The Walnut Door Read online

  * * *

  —

  MARY Calovatto told Elaine that her husband Giulio worked for Southern New England Telephone as a road man, and she said he could call a pal in the office and get Elaine a phone pronto. Elaine said she got a feeling of tightness in her throat when she talked on the phone, and once, when a man told her how, on transatlantic calls, each person’s voice is broken into tiny bits and scrambled with hundreds of other voices and jammed overseas, and then is unscrambled and reassembled into intelligent speech with personality in it, she started coughing and almost choked—just hearing that. Now they were talking about sending voices as light impulses through glass wires. Elaine said resonance mattered to her; distance in space mattered to her; looks in the eye mattered to her.

  Mary Calovatto looked puzzled. “Never mind, honey,” she said, patting Elaine’s hand. “Giulio’ll put some goose grease in there. You’ll get your phone.”

  * * *

  —

  AND she did, the next day.

  Deciding she had to start somewhere, she called Ruth Greenhelge, the one who worked for the linguistics professor.

  “Come see me,” she said, with the tight feeling in her throat. “I have this dream apartment.”

  “I wouldn’t call that a dream neighborhood.”

  “It’s heaven. What are you talking about?”

  “Wooster Square? You’ve got Eyeties. You’ve got Jigaboos. You’ve got Polacks. You’ve got Litvaks. Conte School used to be one hundred percent nice respectable Italians, now it’s half Jigs.”

  “Come on, Ruth.”

  “Wait and see. A mugging every night.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE called her mother.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “Lainie? Why haven’t you called?”

  “I am calling, Mom.”

  “Six weeks. Not a word.”

  “I’ve got some news you’ll like.”

  “You never had any consideration for your mother.”

  “Mom. Listen.”

  “From the time you were a baby.”

  “I’m not living with Greg any more.”

  “You could call me collect I’ve always said that. What?”

  “I’ve left the bastard.”

  “Child. Child. Your tongue.” Then: “Oh, Lainie, I’m so glad. He never was right for you. I knew that from the beginning.”

  “You might have told me that”

  “Would you have listened?”

  “No. My God, no. What a fucking nerve, deciding who’s right and who’s not right!”

  “Lainie! I should wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

  * * *

  —

  A KNOCK.

  Elaine went to the door and found there a man with Swiss-chocolate skin, about forty, she judged, dressed in old Army fatigues, with a misshapen jaw and a down look. “I’m the ’stodian, ma’am.”

  “Oh, good. I’m Elaine Quinlan.”

  “Yes’m. I seen the mailbox. How long you fixing to stay?”

  “I don’t know—what’s your name?”

  “Justy.”

  “I don’t know how long. It depends.”

  “Got to collect for the garbage disposable, Missus Quillan. Two dollar a week.”

  “For the what?”

  “Trash, ma’am.”

  “How come? You mean the city charges to take it away?”

  “No’m. It’s a regulation.”

  “Whose regulation?”

  “Don’t ask me, ma’am. Just a regulation.”

  “Does everyone have to pay?”

  “Oh, yes’m.”

  “Listen, while you’re here, I have a problem in the kitchen. Come in, Justy.”

  She turned, and the janitor followed her. She heard a clicking sound as he walked. She looked back and saw that he had an artificial left leg.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Nam, ma’am.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “You go tell that to the Vet’ans’ Ministration, ma’am. They got my jawbone, too.” He pushed his chin to the right with his left hand, for her to see the ruins.

  The refrigerator door would not swing shut of its own weight. With much clanking of the plastic limb Justy kneeled and turned the right front foot-screw up, until the door clunked to; then he evened out the other supports. Elaine gave him the two dollars, and he left, clickety-clickety.

  * * *

  —

  MARY Calovatto gave shopping advice, gratis. Right around the corner on Wooster Street were a couple of pizza palaces, the real thing. The most convenient market was just beyond them—a neighborhood place, Cavaliere’s. Mrs. Calovatto was everything Elaine dreaded becoming but could not help liking. Her sorrow was that she was childless. It seemed that Giulio could not forgive her for her barrenness. Elaine pointed out that he might have been sterile. “I know,” Mrs. Calovatto said, “but he given up on me.” When Elaine told her that she had had an abortion, so much blood drained out of Mrs. Calovatto’s face that she looked as if she had been zapped by fate and was turning into an albino. But very soon there was a new rush of rosiness—Mrs. Calovatto obviously had quick springs of inquiry in her—and Elaine saw glints in her eyes, jagged bits of brown glass, flashes, it seemed, of curiosity, envy, and even speculation on her own account

  “By the way,” Elaine said, “do you pay two bucks a week to have the garbage taken away?”

  “Did that son of a gun pull that one on you? Watch out, honey. That man is a common criminal.”

  “I felt sorry for him.”

  “Don’t be a softy. You watch it, now. Those people are infiltrating this entire area.”

