Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

peter-heater is?”
    I said, “Ugh.”
    “It’s just a joke.”

    Both Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla had to go out to work in the evenings. Mr. Vorguilla played the piano in a restaurant. He wore a tuxedo. And Queenie had a job selling tickets in a movie theater. The theater was just a few blocks away, so I walked there with her. And when I saw her sitting in the ticket booth I understood that the makeup and the dyed puffed hair and the hoop earrings were not so strange after all. Queenie looked like some of the girls passing on the street or going in to see the movie with their boyfriends. And she looked very much like some of the girls portrayed in the posters that surrounded her.
    She looked to be connected to the world of drama, of heated love affairs and dangers, that was being depicted inside on the screen. She looked—in my father’s words—as if she didn’t have to take a back seat to anybody.
    “Why don’t you just wander around for a while?” she had said to me. But I felt conspicuous. I couldn’t imagine sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and advertising to the world that I had nothing to do and no place to go. Or going into a store and trying on clothes that I had no hope of buying. I climbed the hill again, I waved hello to the Greek woman calling out her window. I let myself in with Queenie’s key.
    I sat on the cot on the sunporch. There was nowhere to hang up the clothes I had brought, and I thought it might not be such a good idea to unpack, anyway. Mr. Vorguilla might not like to see any sign that I was staying.
    I thought that Mr. Vorguilla’s looks had changed, just as Queenie’s had. But his had not changed, as hers had, in the direction of what seemed to me a hard foreign glamour and sophistication. His hair, which had been reddish-gray, was now quite gray, and the expression of his face—always ready to flash with outrage at the possibility of disrespect or an inadequate performance or just at the fact of something in his house not being where it was supposed to be—seemed now to be one of more permanent grievance, as if some insult was being offered or bad behavior going unpunished all the time, in front of his eyes.
    I got up and walked around the apartment. You can never get a good look at the places people live in while they are there.
    The kitchen was the nicest room, though too dark. Queenie had ivy growing up around the window over the sink, and she had wooden spoons sticking up out of a pretty, handleless mug, just the way Mrs. Vorguilla used to have them. The living room had the piano in it, the same piano that had been in the other living room. There was one armchair and a bookshelf made with bricks and planks and a record player and a lot of records sitting on the floor. No television. No walnut rocking chairs or tapestry curtains. Not even the floor lamp with the Japanese scenes on its parchment shade. Yet all these things had been moved to Toronto, on a snowy day. I had been home at lunchtime and had seen the moving truck. Bet couldn’t keep away from the window in the front door. Finally she forgot all the dignity she usually liked to show to strangers and opened the door and yelled at the moving men. “You go back to Toronto and tell him if he ever shows his face around here again he’ll wish he hadn’t.”
    The moving men waved cheerfully, as if they were used to scenes like this, and maybe they were. Moving furniture must expose you to a lot of ranting and raging.
    But where had everything gone? Sold, I thought. It must have been sold. My father had said that it sounded as if Mr. Vorguilla was having a hard time getting going down in Toronto in his line of work. And Queenie had said something about “getting behind.” She would never have written to my father if they hadn’t gotten behind.
    They must have sold the furniture before she wrote.
    On the bookshelf I saw The Encyclopedia of Music , and The World Companion to Opera , and The Lives of the Great Composers . Also the large, thin book with the beautiful cover—the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám —that Mrs. Vorguilla often had beside her couch.
    There was another book with a similarly decorated cover whose exact title I don’t remember. Something in the title made me think I might like it. The word “flowered” or “perfumed.” I opened it up, and I can remember well enough the first sentence I read.
    “The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their