The Heckler

Do you remember?she said with her hands again, and an expression of total sadness crossed her face and Carella remembered what she had said to him not a moment ago,We were so young, and he wondered what she’d really meant and suddenly he took her into his arms.

She came to him desperately, as if she had been waiting for his arms all day long. She clung to him, and he was not surprised to find her hot tears on the side of his neck.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” he said. Weeping, she kept her face buried against the side of his neck so that she could not “hear” him. He twisted his right hand in her hair and pulled back her head. “What’s the matter?”

She shook her head.

“Tired of your humdrum existence?” he asked.

She did not answer.

“Bored by the four walls?”

Still she would not answer.

“Long for a life of romantic adventure?” Carella paused. “What’s the matter, honey? Look, your eyes are running all over your face, and after you spent so much time making them up.”

Teddy sat bolt upright in his lap, an expression of shocked outrage on her face. Her black brows swooped down. Her right hand darted up in front of his face. Rapidly the fingers spelled out their message.

My eyes!

“Well, honey—”

Then youdidnotice! And you probably noticed everything else, too! The—

“Honey, what are you getting all—?”

Shut up! Get away from me!

She tried to get off his lap, but his hands slid up under the robe, and though she struggled to free herself, his hands were strong upon her and at last she relaxed in his arms, and his hands roamed beneath the loose gown, touching her belly and her smooth flanks, stroking her gently as he spoke, his lips moving beneath her listening fingers.

“So sometimes you feel like an old matron,” he said. “Sometimes you roam this big shell of a house in your dirty dungarees and you wipe runny noses all day long and keep cigarette butts out of the twins’ mouths, and wonder when the hell your adventuresome husband is coming home. And sometimes you long for it to be the way it used to be, Teddy, before we were married, when every time was like the first time and the last time rolled into one, when my eyes went up like butane every time I saw you, when it was young, Teddy, when it was new and shining and young.”

She stared at her husband in solemn wonder because there were times when he seemed to be such an insensitive lout, times when he seemed to be only the uncouth slob who told dirty jokes in a detective squadroom and who brought all of his grubbiness home with him, times when she felt alone in her silent world without even the comfort of the person who had been to her the one shining spark in her life, and then suddenly—suddenly there he was again, the person she had known all along, her Steve, the person who knew the things she was feeling, who had felt them himself, and who could talk about them until, until….

“And you want it to be that way again, honey, that wild crazy young flying way that was for kids, Teddy, but we’re not kids, anymore. So you dressed yourself up for me tonight. It’s Fanny’s day off, so you rushed the kids into their beds, and you put on your black shorty nightgown—I saw it when the wind caught your robe—and your good silk robe and your fancy high-heeled slippers, and you put that shadow all round your eyes, and you left your lips naked and Teddy, Teddy baby, I love you anywhich way you are, in a potato sack, or digging in the back yard, or right after you had the babies and they rolled you in all sweaty and stinking on the maternity table, or taking a bath, or cooking, or swimming, dressed, naked, reading, weeping, baby, baby I love you and it only gets better all the time and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to cater to your silly back-to-seventeen movement and get all excited because you’re in a nightgown and high-heeled pumps, especially, especially when I’ve been planning onexactly this all day long, all goddam day long! Take your fingers off my mouth, I want to kiss you.”

He kissed her, and he didn’t ask her afterward whether or not there was any of that flying jazz they had known as kids, or whether or not the world went up in neon, and whether or not Mongolian gongs and bugles went off—he didn’t ask her. Instead he slipped the robe from her shoulders, lowered it to her waist, kissed the full rich globes of her breasts, felt her trembling beneath his fingers, and carried her to the new grass lining the patio. And then he held her to him naked, and he didn’t ask her anything, and she didn’t say anything, and whereas neither of them flew and whereas there was no flash of neon and no crashing of gongs or bleating of bugles, he had the distinct impression that the sky was crumbling and that he was about to fall off the edge of the earth. And, from the way she clung to him so desperately, he knew she was experiencing the same odd sensation.

5.