Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  In this house where flesh never touched except in anger, Omar Duvall was a toucher and a grasper. It gave Alice the creeps to see his large hands reach across the table to cover Benjy’s or his sweaty arm on the back of her mother’s chair. Over her own untouched plate, she watched how he ate, the little sweat beads quivering on his temples, his lips trembling with anticipation as the fork rose, the delicate chewing, the soft moan and rolling eyes as he swallowed, and her stomach would turn with his gluttony. From nowhere, the stranger at the door had come to be everywhere. Even when she was in her room with the radio on, his languorous voice, like his sweet cologne, seeped up through the floorboards in a sly caress.

  She had also noticed the change in her mother. Even if Duvall was the phony Norm claimed, at least their mother’s tearful rages and black moods had subsided. The days of numbing despair had been reduced to quick flashes of temper that Duvall always managed to calm. He had given nothing and somehow worked a miracle.

  And for this, no one was more grateful than Benjy, and no one was more mystified, because there were times when Duvall seemed as much that hunted face in the raw sunlight, a quivering white slug that clung to the corner of the house, a sweet-talking cold-eyed voice whispering into the telephone when he thought no one was near, as he was a brave man who was afraid of black men, someone with perhaps as many faces and secrets as the boy himself.

  Tonight, Marie was exhausted. All these late nights with Omar were as exhilarating as they were tiring. This morning, Mr. Briscoe had marched back a letter that had three typos in one line, and then after lunch he’d caught her dozing with her head in her arms. With a glance at the clock over the sink, she got up from the table and poured more lemonade into Omar’s glass. As she started to turn back to the refrigerator, he caught her hand and smiled broadly.

  “Such a wonderful woman,” he said, gazing up at her.

  Her face flamed, and she drew her cheek shyly across her shoulder and eased away.

  “You are,” he said as she stood at the open refrigerator, staring at its bright emptiness; just yesterday she had brought home another fifteen dollars’ worth of food. “And I want to show my gratitude…if you’ll allow me….” His voice trailed off.

  She was conscious of the crickets near the window as well as the refrigerator’s motor chugging in the same rhythmic pattern as Omar’s breath.

  “Come here,” he said softly.

  She turned slowly, arms rigid at her sides, her chest sore with unexpellable breath.

  He took her hands and said, “I am about to make an offer which you will probably turn down. And if you do, I will understand.” He smiled painfully. “After all, why should you accept? You barely know me. In fact, you know nothing about me except what I have told you. For all you know, before you here sits Jack the Ripper.” He laughed a little. “But you are a woman of faith, Marie. A believer. One of that rare breed who moves by instinct.”

  She felt her knees weaken, her head weightless and spinning. Her eyes roved blindly. How could she accept the proposal of a man she had known for only a few weeks. He would have to be patient. He would have to understand how it wasn’t just her, but her children. First, they would have to get to know him better. Benjy would be easy. She had seen how his eyes trailed Omar, as if he dared not lose sight of him. Norm’s bitterness might take a long time to overcome, but Alice…

  “…a partner,” Omar was saying, “a risk-taker.” He swallowed hard. “A woman like yourself,” he said, raising his eyes hopefully to hers.

  “It’s the kids,” she started to say. “They…”

  He held up his hand. “Hear me out—allow me that.” He fiddled with his tie points, then cleared his throat. “The only way to look at this is in dollars and cents, Marie. Don’t be swayed by my affections or by any pity you may feel for me. Look at this for what it is—an investment—a chance—an opportunity to knock on Fortune’s golden door.”

  She regarded him curiously. For a moment she wanted to laugh. Such a strange proposal from such a strange man. His eyelids were heavy and wet. Sweat glistened on his chin. He’s almost fat, she thought. He is fat. He eats too much. He eats as if he might never eat again. A breeze brushed past her legs.

