The two story garage apartment sits in its oversized lot as though bereft of a master house from some dim unremembered catastrophe. Anomalous garden plots featuring cabbage and tomatoes and field peas surround the weathered frame structure. The Fury slowly passes, then makes the block and comes up again to rest.Twin brown garage doors run the greater length of the front wall. A single draped curtain, washworn and abscess-pink, adorns the upstairs window. He locks up down the curb a respectful distance and moves carefully upon the grass beside the sidewalk, hands tight in his pockets. Passing by once, he makes a quick check on neighboring windows.
He returns and stops before the door. A glass pane shows a stark varnished wooden stairwell and another door at the top, with a light bulb dangling from a long, frayed cord. A place Mac has seen before.
But only in passing by. He would not be able to count the number of times he has traipsed along this sidewalk and paused to peer in. And dutifully moved on.
However. Tonight is the night.
After two long rounds of knocking he hears movement upon the joisted floor. The top door opens. A woman looks down the stairs with a total lack of expression and closes the door again. Her face is like one that catches the eye in a not so long ago yearbook, now weighty, round, edematous.
Five minutes of steady knocking produces her once more. When she reaches the bottom of the stairs to unlatch the outer door she does not appear to be angry. "I aint working tonight," she remarks, trudging back up the stairs.
Mac follows.
There is a soiled-clothing odor to the squat furnishings of the living room. Two lamps sit upon very low end tables. Mac eases down onto the couch. The woman goes directly through a curtained doorway. Everything is old in the way anything two generations past is old. A small black and white TV is on, the sound replaced by a nearby portable radio turned low. An uncurtained window opens to the back, away from the street, a black sketch of branches, leaves and strangled stars.
"I told you I aint working tonight. I don't know what you're doing here." She stands by the TV, smoking. Annie shows the fat of nervous mindless eating, barely covered by a peach terrycloth bathrobe.
"Yeah, well you know. Just thought I'd stop by. I didn't know exactly which days you . . . uh, worked." Mac taps his back pocket, evoking the wallet.
"Been to the Coney Isle lately? Aint seen you there lately."
"Oh, yeah, I have partaken of their fine cuisine lately. Particularly the slip au gratin dog."
She asks for the money. Mac stands up pronto. "That's a big tip," she says. "Did I imply more than I meant to?"
His glance toward the curtained doorway has a timid obviousness.
Annie sighs "I wasn't even going to answer the door." She doesn't move.
They stand off. The DJ's voice cuts into the song. When Mac goes into the pitiful puppy act she tells him to quit, and leads him.
In the back room there is incense burning in service of various odors. "Look, there's some technical difficulties. You understand that, don't you Mac?" Her voice is almost soft, somewhere in it a schoolteacher's tone. With Mac this seems somehow necessary. "Your mother ever explain to you about girls?"
He looks at her a moment. "Uh, yeah. I got a sister."
"Specifically?"
"Uh. Different equipment?"
"Yeah, sort of."
"That's sort of the point of why I'm here."
She watches him. "I warn you, too much talking and I close shop early, understand?"
She steps past him to cut the lamps and then into the bathroom, leaving the door open. Mac sits still in a chair, hears the flush. When the phone rings she comes back out.
The conversation takes half an hour. Mac manages not to listen by humming softly to himself.
She returns without apology, noticing him there as if he had just appeared. Killing her cigarette she drops her robe on the floor, back turned.
"Wait—"
"Huh?
"Put it back on a minute, please." She bends groaning, re-robes. Mac stands. Very edgily he advances to removes the robe himself, then the brassiere. There's a painful, scripted sense to the procedures. She shifts legs impatiently through the ordeal of his pulling the overtight briefs down.
Mac remains still a moment, watching, contemplating the ancient vortex itself.
He notices the string hanging down. He reaches.
"Uh-uh!" Annie slaps his hand away. "I told you." She walks on her knees across the bed, collapsing at the head. He undresses and moves in beside her. She reaches down for him, finds work to be done. "Look. There's going to have to be some arrangements. What do you think you paid for?"
"Uh, the usual."
"Well as I have showed you, there is a temporary problem. That may not be a problem for you, and believe you me, there's enough of them who only want it on a day of the red flag, but that aint me. And it costs extra. More than that tip."
"I had to pay my car note."
"Now is that my fault?
"Could you uh, put 'em back on?"
"What? Put what?"
"You know . . . your . . . under—"
"You can't say what ladies wear to cover their crack?" Mac's face reddens, deeply. She hovers on the edge of the bed, but manages not to laugh. "O.K. then." She stands up and dons the apparel unceremoniously. "But it's a rule. You have to do yourself if you can't say that word."
Mac for all the world like a child being punished by having his lunch withheld.
The wind comes up outside, spreading gauzelike curtains into the room.
Annie stands and smokes another cigarette while Mac dutifully does as told. Finished, he lies with eyes closed. "Hey boy—don't you dare go to sleep."
"Just getting my breath."
Annie squats on the edge of the bed, lacking energy to dress again. She listens to the radio, still on in the next room. As the wind shifts she can hear the cars down on Louisville.
An impish expression arrives on her face. In one quick swing she straddles Mac, hands and knees lifting her torso above him. Her face drops to his, cheek to cheek, lips to ear. Whispers loudly, "Panties! Panties!!"
Mac leaps up, hurriedly wiping himself off with a dirty sock, the closest thing. His face burns helplessly, enormously, as though verging on permanence. He grapples with his belt, finding it difficult to turn the doorknob. Annie is by now doubled over, laughing so hard there is no sound and no breathing.
