The Walnut Door Page 7

  “May I survey the layout?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He steps inside, takes the doorknob, and clicks the door shut. They are closed into the room together with the door locked. She moves away, to the other side of a rocking chair. But then he is on his knees, squinting at the poor fit of door to jamb, of latch to strike plate. He wobbles the knob, which is loose in its seating. He stands, opens the door again, taps the jamb and trim with the knuckle of his middle finger, and turns to her.

  This is the first time he has fired his high-energy look at her. “Ah,” he says. Is this a professional statement?

  Her neck is longish, and as she stands now there is a curve of her spine and a slight tilt of her head like those of a figure by Correggio: one of the paintings that hit him so hard in Parma. She has hung an orange-colored poster on the wall to her right, and her cheek on that side, reflecting its glow, looks like cantaloupe meat at the prime of readiness. Her eyes, greenish blue, have splinters of yellow suspicion in them. Her shoulders are full, she holds her hands flat as if ready to deliver a chop with a curdling outcry. Is that eye shadow on her lids, or the bluish transparency that follows shallow sleep broken into by fitful dreams of biting dogs and of struggles to reach destinations? Her hostile eyes are on his, so he chooses not to look at her breasts. Somewhere in the ribcage behind them is the seat of that voice, which now sounds: “So?”

  “The doorframe,” he says, “is like Aetna Life. They don’t make ’em like that any more. But this door.” He shakes his head.

  At the moment she has nothing to say.

  “That door is about as much protection as a potato pancake.”

  He sees ground glass in the blue-green irises, so he softens his tone. “See, they must have replaced the original—who knows when? The problems you have: These panels—cheap-shit plywood, corrugated cardboard would be just as good. Then you have this Grand Canyon between the edge of the door and the jamb; makes for a totally unsafe situation: jimmying’s far too easy. On top of that you have one of these tinsel knob locks. Our company is kind of old-fashioned, we much prefer a mortised lock. Look at this loose knob, anyhow.” He rattles it again.

  “You finished?”

  “The hinges—”

  “Pack it in, sonny. I asked for a key change.”

  “Sure. Sure. I brought a Yale cylinder. I just thought—”

  “Sometimes a person can think too much—like right over the edge.”

  “We’ll fix you right up, Miss Quinlan.” What a slash, to go from Mzz to Miss! Her eyes catch it. He turns and begins rattling around in his wooden tool box. He is charming. While he works he talks—croons. This section, Wooster Square, used to be Little Italy. The church across the square, St. Michael’s. You wouldn’t be apt to see Renaissance churches like that in Rome or Florence—it is more a small-town type of church. Yeah. (The “yeah” is in response to a question that should have been asked but hasn’t been.) Did a hitching trip through Italy and North Africa two years ago. You might think of your average church as being open to worshipers twenty-four hours a day. Not in Popesville. Santa Maria in Trastevere, old part of Rome, you have these iron-work gates to the portico—fantastic mosaics—iron fence must be twenty feet high to keep the sacred-vessel snatchers out. “I mean,” he says, “security is a very pervasive concept.” The keys to those iron gates, at a conservative estimate: eight inches long. But these kids play soccer in the square in front of the church, and all the time some hero keeps kicking the ball over the top. You ought to see them climb over that twenty-foot fence—spikes at the top! Those kids could rob the Virgin Mary blind.

  She hovers. It is not that she hangs back. She seems interested in the work and part of the time leans over his shoulder to watch. He is on his knees. Once or twice he imagines he feels her breath on his neck. This operation usually takes no more than five minutes. He prolongs it with numerous false moves—most enjoyable when working under such close scrutiny.

  Until a guy named Mayor Lee came along, he says, Wooster Square was a slum. The Eyeties came in in the nineties—immigrants. Before that this section was called the New Township: all kinds of prosperity. These are elegant houses. People don’t even look at them.

  “I do,” she says in a suddenly friendly voice. “I was thinking at one time of going into architecture.”

  “A woman architect,” he says. “There aren’t too many. They say architecture calls for a really autocratic temperament.”

