THREE CONVERSATIONS
A Romance
1. The Mexican Inn
A Romance
1. The Mexican Inn
I’m not a woman who looks for the worst in men, not even old boyfriends, but Johnny Keats was more of a wreck at forty than I thought he’d be. His hair looked like shit, he desperately needed someone to buy his clothes for him, and he clearly drank, ate and smoked too much. I knew the score the minute I saw him. I remember thinking that sooner or later he will start finding reasons for not leaving his house. He’ll become one of those sad people who will die alone, his decomposed body not found until weeks or months after a fatal stroke or heart attack. On the other hand, and this is important, I’m sure his apartment will be reasonably clean, not immaculate but pleasant and comfortable. When they find him, a DVD will be playing the menu of an obscure Korean or Romanian film, the remains of decent food will be found in the refrigerator, most of it in far better shape than he’ll be, a Thai curry, a green sauce from Santa Fe, goat cheese, three or four bottles of dark ale, a brand no one has ever heard of. His books will be in order. Many many books, a fine library, but nearly all paperbacks, a personal quirk that no one but Johnny ever quite understood. If anyone looks at his computer, and probably no one will, they’ll find rotisserie sports, porn and Netflix, but also copious notes in personal files on everything under the sun, as if he were trying to catalog all the things he ever saw or knew, or more to the point, preserve them.
Johnny and I talked on the phone until the wee hours the night of the day after Frank Morris killed himself, me at home, Johnny in his motel room. Earlier we’d eaten together at a Mexican restaurant, the only one in town when we were growing up here. He’d been drinking by the time he got me on the phone and fell asleep several times. I’d hang up and he’d call me back. I sat up in bed and drank decaf, watched a movie and late night commercials with the sound off, and listened to him ramble on about this and that. It’s been so long, I no longer remember when he told me what, but I know the movie I was watching, Hitchcock’s The Saboteur, and even now I can see myself propped up against the pillows watching Robert Cummings run for his life from German spies, all the way across the country, from the Hoover Dam to the Statue of Liberty, as I listened to the lowdown on Johnny Keats, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since coming back from California, the story went, seven or eight years earlier, he’d been living alone in a garage apartment behind a duplex that his late mother had owned. She’d left him two duplexes, mortgage free, and the rent was a big part of his income. The other part came from teaching classes of freshman comp at local community colleges. He’d become pretty good at fixing house things, he said, even though it bored him to tears, and the same could be said for teaching composition. The duplexes were in a neighborhood of old frame houses from the twenties and thirties, almost all divided up into rentals and occupied by a pretty even mix of rednecks and, as he put it, “third world types,” mostly Vietnamese and Mexicans, along with a few artists, writers, urban pioneers and die hard hippies. Just walking down the street, he told me, could be entertaining, which he often did to get his adrenalin going or to cheer himself up. That’s how he saw himself, or wanted me to see him, not as a landlord or school teacher, but as a sort of middle-aged, old-school counter-culture type, a latter-day beatnik perhaps, not the ascetic variety, not by a long shot, but the scruffy, macho, hurly-burly type, a man with big appetites who might amble purposefully and fearlessly down low rent streets towards an old Sears store to price lawnmowers or to the Mexican supermarket for epazote or jicama, along the way passing old houses with big front porches adorned with Confederate and Mexican flags, driveways crowded with stripped down and souped up cars, front yards littered with bottles, plastic toys, barbecue pits, potted plants, and chained rotweilers, all to the tune of nortenyo polkas, heavy metal, power saws, sirens, and of course, all summer long, the cicadas.
I closed my eyes a lot, especially during the used car commercials, but never completely went to sleep. It was, after all, his turn. At dinner I’d told him all about me, a version of me at any rate, and he’d told me what he knew about Frank. And besides, I knew that sooner rather than later, probably as soon as he got a drink or two in him, he’d find a way to make a move on me. He’d missed his chance twenty years earlier. I’d been nuts about him back then, and he knew it. I’d never met a boy, or anyone else, not even a teacher, who gave a shit about what I thought, what I knew, and what’s more, who liked me for it. Russians, especially, got him going, sent him into ecstasy. Dostoyevsky. Shostakovitch. Turgenev. Kandinski. All exotic music to his ears. Not that I really knew a lot about those people in those days, but I knew more than he did, enough to impress him, and I was thrilled by his interest, I don’t mind admitting. I’d have done anything for him. I didn’t tell him that of course. I didn’t even tell myself that. I tried to hide it, my nuttiness, from both of us, but he knew, and we saw each other regularly, at least once every weekend for quite a while, an arrangement that didn’t stop until we went off to separate colleges, and then it stopped completely. Nothing for twenty years, until all of a sudden there he was, and for a reason that had nothing to do with me. So why did he look me up? What was he expecting? One for old times’ sake? Maybe a pity fuck: so very sorry about Frank, Johnny, want to fuck me? I’d picked a restaurant that didn’t serve alcohol just to avoid that, and it went fine, but when he called a few hours later, he was already drunk.
There wasn’t much he didn’t cover, but the turning point came when he said, “I can’t live with women.” It annoyed me. I’d been content to listen until then and watch my movie, but what the hell was that supposed to mean? I said, spitefully, “How about a dog then?” “Worse,” he said, ignoring my tone, “that would be like having a kid. I’m not lonely.” “Okay, so why did you say that? Are you telling me that all you need is a steady fuck? Is that it? Someone always available but who won’t compete for the bathroom or tell you when to come home?” “No, I’ve got somebody for that. I need a woman I can talk to.” “You can’t talk to your girlfriend?” “She’s not my girlfriend.” ”I see. Well, you can talk to me all you want. That should be obvious by now.” “But I’ll probably want to do more than that.” “Like what? We already went out to eat, and it’s too late now for a movie. Besides, you’re drunk.” “You know what I mean.” “Yes, but why do you feel compelled to announce it right now, all things considered? Your best friend just died. You haven’t seen me in twenty years, nor even tried to see me. We don’t really know each other anymore.” “Yes we do, but that doesn’t matter. I’m a sucker for smart women, especially when they look like you.” “How many smart women have you met who look like me?” “Don’t be a smart ass, Sally, unless you want me banging on your front door.” “Don’t. I’ll call the police. Plus I have a gun.” “Don’t tempt me.” “To what? Spend the night in jail? Get shot?” We went on like that a little longer, but I soon got him off on another track. He didn’t mind what we talked about. In his condition, it was all just different ways of coming on to me. By then it actually hurt to stay awake, but I went on listening, and he managed somehow to make fairly coherent a few little conceits that I could tell he saved for special occasions, things that, as drunks will, he seemed to think explained everything. First there was how the episodic nature of innings in a baseball game related to form in novels and movies, which somehow led to the idea of class in thoroughbreds, and that of course made him think of gorditas and the relative merits of Northern and Central Mexican food. I listened, but after a while it was like trying to stay awake through the first chapter of what might or might not be a novel worth reading. My attention strayed, I couldn’t help it, and I almost missed his marriage. A genuine confession, and I recognized it as such, but I was too far gone by then to care. “Ancient history now,” he said, “lasted only a few years, a long time ago, and now, if my math is right, I have a teenage daughter that I haven’t seen since she was six.” I didn’t ask why not. I thought about it, but I was short on patience by then and thought better of it. When I finally hung up for the last time, he was saying whatever popped into his head, rarely finishing a thought, still very drunk, running on fumes.
When we dated, if you can call it that, I thought it might be love, but for one thing, the inconvenient fact that he was ashamed to be seen with me. That was my issue with him, or had been. Do you hold that kind of grudge for twenty years? Should you? Or was it best, if possible, just to save it as a useful piece of information about that person as he used to be and perhaps still was, and a lesson on how shitty people can be? We never went anywhere except where no one could see us, usually the drive-in movie, and I admit to not being blameless, having gone along with it. Nevertheless, even now when I’m old enough to know better, I sometimes catch myself plotting revenge. So Johnny, you thought I was a whore? You were right, as it happens, although I didn’t know it at the time myself, and now I’m going to act like one. You can fuck me anytime, why not, but don’t forget, I get paid for it now, and you’re no exception. Would he take me up on it? No, but imagining his reaction is I admit satisfying. He wouldn’t have enough money, for starters, but even if he did, he’s too sentimental. He’s told me since that what we did as teenagers, me straddling him in the front seat of his car, no rubber and no ejaculation, was to him a thing of beauty, his all time favorite erotic memory. I’d learned all that, the location, the position, and the precaution, such as it was, from a friend of my oldest brother’s when I was thirteen, and it all turned out to be a fond memory for Johnny. His fondest, so he says, a thing of beauty, and since he was a virgin the first time we did it, it should be.
He can be sweet. These days I watch 81/2 with him regularly, in part just to please him, and he’s as faithful to it, and Fellini in general, as a dog. That movie in particular is the real love of his life, more than any woman could ever be. He fell in love with it when he was sixteen, not too long before he met me, and over the years his love for it has only increased. As a teenager, he readily admits, he saw Guido as someone to look up to, a role model, even though he’s never physically resembled him in the least. Johnny is attractive enough, manly and sensual for sure, even now when he’s relatively fat and soft, but no Mastroianni, not even handsome really. The rest, how closely he resembles the character, Guido’s personality, is debatable, although I suspect that if you didn’t know Johnny, or disliked him, you might think it laughable. Even ludicrous. He’s not a womanizer, except maybe in his head, but he counters that by claiming that Guido wasn’t one either. He just wasn’t satisfied with one woman. That’s quibbling, I told him, and besides, if you can’t be satisfied with Anouk Aimee, there’s something wrong with you, but that was just banter. I like Guido too, and even identify with him some, or maybe I’m just charmed. Lately, a stray remark or two is all we share whenever we watch it. A good print. I’m going to get some sunglasses like that. I’ll never get tired of the hat gesture during the harem scene. That sort of thing. Neither of us want to talk about it much, and I don’t need him to tell me why he’s always liked it. Guido for Johnny is an archetype, one that inspired him at twenty, reassured him at forty, consoled him at sixty. 81/2 is a comedy, I’ve come to realize, with an ironic effect common perhaps to all great comedies, one that he and I both find amusing and edifying to this day. You come away thinking, no matter how old you are, how fucked up, how miserable, that everything is okay. It helps you step back, or in Guido’s case, stop hiding under the table, and feel no shame, feel neither guilty nor like a fool, not even when you hold hands in a circle with everyone you’ve ever known your whole life, alive and dead, and prance merrily around a little circus ring.
*****
Johnny and I talked on the phone until the wee hours the night of the day after Frank Morris killed himself, me at home, Johnny in his motel room. Earlier we’d eaten together at a Mexican restaurant, the only one in town when we were growing up here. He’d been drinking by the time he got me on the phone and fell asleep several times. I’d hang up and he’d call me back. I sat up in bed and drank decaf, watched a movie and late night commercials with the sound off, and listened to him ramble on about this and that. It’s been so long, I no longer remember when he told me what, but I know the movie I was watching, Hitchcock’s The Saboteur, and even now I can see myself propped up against the pillows watching Robert Cummings run for his life from German spies, all the way across the country, from the Hoover Dam to the Statue of Liberty, as I listened to the lowdown on Johnny Keats, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since coming back from California, the story went, seven or eight years earlier, he’d been living alone in a garage apartment behind a duplex that his late mother had owned. She’d left him two duplexes, mortgage free, and the rent was a big part of his income. The other part came from teaching classes of freshman comp at local community colleges. He’d become pretty good at fixing house things, he said, even though it bored him to tears, and the same could be said for teaching composition. The duplexes were in a neighborhood of old frame houses from the twenties and thirties, almost all divided up into rentals and occupied by a pretty even mix of rednecks and, as he put it, “third world types,” mostly Vietnamese and Mexicans, along with a few artists, writers, urban pioneers and die hard hippies. Just walking down the street, he told me, could be entertaining, which he often did to get his adrenalin going or to cheer himself up. That’s how he saw himself, or wanted me to see him, not as a landlord or school teacher, but as a sort of middle-aged, old-school counter-culture type, a latter-day beatnik perhaps, not the ascetic variety, not by a long shot, but the scruffy, macho, hurly-burly type, a man with big appetites who might amble purposefully and fearlessly down low rent streets towards an old Sears store to price lawnmowers or to the Mexican supermarket for epazote or jicama, along the way passing old houses with big front porches adorned with Confederate and Mexican flags, driveways crowded with stripped down and souped up cars, front yards littered with bottles, plastic toys, barbecue pits, potted plants, and chained rotweilers, all to the tune of nortenyo polkas, heavy metal, power saws, sirens, and of course, all summer long, the cicadas.
I closed my eyes a lot, especially during the used car commercials, but never completely went to sleep. It was, after all, his turn. At dinner I’d told him all about me, a version of me at any rate, and he’d told me what he knew about Frank. And besides, I knew that sooner rather than later, probably as soon as he got a drink or two in him, he’d find a way to make a move on me. He’d missed his chance twenty years earlier. I’d been nuts about him back then, and he knew it. I’d never met a boy, or anyone else, not even a teacher, who gave a shit about what I thought, what I knew, and what’s more, who liked me for it. Russians, especially, got him going, sent him into ecstasy. Dostoyevsky. Shostakovitch. Turgenev. Kandinski. All exotic music to his ears. Not that I really knew a lot about those people in those days, but I knew more than he did, enough to impress him, and I was thrilled by his interest, I don’t mind admitting. I’d have done anything for him. I didn’t tell him that of course. I didn’t even tell myself that. I tried to hide it, my nuttiness, from both of us, but he knew, and we saw each other regularly, at least once every weekend for quite a while, an arrangement that didn’t stop until we went off to separate colleges, and then it stopped completely. Nothing for twenty years, until all of a sudden there he was, and for a reason that had nothing to do with me. So why did he look me up? What was he expecting? One for old times’ sake? Maybe a pity fuck: so very sorry about Frank, Johnny, want to fuck me? I’d picked a restaurant that didn’t serve alcohol just to avoid that, and it went fine, but when he called a few hours later, he was already drunk.
There wasn’t much he didn’t cover, but the turning point came when he said, “I can’t live with women.” It annoyed me. I’d been content to listen until then and watch my movie, but what the hell was that supposed to mean? I said, spitefully, “How about a dog then?” “Worse,” he said, ignoring my tone, “that would be like having a kid. I’m not lonely.” “Okay, so why did you say that? Are you telling me that all you need is a steady fuck? Is that it? Someone always available but who won’t compete for the bathroom or tell you when to come home?” “No, I’ve got somebody for that. I need a woman I can talk to.” “You can’t talk to your girlfriend?” “She’s not my girlfriend.” ”I see. Well, you can talk to me all you want. That should be obvious by now.” “But I’ll probably want to do more than that.” “Like what? We already went out to eat, and it’s too late now for a movie. Besides, you’re drunk.” “You know what I mean.” “Yes, but why do you feel compelled to announce it right now, all things considered? Your best friend just died. You haven’t seen me in twenty years, nor even tried to see me. We don’t really know each other anymore.” “Yes we do, but that doesn’t matter. I’m a sucker for smart women, especially when they look like you.” “How many smart women have you met who look like me?” “Don’t be a smart ass, Sally, unless you want me banging on your front door.” “Don’t. I’ll call the police. Plus I have a gun.” “Don’t tempt me.” “To what? Spend the night in jail? Get shot?” We went on like that a little longer, but I soon got him off on another track. He didn’t mind what we talked about. In his condition, it was all just different ways of coming on to me. By then it actually hurt to stay awake, but I went on listening, and he managed somehow to make fairly coherent a few little conceits that I could tell he saved for special occasions, things that, as drunks will, he seemed to think explained everything. First there was how the episodic nature of innings in a baseball game related to form in novels and movies, which somehow led to the idea of class in thoroughbreds, and that of course made him think of gorditas and the relative merits of Northern and Central Mexican food. I listened, but after a while it was like trying to stay awake through the first chapter of what might or might not be a novel worth reading. My attention strayed, I couldn’t help it, and I almost missed his marriage. A genuine confession, and I recognized it as such, but I was too far gone by then to care. “Ancient history now,” he said, “lasted only a few years, a long time ago, and now, if my math is right, I have a teenage daughter that I haven’t seen since she was six.” I didn’t ask why not. I thought about it, but I was short on patience by then and thought better of it. When I finally hung up for the last time, he was saying whatever popped into his head, rarely finishing a thought, still very drunk, running on fumes.
When we dated, if you can call it that, I thought it might be love, but for one thing, the inconvenient fact that he was ashamed to be seen with me. That was my issue with him, or had been. Do you hold that kind of grudge for twenty years? Should you? Or was it best, if possible, just to save it as a useful piece of information about that person as he used to be and perhaps still was, and a lesson on how shitty people can be? We never went anywhere except where no one could see us, usually the drive-in movie, and I admit to not being blameless, having gone along with it. Nevertheless, even now when I’m old enough to know better, I sometimes catch myself plotting revenge. So Johnny, you thought I was a whore? You were right, as it happens, although I didn’t know it at the time myself, and now I’m going to act like one. You can fuck me anytime, why not, but don’t forget, I get paid for it now, and you’re no exception. Would he take me up on it? No, but imagining his reaction is I admit satisfying. He wouldn’t have enough money, for starters, but even if he did, he’s too sentimental. He’s told me since that what we did as teenagers, me straddling him in the front seat of his car, no rubber and no ejaculation, was to him a thing of beauty, his all time favorite erotic memory. I’d learned all that, the location, the position, and the precaution, such as it was, from a friend of my oldest brother’s when I was thirteen, and it all turned out to be a fond memory for Johnny. His fondest, so he says, a thing of beauty, and since he was a virgin the first time we did it, it should be.
He can be sweet. These days I watch 81/2 with him regularly, in part just to please him, and he’s as faithful to it, and Fellini in general, as a dog. That movie in particular is the real love of his life, more than any woman could ever be. He fell in love with it when he was sixteen, not too long before he met me, and over the years his love for it has only increased. As a teenager, he readily admits, he saw Guido as someone to look up to, a role model, even though he’s never physically resembled him in the least. Johnny is attractive enough, manly and sensual for sure, even now when he’s relatively fat and soft, but no Mastroianni, not even handsome really. The rest, how closely he resembles the character, Guido’s personality, is debatable, although I suspect that if you didn’t know Johnny, or disliked him, you might think it laughable. Even ludicrous. He’s not a womanizer, except maybe in his head, but he counters that by claiming that Guido wasn’t one either. He just wasn’t satisfied with one woman. That’s quibbling, I told him, and besides, if you can’t be satisfied with Anouk Aimee, there’s something wrong with you, but that was just banter. I like Guido too, and even identify with him some, or maybe I’m just charmed. Lately, a stray remark or two is all we share whenever we watch it. A good print. I’m going to get some sunglasses like that. I’ll never get tired of the hat gesture during the harem scene. That sort of thing. Neither of us want to talk about it much, and I don’t need him to tell me why he’s always liked it. Guido for Johnny is an archetype, one that inspired him at twenty, reassured him at forty, consoled him at sixty. 81/2 is a comedy, I’ve come to realize, with an ironic effect common perhaps to all great comedies, one that he and I both find amusing and edifying to this day. You come away thinking, no matter how old you are, how fucked up, how miserable, that everything is okay. It helps you step back, or in Guido’s case, stop hiding under the table, and feel no shame, feel neither guilty nor like a fool, not even when you hold hands in a circle with everyone you’ve ever known your whole life, alive and dead, and prance merrily around a little circus ring.
*****
Grace, bless her heart, not Johnny, told me what Frank did. She took her coat off and smoothed out her skirt, first things first, but then wasted no time. We were perfectly alone, but she stood unusually close, leaning into me, putting her hand up beside her mouth, whispering. “Did you see on the news? About Dr. Morris? He killed himself.” Not only himself, I soon learned. Two others besides, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that. Not exactly. “And two other people died” is how she put it. One was a man I’d almost forgotten about, a football coach named Cook, and the other was the coach’s daughter. And no, I hadn’t seen it on the news, but it was the talk of the town, or was soon to be. Even the teenagers who came to the library after school whispered about it for weeks. The out of town papers and TV stations gave it play, the sensational angle being that Dr. Morris was a prominent citizen, a highly respected member of the community, a family man. He served on boards and committees. He taught Sunday school. He was so perfect, in fact, that friends and acquaintances at first denied that it ever happened. Must be some mistake, people told reporters. Not the Dr. Morris I know. Kill two people and himself? Are you crazy? Some maniac is on the loose and you want to blame Dr. Morris? What will you think up next? The cops don’t know what they’re doing. The media will say anything. Next they’ll accuse him of cheating on his wife. Of being a pedophile. A queer. An alcoholic. A drug addict. Incompetent. Impotent. God knows what else. People these days have no sense of decency. Think of his wife and family, of how they must feel, his name being dragged through the mud.
Years ago Coach Cook won two state football championships in a row, major events in our little town. Frank Morris had been the quarterback. It was possible I guess that Frank hated the coach for some dark and buried reason from the long ago past, some unspeakable reason perhaps, or maybe the coach had simply yelled at him one too many times, and Frank, after shooting the bastard to satisfy the old grudge, decided he wanted no witnesses, which carried him all the way to the heinous act of murdering the coach’s daughter, and then, instantly remorseful, to the shameful act of suicide. Something like that, but I doubted it, especially after I’d seen the paper. My money is always on love, especially when a woman as good looking as Ginger Cook is involved, but I didn’t share that or any of the rest of it with Grace. Up to a point Grace could sensibly discuss what she’d read or heard, but then she’d frown and shake her head as if someone had just told her something about the world she’d never heard of before, or done something to her she’d never imagined in her worst nightmares. A widow volunteer, Grace should have gotten on my nerves but usually didn’t. I scheduled my most tedious work for when she was around, and she did just fine for me as a kind of background radio program. I could pay attention or not to her endless monologues about her various ailments, her talented kids and sweet grandkids, her poor dead husband, her garden, her troubles with cars, air conditioners, water heaters, leaky faucets. Grace was a busy woman and loved every minute of it. Everyone she met was nice. No one ever tried to cheat her. No one was ever rude or indifferent. And in her spare time, which she claimed never to have enough of, she read the most interesting books and watched fascinating dramas and documentaries on television. It was good to have her around, my very own Pollyanna, even if she was a little slow about putting away books.
As a rule I had no trouble keeping my mouth shut around Grace. Leave her alone, I counseled myself. There’s no reason to challenge sweet old ladies. Normally, I even felt protective, but that morning, even before I knew all the facts, I had to work at it. “It’s one of those things we’ll never understand,” Grace said, and I promptly sealed my lips and found something else to do, retreated to my office, not allowing myself even the most innocuous remark. That slope was too slippery, even before I saw the news reports myself and the paper the next day. I could never say, “The coach’s daughter was a pretty redhead, wasn’t she Grace? The light and airy type, it seems, cheerful and perky, at least ten years younger than Frank, judging from her picture here in the paper, obviously taken from an ID of some sort, probably a driver’s license, but still clearly a very attractive woman. I’ve never seen poor Ginger to know her, don’t know the first thing about her, but I’ll bet you anything that Frank was screwing her. Or wanting to, and either way, what he did, Grace, according to the paper, even if you have to read between the lines, was walk right up to her just like that and shoot her point blank between the eyes. And you know why? It doesn’t say so in the paper, but you can bet your life it was because he loved her. That’s always the reason, and who knows, or cares, why he then decided to finish off the coach. Why not? The old guy was nearly dead anyway, ALS for five years, on a respirator. A mercy killing, twice over. Maybe three times over. Coach, old man, you don’t need to be living like that, down to moving your eyelids, mourning for your daughter, and now feeling betrayed by your old student and friend. That’s three good reasons to die, real good ones, so Coach, let me have mercy on you, and on myself.”
*****
I’d chosen a place for dinner that had been around since before Johnny and I were born, the old Mexican Inn, which was still somehow hanging on in the same location downtown. It would be quiet and familiar, the food was still good, and I assumed Johnny wanted a sympathetic ear. He and Frank went all the way back to grade school, and I knew they’d always stayed in touch, but we’d barely sat down when he announced that he wanted to talk about me. Fine, I thought. Maybe he’s right to steer clear of Frank, at least for a while, and we certainly had some catching up to do, but I was a little put off when he started in on a lengthy summary, a fantasy really, of what he thought he already knew about me. Put off, but amused too, since it was just like him.
Years ago Coach Cook won two state football championships in a row, major events in our little town. Frank Morris had been the quarterback. It was possible I guess that Frank hated the coach for some dark and buried reason from the long ago past, some unspeakable reason perhaps, or maybe the coach had simply yelled at him one too many times, and Frank, after shooting the bastard to satisfy the old grudge, decided he wanted no witnesses, which carried him all the way to the heinous act of murdering the coach’s daughter, and then, instantly remorseful, to the shameful act of suicide. Something like that, but I doubted it, especially after I’d seen the paper. My money is always on love, especially when a woman as good looking as Ginger Cook is involved, but I didn’t share that or any of the rest of it with Grace. Up to a point Grace could sensibly discuss what she’d read or heard, but then she’d frown and shake her head as if someone had just told her something about the world she’d never heard of before, or done something to her she’d never imagined in her worst nightmares. A widow volunteer, Grace should have gotten on my nerves but usually didn’t. I scheduled my most tedious work for when she was around, and she did just fine for me as a kind of background radio program. I could pay attention or not to her endless monologues about her various ailments, her talented kids and sweet grandkids, her poor dead husband, her garden, her troubles with cars, air conditioners, water heaters, leaky faucets. Grace was a busy woman and loved every minute of it. Everyone she met was nice. No one ever tried to cheat her. No one was ever rude or indifferent. And in her spare time, which she claimed never to have enough of, she read the most interesting books and watched fascinating dramas and documentaries on television. It was good to have her around, my very own Pollyanna, even if she was a little slow about putting away books.
As a rule I had no trouble keeping my mouth shut around Grace. Leave her alone, I counseled myself. There’s no reason to challenge sweet old ladies. Normally, I even felt protective, but that morning, even before I knew all the facts, I had to work at it. “It’s one of those things we’ll never understand,” Grace said, and I promptly sealed my lips and found something else to do, retreated to my office, not allowing myself even the most innocuous remark. That slope was too slippery, even before I saw the news reports myself and the paper the next day. I could never say, “The coach’s daughter was a pretty redhead, wasn’t she Grace? The light and airy type, it seems, cheerful and perky, at least ten years younger than Frank, judging from her picture here in the paper, obviously taken from an ID of some sort, probably a driver’s license, but still clearly a very attractive woman. I’ve never seen poor Ginger to know her, don’t know the first thing about her, but I’ll bet you anything that Frank was screwing her. Or wanting to, and either way, what he did, Grace, according to the paper, even if you have to read between the lines, was walk right up to her just like that and shoot her point blank between the eyes. And you know why? It doesn’t say so in the paper, but you can bet your life it was because he loved her. That’s always the reason, and who knows, or cares, why he then decided to finish off the coach. Why not? The old guy was nearly dead anyway, ALS for five years, on a respirator. A mercy killing, twice over. Maybe three times over. Coach, old man, you don’t need to be living like that, down to moving your eyelids, mourning for your daughter, and now feeling betrayed by your old student and friend. That’s three good reasons to die, real good ones, so Coach, let me have mercy on you, and on myself.”
*****
I’d chosen a place for dinner that had been around since before Johnny and I were born, the old Mexican Inn, which was still somehow hanging on in the same location downtown. It would be quiet and familiar, the food was still good, and I assumed Johnny wanted a sympathetic ear. He and Frank went all the way back to grade school, and I knew they’d always stayed in touch, but we’d barely sat down when he announced that he wanted to talk about me. Fine, I thought. Maybe he’s right to steer clear of Frank, at least for a while, and we certainly had some catching up to do, but I was a little put off when he started in on a lengthy summary, a fantasy really, of what he thought he already knew about me. Put off, but amused too, since it was just like him.
“You haven’t been a librarian all these years, I know that much, but Frank had nothing more specific about you, before you came back I mean, than ‘teacher.’ He wasn’t even sure where. I thought at the very least you’d be tenured, an expert on Dostoyevski perhaps, fluent in Russian, a few translations to your credit, probably married to a poet or a novelist, an earnest but mediocre creative type, a guy who gets yearly contracts from the same school as you only because they want to keep you and keep you happy. Am I close?” I said, “Why couldn’t it be the other way around?” “You mean you as the creative type? Sure. That’s fine. We’ll make you a poet, married to a tenured professor. Maybe your husband was actually a Russian, the real thing, and maybe you were sleeping with another poet or novelist.” He saw me raise an eyebrow. “I only add that,” he said, “the last part, because something must have gone wrong.” “Of course.” “You know what I’m getting at.” “That I wouldn’t be faithful?” “No, no. Be serious. I mean I was betting on something like that scenario, that’s what I’m getting at, but instead, here you are, back where we started, and a small town librarian. So what happened?” “What do you mean?” That time I wasn’t just being coy. “For all you know, Johnny, I was a total washout in school. Don’t be so tactless. Maybe I don’t even have a graduate degree, never mind all that other stuff. Maybe I became a druggy or got pregnant my first year and dropped out.” He shook his head. “That’s not possible. When I knew you, you were clearly headed for graduate school and the life of a scholar. You already knew everything, had read everything. If you didn’t do that, it was because you didn’t want to. So tell me what happened. Forget the affair thing. I’m sorry. I got carried away. You’ve always seemed so exotic to me.” “Right.” “Did the poet or the novelist or the Russian die on you? Lung cancer? A brain tumor? Liver? Kidney? Heart attack? Or was it divorce? Did he leave you for a younger woman? Was he gay?” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. It was just like old times, Johnny on a roll. Sometimes I’d have to kiss him to shut him up, or at least slow him down, not an option this time. “Regardless, no matter what it was,” he went on, “I’m sure you came here in reaction to something. To mourn? Work through your anger? Find yourself? Find something to live for? But maybe you got used to it, liked it better here than you thought, maybe the people really appreciate you, you’re doing an important service, they need you, and maybe you’re happier now than you’ve ever been in your life. Is that it? Or maybe you’ve fallen into a terrible lethargy. Unhappy here but afraid to leave. Or unable. The only thing that makes me doubt that is how good you look. Disgustingly healthy, Sally, even happy, and still beautiful of course.”
