Fruit of the Month Read online

  Tom fakes a look of surprise and recognition. He hands her the glass of orange juice and dashes for the television, switching it off. The silence is heavenly. In the living room his neighbor is nodding and gulping the orange juice. She hands him the glass, emptied. She points at her chest and yells, “Carmen.” What a beautiful name. Tom has never heard such a sad and lovely name. It suits her. She repeats it. “Carmen.” He grins and bows. When she is gone, when she has navigated the steps past the smelly black lump that is her dog’s fault, he slams the door mightily.

  This is what Tom does at work. He sits at a small table inside a small office in the topmost floor of a decaying building at the university. The building is called January. The office was originally intended to be a darkroom, and in fact was a darkroom for several years a long time ago. Black paint covers the windows. When Tom is inside with the door closed, a tiny red light blinks on in the hallway, assuring the world of his presence. He has to work at the table because the counter space is occupied by two large flat sinks and a collection of vials, glass platters, and obscure photographic equipment. On a shelf above the counter are some chemicals in squat brown bottles. Some of the bottles are marked “Poison,” with a tiny skull and crossbones on the label. There is a box of measuring spoons, a ladle, and a half empty jar of Pond’s Cold Cream. For this reason Tom suspects that the photographer was a woman. The presence of the ladle mystified him until he found, in a cabinet under the sinks, a hot plate and an envelope of instant soup. A white lab coat hangs from a hook on the door on the inside. In the pocket of the coat is a small black plastic comb of the sort you see on drugstore counters. Tom has studied the comb for further clues to the identity of the photographer, a hair perhaps, red or blonde. He found nothing. He has been instructed not to disrupt the placement of the objects in the room, as if its occupant might someday return.

  Tom’s employer is a sociologist whose research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The nature of the work escapes him. Each week the sociologist brings him a list of numbers to be punched into a calculator. It is important that he enter each set of numbers twice, or until the sums match exactly, to avoid the possibility of error. Once this has been accomplished Tom performs a variety of statistical tests, following the instructions from a book the sociologist has given him. He prints the results in a spiral notebook with a romantic scene depicted on its cover—a couple silhouetted by a sunset on a beach. Perhaps the sociologist was at one time in love with the photographer. Perhaps he is still in love with her. On Friday evenings he opens the notebook and checks Tom’s figures, and then he rips the page out and takes it away with him.

  The funny thing about this job, Tom has decided, is that it requires no thinking at all but such absolute concentration that if he does start thinking about something, about anything, he will get himself in trouble. He will punch in the same number twice, or repeat a step in an equation, or press a key next to the one he intended to press. Ordinarily things go as well as can be expected. Tom allows himself only the most fleeting of sensations; a pang of hunger, an appreciation of the smooth concave surfaces of the calculator buttons under his fingertips. At the end of each day, stepping from January Hall into the fresh transparency of night, he feels buoyant and lucid as a person who has been coaxed into a trance and made to forget his troubles.

  But already this morning is different: Susan has left, she has gone to Chicago, he will never see her again. He has devised a scenario. In the middle of the night she and Jeremy will hitchhike to El Salvador, where, in exchange for a roll of blankets in a cave above a rural outpost, they will smuggle weapons to the guerrillas. They will not make love, of course. They will love only the people of El Salvador and they will carry this love between them like a sacrificial animal. They will share, with the guerrillas, ribbons of beef cooked over a circle of flames. They will forget to speak English. At night they will bathe in the muddy waters of a river whose banks are lit with gunfire.

