The Walnut Door Page 15

  The gumlo wonton may now be tepid, but Macaboy cannot resist the pleasure of waiting a little while, simply to savor this fact: Mzz Elaine Quinlan, you are free. All you have to do is walk to the door and open it and go anywhere you want.

  Creak, creak, creak. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross. He cannot wait any longer. He enters.

  “Do you have a double boiler?” he says.

  “You bastard,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  SHE is seated on one side of the small enamel-topped table in the tiny kitchen. He is standing, dishing out the lichee har kew, now hot again, into a blue bowl, using one of her flat-bottomed Chinese porcelain spoons.

  “Minute rice is barbaric,” he says.

  She is not talking.

  “I brought you some chopsticks,” he says. He pulls a pair, for her, sealed into cheap Hong Kong wax paper, from his breast pocket, and also produces an ivory pair of his own, carved with the magic gadgets of the Seven Immortals: the gourd, the fan, the flute, the crutch, the sword, the phoenix feather, the lotus blossom, and the tablet of admission to the Imperial court.

  “I bought these from a guy who ripped them off from a very expensive whorehouse in Saigon,” Macaboy says. “It was a place for lieutenant colonels and up. The guy was a tech-three. He had to steal a pair of silver maple leaves to get in the place.”

  She says nothing.

  “I don’t think you’re impressed enough,” Macaboy says.

  Her eyes are fixed on a black chip out of the enamel of the tabletop.

  “Look,” he says, sounding peed off, and holding the chopsticks under her nose, and shaking them, “these things cost me three gold ducats and my left nut.”

  She is silent.

  “What are you—in a coma? Hey, I’m good company. Cheer up, kid.”

  “Beautiful,” she finally says, looking at the chopsticks. “I hope you choke on them.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT is the sum total of what he can get out of her. She is mute. He wolfs the food like the sheepdog in the dogfood commercial. She does not touch hers. “Eat, baby,” he says. She sits with her hands in her lap. He finally takes her helpings and eats them, too.

  “What about some decent tea?” Scraping the last grains of rice out of a bowl with his ivory chopsticks. “Let me pour that cold stuff out.” He reaches for her cup.

  Her eyes are up, now, and he sees in them a dangerous Irish radiation, like heat coming off rocks that have been in fire a long time. She says, “What do you want, anyway?”

  “I told you. The company wants you to feel safe.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE has become Miss Outreach—friendly as an airline stewardess (on her day off). It is hard to tell what this bimbo will do next. Guessing her is like reading the weather map: the isobars don’t mean much, you have to know what the jet stream is doing, you have to figure in temperature changes, and on top of everything else you have to assume that your forecast is wrong. They are still sitting at the small kitchen table. They have been talking about Angela Davis’s acquittal, but suddenly now she says, “Hey, Eddie, my electric can opener is busted, would you look at it?”

  “Sure. I mean…”

  “You’re so wizard with your hands. I’ve been watching your hands.”

  Hoo, he says to himself, this chick is going to steal my wallet right out of my back pocket. “Where is it?” he asks.

  She gets up and looks for the broken machine in a cabinet There it is, on a high shelf. Reaching up for it, one foot off the ground, that leg bent at the knee, she looks to Macaboy like one of those breastful mid-nineteenth-century French sculptures, Deceived Virtue Consoled by Cupid—the babykins god of love, touching fingertips with her, being here represented by a GE Universal E1UC11 Can Opener. She fetches it down. He starts puttering.

  * * *

  —

  “I GOT into it,” he says, “seven years ago, at the Camp Maplehurst convention. Up on the Michigan peninsula, near a place called Kewadin. It took me years to realize that that was just the moment when things went bad. See, we’d had these elder statesmen, Tom Hayden, Al Haber, Carl Oglesby, guys like that They were, like, Eastern—Ann Arbor, anyway. White-shirt nonviolent Brainy studs. They were articulate. At Camp Maplehurst this new bunch blows in—I was one of them, I guess, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Sleeping bags. We paid twenty bucks for the whole convention, including food, if you could call it that. Peanut butter and jelly, horse-cock sandwiches. The new ones—let’s see—O.K., blue work shirts. Desert boots. Mexican mustaches. You getting the picture? Sophomores from jerkwater colleges. The thing was, this new crowd didn’t want to bother with history—all that Old Left and Liberal horseshit Balls to theory. You know. It was put your body where your mouth is. It was morality, values. I had made a total and complete break with my mother and father, especially my father. The last thing in the world I would have done at that point was go home for Thanksgiving turkey. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ that was the sound of it. Smoked dope all the time. The Wobblies were the model, if anything—you know, those big old roughhouse guys out of a Western. We didn’t believe in leadership—that was elitism. We had this endless debate whether to have a chairman ever. So finally we just picked guys at random to run the meetings—like, Hey you run it today. And it might be some total spaz. We had votes but we never counted them. Some guys wanted to draw up a paper, like the Port Huron Statement Hell, no, that was bureaucracy, that would be sucking off the system. Well, I know now that was where—Kewadin was where—we lost the chance to…to…Did I tell you my father’s been sick?”