He wisely chose to run out of steam on that note and waited patiently for me to confirm or deny. I have a schtick about the story of my life, or rather, my career arc, especially for people I hardly know, which includes those I haven’t seen for twenty years, should they be annoying enough to ask. My preferred answer would be none of your business, or to some, none of your fucking business. What I actually say, though, since I’ve come home, is that I’ve been a librarian my whole life, but I jazz it up. I name whatever cities first come to mind, plausible or not. New York, Paris, Rome. Bangkok, Mumbai, Buenos Aires. I use the term ‘systems analysis,’ which most people assume is a euphemism for something unbearably tedious, and then, just as I seem to be ready to launch into a lengthy explanation, I let them off the hook. I ask about their grandchildren, or how to smoke brisket. I comment on a cute dress, or I suddenly see a friend across the room. I’ve always been good at changing the subject, and at lying, even before I had to be, and I seriously considered lying to Johnny. Not the librarian story. That wouldn’t do. Instead, I’d confirm his theory, but with my own twist, one he’d like just as well, maybe better. I’d say I’d fallen for some brooding introverted novelist while back east in graduate school, some beautiful boy who could barely concentrate on the present long enough to tie his shoelaces, brilliant of course but sadly under-appreciated, and yes Johnny, you are so right, it was me the schools wanted, only the best schools, naturally, and tenure was a foregone conclusion, I didn’t need my brooding boy wonder, but I dragged him with me wherever I went, and he rewarded me, once the new had worn off of our previously torrid love life, by relentlessly pursuing my most attractive students and colleagues, male, female and in-between. I bore up for a while, took it on the chin, but finally I’d had enough of my perpetually horny mate, not to mention that all those horrible things you hear about academia are actually true, so I came here to escape, you are so right again, to lick my wounds, and I’m content now, I feel useful, wanted and adored by the community. It’s so good to be home again.
Tempted though I was to feed him some bullshit like that, instead, even before our food was served, while we sipped iced tea and munched on tortilla chips, I told him the truth. Why I’m not sure. Did I want to hurt him? Or was it because, despite everything, the time elapsed, how he’d treated me, I still thought there was something special about him? Both could be true, of course, but I wasn’t sure about either. I did like him, still, but it was also true that I wouldn’t mind hurting him. He already knew from Frank, he said, that Judge Prescott got me the librarian job, but no, Frank hadn’t said why. “You didn’t guess?” “Guess what?” “That the judge fell for me. We see each other on weekends now, discreetly of course, since he happens to be married.” He nodded, kept eating chips, but he started dipping each one a little too carefully into the hot sauce and avoiding eye contact. “Want to know how it happened?” “Sure.” What he really wanted, of course, was to be told it didn’t happen. “I was in town for my brother’s funeral, five years ago, and ran into him at the mall. He didn’t recognize me. Actually, if he ever knew who I was, it was probably because of my scholarship, but when I introduced myself as a high school friend of his daughter’s, he was quick to suggest coffee.” Johnny said nothing, but he didn’t have to. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was thinking, of course he suggested coffee, the lecherous old fart. “I told him I was in town because my mother needed me at the funeral. She actually loved the sorry bastard.” “You didn’t tell him that.” “Maybe not in those exact words, but all my brothers are sorry bastards, and I’m not shy about telling people. I’m the one who gives my mother a few hundred dollars every month to supplement her salary at the pants factory. I bought her a car. I offered to buy her a house. Her three darling sons, including the one now deceased, have never given her a penny. On the contrary, they borrow money from her and never pay it back. They sometimes camp out in her apartment and treat her like shit.” “So you told the judge all that over coffee?” he asked skeptically. “I told him a lot, that’s the point, and I was just on the verge of calling my mother a saint, of saying that she worked her butt off and never complained, or something along those lines, just like you hear in the movies, when I stopped. Not from self-restraint, although I was beginning to wonder, I admit, if I’d gone too far, maybe I was boring him, or putting him off by being just a tad self-serving, but it turned out to be just the opposite. He was charmed. He’d fallen for me, I knew it in a flash, the minute our eyes met, and believe it or not, it shut me up and made me blush.”
Johnny kept eating chips. He finished the whole basket without looking at me, and he was still finding other things to look at when he finally found something to say. “That’s not like you.” “What isn’t?” “Initiating all that.” “How do you know?” It was a good question, but he ignored it. “I guess you have money then,” he said. “Or did, if you were helping support your mother. You offered to buy her a house?” “Yes.” He waited for me to elaborate, and when I didn’t, he said, “So, if you didn’t need a job and had plenty of money, now I’m really wondering what you were doing before and why you came back. Surely you didn’t make that much teaching, even if you were a whiz kid. And if you did, how could you leave it? Was I right about a personal crisis? Maybe that explains your candor with the judge. Or maybe you were more bothered by your brother’s death than you realized.” “Don’t make me laugh. I was ecstatic over my brother’s death, but no, things weren’t bad, and I wasn’t unhappy.” “Did you fall in love with him? The judge? Was that it? Or part of it?” “No. Well, not exactly. I’m very fond of him.” “So why? What made you come home?” “One thing you may not know about me, or remember, Johnny, is that I’m always prudent. Prudent to a fault I sometimes think.” “So?” “So I knew that the business I was in wouldn’t last forever, and my interest in it, despite the money, was waning fast.” “You weren’t a teacher? You had a business?” “Yes, you could call it that, and I already had enough money set aside to never work another day in my life, plus I was almost 35, and I was kind of bored. It all added up to early retirement, but what I’d long imagined doing, and this will make more sense to you as an ambition, a life plan, so to speak, was not coming home, but something more romantic, like buying a shabby little hotel somewhere, maybe in South America, or in some unfashionable part of the Mediterranean. I never ever thought I’d come home. I saw myself as an innkeeper in some far flung place. Maybe I’d even have soirees, a salon. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians would flock to my little place, along with an assortment of other colorful types. The human comedy.” He still hadn’t looked at me and was missing what I hoped was a self-mocking smile, a salon indeed, which is probably what prompted me to get it over with. “You get the picture, don’t you? Whore grows old in the sun, surrounded by admirers.” He looked up, of course, and even raised a hand. “Wait. Did you just say whore? Did you just call yourself a whore?” “Sorry. Should I have said courtesan? Kept woman? The point is that I’d fucked men for money for more than ten years and I was ready for a change, I could afford it, and at a certain age, as I’m sure you can understand, I was starting to push it, I was getting precariously close to being over the hill, like an athlete. But listen, I can see you’re uncomfortable. I thought I might just slip that in, the whore part, and we’d move on, but I guess not. Still, that’s enough about me.” I waved it away and asked him how he’d liked California. “Why did you come back? Money? A girl?” He answered promptly, even though it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it. The judge was bad enough, although he couldn’t seriously have expected me to not have a boyfriend. Whore, of course, no matter what we called it, was going too far. “Money,” he said, “no girl, and I guess I was homesick. Are you making fun of me? Pulling my leg? Is this a practical joke?” “About being a whore?” “Yes.” “No joke, and if you’ll stop looking at me that way, I’ll make a very long story about it very short.” “Okay. Tell me.” “When I was in graduate school, a man I knew offered me a ridiculous amount of money to spend the weekend with him, and I took it. That’s how it started.” “And he continued to support you?” “No. It’s more complicated than that. Let’s just say I knew I’d found my calling, and I may or may not eventually tell you all about it, but not now. Basically, you know my story. Now I want to hear a little about you, or if you’d prefer, maybe you could tell me about Frank. You could start with Ginger Cook, if that’s okay.”
Our dinner was served. We’d both ordered enchiladas. They were smothered in a red meat sauce that when I was a kid I’d taken for granted, thought of as ordinary, but after I’d lived out of state for a while, I would dream about it. We both concentrated on our food, but Johnny, predictably, was too quiet and said nothing about Frank. I tried to make small talk. “Have you seen downtown before now? It’s pitiful. Depressing. I try not to think about it. A ghost town.” “The mall’s the villain,” he said, “as you know. An old story these days.” “Yes. I’m afraid so.” I remembered a high school history teacher. “Did you hear about Miss Smiley?” I lowered my voice: “Mes-o-po-ta-mi-a.” That got a forced smile. “That she died you mean?” “Yes, and I’m sorry to say so, but I really hope she’s burning in hell.” “Really?” “Yes. She was hard on sluts. Even smart ones. Especially smart ass ones.” He forgot to smile at that one, but I prattled on as we ate and he responded enough to be marginally polite. I knew he might sulk. It didn’t spoil my dinner, but I did wonder if this was it. Had I gone too far? Should I have lied after all? If so, we were really strangers. Finally strangers,which might even be a relief. So what if it felt like I’d known him my whole life? I didn’t even know at that point what he did for a living, whether he’d ever been married, had children, and so on. The fact was that here was a grown man I’d really known only as a teenager and hadn’t heard from in twenty years, except once. He sent me a telegram about a year after we’d gone our separate ways. A middle of the night telegram, inspired I’m sure by lots of alcohol. He said he was going to join the army, enlist that very night, seized as he was by a beautiful impulse to prove his love for me, just like Dmitri Karamozov might do. Never mind that love had never come up between us, we were too cool for that, but throughout our relationship, I’d gone on and on about having a crush on the oldest Karamozov brother. God knows what silly things I said, but the general idea, only half tongue in cheek, was that my goal in life was to be the obsession of such a man, a wildly handsome, crazy and self-destructive soldier. I probably even said I’d die for love if I had a man like that. That I would be equally obsessed in return. I didn’t reply to the wire, wasn’t even sure I completely understood it, but I inquired around and knew that, of course, he never joined the army.
He wisely chose to run out of steam on that note and waited patiently for me to confirm or deny. I have a schtick about the story of my life, or rather, my career arc, especially for people I hardly know, which includes those I haven’t seen for twenty years, should they be annoying enough to ask. My preferred answer would be none of your business, or to some, none of your fucking business. What I actually say, though, since I’ve come home, is that I’ve been a librarian my whole life, but I jazz it up. I name whatever cities first come to mind, plausible or not. New York, Paris, Rome. Bangkok, Mumbai, Buenos Aires. I use the term ‘systems analysis,’ which most people assume is a euphemism for something unbearably tedious, and then, just as I seem to be ready to launch into a lengthy explanation, I let them off the hook. I ask about their grandchildren, or how to smoke brisket. I comment on a cute dress, or I suddenly see a friend across the room. I’ve always been good at changing the subject, and at lying, even before I had to be, and I seriously considered lying to Johnny. Not the librarian story. That wouldn’t do. Instead, I’d confirm his theory, but with my own twist, one he’d like just as well, maybe better. I’d say I’d fallen for some brooding introverted novelist while back east in graduate school, some beautiful boy who could barely concentrate on the present long enough to tie his shoelaces, brilliant of course but sadly under-appreciated, and yes Johnny, you are so right, it was me the schools wanted, only the best schools, naturally, and tenure was a foregone conclusion, I didn’t need my brooding boy wonder, but I dragged him with me wherever I went, and he rewarded me, once the new had worn off of our previously torrid love life, by relentlessly pursuing my most attractive students and colleagues, male, female and in-between. I bore up for a while, took it on the chin, but finally I’d had enough of my perpetually horny mate, not to mention that all those horrible things you hear about academia are actually true, so I came here to escape, you are so right again, to lick my wounds, and I’m content now, I feel useful, wanted and adored by the community. It’s so good to be home again.
Tempted though I was to feed him some bullshit like that, instead, even before our food was served, while we sipped iced tea and munched on tortilla chips, I told him the truth. Why I’m not sure. Did I want to hurt him? Or was it because, despite everything, the time elapsed, how he’d treated me, I still thought there was something special about him? Both could be true, of course, but I wasn’t sure about either. I did like him, still, but it was also true that I wouldn’t mind hurting him. He already knew from Frank, he said, that Judge Prescott got me the librarian job, but no, Frank hadn’t said why. “You didn’t guess?” “Guess what?” “That the judge fell for me. We see each other on weekends now, discreetly of course, since he happens to be married.” He nodded, kept eating chips, but he started dipping each one a little too carefully into the hot sauce and avoiding eye contact. “Want to know how it happened?” “Sure.” What he really wanted, of course, was to be told it didn’t happen. “I was in town for my brother’s funeral, five years ago, and ran into him at the mall. He didn’t recognize me. Actually, if he ever knew who I was, it was probably because of my scholarship, but when I introduced myself as a high school friend of his daughter’s, he was quick to suggest coffee.” Johnny said nothing, but he didn’t have to. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was thinking, of course he suggested coffee, the lecherous old fart. “I told him I was in town because my mother needed me at the funeral. She actually loved the sorry bastard.” “You didn’t tell him that.” “Maybe not in those exact words, but all my brothers are sorry bastards, and I’m not shy about telling people. I’m the one who gives my mother a few hundred dollars every month to supplement her salary at the pants factory. I bought her a car. I offered to buy her a house. Her three darling sons, including the one now deceased, have never given her a penny. On the contrary, they borrow money from her and never pay it back. They sometimes camp out in her apartment and treat her like shit.” “So you told the judge all that over coffee?” he asked skeptically. “I told him a lot, that’s the point, and I was just on the verge of calling my mother a saint, of saying that she worked her butt off and never complained, or something along those lines, just like you hear in the movies, when I stopped. Not from self-restraint, although I was beginning to wonder, I admit, if I’d gone too far, maybe I was boring him, or putting him off by being just a tad self-serving, but it turned out to be just the opposite. He was charmed. He’d fallen for me, I knew it in a flash, the minute our eyes met, and believe it or not, it shut me up and made me blush.”
Johnny kept eating chips. He finished the whole basket without looking at me, and he was still finding other things to look at when he finally found something to say. “That’s not like you.” “What isn’t?” “Initiating all that.” “How do you know?” It was a good question, but he ignored it. “I guess you have money then,” he said. “Or did, if you were helping support your mother. You offered to buy her a house?” “Yes.” He waited for me to elaborate, and when I didn’t, he said, “So, if you didn’t need a job and had plenty of money, now I’m really wondering what you were doing before and why you came back. Surely you didn’t make that much teaching, even if you were a whiz kid. And if you did, how could you leave it? Was I right about a personal crisis? Maybe that explains your candor with the judge. Or maybe you were more bothered by your brother’s death than you realized.” “Don’t make me laugh. I was ecstatic over my brother’s death, but no, things weren’t bad, and I wasn’t unhappy.” “Did you fall in love with him? The judge? Was that it? Or part of it?” “No. Well, not exactly. I’m very fond of him.” “So why? What made you come home?” “One thing you may not know about me, or remember, Johnny, is that I’m always prudent. Prudent to a fault I sometimes think.” “So?” “So I knew that the business I was in wouldn’t last forever, and my interest in it, despite the money, was waning fast.” “You weren’t a teacher? You had a business?” “Yes, you could call it that, and I already had enough money set aside to never work another day in my life, plus I was almost 35, and I was kind of bored. It all added up to early retirement, but what I’d long imagined doing, and this will make more sense to you as an ambition, a life plan, so to speak, was not coming home, but something more romantic, like buying a shabby little hotel somewhere, maybe in South America, or in some unfashionable part of the Mediterranean. I never ever thought I’d come home. I saw myself as an innkeeper in some far flung place. Maybe I’d even have soirees, a salon. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians would flock to my little place, along with an assortment of other colorful types. The human comedy.” He still hadn’t looked at me and was missing what I hoped was a self-mocking smile, a salon indeed, which is probably what prompted me to get it over with. “You get the picture, don’t you? Whore grows old in the sun, surrounded by admirers.” He looked up, of course, and even raised a hand. “Wait. Did you just say whore? Did you just call yourself a whore?” “Sorry. Should I have said courtesan? Kept woman? The point is that I’d fucked men for money for more than ten years and I was ready for a change, I could afford it, and at a certain age, as I’m sure you can understand, I was starting to push it, I was getting precariously close to being over the hill, like an athlete. But listen, I can see you’re uncomfortable. I thought I might just slip that in, the whore part, and we’d move on, but I guess not. Still, that’s enough about me.” I waved it away and asked him how he’d liked California. “Why did you come back? Money? A girl?” He answered promptly, even though it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it. The judge was bad enough, although he couldn’t seriously have expected me to not have a boyfriend. Whore, of course, no matter what we called it, was going too far. “Money,” he said, “no girl, and I guess I was homesick. Are you making fun of me? Pulling my leg? Is this a practical joke?” “About being a whore?” “Yes.” “No joke, and if you’ll stop looking at me that way, I’ll make a very long story about it very short.” “Okay. Tell me.” “When I was in graduate school, a man I knew offered me a ridiculous amount of money to spend the weekend with him, and I took it. That’s how it started.” “And he continued to support you?” “No. It’s more complicated than that. Let’s just say I knew I’d found my calling, and I may or may not eventually tell you all about it, but not now. Basically, you know my story. Now I want to hear a little about you, or if you’d prefer, maybe you could tell me about Frank. You could start with Ginger Cook, if that’s okay.”
Our dinner was served. We’d both ordered enchiladas. They were smothered in a red meat sauce that when I was a kid I’d taken for granted, thought of as ordinary, but after I’d lived out of state for a while, I would dream about it. We both concentrated on our food, but Johnny, predictably, was too quiet and said nothing about Frank. I tried to make small talk. “Have you seen downtown before now? It’s pitiful. Depressing. I try not to think about it. A ghost town.” “The mall’s the villain,” he said, “as you know. An old story these days.” “Yes. I’m afraid so.” I remembered a high school history teacher. “Did you hear about Miss Smiley?” I lowered my voice: “Mes-o-po-ta-mi-a.” That got a forced smile. “That she died you mean?” “Yes, and I’m sorry to say so, but I really hope she’s burning in hell.” “Really?” “Yes. She was hard on sluts. Even smart ones. Especially smart ass ones.” He forgot to smile at that one, but I prattled on as we ate and he responded enough to be marginally polite. I knew he might sulk. It didn’t spoil my dinner, but I did wonder if this was it. Had I gone too far? Should I have lied after all? If so, we were really strangers. Finally strangers,which might even be a relief. So what if it felt like I’d known him my whole life? I didn’t even know at that point what he did for a living, whether he’d ever been married, had children, and so on. The fact was that here was a grown man I’d really known only as a teenager and hadn’t heard from in twenty years, except once. He sent me a telegram about a year after we’d gone our separate ways. A middle of the night telegram, inspired I’m sure by lots of alcohol. He said he was going to join the army, enlist that very night, seized as he was by a beautiful impulse to prove his love for me, just like Dmitri Karamozov might do. Never mind that love had never come up between us, we were too cool for that, but throughout our relationship, I’d gone on and on about having a crush on the oldest Karamozov brother. God knows what silly things I said, but the general idea, only half tongue in cheek, was that my goal in life was to be the obsession of such a man, a wildly handsome, crazy and self-destructive soldier. I probably even said I’d die for love if I had a man like that. That I would be equally obsessed in return. I didn’t reply to the wire, wasn’t even sure I completely understood it, but I inquired around and knew that, of course, he never joined the army.
*****
As we waited for coffee, I said, “In the paper and on the news tonight they seemed to be saying that the daughter was found naked on a couch in the same room as her father. Is that true?” “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t even have known it happened, but a friend saw it on TV and remembered where I was from.” “Have you seen Patti?” “No. I went by there but just talked to her mother for a minute. She wasn’t seeing anyone.” “So what will you do?” “I don’t know. Go home tomorrow, I guess, then come back for the funeral. I don’t know anyone here anymore, no one I want to see, but I already have a motel room. Might as well stay.” “When were you here last?” “It’s been a while. Before you came back.” “More than five years then.” “Yeah. Frank talked me into a high school reunion. The tenth.” “How’d that go?” “The usual. I got too drunk, hit on married ex-girlfriends, insulted old friends.” “Sorry I missed that.” That got a real smile. “You still do see Frank a lot though. Am I right? Or did.” “Once a month maybe, on average. He comes up to the city a lot for one thing or another and we’ll have coffee or lunch.” “I’m asking because I thought that’s what you’d want to talk about tonight.” “I know, but it hasn’t sunk in. Or maybe I mean I don’t know what to say about it. It’s so bizarre. And besides . . .,” he looked up, “you make a pleasant diversion.” So, had he decided he didn’t hate me for being a whore? That was quick, and I guessed it was good. “Did Frank talk about Ginger?” I asked. “Not lately. I didn’t even know she was here. We’ve talked about you since we’ve talked about her.” “By the way, do you think Frank knew about me, my past, but didn’t want to say?” “No. I don’t think he even knew about the judge. All he said was that he’d “heard” you were a teacher, which is just what I’d expected. Then he said you were back and working in the library. No mention of the judge.” “It didn’t surprise you? My return? The library?” “Yes. You know it did, that’s been my main theme tonight. I kept meaning to come see you, by the way.” “Right.” He started to explain, then changed his mind and the subject. “Actually, now that you mention it, there was a time when he talked about Ginger a lot. It’s coming back to me. Want to hear it?” “Sure.”
“First of all, years ago, when she was thirteen or fourteen, she was a problem. Around that time she got pregnant and Frank helped her out. Or helped the coach out, is more like it. Not an abortion. He wouldn’t allow that, nor would the coach. She went somewhere and had it, gave it up for adoption.” “Could it have been Frank’s baby?” “No. She favored hoodlums, according to Frank, bad boys, and that was confirmed not long after she had the kid. She ran off to Galveston with some ex-con, a guy in his twenties. Archetypal bad boy.” “Perfect.” “I know. The whole thing, her life, looked like a train wreck, but then, miraculously, she settled down. After Frank went to Galveston and brought her back, she never got into trouble again.” “I wonder why Frank had to go get her. Why not her father?” “If you knew the coach, you wouldn’t ask. It was beyond him. God knows what he would have done if he’d seen his daughter with a guy in a motel room, but there’s more. Frank said the coach didn’t think he could get her back. He didn’t think she’d come with him.” “Okay, but why Frank in particular?” “He’d helped with the pregnancy, but even before that, he and the coach were close. Visiting close at least. Frank kept up with him, and there was really no one else for the job. No family, and the coach didn’t have friends.” “But in the end, father and daughter were reconciled?” “It seemed that way. She started taking school seriously, became a nurse. I thought she was still a nurse somewhere.” “So Frank forgot to mention that she’d come home to take care of her father, and that he’d fallen in love with her?” He grinned and shook his head. “We don’t know that.” “We don’t?” “I don’t, and I see him a lot. I never had a clue of anything like that. Frank never changed, Sally. His voice got deeper, that was it. Maybe a few lines around the eyes. He didn’t even put on weight. You must know all that. This is a small town.” “But what else could it be, if not love?” “I don’t know. If what you say about the circumstances is true, how she was shot, I can see why you might think that, but it’s hard to think of Frank in love. With anyone. Even with Patti, which I always thought was more like a marriage of convenience.” “He lost his head over something.” “I guess. It’s just that it would be the first time he lost it over anything, at least that I know of, plus he really admired the coach.” “Why?” “Frank took Cook seriously. I felt sorry for him, even liked some things about him, but on the whole I thought he was more pitiful than sad. Laughable, even, a joke. Believe it or not, you probably weren’t paying attention in those days to football, but he started out here like he was Bud Wilkinson. Know who that is?” “A famous football coach?” “Oklahoma. Fifties. How about the split T?” I shook my head. “Sounds vaguely obscene.” “It’s a formation that relies on speed, agility and brains more than brute force. Cook brought it here from Oklahoma and won big.” “It was hard to miss that part,” I said. “The winning big. The whole town went nuts, and you were a hero.” “Maybe by default I was, but Frank and the coach should get most of the credit. Did you keep up with things much after you left?” “Not at all.” “Cook got demoted. The year after he won those two state championships, he was coaching baseball, and he soon wound up with eighth grade basketball.” “That would be the bottom rung?” “Yes, or close to it.” “So what happened?” “He couldn’t get along with anyone. Couldn’t compromise. The final straw was something about a new football field, something minor like what kind of surface for the track around it, or about the dressing rooms. I don’t know, but he wouldn’t budge, threw a fit when he didn’t get his way, but after they gave him the boot, instead of looking for greener pastures, as any normal person would do, he wanted to stay here. Not to mention the embarrassment over his wife.” It didn’t take me long to remember what he was referring to. “She left him.” “Yes, for one of his assistants. Most people would have gone somewhere else. With his record, I’m sure he could have found something.” “So you think he’s a fool? Is that it?” “Pretty much. With a ridiculous martyr complex.” “But Frank still looked up to him?” “We argued about it all the time. It was one of our favorite conversations, even to this day. In my view, Cook became a parody of himself. He never stopped preaching, never had a moment of self-doubt, was always right, even though he had no authority over anything anyone cared about. It’s funny. Cook used to talk about how only sissies go inside in November when it gets cold, ‘to bounce the little round ball around,’ and everyone around here, at least in those days, even parents, agreed with him.” “I probably would have hated him too,” I said, “but you have to admit.” “What?” “It’s sad.” “I’m not even sure of that. He ate it up, playing the martyr.” “And Frank fell for it?” “Yes. One day when I was in college, home for Christmas, Frank and I ran into him in the Safeway parking lot. Now get this. He snatched a bag of peanuts out of my hand, just yanked it away, like he was the hall monitor or something, and then proceeded to squash one on the pavement to show me how much oil it contained. Made a big production out of it. Took out his pocket knife, said it made pimples, ground the flat of the blade into it. Pimples. That’s all peanuts are good for. It made him look silly, like an old fool, an asshole.” “How did Frank react?” “More indulgent, of course. Afterwards, he listened while I blew off steam, didn’t interrupt or argue, and then he changed the subject, which was the right thing to do. Frank always had class in that way, but I felt like strangling somebody.” “What did you and Frank talk about mostly? On your coffee dates.” “He caught me up on stuff around here, then politics. It was about the only thing left that we could fight about and understand each other. My eyes glazed over when he talked about medicine. His did the same when I got off on literature or movies.” “He was a conservative, I presume.” “Yeah, but we liked hearing each others arguments. I’ve got enough laizze faire in me to not be totally hostile to many of his views, and he had a decent enough social conscience.” “Never women?” “Not from him. Sometimes he’d be curious about what I was up to in that regard.” “You never traded offensive remarks about your waitress?” “Never. Frank was a straight arrow. He never even looked at women, or at least I never caught him at it.” “The last person in the world to do what he did?” “Yes. I’m not sure I believe it yet.”
*****
I thought we were about to leave. I’d caught him up on me. He’d covered the basics about Frank. That was plenty for one night, but when I came back from the rest room, he said he’d ordered more coffee. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice as if we were about to share a secret. “It’s not your past that bothers me,” he said. “I mean that. It was a shock at first, but I’m over it. You’re still Sally.” “Okay.” “What bothers me is that you’re here. I can’t figure it out. I’d be on a Greek island right now if I were you.” I sort of shrugged my shoulders. “Tell me to shut up if you want, but do you have any friends? Do people here know about your past?” “No to both, but I’ve never been big on friends, or any good at it.” “So what keeps you here? The judge?” “I like him, and he’s an influential man,” I said. “Powerful you might even say.” “I know. And that satisfies you?” He leaned back, and I sensed the pleasure he felt from imagining me in that role, the judge’s mistress. Or was he thinking ‘judge’s whore’? “I’m fine,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, think of it as a break. I lived the high life for ten years, now this one for five, and maybe somewhere down the road I’ll do something else.” “Fair enough,” he said, but I knew more was coming, and I can’t say I was indifferent to his interest. I knew he wanted something from me, something even more than a good fuck. I was still Sally to him, so he said, and he was still Johnny. He was healthy looking enough, I thought. Maybe not for long unless he changed his ways, but I still knew a real man was sitting across from me. He had the same voice, only better, slightly lower, a raspy tone and a rolling sort of lilt that I’d liked long ago and still liked because it seemed lyrical and tough all at once. He was built that way too, too round now, fat really, but still powerful and graceful.
It was late for where we were, but it was still not much past eight. The last customers besides us were a family, a young couple with two little kids, and they left a good half hour before we did. We could hear the clatter of dishes and voices in Spanish from the kitchen. The owner, a fat old woman who often sat with me and indulged my meager Spanish whenever I came in alone, had fallen asleep behind the cash register. I caught myself fidgeting as much as Johnny, playing with the coffee spoon, glancing at him when he wasn’t looking, as he did with me, when I heard him say, “Fair enough to everything, but I still want you to tell me why you really came back, and stayed.” I said, “Jesus, Johnny. Holy shit. I thought I already did.” He leaned across the table and put his hand over mine. “Tell me.” I took a deep breath and didn’t hesitate for long. “I didn’t intend to,” I said, “but like I said, when the judge thing fell in my lap, it seemed like a way of getting loose from what I was doing. Not that it was bad, the whore thing. Time for a change, that’s all.” He caught my eye at that moment, probably to see if I was telling the truth about it not being bad. No one really believes that, no matter how much I protest, and it made me wonder if he wasn’t actually thinking romance. Perhaps I needed saving. Idiot, I thought, your best friend just murdered two people and himself and all you can think about is falling in love, and with a whore, no less. Are you insane? Haven’t you grown up yet? I must have blushed, since he seemed to enjoy saying it again. “Tell me why you stayed.” “Two things keep me here,” I said. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” “Yes.” Men really can be vain. What did he think I’d see in him? Like I said, he was still okay, but he didn’t really look all that hot anymore, and although I didn’t know for sure yet, I assumed he wasn’t rich. Only one thing was possible: we were birds of a feather, soul mates, meant for each other, in synch, simpatico, on the same wave length, of the same mind, just as we’d imagined we were back in the drive-in movie days. That’s hopelessly romantic, Johnny, almost criminally so, but it was true, no denying it, that back then, despite what he said later about the beautiful erotic memory, it hadn’t really been the sex. We were both too young and too shy. And too cautious. I think of those moments, the actual fucking, mostly with regret that I couldn’t forget myself and enjoy it more, since I know now that there was beauty in it, in our youth, in the light and shadows from the movie on the screen, how it constantly changed. I think of it now as I would a photograph, or a series of photographs, our caresses, the shifting light. Maybe that’s what he means by a beautiful erotic memory.
“The judge reads popular history,” I said. “Volumes of it. All the wars you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t. He likes to read about great men and great civilizations, and I have to hand it to him, he has a wide range of interests. He’ll be heavy into Custer for a while and before you know it, he’s moved on to Renaissance Italy. I try to get him to talk about it, but he won’t. Not much. Now and then he makes an effort, for my sake, he really is fond of me, but he stalls out quickly and it isn’t worth it to keep him going. He doesn’t really want to share it with me, or anyone else, except, and this is important to him, for my being there when he reads. He wants company. He’s old-fashioned in that he’s a very public man, a politician, hail fellow well met, a backslapper, arm twister, but during his leisure time, he values silence and being almost but not quite alone. He fishes alone. He rows out to the center of the lake and sits there all morning with a cane pole. He hunts alone, using a 30.06 bolt action rifle or a .16 gauge shotgun, both nearly ancient weapons. More than enough, he told me, if you know what you’re doing. In the winter he’s gone before sunrise, and if he brings back a deer or a few birds, he does all the skinning and gutting and butchering himself. After that they’re mine. I’m the camp cook. I even barbecue. He doesn’t know one end of a spatula from the other, and although he always praises my cooking and eats everything I put in front of him, at times pretty fancy stuff, I know he’d just as soon have a steak and french fries and thousand island dressing on his iceberg lettuce. A man of simple tastes, he drinks cheap bourbon and smokes drug store cigars. His idea of a perfect end to the day, after coming home with his spoils to the company of an attractive young woman, is to sit in a lawn chair facing the lake, a drink with two ice cubes in his hand, as he watches the sun go down. I don’t mind it either.
