The Walnut Door Read online

  * * *

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  THEY swam side by side to the raft. Pop had a powerful crawl, the right arm curved more than the left, which flailed high on its swing forward as he lifted his face to breathe. On the raft they began horsing around. Macaboy felt his father’s grip tighten—for what reason? The wet skins were slippery. There were some quick moves. They were down on the cocomat. They lay on their sides with their arms around each other, heaving like unhappy lovers. The raft was rocking in the waves. Macaboy’s eyes were a few inches away from the reddish shoulder: those muscles were not kidding. He became very angry, but the anger was mixed with sadness and the beginnings of some kind of dread. Macaboy breathed the coarse smell of his father’s assertion. He was on his back with a living weight like hopeless depression on his chest. He had a glimpse of the set jaw against the sky—could it be that his own face now had such a look of determined hatred as that? The wetness from the swim had become the hot salt wetness of bitter labor. His muscles ached. His whole body ached with a feverish melancholy that was like the strength-draining grippe of February. Then he felt such a stab of heat at the unfairness of everything that he could not keep himself from arching and hefting and tilting the sky on edge. He was on top then—it took some time to know it—his elbow hurt on the cocomat. He heard a strange man’s voice in his own throat: “Had enough?”

  It took a month for the raspberry on Macaboy’s hip to heal. The mark is still there.

  Chapter 31

  SHE put on a house dress and cooked herself a real and entire dinner of the home sort, for the first time in months. Two broiled chicken thighs; a toy can of Le Sueur peas; a salad with wafers of red onion and rings of green pepper varnished with Wishbone dressing; toast; coffee. She had even thought to chill a pint carafe of Paul Masson chablis. Aretha Franklin on the stereo. A proper setting on her card table in the living room.

  Her father had been loony for those BB-sized Le Sueur peas. There were some nights when he was in a zoomy mood, and she and her mother laughed and laughed with him. She remembered her mother telling the story of the Michigan basketball player named Ammon Lolly who took her to dance one night at the Black Angus. When he sat at the nightclub table he looked stunning in his blue suit. Tall as a yacht. But when he danced you could see he had no socks on. He was still growing, and the cuffs of his pants rode high, and his long ivory ankles flashed above his black shoes as he flung his legs around one of the stuffiest places in Cleveland. When the check came, he screamed. Mom did the scream with eyes like Daisy Mae’s in Li’l Abner.

  Mom must have been quite a dish when she was young. There were many stories of avid wolves. Dad laughed them all off: a bunch of wackos. She was a virgin on his nuptial couch—that he could vouch for, and often did.

  Elaine had the strangest feeling: that instead of sitting at her card table opposite the three soused Henrys, she was on an aisle seat on an American Airlines jet flying home from limbo. The stewardess has just brought her a second cup of coffee. Flying home from Gregsville. She knew now that Greg had been just an agent. His assignment: to give her a moratorium. She had been wondering whether he, too, hadn’t locked her in, without her ever realizing it. For months…. The pilot comes up on the public address system:…beginning our descent to Hopkins Airport, please fasten your seat belts and observe the no smoking sign.

  On the ground Dad is dead. She is deeply happy. Dad’s laughter is in her. Plentagger made that possible. And she wonders: Will Macaboy’s father enter into his son after he leaves life in Avon? Or can such immortality be claimed only for a parent of sex opposite to that of the vessel child? Perhaps that’s not a rule. Macaboy has talked of his father with a prodigal’s yearning and love. If the father dies into him, what will Macaboy then be like?

  * * *

  —

  AFTER dinner she did the dishes and got her laundry together, bundled into one of her sheets. Macaboy would have to take it to the Koin-Kleen.

  Or.

  She saw it as she was stashing the soiled linen on top of the fridge.

