Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [73]
“Maybe later,” Fred said vaguely.
Meanwhile leading the wire directly across the hall and allowing not one inch of slack.
In Fred’s bedroom, gold brocade draped an army cot. A bookcase displayed folded T-shirts, boxer shorts, and rolled socks stacked in a pyramid like cannonballs. Doug managed to take all this in because there was nothing else to look at—not a desk or chair or bureau, not a mirror or family photo. A brown plastic radio sat on the windowsill, and Fred inserted the wire into a hole in its side.
“Looks to me like you might’ve brought the wire in this window,” Doug told him.
But Fred shrugged and said, “More far to fall.”
“Oh,” Doug said.
Presumably, Fred was not one of the engineering students.
Fred turned on the radio and music started playing, some Middle Eastern tune without an end or a beginning. He half closed his eyes and nodded his head to the beat.
“Well, I’d better be going,” Doug said.
“You know what means these words?” Fred asked. “A young man is telling farewell to his sweetheart, he is saying to her now—”
“Gosh, Beastie must be wondering where I’ve got to,” Doug said. “I’ll just see myself out, never mind.”
He had thought it would be a relief to escape the music, but after he left—after he returned home, even, and unsnapped Beastie’s leash—the tune continued to wind through his head, blurred and wandery and mysteriously exciting.
A couple of days later, the foreigners tried wiring the radio to speakers set strategically around the house. The reason Doug found out about it was, Fred came over to ask what those U-shaped nails were called again. “Staples,” Doug told him, standing at the door in his slippers.
“No, no. Staples are for paper,” Fred said firmly.
“But the nails are called staples too. See, what you want is …” Doug said, and then he said, “Wait here. I think I may have some down in the basement.”
So one thing led to another. He found the staples, he went over to help, he stayed for a beer afterward, and before long he was more or less hanging out there. They always had some harebrained project going, something he could assist with or (more often) advise them not to attempt; and because they were students, keeping students’ irregular hours, he could generally count on finding at least a couple of them at home. Five were currently living there: Fred, Ray, John, John Two, and Ollie. On weekends more arrived—fellow countrymen studying elsewhere—and some of the original five disappeared. Doug left them alone on weekends. He preferred late weekday afternoons, when the smells of spice and burnt onions had already started rising from Ollie’s blackened saucepans in the kitchen and the others lolled in the living room with their beers. The living room was furnished with two webbed aluminum beach lounges, a wrought-iron lawn chair, and a box spring propped on four stacks of faded textbooks. Over the fireplace hung a wrinkled paper poster of a belly dancer drinking a Pepsi. A collapsible metal TV tray held the telephone, and the wall above it was scribbled all over with names and numbers and Middle Eastern curlicues. Doug liked that idea—that a wall could serve as a phone directory. It struck him as very practical. He would squint at the writing until it turned lacy and decorative, and then he’d take another sip of beer.
These people weren’t much in the way of drinkers. They appeared to view alcohol as yet another inscrutable American convention, and they would dangle their own beers politely, forgetting them for long minutes; so Doug never had more than one. Then he’d say, “Well, back to the fray,” and they would rise to see him off, thanking him once again for whatever he’d done.
At home, by comparison, everything seemed so permanent—the rooms layered over with rugs and upholstered furniture and framed pictures. The grandchildren added layers of their own; the hall was awash in cast-off jackets and schoolbooks. Bee would be in the kitchen starting supper. (How unadorned the Bedloes’ suppers smelled! Plain meat, boiled vegetables, baked potatoes.) And