  Next door, Jessie and Harvey Klubock had been having a cookout. Now their friends laughed, hooting loudly at whatever game was being played. The smell of meat that had been sizzling on the charcoal still came through the back door. Harvey was a butcher at the Meatarama and always got the best cuts. Oftentimes Marie had seen him open the toolbox in his trunk and lift out paper-wrapped steaks and roasts she just knew he had stolen. And Jessie with her fine blond curls and her eager smile, Jessie was everyone’s sweetheart—oh, but Marie knew, wished, had seen, or imagined Jessie playing up to the mailman and the meter reader in her skimpy shorts, swinging her tight little hips up and down the front steps all day when the telephone linemen were putting up a new pole. Yes, she thought, Jessie and Harvey were headed for trouble. She looked back at the window, suddenly alarmed, because she needed them there, with their windows shining, their lawn mowed, their hedges pruned, their lives intact now as her own found form.

  Omar unfolded a piece of paper, which he smoothed open on the table. “Listen,” he said, reading. “Tired of the eight hours a day, the forty hours a week, the month after month, the year after year after year? Tired of the grind? Tired of the rat race? Tired of taking orders? Tired of never getting anywhere?” He glanced up. “Tired of knowing that no matter how hard you work, nothing will ever get better?”

  The flesh on her face seemed to shrink on her skull. From next door, a woman cried a little drunkenly, “You’re such a peach, Jessie!”

  Omar continued to read. “Then this ad is meant for you. Presto Soap is a nationwide company looking for a few bright people anxious to change their lives around through hard work and diligent investment. Get in on the ground floor. Call 771-4812 and ask for Bob.” He stared at her. “I called,” he said. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it while he told her how the state franchiser, Bob, was sick, so they had given him another number to call. The national distributor! The number one man!

  Omar fumbled through his pockets, laying lint and pennies and candy wrappers on the table until he came to a scrap of yellow paper, torn from a telephone book, scribbled with a name. “Roy Gold,” he read. “The Roy Gold of GoldMine Enterprises. He said he liked the timbre of my voice. He said he could feel the vibrations of my enthusiasm over the telephone wires. Marie, he said they’d had thousands of calls, but he could tell I was the one!” He banged his fist on the table and grinned. “I’ve got a shot at being a franchiser for the whole state.” He sighed. “But my problem is collateral.” He looked at her. “I need help, Marie. A partner. I need a shrewd investor at my side—a woman like yourself.”

  From the Klubocks’ a surge of laughter broke over the night. Marie laughed, too, but her eyes blurred with tears. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said in a low voice. “Last year Benjy brought home a kitten he’d found, and I let him keep it for two days, and then I took it to work with me one morning. I let it out behind the fish market. I couldn’t even afford to buy cat food, that’s how bad things are.” She took Omar’s glass and rinsed it out. Klubocks’ party was ending. Car doors opened and closed.

  “Come again!” Jessie cried. “We had so much fun!”

  “Thanks for coming!” Harvey called. “See you guys at camp next week.”

  “We’ll keep an eye on her, Harve,” a man called.

  “I don’t know, Harve,” a woman called. “You know what they say: when the cat’s away…”

  Omar stood up, pushed in the chair, then lifted the ad from the table and looked at it a moment. “There’s the trust money. You could take them to court for all—”

  “I can’t do that! I can’t fight them. I can’t go through that! I just can’t.”

  “I understand,” he said softly.

  Omar did not come the following night, or the night after that. To
night as Marie absently stirred her creamed corn over her plate, Alice asked what was wrong. She stared at her daughter. “Do you really want to know?” Alice’s face looked gray. Norm and Benjy grimaced.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, arranging her fork and knife and spoon next to her plate with exaggerated care. “I’m tired. I’m tired of working eight hours a day. Forty hours a week, year after year. I’m tired of the rat race. I’m tired of never getting ahead. I’m tired.”

  They looked at her, their eyes shifting imperceptibly as they aligned their vision in the low yellow quiet that filled the room. They were done eating, but didn’t dare leave the table. The phone began to ring, and Marie jumped for it.

  “Hello?” she said too anxiously. “Oh! She’s right here, Les.”

  Alice took the phone, then turned her back to them. “Um, we’re just eating now. Why don’t you call back?”

  “You won’t, though!” Lester was shouting so loud they all heard him. “You never call me back!”

