Snap, p.23
Snap, page 23
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Ruby. He can give her a ride to work in the morning. Tonight she will stay in his house, in his mother’s room, or on the couch in the living room if she minds the smell of paint. On the other hand, Ruby himself can sleep on the couch so that she can sleep in Ruby’s bed and be comfortable.
“I don’t mind the smell of paint,” Linell says stoically. She follows him up to his mother’s room and pulls sheets from the wardrobe while Ruby takes the fringed lamp off of the bed and sets it on the floor. Then he spreads the rag rug on its usual spot and moves the stepladder over to a corner, where it won’t block the door if she has to use the bathroom. The room looks unfinished but perfectly acceptable. In the dim light the paint is a pleasant sky blue, not nearly as forbidding as he had imagined. He might paint the trim white. Then, with the curtains in place and the floor sanded, the room will be fresh and elegant. That is, if he finishes painting it. For now he finds towels, a washcloth and a water glass, which he sets on top of the wardrobe. Linell sits on the bed, massaging her feet.
“Because of that jerk I can’t use my vitamin E cream,” she laments. “I have no robe and no toothbrush and I can’t finish the magazine article I was reading. If only —”
“I can go with you into your house,” Ruby says. “Or I can keep watch on the porch while you go in yourself.” He is aware of the foolishness of this situation. Surely Barry has no intention of harming her, and if he does, he would harm Ruby, too.
“I’m not going in there if that jerk has a key. He’s probably in there right now.”
“Then you can wait on the porch, and I’ll go in,” Ruby offers bravely.
“No way am I standing alone on that porch. It’s not that big a deal, Ruben. It’s just the vitamin E cream, really.”
Ruby goes himself. He doesn’t mind. The night is no longer so dark, and the chilly dampness of the grass island refreshes his ankles. The trees are silhouetted against the sky, and stars hang among the branches like ornaments. Ruby reasons that if Barry is in the house, he’ll think Ruby is a burgler and either hide or call the cops.
Ruby finds the house key under the cushion on the loveseat, lets himself in, and brings the casseroles and baking pans into the kitchen. He creeps upstairs in the dark and switches on the bathroom light for only a second to find the vitamin E cream. Then he feels his way into the bedroom and finds Linel’s robe and her magazine. The robe is slippery nylon, and the cream smells of roses. On the way out, he sees the telescope set up next to the window. It surprises him to think that Linell looks at stars. Perhaps a planet is visible. Perhaps even Saturn, or Venus.
Ruby looks, half expecting to see a shooting star. Instead, he sees a lovely aureole. He focuses, blinks, and sees a woman’s whole breast. Linell has removed her clothes. She isn’t fat, just plump. Her belly is a planet, and her pubic hair glows. She is still on Ruby’s mother’s bed, still massaging her feet. Both breasts shake gently so the nipples bob.
Just because you’ll never love another woman as much as you love me doesn’t mean you can’t try, Ida had written in her letter.
“I don’t know,” Ruby thinks. He looks again through the scope. This time Linell is smiling. He wonders if she knows and thinks of waving from the window just to catch her off guard. But the only way to catch her off guard, for sure, will be to stay where he is and ignore her. Let her come for him if she wants. They can have a little tussle on the threshold of her room; he doesn’t care what they do after that. In any case her smile is beseeching, and not a bad smile at all.
Ruby knows Ida’s letter by heart. Rather, he knows the fragments, and it doesn’t seem to matter if he mixes up their order, because the message never changes.
“Dear Ruby,” it reads,
I know you love me. You don’t have to keep saying it. Please don’t say it anymore for a while. I don’t want to hear it, okay? It’s like those songs that keep playing in your head, and you get sick of them, and they make you want to pass out. I want silence. You know the conch shell we keep on the screened-in porch? I held it to my ear. I didn’t know someone had used it as an ashtray. My ear filled with butts. I picked the cigarettes out and left the ashes in. That’s the kind of noise I’m talking about. I mean, I want to be alone. Some people I can be alone with but I can’t be alone if I’m with you. Because of the way you are. I don’t want you to take this personally. I’m leaving everything behind. You left your shampoo. You never throw out your magazines even after you’ve read them. How’s St. Louis? Don’t wonder where I am. Please don’t be hurt. I bet you are. Don’t be.
