The Walnut Door Read online

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  “HELLO.”

  “Is this Mzz Ruth Greenhelge?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m calling for Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M, Incorporated. My company has instructed me to ask you a few—”

  “Knock it off, Macaboy.”

  “Shiver my timbers, how did you know my name?”

  “You’re aware of a certain Quinlan?”

  “Oh, her. We can’t sell you a new door, then? How about a rim lock?”

  “She says that’s a classy door your company made for her.”

  “Yeah, we do prime work.”

  “She also said you said you’d heard me speak.”

  “Yeah, I was back East, I think it was ‘sixty-eight—I think it was just before the New Hampshire primary, like in Hanover? That be possible?”

  “Yes. In praise of Gene McCarthy. Does that sound a bit kookie now?”

  “That was a bad spring.” Lyndon Johnson withdrawing—that really hurt the Movement. Then McCarthy pooping out, hating kids. Martin Luther King in April. Bobby Kennedy in June. Chicago. “We all started going haywire after that.”

  “Haywire? Speak for yourself.”

  “Like to talk about it sometime?”

  “Not specially. Well. Yes. Yes, I would.”

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  THIS bushy-tailed Macaboy dibble-dabbles his index finger in the doorbell as if it were the bellybutton of Miss Happiness herself.

  In time a tall woman answers. One look at the dangerous expanse of off-white enamel uncovered by what must surely have been intended as a polite smile, and the edge is off Macaboy’s speculations. Is his face a billboard of disappointment? If it is, she seems not to read it. “Be right with you,” she says, and whirls off to get a purse. Back at the door she opens the bag in his presence and drops a ring of keys into it, jingling them at him first as if she thinks he’s kinky for keys. Is this flibbertigibbet in a shortish skirt and a cardigan sweater the great Greenhelge of the fell tongue?

  They walk to the Old Heidelberg at a good clip. They get a table nubbled with carved initials in a booth in the bar. Sipping vodka like any pair of middle-class swinging singles, they chat about The Revolution That Wasn’t.

  At first the memories pour out helter-skelter. It’s like a flirtation of two newly-mets, in which memories of songs both knew before they knew each other set up harmonic vibrations in present time. The mere naming of names is enough to empower the poles of a magnetic field. Kewadin. Carl Oglesby. PLP. Jeff Shero. Stokeley. Clear Lake. Carl Davidson. Greg Calvert T-O Institutes. Vietnam Summer. Huey. Peace and Freedom Party. The Berrigans. Pentagon. Tet. Bernadine. Lexington. East Lansing. Fred Gordon. Spiro Agnew. New Left Notes. RYM. Hayakawa. Venceremos. Weather. Kick-ass tactics. Panthers. The Cleveland mindfuck. The Four Days.

  “You didn’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes were,” he says.

  Her back is up. Her fingers tremble at the lip of her glass. They disagree about some of the names. Tom Hayden. Mark Rudd. They quarrel. Old acrimonies, which have been lying like sediment in them, are stirred up. They cannot find the handles of facts; there is a kind of inner swirling that comes from recalling rage—rage which fed on itself as it missed its targets again and again and simply splattered up against the wall. In the years since those tantrum days each has reached a certain level of stability—yet here they are apart, too: she, tending toward convention; he…where is he going? he wonders. Filing the burr off new-cut keys, planing and sanding, calibrating, staking his entire worth on fitting things together as tightly as the yin fits the yang. He is suddenly angry at what makes him happiest—perfect joining. Then his anger veers toward big-tooth, here, this woman who still has muted access to her sarcasm of those old ranting days and can still slash.

  “Know why I came to Hanover to hear you that time?” he says. “I wanted to see your famous legs. Guys everywhere told me you had the greatest gams east of the gasworks.”

  “Come off it.” God, she’s pleased. She moves her thighs under the table on the seat in the booth.

  He is drawn further. “I hear you’re taking a course in logic between them nowadays.”

  That gets to the mark. “Your friend Quinlan,” she spits out.

  And with that, Macaboy realizes his real reason for having wanted to talk with Ruth Greenhelge. “She didn’t mean any harm,” he says. “She was just talking about how we’ve all changed.” He dills her down, stroking her softly, softly, like a finished door panel with linseed oil and $$ steel wool. And in time he can ask, “What was your pal Quinlan like at Bennington?”

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  “THERE was a period in junior year,” Greenhelge says, “when she wasn’t making connections. She was worried about it. She said she’d know she was in a room with a person, but there was a plate of glass between her and the person. Words could go through the glass, looks could go through it, but temperament couldn’t penetrate it. ‘The real you bounces off it,’ she’d say. In that very period, she was at her warmest, she seemed to be right there, I really loved her then. I guess she was desperate, trying to get to you through the glass. She was a bit spacey, but at the same time she was witty as all get-out, her mind was working at wild speed. She was a top student in Russian, and she could talk this imitation Russian at a great rate—you know, macaronic, mixing in English and French and Spanish words but all with Russian endings and pronunciations, and if your mind could go with her fast enough, it all made some kind of out-of-bounds sense.”