  Chapter 2

  THIS woman leans hipslung against the wall not far from the door. It is not possible to tell whether she is married—there is only a last name, Brainard, on the card in the slot by the doorbell—but it seems that she is a bit bleary and gone. Her face is flushed, there seems to be some kind of tropical fever in her eyes, whose whites mock their name, as she watches the young man work.

  He is bent over putting the finishing touches on a dead-bolt rim lock.

  His long hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He is wearing a clean coverall of blue twill with Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M embroidered in gold on the back. Eddie is written in the same gold like a pledge over his heart.

  She has exclaimed at his workmanship. The chisel cuts he has made in the jamb and trim to accommodate the loop plate of the lock are as if machine-squared. To begin with, his sharpening of the chisel was like foreplay; the foot-long whetstone—one big erogenous zone. His eyes are soapy. He is beautiful. She shifts hips.

  These two have had much satisfactory conversation. He has told her he had a brief stay at Reed College. The only subject he liked was chemistry. “I built up a whole philosophy of life in terms of interactions and energy levels.” She has informed him that her breasts are full of silicone. This has been the occasion for elaborate compliments. He has a sunny disposition. There is a lot going on in his head. She shifts hips again. The fit of the loop plate into the chisel cuts is incredibly snug. He has very strong feelings about beer cans littering up National Parks.

  He is done and she looks sad. He closes the door and turns the lock button on the inside. The lock clicks smartly shut. Then he goes outside and closes the door again and works the lock several times with the key.

  He opens and enters. “You understand you have to lock the door with the key every time you go out, and you want to lock it from the inside when you come in. This doesn’t work by itself like a latch lock.”

  She nods. She looks woebegone.

  Then he glances at the chips on the floor and asks, “Where’s your vacuum cleaner?”

  “Oh, don’t bother,” she
says.

  “I don’t leave till I’ve cleaned up,” he says.

  “Then come in and have a cup of coffee,” she says, brightening.

  She might have suggested beer if he hadn’t been so fierce about the parks. He said earlier he had seen most of them in a microbus he used to own. It had scenes painted on it combining dinosaurs and Unidentified Flying Objects, delicately airbrushed in Day-Glo and porch-and-trim enamel. That, he has said, was “in a younger period.” He declines the coffee. He has to get to another job, he says.

  “About that vacuum cleaner,” he says.

  Sudden sunshine. “Come with me,” she says. Up to this time he has stayed right by the door. This is her first opportunity to draw him into her web. “Let’s see,” she says. “I was house cleaning before you came. I think I left it in here.” She leads him into the bedroom. The silicone upholstery is prominent. The bed is unmade. There is an awkward pause, caused by the absence of the vacuum. His look remains high-voltage and hard-assed. She wilts a little and leads him to the kitchen, where the vacuum is hiding in the broom closet.

  * * *

  —

  MACABOY breezes out of the half-timbered apartment house at 402 Whitney Avenue with twenty smackeroos in his pocket. Eight for the lock, twelve for labor. Here is something quite surprising: The company for which he works, Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M, does not have a truck. Chained to a lamppost on the sidewalk is a bicycle which has an undersized front wheel, so as to accommodate, forward of the handlebars, an unusually large metal basket. Into this basket he lowers his wooden tool box. He twirls the knob of a combination lock and undoes a chain heavy enough to anchor an aircraft carrier. He drapes this crosswise over both shoulders, becoming for a moment, in his struggle with the chain, one of the sons in the Laocoön. Then he wheels the bike off the curb and takes off. The handlebars are high, rising away from the steering post in a capital V. He sits up like a Canadian Mountie. He fiddles with the speed shift lever. He steadily churns his knees. Going down Whitney he whistles an aria from Aïda. O terra addio; addio, vale di pianti. Radames and Aïda are sealed in the great stone tomb, this is their Liebestod. Macaboy whistles it merrily. At the Berzelius triangle he takes the left fork, breasting the oncoming one-way traffic. In the first block of Church Street he dismounts and chains his bike to a lamppost. He lifts his tool box out and carries it into the building with him.

  * * *

  —

  IN the outer office of Helena Beadle Real Estate sits Liz Roecake, Mount Holyoke ’71, wasting her education at a gunmetal desk. The office is a blizzard of brochures. Liz wears braids. Macaboy rests his tool box on the floor in front of the desk.

  “Hello, sweet potato.”

  “Eduardo!”

  Just above a whisper: “The dragon in?”

  “No. She’s out showing the Coliseum to a family of midgets.”

  “What else is new?”

  “Hey, a woman named Brainard just called.”

  “She’s the one I was just at. Something wrong?”

  “Said she was most impressed with your what she called artisanship. So reasonable, too! She wanted to thank Helena Beadle Real Estate for recommending you. What did you do for her, Eddie?”

  “It’s a hard life.” He is grinning.

  “Truly, she was breathless.”