  All day the vision haunts him, but he pushes it back and keeps working. He is performing a Spearman Rank test, arranging the numbers in columns to be paired and correlated. Susan has bartered her wedding ring for a cake of hard brown soap which she rubs between Jeremy’s shoulders. In turn he clears a path for her in the jungle, swiping at the undergrowth with his machete. Is there a jungle in El Salvador? In his frustration Tom clears the calculator before completing the test, erasing the afternoon’s work. It is five o’clock. The sociologist is furious. He needs the data for the weekend—he is writing a paper. Tom has to start over. At eight o’clock he still has an hour to go. His head hurts. At nine when the work is complete he realizes that he hasn’t eaten anything. He opens the cabinet and pulls out the hotplate, plugging it in. He fills a pot with water and empties into it the contents of the envelope. It is vegetarian vegetable soup. The tiny cubed vegetables plump up when the water begins to steam. He drinks from the ladle in measured sips. On the rim of the ladle is something he hadn’t noticed, a narrow pink smudge of lipstick. As he eats, dipping the ladle in and out of the hot, fragrant broth, the smudge disappears.

  He takes the elevator down. Susan and Jeremy are drinking wine from a pouch made of leather. The wine is cheap and grapey but it tastes of leather. It leaves a purple stain on their lips and tongues. Tom cuts across the quadrangle along shoveled walks to a lot where his car is parked under a lamp. But why go home? In the entrance to a building across the lot is a throng of students lining up for a movie. He joins them, pulling a dollar from his wallet. During the film, he eats Milk Duds from a box in the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman gets up and moves to another seat in another aisle, on the opposite side of the theater.

  Saturdays are lazy days. Tom sets out to do nothing as if nothing were a task for which he would be held accountable. He sleeps late, waking and sleeping and waking again, and then he shaves, brushes his teeth, opens the curtains, sniffs the air, dresses, lights a cigarette, and sits on the bed to wait. He waits for inspiration. Perhaps it would be pleasant to spend the day in the sauna at the university. There are always groups of young women wearing swimsuits in the sauna, engaging in the kind of intimate but stagy dialogues they have when they know they can be overheard. “I know she knows,” one of them will say. “She does?” says the other. “Yes. By the way she looks at me. But I haven’t told him about it.”

  Tom will sit in the steamy enclosure until he can no longer breathe and has to go out into the locker room for a cold shower. Then he’ll go back in and watch the girls, who are massaging their legs and arms with natural sponges. Or if he doesn’t feel like sitting in the sauna he might drive the car into the country, into farmland, following a series of right angles on the straight, narrow paved roads until he ends up back where he started. And once last month, when Susan had cramps and had to spend her entire Saturday reading in bed with her legs propped up on a stack of pillows, he spent the day in bed with her, joking, pretending he also had cramps. She was taking Darvon, so he took one too. He enjoyed the heady feeling it gave him, that feeling of distance, of removal from his body, a feeling that, by swallowing the gaudy orange capsule, he had cured himself of a pain of which he had been unaware.

  Or he can go to the Treehouse Restaurant. The Treehouse Restaurant has four unmatched tables and a counter with a row of bar stools covered in tatty blue vinyl. Tom always orders two hamburgers and a Green Garden Salad. The hamburgers are square. He doesn’t go there for the food. There’s a waitress, a Plain Jane named Leslie. She has open pores, and she wears thick-soled white nursing shoes and a crucifix, and she thinks Tom is in love with her. He makes a point of inviting her to sit with him while he eats, because of course she will have to refuse. She wears pancake makeup; in the fluorescent light of the diner her face is a pale shade of orange. The last time he ate there he left her a $3 tip on a $3.50 meal, and she came clomping down the sidewalk after him, waving the bills and shouting. She got all out of breath, her whole body quivering under her apron. She w
ould be easy to love, if you were that kind of man, if you were lonely and needed taking care of. “Wait!” she said. “You must have made a mistake.” Tom said yes, he had made a mistake, and he pulled out a fourth bill and pressed it into her hand. She blushed and lowered her eyes, and then she raised them again to look into his face, but he turned quickly away and walked off. Leslie has become, over the last couple of months, a rainy day entertainment, like a Saturday matinee.

