Good Neighbors Read online

  Mom looks over at him with her yellow eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ she says.

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘Honey?’

  Patrick thinks of the Order to Report sitting on the coffee table maybe twenty feet away. He thinks of the edges of the paper already being stained brown on either side from where he’s gripped it and sweat into it while reading it so many times. He thinks of standing in his underwear with a long line of other boys who have come to be examined. Raise your arms straight in front of you, palms up; now rotate your arms so your hands face the floor; now touch your toes. He thinks of getting on a bus to some basic training ground. He thinks of bivouacking with the rest of his unit during basic training, learning to survive in the jungle. He thinks of flying off to Vietnam. He thinks of sitting in an airplane seat on his way over, but coming home in a body bag or coffin, stacked up with the others in some cargo hold like so much lumber. He still hasn’t told mom.

  What’ll she do when he does tell her?

  Whatever it is, the one thing he’s pretty sure she won’t do is suddenly get better.

  ‘Honey?’ mom says again.

  Patrick turns to look at her.

  ‘I don’t think I feel like reading,’ he says finally.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He nods, flips the dog-ear back into place, puts the book back on the nightstand, and gets to his feet. He glances down at them, his feet, sees a pink toe, his big toe on his left foot, sticking out through a hole in the sock, and he absurdly thinks, This little piggy went wee-wee-wee-wee all the way home.

  ‘I’ll be back when you’re done,’ he says, and turns toward the door before stopping again and looking at mom.

  ‘If something happened,’ he says. ‘If something happened and I had to leave, would you be okay?’

  Mom shakes her head. No.

  For a moment Patrick thinks that’s the only response he’s going to get, the shake of a head, but then mom says, ‘Don’t leave me with strangers.’

  Patrick smiles.

  ‘I was just talking,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t leave me with strangers,’ she says again.

  He nods. ‘I’m sorry I scared you. I’ll always be here for you, momma. You know that, right?’

  Mom smiles. ‘I know that.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back when you’re done.’

  In the living room, Patrick reads the Order to Report for the sixtieth or seventieth time, then sets it down on the coffee table.

  He glances out the living-room window, past the telescope he has sitting there, and out into the lamplit courtyard, which is empty except for four benches and some flower gardens and espaliers and concrete. Then he walks to the telescope and aims it at the apartment windows across the courtyard. As far as Patrick is concerned, the most useful thing you can do with a telescope is spy on your neighbors. They’re more interesting than planets; they have more personality, anyway.

  At this time of night, though, only two windows are lit up.

  He aims the telescope at one and sees nothing but empty lonesome living room on the other side. A brown and red striped couch. A painting of a galloping horse on the back wall. Probably running away from something. In Patrick’s experience, running animals almost always are trying to escape something behind them rather than reach something in front of them.

  In the other window Patrick sees a woman sitting alone on her couch. She is forty or so. She wears a black negligee. She is pretty. Patrick thinks that if, when he’s forty, he’s with a woman who looks like that, he’ll be a happy man; he thinks that he’d be happy with a woman who looks like that right now.

  But then he sees a trail of black mascara trace down her face and he realizes she must be crying. She blots at her eyes with a tissue. Another trail of mascara does not follow the first.

  He imagines himself walking over to her apartment, knocking on the door. She wouldn’t open it right away. It’s late and there are dangerous people out – rapists and pushin burglars.

  ‘Who is it?’ she’d say.

  ‘Your neighbor.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Patrick. I live across the courtyard from you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I saw you through your window. I wasn’t spying. But I saw you. I saw you crying. I thought maybe you’d like to talk about it?’

  And she would open the door. The chain would still be on, of course, but she would open the door so that she could get a look at him, and she would see that he was harmless, that he appeared to be harmless anyway.

  She wouldn’t say anything. She’d just want to get a look. Then the door would close and after a moment it would open again. This time there would be no chain. She would smile sadly.

  ‘Come on in,’ she would say.

  ‘Thank you,’ he would say.

  After an awkward moment or two she would offer to make hot cocoa, which he would accept, and with their cocoa they would make their way to the couch. They would talk for fifteen or twenty minutes, and she would tell him her problems – but he would not tell her his – and he would put his hand on her shoulder, and then on her thigh, and then he would kiss her and his hand would brush across her breast – accidently, of course; he’s not a pig – and it would feel right. She would take his hands in her hands and she would say, ‘Let’s go to the bedroom.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he’d ask.

  She would nod.

  5

  With the lights on in the living room and the window closed, Diane Myers can see her own reflection staring back at her, as well as through her reflection and into the lamplit courtyard.

  It’s like looking at her own ghost.

  Her hair is carefully done, her breasts held up by the lace of her negligee. Her shoulders are broader than she’d like, but she’s grown used to them, and she likes her arms. They’re lean but strong, and even though her age now begins with a four, the skin is still milky and smooth. She’s wearing a light coat of makeup.

