Leonard Gardner - Fat City

“When?”

“Well, when it’s right for us both. We don’t want to rush into a mess when we’ve got each other anyway.”

“Don’t you want to be with me every night?”

“Sure I do. Maybe I could get a day job.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I guess I don’t feel ready yet. I feel I need a few more fights first,” he heard himself saying. “I just don’t feel I’m ready to get married.”

“I wasn’t proposing to you. That’s a thing I certainly would never do. I wouldn’t want anybody who didn’t want me.”

“I want you.”

“That’s up to you. I wouldn’t force myself on anyone. If you don’t want to get married you don’t have to. I wasn’t asking anything about that. I just meant what if, you know, you got drafted or something — how do I know where I stand? Would you want me to wait?”

“Well, sure,” said Ernie, thinking there was no harm in that and piqued by the thought of someone else having her.

“I mean these are things I’m just asking for my own sake. I don’t want you to feel I’m obligating you.”

“I don’t, I don’t,” he assured her.

“Like what would you want if you had some more fights? What’s that got to do with it? Would that make a difference? What would you feel like doing after you had them?”

“Then I guess I’d want somebody so it’d seem worth getting my ass kicked… so I could… I don’t know… have a home. But I want to get set up first,” he said, unconvinced, afraid of what he was saying.

“I don’t want to hold you back. I want to be good for you.” She put her fingers on his cheek, her eyes only hollows in the dim starlight. “I want to cook for you.”

It filled him with panic. To such devotion, such sacrifice, he felt rejection would be unbearable, that to quibble at all would be an unthinkable cruelty. Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness.

Later, on her front porch, she looked so lovely to him, so graceful, her full lips in a smile so gentle, that he could not turn and go home. So many obstacles, so much uncertainty lay ahead in consequence of what he had been forced to say in the car, that this time of intimacy had a transitory sweetness. He would not marry her, and so she would not be his much longer. Eventually there would be conditions he could not agree to. He must cherish the present like a memory. This would be the time of Faye, this would soon be over. Her presence, her voice, the taste of her mouth would be replaced by another’s and lost forever. Or perhaps there would be no other after her and he would again be alone with his lust. He would not marry her, so felt a blissful freeing of his love, an elation that carried him after her through the doorway to a final kiss that became not the last but the first in a fevered goodbye with her skirt up and his little tin box out in the glove compartment of the car. Sitting on the carpeted stairs leading up to the room where he hoped her parents were asleep, he pulled her down onto his lap.

Afterwards Ernie was pensive. Through days of peat-dust storms he waited uneasily. When a month was up he drove Faye to a doctor and sat in the car knowing already what the answer would be and feeling a singular peace. He would quit fighting. Certainly now he could no longer take the risks. There was no decision to make. He had no thoughts of escape from her and was strangely unperturbed. There seemed to him only one thing to do. They were married in the Little Chapel of the Wayfarer in Carmel, the bride wearing a white dress, the groom expressionless in sport coat and slacks. After a dinner of swordfish steak on the wharf in Monterey, they phoned the news to their parents and rented a motel room under cypress trees. Two nights later they were sleeping in Faye’s room.

On Ernie’s second night back at work, his employer, Mario Florestano, was waiting for him in the doorway of the station, the largeness of his alerted face accentuated by frontal baldness, long ears, a slight neck and narrow shoulders.

“You left the shitter open,” he said.

Ernie, seeking an attitude, looked at him with puzzled eyes. “I did? I thought I locked it up.”

“You certainly did not. Want me to tell you what I saw when I drove in this morning? A wino coming out putting toilet paper in his pocket.”

“I’d swear I locked it.”

“Listen, didn’t you hear me? I said I saw him coming out . Now what I want to know is how he got in.”

“I can’t figure it.” Ernie gravely pulled on the end of his nose. “I’d swear I remember checking the door before I left.”

“You couldn’t of checked that door. That door was open. How else did he get in there and get that toilet paper? Did he have a passkey?”

“I don’t know, he might of had one. I sure don’t remember leaving that door open.”

“Forget it, forget I ever said anything about it. Don’t go on any more. It’s settled.” Florestano paced off under dangling fan belts, turned abruptly and came back. “If you don’t want to admit it, forget it. He got in there and he got the toilet paper and arguing won’t bring it back. Now I’m not trying to accuse you if you don’t want to admit it. I just want you to realize your mistake so it won’t happen again.”

“I’d admit it if I thought I did it.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“If you want to put the blame on me it’s up to you.”

“No, no, it’s not a matter of blaming anyone. These things happen. It was just something I wanted to call your attention to. Nobody wants to sit on a toilet seat a wino’s been on. It’s like shaking your dick where a nigger shook his. You got to think of the public. It’s public relations. Personally I couldn’t care less. One man’s as good as another as long as they pay their way. Only there’s people around that don’t feel that way. So if an undesirable asks you for the key, the shitter’s out of order. It’s just a matter of consideration. If there’s no undesirable piss on the toilet seat you’ll get repeat customers. So that door stays locked.”

“I keep it locked.”

Mario Florestano gave him a long look. “So how’s married life treating you?”

Left in charge, Ernie scattered sawdust on the floor of the lube room, pushed it around with a long-handled broom, scooped it up blackened, and dumped it in a drum of empty oil cans. He wiped off the grease rack, wiped and hung up the tools and ambled out to cars, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets. When the streetlights came on he went to the switchbox and the night air quivered in the tall white beams of the floodlights.

Along El Dorado and Center Streets between Mormon Slough and the deep-water channel hundreds of farm workers and unemployed loitered in the warm summer evenings. They talked, watched, drifted in and out of crowded bars and cardrooms, cafés, poolhalls, liquor stores and movies, their paths crossed by lines of urine from darkened doorways. Around the area cruised squad cars and patrol wagons with their pairs of peering faces. The fallen, the reeling and violent were conveyed away. Ambulances came driven by policemen. Fire trucks arrived and sodden, smoking mattresses were dragged out to the pavement. Evangelists came with small brass bands. Sometimes a corpse was taken down from a hotel. Occasionally in The Stockton Record there was an editorial deploring blight.

On the morning the orange city maintenance trucks came to Washington Square, Billy Tully was sitting on the grass. The park was a block of lawn and shade trees within a periphery of tall date palms with high sparse fronds, faced on one side by the ornate eaves of Confucius Hall and on the opposite side by the slate steeple and red brick of Saint Mary’s Church.