Licorice Read online

  “Did Harley like green beans?” I ask Daniel suddenly.

  “Does he,” says Daniel.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He does. Not, he did.”

  “He does?”

  “I don’t know, Liz. Why?”

  “Oh–” I shrug. “I thought Harley belonged here,” I say after a minute, stung. “I thought he liked it. He did. Why the hell should he go? Because the video rental closed? Has it closed? Has it?”

  Daniel nods.

  “I thought they were trying to keep it open.”

  “They were, but they didn’t,” says Daniel.

  “Maybe Harley’s just sick, in the bedroom, maybe.”

  Just sick, I said. Just sick in the bedroom, not gone.

  “I looked,” says Daniel, and at that I take his arm and press it hard to my side. Harley was Daniel’s, not mine, after all.

  And then after a moment, “Maybe he just went away for a while. Maybe on one of his rock climbing trips.”

  I trail off hopefully, ready for Daniel’s encouragement.

  “Maybe,” he says, which is what he always says, and I sigh and lean against him. Maybe, I think, and still my throat clenches up, unconvinced. In less then a minute, I’m crying. But not for long. A year ago this same process took months to accomplish. Then, weeks. Then, days. Now, only seconds, and I am resigned.

  Bye, Harley, I think.

  Then, silence.

  Stevie twitches in sleep in his stroller.

  We’ve crossed the bridge over a bend in the creek onto Morgan Street, closer to home. Adjacent to the road, a narrow, undulating meadow dips finally down to a strip of young forest where Ben’s woodchucks live. Those woods are enfolded in darkness, while on the meadow the fruit trees are shot through with moonlight so that even their colors can be discerned. There are plum, cherry, apple–all reds, pinks, and purples. Throughout, the tall grasses bend over themselves beneath the weight of the perfumed air. From spring I remember an invigorating scent of pollen, exactly like semen, nothing like this. Harley’s wife must have left, I realize, for the very same reason I stay. How daunting the air; so dense, so becalmed, the very pace of our breathing slows.

  At home, Stevie in his crib, I sit in the kitchen at the darkened desk examining the moonlight on the telephone dial. I’ve found my new friend Emily’s number, not a difficult chore at all. It was in the phone book just as she said it would be, an easy number to remember, the year and date of my own birthday. “Which only goes to show,” I say to Daniel, “she and I are soulmates. I need to tell her how I feel.”

  “How do you feel?”

  I sigh. “Restful.”

  “So call her already,” says Daniel, swigging juice from the container at the open refrigerator, replacing the container, unscrewing a jar, popping a Spanish olive into his mouth. I reach out a palm, he throws me an olive, too. “Go ahead,” he persists. I sit unmoving. He lifts the receiver, shoves it under my ear, sticks my finger in the dial in a spot untouched by moonlight.

  “Dial,” he says, and I begin to move the finger, but slowly, in trepidation.

  “There’s no need for me to call her,” I say, withdrawing my finger. “It’s an insult to phone her. She’s thinking about me, I’m thinking about her, she understands me, I understand her, what’s the point of calling?”

  “What you’re saying is if she wanted to talk to you, she would call you.”

  “Right,” I say. “She’s not interested.”

  “Tell me the God damn number.”

  “I’ll do it,” I say, and then dial not Emily’s number but Danka’s. What there is of my friendship with Danka is utterly dependable. We agree on nothing. When one of us phones, the other one is always in the tub.

  Danka answers at once. I hear her husband in the background, shifting his position on the couch. He is papery gray, smokes a pipe, reads horrible autobiographies. Last I knew he was halfway through the life of William Kellogg, the one who invented cornflakes.

  “Are you in the tub?” I ask.

  “Not yet. But I am contemplating…”

  I interrupt, “Would you like to go out for some pecan pie?”

  “Oh, all right,” says Danka.

  “I’ll drive,” we both say, although we both know she will. Driving’s her hobby. The other day I saw her drifting past a stop sign. There was a load of traffic crossing: U-Hauls, pick-up trucks, a bicycle coasting, and last of all, my Fiat. Had the cyclist not screamed, Danka would surely have hit someone. She slammed on the brakes, rolled her eyes, then winked at me when I went past.