“He seems just about perfect for me at this stage in my life, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t shut up that first day at the coffee shop, I knew it already, how perfect he would be, how good he would be for me, how comfortable, and yet he could make me blush. Make me fidget. I forgot all about my shabby little Mediterranean hotel. I don’t mean I fell in love with him, at least I don’t think I did. Not exactly. But he was my type, strong and silent, plenty smart, but very much of the world. At times I had to work at not making a nuisance of myself, talking his ear off. When I get smashed, I really won’t shut up, I’m even worse than I am now, no matter who I’m with, so I’m careful, I schedule the times I allow myself more than two drinks and even then I try to hold back. He never says much, about anything, but he listens well, and I can talk about whatever pops into my head, a writer he’s never heard of, a quirky library patron he may or may not know, a trip to a place he’s never been. He never seems to get tired of listening to me, but he knows just when and how to shut me up. Some might say, noting how much he likes to hear me talk, that it was me who did the seducing, and I know there’s some truth to that, but it works both ways. It’s hard to stay away from someone who seems enchanted just by the sound of your voice. Such good taste they have! And he can be a persuasive man in other ways, and he knows what he wants. The library job was his idea. The weekends at the lake. For the most part, I just follow his lead, which is fine with me.
“The judge’s wife has been in bed for twenty years, for reasons no one really seems to understand, which I learned from discreet inquiry. He never talks about her, or his kids. Not even the daughter I’m supposed to know. As far as compensation goes, he bought my house for me, and we make it look like I pay rent, so that not even his accountant knows I’m living there for nothing, or pretends not to. That’s about it, housing, if you don’t count the job, and the weekends. Sometimes we go further than the lake cabin, take a long holiday, but even then it’s more something he wants to do, like salmon fishing in Alaska, or dove hunting in Mexico. I’ve never done a thing to the lake cabin, never even moved a chair or a table, but I used my own money to furnish and remodel the house he bought me, and I continue to help out my mother. I don’t need his money or the job. I could still buy that modest little hotel, probably in Turkey, and try to grow old gracefully, not lose too much face running after the young locals, maybe even find some judge-type man who’d watch my back if and when I needed it. I’d be a grand hostess, don’t you think? Writers and artists would flock to my little hotel, where I’d preside over long late suppers and be quite a character, one of a kind, the very learned and witty ex-whore, staunch supporter of the arts, and surely someone would turn me into literature, write about how my eyes were just as green and sparkled just as much as ever, my skin just as fair, like moonlight someone told me once, I’m vain about that, and how in an old lady sort of way I could still be seductive, even devastating. As the years passed, I might put highlights in my hair and wear long earrings, and paint my face a little just to remind people of what I was, but otherwise I’d look my age. I’d have my poet of the month by my side at all times and make him sing for his supper. I might even make a fool of myself over one of them, but my broken heart would only be a show. I’d feel it deeply, of course, but like the good actress I am.
As we waited for coffee, I said, “In the paper and on the news tonight they seemed to be saying that the daughter was found naked on a couch in the same room as her father. Is that true?” “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t even have known it happened, but a friend saw it on TV and remembered where I was from.” “Have you seen Patti?” “No. I went by there but just talked to her mother for a minute. She wasn’t seeing anyone.” “So what will you do?” “I don’t know. Go home tomorrow, I guess, then come back for the funeral. I don’t know anyone here anymore, no one I want to see, but I already have a motel room. Might as well stay.” “When were you here last?” “It’s been a while. Before you came back.” “More than five years then.” “Yeah. Frank talked me into a high school reunion. The tenth.” “How’d that go?” “The usual. I got too drunk, hit on married ex-girlfriends, insulted old friends.” “Sorry I missed that.” That got a real smile. “You still do see Frank a lot though. Am I right? Or did.” “Once a month maybe, on average. He comes up to the city a lot for one thing or another and we’ll have coffee or lunch.” “I’m asking because I thought that’s what you’d want to talk about tonight.” “I know, but it hasn’t sunk in. Or maybe I mean I don’t know what to say about it. It’s so bizarre. And besides . . .,” he looked up, “you make a pleasant diversion.” So, had he decided he didn’t hate me for being a whore? That was quick, and I guessed it was good. “Did Frank talk about Ginger?” I asked. “Not lately. I didn’t even know she was here. We’ve talked about you since we’ve talked about her.” “By the way, do you think Frank knew about me, my past, but didn’t want to say?” “No. I don’t think he even knew about the judge. All he said was that he’d “heard” you were a teacher, which is just what I’d expected. Then he said you were back and working in the library. No mention of the judge.” “It didn’t surprise you? My return? The library?” “Yes. You know it did, that’s been my main theme tonight. I kept meaning to come see you, by the way.” “Right.” He started to explain, then changed his mind and the subject. “Actually, now that you mention it, there was a time when he talked about Ginger a lot. It’s coming back to me. Want to hear it?” “Sure.”
“First of all, years ago, when she was thirteen or fourteen, she was a problem. Around that time she got pregnant and Frank helped her out. Or helped the coach out, is more like it. Not an abortion. He wouldn’t allow that, nor would the coach. She went somewhere and had it, gave it up for adoption.” “Could it have been Frank’s baby?” “No. She favored hoodlums, according to Frank, bad boys, and that was confirmed not long after she had the kid. She ran off to Galveston with some ex-con, a guy in his twenties. Archetypal bad boy.” “Perfect.” “I know. The whole thing, her life, looked like a train wreck, but then, miraculously, she settled down. After Frank went to Galveston and brought her back, she never got into trouble again.” “I wonder why Frank had to go get her. Why not her father?” “If you knew the coach, you wouldn’t ask. It was beyond him. God knows what he would have done if he’d seen his daughter with a guy in a motel room, but there’s more. Frank said the coach didn’t think he could get her back. He didn’t think she’d come with him.” “Okay, but why Frank in particular?” “He’d helped with the pregnancy, but even before that, he and the coach were close. Visiting close at least. Frank kept up with him, and there was really no one else for the job. No family, and the coach didn’t have friends.” “But in the end, father and daughter were reconciled?” “It seemed that way. She started taking school seriously, became a nurse. I thought she was still a nurse somewhere.” “So Frank forgot to mention that she’d come home to take care of her father, and that he’d fallen in love with her?” He grinned and shook his head. “We don’t know that.” “We don’t?” “I don’t, and I see him a lot. I never had a clue of anything like that. Frank never changed, Sally. His voice got deeper, that was it. Maybe a few lines around the eyes. He didn’t even put on weight. You must know all that. This is a small town.” “But what else could it be, if not love?” “I don’t know. If what you say about the circumstances is true, how she was shot, I can see why you might think that, but it’s hard to think of Frank in love. With anyone. Even with Patti, which I always thought was more like a marriage of convenience.” “He lost his head over something.” “I guess. It’s just that it would be the first time he lost it over anything, at least that I know of, plus he really admired the coach.” “Why?” “Frank took Cook seriously. I felt sorry for him, even liked some things about him, but on the whole I thought he was more pitiful than sad. Laughable, even, a joke. Believe it or not, you probably weren’t paying attention in those days to football, but he started out here like he was Bud Wilkinson. Know who that is?” “A famous football coach?” “Oklahoma. Fifties. How about the split T?” I shook my head. “Sounds vaguely obscene.” “It’s a formation that relies on speed, agility and brains more than brute force. Cook brought it here from Oklahoma and won big.” “It was hard to miss that part,” I said. “The winning big. The whole town went nuts, and you were a hero.” “Maybe by default I was, but Frank and the coach should get most of the credit. Did you keep up with things much after you left?” “Not at all.” “Cook got demoted. The year after he won those two state championships, he was coaching baseball, and he soon wound up with eighth grade basketball.” “That would be the bottom rung?” “Yes, or close to it.” “So what happened?” “He couldn’t get along with anyone. Couldn’t compromise. The final straw was something about a new football field, something minor like what kind of surface for the track around it, or about the dressing rooms. I don’t know, but he wouldn’t budge, threw a fit when he didn’t get his way, but after they gave him the boot, instead of looking for greener pastures, as any normal person would do, he wanted to stay here. Not to mention the embarrassment over his wife.” It didn’t take me long to remember what he was referring to. “She left him.” “Yes, for one of his assistants. Most people would have gone somewhere else. With his record, I’m sure he could have found something.” “So you think he’s a fool? Is that it?” “Pretty much. With a ridiculous martyr complex.” “But Frank still looked up to him?” “We argued about it all the time. It was one of our favorite conversations, even to this day. In my view, Cook became a parody of himself. He never stopped preaching, never had a moment of self-doubt, was always right, even though he had no authority over anything anyone cared about. It’s funny. Cook used to talk about how only sissies go inside in November when it gets cold, ‘to bounce the little round ball around,’ and everyone around here, at least in those days, even parents, agreed with him.” “I probably would have hated him too,” I said, “but you have to admit.” “What?” “It’s sad.” “I’m not even sure of that. He ate it up, playing the martyr.” “And Frank fell for it?” “Yes. One day when I was in college, home for Christmas, Frank and I ran into him in the Safeway parking lot. Now get this. He snatched a bag of peanuts out of my hand, just yanked it away, like he was the hall monitor or something, and then proceeded to squash one on the pavement to show me how much oil it contained. Made a big production out of it. Took out his pocket knife, said it made pimples, ground the flat of the blade into it. Pimples. That’s all peanuts are good for. It made him look silly, like an old fool, an asshole.” “How did Frank react?” “More indulgent, of course. Afterwards, he listened while I blew off steam, didn’t interrupt or argue, and then he changed the subject, which was the right thing to do. Frank always had class in that way, but I felt like strangling somebody.” “What did you and Frank talk about mostly? On your coffee dates.” “He caught me up on stuff around here, then politics. It was about the only thing left that we could fight about and understand each other. My eyes glazed over when he talked about medicine. His did the same when I got off on literature or movies.” “He was a conservative, I presume.” “Yeah, but we liked hearing each others arguments. I’ve got enough laizze faire in me to not be totally hostile to many of his views, and he had a decent enough social conscience.” “Never women?” “Not from him. Sometimes he’d be curious about what I was up to in that regard.” “You never traded offensive remarks about your waitress?” “Never. Frank was a straight arrow. He never even looked at women, or at least I never caught him at it.” “The last person in the world to do what he did?” “Yes. I’m not sure I believe it yet.”
*****
I thought we were about to leave. I’d caught him up on me. He’d covered the basics about Frank. That was plenty for one night, but when I came back from the rest room, he said he’d ordered more coffee. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice as if we were about to share a secret. “It’s not your past that bothers me,” he said. “I mean that. It was a shock at first, but I’m over it. You’re still Sally.” “Okay.” “What bothers me is that you’re here. I can’t figure it out. I’d be on a Greek island right now if I were you.” I sort of shrugged my shoulders. “Tell me to shut up if you want, but do you have any friends? Do people here know about your past?” “No to both, but I’ve never been big on friends, or any good at it.” “So what keeps you here? The judge?” “I like him, and he’s an influential man,” I said. “Powerful you might even say.” “I know. And that satisfies you?” He leaned back, and I sensed the pleasure he felt from imagining me in that role, the judge’s mistress. Or was he thinking ‘judge’s whore’? “I’m fine,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, think of it as a break. I lived the high life for ten years, now this one for five, and maybe somewhere down the road I’ll do something else.” “Fair enough,” he said, but I knew more was coming, and I can’t say I was indifferent to his interest. I knew he wanted something from me, something even more than a good fuck. I was still Sally to him, so he said, and he was still Johnny. He was healthy looking enough, I thought. Maybe not for long unless he changed his ways, but I still knew a real man was sitting across from me. He had the same voice, only better, slightly lower, a raspy tone and a rolling sort of lilt that I’d liked long ago and still liked because it seemed lyrical and tough all at once. He was built that way too, too round now, fat really, but still powerful and graceful.
It was late for where we were, but it was still not much past eight. The last customers besides us were a family, a young couple with two little kids, and they left a good half hour before we did. We could hear the clatter of dishes and voices in Spanish from the kitchen. The owner, a fat old woman who often sat with me and indulged my meager Spanish whenever I came in alone, had fallen asleep behind the cash register. I caught myself fidgeting as much as Johnny, playing with the coffee spoon, glancing at him when he wasn’t looking, as he did with me, when I heard him say, “Fair enough to everything, but I still want you to tell me why you really came back, and stayed.” I said, “Jesus, Johnny. Holy shit. I thought I already did.” He leaned across the table and put his hand over mine. “Tell me.” I took a deep breath and didn’t hesitate for long. “I didn’t intend to,” I said, “but like I said, when the judge thing fell in my lap, it seemed like a way of getting loose from what I was doing. Not that it was bad, the whore thing. Time for a change, that’s all.” He caught my eye at that moment, probably to see if I was telling the truth about it not being bad. No one really believes that, no matter how much I protest, and it made me wonder if he wasn’t actually thinking romance. Perhaps I needed saving. Idiot, I thought, your best friend just murdered two people and himself and all you can think about is falling in love, and with a whore, no less. Are you insane? Haven’t you grown up yet? I must have blushed, since he seemed to enjoy saying it again. “Tell me why you stayed.” “Two things keep me here,” I said. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” “Yes.” Men really can be vain. What did he think I’d see in him? Like I said, he was still okay, but he didn’t really look all that hot anymore, and although I didn’t know for sure yet, I assumed he wasn’t rich. Only one thing was possible: we were birds of a feather, soul mates, meant for each other, in synch, simpatico, on the same wave length, of the same mind, just as we’d imagined we were back in the drive-in movie days. That’s hopelessly romantic, Johnny, almost criminally so, but it was true, no denying it, that back then, despite what he said later about the beautiful erotic memory, it hadn’t really been the sex. We were both too young and too shy. And too cautious. I think of those moments, the actual fucking, mostly with regret that I couldn’t forget myself and enjoy it more, since I know now that there was beauty in it, in our youth, in the light and shadows from the movie on the screen, how it constantly changed. I think of it now as I would a photograph, or a series of photographs, our caresses, the shifting light. Maybe that’s what he means by a beautiful erotic memory.
“The judge reads popular history,” I said. “Volumes of it. All the wars you’ve ever heard of and some you haven’t. He likes to read about great men and great civilizations, and I have to hand it to him, he has a wide range of interests. He’ll be heavy into Custer for a while and before you know it, he’s moved on to Renaissance Italy. I try to get him to talk about it, but he won’t. Not much. Now and then he makes an effort, for my sake, he really is fond of me, but he stalls out quickly and it isn’t worth it to keep him going. He doesn’t really want to share it with me, or anyone else, except, and this is important to him, for my being there when he reads. He wants company. He’s old-fashioned in that he’s a very public man, a politician, hail fellow well met, a backslapper, arm twister, but during his leisure time, he values silence and being almost but not quite alone. He fishes alone. He rows out to the center of the lake and sits there all morning with a cane pole. He hunts alone, using a 30.06 bolt action rifle or a .16 gauge shotgun, both nearly ancient weapons. More than enough, he told me, if you know what you’re doing. In the winter he’s gone before sunrise, and if he brings back a deer or a few birds, he does all the skinning and gutting and butchering himself. After that they’re mine. I’m the camp cook. I even barbecue. He doesn’t know one end of a spatula from the other, and although he always praises my cooking and eats everything I put in front of him, at times pretty fancy stuff, I know he’d just as soon have a steak and french fries and thousand island dressing on his iceberg lettuce. A man of simple tastes, he drinks cheap bourbon and smokes drug store cigars. His idea of a perfect end to the day, after coming home with his spoils to the company of an attractive young woman, is to sit in a lawn chair facing the lake, a drink with two ice cubes in his hand, as he watches the sun go down. I don’t mind it either.
“He seems just about perfect for me at this stage in my life, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t shut up that first day at the coffee shop, I knew it already, how perfect he would be, how good he would be for me, how comfortable, and yet he could make me blush. Make me fidget. I forgot all about my shabby little Mediterranean hotel. I don’t mean I fell in love with him, at least I don’t think I did. Not exactly. But he was my type, strong and silent, plenty smart, but very much of the world. At times I had to work at not making a nuisance of myself, talking his ear off. When I get smashed, I really won’t shut up, I’m even worse than I am now, no matter who I’m with, so I’m careful, I schedule the times I allow myself more than two drinks and even then I try to hold back. He never says much, about anything, but he listens well, and I can talk about whatever pops into my head, a writer he’s never heard of, a quirky library patron he may or may not know, a trip to a place he’s never been. He never seems to get tired of listening to me, but he knows just when and how to shut me up. Some might say, noting how much he likes to hear me talk, that it was me who did the seducing, and I know there’s some truth to that, but it works both ways. It’s hard to stay away from someone who seems enchanted just by the sound of your voice. Such good taste they have! And he can be a persuasive man in other ways, and he knows what he wants. The library job was his idea. The weekends at the lake. For the most part, I just follow his lead, which is fine with me.
“The judge’s wife has been in bed for twenty years, for reasons no one really seems to understand, which I learned from discreet inquiry. He never talks about her, or his kids. Not even the daughter I’m supposed to know. As far as compensation goes, he bought my house for me, and we make it look like I pay rent, so that not even his accountant knows I’m living there for nothing, or pretends not to. That’s about it, housing, if you don’t count the job, and the weekends. Sometimes we go further than the lake cabin, take a long holiday, but even then it’s more something he wants to do, like salmon fishing in Alaska, or dove hunting in Mexico. I’ve never done a thing to the lake cabin, never even moved a chair or a table, but I used my own money to furnish and remodel the house he bought me, and I continue to help out my mother. I don’t need his money or the job. I could still buy that modest little hotel, probably in Turkey, and try to grow old gracefully, not lose too much face running after the young locals, maybe even find some judge-type man who’d watch my back if and when I needed it. I’d be a grand hostess, don’t you think? Writers and artists would flock to my little hotel, where I’d preside over long late suppers and be quite a character, one of a kind, the very learned and witty ex-whore, staunch supporter of the arts, and surely someone would turn me into literature, write about how my eyes were just as green and sparkled just as much as ever, my skin just as fair, like moonlight someone told me once, I’m vain about that, and how in an old lady sort of way I could still be seductive, even devastating. As the years passed, I might put highlights in my hair and wear long earrings, and paint my face a little just to remind people of what I was, but otherwise I’d look my age. I’d have my poet of the month by my side at all times and make him sing for his supper. I might even make a fool of myself over one of them, but my broken heart would only be a show. I’d feel it deeply, of course, but like the good actress I am.
“Clearly, that fantasy still has its appeal for me, and it’s not too late, but the truth is, I’m not so keen on it as I once was, in part because of how attached I’ve become to the judge, but also because I have in fact fallen in love. Are you listening?” “Yes.” “The second reason I’m still here, maybe the most important one, I’m not sure, is my library. I’ve fallen in love with it, so maybe that’s the real answer to your question. I’d leave my cat before I’d leave it and go to Turkey. It’s a Carnegie building. Did you know that?” “No.” “1906.” “You looked weird in it this afternoon,” he said. I shook my head. “No, that’s just you. I feel perfectly at home there. I belong there now.” He’d come straight there to see me, not even getting a motel room first, and I knew it was him before he got to the circulation desk. I wasn’t expecting him, hadn’t really thought yet that what had happened with Frank might bring him to town, but it fell into place as he approached the desk. I said his name and he said mine, and we both grinned like idiots. Then I said, “Frank?” and he nodded. That whole scene I guess said something. Birds of a feather. Former love birds. We didn’t even shake hands. No friendly hug or peck on the cheek. The circulation desk stayed between us. And then the Texas ritual of sharing enchiladas and iced tea and now pralines with coffee. I had to be clear on this, I realized, what the library meant to me, or he’d never leave me alone.
“I’m not kidding,” I said, “I’m madly attached to it. If the county commissioners ever decided to tear it down (and they might after the judge is gone), I’d sit on the floor, chain myself to a column and make them carry me out kicking and screaming. Or maybe it would be better press if I struck a dignified pose, nose in the air. A library hugger. I’d hope for that as the caption on the news photo. Library hugger. Or maybe I’d resort to violence. Shoot at whoever came in to get me, not to kill, of course, or even wound, but to try to get them to kill me. That would be a statement, wouldn’t it? Dies at her post, defending her turf. The library was her child, a sympathetic editorial might say. Or, next level (you know me, I can never resist at least considering extremes), I would in fact shoot to kill, and they’d have to call a SWAT team, they’d ‘riddle’ me with bullets, the terrorist librarian. Before the shootout I could bomb the cars of the county commissioners who oppose me, and leave behind a testimonial, an apology of sorts: when necessary, fellow citizens, the right thing, getting it done, is always worth the sacrifice of innocent lives. The building is so old now, like my widow volunteers, like I’ll be before I leave it, it creaks and groans, but its life is charmed, Johnny. Nothing really bad has ever happened to it or in it. No devastating fire or flooding, no murders or suicides under its roof or on its steps. Not even a ghost, as far as I know. It’s truly a sanctuary. Most people hardly know it’s here, pay it no attention. Lik me, it survives by keeping a low profile, by being invisible, or very near it. Oak and pecan trees hide its plain vanilla façade, the cream colored brick, the concrete Romanesque columns, the reclining lions flanking concrete steps. Don’t know if you noticed, but in the entrance there are still two white porcelain water fountains, one for children and one for adults. When I first got here, I badgered the judge into pushing through a few repairs and renovations, but only the most basic kind, so the rats wouldn’t completely eat it up and mothers could feel safe bringing their children. I’m hopelessly hidebound, Johnny. I fought to save the double screen doors at the end of the entrance hall, and I don’t use the central air until the outside temperature reaches eighty-five, which is around the middle of May, so that for most of the year, even during the frequent warm spells in winter, I can open the big glass-paned front doors and let a nice breeze come through the reading rooms and not worry about flies or mosquitoes. The high ceilings and fans do the rest. There’s an old doctor who comes in every morning to read the paper and take a nap, and as long as I can hear him snoring, I know it’s not too hot. He tells me all the time it’s the only place he can sleep and hear birds, since his house is always closed up. I worry about his weight, his pants and suspenders and bowtie make him look like a clown, but he says he’d rather be dead than not eat gravy and biscuits for breakfast, so I leave him alone. Now and then he’ll check out a book, always poetry, 19th Century and before. He checked out a little volume of Sir Philip Sydney once and claimed to have loved it. He also says he read Ovid in college and can still read Latin. I didn’t press him on that. It doesn’t matter.
“Sometimes I cheat on my own rule about the air conditioning dates, since it’s mostly teenagers in here in the summer in the afternoons, the dumb ones pretending to study for classes they have to make up, and they pay no attention to the heat, or any kind of weather. A beautiful thunderstorm can come up, darkening the whole place almost as if it were night, and they couldn’t care less. They go on whispering among themselves, listening to music on their earphones, flattering their own vain little adolescent hearts. If I’m without volunteer help, as I usually am in the afternoons, I might sit for a while in the little reference room and read a fifties-era novel, one of those that always has “and” in the middle of the title, the type of novel that satisfies a particular vein of nostalgia for me, for when I was an adolescent myself and wanted to be carried away from all this, my own music, you might say, for flattering my own vain little heart. I daydreamed of rugged and brilliant doctors and architects. I wanted to have long bouncy hair, a mane, and long limbs, thick red lips, wide hips and technicolor dresses that showed off my sultry curves. I was always the bad girl, the brunette with flashing green eyes, too bad to ever get the man she wanted. Even when I was good at heart, I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and nothing could ever hide or make up for that. Thirteen through seventeen, all those years of reading trashy novels while holed up in the little research room, the walls around me crammed with dusty tomes no one ever looked at, worthless and moldy wall decoration that to this day I’ve never had the heart to do anything about, some dating from when the library opened, the big windows open, a coolish storm breeze hurrying through the oaks just outside, the doctor’s birds silent and hiding somewhere, ominously dark everywhere, though now and then a flash of light and the crack of thunder, the temperature in the library suddenly falling ten degrees, balmy now, as I read about all those scandalous affairs and backstreet abortions and mixed marriages, all manner of ghosts in closets, all the tawdry stuff below the surfaces of the clean and affluent suburban towns where everyone drove Buicks and Chryslers and wore summer frocks and drank martinis. Yes, I’m still here, and still sharing those afternoons with fifties novels and teenagers, and now also with an old man who claims to read Latin and widow volunteers who are starting to be my own age. My soiree. Someone I recognize from school might come in, or an eccentric with an oddball question: does hot water really make ice faster than cold, do Eskimos eat frozen blood, do flies eat their own vomit. And inevitably one of the teenagers, boys and girls alike, develops a crush on me, and I’m always careful not to encourage it. I do nothing to rock the boat. I let sleeping dogs lie. I’m nice to everybody, and if they’d let me, when I kick off, I’d have them bury me there, right under one of those trees.”
“I’m not kidding,” I said, “I’m madly attached to it. If the county commissioners ever decided to tear it down (and they might after the judge is gone), I’d sit on the floor, chain myself to a column and make them carry me out kicking and screaming. Or maybe it would be better press if I struck a dignified pose, nose in the air. A library hugger. I’d hope for that as the caption on the news photo. Library hugger. Or maybe I’d resort to violence. Shoot at whoever came in to get me, not to kill, of course, or even wound, but to try to get them to kill me. That would be a statement, wouldn’t it? Dies at her post, defending her turf. The library was her child, a sympathetic editorial might say. Or, next level (you know me, I can never resist at least considering extremes), I would in fact shoot to kill, and they’d have to call a SWAT team, they’d ‘riddle’ me with bullets, the terrorist librarian. Before the shootout I could bomb the cars of the county commissioners who oppose me, and leave behind a testimonial, an apology of sorts: when necessary, fellow citizens, the right thing, getting it done, is always worth the sacrifice of innocent lives. The building is so old now, like my widow volunteers, like I’ll be before I leave it, it creaks and groans, but its life is charmed, Johnny. Nothing really bad has ever happened to it or in it. No devastating fire or flooding, no murders or suicides under its roof or on its steps. Not even a ghost, as far as I know. It’s truly a sanctuary. Most people hardly know it’s here, pay it no attention. Lik me, it survives by keeping a low profile, by being invisible, or very near it. Oak and pecan trees hide its plain vanilla façade, the cream colored brick, the concrete Romanesque columns, the reclining lions flanking concrete steps. Don’t know if you noticed, but in the entrance there are still two white porcelain water fountains, one for children and one for adults. When I first got here, I badgered the judge into pushing through a few repairs and renovations, but only the most basic kind, so the rats wouldn’t completely eat it up and mothers could feel safe bringing their children. I’m hopelessly hidebound, Johnny. I fought to save the double screen doors at the end of the entrance hall, and I don’t use the central air until the outside temperature reaches eighty-five, which is around the middle of May, so that for most of the year, even during the frequent warm spells in winter, I can open the big glass-paned front doors and let a nice breeze come through the reading rooms and not worry about flies or mosquitoes. The high ceilings and fans do the rest. There’s an old doctor who comes in every morning to read the paper and take a nap, and as long as I can hear him snoring, I know it’s not too hot. He tells me all the time it’s the only place he can sleep and hear birds, since his house is always closed up. I worry about his weight, his pants and suspenders and bowtie make him look like a clown, but he says he’d rather be dead than not eat gravy and biscuits for breakfast, so I leave him alone. Now and then he’ll check out a book, always poetry, 19th Century and before. He checked out a little volume of Sir Philip Sydney once and claimed to have loved it. He also says he read Ovid in college and can still read Latin. I didn’t press him on that. It doesn’t matter.
“Sometimes I cheat on my own rule about the air conditioning dates, since it’s mostly teenagers in here in the summer in the afternoons, the dumb ones pretending to study for classes they have to make up, and they pay no attention to the heat, or any kind of weather. A beautiful thunderstorm can come up, darkening the whole place almost as if it were night, and they couldn’t care less. They go on whispering among themselves, listening to music on their earphones, flattering their own vain little adolescent hearts. If I’m without volunteer help, as I usually am in the afternoons, I might sit for a while in the little reference room and read a fifties-era novel, one of those that always has “and” in the middle of the title, the type of novel that satisfies a particular vein of nostalgia for me, for when I was an adolescent myself and wanted to be carried away from all this, my own music, you might say, for flattering my own vain little heart. I daydreamed of rugged and brilliant doctors and architects. I wanted to have long bouncy hair, a mane, and long limbs, thick red lips, wide hips and technicolor dresses that showed off my sultry curves. I was always the bad girl, the brunette with flashing green eyes, too bad to ever get the man she wanted. Even when I was good at heart, I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and nothing could ever hide or make up for that. Thirteen through seventeen, all those years of reading trashy novels while holed up in the little research room, the walls around me crammed with dusty tomes no one ever looked at, worthless and moldy wall decoration that to this day I’ve never had the heart to do anything about, some dating from when the library opened, the big windows open, a coolish storm breeze hurrying through the oaks just outside, the doctor’s birds silent and hiding somewhere, ominously dark everywhere, though now and then a flash of light and the crack of thunder, the temperature in the library suddenly falling ten degrees, balmy now, as I read about all those scandalous affairs and backstreet abortions and mixed marriages, all manner of ghosts in closets, all the tawdry stuff below the surfaces of the clean and affluent suburban towns where everyone drove Buicks and Chryslers and wore summer frocks and drank martinis. Yes, I’m still here, and still sharing those afternoons with fifties novels and teenagers, and now also with an old man who claims to read Latin and widow volunteers who are starting to be my own age. My soiree. Someone I recognize from school might come in, or an eccentric with an oddball question: does hot water really make ice faster than cold, do Eskimos eat frozen blood, do flies eat their own vomit. And inevitably one of the teenagers, boys and girls alike, develops a crush on me, and I’m always careful not to encourage it. I do nothing to rock the boat. I let sleeping dogs lie. I’m nice to everybody, and if they’d let me, when I kick off, I’d have them bury me there, right under one of those trees.”
2. The Dairy Queen
I didn’t hear from Johnny again until two days later, the morning of Frank’s funeral. He said it would probably be over around noon, and I told him I’d meet him at the Dairy Queen. It was freezing outside, gray, a low sky, and he was late. I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake, a rare treat, while I waited. No fries. The DQ was my idea, a mischievous one. Okay, romantic Johnny, let’s see what you can do with formica and stainless steel and huge posters of milk shakes and tacos and steak fingers. Not to mention the pack of good citizens who will overrun the place at lunchtime, most of them fat and tacky. We can share our home town, Johnny, at its most banal, or most typically colorful, depending upon how you want to look at it, or your mood. At certain times of the day, this is the center of it. Clean restrooms. Good fried food. Friendly service. Friendly people. What more could you ask for? Happily, not many of the customers were library patrons, nor did they remember me from when I was a kid. For the most part I could sit there anonymously, no history to deal with, nothing to explain. I’ve seen men I knew, knew as boys in the front seats of their cars, but they either didn’t see me, or had forgotten me, or wished they had. I’d had no school friends. It was as if I’d come home in disguise, which gave me a clean slate and an edge. Everything was familiar to me, but I was familiar to no one. A voyeur’s dream.
