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  But I couldn’t think of a lie. Either I’m dictating this from the grave or the gun jammed. Well, the gun jammed and that’s all there is to it, and come to think of it, I don’t know why in the hell I’m apologizing, because what it amounts to is I’m apologizing for being alive, and that doesn’t make any sense.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN HE SAW THAT THE GUN WAS JAMMED, he tried wiggling the trigger with his finger. It wouldn’t come back into position. I suppose that was the logical time to pick up a chair and brain him with it, while he was standing there playing with the gun and swearing at it, but I don’t have those kind of reflexes. I just sat there on the bed with one hand on my knee and the other on the best part of Francine and waited for him to get the gun fixed and shoot me all over again.

  Then he looked at me and said, “You’re not Pivnick.” His voice was very stern, as if he was accusing me of not being Pivnick. As though Pivnick was something everybody should be, like clean or loyal or trustworthy.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  “I was sure it was Pivnick. I would have sworn up and down it was Pivnick.” He frowned. Then he looked up again and turned his eyes on Francine.

  “You,” he said. “You’re not Marcia.”

  She didn’t say anything. “No,” I said, for her. “She’s not Marcia. She’s Francine.”

  “No wonder you’re not Pivnick.” He frowned again, deep in conversation, and then nodded his head emphatically. “Of course,” he said. “Of course. I see it all now. That’s why you’re not Pivnick.”

  “It’s the main reason.”

  “Then where is my wife?”

  “Huh?”

  “My wife,” he snapped. “Marcia. My wife.”

  “Oh, Marcia,” I said. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me.”

  “She must be with Pivnick.”

  “Ha,” he said, triumphantly. “I thought so! I always thought so. But where?” He lowered his head and paced, then raised it and snapped.

  “There is another apartment in this building?”

  “No. Just the barbershop downstairs.”

  “This is One-eighteen South Main Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn it to hell,” he said. “I was told I would find them at One-eighteen South Main Street. I was told that it was Pivnick. But I was certain. And I was definitely told that it was my wife. They told me I would find her at One-eighteen South Main Street in Rhinebeck.”

  “This isn’t Rhinebeck.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t Rhinebeck,” I told him. And I told him the name of the town.

  “Damn it to hell,” he said. “I knew I had made a mistake as soon as I saw it wasn’t Pivnick. But what a mistake! What an extraordinary mistake! Marcia will never believe this!”

  He was glowing and bubbling. Then his face went suddenly somber, as if he just had a power failure. “But I could have killed you,” he said. “An innocent man. I could have shot you down in hot blood. And you were not even Pivnick.”

  “Not for a moment.”

  “My God,” he said. He looked at the gun in his hand and shuddered. Then he jammed it into his pocket, bowed halfway to the floor, apologized to both of us for the interruption, and headed for what was left of my door. Very little was. He took two steps and the gun went off in his pocket. He lost two toes on his right foot, and it was hell getting the bleeding stopped. I thought sure the cops would come and let him go and arrest me for picking apples out of season. The cops didn’t come.

  “Bostonians,” he said, dully, looking at his feet.

  “Marcia and Pivnick?”

  “The shoes! One hundred and ten dollar Bostonians!” He glared at them. “And only seven years old. The salesman swore they would last a lifetime. Bostonians!”

  I considered pointing out that one of them was still in perfectly good shape, as were eight of his toes. But I kept this to myself.

  Francine ripped up a pillowcase to make bandages. I fixed him up and told him he ought to go to a hospital. He said he had to go to Rhinebeck. I don’t know if he ever found Pivnick or not, but if I were Marcia I would be very goddamned careful from now on.

  Once we were rid of Marcia’s husband, Francine remembered that she didn’t have any clothes on. It was really pretty funny. Before the jerk kicked the door in, it was easy enough for her to pretend that she didn’t know what was happening, or that we were just necking a little, or whatever she wanted to pretend. And while he was there waving the gun in the air and talking about Pivnick, we both had too much to worry about to think about being naked. But then he went out and closed my broken door behind him, and there we were. I turned to look at Francine, and she pulled a bedsheet over her really sensational body and tried to look everywhere but at me.

  I got onto the bed and scurried over next to her.

  “My,” she said, “I really have to be getting home now, Chip.”

  “Oh, it’s real early, Francine.”

  “What a strange man! I thought he was going to shoot you or something.”

  “Well, he tried.”

  She talked about him, the sort of brainless talk Francine was good at, and meanwhile I got a hand under the sheet and kept putting it on Francine, and she kept moving it off without missing a beat.

  Then she said, “I wish you would cover yourself up, Chip.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t have any clothes on.”

  “It’s a warm night.”

  “Be nice, Chip.”

  “Huh?”

  She chewed her lip. “I shouldn’t even be here.

  I don’t know what got into me.” Nothing, I thought. “But I guess I just got carried away because of the things you said and how sweet a boy you are. You’re very sweet, Chip.”

