The Walnut Door Page 14
As soon as she looked at the new lock she said out loud, “Oh, no!” She had no keys. Macaboy had gone off with that diesel-engine stare in his eyes and had forgotten to give her the keys.
Then she took another look. Hadn’t he said that with each entry she would have to turn the oval button on the inside? She could remember his fingers resting on the button as he said it. He had used the word “elliptical.” But there was no button. There was just the round flush fitting you had to put a key in—which he had said would be on the outside: she would have to lock it each time she went out, he’d said. He had turned the lock assembly in his hand to show her its two faces as he explained its working. Knob inside; keyhole outside.
She grasped the doorknob and turned it and pulled. The door was fast shut. She gave a frantic tug. No, it was not just stuck, it was locked.
The idiot! The idiot! He must have installed the lock backwards. How could he have done such a thing? He was so meticulous; she remembered what she had said to her mother: “He’s so exact.”
His forefinger rests lightly on the oval button. He is saying: It’s not automatic, like a knob lock. You have to turn this button to lock it from this side.
She ran into her bedroom and looked up his number and picked up the receiver of the phone. Now this was odd—no dial tone. She clicked the receiver button again and again. In her left ear: black silence of interstellar space. Her next thought came burning like a shooting star out of that black infinity. She stood. She picked up the telephone housing and pulled it out into the room. A loose end of cut wire came away from the wall.
Chapter 24
MACABOY has started the new door. This time, oak. Everything is tuning up. This door is going to be made with the assistance of the Beethoven quartets. The palpable dangers in working with oak are heaviness, dullness, an effect of banality and of nineteenth-century European bourgeois complacency. That haunting music, composed by a stone-deaf man, will demand bizarre harmonies of grain, narrow splines in the panels, integrity in the stiles but unexpected lightness in the rails. The last five quartets, crying out in anguished tones, never heard before or since, against the temporal and sensory limitations of human life, will force Macaboy to test to the utmost the stolidity of oak. Can he bring out the force of hidden incongruities? Can he, for example, make oak seem a bit racy, daring, even disreputable? He is much stimulated by the problems this lumber and this music set for him. He does not desecrate Beethoven now by whistling. His concentration is like a transmission of impulses through a glass rod. Yet his mind runs, as so often, in two channels at once, and besides challenging oakness he is thinking of Dandy Hartwohl.
In the smash-monogamy period Dandy Hartwohl ran through the female cadres of the Oregon collective like a dose of buckthorn bark. Carrying the full charge of a heavy-duty battery, Dandy (the nickname was ironic; he was a bucket of slops) sparked the women one by one. They were drawn to Dandy Hartwohl by more than the revolutionary call of the moment to share, and share alike, all progenitive resources. They lined up to get in the sack with Hartwohl. This was what Macaboy could neither understand nor like. The Hartwohl face was what an insurance adjuster would have had to write off as a “total.” Acne had hit the dark skin with the impact of a load of buckshot; the black hair was tangled and hung down behind like an oriole’s nest; the chin had a crooked cleft; the mouth sagged and gave off the stale stink of White Owl blunts, which he incessantly sucked at. Before joining the Movement he had been a sometime student at Grinnell. He had been attracted to protest by a choice presented one Thursday between a university sit-in (the issue: the right of male and female students to shit and take showers in the same bathroom) and a midterm test in English 20 (the topic: Jane Austen’s Emma). In the Oregon group he had tried to attach himself to Macaboy as his best friend, but Macaboy found him a mean Joe. Dandy’s father was a bitter, retired Army colonel who had been passed over for promotion, and Dandy, loudly repudiating the old soldier’s values, unconsciously mimicked his transactions. And when Dandy Hartwohl fucked Sue Maiden, whom Macaboy considered his girl despite the pressure for sexual socialism, and when Dandy Hartwohl began boasting publicly, in illustrated-lecture detail, about the sixteen orgasms he had caused her to have in a forty-five-minute span, Macaboy had felt a burst of uncomradely anger. He feels it again now. It does not help that he remembers Sue shouting that Dandy was a liar, a liar, a liar, and a male-chauvinist orgasm nut—she hadn’t had sixteen orgasms, she had only had twelve.
