Something Is Out There (3 page)

Andrew says, “You look like you saw a ghost.”

She says, “Can’t you think of something pleasant to say?”

“Well, I’m just fumbling through life, you know.” He takes the last pull of the beer. “You all right?” he asks abruptly.

“Did Ruthie tell you about Stan going to stay in his studio?”

He folds the top of the paper bag over the lip of the bottle. “Yeah.”

“It’s—it’s only temporary. So he can concentrate.”

“I can’t believe the fool’d move out.” He stares at her. She wants to repeat that it’s just a temporary thing. So Stan can work. The lie exhausts her; she doesn’t, just now, have the breath to say it. The light and scattered shade seem to be moving, seem to be coming at her. She sees butterflies lifting from the dark green bushes in front of the house across the street, and the old woman who lives there, who never speaks to anyone, is standing on the front stoop with her black knobby cane, trying to get up the courage to take the first step down. The sight races at Josephine as if from a terrible distance.

Andrew touches her arm. “Hey.”

“I’m okay. Just got a little light-headed there, probably from the beer.” She notices that his eyes are a little glassy. “How much champagne did you have?”

He says, “Stan’s an idiot, if you ask me.”

She can’t help the look that comes to her face, the silent nodding admission that things are as bad as they can be. “Listen,” she says, “can you come in for a second? I’ve got a big box of clothes I need to get up in the attic.”

“Lead the way,” he tells her, handing her the bottle.

They go up to her door and in, and she puts the bottle into the recycling bin under the kitchen sink. There she takes one deep slow breath. “If you’ve got another one, I’d sure be grateful for it,” he says from the living room. She gets a bottle of Moretti Italian—Stan’s favorite—from the refrigerator and walks in there, where he’s settled on the sofa with one of the guitars in his lap. He can play, too, but amateurishly. To his credit, he isn’t the type of part-time musician who imposes, or has illusions about, his ability. She puts the beer down on the coffee table and sits across from him, glad of the opportunity of extending things for Ruthie’s sake. She says, “Play me something.”

“Naw.” He holds the guitar out to her. “You.”

She takes it. There isn’t anything else to do. She tunes both E strings to D, plays a few soft riffs, something she has been working on, a song for Stanislowski. He drinks the beer, and then leans back, watching her. Finally she returns the instrument to its normal tuning.

“Wish I could do that,” he says. “I have to use an electronic tuner. How can you do that?”

“Don’t know.” She smiles. “It’s something you’re born with. Perfect pitch.”

“
I
wasn’t born with it.”

“I didn’t know I had it until Stan.”

“You don’t have yet another beer around, do you?”

She puts the guitar down and goes into the kitchen to get him the beer. “You want a glass this time?”

“Sure.”

She hears the guitar, a few slow bluesy notes. It stops. When she comes back into the room he’s standing at the picture window, looking out at the street. The old lady across the
way has gotten to the second to last step. “I tried to help her once. She wants no help. She cussed at me, no kidding. You’d’ve thought I was making a pass at her.”

She hands him the beer and the glass, and goes over to the guitar. They sit across from each other and he drinks the beer, watching her play. She does the opening of the adagio to Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
.

“There’s something so sexy about a woman playing a guitar.”

She plays on for a space, concentrating. One of her weaknesses when she plays, according to Stanislowski, is that she watches her own left hand on the fret board.

She glances up from playing and sees that Andrew’s staring at her. He has drunk the beer, and he holds the empty glass with its traces of foam on the rounded sides. Some of the foam is still on his lips. He wipes it away with the back of one hand. She stops playing the adagio, and begins finger-picking the pattern to “Landslide.”

“I love that song,” he says. “Can I have another beer?”

“If you do,” she tells him, “you won’t be able to stand.”

“Tell me about what happened with Stan.”

“He—needs space to work.” She sighs, and puts down the guitar.

