Chez Cordelia Read online

  Well, we settled down. Danny worked hard at the shirt factory; in the evenings we watched TV and played cards and invited people over; and on good-weather afternoons, after I’d done my cleaning, I sometimes walked the streets of New Haven.

  I walked up George Street to Howe, and down to the corner of Chapel, where after dark the real streetwalkers hung out. There was an ice cream parlor where I usually bought a cone, before I proceeded down Howe to the buildings of Yale. Sometimes I went into one of the college courtyards, mentally lording it over the lounging students because I was married, with a husband and a home of my own—I don’t think I ever doubted for a minute that, if they knew, they would envy me.

  I would walk down Elm to Church to Whitney and out past the old mansions turned computer places or doctors’ offices. I walked miles, sometimes as far out as Edgerton Park, where I drew an unexpected satisfaction from being among trees that reminded me of my father’s woods. And here I must admit something else: I walked because I didn’t know what else to do. I loved cleaning and straightening and fixing up our apartment, but I was so efficient it didn’t take much of my time. When I was done, there I was: drinking a cup of coffee, alone, staring through the balcony doors at the people moving past. So I went out and joined them, walking until I was so tired it was an effort to walk back—and when I got home I was glad to rest, to sit with my coffee and wait for Danny. But at times I felt the same empty day stretch out before me like the well-worn path on the board of some dull kids’ game. I’d thought the cleaning, the cooking, the being in love with my husband, would be enough for me, and the emptiness of my days was another surprise of married life. I knew that as soon as Danny and I were properly “settled,” I must look for a job, I must get out among the people—but with a purpose. Sometimes I read the want ads. That animal shelter job I’d had to give up nagged at me: that was the job I wanted, and nothing else appealed to me. I waited, suspended, for something to turn up and inspire me.

  Meanwhile, I cleaned, I walked, I ran errands for Mr. Blenka.

  Of all our friends, it was Mr. Blenka, the agoraphobe, who intrigued me most, aside from Ray Royal. Mr. Blenka didn’t come to our place, of course; he never left home, even to go down the hall. But I got to know him well from dropping off his groceries. His apartment was full of birds and plants. He raised parakeets, which he called “budgies” because, though he was (I believe) Polish—his first name was Taddei—Mr. Blenka had been raised in England. He opened his door and it was all green and twittering, a jungle. He had the budgie seed delivered in twenty-pound sacks.

  Mr. Blenka was a fat man, with breasts. “He’s got bigger boobies than I do,” Elisa used to giggle. She thought Mr. Blenka and his phobia were hilarious. Even the budgies could get her giggling. I was three years older than Elisa, and although Mr. Blenka amused me, too, I could see that in a way his life made perfect sense. He had adapted, the way a particolored lizard in a real jungle would adapt. Even his fatness made sense: his fat was an extra layer of protection, and food had replaced normal, human loves. Mr. Blenka was too timid for these, but food filled him up just as well. And food had to be brought to him—that had a function, too: we, his neighbors, his food bringers, were another substitute. I wouldn’t call him lonely. He was, in fact, self-sufficient. He said he was always busy, and had never in his life been bored. He devoured the newspapers, clipping out stories that touched his sentimental side, like one he showed me about a cat mothering an orphaned baby mouse. These he would put up on a bulletin board in the kitchenette until they crumbled and yellowed. “You see,” he used to say, as if to himself, gazing at those clippings while the bag of groceries waited on the tiny table to be put away. “There is good in life, there is some good.” And he would beam his fat, sudden, angelic smile at me.

  He liked me to come in and talk. He wanted to hear the most minute details of everyday life. Trivia that would bore anyone else was exotic to him: how much the laundromat cost, and what the man at the meat counter said. Once he asked me if I got dressed before breakfast or after. He intrigued me because, behind his phobia and his huge body, he was both wholly independent and wholly dependent. I sometimes felt a peculiar attraction toward his phobia—toward its safe, enclosing quality. I had the same feeling once when I traveled with my parents and Juliet to Ephrata, Pennsylvania, to the cloisters there. I said to Juliet, “I wouldn’t mind living in a cloister,” and she found that funny (or “highly amusing,” as she put it), thinking I suppose that only booky people lived in cloisters. But I meant it—and pondering it now I think of those long, quiet evenings with my coin albums, when I seemed to enter a world made of bits of gold and silver where, though I was alone, I felt perfectly at home.

