Faithless: Tales of Transgression Page 5

  RETURNING TO my apartment house I walked quickly, forcing Mr. Cantry to hurry beside me. His breath was audible, like sandpaper rubbed against a rough surface. Poor man, I wondered if varicose veins raddled his pulpy-white legs. I wondered if his feet, like mine, swelled like twin goiters and required nightly soaking in Epsom salts. Yet Mr. Cantry tried to catch his breath, and to regain some of his squandered dignity. “As to death, Xavia—I believe the subject is pointless to discuss. For when you are dead, you are in a state of blissful nonexistence; and in nonexistence is non-knowing. And where there is non-knowing—”

  He spoke passionately, gesturing with his hands. I might have been moved, but the effect of his speech was weakened by the abrupt way in which, seeing a Sandy Hook police cruiser passing on the street, he became rattled; he shrank back as if fearful of being seen. I made a joke about the vigilance of the local police in this place where nothing ever happened but Mr. Cantry was too distracted to respond. He didn’t relax again until the cruiser was out of sight.

  I said, annoyed, “The fact is, Mr. Cantry, you die. It’s an active verb. You die, I die. We die. It isn’t a blissful state, it’s an action. And there’s terror, there’s pain. Like drowning in the ocean—“

  But Mr. Cantry was distracted, and maybe demoralized. I left him on the sidewalk in front of my house, thanked him for the drinks, and hurried up the porch steps before he could accompany me, wheezing and wincing. He called after me, “Xavia—good night?”

  16

  “THAT LEE!—he’s so damned softhearted. Leaves the dirty work to me.”

  It was Maxine on the phone, her horsey face drawn downward in fond exasperation at her cousin. Though he owned the Sandy Hook Inn, or anyway held a sizable mortgage on the property, Maxine was the one who, at his command, routinely laid off or dismissed employees.

  I hadn’t been meant to hear this remark, of course. Maxine didn’t know I’d drifted within earshot.

  To my horror, a new waitress had been hired. I hadn’t seen her but had heard rumors of her—a redhead, good-looking it was said. Since November, business in the diner had dropped a bit farther, then stabilized. A shrine-like McDonald’s had opened a mile away and would surely draw more of our customers. We never acknowledged such rivals; even to allude to them would be to stir Mr. Yardboro’s fury.

  I believed that, in his way, Mr. Yardboro liked me. Yet he watched me closely, as he watched all his employees. His pale-blue bulging eyes following me, jaws working as he sucked at a toothpick. Hey, sweetheart. Hey, honey—speed it up, eh? But don’t go barging around like a goddamn horse. I tried to obey Mr. Yardboro without his needing to give instructions. I tried to anticipate his smallest wish. I was very nice, never failed to smile, while waiting on his noisy pals. I never complained behind Mr. Yardboro’s back, bitterly, like the others. Never cut corners, never hid away in the lavatory cursing and weeping. My only weakness, which I tried to keep secret, was eating leftovers from customers’ plates. Like most food workers, I had quickly developed a repugnance for food; yet I continued to eat, despite the repugnance; once I began eating, no matter what the food, no matter how unappetizing, my mouth flooded with saliva and it was impossible for me to stop eating. The day I’d overheard Maxine on the phone, which had been a hectic, nervous day for me, a day of stingy tips and picky customers, a day of profound metaphysical repugnance, I pushed into the kitchen with a tray of dirtied platters and no one was watching so quickly I devoured the remains of a cheeseburger almost raw at its center, leaking blood, and several onion rings, and french fries soaked in ketchup. In an instant I was ravenous, dazed. I started in on another platter, devouring the remains of some batterfried perch, a foul-fishy taste even ketchup couldn’t disguise, and at that terrible moment Mr. Yardboro slammed through the swinging door whistling, must have seen me, my guilty frightened eyes and greasy mouth and fingers, but in a gesture of unexpected tact—or out of simple embarrassment, for there were things that embarrassed even Lee Yardboro—he continued on his way back into the office, pretending he hadn’t seen.

  Though at closing time saying, with a disdainful twist of his mouth, and his blue gaze raking me up and down, “Eat as much leftover-crap as you want, honey. Saves wear and tear on the garbage disposal.”

