New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 26

by Grant Bailie

“You shaved your beard,” Bree said and Robert explained how it had never really been a beard so much as him just not shaving.

“I like it,” she said and he thanked her.

“It makes you look younger,” she said and he thanked her for that as well.

“Not that you looked old before.”

“I didn’t take it that way.”

“You just look better without it.”

“Thanks.”

And what was she wearing? This became the question of every day for him, a small treat in the dullness of work. Today she wore a pink t-shirt and a black pleated skirt and white socks and saddle shoes.

How old was he? Old enough to be her father perhaps. She could have been the daughter he never had, a product of the sex he wasn’t having when she was born. But biologically speaking, he could have been.

And Robert had to admit that he liked work more, or hated it less, now that she was there, and sometimes even considered picking up an extra Friday if he thought she would be working as well.

“Is that a new shirt?” she asked. It was not, but it was one that was in better condition than the rest, and fit him better, with thin vertical stripes that were not fooling anyone.

He had bought it from the children’s department. On the tag in the back of the neck was a picture of a purple cartoon hippopotamus giving a thumbs-up sign, and he feared that tag, feared the exposure of that tag, but why had he not simply torn it out?

They answered calls and the manager stopped by frequently to see how Bree was doing. Once he glanced over at Robert’s computer, but there was nothing incriminating there.

“Maybe I should move you,” he said to Bree and she said: “Oh, don’t Dan. I like where I’m at.”

His calls that day were normal and mundane. Static, lost stations, mistakes in billing. He received five requests for upgrades in service and he watched the manager when he went to the board to see if any new and encouraging symbol appeared next to Robert’s name but the symbols seemed no more positive or understandable than ever.

Kate did not call to remind him about tonight, or if she did, she had not gotten him and had hung up on whoever answered.

He watched the clock more than was his regular habit and was pensive and mostly quiet on his cigarette break with Bree. She commented on it, of course, but he said that he was fine, that the day had just seemed longer than normal.

And then on their now traditional smoke by the door at the end of a hard day’s work, they put out their cigarettes in the flowerpot and he told her he was not taking the train tonight but was going somewhere else before home and she looked at him curiously, like he was a problem she could figure out by staring at it.

“Really?” she said.

“Yes. Really.”

“A date?” she said.

“Not exactly.”

And she smiled and he shrugged and they parted.

On the short walk to Kate’s house, he imagined all the ways the evening could go wrong. She would not be there, or worse, she would be there with her old boyfriend, who would be a very tall man who would tell Robert to leave and never bother his girl again, or worse, she would be there with the mustached man and he would call him “little brother,” and wink at the private joke and then while he was trying to finish dessert and go home, Kate and the mustached man would disappear into another room and he would hear the rhythmic squeaking of furniture and pounding of walls and slapping of flesh and the moans of joyful pain from Kate as she was entered by what really was an impressively and even frighteningly large penis. Robert was pretty sure that would be the worst scenario, unless she greeted Robert at the door with a knife and stabbed him to death for no reason, but even then, the mustached man would be worse.

Robert felt it was wise to play all these bad endings in his mind ahead of time. It was not simply preparation for failure, but a kind of reverse prescience. He knew that things never unfolded as he imagined they would, so if he imagined the absolute worst, maybe that too would not happen.

He knocked on the door and she was there, and no one seemed to be standing behind her in the house, and there was the smell of cooking and steam that came out of the house like a warm breath when she stood back to let him in.

“Did I get you in trouble at work yesterday?” she asked, and he assured her that she had not.

He sat at the kitchen table while she finished her preparations. Something was boiling on the stove that needed to be turned down and there were onions and parsley to be chopped.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“You’re the guest of honor,” she said. “This is your hero’s dinner. Just sit there. Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Yes please.”

“Red OK?”

“Red is fine.”

And she poured him a glass. He sipped it while she finished cooking. He sipped it a little too fast and had to refill his glass twice while she was still waiting for the pasta to be done. He did not, as a rule, drink much, and he began to feel the warm flush of the wine moving through him, particularly, he thought, settling into his face, which he began to imagine was red, like the wine and so he checked himself in the reflection of a spoon. He was not red, and looked as normal as a reflection in a spoon can be expected to look.

“You’ll never guess who called me today,” Kate said, stirring something.

“The guy with the mustache?” he guessed. “From the other night?”