  “Liar,” says Daniel, when I hang up the phone. “That wasn’t Emily’s number. It was Thank You’s. You going out?”

  “Yes. She’s driving.”

  “Have fun.” Floppy disk in hand, Daniel sits at the computer. When I’ve brushed my hair and teeth, changed shirts, and come downstairs to wait for Danka, I peek in for a look. He knows I am looking, but doesn’t turn from the screen, just types away engrossed in his jewelweed, goldenrod, and phlox. I don’t know what he means by, “Have fun.” Maybe, “Talk long and hard so you can stop sighing about whatever you’ve been sighing about lately.”

  Probably he means, “Too bad you couldn’t get up the nerve to call Emily.”

  Or, possibly even, “Have a good time,” but that thought does not occur to me until later.

  DANKA WEARS her black Audi like a little black dress, as if, were she to step out of it, she’d be naked. In fact, she does wear a little black dress most of the time, and this constancy of attire does seem a kind of nakedness. She looks frankly comfortable, understatedly sexy, elegant, and bored. We are of separate generations. Danka is older, voluptuous, short, but taller than I am, of course. In my jeans I could be Danka’s waywardly precocious Americanized daughter rudely chastising her for smoking cigarettes. She favors a holder of slender black plastic with a filter cartridge, and tonight wears a string of pearls, perhaps in honor of our date, perhaps not.

  Her English is nearly impeccable.

  “This weather…” Danka gestures out the window with her cigarette at the quiet, dewy lawns with their overgrown violet shadows. “I don’t know if everybody has been feeling restless, or if it’s only me. You too, or only me?”

  “Never. But that doesn’t mean nobody else is. Harley, this guy who worked in Daniel’s lab….

  “And I don’t know how I feel about pecan pie,” Danka interrupts. “There’s a man I want to spy on.”

  “Who is he?”

  We start driving around, aimlessly it seems. Danka takes the corners like a cat: rolling up on the curb, rolling down. Distracted, she turns on the windshield washer and then the radio in search of the cigarette lighter.

  “Would you believe that I don’t know his name?”

  “That’s the best kind.”

  “No. Really, I know his last name but not his first. Would you believe I peeked at his name in the library? He was there, and I was looking at the newspapers. He was signing out a book so I went and looked at the card, in fact I stole it. His name is Startup, unless he was joking. Maybe he knew I was going to do it. Oh, that’s terrible. Oh Liz, I am really in need. I am soaking all the time. I should not have gone out with you tonight. It’s too dangerous. You’re too nice. If I drove to his house, and said, ‘wait in the car,’ and then I went and knocked on his door and threw myself into the room and made love to him, for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, you would wait in the car, wouldn’t you? With the radio on, and I have a book, I think. See? It’s too dangerous. You would do it, wouldn’t you?”

  “What book?”

  Danka reaches under the seat and pulls out one of her husband’s books. The autobiography of Hutchins Hapgood. I pull it onto my lap, open it up and stare at one of the pages.

  “I mean the book the man you’re spying on took out of the library,” I say. “What was that?”

  “A woodworking book. He’s very sensual. I knew he had a smell about him, from a distance, th
ose oils they use.”

  “Linseed oil. Lemon. Mmmm”

  “Rather musky, I think.” Danka closes her eyes and inhales deeply while misjudging another corner. “Oh, God. We’ve got to be quiet,” she says, and slows to a crawl. We’ve entered a parking lot behind two perpendicular rows of shops, one facing the square and the other, Main Street. On the far side of the lot, in the college conservatory building, a few practice rooms are still lighted.

  “He might be sleeping,” she says.

  I wonder. In a practice room? Or does he live above the stores?

  “The thing is,” says Danka. “I don’t really know where he lives, but I’ve seen him coming in and out of this parking lot so many times. How do you get up into those apartments? Are you supposed to climb the fire escape? Those are apartments, aren’t they?”

  “I think you have to go around to the front, where the stores are.”

  “I’ll never find it. I shouldn’t be doing this, Lizzie. But it would be so wonderful. I have a feeling he lives in this odd little building right here. What do you think?”