I didn’t hear from Johnny again until two days later, the morning of Frank’s funeral. He said it would probably be over around noon, and I told him I’d meet him at the Dairy Queen. It was freezing outside, gray, a low sky, and he was late. I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake, a rare treat, while I waited. No fries. The DQ was my idea, a mischievous one. Okay, romantic Johnny, let’s see what you can do with formica and stainless steel and huge posters of milk shakes and tacos and steak fingers. Not to mention the pack of good citizens who will overrun the place at lunchtime, most of them fat and tacky. We can share our home town, Johnny, at its most banal, or most typically colorful, depending upon how you want to look at it, or your mood. At certain times of the day, this is the center of it. Clean restrooms. Good fried food. Friendly service. Friendly people. What more could you ask for? Happily, not many of the customers were library patrons, nor did they remember me from when I was a kid. For the most part I could sit there anonymously, no history to deal with, nothing to explain. I’ve seen men I knew, knew as boys in the front seats of their cars, but they either didn’t see me, or had forgotten me, or wished they had. I’d had no school friends. It was as if I’d come home in disguise, which gave me a clean slate and an edge. Everything was familiar to me, but I was familiar to no one. A voyeur’s dream.
I’d finished eating by the time Johnny got there. No tie. If he wore one to the funeral, he’d already taken it off. His light blue shirt looked respectable enough, but then I noticed it was a little frayed at the collar. The sport coat was charcoal with a blue pattern so subtle it was easy to miss. For all I knew, he’d had it since high school. His hair, thick and naturally curly, was combed back and slicked down, the hairdo of a wino or a musician. Small towns aren’t as homogenous in style as they used to be, but he still looked like a fish out of water, which made two of us. Two travelers, those who noticed us might have assumed, on the road between Dallas and Houston. I’m sure that most everyone who saw me, whether they knew who I was or not, thought my makeup was a little too subtle, my hair a tad too short, and that I was way too thin. I’d even been told as much, and without much subtlety, but only by women, for my own good, since of course I’d be looking for a husband. I’d actually had a guy ask me if I was a model for one of those mail order companies, he couldn’t remember the name, but he knew he’d seen me in one. “Where they all look cute,” he said, I suppose to make sure I didn’t think he was talking about Victoria’s Secret. He wasn’t hitting on me. His wife was right there. He’d just never seen anyone live and in person who looked like me.
“Okay,” Johnny said, as soon as he sat down, hardly saying hello, “I’ve had two days to think about this. Want to hear it?” I decided to assume he meant Frank and said as much. “Yes,” he said, “Frank. I’ve been trying to make sense of it. The other day, it was just too much. It’s sunk in now. I know it happened. I might even know why it happened. And how.” Since his call that morning, even though he hadn’t announced the topic of the day, I’d assumed Frank would be it. Surely by now it would have replaced me as number one on his list, the uppermost issue on his mind. I’d been thinking about it too and following with interest the various takes on it around town. The initial reaction, outrage that Frank would be accused of something so terrible, had lost ground rapidly. But when it became obvious that he did it, the first reaction was to think of him as the victim, as the “all-American small town boy, stoic and guileless, tragically undone by a cold, calculating hussy.” But that lost ground rapidly as well. Popular opinion wasn’t comfortable with the nuances of the kind of tragedy the features a good man with a fatal flaw. The media led with the more neutral headline of “Upscale doctor seduced by tramp nurse.” You still had the hussy, and a perfect life ruined, and for what, but it left room for thinking that a man who cheats on his wife must either be a total fool or a villain at heart, not a good man at all. The popular imagination was much more comfortable with Patti as victim.
“Okay,” Johnny said, as soon as he sat down, hardly saying hello, “I’ve had two days to think about this. Want to hear it?” I decided to assume he meant Frank and said as much. “Yes,” he said, “Frank. I’ve been trying to make sense of it. The other day, it was just too much. It’s sunk in now. I know it happened. I might even know why it happened. And how.” Since his call that morning, even though he hadn’t announced the topic of the day, I’d assumed Frank would be it. Surely by now it would have replaced me as number one on his list, the uppermost issue on his mind. I’d been thinking about it too and following with interest the various takes on it around town. The initial reaction, outrage that Frank would be accused of something so terrible, had lost ground rapidly. But when it became obvious that he did it, the first reaction was to think of him as the victim, as the “all-American small town boy, stoic and guileless, tragically undone by a cold, calculating hussy.” But that lost ground rapidly as well. Popular opinion wasn’t comfortable with the nuances of the kind of tragedy the features a good man with a fatal flaw. The media led with the more neutral headline of “Upscale doctor seduced by tramp nurse.” You still had the hussy, and a perfect life ruined, and for what, but it left room for thinking that a man who cheats on his wife must either be a total fool or a villain at heart, not a good man at all. The popular imagination was much more comfortable with Patti as victim.
I knew that wouldn’t go down well with Johnny. In high school he hadn’t liked Patti and had always defended his friend. Not that anyone ever attacked him, except snotty, brainy teenagers, and there was only one of those around. Me. To me he’d always touted Frank as his decent square friend, one of the good guys, bland but appealing in a wholesome sort of way, and for the most part I’d been a total bitch about it. Johnny not only liked Frank, but when the mood suited him, he even tried to fit in with his crowd, the popular kids, the preppies of the day, apparently not noticing or caring that they were all vain, stupid and reactionary. What do you like Frank for, I often asked, for doing what’s expected of him? The excellence with which he toes the line? His flawless conformity? Not fair, even the teenage me knew that, but Johnny was good about taking my shit, which in the long run often softened me up, and I eventually and reluctantly conceded that it took hard work and some degree of talent to be Frank, even in a small town. Quarterback of a state football championship team, debate champion, top 10% of his class, Eagle scout, president of the student council. Still, that didn’t make it, or him, any less boring, and depressing, especially depressing, given the value people put on such things. Even now I’m tempted to leave him out of this story altogether. And I would, believe me I would, if it hadn’t been for his grand finale, his parting shot, the only interesting thing he ever did.
I hadn’t gone to the funeral because, in spite of being tempted by what would probably be a circus, I simply didn’t want to. I’d have felt like a hypocrite. Besides not liking what he stood for, Frank and I never really knew each other. Growing up I saw him mostly from a distance, in the hall between classes or on the football field on the rare occasions when I went to games. Not to mention that he wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a slut like me, and that was fine. He wasn’t my type even physically. He always struck me as being on the short side and a little too pale, almost pasty. He wore glasses with big rims that he was constantly pushing up on his nose. A little mouse, like his wife, except that she was just a rail, hardly visible from the side, whereas he was round and tight. As an athlete, Johnny said, he was the smart and tenacious little guy type, clean-cut to the bone, a take charge catcher in baseball and the perfect thinking man’s quarterback.
Johnny got up to order a cheeseburger, then came back and got right to the point. “Ginger looked innocent, she always had, even during her wild days, but Frank knew she wasn’t, and that’s what drove him crazy.” “Like Lolita,” I said, helpfully. “Yes, but with an important difference. Frank wasn’t cynical like Humbert. He thought she was in love with him, not just playing him, that she did what she did because she thought he was wonderful. If I remember correctly, Humbert never fooled himself about that. Was never even concerned about it.” “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” “So this was more conventional. She wasn’t just an object of desire. She fed his ego. I’m thinking she encouraged him to make frequent visits to check on her father, even though she was perfectly capable of monitoring his condition herself, a house call Frank was happy to make because after checking this and that, the coach’s vital signs, and making all the medically sound adjustments, he and sweet little Ginger had their own private consultation in one of the bedrooms. The poor coach lay on his back in his hospital bed in the center of that tiny living room (or so I imagine it was, you’ve seen those little two bedroom post-war houses, hardly enough space to turn around in without a hospitable bed), and all he could do was lie there with the respirator pumping away at a steady beat, the TV playing game shows or reruns of old situation comedies to keep him company, while the good doctor banged away at his daughter in the next room.”
This was pure speculation, of course, and it seemed to give Johnny pleasure, but I said nothing. He dipped his fries in mustard instead of ketchup, and in between the fries and bites of cheeseburger, he nibbled cautiously on a pickled jalapeno. Glancing out the window, I thought it might start to sleet at any moment.
“She made him feel so good, Sally, took such total advantage of his innocence, and he was innocent, believe me, about things like this, that for a while he didn’t even know he was being bad.” “Wait, “ I said, “now you’re really guessing.” “I suppose, but it’s an educated guess. I knew him pretty well, as well as, probably better, than anyone as a friend, and I’m sure, totally convinced, that he never knew what hit him, or else he wouldn’t have done it. He forgot all about his wife, his kids, his church, his practice, never mind the coach. It was like some exotic form of amnesia, erotic amnesia, if you will, and then, and only then, when Ginger thought he was securely in her clutches, did she make what she wanted clear to him. ‘My father will soon be dead and you can get a divorce and marry me, and meanwhile, no one will know if we twist this knob a little too far to the left, that one not quite enough to the right.’” “You don’t know that.” “So what? It makes perfect sense. She said to him, ‘He’s old, he’s suffering, he’s lived his life, and every day we spend here in this shit hole is a day less in the places we ought to be: Hawaii, the Caribbean, one those Mexican places.’” “Cancun.” “Yes. There you go. Cancun. ‘In those places my dear rich handsome doctor, my hero, my savior, we will fuck to our hearts’ content, linger over romantic dinners, dance under the stars. Will you buy me nice things, Frank dear? May I have a little sports car? A diamond bracelet? A string of pearls? My own swimming pool? A horse? You will buy me a horse, won’t you?’
“But her demands, once they started, changed the game, and should have ended it, but Frank turned out, against all my expectations, to be an idiot. He was so smitten, so flattered by the attention and the apparent submission of this light and airy little redhead, that he couldn’t shake it and actually considered the unthinkable, at least briefly. Lying next to her in her childhood bed, spent, staring at Elvis memorabilia and horse posters, feeling her breath on his neck, slightly ticklish, as she spun her fantasies, contemplating the V made by the slim remarkably white thighs, he understood for the first time in his life the pleasure a man might receive from making a fool of himself for a woman. The more she asked for, the more he wanted her, and, wonder of wonders, the more he wanted to give her. It was as simple as that, and he was drunk with it, crazy as a loon, on the road to disaster and knew it, but for a while he didn’t care. It was a good feeling all in all. Out of control. Off the deep end. Out of his mind, insane with love, with fucking, caught in the grip of an urgent need for her, for wallowing in it, in her, and at the same time euphorically detached from it all, with a bird’s eye view of the whole thing, the rhythm, the steady beat of need then bliss, need, then bliss, and not a shred of guilt, thank god, just frenzy and serenity.”
I hadn’t gone to the funeral because, in spite of being tempted by what would probably be a circus, I simply didn’t want to. I’d have felt like a hypocrite. Besides not liking what he stood for, Frank and I never really knew each other. Growing up I saw him mostly from a distance, in the hall between classes or on the football field on the rare occasions when I went to games. Not to mention that he wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a slut like me, and that was fine. He wasn’t my type even physically. He always struck me as being on the short side and a little too pale, almost pasty. He wore glasses with big rims that he was constantly pushing up on his nose. A little mouse, like his wife, except that she was just a rail, hardly visible from the side, whereas he was round and tight. As an athlete, Johnny said, he was the smart and tenacious little guy type, clean-cut to the bone, a take charge catcher in baseball and the perfect thinking man’s quarterback.
Johnny got up to order a cheeseburger, then came back and got right to the point. “Ginger looked innocent, she always had, even during her wild days, but Frank knew she wasn’t, and that’s what drove him crazy.” “Like Lolita,” I said, helpfully. “Yes, but with an important difference. Frank wasn’t cynical like Humbert. He thought she was in love with him, not just playing him, that she did what she did because she thought he was wonderful. If I remember correctly, Humbert never fooled himself about that. Was never even concerned about it.” “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” “So this was more conventional. She wasn’t just an object of desire. She fed his ego. I’m thinking she encouraged him to make frequent visits to check on her father, even though she was perfectly capable of monitoring his condition herself, a house call Frank was happy to make because after checking this and that, the coach’s vital signs, and making all the medically sound adjustments, he and sweet little Ginger had their own private consultation in one of the bedrooms. The poor coach lay on his back in his hospital bed in the center of that tiny living room (or so I imagine it was, you’ve seen those little two bedroom post-war houses, hardly enough space to turn around in without a hospitable bed), and all he could do was lie there with the respirator pumping away at a steady beat, the TV playing game shows or reruns of old situation comedies to keep him company, while the good doctor banged away at his daughter in the next room.”
This was pure speculation, of course, and it seemed to give Johnny pleasure, but I said nothing. He dipped his fries in mustard instead of ketchup, and in between the fries and bites of cheeseburger, he nibbled cautiously on a pickled jalapeno. Glancing out the window, I thought it might start to sleet at any moment.
“She made him feel so good, Sally, took such total advantage of his innocence, and he was innocent, believe me, about things like this, that for a while he didn’t even know he was being bad.” “Wait, “ I said, “now you’re really guessing.” “I suppose, but it’s an educated guess. I knew him pretty well, as well as, probably better, than anyone as a friend, and I’m sure, totally convinced, that he never knew what hit him, or else he wouldn’t have done it. He forgot all about his wife, his kids, his church, his practice, never mind the coach. It was like some exotic form of amnesia, erotic amnesia, if you will, and then, and only then, when Ginger thought he was securely in her clutches, did she make what she wanted clear to him. ‘My father will soon be dead and you can get a divorce and marry me, and meanwhile, no one will know if we twist this knob a little too far to the left, that one not quite enough to the right.’” “You don’t know that.” “So what? It makes perfect sense. She said to him, ‘He’s old, he’s suffering, he’s lived his life, and every day we spend here in this shit hole is a day less in the places we ought to be: Hawaii, the Caribbean, one those Mexican places.’” “Cancun.” “Yes. There you go. Cancun. ‘In those places my dear rich handsome doctor, my hero, my savior, we will fuck to our hearts’ content, linger over romantic dinners, dance under the stars. Will you buy me nice things, Frank dear? May I have a little sports car? A diamond bracelet? A string of pearls? My own swimming pool? A horse? You will buy me a horse, won’t you?’
“But her demands, once they started, changed the game, and should have ended it, but Frank turned out, against all my expectations, to be an idiot. He was so smitten, so flattered by the attention and the apparent submission of this light and airy little redhead, that he couldn’t shake it and actually considered the unthinkable, at least briefly. Lying next to her in her childhood bed, spent, staring at Elvis memorabilia and horse posters, feeling her breath on his neck, slightly ticklish, as she spun her fantasies, contemplating the V made by the slim remarkably white thighs, he understood for the first time in his life the pleasure a man might receive from making a fool of himself for a woman. The more she asked for, the more he wanted her, and, wonder of wonders, the more he wanted to give her. It was as simple as that, and he was drunk with it, crazy as a loon, on the road to disaster and knew it, but for a while he didn’t care. It was a good feeling all in all. Out of control. Off the deep end. Out of his mind, insane with love, with fucking, caught in the grip of an urgent need for her, for wallowing in it, in her, and at the same time euphorically detached from it all, with a bird’s eye view of the whole thing, the rhythm, the steady beat of need then bliss, need, then bliss, and not a shred of guilt, thank god, just frenzy and serenity.”
He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. In regard to that kind of love, I mean. But again, I kept my mouth shut and sucked on what was left of my milk shake.
“A crash was inevitable. The time came, it always does, when he came to his senses enough to know that it couldn’t last forever, but he still couldn’t do anything about it. He thought seriously about running off with her, giving in, doing whatever she wanted, and even believed at times that he would, but he soon discovered that he couldn’t make himself do anything. Both reason, always his strong point in the past, and Ginger, the opposite of reason, offered solutions, but he was powerless to act on either one, just as he’d done nothing to protect himself from her charms in the first place. He was weak, he discovered, a real blow to someone like Frank. And to me, I might add, now that I know it. Any action at all apart from what they were already doing seemed inconceivable to him. And unbearable. He dreaded even thinking about it, but of course she wouldn’t let him forget his commitment to her, promises he no doubt made in the heat of the moment. Did she start calling him at home? Asking for cash? Demand that he leave Patti immediately, threaten to tell her, make a scene in his office? She was capable of anything, I’m sure of it, and at some point, given Frank’s growing hatred of himself, she crossed a line that proved fatal. Tantrums? Did she scream and throw things, heedless of her father? Did she sob uncontrollably and beat the pillows with her fists?”
“A crash was inevitable. The time came, it always does, when he came to his senses enough to know that it couldn’t last forever, but he still couldn’t do anything about it. He thought seriously about running off with her, giving in, doing whatever she wanted, and even believed at times that he would, but he soon discovered that he couldn’t make himself do anything. Both reason, always his strong point in the past, and Ginger, the opposite of reason, offered solutions, but he was powerless to act on either one, just as he’d done nothing to protect himself from her charms in the first place. He was weak, he discovered, a real blow to someone like Frank. And to me, I might add, now that I know it. Any action at all apart from what they were already doing seemed inconceivable to him. And unbearable. He dreaded even thinking about it, but of course she wouldn’t let him forget his commitment to her, promises he no doubt made in the heat of the moment. Did she start calling him at home? Asking for cash? Demand that he leave Patti immediately, threaten to tell her, make a scene in his office? She was capable of anything, I’m sure of it, and at some point, given Frank’s growing hatred of himself, she crossed a line that proved fatal. Tantrums? Did she scream and throw things, heedless of her father? Did she sob uncontrollably and beat the pillows with her fists?”
I glanced over at a fat woman in black sweat pants and tank top in line. Dry as a bone straw colored blond hair pulled back in a short pony tail. Tattoos on both arms. Fat kids hanging on her. It was so easy to feel superior at the Dairy Queen.
“Actually, crying might have saved her for a short time, because seeing her cry probably made Frank horny. A lot of men get a hard on when they see a woman’s tears,” he told me (as if I didn’t know), “and Frank might have loved fucking her while her cheeks were wet, her lips in a little pout, even if he already realized, finally realized, that she was playing him, and surely he did by then. But no, wait, that wouldn’t have been the only thing. It must be odd, fucking someone you know is playing you and all the while loving her.” “Have you ever done that?” “Me? No. I’ve never had anything worth being played for. Okay, maybe not odd, except in the sense of rare, that you are fucking the woman who has everything. She becomes a goddess, the object simultaneously of hate, love, fear. An exalted thing. Frank becomes one of the chosen. She gives him an audience, so to speak. Nothing less than that could have driven him to such an extreme. He’d reached a pinnacle, fucking a goddess, there was no going back, but of course you couldn’t live with such a woman either. Actually, you could if you didn’t mind suffering a slow and painful humiliating degradation. She’d be fucking cabana boys while you waited in the bar. You’d wind up like that guy, the poor consul, in Under the Volcano, dead drunk and falling off a cliff. So what he did was save himself all that humiliation. Poor Frank wasn’t humble enough. He wasn’t up to all the implications of worship. Far too proud. Kill the bitch now and get it over with. Die a Japanese sort of death, with honor. Far better to face facts and he might as well take the old man along while he’s at it. What he probably wanted anyway. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that there was nothing spontaneous about what he did. She didn’t get pushed and hit her head on something hard, or struck by a hammer or knifed, or sprayed by bullets. He didn’t act in panic. He made his decision, knew he could do it, and then walked into the house with an ordinary pistol in his hand and put a single bullet into her head. He put her down, so to speak, with a shot that was accurately placed to kill instantly. It makes sense to me now, and I don’t think my speculation about what led to it is implausible. He was tempted, he fell, and then he got hold of himself and put an end to it. To save himself. I’m not sure he did hate her. I think it was more a question of honor.
“What gets me, the only thing that still surprises me, is that I didn’t know he had it in him, all that lust I mean. Or rather, the ability, whether it comes from the soul, the gut let’s call it, or the head, to appreciate anything, woman, painting, poem, in that way. The honor I get, but I would have bet anything that a woman like Ginger, any woman actually, would have no effect on him. And just as puzzling, or perhaps more to the point, he had no patience with melodrama. He couldn’t even stand the good ones. It was all just stupid people in stupid situations. No real man would ever feel trapped in that way. I’m sure if he ever saw Double Indemnity, he’d think Fred MacMurray was the biggest fool ever. He’d even think Edward G. Robinson was a sap.”
He stopped talking and concentrated for a moment on eating. A model of simplicity, I thought as I watched him eat, that story. Frank as victim. The way Johnny would have it, he’s walking down the street one day, minding his own business, and zap, a bolt of lightning, or a big truck, or a clogged artery, comes out of nowhere and that’s it. A sniper, a deadly virus, and before that fateful moment, he’s just another red-blooded all-American man boy, which is the moral to the story, if we have the brains or the heart to see it: anything can happen to any of us at any moment. There’s Fred MacMurray just trying to sell an insurance policy, and the next thing you know he’s throwing some guy off a moving train, and Frank would even be more of a sap than that and easier prey. Not the least bit worldly despite his talents and education. His hard work and natural gifts got him to more places than he ever showed any interest in, and instead of venturing out to set the world on fire in glamorous or exotic places, he came home with his high school sweetheart to set up a humdrum family practice with at best moderate financial rewards. Some people are just like that. There’s nothing wrong with coming home, I of all people should believe that, but Frank never really left, and I knew Johnny liked that about him. He had a point. Frank found his niche here as a solidly conservative, straight arrow sort of good citizen, and he was probably more competent and did more good in his own modest little world than he ever could have on a more lucrative and competitive stage, where over reaching is such a temptation, if not required. How could you not admire such a man? And how could you doubt that he was blindsided by a force that came out of nowhere and overwhelmed him?
“Actually, crying might have saved her for a short time, because seeing her cry probably made Frank horny. A lot of men get a hard on when they see a woman’s tears,” he told me (as if I didn’t know), “and Frank might have loved fucking her while her cheeks were wet, her lips in a little pout, even if he already realized, finally realized, that she was playing him, and surely he did by then. But no, wait, that wouldn’t have been the only thing. It must be odd, fucking someone you know is playing you and all the while loving her.” “Have you ever done that?” “Me? No. I’ve never had anything worth being played for. Okay, maybe not odd, except in the sense of rare, that you are fucking the woman who has everything. She becomes a goddess, the object simultaneously of hate, love, fear. An exalted thing. Frank becomes one of the chosen. She gives him an audience, so to speak. Nothing less than that could have driven him to such an extreme. He’d reached a pinnacle, fucking a goddess, there was no going back, but of course you couldn’t live with such a woman either. Actually, you could if you didn’t mind suffering a slow and painful humiliating degradation. She’d be fucking cabana boys while you waited in the bar. You’d wind up like that guy, the poor consul, in Under the Volcano, dead drunk and falling off a cliff. So what he did was save himself all that humiliation. Poor Frank wasn’t humble enough. He wasn’t up to all the implications of worship. Far too proud. Kill the bitch now and get it over with. Die a Japanese sort of death, with honor. Far better to face facts and he might as well take the old man along while he’s at it. What he probably wanted anyway. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that there was nothing spontaneous about what he did. She didn’t get pushed and hit her head on something hard, or struck by a hammer or knifed, or sprayed by bullets. He didn’t act in panic. He made his decision, knew he could do it, and then walked into the house with an ordinary pistol in his hand and put a single bullet into her head. He put her down, so to speak, with a shot that was accurately placed to kill instantly. It makes sense to me now, and I don’t think my speculation about what led to it is implausible. He was tempted, he fell, and then he got hold of himself and put an end to it. To save himself. I’m not sure he did hate her. I think it was more a question of honor.
“What gets me, the only thing that still surprises me, is that I didn’t know he had it in him, all that lust I mean. Or rather, the ability, whether it comes from the soul, the gut let’s call it, or the head, to appreciate anything, woman, painting, poem, in that way. The honor I get, but I would have bet anything that a woman like Ginger, any woman actually, would have no effect on him. And just as puzzling, or perhaps more to the point, he had no patience with melodrama. He couldn’t even stand the good ones. It was all just stupid people in stupid situations. No real man would ever feel trapped in that way. I’m sure if he ever saw Double Indemnity, he’d think Fred MacMurray was the biggest fool ever. He’d even think Edward G. Robinson was a sap.”
He stopped talking and concentrated for a moment on eating. A model of simplicity, I thought as I watched him eat, that story. Frank as victim. The way Johnny would have it, he’s walking down the street one day, minding his own business, and zap, a bolt of lightning, or a big truck, or a clogged artery, comes out of nowhere and that’s it. A sniper, a deadly virus, and before that fateful moment, he’s just another red-blooded all-American man boy, which is the moral to the story, if we have the brains or the heart to see it: anything can happen to any of us at any moment. There’s Fred MacMurray just trying to sell an insurance policy, and the next thing you know he’s throwing some guy off a moving train, and Frank would even be more of a sap than that and easier prey. Not the least bit worldly despite his talents and education. His hard work and natural gifts got him to more places than he ever showed any interest in, and instead of venturing out to set the world on fire in glamorous or exotic places, he came home with his high school sweetheart to set up a humdrum family practice with at best moderate financial rewards. Some people are just like that. There’s nothing wrong with coming home, I of all people should believe that, but Frank never really left, and I knew Johnny liked that about him. He had a point. Frank found his niche here as a solidly conservative, straight arrow sort of good citizen, and he was probably more competent and did more good in his own modest little world than he ever could have on a more lucrative and competitive stage, where over reaching is such a temptation, if not required. How could you not admire such a man? And how could you doubt that he was blindsided by a force that came out of nowhere and overwhelmed him?
*****
Outside the DQ, it was only getting more gray and bleak. The wind had picked up, the lunch crowd had thinned out, and we were almost alone. When I looked out the window I saw a nearly empty parking lot, a Big and Tall store, a self-service car wash, a Chinese Buffet.
“I’ve been going over what he told me about her,” Johnny said. “Through the years I mean, wondering what he might have left out, and what I might have known, should have known, if I’d been more perceptive, read between the lines. This had to have been going on for a while, his interest in her, not necessarily fucking her, but the fascination, or whatever it was, the sickness, the worship, maybe even from the beginning, and I never saw it.” “From when she first got pregnant you mean?” “Yes.” “You said she was fourteen?” “Yes.” “You’re lucky you didn’t know me at fourteen. I was merciless.” He laughed. “You were merciless at seventeen.” “Not really, but I think you’re forgetting something.” “What?” “Girls can fall in love too, you know. Maybe she was the one doing the worshipping all this time, and maybe that’s what you missed, because you didn’t see her. Only him. He was the doctor after all. Not exactly a rock star, not even a rock star doctor, but a doctor nevertheless.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “He wasn’t like that. Nor was she.” “But I’m not talking about how he was. I’m talking about how she thought he was, and face it, Johnny, you don’t really know how she was. When was the last time you saw her?” “I don’t know. Maybe as a kid.” “I can tell you for sure, though, that it doesn’t take much to get a fourteen year old girl going. One little sign. Maybe he blushed at the wrong time, looked at her the wrong way, touched her arm or patted her head a tad more affectionately than he really needed to. And maybe, just maybe, he started something, not even consciously, probably not, I’ll give you that, that got out of control. Teenage girls are crazy you know, especially in societies like ours, where we don’t let them have babies. They get hysterical instead. They see devils, witches, they kill themselves, they faint at rock concerts.” He raised a hand to stop me. “Okay, I get it. Maybe I was hasty in saying she didn’t love him. I don’t know, but I see your point. Being too cynical. But okay, you’re saying she wasn’t Barbara Stanwyck, just a sweet girl who had a big crush on him. Right?” “Well, I’m not sure I’d say just a sweet girl, but for sure I’m saying not a Barbara Stanwyck, probably naïve, or maybe stupid, but definitely in love. That’s the point, Johnny. In love and didn’t know the danger she was in. She wasn’t playing him cold, Johnny. That’s the logic of it. If she had been, she’d have known when to stop, how far to go. She wouldn’t be dead now. That I’m sure of. If she was capable of playing him cold, she’d have known this: that deep down she pissed him off, that he never stopped seeing her as that irresistable and infuriating young girl. And that’s what I think it was. He in fact never stopped seeing her that way, or else it makes no sense, him killing her.”
“I’ve been going over what he told me about her,” Johnny said. “Through the years I mean, wondering what he might have left out, and what I might have known, should have known, if I’d been more perceptive, read between the lines. This had to have been going on for a while, his interest in her, not necessarily fucking her, but the fascination, or whatever it was, the sickness, the worship, maybe even from the beginning, and I never saw it.” “From when she first got pregnant you mean?” “Yes.” “You said she was fourteen?” “Yes.” “You’re lucky you didn’t know me at fourteen. I was merciless.” He laughed. “You were merciless at seventeen.” “Not really, but I think you’re forgetting something.” “What?” “Girls can fall in love too, you know. Maybe she was the one doing the worshipping all this time, and maybe that’s what you missed, because you didn’t see her. Only him. He was the doctor after all. Not exactly a rock star, not even a rock star doctor, but a doctor nevertheless.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “He wasn’t like that. Nor was she.” “But I’m not talking about how he was. I’m talking about how she thought he was, and face it, Johnny, you don’t really know how she was. When was the last time you saw her?” “I don’t know. Maybe as a kid.” “I can tell you for sure, though, that it doesn’t take much to get a fourteen year old girl going. One little sign. Maybe he blushed at the wrong time, looked at her the wrong way, touched her arm or patted her head a tad more affectionately than he really needed to. And maybe, just maybe, he started something, not even consciously, probably not, I’ll give you that, that got out of control. Teenage girls are crazy you know, especially in societies like ours, where we don’t let them have babies. They get hysterical instead. They see devils, witches, they kill themselves, they faint at rock concerts.” He raised a hand to stop me. “Okay, I get it. Maybe I was hasty in saying she didn’t love him. I don’t know, but I see your point. Being too cynical. But okay, you’re saying she wasn’t Barbara Stanwyck, just a sweet girl who had a big crush on him. Right?” “Well, I’m not sure I’d say just a sweet girl, but for sure I’m saying not a Barbara Stanwyck, probably naïve, or maybe stupid, but definitely in love. That’s the point, Johnny. In love and didn’t know the danger she was in. She wasn’t playing him cold, Johnny. That’s the logic of it. If she had been, she’d have known when to stop, how far to go. She wouldn’t be dead now. That I’m sure of. If she was capable of playing him cold, she’d have known this: that deep down she pissed him off, that he never stopped seeing her as that irresistable and infuriating young girl. And that’s what I think it was. He in fact never stopped seeing her that way, or else it makes no sense, him killing her.”
He got us both a coffee. “There may be ice on the roads by tonight. If it gets bad, I’ll get a room.” “Just don’t keep me up all night.” He grinned. “Actually, I’m surprised by how interested you seem in all this.” “It’s the talk of the town.” “Yeah, but you were always so disdainful of Frank.” “I still am. It’s just that he’s finally done something interesting. It’s perfect for me, as you should know. What could be more perfect? Town hero turns into cold-blooded killer. You should know that. You do know it. It’s why you’re here talking to me, isn’t it?” “Not the only reason.” “You know you can say whatever you want to me. You don’t have to censor yourself.” “Yes, that’s true, and only to you.” “Two misfits. But Johnny, I’ve been a whore most of my life. What’s your excuse?” “That’s easy: I’m poor and shiftless. The only thing that made me respectable was my mother dying. What’s strange, though, is that Frank always respected me. You could even say we became friends because at some point he decided I was smarter than he was. Probably when I beat him at chess, and after that, no matter what I did, how much I dropped out and turned on, I could never talk him out of it. In fact, whenever I fucked up, it seemed to make him even more certain.” “Sounds like unconditional love.” “Yeah. Maybe he had a crush on me, too.” “Maybe he did.” “Seriously, do you really think she might have loved him?” “Would that surprise you?” “Yes. Forget the cynicism. I just never thought of him as being very sexual. You know what I mean.” “Yes, but just because we couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean anything. More to the point, to use your method, working backward from what we know happened, it just seems more plausible to me that she was blinded by love.
