The House on Coliseum Street Page 5

  “What are you taking?” she asked.

  “Taking?” He could lift one eyebrow straight up so that it almost touched his low growing hair. “I’m giving.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I teach,” he said. “Didn’t Doris tell you?”

  She wished he had not said that, and wished that the words had not made a difference.

  “I don’t think we talked about it.”

  “Didn’t she say anything about me?”

  “Why should she?”

  “Didn’t you want to know what I did when you went out with me?”

  “No,” she said. “It didn’t seem important. At all.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  She began to walk toward the building. He fell into step beside her.

  “You’re a strange gal.”

  “I suppose I should ask what you teach?”

  “No, honey bunch,” he said, “but it’s economics.”

  “Oh.”

  “Take my course.”

  “I’m taking art this summer. Art survey.”

  “Why?”

  “Something to do. The summers are kind of long if you don’t do something.”

  “What did you take last year?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I went to Jamaica and then to Mexico.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “So much fun I can’t afford to go back this year.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Not really.”

  They passed the cafeteria. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “No,” she said, “I’d rather go and get finished right now.”

  “Okay,” he said, “see you.” He touched her shoulder briefly.

  The registration hall was stifling. She stood in endless lines and waited patiently, staring at the sweat-stained shirts around her, seeing them and not really seeing them. The tall Gothic windows on each side were open, but no breeze moved through them. Mosquitoes came, in slow drifting clouds and dragonflies followed them, weaving back and forth with quick ducking movements. Outside, and far off, the band began practice, the summer band, sounding thin and reedy. Most of the players would have gone home.

  She sat down on the floor in a corner and patiently filled out a long duplicate form, writing laboriously on the back of her purse. She paid little attention to what she was doing. Her eyes without looking were observing, and her ears were listening.

  In the heat the smell of sex was almost tangible, almost hung in the air like smoke. She noticed that at the beginning of every term—men and women thrown together in the same large hall, brushing elbows, brushing hips, until the air was full and you could almost hear the heavy breathing. She had always noticed that. The glance, the appraisal—she hated the girls for their coy peep from under the lashes; she knew what they were thinking. She knew what Doris was thinking. Doris liked to talk and had explained in great detail what she looked for in a man, how she selected him first, from across a room, and what she liked in bed.

  And no one, she thought, is trying me… That was the way it always happened. She was nice looking, she was even quite pretty; she had a lovely figure, lush and full. But there was something in her that repelled advances. She wondered about that. She even knew what it was, but not how to change it.

  A certain directness, a businesslike manner, that was not very feminine. A manner that reminded of tweeds and low-heeled shoes and sensible hats… She looked a great deal like Elizabeth of England; people told her that often.

  She thought with a wry smile: that means I look more motherly than wifely…

  She had almost finished filling the registration form. She had come to the part that asked for her religious preference. Always before this she had written Catholic. Though she had not been in a church for years.

  This time, she wrote plainly: Mahayana Buddhist.

  That would interest them, she thought, if they ever bothered to read those things.

  The idea amused her. She stopped writing and grinned out across the crowded floor.

  As she did, she caught a brief glimpse of Michael Kern. Or perhaps it wasn’t. But it was enough. For all the rest of the morning she could feel the imprint of his hand on her shoulder.

  THE JUNE DAYS SLIPPED one into the other. Doris won the city’s singles tennis championship. She and Aurelie argued for days about having the trophy in the living room. Aurelie won, as she always did. Doris carried the hideous yellow thing up to her room and sulked.

  Fred Aleman went on his two-week vacation. Joan saw him off on the cruise ship at the Julia Street wharf, the sleek white ship that would eventually deposit him at Buenos Aires. She brought him a little box of English cookies, a hideous tin box with a leering picture of Winston Churchill on the cover in four garish colors. She kissed him goodbye awkwardly, wondering if anyone was looking. And clumped down the gangplank, catching her heel and almost tripping, conscious suddenly that her white dress had a smear of black tar…

  The other days blended together in a mist of heat and steamy rains. She went to class, sat and listened and wrote down the parts of a symphony and the definition of a fugue and bought herself a recorder and practiced on it at night.

  After about a week the assistant dean asked to see her. He was a short balding young man, with an apoplectic face and a heavy mood of jollity that was protection against student problems.

  “Now what do we have here?” he laughed mirthlessly.

  Joan felt silly. “I don’t know,” she said, “what do we have?”

  He looked at her sharply.

  “I wasn’t being funny,” she said.

  “Sign up for a course in art and then don’t appear… The instructor is wondering what happened to you.”

  He held out the class card. Joan took it and studied it slowly. There, in her own handwriting. Two courses listed: the music, then Art 103.

  She remembered. “I’m sorry.”

  “Haven’t been sick?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You don’t want to change to another course or anything like that?”

  “No,” she said again. “I just forgot I had registered for this.”

  “You what?”