“Oh Christ no! Thank goodness. Ouch. No, Phil. My boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He rubbed his face. It really did feel warm, but not bad. He liked the warmth. He liked that it seemed that for a moment he had forgotten some part of himself. Some part of himself that he was always tripping over and was always getting in the way of things. He refilled his glass and said: “To apologize? To beg for you to take him back?”

“Jesus no. Though I thought for a moment he might. He wanted some of his things. So I piled them all up in the tree lawn and lit them on fire.”

“Did you really?”

“No. I put them in a box on the porch. He came and got them while I was at work today. But close.”

“That was probably for the better.”

She put two plates down. “You think?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think maybe it’s illegal to burn things on the tree lawn.”

“Well, good thing I didn’t then. I took no care in putting his stuff in the box though, I can tell you that. Heavy things on top of breakable things, nothing folded.”

She piled pasta onto the two plates and ladled on the sauce.

“I should have asked if you like pasta.”

“I do.”

She sprinkled the chopped parsley on top and said: “Presentation,” then sat down across from him at the table.

She raised her glass: “To my brother the hero,” she said, and with some slight hesitation he lifted his glass and touched it against hers.

“We take our customer service very seriously at the cable company,” he said and she laughed and for some reason he already began to feel sad and defeated.

But wine helped. He refilled his glass twice more at least while she talked about her day at work — at the library — and about Phil, who was getting his masters in business and used to leave cigarettes piled up in coffee cups around the house — and the house itself, which had been left to her by her parents.

He watched her mouth as she talked and thought about kissing it when it was not moving so much. But the library was such an interesting place to work and she met such an interesting variety of people and of course too there were the books and she could take as many as she wanted without even checking them out and right now in the house there were at least three dozen that she should bring back some day and meant to but had not gotten around to it yet.

“But I bet you meet a lot of interesting people in your job,” she said and he said sure, her for instance. But mostly just her.

She smiled. “You’re very sweet.”

And her smile was good. And the wine was good. He should buy wine, he thought. To keep around the apartment. Maybe wine would make the view from his room better. Maybe wine would enable him to look up from the street, like Mr. Carleton, and only see the beautiful sky and now and then a touching scene sitting on the phone line.

“Where is your bathroom?” he said and she told him down the hall, next to the bedroom, and he was surprised when he stood up that he wobbled a bit and had to concentrate not to stagger as he moved down the hallway to the door next to the bedroom.

He stopped and looked into the bedroom. The scene of her most recent crime. Or mistake. Why be judgmental about this? We all make mistakes. He had made mistakes, though not as many as he had attempted.

The bedroom was as he would have predicted. Femininely cluttered but neat. The bed made. A poster by some impressionist or another on the wall. Haystacks at sunset.

And all this might have been vaguely disappointing, were he not, at the moment, feeling very expansive in his emotions. This was her room. Where she slept and dreamed. Where her heart was broken by Phil with his strange girl and forbidden cigarette. This was where she had made her own mistake and regretted it and called him, Robert, and now he, Robert, stood gazing into it and if he wanted he, Robert, could have taken a running start and leapt onto her bed.

But that would be rude and he would at least have to take off his shoes off and anyway he did not want to and had come down this way for the bathroom. The other door, the other room, as much her as the bedroom, the scene of unknown intimacies, more even, though some of them, of course, strictly functional and not the sort of thing Robert liked to imagine except on occasion in some abstract and humanizing way, but without details thank you. But here — here was where she showered or took a bath. And look there: a shower massage! Well well well. Of course, it was only a shower massage. It didn’t mean anything. He splashed some water on his face — it was a little too warmly flushed by the wine now and need to be cooled some. Then he pissed into her toilet bowl. It was pink. Where was Phil when they were picking out toilet bowls?

The stream of his urine wobbled a little and splashed perhaps too loudly in the water of the bowl, and he aimed a little higher, let it hit quieter just above the edge of the water.

He finished, washed his hands, splashed water on his face again and dried himself with her towel, also pink.

When he came back the dishes were cleared. Had he finished his pasta? He could not remember. She sat at the table, sipping her glass of wine. How many had she had? He wondered vaguely if it would be enough.

He sat down across from her at the table and remembered when they had sat closer, at the corner, plotting her escape from the enormous penis that had wandered its way into her bed.

