Mary And The Giant

"You wish you were back at the furniture place? Ask them they'll take you back."

"Don't kid me. I wouldn't go back there on a bet."

"Suit yourself." Tweany shrugged. "It's your life."

"Why did you throw me out when I came to you that day?"

"I didn't throw you out. I don't recall doing that."

"You wouldn't let me move my things over. You made me keep a separate address, and after a week you wouldn't let me stay all night. I had to get up and leave-that's what I call being thrown out."

He regarded her with wonder. "Are you out of your mind? You know the situation. You're under age. It's a felony."

"If it's a felony to do it at three o'clock in the morning, it's a felony to do it in the afternoon."

"I thought you understood."

"If it's a felony-"

"Keep your voice down," Tweany said, with a glance at Nitz and the couple. Now they were involved in a discussion of contemporary atonal experiments. "That was only-now and then. Not a thing they could catch."

"Now and then? Temporary?"

She was furious, really furious. Because she remembered what it was convenient for him to forget: that specific day he had taken her into his apartment, the two of them lost among the clutter that filled the rooms, two living creatures bedded together among the pack rat's hoard. And the hot summer sun baking the flies that crept up the windowpanes ... lying, the two of them, slippery with sweat, covered by nothing, spread out on the bed with the glare blinding them into an indolent, careless stupor.

There, in that high loft, they had eaten their breakfast, had shared the old bathtub, had cooked and ironed, had roamed naked through the rooms, playing the little piano, had sat, in the evening, listening to the radio, staring into the red button of its dial light, the two of them combined on the couch, on the sagging, dust-sodden couch.

Although, according to Tweany, she was not much good that way. She had learned-been taught-to rest her weight on her shoulder blades and not on her coccyx; that way she could raise her hips higher. But other than purely muscular tensions, she had developed no responses; the experience brought her nothing, and nothing was what she gave back.

It was, to her, very like the time the doctor had stuck his metal probe into her nose to break off a polyp. The same pressure, the same too-large physical unit forcing its way inside her; then pain, and a little blood, and the crickets chirping in the grass of the yard below the window.

Tweany said she was no good: small and bony and frigid. Gordon, of course, had no opinion; he expected nothing but concavity, and that was what he got: no more and no less.

"Tweany," Mary Anne said, "you can't pretend we haven't been-"

"Don't get upset," Tweany said silkily. "You'll get ulcers."

Mary Anne leaned toward him until her small, tight face was almost touching his. "What have you been doing the last two months?"

"Absolutely nothing. Except my art."

"You're staying with somebody. You're never at home; I waited one night all night and you didn't show up. You didn't come home."

Tweany shrugged. "I was visiting."

Next to them, the discussion had become heated. "I never heard of that," Nitz was saying.

"You could have," the blonde told him. "Don't you have a radio? Every Wednesday night Joe has a program over that San Mateo good-music station. Listen to that. He writes up his material; he likes to do it all himself."

"I tried listening to that stuff," Nitz said, "but I can't get with it. It's-old."

Lapsing into silence, Mary Anne withdrew into her own thoughts; the conversation meant nothing to her.

"It's not old. It's still going on; the same material you're doing, only they don't call it by the same name. Milhaud, up in Oakland. And Roger Sessions is at Berkeley; go listen to him. Sid Hethel is at Palo Alto; he's about the best there is. Joe knows him .. they're old friends."

"I thought it was nothing but Mozart," Nitz said.

The blonde continued: "On Sunday, when the shop is closed,

Joe has a two-hour record concert. You should go."

"You mean people just walk in?"

"Fifteen or so people show up. He plays atonal, early baroque, whatever they want." With a flicker of her blue eyes she glanced up at Tweany. "I saw you there; you showed up once."

"That's so," Tweany admitted. "You brought out a tray of coffee for us, halfway through."

"Did you enjoy yourself?"

"Very much. That's an extraordinary shop he has."

"What's that?" Mary Anne said sharply. She woke up, then: the conversation had ceased to be abstract. Now it was dealing with reality, and she began to pay attention.

"The new record shop," Tweany said.

Mary Anne turned to confront the blonde. "Do you know that man?" she demanded, recalling in a rush the record shop, the looming shape of the man with his vest and gold watch and tweed suit.

"Joe?" The blonde smiled. "Oh, yes. We're old friends of Joe's."

"Where'd you meet him?" She experienced a kind of horror, as if she were being told about some personal crime.

"In Washington, D.C."

"You're from out of town, aren't you?"