Not a Creature Was Stirring(87)

He sat up, looked around, and touched his hair. It was stiff with dried sweat and very clammy. Through his bedroom windows, he could see the glow of security lamps on the back terrace and chart the passage of a heavily falling snow. He didn’t bother looking in the other direction. Over there was the writing desk, with the top left drawer sitting slightly ajar, where he’d tried to close it and hadn’t been able to. In that drawer were Mother’s candlesticks. Every once in a while, it would hit him: what he had done and what he had tried to do, first in attempting to sell them and then when he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. The picture that came to him most clearly was of the pavement just outside the main doors of Pennsylvania Station. The derelict with the mud in his beard. The crazy lady with the vest and no shirt. The fake veteran with the American flag sewn across his chest. Most of all, the people going in and out with the trains, so different from what they would have been like if this were Los Angeles. Out there you got a lot of kids, teenage and stupid. Here it was mostly well-dressed men in middle age, with somewhere in particular to go. He hadn’t been able to classify himself, although he had tried. He had tried again last night, in the wake of Emma’s dying, nearly catatonic with dope and guilt. Now he decided not to bother again, not yet. It was too much. He didn’t have the energy and he didn’t have the courage.

He got up, crossed the room, turned on his night-table lamp, and sat down on the edge of his bed. Down the hall, a door opened and closed, letting padded footsteps into the corridor. He got up, stuck his head out the door, and caught Anne Marie just as she was disappearing into the bathroom. She looked terrible, her hair snarled, her body—much fatter than he’d realized, seeing her in clothes—squeezed into a yellow velour bathrobe that made her look like a stuffed canary covered in Saran Wrap. Her face was as sour as he’d ever seen anybody’s. Looking at it, he realized sour wasn’t an expression he had much experience with, these days. Menacing, yes. Seductive, certainly. Exasperated, every day. But sour—that was an emotional territory confined exclusively to Engine House.

He shut the door of his room again and then, on impulse, went to check the writing desk. The candlesticks were still there, wrapped in a thin plastic bag from a Pathmark in the Jersey town where he had spent half an hour getting gas and lunch. He took them out, felt their weight, and thought about putting them back where they belonged. Then he wrapped them in the plastic bag again and pitched them into the drawer.

Last night, wallowing in the precursor to this condition, he had promised himself that as soon as he got up this morning, he would talk to Bennis. As soon as. Now he was up, and it wasn’t even dawn yet. Bennis was on vacation. Did it make sense to wake a woman from a sound sleep when you wanted to ask for her help?

He got off the bed again, opened his door again, stuck his head into the hall again. He felt like one of those souvenir gooney birds they sold in the Stuckey’s off southern highways, going up and down, up and down, in a senseless imitation of perpetual motion. He stepped into the hall and closed his bedroom door behind him.

All around, between all the candlesticks on all the chests in the hall, there were holly baskets: Mother’s traditional first preparation for Twelfth Night. He squinted into the distance and saw there was a holly basket on the chest without candlesticks, too—but of course, there would be. Christmas decorations at Engine House were orchestrated with all the battlefield solemnity the manager of Rockefeller Center brought to the lighting of the giant tree. Now someone knew those candlesticks were gone, and he only had to worry about who.

He crossed the hall and started counting doors, until he came to the fourth to the north of his. He raised his hand to knock, then thought better of it. No use waking Bennis the way the volunteer firemen would. Christ only knew what she’d think was going on, before he had a chance to tell her it was only him. He opened the door very slowly and stuck his head in.

Bennis’s bed was empty. It had been slept in—or wrestled in, from the look of it—but it was empty. He opened the door wider and tried to search the room.

“Bennis?”

“Here,” she said.

The voice came from behind him, and he jumped. Just like a bad actor in an even worse comedy.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Bennis slipped under his arm—she was small enough and he was tall enough so she hardly had to stoop—and went to turn on the night-table lamp.

“I was in the bathroom,” she said. She picked up her cigarettes and started fumbling with the paraphernalia: lighter, ashtray, butt. “I couldn’t sleep. I take it you couldn’t sleep either.”