Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Page 4

  “Come in, please, Betty,” I said. “We’re just cleaning up some around here.” I moved aside and held the door.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have the children I’m looking after today. I have to get right back. But Pete and I were wondering if you could come to dinner before you leave.” She spoke in a quiet, shy manner and held a cigarette in her fingers. “Friday night?” she said. “If you can.”

  Sarah brushed her hair and came to the door. “Betty, come in out of the cold,” she said. The sky was gray and the wind was pushing clouds in off the sea.

  “No, no, thank you, I can’t. I left the children coloring, I have to get back. Pete and I, we just wondered if you two could come to dinner. Maybe Friday night, the night before you leave?” She waited and looked shy. Her hair lifted in the wind and she drew on her cigarette.

  “I’d like that very much,” Sarah said. “Is that all right with you, Phil? We don’t have any plans, I don’t think. Is it all right?”

  “That’s very nice of you, Betty,” I said. “We’d be happy to come to dinner.”

  “About 7:30?” Betty said.

  “Seven thirty,” Sarah said. “This pleases us very much, Betty. More than I can say. It’s very kind and thoughtful of you and Pete.”

  Betty shook her head and was embarrassed. “Pete said he’s sorry you’re leaving. He said it’s been like having more family here. He said it’s been an honor having you here as renters.” She started backing down the steps. The color was still high in her cheeks. “Friday night, then,” she said.

  “Thank you, Betty, I mean that,” Sarah said. “Thank you again. It means a lot to us.”

  Betty waved her hand and shook her head. Then she said, “Until Friday, then,” and the way in which she said it somehow made my throat tighten. I shut the door after she’d turned away, and Sarah and I looked at each other.

  “Well,” Sarah said, “this is a switch, isn’t it? Getting invited to dinner by our landlord instead of having to skip town and hide out somewhere.”

  “I like Pete,” I said. “He’s a good man.”

  “Betty too,” Sarah said. “She’s a good kind woman and I’m glad she and Pete have each other.”

  “Things come around sometimes,” I said. “Things work out.”

  Sarah didn’t say anything. She bit her lower lip for a minute. Then she went on into the back room to finish scrubbing. I sat down on the sofa and smoked a cigarette. When I’d finished, I got up and went back to the other room and my mop bucket.

  The next day, Friday, we finished cleaning the house and did most of our packing. Sarah wiped down the stove once more, put aluminum foil under the burners, and gave the counter a last going over. Our suitcases and few boxes of books stood in one corner of the living room, ready for our departure. We’d have dinner tonight with the Petersens and we’d get up the next morning and go out for coffee and breakfast. Then we’d come back and load the car; there wasn’t all that much left after twenty years of moves and disorder. We’d drive to Eureka and unload the car and put things away in Sarah’s efficiency apartment, which she’d rented a few days before, and then sometime before eight o’clock that night she’d drive me to the little airport where I would begin my trip east, planning to make connections with a midnight flight leaving San Francisco for Boston, and she would begin her new life in Eureka. She’d already, a month before, when we began discussing these matters, taken off her wedding ring—not so much in anger as just in sadness one night when we had been making these plans. She had worn no ring at all for a few days, and then she had bought an inexpensive little ring mounted with a turquoise butterfly because, as she said, that finger “felt naked.” Once, some years before that, in a rage, she had twisted the wedding band off her finger and thrown it across the living room. I had been drunk and left the house and when we talked about that night a few days later and I asked about her wedding ring, she said, “I still have it. I just put it in a drawer. You don’t really think I’d throw my wedding ring away, do you?” A little later she put it back on and she’d kept wearing it, even through the bad times, up until a month ago. She’d also stopped taking birth-control pills and had herself fitted with a diaphragm.

  So we worked that day around the house and finished the packing and the cleaning and then, a little after six o’clock, we took our showers and wiped down the shower stall again and dressed and sat in the living room, she on the sofa in a knit dress and blue scarf, her legs drawn up under her, and me in the big chair by the window. I could see the back of Pete’s restaurant from where I sat, and the ocean a few miles beyond the restaurant and the meadows and the copses of trees that lay between the front window and the houses. We sat without talking. We had talked and talked and talked. Now we sat without talking and watched it turn dark outside and the smoke feather up from the restaurant chimney.

