A Patchwork Planet Read online

  Mrs. Dibble phoned again. “Well, I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she started out. “You are seriously disappointing me, Barnaby. Call when you get this message. Mrs. Morey wants her grill tank filled. Martine says to remind you she’ll need a ride to the Alford job. Also, Mrs. Hatter would like to arrange for regular hours with you, starting tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t even remember what Mrs. Hatter looked like, she used our services so seldom. Maybe she’d had a stroke or something. Well, tough luck. I started kicking through the clothes on the floor, trying to find my sneakers.

  While I was drinking my coffee, two more people left messages. Mrs. Figg wanted me to know that I had ruined her entire morning, and Natalie asked if I could shift next weekend’s visit to Sunday. It seemed Opal had been invited to a birthday party on Saturday. “I wouldn’t bring it up,” she said, “except the birthday girl’s from the popular crowd, and it means a lot to Opal that she was included.”

  Yeah, right; it meant more than a visit from her own father. Fine, I thought. I just won’t go at all.

  By this time I was starting to feel I had died or something, listening to so many phone calls without picking up. So I grabbed my car keys and left the apartment. Went off to Mrs. Figg’s to face the music.

  It was hot as blazes out. I practically needed oven mitts just to work my steering wheel. I drove badly, zipping through yellow lights and honking at any pedestrian dumb enough to assume I would give him the right-of-way.

  “If I’d wanted a worker who didn’t show up,” Mrs. Figg said when she opened the door, “someone I needed to nag about every little task, why, I could rely on my own son, for heaven’s sake.” She scowled into my face, pursing her raisin mouth—not an old woman, but a dried-up, drained-out one with a grudge against the universe. She went ahead and gave me her list, though, because who else could she get to do it? Most of our employees refused to deal with her anymore.

  I went to the cleaner’s first and picked up her husband’s shirts. Ordinarily I’d have held my breath the whole time I was inside (the cancer is just swarming at you in those places), but today I took big, deep gulps of the chemical-smelling air while I waited. I wondered what Mrs. Figg had done that made her permanently unwelcome there.

  At Ed’s Electronics (where she had hit a salesman with her pocketbook, I happened to know), I collected her tape recorder from Repairs. Then I went to the pharmacy and the hardware, and I was done. But when I got back to Mrs. Figg’s, what did she point out? The tape recorder’s earphone pads were still in need of replacement. “If I’d wanted the kind of worker who did things any which way—” she began, but I was already wheeling around and stomping off. Went to Ed’s Electronics again and raised such a stink, Mrs. Figg looked like a model customer by comparison. Then I drove back to her house and all but threw the pads in her face.

  At Mrs. Morey’s, I headed straight for the patio and unhooked the propane tank from her grill. “Wouldn’t you like to see what I just persuaded to bloom?” she asked, trailing behind me, but I said only, “Mmf,” and set off for my car as if I hadn’t quite heard her. Got the tank filled at the gas station, reached into my pocket for my billfold, and came up with two earphone pads in a little plastic pouch. I guess they’d been clipped to the receipt and somehow worked themselves loose. Well, too late now. I tossed them in the trash bin.

  At home, I found three more messages on my machine. Sophia said, “Hello, sweetie. Call me at the office, will you?” Mrs. Dibble said, “I wish you’d get in touch. Where are you?” And then Sophia again: “Barnaby, why haven’t you phoned? Do you want me to bring supper tonight? Or not. I’ll wait to hear.”

  I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the bar. Then I polished off the last of the milk, drinking straight from the jug, and threw the jug in the wastebasket, even though it was the kind you were supposed to recycle. After that, I switched on the TV and watched a talk show, the outrageous type of show where everybody tries to confess to more unpleasantness than the next person. I had to sit on the bed to watch, since my chair had turned to glue in the humidity. Even my sheets felt sticky. Overhead, the Hardesty kids were carrying on a thin, shrill squabble, and their mother must have been tuned to her soaps, because at every pause in my own program, I could hear hers murmuring away.

