Nothing In The Way She Walks

Earl Fowler

It was a Monday. Or maybe it was a Wednesday. Does anybody really know what time it is?

All I know for sure is that it was the kind of day where the sun shone through the blinds like a dirty little secret, casting long, gloom-flecked shadows on emaciated Giacommeti statues and melting Dalí clocks. On yoga mats.

I was sitting behind my desk, sucking the living daylights out of a Tums calcium carbonate tablet when I caught a whiff of approaching perfume.

If I had to guess, I’d say it was a mixture of mothballs and Vicks VapoRub— the way your grandpa used to smell — tempered by the spool of Butter Rum Life Savers in his pocket. When he’d offer you one off the top of the opened roll, it always came with a thin patina of lint. But you sucked it anyway, I reflected, while savouring the satisfying snap of a Tum of no fixed flavour on my sophisticated palate.

The knock at the door interrupted my reverie. In my line of lolling about, I don’t get a lot of knocks — most people have the decency to ignore me until they need something. But when they do, it’s usually trouble wrapped in a paycheque.

“Are you decent?”

Now, where had I heard that voice before? Husky, with a side of fatalism. Rita Hayworth, maybe, overdubbed in Gilda?

“Me?” I ventured, playing along. “Maybe I’m decent and maybe I’m not. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like them myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on winter evenings. And by the way, you’ve got five minutes and then you’re paying for the coffee.”

Nescafé Instant. I was mad for the stuff after going cold turkey on Ovaltine. Hazelnut or French Vanilla, ça m’est égal. Surprise me.

As a stick of lipstick rolled across my floor, the camera in my head panned to watch it until the viewfinder came upon a pair of white open-toe shoes, pausing for a few seconds on legs stretching from here to a stately pleasure dome. Caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Even her legs had legs.

“Look up,” she said. “Look way, way up.” But that sure as hell wasn’t Rusty waiting at the top.

I got my first full, fatal glimpse of Cora as I stooped to pick up the lipstick. The camera took a full shot of her high-waisted short pants, a cropped top with a deep V-neckline and a turban like the one worn by Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

“I can see you’re a ladykiller,” she purred, the way the cats font des ronrons à Paris.“But don’t get any ideas. I ain’t no lady.”

There was a rustling in the book bag I hadn’t experienced in years. Ronronron, you been gone so long.

Platinum. Tall. The kind of dame who looked like she knew what a good vacation felt like, and it didn’t involve work. She was holding her cigarette like she’d just invented tobacco, paired with a look in her eyes that meant she’d had it up to here with working at a service station diner with a poor dumb schlub for a husband.

“Drifter?” she asked, like she already knew the answer. Might have just been a lucky guess but that’s what it said on my door. “I need someone to do something for me. Something ... important.”

I could see it coming already. Or maybe it was me veering into the headlights. What kind of dish was she? The dollar-49-day special — cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.

“Spit it out, sister. But do me a favour. Stay away from the window. Somebody might blow you … a kiss.”

When she came to, she caught me massaging her breasts. “You fainted,” I explained, “knocking them out of whack.”

She took a long drag off her cigarette, then flicked the ash into the Nescafé I’d poured for her. “Nice try, Reardon. Got any Ovaltine?”

It occurred to me that a man eats an apple. He gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth. He tries to work it out with some cellophane from a cigarette pack. What happens? The cellophane gets stuck in there, too. What’s the use? I knew that somehow I’d wind up seeing her that night.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “A lot of people think being productive is the only way to live. Get a job, make money, climb the ladder. That kind of thing. But I’m starting to wonder: What if there’s something better? Maybe not better. But … lazier?”

Oh, she was a sharp one, all right. Sharp as a shard of the 15, 20 reasons I could think of as to why she’d never make me happy. I wouldn’t give her the skin off a grape.

But it was too late. She was stuck between my teeth like a pair of gloves. I knew then that whenever I got cold, I’d pull them on. Like Gilda.

I stared at her, the words hanging in the air in slow-mo, like the hand of the first woman who ever slapped me. “You want me to find laziness for you? Sounds like you already have the concept down pat.”

She smiled, the kind of smile that told you she didn’t care about your problems, but she sure as hell was willing to get you tangled up in hers.

“Not laziness, exactly. Idleness. There’s a difference.”

I tried to remember the last time I hadn’t been idle. Lazy, if it came to it. Indolent, slothful, shiftless, lethargic, torpid, enervated, listless, inert, languorous … the whole nine synonyms. Maybe it was the last time I hadn’t been staring at my half-empty canister of Ovaltine, wasting away in anesthesiaville. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue. “I’ll bite, Doll Face. Tell me more.”

She leaned in closer and her perfume was unspeakable. It was all I could do not to take a bite out of her. She was a Rum and Butter Life Saver made out of arsenic.

“I’m tired of this rat race, Marlowe. The hustle. The grind. Everyone’s too busy to notice the world is full of beauty and wonder. They’re too busy checking their phones or making their next big move. I want to know what it’s like to do absolutely nothing and enjoy it. To sit back and watch the wheels go round.”

I grinned. “I’ve known some hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you — you’re 20 minutes.”

Still. This looked like the kind of case that came with a guaranteed cheque and no real work. Right up my 221B Baker Street alley. “You want me to help you become a fellow idler. A professional loafer. A connoisseur of relaxation.”

“Bright boy,” she said, pulling out another Virginia Slim. “You’re paid to observe stuff. I figured you’d know how to get to the heart of this thing. What does it take to be a real sewer rat?”

I bristled a little at that one. “Listen, Doll Face, I used to live in a sewer. Now I live in a swamp. I’ve come up in the world.”