  “Forgot. I just forgot.”

  “Well, well,” he muttered with heavy irony, “the heat does strange things to all of us.”

  “I know that sounds silly.”

  “Do you think,” he said, standing up, “you could manage to remember now?”

  “Yes,” she answered seriously. “Yes, I can.”

  “It might be a splendid thing to do.”

  “I will,” she said, “yes, I will. And thank you for reminding me.”

  He stopped the reply that was balanced on his tongue. She probably didn’t mean that. As they shook hands, he studied her eyes carefully. They were nice eyes, blue, with dark lashes. They had a sick look too; they were sort of opaque. So he kept still and only allowed himself to sigh, deep and sad, after she had gone. “We get them all,” he said aloud as he went over to the window and checked to be sure that the air conditioner was really working at full capacity.

  Joan went to art class the very next day. And found she liked it. She bought herself a pale green smock and spent hours scratching away with pieces of charcoal on large pads of white paper. She took her sketches home and pinned them to the wall with tiny bits of Scotch tape. After two weeks most of the great pink cabbage roses were hidden from sight.

  Aurelie, who never came to her room, slipped in the door one day and looked around. “Mercy, child,” she said, “this is such a strange summer.”

  “Who told you?” Joan demanded. “Who told you about them? That little bitch Doris?”

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” Aurelie quoted.

  “Oh shit!”

  “The lack of range in your vocabulary,” Aurelie said, “is simply appalling.”

  “God,” Joan said, “don’t you ever get angry?”

&nb
sp; “A soft answer turneth away wrath.”

  “Oh God,” Joan said.

  The following week, which was just a few days before Fred came home, Joan got a job at the college library. From four until eleven at night, when the library closed, she sat up on the sixth level of the stacks at a hard little steel desk and waited for circulation to call for books on that floor.

  Nobody wanted that job. It was the next to the highest level and the air conditioning didn’t work too well up there, so there was always the stuffy odor of gently moving dust and the faintly carbolic odor of the bindings. It was the quietest of all levels. There were few calls for books and hardly anyone came by. The staff had always tossed coins for it, until Joan came.

  She liked it up there. Liked the dusty quiet. Liked the emptiness. And sometimes she went up to the next level, the highest level, where there were no windows at all, only faint yellow bulbs too small to cast much light. Uncatalogued things were kept there. Heaps of old magazines. Wooden boxes of mementos. And collections given to the library as units. The smell of old leather was as thick as incense. Pictures. And daguerreotypes. And swords in velvet boxes. One small wood box labeled Souvenirs of Sarah Bernhardt. Joan would have opened that, but the top was nailed on. She pried at it some with a little fingernail file she carried in her purse but gave it up to open a hand-bound volume of ornate leather called The Genealogy of the Wives of Louisiana Governors.

  Because her heels echoed so on the glass floor, she took to leaving her shoes under the desk and padding silently about the top level in her nylons. There was a single window on the west side, and she discovered it one day. After that she would spend hours standing there, leaning against the concrete, looking out over the campus. She was above even the tops of the trees and she felt floating and detached. The window didn’t open, so she could hear no sounds; she only saw the play of light, the changing from day to evening, from evening to dark. The evening star would swim into view just over the biggest of the oak trees. She would see the lights come on, yellow for some, blue for the fluorescents.

  There were some rooms on the south side of the level, little empty rooms all in a line, like the tiny rooms in an army hospital. They were windowless too with only a big round O of fluorescent tube in the ceiling. On their doors, right under the small clear glass square of window looking in, was a carefully lettered sign: Study. It was done in very precise Gothic script.

  The rooms were not used, never had been. Their concrete brick walls were not even painted. No one came up here. She liked to go into the rooms sometimes and stand very still and listen and try to imagine things or remember things, she was never sure which. She was only sure that it was very important for her to do it.

  She would turn on the overhead corridor light (only one worked) and stare at the dust as it floated under it.

  One evening, after supper, and shortly before the library closed, she was padding around as usual in her bare feet. There had been a couple of calls for books, only one of which she had been able to find. She circled aimlessly looking for the remaining one, the call slip clutched in her hand.

  She was passing back by the line of studies when she noticed the noise. Not a real sound so much as a brushing. A sound that almost wasn’t a sound.

  Instinct told her sharply: go back to the desk and read; you haven’t heard anything. But she padded silently along. It was the second little square glass window she looked into. The door was almost closed and the window was coated with grime, but still she had no trouble making out the two figures on the floor.

  For a long second she watched, scarcely realizing what she was seeing, thinking with silly precision: the floor must be awful on their backs… Then she felt the delayed rush of embarrassment and scooted back to her desk. She sat for a moment under the little gooseneck lamp, studying the scratched initials on the metal top. Then she put on her shoes and pounded down the narrow stairs to the next level.

  “Hi,” she said, “I got lonesome so I thought I’d come down and say hello.”

