Door in your eye

Neighbourhood watch
May 3, 2009

My daughter, the very ?rst night I was in her house, she wanted right off to put me in a state of fear. I was not even through with my soup when she came out, very excited, with a stack of photographs. She had them in a plastic Baggie so they'd be safe even in a flood. What was in those pictures she needed to be so careful about? Somebody lying dead in the street in front of Charlotte's apartment, shot in his chest, a black man about eighteen years old. "See, Dad? Right in here? See the blood dripping out of his mouth? That's how fresh he was when I found him."
"So what?" I told her. "It's a dead man. Do I know him? There's not enough terrible stuff around, I have to look at this?"

But my daughter was so excited about her photos, she made me go through every single one, all the way until we hit the pictures where the police and ambulance drivers arrived and spoiled her angle with their barricades. "After here it's no good," she said, pulling down her mouth. "You can't see anything. They blocked me out before I could actually see rigor mortis."

"You saw too much already, Charlotte," I said. "You never should have seen it, and then you turn around and show it to me. Some idea of how to make somebody feel welcome."

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She knocked the stack of pictures hard against the tabletop to even them up. Then she slipped them back into the plastic bag. "I'm just saying it's not like Pottsville. You have to be careful here."

"I'm not afraid of this place," I said. "I've seen some things. I've been around the track a few times." If anything, I was afraid of my daughter, a grown woman who when she ?nds a dead man, the ?rst thing she does is take a hundred photographs. I said nothing. Charlotte is a single girl, though she was married once. We threw her a big foolish wedding with tailcoats and a white limousine and a bagpiper walking around. Her marriage held on for ten months. Since then, Charlotte has gone to one school after another, hoarding up degrees, this latest one in public health. I didn't see her getting married again. She was forty-one. Her face was still a little bit pretty, but she'd turned into one of these girls who carries a big load under her belt.

"I hate to say it, Dad, but you're naive," she said. "Things happen all over this city, and you never know where. This is a risky place."

"So what? I just stay in the house all day, afraid for my life?"

"Of course not. There's plenty of good places for you to go. There's the Mintz Centre on Nashville Street. They have games there, and cards, and I think they'll give you lunch and they don't charge."

"I'll go see about it," I said. "What kind of girls are there?"

"Old ones, I guess," she said.

"I don't mind," I said. "Maybe I can do some courting. Get myself a nice girlfriend."

"Oh, yeah? Been studying the pickup books? Getting your method down?"

"Hell, no," I said. "I don't have a method. My method is to be nice and congenial. Maybe you should try it."

My daughter turned away and went to picking at something on her big white arm. Charlotte didn't like to hear about me and girls. The whole reason she brought me down here was because of romance. I'd been mixing with a little Spanish girl in Pottsville. My daughter felt I was getting too romantic with her. So what? My wife was dead seven years, and there was no one else around.

I went back to my food, and this caused Charlotte to put her ?ngers in her ears and murmur to herself and look at her lap.

"What's your problem, sweetheart?"

"It's you and that soup. You tell everybody not to slurp, but I couldn't slurp as loud as you if I tried."

"OK, ?ne," I said. "I'll take some dessert."

"There's some butter pecan," she said.

"Any Hershey's?"

"I think so."

"I'd like mine with some Hershey's, please."

She took my plate and walked into the kitchen, her heels clomping all the way. Everything sounded loud and strange in this apartment, because although Charlotte had been here two years, she did not have much furniture, and she hadn't put any carpets down.

Through the open window, I could hear more banging coming from across the street. A man was standing on an upstairs balcony, really giving it to the door. I undid the brake on my chair and turned it so I could have a better view. He pounded for a while, but no one answered. By the time Charlotte returned, the man was so frustrated that he was banging very hard on the tin downspout that ran along the edge of the house. This scared a row of little green birds from their perch on the power line. They swarmed around in the air, making hoarse calls. Apparently, the man had done this kind of knocking a few times before. The downspout was pretty beat up, bent and crimped like a stubbed cigarette.

Charlotte set the ice cream in front of me.

"Look at this joker," I said, pointing at the man with my spoon. "He's put himself in real trouble with his wife. She's got him out here knocking like an asshole, and she won't let him in."

Charlotte let out a little chuckle. "Ah. How apropos. That's no one's wife up there. That particular neighbour of ours," said my daughter in an important, sneering voice, "is a whore."

"Charlotte," I said, "what did this woman ever do to you that you have to be so ugly behind her back?"

