said softly.
“You overwhelm me too, honey. Now can I go clean the basement?”
“You go to hell.” She said this sternly, but then her lips quivered and she seemed about to cry.
“Hey,” said Dan, going to her. “What am I missing here? Come on. I’m sorry if I missed something. Tell me.”
Beth said, “You’re missing the whole point. Why is he here?” She jabbed a finger at Cook. “He’s not going to learn anything watching you move a bunch of junk around.”
“Yeah,” Dan said slowly and thoughtfully. “He’s here to watch us talk. I guess I could talk out loud while I work. Would that be okay, Jeremy?”
Cook held his body language in check, declining to respond. He didn’t want to be part of Dan’s plunge onto the rocks. It was as if Dan were trying to be stupid.
“He’s supposed to watch us together!” Beth yelled. “Jesus Christ!”
“Okay okay okay,” Dan said in instant surrender. “I was just in the mood to clean the basement, all right? You know what it’s like to be in the mood to do a rotten job? You’ve got to take advantage of it. There’s a lot of work to do around the house—”
“How about working on our marriage?”
“Fine. We’ll do something together.”
Now that she had him, she didn’t want him. “Forget it,” she said, turning back to the sink. “Do whatever you want.”
“No, honey,” Dan said, reaching for her. “Come on. Don’t do that. You’re right—we’ll do something together.”
Beth let him hold her, though she seemed a little stiff. “I just can’t believe you sometimes,” she said.
“I know. I’m awful.”
“So what do we do?” Beth said, easing away from him.
Dan went slowly back to his chair as his mind lumbered into action. Total redemption required that he propose a common activity acceptable to Beth but not wildly out of character for him, for then his proposal would seem insincere. Cook figured he was a goner.
“I don’t suppose you’d want to help me clean the basement.”
“No.”
“It needs to be done. We could do it together.”
“No. I’d hate that.”
Dan had regained some ground there. Cook was sure of it.
“Yeah,” said Dan. “I guess it’s not very romantic.”
Cook held his breath. But Beth said nothing.
“Shopping?” said Dan.
“I’d love to,” said Beth, showing more feeling toward the subject than Cook would have thought possible. “But you’d hate it.”
Dan got a sadly crazed look on his face, and he whined plaintively, “Can’t we meet somewhere between shopping and cleaning the basement?”
Cook found the silence generated by this question deeply discouraging.
“It’s a lovely day,” Beth said, her eyes drifting to the window.
“Want to go for a bike ride?” said Dan.
Beth smiled. “Great idea”
“Good,” said Dan.
They turned and looked at Cook. He was obviously bike-less. Their stares made him feel like an obstacle to their reconciliation.
Beth said, “Robbie’s bike?”
Dan shook his head. “Too small.”
“Could he trot alongside?”
“He doesn’t strike me as a trotter. You a trotter, Jeremy?”
Cook shook his head.
“How about Ron’s bike?” said Dan. “Can you call Mary?”
“Could you call her? I don’t feel like talking.”
“You don’t have to talk,” Dan said. “Just ask if we can borrow Ron’s bike.”
“You do it, honey. I’d have to talk.”
“Why would you have to talk?”
“I just would.”
“Why? You just say, ‘Hi, Mary. Listen. We have a friend here who needs to borrow a bike. Can we use Ron’s?’” Dan’s wooden delivery seemed to ridicule Beth for failing to recognize how little would be required of her. Cook tensed, expecting her to retaliate. But she didn’t get angry at all.
“Just do it. As a favor. All right? I’ve got to change.” She left the kitchen and went upstairs.
Dan looked at Cook. “She’d have to talk. Figure that out.” He got up and dialed. While he waited for an answer at the other end, he said to Cook, “They’re neighbors, across the street. Hey—I should have had you call. I’d like to see you act it out over the phone, without speaking.” Dan threw himself into a violent charade to suggest this, then abruptly stopped.