“What’s depressing, or one more thing that is, is how people in these situations, ordinary observers, really hate love. Or they don’t believe in it. Like it doesn’t really exist, and the bias among the people I know is still with Frank. ‘Dr. Morris sure got hold of a wild one, didn’t he?” the old geezer who pumps my gas said to me yesterday through a mouthful of tobacco juice. My maid, really a sweet woman in general, called Ginger a “bruja,” which made me laugh. The janitor at the library said he knew what nurses were like (he’s always saying shit like that, no doubt because he knows I hate it), and Grace said, “Men can be so foolish at times.” They reduce everything to lust. My mother actually cried for Frank. “So clean-cut,” she said, “and so friendly to everyone. Not like most doctors. It’s such a shame.” I haven’t seen the judge since it happened, but the old doctor, with his better education and more worldly view, kept his opinion more measured. At least he believes in love. ‘Love is like an illness,’ he said portentously as he leaned back in his chair, running his fingers through what white hair he has left. ‘It plays no favorites.’ But I still think he’d agree with your analysis, Johnny. Frank got hit by a truck.
“You know, this is the biggest thing that’s happened here since Officer Bates was killed back when we were in high school. That happened before we met, and I don’t think we ever talked about it, but I tried to sneer at it in my usual way, brat that I was, only my heart wasn’t in it. Not because he was a cop. I didn’t care about that. In fact I knew him and didn’t like him. He was stupid, a terrible bully and nearly illiterate. No redeeming qualities that I knew anything about, but it bothered me anyway. I wondered what kind of low life sub-human could do such a thing. Kill somebody you didn’t even know in cold blood. It was an education to me. The guy had outstanding warrants and didn’t want to go back to jail, so he shoots a cop as he’s walking up to his car. The stupidity of that was bad enough in itself, but it’s not what bothered me. Sub-human didn’t either. Both were revelations, but more interesting to me than terrifying. What bothered me, what chilled me to the bone and still does to this day, was that it was arbitrary. No favorites indeed. That guy was going to kill somebody sooner or later, and probably for no better reason, but it wasn’t Officer Bates’ fault that it was him. It was bad luck. I’d have felt better if it had come out that Bates had been harassing the guy. For dating his sister, beating up his nephew, cheating his brother-in-law in a poker game. Anything.”
“You know, this is the biggest thing that’s happened here since Officer Bates was killed back when we were in high school. That happened before we met, and I don’t think we ever talked about it, but I tried to sneer at it in my usual way, brat that I was, only my heart wasn’t in it. Not because he was a cop. I didn’t care about that. In fact I knew him and didn’t like him. He was stupid, a terrible bully and nearly illiterate. No redeeming qualities that I knew anything about, but it bothered me anyway. I wondered what kind of low life sub-human could do such a thing. Kill somebody you didn’t even know in cold blood. It was an education to me. The guy had outstanding warrants and didn’t want to go back to jail, so he shoots a cop as he’s walking up to his car. The stupidity of that was bad enough in itself, but it’s not what bothered me. Sub-human didn’t either. Both were revelations, but more interesting to me than terrifying. What bothered me, what chilled me to the bone and still does to this day, was that it was arbitrary. No favorites indeed. That guy was going to kill somebody sooner or later, and probably for no better reason, but it wasn’t Officer Bates’ fault that it was him. It was bad luck. I’d have felt better if it had come out that Bates had been harassing the guy. For dating his sister, beating up his nephew, cheating his brother-in-law in a poker game. Anything.”
“But you weren’t inclined to be on his side.”
“Exactly, and I’d have been fine about it then and enjoyed being a brat, or at least imagining the fun of being one, of thinking up bad shit to say about Officer Bates, if only he’d asked for it. Instead, he just walked up to a car with a stranger in it and got his head blown off. That’s what you’re saying happened to Frank, because you liked him, but I’m saying no, it happened to Ginger. Not Frank. Frank did it to himself. Officer Bates didn’t, nor did Ginger. It was done to them. Remember that famous Vietnam picture? The one with the guy on his knees getting shot in the head? Putting aside whether he deserved it, he’d no doubt asked for it, in the sense of putting himself in harm’s way, but it wasn’t the injustice people reacted to in that picture. No one cared about the context. It was the violence. That was the genius of the photo and accounts for its popularity, the expression on the guy’s face, the angle of his head and body. The exact moment of death. It didn’t matter what he’d done or hadn’t done. The violence committed against him was wrong. Period.
“Exactly, and I’d have been fine about it then and enjoyed being a brat, or at least imagining the fun of being one, of thinking up bad shit to say about Officer Bates, if only he’d asked for it. Instead, he just walked up to a car with a stranger in it and got his head blown off. That’s what you’re saying happened to Frank, because you liked him, but I’m saying no, it happened to Ginger. Not Frank. Frank did it to himself. Officer Bates didn’t, nor did Ginger. It was done to them. Remember that famous Vietnam picture? The one with the guy on his knees getting shot in the head? Putting aside whether he deserved it, he’d no doubt asked for it, in the sense of putting himself in harm’s way, but it wasn’t the injustice people reacted to in that picture. No one cared about the context. It was the violence. That was the genius of the photo and accounts for its popularity, the expression on the guy’s face, the angle of his head and body. The exact moment of death. It didn’t matter what he’d done or hadn’t done. The violence committed against him was wrong. Period.
With Officer Bates there’s enough clear and simple injustice to make up for the lack of violence that a picture gives us. A small town cop, a routine traffic stop. He didn’t even know that the guy had outstanding warrants. Ginger is another story. Not just no picture of her lying there with a bloody face, she was playing with fire, screwing a married man. That was bad enough, but what in the world had she done to get poor Dr. Morris so worked up? Not to mention that she was lying there right in front of her father naked as a jaybird. Maybe she didn’t ask for it exactly, but she should have known better. That’s the comfortable way to look at it. They way everyone wants to see it, and I don’t dare suggest to anyone, not even my mother, that she might have been in love. Clearly, I’d be trying to get sympathy for her. I’d be laughed at, and in the worst possible way. With scorn. People would hate me for even considering such a thing. Even, or maybe especially, and ironically, feminists would hate me for suggesting it. Love is a weakness. It makes her a victim. It’s far more comforting, and politically correct, to think of her as a bitch. That can be justified, explained away, accounted for. She can be turned into a heroine. He couldn’t take her strength and so killed her.
"Plain and simple, though, in my opinion, if she were a bitch, she wouldn't be dead. It's a risky business, I admit, trying to con guys with your pussy, and hard cases no doubt get themselves killed occasionally, there's always hubris, but you’d really have to be stupid to get yourself killed by a man like Frank Morris. Or in love. Or both." "Are you speaking from experience? The bitch part? In your days as a courtesan, did you play men like that?" "What a thing to suggest. I’m shocked, but I do envy women who play that game. Sometimes I dream about being totally unscrupulous, a regular female Tom Ripley, not just a run of the mill ball crusher, which I'm not either, by the way, but a genuine sociopath, clear-eyed and cold-blooded, willing to do anything. In Ripley's case, it's usually how he gets out of trouble. Just kill anyone who gets in the way. But it’s also, of course, how he gets into trouble in the first place and that’s the part that for me would be fun. Playing parts, adopting disguises, whatever works to convince people to give you what you want. Maybe, come to think of it, I have done that a little bit, but I’ve never tried to get a man to leave his wife. Never wanted a man that bad, or at all really. But if I did, if I wanted a man to leave his wife and marry me, I’d make sure first that I was exactly what he wanted me to be, a dream come true. Good girl? Bad girl? Blonde? Brunette? I probably wouldn’t resort to surgery, unless it was minor and the prey was too tempting to resist, but there’s all sorts of not so extreme tricks in that regard, and I’m just average enough to pull it off. And as far as what I was willing to say or do, there would be no limit. If he dragged his heels, as you think Frank did, I’d beg, cajole, tease, whine, cry my eyes out, throw things, make terrible threats, and if none of that worked, if promises and evasion were all I got in return, I might then, but only then, take an unusual risk, just as Ripley does when he murders someone. The last resort, since it’s the most dangerous one. In the case of a married man, any of them, not just Frank, I’d force him to do something that would make it impossible for him to go back. I don’t mean commit a crime. I mean decency. I’d make him do something indecent, so bad that he’d know he’d crossed a line, become so different that he belonged with me, not in his old life. And if he refused, which is always possible, I’d hit the road. Adios, sweetheart. I’m not doing this for my health. Put up or get lost. Stop wasting my time.”
“But that’s exactly what happened,” Johnny said. “Remember where they were fucking.”
“Yes, but if I were a hard case I’d understand the risk not just of him rising or not to the bait, but also the not minor point of whether there was any chance at all that he’d murder me for corrupting him. Of course I’d know, and, therefore, in this particular situation, I wouldn’t do it. If I were the cold smart bitch that everyone wants Ginger to be, including you, Johnny, I wouldn’t be on that couch naked, waiting like some retarded little lamb for him to insert a bullet into my brain. No. For that to happen, I’d have to be another kind of woman altogether, one who could be hopelessly and stupidly in love, and I might even know he could kill me, and I might not care, at least until it was too late. Life’s not worth living without him, the little lamb thinks, and believes it with all her heart, right up until the moment he puts a gun up to the side of her head. Then maybe she has second thoughts. How old was Ginger? Late twenties, I suppose, and still so romantic? Or was she just that way about Frank? The love of her life. An old romance, an obsession, a crush she couldn’t get rid of, from as far back as when he rescued her from this and that teenage calamity, from the day he pulled her out of that motel room in Galveston, or took her to the home for unwed mothers, or put his clean white doctor’s hand between her legs.
“Yes, but if I were a hard case I’d understand the risk not just of him rising or not to the bait, but also the not minor point of whether there was any chance at all that he’d murder me for corrupting him. Of course I’d know, and, therefore, in this particular situation, I wouldn’t do it. If I were the cold smart bitch that everyone wants Ginger to be, including you, Johnny, I wouldn’t be on that couch naked, waiting like some retarded little lamb for him to insert a bullet into my brain. No. For that to happen, I’d have to be another kind of woman altogether, one who could be hopelessly and stupidly in love, and I might even know he could kill me, and I might not care, at least until it was too late. Life’s not worth living without him, the little lamb thinks, and believes it with all her heart, right up until the moment he puts a gun up to the side of her head. Then maybe she has second thoughts. How old was Ginger? Late twenties, I suppose, and still so romantic? Or was she just that way about Frank? The love of her life. An old romance, an obsession, a crush she couldn’t get rid of, from as far back as when he rescued her from this and that teenage calamity, from the day he pulled her out of that motel room in Galveston, or took her to the home for unwed mothers, or put his clean white doctor’s hand between her legs.
“Lucky Ginger,though, so unlike me. She could jump on the first good ride that came along and have a hell of a time. Of course it’s fun to say I envy her now that I’m forty years old, but I was never like her, never that much different from the way I am now. She’s the one who got pregnant, not me. I didn’t run away from home. I’ve never dressed like a whore, not even when I was a teenager, and rarely by request in private, and even then on my own terms. I’ve certainly never had an affair that might get me murdered. Like most girls, I could easily have gotten pregnant at fourteen and run off with some moron at fifteen, so of course I was the lucky one. Lucky not to have made a baby, not to have fallen in love, not to have got myself killed. I wanted to fall in love. Desperately. So desperately I get nervous to this day thinking about it, but I wasn’t Ginger, which is why luck, whether it was on my side or not, wasn’t all that saved me. I wanted the impossible. That’s the secret of my success, not brains or upbringing or strength of character. I owe it all, my narrow escape from the carelessness and romanticism of youth, to wanting what wasn’t there. No Dmitri Karamazov to elope with, although I guess there were a few impulsive ne’er-do-wells around, sexy because they were no good, who might have run away with me. Maybe I just had better taste, which probably amounts to the same thing as wanting the impossible around here. Funny. She’s the coach’s daughter; I’m the slut from the wrong side of the tracks. Just from her picture in the paper, never mind your tales of her youthful indiscretions, I can imagine how she looked, especially since she had no mother to tone her down, and a father she wanted to scandalize. She had it down, I’m sure, the art of being vulgar yet basically respectable, of being provocative but sweet, a hot ticket with that flaming red hair and boyish little body. I’m sure she pissed Frank off, and a lot of other men, just by existing. Maybe he wanted to kill her when she was fourteen. It may have seemed the only way out even then. Get rid of her. Wipe her off the face of the earth. As long as she breathed, he would want her. It was like a plague, and once it got hold of him, no matter how he struggled, or how much he prayed, there was no hope.
“All that by instinct on her part, a natural, a force of nature, a naïve artist, and in that regard if no other I do envy her. She was always just herself, whereas I’ve had to make my living with disguises, which can get wearisome, and I often want to escape. So much so that I have my routes planned. When I have the nerve, even to this day, I like to stand on railroad tracks or on the roofs of tall buildings and lean precariously over the rails. I always have a prescription for sleeping pills. I keep a fresh razor blade on the edge of the bath tub. I drive through bad neighborhoods late at night, sometimes parking, doors unlocked, and dare myself to get out and walk around. So, I can’t escape it, how I am. Not really. I’m self-conscious even about being impulsive, and although I attract men, I do okay, I don’t make them crazy. Ginger had that gift, or curse, whether she knew it or not and without really trying. She was born with the right look. A thin little nose and big round eyes. Short with curves. A little girl, a small woman, but something about those eyes and that body told men in no uncertain terms that she was a wild one, genuinely impulsive, and the final straw for Frank was loving him. Not just the teenage crush. As she matured she began to really understand what he’d done for her. She’d be dead, or a cheap whore, or on welfare if it weren’t for Frank Morris. She owed him everything, and that realization led to the conviction that she couldn’t live without him, that she loved him, and once he knew that, once she made that clear to him, he was really in a fix. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
“All that by instinct on her part, a natural, a force of nature, a naïve artist, and in that regard if no other I do envy her. She was always just herself, whereas I’ve had to make my living with disguises, which can get wearisome, and I often want to escape. So much so that I have my routes planned. When I have the nerve, even to this day, I like to stand on railroad tracks or on the roofs of tall buildings and lean precariously over the rails. I always have a prescription for sleeping pills. I keep a fresh razor blade on the edge of the bath tub. I drive through bad neighborhoods late at night, sometimes parking, doors unlocked, and dare myself to get out and walk around. So, I can’t escape it, how I am. Not really. I’m self-conscious even about being impulsive, and although I attract men, I do okay, I don’t make them crazy. Ginger had that gift, or curse, whether she knew it or not and without really trying. She was born with the right look. A thin little nose and big round eyes. Short with curves. A little girl, a small woman, but something about those eyes and that body told men in no uncertain terms that she was a wild one, genuinely impulsive, and the final straw for Frank was loving him. Not just the teenage crush. As she matured she began to really understand what he’d done for her. She’d be dead, or a cheap whore, or on welfare if it weren’t for Frank Morris. She owed him everything, and that realization led to the conviction that she couldn’t live without him, that she loved him, and once he knew that, once she made that clear to him, he was really in a fix. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
“That kind of woman leaves men with only one solution. Men like Frank at any rate. She’s not consciously manipulative, or at least not maliciously so, but there is no end to what she can do to him, what he is not just willing but wants her to do, and since he can’t face admitting that to anyone, there is no way out. She has him trapped like a rat. The more he has of her, the more he wants, and unless he takes desperate measures, it will never end. Fucking her, he soon learned, was the only way he could even marginally control himself, but that didn’t work either in the long run. They were crazy and irresponsible from the start, and of course it escalated quickly, as those things do, new things in different places, their increasing ease and familiarity making everything more pleasurable and tempting, the world, each other, at their fingertips, always ecstatic, never satisfied, until finally they got to a point that no one else could ever hope to understand. Remember, she was found naked not two feet away from her father. There’s no suggestion in any news reports that he undressed her, no mention of it at all, not even “we’re uncertain at this point how she came to be in that state of undress.” Just naked and a bullet hole in her forehead. Naked as sin.
*****
“Had they fucked there on a previous occasion? That’s my first question. How many times, and did Frank walk in this time determined that it would never happen again? But even more basic: what was it exactly? What was the pleasure of it? Was fucking in the same room as her father, not two feet away, any different from, say, doing it on the kitchen table or in Frank’s car or in the coach’s former bedroom, no different from the times she screamed “fuck me” in that little house, at the top of her lungs over and over again? In any case, clearly, Ginger didn’t understand the danger of Frank becoming so disgusted with her and himself that he blew up. But why not? What blinded her? I think it was love, but she also may have hated her daddy,
“A little of both is my guess, one feeding the other. Daddy chased her mother away, and he was so strict. My brothers were bullies, often out of control, which makes them different from the coach, who I suspect was more like a preacher. Rules to live by, right on his side. Ginger at eleven or twelve probably wanted to mind him, and then suddenly didn’t want to. That’s how it often happens. Adolesence intervened. Until then, despite the loss of her mother, or because of it, she might have done everything he asked her to, agreed with him about everything, he was all she had and she was the perfect daughter, innocent and pure and a hard worker, trying to take care of him, substituting in domestic ways for her absent mother. But then all of a sudden she’s completely boy crazy and begins to feel like a prisoner in her room at night, especially since so many boys are begging to see her, pleading with her to sneak out of the house, practically drooling, howling at the moon, pawing the ground, snorting. There are no bars on her windows, and since her bedroom is on the first floor, there’s no need to fashion a rope from blankets or sheets. All she has to do is open the window and crawl out, and it was only a matter of time before she did just that.
I’ve never played sports, but I’ve known men like the coach, or like you say he was, we all have, and I’m sure he wanted to lock her up tight, complete with chastity belt if society had allowed it. Bars on her window, a burglar alarm system she didn’t know how to use, take her to school himself and pick her up, the strictest dating rules he could get away with. All through high school, if he had his way, she would never leave the house without a chaperone. And he would keep her busy, exhausted. Sports, housework, homework, lessons in everything. He would even manage to afford, somehow, an old woman to look after her, to be there, keep her out of trouble. He would do everything he could short of sending her to a convent or murdering her, and sooner or later she would have to choose. Good girl or bad girl? Mind her daddy or please the boys? There was no in between. No compromise. The coach negotiated with no one. Just imagine what he and Frank must have felt when they thought of her in a motel room with that hoodlum. It’s a wonder one of them didn’t kill her back then.
She was the only thing of value the coach had left. He was coaching junior high basketball by then and no one, hardly even the parents of the kids playing it, cared about that. He had no job that mattered, and no wife. Just little Ginger, and he knew that once she reached thirteen, his main role, his purpose in life, was to keep her pure. She would be the opposite of her mother, and he was just the man to do it. He was an expert on teenage boys and had no illusions. He’d spent his whole working life whipping them into shape, training them, exhorting them, forcing them to obey the rules of civilized society. An essential job, but thankless. Even many of the parents thought he was a fanatic. They didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit, that teenage boys, left in their natural state, were lazy, mean, horny and hungry. That’s it. That’s all they were, and all they wanted to do as a result was sleep, fight, fuck and eat. Typical carnivores, and it was his job to turn them into human beings, to teach them discipline, how to deny themselves what came naturally, and how to fight with skill and brains. He had to take their natural instincts and channel them productively, for a good cause, winning, success, in a good way for good goals, with honor and humility. He knew boys, he knew that his prize, his angel, was nothing but prey to them.
What must the coach have thought then of easy women like me, sluts and whores. Growing up I was just the sort of girl he feared his daughter would become. Filthy, dirty, nasty. The bottom of the barrel. A tramp from the gutter, and despite being from the wrong side of the tracks, I know exactly how he thought. I even know how he felt, and at one time had some sympathy for it. I’d felt that way too. My mother and brothers talked the same game, and I was so naive that at first I couldn’t even believe that such women existed. I thought my brothers were making it up, making fun of me. Sooner or later they would laugh and tell me what a gullible idiot I was. But reading corrupted me. It always does, and once convinced, once I had it from people who didn’t even know my family, I would lie in bed at night and become very worked up, half excited, half appalled, over the fact that anyone could be that bad. It didn’t seem possible. Even in my no account white trash family, among my crude and ignorant brothers, there were still things you didn’t talk about, lines you didn’t cross or even dare admit you knew about. Like my mother, like most parents then and now, the coach assumed that the less his daughter knew the better, which might have been the best reason of all for not putting bars on the windows, not locking her door, not giving her even a hint of what might be out there waiting for her. She might really have been innocent, not having older brothers to tease her or to eavesdrop on. How much more mysterious and enticing, then, this secret forbidden knowledge. How disturbing at first, when you think of all the lost souls, an eternity in hell, but how exciting finally, how titillating, when you realize you don’t care anymore.
He didn’t let her out of his sight, so when his star quarterback, the best of good boys everywhere, now the highly respected and successful Dr. Morris, said, I’m afraid Ginger is pregnant, he didn’t believe it at first. He said nothing and hardly listened when Frank broke the awkward silence with the details and recommended a solution. Abortion was never mentioned or thought of, not between those two. The timing was fortunate, Frank said, Ginger would only have to miss a few weeks of school, which could easily be explained by some made up illness, serious, but something that comes and goes. Frank would take care of everything, and when she comes back, he assured the coach, it will be as if nothing had happened. Wishful thinking, they both knew. The coach was not a man of moderation. He didn’t believe in it, never mind practice it. One option when she came back was to put those bars on the windows, but he couldn’t get it out of his head that the chicken had already flown the coop. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. The wolves were already licking their chops. His daughter was no longer a virgin. Period. Frank was wrong. It couldn’t possibly be as if nothing had happened. His daughter was like her mother. Period, and the only question was how he got stuck with such a slut to begin with, the wife not the daughter, the original slut, the prime slut, slut mother of the slut child, oddly, insanely, married to this immoderate man, obsessed with purity and honor and achievement. I actually knew the original slut a little bit. I’d forgotten all about her until this happened. She was a PE teacher, and she didn’t seem that much different from her husband at the time. A handsome woman with a tight, tanned little body, she looked more like the sort of person who’d run away with another woman, not one of the coach’s macho assistants, but that was the story I heard, the one that was all over school at the time, the line coach, a very hairy and muscular man as I recall, all hush hush but everyone knew, which these days doesn’t make her a slut, necessarily. The only thing against her is that she left her child. I’ve never had a child, but I don’t think I could or would do that. You never know, but I like to think I’m more like my mother on that score. Maybe not pay them much attention, but stick with them, want them nearby when they’re little, even against all reason and common sense.
I’ve never played sports, but I’ve known men like the coach, or like you say he was, we all have, and I’m sure he wanted to lock her up tight, complete with chastity belt if society had allowed it. Bars on her window, a burglar alarm system she didn’t know how to use, take her to school himself and pick her up, the strictest dating rules he could get away with. All through high school, if he had his way, she would never leave the house without a chaperone. And he would keep her busy, exhausted. Sports, housework, homework, lessons in everything. He would even manage to afford, somehow, an old woman to look after her, to be there, keep her out of trouble. He would do everything he could short of sending her to a convent or murdering her, and sooner or later she would have to choose. Good girl or bad girl? Mind her daddy or please the boys? There was no in between. No compromise. The coach negotiated with no one. Just imagine what he and Frank must have felt when they thought of her in a motel room with that hoodlum. It’s a wonder one of them didn’t kill her back then.
She was the only thing of value the coach had left. He was coaching junior high basketball by then and no one, hardly even the parents of the kids playing it, cared about that. He had no job that mattered, and no wife. Just little Ginger, and he knew that once she reached thirteen, his main role, his purpose in life, was to keep her pure. She would be the opposite of her mother, and he was just the man to do it. He was an expert on teenage boys and had no illusions. He’d spent his whole working life whipping them into shape, training them, exhorting them, forcing them to obey the rules of civilized society. An essential job, but thankless. Even many of the parents thought he was a fanatic. They didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit, that teenage boys, left in their natural state, were lazy, mean, horny and hungry. That’s it. That’s all they were, and all they wanted to do as a result was sleep, fight, fuck and eat. Typical carnivores, and it was his job to turn them into human beings, to teach them discipline, how to deny themselves what came naturally, and how to fight with skill and brains. He had to take their natural instincts and channel them productively, for a good cause, winning, success, in a good way for good goals, with honor and humility. He knew boys, he knew that his prize, his angel, was nothing but prey to them.
What must the coach have thought then of easy women like me, sluts and whores. Growing up I was just the sort of girl he feared his daughter would become. Filthy, dirty, nasty. The bottom of the barrel. A tramp from the gutter, and despite being from the wrong side of the tracks, I know exactly how he thought. I even know how he felt, and at one time had some sympathy for it. I’d felt that way too. My mother and brothers talked the same game, and I was so naive that at first I couldn’t even believe that such women existed. I thought my brothers were making it up, making fun of me. Sooner or later they would laugh and tell me what a gullible idiot I was. But reading corrupted me. It always does, and once convinced, once I had it from people who didn’t even know my family, I would lie in bed at night and become very worked up, half excited, half appalled, over the fact that anyone could be that bad. It didn’t seem possible. Even in my no account white trash family, among my crude and ignorant brothers, there were still things you didn’t talk about, lines you didn’t cross or even dare admit you knew about. Like my mother, like most parents then and now, the coach assumed that the less his daughter knew the better, which might have been the best reason of all for not putting bars on the windows, not locking her door, not giving her even a hint of what might be out there waiting for her. She might really have been innocent, not having older brothers to tease her or to eavesdrop on. How much more mysterious and enticing, then, this secret forbidden knowledge. How disturbing at first, when you think of all the lost souls, an eternity in hell, but how exciting finally, how titillating, when you realize you don’t care anymore.
He didn’t let her out of his sight, so when his star quarterback, the best of good boys everywhere, now the highly respected and successful Dr. Morris, said, I’m afraid Ginger is pregnant, he didn’t believe it at first. He said nothing and hardly listened when Frank broke the awkward silence with the details and recommended a solution. Abortion was never mentioned or thought of, not between those two. The timing was fortunate, Frank said, Ginger would only have to miss a few weeks of school, which could easily be explained by some made up illness, serious, but something that comes and goes. Frank would take care of everything, and when she comes back, he assured the coach, it will be as if nothing had happened. Wishful thinking, they both knew. The coach was not a man of moderation. He didn’t believe in it, never mind practice it. One option when she came back was to put those bars on the windows, but he couldn’t get it out of his head that the chicken had already flown the coop. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. The wolves were already licking their chops. His daughter was no longer a virgin. Period. Frank was wrong. It couldn’t possibly be as if nothing had happened. His daughter was like her mother. Period, and the only question was how he got stuck with such a slut to begin with, the wife not the daughter, the original slut, the prime slut, slut mother of the slut child, oddly, insanely, married to this immoderate man, obsessed with purity and honor and achievement. I actually knew the original slut a little bit. I’d forgotten all about her until this happened. She was a PE teacher, and she didn’t seem that much different from her husband at the time. A handsome woman with a tight, tanned little body, she looked more like the sort of person who’d run away with another woman, not one of the coach’s macho assistants, but that was the story I heard, the one that was all over school at the time, the line coach, a very hairy and muscular man as I recall, all hush hush but everyone knew, which these days doesn’t make her a slut, necessarily. The only thing against her is that she left her child. I’ve never had a child, but I don’t think I could or would do that. You never know, but I like to think I’m more like my mother on that score. Maybe not pay them much attention, but stick with them, want them nearby when they’re little, even against all reason and common sense.
I sometimes wonder if every story sooner or later doesn’t come down to a common situation in many old jokes: when you find your lover in bed with another person, which one do you shoot? Or soften it up for these mild times: which one do you blame? Being fairly promiscuous, I took that question seriously when I was younger. It seemed to come up a lot in conversation, and it was surprising to me how many people, men and women, would blame the other person. Who cares about them, I always wondered, perhaps with no little self-interest. Now I wonder who cares about either of them, but we do, of course, betrayal hurts, the person we loved and trusted changes and can never change back. The train’s left the station, the milk has spilled. Ginger at fourteen betrayed her father, not her lover, but we can still ask the same old question: should he have killed her or the boy? Maybe both. Maybe the boy and send her to a convent, or, more moderately to suit the times, make her a lifelong servant in the house, maiden Aunt Ginger, or put her out on the street, sink or swim bitch, as long as it’s a street in some other town. An even more moderate and modern way would be to make the boy marry her, a shotgun wedding, not so extreme as death but at least it makes them both pay dearly, makes it change their lives, and if that means ruin, so what? It’s no more than they deserve. Honor requires it and society used to demand it, probably still does in most parts of the world, which we know, if we keep up at all with the news, is stubbornly old-fashioned.
The one we love says one thing and does another. We’ve never told her about all the drooling wolves, the chest-pounding baboons, laughing hyenas, sly foxes, that wait impatiently but stubbornly outside her window, but somehow she knew. She knew they were there. She’s only human after all, and humans always wonder and sense deep down what’s on the other side. But in her case, so uninformed, in the dark, she might have been thinking of nothing more than holding hands, at most a kiss, unaware of slippery slopes. Poor babe. A babe in the woods, blameless, but the coach didn’t want to think that way. He tried for a while not to think about it, since that would be the first step towards changing his mind, giving in to moderation, but he thought about it anyway. He cried over spilt milk. He couldn’t help it, and he couldn’t stop himself from looking for a solution. A weakness, he knew, but watered-down permissive phrases like these things happen, she’s only a girl, she’ll learn from her mistake, started pestering him, and before he knew it he was thinking of her as someone he might tutor, give advice to, helpful hints about how to get along in the world, hints based for a change on the fact that most things outside that window weren’t very pretty. That’s why, my dear, it takes sacrifice, duty, honor, guts and hard work to get through life. He didn’t want to admit that his own daughter was so much like those boys, those hyenas, but what choice did he have? She might be tarnished, not the girl she was, once impure always impure, forever stained, but she could still be a decent human being, and wasn’t that worth something? The coach knew how to settle for less, no matter how bitter a pill it was. She was only a girl, a female, and all of them, not just her, seemed to gather around the sorry bastards of the world like flies. The coach had known a lot of the sorry bastards. Do nothings, punks who think that all the worthwhile things in the world are stupid. Exercise. Grades. Courage. Honor. Virtue. Everything was stupid and boring except cars and jungle music and girls. Surely she knew better than that, could see them for what they were, especially now, but evidently not. It wasn’t six months before she ran off with another one, which at least settled things once and for all. She was hopeless, beyond any doubt. After a stunt like that, two stunts, how could she even be his daughter?
