“No thanks.” She resnaps the pocket to the coat with the keys and wads back inside. “My good deed and all that and maybe it’ll get back my bear.”
“Then what’s your name and address so I can repay you, in just stamps.”
Smiles. “Think I’m crazy?” Crosses the street, seeming from behind in her raised attached hood to ankle-length hem like a jaywalking sleeping bag or sleeping jaybag or some converse figure of speechlessness, though neither of those. I dial Information, give Helene’s borough and name and last four letters in it and get her number, think I shouldn’t, won’t, but can’t help myself tonight which true is a flimsy and untruthful excuse, but go on, what’s the harm? might even help in several unexplainable ways I haven’t time or mind to try to explain right now why I think they’re unexplainable or even why I haven’t time or mind right now, dial Information and give the same information and say “By the way, that’s Stuyvesant Place she lives on, right?” and he says “I’ve only one Helene Winiker and it’s on West a Hundred-tenth, still want it?” and I say “That’s right, she moved,” get the number, repeat it once to him and several times to myself, dial and a woman answers with the last four digits I dialed but combines them into two numbers, something I should have done to simplify memorizing the whole number.
“Ms. Winiker’s answering service? Or Mrs.? Miss?”
“Winiker will do. Any message?”
“She’s no doubt out. I don’t know why I invariably say that to answering services. Most likely my initial surprise, expecting the person I dialed to answer or some surrogate of hers I know, though she told me of you.”
“Who’s calling?”
“She’ll know what I mean by the following if she remembers who I am. Sure she will, if she contacts you in the next few days. Will she?”
“Up to her. Your message?”
“Tell her…That I wanted to reach her before the newspapers hit the stands?”
“That it?”
“No. Give me time to think.”
“Tell you what. Call back when you have it, but I’m very busy with other calls flashing and even one on hers.” Hangs up.
Who’d be calling her now? None of your bizwax and so forth. But obviously someone who didn’t know she was going to a wedding tonight, if she was telling me the truth. Was she? Hardly your affair, etcetera. Tend to your sodden pants, waterlogged socks and now soaked raincoat. Could I tell by her face though? Goddamn this man never gives up. Seemed truthful enough. Seemed more than that. Seemed truth-filled, overflowed, true-blue, tried and true, true to life and to type, whatever that means, trueborn and to form and the like, though do go on: straight-out, girl scout, foursquare and forthright forsooths ago and still going strong, and so did her voice, which was mellow, intelligible and calm, and her hair, which has nothing to do with truth but which I’d love to be able to portray in a poem to her she’d appreciatively receive in the mail and repeatedly read. Maybe she had a date or wanted to go to a movie alone or felt so disconcerted and repelled with my systematically surveying her and parts unknown that I sort of forced her to set off earlier than she’d planned to. That’s the case she could be home soon or home now but not answering the phone for fear I’ll phone or no fear but has someone home with her now and doesn’t want to answer the phone because she’s or they’re in the middle or start or end of something she or they don’t or he doesn’t want to interrupt. “True-tongued, homespun, abundantly gummed and lipped, not that I caught all of it,” Hasenai says with the aid of his transgressive-lator, “jest saying, past paying, moon’s out, so’s this lout, wood woofs, whelp in the wild and weep in a while, Jun (his first name), same as his son (I write only semidocumentary poems), go home!” Or a man phoning to get the message she left as to when she’ll be home and where’s her doorkey this time: left with the elevator man or taped to the side of her doorjamb or under her stairway handrail but surely not under the doormat. Or a friend or relative saying a good friend or relative’s very sick, so and so suddenly or after a long illness died, car-pool driver — if that’s how she gets to her school upstate and Monday’s one of her teaching days — saying he or she can’t make it and she’ll have to find another ride, or rider, if she’s the one who drives the car-pool car, saying he or she can’t make it, or friend, relative or mate of the rider or car-pool driver saying he or she’s sick, can’t make it or died. Or just a new or relatively new to recently old lover calling to say if she phones that he’s coming by tonight, which he can do because he has his own key and knows it’s all right. Or even Helene, phoning to see who might have called, learning that an anonymous indecisive man was just on the line.