This is all my own thing. I believe in self-indulgence. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want you to care. I’ve taken my bike, and I don’t think I’ll see you again.
Imagine I’ve died. It is true that I don’t want to talk on the phone. Just because you’ll never love another woman as much as you love me doesn’t mean you can’t try. Did I tell you our car was stolen? Don’t worry about it. They brought it back.
So Ida doesn’t think that she’ll see him again. Ruby tries being grateful for the phraseology, which leaves room for false hope, but he can’t muster any. True, after all these years she is telling him what she believes in. Self-indulgence. Ruby still remembers what she asked him on the stoop that first morning, after he asked her what she believed in.
“What are you talking about? What do I think is true? Or what do I want to be true?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” Ruby whispers to the letter. “Self-indulgence my ass, anyway.”
Because Ida is not self-indulgent. He’s seen enough of her cakes to know that. All these years he’s been spying when she thinks he’s asleep. Ida circles the kitchen until four in the morning, mixing and layering, concocting, designing, “building” a cake that she’ll never even taste. She calls it building. It is. She draws blueprints on napkins on the stove top under the fluorescent bulb. She concentrates. She never dips a finger in the batter, never licks a spatula until the work is done. There was a cake she was big on, a chocolate raspberry torte that everyone wanted. She named it Berry Nice. Ida must have sold twenty before tasting a slice at the wedding of someone she knew. That night she confided, “I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“The flavor of that jam. It’s the fancy English import, the best. I’ve sampled all the others and this is the best. But it doesn’t complement. It’s not quite right. I don’t like it.”
“People love that cake, Ida. I love that cake.”
She waved him away. “But people like you don’t know. You don’t know what it would taste like if it were perfect. You can’t imagine, if it were perfect it would be …1 can’t describe it. Shit. We’ll have to grow our own berries. I’ll make the jam myself.”
She found some bushes in a patch behind the middle school playing fields and dug up a few young ones. These she wrapped in burlap, treated with plant food, and replanted in a scraggly row fronting the garage where the driveway ended and the dirt began. With the bushes in place the car had to stay in the driveway. The bushes have not yet matured, and Ruby doesn’t know when they’re due to fruit. When they do, Ida will pick the berries, dropping them into her black top hat. Ruby knows this as well as if he’s witnessed it already. Then she’ll cook up the jam, busying herself with her fruits and liqueurs until she hits on something everyone will recognize as perfect. Until then, the Berry Nice cake is on hold. She won’t make one even for Ruby. He misses the flavor. He misses it now. He wants it. He’s the one who’s self-indulgent, the one who won’t get out of bed. He wiggles his toes and stretches his limbs between Linel’s fancy linens. Satin, he thinks, with a vast quilted coverlet light enough to double as a cloud. He spreads his fingers upon it, sighs, and decides he needs to go to the bathroom. Some time goes by before he climbs out of bed, pees, drinks some water and greets himself in the mirror. He does look disappointed, and he knows why, too, although of course he doesn’t want to admit it. Apparently Linell has decided to leave him alone. She has not come over, and there has been no tussle in the doorway.
Ruby climbs back in bed and “does” Ida’s letter again. He supposes he’s addicted, because it sends him so low and yet he keeps needing to hear it. Dear Ruby, she’d said. Doesn’t that mean something? And what’s that noise? Pots and pans banging: domestic bliss. Ida, he thinks, except it can’t be Ida, who never fixes breakfast at all. Linell, then. A few cabinet doors click open and shut. Then he hears a series of thuds and imagines her carrying a card table up from the basement, to be set up in the bedroom where Ruby lies waiting. Breakfast in bed? He would love a cup of coffee, even Linel’s. But curiously, there seems to be nothing cooking. No smells. No crackle of bacon, no gurgle of perking coffee. Ruby steps to the bedroom door, opens it a crack and sticks his ear in the hallway.