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  “SHE had this funny thing of only being able to speak to one person at a time. There’d be three of us talking, let’s say Quinnie and me and this Bottsy Feldman, and Quinnie would aim everything at me. If she wanted then to get something over to Botts, she’d look at me and say, Tell her so-and-so’—with ‘her’ right there in front of her. It was as if she were some kind of radio and could only transmit on one frequency at a time.”

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  “YES, she had a boyfriend at Dartmouth—to me he was a bad influence. He was a weirdo—half jock, half weenie. Amazing dexterity-he took up tossing Indian clubs, and like one year he got to the International Jugglers’ Association world championships. That was before he went pill-happy. He was quite funny, but his humor was mostly putdowns. A lot of it was directed at Quinnie. She sat there taking it. She could dish it out, too, but she was never cruel like he was.”

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  “I COULD never get her going in the Movement. She has a stiff back, that girl. She cared about things, but she saw through motives. She saw through me. I’ve never told anybody this, Macaboy, but I felt ashamed when I talked with Quinnie. She knew all about power without ever seeming to need it.”

  Chapter 15

  GREENHELGE on the pipes. She seemed to Elaine to be talking down to her from a great height. Many topics: How was the door? Any luck job-hunting? Status of her own research. The logician in a cranky mood. Sounds, through all the chatter, of exultation. Elaine began to feel the old telephone-tightness in her throat.

  “Your friend Macaboy took me to dinner last night. God, is he a charmer! We went all back over the Movement Actually, we discovered we were at the same protest rally together once without knowing it, the time Rusk spoke to the Foreign Policy Association at the New York Hilton, the first trashing either of us was in on. Neither of us knew it was going to happen. They were throwing bottles and bags of cow’s blood and paint and garbage at the cops and the limousines that pulled up. Macaboy said it turned him off trashing for good. We went to the Heidelberg. He is so bright.”

  Elaine was damned if she was going to ask any questions. Greenhelge’s voice, from up there, just begged for questions. Did he talk about me at all? Did he ask about me? Where’d you go after dinn
er? What did you do, did you…?

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  SNARL of the foyer buzzer. She talked into the intercom grille on the kitchen wall: a pattern of perforations in a round plate, some of the holes half blocked with wrinkled driblets of ancient paint. Speaking into that hideous metal ear she felt disembodied; the abstract Force of Interrogation stood in for Elaine Quinlan. “Who is it?” After stirring a few tendrils of lint in the holes, the sounds seemed to go dead beyond the wall plate.

  But at once a tinny vibration came back at her from the grille. “It’s the Fuller Brush man.” A gargling robot standing in for Macaboy the locksmith and laughing boy.

  Reflex: She pressed the release button before she remembered Greenie’s call.

  The knock came soon.

  She opened the door only a crack—she kept it on the chain. In the gap she could see Macaboy’s steeply tilted head, cut off aslant at forehead and chin by jamb and door stile. She had a weird moment of slicing his skull along those planes: miracles!—the upper geometric section showing the almost woodlike dense channels and flat nucleated disks of the carapace, and within it, the intricately folded sac of gray and white evasions and betrayals; and the lower section, even more beautiful—a marbleized design of bone and dentine and enamel and mucous membrane and fibrous root of tongue where deceit would be embedded….

  “I came by to see if you’re feeling—”

  “Go away,” she said, “you creep.”

  He had a plant in a jar for her. “The woman said it’s a pothos. Check out the Greeks on that word. That’s why I picked it.” He showed it to her in the crack. Leaves streaked with lemon yellow. He could not pass the jar through with the door on the chain. He urged her, again and again, to open up, but she kept telling him to go away.

  “If I’m such a creep, why do you stand there talking to me? Why don’t you slam the door in my face? Is it because you know I wouldn’t have any trouble getting in if I really wanted to?” The chain, he pointed out, was a psychological deterrent to entry, not a physical one. All he would have to do would be to put his shoulder into it and…

  “Go away!”

  He put the terrarium down on the floor just outside the door and left.