  “Well,” Sarah said and straightened out her legs on the sofa. She pulled her skirt down a little. She lit a cigarette. “What time is it? Maybe we should go. They said 7:30, didn’t they? What time is it?”

  “It’s ten after seven,” I said.

  “Ten after seven,” she said. “This is the last time we’ll be able to sit in the living room like this and watch it get dark. I don’t want to forget this. I’m glad we have a few minutes.”

  In a little while I got up for my coat. On my way to the bedroom I stopped at the end of the sofa where she sat and bent and kissed her on the forehead. She raised her eyes to mine after the kiss and looked at me.

  “Bring my coat too,” she said.

  I helped her into her coat and then we left the house and went across the lawn and the back edge of the parking lot to Pete’s house. Sarah kept her hands in her pockets and I smoked a cigarette as we walked. Just before we got to the gate at the little fence surrounding Pete’s house, I threw down my cigarette and took Sarah’s arm.

  The house was new and had been planted with a tough climbing vine that had spread over the fence. A little wooden lumberjack was nailed to the banister that ran around the porch. When the wind blew, the little man began sawing his log. He was not sawing at this moment, but I could feel the dampness in the air and I knew the wind would come soon. Potted plants were on the porch and flower beds on either side of the sidewalk, but whether they had been planted by Betty or the first wife, there was no way of telling. Some children’s toys and a tricycle were on the porch. The porch light was burning, and just as we started up the steps Pete opened the door and greeted us.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, holding the screen door with one hand. He took Sarah’s hands in his hands and then he shook hands with me. He was a tall thin man, sixty years old or so, with a full head of neatly combed gray hair. His shoulders gave the impression of bulk, but he was not heavy. He was wearing a gray Pendleton shirt, dark slacks, and white shoes. Betty came to the door as well, nodding and smiling. She took our coats while Pete asked us what we’d like to drink.

  “What can I get you?” he said. “Name it. If I don’t have it we’ll send over to the restaurant for it.” Pete was a recovering alcoholic but kept wine and liquor around the house for guests. He’d once told me that when he’d bought his first restaurant and was cooking sixteen hours a day he drank two fifths of whiskey during those sixteen hours and was hard on his help. Now he’d quit drinking, had been hospitalized for it, we’d heard, and hadn’t had a drink in six years, but like many alcoholics, he still kept it around the house.

  Sarah said she’d have a glass of white wine. I looked at her. I asked for a Coke. Pete winked at me and said, “You want a little something in the Coke? Something to help take the dampness out of your bones?”

  “No thanks, Pete, but maybe you could toss a piece of lime in it, thanks,” I said.

  “Good fellow,” he said. “For me it’s the only way to fly anymore.”

  I saw Betty turn a dial on the microwave oven and push a button. Pete said, “Betty, will you have some wine with Sarah, or what would you like, honey?�
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  “I’ll have a little wine, Pete,” Betty said.

  “Phil, here’s your Coke,” Pete said. “Sarah,” he said, and gave her a glass of wine. “Betty. Now, there’s lots more of everything. Let’s go in where it’s comfortable.”

  We passed through the dining room. The table was already set with four place settings, fine china, and crystal wineglasses. We went through to the living room and Sarah and I sat together on one of the sofas. Pete and Betty sat across the room on another sofa. There were bowls of cocktail nuts within reach on a coffee table, cauliflower heads, celery sticks, and a bowl of vegetable dip beside the peanuts.

  “We’re so glad you could come,” Betty said. “We’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

  “We’re going to miss you,” Pete said, “and that’s a fact. I hate to see you go, but I know that’s life, people have to do what they have to do. I don’t know how to say this, but it’s been an honor having you over there in the house, you both being teachers and all. I have a great respect for education, though I don’t have much myself. It’s like a big family here, you know that, and we’ve come to look on you as part of that family. Here, here’s to your health. To you,” he said, “and to the future.”

