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“I won’t. Not anymore. So don’t start up with the stuff about how you’re not doing anything you’re
ashamed of and I wouldn’t be, either. Those are things I need to decide for myself. It comes down to
this: either the broom goes, or you’ll have to.”
“If you knew, you wouldn’t—”
“Then tell me!”
“I can’t.” The anger popped like a pricked balloon, leaving an emotional dullness behind. I dropped
my eyes from her set face, and they happened to fall on her desk. What I saw there stopped my breath.
It was a little pile of job applications for her time in Reno this coming summer. The top one was
from Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. On the first line she had printed her name in neat block letters. Her
full name, including the middle one I’d never thought to ask her about.
I reached down, very slowly, and put my thumbs over her first name and the second syllable of her
last name. What that left was DORIS DUN.
I remembered the day I had spoken to Frank Dunning’s wife, pretending to be a real estate
speculator with an interest in the West Side Rec. She’d been twenty years older than Sadie Doris
Clayton, née Dunhill, but both women had blue eyes, exquisite skin, and fine, full-breasted figures.
Both women were smokers. All of it could have been coincidental, but it wasn’t. And I knew it.
“What are you doing?” The accusatory tone meant the real question was Why do you keep dodging
and evading, but I was no longer angry. Not even close.
“Are you sure he doesn’t know where you are?” I asked.
“Who? Johnny? Do you mean Johnny? Why . . .” That was when she decided it was useless. I saw it
in her face. “George, you need to leave.”
“But he could find out,” I said. “Because your parents know, and your parents thought he was just
the bees’ knees, you said so yourself.”
I took a step toward her. She took a step back. The way you’d step back from a person who’s
revealed himself to be of unsound mind. I saw the fear in her eyes, and the lack of comprehension, and
still I couldn’t stop. Remember that I was scared myself.
“Even if you told them not to say, he’d get it out of them. Because he’s charming. Isn’t he, Sadie?
When he’s not compulsively washing his hands, or alphabetizing his books, or talking about how
disgusting it is to get an erection, he’s very, very charming. He certainly charmed you.”
“Please go away, George.” Her voice was trembling.
I took another step toward her instead. She took a compensatory step back, struck the wall . . . and
cringed. Seeing her do that was like a slap across the face to a hysteric or a glass of cold water flung
into the face of a sleepwalker. I retreated to the arch between the living room and the kitchen, my
hands held up to the sides of my face, like a man surrendering. Which was what I was doing.
“I’m going. But Sadie—”
“I just don’t understand how you could do it,” she said. The tears had come; they were rolling
slowly down her cheeks. “Or why you refuse to undo it. We had such a good thing.”
“We still do.”
She shook her head. She did it slowly but firmly.
I crossed the kitchen in what felt like a float rather than a walk, plucked the tub of vanilla ice
cream from one of the bags standing on the counter, and put it in the freezer of her Coldspot. Part of
me was thinking this was all just a bad dream, and I’d wake up soon. Most of me knew better.
Sadie stood in the arch, watching me. She had a fresh cigarette in one hand and the job applications
in the other. Now that I saw it, the resemblance to Doris Dunning was eerie. Which raised the
question of why I hadn’t seen it before. Because I’d been preoccupied with other stuff ? Or was it
because I still hadn’t fully grasped the immensity of the things I was fooling with?
I went out through the screen door and stood on the stoop, looking at her through the mesh.