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I was inside with a flashlight. The little man seized my arm.
I smelled his breath.
And then my flashlight shot through the rooms of their house. Light sparkled on a hundred wine bottles standing in the hall, two hundred bottles shelved in the kitchen, six dozen along the parlour wall-boards, more of the same on bedroom bureaus and in closets. I do not know if I was more impressed with the hole in the bedroom ceiling or the endless glitter of so many bottles. I lost count. It was like an invasion of gigantic shining beetles, struck dead, deposited, and left by some ancient disease.
In the bedroom, I felt the little man and woman behind me in the doorway. I heard their loud breathing and I could feel their eyes. I raised the beam of my flashlight away from the glittering bottles, I focused it, carefully, and for the rest of my visit, on the hole in the yellow ceiling.
The little woman began to cry. She cried softly. Nobody moved.
The next morning they left.
Before we even knew they were going, they were half down the alley at six a.m. carrying their luggage, which was light enough to be entirely empty. I tried to stop them. I talked to them. They were old friends, I said. Nothing had changed, I said. They had nothing to do with the fire, I said, or the roof. They were innocent bystanders, I insisted ! I would fix the roof myself, no charge, no charge to them! But they did not look at me. They looked at the house and at the open end of the alley, ahead of them, while I talked. Then, when I stopped they nodded to the alley as if agreeing that it was time to go, and walked off, and then began to run, it seemed, away from me, towards the street where there were street-cars and buses and automobiles and many loud avenues stretching in a maze. They hurried proudly, though, heads up, not looking back.
It was only by accident I ever met them again. At Christmastime, one evening, I saw the little man running quietly along the twilight street ahead of me. On a personal whim, I followed. When he turned, I turned. At last, five blocks away from our old neighbourhood, he scratched quietly at the door of a little white house. I saw the door open, shut, and lock him in. As night settled over the tenement city, a small light burned like blue mist in the tiny living-room as I passed. I thought I saw, but probably imagined, two silhouettes there, he on his side of the room in his own particular chair, and she on her side of the room, sitting, sitting in the dark, and one or two bottles beginning to collect on the floor behind the chairs, and not a sound, not a sound between them. Only the silence.
I did not go up and knock. I strolled by. I walked on along the avenue, listening to the parrot Cafés scream. I bought a newspaper, a magazine, and a quarter-edition book. Then I went home to where all the lights were lit and there was warm food upon the table.
The Sunset Harp
TOM, knee-deep in the waves, a piece of driftwood in his hand, listened.
The house, up towards the Coast Highway in the late afternoon, was silent. The sounds of closets being rummaged, suitcase locks snapping, vases being smashed, and of a final door crashing shut, all had faded away.
Chico, standing on the pale sand, flourished his wire-strainer to shake out a harvest of lost coins. After a moment, without glancing at Tom, he said, ‘Let her go.’
So it was every year. For a week or a month, their house would have music swelling from the windows, there would be new geraniums potted on the porch-rail, new paint on the doors and steps. The clothes on the wire-line changed from harlequin pants to sheath-dresses to handmade Mexican frocks like white waves breaking behind the house. Inside, the paintings on the walls shifted from imitation Matisse to pseudo-Italian Renaissance. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a woman drying her hair like a bright yellow flag on the wind. Sometimes the flag was black or red. Sometimes the woman was tall, sometimes short, against the sky. But there was never more than one woman at a time. And, at last, a day like today came.…
Tom placed his driftwood on the growing pile near where Chico sifted the billion footprints left by people long vanished from their holidays.
‘Chico. What are we doing here?’
‘Living the life of Reilly, boy!’
‘I don’t feel like Reilly, Chico.’
‘Work at it, boy!’
Tom saw the house a month from now, the flower-pots blowing dust, the walls hung with empty squares, only sand carpeting the floors. The rooms would echo like shells in the wind. And all night every night bedded in separate rooms he and Chico would hear a tide falling away and away down a long shore, leaving no trace.
Tom nodded, imperceptibly. Once a year he himself brought a nice girl here, knowing she was right at last and that in no time they would be married. But his women always stole silently away before dawn, feeling they had been mistaken for someone else, not being able to play the part. Chico’s friends left like vacuum-cleaners, with a terrific drag, roar, rush, leaving no lint unturned, no clam unprized of its pearl, taking their purses with them like toy-dogs which Chico had petted as he opened their jaws to count their teeth.
‘That’s four women so far this year.’
‘Okay, referee.’ Chico grinned. ‘Show me the way to the showers.’
‘Chico –’ Tom bit his lower lip, then went on. ‘I been thinking. Why don’t we split up?’
Chico just looked at him.
‘I mean,’ said Tom, quickly, ‘maybe we’d have better luck, alone.’
‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ said Chico, slowly, gripping the strainer in his big fists before him. ‘Look here, boy, don’t you know the facts? You and me, we’ll be here come the year 2,000. A couple of crazy dumb old gooney-birds drying their bones in the sun. Nothing’s ever going to happen to us now, Tom, it’s too late. Get that through your head and shut up.’
Tom swallowed and looked steadily at the other man. ‘I’m thinking of leaving – next week.’
‘Shut up, shut up, and get to work!’
Chico gave the sand an angry showering r