The flurry of negative feelings rapidly passes. He remembers last evening. Macaboy holds up to window light the piece of oak—rather open-grained, almost feathery—that he has selected for the top rail. Yes, this piece will serve.
Chapter 25
SHE dropped the carcass of the telephone onto the bed. The bedroom—wow—turning on an axis of the stretched-out telephone wire? She hurried into the living room, hoping to find stasis. After an unmeasured time she realized she was standing there, scarf at throat, purse in hand, as if intending to begin the departure all over again. Courage is a mutant of fear. Once Aggie Bent tried to talk her into flying, like Peter Pan, off the edge of her bed. Flap! Flap! Harder! Her wrists moved when she was afraid. It seemed to her important to figure out when he had cut the telephone wire. There had always been someone to help, always. The day she threw out all the stupid Gregtime hardware…Homer Plentagger pounding on the ceiling below, probably with a broom handle, to protest the racket she had been making. That was it! She ran to the wretched broom closet, and when she opened the closet door she began to sneeze. Four, five, six katchoos in a row. Her vision swam on the sudden Niagara in her nose. She blew it on a paper towel and wondered if she was crying. The broom. She grasped it from the closet, upended it, and ran back in the living room. She had won the prize—standing in her Girl Scout uniform on the mowed knoll of Brandywine Hill, wagging the Morse Code with a signal flag, white field with a red square at the center, to the observers on the town water tower—proud of her competence, her mind clicking like a ship’s telegraph key: the sun behind her, the white and red of the flag mixed in a rippling pink passing back and forth above her eyes: dot right, dash left. She began to pound now on the floor: SOS: dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot While she pounded she dimly saw in her mind a man in a prison cell tapping on the wall in code to his fellow prisoners beyond it. Darkness at Noon. She had read it for Professor Muggsy Herwin and hated it in Comp Lit 32. But now she tried to recall the system the ex-Commissar—his name came to her, Rubashov—had used to simplify the signals; something about a “quadratic alphabet.” She couldn’t remember how it worked. She would just have to use numbers for letters. The message would have to be: LOCKED IN. L—she counted—the twelfth letter of the alphabet. She tapped deliberately twelve times. O—fifteenth. She tapped. As she paused before tapping an easy C she heard an answer from below. Merle was there! Elaine visualized her: still in her blood-stained slacks, she has dragged out a stepladder and is knocking on the ceiling, also with a broom handle—as if begging for help herself. She would have to wait to do the C till Merle had stopped and could hear. Or should she start all over again? What if Merle had deciphered the L, O—and thought she was tapping L-O-V-E? Something about the knocking below confused her, then made her feel self-conscious, then made her feel deeply foolish. The pounding sounded exactly like Homer’s that Sunday. It had the quality of the buzzing of a bee. Impatient Dangerous. The pounding was a snarl, its message: STOP. Did Merle think Elaine was on something—tapping out a high? Keeping time to the Grand Funk Railroad? Merle was a widow of two days; blood on her pants. There was a terrible rage in her pounding. Then it ceased. Elaine sagged on the floor and let the broom down. There was no doubt that she was crying.
* * *
—
He went to the bathroom. They had been talking about the scene on the sidewalk. Macaboy asked, “May I have the courtesy of the house?” “My God,” she said, “my Dad used to use that expr
ession.” That was how she remembered. That must have been when.