  “I will! In a few minutes,” Alice said.

  “No you won’t! I know you won’t!”

  Alice pressed the button down, then left the phone off the hook.

  “No!” Marie said, pointing. “Hang it up! Don’t leave it like that!” Omar might be trying to call her at this very moment.

  “But he’ll just call back, and I don’t want to talk to him,” Alice said.

  “Well, think about the rest of us. Maybe someone’s trying to call one of us right now!”

  “No one’s trying to call me, I don’t care,” Norm said.

  “Me neither,” Benjy said. “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do!” she cried, slamming the receiver onto the cradle. “I care! Goddamn it, I care very much!” She turned back and caught them looking at one another. The phone rang and she picked it up, forcing herself to speak calmly. “Hello?”

  “Don’t hang up, please,” Lester gasped in her ear. “I can’t stand this. You’ve got to forgive me! I’m so miserable, I miss you so much. I ache all—”

  “Alice can’t come to the phone right now, Lester; she’s busy. She’s going to be very busy tonight.”

  “Good!” Alice said when she hung up. “He’s driving me crazy.”

  “He’s such a creep!” Norm said.

  “Yah!” Benjy agreed.

  “He’s lonely!” she said. “It’s a terrible feeling to be alone. Don’t look at me like that, the three of you! You have each other, so you don’t know what that’s like. You don’t know how frightening that can be! How lost and desperate you can get!”

  They stared down at the table.

  “Believe me, you have no idea!” she said.

  Even at dusk the air was still heavy with the relentless heat. Quick black slashes of fleeing birds darted across the orange sky. Benjy was in the yard, unpinning dry clothes from the line, when Louie crossed the driveway.

  “Can I go in the box?” Louie asked.

  “If you want,” Benjy said, pleased to see Louie again after so many weeks. “Where you been?” he asked, twice folding a stiff towel before dropping it into the basket.

  “No place.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothin’. My father’s fishing at camp.” Louie sat cross-legged in the box opening.

  “Oh yah,” he said, the twinge of dread recalling Mr. Briscoe’s pledge to take him fishing this summer. He no longer carried on the ruse of going up to the swimming pool every day. Now he just lied and said he did.

  “Louis!” Mrs. Klubock called from her back steps. “Benjy, have you seen Louie?”

  “He’s over here. In the box,” he called back.

  “Louis, get over here!” Mrs. Klubock demanded with a stamp of her foot when Louie dragged into sight.

  “She’s scared,” Louie said quickly to Benjy. “Some man keeps calling, and he won’t stop.” He looked frightened.

  “What did I tell you?” Mrs. Klubock scolded as Louie climbed the stairs. “You stay in your own yard, where I can see you!” She hustled him inside and locked both doors.

  Behind Benjy came a quick rustling through the weeds and wild hedges; then the shiny blunt head of Klubocks’ dog broke into sight.

  “Hey! Hey, boy!” he whispered. He knelt down and held out his hand, but the dog pulled back, its eyes bright with a wary wildness. Clenched in its mouth was a long strip of brown cloth, cuffed at one end like a pant leg. “C’mere! C’mere!” he coaxed, but the dog sprang then, flying past him, diving into the lilac thicket, and as it went, his stomach turned with the stench. It was the most disgusting thing he had ever smelled.

  Chief Stoner’s love affair had started a year ago January. It had been his wife’s canasta night and Eunice Bonifante’s car had run out of gas, even though she owned the busiest gas station in town.

  Typical, Sonny had been thinking as he buckled his boots and listened to his sister-in-law’s throaty laughter coming from the pantry. Ever since her husband, Al’s, suicide, Eunice seemed to be either in the depths of depression or laughing hysterically.

  She was a careless woman and carelessness made Sonny nervous. His virtue was as much rooted in superstition as in goodness. There were dark forces in the universe, forces ready to pounce on careless men, forces that demanded appeasement. His talismans against such furies were the insurance policies in his strongbox, the bomb shelter in his backyard, the lightning rods on his roof. To this end, he had taught his deputies that keeping their guns cleaned and oiled meant never having to use them.