  This was the first weekday afternoon in months that I wouldn’t be going to Mrs. Glynn’s. The thought gave me a sort of wincing sensation. I fell back against the pillows and covered my eyes with one forearm.

  I might have slept a little. When the phone rang again, the evening news was on. “Hey Gaitlin,” my machine said. (Mar-tine’s little raspy crow voice.) “Pick up, will you?”

  I rolled over and reached for the receiver. I said, “What.”

  “Why aren’t you here? It’s ten till seven! You promised you’d give me a ride!”

  “I did?” I said. “Where’re we going?”

  “Sheesh! Mrs. Alford’s. We’re clearing out her kitchen for the painters.”

  I said, “Can’t you do it alone?”

  “Duh, Barnaby. I don’t have any wheels, remember? What’s with you? I hope you’re not hung up on that Mrs. Glynn crap.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You heard. Great. It must be all over town.”

  “She’s crazy; don’t you think everyone knows that? Now get yourself on down here. We’re running behind.”

  I said, “Well, okay.”

  It might not be a bad idea, I decided. Sophia wasn’t going to wait by her phone forever. She’d come by in person, sooner or later, and I just didn’t feel like facing her right at that moment.

  Martine was standing out front when I pulled up—leaning against a parked car and eating pork rinds from a cellophane packet. She had on her usual overalls and what looked to be a man’s sleeveless undershirt, so worn it was translucent. “At this rate, we won’t finish work till midnight,” she said as she got in.

  I said, “You’re welcome,” and she said, “Oh. Thanks.”

  Then she slouched down in her seat and braced her boots against the dashboard and went back to eating her pork rinds. She held the packet toward me, at one point, but I shook my head.

  Clearing a kitchen for painters wasn’t that big a job. I could easily have done it alone. But we were dealing, I guess, with Mrs. Alford’s private little affirmative action program, because her first words when she opened her door were, “Oh, I just love to see what young women can get up to nowadays!”

  This evening she wore a mint-green housedress that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a mental patient’s uniform. She was having one of her good spells, though, and got both our names right. “What I’d like, Martine,” she said, “is, you take the small things, the pots and pans and things, and stack them in the far corner of the dining room. Barnaby, you can take the furniture and the microwave.”

  But Martine had to show off and grab the microwave herself. She staggered away with it, her arms straining out of her undershirt like two brown wires. I followed, with a chair in each hand, and Mrs. Alford came last, clasping a single skillet to her bosom. “You leave this to us,” I told her. Already she was sounding out of breath. She said, “Oh, well, I suppose …” She laid the skillet on the buffet and retreated to the living room. We could hear her footsteps padding across the carpet, and a moment later, the creak, pause, creak of her rocking chair.

  Before we moved the step stool, Martine climbed onto it and took down all the curtains. It was starting to get dark out, and the naked, blue-black windowpanes made the kitchen look depressing. Shadows loomed in the corners. Bare spots showed where the clock had been, and the spice rack, and the calendar. I stole a glance through the calendar after I took it down. I saw all the medical appointments—doctor this, doctor that, mammogram, podiatrist. Anything to do with her family had an exclamation mark after it. Grandkids coming! Ernie spending night! Edward here for Labor Day! Then I checked the times I had come, but she didn’t refer to me by name. Rent-a-Back 7 p.m.,
she wrote. And no exclamation mark.

  “What’re you looking at?” Martine asked. She was standing so close behind me that I jumped. I laid the calendar aside without answering.

  When everything had been moved, Martine ran a dust mop around the tops of the walls, while I swept the floor. I found a dime, a red button, and a furry white pill. The pill didn’t look all that intriguing, so I set it in a saucer with the dime and the button. Then we went out to the living room. Mrs. Alford was sitting in her rocker, with her hands folded—not reading, not sewing or watching TV—her face exhausted and empty. But when I cleared my throat, she instantly put on this animated expression and said, “Oh! All done? My, wasn’t that speedy!” And she asked if we’d like a soft drink or something, but we told her we had to be going.