* * *
—
SHE threw open the southwest corner window, where she so often sat and looked at the world. She was not sure what she was going to do. She knew she could not scream. What was more, she did not now feel the need to scream; her fear had plummeted all the way to her Atlantic rift; the surface was calm. Her face felt hot—she wondered: was she blushing because Merle Plentagger thought her a noisy kid with all that pounding? Through the narrow gap in the buildings she saw the slice of urban renewal, on Court Street; at this morning hour the mall was empty. No! A fat lady came into view. Her huge legs gave her a knock-kneed, floating walk, and with each step forward she seemed to kick her tiny feet in an outward arc, almost as if she were skating. Elaine let out a timorous “Help!” The big lady skated along. “Help!” Her thin cries made Elaine feel, even in terror, a burning self-consciousness; she was a singing mouse. With five more dainty outward swoops of her model feet the fat lady glided out of sight. Elaine swam in an age of fear that no one would ever pass through that gap again. Then a girl came from the right, in blue jeans and a tee shirt with some sort of silkscreen design on the front. Elaine shouted as loud as she could. The girl heard something. Her eyeline swiveled like a dim, unsteady flashlight beam probing a misty night The girl’s face, turning vaguely for a moment toward Elaine, was as blank as the heel of a loaf of Wonder Bread. She did not break her pace; the dull beam swung away; she walked on out of view. So much time passed in the empty street that Elaine’s sense of alarm went out of whack: she hardly knew what she should be most afraid of. At last a stout, swarthy, gray-haired man in dark trousers and a white shirt—he looked like one of the Italian senior citizens who played bocce on the school grounds—walked into the opening. “Hey!” Elaine shouted. “Hey, mister!” The man stopped and seemed to search for the source of the sound but did not find her. The gap out to the street was narrow; the buildings must have been playing catch with her shouts. Louder: “Hey, I’m locked in!” The old lion in the street canted his head and stared around. “Locked in!” Perhaps, like so many of the very old men in the neighborhood, this one could barely understand English. He shook his head with a dark frown of alien disapproval. Elaine felt like a whore calling out from a street crib. The man turned and went on. Then no one. No one. No one. A tall young man walked hastily left to right. Jesus, he looked like Macaboy out of his coverall! The company wants…. Was her fear playing tricks on her inner eye? Elaine suddenly felt the mad whale in her rushing up from the deeps to breach all its tons out in the air. It couldn’t be Macaboy at this hour. Her fear was condensed like propellant gas in a sealed can. Her next outcry—to no one in sight—blasted out full and strong and then cracked and went up in a ridiculous squeak. She was mortified in blank space. Then she thought: That old man knew very well where the sound came from. He chose not to look at me. She took a breath and was able to scream. For the first time in her life her throat opened froglike and she screamed. There was no one in the street
* * *
—
SHE launched her confusion in her rocker. Maybe she would try pounding on the floor again later. Maybe she wouldn’t need to, maybe Merle could hear her heart crashing in its cage. The motion of the waves under the chair gradually lulled her. That had been a twenty-four-year scream she had finally been able to let out What if the myriad bits of the scream could have been unscrambled into coherence, as in one of those phone calls across an ocean? O Aggie, why did I want your influence? Daddy, lift me up! You’re crushing me, Greg, you’re going to drive my ass through the mattress. Mom, don’t contaminate me with your negative charge, against against against in the name of “love.” What made you turn my button, Macaboy? I have been waiting so long!…
* * *
—
SHE thought—how much later?—she might have a snack. When she opened the fridge she learned from her liver and lights that a snack would not be enough. She was famished. She made a peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwich and ate a tubful of yoghurt and seven stalks of celery and drank a Tab from a can. Then she put a stack of gospel on the record player, watered her strawberry begonia, which was parched, and sat down again. There was no use standing up.
* * *
—
SHE felt a dopey haze settling over her. Not exactly sleepiness. Something more like—she had to face it—full-bellied torpor. She tried to worry about not staying scared but gave up. A voice in her said something always came along. Her father often said that. “Calm down, Evvy,” he said to her mother when she whirled back in from the car, babbling that the battery was dead, as if it were a relative. “Easy does it, old girl.” Not with Mom it didn’t. She sounded like a chain saw, or one of those model airplanes that hornet around in circles. Five minutes later he was out in the street with his thumb up, looking like a man leaving his bed and board for the clean womanless air of Colorado. But no. The first vehicle to come along is Slippery Zilroy’s tow truck from the Chevron station, cruising around to snatch parking violators, and quicker than you can say Jackie Robinson there is a rental battery in the Plymouth and Pop is pouring himself a wallop of Old Crow and saying to Mom, “Something always comes along, old Ev.” Sometimes he said the reason he drank was because he was so lucky.