  It’s a single-story, square brick building that somehow I’ve never quite noticed, in the exact middle of the parking lot. The brick is yellow. All around it is planted tall shrubbery like the shade trees planted around farm houses on the open prairie. Outside on the cement stoop sit a couple of dented garbage cans and a mailbox with a number eight stenciled on it. Also, one of those tin boxes that milk bottles used to be left in.

  “Looks promising.” Inside, a tv flickers behind bamboo blinds. There are beer cans stacked on the window sill.

  “He has a beer belly,” says Danka. “How do I know there’s not anyone in there with him? We’ll have to sit, watch the windows for a while, see if we can tell.”

  “I’m going over to Lorenzo’s for a second to get a Dove Bar,” I say. “Do you want one?”

  “Why didn’t I just look up Startup in the phone book? Why didn’t I think of that? That was stupid of me.”

  “I’ll look in Lorenzo’s. Want a Dove Bar?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I climb out of the car, close the door softly, walk across the empty parking lot to Lorenzo’s Pizza. In a way it seems unfair to me that I should be expected to sit in the car reading the autobiography of Hutchins Hapgood while Danka begins an affair. But then I think, no matter what I am doing at any time, there is always someone having an affair, somewhere, and if Danka’s having one here and now would make me jealous, then I should be jealous always. Am I? No. My longings are sudden and transitory if fierce, like the one I have for Joe’s bald head. It’s like passing a pond on a hot day, thinking how good it would feel to jump in, then walking on by. Anyway, there’s no Startup listed in the telephone directory. Danka accepts this news bravely, and seems content for the moment with peeling the wrapper off her Dove Bar. We both are. The parking lot is silvery, and some dogs trot across intermittently. Behind us in the conservatory the last practice room goes dark, and a few minutes later a girl carrying a cello crosses the lot.

  “How do I know? That could be his wife,” says Danka, and we watch the girl eagerly to see if she climbs the stoop into the low brick building. She doesn’t, but disappears into an alley with her cello, which gladdens us even though we don’t know if the brick house is Startup’s or not.

  “You are the kind of person who would consent even to knock on the door, so I could see if it is Startup who answers, at which point you should pretend you were looking for somebody else. Aren’t you?” says Danka.

  “Yes,” I say. In unison we start on our Dove Bars. Both are coconut, but we go at them differently. I bite right in, while Danka peels oblong sheets of the chocolate coating and lets them melt one by one on her tongue. She turned the radio on while I was out buying them.

  “And you could see if there was another woman in there with him, and if you couldn’t see from the door then you could ask to use the bathroom in which case you could see if there was evidence of another woman, especially in the bathroom. Tampons and such.”

  Startled, I say, “In that case I may as well sleep with him to see if he’s impotent, or if you want to know if he’s circumcised. Then you can wait around and see if I get AIDS.”

  Danka sucks her chocolate quietly as if considering.

  “But you would knock on the door,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “But it really wouldn’t do any good since I wouldn’t know if there was anybody else in there.”

  “But at least you would know if it was his house or not.”

  “Yes. I don’t want to know if he is circumcised or not. Why do you say that? Do you think it makes a difference?”

  “I have this idea there might be more friction.”

  “Oooh,” says Danka. “I’m going to look in the window.” She hands me her stripped-naked Dove Bar, and gets all the way up to the stoop before turning around and coming back to the car.

  “What time is it?” she whispers.

  “Just about midnight.”

  She goes back to the stoop, stands there a couple of minutes as if listening, and returns to where I’m sitting.

  “I can’t tell if what I hear is the television or real people,” she says.

  “Is there a woman?”

  Danka nods. I follow her across the lot to the stoop, still holding the two Dove Bars. Danka’s, deprived of its coating, falls off the stick as we listen at the window. It’s television, a laugh track, but that still doesn’t tell us whether there’s anyone else in there watching with him. Before leaving we open the milk bottle box, out of curiosity. There’s a Barbie Doll dressed in a gold lamé jumpsuit. Danka stamps her foot, takes hold of my arm and leads me back to the car. Inside, she finishes off the remaining portion of the Dove Bar.

  “Really, it is getting too late to do anything,” she says.

