Snap, p.22
Snap, page 22
Nearby on the porch is a green wicker loveseat and a matching wicker table crammed with news magazines and a booklet of horoscopes.
Ruby’s horoscope for the day reads: “Today is a good day for serious thinking. Celebrate tomorrow.”
Then he reads Ida’s horoscope: “Cultural events are a must this afternoon. Be on the lookout for a stunning buy.”
But Ruby knows that Ida’s not the type for dedicated shopping. She prefers flea markets and serendipitous stops at garage sales. Also an occasional look at the classifieds, just to see if there are any surprises, and a little drop-in browsing along country roads. She buys tin wind-up toys, hand-painted ankle socks and plastic canisters of multicolored metallic sparkles to be brushed through her hair now and then. Once, she bought a slab of marble from a man who carved gravestones, for use in the kitchen as a pastry board. The stone stayed chilly even in summer, its blue-black surface veined silvery white. Ruby was surprised to like it so much. He liked to mix himself a gin and tonic on a hot afternoon and stand in the kitchen to watch her at work, his shirt unbuttoned, one palm flat on the dense cold of the marble. Why not do the whole kitchen in gravestones? he thought. White floor, black counter, the veins of the marble branching throughout.
He used to think like that, in dreams and possibilities that never seemed absurd.
Why not now? he thinks, piercing the thick, tart skin of a plum. Every day he walks to the outdoor market on Delmar and buys just one. Purple, not green. Beneath the blue frost is an amethyst sheen that just a day ago gave him pleasure. Now he bites through to the yellow and chews. Ida would like the outdoor market, come to think of it, a square of blacktop crowded with shoppers and overhung with striped awnings, the produce trucks backed right up to the stands, open to reveal crates of strawberries and peaches, cucumbers, snow peas and heads of purple cabbage. There’s a seafood van as well, and that’s where Ida would start — a summer picnic à la Martha’s, with tubs of melted butter and lobster bibs. After that she’d head for the fresh cut flowers, but soon she’d make her way to the far, melting edge of the blacktop, to a sort of adjunct market set up on the grass. A bunch of junk spread on blankets, but Ida would find something wonderful. What would it be? Ruby scans the rows of shabby rubber galoshes and the card tables of crocheted baby toys, paperback books and rusted andirons. Maybe she’d buy a set of those, to be sanded and painted. But no, she wouldn’t, they’re too heavy, too bulky, too lacking in grace. Ruby lifts one like a barbell and grins sadly at some men playing cards in lawn chairs before lowering it down to the table. The palms of his hands are slippery with sweat, and the one plum he bought was too small; he holds the pit in his mouth between his teeth and his cheek, sucking the last of its woody flavor.
He returns to the fruit stand and chooses another plum, purple, not green. The green scares him off, but makes him think of something Ida once told him: red peppers are really green peppers that have been permitted to ripen on the vine.
Linell probably knows this too, Ruby thinks. Too bad. When Ida spoke them, the words sounded lovely and true; now they’re just another fact. Who needs it? Who needs a detail when what’s missing is the whole tapestry? Every day he’s walked down Delmar to the outdoor market, and he’s purchased his plum, and he’s felt, he’s really felt, that by munching a plum he has paid a small tribute to summer. If nothing else, he’d imagined, he wouldn’t let the whole season slip through his fingers. But he was kidding himself, because away it slipped. It’s been a bellyful of plums, that’s all, six plums. Two today makes eight and ruins his tally of useless days. Ruby sits and sits. He’s always wondered what loitering means. Now he knows, because he’s doing it. Across the street some kids are playing in the fountain, gleeful and skinny in their soaked T-shirts and cut-offs. Down the block is a crafts gallery Ruby likes because it’s air-conditioned. The exhibit has changed. Last time it was rugs, now it’s “Juried Ceramics.” Below the banner is one of those clay slab constructions that look like vases except that there’s no place to put any flowers.
The gallery is strangely quiet, like the library, and secret, because there’s no one around except a lady in back on the telephone, writing something down with a slender fountain pen. And there are photos of the artists on the walls, unframed black-and-whites spaced at intervals around the room so that each looks out on a cluster of pedestals topped with his or her creations.
