Early Autumn Read online

“That’s right,” I said.

  “Why don’t you take your coffee into the living room and read the paper,” she said. “I’ll clean up here.”

  I did.

  She bustled about in her flowered apron and put the dishes away in the dishwasher and swept the floor. When my breakfast had settled and I’d finished the paper I went to my room and changed and went out to run.

  The winter was over. The weather was good and somewhere the voice of the turtle was probably being heard. What I heard were mostly sparrows. I jogged toward the center of town, feeling the spring sun press on my back. There was still an edge to the air. It had not yet softened into summer. But by a mile I had a pleasant sweat working and my legs felt strong and my muscles felt loose. There were other joggers out, mostly women this time of day. Probably looking for a man to grab so they could cut in on the money and power. Probably why Susan had latched on to me. Poor old Patty. She’d read all the stuff in Cosmopolitan and knew all the language of self-actualization, but all she really wanted was to get a man with money and power.

  Ahead of me a young woman was jogging. She had on the top of a beige-and-blue warmup suit and blue shorts cut high. I slowed down to stay behind her and appraise her stride in the high-cut shorts. Women looked realer in the spring. Like this one. She hadn’t had a chance to get this year’s tan yet and her legs were white and vulnerable-looking. Good legs though. I wondered if I offered her money and power if she’d jog with me. She might. On the other hand she might accelerate and run off and I wouldn’t be able to catch her. That would be humiliating. I picked up the pace and went past her. She had big gold hoop earrings on and she smiled a good-fellowship smile at me as I went past. I tried to look powerful and rich, but she didn’t hurry to catch me.

  I cruised down through Lexington Center past the Minuteman and looped back in a wide circle to Emerson Road. It took about an hour and a quarter, which meant I’d done seven or eight miles. Patty’s car was gone. I did some stretching, took a shower, and dressed. I heard Patty’s car pull in. And when I went out, she was just breezing into the kitchen with some groceries.

  “Hi,” she said. “Want some lunch?”

  “Are you after my money and power?” I said.

  She looked quickly sideways at me. “Maybe,” she said.

  CHAPTER 9

  On the weekend Paul improved his TV viewing average. Patty Giacomin had departed to self-actualize in New York. I had the living room and Paul stuck to his bedroom except to make a periodic trip to the kitchen to stare, often for minutes, into the refrigerator. He rarely ate anything. Looking into the refrigerator seemed merely something to do.

  I had to stick with him, so I couldn’t run or build some cabinets in Susan’s house like I’d promised I would. I read most of the day about Enguerrand de Coucy and life in the fourteenth century. Saturday afternoon I watched a ball game on the tube. About six o’clock Saturday afternoon I yelled up the stairs to him.

  “You want some supper?”

  He didn’t answer. I yelled again. He came to his bedroom door and said, “What?”

  I said, “Do you want some supper?”

  He said, “I don’t care.”

  I said, “Well, I’ll make some, I’m hungry. If you want some, let me know.”

  He went back into his room. I could hear the sounds of an old movie playing.

  I went to the kitchen and investigated. There were some pork chops. I looked into the cupboard. There was rice. I found some pignolia nuts and some canned pineapple, and some garlic and a can of mandarin oranges. I checked the refrigerator again. There was some all-purpose cream. Heavy would have been better, but one makes do. There were also twelve cans of Schlitz that Patty Giacomin had laid in before she left She hadn’t asked. If she’d asked, I’d have ordered Beck’s. But one makes do. I opened a can. I drank some. Perky with a nice finish, no trace of tannin.