She smiled at him and he smiled back and she said: “Did you fall in?”

“You have a very nice house,” he said and she told him about the house at length, how it had been her parents’, how she had grown up here and sometimes still found some bit of her childhood — a doll’s head in the heat vent or a small spoon that had dropped into a space between the windowsill and the wall — while she was cleaning, and put them in a box under her bed or put them on the shelf behind him on the wall.

He looked behind him. There were marbles and dolls heads and a small box of crayons that looked misshapen and unusable, and a row of green plastic army men.

“You had army men as a child?” he asked.

“I liked army men,” she said.

Her parents had left her the house in their will and they had both died unexpectedly in an accident while she was away at college. The house was nothing spectacular, of course, but she grew up here, surrounded by tall buildings. One small house that seemed to have wandered far from its own neighborhood and gotten lost in a forest of steel and glass and cement, found one small patch of yard left and stayed there.

She did not have many friends growing up, since there was never a neighborhood surrounding the house — only tall buildings, and only businessmen passing by as she drew chalk drawings on the sidewalk and sometimes tried to sell them lemonade for a nickel and in the winter made small, dirty snowmen that waved to them with stick arms, and she had to use the same sticks, year after year, because there were not a lot of sticks in the city, let alone ones that made good arms so she would keep the sticks under her bed during the off season.

“Were you lonely?” he asked and she told him not as much as one might imagine. She had books. She read a lot. And sometimes there was a group of cousins that would come over, but she had lost touch with them over the years and could not now even remember all of their names. But she had books. And then she had Phil.

She had met Phil in college — and here Robert remembered his own abortive college career, and pictured Kate and Phil meeting in the same class where he and Raina had sat in the back, trying to stay awake. Kate and Phil would be sitting in the front, the very front, looking up at the teacher and taking thorough notes and raising their hands with pointed questions and remarks.

And while Robert and Raina had gone out for coffee, Kate and Phil had their study session in the campus library, at a secluded table, leaning close to each other as they shared one book.

And when Robert and Raina had run from the riots to the safety of an unmade bed, Kate and Phil were weekending off campus somewhere, maybe camping, maybe visiting his parents.

And then Raina had left — had vanished — leaving behind only an empty chair, and Robert sat alone in the back of the class, while Kate and Phil were pushing their desks closer and listening attentively to the teacher.

“Phil was OK really, I guess,” Kate said. “Just not faithful. Or honest.”

“But other than that…” he said.

“Yeah, other than that, a peach.”

They had opened a second bottle of wine and now that too was gone. He could not tell which one of them had drunk the most, but when he stood up to use the bathroom again, he wobbled even more and steadied himself with his hand on the back of the chair.

“The meal was excellent,” he said, because it occurred to him that he had not said it earlier and he really should have.

“Off to the little boys’ room?” she said and he said yes.

And he paused again to look into her bedroom. It was the same, but he saw the books now piled up in corners on the floor, with library labels on their spines. He wanted a cigarette and thought of Phil sitting in that bed with another woman, blowing smoke rings at Kate as she stood in the doorway — perhaps exactly where he was standing — and looked on at the scene she was not meant to see but while she was here there was something they clearly needed to talk about.

He went to the bathroom, splashed his face again, carefully pissed, washed, dried. Walking down the hallway back to the kitchen the world seemed jittery. It seemed to bounce with every step like the trick in movies where the camera becomes the character, and the camera jitters down hallways, often carrying a knife.

She was at the table, her head resting across it like she had done that night before. He seemed to be watching her get closer rather than moving closer himself, with the camera bouncing, the lights above her swaying with his steps. He stopped beside her, looked down at her, bent forward and kissed the back of her head — the hair there. It smelled of shampoo.

She straightened up in her chair, smiled at him sadly and said: “Let’s not ruin it, OK? Not yet. Let’s not ruin it yet.” And he took his seat across from her.

“OK,” he said. “We can always ruin it later.”

She looked at him for as long as he could stand and then he looked down at his glass, which still had some wine in it, and picked that up and finished it and put the glass down and looked at the glass, at the smudges his fingers and lips had made.

He felt his mouth fill suddenly with saliva. He swallowed but it was filled again. The saliva seemed unusually warm, like blood in his mouth. Then he got up and walked quickly and unsteadily back to the bathroom and vomited into her pink toilet.

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