Once you got to know Marty and Helen you couldnt ever get to unknow them. There are people like that. Sometimes I despised the both of them, but then I felt guilty, and our association went on.
Marty had this heavy, thick-lipped way about him. Just looking at his body lumbering towards me made me sweaty and desperate to get away. I hated the way he held out his hand under my face, suspended by invisible hooks, and wanting to be shaken up and down so many times. The thing was shaped like a slab of moldy picnic ham, and I wanted to clean it and scrape off the bumps and discolorations. Maybe Id spray it with some chemical food stabilizer and hang it in a butchers window over the luncheon meats? Some guy hurrying home from work would buy it and toss it into his attach case. Later that night, the guy and his wife would eat it and no one would know the difference.
There were times I thought Marty was only pretending to be so boring hiding something behind that contemplative stare. And he asked a lot of questions. Boring people normally dont do that. But Lordy, how I wanted to be rid of him, and Helen too! But I pretended to like them as I have pretended to like certain other sorts of miserable people: the sorts who are always going to quack doctors, who invite you to birthday parties for over-the-hill adults with moon-shaped faces and you get sick from the cake; they keep you for hours on the phone, and when you hang up, the rim of your ear stings and you cant remember anything that was said.
Back when Marty married Helen, she was gorgeous: a tall bronze body and smooth skin. Marty was gorgeous too. He had that flat-fronted, squarish build with door-like shoulders and a matinee idol face. His black wavy hair, big jaws, and forty-five degree angle nose made all the women want to touch him. And they did, but he wasnt interested in any of them one bit. He was a regular Cary Grant in the looks department, but he only loved Helen.
They had been married for twenty years but had had sex only once, a few weeks after the wedding. Thats really not so surprising; there are a lot of couples like that. Helen had once mused aloud, Poor Marty, because of me hes celibate.
When I visited them, Marty would just smile blandly at me, with that big hot-dog-lip smile. No laugh, just the lippy-look-smile boring down into me. But I had to laugh, because if I didnt, I knew that something awful would be the result.
So, at first Helen was the goddess of fishwives: swarthy, oily, unpainted, large in her lungs. But as the years passed, two things happened: Helen got enormously fat and cackled eagerly at Martys jokes, and Marty began ticking slower and slower like an unwound clock, and he became even more devoted to Helen. It was about that time that I was nearly ready to move out of town and get an unlisted phone number just to cut them out of my life when everything changed and I decided to stick around for the entertainment.
One day they were in a Newberrys store when a prize number was called out and they had the winning ticket. They won a ten-inch stuffed bear, white and furry with a black, crooked nose and a red ribbon tied into a bow around its neck. When the announcer called her number, Helen squealed like a sow being butchered, and she hopped around the store holding the bear in her face, chanting, Sigmund Dorsey! Sigmund Dorsey! His name is Sigmund Dorsey hes our baby.
The next day I called up just out of morbid curiosity to see what was going on, and Helen said that Sigmund Dorsey had an ear infection, but for me to come over anyway. I didnt want to go. I was sorry I had even called, but I went over there just for the hell of it.
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