  She hears the doorbell and she runs to answer. She turns the doorknob and pulls open the walnut artifact—but not far: she swings it only about a foot. She gets a great lift from seeing Macaboy—that manic perfectionist—standing there in the hall with a tray balanced above his right shoulder on the fingertips of his right hand. (For he promised, last thing last night, that when he would get back from Avon on Wednesday he would bring her a Mexican dinner from Fat Taco’s.) They exchange a few words. She fills the door gap. Suddenly she darts a hand upward, the tray flips backward, he turns in surprise. She gives him a sharp crack in the balls. He doubles over. She runs past him down the stairs and out to the big world of law and order.

  She heard her old man laughing in her head. She undressed and went to bed and took off in a jet liner that swam underwater with sinuous movements of its fuselage.

  Chapter 32

  SHE heard the doorbell and ran to answer. She was wearing a work shirt and a pair of jeans. She turned the knob and pulled open the walnut artifact—but not far: she swung it only about a foot. She got a great lift from seeing Macaboy—that dear man!—standing there in the hall with a tray balanced above his right shoulder on the fingertips of his right hand.

  “Are you O.K.?” she asked. “Your father—?”

  “He’ll never die,” Macaboy said with a kind of vehemence: pride? bitterness?—she couldn’t tell.

  He made as if to move forward, but she filled the door gap.

  “Was it a false alarm? Did your mother—”

  “No. But the old cock’s just unwilling to bow out.”

  Suddenly Elaine darted a hand upward to flip the tray.

  Like a striking snake Macaboy’s left hand shot across in front of him and batted her hand away before it could touch the tray. Then he reached and grasped her wrist—a Vise Grip wrench on a piece of soft copper tubing. This was the second time they had touched. “You crazy bitch!” he said. “Have you lost your mind?” His eyes had a forest fire in them. Letting go of her wrist he shifted his hand to high on her chest, spanning her collarbones, and pushed her roughly back into the room. The tray never veered by a millimeter from the horizontal.

  He kicked his masterwork, the door, wide open. “What did you think you were doing?” he said. “It’s pretty clear you don’t feel very safe yet—huh?”

  He was in a rage. Elaine began to laugh. Joy caused almost the same kind of gross fullness in her throat as the scream had, the other day. At the same time, she felt a wash of tenderness akin to what she had felt when she had looked closely at the moss. “My God!” she said. “You’re human.”

  With a stiff back he kicked the door shut and said, “Get in the kitchen.”

  “Does a visit to your father always give you a need to pass the shit down the pecking order?”

  “My father,” he said in a suddenly quiet voice, “is a very gentle person. Very gentle.”

  She gave him a long stare, then turned and went into the kitchen. He followed with the tray.

  * * *

  —

  EVERYTHING was as usual. She was sitting at the tiny kitchen table, and he was getting the dinner ready. He had lit the broiler to heat the tacos.

  “I guess part of the reason for all that junk I went through in the sixties was that he hadn’t prepared me for the changes. Black Muslims. Their rhetoric set my teeth on edge, and then I’d wonder: Am I a racist? The assassinations. Vietnam. I sit there with a 3-S, and my best friend at Reed freaks out all the way shooting up crystal. Everybody fucks everybody. When Pop told me bedtime stories he didn’t have the right kind of imagination.”

  She was groping for reasons why she hadn’t gone through all that junk in the sixties. She’d gone through junk, but not that junk. Greenhelge had seemed a big joke to her at Bennington: so grim and angry. Elaine searched her own lack of anger—it’s like a
vitamin deficiency. Somewhere, perhaps, in the tension between her mother’s predictability and her father’s unpredictability lay a clue to the lack. She laughed off too much. She should be wildly angry at Macaboy right now. But.

  * * *

  —

  THE Mexican food made her feel hot on the top of her head. She had a place, abaft where the spooky fontanel had once been, as she thought of it, which broke into a sweat when she ate ginger or curry or hot pepper. She made Macaboy feel the place. This was the third time they touched (she counted the shove in the doorway as part of the second).

  “You’re a hot mama,” Macaboy said.