  Chapter 16

  MACABOY is puzzled. His day is crowded yet empty. He has three jobs. He charges up and down the streets of New Haven on his bike with a sense that the chain is slipping on the sprocket: he seems to be getting nowhere. He is not whistling. A lady, fishing in her crammed pocketbook for change, put her home key ring down on the checkout counter at the York Street Pegnataro’s and left it there; it was gone when she went back for it; she is convinced a housebreaker picked it up; she wants a new set of cylinders. Macaboy is not used to finding people boring; he has always said that monomanias were fascinating. Hers is not. The welfare system. She runs it ragged. Freeloading breeds crime. He is so ear-weary when he finishes that he charges her fifteen dollars instead of the usual twelve for a key change—a three-dollar lip tax. When he gets back to Lynwood Place he starts his monthly inventory of key blanks. The phone rings. Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M is listed in the Yellow Pages. A woman on Fountain Street. Her son called her yesterday to say that he had broken his wife’s arm in an argument, and the mother had been so upset that when she came in from shopping she left the key in the front-door lock. All night. It was there in the morning, but she was afraid some half-breed criminal had taken it and had it copied and then come back and put it in the lock again to make her unwary. Yes, she actually used the phrase “half-breed.” Macaboy never argues with a client. Out the door. On the bike. This woman weeps for her son’s unhappiness while Macaboy works. He is distressed that he has nothing to say except that she should be glad it wasn’t the other way around, her son with compound fracture of ulna and radius. Lots of women nowadays, he says, can break both the bones in a man’s forearm. Has she heard about the Equal Rights Amendment? It applies, he says, to the right to break bones. Women have that right Home again. He completes the inventory. Makes himself a baloney, salami, tomato, and sauerkraut submarine. The mail comes. Two of his checks have bounced. Locksmithing doesn’t quite pay. But it is not that he is short of cash. He has income from a trust fund, set up by his father when Macaboy went into the Movement, to prevent—as his father put it—“the fruits of my life’s work going to a bunch of God damn red Wobbly anarchist hippies”; the trust fund made Macaboy’s employment a condition of its dole. No work, no get. Macaboy is not supporting himself; worse, he can’t bother to enter the amounts of checks on the stubs. Is this a way of life for a philosopher? The phone rings. It is a Yale art student with a likely story. He gave a key to his loft to a model. He has finished painting her. He does not need to have her sit for him any more. He therefore wants a key change. Out the door. On the bike. The loft is on Grand Street While Macaboy is slipping out the old cylinder the artist offers to show him a painting of the key-carrying model. Macaboy is not even in the mood to see a nude at two p.m., but he never argues with a client. The artist drags out a canvas. The style is Abstract Expressionless. There is a muddy red splotch on a greenish-grayish marbleized field. “You really needed a key change,” Macaboy says.

  Where is the fun Macaboy usually gets from life? He drops in to see Okvent when he gets home.

  “Okkie,” he says. “Remember that door we delivered the other day?”

  “Ooh yaw.”

  “It has led to nothing but trouble.”

  Chapter 17

  SHE thought that if she turned over, shifted, dug into enough chattels, she might find her lost past: the album. As she searched she remembered snapshots of herself in it: aged nine, on Halloween, with Aggie Bent, both dressed as witches—Aggie looking like one of the ten Salem girls standing before the judges, sexfiend-eyed, possessed, speaking in tongues; while Elaine looks like an adorable trick-or-treat cutie dressed up to attract Tootsie Rolls and Good and Plentys. She wondered, digging in her closet, why she wanted to recover this past of hers at all. Aged thirteen, trying hard to please her father, as she imagines, by being a tomboy, holding up a limp catfish she has caught in the algae-green pond out beyond the Ace Laundry—her wrist bent as if by an intolerable weight, her face straining to cap the horror she feels at this mutated throwback’s whiskers and fat-man’s mouth. Aged fifteen, dressed for her first dance, in a confectioner’s dream of ribbons and pleats and furbelows, and wearing Mary Janes. She fell to her knees on the closet floor. She blamed her mother. What fairy tale was her mother trying to push her toward? And why did she let herself be pushed for so long?

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  SHE rose and quickly walked to the row of not yet unpacked storage boxes along the back wall of the living room. She routed frantically in them. She hauled out the Bell hand grain grinder and threw it with a crash in the middle of the floor. She burrowed again and came up with her broken Clairol hair drier and threw it, clatter, beside the grinder. She went into the kitchen and got her spun-steel wok, which she hadn’t used for two years, and carried it back, and bong. From the box, her McAlister bean sprouter. Her Fleming bottle cutter, with which, for a month way back in Greg time, she made hideous glasses from Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. Her Indonesian incense brazier, long empty of sand. At last, at last, she was going to shed the dregs and lees of Greg and of…and of…

  She looked at her dulcimer. How many hours and hours had she sat over that melancholy little box, picking out “The Dew Is His Pearls” and “Sit Ye Doon My Faily-Foot” and “Aysters and Crayfish Me Hearties”? She moved toward it, faltered. She wanted both to keep it and to smash it into a thousand splinters in the shapes of quavers and clefs and rest marks and sharp signs and all reminders of all that practice that made imperfect. Somehow she could not part with it—yet.

  There was a knocking. From somewhere under her. Oh, God, the Plentaggers. She could just see the poisoner standing on a chair and poking at the ceiling with
a broom handle to protest against the noise she had been making.

  She ran into the bedroom and wrenched open one of the drawers in which she kept her underclothes. She weeded out the old relics first—the nylons and rayons—and dropped them in a pile on the floor. She had some slips that she would never wear—out they came. Greg’s black bikini panties with the red heart—onto the throwaway pile. She held up a borderline nightgown that she hadn’t worn for a long time, trying to decide…