He wondered if she hadn’t lost her marbles. He had heard that women sometimes did. Had he been wasting his time? He didn’t want to fool around with a woman who had lost her marbles. He knew he wasn’t divine. If he was, someone would have said so before and if he had been divine and had been convinced of this, he would have concealed it—not through modesty but through an instinct of self-preservation. “Sometimes I think I’m good-looking,” he said earnestly to try and modify her praise. He finished his beer. “Now I have to get back to the store.”
Melissa went shopping in New York a few days later. She stood on the platform with her neighbor, Gertrude Bender, waiting for the midmorning train. As the train came around the curve the station agent pushed out on a wagon one of those yellow wooden boxes that are used for transporting coffins. This simple fact of life came as a blow to Melissa’s high spirits. “It must be Gertrude Lockhart,” her friend whispered. “They’re sending her back to Indiana.”
“I didn’t know she was dead,” Melissa said.
“She hung herself in the garage,” her friend said, still whispering, and they boarded the train.
Now it was not true that nothing happened in Proxmire Manor; the truth was that eventfulness in the community took such eccentric curves that it was difficult to comprehend. It was not a force of discreetness that kept Melissa from knowing Gertrude Lockhart’s story; it was that the story was more easily forgotten than understood. She had been, considering her widespread reputation for licentiousness, a singularly winsome woman; light-boned, quick, a little nervous. Her skin was very white. This was not a point of beauty, a stirring pallor. She just happened to have a white skin. Her hair was ash-blond but it had lost its shine. Her eyes were bright, small, dark and set close together. Her ears were too big, a fact that made her seem basically unserious. At the fourth- or fifth-string boarding school she had attended she had been known as Dirty Gertie. She was married, happily enough, to Pete Lockhart and had three small children. Her downfall began not with immortal longings but with an uncommonly severe winter when the main soil line from their house to the septic tank froze. The toilets backed up into the bathtubs and sinks. Nothing drained. Her husband went off to work. Her children caught the school bus. At half-past eight she found herself alone in a house that had, in a sense, ceased to function. The place was not luxurious but it appeared to be civilized; it appeared to promise something better than relieving herself in a bucket. At nine o’clock she took a drink of whisky and began to call the plumbers of Parthenia. There were seven and they were all busy. She kept repeating that her case was an emergency. One firm offered, as a favor, to stir up for her a retired plumber and presently an old man in an old car came to the house. He looked sadly at the mess in the bathtubs and the sinks and told her that he was a plumber, not a ditchdigger, and that she would have to find someone to dig a trench before he could repair the drain. She had another drink, put on some lipstick and drove into Parthenia.
She went first to the state employment office where eighteen or twenty men were sitting around looking for work but none of them was willing to dig a ditch and she saw as one of the facts of her life, her time, that standards of self-esteem had advanced to a point where no one was able to dig a hole. She went to the liquor store to get some whisky and told the clerk her problems. He said he thought he could get someone to help. He made a telephone call. “I’ve got you somebody,” he said. “He’s not as bad as he sounds. Give him two dollars an hour and all the whisky he can drink. His father-in-law fired him out of the house a couple of weeks ago and he’s on the bum, but he’s a nice guy.” She went home and had another drink. Sometime later the doorbell rang. She had expected an old man with the shakes but what she saw was a man in his thirties. He wore tight jeans and a dark pullover and stood on her steps with his hands thrust into his back pockets, his chest pushed forward in a curious way as if this were a gesture of pride, friendship or courtship. His skin was dark, rucked deeply around the mouth like the seams on a boot, and his eyes were brown. His smile was bare amorousness. It was his only smile, but she didn’t know this. He would smile amorously at his shovel, amorously into his whisky glass, amorously into the hole he had dug, and when it was time to go home he would smile amorously at the ignition switch on his car. She offered him some whisky but he said he would wait. She showed him where the tools were and he began to dig.