  I cut the eyes out of the pork chops and trimmed them. I threw the rest away. Patty Giacomin appeared not to have a mallet, so I pounded the pork medallions with the back of a butcher knife. I put a little oil into the skillet and heated it and put the pork in to brown. I drank the rest of my Schlitz and opened another can. When the meat was browned, I added a garlic clove. When that had softened, I added some juice from the pineapple and covered the pan. I made rice with chicken broth and pignolia nuts, thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf and cooked it in the oven. After about five minutes I took the top off the frying pan, let the pineapple juice cook down, added some cream, and let that cook down a little. Then I put in some pineapple chunks and a few mandarin orange segments, shut off the heat, and covered the pan to keep it warm. Then I set the kitchen table for two. I was on my fourth Schlitz when the rice was finished. I made a salad out of half a head of Bibb lettuce I found in the refrigerator and a dressing of oil and vinegar with mustard added and two cloves of garlic chopped up.

  I put out two plates, served the pork and rice on each of them, poured a glass of milk for Paul, and carrying my beer can, went to the foot of the stairs.

  I yelled, “Dinner,” loud. Then I went back and sat down to eat.

  I was halfway through dinner when Paul appeared. He didn’t say anything. He pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down at the place I’d set.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “Pork, sauce, rice, salad,” I said. I took a bite of meat and washed it down with a sip of beer, “And milk.”

  Paul nudged at the pork medallion with his fork. I ate some rice. He picked up a lettuce leaf from the salad bowl with his fingers and ate it.

  I said, “What were you watching?”

  He said, “Television.”

  I nodded. He nudged at the pork medallion again. Then he took a small forkful of rice and ate it.

  I said, “What were you watching on the television?”

  “Movie.” He cut a piece off the pork and ate it.

  I said, “What movie?”

  “Charlie Chan in Panama.”

  “Warner Oland or Sidney Toler?” I said.

  “Sidney Toler.” He reached into the salad bowl and took a forkful of salad and stuffed it into his mouth. I didn’t say anything. He ate some pork and rice.

  “You cook this?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you know how to do that?”

  “I taught myself.”

  “Where’d you get the recipe?”

  “I made it up.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Well, I sort of made it up. I’ve eaten an awful lot of meals and some of them were in places where they serve food with sauces. I sort of figured out about sauces and things from that.”

  “You have this at a restaurant?”

  “No. I made this up.”

  “I don’t know how you can do that,” he said.

  “It’s easy once you know that sauces are made in only a few different ways. One way is to reduce a liquid till it’s syrupy and then add the cream. What you get is essentially pineapple-flavored cream, or wine-flavored cream, or beer-flavored cream, or whatever. Hell, you could do it with Coke, but who’d want to.”

  “My father never cooked,” Paul said.

  “Mine did,” I said.

  “He said girls cook.”

  “He was half right,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Girls cook, so do boys. So do women, so do men. You know. He was only half right.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What did you do for supper when your mother wasn’t home?”

  “The lady who took care of me cooked it.”

  “Your father ever take care of you?”

  “No.”

  We were through eating. I cleared the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher. I’d already cleaned up the preparation dishes.

  “Any dessert?” Paul said.

  “No. You want to go out and get ice cream or something?”

  “Okay.”

  “Where should we go,” I said.
/>   “Baskin-Robbins,” he said. “It’s downtown. Near where we ate that time.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Paul had a large cone of Pralines ’n Cream. I had nothing.

  On the ride home Paul said, “How come you didn’t have any ice cream?”

  “It’s a trade-off I make,” I said “If I drink beer I don’t eat dessert.”

  “Don’t you ever do both?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  I deepened my voice and swelled up my chest as I drove. I said, “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, boy.”

  It was dark, and I couldn’t see well. I thought he almost smiled.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was almost the first day of May and I was still there. Every morning Patty Giacomin made me breakfast, every noon she made me lunch, every evening she made dinner. At first Paul ate dinner with us, but the last week he’d taken a tray to his room and Patty and I had been eating alone. Patty’s idea of fancy was to put Cheez Whiz on the broccoli I didn’t mind that. I used to like the food in the army. What I minded was the growing sense of intimacy. Lately at dinner there was always wine. The wine was appropriate to the food: Blue Nun; Riunite, red, white, and rosé; a bottle of cold duck. I’d eat the eye of the round roast and sip the Lambrusco, and she’d chatter at me about her day, and talk about television, and repeat a joke she’d heard. I had begun to envy Paul. Nothing wrong with a tray in your room.

