Jack (Gilead #4)(75)

* * *





That was something. What a relief to be out on the street. Della clearly did feel sure that she loved him. When her sister was out of the room, she turned to him, smiling, face shining, proud of her loyalty, at having withstood the onslaught. It was rare, even in his experience, to hear exactly what someone thinks of you. No point brooding over it. Still, that triumphant look of Della’s meant she thought she knew the worst and was loyal all the same. The actual worst would be still another test. Obviously she had found this one hard enough to let her think the final trial of her loyalty had been made. He might as well let her think that. “Just look at him!” She did not look at him. If she had, she’d have seen him paralyzed with unease, like a criminal watching a search of his dresser drawers, his dirty clothes, waiting to see which of his paltry effects could at least seem to testify against him. His scar had begun to itch. Would it be the knots in his shoelace that gave him away? The thinning of his hair? Or was it that the disreputable pointlessness of his life had put its mark on him. Sometimes, when he had nothing better to do, he lit a cigarette, slouched against a wall, and watched people. He had found that passersby were less offended by cheek than by simple curiosity, so he adopted a wry and knowing air, smiled a little. From these studies he had concluded that the hardest faces were set in the moment of worst surprise—So that’s how it is! These hard faces were a pitiless exposure of old damage. Innocence isn’t lost, he thought, it is obviously, terribly, injured. And it abides as a gauge of the injury. He had no claim to being a veteran of these wars. No one had done him any real harm, except himself. He knew there was an old home always waiting for him. His fine, loyal family was the most presentable thing about him. Still, Look at him! the sister had said. That was a shrewd blow. No need for her to say more.

On the other hand, a wonderful woman loved him. He owed her some feelings of happiness on this account, a spring in his step and so on. But he could not put it out of his mind entirely that her father would not speak her name. His own father would embrace him weeping if given the chance, he was fairly sure. This thought was the thread his life had hung by. It was why he had to give a little thought to his own well-being. But now there was the fact of a colored wife, nothing that had arisen as an issue in Gilead, so far as he knew. His father had never said a word in his hearing about the mingling of races. It might be that his father would turn away from him, dear Jesus, a miserable thing to imagine. He would tell Della once more to consider what she was doing. These men of high principle made him feel pretty harmless, from time to time.

What he had in mind was not so much a plan as an interesting possibility which had presented itself unexpectedly, a kind of reward for his attempts at being conscientious and unoffending with the thought of keeping his job. He had been early to work a number of days in a row. There were few ways for him to ingratiate himself. This one, fairly useless in itself, signaled good intent but did not oblige conversation. The boss had decided that if Jack was going to be hanging around, anyway, he might as well be inside sweeping up, choosing records for the Victrola, allowing the boss himself to make a dignified entrance. His boss had given him the keys to the front door of the building and to the dance studio on the second floor, a big room with the scars and stains of other use showing through the midnight-blue paint on the walls, and in the dents in the oak floor, which was sanded and polished, and still darkly marred as if by weighty machinery. They danced with feigned grace across this scene of forgotten productivity, avoiding the bad places as they could. The windows were things of great dignity, tall and arched, framed inexplicably in heavy ornamental woodwork. They were hidden behind blinds and drapes to suggest night and to heighten the effect of the mirror ball, since the swooping and swirling in this ballroom occurred during business hours only.

Jack’s sudden sense of the possible must have been as read able as were his boss’s second thoughts, though possibility was as undefined in that moment as the boss’s suspicions would have been. A pause, a glance of unspecific reproof, and then the keys were in his hand. “Don’t—” the fellow said, and walked away. Jack put the keys in his jacket pocket, the two on one fob. All his conniving was mainly just an exercise of imagination, half of it daydreams about stealing time with Della. But he was open to suggestion. What interesting violations of trust had the boss imagined in the second before he handed over those keys? Downstairs were a barbershop, a failed lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, the office of an accountant. Jack knew, because he knew such things, that there was hardly anything worth stealing. The dance studio was an empty room, in which even determined malice could hardly be up to much. There was a big, open elevator at the far end of it, for raising and lowering very heavy things from or to an alley. If it had worked, it would have been perfect for bringing up a piano. A lot of the futility of the instructing that went on there came with the problem many of them had really hearing the music, and from the fact that Jack heard it in his head and forgot to make allowances. This was not a problem. The slower their progress, within limits, the longer the ladies came back. Selling shoes, waiting tables, waltzing strangers—there is a craving for courtesy, even when it draws attention to itself as a sort of shared joke. Courtesy was one thing he still did fairly well, especially sober.

If he stole the Victrola, he would have to change his address and find another way to survive. The interval would no doubt involve selling the cumbersome thing in a back street for a pittance. Or trying to pawn it. Then desperation would prompt one of those shifts that bring jail time. His father called this “thinking things through.” Such considerations had grown tedious because he was still a thief and endlessly obliged to rehearse them to stay on the narrow path. That pious demon Consequence had much diminished his interest in life.