“That slick bitch,” Ruby hears a man say. He shuts the bedroom door, locks it quietly and steps over to the telescope again. He sees a full moon basking in the morning light. Linel’s ass. She is lying on her belly with the sheets kicked down around her ankles, oblivious to the commotion on her own front lawn. Below Ruby on the grass, a circle of side chairs keep watch on the television console. There is a van on the street with its back doors open and a ramp extending down to the level of the pavement. Already they’ve loaded the dining room table; Ruby sees one of its ornate legs gleaming in the shadow of the inside of the van. Then Barry (surely it’s him) steps out of the back, clapping dust from the palms of his fuzzy hands. He wears jeans and a tank top over a blanket of glossy hair. He and a skinny man dressed in a pair of red gym shorts carry the console into the van. After that they take the four side chairs, one on each elbow. Perhaps Linell should be alerted. Ruby dials his mother’s number and watches through the scope as Linell gets up to answer. But she can’t find the phone, which rings ten times before Ruby recalls where it is, hidden in the cupboard like the missionary’s wife. He’d gotten sick of looking at it, sick of longing for it to ring. Now he wishes he’d stayed asleep. Isn’t this what he’s been waiting for? They’ll dismantle the house around him; he’ll wake in a bed of dandelions. Already the lawn looks like fantasy land; they are carrying out the birdcage.
At this moment Linell, wrapped in a towel, charges from the grass island straight for the birdcage, now shoulder high. She rams into it hard, knocking herself and both men to the ground. Barry shrugs. Linell lunges, but her towel comes undone. Barry’s friend hoots, the cockatoo squawks, and Barry wipes his face with a rag. Linell unlatches the birdcage door and shoos out the bird with her hand. It takes off with a flash of yellow and gold, for which Ruby, watching, is grateful. He hasn’t known who to root for, Barry or Linell, but now he can root for the bird.
The two men shove the rug into the van, crack their knuckles in unison, climb into the front and share a drink from a Thermos before driving away. Ruby is jealous. How long has it been, since he’s hung out with one of the guys? But he joins Linell on the flattened grass, rubbing his eyes.
“Jesus. What’s going on?” he asks innocently.
Linell glares at him and gestures at the birdcage, whose whitewashed floor is covered with cockatoo dung.
“I should have let him take it.”
“You can wash it out and get another bird, you know,” says Ruby. He is truly impressed by her lack of tears.
“I can’t afford it.”
“Get the friend who smuggled out the last one to get you another.”
“That was him.”
“What?”
“The smuggler,” Linell says impatiently. “I don’t want another cockatoo. I can’t stand the stink and I hate the way she looks at me when I’m eating. He took the chandelier, too, you know, right off the damn ceiling. You have a lot of nerve. Where were you when this was happening, anyway? What the hell were you doing?”
“I was having a look through your telescope,” Ruby replies.
That Linell is capable of anger is a pleasant surprise. Of course, the anger itself is conventional: she won’t speak to Ruby at all. Barry has left the house and car keys on the high windowsill in the hallway, but Linell still needs to get to her car, still parked in the parking lot of the fitness club. When Ruby offers to drive her to the club, Linell calls a cab. She is dressed in her hospital clothes: a white lab coat, pantyhose and thick-soled shoes. Ruby doesn’t know exactly what she does at work. He knows only that she works in a lab. Probably she pricks fingers, draws blood. She is still carrying the birdcage, and he wonders if she’ll bring it with her all the way to work.
“Hold it,” says Ruby, when she is halfway out the door. “We can make a chandelier out of that thing.”
Linell sets the birdcage down, puts her hands on her hips and squints at him like he is trying to make a fool out of her.
“We spray paint it green, hook a bulb inside and hang it from the ceiling. You can move the other green wicker inside and put it in the dining room where the table was. It will be like a set. You know. It would look good with plants and a hammock in the corner. You don’t need all that stuff Barry took.”
Ruby had read about the birdcage chandelier in one of his magazines some time ago. Linell looks skeptical, then pleased, then skeptical again. She spins around on her thick-soled heel, leaving the birdcage at Ruby’s feet.
“I’ll need some spray paint, a brass socket and some rubberized wire with a switch,” Ruby calls after her. “And a couple of ornate brass ceiling hooks, antiqued if possible, and a brass oval link chain, and a sixty-watt bulb and some very fine sand paper. And some Lysol,” he adds, wrinkling his nose at the floor of the cage. “And a drill.”