"I'm not being ugly, I'm being honest," Charlotte said. "She goes to bed with men for a living. Just watch. She's got johns going in and out of there twenty-four hours a day."

As if to prove Charlotte's point for her, the door opened a crack right then. The man stopped his banging and slipped inside. The street went quiet and the green birds came back to the power line.

***

The next day, Charlotte went off to class, and I stayed in the house. I couldn't go to the Mintz Centre. It would have been too much trouble for me. Even though Charlotte had said she was going to, she had not made the landlord come by and put a ramp on the steps. As a matter of fact, I don't really need the chair. I just like it for the purpose of saving energy, my energy. The way I look at it, if all I'm going to do is get up from where I'm sitting to walk to some other place just to sit down again, I might as well stay in the chair.

I keep a diary. I don't write anything in there except the weather, and I don't say a lot about that. "Warm, clear" is about the extent of what I put down. And with my little watercolour kit, I paint the sky. Not all the whole thing, only about as much as could go on a playing card. I used to put more words in the diary, but when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I'd become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things—when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure. So I stopped writing words and decided to stick with just the paintings and the weather. It isn't much of a diary, but it's accurate, at least.

About noon, I went out on the porch with my kit. With the sun on my face, I ate the sandwich Charlotte had left for me, salami and mustard. Then I got to work. An unusual sky was happening that day. So much was going on up there, I had to make three paintings of it to get the whole idea across. Up above the power lines, it was pretty easy—just a simple blue. But down toward the Mississippi River there was a big green blackness with lightning going crazy in it, and this took some thought and care to paint correctly. Number three was the combination place of dark wisps where the storm clouds feathered into the blue.

I must have spent an hour making my three little watercolours, and in that time, three men visited the upstairs apartment of the lady across the street. One was a thin black man with a big beard and a Vietnamese peasant hat. Maybe the woman didn't like his looks, that hat or something else about him, because she made him whack the downspout for about ten minutes before she let him in. The second customer was a young white kid with baggy shorts and big pink calves. She didn't let him in at all. This signi?ed to me that the woman was probably an interesting person. She wouldn't go with anyone. She had scruples of some kind. The third was a policeman in uniform, and he didn't have to wait but a minute. I got excited, thinking he was going to drag out the prostitute in handcuffs and I'd ?nally get a look at her. But no, ?fteen minutes later the son of a bitch comes out by himself and drives off in his car. If I'd been a decent person, I would have taken down the licence and called it in to the station. But for all I knew, the whole goddamned department was in on this kind of thing, and it would mean trouble if I called. Anyway, I stayed very curious about the woman. Each time she had a visitor, the door would open and the man would disappear inside with no sight of the lady. Not once did I even see her hand, and that was frustrating for me. It was like watching wind. You could only see her by what she moved.

After the policeman left, I waited for someone else to come along, but no one did, so I went inside and took a nap. Just as it was getting dark, Charlotte came home. We ordered in some Chinese for dinner, and then Charlotte said she was going to a dance lesson. To keep me occupied, she'd checked out some videos from the library, The Thorn Birds, which I'd already seen. Charlotte went to go dancing, and I didn't know what to do. I phoned up Sophia, the girl I knew in Pottsville, but there was nobody home.

At a quarter after nine, I got into bed. I fell asleep and what I dreamed was a true memory. I dreamed about Claudia Messner, a wild girl from my middle school. One time, she said she wanted me to kiss her in a cemetery, and I said okay. So we went into a cemetery. She picked out a nice big stone to sit on, and I kissed her on that. Her mouth had the flavour of a blackberry candy she was sucking on. After a little while, a young guy came by in a car. He said, Hey, you two can't do your kissing here.

What's it to you? I said, very tough.

Hell, I don't care, he said. But that's my uncle's stone and my aunt saw you two out here and it's making her nuts. She sent me to tell you to get off it.

So Claudia and me went to a little strip of forest right next to the highway and lay there in some vines until our lips were sore. It was a very nice memory for me. But I didn't get to dream the whole thing, because when my daughter came back from her dancing, she stuck her head in my door and said, "Hey, Dad, I'm home," as she used to do when she was a girl. It was dark in my room, and I still had Claudia in my head. I said, "Hello, Charlotte. I'd like you to meet Claudia, who's lying here in bed with me."

Charlotte didn't say anything. She just turned on the bright overhead light, looked at me blinking in my bed, and turned it off again.

