John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

The aches were starting to close round his spine. He headed for the stairs, for Zefira’s room. At first he climbed with one hand gripping the bannister, but the tight hold made him think of his mother and her walker. He let go and instead opened the neck of his shirt a little more.

She wasn’t in bed. Of course she lived on all-nighters anyway, the driven star student, but it looked as if this one had been worse than most. Her desk lamp burned feebly inside the rough column of her smoke. On every side of her, books stood in stacks. Plus usually she played up her hair for all it was worth, teasing it to such a fine blond blowziness that the first time Pinnerz had met her he’d asked a classic roll-call question: was Zefira a Jewish name? But tonight she’d let herself go so badly that her hair’s snarled ends looked like a smearing of seafoam. As if Pinnerz’s son’s shirt, a couple sizes too big for her, had gotten stuck to her shoulder blades by a line of those dirtied bubbles.

He’d been stopped in the doorway. At last her head jerked up, startled, and she turned from her papers.

“You were right,” Pinnerz said at once. “They’re not pre-Revolutionary.”

He kept his hand on the knob, carefully holding himself eye-to-eye with her.

“They’re not?” Finally. “That’s too bad. Too bad for the old savage.”

“Well they’re not bad , Zefira. They’re just not pre-Revolutionary.”

She gave him what might have been a moment’s lead-in to a smile, then stubbed it out with her next cigarette. He took the three steps to her bed and sat.

“I came up here,” he told her, “and I said you were right.”

She faced the bed.

“Okay, Dr. Pinnerz. What else can you tell me?”

He inhaled through his mouth and began about the bones. Right away he found that — in spite of the hour, his back, the unwashed closeness of this girl — he couldn’t keep down his enthusiasm. His two-way excitement, first at having done such good work, next at having found the work so rewarded. Together they picked him up like a spiral wind Now he could no longer look at Zefira, only let his eyes lock and talk on. He heard himself start to fumble for words and even, very unprofessional, to chase after ideas with no clear sense of where they’d lead. But Pinnerz let the awkwardness go. The rest of his life after all felt to him like a continually narrowing rat’s maze, with department chairs on one side and editor’s desks on the other. Yes he could get a rudimentary charge out of this everyday slog, just as this morning he’d found his own low-level relief in the nip-and-tuck with Bud’s crew. But tonight was inspiration. Another stumbling sentence and he was sure of it. Tonight, the reason he toughed out all the rest had whipped both his assistant and himself into its rising spiral. Because this woman he’d brought up, and named— there’d never been anything like her at an urban dig. Now she’d stand by him forever. The Pinnerz Case. “We’ll go on TV again,” he said, “you and I. We, we’ll have to break out the jeans and T-shirts again and—”

“Hank, Jesus!” Zefira wailed. “You old . . Jesus.”

He blinked, focussed. Apparently he’d been staring at the button of her jeans as he spoke. When he raised his eyes to her face, Pinnerz found a look so uncomplicated that at first he couldn’t think of what it meant.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. “I can’t believe.. . Look, tell me. How far are you going to take this?”

His forearms were back on his knees. He turned his hands as if trying to catch the last breath out of a restroom dryer.

“You know years and years from how, Hank, it’s not going to matter how hard you tried to hang on. All that trouble yesterday, all the times I had to sneak around, it’s not going to matter. And even what I got into with you, back at the beginning of the summer… I mean, I admit it was a wrong move. I made a wrong move, Hank. But you weren’t married or anything. You were just, this very impressive older man who’d given me this wonderful opportunity.”

Deep sigh. Pinnerz watched her flick one big toe with the other.

“But Hank, how long are you going to think that gives you some kind of hold on me? Last night, you threw such a fit, I admit you had me bulldozed for a while. You had me talking to the walls in here today. But finally I realized that years and years from now all that’s going to matter to me is, this was the summer when I met Tripp. Jesus, I hope so. I hope…” She cleared her throat. Then, louder: “So Hank, tell me. When can I go see him without sneaking around? When do we all stop acting like I’m some kind of slave?”

Pinnerz couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even think what was practical, or begin trying to reckon her background against his. He knew only that if he so much as looked at Zefira, he’d have to deal with the same uncomplicated hatred he’d seen in her face a minute before, and seen last night in his son’s as well. Lying, scheming bastard , he’d shouted at Tripp then. All summer long you never cared what I was after, lying bastard kid . Hard words that now emerged again to ache in his neck like mutant teeth. Between that new bony catch in his breathing and what this girl had asked, it was all Pinnerz could do just to manage a ghostly gesture with one hand. A signal that he wanted more time.

She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She’d appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially. Syl , he wished he could tell his wife now, you were up in that room with us . And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive’s one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom’s control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.

And Grissom knew also he wasn’t your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He’d been through all that crap already. He’d started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he’d switched to a job where it wasn’t the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He’d gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days — Grissom wasn’t then thirty-five — he’d told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom’s reasoning. Grissom’s father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.

But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn’t been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom’s career had been getting started, he’d been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He’d gone over them carefully with his lawyer.