  I went to kiss her, but she got her mouth out of the way very skillfully. “Be nice,” she said.

  “Nice? I thought we would sort of get back to what we were doing.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “Before he walked through the door.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Well, just for the record, Francine, we were about to make love.”

  “Really, Chip, I don’t—”

  “I mean I was lying on top of you, for Christ’s sake, and you were telling me to shove it in all the way to your neck. I mean let’s not pretend we don’t know our names, for Pete’s sake. I mean that’s what we were doing before we were so rudely interrupted, and I don’t see why all of a sudden we have to pretend that we just met each other at a church picnic.”

  She was staring at me.

  “I mean it seems pretty silly,” I said.

  She turned away from me. “You’re a very crude boy,” she said.

  “A minute ago I was very sweet.”

  “I thought you were, but obviously I was mistaken. I shouldn’t even be here.”

  “Well, give me a minute and I’ll cut the ropes.”

  “What?”

  “The ropes that are tying you down so you can’t escape my evil clutches. I’ll cut you loose and you can hurry home.”

  “Chip—”

  “What?”

  She sighed a couple of times. Her eyes stole a look at me, moving over my body to the part of me she wanted me to pull a sheet over. She withdrew them, but they came back again of their own accord.

  She said, “If you would just be a gentleman, and if you would tell me the things you said before, you know, about thinking I’m really pretty and that you like me as a person and you respect me, then everything could be the way it was before.”

  I made her say it again. And she said it again in just about the same words.

  “That’s a great idea,” I said. “Say, do you suppose we should put our clothes on first so that we can start over from the beginning?”

  “That would be best, Chip.”

  “That sure is a great idea,” I said.

&
nbsp; “I’m glad you—Chip, what are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Chip, now stop that!”

  “It’s my thing,” I said, “If I want to play with it, I’ve got every right in the world.”

  “If you think I’m going to sit here and watch you, you’re out of your mind!”

  “Would you like to do it for me?”

  “Chip, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

  “Go home.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Go home.”

  “Chip?”

  “Go home.”

  When she went home, I stopped playing with myself. I was only doing it to annoy her. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that I got any kick out of it, at least in a sexual sense. But it sure got old Francine’s teeth on edge, and that was the general idea.

  After she left I sat around for a while. I got dressed again and had a look at the door. If the barber saw it he was going to have a fit and if he didn’t see it I didn’t want him cutting my hair, because he would be likely to lop off an ear. I mean it was smashed beyond recognition. You couldn’t make it look like a door again. The only way to hide it was to hang a picture over it, and I didn’t know where to get one at that hour.

  What I did was take the door right off its hinges and carry the whole mess downstairs. I put all the pieces back with the garbage from the drugstore two doors down. The next time Mr. Bruno asked for the rent, I asked him when he was going to bring my door back.

  “Door? What door? I never tooka your door.”

  “Then where did it go?”

  “Jeez,” he said, and added something in Italian. The next day two of his sons came and hung a new door for me. The next time I saw old Bruno he said he was sorry they had taken the door off without telling me, but it needed painting. I got so I had trouble knowing whether that guy kicked my door in or not.

  But all this is off the subject. I guess I’m trying to duck the obvious question, which is was I losing my mind or what?

  Because Francine would have let me do it. She just about came right out and said she would let me do it if only I would play up to her the way she wanted. She spelled it out for me, just about, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t get the message, and what did I do? I sent her home, for Pete’s sake. I sat there, pulling my pud like a total dip and told her to take her whatchamacallit and go home, and kept telling her until she went.

  I sat around for hours trying to figure it out. And the best I could come up with was that I had just been trying to get laid for so long that finally something snapped inside me and I just wasn’t going to go through all that goddamn nonsense again. If you stop to think, ever since I left Upper Valley I had been planning on working hard and applying myself and being straightforward and open and honest and sensible, all in a heroic All American effort to Get Ahead. And time after time I wound up being dishonest and sneaky and conniving, and floated around aimlessly and didn’t save money and wasn’t getting ahead, and all because the only thing I really gave a damn about was getting laid. And it might have made sense if I was making out like a maniac, but I wasn’t getting anyplace at all, and the whole thing just wasn’t worth the trouble.

  And Francine wasn’t worth the trouble, for Pete’s sake. No matter how nice her body was, there was too thick a layer of stupidity and selfishness hovering over it. And no matter what terrific secrets she had hidden between her legs, they just couldn’t be worth all the games and crap you had to go through to get to her.

  I just wasn’t interested.

  You may have trouble believing it. I don’t blame you for a minute. This is I, Chip Harrison, talking, after all, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe it all myself. But it was true.

