What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Read online

  I can see she doesn’t know.

  I move over to the window and look out from behind the curtain. Someone says something below and rattles the door to the office. I stay there. I pray for a sign from Holly. I pray for Holly to show me.

  I hear a car start. Then another. They turn on their lights against the building and, one after the other, they pull away and go out into the traffic.

  “Duane,” Holly goes.

  In this, too, she was right.

  I Could See The Smallest Things

  I WAS in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

  There was light enough so that I could see everything in the yard—lawn chairs, the willow tree, clothesline strung between the poles, the petunias, the fences, the gate standing wide open.

  But nobody was moving around. There were no scary shadows. Everything lay in moonlight, and I could see the smallest things. The clothespins on the line, for instance.

  I put my hands on the glass to block out the moon. I looked some more. I listened. Then I went back to bed.

  But I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept turning over. I thought about the gate standing open. It was like a dare.

  Cliff’s breathing was awful to listen to. His mouth gaped open and his arms hugged his pale chest. He was taking up his side of the bed and most of mine.

  I pushed and pushed on him. But he just groaned.

  I stayed still awhile longer until I decided it was no use. I got up and got my slippers. I went to the kitchen and made tea and sat with it at the kitchen table. I smoked one of Cliff’s unfiltereds.

  It was late. I didn’t want to look at the time. I drank the tea and smoked another cigarette. After a while I decided I’d go out and fasten up the gate.

  So I got my robe.

  The moon lighted up everything—houses and trees, poles and power lines, the whole world. I peered around the backyard before I stepped off the porch. A little breeze came along that made me close the robe.

  I started for the gate.

  THERE was a noise at the fences that separated our place from Sam Lawton’s place. I took a sharp look. Sam was leaning with his arms on his fence, there being two fences to lean on. He raised his fist to his mouth and gave a dry cough.

  “Evening, Nancy,” Sam Lawton said.

  I said, “Sam, you scared me.” I said, “What are you doing up?” “Did you hear something?” I said. “I heard my gate unlatch.”

  He said, “I didn’t hear anything. Haven’t seen anything, either. It might have been the wind.”

  He was chewing something. He looked at the open gate and shrugged.

  His hair was silvery in the moonlight and stood up on his head. I could see his long nose, the lines in his big sad face.

  I said, “What are you doing up, Sam?” and moved closer to the fence.

  “Want to see something?” he said.

  “I’ll come around,” I said.

  I let myself out and went along the walk. It felt funny walking around outside in my nightgown and my robe. I thought to myself that I should try to remember this, walking around outside like this.

  Sam was standing over by the side of his house, his pajamas way up high over his tan-and-white shoes. He was holding a flashlight in one hand and a can of something in the other.

  SAM and Cliff used to be friends. Then one night they got to drinking. They had words. The next thing, Sam had built a fence and then Cliff built one too.

  That was after Sam had lost Millie, gotten married again, and become a father again all in the space of no time at all. Millie had been a good friend to me up until she died. She was only forty-five when she did it. Heart failure. It hit her just as she was coming into their drive. The car kept going and went on through the back of the carport.

  “Look at this,” Sam said, hitching his pajama trousers and squatting down. He pointed his light at the ground.

  I looked and saw some wormy things curled on a patch of dirt.

  “Slugs,” he said. “I just gave them a dose of this,” he said, raising a can of something that looked like Ajax. “They’re taking over,” he said, and worked whatever it was that he had in his mouth. He turned his head to one side and spit what could have been tobacco. “I have to keep at this to just come close to staying up with them.” He turned his light on ajar that was filled with the things. “I put bait out, and then every chance I get I come out here with this stuff. Bastards are all over. A crime what they can do. Look here,” he said.

  He got up. He took my arm and moved me over to his rosebushes. He showed me the little holes in the leaves.

  “Slugs,” he said. “Everywhere you look around here at night. I lay out bait and then I come out and get them,” he said. “An awful invention, the slug. I save them up in that jar there.” He moved his light to under the rosebush.

  A plane passed overhead. I imagined the people on it sitting belted in their seats, some of them reading, some of them staring down at the ground.

  “Sam,” I said, “how’s everybody?”

  “They’re fine,” he said, and shrugged.

  He chewed on whatever it was he was chewing. “How’s Clifford?” he said.

  I said, “Same as ever.”

  Sam said, “Sometimes when I’m out here after the slugs, I’ll look over in your direction.” He said, “I wish me and Cliff was friends again. Look there now,” he said, and drew a sharp breath. “There’s one there. See him? Right there where my light is.” He had the beam directed onto the dirt under the rosebush. “Watch this,” Sam said.

  I closed my arms under my breasts and bent over to where he was shining his light. The thing stopped moving and turned its head from side to side. Then Sam was over it with his can of powder, sprinkling the powder down.

  “Slimy things,” he said.

  The slug was twisting this way and that. Then it curled and straightened out.

  Sam picked up a toy shovel, and scooped the slug into it, and dumped it out in the jar.