  I suspected Mr. Blenka of being more than he seemed, and if it had been suddenly revealed that he was a famous novelist, or Howard Hughes, or in communication with another planet, I wouldn’t have been much surprised. His apartment was dirty and shabby, but I knew he had plenty of money. He insisted on paying Elisa and me for doing his errands—by check, of course—and he was sometimes extravagant with us. He was especially fond of a hard-crusted French peasant bread, available only at a market on Orange Street. Sometimes I used to walk over and get him a couple of loaves, and when I brought it back he always tipped me hugely and then he offered me a piece: he insisted it had to be broken off in chunks and eaten without butter. Once, on my birthday, he gave me ten dollars for getting him a hot pastrami on rye from the deli.

  Danny thought Mr. Blenka was weird, but I liked him. He was so cheerful all the time, except when he thought he might have to go out and the look of horror and panic came over his fat, saggy face. There was the time he needed a tooth pulled, for example, and when I persuaded the dentist downstairs to come up and take care of him in his apartment, he collapsed on his old green sofa, laughing in huge sobs with relief. Danny was convinced his phobia didn’t exist, and that Mr. Blenka simply liked being waited on. If it was true, it was okay with me. He paid generously for his whims. I admired the ingenuity with which he’d set up his life to suit him.

  I was glad I never told my parents about Danny’s coming promotion. He didn’t get it because soon after our marriage he switched from the night shift to the day shift. He did it for me—I couldn’t bear sleeping in the daytime—but the price was that he lost his chance of becoming a supervisor. It was in the lonely nights that men were needed, that hard workers like Danny, however low on the ladder, could make their way up. On the day shift there was no shortage of candidates for supervisor. But it didn’t matter. We had Hector’s before us. George was beginning to talk vaguely of giving up the business and taking his arthritis to Florida. And we had each other.

  We were also very sociable. There were a lot of people we liked. It wasn’t that either of us was particularly close to any of them—we were still getting close to each other, still preoccupied with that—but we loved being around people as, I think, another way of defining ourselves to ourselves. There are more mirrors thrown up by six people playing cards at a table than by two alone. And, in an odd way, we were shy with each other. Our marriage was like an especially valuable present, achieved at long last after ages of coveting; it takes time to accept it as one of the family, to use it without self-consciousness. Our friends helped us over that breaking-in period, the way Billy Arp had in the first days of our teenage romance.

  For the first time in my life I could invite my friends over to my house without embarrassment or constraint. It got so that there was a regular small parade of people, and Danny and I would say how we really had to quit being so sociable for the sake of our beer-and-potato-chip bills, and then the phone or the doorbell would ring, and we would grin at each other and shrug. We liked the parade.

  We saw a lot of Sandy and her fiancé, Harvey Sanderson. Sandy was in nurse’s training at Yale-New Haven hospital. I never told Sandy this, but if I ever found myself in a hospital with her for a nurse I’d rather go home and die of my illness. Well, I exaggerate, but
it’s true she wasn’t the nurse type; she was nervous, dippy, overweight, a chain-smoker, a worrier. I was very fond of her, she was a good friend, but she must have been a terrible nurse.

  Nor would I have let Harvey Sanderson, who was planning to be a surgeon, cut me open. There was something sadistic about his relish for his profession. Sandy thought he was a scream, but the enthusiasm with which he talked of organs and cadavers made me queasy. It was the flowing of blood that seemed to spur him, the sheer love of getting his hands into it—a gory Macbeth of a man. He said once that he regretted the invention of surgical gloves. He looked at us as if we were simply a collection of organs, potentially diseased or malfunctioning, as if he longed to get his hands in us. I couldn’t imagine going to bed with someone like that, but I knew Sandy was, and I must admit Harvey was handsome enough, one of those large, smooth, muscular guys—blond, with square teeth and a big jaw. He and Sandy were always pawing each other, and when I once saw him take her earlobe between his teeth, I had to look away.

