John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“I don’t know,” he said, “let me see.” He took the cup from Craine’s hands and, preparing to turn away, gave Craine’s face one more quick look. “Come in?” he asked. He held the door open wider. Craine glanced left, down the hallway in the direction of the bare lightbulb dangling in front of his own door, then looked at Ira Katz’s doorway again and, after an instant, hurried through. He felt a brief afterflash of the nightmare or vision, the man coming after him in the dark; then it was gone. He was suddenly aware of the ticking, clicking, and knocking of his neighbor’s clocks. There was no sound from the stereo. The record had ended; the turntable arm was at rest in its gray metal cradle, the red light glowing like a ruby on the amplifier.

Ira Katz, in stocking feet, went through the kitchen door, opposite the door to the hallway, and switched on the light. “I don’t even know if I have any or not,” he said. “I hardly ever use it.” He put the cup on the counter and stood with his fists on his hips, looking around as if the kitchen were someone else’s. He wore a blue work shirt, the sleeves rolled up past the biceps — the muscles were large and tanned, like a laborer’s — black suspenders, black slacks pulled up tight by the suspenders, and below the cuffless pant legs, black stretch socks of the kind old men wear. The cat called Rooster came silently into view, an enormous tiger-stripe with Chinese eyes, walking and stretching at the same time, as if wakened from a snooze. He stood looking up at Ira Katz for a moment, then with great dignity rubbed his head against Ira’s leg. Ira ignored it, reaching up and opening a cupboard. “Ah!” he said.

Craine looked away and tried to put his hands in the pockets of his suit coat. The left one went in easily; the right one bumped against the bottle and kept poking, witless, Craine’s mind too far away to help. In the livingroom, laid out to the right of where Craine stood, swaybacked pine and used-brick bookshelves covered all the walls, right up to the window looking out on the street and up to the sides of the door to the bedroom and bathroom, opening off the end of the livingroom to the left. On the tops of the bookshelves, on the narrow table that held the stereo, on the stereo speakers, on ornate old wall shelves and on the rickety tables at each side of his overstuffed chairs — grungy and misshapen, as old as Craine — Ira Katz had his antique timepieces — clocks, fancy watches, here and there an hourglass. Except for the hourglasses, most of them were running; none was in complete agreement with any other about the time. Craine moved unsteadily, hardly knowing he was doing it, toward the farther of the chairs. Propped among the clocks and silver watches on the table beside it stood two photographs, one of them a picture of a straw-yellow-blond-headed smiling young woman, the other a snapshot of two solemn dark children holding a kite, one — the elder — a boy, the other one a girl. Craine bent over to look more closely. The pictures were new, or at any rate Craine had never noticed them before. They glinted in the light from the wooden floor lamp behind the chair. As Ira Katz came back into the room with the sugar, Craine straightened up and pointed. “Yours?” he asked, and smiled one-sidedly, accidentally ironic.

The young man glanced in the direction of the photograph and snapshot, his expression clouding for an instant, then smiled and, just perceptibly, nodded. “You’re in luck,” he said, and held the sugar toward Craine. “It’s not quite a cup, but you’re welcome to what there is.”

Reluctantly, grimacing, Craine approached to take the cup from him. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.” He glanced toward the door but remained where he was. His neighbor stood waiting, watching him. “You’re right,” Craine said, and gave a sharp little laugh, “sugar’s poison. You’re smart to stay clear of it.” He leaned toward his neighbor, explaining quickly, confidentially, almost losing his balance, steadying himself with a hand on the wall, “Pancreas can’t handle it except if vitamins come with it, the way they do when you eat fruit. Take sugar without vitamins — sugar with your coffee, you know, or sugar in a candy bar — the pancreas has to steal vitamins from elsewhere. Robs you of nutrients — thief in the night! I’m a detective, that’s why I’m informed about these things.”

His neighbor smiled. It wasn’t clear that he got the joke.

“The worst of it,” Craine said, touching his neighbor’s arm with the sugar cup and leaning in closer, “is that the sugar turns to fat — fat on your heart among other things. It’s a murderer, in the end. First a little harmless pilfering, you know, a little vitamin snatching when nobody’s on the look-out, but then one thing leads to another, as we know—” He chuckled and winked. The young man looked at him strangely.

The cat came in from the kitchen and rubbed against Ira’s leg. As before, Ira seemed not to notice. “I don’t really have any theories about it,” he said, slightly smiling, apologetic. “I’ve got friends who are health nuts, macrobiotics … But personally—” He shrugged. “I had a girlfriend who used to use honey for everything.” An obscene image came into Craine’s mind. He doubted that Katz had intended it. “I got hooked on it,” Katz said. He leaned down to touch the cat’s large head with two fingertips. The cat pushed up against him.

Craine took a sideways step toward the door, then paused, eyes furtively darting around. “Must be hard to know what time it is, with all these clocks,” he said.

Ira Katz smiled and nodded, glancing at the clocks, then straightened up again. After a long moment he said, “Can I offer you a glass of wine?”

“Oh, no, no, thank you very much,” Craine said, and took another quick step toward the door. Again he stopped, grinning, unconsciously closing his hand on the neck of the bottle in his pocket. “Wine and I don’t get along, Mr. Katz. I had an operation on my colon, five, six months ago — I think I may have told you — and ever since, one little glass of wine and whoosh! — where’s the rest room?”

“Rest room?” Ira Katz raised his eyebrows.

“Whenever I drink wine,” Craine explained. “Also coffee, but less so.” He made his face look as if a thought had just occurred to him. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a little Scotch here!” He drew out the Scotch and, too eagerly, held it toward his neighbor. “Scotch and beer go through the kidneys.”

Katz looked sadly at the bottle — resigning himself to the waste of a perfectly good evening, perhaps — then up at Craine’s face. “It wasn’t serious, I hope — the operation.”

“Cancer of the colon,” Craine said. He opened the front of his suit coat as if showing off his wounds. “But they got it all out, they say. Clean as a whistle.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He turned toward the kitchen, reaching out and touching the door frame. “I’ll stick with wine, I think. You want water and ice?”

“No, thank you,” Craine said, “wrecks the color.” He grinned. As Ira Katz went back into the kitchen, Craine strode, slightly staggering, to the middle of the livingroom and stood looking around, bent forward, as if taking possession. In the kitchen behind him the cat said something Craine didn’t catch, some irritable question, and Ira Katz said something back to him. Above the ticking of the clocks Craine heard a growling sound, something like “Ow, ow, ow!”—an electric can opener, it came to him — then the sound of a spoon hitting the side of the plastic cat dish, and his neighbor’s voice, talking softly. The cat said nothing. Craine set his cup of sugar on the nearest of the bookshelves, between two tall clocks, and bent close to read the top row of titles. A long stretch of them — French paperbacks — were called Situations . At last Ira Katz came in with a fat Almadén bottle, a wineglass, and an empty glass for Craine.