  “I quit, you know,” Sam said. “Had to. For a while it was getting so I didn’t know up from down. We still keep it around the house, but I don’t have much to do with it anymore.”

  I nodded. He looked at me and he kept looking.

  “I’d better get back,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll continue with what I’m doing and then when I’m finished, I’ll head in too.”

  I said, “Good night, Sam.”

  He said, “Listen.” He stopped chewing. With his tongue, he pushed whatever it was behind his lower lip. “Tell Cliff I said hello.”

  I said, “I’ll tell him you said so, Sam.”

  Sam ran his hand through his silvery hair as if he was going to make it sit down once and for all, and then he used his hand to wave.

  IN the bedroom, I took off the robe, folded it, put it within reach. Without looking at the time, I checked to make sure the stem was out on the clock. Then I got into the bed, pulled the covers up, and closed my eyes.

  It was then that I remembered I’d forgotten to latch the gate.

  I opened my eyes and lay there. I gave Cliff a little shake. He cleared his throat. He swallowed. Something caught and dribbled in his chest.

  I don’t know. It made me think of those things that Sam Lawton was dumping powder on.

  I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn’t have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.

  Sacks

  IT’S October, a damp day. From my hotel window I can see too much of this Midwestern city. I can see lights coming on in some of the buildings, smoke from the tall stacks rising in a thick climb. I wish I didn’t have to look.

  I want to pass along to you a story my fat
her told me when I stopped over in Sacramento last year. It concerns some events that involved him two years before that time, that time being before he and my mother were divorced.

  I’m a book salesman. I represent a well-known organization. We put out textbooks, and the home base is Chicago. My territory is Illinois, parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. I had been attending the Western Book Publishers Association convention in Los Angeles when it occurred to me to visit a few hours with my father. I had not seen him since the divorce, you understand. So I got his address out of my wallet and sent him a wire. The next morning I sent my things on to Chicago and boarded a plane for Sacramento.

  IT took me a minute to pick him out. He was standing where everyone else was—behind the gate, that is—white hair, glasses, brown Sta-Prest pants.

  “Dad, how are you?” I said.

  He said, “Les.”

  We shook hands and moved toward the terminal.

  “How’s Mary and the kids?” he said.

  “Everyone’s fine,” I said, which was not the truth.

  He opened a white confectionary sack. He said, “I picked up a little something you could maybe take back with you. Not much. Some Almond Roca for Mary, and some jellybeans for the kids.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t forget this when you leave,” he said.

  We moved out of the way as some nuns came running for the boarding area.

  “A drink or a cup of coffee?” I said.

  “Anything you say,” he said. “But I don’t have a car,” he said.

  We located the lounge, got drinks, lit cigarettes.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “Well, yes,” he said.

  I shrugged and said, “Yes.”

  I leaned back in the seat and drew a long breath, inhaling from what I took to be the air of woe that circled his head.

  He said, “I guess the Chicago airport would make four of this one.”

  “More than that,” I said.

  “Thought it was big,” he said.

  “When did you start wearing glasses?” I said.

  “A while ago,” he said.

  He took a good swallow, and then he got right down to it.

  “I liked to have died over it,” he said. He rested his heavy arms on either side of his glass. “You’re an educated man, Les. You’ll be the one to figure it out.”

  I turned the ashtray on its edge to read what was on the bottom: HARRAH’S CLUB/RENO AND LAKE TAHOE/GOOD PLACES TO HAVE FUN.

  “She was a Stanley Products woman. A little woman, small feet and hands and coal-black hair. She wasn’t the most beautiful thing in the world. But she had these nice ways about her. She was thirty and had kids. But she was a decent woman, whatever happened.

  “Your mother was always buying from her, a broom, a mop, some kind of pie filling. You know your mother. It was a Saturday, and I was home. Your mother was gone someplace. I don’t know where she was. She wasn’t working. I was in the front room reading the paper and having a cup of coffee when there was this knock on the door and it was this little woman. Sally Wain. She said she had some things for Mrs. Palmer. ‘I’m Mr. Palmer,’ I says. ‘Mrs. Palmer is not here now,’ I says. I ask her just to step in, you know, and I’d pay her for the things. She didn’t know whether she should or not. Just stands there holding this little paper sack and the receipt with it.

  “‘Here, I’ll take that,’ I says. ‘Why don’t you come in and sit down a minute till I see if I can find some money.’

  “‘That’s all right,’ she says. ‘You can owe it. I have lots of people do that. It’s all right.’ She smiles to let me know it was all right, you see.

  “‘No, no,’ I says. ‘I’ve got it. I’d sooner pay it now. Save you a trip back and save me owing. Come in,’ I said, and I hold the screen door open. It wasn’t polite to have her standing out there.”

  He coughed and took one of my cigarettes. From down the bar a woman laughed. I looked at her and then I read from the ashtray again.

  “She steps in, and I says. ‘Just a minute, please,’ and I go into the bedroom to look for my wallet. I look around on the dresser, but I can’t find it. I find some change and matches and my comb, but I can’t find my wallet. Your mother has gone through that morning cleaning up, you see. So I go back to the front room and says, ‘Well, I’ll turn up some money yet.’