“Hi, Mary. Listen. We have a friend here who needs to borrow a bike to take a ride with us. Can we use Ron’s?” He winked at Cook, apparently to show him how easy it was. “An old friend from college … Yeah … Santa Cruz, right … No, first time in the Gateway City … Yeah. Anyway, listen … Yeah, we’re about to go out and … It’s a great day. Sure is. Listen, can we borrow Ron’s bike? … Oh? You have to do that? … Okay. We’ll be here. Bye.”
Dan hung up and said to Cook, “She’s got to call her husband for permission. Jesus.” He sat down at the table. “She’ll call back.” He sat still for a moment, then stood up and went out the swinging door to the bottom of the stairs and yelled the news to Beth. Cook heard a faint, obscure response. Dan returned and sat back down. He drummed his fingers on the table.
“Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? That she would have to get his okay?”
Cook shrugged.
“I mean, if they called here to ask for my bike, Beth’d say, ‘Sure, take it, have fun.’ What’s the big deal?” He looked at Cook’s cup. “More coffee?”
Cook nodded.
“A bike,” Dan said as he took Cook’s cup to the coffee maker and refilled it. “What can you do to a bike?”
Cook was silent on the subject.
“The guy—Ron—is a bike nut, so maybe it’s an expensive one.” He set the coffee in front of Cook. “He’s a fusspot. Maybe all bike nuts are. You think so?”
Cook tried to signal fairly strong agreement, wanting to make it clear, however, that his agreement was based not on actual experience with bike nuts but merely on a lifelong partiality to hostile generalizations. It was a tough concept, and he almost threw his neck out trying to convey it.
“I wish to hell she’d call. Jesus. You see a pattern here, Jeremy? My wife won’t let me do what I want to, so I commit myself to a new want, which I don’t really want, but in time maybe I will, because if you can train a dog, you can train a husband, right? So I call Mary, and she won’t let me do my new want, which I don’t even want anyway.” He froze and studied the phone, as if he could make it ring that way. When it didn’t, he walked to the window and looked out onto the backyard.
“‘Work on our marriage,’” he said. “I’m working. Look at me. I’m working right now. I’m working so fucking hard I—”
The phone rang and Dan grabbed it and said hello. His shoulders sagged. “Hi, Rose … Yeah … Hey, I’m sorry I left you hanging on so long yesterday. The doorbell rang and I had to answer it … Yeah, just for a couple days. To fix up the house, spend some time with Beth, you know. Lemme get her.” He set the phone down, grimaced, and went to the bottom of the stairs, where he yelled at the top of his lungs, “Beth! It’s your mom!” Beth called out something in response, and Dan muttered and returned to the phone.
“She’ll be right here, Rose.” He added with a laugh, “Honest, I promise. Yeah. Bye.” He set the phone down and said in a whisper to Cook, “I’m gonna go across the street and see what the story is. When Beth picks it up in the bedroom, can you hang this up?”
Cook nodded and watched him go. He sipped his coffee. The kitchen was wonderfully quiet with Dan gone. Cook’s eyes came to rest on the phone. He wondered if Beth and her mother were going to say anything interesting—about Dan, for example. You never knew where data might lurk. He slipped out of his shoes and tiptoed to the phone. It was a wall phone, and Dan had hooked the receiver precariously on the top of it. Cook didn’t touch it, for fear of making noise. He contented himself with snuggling up close to it. Despite his necessary distance from the earpiece, he could hear Beth’s mother breathing as she waited for her daughter. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. He listened, feeling that they were becoming intimate, in a sense—though in what sense he wouldn’t have been able to say.
He heard a door open upstairs, followed by footsteps and the click of the extension. Then he listened hard.
“Got it!” Beth yelled.
Cook lurched away from the phone.
“Got it!” Beth yelled again. “Hang it up!”
He rattled a kitchen chair noisily at the table, then stomped to the phone, which he hung up definitively.
No eavesdroppers down here, lady. Not a one.
