Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But he came a second time.

This time he took something.

It was getting later, and Houston seemed not so far away as the airport John had to get to tomorrow afternoon to fly to Houston. Houston was why they had had dinner at the Spanish restaurant tonight. The quilt was in his hand, the bed just above eye level; Linda was looking at him, the window behind her.

The Departed Tenant had taken two things, as a matter of fact.

John was asking just when was this second visit, but in his thoughts he put the last couple of weeks together — himself the least vivid neighbor in these places where the man with the crease on his cheekbone got up and left, and he sat down in front of the other man’s coffee, so that a woman with improbable blue eyes could tell John a couple of times that he was late, and take the coffee away, and another woman, with amber eyes, could look at him with concerned anger, he thought, while he looked at her photograph with some anguish against his heart. She had said, "O.K.?" as if to ask leave of the Departed Tenant, who had apparently been breaking into this pad of hers, where not only had the piano that had been in the old bedroom moved into the new living room but there was a bed high off the floor as well, and now a quilt. He didn’t like hearing her talk to the guy, but as for his real anguish, it wasn’t here in this place; John had left it somewhere else.

He heard himself saying to her that maybe he ought to move, too.

"What’s that got to do with that man getting in here?" said Linda.

"It’s how I feel when I go back to my own place," he said, and his heart was thick as a hundred sounds at once.

"Stop smiling," she said. "Or tell me what it is."

"What did he get away with?"

"You couldn’t care less," she said extravagantly.

He laughed, and she said that when he got back from Houston they’d have to have a talk. He said he’d heard that before. He bobbed his head sideways at the bed above them — an unspeakable crudity, at this moment, that sent her into the bedroom.

He turned out the lights and put the chain on the door. He went in expecting her to be sitting on the bed or lying down staring at the ceiling. She was standing beside her bureau, absorbed in a magazine. He held her shoulders and looked at the article she was reading, and asked what the intruder had gotten away with. She put the magazine down and didn’t speak until she was in bed. He had watched her, and now he stood there with his clothes on.

The neighborhood led to her front door and through it. And out again, home again, he envisioned, and he also saw that — after her apartment had changed again, a third apartment, a fourth apartment, and he was walking home in one new way after another, but always through the intersection where the Puerto Rican woman with the blue eyes sometimes had the night shift and once, well after dawn, was being helped by a little girl who had her hair in two braids — he would himself move to a new apartment, so that between his place and Linda’s there was no point in passing through that intersection.

"Please don’t tell me you’ve heard it before," she said. She did not ask if he was coming to bed.

"But I have heard it before," he said.

"And you’ve heard your wife say she was moving because you wouldn’t; and you’ve heard the stereo blasting out the Beatles or Beethoven as you put your key in the front door and your heart fell because you felt it was your fault she was boozing, but you would never tell her it was your fault. And you heard her say When you get back, we’ve got to have a talk; but so what — so what?"

"But when I got back, she wasn’t there," he said.

"I really wouldn’t know," said Linda. She shifted in bed and raised up on an elbow. "She must have been there sometimes. Maybe she’s there now, for all I know."

"I’m going," he said.

"What a sucky date this has been," said Linda.

"Do you think he’s dangerous?" said John.

Linda laid her head down on the pillow. "He’s got a hammer," she said.

"He took a hammer?"

"It was right here on the bed table under the lamp, with the two Polaroid pictures of me."

"That was his hammer," said John.

"But I was using it."

"Listen, I really meant to staple those speaker wires for you."

"I’m glad you didn’t," said Linda wearily.

He moved out of the bedroom. "You creep," she called after him. "We’ve had that talk, so forget it. Lock the door on your way out."

He took the chain off, and as he was letting himself out Linda said, "He took one of the pictures."

"What?" said John across the dark space of the apartment.

Linda raised her voice. "He took one of the Polaroids with him when he called, but I was afraid he’d try to return it." John bet himself that Linda didn’t think he would go. He closed the door softly behind him and locked it.

In the elevator he was relieved. Linda would have to have the lock changed — and by another locksmith, not from around here. That was the answer— of course! — to how the Departed Tenant had gotten in. And the door didn’t lock by itself, so he had to have had a key to lock up when he left. The Departed Tenant had a friend who worked for the contractor, who was also the locksmith in the neighborhood, and he must have done the job or had it done by somebody who worked for him. The key must not have been registered if the Departed Tenant had gotten hold of a duplicate.

The story went on in his head. He came to the lobby door and leaned his head against the glass. It was cool against his forehead, and, staring at his shoes, he remembered again the snapshot in his inside pocket. The tension or whatever it was passed without a sound, and he imagined, there, with his eyes shut, that his hand on the doorknob felt the polite force of somebody on the other side, coming home.

The restaurant was still very much open. He’d been right about the sign. The pet shop and the checks-cashed place were shut up tight. He wanted it to be later. A couple passed, and both of them were chewing gum. He’d seen a girl running for a bus this morning chewing gum.

He approached the corner where his former route joined this one. He saw the bearded man in the big western hat, who might have been the Departed Tenant, cross the street in front of him and disappear, walking south. It had to be the same man, though he wore an army jacket, not the grimy white parka.

At the corner he turned south to follow the man, who stopped down the block at the pay phone. And John stopped, as if, at fifty yards’ distance, he was waiting to use the phone when the man was through, while the man was looking at him as if the call might go on for a long time.

Two large trucks came racing uptown side by side, and a cab was trying to get around them. The man at the phone seemed to be talking. Now he put the phone back on the hook and strode off. John stood watching until the man broke into an easy jog and turned west at the next corner. John went after him past the phone on its cement post and the wire-mesh trash basket.

At the corner he didn’t see the man. The man could not have made it all the way down the block, but he had been going in the direction of Linda’s place. John ran back along the pavement to the phone and dialed her. She wasn’t answering.

He needed to pack. He would scare Linda if he went back now. He made the turn at the next corner, wondering if Linda had put the chain back on. She had an excellent sense of humor. So did he. Sometimes, she said.

At the cafe-newsstand intersection the traffic light was turning red when he saw Linda. She was wearing her purple coat, and she was crossing the avenue half a block ahead of him. A cab passed, and then another.