  Thank God she never did marry him. For months they were inseparable; then, suddenly, Jack the Ripper was gone, replaced by Carl Keyes, whom she did finally marry. She moved to California with him shortly after Danny’s and my first anniversary—moving out of my life at a time when I needed a friend most.

  During that year, Sandy and Harvey, and then Sandy and Carl, were often at our apartment, and so was Danny’s friend Ray Royal. Ray worked at the shirt factory; Danny met him on the day shift. I considered him the oddest person I had ever met. He had gone to Yale, he was black, and he was living in sin with a woman old enough to be his mother. After he graduated from Yale, he began work at the factory because he wanted to get in touch with real people—that’s what he said. Danny was apparently one of the real people, because Ray took to him right away. Ray was very handsome, with skin precisely the color and (so it looked to me) texture of a Hershey bar, and he had a vast nest of frizzy black hair exploding around his head; he used to pull strands of it out straight when he talked and then let it twang back again. He had a mournful face, everything turned down—eyes, lips, the sides of his nose. Even his smile was lugubrious. Only when he honked out his abrupt laugh (showing big, perfect teeth like Chiclets) did he ever seem truly cheerful.

  He claimed to come from a wealthy black family in New Orleans who had made their money after the Civil War by assassinating influential Southern whites for enormous sums; their specialty was nasty, slow death made to look accidental. He told us this with his wily, liver-colored eyes glittering, and he told us the terrible details, too. Harvey listened open-mouthed, licking his bottom lip slowly across and back. He and Danny believed everything Ray said; Sandy and I rolled our eyes at each other behind their backs. Danny would have believed Ray if he claimed to have been raised by wolves.

  I liked Ray, but he scared me a little, and I didn’t really trust him. Yale was true, though; he had a diploma and a Co-op number. And May was true—his fifty-three-year-old mistress. We never met her, but she used to call him at our place, asking for “Raymond” in a soft whiskey voice, and once or twice she picked him up at work—a tall, statuesque black woman, Danny reported, with a head of thick, straight white hair that tumbled over her shoulders. “It could be his mother,” I said to Danny, but he shook his head. “She’s no mother,” he said, impressed.

  Danny’s susceptibility to Ray Royal made me keep my own gullible nature reined in. It was odd that Danny trusted Ray and I didn’t. I was the truster, not Danny. He was always wary with people, almost suspicious, until he got to know them well. He expected people to laugh at him, though he wasn’t laughable. Even in school, it wasn’t Danny who got jeered at for stumbling through Neighborhood Friends; it was me. Danny has a natural dignity, possibly only because of the harsh planes of his face; he looks like Sir Walter Raleigh on the 1937 Roanoke Island commemorative half dollar, and his normal facial expression is serious to the point of severity in spite of the freckles. I, on the other hand, seemed to invite ridicule. Partly, I courted it; I could always clown to good effect, and ridicule never bothered me. After all, I was used to being the family anomaly, the butt of a ridicule that was tacit and affectionate but nonetheless there. I liked attention, nearly any kind. And except for Mrs. Meek and a few nuns, I trusted individuals, and from there went on to trust mankind. (Unlike Danny, for example, I was never afraid to go out at night in New Haven.) With Mr. Blenka, I believed in the goodness of people. I became aware of this in myself only because I saw its opposite in Danny.

  But he trusted Ray Royal, all right. He believed every word Ray ever uttered. And when Ray used to come over after work and sit at our table and tell us his preposterous tales (like the one about his great-uncle, who learned scalping from the Indians and personally massacred a whole Tara full of whites with an axe), Danny used to listen closely, with his head cocked to one side and his eyes shining, and murmur, “No shit, Ray.” His own ancestors were all French-Canadian shopkeepers and domestics.