  “‘Please, don’t bother,’ she says.

  “‘No bother,’ I says. ‘Have to find my wallet, anyway. Make yourself at home.’

  “‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says.

  “‘Look here,’ I says. ‘You hear about that big holdup back East? I was just reading about it.’

  “‘I saw it on the TV last night,’ she says.

  “‘They got away clean,’ I says.

  “‘Pretty slick,’ she says.

  “‘The perfect crime,’ I says.

  “‘Not many people get away with it,’ she says.

  “I didn’t know what else to say. We were just standing there looking at each other. So I went on out to the porch and looked for my pants in the hamper, where I figured your mother had put them. I found the wallet in my back pocket and went back to the other room and asked how much I owed.

  “It was three or four dollars, and I paid her. Then, I don’t know why, I asked her what she’d do with it if she had it, all the money those robbers got away with.

  “She laughed and I saw her teeth.

  “I don’t know what came over me then, Les. Fifty-five years old. Grown kids. I knew better than that. This woman was half my age with little kids in school. She did this Stanley job just the hours they were in school, just to give her something to keep busy. She didn’t have to work. They had enough to get by on. Her husband, Larry, he was a driver for Consolidated Freight. Made good money. Teamster, you know.”

  He stopped and wiped his face.

  “Anybody can make a mistake,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “She had these two boys, Hank and Freddy. About a year apart. She showed me some pictures. Anyway, she laughs when I say that about the money, says she guessed she’d quit selling Stanley Products and move to Dago and buy a house. She said she had relations in Dago.”

  I lit another cigarette. I looked at my watch. The bartender raised his eyebrows and I raised my glass.

  “So she’s sitting down on the sofa now and she asks me do I have a cigarette. Said she’d left hers in her other purse, and how she hadn’t had a smoke since she left home. Says she hated to buy from a machine when she had a carton at home. I gave her a cigarette and I hold a match for her. But I can tell you, Les, my fingers were shaking.”

  He stopped and studied the bottles for a minute. The woman who’d done the laughing had her arms locked through the arms of the men on either side of her.

  “IT’S fuzzy after that. I remember I asked her if she wanted coffee. Said I’d just made a fresh pot. She said she had to be going. She said maybe she had time for one cup. I went out to the kitchen and waited for the coffee to heat. I tell you, Les, I’ll swear before God, I never once stepped out on your mother the whole time we were man and wife. Not once. There were times when I felt like it and had the chance. I tell you, you don’t know your mother like I do.”

  I said, “You don’t have to say anything in that direction.”

  “I took her her coffee, and she’s taken off her coat by now. I sit down on the other end of the sofa from her and we get to talking more personal. She says she’s got two kids in Roosevelt grade school, and Larry, he was a driver and was sometimes gone for a week or two. Up to Seattle, or down to L.A., or maybe to Phoenix. Always someplace. She says she met Larry when they were going to high school. Said she was proud of the fact she’d gone all the way through. Well, pretty soon she gives a little laugh at something I’d said. It was a thing that could maybe be taken two ways. Then she asks if I’d heard the one about the traveling shoe-salesman who called on the widow woman. We laughed over that
one, and then I told her one a little worse. So then she laughs hard at that and smokes another cigarette. One thing’s leading to another, is what’s happening, don’t you see.

  “Well, I kissed her then. I put her head back on the sofa and I kissed her, and I can feel her tongue out there rushing to get in my mouth. You see what I’m saying? A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore. His luck just goes, you know?

  “But it was all over in no time at all. And afterwards she says, ‘You must think I’m a whore or something,’ and then she just goes.

  “I was so excited, you know? I fixed up the sofa and turned over the cushions. I folded all the newspapers and even washed the cups we’d used. I cleaned out the coffee pot. All the time what I was thinking about was how I was going to have to face your mother. I was scared.

  “Well, that’s how it started. Your mother and I went along the same as usual. But I took to seeing that woman regular.”

  The woman down the bar got off her stool. She took some steps toward the center of the floor and commenced to dance. She tossed her head from side to side and snapped her fingers. The bartender stopped doing drinks. The woman raised her arms above her head and moved in a small circle in the middle of the floor. But then she stopped doing it and the bartender went back to work.

  “Did you see that?” my father said.

  But I didn’t say anything at all.

  “SO that’s the way it went,” he said. “Larry has this schedule, and I’d be over there every time I had the chance. I’d tell your mother I was going here or going there.”

  He took off his glasses and shut his eyes. “I haven’t told this to nobody.”

  There was nothing to say to that. I looked out at the field and then at my watch.

  “Listen,” he said. “What time does your plane leave? Can you take a different plane? Let me buy us another drink, Les. Order us two more. I’ll speed it up. I’ll be through with this in a minute. Listen,” he said.

  “She kept his picture in the bedroom by the bed. First it bothered me, seeing his picture there and all. But after a while I got used to it. You see how a man gets used to things?” He shook his head. “Hard to believe. Well, it all come to a bad end. You know that. You know all about that.”