  It was warm enough for the top down when I dropped Paul off at school on a Thursday morning and headed back to Emerson Road. The sun was strong, the wind was soft, I had a Sarah Vaughan tape on at top volume. She was singing “Thanks for the Memories” and I should have been feeling like a brass band. I didn’t, I felt like a nightingale without a song to sing. It wasn’t spring fever. It was captivity.

  While I could get in my miles every morning, I hadn’t been to a gym in more than two weeks. I hadn’t seen Susan in that time. I hadn’t been thirty-five feet from a Giacomin since I’d come out to Lexington. I needed to punch a bag, I needed to bench press a barbell, I needed very much to see Susan. I felt cramped and irritable and scratchy with annoyance as I pulled into the driveway.

  There were flowers on the kitchen table, and places set for two, with a glass of orange juice poured at each place. And the percolator working on the counter. But Patty Giacomin wasn’t in the kitchen. No eggs were cooking. No bacon. Good. My cholesterol count was probably being measured in light-years by now. I picked up one of the glasses of orange juice and drank it. I put the empty glass into the dishwasher.

  Patty Giacomin called from the living room, “Is that you?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “Come in here,” she said. “I want your opinion on something.”

  I went into the living room. She was standing at the far end, in front of the big picture window that opened out onto her backyard. The morning sun spilled through it and backlit her sort of dramatically.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  She was wearing a metallic blue peignoir and was standing in a model’s pose, one foot turned out at right angles, her knees slightly forward, her shoulders back so her breasts stuck out. The sunlight was bright enough and the robe was thin enough so that I was pretty sure she had nothing on under it.

  I said, “Jesus Christ.”

  She said, “You like?”

  I said, “You need a rose in your teeth.”

  She frowned. “Don’t you like my robe,” she said. Her lower lip pushed out slightly. She turned as she talked and faced me, her legs apart, her hands on her hips, the bright sun silhouetting her through the cloth.

  “Yeah. The robe’s nice” I said. I felt a little feverish. I cleared my throat.

  “Why don’t you come over and take a closer look?” she said.

  “I can see an awful lot from here,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to see more,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  She smiled carefully, and let the robe fall open. It hung straight and framed her naked body. The blue went nicely with her skin color.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a closer look?” she said.

  I said, “Jesus Christ, who writes your dialogue.”

  Her face flattened out.

  “What?”

  “This is how it would happen on The Dating Game, if they were allowed to film it.”

  She blushed. The robe hanging open made her seem less sexy than vulnerable.

  “You don’t want me,” she said in a loud whisper.

  “Sure, I want you. I want every good-looking woman I ever see. And when they point their pubic bone at me I get positively turbulent. But this ain’t the way, babe.”

  Her face stayed flushed. Her voice stayed in the whisper, though it sounded hoarser and less stagey now.

  “Why?” she said. “Why isn’t it?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s contrived.”

  “Contrived?”

  “Yeah, like you read The Total Woman and took notes.”

  Her eyes had begun to fill. She had let her hands drop to her sides.

  “And there’s other things. There’s Paul, for instance. And a woman I know.”

  “Paul? What the hell has Paul got to do with it?” She wasn’t whispering now. Her voice was harsh. “I have to get Paul’s permission to fuck?”

  “It’s not a matter of permission. Paul wouldn’t like it if he found out.”

  “What do you know about my son?” she said. “What do you think he cares? Do you think he’d think less of me than he does now?”

  “No,” I said. “He’d think less of me.”

  She stood without movement for maybe five seconds. Then she deliberately took hold of her robe and shrugged it back over her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She was naked except for a pair of sling-back pumps made of, apparently, transparent plastic. “You saw most of it already,” she said. “Want to see it all?” She turned slowly around, 360 degrees, her arms out from her sides. “What do you like best?” she said. Her voice was very harsh now and there were tears on her cheeks. “You want to pay me?” She walked over to me. “You figure I’m a whore, maybe you’ll pay me. Twenty bucks, mister? I’ll give you a good time.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “Who’d tell Paul that you fucked his whorey mother? How would he find out you’d been dirty?”

