Lucinderella, p.16
Lucinderella, page 16
She seemed to be in one of those moods though, silent as we drove away, when we had so much to talk about, worried, when the worst was clearly over. She said after a minute or two in her dreamy way as if it didn’t matter who was listening or if anybody was, “We are primitives in an unknown culture” (what a thing to slap a man with!), going on almost at once, “I feel it coming on, like your throat feeling spiteful when you’re catching cold.” I was stopping in the loading zone at the hotel—I had been thinking about steak prices and gin prices and wine prices and I thought I had better get Tom Dixon to spot me fifteen on next week—and I said I would borrow a couple of aspirins for her from Clarissa. When she didn’t say anything I looked at her and she shook her head, sat there gazing at the windshield for a second then said, “I’m giving up the job, Clamp. I told them yesterday.”
Giving up a county job! I couldn’t believe it. I said, “But, honey, the taxpayers are the best people to work for you can possibly find.”
“I’m not complaining about the taxpayers.”
“You get a pension, you get all the holidays, National and Confederate too, and maybe Jewish too; you can’t be fired short of murder which you probably wouldn’t do anyhow——”
“I thought I was all right. I believe I would have been if I hadn’t come home. It’s no reflection on Zyggy, you understand.”
I didn’t understand at all. I said, “Zyggy who?”
“Dr. Yski. I told you about him. I wired him this morning.”
I said, “But why, Lucy? You don’t need a doctor. A cold’s nothing.”
“I didn’t say I had a cold.”
I said she was looking fine, we’d get her another job. “There’s nothing to be upset about. Is your back bothering you?”
“I made an appointment with him for six months from today.” I said no doctor was that full-up, not even a shrinker, and she said, “It isn’t that he wouldn’t have taken me before, the dear man, it’s that I won’t be ready for him before.”
It was the sort of talk she had given me the first day she came, wanting a horizontal funeral and all that; I didn’t know how seriously to listen. I said, “So you’re planning a nice illness for six months from today. Are you going to slip another disc, or what do you plan?”
She didn’t answer precisely, began fumbling in her pocketbook and came up with the cold chisel and said she wanted me to have it. I said, “For God’s sake, now quit all this. I appreciate the chisel, Lucy, don’t misunderstand me, but that’s your good-luck piece. That’s the symbol of your escape from all those make-believers up there in the city; don’t you remember when you got it, on the bus coming down. Because it was so real, so perfect. You loved that chisel.”
She said she still did but it just wasn’t for her and I asked her why? had something happened? I was getting worried about her myself.
Then she took my hand and I noticed there was ink on her fingers; strange, because it was not on the middle finger such as you might get writing a letter with a leaky pen but a smudge over two fingers and her thumb, faint, she had obviously tried to remove it. And ink on the other hand too when she brought it over as if getting me ready for something though I felt now as if the news had already been broken to me; I had changed enough ribbons in my day. I thought there was a very weak chance that Uncle Brownell had had her change the ribbon on the L. C. Smith he used for his letters to the editor but I had changed it for him myself hardly two years ago. I held up the four fingers and two thumbs as you might ask a question and she nodded.
“Dahlonega’s portable. I didn’t mean to do it, Cliff, I really didn’t. But one thing coming on top of another, Bivins and Laban and Big Ma and the thing at the bank and Cousin Leon and all that and now this other thing——”
“What other thing?” She was fumbling with the chisel and hesitating.
“I hate to be the first to tell you this, Clint, but I think you should know. You’ll find out some day anyhow.”
“Could we get on with it, Lucy?” She said there was a certain Mrs. Mooneyham in town and I said, “Who?”—ridiculous of me but as you will hang back on unrolling your license even with the cop breathing in the window—and she spelled it and went on with the whole story. “I didn’t believe Fax,” she said, “and I looked it up myself. The Clerk’s Office is just down the hall from my desk—my ex-desk. It’s just more than I can take and I can’t take any more.”
I said we just hadn’t had a rug big enough to sweep it all under, but she was airborne again: “All this Life, Cliff. Waiting to be created into Art. And Uncle Taillefer back there wondering why I’m not singing my Song of Roland——”
“The name’s ‘Clamp,’ Lucy.”
“That’s what I mean, honey! ‘Clamp’ is you, but ‘Cliff’ belongs to me.”
I said, “Clamp belongs to you too, baby. Look, I have a good job here, that is it ought to be some day. There’s a nice three-room apartment on the top floor that’s been empty since old Mrs. Watson passed. I know Uncle Otis would let us have it.”