  In the car, Martine got started on her favorite subject: Everett. How glad she was to be shed of him; how she couldn’t imagine now what she’d ever seen in him. I wanted to discuss my own troubles, but she was rattling on so, I couldn’t get a word in. She said Everett had given her every Willie Nelson tape that ever existed, given them as gifts, and now was demanding them back; and it was true she no longer listened to them, but still he shouldn’t expect them returned just because she had dumped him.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said, and drove on.

  I didn’t want to see Sophia tonight. I just didn’t; I wasn’t sure why. I thought of her wide, gentle face and her kind smile, the way her blue eyes seemed lit from within whenever she stood in sunshine, and I got this wormy, shriveled feeling. I couldn’t explain it.

  “Here’s an example,” Martine was saying. Example of what? She’d lost me. “Say he’s walking down the street and a man jumps off a roof,” she said. Everett, she probably meant. “Know what he would say? He’d say, ‘Hey! Why is this happening to me? Hey, isn’t it amazing that someone should jump off a roof just as I’m passing by!’ That’s Everett for you. He thinks the world exists purely for his benefit. If he’s not there, then nothing else is, either.”

  “Solipsistic,” I said. I remembered the word from philosophy class.

  “Right,” she said, digging through her packet of pork rinds.

  “Green light, now: figure it out,” I told the car ahead of me. “What do we do when a light turns green? Ah. Very good.”

  Martine crumpled her packet and stuffed it in my ashtray. “So,” she said. “Did you decide yet?”

  “Huh?”

  “About the truck. Yes, or no?”

  “What truck?” I asked.

  “Everett’s truck; what else. It’s a pretty good piece of machinery, you have to admit.”

  I didn’t have the remotest opinion of Everett’s truck, and I couldn’t imagine why she thought I would. I put our conversation on Rewind. Came up empty. “Well, um,” I said. “It’s always looked fine to me. But face it: I’m no Mr. Goodwrench.”

  “You don’t think it’s a stupid idea, though.”

  “What idea is that?” I asked her.

  “You and me going in on it.”

  “Going in on it?” I asked. “You mean, as in buying it? You and me? Buying a truck?”

  “Jesus! Where have you been?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I must have missed something.”

  We were on her block now, and I had been planning just to let her out in the street. Instead I pulled into a parking space. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I told her. “Maybe it’s nothing to you that I’m a victim of rank injustice, but—”

  “What was the point! What have I wasted my breath for?”

  She could have chosen a better moment for this. On the other hand, she was just about the last friend I had left in the world, and so I turned to face her and said, “Martine, I sincerely apologize. Run it by me again.”

  She sighed. “See, Everett bought that truck off a lady in Howard County—” she said.

  “Howard County; yes.” I tried to look as knowing as possible.

  “—and he was supposed to pay for it in thirty-six monthly installments. Only he kept falling behind and his mom had to do it for him. And now he wants to move to New York, he says, where a truck wouldn’t be any use to him; so he says to his mom, ‘You take the truck; I can’t keep up the payments.’ She says, ‘When did you ever, I’d like to know? And what would I do with a truck?’ And that’s why she phoned me and asked if I wanted to buy it.”

  In the dusk, Martine was all black-and-white, like a photo. Black eyes slitted with purpose, black hair sticking out at drastic angles around her high white cheekbones.

  “And you’re suggesting the two of us should go in on it together,” I said.

  “Well, for sure I can’t swing it on my own. But I can manage the installments, just barely, if you’d give his mom what she’s already paid: twenty-four hundred dollars.”

  “Twenty-four hundred!” I said. “Martine. My total assets come to exactly half of that. And I’m still in debt to my parents, don’t forget.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, “but not if you sold off your car.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your car’s worth thirty thousand, did you know that? I looked it up in a book.”

  I started laughing. I said, “My car’s worth what?”

  “They’ve got these books that give you the price of every used car ever made. So I went to the bookstore and, like, flipped through one, and there it was: a ‘63 Corvette Sting Ray coupe in excellent condition is worth thirty thousand dollars.”

  I was stunned. But I did think to say, “We could hardly claim my car is in excellent condition.”