  17

  MR. CANTRY HAD STOPPED eating in the Sandy Hook Diner, it seemed. Only by accident did I learn, from a remark made by another waitress, that “that big weird-looking guy with the crew cut” had come in a couple of weeks ago, when I hadn’t been on duty, and Mr. Yardboro had told him please not to patronize his diner any more because other customers—meaning Mr. Yardboro’s pals, who’d been pissed at Lover Boy over the Hustler incident—had complained about him. “And what did the man say?” I asked. It was curious how my mouth twisted in a smile of childish complicity as if, talking with this mean-spirited woman whom I didn’t know and didn’t like any more than she liked me about an individual helpless to defend himself, we were establishing rapport. We were behaving like friends! “He said something like, ‘Thank you, it is exactly my wish as well.’ And walked out. Like this weird teacher I had in high school, always making speeches toward the ceiling.” I laughed, trying to imagine the scene. Thank God he hadn’t said anything about “Xavia.” I was relieved no one could connect the two of us.

  Did I think about Mr. Cantry, my old math teacher? No I did not. Erased him from my thoughts like wiping down a sticky Formica table.

  Except, the blowy, dark afternoon of Christmas eve, when we were closing early (it was a lonely time—Mr. Yardboro and his family were spending a week in Orlando, Florida), there came Mr. Cantry to ask if he might see me that evening. He was wearing a bulky black wool overcoat and a black homburg pulled down tight on his forehead. His no-color eyes, fixed to my face, shone with yearning and reproach in about equal measure—as if I’d been the one to bar him from the Sandy Hook Diner. I wanted to say What? Are you kidding? Christmas eve, with you? but I heard myself say, sighing, “Well. All right. But only for a little while.”

  The diner was minimally but colorfully decorated for Christmas. Maxine and I had decorated it together, and I was sort of proud of it. There were strips of tinsel, plastic mistletoe, and holly above the booths; there was a three-foot plastic evergreen with winking bubble lights in a window; there was a comical fat-bellied Santa Claus beside the cash register whose nose could be lighted (the joke in the diner was, this Santa Claus resembled Mr. Yardboro with his flushed cheeks and bulging blue eyes). I asked Mr. Cantry what he thought of the decorations, making my question ironic, and Mr. Cantry looked around as if taking inventory, slowly. There was no one else in the diner at the moment and, seeing it through Mr. Cantry’s eyes, I felt a wave of horror pass over me—the Sandy Hook Diner was only this, the sum of its surfaces. It was like one of those trendy hard-edged realist paintings of city scenes, neon, chrome, Formica, plastic, and glass you stare at trying to comprehend why anybody’s asshole enough to have painted it.

  Mr. Cantry said, meaning to be kind, “It does capture a kind of Christmas spirit.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  DESPITE HIS PAINED WALKING, Mr. Cantry insisted upon coming to escort me to his place. I was surprised to discover it was on a street parallel with my street, a few blocks away; a stucco apartment building of five floors. His apartment, on the second floor, was high-ceilinged, with a fireplace (unused) in the living room, crowded with old furniture. Embedded in the grimy oriental carpet as if woven into the fabric were strands of coppery dog hairs, and there were more dog hairs on the Victorian horsehair sofa on which Mr. Cantry invited me to sit. The heavy velvet draperies had been pulled across the windows, though not completely. There was a pervasive odor of something medicinal. A voice teased, The scene of the seduction! While Mr. Cantry fussed about in the adjoining kitchen, heating up, as he called it, appetizers in the oven, I examined a table laden with numerous dust-coated framed photographs of Mr. Cantry’s kin, oblong-headed, earnest persons, most of them middle-aged or elde
rly, in the clothes and hairstyles of bygone times. In the front row of photos were bright color snapshots of a butterscotch cocker spaniel with watery eyes. Mr. Cantry entered the room humming, in high spirits, carrying a silver tray containing a tall champagne bottle and two crystal goblets and a platter of still-sizzling sausages and cheese bits. He said loudly, “Ah, Xavia. Monuments to my dead. It should not dampen our spirits, though. On Christmas eve.”

  Smelling the appetizers, I was immediately hungry. Though I felt slightly sickened, too—the medicinal odor, and an underlying odor of dust, dirt, grime, loneliness were so strong. Ceremoniously Mr. Cantry set the tray down in front of me as if I were a tableful of people. His eyes were moist with effort and his fingers trembled. When I said nothing, beginning to eat, he added, in a wistful tone, “When you are the last of your bloodline, Xavia, as I am—you look backward, not forward. With children, you would of course be tugged forward. Your attentions, your hopes, I mean. Into the future.”