  She looks at a clock on the wall, a dumb clock Larry’s mom gave them, with a picture of a different animal at every hour, and each time the hour strikes, that hour’s animal makes its noise.

  It’s now eight minutes past four o’clock. Of course. Didn’t she just hear the pig oinking, and isn’t the pig the four o’clock animal? In another fifty-two minutes she’ll hear the cow mooing, and an hour after that, at six o’clock, the cock will crow.

  She looks back at her own reflection, at the ghost of herself floating thirty feet off the ground in the courtyard, looking back at her, floating on its own ghost of a couch, surrounded by a ghost of a living room. Is her ghost happier than she is? Being disembodied but still conscious would have its advantages. Walls and locked doors could no longer stop you. No more back pain or neck aches. No more miscarriages with names. Of course, Diane is pretty sure she’s finished with wanting to have Larry’s baby. Maybe it’s even for the best that she never carried one to term.

  What happened to their youthful, hopeful love? What happened to the way they always used to hold hands when they walked together? To the way they would look into each other’s eyes at random moments and with just that visual contact confirm their love? It seems now that those were two completely different people.

  The front door opens behind her.

  She gets to her feet and turns around.

  In walks Larry. Look at him with his fat fuck belly and his cue-ball head with its mossy half halo of gray hair like cheese that’s gone bad. Look at the way he’s even gotten too fat for his extra large bowling shirt (it’s only a year old), putting so much pressure on the buttons you can see his gut beneath where the fabric from each side of the shirt doesn’t quite reach anymore.

  Oink, indeed. Hour of the pig, indeed.

  Larry nods at her and sets his bowling bag down by the door.

  ‘Hey, honey,’ he says. ‘Looks like it might rain. You hear the forecast?’

  �
��Where have you been?’

  ‘How about a hello?’

  ‘The bowling alley’s been closed for two hours,’ she says, ignoring him. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  ‘That’s not my fault. I didn’t ask you to wait up.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Don’t treat me like a child who’s been out past curfew. Just because we never had kids doesn’t mean you need to treat me like one.’

  There is silence. Diane is hurt and angry, now, but she thinks that’s why Larry said what he said: to distract her with her own hurt and anger, to turn the fight in a different direction. She’s not going to allow that to happen. She says again, ‘Where have you been?’

  He sighs, closes his eyes in exasperation, opens them again, and there’s that familiar contempt. It makes her sad.

  ‘Me and the boys went out for a couple drinks after,’ Larry says.

  A lie.

  ‘You and Thomas and Chris?’

  Larry nods. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Have fun?’

  ‘It was okay,’ he says, and shrugs. It was a way to spend a couple hours, the shrug says, that’s all.

  ‘You said you’d be home around two,’ she says.

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters because I was waiting for you. It matters because I thought we were gonna have a romantic—’ She stops, hearing her voice getting shrill. She closes her eyes a moment and collects her thoughts, calms herself.

  ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘I look ridiculous.’

  ‘You do not,’ Larry says.

  What he doesn’t say is that she looks beautiful, that he still finds her attractive, that he finds her sexy.

  ‘I do,’ Diane says, looking at her ghost of a reflection in the window. ‘I’m too old to dress like this and I look ridiculous.’ She says it quietly, more to herself than to Larry. But then she turns back to him. ‘I want to know where you went after bowling tonight,’ she says. ‘Can you please just tell me that?’

  ‘Are you implying that I’m lying?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m telling you that I know you’re lying – and I want the truth.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Thomas lives on the third floor across the courtyard, third window from the left. His light came on two and a half hours ago.’

  ‘You’re spying on my friends now?’

  ‘Don’t you try to turn this around. I look for the light on bowling night because when it comes on, it used to mean you’d be home soon. I wait for you. Tonight I thought it might be fun to . . . I wanted it to be like it used to be.’

  ‘You know why you saw the light at Thomas’s turn on over two hours ago? Because his wife doesn’t wait up. It was dark in there because she went to bed.’

  ‘Thomas doesn’t have a wife, Larry,’ she says. ‘I’ve never even talked to the guy and I could tell you that.’

  Maybe if she’d married a better man she could have kept a child inside her for an entire pregnancy. Maybe her body wouldn’t have rejected it as a parasite. Maybe her body has known all along what her mind has denied – until now. Larry is a piece of shit and everything he touches turns to shit. He goes out bowling and drinking and whatever elseing with her money. She works all day at Pete’s, waiting tables, delivering burned steaks and undercooked chicken breasts, her ankles swelling, her arms hurting, taking shit from Gary the ass-grabbing manager, while he sits around reading military novels and watching TV, and when she gets home, he leaves, goes out and spends her tip money on beer and who knows what else.

  Larry pulls himself out of his bowling shoes and kicks them over toward the door where his bowling ball already sits waiting for next week.

  ‘Of course he has a wife,’ Larry says. ‘It’s practically all he talks about. His wife and his daughter.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Diane says, shaking her head. ‘I want to know where you went after you left the bowling alley.’

  ‘You changed the subject,’ Larry says.

