234
PAUL NEUBURG
in a dresser. Then books. Then a stool. Then towels. He held them
up to her. She made a face and he threw them in a box. Then he
brought in a mattress.
"What are you doing with that?"
He stood it up lengthwise against the wall facing her.
"I have to get everything out so I can start," he said.
"But the dirt will go on it when we do this room."
"It won't. The bedroom will be finished, and then we'll shove
everything in there and do this one. Then cover it when we paint
and maybe wash the floors at the end."
"You're so methodical."
Dave shrugged his shoulders and laughed. He went back and
brought in the bed, standing it next to the mattress, its burlap toward
her, the legs sticking out.
"Looks horrible," she said.
"You never see it."
He brought a lamp. Then armfuls of garbage and broken hang–
ers and old clothes. Into the box. He'd got going. Tearing up the
place, sorting it out. making fast decisions, inexorably. Working,
growing oblivious almost. Stubborn. Stubborn against stubborn. It
gave her a headache to watch. The bed and the mattress covered
her wall. Only a streak of blue.
"Can't you stop?" she shouted to him.
"Not now.
It
won't be long."
"But just a little. For tonight. And sit down."
"And smoke and drop out?"
She shuddered. He was ahead of her, had found her out. But
he didn't sound hostile, just firm. His firm self, working self. It was
gaining hold of him now, getting somewhere.
"Maybe," she ventured. "You could try it. Just once. You'd
like it, you've never really tried."
"Not tonight."
"Why not tonight? The first evening, the first time in my
place."
He stopped whatever he was doing. She could almost see him
take breath and set his head at an angle.
"We can't all drop out," he said. "How would we eat and
sleep?
If
we all dropped out, we'd all be dead."
That was suddenly too much. To be expected somehow, yet
