Desperate Characters. Paula Fox

fund him. And the hair. He was playing with it all the time I was talking to him. Pleating it, braiding it, stroking it, pulling it.”

      “What did you talk to him about?”

      “Stupid things, stupidly.”

      “They aren’t all that bad,” Otto said.

      “Water babies. They come out of faucets, not out of people.”

      “They want to be Negroes,” Otto said, yawning.

      “I wish I knew what they’re up to,” she said, suddenly remembering she had told Mike’s father that she wanted to be a Jew.

      “They’ve chosen to remain children,” he said sleepily, “not knowing that nobody has that option.”

      What was a child? And how would she know? Where was the child she had been? Who could tell her what she had been like? She had one photograph of herself at four, sitting in a wicker rocker, a child’s chair, her legs straight out, in white cotton panties, wearing someone’s Panama hat that was too big for her. Who had assembled all those things? Panama hat, wicker chair, white cotton panties? Who had taken that picture? It was already turning yellow. What did young Mike, dirty, mysterious, seemingly indifferent, speaking that hieratic lingo that both insulted and exiled her, have to do with her childhood? With any childhood?

      “Otto?” But he was asleep. A car went by. A slight breeze came through the open window, carrying with it the sound of a dog’s bark. Then she heard knocking, a fist on wood. She went to the window and looked down at the ledge which hid from view the stoop and anyone who might be standing there.

      There was a kind of grunt, then several sharp raps, then a whisper. Had her scalp really moved? She looked back at the bed. Then she went to the hall and down the stairs, her hand held stiffly against the soft folds of her nightgown.

      Stopping at the front door, hidden by the curtains which covered the glass insets, she listened and looked. On the other side of the door, a large body swayed, a large head veered toward the door, then away.

      “Otto …” sighed a voice sadly.

      Sophie unlocked the door. Charlie Russel was standing there, one lapel turned up.

      “Charlie!”

      “Ssh!”

      He stepped into the entryway and she closed the door. Then they were close to each other like two people about to embrace. She felt his whole face watching her like an enormous eye. “I’ve got to talk to Otto,” he whispered intensely.

      “He’s asleep.”

      “I’m in a terrible state. I have to see him.”

      “Now? You’re crazy.”

      “Because I couldn’t see him a second before now. Because it’s taken me all this time, from this morning when I last set eyes on him, to get to the point where I am. I don’t care what time it is.” He reached out and gripped her arms.

      “I won’t wake him,” she said angrily.

      “I will.”

      “You’re going to hurt my hand. A cat bit me.”

      “I feel murdered,” Charlie said, letting go of her all at once and leaning against the wall. “Listen. Let’s go out and get a cup of coffee. Now that I think about it, I don’t want to see that bastard.”

      “Does Ruth know where you are?”

      “Ruth who?”

      “That’s some joke,” she said. “I don’t like wife jokes. They drive me up the wall. Don’t make wife jokes to me.”

      He stooped and peered into her face. “You sound mad.”

      “I am mad,” she said.

      “Will you? Have a cup of coffee?”

      “Yes.”

      “Let’s make a getaway,” he said, clapping his hands together.

      “I’ve got to get dressed. Don’t make any noise. I’ll be right down. There’s a chair. Don’t move.”

      She dressed silently; even the sleeves of her blouse, drawn up carefully over her arms, made no sound. It was as though she was only thinking about getting dressed.

      Otto lay diagonally across the bed, one knee protruding from beneath the blanket. She brushed her hair quickly and pinned it, reached for a purse on the bureau, then left it there, putting her house keys in her pocket. As she picked up her shoes from the closet and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment, an unlawful excitement.

       FOUR

      They went down the street silently, quickly, like conspirators, speaking only when they had turned a corner and were headed for downtown Brooklyn.

      “Where are we going?” he asked. “Is there anything open?”

      “I don’t know. I’ve never been around here at this hour. Did you come by subway?”

      “No. I took a taxi. He dropped me at the wrong corner, but I was too tired to argue. I walked to your house.”

      “Did you tell Ruth you were coming?”

      “No. I had gone out to a movie. A man who was sitting beside me told me I was talking to myself. I told him not to interrupt, then, and he told me I was fucking up his one night out. So I left and got a taxi and went to a Bickford’s, which was full of people talking to themselves. Christ! Look at the paper all over the sidewalks.”

      “Please. Don’t talk to me about garbage.”

      They had come to an intersection. From the west, bearing down on them with an echoing bang and rattle of mechanical parts, came a bus. It went through the red light. The driver was hunched forward, his arms encircling the wheel, his hands hanging down like paper hands. There was only one passenger, an old woman with dazzling white hair. She looked at once majestic and mindless.

      “What is she thinking about?” Sophie said.

      “Nothing. She’s asleep.”

      The light changed and changed again. Discarded wrappings and newspapers rustled all around them. A block away, a few figures stood torpidly outside the windows of a lunch counter. As they walked toward it, Sophie could see two men inside, moving briskly as they rinsed out thick white cups and scrubbed a grill. The people outside were simply standing there, watching. Across the street, near a subway exit, a short fat dark man wearing a tiny black hat was staring down at a sewer grating. He had the stunned immobility of a displaced person who had come as far as he could without further instructions.