Betty Blue Read online

  I must have been more tired than I thought-the first glass of sherry went right into my bloodstream. My head started spinning-I almost stepped on the dog when I stood up to go to the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face. I had a three-day beard and eyes circled with dust. I felt rubber-legged, sort of a street-angel-blitzed-on-two-fingers-of-rotgut thing.

  When I came back Bongo was finishing the chicken and Betty was recounting the end of our trip. Lisa clapped her hands.

  “Perfect timing!” she said. “The upstairs has been free for a week!”

  Betty seemed staggered. She put her glass down slowly.

  “What? You mean there’s nobody upstairs and you’d rent us the apartment?”

  “Sure. Might as well have you take it.”

  “Oh Lord, I’m dreaming,” Betty said. “This is fabulous!”

  She bounded over to me and kneeled down in front of my chair. I wondered if she hadn’t actually covered herself with spangles.

  “See, what did I tell you?” she said. “See what can happen?

  If this isn’t some kind of luck I don’t know what is.”

  “What’s going on, exactly?” I asked.

  Betty squashed her breasts into my knees.

  “What’s going on, honey, is that we haven’t even been in town one hour and we’ve already found a sensational apartment that has fallen into our laps straight from heaven!”

  “Ask if it has a big bed,” I said.

  She pinched my thigh and we raised our glasses. I didn’t say anything, but I was willing to admit that we were, in fact, off to a good start. After all, maybe she was right-maybe an easier world was really about to open its arms to us. I started feeling good.

  The bottle hadn’t gone too far. I told them. Don’t worry, and I went out-down to the corner with my nose in the air, my hands in my pockets. I’d spotted some stores farther down the street.

  I went into the grocer’s-Good evening, everyone, I said. The guy was alone behind the cash register, an old man with suspenders. I got some champagne, some cookies, and a can of food for the dog. The old man added it up without looking at me, nearly asleep.

  “You know,” I said. ‘“We’ll likely be seeing a lot of each other. I’ve just moved into the neighborhood…”

  The good news did not stir him. He handed me the bill, yawning. I paid up.

  “You’re really a lucky guy,” I joked. “I’m going to be dropping a bundle in here every month…”

  He gave me a smile-visibly forced-and waited for me to split. His face had a pained expression on it, like most of the people on the street. It made me feel like a leper. I thought for a second, then went back and got a second bottle. I threw the money at him and left.

  The girls welcomed me back with cries of joy. While the champagne ran I opened the can of dog food: two pounds of bright pink mush bathed in jelly. Bongo looked at me with his head cocked. I knew it was wise to get on the good side of these animals. I saw that I had already scored a point.

  Next we went to see the apartment. We climbed the stairway that led to the second floor, laughed when Lisa took a few minutes to get the key to turn.

  “Usually this door is locked, but from now on we can just leave it open. Gosh, I’m so happy about this! Sometimes I get kind of lonely, you know…”

  There was a bedroom, a room with a kitchen in the corner, and the little terrace. In short-paradise. There was a closet that had been turned into a shower. While the girls made the bed, I went out onto the terrace and leaned over the balcony. Bongo did likewise. Standing on his hind legs, he was almost as tall as me. The balcony looked out onto some deserted land, closed off by a fence. You could see houses on the other side, some hills farther on, then a blackness, darker than night. I heard them laughing and squealing in the bedroom. I smoked a cigarette and let it go all through me. I winked at Bongo.

  Later, between the sheets, Betty squeezed herself against me and immediately went to sleep. I looked at the ceiling. I didn’t know where I was anymore, but I didn’t rack my brain about it. I did some deep breathing. Little by little I drifted into sleep, all the time feeling like I was slowly waking up.

