The Summer of Apartment X Page 3

  And as I careered back to 307½ Hibiscus, I, too, smiled. Love was finding me after a long and harrowing search. I was finding the real thing after racing down a hundred blind alleys. I kept wondering, however, why my thoughts kept drifting away from Melanie’s poor, looking-to-get-shattered heart and instead traced with an imaginary finger the long tapered legs, the graceful, gentle geography of her innocent breasts. And that tongue kept getting in the way of pure thoughts.

  Richard was home alone trying to figure out a way of installing a peephole into the door so that he could take in the parade of women showerers.

  “The problem is that they all shower at night. It’s a technological dilemma. I’m looking into infrared. They make these scopes for high-powered rifles that use infrared. Mounted in the right spot, it could be quite revealing. TV monitors are out of the question, though. It’s a matter of economics and ethics. In descending order.”

  “In descending order,” I echoed. I wasn’t interested in his fantasy. “I’m in love, Richard, you heartless son of a bitch. And all you can think about is a free peep-show pass.”

  “Love rises above economics and ethics. Yes. Proceed. Love. Illicit or otherwise?”

  “Otherwise.”

  “Ah.” A certain disappointment was evident in his voice. New noises came from upstairs. First the moans of a couple doing whatever they did every night at this time, then something that sounded like bowling.

  I couldn’t tell if the noises were from the same room.

  “I must meet her.”

  “The hell you will.”

  “Come on. Ease up. I’m not out after your gal — isn’t that the way swingers like you talk about their ladies? Your gal is safe around me. Look, you can make me wear a straitjacket. Or a chastity belt. I want to see what real love looks like. I want to see the radiance that has danced light into your dark, moral being. Please?”

  I told him that she worked with me and that if he bought a ticket to see Invasion of Mars he would meet her. She would be behind glass and very busy. That made things seem safe enough.

  “A prince among men,” Richard said and hugged me, kissed me behind the ear. As the shower started up and the door was latched from the other side, Richard returned to the keyhole and grieved the absence of the proper infrared equipment.

  A Perfectly Fine Day

  There had been a time not so long ago when I believed in an automobile the way I now believed in love. Even draining black, scummy oil from the crankcase of a ten-year-old VW could instill in me a feeling of mild euphoria. But on a slouching grey morning on a drizzling street, my car seemed less worthy of infatuation. I was obliged to drive a hundred miles to the Division of Motor Vehicles and renew the registration on the car or face the potential of a fifty dollar fine and, therefore, certain bankruptcy. But I had to clean the brushes in the alternator first.

  To start out, I dropped the pigtail bastards in the already littered street, and it took me twenty minutes to retrieve them. Then I scraped nine out of ten knuckles attempting to plug the little suckers back into place. After all that, the alternator still wouldn’t charge and I knew I’d have a dead battery before I made it over the causeway. So I asked Brian if he would let me borrow his car.

  The truth is, all night I had been asking God to bless the Division of Motor Vehicles for its gravity in these matters. As it had turned out, Melanie’s hometown of East Weston was on the way to the county seat, and she had agreed to come along for the joyride just to see her old neighbourhood. I, like a benevolent Boy Scout looking for merit badges, offered to stop at her house so she might visit her parents.

  “They’re not always nice people,” she warned me, her brown eyes making my heart do gymnastics.

  “I’m good with parents,” I lied, guessing that Melanie’s parents probably made Ozzie and Harriet look like criminals.

  So she nestled into my side as we crossed the inlet that kept the shore town safely away from the mainland, and I thanked GM for the blessing of a standard bench seat. Bucket seats are only acceptable to eunuchs and Presbyterians. “Just remind me not to try backing up,” I asked Melanie.

  She put a warm hand on my knee, and I had to grip the wheel tight to keep from driving into the bay. I think it was the poverty of the car that really got to her. An obscure war had been waged inside Brian’s car, and the ravaged interior was well suited for two refugees.

