A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“I do”—taking a moment to find it. “Steam electric,” he says, carefully taking it out of the box to show her. “I got one of these for my mother and she says it does a beautiful job.”

“How much does that go for?”

“Six dollars and forty-nine cents.”

“And what about penny candy?” she asks shyly.

He laughs. “Don’t think you’re the first person this week who’s asked — I have peppermint balls, lemon drops, red and black licorice, and, if you’re looking for something fancy, I’ve got a couple of boxes of See’s chocolates.”

“I had one of those once,” she says, “it was heaven on earth.”

“Chocolatiers to the stars,” he says.

She laughs and reaches into her dress pocket. “How about I take the iron and fifty cents’ worth of candy.”

Grady works door to door 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. If the husband is home, Grady makes it a point to seem interested in whatever it is the fella wants to show him — it’s always something — a project he’s got going in the barn out back or in his basement workshop. Grady finds it sad — all the fellas want is a pat on the back and someone to tell them they’re doing fine. He listens, lets the man go on longer than he ought to, and then, before starting his pitch, he sobers the fella up with the story of how he never saw his father in a suit until the day he died. And then he goes for the sale — anything less than fifty bucks he considers a failure. It’s a success if he can get them to buy the encyclopedia for the kids and a box of candy for the wife — and near the holidays he also keeps a supply of toy trucks with working headlights, and dolls whose eyes open and close for the girls.

For Wilson Grady, a good day ends in a diner. With the exception of his mother’s pies, he’s had the best meals of his life tucked into a window booth under the glow of the neon sign and with a letter from his encyclopedia as good company.

“I’ ll start with a cup of the chowder and then I’ ll have the special.”

His plate, with two thick slices of meat loaf, well-cooked green beans, a warm biscuit, and a scoop of mashed potatoes mounded like hills with a well of brown gravy in the center, is so perfect it almost makes him cry — he loves America.

At night a wind sweeps across and the temperature drops down. Even though it’s been a good day, Wilson Grady is achingly cold. He keeps a couple of old wool blankets in the car, along with a pillow that belonged to his brother as a young boy. He parks on a side street and hunkers down for the night — most of the time no one notices him, and if they do he apologizes and drives off into the night, thinking of the waitress with her apron tied neatly around her waist like a chastity belt, as he vanishes down a darkened road.

I finish and I’m almost in tears — it’s a side of Nixon that I’ve never seen before but always suspected existed beneath the surface. There’s a humanity, a desperation to this Nixon, which is early Nixon, not presidential Nixon, but Nixon as he knows himself. This Nixon is a man with burgeoning ambition, an idealized, if clichéd, everyman, crisscrossing the country laying the groundwork for the great moment to come. Wilson Grady is a man who wants something but doesn’t quite know how to get it.

I unpack the box, making a row of piles of the material, careful to keep things in order — but wanting to get to the middle, the end, wanting a sense of the arc of the materials, the shape of things.

I find a short piece about halfway through the stack. What draws my attention to it is how Nixon has printed “SOB, Son of a Bitch” multiple times across the top two inches of the page. The “story,” almost entirely in curses, is a vignette of a man being attacked by the furniture in his office. The man arrives late, having been delayed by train trouble. And rain. His shoes are soaked. His socks are wet. He comes into his office, takes his shoes and socks off and lays them on the radiator, puts his damp leather briefcase down — noticing that it actually smells like a barnyard — takes out his important papers, and sits in his chair, which promptly spins him in endless circles before tipping him forward onto the floor. He remounts the chair and leans forward to turn on the desk lamp, which delivers a surprising shock. He then picks up his ink pen, which leaks all over his fingers, and then, finally, in a rage, as he’s looking for a handkerchief to clean himself, he slams the pencil drawer shut, pinching his fingers.

“Christ.”

“What the hell?”

“Damn it.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Cocksucker.”

From there I find another story; scrawled across the top in parentheses is a note, “no names, because I actually once had a drink with this fella.”

An Apartment on the Avenue

Arthur comes home late, having had one or two more than is good for him. He finds his wife in the bedroom, undressing; he watches her thinking she still looks good, sexy, he’ d be in the mood for getting frisky, but as soon as she speaks, his hopes …

“Is there something I can get for you, Arthur?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“All right, Arthur, I thought from the way you were standing there that you were waiting for something.”

“You wanna know what it is, Blanche? The truth of it all … I never loved you — I married you because I thought it would be good for me.”

“I already know that, Arthur.”

“And if I didn’t think it would cost me in more ways than one, I would have been out of here long ago.”

“You’re not the only one who feels that way,” she says.

“When was the last time you wanted me?” he says. “In the way that a woman should want her man.”

“I’ve never liked sex, you know that,” she says, looking at him in the mirror of her dressing table.

“Exactly,” he says, talking to her reflection. “But imagine how that makes a fella feel? The thing is, I like it and it would be nice to do it once in a while with someone who didn’t think it was disgusting.”

“It is my understanding that you certainly have found places to ‘do it.’”

“It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?”

“Doesn’t it?” she says. “Well, Arthur, when you talk about things that could hurt you, having relations with your boss’s secretary can’t be good for you, can it?”

“Men don’t see it the same as women,” he says.

“I’m sure,” she says.

He comes close to her, close to the dressing table where she’s sitting, putting cream on her face.

“Put some on me,” he says, almost begging for it. She’s not interested.

“You know how to take care of yourself,” she says, getting up and walking away.

He reaches out to pull her towards him, but everything goes wrong, and his hand connects with her face, like he’s taking a swing at her. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.

She has no reaction, she just takes it, and somehow it’s the lack of a reaction, the absence of anything human, that prompts him to do it again — this time with clear intention. Fingers rolled into a fist, he lays one on her, hitting her cheek.

She doesn’t fall; she stands there, barely swaying. “Are we done for the night?” she says and then spits — a single tooth lands on the carpet.