  “It takes the place of anger in my life,” she said, for she was still wondering. “You know: I can say I’m a hothead.”

  “Cool,” Macaboy said.

  * * *

  —

  ELAINE stood up. “You finished?”

  He had just dried the last of the washed pots and had stashed it in the cabinet under the sink. He now did a matador’s veronica, with the dishtowel as the cape, and said, “Olé! Guess so.”

  “Then sit down.”

  Obviously surprised at hearing the tone of voice of an elementary school principal, he obeyed.

  She stepped toward the place where he had just been standing, pulled open a drawer, reached in, and came out with a long, pointed carving knife of steel that was not stainless—the old-fashioned cook’s kind that really keeps an edge. She ran it six times down the slot of an Aladdin sharpener screwed to the doorframe to her right

  Then she faced Macaboy and, holding the knife stab-fashion, said, “And now we’re finally going to get it over with.”

  “Get what over with? We already ate, remember?”

  “I’m going to rape you.”

  “You’re what?”

  “You heard me.”

  Macaboy’s face shone. He looked as if he’d been promised a chocolate-chip cone with a double dip. “That’s a neat trick. How you going to get my thingumbob up?”

  “You better wipe that smirk off your face, man. I’m serious.”

  “I read about that once,” he said. “Three gals raped a sailor in a Pontiac coupe, in Jersey. They did it on a shoulder of the Jersey Turnpike, right near a speed-limit sign, remember? He brought charges. Said he was a virgin. Remember that case? I always wondered—how did it work? As I recall, he got a judgment. How the hell did that rape work?”

  “Watch. I’ll show you.”

  The fingers of her left hand were at the top button of her work shirt. They talk about the Women’s Movement: this undulation, hinged on the fifth lumbar vertebra, where the hipbone connects to the backbone, was what she had now most subtly begun. Her right hand still held the knife high, its point aimed at Macaboy’s comprehension. She unbuttoned the button and folded back three inches of shirt Then, changeable as always, she kicked her left loafer all the way to the ceiling. She did a little one-shoe-on, one-shoe-off dance, as if going round the rim of a hillside meadow full of buttercups. The other loafer flew straight for Macaboy’s head. He ducked. Her left hand went back to button work. This was slow labor; it seemed she usually used her other hand to button and unbutton shirts. She said not a word. She had no need of music; music would have been constricting, for hers was the erratic tidal tempo of the knowledge of power in conflict with trained modesty. The cleft deepened. After she diddled out the last button at her waist, she bent her left leg up and reached down behind and pulled off the sock. She threw it, like carelessly spilled salt, back over her left shoulder. Right sock next. Over the shoulder. She could see in Macaboy’s eyes that her work was not entirely in vain; laughter had pulled back and was hiding in the shadows, and something she had never seen before was out in front That something made her feel a blush climb slowly from her neck. She flipped her rear shirttail out. But the left front shirttail seemed to have a playful puppy in a growling grip on the other end. She tugged and tugged. It came with a final grrrr, and in one fluent move, like the shrug of a sincere person who really does not know, her left breast and arm and shoulder and back came out from under cover. She switched the knife to her left hand and backed away a little, as if it were she, not he, who was threatened in clumsy-time. Then the shirt was on the floor and he was again the one in danger; her right hand took the knife back. She was made aware by the pupils of Macaboy’s eyes, which were shuttered down as if bathed in brightest light, that every move of her body now brought an answering shudder or lift of her breasts. She pulled at the zipper of her jeans. Peeling her jeans with her right hand upraised required motions too slow, and far too serious in implication, to be called wiggles; Elaine felt as a bird must feel in the moment before liftoff. She stepped in her panties away from the puddle of denim on the floor. And now, both hands raised, she gave herself for a very brief time to primal motions that had, from history’s beginning, roused jaded Sultans and bone-weary bricklayers and tired husbands and burlecue freaks to upper levels of interest She stopped that and lowered the point of the knife to the hem of 60% polyester and 40% cotton at her right hip. With some help from her left hand, and with great care—but keeping her eyes on Macaboy’s eyes—she pricked the knife between the edge of the cloth and her skin, and flicked the blade outward. An inch of the cloth was cut. Once more she raised her hands and made the moves of delay and provocation. Then she cut again and the cloth fell on her left thigh and slid down her leg.