  Now Tom is crouched before the dresser, rifling through the drawers. He has taken all of his shirts out and thrown them on the floor. Then he lifts them one by one, shakes them frantically, and stuffs them back into the dresser. He is looking for his Saturday shirt, a worn blue denim workshirt on which Susan embroidered, before they were married, a purple half moon and a circle of yellow stars. He wears this shirt whenever he goes to the Treehouse Restaurant, for Leslie’s sake; however simple she may be, she will recognize in the embroidery the handiwork of a woman. But the shirt is nowhere in sight. It is not in the closet or in the dining room or in the laundry or under the bed. Tom stands still in the center of the room and shuts his eyes. He likes to think that by concentrating emphatically on whatever he is looking for he will find it—or, rather, it will simply appear. In a rerun of The Twilight Zone everyone kept wandering into the fifth dimension, a never never land of fog and creepy music, and he imagines the shirt in that vast empty place, waving its sleeves. Susan is in there too. She is cutting her hair. She is hacking away at her hair with the curved white blade of a clam shell. Are there clams in El Salvador? It comes to him suddenly that Susan has taken the shirt with her; he remembers now, how she rolled it up and put it in her bag. It fits her just right; it is too big on him. He is pleased and then saddened by its absence; on chilly nights she will wear it and be reminded of him.

  The Treehouse Restaurant is three blocks north along a road they are widening, and he walks where the sidewalk once was, ankle-deep in black snow in a rut. He would hitch, but no one ever stops on this road because it’s so narrow, and anyway he is thinking about ducking into the shopping center and buying a valentine for Leslie. Valentine’s Day was two weeks ago so the cards are half price. He buys a small heart-shaped box containing four pieces of chocolate nestled in foil, for a dollar. But the lady at the cash register has a black eye and looks so brave and so deeply hurt that he cannot stop himself from offering her a piece of the chocolate. She hesitates. She has graying hair, no lipstick, she could be anybody’s mother. “Take it,” says Tom. “I mean it. I want you to have it.” He has to eat one himself to show her it’s all right. When she bites into the chocolate, a tear wells up in her good eye, and she turns away to dry it with a tissue. Tom hurries off, leaving the box on the counter.

  Leslie must have seen him coming from a distance—his table is set, there’s a cup of coffee with a saucer on top, his hamburgers are sizzling on the grill. He tastes the coffee. She has sweetened it the way he likes, with three envelopes of sugar. No cream. She is not around. She is in the basement probably, in the bathroom under a light bulb, freshening up. Once, when he came in unannounced, her slip was showing. Finally she appears. She is carrying one gallon jar each of mustard and catsup, and she doesn’t look at him, of course. Her rouge is crooked, one cheek higher than the other, and the tips of her fingers, when she comes to take his order, are stained pink. It’s cute that she takes his order even though she always knows exactly what he wants. Also, that she always brings him French dressing even though he orders Italian. She has them confused. Today, when he orders French, she brings Italian, which is what he has in mind. He says, “Thanks, beautiful,” when she sets the food in front of him. She blushes. He asks her how Dolly is. She says Dolly is fine. He doesn’t know if Dolly is her cat or her mother. One of them is named Dolly, the other is Dotty. Either Dotty or Dolly has a cataract, and the other one walks in her sleep. “How’s Edith?” he says. Edith, he knows, is a canary.

  “She’s okay,” says Leslie. “You should ask me how I am. I have a toothache. I have to go to the clinic. I have to get off early today.” She blushes when she says this, about getting off early. She picks a rotten piece of lettuce out of his salad and drops it in the ashtray. Then she picks the ashtray up and empties it into her apron pocket. He has never seen anyone do this before. He feels sorry for her. The thing is, when he started in on her a year ago he thought she would know he was teasing, but that’s the sad part—she never caught on. And now it’s too late, if he played it straight he would hurt her. So this is how it is. She dyed her hair. It used to be brown, now it is blonde. Also, when she writes thanks and her name on the back of the check, in her neat looping script, she includes her last name so if he wanted he could look her up in the telephone book.