***

My ?rst week in Charlotte's house went pretty much like that ?rst day. In the morning, my daughter would go off to school and leave me with a sandwich. I had no occupations. The watercolours and watching for the woman across the street—those were my occupations. The second fed the ?rst. I wanted so much to see the woman that I stayed on the porch for many hours, doing my art. I painted not just my little samples of sky but every thing I could see—the extra complex stuff they have on the power poles (you can't bury cable in this swampy town), the little houses, a giant pothole in the street, which people had tried to ?ll up with their garbage, including a broom sticking out of the hole to warn drivers. I painted a big dead rat in the drainage canal, bloated up so hard you could see its hide shining between its fur. Nearby, a crew of buzzards slunk around ignoring the carcass, as if to say, We know we eat terrible things for a living, but there is a limit.

I don't know how the woman stood all the work she was doing. Men to-ed and fro-ed along her steps all day and night, but in three days of watching, I still hadn't seen her. All I had to do was glance up at that door where a beige rag hung in the window, and my heartbeat would go a little quicker, and my temperature would heat up by a degree or two. What did she look like? Was she happy in there? Some men went in with packages. I wondered if she got her groceries this way. Giving herself away for a chicken or a can of beans because she couldn't face her neighbours in the supermarket. Up and down the street, all day, I watched people coming and going from their houses. Only me and that woman I couldn't see were stuck at home. It was ridiculous, but I felt I had this connection with her because of that.

The fourth afternoon was a Saturday, and Charlotte said she wanted to make me a proper dinner of the last soft crabs of the season. She went off for groceries. I was on the porch when something happened that I could not believe. Somebody tried to burn the woman out. It wasn't a man I'd seen before. He had light skin, and a jacket with the Empire State Building in sequins on the back. He did the ordinary thing of beating on the gutter, and when that didn't work, he took out a cigarette lighter and held the flame against the door. I should have yelled or called the police, but once again in life, I was a coward. You call the cops on somebody like that, and before long it's your house that's on ?re. Panic, a sour tin flavour, came into my mouth. But I just sat there, watching him, doing nothing.

The man kept at it awhile, but he couldn't get the job done. He only put long smears of soot on the door. Finally, he quit trying, and he stormed up the street. I'd been an eyewitness to a felony crime, and I had an obligation. I rolled back into the house and I rifled around for something to write on. I found an envelope of Charlotte's from the gas company. On the back of it, I wrote, "Hello. My name is Albert Price. I am your new neighbour in 4903. I was a witness to someone trying to burn your door on Tuesday afternoon. I have his description." I put my daughter's number. Then I got out of my chair. I took up a cane, and I stepped out into the wind, which was blowing pretty strong. I crossed the street, no problem, but the steps to the woman's apartment were very challenging for me. When I reached the top, I'd run out of breath.

The idea was just to stick the envelope in the door and go away, but once I'd gotten up there, I had a hard time staying with the plan. I'd watched so many people try their luck on the door, it was as irresistible as a free roulette wheel. You had to give it a spin. I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again, a little harder. I was going to turn around when I heard footsteps inside. The door opened, just a crack. All I could see was an eye looking out of the crack, a large, nice hazel one. That eye had an interesting thing wrong with it. The pupil was enlarged and misshapen. It spread down into the hazel part like the hole for a skeleton key.

"All right," she said in a low voice. "What you want?"

I was caught off guard. I couldn't speak. I was still breathing pretty hard. "I live there," I said, gesturing down at my daughter's house. "Hell, I'm sorry. Here you go." I held the envelope out to her.

She looked at it without much interest. "You all right? You need a glass of water, or something?"

"To be honest, I could use one," I said. She opened the door. I glanced behind me at the street, but there was nobody to see me, just a dog snif?ng at the storm drain. I stepped into her home and got a full look at her for the ?rst time.

She wasn't the kind of hooker I was prepared for. She was an older person—younger than me, but she had plenty of years on her for that kind of trade. Her hair had gone silver, and it was knotted tightly at the back, proper as a Quaker woman. She had a smooth face and ?ne bones, and she wasn't wearing any garters or lace or bedroom stuff, just a clean black V-neck T-shirt and a blue jean skirt, showing off some very nice legs. I didn't know what to make of her.

There was a little hall, and then more steps. I took my time with them.

"You sure you're all right?" she said. "I hope you're not gonna keel over in here. This is a busy day for me."

"No, I won't. I could use that water, though."