Be on the lookout for a stunning buy.
The buys are stunning, all right, at least the prices are. He runs his finger around the rim of a skewed bowl so thin that the light comes through. Around it the light has a reddish cast. The price is two hundred dollars. Ruby moves past to a table of high-fired ceramics with a watery glaze of stars. Three hundred. Four.
Ruby drifts reluctantly into a second room, not carpeted like the first. Its few windows are covered with posters from previous shows, and there are tiers of bare pine shelving stuck all over with price tags and assorted objects. A jade plant sits in one corner beneath a sliver of exposed window, next to a shelf of ten-dollar items. Ruby sees a sphere of clear glass like a fistsized marble and wonders what it’s supposed to be. The glass appears to be green, but when he lifts it away from the jade plant the color changes to pink. What’s pink? His hand. He moves the glass to his T-shirt, a cottony blue. Magic, he thinks. Of all the stupid things.
He has his wallet, his credit card.
He buys the giant marble. Wrapped in tissue, it turns white, he supposes. Dropped into its box it turns dusky in the dark.
So he carries it home, not along Delmar, where the noise and commotion make him nervous about dropping the box, but along Kingsbury, on the block where the college students rent their apartments. He wants to see if the neighborhood has changed. Since years ago. Since yesterday. It hasn’t. How can that be? Even the big front doors remain open, as if no one had troubled to close them during the night. In the road an old car has been left with its engine running, as Ruby swears it was running yesterday. Maybe the owners have died. Too bad. Anyone looking out a window would notice Ruby standing on the sidewalk just as he stood a day ago, watching the ivy climb the walls.
At the end of the block he has to unlatch a black iron gate and step through into his mother’s neighborhood of single-family homes and curving, looping, graceful streets. Soon he reaches the house, still bearing his package and its odd, round weight. Climbing the steps to the purple chair, Ruby becomes aware of the plum pit still in his mouth, lodged in the space between his teeth and the moist inside of his cheek. Is this yesterday’s plum, or today’s? And if this is today ‘s second plum, maybe that means it’s tomorrow already. Ruby pulls the marble out of the box and holds it up to the sky. No color at all. He sits down and closes his eyes.
And dreams a memory of Richmond when he’d first loved Ida. Above the door to Ida’s apartment building was a single bare bulb that cast a yellow circle on the stairway. The surrounding buildings were lit with similar yellow bulbs, so that looking out you saw an assortment of eerily yellow stairways leading nowhere.
Night in Ruby’s neighborhood, unlike night in Ida’s, was chaos. Bright headlights whizzed past on the streets below, while in the distance blinked a residue of restaurant signs and marquees. This shifting collage of neons seemed unreal to him after the quiet yellow, isolated stairways that he could see while standing naked at Ida’s window, the night air moving against his chest. Ida’s bedroom was the real bedroom, the real bed, the real place to make love. His own room became nothing but a television and an occasional visit from Andrea or Debby, who commented on the fact that he had stopped eating so much pizza.
“There aren’t so many pizza boxes lying around,” say Andrea and Debby in his dream.
“That’s because of Ida,” Ruby answers.
“Ida, Schmyda.” Andrea/Debby wraps four arms around his neck, four legs around his hips, and blows softly in both his ears.
Tonight in St. Louis, he walks. Why not, after sleeping intermittently all through the day? Besides, he craves the darkness. It makes him think of Ida’s letter on its dense black paper as a thing he can’t get past or around. He’s simply in it. It surrounds him. Why not?
He doesn’t care to look to the future.
Despite a history of crimes in University City, the night remains unadorned by streetlights of any kind. Not even the tops of the telephone poles placed at intervals along the stony alleyways behind the garages are lighted. Nor are the edges of the grass islands bisecting the streets. The centers of these islands simply cannot be seen. At this hour the houses, with their reading lamps and TVs switched off, are dark shapes in a fabric of darker black, like variations in an ocean at night. Bats flit around, but there are no night birds. The nighthawks live on Skinker and Clayton Road; Ruby has seen hundreds circling the giant Amoco sign, diving into and out of the electric, bug-filled glare.
