along with other brands. Mona’d parked her wad on the coin slot. Thumbed it like a kidney. She’d kept on climbing, to the fourth and top floor, I was sure.
I climbed the first flight of stairs. Alone on the darkened landing I tried to clear my mind. For eighteen hours a day I had kept Mona off the streets of Cincinnati. Her sister was three hundred miles away, in Richmond, our real destination. Sally had promised me she would take charge of Mona’s care. There Mona might get straightened out, live without me. With me she would only get worse. Yet I knew, as I stood on the landing, mustering strength to keep climbing, that I wouldn’t be able to let her go. That was why I’d veered off the I-64 exit ramp, come to Spink Hotel.
Mona was still asleep. I lit a cigarette and got out of bed. I straddled a rickety chair, rocking with a furry squeak. Our room had a ponderous chiffonier beside a door to a tiny bathroom. On the other side of the bed a window overlooked a funeral home. Dust hung in the sunlight streaming in, lacing the carpet with hieroglyphics. The bed had a low headboard depicting a pastoral scene in low relief—a nymph being enticed by a satyr, in a scratchy, ivory stain. The satyr was playing a flute of some sort and the nymph was shielding her seat of love with both hands, fingers entwined. Smoking, I rocked with the back of the chair.
From a room below I heard hammering, intermittently, yet with what seemed a willed intent. I was now on my second cigarette. Smoke from the first blimped over the bed. In her sleep, Mona’s breath mushroomed, lofted smoke toward the scarred plaster ceiling. Rust streaks showed in Mona’s frowsy hair. The hammering had given way to the sweeping clip of a carpenter’s plane. Next door, beyond the bathroom, the chiffonier, a lachrymose bleat of a radio emitted theme songs from old soaps, “Stella Dallas,” “Lorenzo Jones,” “Mary Noble Backstage Wife.” Must be a geezer next door, over ninety, or were these songs meant for me. He walks with me and He talks with me, the carillon chimed, way off key.
Mona slept like she used to once, as if in a sodden sleep of depression. She used to total sixteen hours, waking up to watch Turner Classics, play solitaire, do crossword puzzles. I would come home to find her waiting up for me, with a list of words she was stuck on. Animal waste, urea, golden brass, ormolu. Oh the blessing of torpor, easy ease as I did my tasks, drove a taxi, worked in a housepainters crew, did whatever it took to keep her happy.
All this before the telephone call from her shadowy lover, Roebuck.
The chiming stopped, the radio stopped, the carpenter planing coffin boards stopped, in sequence, as if on cue. I pictured Roebuck’s oblong noggin, his bulging, baleful left eye. A black patch masked his right eye. I had inquired concerning the telephone call—your lover, who might he be? She had touched up a photo of Tom Cruise, inked in an eye patch, blackened in teeth. “This isn’t the Roebuck I know. He’s the Roebuck you think you know.”
She raised her head up to the headboard. Scrutinized me out of a sunny haze, knowing instantly where my mind was, on the Roebuck she, not I, had known. She’d claimed Roebuck was a lobbyist for Harlan County Strip mines. Promoting strip mining in D.C., driving a tan SUV. She had met Roebuck in a Covington, Kentucky, strip club in her last little manic excursion across the Ohio River—where she had been—mistake—a cooperative cocktail waitress. She had run off with Roebuck in his SUV, barreled around D.C. with him for a glorious month while I suffered an agony of worry back home. Dumped, she had come back home. Come back to me on a Greyhound bus.
Roebuck had sent her a postcard, last week, the Washington Monument. He had printed in caps “I need you. Let bygones be bygones,” and in lower case “Meet me at the Harrington Hotel. A fleabag on Tenth Street.” He’d telephoned her at home. I’d picked up the receiver. Roebuck’s baritone had bombarded my ear like amplified Ezio Pinza. Can you connect me with Mona? Connect? A singing telephone call. Unwillingly I had connected him to her. Before she picked up the receiver she had taken a drag from my cigarette. She had stubbed it out, as she was doing now.
“We are going to march on the White House. You were one of us but you finked out.”
Said Mona. The loonies, the kooks, the feebs, the nuts and bolts of the nation. Fink out, a Roebuck locution. My Roebuck’s, not hers. For only I used words like fink out. Only I had thought of marching on the White House once, so far back in time it seemed primeval.
Mona squinted. She clenched her fists and rolled her eyeballs. She was receiving messages. My gut knotted as I waited for her to get through yet another delusion. Her demons were floating across the room as she motioned them out the window. “Out! No, don’t move! Sit!” Sally had to keep her in Richmond. Sally’s husband had to pay for the therapy. Alex, a textile engineer.
This D.C. business was a ruse. No march. No Roebuck.
“We don’t need you anymore. We’re strong. We have each other.” From Mona, in a monotone.
I was able to get out of the chair. “I’m going to telephone Roebuck personally.”
Extemporize, invent! Get her mind into phase with mine. A bar of Dial and a can of Rise would serve for receiver and mouthpiece. For these I went to the bathroom, pried the Dial off a squash colored stain, grabbed the Rise from the medicine cabinet—our Dial, our Rise. Squirting Rise into my left ear, I put in that call to D.C. Front desk, please. Long distance!
“We can’t make it tonight. The goddamned brakes went out last night. We’re stuck here, stranded, up shit creek without a paddle.”
I lowered the bar of Dial. Felt the seashell pulse in my tympanum, the Rise glob insanely seething. Heard, or thought I heard, a whisper, insidious. Give Mona up. Put her out of your life. Or was that Roebuck whispering?
I laid the Dial and the Rise on the bed table. Watched her pick them up, her moving lips.
“Roebuck,” said her lips. She clenched her fists, she glared at me. “Please don’t try to telephone him. You know he won’t listen to you.”
“I will listen,” I protested passionately, knowing she wouldn’t listen, heed, do anything to help me help her. I had to watch her go to the bathroom, I had to sit on the bed while she brushed her teeth. This she did with concentration. Her straggly hair showing rust streaks which she seemed to be trying to lather out. Soapsuds laced her nipples and aureoles, seen through the bathroom mirror. The pipes groaned as she rinsed.
We had a late breakfast in the coffee shop. It adjoined the bar and beauty parlor, these facing away from the lobby, fronting a side street of plum-colored brick. There was a familiar marble-topped counter, a tarnished nickel coffee urn, booths, a tessellated floor, an ornate cash register from times gone by, a glassed-in cigar and candy counter, another with slices of various pies, apple, lemon meringue, pumpkin.
Mona was slumped on her side of the booth. Her eyes were dulled. She was wearing her purple T-shirt, appliqued with a yellow cello. Brown crystals choked up the salt cellar. The plum-colored bricks outside were rippling with maple-leaf shadows.
Suddenly Mona spun something dire for me out. “This town is a good place for you. Your family is here. Your friends. Me, I’ll be moving on. On and on,” she crooned.
I made myself tune Mona out. The plum-colored brick, the soft maples, the darker green of a tree lawn on the other side of this side street, an embankment, steps, a front porch, green shingles, blazing white imbricated boards. Black Packard, Dad’s, in the driveway. Other members of my family in other booths, for the coffee shop was familiar, the cashier had a bow tie, red polka dot, a clip-on, like Dad had on. He had nicotine-stained teeth like Dad.
I thought of E. A. behind the prescription counter of the vanished West Side Drug Store. A laxative is it you need now. Or a ladies