She started to say something but I interrupted her; I didn’t want to go into such personal things sitting there in a loading zone. I said, “You sit tight right here. Tom Dixon wants to see me for just a second. I’ll be right back. Don’t move. I’ll explain it all to you as we go—as we cut into those Kansas City imports,” nervous and trying to be funny, kissing her in front of the left ear and getting out and going round behind the car and turning to glance back at her so that I collided with a man on the steps, possibly a guest I thought though I hadn’t seen him before and on second thought more likely a user of our telephones because he didn’t look like a Jonathan Copp guest, fringe beard, hair over his collar.
But it was my fault and I began putting together a guest-staff apology just in case, when somebody screamed that I knew was Lucy though I had never heard her scream before. The car door was flung open and there in front of my eyes, the apology still wet on my tongue, I saw those two, Lucinderella and this man, meet with a thump in the middle of the sidewalk and become practically one person, one bale of humanity roped round with arms in every direction. I leaned against the brass handrail in the center of the steps that Uncle Otis had put in when Mrs. Hawkins came to live with us (arthritis in her left leg). I backed up a step or two, stunned and fascinated by the monolithic pair who after a time drew apart a few inches, said two or three words I couldn’t catch, then re-roped themselves and I sat down on the steps. At length they became two, except for a connection of hands, and I went up to them and I said, “Who’s this, Lucy?” I felt I had a right to a little information.
She said, “This? Why this is my husband, honey.”
I said, “That couldn’t be. You’re not married, Lucy.”
“Certainly I am, Cliff. I’ve been married for going on six years.”
I said she hadn’t been married on any of her book jackets, thinking I could prove her wrong I suppose, and she said, “You have to keep this sort of thing quiet. You sell more books if they think you’re a sinner. Jookie-darling, this is Cliff Maloof.”
“Is this the bastard’s been screwing you?”
“Jookie, we don’t talk like that down here.”
“Like what?”
“Like all those words. We don’t like to hear all those words. You must——”
“Quit talking so fast and answer me. Is this the one? He looks like his picture.”
“No, honey. Nobody’s been screwing me.”
“Well, why not? Who the hell does he think he is?”
She said I was in love with some intertwined twins and hadn’t yet been able to untwine them. I went inside.
Well, that’s about it.
We are waiting round now curious to see what all really happened, to see what our next reincarnation is going to be. It won’t be much longer, I should guess. I had several postcards from Lucy at first, we had (I didn’t get home until late afternoon and the others had usually finished with them by then); the last one, a few weeks ago, said she was fit to be tied and was going next day to keep her appointment with “dear Zyggy,” hardly knowing, she said, whether to ask him to tie her or untie her, “though the dear man will know which is better.” So I take it that we are all now at the printer’s.
I send her a card now and then, signed “Cliff” of course (“Love, Cliff,” in our warmhearted Southern way), and the other day Tom Dixon one-handed me a check he had cashed for me the week before stamped UNABLE TO LOCATE ACCOUNT. I said, “What’s the matter with those people, I’ve got over a hundred dollars in that account! They haven’t been themselves since Crit was there.” And even when I studied the signature I couldn’t understand for a minute or two. “Cliff Maloof” looked all right to me.
I suppose it will be a month before the printers get us all acting quite right—Next-Best Behavior I believe it is, unless they change our title—and it gives you an odd feeling to think of them up there in New Jersey or some place building us up galley by galley (slug by slug I suppose I ought to say) while Modern Wrecking, Inc., works its way down from our ridgepole with crowbars and hatchets and nail-pullers clearing us out for the superhighway, shingles gone, rafters stripped, the chimneys down to the second floor now. (Lester had broken it to Uncle Brownell with a typical offhandedness, Uncle Brownell hanging up the phone on the news from the bank that Madam Ace was moving to the County and saying wearily to Judge Fluther and Lester standing there, “They might as well come on and knock us down,” and Lester saying, “Yes sir, I meant to tell you”). The bathroom went first of all because people like to steal plumbing fixtures if they’re left around. There is a good chance the bulldozers will be smoothing us over on the very day that we pop up in the bookstores livelier than ever.
We have disposed of ourselves in various ways; Uncle Otis took some of us, Mr. Grimes and his young men took others (Big Ma and of course Uncle Brownell, much younger but only a man, and the summer had been hard on him too), Dr. Steel took Jessie—the other way round it was but he didn’t know that, probably asking for her in his prayers while she was weighing small wedding-large wedding—Dr. Steel the Presbyterian minister; and so on.
When Lester had brought us word that somebody had double-crossed him somewhere along the line and the highway was coming through I sent Lucy a postcard; I thought she might be interested to know. She postcarded back, “Don’t worry about it, honey, nobody’s going to bulldoze you out of the Library of Congress.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1967 by Berry Fleming
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9345-4
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Berry Fleming, Lucinderella
