The New Yorker Stories

He had already been somebody’s husband, but he and his wife were separated. He was also separated from his daughter, but she looked so much like his wife that he thought of them as one. Toward the end, he had sometimes got confused and talked baby talk to his wife and complained about his life to his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. His wife wrote to his grandmother about the way he was acting, and the old woman sent him a hundred dollars and told him to “buy a psychiatrist,” as if they were shirts. Instead, he bought his daughter a pink plastic bunny that held a bar of soap and floated in the bath. The bunny had blue eyebrows and a blue nose and an amazed look, probably because its stomach was soap. He had bought her the bunny because he was not ungenerous, and he spent the rest on Fontina cheese for his wife and hash for himself. They had a nice family gathering—his daughter nose-to-nose with the bunny, his wife eating the cheese, he smoking hash. His wife said that his smoking had killed her red-veined maranta. “How can you keep smoking something that killed a plant?” she kept asking. Actually, he was glad to see the maranta dead. It was a creepy plant. It looked as if its veins had blood in them. Smoke hadn’t killed the plant, though. A curse that his friend Carlos put on it at his request did it. It died in six days: the leaves turned brown at the tips and barely unfolded in the daytime, and soon it fell over the rim of the pot, where it hung until it turned completely brown.

Plant dead, wife gone, Michael still has his dog and his grandmother, and she can be counted on for words of encouragement, mail-order delicacies, and money. Now that they are alone together, he devotes most of his time to Silas, and takes better care of him than ever before. He gives Silas Milk-Bones so that his teeth will be clean. He always has good intentions, but before he knows it he has smoked some hash and put on “One Little Story That the Crow Told Me,” and there is Silas listening to the music, with his clean, white teeth bared.

Michael is living in a house that belongs to some friends named Prudence and Richard. They have gone to Manila. Michael doesn’t have to pay any rent—just the heat and electricity bills. Since he never turns a light on, the bill will be small. And on nights when he smokes hash he turns the heat down to fifty-five. He does this gradually—smoke for an hour, turn it from seventy to sixty-five; smoke another hour and put it down to fifty-five. Prudence, he discovers, is interested in acupuncture. There is a picture in one of her books of a man with his face contorted with agony, with a long, thin spike in his back. No. He must be imagining that. Usually Michael doesn’t look at the books that are lying around. He goes through Prudence’s and Richard’s bureau drawers. Richard wears size thirty-two Jockey shorts. Prudence has a little blue barrette for her hair. Michael has even unwrapped some of the food in the freezer. Fish. He thinks about defrosting it and eating it, but then he forgets. He usually eats two cans of Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup for lunch and four Chunky Pecan candy bars for dinner. If he is awake in time for breakfast, he smokes hash.

One evening, the phone rings. Silas gets there first, as usual, but he can’t answer it. Poor old Silas. Michael lets him out the door before he answers the phone. He notices that Ray has come calling. Ray is a female German shepherd, named by the next-door neighbor’s children. Silas tries to mount Ray.

“Richard?” says the voice on the telephone.

“Yeah. Hi,” Michael says.

“Is this Richard?”

“Right.”

“It doesn’t sound like you, Richard.”

“You sound funny, too. What’s new?”

“What? You really sound screwed up tonight, Richard.”

“Are you in a bad mood or something?” Michael counters.

“Well, I might be surprised that we haven’t talked for months, and I call and you just mutter.”

“It’s the connection.”

“Richard, this doesn’t sound like you.”

“This is Richard’s mother. I forgot to say that.”

“What are you so hostile about, Richard? Are you all right?”

“Of course I am.”

“O.K. This is weird. I called to find out what Prudence was going to do about California.”

“She’s going to go,” Michael says.

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“Oh—I guess I picked the wrong time to call. Why don’t I call you back tomorrow?”

“O.K.,” Michael says. “Bye.”