Johnson ate his pot roast and his pie and went into the bar. It was crudely lighted by illuminated beer signs and smelled like a soil excavation. The only customers were two farmers. He went to the end of the bar farthest from them and drank another glass of sherry. Then he bowled a game on the miniature bowling machine and went out the side door onto the street. The town was dark; turned back on itself, totally unfamiliar with the needs of travelers, wanderers, the great flowing world. Every store was shut. He glanced at the Unitarian church across the green. It was a white frame building with columns, a bell tower and a spire that vanished into the starlight. It seemed incredible to him that his people, his inventive kind, the first to exploit glass store fronts, bright lights and continuous music, should ever have been so backward as to construct a kind of temple that belonged to the ancient world. He went around the edges of the green and turned up Boat Street as far as Honora’s. Lights burned here and there in the old house but he saw no one. He went back to the bar and watched a fight on television.
The favorite was an aging club fighter named Mercer. The challenger was a man named Santiago who could have been Italian or Puerto Rican. He was fleshy, muscular and stupid. Mercer had it all his way for the first two rounds. He was a fair, slight man, his face lined, so Johnson thought, with common domestic worries. He would have kissed his wife good-bye in some kitchen an hour ago and he was fighting to keep up the payments on the washing machine. Agile, intelligent and tough, he seemed unbeatable until early in the third round when Santiago opened a cut over his right eye. Blood streamed down Mercer’s face and chest and he slipped on the bloody canvas. Santiago reopened the cut in the fifth and Mercer was blinded again and staggered helplessly around the ring. The fight was stopped in the sixth. Mercer’s spirit would be crushed, his wife and children would be heartbroken and his washing machine would be taken away. Johnson went upstairs, got into a suit of pajamas printed with scenes of a steeplechase and read a paper-back novel.
His novel was about a young woman with millions of dollars and houses in Rome, Paris, New York and Honolulu. In the first chapter she made it with her husband in a ski hut. In the second chapter she made it with a butler in the pantry. In the third chapter her husband and the butler made it in the swimming pool. The heroine then made it with a chambermaid. Her husband discovered them and joined the fun. The cook then made it with the postman and the cook’s twelve-year-old daughter made it with the groom. On it would go for six hundred pages. It would end, he knew, in religious institutions. The heroine, having practiced every known indecency, would end up in a cloistered order with a shaven head and a lead ring. The last you saw of her depraved husband would be his feet in the rude sandals of a monk as he pressed through a snowstorm carrying a vial of antibiotics to a sick whore in the mountains. It seemed like a poor fare for a lonely man and he felt from the hard mattress where he lay an accrual of loneliness from the thousands like himself who had lain there, hankering not to be alone. He turned off the light, slept and dreamed of swans, a lost suitcase, a snow-covered mountain. He saw his mother lifting the ornaments off the Christmas tree with trembling hands. He woke in the morning feeling natural, boisterous and even loving, but the stranger with a hidden face is always waiting by the lake, there is always a viper in the garden, a dark cloud in the west. The eggs that Mabel brought him for breakfast were swimming in grease. As soon as he stepped out of the Viaduct House a dog began to bark at him. The dog followed him across the green, snapping at his ankles. He ran up Boat Street and some children on their way to school laughed uproariously at his panic. When he got to Honora’s his high spirits were spent.