Her dream last night was that she was lying at the edge of an ocean, looking out at the emerald-turning-to-brilliant-blue of the water with its bands of whiteness up close, a perfectly innocent sweet afternoon, bright sun and pale sky—and suddenly turtles came out of the surf. They were small, yet in the province of the dream she knew them to be giant sea turtles, slithering up the beach toward her. The trail of their approach was precisely toward her, inscribing a wide fan of which she was the focal point. Realizing this, she was aghast, but she
couldn’t move, and then she was aware that she was dreaming, and so she began trying to wake up, and she did wake up; she was in the bedroom, and Stanislowski was there, but the turtles were there, too, very small now, like the pets in the little aquariums, and yet her dream-mind continued to categorize them as the gigantic slow sea turtles that made their heavy trail across the beach sand and laid the millions of eggs. Stanislowski got up and went out of the room and didn’t see the turtles and she was begging him to do something about them. He didn’t hear her.

And didn’t hear her.

And she woke up again, alone in the house with the cats and all the musical instruments. She remembered a story about a woman who died and her many cats devoured part of her face. She got up, trembling, and spent an hour in the other room, playing the harp for the celestial feeling of the notes in the stillness, and for the difficulty, which teased her out of thought.

But it all comes back to her now like a missed heartbeat. She tries to collect herself.

“You just got that look again,” Andrew says. “I’m making you nervous.”

She wants Ruthie to call now. She walks back in the kitchen and opens another Moretti, and brings it back to him. “This is the last one I’ve got.”

He takes it. “You don’t want any of it?” He pours it.

“I’m fine.”

He drinks, looking at her over the lip of the glass. Then he smacks his lips. “So, what’ll we do now?”

“Well, I’ve got this box of clothes.”

He stands. “Okay.” She wonders if he knows about the surprise party.

“Here,” she says, going into the hall, where the box is, and when she reaches up to pull the attic door down, he stands close, so that his arm comes against her shoulder.

“Let me,” he says, and pushes in front of her. She thinks of the alcohol he’s had. He goes up to take a look. She sees his black shoes on the steps; he isn’t wearing socks. When he backs down he has that simpleton’s smile on his face. The box of clothes is against the wall, on the floor. He claps his hands together and then bends down to lift it. It’s bulky and heavy, and he nearly falls back on the first step, but then steadies himself, inching upward, one-foot-up-and-standing, one-foot-up-and-standing, using the metal braces at the sides of the stairs, and the box as something to lean into, going up. He makes it with a lot of loud breathing, and when it’s done, he comes back down and closes everything.

“There,” he says. “Now what?”

“I don’t have any beer left,” she tells him. It comes to her that she has always felt that there was something missing in Andrew, something vaguely not right.

He moves toward her, and she steps back. “Andrew?”

And his arms are around her. “I feel so sad for you guys,” he says, leaning in. “I wish I could make it better.” She presses her hands against his upper chest, turning her head. His mouth brushes her cheek, her nose, her neck, and he keeps leaning with her. The two of them struggle briefly, he’s trying to find her mouth, and then he says something, only she can’t hear what he’s saying because her own voice is sounding, a string of words she comes to understand are at the level of a scream, ending in “Jesus Christ!”

He steps back from her, tries to take hold of the frame of the bedroom door, and misses, falling so that his shoulder hits the frame, and he lets out a cry and straightens himself, clutching
the hurt shoulder and staggering toward the living room, where he sits heavily on the sofa and bends forward over the pain, head down. “God,” he murmurs. “I’m drunk. Sorry. Forget it. God almighty—”

She’s standing over him. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she says. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

He sits up, still holding the hurt shoulder. He looks like he might cry. But then his expression changes, becomes that of someone who has been grievously and unjustly treated. “What the hell—I just wanted to hug a friend who’s hurting.”

She says nothing.

“A friend can kiss a friend.”

They’re both unable, for the moment, to speak. There’s just the sound of their breathing. Instances flash through her consciousness, like a kind of mental static, of her and Stanislowski in the company of this man and his wife.

“You come out and have some beer with me,” he says. “And then you invite me in after telling me you’re separated. Jesus. You offer me drinks. You play guitar for me. Come on. I was just being a friend.”

“Get out,” she says.

“Well, it doesn’t matter because I was just going to hold you like a friend.”

“Okay,” she says. “Fine. Fine. But I didn’t want to be held.”

“Stan never wanted me around,” Andrew mutters.
“You
did.”