  Melanie’s hometown was known for its profusion of paint factories and scrapyards, but her parents lived on a respectable street lined by barrel-chested trees recently trimmed of all branches and foliage after the ravages of Dutch elm disease. I pulled up in front of a Cape Cod standard with asbestos siding and beige aluminum shutters, careful to pick a spot where I wouldn’t be wedged in and forced to back up the car manually. Melanie squeezed my hand gently and said that I didn’t have to come in if I didn’t want to. I didn’t realize that I was looking nervous.

  “Naw. It’s okay. Like I say, I do well with parents.” I was thinking of the time a girl from Sunday school had invited me home to have lunch with her mother and I had passed out face down into a plate of overcooked Rice-a-roni.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.” I tried to shut off Brian’s Chevy, but it didn’t want to give up idling until we were halfway up the sidewalk to the house. “Perseverance,” Brian called it.

  Melanie knocked once and walked in. I followed, letting the screen door slap hard against the house. Inside, it smelled like fresh laundry and ironing. Her mother was standing at a table folding sheets.

  “Are you still taking in wash?” Melanie asked without a word of hello.

  “They haven’t called your father back to the plant.” She smiled at me, acknowledging my presence.

  “Do I hear my little girl?” The voice came from kitchen. Then a door opened and a heavy-set man in t-shirt and grey flannel pants came through the door, wielding a lit propane torch. “Melanie. It’s great to see you. Who’s your friend?”

  “Daddy, you’re wearing those same old corny pants. You promised to throw them away.”

  “Yeah, kid, but I was just trying to hook up your mother’s new washer. I put on my old clothes.”

  “Jesus Christ. Nothing changes.”

  Her father waved me a fiery hello, almost frying the wallpaper before turning off the flame.

  “Could we have some food?”

  “Sure, dear. And your friend?” Her mother, too, was probing for an introduction. I was waiting for Rod Serling to come out from behind the mirror. Melanie had turned to vinegar.

  “This is Fred,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Fred’s asked me to marry him.”

  Incredulity all around.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Our honeymoon will be in Tasmania.” I assumed somebody was joking. Melanie gave me a hydrochloric stare.

  “I guess he changed his mind,” she said in disgust.

  “Lord have mercy!” her mother shouted as she discovered her iron burning through somebody’s shirt on the ironing board. The father looked as if he was trying out for the heart attack team.

  While Melanie bounced upstairs, I sat myself down on a faded sofa and began thumbing through a pile of Good Housekeeping.

  “Tuna fish all right?” her mother asked me.

  “That would be just fine,” I heard myself saying. Somebody turned on a radio in the kitchen — it was a talk show on which callers were complaining about taxes. Then I was left alone with the smell of burned rayon and an ancient poodle that began to lick my fingers. When I tried to pet him, he showed me a set of thoroughly rotted teeth and a tongue the colour of nail polish. When Melanie came back down, I saw that she had done something to her face. Heavy makeup had been applied — blue over the eyes, dark eyeliner, rouge. She wore lipstick and had rearranged her hair. For a minute I thought this was some trick. Twins maybe — one good, one bad? This on
e was an angry-looking, sexy vamp. Maybe I was being tested for a new situation comedy.

  Whoever she was, she shooed the dog away and sat down beside me, planting her tongue inside my cheek. Then I knew it was still Melanie, but not the one I used to know. Her father walked in while I was still verifying her identity. He cleared his throat. “So, Fred, you work with Melanie?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re in the movies together. That is, she sells tickets...as you of course already know...and I’m an usher. I usher people around. They give me a flashlight and everything. I like the work.”

  “I’m sure you do.” He looked doubtful as I tried to wipe off the lipstick, which didn’t want to budge.

  “What about you, Daddy? They call you back yet?”

  “The damn government’s closed her up for good. Too much lead contamination or something. Who’s gonna hire me now?” He looked dazed and defeated.