  The three girls who worked that level stared at her in surprise. She had never done that before.

  FRED ALEMAN CAME BACK, his olive skin tanned almost mahogany by wind and sun. He brought Joan a vicuña stole and a long necklace—a marriage chain, he called it—of silver so soft she could bend it in her fingers. Joan folded the stole away to wait for cool weather and wore the necklace dutifully each time she went out with him.

  She saw him only on week ends now, on the nights she didn’t work at the library. She wondered sometimes if the change in their plans had upset him, but he said nothing. He did call her every evening when she got home. But if he missed her he said nothing.

  One Saturday—the first since he’d come back—he took her to the concert in Beauregard Square. She wore a brand-new blue print dress, cut low in back, and she had borrowed Aurelie’s beaded bag. Fred’s cluster of tiny white roses perched on her shoulder. They sat in the warm still night, at a table that was too small, and drank rum collinses. Her stockings snagged on a splintered chair. The unmoving air still smelled heavily of the DDT with which the area had been sprayed. Even so, a few mosquitoes circled and droned lazily overhead.

  “Do you remember,” Joan said, “how often we used to come to these last summer?”

  “I think it was a better series last year,” Fred said.

  “And how we used to go out to the lake at night and go swimming?”

  “And how you thought you saw a gar?”

  She made a face. “I did feel something… But all that was fun.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it was.”

  If he would only tell her. If he would only admit that he missed her those weekday evenings. She wondered what he did, though she knew she should never ask. Maybe he was finding somebody else. She didn’t even know if he missed her.

  “I get to thinking about it sometimes,” she admitted slowly. “And it was kind of fun when we had time to go and do things like that.”

  He leaned back in the chair, which creaked under his weight, and chuckled. “Young lady,” he said, “if you didn’t want to work evenings, you wouldn’t do it. And wild horses couldn’t drag you there.”

  She smiled feebly. He still hadn’t said.

  She watched him in the little light from the one candle on the table. He was handsome, in a heavy solid way. The thick black hair, the heavy jaw, the wide forehead.

  “You know,” she said, “what’s the best thing about you?”

  “No,” he said. “What?”

  “Your coloring. Olive skin and black eyes are awfully good with a white shirt.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Then it popped out. “What do you do in the evenings, when I’m working?”

  He smiled gently. “Layovers to catch meddlers.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean it.”

  “So do I.”

  His smile wasn’t as gentle as she had first thought. But she plunged ahead, because she had gone too far to stop. “I just wanted to know.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “I haven’t been chasing around with anybody.”

  “I didn’t think so, but I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I told you: layovers to catch meddlers.”

  He was teasing now, and she stopped, knowing that she had brought up a subject that would spoil the rest of the evening. He was annoyed with her, she could tell. She had known him too long not to recognize the signs.

  Why do I always do it, she thought fiercely. Why do I have to ruin things? Why always me? And I still don’t know if he misses me. I don’t even know that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said miserably and then saw that the apology had made things worse; it had embarrassed him. She stared down at her glass and busily removed a gnat that had fallen in.

  “When this is finished,” he said, “want to go out to the Fairfax Club and try your luck?”


  It was an old joke between them. She had never been able to bring herself to gamble. She would go and stand by the tables by the hour and watch the players and watch the wheel and the board or the dice. She would go to the races and study the form and dope out the horses and head toward the parimutuel window, but somehow she always came back with the money jammed way down in the pocket of her coat. She couldn’t do it. Not even just two dollars.

  “I’d like to go,” she said truthfully. The sense of excitement in the gamblers about her always left her exhilarated too.

  “When the concert’s over,” Fred promised.

  “It’s not really very good tonight.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “It’s not nearly as good as last year,” she said.

  Hours later they went into the bar at the Fairfax Club. It was deserted, as it nearly always was. Most people preferred the gambling rooms.

  Joan sat at the bar, swishing out her skirts so that they did not get mussed. She put Aurelie’s little beaded handbag on the bar and folded her gloves neatly on top.

  “Why is it always empty in here?”

  “I suppose,” Fred said, “most people want to be near the action.”

  “Oh.” She noticed the clock, twenty past one. That was why she felt tired.

  “You get to play tonight?”

  “Don’t tease me, Fred.”

  He grinned. “A wild gambler like you, always after the action…”

  “I saw you play,” she said hastily. “Did you win?”

  “Some,” he said; “enough to buy our drinks anyway.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She ordered brandy and soda. He lifted his eyebrows but said nothing when the empty-eyed barman brought the soda and she poured it as a chaser.

  “Don’t look so disapproving.”

  “My dear child,” he said, “your drinking is not one of the things I worry about.”

  She thought she had an opening then, a faint one, and she pushed right ahead, wondering if she was going to have it now. “What do you worry about?”

  “About you?” he laughed softly. “Not very much. You’re a smart gal, with a sensible mother, so who can worry?”