* * *
—
NOTHING came along. Silence of the big world. Out the window the shadows were pulling themselves toward night. No music was going now. The amp of the record player was giving out a hot buzz. Once Elaine thought maybe she should canvass how much food she had, canned and in the cooler. She racked her brains and could not remember ever having read in the papers, or ever having heard on the evening news—even the local news, which was all arson and assaults and gory wrecks—a single case of a person starving to death because of being locked in. She took a nap.
* * *
—
SHE waked into a half-minute stretch of her limbs. It was dark out. She thought she would read a bit. Might as well start Middlemarch again. Time on her hands, a long book would help. There was a layer of fog on her fear. Hazily she thought she was due on Middlemarch: the last time she read it was during the worst of Greg—many blank pages in her mind. She didn’t like Dorothea Brooke that much, there was something priggish about her, she was a woman who could have done with some fleas in her underpants—but Ladislaw! Will Ladislaw was the cock and balls she was waiting for. She lit some lights and found the book and sat down.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress….
Chapter 26
MACABOY has left his tool box at home. As a result, the front tire of the bike is full of antigravity powder, and charging along Howe Street he rears up, like Evel Knievel doing wheelies on his motorcycle, and tears along for nearly half a block on his rear wheel, with the small front wheel up in the air, revolving slowly on its ball bearings. He settles down and rides no hands the rest of the way to the New China.
He has remembered her saying that she was big on Middle Kingdom chow; once while he was planing the door they discussed nuances, Peking versus Shanghai versus Shantung versus Szechuan. He likes hot Szechuan best; she prefers North Chinese. Macaboy’s stomach is lined with goatskin, he likes hot Mexican better even than hot Chinese, he could eat a stack of tamales right this minute with four-hundred-degree-Fahrenheit red peppers on them awash in Tabasco sauce.
Locks up on a lamppost. Goes in. Orders gumlo wonton, lichee har kew, and wor shui gai, to go. And some rice. Drinks some green tea while he waits, and leans back, super-hyper-casual, like Emperor Huang-ti waiting for a report on the Inner Mongolian concubine situation from his head eunuch.
Then he is off again, laying down circumferences of two sizes on Elm. In the bicycle basket, three kraft paper boxes are wrapped to keep in the warmth, in yesterday’s New Haven Register. As he rides he glances now and then at the bulge of newsprint
on the top package. PEACE HOPES DASHED BY RUSSIAN OUTBURST. What he sees has to be the lower part of the front page. CITY MAN SHOT. MRS. IRVING STARTS TERM. A small headline attracts his attention, and he leans forward and reads, with a radar of peripheral vision tuned in for navigation;
DEMOCRATS CRY FOUL
OVER OFFICE BREAK-IN
WASHINGTON (AP). Disclosures that a salaried Nixon-campaign security expert was one of five men arrested during a break-in at the Democratic National headquarters has prompted Democratic accusations of “political espionage” and Republican denials of involvement…
Nothing in the part of the story that shows tells how the break-in was accomplished, so Macaboy gets bored and drifts to the story next to it on the page.
VIENNA (UPI). Prof. Gerard Brauer got a standing ovation at the end of his lecture on the health hazards of sitting too long.
His audience consisted of prisoners serving long sentences at a prison in Stein, Austria.
* * *
—
HE picks the knob lock first. He feels, as a luxurious challenge, the pressure of time: the Chinese food, wrapped in the packet of human folly on the floor by the door, is cooling, cooling. A rhythmic creaking sound, which after a time he deciphers as outcries of uneven floorboards under the oscillating curves of the rocker, gives bite to his task of listening for—feeling with his fingertips for—the delicate engagement of the tumblers by the cylinder with the help of his picking rake. So she is flying over the moon on her time machine! O Macaboy, you lucky son of a bitch! Stay cool, man: The tiniest tremor in the fingers is a liberation movement for all the tumblers of the world Tick…. Tick…. Yes! The lock is sprung, the latch is withdrawn from the strike plate. Now—slowly—he turns the oval knob of the Stanloc. The door can be opened from either side.