“What was about Sally? What are you talking about?”
“The snake had been eating pets for months, you didn’t care. Then you met Sally, all of a sudden you want to kill the thing. You were doing it for her sake.”
“Was I?”
“Grandpa. Come on.”
“Maybe.”
“Totally.”
“Well,” my grandfather said. “There are worse reasons for killing, believe me.”
*
My grandfather took Sally to an overpriced crab house in Boynton Beach, a rope-trimmed tourist trap that my grandmother had despised. On the way home, as though her ghost had poisoned his chowder, my grandfather experienced cramps. As a rule, he avoided shellfish and pork because, while he had long since left his religion in the Neolithic, where he felt it belonged, he retained, in his words, “a kosher belly.” The trouble in his stomach embarrassed him obscurely, so he kept it to himself. It would be a matter of getting to a toilet as soon as possible. On the way home from the crab house, he obliged himself to drive patiently. The effort required kept his mind off the pain.
“Good lord, I just remembered,” he said. He had parked the LeSabre and they were walking toward Sally’s cluster of units through the luminous Florida dark. She had invited him to come have a look at her place. Curiosity about the interior arrangements of one another’s units was a kind of currency at Fontana Village, one in which even my grandfather traded. There was not necessarily anything more to her invitation, he had decided, than that. “I think I might have forgotten to unplug my soldering iron.”
That afternoon he had recapped a buzzing old Zenith at the request of his neighbor Pearl Abramowitz. There was nothing he had been able to do for Pearl’s other complaint: that increasingly, all the people singing and talking on her radio seemed to be doing so in Spanish. He had, however, remembered to turn off the soldering iron. It was not even a question of remembering; he had made a habit of it. That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.
He could see that he had let Sally down, but she covered it with a joke. “I’ve only known you three days,” she said. “But that doesn’t sound like something you would forget.”
This was undeniable. “No, but if I don’t check . . .”
“Of course. I totally understand.”
“I’ll be over in ten minutes. Five minutes.”
“Go.”
He hurried back to his unit and repaired to the bathroom, where fighting, though fierce, was mercifully brief. He washed up and discharged three precise bursts of Alpine Summer air freshener. He went back out to the living room. The yellow sofa, the whitewashed wicker étagère, the expressionless walls had a disintoxicating effect on his imagination. He saw the elaborate scale model of LAV One on its mound of simulated lunar surface, on which he had lavished thousands of hours and dollars, for what it was: five pounds of painted plastic scrap sitting on ten dollars’ worth of plaster cloth and chicken wire. What was he doing, chasing after Sally Sichel? “Asking her out,” so improbably, on a “date”? The recliner they’d had since Riverdale, in which my grandmother used to sit, watching Jeopardy! and yelling deliberately incorrect guesses at the screen, as though trying to throw the contestants off their game, leveled its mute reproach.
Sit, it seemed to implore him. Stay. Slacken. Vegetate.
The telephone rang. It was Sally.
“You all right?” she said, and for a moment he thought she had inferred from a grimace, a sharp intake of breath, the uproar in his belly. Had he groaned or, God forbid, farted without realizing it? “Did your house burn down?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I had turned it off.”
“I see.” Her tone was distinctly disbelieving. This irked my grandfather for a moment until he recalled that in fact he was lying to Sally. She was an observant person, a noticer. There was no human quality that my grandfather held in higher regard. “Well,” she said, “that’s too bad.”
“It’s too bad?”
“Yes. A little fire might help with the cold feet.”
This remark puzzled my grandfather—his feet were fine—but then he understood: Sally had no idea that his dinner had given him a cramp. She supposed he was just running away from her, that he was afraid of having, as he put it to me, “feelings in that direction.” Once he understood, he was shocked. It came as a worse shock to discover, on searching the feelings he was afraid of having, that Sally’s supposition was correct. There had been nothing wrong with his stone crab chowder apart from too much salt. The cramp was a case of nerves, not food poisoning.
“Okay, okay,” he said, glaring back at the haunted recliner. “I’ll be right over.”
The unit did not belong to Sally but to an old friend who was living now with a daughter in Tel Aviv. The friend and her late husband had bought the unit, remodeled it, and furnished it with lots of raffia and glass, and then a week after they moved in, the husband had keeled over on the Fontana Village tennis courts and died. Everything that was not raffia or glass had been painted, covered, or tiled in soft tones of rose and ash-gray, a modish palette that Sally didn’t care for. A bedsheet had been tacked to the large white wall by the patio doors, where it struck a discordant note, because it was patterned with green and gold dandelions, and because it was a bedsheet.
“You have one of your paintings under there?”
Sally shook her head. She turned to the bedsheet on the wall and lifted it with both hands. My grandfather went and stood underneath this impromptu canopy to look. It was a large photographic portrait in black and white, mounted and matted in a black metal frame. It was a close-up shot of a moonfaced beauty and a handsome fellow with satyric eyebrows, both around his age. They were posed with their heads together, their eyes twinkling with acceptance and wisdom.
“Little did they know,” my grandfather said.
She nodded. They stepped out from under the bedsheet and she let it fall. “I have to keep it covered,” she said. “I don’t have the patience for hindsight.”
“Too much like regret,” my grandfather said.
A viable moment had arrived. Sally leaned in to kiss him. He got a late start and then misjudged her angle of approach. There was an unfortunate encounter between her teeth and his chin. She clapped a hand to her mouth, her cheeks ablaze, and made an adjustment to her dental work.
My grandfather dabbed at the bite mark on his chin, checked his fingertips for blood. “Wee wow,” he said.
“Shit,” Sally said, having restored order in her mouth. “Is this going to be a disaster?”
My grandfather had a hunch about it, but he kept it to himself. She reached out and took hold of his chin and examined it, then used her purchase on his chin to guide her mouth toward his. There had been pink grapefruit in her salad at dinner and he thought he could taste it on her lips.
“How about we give it one last try?” Sally said.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” said my grandfather.
But thirteen minutes later, when she emerged from the master bath having made it plain that she intended to fuck him, the expanse of her naked body, lavishly freckled and presented without modesty, overwhelmed my grandfather. An inner coaxial was cut, and his head filled with white noise, and then he passed out. When he came to his senses, he was on his back on the bed in possession of what felt like a monstrous erection. Stretched out alongside him, Sally reached to take hold of it. Before her fingers even brushed against his skin, however, my grandfather came. The spurt was so abrupt and unadvertised that it had the character of a practical joke. Sally flinched and looked slightly offended. My grandfather’s sense of humiliation was acute. It took everything he had not to get up and leave. Pack his car, drive to California without stopping. Only California would not really be far enough.
Sally went back into the bathroom. This time when she came out, she was wearing a robe.