  No response.

  For a while, this was really the heart of New Haven. Down here, he says, along Mill River, things hummed. Brewster carriage factory. Clocks, bentwood chairs, rubber boots, hardware, melodeons, daguerreotypes. “Our company requires its operatives to know this city cold.”

  She is silent.

  “I see you’re a reader,” he says.

  She says nothing. His fingers keep twiddling.

  “My favorite is The Charterhouse of Parma. Did you ever read The Charterhouse of Parma?”

  “Modern European lit,” she says. “Junior year.”

  “Stendhal wrote that mother in fourteen weeks, can you believe it? The part where Fabrizio is locked up in the tower—this totally visual love affair he carries on! That really sends me.”

  She says nothing. Twiddle-diddle delay. He is running out of tactics.

  “Junior year? Where?”

  “Bennington.”

  “Holy shit. You one of those?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know, Bennington chicks, there’s something so—they’re like Mondrians. Or imitation Mondrians. Very hard-edged. Patterned. Know what I mean? I went west to college.”

  “Are you almost done?” The voice is like a paring knife.

  “Almost.” His knees on the hardwood floor feel as if they were stuffed with damp peat moss. “Sometimes,” he says, “I think words—I mean spoken words, print is something else—words that we speak are poor tools. I like to use good tools.” He shakes a magnetized screwdriver at her over his shoulder. “One thing I never learned in college was how to say what I mean. I can think all these things perfectly, but like when it comes to pushing those thoughts over into sound—I don’t know.” He rises, almost bumping into her. “Do you think it’s just us?”

  “Us?” she sharply asks, as if he has made an indecent proposal.

  “People like us. My father never had any trouble finding accurate words—specially when I did something he didn’t like. Here are your keys,” he says. “Don’t leave them lying around.”

  She reaches out a flat palm, and he drops the keys into it.

  He is almost issuing beeps, his capacitors are so overloaded. “What I mean is, there never seems to be time to think out what you want to say. Then you spend a lot of time when it’s too late trying to figure out what you would have said if you’d had time. Even then, the words are sort of—I don’t know. Ever break a thermometer? It’s ruined anyway, so you start playing with the little balls of mercury that spilled out? Words—am I—”

  “How much?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “The company doesn’t charge for a first visit—if it’s just a key change.”

  “Oh, man—”

  “The company wants you to feel safe.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Cross my heart.” He runs his forefinger in an X over the Eddie. “Look, here’s the work order.” He takes the yellow slip out of his thigh pocket, spreads it on his left hand, and moves around beside her, his shoulder almost touching hers. The slip has Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M printed across the top, all right This is a carbon copy. “Look here. N slash C. That means ‘no charge’ on anybody’s voucher, right?”

  “New Haven is some loony town,” she says.

  “We’ll sock it to you whe
n we hang the door,” he says with a sweet expression.

  “No way, Eddie boy,” she says. This is the first time she has granted him an identity.

  On the way out he wobbles the loose doorknob and sends her an electric-eye beam.

  * * *

  —

  WANT to see a goofy man? Look at Macaboy pumping his knees up Chapel. You’d think he was sail planing. He has a good hard mouth for whistling—this time it’s Fidelio. Florestan is chained in Don Pizarro’s subterranean dungeon. Here comes Leonore dressed as a man, to save him. Rapturously: O namenlose Freude! The timbre of Macaboy’s whistling is thick, piercing—like a cardinal’s song. Ludwig van Beethoven bounces in splashes of redbird echo off the plate-glass windows of Ann Taylor’s smart shop; behind the half-mirroring glass, the mannequins look surprised at Macaboy’s euphoria. Suddenly the music breaks off. Macaboy could kick himself for the way that line about the Mondrians popped out. She is hypersensitive; she seems to be in a phase of temporary repairs. He sees her melon cheek; the hair has been shampooed; the eyes are flashing with an anger which, he would be willing to bet his final buck, doesn’t tell the truth about itself. Will she feel safe? The lips go out, pursed, as if to kiss the day, but instead begin again to peal out Macaboy’s high.