  7

  We didn’t start looking for a job right away-we were in no hurry. We spent most of our time on the terrace, talking to Lisa and Bongo, playing cards, reading. The afternoons succeeded each other, threaded together by an amazing calm-I’d never known anything that good. Betty was tanned to a golden turn, Lisa somewhat less so, since she worked during the day as a cashier in a department store. From time to time I’d play with Bongo in the vacant lot, chasing the birds away. Betty would watch us from the balcony. We’d wave at each other, then she’d disappear. Soon all I heard was the tapping of the typewriter-the little bell that rings when you come to the end of a line.

  Actually, this worried me a little. She’d gotten it into her head to type my whole manuscript and send it out to publishers. She’d run herself ragged finding a typewriter. I’d written the thing for my own pleasure, not to throw myself to the lions-at least that’s the way I’d always looked at it-but Betty was preparing my entrance into the arena. I tossed a stick for Bongo to fetch, fretting about it all, but I didn’t let it get to me. I had other things on my mind-the evening’s menu, for example. It was something I’d happily put myself in charge of. A clever guy who has all day to ponder dinner can make miracles out of nothing. I even whipped up something special for Bongo-we’d become fast friends.

  After putting dinner in the oven, I’d take him for a walk to meet Lisa. Betty kept typing with three or four fingers till the last rays of sunset, and this gave us quite a bit of time. She made a lot of mistakes and the corrections doubled her work, but I didn’t worry too much about it. Bongo would run ahead of me and people would just get out of the way. It was fabulous-I always found a seat on the bench at the bus stop. We hadn’t had an autumn that mild in a long time. Afterward we’d walk back to the house slowly, Lisa and I, me carrying her things, Bongo sprinkling the cars. She’d tell me about herself; I didn’t have much to tell. I found out that she’d married very young and that the guy had dumped her after two years. Not much was left of the marriage-just Bongo and the house, and the apartment upstairs that she rented out to make ends meet. We’d come to a nice agreement about that. There were a lot of things in it that needed fixing plumbing and electrical work-so we’d estimated that the work would come out to about three months’ rent. Everybody was happy.

  In the evenings, we’d catch a movie on TV. We’d take it in, all the way to the end-the last commercial-then haggle about who was going to get up and turn the set off. You had to be careful not to fall on all the beer cans. If it was really too boring, we’d turn it off in the middle and get out the deck of cards, or just hang out in the apartment, the girls talking to each other while I played with the dials on the radio, trying to get something decent. Sometimes I’d feel like taking a walk. I’d get my jacket without a word and we’d weave our way through street after street, Bongo running between all our legs. The girls loved that. I told them it made me feel like a rat in a maze and they laughed. It’s true-we would turn right, then another right, or left… the scenery never changed at all. When we got home we were dead on our feet. Still, it was good for the digestion and made us hungry. By the time the door was closed we’d have already emptied the whole refrigerator onto the table. When Lisa felt tired we’d go upstairs, but we never went to bed until three or four in the morning. It’s hard to go to bed early when you get up at noon.

  When we weren’t doing all this and she felt up to it, Betty would go back to her typing. I’d settle down on the terrace with Bongo’s snout across my lap, watching her decipher what was in the notebooks with a furrowed brow. I wondered what I’d done right to wind up with a girl like that-still, I knew that even if I’d been holed up at the North Pole, I’d have come across her sooner or later, trudging across the ice floe with the chill wind blowing around her neck. I loved to watch her. It made me forget all
the shit we’d left behind. When I thought about it, I imagined a posse of cops hot on our trail, the burning bungalow hanging like a sword over our heads. Luckily I didn’t leave my address. I imagined the tenants in the shadows of the flames, making faces and screaming at us as we took off running with our suitcases in our hands like some yellow-bellied bank robbers. Now when I heard a siren in the distance I’d just take a swig of beer and in five minutes all was forgotten-all except this woman sitting a few yards from me who was the most important thing in my life. It didn’t bother me that the most important thing in my life was a woman, in fact it felt great-the feeling in the air had turned into something simple and carefree. Once in a while I’d get up and go cop a quick feel-see how she was getting along with it.

