At twenty-six, Karl Floor had had a hard life: father dead, mother dead, stepdad sick and mean, siblings none, friends none, foes so offhanded in their molestations that they did not make a crisp enough focal point for his energies. Not that he had many energies — he had few. He wasn’t born wan and slow, but misfortune made him so, and so he felt he would remain till death. Death: it cast a faraway light of exaltation over the future, as the prospect of a shining city on a hill gives comfort to pilgrims enduring a rough sea voyage, but he could not, as the pilgrims could not, get there any faster. He simply had to withstand storms and lulls, eat spoiled food, fall ill for months, never fully recover, and put up a sail at the first sign of wind. The strange woman in the upstairs hallway of his stepfather’s house did not seem to him such a sign. He felt she was twenty-four. She wore jeans and a rose-colored T-shirt over her thin, strong body. She did not have on a mask, nor was she carry ing any of his family’s possessions, so Karl may be forgiven for not immediately identifying her as a burglar. A maid, he thought, an amateur from the university who’d tacked up posters around town with little half-cut tabs at the bottom that had her phone number on them that you could tear off and put in your pocket and call her later about daubing the inside of your house with her unwashed rag.
“Hi,” she said.
Dust descended across the close air of the hallway on a mid-afternoon sunbeam that entered the house through a bedroom window to the right. The rose-colored T-shirt was lit by the beam, and now the words fitness instructor formed in his head.
“Are you—”
The likelihood of this afternoon’s turning out to be other than grim was nil. His walk home from the high school where he taught math had been halted by the two worst boys from trig — a class of twenty pleasant sophomores and these two, seniors with no feel for trig or any subject that was not the idiot interruption of reasonable endeavor, or, to put it another way, they were assholes — blond assholes, he felt compelled to add. Karl himself was almost blond, and was willing to concede there were many blond people who were not assholes, and many brunettes and redheads who were, but a small, unkind segment of the blond population, he felt, acted out their unkindness as if wearing a blond wig, or as if they felt their blondness made them suitable for a role in which a brown-haired actor, no matter how brilliant the audition, would never have been cast. Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in “The Thomas Crown Affair,” McQueen laughing woodenly and kicking the air in the mod parlor of his mansion after pulling off a two-million-dollar bank heist, and Dunaway in her wide-brimmed hat crying out unconvincingly to the brown-haired chief of police, “Yes, I’m immoral, but so is the world!” That was who stopped Karl on his way home from school, a pair of high-society sophisticates with their own elite moral code, only both male, both teen, both crude, both dumb, both smelling like a week-old milk spill.
“Nice weather, Mr. Floor,” one of them said, and the terrible thing was, it was nice weather, and the punching began.
A grown man, a teacher, beaten by two teens was grim. The central mathematical fact of the beating — two assailants — upset him most of all; five would’ve made it less personal; one would’ve given the dignity of a duel, or the randomness of an encounter with a lone psychopath; two made it intimate, a love triangle in which Karl was the odd man out.
“Are you—” he said to the burglar, forty minutes after the beating.
“Robbing you? Yes.”
“Robbing me?”
“This is your house, isn’t it?”
“Well, I live here.”
“But it’s not yours?”
“No.”
“So you don’t own anything here?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Whose is it?”
“My stepfather’s.”
“Where’s he?”
“At work.”
“What’s he do?”
“Manufacturing.”
“Of?”
“Something vulgar.”
“Toilet fixtures?”
“Not vulgar in that way, just not exalted.”
“So everything in the world is either vulgar or exalted, with a line down the middle?”
“You’re rude.”
“I’m a robber.”
