William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

Halfway to the second floor there was a landing.

You want to sit down here and rest? I’ll bring you a glass of iced tea.

He didn’t want to say how all right he was. I’m just a little dizzy is all, he said.

Rest a minute.

Oh hell. Come on, I’m all right.

He drank the iced tea on the couch. She sat across from him in an armchair waiting as if an explanation or at least an elaboration of what had happened might be forthcoming but none was. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He closed his eyes. The room seemed to be tilting on an axis, everything poised at the point of sliding across the floor and slamming against the walls.

What made you fall?

He opened his eyes. The highvoltage pain pills seemed to be kicking in. She was moving away from him at the speed of light, the chair telescoping backward toward the receding wall. He tried to concentrate.

Gravity, he finally said.

When he awoke it was night. He wasn’t on the couch anymore. He was in bed without knowing how he got there and she was reading on a chair by the wall sconce. He watched her. She read on, oblivious to his scrutiny. You won’t keep her, a friend named Avery had told him. You can’t keep her at home. She’s used to being on the wing. One day she’ll be a high fly in the tall weeds and that’ll be all she wrote. Avery had wanted her himself, however, and this could hardly be considered an objective appraisal of the situation. Wildman had caught her on the rebound so quickly it made him dizzy, she had seemed to come with the thousanddollar story, the contract, the new agent, the dreams about the novel.

She had been with him three years but he had had to work full time at keeping her. He began to think of her as some piece of expensive and highpowered machinery he had bought on time. Some luxurious automobile loaded with options and coated with twenty coats of lacquer but the payments were eating him alive, the payments were enormous with a balloon at the end and he had begun to think he couldn’t keep them current. He hadn’t been trying as hard lately, he’d been slacking off, and the threat of repossession hung over his head like a guillotine on a frayed rope. Long a student of nuance he had noticed a difference in her body language when other men glanced at her, a speculative look of distance in her eyes when she studied him. He caught her appraising herself critically in a mirror as if she were evaluating herself, looking for microscopic signs of wear and tear.

After a while she seemed to feel the cool weight of his eyes and she looked up. She closed the book and laid it aside.

How do you feel?

Like death warmed over, he said. My ribs hurt. I can’t take a deep breath. I can’t even breathe God’s own air like everybody else.

What?

Nothing.

You’re acting awfully strange lately.

Strange in what way?

Strange in a lot of ways. Half the time you act as if you’re not even here. You don’t talk to me. You talk but it’s like little things you say for your own amusement. You’re off in a little world of your own. You used to act like this sometimes when you were writing but you’re not writing. I don’t understand you anymore.

I don’t know, he said.

You don’t know what?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I apologize for all my shortcomings. My ribs do hurt though.

You want to go out and eat? It’s early yet.

No. I don’t feel like it and anyway I’m not hungry.

Go back to sleep then, she said. She took up the book and opened it. She sat as if she was reading but he didn’t think she was. He closed his eyes.

After a while he opened them and she was watching him. This shit is beginning to get on my nerves, she said.

I don’t know that I’m crazy about it myself, Wildman said.

The next morning he sat on the sunlit balcony wearing dark glasses and watching the comings and goings of the apartment building. Across the parking lot a yellow moving van was backed up to an apartment and two men were wrestling an enormous green sofa into its belly. Folks brought out boxes, cartons, a woman carried a lamp.

So many comings and goings, folks moving in, folks moving out. There seemed little permanence left to the world. Families split and regrouped. People threw up their hands and carried their lives back to ground zero and began again. People were perpetually changing jobs, changing partners, changing lives.

His head throbbed dully. He chewed two Excedrin and swallowed them, hot sour aftertaste in the back of his mouth. The rental van pulled onto the highway, headed toward the interstate. Log trucks passed in a blue haze of diesel smoke, concrete trucks, mixer spinning slowly. They were cutting all the timber, paving the world with concrete.

Beth, he called.

She came to the door and halfopened it, he could see her, warpedlooking through the glass.

What is it?

You want to drive out to the farm?

The farm? What on earth for?

Just to look around a little. Anyway it’s mine now. Ours.

Ours? You can have my part of it. That place gives me the shivers. Like something walking over my grave.

All it needs is a little work.

All it needs is a hold dug beside it and a bulldozer to push it off in the hole and somebody to throw in the dirt. That’s what it needs.

Well. Such as it is it’s mine. I thought I might clean up a little. Pack up some of her things. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all that stuff.

Dig a bigger hole, Beth said.

I need to pick up some magazines anyhow. Is there anything I can get for you?

Nothing you can find in a 7-11, she said. She paused. He was halfway down the wroughtiron stairway when she said, You’re even beginning to look like her.

He didn’t turn.

Buddy, she called.

He halted. What?

She was silent a time. Nothing, she finally said. He went on.

He sat in a welter of cardboard cartons and strewn memorabilia. It was hopeless. There was just so much of it. The room seemed time’s attic, its dump heap. Finally he gave up. The old woman saturated the very walls, her spirit was not going to be exorcised by a few cardboard boxes, she was not going to be dispossessed.

She had seemed intent on absorbing him, secreting some sort of subtle chemical that was digesting him, making him part of her. Eating him alive. Every move he made came under her critical scrutiny.

That Luna girl is no good for you, she had told him once in his junior year.

Well. I think she is. That’s for me to decide.

I knew her whole family. There wasn’t anything to any of them. None of them ever amounted to a hill of beans. She’s in some of my classes. She lets the boys look up her dress.

He hadn’t known what to say to that and so had said nothing at all. He figured it’d all blow over. But she had gone over there. She had a talk with Mrs. Luna and the next time he had gone calling he was left cooling his heels on the porch fifteen minutes before Mrs. Luna even opened the door and he was turned away with polite and distant firmness.

Lynell had never spoken to him again but he had seen her whispering once to another girl and both of them were looking at him and he wondered what was being said. He never found out what his grandmother and Mrs. Luna had discussed and on some level he didn’t want to know.

And yet.

She’d nursed him through all the childhood diseases, mumps and whooping cough and measles, stood between him and fire and plague and biting dogs. She sheltered him from the world.