  “Well, I’m not in the mood for having a baby. Even if it’s Christmas eve. Count me out, Mr. Cantry.”

  “Xavia, you say such things!”

  Mr. Cantry blushed, but with pleasure, as if I’d leaned over suddenly and tickled him. I’d become the brash smart-aleck student some teachers inexplicably court. “I was not speaking of either of us—of course. I spoke only in theory.” He sat on the sofa beside me; the piece of old furniture creaked. I was surprised he’d sit so close to me—Mr. Cantry seemed to have gained, in the seclusion of his apartment, a degree of masculine confidence. With some effort he uncorked the champagne—it was a French champagne, with a black label and pretentious gilt script—and poured brimming glasses for us both. He laughed as some of the bubbly liquid spilled onto my fingers and corduroy slacks. “To the holiday season, Xavia! And to the New Year, which I hope will bring us both much happiness.” There was something giddy and ominous in the way he smiled, and clicked his glass against mine, and drank. I said, on a hunch, “Are you supposed to drink, Mr. Cantry?” He said, hurt, “Christmas eve is a special occasion, I believe.”

  If you’re an alcoholic there’s no occasion that can be special, I thought. Actually I’d had a drinking problem myself, a few years before. But I kept all this to myself.

  Within a few minutes Mr. Cantry and I had each drunk two goblets of champagne. We’d eaten most of the greasy little sausages and cheese bits. Mr. Cantry was telling me of his sources of income—a disability pension from the state of New Jersey and a small family trust. “I have never yet married,” he said, belching softly, “for the very good reason that I have never yet been in love.” There was a buzzing sensation in my head like miniature popping bubbles, or brain cells. I smiled, seeing a man’s fattish hand reach fumblingly for mine, one hairless creature groping for another. Now the seduction! Now the rape! I laughed, though I was beginning to feel panic. Mr. Cantry said, “You are so mysterious, Xavia! So exotic. Unlike the other young women waitresses I have come to know in Sandy Hook, you are special.” I didn’t like to be told that there’d been other waitresses in Mr. Cantry’s life. “Why am I so special?” I asked ironically, staring at Mr. Cantry’s fingers locked around mine, and both our hands resting on my knee. His knuckles were enlarged and hairless and his fingernails were neatly clipped, as clean as or cleaner than my own. “Because you were my student. Always there is something sacred in that relationship.” I laughed, disappointed. I wasn’t sure I’d actually been in Mr. Cantry’s class, in fact. I pulled my hand from his and upset my champagne glass and it fell onto the horsehair sofa, spilling what remained of its contents. Mr. Cantry fussed with napkins, muttering under his breath. I said, “I think I should go now, Mr. Cantry. I don’t feel well.”

  He said, breathing harshly, “You could lie down! Here, or in the other room. This is meant to be a happy occasion.” I stood, and the room spun. Mr. Cantry lurched to his feet as if to steady me but he was unsteady himself, lost his balance, and we fell together to the floor in a clumsy heap. I was laughing. I was on the verge of hyperventilating. He will strangle you now. Look at those eyes. I was crawling to escape, on my hands and knees. A lamp must have been unplugged, the room was partly darkened. Mr. Cantry was on his knees panting beside me, awkwardly stroking my hair. “Please forgive me! I did not mean to upset you.” Something blocked my way as I crawled—a heavy chair. I pushed at Mr. Cantry’s hand, which was stroking my hair and neck in a way that might be interpreted as playful, the way Mr. Yardboro and certain of his friends bounced boyish punches off one another’s upper arms. But Mr. Cantry was strong, and he was heavy. He was stroking my back now and kissing the nape of my neck, his mouth damp and yearning as a dog’s. “I would love you. You are in need of strong, devoted guidance. In that place, you demean yourself. If you are punished long enough, you become guilty. This is a fact I know. Xavia—” I panicked and pushed him, he lost his balance and fell against a table, a cascade of framed photographs toppled to the floor and their glass shattered.

  I crawled desperately, got free, and jumped up and grabbed for my windbreaker. Mr. Cantry shouted after me like a wounded beast, “What have you done! How could you! Please! Come back!” I ran out of the apartment and down the stairs and when I returned to my own place and bolted the door I saw with wild, teary eyes that it was only 8:10 P.M. of Christmas eve—it had seemed so much later.