  * * *

  —

  “DID you bring your tools?”

  “This is a social call, ma’am. Tools? For what?”

  “To turn that goddamn lock around the way it’s supposed to be. That’s what.”

  “Who’s to say what’s supposed to be?”

  * * *

  —

  HE is talking like a popcorn popper, yet he cannot quite think what it is he wants to tell her. He feels as if he wanted to tell her everything in a hurry. About the time on the swimming raft at Madison when he felt such a surge of strength and pinned his father’s shoulders to the cocomat—the pain like a memory of hunger in his upper arms afterward. About how Arden tricked him into breaking the Stallworths’ window with the slingshot Arden had made from a beech fork and a strip from an inner tube, and Mr. Stallworth rushing out, in rotary-mower rage, and Eddie’s fear turning into laughter which seemed to have its tingling seat in his little balls, as they ran away—and how often over the years laughter has had in it a risible echo of those pursuing shoes: Your father will hear about this.

  How can he tell her about his desire to be decent? His wish is tenderized, pink, positively edible. But babbling away he is, so to speak, wordless.

  * * *

  —

  SHE is surly now. This has not turned out exactly as he pictured it would. He rinses his ivory chopsticks under the faucet, slips them into his shirt pocket, and says, “I got work to do in the morning.”

  “You mean you’re…Hey, Macaboy, aren’t you going to fix that lock?”

  “Fix? You mean that new Stanloc? Nothing wrong with that lock, Mzz Quinlan. Works supercalifragilistic.”

  She now stands, pale. “Hey, man, tomorrow is Monday.”

  “ ’At’s right.”

  If only he could touch his fingertips to her cheek—the fingertips that are able to feel that unbelievably delicate tick when a tumbler finds its footing on the edge of the cylinder as he works the picking rake so gently in—up—there! That skin, that pinkish tegument of warmth and fresh milk and estrogen, would surely give his fingertips the proper signal, barely to be felt, at the moment of imminence.

  But she is saying, “Jesus, Macaboy, I’ll lose m
y job.”

  His face shines. “I’ll call you in sick, first thing in the morning.”

  “Who’s going to believe you?”

  “I don’t know why, but people usually believe me, Elaine.”

  Chapter 27

  IT is still dark when Macaboy comes charging out of bed like a wide receiver on a quick cut for a jump pass. He was in such a hurry to have sweet dreams last night that he just took off his shoes and flaked and flipped the sleep switch, so now he runs into his shoes and shoots out the door and vaults into the saddle and vrooms in half light across to South Frontage and down to Sargent Drive and under I-91 and back along Long Wharf Drive, between the pike and the harbor. Not far from the wharf—a Coast Guard vessel is sinister in the dim promise, it has the iridescent skin of a sand shark—he dismounts, drops the bike, and sits in the grass and waits, looking across the water. There is new wine in the sky. The tide is high. An arrow is in his heart. Macaboy! Macaboy! This is going to be another day! So much is possible, so little has happened to you in all the years. Up jumps the yellow ball of energy, bouncing off the deck of last night, into the superstructure of stacks and ship funnels across the way in East Haven. It is so huge, so fast-rising, that you can’t hide: the eye of heaven sees you, Macaboy, its direct look paints you a new color. The flat light of its stare brings out the truth on your face: This man has made so many mistakes in a short life.

  * * *

  —

  NINE oh five.

  “Lampson Gunsmithy. Good morning.”

  “Hello. Here Dr. Polazczychuk. Can you give a message to madam office supervisor? I’m calling for patient, she is not able to report work. What’s—how you call it—can you handle?”

  “Certainly, doctor. The name?”

  “Miss Elaine Quinlan.”

  “Quinlan. I have to have the complaint.”

  “She is confined—yes?—wiz mild viral pneumonia. ‘Summer flu,’ yes? Highly contagious, huh, at this stage. These things spread like rumor, yes?”

  “How long will she be out?”

  “Hard to say. Depends how fast she improves. Huh. You write, ‘Some days,’ yes?”

  “What did you say your name was, doctor?”

  “Polazczychuk.”

  “Would you—”

  “Certainly.” Very fast: “P-o-l-a-z-c-z-y-c-h—”

  “Excuse me…c-z-c-…?”

  “No…z-c-z-…”

  “c-z-…did you say then c-h-…? It’s not that important, doctor. As long as—”

  “Thank you. You’ll pass message?”

  “Right away, doctor.”

  * * *

  —

  HE stops at George and Harry’s. What he likes best for breakfast, if it’s boughten, is a Western sandwich. He gets an enormous gooey Swedish, with the icing all stuck to the cellophane, for her. A pat of butter to go. A full quart of coffee.

  * * *

  —

  THIS time he turns the Stanloc knob and knocks three times.

  A longish wait. Then: “Who is it?”

  “Dr. Polazczychuk here. I have bring rectal zermometer.” The accent is even thicker than it was on the phone.