  When Eunice got into his car that January night, she asked him the time. Ten forty-five, he told her as he pulled onto the dark street, heartened by the clank of the tires’ chains over the ice. She asked if he’d mind speeding it up a little so she wouldn’t be late. Late for what, he asked irritably. My obscene phone call, she sighed.

  “Your what?”

  “My obscene phone caller. He calls every night.”

  “Eunice!” he said, never knowing whether to believe her or not.

  “It’s a riot, Sonny. He breathes, and I breathe back.” She lit a cigarette and blew out a smoky laugh. “The creep can’t believe his good luck.”

  He glanced at her. After Al’s funeral she had invited everyone back to the house, then got so drunk she passed out. He remembered how disgusted he had been to see Carol, red-eyed from weeping, trying to coax Eunice up to bed. Carol had been devastated enough by her brother’s suicide and didn’t need any of Eunice’s trashy scenes. Leave her on the couch, he’d told Carol, but she’d refused, saying Eunice wouldn’t have left her.

  “I think I know who it is,” Eunice said.

  “Who?” he asked, frowning over the wheel.

  She touched his arm. “Promise you won’t tell Carol?” she whispered solemnly. “Last night I heard church bells in the background. I think it’s the Monsignor,” she said, bursting into laughter. “I think he’s got the hots for me!” Just then a call had come over the radio, reporting a disturbance up at the pig farm. He’d check it out as soon as he made one more stop, he said, looking at Eunice.

  “Nosirree!” she roared. “The Monsignor’ll just have to wait!”

  As they drove along the dark winding road to the pig farm, Eunice lit another cigarette and stared out the window. “God, I haven’t been out here in years,” she said with a shiver. “Al and I used to park somewhere along here.”

  As they came over the rise, she pointed to the frozen gully below. “Right there’s where we parked!” She laughed. “Al used to break branches off and put them over the windows.” She was quiet again.

  “Al always covered his bases,” Sonny said pointedly. Al had been a judicious man; his only lapse in judgment had been Eunice, though Carol used to say she was the best thing that had ever happened to her morose brother.

  “Yup,” Eunice sighed. “Our own private fuck blind, he called it.”

  He couldn’t help it, he burst out laughing. Eunice just stared out the window.

  W
hen they came to the farm, Grondine Carson ran out of the old gray house in his bathrobe and boots to report that someone had been banging on his windows. Sonny walked around the house, beaming his flashlight on the untracked crusted snow, knowing he would find nothing. The pig man had spent too many years alone. He was so accustomed to his trespassers that when they didn’t come he invented them.

  “See anything?” Eunice asked when he came back.

  “Nothing,” Sonny sighed, ducking his long body into the cruiser. “Every now and again he just needs to know someone’s around, I guess.”

  “I know the feeling,” Eunice sighed, watching the ice-blasted trees flick past as they started back down the road.

  He glanced at her. He was more accustomed to her blowsy humor than this melancholy. “Hey,” he chided after a minute. “I’m not used to you being so quiet. Cut it out!”

  “I was just thinking. Poor Carson, all he needs is a woman. You know, it’s tough being alone. It really is. Being alone can make you crazy.”

  “Uh-uh, no excuse.” He shook his head. “You were always crazy, Eunice!”

  She laughed. “And you were always a pain in the ass! Just like Al. The two of you!”

  At that, he stopped the car, threw it into reverse, and switched on the flashing lights.

  “What the hell’re you doing?” she gasped as they headed backward down the road.

  “I’m bringing the pigman a woman!” He laughed over his shoulder. “Sure will cut down on these late-night runs.”

  The car filled with her rocky laughter as she grabbed his arm and jammed her foot down on the brake, spiraling the cruiser over the ice, and as it turned, and turned, and turned, he felt it all getting away from him, all that caution, all that good sense, and he wasn’t afraid or angry, but laughing just as much as she was, even as the car slid over the soft shoulder, coming to rest against a snowdrift as gently and silently as a head sinks into a pillow. He closed his eyes and kissed Eunice Bonifante’s warm wet mouth while the dome light spun red whorls on the snow.