Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

Larry came in behind Altar and Di Labbia, saw the mason, and stopped. He faced the wall, hands on his hips, and said, “What’s that supposed to be?”

Di Labbia turned, the proud smile still on his face, the eagerness to exhibit his work still shining in his eyes. “What’s what, Larry?” he asked, still caught in the intoxicating grip of what had seemed to be ideal builder-architect rapport.

“That wall,” Larry said.

“It’s gonna make the room,” Di Labbia said enthusiastically. “When you step into this room—”

“You’ll be smacked in the face with a wall that looks like the local bank!” Larry snapped.

Di Labbia blinked, puzzled. “What?” he said.

“The drawings call for a random rubble pattern,” Larry said, his voice rising. “Your mason’s doing ashlar. There’s supposed to be a natural feel to this room, and you’ve got him laying the stone up in neat courses. Look at it! He’s got half the wall done already — and all wrong!”

“Gee, that’s funny,” Di Labbia said. “The elevation—”

“The elevation indicated the pattern clearly!” Larry shouted. “Get the plans! Where are they?”

Di Labbia turned to his foreman. Anxiously, he began leafing through the drawings. When they came to the detail for the wall, Di Labbia bit his lip and frowned. “I can see how he made the mistake,” he said. “You only indicated a portion of the wall, and he—”

“That’s usually enough for a competent mason,” Larry snapped. “Or did you suddenly decide to design my house?”

“Now, don’t get excited, Larry. It was a natural mistake. The mason probably figured you wanted things—” He sought a word with his hands — “neat and even in such an expensive house. He probably figured—”

“It’s my job to do the figuring!” Larry said. “Why wasn’t the drawing followed?”

“It was a mistake,” Di Labbia said apologetically, obviously embarrassed. He looked at Altar, his face trying to indicate how natural the error had been, and then he turned to Larry again, eager to reconstruct the earlier, friendlier feeling. But Larry would not let it go.

“Doesn’t anybody here know how to read a simple elevation?” he asked. “What kind of a builder are you, Di Labbia? Is everybody asleep around here?”

“The elevation showed only—”

“The elevation showed a rough, round, informal pattern! Your man took it into his head to change the design. And your foreman didn’t stop him, and you didn’t stop him, and if I hadn’t come up today, you’d have built that damn wall to China without being stopped!”

“Larry, it was a mis—”

“Rip it out!”

“All right, I’ll rip it out. Don’t get so excited. It’s only a wall. So we’ll—”

“Don’t tell me what to get excited about. I don’t like workmen meddling with my design.”

“But nobody meddled...”

“What else is wrong around here? What else are you trying to hide?”

He went storming away from Di Labbia and Altar. Like a patient father watching a spoiled son in a tantrum, Di Labbia stood with his grimy hands hanging at his sides, chewing nervously at his mustache. Altar didn’t know quite what to say. By association, he felt somewhat like Larry’s accomplice. He could hear Larry shouting at the workmen as he moved angrily through the house. When he returned, his full fury had still not been vented.

“Why hasn’t he started taking it down?” he shouted. “Must I watch you every minute, Di Labbia? I thought you were an honest builder.”

“Now listen—” Di Labbia started.

“What the hell are you? A crook? A cheat?”

“Now just a minute!” Di Labbia said, his voice rising.

“I don’t like crooks or cheats! You said you were a builder. All right, builder , why don’t you—”

“I’m a builder!” Di Labbia shouted, as if his manhood had been questioned. “I’m a damn good builder!” His voice was shrill in indignation now. “Everybody makes mistakes. You designed a door that swung open against a closet, didn’t you?” He paused, and then lowered his voice in an attempt once more to recapture the friendship he’d felt earlier. “Didn’t I point that out to you?”

“Thanks for nothing,” Larry said. “I’d have discovered it myself anyway.”

Di Labbia was trembling now with the effort to make things right again. The house had been going along beautifully, so beautifully, and it seemed incredible to him that a mason’s stupid mistake could cause so wide a breach. He sought the right words, but they would not come. Instead, in childish retaliation, he said, “When am I getting my Thermopane? How can I finish inside if I can’t enclose?”

“Use tar paper,” Larry said.

“What about the glass?”

“It’s on order. You’ll get it, don’t worry. You’ve got plenty to do outside.”

“My exterior work’ll be finished by the end of next week. I want to get started on—”

“Then use tar paper! Don’t create problems. Your big problem now is ripping out that wall.”

Di Labbia nodded. With great dignity, he said, “The wall will be ripped out and rebuilt according to your drawing,” and then he turned from Larry and walked away.

“Come on, Altar,” Larry said, and he strode out of the house. Altar went to Di Labbia to shake hands with him and then ran to catch up with Larry. When he fell into step beside him, Larry muttered, “The crook! I can’t stand a goddamn cheat!”

And Altar very softly said, “Transference is a marvelous phenomenon, isn’t it?”

When he got out of the car after the long drive to Howard Johnson’s, Larry apologized to Altar. The writer gently suggested that perhaps the apology was being misdirected, and Larry promised to call Di Labbia as soon as he got home. He said goodbye to Joan, walked to his own car, unlocked it, and climbed behind the wheel. He sat behind the wheel for a long time without starting the car. The afternoon sun slanted against the windshield, throwing a faint reflection of his face into the car. He looked at the face, a face he once had known. The reflection was transparent, not a true mirror image. Beyond it, through it, he could see people walking in and out of the restaurant. He had the sudden feeling that the person he’d known to be himself, like the face he’d known, was becoming transparent and thin, was fading, and would someday vanish completely.

Today, he thought, I turned on a nice guy doing a job. What do I do tomorrow? Kick a blind man? How many other people will I attack in an attempt to justify something in myself which I know to be wrong? How long can I maintain two separate warring identities within the same body shell? How long can I be two people without being either, borrowing the worst from each to create a monster unlike either? I can’t, I can’t. I can’t go on this way without destroying myself.

I guess I’ll have to leave Eve, he thought calmly. The thought did not frighten him or startle him. It came quite easily and reasonably, as if it were the result of irrefutably logical thinking.

If I were a different person, he thought, I wouldn’t have to leave my wife. I could allow things to go along just the way they’re going now. According to Felix Anders, everyone in the world is cheating anyway, and perhaps Felix is right. Perhaps, after all, there’s nothing new under the sun, nothing startling about two basically decent people who have somehow become so involved with each other that all values are now meaningless. If I were capable of adjusting more easily, he thought, I could doubtless adjust to this too and leave things just the way they are. I could allow my marriage to move along steadily on a rising graph line recording a bank of memories — the birthdays, the sick children, the parties, the traffic snarls, the outings, the anniversaries, the Christmases, the jokes shared, the movies shared, the songs shared — and at the same time there would be another graph for Maggie and me, a similar graph with its own memory bank, separate and apart. I could maintain a split identity which overlapped at some points, do just what Felix says everyone else is doing anyhow.