The Followed Man (8 page)

Marcia scuttled over on her
knees and turned the volume up, a sea-crash of undifferentiated
breathings and cries, transcended by the man's joking, patronizing
voice:
Yes, my dear Mrs. Mustig! And now . . . and now! Yes! Yes!
Here it is ... .

"Honey, Honey!"
Marjorie called across the noise. "We can't hear! Turn it down!"

Marcia, on her knees in front of
the haze of color and sound, paid no attention to her mother. Mickey
looked at his mother once, quickly, then at Marcia with an amusement
he tried to con­ceal; evidently he considered his little sister a
character. Marjorie got up, big and graceful, and turned the volume
down. Marcia waited until her mother was seated again before she
turned the volume back up.

"If you don't turn it down
we'll have to turn it off!" Marjorie called to her.

There was more of this, Luke
feeling the detachment of the ob­server, the nervousness of one
who feels embarrassment in oth­ers, until Marcia was crying and
pouting. Finally Mrs. Ryan said, "I'll take them out, Marge.
Here, let me get them ready." She had decided to trust him, as
they always trusted him unless they were slightly insane. "Mickey,
go get your clothes changed. We'll go to the playground." She
took Marcia's hand and led her into a bed­room, Marcia's face red
and wet, her lower lip still swollen into a pout.

He took a swig of his gin and
tonic and Marjorie said, "Here, let me freshen your drink. Maybe
I'll have one, too. It's hard for kids just sitting around, but what
can you do?"

He shook his head. She took his
half-f glass away and he heard the prying fracture of ice in an
ice tray, the thud of the re­frigerator, its hiccup before it
hummed—domestic noises he hadn't heard for several months
unless they were ones he had made himself.

At first there had been the
friends who came to see how he was taking it, husbands and wives
bringing food. And the few neigh­bors he knew in that dormitory
suburb stopped by with not much to say at first except the half-mute
words of consolation and the touching of hands. Later some came to
offer advice, his dissolu­tion apparent but not too obvious
because he did the dishes and picked things up, more or less. But
evidently there were ways beyond his ken in which Helen had kept the
house fresh and new; after a while an aura, or patina, of staleness
and neglect had sifted through the house like a fog.

Marjorie brought back two gin
and tonics. This time she sat in the deeper chair, her long legs
crossed, and offered him a ciga­rette, which he accepted. She got
up to get him an ashtray, a heavy metal square with a thin,
Giacometti-like figure standing on one edge of it, arms raised in a
supplicating pose.

"What's this?" he
asked, surprised; even though it decorated an ashtray, the figure was
unlike any other object he'd seen in the apartment.

"It used to have a saying
on it," she said, hastening to explain that it was incomplete as
it was. " 'Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?'"

Yes, for a moment, in that
strangely precise way in which the eye assesses value, it had been
wrong for this place. Now he looked more closely at the supplicating
figure and saw that it hadn't the rough unsentimentality of
Giacometti; each limb and feature, though skeletal enough, merely
implored.

When Mrs. Ryan and the children,
who now wore their play­ground dungarees, had left, Marjorie
asked why he wanted to talk to her, really.

"So I can write about your
experience, I guess," he said. "What it's been like for
you."

"But why me in particular?"
she asked, blushing a little around the edges of her makeup, which
now seemed a mask he wished she hadn't wanted to wear, though that
mask was part of what he must observe. To her, he supposed, it wasn't
a mask at all, but sim­ple reality; one wore makeup in certain
situations just as one wore clothes, and clothes were not necessarily
a mask.

"Because Jimmo McLeod and
Mike Rizzo talked to me about your husband, and your name and address
were on a list I got from
Gentleman."

"Sheila—Mrs.
Ryan—made me call and check on you," she said.

"And I passed?"

"They said you were a
well-known writer. Then Sheila—Mrs. Ryan—looked up
Gentleman
in the book and it was the same num­ber you gave
me, so we figured you were you." She laughed, then stopped
suddenly, as though her easy laugh had been wrong. "But what
could you write about me?"