  “William might get a little suspicious,” I concede.

  “William is never suspicious. He is not imaginative enough to be so. William is probably sleeping. William says he’s retiring after this year and that we’ll finally be moving away, but he said that last year, too.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I say.

  “What?” asks Danka, but I don’t want to answer. Even the sight of a moving van loading up at the house of a family I’ve never met makes me feel abandoned. Sometimes I ask, “Why?” and the answer varies only within the constraints of its unvarying theme. There’s nothing for us here, it’s too slow, too quiet, there’s nothing to do, the kids are just hanging out, there’s no place to eat, no jobs, no place to purchase ethnic clothing, crafts even.

  “William makes me feel old just as I am beginning to feel like a teenager for the first time in my life,” says Danka, starting the motor. The car purrs out of the lot, past the five parked cars and the stop sign, without pause.

  “Come to think of it I don’t recall ever seeing his car in this lot,” says Danka, and spins around to pass through the lot a second time. His car is there. It’s rusted through in places and has no side-view mirror. We have to sit for a minute while Danka smokes a cigarette and looks it over dreamily.

  At last, we drive home. Daniel is not yet asleep.

  “Your new friend Emily called,” he tells me, rolling upright on his pillow. “She said she’d call back in the morning.”

  EMILY DOESN’T call back, but what choice do I have but to be as understanding of her as she would be of me? After all, we are soulmates, and were I in her place, I wouldn’t call back either. Instead I’d be thinking, Where could she have been when I called at eleven o’clock at night? She must not have wanted to talk to me, and told her husband to tell me she wasn’t home. No matter that we were soulmates three days ago at that party. Now she’s ashamed, embarrassed even, by our sudden, needy intimacy. Probably having caught sight of me the other day downtown she realized that I wasn’t her type-my feet were bare, my toes dirty, and I was buying the wrong kind of toy. Oh God. She must have seen me on my way to returning
those awful toy guns that Daniel’s sister bought for Stevie. I was to exchange them for something summery and idyllic, a child’s lawn-sprinkler in the shape of a juggling clown. Emily must have caught sight of me at a crucial moment, on the sidewalk right next to my car carrying my see-through plastic bag of Mr. Tough Guy Advanced System Machine Guns. She must have realized at that moment that she’d made a mistake, that the party had been a fluke and we weren’t soulmates after all.

  “I know why she’s not calling,” I say to Daniel. “She must have seen me carrying those guns.”

  “She did call. Remember? You’re the one that’s not calling back.”

  “But she said she’d call back.”

  “Tell me the number,” says Daniel. I tell him. He dials. The line is busy. When I dial again after less than a minute, it rings but no one answers. She must have phoned me last night only to to assuage her guilt about the fact that she could no longer stand the thought of being my friend. In fact, I conclude, very likely she knew I was out, she saw me driving along with Danka, and called at that moment perfectly assured that she would not have to talk to me and that, come morning, she would avoid me all together by not answering her phone.

  Built into the corner, our kitchen telephone desk forms a crescent of blonde oak glowing under the sunlight that falls through the evergreens outside the window. Like someone hiding under a sunhat, I sit in its semi-circle of protection, my private oasis of cool indifference. Our typewriter, for bills and business letters, is shielded by a dust cover of gray vinyl that I peel back just enough to slide a finger underneath and strike the keys.

  I don’t care, the finger types, but disconnectedly, as if the rest of my body does care.

  These are the things Emily and I talked about on the day of the party: the overabundance of flowering trees; hallucinations; our mothers. Both of us are straight and pure, our hallucinations products only of our shared propensity for being awe-inspired. Hers featured moments of communion with inanimate objects, and mine, a centaur. I saw him standing very proudly near a railing spanning an overpass. Dusk had fallen; I looked up and saw him but he did not see me. His human half was hairless, with burnished skin the tone of polished chestnut. How regally he stood, as if his visit to our planet were only incidental, a stop-off at a scenic overlook highlighting the road to some far more significant destination. Indeed when I had passed beneath the span and turned back for a second look, the strange animal was gone; there was only a handsome black man walking a Great Dane. I had seen the man before, over the week I had spent in St. Louis.