  I thought possibly Mr. Cantry might follow me, to apologize. But he didn’t. The phone didn’t ring. I wasn’t expecting my mother to call to wish me happy Christmas, as I hadn’t planned on calling her, either, and this turned out to be so.

  18

  CHRISTMAS DAY, the Sandy Hook Diner was closed. The next day, a Friday, when I went in to work in the late afternoon, I learned that Mr. Cantry had been arrested the previous day, for prowling in backyards and trying to look into a woman’s downstairs windows. Gleeful Maxine showed me a copy of the local newspaper, a brief paragraph in the police blotter column and an accompanying photo showing Virgil Cantry gaping at the camera’s flash, one hand feebly raised to shield his face in a classic pose of shame. “That’s him, isn’t it? That guy who used to come in here all the time?” I took the paper from her and read, astounded, that on Christmas eve, a local woman had reported a male prowler in her backyard, a man peering into her windows; she’d screamed, and he’d run away, through neighboring backyards; she called the police, who came and found no one. Next day, working with the woman’s description, and other information, the police had arrested Mr. Virgil Cantry, 39, who’d denied the charges. “I don’t believe this,” I said numbly. “Mr. Cantry wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  Maxine and the others laughed at me, at the look on my face.

  I said, “No! Really. He wouldn’t, ever.”

  I went to hang up my windbreaker, dazed as if I’d been hit over the head. Behind me, I could hear them talking, laughing. That hum and buzz of jubilance.

  On my break I half-ran to the police station a few blocks away. I asked to see Virgil Cantry and was told that he wasn’t there; he hadn’t been arrested, as the paper had stated, only brought in for questioning. I was excited; I insisted upon speaking with one of the investigating officers; I said that Mr. Cantry and I had been together on Christmas eve, Mr. Cantry couldn’t possibly have been prowling in backyards—“And he couldn’t run, either. He has a problem with his legs.”

  The woman making the complaint had called the police at 8:50 P.M. of Christmas eve. It was ridiculous, I thought, to imagine that Virgil Cantry had gone out after I’d left him, to behave in such a desperate way. I insisted that we’d been together until sometime after nine. I gave an official statement to the Sandy Hook police, signed my name. I was trembling, incensed. “This man is innocent,” I said repeatedly. “You have no right to harass him.”

  I would learn afterward (I made it a point to follow the case) that Mr. Cantry had been one of several men brought into the station for questioning. Though he hadn’t fit the woman’s description of a portly dark-haired man
in a leather jacket, with a scruffy beard, the police had brought him in anyway, for questioning, since he was one of the few local residents with a police record (for public intoxication, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest nine years before—charges to which he’d pleaded guilty in exchange for probation and fines instead of a prison term). Four days later, the prowler-peeping tom was arrested, and confessed.

  When Mr. Yardboro returned from Florida, trimmer by ten pounds, tanned, and ebullient, he learned of the “arrest” of his former customer and how I’d gone to police headquarters, what I’d said. It had become a comical sort of tale at the Sandy Hook Diner, repeated frequently, laughed over. Mr. Yardboro thought it was very funny and laughed loudly; he was a man who liked to laugh. “What, honey-bun, you’re Lover Boy’s girl? How the hell long’s this been going on?”

  My face burned as if it was on fire. “No. I just wanted to help him.”

  “You were with him, like you said? Christmas eve?”

  Mr. Yardboro laughed, laughed, his warm heavy hand falling on my shoulder.

  19

  IN MID-JANUARY, I discovered a letter for “Xavia,” neatly typed, in a plain white unstamped envelope slipped into my mailbox.

  Dear Xavia,

  Thank you! I am deeply grateful to you. But so humiliated. I see I am “fair game” in this terrible place from now on.

  Your friend,

  Virgil Cantry

  I never saw Mr. Cantry again; I suppose he moved away from Sandy Hook. But he’d loved me for an hour, at least. I hadn’t loved him and that was too bad. But for that hour, I was loved.

  20

  ONE DAY in late January Mr. Yardboro called me into the kitchen to give me instructions in fish-gutting. One of the kitchen help had just departed the Sandy Hook Diner. Sucking at a toothpick, Mr. Yardboro pointed to the cleaver, already moist with watery blood, and told me to take it up. Eight whole fish had been placed belly up on the butcher-block table. “Start with the heads, sweetheart. Chop-chop. Careful. Then the tails. Don’t swing crooked. Don’t be shy. Good girl.”