  “Okay; so knock off a few thousand. You’d still be rolling in money. Haven’t you always told me your car was a collector’s item?”

  “Theoretically, I suppose it is,” I said. “But it was pretty well worn out way back when my Pop-Pop bought it, and you may have noticed I haven’t exactly cosseted the poor thing.”

  “Oh! You’re so negative!”

  She bopped me on the kneecap with one of her fists. I said, “Hey, now.” I took hold of her fist and set it back in her lap. Then I laid an arm across her shoulders. “I’m not trying to be a spoilsport here—”

  “Well, you are one,” she said, but a sort of grudging amusement had crept into her voice. She snuggled in closer under my arm and said, “Just listen a minute, okay? Let me tell you how I’ve got it figured.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had any pressing engagements.

  “You would sell your car and, first off, pay back your folks. Quit your nickel-and-diming and just pay them back; be done with it. Get that Chinese statue off of your conscience once and for all. Wouldn’t that feel good? Then take some more of the money and go in with me on the truck. It works out just about fifty-fifty—slightly in your favor, even—between what you’d give Everett’s mom and what I would pay monthly.”

  “But meanwhile, I’d have no car,” I told her.

  “You’ll have the truck then, idiot!”

  “We’ll have the truck,” I reminded her. “And you’ll be wanting to take it one place when I want to take it another.”

  “Don’t we just about always go out on the same jobs together? And aren’t you tired to death of trying to get your work done in a little, toy, baby-sized car that doesn’t even have a rear seat?”

  As she spoke, she was tracing a rip that ran across the knee of my jeans. Her fingertips hit bare skin and started coaxing at it. She said, “You could keep it at your place, if you like. And besides: we’ve been sharing it all along, more or less, when you stop to think.”

  “Well, shoot, with thirty thousand dollars, maybe I should just go on and buy each one of us a truck or two apiece,” I said.

  I was talking down into the top of her head, into her hair. It smelled of sweat. This got me interested, for some reason. Maybe she could tell, because she turned her face up, and next thing I knew, we were kissing. She had this very thin, hard mouth. I was surprised at how stirring that was. I wrapped both arms around her (
not easy with the steering wheel in front of me), and she pressed against me, and I felt the little points of her breasts poking into my chest.

  Then she drew back, and so I did too. I was relieved to see we were coming to our senses. (Or at least, partly relieved.) But what she was doing was shutting off the ignition. She dropped my keys in the cup of my hand, and her little face closed in on me again.

  “You want to?” she asked me.

  Her eyes had a stretched look, and she wore a peaky, excited expression that made me feel sad for her. I’d never really thought of Martine as a woman. Well, she wasn’t a woman; she was just this scrappy, sharp-edged little person. So I said, “Oh—um—”

  And yet at the same time I was reaching for her once more, as if my body had decided to go ahead without me. I had her between my palms (every rib countable inside the baggy denim), but she was leaning across me to douse the headlights. Then she tore free and climbed out of the car, all in one rough motion. I got out, too, and followed her toward the house. The porch floorboards made a mournful sound under our feet. The first flight of stairs was carpeted, but the second flight was bare, and so steep that I had to tag a couple steps below her so as not to be nicked by her boot heels as we climbed.

  The instant we had reached the third floor—one large attic room fall of a tweedy, dusty darkness—we were hugging again and kissing and stumbling toward her bed. Her bed had a headboard like a metal gate, white or some pale color, so tall it had to sit out a ways from the slant of the ceiling. It jangled when we landed on it. Martine breathed small, hot, bacon-smelling puffs of air into my neck while I fumbled with her overall clasps. They were the kind where you slide a brass button up through a brass figure eight. I don’t think I’d worked one of those since nursery school, but it all came back to me.

  “Martine,” I said (whispering, though no one could have heard), “I’m sorry to say I don’t have, ah, anything with me,” but she said, “Never mind; I do,” and she rolled away from me to rummage through her overall pockets. Then she pushed something smooth and warm and warped into my palm: her billfold. That made me even sadder, somehow. But still my body went hurtling forward on its own, and it didn’t give my mind a chance to say a thing.