He can hear crickets now. It must be past midnight, because already the night has seemed long. He never walks this late in Williamsburg. Sometimes he steps out just to lie in his hammock, but that’s different because it’s Williamsburg and Ida is nearby, on her spot on the roof perhaps, where she can see the light bulbs that Ruby stealthily hid among the branches of the trees to light up his garden. Nothing garish. No colors. No surprises. No drama. The bulbs are meant to be invisible, and they are, from the ground. The trick is to see the darkness rather than the light, all of the shades and textures of shadow. Where the ivy cascades around the low, beveled edges of the birdbath, for instance, the spaces among the leaves can be seen, but the leaves themselves cannot. Likewise, the folds among the petals of the roses. The water in the birdbath reflects a lunar pallor but only on its surface; beneath that, its shallow reaches remain quite black. Seen from his hammock in Williamsburg, night is a woven blanket — ribbons of silver, ribbons of black, fibers of blue and gold. The lighting took Ruby ages to complete, and months and months of experimentation. He had some wiring experience, a manual, several catalogues of obscure fixtures and a magazine containing a portrait of a garden specialist who advised, over and over, that “you have to account for the moon.”
Which seems not to exist at all in St. Louis. Where can it be? Behind a cloud? If so, where is the cloud? Several nights ago he saw it, the moon. It was distant but full, a fuzzy round button of light. Then he turned a corner, and it wasn’t the moon, at all. It was a phosphorescent doorbell floating in the darkness of a porch.
Ruby’s mother once explained to him the absence of streetlights in her neighborhood. “We don’t need them,” she said. When pressed, she added that the gates at both Skinker and Kingsbury were watched by police, who sometimes circled the streets in their cruisers, looking for signs of trouble. So that any man out walking past midnight was a likely candidate for suspicion. But Ruby’s not doing anything wrong. He’s even wearing his cut-offs under his mother’s robe. The robe is terrycloth, sashed at the waist. In its single pocket Ruby found a fifty-dollar bill. This was after he had rolled up the rest of her clothing and stuffed it haphazardly into one of the Xerox cartons. He tore the packing tape off of the carton, pulled out the clothes and plunged his hands into all of the pockets, tossing around trousers, blouses and undergarments. He sat cross-legged among it all like a guru, holding his breath. From an apron pocket deep enough to hold a wooden spoon he pulled another fifty, and a twenty from the zippered lining of a jacket. All in all there were two hundred and thirty-five dollars, which he stuffed into the pocket of his cut-offs. It doesn’t make him feel lucky or even rich. It makes him feel like a sitting duck. If he gets mugged he’ll lose the money, and if the cops intercept him they’ll wonder how he got it.
If the cops intercept him. Funny, because he’s walking in circles. Wide circles, yes, but in truth he’s no farther from his mother’s porch than he was ten minutes earlier. The trees are cylinders of blackness topped by a canopy of singing crickets. They don’t look so big in daylight. Nor so numerous. He may as well be alone in a forest, lost, because why else would he be walking in circles?
He craves amnesia, but remembers Ida’s letter.
I don’t think I’ll see you again.
I don’t want you to take this personally.
Because of the way you are.
How black the letter was, just another grainy shadow underneath the bronze fretwork of the mailbox. How long had it been in there? How many days, how many plums, how many casseroles? What he hungers for now is a mugger, a good, forgetful blow to the head. In the morning they’ll find him, limping around in his high school shoes. The loafers are far too small, and their ridiculous tassels flop around on stretched-out leather thongs, but they’re the only matching pair he could find.
Linel’s car still is not in her driveway. Ruby senses its absence each time he passes the house. Probably she’s a member of some health spa, with a sauna and a Nautilus room. Probably she chats all evening while sitting in the Jacuzzi with the other club members, none of whom like Linell any more than he does. Maybe the health club stays open late. Maybe she got herself locked in the sauna. Maybe they all went out dancing together, on Euclid somewhere, maybe Herbies. Ruby doesn’t know for certain if Herbie s is still in existence. But it was glittery and fashionable at one time, not so long ago. Around Christmas one year when they were visiting his mother, he and Ida went. They had eaten Creole, and Ida, who wore any scent like a subtle perfume, smelled faintly of pepper. She had on a genuine peach flapper dress from the nostalgia shop on Delmar. Ruby loved her body dancing inside that fringe. When they got home, Ida’s pubic hair smelled of cigarette smoke, but that too was lovely. It made Ruby dizzy. So does her letter, with its inky black scent and its frosting of tiny gold stars, like dust. The ink itself is gold, and the strokes not fine but heavy, as if the gold might keep flowing even after the pen was lifted from the page.