  We raised our glasses and then we drank.

  “We’re so glad you feel that way,” Sarah said. “This is very important to us, this dinner; we’ve been looking forward to it more than I can tell you. It means a great deal to us.”

  Pete said, “We’re going to miss you, that’s all.” He shook his head.

  “It’s been very, very good for us living here,” Sarah said. “We can’t tell you.”

  “There was something about this fellow I liked when I first saw him,” Pete said to Sarah. “I’m glad I rented the house to him. You can tell a lot from a man when you first meet him. I liked this fellow of yours. You take care of him, now.”

  Sarah reached for a celery stick. A little bell went off in the kitchen and Betty said, “Excuse me,” and left the room.

  “Let me freshen those up for you,” Pete said. He left the room with our glasses and returned in a minute with more wine for Sarah and a full glass of Coke for me.

  Betty began carrying in things from the kitchen to put on the dining room table. “I hope you like surf and turf,” Pete said. “Sirloin steak and lobster tail.”

  “It sounds fine, it’s a dream dinner,” Sarah said.

  “I guess we can eat now,” Betty said. “If you’d like to come to the table. Pete sits here always,” Betty said. “This is Pete’s place. Phil, you sit there. Sarah, you sit there across from me.”

  “Man who sits at the head of the table picks up the check,” Pete said and laughed.

  It was a fine dinner: green salad dotted with tiny fresh shrimp, clam chowder, lobster tail, and steak. Sarah and Betty drank wine, Pete drank mineral water, I stayed with the Coke. We talked a little about Jonestown after Pete brought it up, but I could see that conversation made Sarah nervous. Her lips paled, and I managed to steer us around to salmon fishing.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to go out,” Pete said. “But the sports fishermen aren’t doing anything yet. It’s only the fellows with the commercial licenses that are getting them, and they’re going way out. In another week or two maybe the salmon will have moved in. Anytime now, really,” Pete said. “But you’ll be on the other side of the country then.”

  I nodded. Sarah picked up her wineglass.

  “I bought a hundred and fifty pounds of fresh salmon from a guy yesterday, and that’s what I’m featuring on the menu over there now. Fresh salmon,” Pete said. “I put it right in the freezer and fresh-froze it. Fellow drove up with it in his pickup truck, an Indian, and I asked him what he was asking for it and he said $3.50 a pound. I said $3.25, and he said we had a deal. So I fresh-froze it and I have it over there on the menu right now.”

  “Well, this was fine,” I said. “I like salmon, but it couldn’t have been any better than what we had here tonight. This was delicious.”

  “We’re so glad you could come,” Betty said.

  “This is wonderful,” Sarah said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much lobster tail and steak. I don’t think I can eat all of mine.”

  “Whatever’s left we’ll put in a doggy bag for you,” Betty said and blushed. “Just like at the restaurant. But save room for dessert.”

  “Let’s have coffee in the living room,” Pete said.

  “Pete has some slides we took when we were on our trip,” Betty said. “If you’d care to see them, we thought we might put up the screen after dinner.”

  “There’s brandy for those who want it,” Pete said. “Betty’ll have some, I know. Sarah? You’ll have some. That’s a good girl. It doesn’t bother me a bit to have it around and have my guests drink it. Drinking’s a funny thing,” Pete said.

  We had moved back into the living room. Pete was putting up a screen and talking. “I always keep a supply of everything on hand, as you noticed out there, but I haven’t touched a drink of anything alcoholic myself for six years. Now this was after drinking more than a quart a day for ten years after I retired from the service. But I quit, God knows how, but I quit, I just quit. I turned myself over to my doctor and just said, Help me, doc. I want to get off this stuff, doc. Can you help me? Well, he made a couple of calls. Said he knew some fellows used to have trouble with it, said there’d been a time when he’d had trouble with it too. The next thing I knew I was on my way to an establishment down there near Santa Rosa. It was in Calistoga, California. I spent three weeks there. When I came home I was sober and the desire to drink had left me. Evelyn, that’s my first wife, she met me at the door when I came home and kissed me on the lips for the first time in years. She hated alcohol. Her father and a brother both died from it. It can kill you too, don’t forget it. Well, she kissed me on the lips for the first time that night, and I haven’t had a drink since I went into that place at Calistoga.”