  “Go away, Macaboy.”

  He hears the creaking of floorboards moving away from the door.

  “I brought breakfast.”

  He waits. Waits.

  Creaking toward the door.

  Still he waits.

  Then he says, not very loud, “You know I can come in any time I want. Open up, baby.”

  From inside: “You are such a bastard.” But then the door opens. She is wearing plum-colored corduroy slacks, a navy-blue tee shirt, and a small silk scarf tied French-workman style at the throat.

  Macaboy does not say that he expected her to be in a nightgown. He says, “I watched the sunrise down on the harbor this morning.”

  “Knock off this game,” she says. “It’s getting on my nerves.”

  She is in a rotten humor. He takes the breakfast into the kitchen. The Chinese-food cartons, the bowls, the plates, the chopsticks—all are still on the kitchen table. The pans are in the sink. Macaboy starts cleaning up. She stands in the doorway.

  He says there’s no problem at Lampson’s Gunsmithy; union contract, they probably won’t even dock her pay, since they have a doctor’s report

  He pours the coffee in a pot and sets it to heat. He dumps the cartons in the garbage pail. It needs emptying—where should it be left? She will not say. Out in the hall? No answer. He takes it to the door. She is right behind him. He stays in the doorway, leans to one side to put the container down. He turns and looks her in the eye. Two-twenty volts. Direct current.

  “Get it over with,” she says.

  “Get what over with?”

  “Whatever it is you have in mind.”

  “Breakfast,” he says. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  * * *

  —

  THIS morning she sips at her coffee. He sees the need in her lips, which are as sensitive as a snail’s eye-stems. Gathered as if for kissing, they suck at the heat without touching the dark liquid, then the upper one moves down over the rim of the cup to the coffee’s edge. The lip winces. The brew is hot. But he can see, in a minute, that the very first trickle has quickened her. Her color is getting better. She is testy. He admires her spirit

  “Everything was the way it was supposed to be. My older brother Arden went to Loomis, so I went to Loomis. Mother wouldn’t get our clothes in Hartford, she went to New York. Rogers Peet—that was the right place for boys. I was destined for law school: you could go into law, business, politics. Law was the Protestant priesthood. I was the one who was chosen to be the priest. We wore jackets and ties at meals. You learned a certain way of talking. My mother’s family had been in Avon since—well, since the beginning. Her people migrated to Hartford with Thomas Hooker and Roger Ludlow when they broke away from Massachusetts Bay. Hooker was the one who wrote: ‘The foundation of authority lies in the consent of the people.’ I had a sense of legacy dinned into me.”

  “Why do you keep spouting this stuff?”

  “We’re getting acquainted.”

  “That assumes mutual interest.”

  “Appetite comes with eating.”

  “I guess bulls can fly. It sure is raining bullshit around here.”

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT do you think you’re proving?”

  “This is not a proof.”

  “What is it—some kind of macho kink?”

  “Not at all. Our company—”

  “Don’t say that again.”

  * * *

  —

  HE asks her questions, but she parries. It is as if she were taking the Fifth Amendment. She does not grant him the right to know. He has the strangest feeling that she is enjoying herself.

  “Ruth Greenhelge told me you had a serious man.”

  “She did?”

  “For a long time.”

  “Really?”

  “She didn’t like him. She called him a hairball. That’s what a cat throws up, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m an aleurophobe.”

  * * *

  —

  HE watches her breathe. As the air goes in, her breasts rise and move away from each other. The ribs of the weave of the thin tee shirt are stretched apart, as if there were an osmosis taking place through the fabric. She sucks life into her from all around her. Macaboy feels so light-headed that if she were to take a deep breath she might inhale him.

  Then she breathes out. The fabric closes. The wastes that leave her body are tinctured with her fragrance. He imagines he can see her out-breath, as if the air were chilly. Her prickly quality hangs about her in a diffuse aureole of musk. Macaboy takes a deep, deep breath, t
rying to incorporate…

  * * *

  —

  THE rule for Dandy Hartwohl was gratification. A woman was a guitar; her function was the expression of harmony through chords. Chords could only be made by plucking. The sooner—and the oftener—the better.

  “How often do you play your dulcimer?”

  “I suppose you’re going to say I have lots of time to practice now.”

  “One thing my mother did give me was music. You know the early memories that stick in your mind? Mine is being down in the cave between the piano bench and the piano—it was an upright. My mother’s feet pumping up and down on the pedals. And the vibrations all around you. I don’t know if she played well. But those harmonies go into you like X-rays.”

  Elaine’s eyes are downcast. She looks faintly puzzled.

  “Remember Dandy Hartwohl I was telling you about? In our Oregon collective? Fifteen—twelve orgasms? All he cared about in music—and I guess in bed—was the beat. Tempo. To me, there is so much more. Pitch, volume, timbre—you know, the quality of the tone. Anyone can have a fast hard beat—but tone: that’s something else. And memory, musical memory. To be able to recapture. I don’t know.”

  She is looking at him now. He feels the arrow turn.