"I want to find out who you
are, what it was like before and af­ter. I know my questions
might make you unhappy and if you don't want to answer them, please
don't. I don't want to add to your tragedy, even in little ways."

"Is that what reporters
say?"

"It's what I say, anyway,"
he said.

"I thought just now you
were going to cry," she said. "Now, if
I
do, my mascara
will get all gooey and my false eyelashes might fall off. You know,
tears look funny on pancake makeup. They sort of roll down like they
were on oil or something." She laughed again, her eyes, which he
now saw were light green, looking out of their heavily darkened rims
at him.

"Why do you wear it?"
he asked, a question he hadn't intended.

She thought, frowning at him,
though not in anger. She blinked, and he wondered if her lids felt
sticky. Closed, her eyes were ragged black slits in fleshcolored
paste.

"If I'm going to have to
cry I'll take it all off," she said. "I don't know why I
didn't think I'd have to cry. You're going to ask about Mickey and
where we went when we went on trips to the country. We went to
Pennsylvania sometimes, sometimes Vermont, or At­lantic City.
Sometimes on Sunday we just drove around in the suburbs looking at
houses. You know, with a yard, a garage and grass. Neither of us ever
lived in a house, but I always wanted to try it. Just think! Your own
house? Do you live in a house?"

"Yes," he said.

"Is it nice? Trees and
grass and all?"

"Yes, it's nice. You'd like
it."

"I'd like to see it
sometime. Where is it?"

"In Wellesley,
Massachusetts."

"But you know, with all
those doors and windows on every side, don't you feel funny? Like,
somebody could look in, or break in. Like, here, we got the door with
the police lock, and bars on the windows. I mean if somebody tries to
get in at least I know what door." She stopped and shook her
head, the high golden crown of her hair seeming too massive to rotate
that quickly. "But you want to ask questions, right?"

"Well, you're answering
them before I even ask," he said.

"You mean you want to know
things like we wanted to live somewhere else? Anyway, who wouldn't?"

He asked her about her life
before she was married, and she told him that she came from the
Bronx, grew up in the Bronx, graduated from high school and worked as
a receptionist-secre­tary in a private clinic. She met Mickey
Rutherford because she sometimes dated his younger brother, who was
in high school when she was. Mickey never went to regular high
school, but he got an equivalency certificate in the army, where he
was a techni­cian—a mechanic. In Vietnam he was wounded in
the back when a rocket landed thirty feet away from him. Then when he
got out of the army his uncle, who was a shop steward, got him into
the IUOE. He was only on permit a year before he got his card.

Mickey loved his kids. He was a
home-loving man. "I still can't believe sometimes he's not
coming home. Sometimes I have to shake myself, around five or six,
because without knowing it I been expecting to hear his key in the
lock. And then I got to know he's not ever going to come busting in
and grab me and the kids ever again."

She put her fingers to her eyes,
then looked at them. "I better go wash my face," she said.
"Look, I don't want to weep all over the place. I'm not a
crybaby. ..." She got up, trying to suppress a high whinny of
grief, and went into the bathroom past the sign,

MICK IN THOUGHT.

As the water ran in the bathroom
he considered flight from her, but that would be betrayal. She
wouldn't know why he had left. She would wonder, and feel bad on that
account as well. He liked her, and felt that she was good. He was
aware of his mental note-taking: ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM on that
plaque from a gift house or souvenir shop supposedly meant, Don't let
the bastards wear you down. A conversation piece. He thought about
the social implications of that, of everything; but the woman behind
the bathroom door was real, a system of life exquisitely tuned to
feel pain.

All his life he'd had the
feeling that he thought about things other people didn't think
about—not because of their lack of imagination or intelligence,
but because they acted upon some ethical or moral code that he had
somehow missed, as though he'd been out of school the term it had
been introduced into everyone else's consciousness. And so now he
thought of her naked haunches, and how they would be vast and warm as
sand dunes, sea grasses blowing between. This vision was not sexual,
it was just there, tawny and immense.

After a few minutes she came out
of the bathroom, her hair tied back and with a different face made of
honest shiny skin incorporating pores, the inner shadings of her own
blood, green eyes rimmed by the faint rosiness caused by tears, and a
small white scar at her left temple.

