Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“No,” she said.

“Y ’really loved me,” Sparky said, “you’d join me, ’stead of fussin’ at me all the time.”

“No,” she said again.

“Go fine it,” he said. “Top drawer of the dresser. I’ll cook it up for you, darlin’, show you how to...”

“Not for you, not for anybody,” she said, and walked out of the room.

The couple on the third floor were sitting on the stoop outside the building. They said nothing to her as she went by. She knew they were trying to force the landlord to evict her and Sparky. They’d told the landlord there was drug traffic on the fourth floor of the building. She knew it was because Sparky was black, this fucking country. The streets were miserably hot. Her tent dress clung sweatily to her thighs as she walked the three blocks to the bus stop. It was almost nine o’clock when she got to Cambridge. She wandered Harvard Square for another half-hour or so, and then bought a ticket to see a movie, anything to get out of the heat. The movie was a foreign film called Blow-Up, they brought back a lot of foreign films in Cambridge, made sure the college kids were up on their culture. It broke at about eleven-twenty, and she was coming out of the theater, into the suffocating heat again, moving past the cashier’s booth, when a voice at her left elbow said, “Hey, look who’s here.”

She did not recognize him at first. He seemed only another of the faceless squares she’d learned to avoid over the years, a dumpy little bald-headed man, blue eyes twinkling in a moon face, a fringe of brown hair over each ear. Then suddenly he brought up his hands and snapped his fingers on both sides of his head like a flamenco dancer.

“Matthew Hobbs,” he said. “Light on my feet.”

“Oh, hi,” she said.

“How’s business?” he said. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Well, I...”

“Come on, you won’t turn into a pumpkin till midnight.”

She looked at her watch. “Well, okay,” she said, and they began walking up toward the square.

“So tell me, did you ever get your business going?” he asked.

“I gave it up.”

“Wise move,” he said. He was puffing. “Slow down a little,” he said. “Are we running a foot race?”

“I’m sorry, I...”

“I’ve got to lose some weight, I know,” he said. “My love life is suffering, I mean it. My roommate asked me yesterday how I had the nerve to undress in front of strangers. He wasn’t talking about himself, he’s not a stranger, I’ve been sharing the room with him since I started summer school. I’m making up courses, you know? He meant strangers. Girls. People of the female persuasion. I’m too fat, I know it. How tall do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.”

“Five eight. How tall are you?”

“Five nine.”

“You seem much taller,” he said, and looked down at her feet. “Are you wearing heels?”

“No, I...”

“No heels. You’re tall. I’m short and fat. Spencer is right. My roommate. Spencer Larsson, he’s Swedish.”

“Your roommate where?”

“Tufts. I’m gonna be a fucking dentist , would you believe it? Listen, do you really want coffee? It’ll only keep us awake.”

“Well...”

“You want to walk instead? I can use the exercise.”

“Sure, but I have to get home before long.”

“Mother waiting up?”

“Well... not exactly.”

“Man in your life these days? I remember when I met you...”

“Yes, the situation has changed.”

“Brooke Hastings,” he said.

“What?”

“You were crashing with a girl named Brooke Hastings.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Tempus fugit,” Matthew said. “The Charles okay?”

“The Charles is fine.”

They walked by the river. A semblance of a breeze was blowing in off the water.

“Spencer cuts his toenails once a week,” Matthew said. “How often do you cut your toenails?”

“Whenever they get long,” Lissie said.

“Big muscular Swede,” Matthew said, raising his arms and flexing his muscles. “Built like a marble statue. Spencer Larsson, where’d a Swede get a name like Spencer? Cuts his toenails every week. Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning. I didn’t even know I had toenails till I began rooming with him. Well, that’s not exactly true. Did you used to chew on your toenails when you were a kid?”

“No.”

“I did.”

“How’d you get your feet in your mouth?”

“I mean the parings. After your mother cut your nails. Didn’t your mother used to cut your nails?”

“Sure.”

“After your bath, right?”

“Right.”

“So? The parings. Nice clean parings. Toenail soup,” he said. “How’d you like the movie?”

“It was good.”

“Do you know what it was about?”

“Sure. I mean I think so.”

“It was about witnessing the primal scene.”

“What’s that?”

“The primal scene? It’s your mother and your father fucking.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember the part in the film where he’s enlarging the pictures he took in the park?”

“Yes. My father’s a photographer, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Of the couple hugging and kissing in the park, do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s trying to dope out what happened? By blowing up the pictures, remember? That’s where the title came from, Blow-Up.”

“Well, it was also a play on words.”

“Oh, sure. But the key scene in the movie is the enlarging of those black-and-white pictures. What’s your father’s name?”

“James Croft.”

“Never heard of him. I thought he might be Steichen or somebody.”

“No.”

“Does that bother you? That I never heard of him?”

“Me? No. It might bother him, though.”

“When I meet him, I’ll tell him how much I admire his work, how’s that?” Matthew said.

Lissie said nothing.

“Anyway, the photographer keeps blowing up all the pictures, bigger and bigger, trying to find out just what the hell those two people were doing there in the park. Because he’s a kid trying to dope out the primal scene he’s just witnessed, you understand? And finally, after all the enlargements, he zeroes in on a big blowup of a pistol.”

“Ah,” Lissie said. “Yes.”

“You know what a pistol stands for, don’t you?”

“Sure, a cock.”

“Right, a penis. So there you are.”

“Well, I think that’s an interesting way of looking at it,” Lissie said, “but I’m not sure that’s what the movie was really about.”

“Did you ever witness the primal scene?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“No lech for your daddy, huh?”

“None at all.”

“What does your mother do? You said your father...”

“She’s a speech pathologist.” Lissie paused. “They’re divorced. My father got married again two months ago.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Your father remarried?”

“No, my mother. And not two months ago. Two years ago.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“About what? The divorce? The remarriage? I don’t think about it anymore.”

“But when you did think about it.”

“I hated them at first. Both of them. My mother and my father both. I tried everything I could think of to get them together again. That’s because I was afraid I’d try fucking my mother now that the competition was out of the way.”

“Come on,” Lissie said.

“I’m serious. Listen, Freud knew what he was talking about. I never even liked my father, I mean there wasn’t the slightest bit of communication between us ever. But all of a sudden my mother was leaving him for this tennis player...”