So he gave up, let her do as she pleased, hardly noticed she was there, which was the beginning of her reform, perhaps even accounts for it. An unwed mother and runaway in her early teens, by the time she graduated from high school, she was a good student and a responsible and decent person. She even seemed interested in her father, his welfare, his health, and although he might not have warmed up to her, he didn’t shun her either. He tolerated her, and maybe he was even grateful and shed a tear or two when she decided to come home and take care of him in his time of need. How could he know that she would revert to type? But he probably told himself, over and over again, once it started with Frank, that he should have known, had known all along but foolishly made himself forget.
The one we love says one thing and does another. We’ve never told her about all the drooling wolves, the chest-pounding baboons, laughing hyenas, sly foxes, that wait impatiently but stubbornly outside her window, but somehow she knew. She knew they were there. She’s only human after all, and humans always wonder and sense deep down what’s on the other side. But in her case, so uninformed, in the dark, she might have been thinking of nothing more than holding hands, at most a kiss, unaware of slippery slopes. Poor babe. A babe in the woods, blameless, but the coach didn’t want to think that way. He tried for a while not to think about it, since that would be the first step towards changing his mind, giving in to moderation, but he thought about it anyway. He cried over spilt milk. He couldn’t help it, and he couldn’t stop himself from looking for a solution. A weakness, he knew, but watered-down permissive phrases like these things happen, she’s only a girl, she’ll learn from her mistake, started pestering him, and before he knew it he was thinking of her as someone he might tutor, give advice to, helpful hints about how to get along in the world, hints based for a change on the fact that most things outside that window weren’t very pretty. That’s why, my dear, it takes sacrifice, duty, honor, guts and hard work to get through life. He didn’t want to admit that his own daughter was so much like those boys, those hyenas, but what choice did he have? She might be tarnished, not the girl she was, once impure always impure, forever stained, but she could still be a decent human being, and wasn’t that worth something? The coach knew how to settle for less, no matter how bitter a pill it was. She was only a girl, a female, and all of them, not just her, seemed to gather around the sorry bastards of the world like flies. The coach had known a lot of the sorry bastards. Do nothings, punks who think that all the worthwhile things in the world are stupid. Exercise. Grades. Courage. Honor. Virtue. Everything was stupid and boring except cars and jungle music and girls. Surely she knew better than that, could see them for what they were, especially now, but evidently not. It wasn’t six months before she ran off with another one, which at least settled things once and for all. She was hopeless, beyond any doubt. After a stunt like that, two stunts, how could she even be his daughter?
So he gave up, let her do as she pleased, hardly noticed she was there, which was the beginning of her reform, perhaps even accounts for it. An unwed mother and runaway in her early teens, by the time she graduated from high school, she was a good student and a responsible and decent person. She even seemed interested in her father, his welfare, his health, and although he might not have warmed up to her, he didn’t shun her either. He tolerated her, and maybe he was even grateful and shed a tear or two when she decided to come home and take care of him in his time of need. How could he know that she would revert to type? But he probably told himself, over and over again, once it started with Frank, that he should have known, had known all along but foolishly made himself forget.
“The coach could move his eyelids, nothing more. Every question had to be answered with one blink or two. He couldn’t breathe for himself. Ginger cleaned him twice a day, scrubbed all his parts, disposed of his waste. Judging from his answers to questions, his mind was okay, but his active, really re-active, hold on the world beyond himself, for all practical purposes, not counting the waste he produced, was down to once for yes, twice for no. The rest was passive. The cotton cloth that was molded and pushed over his body by his daughter’s hands, her bodily presence over him, her face, Frank’s face, their voices, and the sound of the television, always on at his request because the constant noise cushioned the blow of being helpless and dying. All passive, reduced to a dessicated, all but lifeless, grotesque form, no longer a man, hardly even a person, about which it was therefore easy to say, in response to vaguely scrupulous thoughts by either of them, “Pay him no mind.” Was there even room enough to turn around between the hospital bed and the couch? I do know those little ranches with their tiny living rooms. From where she died she could have reached out and touched the bed rails. By that time Frank knew her body like the back of his hand, but perhaps he’d never seen it there before, the reclining buxom maid on the green sofa, luscious whore at rest, waiting for her lover, a study in gleaming white flesh, soft curves, over dull green cloth. Note the rosy cheeks, the plump little belly, and don’t forget the dust particles in the ray of light between the window shade and the sill. Was it her idea? Was she capable of thinking that if he will do this, he will do anything? Or did she like it, the flaunting of her youth, her beauty, her sexuality, life, in front of this shell, this effigy, her real father having faded away a long way back, but her hatred for him still very much alive? Or was it Frank who hated him? Was the idea of corrupting the coach’s daughter, almost literally under his nose, part of his obsession? Did he coerce her into it? Perhaps with the idea already forming in his mind of dispatching them all if she did it?
After walking into the house, gun in hand, he still had a chance to change his mind, turn around, get in his car and drive away. According to Johnny, that had certainly been his advice to all those dopes in melodramas. Drop it. Let it go. Forget it. Walk away. It probably won’t be as bad as you think, but so what if you lose your livelihood, your wife, your kids? You’re still relatively young. Forty years old is nothing. You’ve got time for two, maybe three more lives. Walk away, Frank. It’s a bad choice. Don’t be like an idiot teenager. Life is always worth living. Nothing is ever that bad, certainly not permanently. But no, he would say. You don’t get it. It’s not like that. I’m not escaping ruin, disgrace, poverty. The plain fact is that I want these people to die, and die today, for what they’ve done to me, for making me something I’m not, or for reminding me of what I really am, and I want to kill them myself.
*****
“You just made all that up.” “Pretty much. Yes. But does it sound right?” “Righter than my version, you mean?” I smiled. “Actually,” he said, “You have more empathy for them than I thought you would.” “I’ve been amongst them for a while. Maybe I’ve gone native.” “I doubt it.” “Me too. After that, though, you can’t tell me you’ve never been in love.” “Sure I can.” He shook his head. “You were once in love with me, I think. And I was in love with you.” “No, you just liked fucking me. I should have made you pay for it.” He laughed. “Why? And with what? I’ve been just this side of broke my whole life.” “To keep you honest.” “About you?” “Yes.” “I don’t understand.” “You were ashamed of me. Twenty bucks for a drive-in quickie and you’d have had a reason to be.” He blushed. I said, “Tell me something. Would you have killed me if I’d threatened to tell your snooty friends that you were fucking me? By the way, how did you explain all those Saturday nights?” He blushed deeper. “Never mind. See? I told you I was attracted to being a bitch, and I’m not done yet.” “Okay. Maybe I deserve it, but what brought this on?” “Your bullshit about love. You’d have liked it fine if I’d been a tenured slut, respectable but fucking everything in sight, but now that you’ve had time to think about it, get used to the idea, whore is so much better. Isn’t it? Want me to improve even on that? Say I came home to write a novel, or study Russian, or have babies, or better yet, improve the schools, hand out canned goods to the poor? Whore to saint. The whole package, both sides of the female as dreamed up by men, in one neat little bundle. Want me to say I’ve used my savings and my good looks to start free clinics, buy computers for the schools, elect city councilmen who will finance sewers and paved roads in poor neighborhoods? No novel or Russians in that latter scenario, but I keep notes for my uplifting memoir, the profits all going to charity. And meanwhile I’m screwing the old judge, the touch that makes me human but also he helps me with my little causes, and now at last I have a chance to make all of your dreams come true. Or at least make a generous contribution to one strand of them. Want me to take you out to the judge’s lake cabin? Want to screw me on his bed?” I stopped with that question, and he waited until he was sure I was done. He said, “You sure know how to hurt a guy, but I still say I loved you back then. Sling more arrows, I don’t care. That’s how I remember it. But to be honest, I don’t know what I want from you now. Besides this, I mean, or rather, the conversation about Frank, which is no small thing. Frank was a shock. Still is. You’re helping me with it, and I appreciate it.” “You’re welcome. You were pretty loaded the other night, and I was on my guard and exhausted.” “When are you not on your guard?” I smiled. “But is it true that you don’t have anyone to talk to?” “Did I say that?” “Yes. A woman you could talk to.” “Yes, it’s true.” “But you have to be drunk to want to do anything about it, don’t you?” He blushed yet again. “This is harsh, I know, but it’s better if I say it now and get it over with. Stop hinting that you think we’re still in love or should get together. It’s nauseating. Here’s the thing. When it comes to that, you’re a coward and always have been. If you hadn’t been such a coward--or do you prefer hypocrite?--you’d have gone for my soul when we were seventeen. And you’d be going for it now.” “I’m not?” “No. Half ass vague hints and no follow through. Besides, jealousy is what’s driving you. The only thing you really care about is the old man, whether I’ve fallen in love with him.” “Have you?” “It’s none of your fucking business.” “Then why bring it up?” “Just to piss you off.” “I wasn’t ashamed of you. You’re wrong about that. Just the opposite.” “Oh? So did you brag about me to your friends?” “No. Okay. On one level, the social one, I was a coward. I admit it, but I wouldn’t have bragged regardless. Even if you’d been a cheerleader or homecoming queen. I don’t do that. That’s for jocks and fraternity boys. But I was a coward about being seen with you. I admit it and regret it. I’m sorry, but you have to believe that to myself, in my own little world, I was proud of you. Very proud. Still am. It’s flattering to just be sitting here with you.” I believed him, but it didn’t change anything. “And that’s why you’re jealous? I’m still a prize?” “Yes, if you want to put it that way.” “I like him,” I said, “the judge, I’ve grown fond of him. At times I feel very tender towards him and I like it when he squeezes my hand, puts his arm around me, kisses my cheek. He’s a good man. I feel safe and adored when I’m with him, and if he asked me to marry him, I might. But I don’t love him, and he doesn’t love me. The judge and I are fond of each other. We make each other happy.” “I’ve never been able to have that with anyone, never mind anyone of the opposite sex.” “I know. It’s all or nothing with you.” “Wait. How does that make me a coward?” “You have to be swept up.” “I see. No rational commitment.” “Right. No choice in the cold light of day.” “It’s true that when my wife and I fell out of lust, it was over. The other night, on the phone with you…” “When you were drunk.” “Yes, when I was drunk. I had these visions of making love to you all night. But not just one night. We’d play it out, see how long it would last. You’re right, I don’t follow through. That’s why I’m no good at crafts. No patience. As you know, I’m not even good at seduction.” I took his hand. “Never mind. You’ll like me better as a friend, Johnny. I’ll be sweeter and more dependable.”
3. IHOP
After walking into the house, gun in hand, he still had a chance to change his mind, turn around, get in his car and drive away. According to Johnny, that had certainly been his advice to all those dopes in melodramas. Drop it. Let it go. Forget it. Walk away. It probably won’t be as bad as you think, but so what if you lose your livelihood, your wife, your kids? You’re still relatively young. Forty years old is nothing. You’ve got time for two, maybe three more lives. Walk away, Frank. It’s a bad choice. Don’t be like an idiot teenager. Life is always worth living. Nothing is ever that bad, certainly not permanently. But no, he would say. You don’t get it. It’s not like that. I’m not escaping ruin, disgrace, poverty. The plain fact is that I want these people to die, and die today, for what they’ve done to me, for making me something I’m not, or for reminding me of what I really am, and I want to kill them myself.
*****
“You just made all that up.” “Pretty much. Yes. But does it sound right?” “Righter than my version, you mean?” I smiled. “Actually,” he said, “You have more empathy for them than I thought you would.” “I’ve been amongst them for a while. Maybe I’ve gone native.” “I doubt it.” “Me too. After that, though, you can’t tell me you’ve never been in love.” “Sure I can.” He shook his head. “You were once in love with me, I think. And I was in love with you.” “No, you just liked fucking me. I should have made you pay for it.” He laughed. “Why? And with what? I’ve been just this side of broke my whole life.” “To keep you honest.” “About you?” “Yes.” “I don’t understand.” “You were ashamed of me. Twenty bucks for a drive-in quickie and you’d have had a reason to be.” He blushed. I said, “Tell me something. Would you have killed me if I’d threatened to tell your snooty friends that you were fucking me? By the way, how did you explain all those Saturday nights?” He blushed deeper. “Never mind. See? I told you I was attracted to being a bitch, and I’m not done yet.” “Okay. Maybe I deserve it, but what brought this on?” “Your bullshit about love. You’d have liked it fine if I’d been a tenured slut, respectable but fucking everything in sight, but now that you’ve had time to think about it, get used to the idea, whore is so much better. Isn’t it? Want me to improve even on that? Say I came home to write a novel, or study Russian, or have babies, or better yet, improve the schools, hand out canned goods to the poor? Whore to saint. The whole package, both sides of the female as dreamed up by men, in one neat little bundle. Want me to say I’ve used my savings and my good looks to start free clinics, buy computers for the schools, elect city councilmen who will finance sewers and paved roads in poor neighborhoods? No novel or Russians in that latter scenario, but I keep notes for my uplifting memoir, the profits all going to charity. And meanwhile I’m screwing the old judge, the touch that makes me human but also he helps me with my little causes, and now at last I have a chance to make all of your dreams come true. Or at least make a generous contribution to one strand of them. Want me to take you out to the judge’s lake cabin? Want to screw me on his bed?” I stopped with that question, and he waited until he was sure I was done. He said, “You sure know how to hurt a guy, but I still say I loved you back then. Sling more arrows, I don’t care. That’s how I remember it. But to be honest, I don’t know what I want from you now. Besides this, I mean, or rather, the conversation about Frank, which is no small thing. Frank was a shock. Still is. You’re helping me with it, and I appreciate it.” “You’re welcome. You were pretty loaded the other night, and I was on my guard and exhausted.” “When are you not on your guard?” I smiled. “But is it true that you don’t have anyone to talk to?” “Did I say that?” “Yes. A woman you could talk to.” “Yes, it’s true.” “But you have to be drunk to want to do anything about it, don’t you?” He blushed yet again. “This is harsh, I know, but it’s better if I say it now and get it over with. Stop hinting that you think we’re still in love or should get together. It’s nauseating. Here’s the thing. When it comes to that, you’re a coward and always have been. If you hadn’t been such a coward--or do you prefer hypocrite?--you’d have gone for my soul when we were seventeen. And you’d be going for it now.” “I’m not?” “No. Half ass vague hints and no follow through. Besides, jealousy is what’s driving you. The only thing you really care about is the old man, whether I’ve fallen in love with him.” “Have you?” “It’s none of your fucking business.” “Then why bring it up?” “Just to piss you off.” “I wasn’t ashamed of you. You’re wrong about that. Just the opposite.” “Oh? So did you brag about me to your friends?” “No. Okay. On one level, the social one, I was a coward. I admit it, but I wouldn’t have bragged regardless. Even if you’d been a cheerleader or homecoming queen. I don’t do that. That’s for jocks and fraternity boys. But I was a coward about being seen with you. I admit it and regret it. I’m sorry, but you have to believe that to myself, in my own little world, I was proud of you. Very proud. Still am. It’s flattering to just be sitting here with you.” I believed him, but it didn’t change anything. “And that’s why you’re jealous? I’m still a prize?” “Yes, if you want to put it that way.” “I like him,” I said, “the judge, I’ve grown fond of him. At times I feel very tender towards him and I like it when he squeezes my hand, puts his arm around me, kisses my cheek. He’s a good man. I feel safe and adored when I’m with him, and if he asked me to marry him, I might. But I don’t love him, and he doesn’t love me. The judge and I are fond of each other. We make each other happy.” “I’ve never been able to have that with anyone, never mind anyone of the opposite sex.” “I know. It’s all or nothing with you.” “Wait. How does that make me a coward?” “You have to be swept up.” “I see. No rational commitment.” “Right. No choice in the cold light of day.” “It’s true that when my wife and I fell out of lust, it was over. The other night, on the phone with you…” “When you were drunk.” “Yes, when I was drunk. I had these visions of making love to you all night. But not just one night. We’d play it out, see how long it would last. You’re right, I don’t follow through. That’s why I’m no good at crafts. No patience. As you know, I’m not even good at seduction.” I took his hand. “Never mind. You’ll like me better as a friend, Johnny. I’ll be sweeter and more dependable.”
3. IHOP
There’s an IHOP about halfway between us, a half an hour drive, and I’ve encouraged our meeting there on Wednesday nights. It makes those late night calls of his less frequent and helps me to hang up on him if I’m particularly annoyed or sleepy or both. I always eat at home first and just drink a decaf when I’m with him. Half the time he has pancakes or a chicken-fried steak. He’d eat chicken-fried steak anywhere, I swear to God. I tell him not to bother calling me if he has a heart attack, and he shrugs. I tell him he needs to start running, or at least walking, and he shrugs. Tennis? Racketball? Lifting weights? Not a flicker of interest. Mostly we talk about books and movies, sometimes music, and more often than not we segue into more personal things. Like every man I’ve ever known, except maybe the judge, he wants, more than anything, to explain himself. He’s not cool and aloof, doesn’t play that part well, never has. I suppose in a sense, at least on Wednesday nights at IHOP, I’m his muse. I get him going.
There’s no muzak to compete with and few if any other customers that time of night. Sometimes it’s eerily quiet. The lighting is too bright, but we’ve gotten used to it. Our usual waitress is attentive but not overly friendly. She sometimes comments favorably on my jewelry, if I’m wearing any. She has a cute ass, and Johnny looks at it as she walks away, but only when he thinks I’m not looking, a sign that we’re still more than friends. Or maybe he’s just old-fashioned and discreet. Good manners. He tends to be that way about a lot of things, and it’s part of why I like him. We sat in the smoking section when there was one, but now he steps outside for a couple of puffs or brings nicotine gum. Sometimes both. We reminisce. “Did you ever go to that truck stop where they served everyone ice water?” he asked me once. “I guess they all did back then, but the custom there was to get a tiny piece of ice on your spoon and cool your coffee with it?” “I never had that pleasure,” I told him. “You missed something. I thought of it because this is a very nostalgic thing to do, you know. Being here.” I knew. “All we’re missing is more people in our crowd, and it could be like high school.” “Yes,” I said, “two is hardly a crowd.” Not that I was ever in one myself, or wanted to be, but I didn’t spoil it for him.
He rarely if ever brings up Frank anymore, although I’m sure it’s still with him. Nothing important ever came up after the first wave of information. The cops were happy, and probably for good reason. Double murder and suicide, case closed. Patti receded into oblivion. No one cared about her anyway. The town chose up sides, talked about it for a while, and then slowly but surely put it aside. If the papers are to be believed, what kept people’s attention the longest, once what happened was accepted, was the idea of evil being in our midst and disguised. Hidden behind a respectable mask evil, the worst kind, the kind people hate being reminded of. Or do they love it? In any case, Grace’s face stayed red for a month, all screwed up tight and frowning, and she never wanted to talk about it after that first day. Normally, the teenagers who were supposed to be studying walked all over her, but about that she hushed them. She wanted to pretend it never happened. Only the old doctor wanted to talk about it. Turned out he had a good memory for murder suicides, and sensational crimes in general, and he entertained me for quite a while with tales that curled my toes. Maybe that, not his love of poetry, or birds, gave me a soft spot for him, and I usually stop by his grave whenever I go see the judge.
He rarely if ever brings up Frank anymore, although I’m sure it’s still with him. Nothing important ever came up after the first wave of information. The cops were happy, and probably for good reason. Double murder and suicide, case closed. Patti receded into oblivion. No one cared about her anyway. The town chose up sides, talked about it for a while, and then slowly but surely put it aside. If the papers are to be believed, what kept people’s attention the longest, once what happened was accepted, was the idea of evil being in our midst and disguised. Hidden behind a respectable mask evil, the worst kind, the kind people hate being reminded of. Or do they love it? In any case, Grace’s face stayed red for a month, all screwed up tight and frowning, and she never wanted to talk about it after that first day. Normally, the teenagers who were supposed to be studying walked all over her, but about that she hushed them. She wanted to pretend it never happened. Only the old doctor wanted to talk about it. Turned out he had a good memory for murder suicides, and sensational crimes in general, and he entertained me for quite a while with tales that curled my toes. Maybe that, not his love of poetry, or birds, gave me a soft spot for him, and I usually stop by his grave whenever I go see the judge.
We’re old now and what Johny and I talk about the most, almost exclusively, is the past, our separate pasts, since our shared past is rather limited. The weekly drive-in movie dates when we were seventeen. Our talks right after Frank died. Our friendship for the past twenty years, including but not strictly confined to the weekly conversations at IHOP. The thing is, nothing much has happened to either of us in the past twenty years. No marriage or divorce. No moving. He still says he’s never been sick a day in his life, one of his favorites, and I suppose it’s true of me as well. Not even that bad a time during menopause. That’s about it, our so-called relationship, but I suppose we do love each other in a way. Like a brother and sister? An old married couple? We’re both good talkers and good listeners. Monologues are frequent, and we never get bored, all without benefit of stimulants except coffee, and in Johnny’s case, nicotine. I talk as much as he does, so I guess he’s my muse too. You might even say I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to tell him who I am, and why we shouldn’t be lovers. He knows he’s still a coward. I don’t need to rub that in.
*****
“All my life,” I confessed, “I only played at risk For example, my attorney admirer went through a phase of putting a hand around my neck just before he came. He knew how to kill people like that, or so he said, and I believed him. He was the sort of person who would know how to but never do it. Push in just the right way on the trachea, he told me with a smile, and that’s all she wrote, a quick death. I liked it. I liked being thought of as fragile and valuable, a priceless vase that would smash into pieces on the tile floor, a baby held over a balcony rail. See what I could do to you, Sally, if I had a mind?
“Mississippi was different but the same. He liked to imagine all sorts of demeaning circumstances for me, but in the end, like the attorney, he was all talk. He wanted us to pick up strangers, have orgies, hordes of bodies in our bed, the more the merrier, and he fancied putting various things into every orifice of my body. I pretended to draw the line there, feigning shock and horror. “That’s so big, sweetie, and I’m so little!” He loved it so much when I acted horrified or disgusted I couldn’t resist hamming it up. He wanted to play with fire, risk something of value, but like you, sweetie, he was a coward when it came right down to it, when push came to shove. All show and no go. I can’t say I was opposed at one point in my life to the idea of having two men in bed with me at the same time, and he was all for it, so he said, but the one time I went to considerable trouble to set it up, he got cold feet. Came down with a fever that day, perfectly fine the next. Twenty-four hour flu. Sorry my little whore. Maybe next time.
“The funny thing is that beneath all that male posturing was an eagerness to please. It’s always been like that for me. All those times at the drive-in movie, those boys didn’t dare come in me, and not just because they were afraid of getting me pregnant. They were afraid of me. They wanted my good opinion. I wouldn’t and couldn’t have done anything about it if they had all just come in me, and they always wanted to, but they didn’t have the nerve. They wanted me to like them. I don’t know why. My confidence, I guess, my playing the experienced whore right from the start. You admired my brains too, of course, and maybe for that reason you, more than most, were worried about having an accident. You remember telling me that you usually masturbated earlier in the day, just to be on the safe side? As I recall, I laughed and gave you a kiss. I won’t deny that it pleased me, that reluctance, even fear in some, of getting on my wrong side. The essential meekness. I’m not saying they didn’t push the limits, all men do in one way or another, and sometimes I gave a little and sometimes I didn’t, but it was all very tentative. They knew my limits, and testing them wasn’t the main thing they wanted from me. Comfort is what they wanted. I seem to attract men who want comfort more than excitement. More than real excitement, and you’re no exception, Johnny. They pushed too far at times, once they were sure I wouldn’t just drop them cold, but they knew they had no hope and accepted it. They just had to assert their manliness now and then. I understood that. Men are usually happy with themselves just for trying. I don’t know how many times I told the lawyer that if he insisted on asking me to do a certain thing one more time, I’d never speak to him again. I never did it, and he never stopped asking, but it was only a game, one we played right until the end.
“Both men said I was the dangerous one, a fantasy I did nothing to discourage. You don’t have the balls to really choke me, I might say to the attorney, or sure Mississippi, I can take on as many men at once as you want me to. Bring ‘em on! But I never got choked, and I never had that gang bang, or even a menage a trois, at least not with Mississippi. Maybe I was the dangerous one. They were so ardent and devoted that I was soon fighting boredom. They each rented an apartment for me and gave me such generous allowances that I soon had to hire an accountant and an investment counselor. All that money, but aside from occasional holidays, I rarely saw either of them more than twice a week, and they often didn’t spend the night. I had it made, I know, and God knows how long I could have made it last. Maybe forever. Maybe the three of us could have grown old together. Sally and her two johns. Hobbyists. That’s what they call them these days. Sally and her two hobbyists.
“Mississippi was different but the same. He liked to imagine all sorts of demeaning circumstances for me, but in the end, like the attorney, he was all talk. He wanted us to pick up strangers, have orgies, hordes of bodies in our bed, the more the merrier, and he fancied putting various things into every orifice of my body. I pretended to draw the line there, feigning shock and horror. “That’s so big, sweetie, and I’m so little!” He loved it so much when I acted horrified or disgusted I couldn’t resist hamming it up. He wanted to play with fire, risk something of value, but like you, sweetie, he was a coward when it came right down to it, when push came to shove. All show and no go. I can’t say I was opposed at one point in my life to the idea of having two men in bed with me at the same time, and he was all for it, so he said, but the one time I went to considerable trouble to set it up, he got cold feet. Came down with a fever that day, perfectly fine the next. Twenty-four hour flu. Sorry my little whore. Maybe next time.
“The funny thing is that beneath all that male posturing was an eagerness to please. It’s always been like that for me. All those times at the drive-in movie, those boys didn’t dare come in me, and not just because they were afraid of getting me pregnant. They were afraid of me. They wanted my good opinion. I wouldn’t and couldn’t have done anything about it if they had all just come in me, and they always wanted to, but they didn’t have the nerve. They wanted me to like them. I don’t know why. My confidence, I guess, my playing the experienced whore right from the start. You admired my brains too, of course, and maybe for that reason you, more than most, were worried about having an accident. You remember telling me that you usually masturbated earlier in the day, just to be on the safe side? As I recall, I laughed and gave you a kiss. I won’t deny that it pleased me, that reluctance, even fear in some, of getting on my wrong side. The essential meekness. I’m not saying they didn’t push the limits, all men do in one way or another, and sometimes I gave a little and sometimes I didn’t, but it was all very tentative. They knew my limits, and testing them wasn’t the main thing they wanted from me. Comfort is what they wanted. I seem to attract men who want comfort more than excitement. More than real excitement, and you’re no exception, Johnny. They pushed too far at times, once they were sure I wouldn’t just drop them cold, but they knew they had no hope and accepted it. They just had to assert their manliness now and then. I understood that. Men are usually happy with themselves just for trying. I don’t know how many times I told the lawyer that if he insisted on asking me to do a certain thing one more time, I’d never speak to him again. I never did it, and he never stopped asking, but it was only a game, one we played right until the end.
“Both men said I was the dangerous one, a fantasy I did nothing to discourage. You don’t have the balls to really choke me, I might say to the attorney, or sure Mississippi, I can take on as many men at once as you want me to. Bring ‘em on! But I never got choked, and I never had that gang bang, or even a menage a trois, at least not with Mississippi. Maybe I was the dangerous one. They were so ardent and devoted that I was soon fighting boredom. They each rented an apartment for me and gave me such generous allowances that I soon had to hire an accountant and an investment counselor. All that money, but aside from occasional holidays, I rarely saw either of them more than twice a week, and they often didn’t spend the night. I had it made, I know, and God knows how long I could have made it last. Maybe forever. Maybe the three of us could have grown old together. Sally and her two johns. Hobbyists. That’s what they call them these days. Sally and her two hobbyists.
“They knew about each other but never met, so there they’d be, I can see them now in the cemetary standing over my headstone, not speaking but exchanging poignant glances. Or would Mississippi say something? Helluva girl that Sally! To which the attorney, a far more reticent man, might reply with a curt nod. Or maybe they’d bond, just for the day. Toast me with a sensible beer, or, what the hell, it’s my funeral, maybe they’d go whole hog for once and get drunk together and blubber semi-coherently about my virtues, my talent, my beauty. That would be sweet, and it’s not so far-fetched. In their way, both were devoted to me.
Or what if they went first? The attorney has a stroke, Mississippi is lost at sea on his homemade boat, and I sit at the back of the chapel in the funeral home, playing to the hilt my role as mistress, the other woman, dressed in something modest and appropriate but eye-catching nonetheless, a handsome and formidable looking woman, but unknown, ignored by wives and children. Maybe I’d make eyes at one of the sons. I have to be shameless, you know.
“No, I probably left just in time. We all knew I wasn’t twenty, nor even just thirty. Maybe they were already looking ahead, had something on the side, and maybe I suspected it and that’s why I let the judge seduce me, or why I seduced him, but I don’t think so. I was never the ripe pear, never like Ginger, for example, never so sweet, so soft, innocent. Youth wasn’t my appeal. Certainly not innocence. It’s not why my two admirers fell in love with me, and make no mistake, that’s what happened. They fell in love with me, with a man’s woman, that’s what I am, always was, and I couldn’t be replaced, or so they believed. Both were cautious men. They didn’t want to risk never finding another such perfect fit, someone so smart yet so accommodating, and maybe the odds really were against it. It would certainly have been a lot of trouble for them, and while they might dabble elsewhere, screw this or that sweet younger thing, they would never let me go. No one knew how to please them the way I did, and no one would so consistently and willingly do it.
“It’s possible that I’m being not just naïve but delusional. I didn’t put it to the test, and when it comes right down to it, they were both men, and men may not notice if you change the color of your hair, but they have a keen eye for aging, and they don’t like it. Sure, they might have been civilized about it, gently put me out to pasture, come by my little cottage occasionally for coffee or a drink, donated generously to my charities, sought my advice about a tie or a jacket, and even taken me out to dinner once in a while. But they wouldn’t look at me in the same way past a certain age. I would have become attractive, not beautiful, and so what if they still liked me, or even loved me? They would no longer desire me. No lust, no edge. At some point, we all know about when, and why, they would look at my naked body and not be aroused. I would become a friend, an old friend, a trusted friend, lovable but not loved, with whom they could share their war stories. To the attorney, I’d be like a retired executive secretary. To Mississippi, a trusted old servant. Perhaps they’d spare my feelings, out of respect, or courtesy, or pity, and pretend that nothing had changed. They were decent men, all in all, and both were absurdly rich, so they might even have kept throwing money at me. It wouldn’t cost them all that much extra to find something young to fuck, an ordinary piece of ass, and sooner or later, even if we didn’t admit to the change, we’d all be grateful for it. My beauty would no longer be a distraction for them, nor would my vanity be one for me.
“No, I probably left just in time. We all knew I wasn’t twenty, nor even just thirty. Maybe they were already looking ahead, had something on the side, and maybe I suspected it and that’s why I let the judge seduce me, or why I seduced him, but I don’t think so. I was never the ripe pear, never like Ginger, for example, never so sweet, so soft, innocent. Youth wasn’t my appeal. Certainly not innocence. It’s not why my two admirers fell in love with me, and make no mistake, that’s what happened. They fell in love with me, with a man’s woman, that’s what I am, always was, and I couldn’t be replaced, or so they believed. Both were cautious men. They didn’t want to risk never finding another such perfect fit, someone so smart yet so accommodating, and maybe the odds really were against it. It would certainly have been a lot of trouble for them, and while they might dabble elsewhere, screw this or that sweet younger thing, they would never let me go. No one knew how to please them the way I did, and no one would so consistently and willingly do it.