  “Doing okay? Still into it?” I’d ask.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, if it turns out that no one publishes it…”

  “What, are you kidding?”

  “Look, it’s quite possible.”

  “Oh yeah? Explain to me how that could ever happen.”

  “Betty, it’s a tough world out there…”

  “No it isn’t. All you have to do is know how to handle it.”

  It was food for thought. I went back to the terrace and she went back to the typing, Bongo went back to my lap, and over my head the stars came out, chattering.

  I woke up one morning wanting to get on with the plumbing. I kissed Betty on the forehead, borrowed Lisa’s car, and went to town to get supplies. A few of the pipes stuck out of the car on the way back, and when I got home and started unloading it, this woman suddenly showed up next to me. She was wearing a little gold crucifix.

  “Excuse me, sir… you wouldn’t be a plumber, would you?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, it’s about my faucet, my faucet in the kitchen. I’ve been trying to get a plumber for a month now, but nobody wants to come out to fix my faucet. You don’t know how bothersome…”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve been there myself.”

  She stroked her crucifix and looked at the ground.

  “You wouldn’t consider… it’s perhaps just a matter of a few minutes’ work…”

  I thought it over for a second, looking at my watch like I was already overloaded.

  “Shit, it would be tight… You live far from here?”

  “No, no. Just across the street.”

  “Okay, but let’s get going.”

  She was around sixty, with a dress that came down to the middle of her calves. I followed her across the street. It was the house of a retiree who lacked for nothing-the tile gleamed and all was silent. She led me into the kitchen and pointed to the faucet. A little stream of clear water trickled gently onto the enamel. I went up and turned it a few times in every possible direction, then stepped back and sighed.

  “Just as I thought,” I said. “The rotary has gotten caught in the valve and is botching up the equilateral. It happens all the time.”

  “Oh no. Is it serious?”

  “Could be worse,” I said. “Got to replace everything.”

  “Oh my God. And how much will this cost?”

  I did a little vague calculating in my head, then multiplied by two.

  “Oh sweet Jesus!” she said.

  “And that doesn’t include the labor,” I added.

  “And when do you think you can do this…?”

  “Right now or never. I don’t take checks.”

  I ran back to the house and got together all the tools I could find. I told Betty what was going on. She just shrugged and dove back into the notebooks. Two seconds later I was back in the car. I double-parked, bought the faucet, and went back to the old lady’s house.

  “I can’t be disturbed,” I said. “I’m used to working in silence. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

  I holed up in the kitchen and went to work. One hour later I put my tools away, mopped up the last drop of water, passed Go, and went up to the teller’s window. Sister Mary Magdalen and Baby Jesus were in heaven-the kitchen was in perfect working order.

  “Now, young man,” she said. “Don’t leave without giving me your telephone number. Knock on wood, I hope I won’t need you again, but…”

  She walked me out to the doorstep and waved at me until I disappeared into the house. Not a bad day’s work, I thought.

  That same night I was keeping an eye on dinner when the phone rang. Betty was setting the table. Lisa answered. She listened for a second, said a few words back, then put her hand over the receiver, laughing:

  “Hey, get this, it’s the guy from the market down the street. He says he wants to talk to the plumber!”

  Betty gave me the evil eye.

  “I think you’re on call,” she said. “Must be something clogged somewhere…”

  Word spread like wildfire. My phone number made the rounds with the speed of light. I wondered where the other plumbers-the real ones-were hiding, what with all those houses leaking all over the place, all those pipes clogging up. I was standing in line to buy a few yards of copper tubing and a right-angle elbow, when I happened to talk to a pro who told me that they didn’t want to bother with the little jobs. I’ll tell you something, the guy said, lowering his voice to a whisper, when somebody calls me up for a leak, if I don’t think I can wind up selling them a new bathroom, I don’t mess with it.