The three of them rolled through Forest Park, Dan in the lead, then Beth, followed by Cook, who kept falling behind. Mr. Bike across the street had been unreachable at the office, so Mr. Bike’s wife had donated her own vehicle to the cause. It was a three-speed clunker, festooned with plastic flowers and laden with so many wire baskets that Cook felt as if he were riding a cyclone fence. One of the pedals developed a slip shortly after they set out: on every revolution Cook’s right foot coasted freely for several inches before engaging again in any kind of useful propulsion. He had an urge to hop off the bike and give it a shove out into the street traffic.
Dan seemed to be having a hard time throttling down, and he pulled ahead even farther. Beth dropped back and fell in alongside Cook. She apologized for the condition of his bike and offered her own to him. He shook his head and struggled manfully on.
“Look at Dan,” she said. “I swear. He’s just dying to go faster. He hates slow bike rides. I used to think it was just a male thing—a fascination with speed. But I know better now. I can’t talk if we go fast. So we go fast.” She sighed. “Control. It’ll get you every time.” She glanced at Cook. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask any questions about it last night in your questionnaire. Who controls things? That would be a good question.” She looked ahead at Dan, who was pulling away so gradually that it was hard to tell he was doing it. “Dan hates being in the car with me because I’ve got him trapped. That’s what he’d say. Just ask him. Why’d he marry me if he doesn’t want to talk to me? Who am I supposed to talk to?”
They rode on in silence for a while. “What he does,” Beth went on, “is he declares certain subjects forbidden. I can’t tell him my dreams in the morning. Too boring. I can’t talk about problems at my school for too long—I reach his limit real quick there. Even stuff that concerns us. I like to talk about the future, sort of dream out loud, fantasize. Nope. Nothing about the future, except for short-term stuff, like upcoming trips. Oh, Robbie’s education—that’s another exception. We can talk about that. But not about me, not about my hopes.” She laughed bitterly. “I guess his goal is to eliminate all topics, one by one, until nothing’s left, and I’ll be mute. His father—that’s another forbidden subject. He’s all alone. Dan’s mother died a couple years ago, and he lives in an apartment in South San Francisco. He’s retired—used to be a Muni bus driver. Now he never sees anybody. He’s a total recluse, the unhappiest man I know. Can’t talk about him, though. Dan says it’s a hopeless case, there’s nothing he can do, so no more talk about it. The subject is closed.”
Beth’s voice had become slightly hoarse—with unhappiness, Cook guessed. He looked ahead. Dan was so far in front that the dips and bends in the bike path kept taking him out of view.
Beth heaved a huge sigh and made a valiant shift of subject, pointing out the houses across the street from the park—some of the finest houses in the city, she said. She called them “mansionettes” and said most of them dated from the turn of the century. She named the styles for him: Italianate, Georgian, Greek Revival, and when all else failed, American Eclectic. They were all set well back from the road. Cook noticed that there was absolutely no sign of life about them—no little children playing on the grass, no one unloading groceries. The houses seemed to exist independently of people, just for themselves.
Beth said, “Look at that one—the French one with the porte cochere.”
Cook plumbed his Romance vocabulary and figured out that she meant the gray limestone house with the little drive-up porch on the side: the coach-port. It had forbidding lines and a yard heavily shaded by trees that looked like magnolias. Did magnolias grow in St. Louis? He turned to Beth, wishing he could ask her.
She was crying. Her bike began to weave.
“What is it?” said Cook. “Stop, Beth. Stop your bike.”
She came to a jerking halt, nearly tipping over when she put her feet down before the bike had completely stopped. She looked ahead. Dan was well out of sight now, long gone. She began to cry more heavily.
Cook stopped beside her. He said, “Maybe he’s just gone ahead a bit and he’s waiting for us. He’s probably waiting. Don’t you think so?”
Beth cried. He reached out for her. As they awkwardly straddled their bikes, he held her against his shoulder, letting her cry there and patting her back. It was all he could think to do.