Linell reappears in a minute, carrying a drill and a yellow plastic case, which she flips open so Ruby can choose the bit. He feels like a person being offered a cigar and just then remembers his horoscope.
“Celebrate tomorrow,” he whispers when Linell is gone, and then he screws the bit into the drill and drills a hole in the ceiling of the cockatoo cage. He is filled with purpose, suddenly. What he has in mind is a garden room, the kind with dense fronds spreading all around under a ceiling fan and shuttered windows opening onto a patio. He can turn Linel’s buffet into a bar, with tall glasses and bottles and bottles of rum, and cans of pineapple and coconut nectars. The idea makes him hungry. In Linel’s refrigerator he finds a luncheon tray already prepared: an ice cream scoop of tuna salad surrounded by slices of avocado. In a fluted bowl is a heap of mayonnaise, and in a linen-lined basket are several slices of bread with the crusts peeled off. Also a pat of butter and a knife with a handle in the shape of a zucchini. “Amazing,” Ruby whispers. He eats the avocado and then hunts in the garbage for the pit. If the new room is to have fronds, then it must have trees. Providentially, he had saved the toothpicks he’d discovered in his mother’s pantry, and he crosses the street to find them. Arranged like spokes around the seed’s circumference, the picks will hold it in a glass of water. The knowledge that this project might be years in the making does not dissuade him; it is not the grown tree that matters as much as the pit and its first wet, thirsty sprouts. The pit is slimy in his hands as he pokes in the swords, choosing all yellow with braided hilts, and the only appropriate glass in his mother’s house — a jelly jar. This he sets on the windowsill, wishing it peace and quiet, a rightful spot among the dust motes of his mother’s humming kitchen. In a welcoming gesture he parts the chintz along the bent curtain rod, which falls from its twin hooks into the sink, clattering musically. So that at first he doesn’t hear it, the ringing of the phone. When he does, he is frantic, forgetting for a moment the hiding place under the sink. One day won’t mean that much to Ida, who moves like a cat through the seasons. If he misses her now it might be another week before she bothers to phone him again, unless she changes her mind and never bothers at all.
She might even talk to Audrey first. Audrey will talk her out of it. Whatever it is.
Ruby pants into the telephone not knowing what to say. Hello doesn’t feel quite right.
He says nothing.
“Ruben?”
“Yes.”
“I tried my house and you were out so I figured I’d try you here. Look, I’m thinking I could make linguini for dinner, with clam sauce. How does that sound?”
“Fine.”
“Red or white clam sauce?”
“White,” said Ruby.
“Linguini? Or spaghetti?”
“Linguini.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye, Linell.’
He slides the phone under the sink and then on second thought sets it on the counter once again in plain view. How relieved he feels. Can this be married life? Can this be domesticity? If so, how interesting. Never once had Ida phoned him to ask what he wanted for dinner. That wasn’t her style. He cannot remember Ida’s style, suddenly. He cannot remember if she’d ever made linquini with clam sauce, or if he had ever made it for her. But he is suddenly eager for the taste of some.
The grass island floats on the heat rising out of the road. Linel’s porch is in shade but the brass door chain is hot to the touch. The chain’s links are round not oval, but it will do for the chandelier. In Linel’s utility drawer he finds a socket and bulb, and makes a quick trip to the hardware store for a switch, spray paint and reflecting shield. That way the bulb’s rays will be directed toward the ceiling, not down into somebody’s eyes.
The job is simple and relaxing, a sequence of sensible maneuvers. Ruby has a little problem wiring the socket into place, and has to lie on his side with his shoulder rammed up against the open door of the birdcage while his fingertips reach for its high curved ceiling. In a way, even that is fun. He even thinks of something funny while spray painting the wicker: Dale Lewis once worked as a consultant in the Everglades and had to spray paint orange survey marks on the trunks of the cypress trees. At dusk the mosquitoes began to swarm, and in the dismal gray climate of the swamp Dale shut his eyes and sprayed his face with insect repellent. Not until he stumbled from the swamp and made his way to a diner to eat did he see his face in a mirror and realize that he’d sprayed himself with paint. Dale Lewis was orange. He ate his dinner that way, enduring the frightened glances of the waitresses.