  So I found my niche: five-second jobs paid for in cash. In a matter of hours I’d become a neighborhood celebrity. Expensive, but efficient. I knew where my power lay: somebody who has the flu can try to fight it, but somebody with a clogged toilet is at your mercy. I made as much money as I could. I overcharged. I had them all in a hammerlock.

  For a couple of weeks it was pretty wild, but then it settled down. I stopped running around so much, booking all my jobs for the morning. Betty didn’t like me leaving, cap pulled down over my eyes and toolbox under my arm-it made her nervous. We even had a fight about it one night. I had come home totally wiped out.

  I’d just done an emergency job for this military guy-uniform, white hair, blue eyes. It was my fifth job of the day and I was wasted. The guy led me down this long dark hall, his boots clacking on the floor, me following him all hunched over. The minute I got to the kitchen I was hit by this smell, like french fries and burned plastic, horrible. It was all I could do to stay there. It was something that happened every time I went into somebody’s house-this desire to turn tail and run. I stayed, though.

  The guy was carrying a riding crop in his hand-he pointed it at the kitchen sink without saying a word. It didn’t matter-by the end of the day I didn’t care if people talked to me or not. It was more peaceful if they didn’t. I approached the sink, half holding my breath. There were three plastic dolls in it, mostly melted. The drain was clogged and everything floated in about two inches of oil. I opened the cupboard underneath to take out the garbage can and I saw that the drainpipe was completely corkscrewed, even melted in some places. I stood up.

  “You did this with boiling oil?”

  “Listen, I don’t have to answer you,” he whined. “Just do whatever needs doing and let’s get it over with quickly.”

  “Hey, take it easy. It’s okay with me if you want to pour hot oil on your dolls. I see weirder things than that every day. It’s just that I have Io know if there might be something else besides grease and melted plastic in your pipe here. You’ll have to tell me.”

  He shook his head fast and said no, then he left me alone. I took a cigarette break. At first glance it didn’t seem very complicated-just a drainpipe replacement-but of course things are never as easy as they seem. I went back into the cupboard and saw that in fact the drainpipe ran through two other cupboards before going into the floor. I saw that I was going to have a good time trying to get through all the crap.

  I went out to the car to get a piece of drainpipe. I had all the basic sizes-they were strapped onto the roof and hooked to the bumpers at each end. Betty had roll
ed her eyes when she saw that. I’d found a whole bunch of them at this construction site during one of my nocturnal outings, and my profits had skyrocketed ever since. I grabbed a beer from under the front seat and chugged the whole thing before going back to work.

  It took me an hour to remove the old pipe and another hour to install the new one. It drove me half crazy-down on all fours in the cupboards, smashing my head in every possible corner. I had to stop every once in a while to close my eyes for a minute. But I did the job. I leaned on the sink and got my breath back, smiling at the little disemboweled dolls. Come on, man, just hold on a little longer and your day will be over-think about the girls fixing you a drink. I grabbed the pipe, sawed off a good yard of it, and fitted it into the joint. I was putting my tools away when the guy in the khaki uniform showed up again. He didn’t even look at me, just stuck his nose in all the cupboards to check the installation. Guys like that make me laugh. I slipped the strap of my toolbox over my shoulder, grabbed my piece of drainpipe, and waited for him to come out of there.

  He stood up, seized with agitation.

  “What is this…?” he said. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

  I wondered if maybe he’d burst a blood vessel in his brain while bending down under the sink. I stayed calm.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  He tried to dig his eyes into my forehead. He must have thought he was still in the colonies, getting ready to chastise one of his slaves.

  “Are you trying to pull the wool over my eyes? Your pipes are not regulation!”

  “How’s that?”

  “Yes… the length of pipe that you’ve put in, THERE-it’s a piece of telephone tubing!! It’s WRITTEN on it!”

  It was news to me. It’s true I’d never paid much attention. Still, I didn’t let it shake me.