New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 25

That evening Robert shaved and took a bath. It was not a relaxing bath. He kept one eye on the door at all times. And the water, which he had not gotten as hot as he would have liked, had a slightly orange tinge to it, even after soap had been added. He did not feel as if he were getting as clean as he should. He felt instead as if a thin layer of rust was being added to his skin.

Before his bath he had shaved and this had proven difficult. He had let his beard grow too long and the razor had seemed to tug as much as cut. The wiry hairs that were left in the sink felt like the evidence of a crime that he had to carefully dispose of with toilet paper and water.

He was sitting in the tub, rubbing his face, noticing a few bumps that had risen in irritation, when the door opened. It was one of the old women. She said, “Oh!” but did not immediately close the door.

“I’m in here,” Robert said, which was of course obvious, and he covered a part of himself with his hands in the water. She was not looking there. She was looking at his face perhaps, or looking at him in some less focused way than that, and Robert wondered if it was the same women who had mistaken him once, when she was drunk in the dark stairwell, for a son she had lost to distance or years.

“Please,” he said. “I’m taking a bath.”

The old woman did not move. Two tears leaked from her eyes.

“Oh my,” she said and then finally left, slamming the door behind her.

He got out of the tub and dried quickly and put on his clothes. He went back to his apartment, sat at the window, smoked, rubbed his new face, and thought again about the unfathomable and alien sadness of other lives.

There was a loud crunching sound below him and he looked down just as one of the cable installers completed backing his truck into a fire hydrant. Water shot out from the base of the hydrant in all directions and poured into the street. The driver got out of the truck and began swearing at the hydrant and the water. Cars stopped to look and the cars behind the cars stopping to look honked. The driver of the truck, got in again and pulled forward, as if that would help, and the water shot straight into the air, reaching as high as Robert’s window, and spraying the glass with drops that ran down through the dust.

Traffic did not move and sirens were eventually heard in the distance, but the sirens could not move through the traffic and it took a long time before police arrived and a fire truck arrived and a city water truck arrived. It was only the city water truck that could do anything about the hydrant and two men got out and did things with large wrenches and a mallet and the water eventually stopped. The policeman gave the cable installer a ticket. The fire men stood around in their raincoats for awhile and then got back in their truck and moved on.

The sun began to set on the street still pooled with water, but everything became relatively quiet again with the shadows growing and traffic moving and the cable installers all going home for the day.