  “So you’re making Mom do all the work?”

  “She takes in wash. She doesn’t mind.”

  Melanie gave him a look that read, “stupid jerk,” and waltzed off to the kitchen. The dog came back and licked my hand. Arguing began in the kitchen. Her father now seemed shy and embarrassed.

  “Have you tried job retraining?” I asked, sounding disconcertingly like a welfare caseworker.

  He shook his head, but he didn’t answer my question. “I really love my daughter, you know. Be good to her, okay?” It was from the heart. He seemed like a nice, sincere guy, a sad case but a gentle person. I couldn’t figure out why Melanie was castrating him. We sat in silence, looking at the poodle and listening to his sloppy licking. The argument in the kitchen subsided, then flared up again. Melanie came blasting back out into the living room, turned back to the door and shouted, “Well, then, screw you both to hell!” and walked out the front door. Her mother followed, wringing a dishcloth in her hands. “Melanie!”

  But Melanie was already slamming the door to Brian’s car. I was left in a stony silence with two confused strangers.

  “I guess I’ll be going too, then,” I said, as if we had just finished a quiet meal together.

  Her mother ran back to the kitchen and then returned. “Here, take the sandwiches. Pickles and tuna fish. You two have a...fun day.” She was trying to be sweet. I took the sandwiches and shook her father’s clammy hand. He looked down at the floor.

  “She gets a little moody sometimes,” he said.

  Outside, someone had vindictively parked sausage-tight against my front bumper, and I had to brace my feet on the offender’s car and push the Chevy a couple of yards back. Melanie’s parents came out on their front steps to watch. In fact, it seemed as if the bulk of the unemployed neighbourhood had come out to watch. When I finally sat down in the driver’s seat, Melanie handed me back the wax-paper-wrapped tuna fish sandwiches. “Throw them out in the yard.”

  “Why?”

  “Throw them, dammit.”

  I threw.

  I couldn’t help but notice that her mother was crying now. Her father was wiping his hands on his grey pants. Half of East Weston had taken to their front yards to get a better look at us as we pulled away slowly enough to pretend that nothing was happening at all, that it was a perfectly fine day.

  And then we turned the corner onto Bligh Avenue and drove toward South County High School, a squat brick and concrete nothing of a building with maybe five windows. Buses lined up in front of the building looked like a single giant yellow caterpillar. We were approaching a stand of wild hickory and maple trees with a rutted pull-off that was once a dirt road. A few yards in, a pile of ripped-up pavement had been dumped so nobody could drive among the trees.

  “Pull in there,” Melanie ordered me. I pulled up to a mangled metal “No Parking” sign and stopped, forgetting the reverse problem.

  “Jesus.”

  Melanie just looked at me. I was having a hard time finding her behind all that makeup, and I was still waiting for Rod Serling to stick his head over the back seat.

  “What are we doing?” I asked her.

  “You know how many cigarettes were smoked here?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “You know how many kids have got high here?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up on the statistics.” I was starting to sound grim. Edgy too. No food. I was pissed off at Melanie for chucking her mom’s tuna fish sandwiches. I always think more clearly with food in my gut.

  “You know how many girls lost their virginity in these woods?”

  “‘Whose woods these are I think I know.’”

  “Robert Frost.”

  “Right.”

  “‘His house is in the village, though.’”

  “Corny, but a good poem,” she said. “I always paid attention in English. It was science and algebra I couldn’t stand.”

  “Me too.”

  “Three hundred. Twenty times fifteen. That’s a low estimate. High margin of error.”

  “Huh?”

  “The virgins who made much of time.”

  “Andrew Marvell. I don’t get it.”

  “The school’s been here for twenty years. Fifteen virgins lost per year.”

  “Lost?”

  “Well, graduated. Whatever. I could be wrong. But I tried to keep track.”

  “And you were one of them.”

  “Nope.”

