Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Stories by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates [Yates, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The B.A.R. Man

UNTIL HE GOT his name on the police blotter, and in the papers, nobody had ever thought much about John Fallon. He was employed as a clerk in a big insurance company, where he hulked among the file cabinets with a conscientious frown, his white shirt cuffs turned back to expose a tight gold watch on one wrist and a loose serviceman’s identification bracelet, the relic of a braver and more careless time, on the other. He was twenty-nine years old, big and burly, with neatly combed brown hair and a heavy white face. His eyes were kindly except when he widened them in bewilderment or narrowed them in menace, and his mouth was childishly slack except when he tightened it to say something tough. For street wear, he preferred slick, gas-blue suits with stiff shoulders and very low-set buttons, and he walked with the hard, ringing cadence of steel-capped heels. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens, and had been married for ten years to a very thin girl named Rose who suffered from sinus headaches, couldn’t have children, and earned more money than he did by typing eighty-seven words a minute without missing a beat on her chewing gum.

Five evenings a week, Sunday through Thursday, the Fallons sat at home playing cards or watching television, and sometimes she would send him out to buy sandwiches and potato salad for a light snack before they went to bed. Friday, being the end of the workweek and the night of the fights on television, was his night with the boys at the Island Bar and Grill, just off Queens Boulevard. The crowd there were friends of habit rather than of choice, and for the first half hour they would stand around self-consciously, insulting one another and jeering at each new arrival (“Oh Jesus, looka what just come in!”). But by the time the fights were over they would usually have joked and drunk themselves into a high good humor, and the evening would often end in song and staggering at two or three o’clock. Fallon’s Saturday, after a morning of sleep and an afternoon of helping with the housework, was devoted to the entertainment of his wife: they would catch the show at one of the neighborhood movies and go to an ice-cream parlor afterwards, and they were usually in bed by twelve. Then came the drowsy living-room clutter of newspapers on Sunday, and his week began again.

The trouble might never have happened if his wife had not insisted, that particular Friday, on breaking his routine: there was a Gregory Peck picture in its final showing that night, and she said she saw no reason why he couldn’t do without his prize fight, for once in his life. She told him this on Friday morning, and it was the first of many things that went wrong with his day.

At lunch—the special payday lunch that he always shared with three fellow clerks from his office, in a German tavern downtown—the others were all talking about the fights, and Fallon took little part in the conversation.

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