  “She has knockers the size of soccer balls.”

  “Chacun à sa…Listen, bad one, Oh! Calcutta!’s at the York Square. Want to catch?”

  “Can’t tonight. Got any new suckers?”

  Liz passes off his refusal without a flicker. “Wait a minute,” she says. “Yeah. There was one the other day. Wooster Square area. Madam says she was a toothsome little biddy. Lost soul type. Maybe she’d be impressed with your artisanship, Fast Eddie.”

  “Come on, Liz. This is bread.”

  “Yeah, like pump-her-nick?” She shuffles some papers. “Let’s see here.” She finds a file card. “Elaine Quinlan. Thirty-two Academy Street It would be a new phone, if any.”

  He writes in a notebook, says to Liz, “You’re a living doll.”

  “Living?”

  * * *

  —

  HE tools up Chapel, whistling. Banks right, onto Park. A couple of faggots are already out, in broad daylight, at the popular pickup corner, Park and Edgewood. Macaboy has passed these two youths here before, his heart has sunk as he watched them—for he can see the corner from the back window of his digs—getting into strange cars; they now wave to him as he swoops left into Edgewood. “Ah so!” Macaboy calls out to them with the bold, guttural, grunting voice of a Samurai. “Rots of ruck!”

  Macaboy lives on the ground floor of one of the toy houses on Lynwood Place, famous in the past for having been broken into once a week. He has converted it into a fortlet He leans his bike beside the door and takes from his tool box the leather case containing his sixteen sets of picks. He selects a delicate forked pressure wrench and a medium rake and goes to work on his own deadbolt lock, just to keep his hands tuned. It takes patience. He has installed a Farleigh-Munson Eversure, hard as a Brazil nut to crack. He hates the private-eye shows on the tube—Cannon sticks a gizmo in a keyhole, one diddle and he’s in. Picking a decent lock is not like that. It’s breathholding work, he tells people. Requires a lover’s fingertips. If you’re patient you can just barely feel the pin tumblers tick into lodgment, like the barest flutterings of the wings of a dying Polyphemus. Day after day pedestrians stroll past, and they see Macaboy bent over, obviously picking a lock, and what do they do? They walk on. They must be spaced out on too many of those mystery shows, they assume he’s a plainclothes good guy making sure that crime will pay only so long as it entertains. Or else they have a load in their pants and don’t want anyone to know. This time it takes him about eight minutes until click, he opens the door. He wheels his bike inside.

  * * *

  —

  THIS apartment is one large room with a kitchenette you could play sardines in, a bathroom just big enough for two to take a shower together; but the generous main room has three zones, each so distinctive as to seem a separated space.

  Against the south wall is a locksmith shop: a long bench with several key machines, for cylindrical, pin-tumbler, and flat keys; two vises; and hammers, files, chisels, picks, drills, wrenches, screwdrivers, all hung in their proper places on wallboard hooks. Half the wall, to the right of the window, is given over to rows and rows of key blanks of most of the famous makes, on hooks, labeled, showing the symmetries of diligent inventory.

  Along the east wall is a carpentry shop: another immaculate bench, another array of tools hung on wallboard hooks in fussy order. Not a grain of sawdust in sight. Everything oiled and sharpened and dusted.

  In the angle between the north and west walls are a young man’s living quarters—a catastrophe of failed training. Clothes kicked off onto the floor, sneakers and hiking boots and Earth Shoes estranged from mates, bedclothes giving hints of epic past contests of flesh or dream, records in a heap on the floor, dusty stereo speakers, dirty dishes in the sink, damp towels on the bathroom floor, signs of haste, signs of torpor, broken cups and resolutions—signs, Macaboy sometimes thinks, of the wreckage of his psyche. Or else, seen in a single panning shot along with the two obsessively tidy shops, signs of a wacky sense of relative importances in a not yet firmed organism.

  He puts three platters of Nathan Milstein’s recording of the Bach partitas and sonatas on his record player and turns on the machine.

  He unzips and removes his company coverall, works on an oil spot on the left leg with Carbona, puts the coverall on a coat hanger, and hangs it in the closet. This he takes care of.

  A long shower. He smooths out the water on his skin with one of the damp towels. He walks around in the buff for a while to dry off, takes the Bach off and puts The Who on, then rummages in his wardrobe on the floor and comes up wi
th some jeans and a tee shirt, which he puts on.

  At his lockeyist’s bench, getting bitting numbers and root depths from a Kanjan code book, he makes cuts in a pair of blank keys of that brand for a knob lock he plans to install the next morning.

  After that, with Joni Mitchell on, he scarfs some Moroccan sardines out of a can, with Kirin beer and Arab bread; then he brews some lapsang souchong.

  He reads Nostromo for a couple of hours.

  By now it is nine o’clock—the best time. He picks the phone up off the floor near the head of the bed, and he lies on his side on the bed and dials Information.