It seems to her now that there have indeed been moments of a kind of pleasure in him. As with Bradford Smith. She has a fleeting sense of wonderment at the notion that there might be something she emanates that invites this sort of thing. But here is Andrew, holding his sore shoulder, looking at her with rage, his eyes accusing her, and his wife less than a city block away.

“Ruthie—your wife, remember her?—Ruthie asked me to stop you. Okay?” And then she tells him everything, all the plans. She speaks in an exhausted, sad, slow murmur.

Another moment passes. He won’t look her way now, and he simply sits there with the one hand clutching his shoulder, rocking back and forth slightly. “Ruthie’s—doing a party,” he says, dumbly, merely repeating it. Now he stops rocking. He’s very still, very quiet, seeming to contemplate everything.

Suddenly a terrible, braying laugh comes from him, an alcoholic, hacking, hellish noise that seems to come from somewhere other than his throat.

Josephine staggers from him to the dining room, sick to her stomach, and then around to the kitchen. She only wants him to leave, disappear. She never wanted anything more in her life. Out the window over the sink, she sees a cab pull up, Stanislowski. It thrills her; it makes everything else all right for a second. And then it is absolutely the worst thing she can imagine, another increment of badness. The house with its two outdoor cats and its musical instruments and its quiet and all the calm passages composing songs—all of this seems intolerably fragile, almost unthinkable anymore. She hears herself talking to Andrew: “Go home,” she says.
“Now
. Get out of here.”

He comes to the entrance of the room. “Nothing happened,” he says. He sounds as though someone is already challenging him about it. His face is the color of paste.

They hear the door. Stanislowski comes shambling in. “I need some cash for the damn cab,” he says, looking at Josephine and then at Andrew. “Hello, Andrew.”

The phone rings, as if on cue. They all stand completely silent and still in the sound of it. It rings four times, and at last Josephine picks it up.

“Hi, we’re ready!” Ruthie says. “Send him on his way.”

“Okay,” says Josephine.

“What’s wrong—you really do sound awful.”

“No,” Josephine finds the breath to say. “Fine. It’s fine.”

“He’s standing there and you can’t talk, right?”

“Right. Yes.”

“Send him on. Wait one minute and then follow.”

“Stanislowski’s here, too,” Josephine tells her. They’re both looking at her.

“That’s great!”

She puts the receiver down. There’s another pause. Stanislowski stares with his dark blue eyes at Josephine, one hand out, palm up. “The cab,” he says.

She retrieves her purse from the dining room, brings out a twenty, and gives it to him.

“Better head on home,” he says to Andrew. “Josephine and I are fixing to have a very personal conversation.”

“Nothing went on here,” Andrew says. “I swear to you.”

Stanislowski looks at Josephine. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Josephine doesn’t answer, so he turns to Andrew. “You want to tell me what in the living hell you’re talking about, there, Andrew?”

“She asked me to put a box of your clothes up in the attic.”

“Okay.”

“I was coming home early and Ruthie asked her to delay me. There’s a party for me.”

“I know that,” Stanislowski says.

“That was Ruthie,” Josephine says to Andrew. “Go on, go.”

Stanislowski stares at them. He smiles, but the smile dies on his lips and then he’s just waiting there in the doorway. He looks old. For the first time in her life with him, she sees his
age as a separate thing, a fact about him, like something that might be explained to her. At first she’s happy about this—it’s a realization of just how much his age has
not
meant. But then she sees him start out the door, and move away.

“Get out,” she says to Andrew. “Christ!”

He moves slowly, through the door and out. She waits. She doesn’t want to be within ten feet of him. Finally, making her way out onto the sidewalk, she looks one way and sees the empty prospect of the street with the houses on either side, and Andrew in it, walking unsteadily toward his house. Up the other way, her husband has paid the taxi and is just walking along behind it as it pulls away. She calls his name and he turns and stops. It’s as if he doesn’t really know where to go. She walks up and embraces him. “Stan,” she says. “Let’s just stay home.” She puts her face into the cloth of his shirt, letting go, crying. Everything she has been through with him and everything that has brought them to this trouble is rushing through her. She steps back, and looks into his face.