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Posted March 13, 1997 |
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Posted March 13, 1997 |
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Lumbricus
 
"I'm holdin up okay."
Nate was having a cigarette out back with Hammond and the rest of the smokers during a fifteen minute break. The Carcinogenic Brotherhood, Ham called them; exiled to the breezy side of the loading dock in order to indulge their addiction.
"No you're not. Look at you. You ain't took two puffs from that nail. You're just standin there, lookin at the blacktop. Crap. You're walking angst, you are."
"Shut up."
Nate took a long draw from his cigarette. The end lit up and the paper crumbled back towards his lips. He blew the smoke out his nose and it whisked away on the nippy February wind.
"It's too cold out here," he said, then cupped his hands and breathed on them.
"That's for galldarn sure," Hammond said. One of his annoying habits was the use of corny swear words. "Pricilla is lookin awful good today. I don't think that skirt is allowed under company rules. Do you think I could get anything on a sexual harassment suit?"
Nate simply snorted.
"Yeah, I wish she'd harass me. Great Caesar's Ghost, but what I could do with that. I'd just start at the top and work my way down real slow like, and then I'd break out the--"
"Will you shut up? Dammit, Ham."
"Oh yeah. Sorry." He dropped his cigarette on the oily pavement and ground it out. "But I mean, look at that. Look at that and blame me, man."
Nate looked at Pricilla, who was standing a few feet away with her back to them, talking to someone in a blue suit. He looked at her skirt, her legs, her waist, and then at the back of her neck, because her hair was up and it made him think of Sadie and the coffee she made in the morning. She made coffee in the kitchen with her hair tied up in a sloppy bun before she went to school. And every morning Nate came in and blew on the back of her neck and she hunched up her shoulders and turned around and kissed him wide awake. It was always that kiss that did it and not the coffee, although it was very strong coffee.
But those were the good mornings, and lately there had been only drowsy, confused mornings that were no good at all.
"No, I guess I really can't blame you," he said.
It was dark after work when Nate went looking for Sadie at her friend's place, a cheap apartment on Lafayette. It wasn't big so Nate wondered how they could both be living in there if in fact they were. He had had the forethought to buy flowers. He ordered them from work and talked the florist lady into staying open a few minutes later so he could pick them up: a dozen roses.
He felt stupid getting out of the car. He hoped no one would see him. It was embarrassing to have to do this, but there was nothing else for it. There was a light on in the apartment, but the blinds were shut so he couldn't see inside. It was a ground floor apartment, and there was one above it. There was a little porch and two potted plants. Sadie liked plants. Maybe that meant she really was there.
Five 'til six.. Good Lord, had it taken that long to drive across town? No, but it had to drive around the neighborhood and stop for a newspaper and a half-finished coffee. And as he stepped onto the porch he knew he'd left the paper with the coffee. There goes fifty cents.
The panes in the door rattled when he knocked. That was poor insulation. There was a heavy Chilean rug hung over the inside of the window. A hand with purple nails drew it back and half a face with a brown eye followed it.
The face went away and Nate waited but the latch didn't click and the door didn't open so he knocked again. It took a little while but the door finally opened a crack and Sadie's friend filled the crack.
"She's not in here," she said. She looked at the flowers.
"Then how'd you know I was lookin for her?"
"It's been two weeks, Nate. Everybody knows. What the hell were you thinking, anyway? I told her she should've left with a piece of you."
"So she is in there. You let me talk to her, Yvonne."
"Did I say that? Did I say she was in here? No. I didn't. All I said was that--"
"Well have you at least seen her?"
"Sure. Sure, I've seen her. But I won't say where."
"Is she as worn out by this as I am?"
"Well, she's not too chipper, I guess."
"Then why doesn't she just come home?"
"She has got a little bit of pride, Nate."
"I know."
A pizza delivery guy pulled up on the curb and tramped up to the second apartment on the nosy wooden stairs. He didn't' try to hide his interest in the intriguing threshold conversation.
"Well, look, just take these in case she does show up. Tell her I said I wish she'd come back."
Yvonne took the lowers from him and read the card that was bundled with them.
"That's what this says, isn't it?"
"Just give 'em to her, okay?"
He bumped into the pizza guy on the way off the porch but he didn't apologize. He didn't even grunt. The pizza guy caught the scent of what was going on, so he just picked up his change and didn't say anything.
Nate got into his car and he drove away with his eyes in the rearview mirror. He went back for his paper but it was gone. He drove back by Yvonne's apartment a couple of times, then he drove by real slow and he saw the flowers all thrown out on the lawn. he couldn't believe it so he came around again. They weren't gone. He kept going around over and over again, and they kept being there.