"This is what I really look
like," she said, blushing.

"You look more real,"
he said.

"More's the pity."

The telephone rang, and she got
up quickly to answer it. "It's for you," she said,
surprised as one always is in that circumstance.

As she handed him the receiver
their fingers touched, then it was Robin's voice at his ear. "Hey,
Luke? I'm sorry I didn't make it today, but I got hung up." Luke
thought of dogs in the rut. "But is it okay if I come over and
get the pictures? Have you asked her about it?"

"No, not yet. Let me ask."
He turned to her and said, "It's the photographer. He'd like to
take pictures of the apartment and you and the kids. Would you mind
that?"

"Like this?" she said,
putting her hands on her washed and shining face. "My God!"
Then she said, "You didn't tell me about any pictures."

"I was going to ask you.
Anyway, it can be some other time." He wanted to say that it
could be never, if she didn't want them to take pictures, and in
leaving out this option he felt the twinge of coercion.

"Oh," she said. "Well
..."

"I don't want to intrude,"
he said. But he didn't want her to say no to the photographs, either.
Even now there was the sense of getting this assignment over with.
But then what would he do? She nodded, and he told Robin to come.

"All right," she said.
"Let's sit down." They sat down and lit cig­arettes.
"Mickey didn't smoke. He used to get disgusted with me. 'Why
smoke that garbage?' he always said."

"A good question," he
said. "I always used to think—maybe I still do—that
if I could live a certain kind of life, with everything just right,
I'd never even think of smoking."

"When you're sound asleep,
maybe," she said. "We're fellow ad­dicts, you know?"

He considered telling her that
they had more in common than that, but he was afraid of that
connection, and also of a loss of con­trol. It seemed a meanness
in him that he could not share it with her, and in not confessing his
own loss he felt cruel and small. He had never trusted secrets; in
many ways they seemed more power­fully evil than lies.

She found him easy to talk to.
She said this. She told him about Mickey, when they first dated and
he'd taken her to his social club, The Nocturnes, and later when
they'd had an engagement sort of party there, with the club—it
was a dingy sort of basement, real­ly—all festooned in
crepe paper. Her maiden name was Burns and she wasn't Catholic, but
Mickey was and now Mickey Jr. and Marcia were Catholic, which was all
right but it made her feel fun­ny sometimes. Was he a Catholic?

"No," he said.

"Carr. Is that German?
Jewish?"

"English, or Scottish, I
think. Maybe it was once spelled K-e-r-r—you know, like Deborah
Kerr."

"Oh, the actress! Yeah,
sure. I always used to pronounce it Curr. I saw her on the Late Late
Show with Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. I been watching the
Late Late Show a lot lately."

When he asked her about her
finances she spoke as openly; the money seemed like a lot, but she
knew it wouldn't last long unless she went to work. She'd been
putting that off, because of Mickey Jr. and Marcia, but she'd have to
go looking soon.

He found that she was afraid of
blacks, though without the in­tensity or even shrillness that
usually came with that fear; she had no programs for a solution to
that problem. She knew Mickey felt stronger on the subject, but he
also said many blacks couldn't get jobs, so maybe they had to steal.
She'd heard him say that. And he admired black athletes. He was crazy
about Muhammad Ali, though he always called him Cassius Clay. He
couldn't admire that man enough; whatever he said just broke Mickey
up.

She
showed him pictures of Mickey, her hands trembling and her voice
tremulous at first. In one picture the family sat at a pic­nic
table among long-needled pines, a blue lake behind them. Mickey's
curly fair hair was thick, and his wide red face grinned more
intensely than anyone else's. "This old lady came along and
Mickey got her to take the picture," Marjorie said. "She
really loved doing it but he had to teach her how to hold it and look
through the viewfinder and push the button. That's at Lake George,
last summer."

She knelt beside him, her red
fingernail pointing out the blue lake, the far shore. Her round arm,
reddish and fuzzed, gave off heat, and again he saw her monumentally
naked, tawny dunes and grasses shimmering, baking under the force of
sunlike energy.