  Her voice was shaking and clogged. She was crying.

  “You’d tell him when there was a good occasion. Or you’d tell his father and his father would tell him. And besides there’s this woman I know.”

  Patty Giacomin pressed against me. Her shoulders were heaving, she was crying outright. “Please,” she said. “Please. I’ve been good. I’ve cooked. I pay you. Please, don’t do this.”

  I put my arms around her and patted her bare back. She buried her face against my chest and with both hands straight at her sides, stark naked except for her transparent shoes, she sobbed without control for a long time. I patted her back and tried to think of other things. Carl Hubbell struck out Cronin, Ruth, Gehrig, Simmons, and Jimmy Foxx in an all-star game. Was it 1934? The crying seemed to feed on itself. It seemed to build. I rested my chin on the top of her head. Who played with Cousy at Holy Cross? Kaftan. Joe Mullaney? Dermie O’Connell. Frank Oftring. Her body pressed at me. I thought harder: All-time all-star team players I’d seen. Musial; Jackie Robinson; Reese; and Brooks Robinson. Williams; DiMaggio; Mays; Roy Campanella; Sandy Koufax, left-hand pitcher; Bob Gibson, right-hand pitcher; Joe Page in the bullpen. She was crying easier now.

  “Come on,” I said. “You get dressed, I’ll take a cold shower, and we’ll have some breakfast.”

  She didn’t move, but the crying stopped. I stopped patting. She stepped away and squatted gracefully to pick up the peignoir. She didn’t put it on. She didn’t look at me. She walked away toward her bedroom.

  I went into the kitchen and stood at the open back
door and took in a lot of late April air. Then I poured a cup of coffee and drank some and scalded my tongue a little. The principal of counterirritant.

  It was maybe fifteen minutes before she came out of the bedroom. In the meantime I rummaged around in the kitchen and got together a potato-and-onion omelet. It was cooking when she came into the kitchen. Her makeup was good and her hair was neat, but her face still had the red, ugly look faces have after crying.

  “Sit down,” I said. “My treat this morning.” I poured her coffee.

  She sat and sipped at the coffee.

  I said, “This is awkward, but it doesn’t have to be too awkward. I’m flattered that you offered. You should not consider it a negative on you that I declined.”

  She sipped more coffee, shook her head slightly, didn’t talk.

  “Look,” I said. “You’ve been through a lousy divorce. For sixteen years or more you’ve been a house-wife and now all of a sudden there’s no man in the house. You’re a little lost. And then I move in. You start cooking for me. Putting flowers on the table. Pretty soon you’re a housewife again. This morning had to happen. You had to prove your housewifery, you know? It would have been a kind of confirmation. And it would have confirmed a status that I don’t want, and you don’t really want. I’m committed to another woman. I’m committed to protecting your son. Screwing his mom, pleasant as that would be, is not productive.”

  “Why not?” She looked up when she said it and straight at me.

  “For one thing it might eventually raise the question of whether I was being paid for protecting Paul or screwing you, of being your husband substitute.”

  “Gigolo?”

  “You ought to stop doing that. Classifying things under some kind of neat title. You’re a whore, I’m a gigolo, that sort of thing.”

  “Well, what was I if I wasn’t a whore?”

  “A good-looking woman, with a need to be loved, expressing that need. It’s not your fault that you expressed it to the wrong guy.”

  “Well. I’m sorry for it. It was embarrassing. I was like some uneducated ginzo.”

  “I don’t know that the lower classes do that sort of thing much more often than we upper-class types. But it wasn’t simply embarrassing. It was also in some ways very nice. I mean I’m very glad to have seen you with your clothes off. That’s a pleasure.”