  “Now, you crumb, is your thingumbob up? Or isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he said.

  “Stand up.”

  He did. It was.

  She made a lunge for his fly with her left hand, still holding the knife for a strike with her right. “Get it out here,” she said between clenched teeth.

  “No,” he said, and too easily grabbed her right wrist. “No.”

  She twisted back and forth and in her struggles mimicked, without necessarily meaning to, the motions of the seraglio that she had used to another purpose a few moments before, hips and breasts in fervent oscillations which showed how narrow, in the end, might be the gap between sexual aggression and self-defense.

  “Drop the knife,” he said.

  She let it fall.

  He released her wrist. “I don’t want it this way. Put your clothes on.”

  Feeling suddenly naked, she covered her breasts with her forearms. Then she darted here and there picking up her clothes and went to her bedroom to dress. She was sort of laughing. She told herself the reason she wasn’t angry was that Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M, with its “this way,” had begun to make her feel supersafe.

  Chapter 33

  AT about ten the next morning there came a knock knock. What a dynamite surprise! A Swedish and a Western and coffee! She ran to comb her nut-brown hair, ran back to let him in. But when she pulled at the doorknob, it would not come away; its resistance ran up through her arm and shocked her shoulder.

  “Who is it?”

  “Quin! You all right?” Greenhelge’s voice cut through the two-inch walnut like a Skilsaw.

  “Greenie! What are you—”

  “Let me in.”

  “I can’t. I’m very infectious.”

  “Christ, Quin.”

  “Really. The doc said I wasn’t to allow anyone.”

  “What is it?”

  “Viral pneumonia. Bitch of a strain. One sneeze and—you may be catching it through the damn door.”

  “I tried to telephone.”

  “I’ve been temporarily disconnected.”

  “Just nothing when I called. No ring. No operator.”

  “I forgot to pay my bill.”

  “I called that Lampson company. They said you were out sick.”

  “Well. You see?”

  “Let me in.”

  “I can’t, Greenie. Honest. I have a temp. The doctor said I was poison, he wanted like a quarantine.”
/>   “What doctor?”

  “It’s a name like Polassichick.”

  “Spell it.”

  “P-o-l-a-s-…I’m not sure.”

  “Quinnie. You called him, didn’t you?”

  “I have it in the other room.”

  “Get it.”

  “Look, you’re being nosy. Lay off. I don’t feel so good.”

  “You sound damn funny. I’m—do you need anything? How do you get food?”

  “Macaboy brings it and leaves it at the door.”

  “Do you want me to call the telephone company?”

  “God damn it, Greenie. Leave me alone, will you? I’ll get to my checkbook when I feel better.”

  * * *

  —

  FOUR fifteen in the afternoon. The same knock knock.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. I called Macaboy when I got home this morning. I was worried. He confirmed what you said. He said you’re improving.”

  “Bully for me.”

  “He spelled the doctor’s name for me.”

  “You sure are a trusting friend. What does it take to make a believer out of you?”

  “I couldn’t find this Polak or Slovak or whatever he is in the phone book.”

  “He comes from Guilford.”

  “From Guilford he makes a house call in New Haven?”

  “Greenie. My temperature is rising.”

  “The reason I came this time, Macaboy called me back this afternoon. He wanted me to give you a message. His father died. He has to go to Avon. He said he’d check in as soon as he gets bade.”

  Chapter 34

  BY the second morning—it was raining cows and horses—her food was all gone. She had even eaten the little oval can of anchovy paste that Bottsy had given her as a house present, and now she was drinking glass after glass of water to put out the salt fires.