  “I’ll walk you to the clinic,” he says.

  He had never quite realized how solid Leslie is. They are walking in the snow, across an unused lot on the way to the clinic, and he has taken her arm and now she is leaning against him. She is heavy and the snow is slippery. He worries about falling. She is talking about Dotty, about how Dotty bumped her head on the refrigerator one night when she was sleepwalking. But at the door to the clinic she is silent. She doesn’t let go of his arm. He knows he is expected to kiss her. But where? On the cheek? He can see, in the smoked glass pane of the clinic door, their reflection. They look like square dancers waiting for a chance to skip down the aisle together. “Well, I better be going,” she says, without moving. He bends to kiss her forehead. It is smooth and cool, a surprise. When she goes, when the door clicks shut behind her, it is later than he thought and he is lonely.

  Now Tom is standing in the lot outside his building, flexing his arms. It is six o’clock, the world is black and white, all darkness and snow. He has a plan. After dinner he will drive to the university and climb the steps through the gym to the weight room, where he will watch the students lifting weights. He will sit on a mat with his knees drawn up and his hands on top of them, inhaling the twin smells of metal and sweat. He likes the sight of the girls in their leotards and sweat pants, lifting the smallest barbells up over their heads then down and then up again. He has already purchased his dinner, a chicken pot pie and a bottle of Coke. At the check-out line in the supermarket, paying his dollar and change, he thought, I am in training for the single life. He wanted some lettuce but the girl in produce said no, she could not cut a head of lettuce in half for him, he would have to buy the whole head.

  Something funny has happened. The dog mess is gone. There is a bleached-out spot on the carpet, like a flaw in a photograph. He crouches, touches his finger to the damp spot, and sniffs. There is a smell of vinegar and detergent, Susan’s recipe for stains. Looking up he can see, through a crack at the base of his door, a dim gauzy light.

  She is not in the front room, but her coat and boots and scarf and gloves are spread out on the floor where she dropped them in passing. There is a folder, petitions spilling out onto the seat of a chair, and in a pile in the hallway her blue jeans and a T-shirt. The sight of her clothing makes him nervous, as if he’s entered a house in which everything, somehow, has been left undone, half finished. He remembers a book he read over and over as a child, about the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. Archeologists, digging at the site, found a half-eaten meal on a plate on a table, a boiled egg and loaf of bread turned to stone. His unease heightens when he reaches the bedroom. There, on the unmade bed, on a landscape of crumpled white sheets, is her bra, the matching hills of black nylon gleaming in the filtered light from the living room. In the hallway—her underpants, a wad of tissues, a sock. He finds her asleep in the bathtub, her head resting on the shoulder of porcelain, her neck arched, her mouth slightly open, her knees raised and spread, the smooth curve of her belly rising with each breath above the surface of the water and then sinking below it. He can see a vein in her breast, a suggestion of blue beneath the globed flesh. She has lovely skin. He has told her this: you have skin like the skin of a woman in a fairy tale. But how defenseless she
looks, one hand in the water, one hand out, her blonde face eclipsed by his shadow.

  She is dreaming. He can see her eyes hard at work under the lids, darting here, darting there. Nothing else changes or stirs. She is far, far away in a dream. He bends closer to look, and closer still, and he stares at her eyes as if by staring he might follow her and go where she is going.

  Fruit of the Month

  I went strawberry picking with June in her pickup truck ten years ago, in May. Late May, in Virginia. June came early, before Jack got home from work, so we left without him. I left a note on the door. When I get back, said the note, I’ll make us some strawberry daiquiris and we’ll sit together on the porch and drink them all night long, listening to mosquitoes. The nature of my notes to him was always, and still is, piquant, because he likes them that way. He is a sentimental man; he keeps my letters in a shoebox tied with string. In the dark interior of the box the ink doesn’t fade, nor does the paper deteriorate. Every couple of years he replaces the string, which turns gray from being so often tied and untied.