  Chapter 10

  ELAINE went next morning to the Koin-Kleen on Orange Street.

  Keeping George Washington sunnyside up, she put a dollar bill in the change machine. It was always a delightful surprise to her when the change came bursting out into its cup, as if she had hit at least two cherries and a bell on a one-armed bandit. The broken buck wouldn’t last long. Thirty-five cents in the vending machine for a chinchy little box of Tide. Fifty cents for the washer: her sheets, pillowcase, and light fabrics were disposed around the agitator in one of the machines. The drier would chew up a nickle and a dime—and wouldn’t get things beyond damp dry at that. First load. More to come.

  “You’re new here.”

  Elaine adored conversations in laundromats. Visits to laundromats were like plane rides: pickup relationships skirted to the very horizon of possibility and then quickly burned themselves out. Beyond the last tumble of the drier, as beyond the airport of destination, there could be no further claims.

  “No,” Elaine lied, “I just used to go to a laundromat over on Whalley. I’ve been in New Haven three long years.”

  The lady who had spoken was diagonally across from Elaine, shaking an appalling history of child rearing into a washer. The lady had a permanent wink in her right eye, with a matching droop of the right side of her mouth.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Lake Place,” Elaine lied.

  “Ooh, I wouldn’t live there in a million years. They say they get burgled in there every night.”

  “My husband and I have been lucky,” Elaine said, and she backed away to knock on the wood of a windowsill. “We haven’t been broken into once.”

  “ ‘We’? You’re such a pretty thing—I thought you was a student. A married woman?”

  “Two years next week.”

  “But you have to be kidding me about your house. Everybody’s been burgled. We been burgled three times, and we’re on a good street-Lawrence.”

  “No, you see, we feel very secure. My husband is a locksmith. He knows how to safeguard a place.”

  “Bless Bob! Lucky you! What a gold mine, these days!”

  “I suppose it could be, but my husband doesn’t believe in ripping people off.”

  “What’s the matter with his head, dearie? Everybody does it. How can he get any place?”

  “He says, ‘Why should I rob ’em? I’m trying to prevent their being robbed.’ He’s something else! Completely self-educated. He’s the best-read person I know. He’s reading Stendhal in French right now.”

  This was too embarrassing to discuss; the lady changed the subject. “No children, I see.” She nodded toward Elaine’s plastic laundry basket.

  “I’m expecting.”

  “Oh, golly. How nice! It turns the world upside down, having little ones. When are you due?”

  “Well, my doctor can’t tell. The egg was lodged in the Fallopian tubes, and one of my husband’s spermatozoa collared it in there, my uterus is tipped, and I have a very queer irritation from my vaginal deodorant.”

  The lady’s one good eye did a loop-the-loop. “You got problems!”

  * * *

  —

  SHE liked Greenhelge better this time. They went to The Blessings. Greenie knew how to order Peking food. They had six dishes. Greenie’s fortune cookie said: CASH IS SLIPPING AWAY. REVIEW YOUR ACCOUNTING SYSTEM.

  Greenie said, “You can say that again, Confucius.”

  They drank a gallon of tea and talked about parents.

  Elaine said, “We had Dr. Spock all over the place. That was kind of remarkable for an Irish Catholic family. We never got spanked. I take it back: my brother was spanked once—with a soft, fuzzy slipper, and it sort of tickled his ass, and he laughed, and that pressed Father’s potato-famine button, and he used the back of a hairbrush, for real. But that’s absolutely the only time I can remember. Mostly—reasoning. Oh, God, they explained and explained and explained: we had to see every split hair of right and wrong. They were so boringly decent. Dad was in love with our Lab, Josephus. He was like St. Francis with that oaf of a hound. Mother, she was more of an amateur lawyer. What got her off was winning one for the good guys. She was always citing some decision of Justice Black or Learned Hand. They fell completely out of their tree over Stevenson. You could have cut the decency around our house with a hacksaw. And yet, when it came to each other: slam bang crash voom grrr pow—Jesus, Greenie, the fights! I mean, the crockery that got smashed. Real bruises, I saw them. One martini and—”

  “Home, sweet home,” Greenie said. “I had all that, too.”