  Brian’s Chevy was improvising a minor symphony of creaking, moaning, hissing noises as it always did when the engine cooled down. And now Melanie was trying to seduce me. She was sliding her hand up and down my leg. It was the middle of the day. In Brian’s hand-painted car with flower and butterfly decals, we were probably only the second most visibly interesting landmark in East Weston. What was a fella to do? Melanie leaned on the horn rim as she pulled herself onto me and kissed me hard, smashing our teeth together. Fortunately, the horn didn’t always work.

  “You want us to do it here? For old times’ sake?”

  “Not here.”

  “In the woods?”

  “In one of the buses.”

  “Melanie, why don’t we wait until some night back at my apartment?” She hadn’t seen my apartment yet. Richard had pro­posed the theory that only rodents were capable of intercourse in that domain anyway, this after one of his failed attempts to untangle the mysteries of womanhood. Still, I would have preferred Apartment X to three seats back inside a GMC Bluebird.

  “No, I think now is the time. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...’ ”

  Somehow I was truly sorry that I couldn’t travel both. We got out and picked our way through the garbage and the flowers, the flowers mostly dried and dead, the garbage indestructible plastics that would long outlive weak mortal flesh. My own weak mortal flesh was feeling weaker than most. Pulled toward the yellow buses more by Melanie’s will than love or lust, I would have been happy to have been back safe on the highway, sucking diesel fumes on my way to the Motor Vehicle Bureau.

  “I have this fantasy, you know.”

  “You do?”

  “In my fantasy, I’m with this man, a young man, someone like you. And we’re in some poverty-stricken country that’s torn apart by war. And we’re driving this bus, see. You’re driving this bus. It’s full of malnourished, homeless babies and little children. We’re somewhere in the Middle East, or Central America or Southeast Asia. The scene varies. But we’re driving, see, and it’s very dangerous, but we have to get these kids to a plane that’s waiting for us just across the border in another, less hostile, country.”

  “You saw this in a movie. An old Warner Brothers flick?”

  “No. This is serious. Listen. We don’t know how we’re going to make it but we have to. Three hundred children’s lives are depending on it. We’ve somehow crammed them all into the bus. We’re going to save every last one of them. You know how w
e got the bus, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.” We were coming out of the woods, into the open field. Nothing but a baseball backstop and some vandalized football practice equipment between us and the summer buses, lifeless on the hot macadam parking lot.

  “We had to run across a field of battle and steal it from under the nose of the bloodthirsty dictator.”

  “Oh, shit.” Already she was running. The girl could run. She was passing second base and heading toward the left field snow fence that contained the outfield before I could gather my wits and get past first. Sniper bullets were all around. Robert Frost had sent me down the wrong road, smug bastard.

  I caught up with Melanie as she snaked around the home run fence and ducked down behind a car parked behind a neat little posted sign that read “Principal.” The caterpillar of buses loomed before us, and Melanie, disconcertingly schooled in the ways of guerrilla activity, leaped to the window of the fifth bus and reached in by the driver’s seat, opening the door through which thousands of teenagers had once migrated daily to the tedium of grammar lessons and pop quizzes in geometry. Anyone staring out from one of the vacant classrooms would have seen the door of the empty bus close mysteriously from the inside and probably not have detected any movement of the chassis at all after that, owing to a truly solid suspension designed to support the havoc of a hundred young pugilists exercising their daily right to violence.

  We crawled down the aisle toward the back of the bus until we came to the second to last seat. Melanie threw herself down on the seat and pulled me to her, licking my neck. Expecting the imminent grenade of an authoritative voice or a bayonet in my back from some unforeseen vigilante protector of school property, I gave in to the demands of the moment. We were both panting and sweating from the run, and our inability to breathe intensified something that had little need of magnification. I wiped away Melanie’s cosmetics with my shirt until she looked more like the girl I had once discovered in a ticket booth at a seedy shore town movie theatre.