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling like it owed me money. This wasn’t a case for a private eye on the public purse. It was a case for professional philosophers, people who spend too much time thinking about the nature of reality while all the while engaged in petty faculty politics like briefs and boxers clerks fighting for a promotion to the bras and panties department at Costco. The bun section, as it’s known on the street.

There are a million stories in the naked city, but the ones I didn’t want to see mostly unfolded in Costco change rooms.

“All right, sister. Here’s what you do. First, you need a place to swing low, sweet chariot. Somewhere that doesn’t demand your attention. Somewhere that doesn’t care if you’re working or not.”

“Sounds easy enough,” she said, puffing out a series of smoke rings with a delicate flick of her tongue. “What I like about you is you’re rock bottom. I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, but it’s a great comfort for a girl to know she could not possibly sink any lower. Anything else?”

“You need to get comfortable with the idea of nothing. Doing nothing, seeing nothing, being nothing. Non-being and somethingness. Most folks can’t handle it. They start twitching after a few minutes of blankness. But if you want to loaf like a pro, you’ve got to let time slip through your fingers without trying to catch it.”

“Sounds like torture,” she said. “When I try to calm down, a motorboat spins in the futile circles of my mind. A telephone dangles from its cord.”

“That’s because it’s never easy to take it easy,” I said, taking a cold sip of instant karma. “People are addicted to productivity. They’ve got deadlines, goals, bucket lists. But the real joy of idleness comes when you stop chasing all that nonsense. When you find your mind in a brown paper bag within and you realize — hell, there’s no rush. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

That little pep talk put me in mind of In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell’s 1932 meditation on leisure, social justice and simply doing less harm by being less busy:

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said, underscoring the complete and utter marginality of my entire sorry existence. “Can’t-do-it-iveness.” I was going to outline Russell’s second cause but realized doing so would be too much work.

Doll Face looked at me like I’d just handed her Google co-ordinates to the most dangerous part of town. “So, what, you just sit around doing nothing all day?”

“Ten-four, good buddy. And if you’re exceptionally good at it, like Samuel Johnson in The Rambler or Addison and Steele in The Tatler, you can tune into the poetic transience of life by doing the square root of sweet Francis Ann till the cows come home. Without looking out of your window, you can know the ways of heaven. People will start wondering how you’re so at peace, how you’ve got it all figured out. But the truth is, you’ve just learned how to stop trying.”

I opened a desk drawer, shoved aside a couple of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and pulled out the “Apology for Idlers” essay that Robert Louis Stevenson penned early last century. Still as fresh as a nib in an inkwell:

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

Doll Face was quiet for a moment, and I could tell she was thinking about it — probably weighing the cost of doing nothing against the price of a well-planned future. “OK,” she said finally. “Where do I start?”

I took another drag off my cigarette, staring at the smoke as it curled up into the air. “Find a chair. Not just any chair, mind you. A chair with character. Maybe an old leather recliner or a worn-out rocking chair. Somewhere that feels like it belongs to someone who knows the meaning of a good nap.”

“That’s it?” she asked, still tentative. Still incredulous.

“That’s the first step. Once you’ve got your chair, the rest will fall into place. Maybe you start by watching the clouds. Maybe you do a little light staring at the cracks in the wall. The key is to not care what anyone else is doing. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to not do it.”

Digging a little deeper through the mess of papers and discarded Werther’s Original wrappers under my desk, I emerged with my copy of “Twenty-Four Hours in London,” a three-century-old essay by Sir Richard Steele in which he related his impressions from simply walking around the city for a day without a worry or a care:

It is an inexpressible Pleasure to know a little of the World, and be of no Character or Significancy in it. To be ever unconcerned, and ever looking on new Objects with an endless Curiosity, is a Delight known only to those who are turned for Speculation: Nay, they who enjoy it, must value things only as they are Objects of Speculation, without drawing any worldly Advantage to themselves from them, but just as they are what they contribute to their Amusement, or the Improvement of the Mind.

I could have hit her with some of Montaigne’s shtick as a retired country gentleman. Seneca’s letters on enforced idleness written in exile. Japanese monk Yoshida Kenko’s stream-of-consciousness essays on withdrawing from his 13th-century world. Chinese essayist Ouyang Xiu’s thoughts on the sublime pleasures of unemployment after he’d fallen into political disfavour in the Song Dynasty of the 1100s.

But like you, she was already yawning over the showy overkill.

Doll Face stood up, throwing her cigarette into the ashtray like it was the last one she’d ever see. “Seriously! You’re telling me the secret to idling is just sitting around?”

I leaned back, stretching my legs out under the desk. “You’ve come a long way, baby. Made it, Ma! Top of the world! The more you try to fight it, the harder it gets. Just let go, lady. Relax. Let the world keep spinning without you for a while.”

She gave me a long look, then walked out of my office without a word. Or leaving that cheque I’d been counting on. Pity. Deranged tariffs weren’t doing my Nescafé habit any favours.

Office memorandum. Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, claims manager: You said it wasn’t an accident. Check. You said it wasn’t suicide. Check. You said it was murder … check. Yes, I killed an hour with Doll Face. I’d killed time for money — and a woman — and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?

I’d given her the tools, but whether she’d use them? Well, that was a different story. Most people don’t know how to slow down. They’re too busy trying to prove they’re alive. I suppose that’s the real trick of idleness: When you stop caring, you start living. Maybe you have to walk before you can crawl.

It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it’s true, so help me. I couldn’t hear my own footsteps, but was almost sure I was picking up the soft cadence of a pair of open-toe shoes gliding past the window.

There was another knock at the door. “Are you decent?” she asked. “If you need me, just call. You know how to dial, don’t you? You just put your finger in the hole and make tiny little circles. Da doo ron-ron-ron, da doo ron-ron.”

“Don’t bother with the lights,” I said. “We’ll think better in the dark.”