The paper is familiar but the pen is not. However, its ink is Ida’s style, something she might come upon and take a liking to. Over the years she’s developed a sort of quirky calligraphy with which she bills her customers, so that her bills have the crafted look of wedding invitations. The degree of elegance depends on her mood. Today’s is langorous, as if she’d written the thing while lying in the arms of her lover. If she has a lover. She doesn’t mention the existence of one. As if she thinks it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t.
Because of the way you are.
The crickets clamor overhead in their dense canopy. Now a figure emerges from the blackness up ahead: his mugger at last! Ruby feels a docile, obedient calm, as if he’s already been knocked out. He slips his hand beneath the robe to the money in his pocket. His mugger pauses abruptly not two feet away, and screams at the top of her lungs.
4
THESCREAM is nothing spectacular. Neither tragic nor horrified; no crescendo, no timbre, no plateau. It never wanes. It simply stops. They stand entangled in the darkness. A light flicks on on the porch opposite, then a screen door opens and an orange cat walks out low to the ground. It leaps down the steps and disappears in a flash among some bushes.
“There’s a Bengal tiger loose in Pennsylvania,” Ruby says. “It’s somebody’s pet. She doesn’t want them to shoot but they will if they find it. There’s a panther loose in Detroit, too. In parts of Los Angeles there are coyotes running around. They come out of the hills. When I grew up here in St. Louis there was a feral dog problem. They used to roam around in packs near the river at night. I just remembered that.”
“They still do. In Forest Park. They’re poisoning them, I think. Do you sleepwalk?”
“No.”
“Weird bathrobe.’
“My mother’s.”
“I’m locked out of my house,” says Linell.
It turns out she is holding the money, Ruby’s two hundred and thirty-five dollars, in her hand. The bills are rolled up and secured with one of his mother’s beaded hair elastics. Neither one of them knows how this happened. Had Linell stuck her hand in his shorts pocket? Had Ruby pulled the money out? Had he thrown it at her? Had she pulled it from his fingers? Had they actually scuffled, for a moment, before the scream ended? But that had been only a matter of seconds, had it not? In any case, she has the money somehow. She gives it back and he slips it deep into a pocket of the robe. Later he finds that his fly is down. Had she done that, too? When? He zips discreetly as they walk back together on the invisible sidewalk. Linell is explaining her circumstance. She never tells stories, Ruby thinks, she tells sob stories. She had been at her club. It had a Nautilus but she never used that. She used the hot tub, the whirlpool, the pool, the sauna and the rowing machine. She kept her clothes and purse in her locker, whose combination consisted of the month, day and year of her birth. So she can only assume that it was Barry who took her keys. Because a thief would have taken the car. Barry had not. Everything else — her clothing, her purse — was untouched, and not until she’d made her way into the parking lot and up to her car did she realize the keys were missing. At that point she went back into the club and found someone to give her a ride. They were going to a party. Linell went, too, because the party was just up the street. Who was there but Barry, but he refused to admit to his crime.
“The least you could do is let me into the goddamn house,” Linell had said, and Barry said he’d be happy to do so had she not made him give his keys back months ago. He was not even drunk, he was just being mean. Then to show off he offered to let her sleep in his house. “No way,” said Linell, who stalked out angrily and thus had no choice but to walk home alone in the dark.
“I’m afraid to sleep in my own house now that Barry has a key,” says Linell. “I’m not really locked out. I’ve got a key hidden under the loveseat cushion on the porch. In the morning I’ll call a cab and get a ride to work and pick up my extra car keys. Then I’ll get the locks changed on the house. Maybe now you could just give me a ride somewhere. I don’t know. A hotel or something, Ruben. The Clayton Inn.”