“It’s possible that I’m being not just naïve but delusional. I didn’t put it to the test, and when it comes right down to it, they were both men, and men may not notice if you change the color of your hair, but they have a keen eye for aging, and they don’t like it. Sure, they might have been civilized about it, gently put me out to pasture, come by my little cottage occasionally for coffee or a drink, donated generously to my charities, sought my advice about a tie or a jacket, and even taken me out to dinner once in a while. But they wouldn’t look at me in the same way past a certain age. I would have become attractive, not beautiful, and so what if they still liked me, or even loved me? They would no longer desire me. No lust, no edge. At some point, we all know about when, and why, they would look at my naked body and not be aroused. I would become a friend, an old friend, a trusted friend, lovable but not loved, with whom they could share their war stories. To the attorney, I’d be like a retired executive secretary. To Mississippi, a trusted old servant. Perhaps they’d spare my feelings, out of respect, or courtesy, or pity, and pretend that nothing had changed. They were decent men, all in all, and both were absurdly rich, so they might even have kept throwing money at me. It wouldn’t cost them all that much extra to find something young to fuck, an ordinary piece of ass, and sooner or later, even if we didn’t admit to the change, we’d all be grateful for it. My beauty would no longer be a distraction for them, nor would my vanity be one for me.
“As you know, Johnny, I’ve always been a good listener, even when I was pretty, and thankfully, I found both men amusing. That may be what kept me from letting boredom get the upper hand, why I never did anything really crazy to sabotage our arrangement. I liked hearing how the attorney saw himself as a man who fearlessly cut to the chase, and how proud of himself Mississippi was for solving everything with common sense. And not just because I was well paid for listening. Both men were actually good at defining themselves in an inoffensive, even likable way. The attorney never said he was brave. Mississippi never said he was smart. Curiously, the theme of most of their stories, what they used most often to camoflauge their true self-serving intent, was pragmatism. Both men could get things done, which, they modestly assured me, was no big deal. Anyone could do it. Just cut to the chase. Just use common sense. But I knew what they were really telling me. This is me. I’m fearless. I’m smart. Now spread your legs for me sweetie and I’ll show you what a man I am, and later, if we’d grown old and mellow together, I’d have heard them out and then cooked for them, the old age way of spreading my legs, and like all good mothers and grandmothers, I’d have taken pleasure in watching them eat.
“Mississippi for sure would have come around for my cooking, and to see the kid that for a while he lobbied for relentlessly, although I was never sure how seriously. But if there’d been a kid, and if he meant it when he said he wanted one, he might even have moved in with me. In his most perverse dreams he was a great patriarch with a houseful of kids and “bitches,” and whenever the fancy struck him, he might drop by from time to time to pat the kids on the head, screw a bitch or two, and throw his money around. Remember, that was all fantasy. In his less perverse moods, he simply wanted a kid, and in the absence of a real one, he liked it when I called him Daddy. He liked thinking, even though he knew about the attorney, that I depended on him in every way. He loved it when I seemed to be broke. I never was broke, not a day in my life since graduate school, but I was always begging and pleading with him for more money. It worked so well that I had to be careful not to go too far. I made it a point to show him things I’d bought with his money, and I was always telling him about something else I wanted, the more expensive and useless the better. I could get him hard just by whispering in his ear, “I wish I had that diamond bracelet,” or “Do you think I could have a Ferrari?”
“Mississippi for sure would have come around for my cooking, and to see the kid that for a while he lobbied for relentlessly, although I was never sure how seriously. But if there’d been a kid, and if he meant it when he said he wanted one, he might even have moved in with me. In his most perverse dreams he was a great patriarch with a houseful of kids and “bitches,” and whenever the fancy struck him, he might drop by from time to time to pat the kids on the head, screw a bitch or two, and throw his money around. Remember, that was all fantasy. In his less perverse moods, he simply wanted a kid, and in the absence of a real one, he liked it when I called him Daddy. He liked thinking, even though he knew about the attorney, that I depended on him in every way. He loved it when I seemed to be broke. I never was broke, not a day in my life since graduate school, but I was always begging and pleading with him for more money. It worked so well that I had to be careful not to go too far. I made it a point to show him things I’d bought with his money, and I was always telling him about something else I wanted, the more expensive and useless the better. I could get him hard just by whispering in his ear, “I wish I had that diamond bracelet,” or “Do you think I could have a Ferrari?”
Life was simple in so many ways back in those days, or could have been if I hadn’t been so restless, always afraid I was missing something. But Mississippi was so easy. He devoted every day of his life to mellowing himself out with beer, pot and various rich boy do-it-yourself activities. I found sailing pretty dull, the deck of a small boat is not a good place to read, and I absolutely refused to learn anything about jibs or tacking or whatever, but I did like to see him struggle with his anger, a treat he gave me every time we went out. He was a master ranter and really should have had a circle of good old boy friends, guys who would just laugh off his more outrageous outbursts, or even think they were normal, but he was even too weird for that. I suspect he had some sort of mild brain damage. Something was wrong. He had no sense of propriety, or paid no attention to it if he did. He’d doubtless have been homeless or in jail or the loony bin if not for his trust fund. Every one of his interests he could do alone. He’d built his boat himself from plans he got from a magazine. Built a plane the same way, but I refused to go up in that. “All right,” he said, “if you want to be a pussy about it.” “I do.” “But I promise it’s safe. I could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded.” “I don’t doubt it.” “I’ve been up in it many many times and never had a problem.” “Logic won’t sway me, sweetie.” “Stupid fucking woman.” He was mad at me a lot, turned red in the face and mumbled insults and profanities about me in the third person. She’s f’ing this, she’s f’ing that. He wanted me to hear him but didn’t have the nerve to go face to face. I had him convinced that I’d leave if he got too rough. Early on he did get in my face and screamed at me and came very close to hitting me. I made myself unavailable for a week, refused the flowers and gifts, and when I finally agreed to talk, I lied about having a couple of other offers I was considering. That cured him, except for the mumbling, which I pretended to take offense to only when I was very very bored or feeling mischievous.
“So maybe I could have had my really dangerous man if I’d really wanted it, by really pushing Mississippi to the limit. It was fun to annoy him, but I was always careful not to go too far. I could have made him hit me, and at times I was bored or high enough to consider it, but that’s as far as I got. It was like having a tame bull. Now and then in bars and restaurants I had to caution him with a pinch if he got too wound up and talked too loud about something really gross or sensitive. That annoyed him of course, but he knew I was right and that I would simply get up and leave if he didn’t tone it down. He liked weapons, and he might at the drop of a hat decide to share in graphic detail with me and everyone else nearby the effects of radiation or gas poisoning or hollow point bullets, which was okay in some of the places we went to, up to a point, and not at all okay in others. One problem was that it was hard to tell if he emphasized the gory details as a caution or for pleasure, an ambiguity, totally unconscious on his part, that always amazed me. He could be two things at once and not even know it, a moralist and a psychopath, and keep you guessing about where his next sentence would land. I suppose that’s what really kept me interested in him. It did make him a little bit risky. He was that way even with me personally. I was precious to him one minute and only a toy the next; he desperately needed me, or I could easily be replaced. I sometimes think that’s how all men really feel, first one way, then the other, down there under all their various coats of civility. Mississippi just couldn’t keep it to himself. He couldn’t keep anything to himself, a form of self-indulgence that also showed up in his appetites. He was a big man and only got bigger over the ten years or so he kept me. He loved to eat, the junkier the food the better. Sometimes he’d pull into a fast food place because the sign had given him a sudden craving for chicken fingers or tacos or a hamburger. Popeye’s was his favorite. We couldn’t pass one without stopping, and as he pulled into the parking lot, I’d sometimes lower my voice and say, “Luv that chicken at Popeyes,” which always made him laugh. When I first met him, his idea of a perfect day was to eat, drink and fuck until he fell asleep, and he could last a long time. Longer than me. “I love to fuck you when you’re asleep,” he told me once. “You’re so sweet then.” That was okay with me, as long as he didn’t expect me to do anything. By the time I left for good, he’d slowed down quite a bit. Age was taking a toll on his anger and his appetites. Sometimes he’d be content with just eating and drinking, or he’d ask me to help him get horny, which I never took as an insult. As a rule, I’d just as soon have gone to sleep myself.
“He kept me busy, but it was a blue collar sort of job, and I might have gone stir crazy or brain dead if it hadn’t been for the attorney, who was more of a connosieur. He often focused on a certain part of my body, carressed it for an inordinate amount of time, showered it with praise, then looked up to say, “It turns you on to be paid for this, doesn’t it?” Sometimes I said yes and meant it, and sometimes I just grinned and shrugged, a neutrality that seemed to excite him just as much, maybe more. Indifference often got him stirred up, but sometimes I think I should have loved him back. He was married, had a family, but he proposed to me more than once, and there was a time or two when I almost let sentiment get the best of me. In many ways the idea was tempting and not completely crazy. We were compatible up to a point. He’d go places with me, even highbrow places, and enjoy himself more often than not. Of course he thought I was beautiful, or said he did, and I’m sure that accounted for a large part of his enjoyment, being seen with me. But he usually didn’t fall asleep during an opera or play, and once in a while he even said something interesting about what we’d seen. More often than not, though, especially after I’d had a glass or two of wine, I’d see his eyes glaze over as I rambled on about why I liked this or that. It’s hard to feel lonelier than at moments like that, but he couldn’t help it. No one can. Just as he couldn’t help how he loved me, which was based on how I looked, how I flirted with him, and how I fucked. That was his world. No wider. No deeper.
“So maybe I could have had my really dangerous man if I’d really wanted it, by really pushing Mississippi to the limit. It was fun to annoy him, but I was always careful not to go too far. I could have made him hit me, and at times I was bored or high enough to consider it, but that’s as far as I got. It was like having a tame bull. Now and then in bars and restaurants I had to caution him with a pinch if he got too wound up and talked too loud about something really gross or sensitive. That annoyed him of course, but he knew I was right and that I would simply get up and leave if he didn’t tone it down. He liked weapons, and he might at the drop of a hat decide to share in graphic detail with me and everyone else nearby the effects of radiation or gas poisoning or hollow point bullets, which was okay in some of the places we went to, up to a point, and not at all okay in others. One problem was that it was hard to tell if he emphasized the gory details as a caution or for pleasure, an ambiguity, totally unconscious on his part, that always amazed me. He could be two things at once and not even know it, a moralist and a psychopath, and keep you guessing about where his next sentence would land. I suppose that’s what really kept me interested in him. It did make him a little bit risky. He was that way even with me personally. I was precious to him one minute and only a toy the next; he desperately needed me, or I could easily be replaced. I sometimes think that’s how all men really feel, first one way, then the other, down there under all their various coats of civility. Mississippi just couldn’t keep it to himself. He couldn’t keep anything to himself, a form of self-indulgence that also showed up in his appetites. He was a big man and only got bigger over the ten years or so he kept me. He loved to eat, the junkier the food the better. Sometimes he’d pull into a fast food place because the sign had given him a sudden craving for chicken fingers or tacos or a hamburger. Popeye’s was his favorite. We couldn’t pass one without stopping, and as he pulled into the parking lot, I’d sometimes lower my voice and say, “Luv that chicken at Popeyes,” which always made him laugh. When I first met him, his idea of a perfect day was to eat, drink and fuck until he fell asleep, and he could last a long time. Longer than me. “I love to fuck you when you’re asleep,” he told me once. “You’re so sweet then.” That was okay with me, as long as he didn’t expect me to do anything. By the time I left for good, he’d slowed down quite a bit. Age was taking a toll on his anger and his appetites. Sometimes he’d be content with just eating and drinking, or he’d ask me to help him get horny, which I never took as an insult. As a rule, I’d just as soon have gone to sleep myself.
“He kept me busy, but it was a blue collar sort of job, and I might have gone stir crazy or brain dead if it hadn’t been for the attorney, who was more of a connosieur. He often focused on a certain part of my body, carressed it for an inordinate amount of time, showered it with praise, then looked up to say, “It turns you on to be paid for this, doesn’t it?” Sometimes I said yes and meant it, and sometimes I just grinned and shrugged, a neutrality that seemed to excite him just as much, maybe more. Indifference often got him stirred up, but sometimes I think I should have loved him back. He was married, had a family, but he proposed to me more than once, and there was a time or two when I almost let sentiment get the best of me. In many ways the idea was tempting and not completely crazy. We were compatible up to a point. He’d go places with me, even highbrow places, and enjoy himself more often than not. Of course he thought I was beautiful, or said he did, and I’m sure that accounted for a large part of his enjoyment, being seen with me. But he usually didn’t fall asleep during an opera or play, and once in a while he even said something interesting about what we’d seen. More often than not, though, especially after I’d had a glass or two of wine, I’d see his eyes glaze over as I rambled on about why I liked this or that. It’s hard to feel lonelier than at moments like that, but he couldn’t help it. No one can. Just as he couldn’t help how he loved me, which was based on how I looked, how I flirted with him, and how I fucked. That was his world. No wider. No deeper.
He took a completely practical and impersonal view of just about everything, including getting people to do what he wanted, which is probably why he was so good at it, why he never quit, and why hearing no bounced right off him. He took nothing personally. Maybe he didn’t even get the concept. He said my brain turned him on, but that was true only as it related directly to my appetites, or his. I could take him to operas and museums, force feed him books, and it wouldn’t change a thing. Compatible, I guess, but we weren’t meant for each other. I never told him that, although it probably wouldn’t have phased him. He was practical through and through. He’d have said, without so much as mulling it over, “So what? I think you’re fun and adorable. What else is there?” He’s not the first one to ever say that to me, probably won’t be the last, and I stay sober most of the time so that I’m not tempted to try to explain it to men. It would do no one any good. The first time he proposed was very romantic. We’d gone to an amusement park and were about to get on a roller coaster. His plan was for me to give my answer when we got off. I love roller coasters. I guess he thought it would soften me up, but after the ride, as soon as we were standing on the platform again, I looked him right in the eye and without preamble I said, “I like things just as they are.” He didn’t argue. He knew better. He just shrugged and took my hand, undaunted, as confident as ever in his persistence.
“He liked quizzing me about my past, and since I knew wild stories would please him, I decided to see just how much I could make him believe. I told him that as a kid I ran wild, literally, naked in the woods on warm moonlit nights, and had dreams in my early teens of copulating with elves. I told him one of my uncles was a moonshiner and I rode shotgun for him a few times, and that I ran away from home when I was sixteen and worked in Jack Ruby’s strip joint in Dallas, which is where I met the oilman who started me out on my career as a high class call girl, only part time of course while I was in college and graduate school. He never seemed to worry about whether it all fit together. I just rattled on, and he heard what he wanted to. I caught on quickly about that, his talent for seeing what he wanted to see and nothing more, for editing out what didn’t interest or please him. That applied as well to what he revealed about himself. I knew next to nothing about him, not even his wife’s name for a long time, never his kids’ names or ages. I didn’t know if his parents were still alive, what they did, where he grew up. Out of delicacy I was careful not to ask about his immediate family, but at first I wanted to know where he was from, in the broad sense, and he never told me a single thing. Not even Philly. Chicago. Houston. Los Angeles. Not rich, middle-class, poor. Not city or farm. I could guess a few things. East coast from his accent. Middle-class suburban from his taste and his outlook on life. At least I knew where Mississippi was from and that he was born rich. That’s about all I knew though. If he had friends or family, I never knew.
“He liked quizzing me about my past, and since I knew wild stories would please him, I decided to see just how much I could make him believe. I told him that as a kid I ran wild, literally, naked in the woods on warm moonlit nights, and had dreams in my early teens of copulating with elves. I told him one of my uncles was a moonshiner and I rode shotgun for him a few times, and that I ran away from home when I was sixteen and worked in Jack Ruby’s strip joint in Dallas, which is where I met the oilman who started me out on my career as a high class call girl, only part time of course while I was in college and graduate school. He never seemed to worry about whether it all fit together. I just rattled on, and he heard what he wanted to. I caught on quickly about that, his talent for seeing what he wanted to see and nothing more, for editing out what didn’t interest or please him. That applied as well to what he revealed about himself. I knew next to nothing about him, not even his wife’s name for a long time, never his kids’ names or ages. I didn’t know if his parents were still alive, what they did, where he grew up. Out of delicacy I was careful not to ask about his immediate family, but at first I wanted to know where he was from, in the broad sense, and he never told me a single thing. Not even Philly. Chicago. Houston. Los Angeles. Not rich, middle-class, poor. Not city or farm. I could guess a few things. East coast from his accent. Middle-class suburban from his taste and his outlook on life. At least I knew where Mississippi was from and that he was born rich. That’s about all I knew though. If he had friends or family, I never knew.
“We all had secrets then, probably told lies, played it safe. They knew nothing about my house, not even that I had one, a modest little red brick Tudor in a very old and leafy suburb. It was the hardest thing to give up when I decided to come home. It was my sanctuary. I kept all my whore things, clothes, cosmetics, toys, in the apartments, and just had casual things, old jeans and t-shirts, minimal makeup, at home. More the real me, you might say. I had a brass bed that no man ever lay on. I cooked for me and my cat. I ignored the garden until it was practically in the house. I never used the AC, not even in July and August, even though I sweated like a pig and had to sleep some nights right under the attic fan on the hallway floor, or else I’d give up and go smoke a cigarette in the backyard and watch varmints, rats running along the tops of chain link fences, possums doing high wire acts on the power lines. I saw a slow-speed chase one night at about one in the morning. Three cop cars, red lights circling, no sirens, behind one old clunker, might have been a low-rider, a seventies vintage something or other, probably an Impala or a Monte Carlo. They circled the block three times before moving off somewhere else, top speed maybe 15, the pace of a funeral procession. There was one stretch where I could see them on a side road, but most of the time all I could see were the revolving lights creeping slowly along the rooftops.
“I knew my neighbors only a little. On one side was a fat guy and his mother. He always tried to spy on me with binoculars, but in person he’d go to great lengths not to have to say hello. Mysteriously, sometimes a panel truck would deliver prime beef to their house, always after dark. The sign on the side was for a real company, but it always seemed a little creepy to me. On the other side was an old lady, I mean really old, late eighties or nineties, who came over once in a while and asked me for a glass of buttermilk. I started keeping it just for her, and even though I asked her to come in, she’d stay on the porch and drink the glass down right there, thank me, and walk back through the hedge to her house. I never could get any sense out of her and have no idea what it was all about. There was a little park nearby, and whenever I could, I’d take my cat down there early in the morning and again right before dark, and even though it had a nice playground, I never saw one kid. Nor many dog walkers. The only other regulars were a middle-aged couple in a pickup who may never have seen me, they were so busy with each other. They made me think of a Spanish language talk show I watched occasionally, where one of the bits was to catch a husband or wife cheating on camera. Railroad tracks ran right next to the park, but it seems like the train ran only in the middle of the night. That and the rest of it seemed just right to me, comfortable, a needed break from all that high life.
“I knew my neighbors only a little. On one side was a fat guy and his mother. He always tried to spy on me with binoculars, but in person he’d go to great lengths not to have to say hello. Mysteriously, sometimes a panel truck would deliver prime beef to their house, always after dark. The sign on the side was for a real company, but it always seemed a little creepy to me. On the other side was an old lady, I mean really old, late eighties or nineties, who came over once in a while and asked me for a glass of buttermilk. I started keeping it just for her, and even though I asked her to come in, she’d stay on the porch and drink the glass down right there, thank me, and walk back through the hedge to her house. I never could get any sense out of her and have no idea what it was all about. There was a little park nearby, and whenever I could, I’d take my cat down there early in the morning and again right before dark, and even though it had a nice playground, I never saw one kid. Nor many dog walkers. The only other regulars were a middle-aged couple in a pickup who may never have seen me, they were so busy with each other. They made me think of a Spanish language talk show I watched occasionally, where one of the bits was to catch a husband or wife cheating on camera. Railroad tracks ran right next to the park, but it seems like the train ran only in the middle of the night. That and the rest of it seemed just right to me, comfortable, a needed break from all that high life.
“I was only 25 when that life started, but I guess I was already getting old. No wonder. I partied so hard there for a while I’m lucky I kept my looks. Two years of graduate school, ABD on Charlotte Bronte, and then the oilman asked me out. Actually, he was an associate professor, a specialist of the Lake Poets. His family had the oil. He invited me to the actual lakes, I kid you not, and I turned him down until he got up to five grand, above and beyond any expenses. That was maybe 4 times what it is now. I took it and we spent a long weekend in a cabin. It was like going anywhere else that’s been well-travelled. Nice but you get the feeling you’ve done it before, or you’re just trying to stay in the deep tracks already made for you by countless others. New Orleans is that way. Most of the capitals of Europe. The best part was the fucking. He was fat and bald and short and laughed too much. A total dweeb. But he absolutely worhsiped me and couldn’t get over that he was fucking me all he wanted. He kept saying that: I can fuck you anytime I want. That turned me on as much as it did him. How much he adored me. I was totally self-absorbed, like one of those strippers who can’t stop looking at herself in the mirrors. If there’d been a mirror on the ceiling I’d have gone nuts. Anyway, bottom line is I was hooked.
Still, I had no plans of taking it any further. Not until an attractive middle-aged woman approached me in the lobby of a Four Seasons. My fourth or fifth trip with the oilman. She told me what she could get me for one night’s work, and I was on my way. I soon abandoned my disseratation. For nearly a year I was snorting coke and fucking strangers nearly every night of the week. A good time, all in all. I’d highly recommend it to anyone, as long as you can go first class all the way and you’re sure you can stop. I never saw the minor leagues of whoredom, nor do I want to. It’s not so much the rooms as the clientele. Many of the guys I saw were young and good-looking, and all were one or the other. And smart. That’s the important thing. If they’re smart, they at least won’t bore you to tears, and the drugs helped with that too. Finally, though, I met the two guys who took me away from all that. They started out as regular hobbyists, but they kept coming back. The arrangement was their idea. They had to pay the woman who’d recruited me to free me up. It took a while to negotiate, all the details, but I knew by then it’s what I wanted to do. I’d had my fun. It was time to settle down with just one or two guys. Ease off the drugs.
*****
While I was living the high life on the other side of the country, Johnny was married to a cute little blonde in California. Good figure. Pretty. One minute he says that not even counting the kid, he regrets deserting the person he shared a good part of his youth with. The next minute he says ‘wasted’ instead of ‘shared.’ It’s not the deserting he regrets; it’s how long he stayed with her. He goes back and forth on that. Shared. Wasted. She was a good sport. Smart as a whip. They went through a lot together. On the other hand, she was relentless, self-absorbed, too intellectual. When he was no longer the shiny new toy she coveted, she tried to walk all over him. In fairness, he says, he could point out to her the damage she was doing and she saw it, maybe even felt it, promised to change, but she never did for long. “Aren’t you being a bit patronizing?” I asked. “No,” he said, “you didn’t know her. When she wanted something, she would do anything to get it and never gave up.”
While I was living the high life on the other side of the country, Johnny was married to a cute little blonde in California. Good figure. Pretty. One minute he says that not even counting the kid, he regrets deserting the person he shared a good part of his youth with. The next minute he says ‘wasted’ instead of ‘shared.’ It’s not the deserting he regrets; it’s how long he stayed with her. He goes back and forth on that. Shared. Wasted. She was a good sport. Smart as a whip. They went through a lot together. On the other hand, she was relentless, self-absorbed, too intellectual. When he was no longer the shiny new toy she coveted, she tried to walk all over him. In fairness, he says, he could point out to her the damage she was doing and she saw it, maybe even felt it, promised to change, but she never did for long. “Aren’t you being a bit patronizing?” I asked. “No,” he said, “you didn’t know her. When she wanted something, she would do anything to get it and never gave up.”
The good part, the part he says he’ll never regret, is that they lived rough. Hand to mouth. On a shoestring. He no longer talks about that time much with anyone but me, in part because no one listens to long stories any more, in part because people invariably associate that time, the late sixties and early seventies, with hippies, and he got tired of trying to convince people that although poor they were never hippies. Yes, they went to San Francisco, but they never owned a VW bus, never lived in a commune, didn’t smoke much pot and didn’t care much for the Beatles. They crossed the country in an old Chevy pickup with a homemade camper on the back. They shared a house once with another couple but the four of them never had sex. They drank bourbon. They listened to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Hank Williams. They read novels. They talked more about Faulkner and Dostoyevski than Eldridge Cleaver or Timothy Leary. He showed me this piece, a kind of memoir which he says summarizes pretty well how they lived and what they thought about it, once they got settled and relatively comfortable:
“A little after seven every weekday morning I caught a bus from my house in Oakland to the terminal in downtown San Francisco. From there I caught another bus that took me out to an industrial area near Hunter’s Point. I worked in a store that sold welding supplies. I took care of the stock in the warehouse, helped the truck drivers load cylinders of oxygen and acetelyne, and waited on customers who came up to the loading dock. It was a good job, not too hard physically, never a dull moment, and since it was union, it paid well for what it was. I liked the responsibility of keeping track of the merchandise, checking it in and putting it away, and I got along well with the truck drivers and the customers.
“There were three truck drivers, all life-long residents of the area. The oldest was a little gnome-like Italian named Tony who was getting close to retirement. He drove the smallest truck, had the shortest route and the lightest loads, an easy job if there ever was one, but he was always finding something to complain about. The weather. The traffic. His customers. Nothing was quite like it used to be and ought to be. Richard, who called himself “Frenchie,” was in his thirties. He was tall, lanky, and big-boned, built like a basketball player, and he was often hungover in the mornings, which made him even more overbearing than usual. He bragged and bullied his way through the day, and what he bragged about the most was getting laid. One of his favorite expressions was “knob job.” It seemed like he couldn’t say it enough. The youngest driver was Bill, the quietest and friendliest of the group, “just a dumb Polack,” he liked to say about himself, grinning, his eyes usually red and watery from smoking dope. He had two small children, a pretty wife, and a new little Japanese car.
“The drivers loaded oxygen cylinders two at a time by crossing them and pushing them along with little kicks. It was a skill that took time to master, but I soon got the hang of it. As one of them said after they got to know me, my first day I hadn’t known the difference between “a stinger and a ground clamp,” but before long I was crimping hoses, filling CO2 tanks, and measuring out brazing rod as if I’d been doing it my whole life. At first the high pressure of the tanks made me nervous, especially when they told me that a hole in the plywood shipping desk had been made by a small oxygen tank. The hole was nearly a foot wide. The valve had broken off when someone dropped it, and it fractured a customer’s leg in several places before fizzling out.
“Most of the customers were tradesmen. Mechanics, plumbers, maintenance men, construction workers. For the most part they were sober, prosperous looking men with things to do and a tight ship to run, the backs of their trucks and vans as neat as a pin. I got along with them fine, but my favorite customers were the “scrappies,” guys who made a living cutting up scrap metal to sell to the salvage yards. They were friendlier, meaner, louder and dirtier than the others and lived from job to job. They drove beat up old pickups or flatbeds and usually had to wade through all manner of trash to get the empty acetelyne tanks out and the full ones in.
“My favorite person at the store was Barney, my boss, a pudgy, red-faced old man with just one good eye. Barney had sold welding supplies in one way or another for forty years. Every day he wore a dark sport coat, a tie with wide diagonal stripes, and a white dress shirt with a starched collar. His hair was thinning on top, but he dyed it black, slicked it down with oil and combed it straight back. He had strong politically conservative opinions about everything and a quick temper, but he told good stories about swing bands, baseball and horse racing. Late in the day, if business was slow, he might say, “You’ve earned your money today, young man. Grab a cup of coffee and come sit for a while.” And then he might talk about the unpredictable wind at Candlestick Park, muddy tracks at Bay Meadows, or the old ballrooms he went to in the thirties and forties. One day he asked if anybody had read in the paper about what had happened at Bay Meadows. Nobody had. Well, said Barney, a three-year-old threw his rider just before a race, then jumped over the rail and ran through the stands right up to the betting window. He said to the clerk, “I want to put twenty dollars on myself to win.” The clerk looked stunned. He didn’t say a word, just stared at the horse. “What’s the matter?” the horse wanted to know. “Never heard a horse talk before?” “It’s not that,” the clerk said, shaking his head as he took the bet. “I just don’t think you have a chance.”
“On certain days whatever they were doing at the nearby meat packing plant, some said it was pigs, made it feel like someone had stuck a knife up my nose, and anyone foolish enough to leave his car on the street overnight would find it stripped down to the frame the next morning. It rained every day for a month or two in the winter, but they were too far south to get much fog, so most of the time the weather was perfect. The drivers often ate lunch at a bar in the produce market a few blocks away. In addition to drinks, plate lunches and liar’s dice, it had pin ball and punch machines that paid off in cash. I usually took a brown bag lunch to work, but now and then on a Friday I might join the drivers for a beer.
“On my way home on Fridays I stopped at the Safeway to cash my check and buy vodka and sirloin steak. I cooked the steak on the grill while my wife made french fries and a salad. Sometimes we’d also open up a can of pork’n beans, which we ate without heating up, just as we had growing up in Texas. And if it wasn’t too chilly, we’d sit on the porch steps and drink vodka and seven-up before putting the steak on. We lived in a duplex in a neighborhood of mostly two story stucco houses separated only by driveways. It was in east Oakland during the time when it wasn’t unusual to see large groups of Hell’s Angels roaring down the main streets, or headlines about confrontations between the Black Panthers and the police. We lived on the ground floor for two years, and during that time a steady stream of renters occupied the upstairs apartment. One was a very young couple, maybe even teenagers, with a little boy, the guy more than a little strange. For reasons unknown, since it saved him no money, he parked a trailer in the front yard and put all their trash in it for a month. He also bought a smudge pot at a flea market and said he planned to use it as a heater. Another couple were Moonies or Maharishis or something like that, and one evening while we were having drinks on the porch steps, the couple’s six year old daughter, a cute little blonde, came down to say “Hi” and announce that, “My name is Tiffany Michelle and we’re macrobiotic.”
“But most of the people in the neighborhood were older, owned their homes, and had lived there a long time. Through our front window I saw the old couple across the street go to church every Sunday morning. I’d look up and see the old man slowly but surely take an old DeSoto out of the garage that was built under his house. Then he’d walk up the steps to get his wife and escort her down to the car, opening the door for her. They were always dressed in their Sunday best. Next door, the Greek family had turned their whole yard into a peach orchard. There were two peach trees in the front, one that dropped peaches on our driveway, but the Greek would always come out and rake the stray peaches onto his own property. More than once I saw him yell and wave his arms at kids who’d picked up peaches from the sidewalk. The kids usually threw the peaches back into the yard, they didn’t care, but the Greek followed them down the block anyway. On the other side, a woman lived with her son and daughter. The son was in his early twenties, the daughter 12 or 13. All were extremely fat and the mother drove a red Rambler covered with bumper stickers. I remember daisies, peace symbols and Peanuts characters, and one that said “Passing Side, Suicide,” with arrows pointing left and right. Now and then they hung old clothes in the driveway and had a yard sale, and they had a German Shepherd who often barked all night in the back yard. The son was always working on his car, a customized Camaro, and one day after spending all morning putting on new tires, he peeled rubber leaving the house, came roaring back a few minutes later, turned sharply into his driveway and slammed on the brakes. Immediately, a corner of the front bumper hit the asphalt, and the loose front wheel rolled smartly down the street.