She went into her kitchen and ran the tap. It was dim and cool as a basement in her place, which was just a room with a bed in the middle of it and a kitchenette to one side. On a table was an old sewing machine whose plastic had gone yellow. A quilt covered the bed, and it was cratered in the centre where the woman had taken a nap, or maybe entertained somebody. A tomato plant stood by the window with one big red fruit on it.

She came back with the water, and I drank it in two slugs. "Need some more?" she asked.

"Yes, please," I said.

She ?lled up the cup and brought it back to me.

"Look, I just wanted to tell you, my name is Albert Price. I'm your neighbour. I live across the street."

"I know you do," she said. "You out there on that porch like you was afraid somebody's gonna steal it."

"Well, I'm sorry to disturb you, but there was a man out there just now. He had a cigarette lighter. He was trying to burn your door."

She made a clucking sound. "That's Lawrence," she said. "He thinks I owe him something, but I don't owe him anything."

"Maybe not, but he could have done you harm."

"I'd like to see him try," she said.

"I saw him try!" I told her. "He tried to burn down your house."

She closed her eyes halfway and shook her head. "Lawrence likes to make noise. He ain't really for real." She lit a cigarette, blew out a plume, and drew some of it in through her nose. "How old are you, Albert?"

"I'm eighty-three," I said.

Her brow went up and down.

"And you came all the way up here to tell me that?" She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms across her chest.

"Just to tell me about Lawrence? Nothing else I can help you with?"

I needed to think. I'd never gone with a whore in my life, except one time, in Germany, a morale girl some buddies of mine snuck into the barracks. I don't think she was ?fteen years old, and we all pitched in on taking her in terrible ways.

This was different, a grown woman. I thought about kissing her and my hands on her skin, and it came into my mind that maybe this would be the last woman I would ever get the chance to touch. What did it mean, I was wondering, to ?nish the count of women in your life?

My breathing was the loudest thing in the room. I didn't feel steady. "Could I sit down here?" I asked her. "Could I sit on your bed?"

"I don't mind."

"What's your name, miss?" I couldn't hear over my heart.

She stroked her throat with her ?ngers and took me in through half-closed eyes. "Carol," she ?nally said.

I reached out to put my water glass on the table. My hand was shaking so it made a loud noise when I set it down.

"That's a pretty name," I said, though I didn't particularly think it was.

"Thanks," she said. I could see that under her shirt, she wasn't wearing a brassiere.

"Okay, Carol. What if you were to just get down here next to me? I just want us just to lie here for a little while. What would be the price for that?"

A doubtful extra chin formed under her jaw. "What the fuck are you talking about, Albert?"

"I'm not up for much," I said. "I want us just to lie here. Now, I have twenty dollars in my pocket. I'll give it to you. Twenty dollars for just resting. To me, that seems like a pretty good deal."

Then Carol began to laugh a high, chiming laugh, a really pretty sound. I couldn't remember the last time I'd said something to make a person laugh this way. When she ?nally got control of herself, she said, "Hold up, Albert. You think I'm a whore?"

I said nothing, and she went into another laughing ?t.

"Whore," she mumbled into her hand. "This will kill Glenda. This will break Glenda up."

"What?"

"Pay me to lie down with you." She rubbed her palm against her eye. "You lucky I'm so easygoing, Albert. Most people, you come out your mouth with that, you'd be in some shit."

"If you don't want to, that's your business," I said, a little angry now. "Only please don't treat me like I'm stupid. I see the men coming in and out of here."

"Albert, you got it all fucked up," she said. "I don't sell this body."

"You don't?"

"Hell, no. I sell drugs."

"Oh, my God," I said.

"Shit, everybody on this street knows that. I sell to everybody. Even them people on the corner with the big house and that big iron fence."

I put a hand to my face. "Oh, Christ. I apologise."

"That's all right," she said. "You got confused."

"Oh, Jesus," I said.

"That's all right," she said. "You're up here, now, Albert. Now tell me, what kind of thing you need? I got sleeping pills, Vikes, Xanax, pills for your mood. They bring it up from Mexico. You spend more at the Walgreens."

"I don't need that stuff," I said. "I take a water pill. That's all."

"I got some gentle weed. Help you with your appetite. You better put on weight if you're trying to stay down here. It's not a town for skinny people. It's a town for the big set."

I thought it over. "You're talking about reefer?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'll tell you what, then. I'll buy a reefer from you."

"A joint?"

"Sure," I said. "A joint. What the hell."

"Come on, now, Albert. You can do a little better than a little old joint. I got some bills to pay."

"All I've got is this twenty. Does that buy a joint?"

I held up the bill.