  “Bet you didn’t have this: After one of their championship bouts, Mom up and left—like I left Greg, come to think of it. She just packed up and popped me in the car and split. I was like eight. They couldn’t get a divorce because of the Church. Mom took a salt box near Montclair—her money. So one Sunday I’m out playing with a neighbor kid, and my Dad drives up, and he says, ‘Hey, doll, want to go for a ride with Daddy? Hop in!’ So sure, I get in, and he kidnaps me. Took me to Connecticut. He said he loved Mom and me so much he couldn’t live without both of us.”

  “How did it come out?”

  “Oh, hell, she followed us to Connecticut. Moved back in. I guess she’d really missed being slammed around.”

  Greenhelge said, “I’ve given up trying to use memories to account for the way I am.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to get married,” Elaine said. “I want to try to find the right guy, but I don’t know, when you say ‘till death us do part,’ it clips your wings. It seems to shorten the time. I want the time to be long long long—and varied.”

  “But men want it on the line. They’re always saying, ‘Bottom line. Bottom line.’ My boss is supposed to be a logician, he’s married as you know, he’s always pawing me and talking about the bottom line. I think that means he wants me to sign a contract to fuck with no strings.”

  “You can get around that kind of junk.”

  “How?”

  “Wiles, Greenie. Wiles. You’ve heard of wiles.”

  * * *

  —

  GREENHELGE drove Elaine to Wooster Square and dropped her in front of the house.

  Elaine pushed the foyer door open, and in its rapid closing she thought she heard the rush of a hawk’s wings. Then she realized that what she was actually hearing was music, and she froze: played the game of statues: one arm raised, one foot forward.

  James Taylor was singing “Knocking Around the Zoo,” loud for him, from the second floor. Back. The song was in the early album of his that she had. Elaine hovered there. Sh
ould she go up at all? Greenie must have pulled away. She listened for a clicking sound mixed with the music, then remembered she had had the lock changed; the old master key would no longer work. She felt a blip of annoyance with the awkward young man from Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M—a lot of good he had done her! She reacted as she always did when she was conscious of the hawk—incautiously. She started up the stairs. Her crazy heart ran ahead of her.

  She could see from the top of the flight that her door was standing wide open. The lights were on. Music was pouring out:

  “Just knocking around the zoo on a Thursday afternoon

  There’s bars on all the windows

  And they’re counting up the spoons…”

  She paused beside the door to gather her recklessness together.

  She walked in. Nothing. No one. Bright lights and loud music.

  The bedroom. A light was shining in there, too.

  She hugged herself. There was a motherly, protective love in her arms folded tight across under her breasts. The new Elaine—whenever she might arrive—was to have this tender side in good measure. It was a strength that was to come from a giving that was not to be a giving in.

  Keeping her eye on her bedroom door, she went to the record player and shut it off. The abrupt silence was like an implosion, so powerful it might shatter the windows with its insucking force.

  When the crash of the silence had passed, she loudly said (trying to drop her speech into the gut-sound of Bottsy Feldman’s hoarse voice): “All right. Come on out.”

  She waited. Total silence. No clicks. No breathing. Hardly even her own.

  “Justy?”

  No answer.

  “Who is it?”

  No answer.

  She stood like a fiberglass figure for a long, long time. Then she saw that one of her terrarium jars had been knocked from the mantel. She went to it. It was her artillery plant—when you reached in the jar and touched the clusters of blossoms with your fingertip they exploded into tiny clouds of pollen: if only all wars could be like that! The plant was fatally wounded. She knelt and mourned. The dirt and minifoliage and moss and glass had been gathered together into a heap on the floor. A slip of paper was beside the debris, and written on the paper in seaweed strokes were the words: REALLY SORRY. Her felt pen, its cap neatly replaced, lay beside the note.