  It was funny about Ray Royal. I didn’t believe half of his crazy stories, and I didn’t consider him a good influence on Danny—I don’t know why; I kept expecting him to peddle us dope, I suppose. But I did like him. I couldn’t help it. He was bright without being bookish, for one thing. And he liked to hear other people talk as well as himself. He liked to hear about my father, whom he considered a comic character right up there with Archie Bunker. He howled when I told him about the poetry journals in the bathroom, the Vogue piece, the wood stoves, the kippers for breakfast. Sometimes I played my father for laughs, but at other times I couldn’t always see what was so funny. Ray heard Daddy speak once at Yale, and every time he recalled it he collapsed in tenor giggles. “That big black beard!” he sputtered. “That big booming voice! That flannel shirt! Oo, man! What an act!” The giggles erupted out of him while I got more and more solemn. That wasn’t what was funny about my father—his appearance. And that, at least, was no act: he’d been born on a New England farm; he’d always dressed that way, and his father before him. But maybe I was reluctant to discuss with Ray the really funny things, whatever they were. Maybe I didn’t altogether like his ridicule.

  Ray had some amazing ideas. Once he said, “You know, I think it’s very odd how people go to sleep every night. Just sink into unconsciousness like that without a protest. You know, Delia? Dan?” (He had a way of using your name a lot, and of seeking confirmation from his audience as he talked. Mostly we just nodded, Danny and I, but I think Ray would have liked it better if we threw up our hands and cried, “Yes, Lord, I hear you!”) “Do you know what I mean? I think it must be designed to make death easier, don’t you? To give us something to compare it to, something familiar. Now I call that real consideration on the part of the Almighty. Just imagine if there was no such thing as sleep, Dan. I mean, death would be weird, man, don’t you think so?”

  “I think it’s weird anyway,” Danny said. (That’s what I mean about our friends acting as mirrors.)

  And then Ray said what was to me a startling thing, which I’ve never forgotten: “I think it’s going to be an adventure unlike anything else.” He had a velvety voice, pitched high, with traces of a Southern accent left in it in spite of Yale and a lot of effort; and he spoke, when he was in these reflective moods, with a peculiar distinctness. “Think of it!” he said, letting go one of the springy strands of his hair. “Everybody who’s ever lived has done it, and everybody’s going to do it! It’s waiting there somewhere for all of us! And we don’t know one goddamned thing about it!” He tipped his chair back on two white-wire legs and took a swig of beer. “Now that is what I call something damned exciting to look forward to!”

  Then the phone rang. It was May wanting Ray home, so he left in a hurry, as he always did when she called, as if she really were his mother.

  The conversation agitated Danny. That’s one reason I remember it so well. I always thought Ray’s words had some bearing on Danny’s disappearance, though I have no reason to think so except t
hat he used to bring it up during those odd months before he left.

  “Remember all that stuff Ray said about death that time?” he used to ask me, out of the blue. “The big adventure?” And then he’d pause, and his face would get sterner and bonier before my eyes, and then he’d say, with all the irony leached out of his voice, “I don’t know, Delia. I just don’t know.” And I would look back at him helplessly, not knowing what to say. When he left me, that October morning (a year and a month after our wedding), I thought at first he’d gone somewhere to die, until I realized that a dead person can’t disappear with the thoroughness Danny had.

  We had a year, though, before the oddness began which culminated in Danny’s exit. But I’m beginning to dislike, now, the way this story rambles, the way it can only approximate what is to me so clear. Why all these friends and neighbors? Why put them in? Because they were so important to me, I suppose, and to give an idea of the life we led—the normality of it. Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Average, that was us—with our friends, our happy home, our hot dogs and Coca-Cola and Budweiser, the Vanish in our toilet, the Lux under our sink. I had no idea the friends we cultivated would sound so eccentric, become on paper such characters. It’s the evil power of words again, with their false magic. Day to day, these people weren’t peculiar, except maybe for Mr. Blenka, but even he—except for his phobia—was bland enough, a fat man, optimistic about human nature, generous with his cash, addicted to French bread, enamored of budgies. Even Harvey Sanderson was only a smart-mouthed young medical student with a grotesque sense of humor. And Danny—ah, my dear, lost Danny. On my twentieth birthday he gave me a pretty little gold wristwatch; on the back it was engraved, “For Delia, my dearly beloved wife—DHF, 1973.” It made me cry; it was so old-fashioned, so sincere, so sweet and typical, and far too extravagant. We were happy; the watch proves it. I wear it still. It keeps perfect time. I think of Danny, in Sommers State Prison, keeping time by bells. The watch is like our good year together, gentle and regular and somehow delicate—easily shattered.