It was four days later when Yvonne finally gave in and called Nate to confess that yes, Sadie was staying with her and could Nate please patch things up with her. She said Sadie was getting more miserable by the day and she failed a test last week and if she didn't put herself together she might as well write off the whole semester.
Nate listened to all this on the answering machine and he wondered what he should do. he was at a loss to figure out how he could patch things up when Sadie seemed so dead set to keep them gaping and unpatched. It always juste seemed to work itself out before without much effort.
Like the Thanksgiving when he had been rude to her mother. Not actively rude; he just didn't say anything to the whole weekend. Sadie got so mad, and wanted to know what he mother had done to deserve such shoddy treatment and Nate had said how all the stuff Sadie bellyached about whenever her mom was mentioned was reason enough. But that didn't help things. That time a silly romantic gesture had saved him, but after the flower incident, he doubted the same would work this time..
And in December when she got so pissed just because he wouldn't go see "Sense and Sensibility" and she'd cast aspersions on his intelligence. But he went to her poetry readings, didn't he? For her.
That line of thought reminded him that she'd left her note books in the night table. There were nearly a dozen of them in there, from as far back as eight grade she'd once said. She wouldn't touch the old ones but sometimes she would take them out at night and read to him from the later ones. She'd put on her reading voice and make sure she picked the absolute best ones, and he would lie there in bed and close his eyes and listen to her reading all those words that made no sense t. Then once or twice a week she'd sit up late to write and the sound of her pen on the paper trailed off into his dreams.
So he went into the bedroom and he sat down on the edge of the bed that wasn't made and he tried to read. He looked for the ones she liked to read the most but he couldn't make them sound like she did. He couldn't work the magic. He left them there on her side of the bed and went into the kitchen.
The words had given him an idea at least. It might be stupid, yes, but he was going to write her a letter. He wouldn't try a poem like her, and he couldn't begin to tell a story, but a letter he could handle. He sat down and he wrote it on some stationary he had brought home from work. He worked on it for nearly fifteen minutes, writing slowly, but when he was finished he felt sure it was crap. Three times he read it over, and then he was sure it was crap. He got so mad about it that he crumbled up the letter in his hands and threw it in the trash. Then he slammed out the door, dove into the car and drove, trying to burn frustration like gasoline.
It was 8:47 when Sadie came in looking for a text book she'd left behind; one of those text books you use maybe twice a year but they make you pay fifty bucks for anyway. She'd tried to get Yvonne to come get it for her, but she had testily refused.
She shook her head at the mess in the sink and the pile of newspapers on the breakfast table. Still, it was tidy compared to the living room, with its half-empty glasses and microwave dinner remains. She frowned with a mixture of pity and disgust.
Some books were piled haphazardly on the coffee table. Sadie rifled through them in search of her text book. They were Nate's books, she realized. Asimov, Gibson, Fink--that last one threw her. It was the only one without a robot or a rocketship on the front. She looked at it again. It was a book for expectant parents.
"Damn him!: she spat, and threw the book on the floor.
Sadie kept mumbling angrily as she made her way to the bedroom. On the way she made a point of not glancing into the bathroom. When she saw her journals fanned out all over the bed, her mumbling turned to inarticulate grunts and moans. She gathered them up, put them back in order, then filed them away in the nightstand drawer. She considered taking them back with her, but she knew there wasn't' room for her stuff as it was.
It took Sadie another twenty minutes to find her book. It was in the bottom of the closet, underneath some shoes. Her nerves were stretched to breaking, so she sat down in the kitchen for a cup of Sleepy Time. She let it go down slow, from her mouth through her throat, to disappear ambivalently beneath her ribs. She'd gone without decent tea and coffee for weeks now. Finding it again after so long was wonderful.
It was after her third cup that she found the note. It caught her eye from the wastebasket, the one that was supposed to be in the bedroom. She picked it out with thumb and forefinger and tried to uncrumple it without getting ick on her hands. She read:
Sadie put the letter down on the table and smoothed on it some with he hands. She couldn't get the creases out and she couldn't get the coffee stains out, but she just sat there for the longest time, running her hands over the paper, again and again, from the top to the bottom and from one side to the other; first with her fingertips, then with her palm, then with her whole hand at once. Before long Nate came through the door, and he saw her sitting there, and he saw that she had found the letter. He didn't know what to do so he just stood there in the door and dropped his keys on the table. Sadie got up and she wrapped herself all up around him until he felt like he was going to suffocate. He didn't care about suffocation though, because air wasn't anything, and earth wasn't anything, and all the stars could have twinkled out and it wouldn't have mattered one bit. It was all right there between his two arms.
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