"That'll work," she said, and took it. She reached under the bed and pulled out a plastic container that was full of bags of marijuana and pinched a little from one of the bags. Then she sat in a chair beside the bed. She had no rolling papers, so she emptied out a cigarette and began carefully tamping the stuff down the frail, empty paper.

"Can I ask you a question, Carol?" I asked.

"Depends on what it is," she said.

"What happened to your eye?"

"It don't work right. I can see light and dark and that's pretty much it."

"Sure, but what happened to it?"

She was quiet. "Impact," she said after a time. "Detached retina."

"Okay, so what detached it?"

She sighed. "Matter of fact, it was a bullet. From a .22 pistol. My husband shot me. That's what they say, anyway."

She held the joint out to me. It was a pretty crooked joint for twenty dollars. "You get it started, Carol."

She shrugged. "I'll take a little puff."

She put a match to the joint and drew in a deep lungful.

"So what do you mean, 'That's what they say'? You don't think he shot you?"

"To be honest, it's just as likely that I did it. I remember that gun in my hand at one point."

"I'd say you look pretty good for getting shot in your face."

"Well, I didn't look good when it happened. My eye swelled up like a basketball. And you know how they prop you up in a hospital bed? I was sitting like that, blood running down like this, and it ran across here and made a perfect cross. They brought all the nurses and orderlies in to see that cross, like it was a miracle. But I wasn't thinking about God in that hospital, and I don't think about him now."

She passed the cigarette to me. I took a pull on it. "What were you thinking about?" I asked her when I'd stopped coughing.

"I was just kind of tripping out on what getting shot is all about. How it's just you getting touched by a little thing, only it's touching you really fast. If it was going slow, you'd be ?ne as pie. The only thing matters is the speed."

It was quiet in the room, and then I said, "Funny you should have been shot."

She dipped her brow at me. "Yeah, it was funny as a motherfucker."

"No, I mean, it's a funny connection for us, Carol. I've been shot, too."

"No shit?"

"No shit. In Germany. In the war. Here."

I pulled aside my collar so she could see my wound. It seemed to interest her. She leaned in and ran her ?ngers over the scar a couple of times, very tenderly. Then she pulled up my collar and smoothed it out with her hand.

"The Germans shot you?"

"Nope," I said. "It was my own sergeant. This was towards the end. We didn't have much of an out?t left, no artillery or heavy weapons, but for some reason, he wanted us to cross the Elbe River, where all the ?ghting was. I said we'd be an asshole to try to cross without laying down a barrage, and I wouldn't do it. Suddenly, behind me, a pistol goes off, and the guy shoots me. I said, 'God, am I here yet?' By the time I was healed up, Truman had dropped the bomb."

Carol smiled at me. Her teeth were very white and straight. "You a religious man, Albert?"

I tried to think this over, but I couldn't really focus my thoughts. I was pretty rearranged from the reefer. I shrugged my arms. The fabric of my shirt felt new against my skin, and I shrugged one more time for the feeling.

"Sure," I ?nally told the woman. "God's a wonderful person. I like him."

Carol laughed beautifully at this.

"You were right about this dope," I said after a while. "It does make you crave something to eat."

"You hungry?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

"Well, don't look at me," she said. "I can't be cooking now. This is one of my busy days."

"What about that?"

"What?"

"That tomato. We could eat that," I said. "It looks ripe."

"You want to eat my tomato?"

"Sure," I said.

She reached out and snapped the tomato off its vine and handed it to me.

"You don't want some?"

"Nah," she said. "Go to town."

I took a bite. It was delicious, full of the strong, green flavour of the vine. So much juice ran out that Carol stopped me and went to get a towel. The juice ran down my chin. I could feel my beard getting heavy with it, but I didn't care.

I was nearly ?nished when Carol motioned me over to the open window. Charlotte had gotten home. She was out on the porch next to my empty chair, holding the crabs in a white paper package, turning her head up and down the street.

"That your daughter?"

"That's her," I said.

Charlotte shouted out for me, a yell as loud as a bullhorn.

Carol seemed not to hear. She held up the little remnant of our cigarette. "You want any more of this?" she asked.

"No, thank you," I said.

She licked her ?ngers and pinched it out, and then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed it.

Down below, Charlotte yelled for me again. "You're not going to see about her?" Carol asked.

I put my hands on the windowsill and stuck my entire head out into the afternoon. The wind chilled the wetness on my lips and my chin. "Hey," I called out to my daughter. "Hey, Charlotte, look up here."