  I went outside and walked around until I found a place to have a cup of coffee. I just walked right in and sat down at the counter without giving the place the usual carefully casual are-there-any-girls-here glance. I didn’t even care. I sat at the counter, and the waitress who always served me came over and gave me the usual big phony smile and leaned forward to give me the usual cheap thrill, and I talked to her the same way I always did but without even pausing to think for a moment that I would like to bang her. I drank my coffee and ordered another cup. I told myself I might be a virgin for the rest of my life, and if that was the way it was going to be, I would just have to learn to live with it, because no matter how great Doing It felt (and I don’t suppose it would really feel a whole hell of a lot different from some of the things I had done with Aileen, as far as that goes), it still couldn’t be worth making a horse’s ass of yourself or building your whole life around. It just wasn’t worth it.

  I was having a third cup of coffee, which I don’t usually do, but this wasn’t my usual kind of evening, either. A voice said, “Say, is anybody sitting here?”

  I turned around. It was a girl about my age, with long brown hair and, very wide brown eyes. She was wearing a pair of those granny glasses and if anything they made her eyes look bigger.

  “No one at all,” I said.

  “What I meant was, do you feel like company or are you involved with your own private thoughts?”

  “Company’s fine.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to come on heavy or anything.”

  “I’m sure. I ran out of thoughts, anyway.”

  She parked herself on the stool next to mine. The waitress came over and showed off her breasts. The girl ordered coffee, and I said I didn’t want anything, thanks just the same. The waitress gave me one of those tentative dirty looks, as though she didn’t know whether to take that the wrong way or not. She brought the girl’s coffee and went away.

  “I think I’ve seen you around,” the girl said.

  “I’ve been around.”

  “Are you living in town?”

  “For the time being. Just passing through, actually.”

  “I’ve been living here for years, but I’m on my way out now. I’m going to college tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh.”

  She stirred her coffee. “My first year. I guess I must be a little nervous about it because I couldn’t sleep. I had to get out of the house. I didn’t think I was nervous but I must be.”

  “Maybe you’re just excited. That can happen.”

  “I guess so. Do you go to school now or did you finish?”

  “I sort of dropped out.”

  “That’s groovy. I guess I’ll probably drop out. Most of the kids I know who went already, the more interesting ones, all dropped out after a year or two. But I wanted to see what it was like first.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  “That’s what I figured.” She drummed the countertop with her fingers. Her fingernails were chewed ragged and the backs of her hands were brown from the sun. “I’m a Capricorn. Open to new ideas. I believe in that, I think, but I don’t know much about it. Astrology, I mean. What are you?”

  “Oh. Virgo.”

  “My name’s Hallie.”

  “Mine’s Chip.”

  “That’s very together. I like that.” She sipped her coffee and made a face.

  “It’s pretty bad coffee,” I said.

  “The worst. But everybody’s closed at this hour. Do you work or what?”

  “Over at the car wash. They wash and I dry.”

  “That sounds fair enough.”

  “I don’t love it, but it’s a job.”

  “I think that’s where I may have seen you. And you know, walking around.”

  I looked at her again. “I’ve seen you, too. I think. With a sort of stocky guy? With shoulders?”

  “My brother.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s in the Service. The Infantry.”

  “Oh.”

  “He enlisted to get it over with and now he’s sorry. He hates it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “He thought it would get better after basic training, but he says it’s
the same shuck all around, and now he thinks they’re going to send him overseas.”

  “Rough.”

  “You know it.”

  I looked at her again. She was damned attractive, although it was the kind of goodlookingness that you didn’t notice right off. It didn’t wave and shout at you, but after you saw it a few times you began to appreciate it. She looked very clean and cool and casual, and she talked with her whole face. I mean, she didn’t keep throwing smiles and winks at you and do things with her eyebrows, nothing like that. But the expression on her face always went along with what she was saying. A lot of the time a person’s mouth will go off in one direction while their mind is somewhere else.

  We didn’t talk about anything very important. I told her about some of the apple knockers I had met, and she talked about spending summers on her uncle’s farm when she was a kid. I hadn’t really talked to a girl this way in I don’t know how long. I used to talk to Aileen in Chicago, but that was all screwed up by the fact that I was all hung up on her sexually. With Hallie, sex didn’t have anything to do with it. Not that she wouldn’t have appealed to me, but that I had gone through some real changes and I wasn’t the same horny kid I had been a couple of hours ago.

  She had a second cup of the terrible coffee, and I kept her company and had a fourth. When she finished hers I said I thought I would probably go for a walk, and she said maybe some fresh air would do her good, help her get to sleep. We each paid for our own coffee and went outside together.

  We walked two or three blocks without talking. But it was an easy silence, not one of those uncomfortable ones where you try to think of something to say and keep running different sentences through your mind. It was completely relaxed. I didn’t even get lost in my own thoughts. I just walked along, hardly thinking of anything.

  Then she said, “Chip?” I looked at her and for a second her eyes seemed so deep that I could see for miles into them. Then she lowered them and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.