  Betty and Sarah were clearing the table. I sat on the sofa and smoked while Pete talked. After he’d put up the screen he took a slide projector out of a box and set it on an end table. He plugged in the cord and flicked a switch on the projector. Light beamed onto the screen and a little fan in the projector began to run.

  “We have enough slides that we could look at pictures all night and then some,” Pete said. “We have slides here from Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, the Middle East, Africa too. What would you like to see?”

  Sarah came in and sat down on the other end of the sofa from me.

  “What would you like to see, Sarah?” Pete said. “You name it.”

  “Alaska,” Sarah said. “And the Middle East. We were there for a while, years ago, in Israel. I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska.”

  “We didn’t get to Israel,” Betty said, coming in with the coffee. “We were on a tour that went only to Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon.”

  “It’s a tragedy, what’s happened in Lebanon,” Pete said. “It used to be the most beautiful country in the Middle East. I was there as a kid in the merchant marines in World War II. I thought then, I promised myself then, I’d go back there someday. And then we had the opportunity, Betty and me. Didn’t we, Betty?”

  Betty smiled and nodded.

  “Let’s see those pictures of Syria and Lebanon,” Sarah said. “Those are the ones I’d like to see. I’d like to see them all, of course, but if we have to choose.”

  So Pete began to show slides, both he and Betty commenting as the memory of the places came back to them.

  “There’s Betty trying to get on a camel,” Pete said. “She needed a little help from that fellow there in the burnoose.”

  Betty laughed and her cheeks turned red. Another slide flashed on the screen and Betty said, “There’s Pete talking with an Egyptian officer.”

  “Where he’s pointing, that mountain behind us there. Here, let me see if I can bring that in closer,” Pete said. “The Jews are dug in there. We could se
e them through the binoculars they let us use. Jews all over that hill. Like ants,” Pete said.

  “Pete believes that if they had kept their planes out of Lebanon, there wouldn’t be all that trouble there,” Betty said. “The poor Lebanese.”

  “There,” Pete said. “There’s the group at Petra, the lost city. It used to be a caravan city, but then it was just lost, lost and covered over by sand for hundreds of years, and then it was discovered again and we drove there from Damascus in Land Rovers. Look how pink the stone is. Those carvings in the stone are more than two thousand years old, they say. There used to be twenty thousand souls who lived there. And then the desert just covered it up and it was forgotten about. It’s what’s going to happen to this country if we aren’t careful.”

  We had more coffee and watched some more slides of Pete and Betty at the souks in Damascus. Then Pete turned off the projector and Betty went out to the kitchen and returned with carameled pears for dessert and more coffee. We ate and drank and Pete said again how they would miss us.

  “You’re good people,” Pete said. “I hate to see you leave, but I know it’s in your best interests or you wouldn’t be going. Now, you’d like to see some slides from Alaska. Is that what you said, Sarah?”

  “Alaska, yes,” Sarah said. “We’d talked once about going to Alaska, years ago. Didn’t we, Phil? Once we were all set to go to Alaska. But we didn’t go at the last minute. Do you remember that, Phil?”

  I nodded.

  “Now you’ll go to Alaska,” Pete said.

  The first slide showed a tall, trim red-haired woman standing on the deck of a ship with a snow-covered range of mountains in the distance behind her. She was wearing a white fur coat and facing the camera with a smile on her face.

  “That’s Evelyn, Pete’s first wife,” Betty said. “She’s dead now.”

  Pete threw another slide onto the screen. The same red-haired woman was wearing the same coat and shaking hands with a smiling Eskimo in a parka. Large dried fish were hanging on poles behind the two figures. There was an expanse of water and more mountains.