his finger on the edge of his dinner plate, wise and patient and tolerant. He’d been watching a softball game at the playground between Fritz’s Bar and Grill and Papa Joe’s, the kid hates softball, he said. He said that then he went to the movies, the kid is scared of the movies, for God’s sake. Her mouth was twisted in the bitter smile that enraged him. And you saw? she said. Oh, he said, you want to know what I saw? Well, I saw Three Men on a Horse and If You Could Only Cook and Come and Get It and Red Dust and Dawn Patrol and how can I forget Tarzan of the Apes? Starring Edward Everett Horton, Edward Arnold, Edward G. Robinson, Edward Brophy, Edgar Buchanan, Edgar Kennedy, Eduardo Ciannelli, and—Akim Tamiroff! I think Jean Harlow was in one of them, too. What a movie—passion, action, betrayal, temptation, fury, danger! She put a paper napkin in her book and closed it, then stood up. She was pale, then she suddenly reddened and paled again. Charlie thought you’d have a catch with him in back or take him for a walk down to the shore through the park, it’s Saturday. She was shaking with anger. You’re a mean, rotten father! Oh, he said, it wasn’t that she cared about herself, not a bit, just about the son he ignored, not, oh no, not herself! She was a martyr, a selfless wife, a saint who put up with his neglect of her with a smile on her face, her nose in a book, her hair in snarls, and her body in an old stained housecoat with tattered stockings rolled down to her knees like the super’s wife from Bulgaria, Jesus. I can smell her on you, Anna said, her five-and-ten perfume and her sweaty, dirty dress, you don’t have, you’ve got, you haven’t one iota of self-respect or shame coming home smelling of that tramp, my mother was right about you, she was always right about you, you dirty guinea! She turned and started out of the room, her novel under her arm, and he picked up the gravy boat and threw it against the wall, cold gravy and shards of china everywhere. The other movie I saw, he shouted after her, was fuck you and your drunken mother! He saw blood on his shirt and realized he’d somehow cut his hand. He’d never said, never, he was sure, that he was going to have a catch, the kid couldn’t catch a ball with a basket with his cockeye. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of Philip Morris. Irene’s cigarettes, he’d taken them and left his Luckies by mistake. You better get them off the night table, honey, before the old man gets home, he muttered.
An Apartment
T HE OLD MAN HAD BEEN SAVING PILLS FOR THREE YEARS, Percodans mostly, although there were some others. He thought of them as his medical Mickey Finn. He had a good handful of them and would use them as soon as he’d dealt himself the winning hand, or, perhaps more precisely, the hand that would finally beat life. He had determined, a couple of years before, when it became apparent to him that to die would be a more reasonable choice than to live, that each day he would shuffle a deck of cards, a poker deck from which the Jokers had been removed, and allow himself eight cuts, playing for a flush. He had also determined that eight cuts would be fair, this based on the draw poker he’d played all his life, the classic game, one he thought of as old-fashioned, that permitted players to discard and draw up to three cards after the hand was opened. He also made it a rule that he would play but three hands a day, one in the morning with his second cup of coffee; one around noon; and one in the evening after he’d made himself a bourbon and water. He had often drawn four of the same suit, and, even more often, three, but he was certain that four hearts, for instance, were no closer to a flush the next time than one; or, as he thought of it, close but no cigar did not mean cigar next time. So he did not torment himself with the anguish suffered by those who believe that luck and chance are incremental and progressive and
An Apartment
T HE OLD MAN HAD BEEN SAVING PILLS FOR THREE YEARS, Percodans mostly, although there were some others. He thought of them as his medical Mickey Finn. He had a good handful of them and would use them as soon as he’d dealt himself the winning hand, or, perhaps more precisely, the hand that would finally beat life. He had determined, a couple of years before, when it became apparent to him that to die would be a more reasonable choice than to live, that each day he would shuffle a deck of cards, a poker deck from which the Jokers had been removed, and allow himself eight cuts, playing for a flush. He had also determined that eight cuts would be fair, this based on the draw poker he’d played all his life, the classic game, one he thought of as old-fashioned, that permitted players to discard and draw up to three cards after the hand was opened. He also made it a rule that he would play but three hands a day, one in the morning with his second cup of coffee; one around noon; and one in the evening after he’d made himself a bourbon and water. He had often drawn four of the same suit, and, even more often, three, but he was certain that four hearts, for instance, were no closer to a flush the next time than one; or, as he thought of it, close but no cigar did not mean cigar next time. So he did not torment himself with the anguish suffered by those who believe that luck and chance are incremental and progressive and
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