  ‘Where were you?’

  Larry says nothing in response. He pads in his stinky goddamn socks to the window and looks out into the night.

  Diane follows his gaze toward Thomas’s apartment. She can see Thomas sitting in an easy chair on the right side of his living room. He seems to be staring off into the nothingness. She wonders if he might be looking at his ghost floating on the other side of his living-room window.

  She watches him for over a minute. He simply sits and stares. He does not move.

  6

  Thomas Marlowe sits in his tattered easy chair, still wearing his sweat-stinking bowling shirt and his multi-colored shoes which make him look, he’s certain, like a damn fool. Thin gray hair wisps up off his head and thin gray skinbags sag under his eyes. Gray. He is a man of grays: gray hair, gray eyes, gray moods. The last usually dark gray, bordering on black.

  A picture of a brunette woman standing with a young girl of about ten or eleven sits on his coffee table. He looks at it for a long time. The woman has her arm around the shoulder of the girl. They are both smiling. Both of them have blue eyes and straight white teeth. In the background, the Golden Gate Bridge, all the way off in San Francisco. The yellow sunlight is hitting their hair and faces just right. They are beautiful.

  There are other pictures of these two throughout the apartment, sometimes together, usually not.

  Here is the woman standing in a field of yellow flowers. There is the girl standing in front of the lit-up Eiffel Tower.

  Here is the woman holding a fishing rod while sitting on a boulder on the edge of a lake. There is the girl laughing and riding a merry-go-round, hair flowing straight out behind her.

  Here is the woman standing on a bridge as a ferry floats by on the water behind her. There is the girl fighting with a dog over a stick.

  Thomas is in none of the pictures; he can see himself in the mirror whenever he wants.

  His right hand grips the handle of a pistol which is resting on his lap, an ancient Colt .45 that once belonged to his grandfather. It was issued to the man when he was a captain in the army, and it was one of the few things of his that made it home. Also a pair of boots and one round dog tag. Marlowe, William P. 688436. Cptn. U.S.A. The Colt .45 is a semi-automatic pistol but Thomas doubts he’ll be pulling the trigger twice tonight.

  He lifts it and puts the dangerous end against his temple. The end that promises nothing, which is just what he wants – sweet nothing.

  He closes his eyes, trying to find a moment between breaths in which it feels right to pull the trigger, but there’s this goddamn music coming from the apartment below, and it throbs through him like a second heartbeat that’s not in time with the first.

  He stomps on the floor.

  ‘Can’t a guy have some fucking peace and quiet!?’

  The music gets louder rather than softer.

  A woman laughs.

  For a brief moment Thomas actually considers storming downstairs, kicking in the goddamn door, and putting a bullet in the brain of any and everyone down there, and then putting several rounds in their fucking record player, watching wood and vinyl splinter and shatter. Then he could have some peace and quiet, then he could find that calm moment between breaths.

  But maybe it’s not their fault he can’t think. He hasn’t been able to think all night. Three games and his highest score was one sixty-six. Not good for a man whose average is one ninety.

  But then things haven’t been good for him for a long time.

  He wipes at his eyes and puts the barrel to his temple again.

  He thinks of a bayonet in his grandfather’s chest, a cardboard box with his grandfather’s medals in it, an empty pair of boots.

  He closes his eyes.

  He pulls the gun away from his head and sets it on the coffee table. He wonders who first called it a coffee table. He gets to his feet and walks into the hallway. He wonders who first called it a hallway. He wonders who first name
d anything. How did someone look at a dog and decide what to call it? It’s all so random. Everything is so goddamn random.

  In his bedroom, Thomas finds a stack of bills on the dresser. He doesn’t want to write on the bills themselves – he has to pay them – so he grabs an envelope one of the bills came in, blank white on one side, and decides to use that.

  Then he laughs.

  Pay his bills? How’s he gonna do that from the grave?

  Still, someone might have to pay them – or at least look at them to determine how much debt he was in when he died. He doesn’t really know how that stuff works.

  After another minute of shuffling things around on the top of his dresser he finds a pencil and heads back out to the living room.

  He looks at the carpet as he walks and he wonders how long it’s been since he last vacuumed. There are a few vacuum lines still visible beneath a couple tables, but otherwise all evidence that anyone ever vacuumed in here has been trampled away. Pennies and pieces of torn paper and unidentifiable flakes and crumbs of whatever litter the floor.

  He wonders if maybe he should vacuum now, before he gets on with this. He imagines someone will have to clean the apartment, take all his stuff out of here, go through it, see what can be sold to pay off the debts they determined he had by looking at his bills, and so on. Maybe vacuuming would make their job a little easier. Then again, they’ll probably have to replace the carpet anyway. Even if he doesn’t get any of his brains on it – and he doesn’t see how that’s avoidable – he’ll probably collapse to the floor, and if a week goes by before anyone finds him, he’ll have started leaking, and the carpet will be ruined.

  Yeah, no point in vacuuming. Might as well just get it done.