The Stand:BOOK I(54)

"No, I don't think I am. Are you?"

"Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?"

He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.

"You look like a stork," she said. "Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor."

"Pleased to know you. I'm Larry Underwood."

He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT'S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn't changed. It rose from your belly and escaped from between your teeth in the same jolly go-to-hell way.

Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel. Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV when he was just a kid.

"When I heard you coming, I almost hid," she said. "I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy."

"The monster-shouter?"

"Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?"

"What I call him."

"Very apt," she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. "He reminds me of an insane Diogenes."

"Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster," Larry said, and laughed again.

She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.

"He's not sick, either," Larry said. "But most of the others are."

"The doorman at my building seems very well," Rita said. "He's still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don't know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?"

"I really don't know you well enough to say."

"No, of course you don't." She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. "It was my husband's. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That's just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry."

A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.

"He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?"

Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, "I don't think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?"

"I believe it's a .32." She took it out of her bag and he saw there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn't follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. "I believe I'll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?"

"I don't know," he said apprehensively. "I don't really think-"

She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. "Bull's-eye," she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.

"Real good," Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.

"I couldn't shoot a person with it. I'm quite sure of that. And soon there won't be anyone to shoot, will there?"

"Oh, I don't know about that."

"You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?"

"Huh? No!" He began to blush again.

"As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they're only rocks again, aren't they?"

"I guess that's right."

"Of course," she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. "And if a stick-up man wanted them, I'd not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier's. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own."

"What are you going to do now?" Larry asked her.

"What would you suggest?"

"I just don't know," Larry said, and sighed.

"My answer exactly."

"You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je …  and masturbate on home plate." He could feel himself blushing again.

"What an awful walk for him," she said. "Why didn't you suggest something closer?" She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.

"What's that?" Larry asked.

"Vitamin E," she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.

"There's nobody in the bars," Larry said suddenly. "I went into Pat's on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn't even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out."

They sighed together, like a chorus.

"You're very pleasant to be with," she said. "I like you very much. And it's wonderful that you're not crazy."

"Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor." He was surprised and pleased.

"Rita. I'm Rita."

"Okay."

"Are you hungry, Larry?"

"As a matter of fact, I am."

"Perhaps you'd take the lady to lunch."

"That would be a pleasure."

She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.

Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn't), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.

They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 28

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.

She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the knife-rack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, half-curious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist.

At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own. She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, not to mention a song she had learned in Vacation Bible School-"I'll Be a Sunbeam for Him."

 – before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye -

But it wasn't an eye; it was a pie. She turned to it and saw there was a fly crawling on her pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye-bye, Mr. Fly, say so long to Frannie's pie.