“We went often to the fifty-cent movies, always a double feature, and saw films like Two Lane Blacktop, Machine Gun McCain, A Boy and His Dog and The Wild Bunch. It didn’t seem like a dangerous place, but there was a security guard, a chubby blonde guy with an almost invisible moustache who always wore a riot helmet and brandished a billy club. As a rule, we had the balcony almost to ourselves, and one night soon after our daughter was born, we took her with us to see whatever was playing with The Summer of ’42, which was not quite over when we arrived. The plan was for my wife to breast feed our daughter in what we assumed would be a nearly empty balcony, so that she’d be asleep when the movie we’d come for started. But the balcony was packed, and not with the usual dope-smoking teenagers. These were solid adult citizens, and soon after we found seats, we noticed that we’d come in the middle of a very long and very explicit love scene. One with no dialogue or soundtrack. You could hear a pin drop in the theater, but our daughter wouldn’t wait to be fed, so for an excrutiatingly long time, as the love scene went on and on, all anyone in the balcony heard was the sound of our daughter sucking on her mother’s breast.
“On Sunday mornings I walked to a nearby corner store for the paper. It rained in Oakland nearly all winter, but I remembered Sunday mornings as sunny and warm, the air balmy, and I enjoyed strolling by the little stucco houses, so close together, many with wrought iron gates, red tile roofs, and brightly painted patios. Adjoining the corner store was a bar, the door between always open, and I could hear people talking and bottles clinking when I bought the paper, no matter how early it was. I didn’t frequent the bar much, but whenever I went, something always seemed to happen. Once I listened to two guys betting on balls and strikes during a Giants game on TV, and it became clear almost immediately that only one of them, the one whose idea it had been in the first place, knew how to predict a ball or a strike based on the count and the situation. It didn’t last long. After losing a few dollars, the man with no clue stopped the betting. Another time I met a guy named Roger who’d recently moved from New Jersey. He had to leave the state in a hurry because they were going to send him to prison for “starting a race riot,” which proved to be an exaggeration. It turns out he was in the car with some guys who fired a rifle at the house of a “colored girl,” and the black community made an issue of it, which mystified Roger since no one was hurt and the girl was “a known whore.” He and his wife and baby girl liked California. He was working steady for Manpower, spent Sundays at the rocky beach in Alameda, watched a lot of roller derby on TV, and had credit at a local pizza parlor. His only complaint was that a good car cost a hundred dollars. He said he could buy the same car in New Jersey for twenty or thirty.
“One afternoon I found myself on a barstool next to a guy who lived in the apartments across the street, the eyesore of the neighborhood. The building needed paint. Old bedsprings and appliances were piled up along a side wall. More windows were broken than not. The man said he’d just gotten out of prison. He was with a woman who was so drunk she didn’t seem to be able to talk, and he kept pushing her off her stool. She’d fall to the floor, climb back up slowly and unsteadily, and as soon as she’d regained her seat, he’d push her off again. Aside from that, he paid no attention to her and wanted to play liar’s dice. He insisted, and then he didn’t want to quit after he’d won a couple of dollars. Luckily, there was time to escape the next time the woman was pushed off her stool.”
*****
I should admit: those stories made me a little envious. Like I’d sold out and missed something. I was poor like that as a grad student, but that’s a pretty rarified environment. I guess I’d rubbed elbows with those kinds of people. I guess I’d grown up with them. It’s my family, truth be told, but I left it all behind once I became a full-fledged adult. Luxury apartments, of course, are pretty rarified too. The excursions into working class bars with Mississippi and his way in general of being in the world was kind of the same, but I was far less exposed than Johnny, more of an ornament than anything else. I didn’t have to worry about making the rent or my car breaking down. And then, when I moved back home and had a respectable job, it was middle class, not working class. I’d come up in the world. I could rub elbows with doctors who read Ovid, respectable old ladies and even prim tight ass bitches like Patti.
“Over the years I got to know her,” I told Johnny. “I can’t say I ever really liked her, but I got to know her, maybe at first from morbid curiosity. The ‘i’ at the end of her name was the result of her mother being a Spanish teacher. Her mother couldn’t really speak Spanish, she’d never been out of the country, but as Patti explained, she loved the culture. So did Patti, or so she said, and after Frank died she turned herself into a Spanish teacher, and when her own children were grown, she spent part of every summer in Mexico, always comfortable there, to hear her tell it, as if she’d never left the country. Blind to anything foreign, people like Patti hardly notice that they’ve left, but at the same time they are always trying improve on it. Improvement is their mantra. The world, themselves. Progress. Study. The problem for Patti was that she never had an original thought in her head.
“Even after everyone had a computer, she came to the library to enlist my help. She took teaching very seriously, and she had to make sure that she had all the most up-to-date materials, and before each trip to Mexico, she quizzed me about local customs and figures of speech. I was no expert, but Patti had to memorize everything, even how things fit together, nothing ever just made sense to her or fell into place, and something about my personality made her think I knew a lot about everything. Part of it I’m sure was my degrees, but mostly I think she was constantly amazed at what she called my insight, although more often than not, she called it insightfulness. “Help me understand this,” she might say. “Apply your insighfulness to it.”
“There was something sweet about that, of course, in a stupid sort of way, so I couldn’t help but warm up to her a little. She was genuinely clueless in a lot of ways and lost without Frank, despite the teaching and her kids to keep her occupied. She never mentioned his death. We never talked about anything personal. And we never had anything resembling a conversation outside of the library. She’d walk up to me in one of those beige or gray tailored outfits of hers, the more daring ones trimmed in black or white, or sometimes even very dark shades of red or blue, a person who’d never looked casual a day in her life, probably not even at home, no hair out of place, and say with a smile, “Good afternoon, Sally. How are you today?” The same thing every time, said in exactly the same way, perfect diction, the same smile. I made it a point not to answer with a salutation of any kind. I always picked up where we’d left off. “Did you decide for sure on the dates for this summer? How’s that new reader working out for you?” Sometimes, when she caught me in a bad mood, I was tempted to tell her I felt like shit, but I never did. And there’s something else I never did, even though I wanted to. I never asked her if she knew Frank was cheating on her.
“That’s what fascinated me about Patti. I could never quite fathom her ignorance. Was it willful or was she really just stupid? Some women always know when their husbands are cheating, and some never know, even after they find out. Patti was of the latter type. I’m not sure she ever admitted it to herself, in spite of all the evidence. It’s a good thing I never saw her after I’d been drinking. I might have said face it, bird brain, Frank had a side to him you didn’t know about. I did sometimes stare at her with what I guess was contempt when she wasn’t looking. She always pointed at what she read, not exactly running her finger along the line, but close, and from time to time she’d pull her head back, as if to acknowledge a particularly cogent point. I wanted to grab her hand and make her read without its help. She even made little noises, like stupid people do in movies when the plot turns or thickens. Everything seemed to surprise Patti, and if someone wasn’t around to point her in a certain direction and give her a shove, she might never have done anything.
“That’s what fascinated me about Patti. I could never quite fathom her ignorance. Was it willful or was she really just stupid? Some women always know when their husbands are cheating, and some never know, even after they find out. Patti was of the latter type. I’m not sure she ever admitted it to herself, in spite of all the evidence. It’s a good thing I never saw her after I’d been drinking. I might have said face it, bird brain, Frank had a side to him you didn’t know about. I did sometimes stare at her with what I guess was contempt when she wasn’t looking. She always pointed at what she read, not exactly running her finger along the line, but close, and from time to time she’d pull her head back, as if to acknowledge a particularly cogent point. I wanted to grab her hand and make her read without its help. She even made little noises, like stupid people do in movies when the plot turns or thickens. Everything seemed to surprise Patti, and if someone wasn’t around to point her in a certain direction and give her a shove, she might never have done anything.
“I never thought of that,” she was always saying, and I got the impression that her mother, perhaps more from pity or desperation than wanting to control her, basically suggested her whole life to her after Frank. How to raise her kids, the teaching, and later, when the kids were older, the trips to Mexico. Patti did say this to me, which was marginally personal: “My mother says I need to stay busy in the summer, so why not do something practical?” “It might be fun, too,” I told her, giving her my best librarian smile. “And enriching,” I added, “seeing a different culture?” “Oh yes,” she said, “It’s so educational. I’ve always wanted to travel.” But I didn’t believe her, and besides, that kind of remark makes me want to hit people. “And where better than to our southern neighbor?” she asked, sounding as if she were reciting from a guide book, or a propaganda film. “We’re so blessed to have such a different culture so close.” I nodded with a librarian’s agreeableness. “The only thing is leaving my kids for so long.” “It’s only four weeks, Patti, and they’re grown now.” “I know. That’s what my mother says too.” Looking at her that day across the ciculation desk, I thought about her in the high school classes we’d had together, how much I’d hated her. She never did anything wrong, never made a mistake, never understood anything. My one great day was when our senior year English teacher announced my Ivy League scholarship to the class. The look on Patti’s face. It was another thing she didn’t understand, but that time I think she knew it.
Can you really hate someone for not understanding? Never mind should. Is it even possible? I thought okay, she washed his clothes, slept in the same bed, had sex with him, rode in the car with him, talked to him at dinnertime, made decisions, had arguments, got annoyed, kissed him on the cheek. But she didn’t have a clue that he was fucking Ginger? That’s not even human Patti. You’re some other species. I told her once that growing up I’d been a nature girl, a family appropriate variation on what I’d told the attorney. Little Sally, nature girl. I said that instead of tomboy because it sounded more exotic without being erotic, and maybe closer to the truth. I wanted her to imagine me running naked through those woods on moonlit nights, but not fucking elves, nor at the other extreme collecting bugs or bringing snakes and frogs home in my pockets. Just a free spirit, doing whatever I pleased. That was the point. Doing what comes naturally, a notion that still might be a little edgy for a person like Patti, even in the eighties, at least when you got down to specifics. Or maybe especially in the eighties. Isn’t that about when we started keeping our kids in protective custody? Thank God I never had any kids. It would kill me to do that. My mother never had the least idea where I was, almost from the time I could walk. I remember walking downtown to the movies when I was five. It wasn’t that far, even for a five year old, and it was the best place to get cool in the summer. They’d let me in free. I didn’t even have to bat my eyes or pout. I just walked in as if I didn’t know any better, and no one ever stopped me. At least not until I was about seven, and then they made me pay the children’s price, nine cents, which I usually had from selling deposit bottles. I’d never have dreamed of asking Mother for the money, not for a movie or anything fun. It was hard enough getting decent school clothes. I had to be thrifty and industrious to get what I wanted, it was a necessity, but sometimes I think I was born that way. I’ve always tried to get nice things for nothing, or as close to it as possible, which is kind of how I saw my profession. Getting nice things for nothing. I doubt if Patti ever thought much about what she bought, either what it cost or if it suited her or if it was in style. It was interesting to watch her come in and walk up to the circulation desk. Nothing she wore seemed to touch her. It was made to fit modestly, tastefully snug, snug in a way that flattened out and concealed her figure, but she had no figure to hide. There was nothing to be snug to, so it all just hung, and moved on its own across the floor. The ultimate in effortlessly modest good taste.
I don’t want to help her. She’s fascinating to me in an almost morbid sort of way. Perhaps what I want is revenge, as with Johnny, and everyone else who looked down their noses at me, which was just about everyone. I imagine her breaking down for no apparent reason as we discuss in hushed tones the mysterious Mexican subjunctive. “It’s so hard, Sally. How can you possibly understand it?” And of course I smile indulgently. I’ve just proved my superiority and put my arm around her, lead her into my office. What would she tell me? No, no, Patti dear, cry all you want. I don’t mind a bit, not as long as you spill your guts before you leave and explain to me how anyone can be as cold and stupid as yourself. See? I always get right to the point. With me it’s always business. Tit for tat. A negotiation. A whore to the bone. Nothing’s really free, sweetheart. The most you can hope for is a bargain. Cry all you want. Your tears are currency. I’m nothing if not fair. I like to keep accounts. You get to unburden yourself, cry your boring little heart out, and I get to see it, see you cry. Balancing the books.
Can you really hate someone for not understanding? Never mind should. Is it even possible? I thought okay, she washed his clothes, slept in the same bed, had sex with him, rode in the car with him, talked to him at dinnertime, made decisions, had arguments, got annoyed, kissed him on the cheek. But she didn’t have a clue that he was fucking Ginger? That’s not even human Patti. You’re some other species. I told her once that growing up I’d been a nature girl, a family appropriate variation on what I’d told the attorney. Little Sally, nature girl. I said that instead of tomboy because it sounded more exotic without being erotic, and maybe closer to the truth. I wanted her to imagine me running naked through those woods on moonlit nights, but not fucking elves, nor at the other extreme collecting bugs or bringing snakes and frogs home in my pockets. Just a free spirit, doing whatever I pleased. That was the point. Doing what comes naturally, a notion that still might be a little edgy for a person like Patti, even in the eighties, at least when you got down to specifics. Or maybe especially in the eighties. Isn’t that about when we started keeping our kids in protective custody? Thank God I never had any kids. It would kill me to do that. My mother never had the least idea where I was, almost from the time I could walk. I remember walking downtown to the movies when I was five. It wasn’t that far, even for a five year old, and it was the best place to get cool in the summer. They’d let me in free. I didn’t even have to bat my eyes or pout. I just walked in as if I didn’t know any better, and no one ever stopped me. At least not until I was about seven, and then they made me pay the children’s price, nine cents, which I usually had from selling deposit bottles. I’d never have dreamed of asking Mother for the money, not for a movie or anything fun. It was hard enough getting decent school clothes. I had to be thrifty and industrious to get what I wanted, it was a necessity, but sometimes I think I was born that way. I’ve always tried to get nice things for nothing, or as close to it as possible, which is kind of how I saw my profession. Getting nice things for nothing. I doubt if Patti ever thought much about what she bought, either what it cost or if it suited her or if it was in style. It was interesting to watch her come in and walk up to the circulation desk. Nothing she wore seemed to touch her. It was made to fit modestly, tastefully snug, snug in a way that flattened out and concealed her figure, but she had no figure to hide. There was nothing to be snug to, so it all just hung, and moved on its own across the floor. The ultimate in effortlessly modest good taste.
I don’t want to help her. She’s fascinating to me in an almost morbid sort of way. Perhaps what I want is revenge, as with Johnny, and everyone else who looked down their noses at me, which was just about everyone. I imagine her breaking down for no apparent reason as we discuss in hushed tones the mysterious Mexican subjunctive. “It’s so hard, Sally. How can you possibly understand it?” And of course I smile indulgently. I’ve just proved my superiority and put my arm around her, lead her into my office. What would she tell me? No, no, Patti dear, cry all you want. I don’t mind a bit, not as long as you spill your guts before you leave and explain to me how anyone can be as cold and stupid as yourself. See? I always get right to the point. With me it’s always business. Tit for tat. A negotiation. A whore to the bone. Nothing’s really free, sweetheart. The most you can hope for is a bargain. Cry all you want. Your tears are currency. I’m nothing if not fair. I like to keep accounts. You get to unburden yourself, cry your boring little heart out, and I get to see it, see you cry. Balancing the books.
Now what is it you want to say? Never mind, I know already: you thought your life was perfect. That’s a good place to start, keeps it simple, since there’s only one way to go from there. Perfect how, my dear? As if I didn’t know. Everything was by the book, or books rather, the Bible, of course, and that earthly one, the one that is not under one cover and not even all written down, the one about manners, all very clear on how life was supposed to be. She’d want to show me her wedding pictures at that point. She might even laugh in spite of herself at the one where she stuffs cake into Frank’s mouth. No, I take that back. She’d break down even more, maybe even find it hard to breathe, or faint dead away. Looking at old photos of the late beloved is always a mistake, if composure is the goal. What was so special about him Patti? He was perfect. Of course he was, and dragging specifics out of you, anything resembling a reason, will be difficult even now, when you really and truly want to let go and tell all. I’ll have to prompt you. In fact, I’ll have to let go for you, sweetheart. I’ll have to tell you why he was so perfect.
You thought, didn’t you, that he was the best boy in the school. A shining example of boyhood, circa mid-twentieth century. Best in everything: grades, sports, manners, morals. And best of all, everyone agreed with you. Best not for your ego, or maybe just a little bit, but mainly for validation. Everyone agreed, so it had to be true. Looks? What about looks, Patti? That you took for granted. How could the best boy in the class not be handsome? He had a pretty face, and those glasses made him look kind of timid, which he wasn’t in the least. Timido? That’s right, Patti. Timido. Very good. Your vocabulary is improving. She’d always liked boys who looked gentle. Not girlish. Just sweet. That was her type. But Frank was a real man, no question about that. A gentleman, but all man. Isn’t that the perfect combination? And so deep. She couldn’t believe how deep he was. He read the Bible all the time and liked talking about it, and she could barely keep up with him. In fact, he sometimes got impatient with her for wondering why he was questioning certain passages, or even if he should. She was never completely candid with him about that, never just said, it’s God’s Word and that’s that, or maybe we don’t need to understand, but she often thought it.
So maybe that’s a clue, Patti. That questioning of his. Doesn’t it suggest a kind of restlessness? He was happy, she insists. Of course he was, I say, the absurdity of that proposition making me want to pat her on the head and say something cruel, like an old whorehouse madam to an over the hill girl. Face it, Patti, you’re old and ugly, you’re washed up, you might as well go slit your wrists. Curiosity, I say instead. Maybe he was curious. Curious about what? See? Even that doesn’t sit well with her. Patti lived in a practical nightmare, no place for curiosity. Nightmare to you, she might retort, and she’d have a point. Why did I hate her so much? I might as well hate donkeys who walk in circles all day to grind corn.
Of Ginger, when I press her on it, Patti says, I knew she had a past. That’s the first breakthrough: I knew she had a past. She got pregnant when she was very young and Frank helped her. Then she ran off with some boy and Frank went and got her. He was doing it for Coach Cook, poor man. And then she seemed to straighten out, became a nurse, had a real good job I hear. I thought it was sweet when she came back to take care of her father. I didn’t know she had designs on Frank. And I never dreamed, nobody would, how far she’d go. If she wanted a doctor, why couldn’t she find one up there where she was working? Why’d she have to come down here to try to get Frank? And ruin everyone’s life? I don’t understand. What made her think he was that kind of man? All she did was make a mess of things. I can’t imagine it. No matter how I felt about someone, I’d never deliberately try to break up a family. It’s beyond me. She must have had something wrong with her. I hope so. I hope she was crazy, or else God will never forgive her.
Of Ginger, when I press her on it, Patti says, I knew she had a past. That’s the first breakthrough: I knew she had a past. She got pregnant when she was very young and Frank helped her. Then she ran off with some boy and Frank went and got her. He was doing it for Coach Cook, poor man. And then she seemed to straighten out, became a nurse, had a real good job I hear. I thought it was sweet when she came back to take care of her father. I didn’t know she had designs on Frank. And I never dreamed, nobody would, how far she’d go. If she wanted a doctor, why couldn’t she find one up there where she was working? Why’d she have to come down here to try to get Frank? And ruin everyone’s life? I don’t understand. What made her think he was that kind of man? All she did was make a mess of things. I can’t imagine it. No matter how I felt about someone, I’d never deliberately try to break up a family. It’s beyond me. She must have had something wrong with her. I hope so. I hope she was crazy, or else God will never forgive her.
Perhaps at that point I’d sit next to Patti and take her hand. Cold as ice, I presume, and all skin and bone. A bird’s claw. Perfect nails the bright shade of red my mother and her friends still wear. Wedding and engagement rings still worn. Dry flaky skin. I could recommend something for that, but of course I don’t. Let nature take its course, an admirable way to be, one I’ve never completely adopted, despite being a nature girl. Isn’t life just full of paradox? Anyway, with mock sisterly affection, I look into Patti’s eyes. She’s scared, but by no means without defenses. I see her strength there, in her eyes, which are hazel and transparent. Patti has no secrets. She’s all surface, just as she seems to be, claims to be. Her eyes might as well be her brain. Looking at them, I get the feeling I’m looking at a cat. Everything is very simple. She knows how things are and how they should be, and we’ll get along just fine if I leave her alone. But Frank didn’t, did he? He didn’t leave you alone. Not completely. A straight arrow most of the time, but a curious man as well. He pushed and probed, gently perhaps, or at least not so much as to create a scene, a crisis, but you knew he wanted more from you than he got. You knew it all the time. But you didn’t have any more, did you sweetheart? You were who you were, and nothing more. You didn’t even know what more would be, and surely not that it would be a teenage girl. Never.
Frank was curious about ethical questions, how to interpret certain of the ten commandments and Jesus’s fables, how applying them to certain real life situations led to questions that couldn’t be answered, and certainly weren’t in the Bible. And, oh yes, how much should Christians be involved in politics? That bothered him a lot, she says, looking up at me as if taking a test. She wants me to think she’s being candid, but I know better. Not poontang, my dear? That never bothered him? I’d love to see those eyes when I asked her that. She probably wouldn’t even know what it meant, but maybe I could pronounce the word in such a way that she got the idea. Poontang. Not poontang, my dear? You never guessed that Frank might want to insert his erect member into someone else’s sweet poontang? Not that yours is lacking, I’m sure it’s as sweet as can be, but that’s not the point with men, at least not when presented with a choice. Those see through eyes get hard at that point. Duro, in case you were wondering, Patti. Your eyes are duro. No, she says, not Frank. Ginger tried, even to the point of making herself naked in front of him and her poor father, she tells me, confessing that she knows that much, but Frank did not betray me. He didn’t. Period.
I understand. He couldn’t, being Frank, but I show Patti no mercy. I really do hate the bitch. So I say, Patti, are you saying that instead of fucking her, he shoots her? Is that what you’re saying? And the coach too? And himself? Does he think he’s betrayed you just by seeing her naked body, and maybe wanting it just a tiny little bit? And then I guess he decides the coach no longer wants to live, given what’s just happened, and then after he puts a bullet in the coach, he thinks it would be easier on everyone to shoot himself. Is that it? If only I could make her hate me equally. Hate me back. I might even squeeze those bony fingers for that, with real affection.
You’ve told me, Johnny, that Frank and Patti went to Galveston for their honeymoon, the closest and cheapest place. Was she a virgin? Was he? I think so. They’ve dated only each other, and over the years, they’ve come up with a routine. He can rub her titties, such as they are. I don’t mean to be bitchy about that, but I don’t think anyone has ever seen evidence of their existence. Even sitting next to her, holding her hand, from what I can see, she could be a boy. What else? He can put his hand down her panties. She won’t touch his thing, but she will rub it through his jeans. They lie down on the front seat of his car in a safe place. Was that pleasurable Patti? It was necessary, she says. Nor does she expect pleasure at the motel in Galveston. To my surprise, she squeezes my hand. She won’t look at me, but she holds on tight. I want to ask: don’t you think you had anything to give him? Evidently, he thought so. No, she says. I’m not a sensual person. I’m not even affectionate, not even with my children. I just wanted to get it over with. It was like having a physical, an examination of places that are private. But you’d been dating this boy for years. You’d masturbated him in the front seat of his car. Not to mention, I think you loved him. So I don’t get it. Yes, I loved him. Of course I did. I’m just not comfortable when it gets physical. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I feel the same way about eating. There’s something obscene about it. Anything coming into or going out of my body. I know that’s not normal. Believe me, Frank told me often enough. Even my mother says that. You did know then, just as I suspected. I knew he wasn’t satisfied, yes, but I never thought he’d cheat on me. I mean, I did almost everything he wanted, not with enthusiasm but I did it, and Frank had such control. Perfect control. It’s one of the things I loved about him, maybe the main thing. He really should have been a surgeon, you know, instead of a general practitioner. He could have done heart surgery, brain surgery. Anything. But he thought that would limit him. He wanted to be a family doctor. Get to know everyone. Help everyone. He was such a good man. He really was. You know why he stopped making house calls? Because I asked him to. It disrupted our family life too much, and no one else was doing it. You see? He did love me. When he knew something was important to me, really important, he’d always give in.
So there’s nothing new to report from the honeymoon at the Galveston motel. Same as always, but without clothes. Neither of them eat shrimp, so for their first meal as a married couple he has chicken-fried steak and she has fried chicken, dark meat only please. Until she was sixteen, all she ate was fried chicken legs, canned green beans, oatmeal with butter (no milk; she hated milk, it made her sick to think about it), and peanut butter sandwiches. For a while when she was seven she ate black olives out of a can but soon got tired of them. Her mother fried her chicken legs every night. She never got tired of that and sometimes even left the green beans on her plate. Why eat anything else, she asked, if that’s what I liked? Maybe that’s the key to happiness, I think. Ride the one horse you like until he drops. I tried to get a feel for that dry claw I held in my hands, tried to move my fingers along its surface, but she wouldn’t let me. She withdrew her hand. No caressing. If she hadn’t broken down temporarily, she’d never have let me get so close.
So there’s nothing new to report from the honeymoon at the Galveston motel. Same as always, but without clothes. Neither of them eat shrimp, so for their first meal as a married couple he has chicken-fried steak and she has fried chicken, dark meat only please. Until she was sixteen, all she ate was fried chicken legs, canned green beans, oatmeal with butter (no milk; she hated milk, it made her sick to think about it), and peanut butter sandwiches. For a while when she was seven she ate black olives out of a can but soon got tired of them. Her mother fried her chicken legs every night. She never got tired of that and sometimes even left the green beans on her plate. Why eat anything else, she asked, if that’s what I liked? Maybe that’s the key to happiness, I think. Ride the one horse you like until he drops. I tried to get a feel for that dry claw I held in my hands, tried to move my fingers along its surface, but she wouldn’t let me. She withdrew her hand. No caressing. If she hadn’t broken down temporarily, she’d never have let me get so close.
She won’t want to hear my story. A lot of lust and affection for me, Patti, but no love. Maybe that’s why I really want to hold your hand one minute and slap you in the face the next. I never thought I was Miss Universe, not even close, but I knew I had a body that boys wanted, and that made me feel good. Not just good. A special kind of good, once I learned how to control it. Control them, I mean, and control myself. I could measure it out. Never too much, never too little, like water from a dam, money from banks. Just right, every time. That’s the secret, and it made me happy for a very long time. And my share of men happy as well, I like to think. You don’t want to hear this. You’d spit in my face, wouldn’t you, only figuratively, of course, if I told you I felt sorry for you, and that’s just where it would lead if I ever got started. A whore feels sorry for you, Patti. Take that. There’s one chicken leg you have to eat bone and all. Choke it down, bitch. A whore feels sorry for you, but she also has to admire you for somehow getting over that prick you married. There’s nothing to you, or not much, never has been and never will be, but there you are anyway, not broken down, that will never happen, but standing there three feet away moving your lips and pointing your finger at some stupid textbook. I’d have brought Frank to his knees, Patti. You should know that. I wish I was cruel enough to tell you. I’d have had him licking my toes. Between my toes. I’d make him eat my toe jam, but no, you’re right about one thing: I could never have talked him into leaving you.
Never mind. We’ll never have that discussion. We have just one thing in common, Patti and me. No, not Spanish. Not Mexico. Not even heartbreak. I’ve been jilted, but not like her. What we have in common is that we both like everything perfect a little too much. The difference is that my idea of perfect changes all the time, and she was born knowing what it is, what’s normal, and it never changes because she never thinks about it, no matter how hard she gets kicked in the head for not thinking. If she’d let me, I’d put a hand under her chin and squeeze that plain as mud face together, make her pucker up like a fish, and look into those transparent green eyes. Not deep. There is no deep to her eyes, but I might kiss her. I don’t know why.
*****
I put off asking him about Lucy, the woman he mentioned on the phone that first night, the one he was “fucking” but not living with, since he couldn’t live a woman, or so he said. Not from jealousy. More from not wanting to ruin one of my theories about him, the one about how it had to be all or nothing with him. He might never have brought it up, which of course increased my curiosity. Too important or not important enough? All I knew for the longest time was her name, but of course I couldn’t admit to him that I remembered it. “That whore still come regularly?” I finally asked one Wednesday night. “Lucy? She’s not really a whore. She cleans my apartment once a week, and the apartments between renters. I just got to know her and it happened.” “She didn’t ask for more money? A gratuity?” ”No.” “But you gave her more?” “Yes.” “Why?” “To be honest, I think it was more from perversity than generosity.” “Securing your superior position?” “Something like that, but she not only cleans and provides personal services, but I film her. Not porn. Just her doing stuff she’d normally do. Her regular chores, but I also include things she wouldn’t be doing if we weren’t intimate. She might be sweeping or making breakfast or putting on her shoes. Even her underwear. Ordinary life. Just Super 8. Nothing ambitious.” “You can still buy that?” “Yeah, but I may have to switch to tape soon.” “So what do you do with it?” Do you show it to people?” “At amateur events. There’s a kind of circuit for that, for the kind of film I make.” “What else do you film?” “Nothing. Just her.” “For how long? “As long as I’ve known her. Over ten years.” “You’ve filmed the same person, and nothing but that, for ten years?” “The same person in the same place.” “That’s weird Johnny.” “I know. The thing is, though, I have a problem about finishing things. I tried to solve it by moving on to another part or episode of the same thing. A sequel. More of Lucy. But then it became a trilogy, and now it’s whatever six is. Each one takes about two years. Or I make it take two years. I make myself stop.” “Stop but not stop. You just call it something else?” “Right.” “At least you show them. That’s a final sort of thing.” “True, but it’s really only a compromise. I wince when I watch the first one, but the latest one, though better, isn’t right either.” “What does she think of it?” “She thinks it’s extra money.” “Come on. After ten years?” “She’s older than me. About ten years.” “So?” “She’s settled. No husband now. He died about five years ago, but two grown children. God knows how long she’s had basically the same daily routine. She’s probably the most stable person I know.”
“Have you tried to do other things? Are you into making films?” “I don’t know if I am or not. Isn’t what I’m doing making films? Maybe not, but it’s always what I want to do when I pick up the camera. Film her in the apartment. I can’t convince myself to do anything else.” “Do you love her?” He shook his head. “Not like you mean. She’s Lucy.” “Is she a good fuck?” He grinned. “You like to play the whore, don’t you? A tough broad.” “Yes. All in all, my favorite role. What if she can’t do it anymore? Or doesn’t want to? Or dies?” “I don’t know, but I’m not worried about it. It’s probably the only way I’ll get free from it.” “That’s cold. You might die yourself.” “Yeah. I might.” “And while we’re on the subject of your mortality, tell me why you haven’t seen your daughter in fifteen years. Or however long it’s been now.” “That’s a leap.” “No. Just another thing I kept thinking you’d bring up, but you never did.” “I sent her money the whole time she was growing up. Not much, but the same thing every month, and cards at the appropriate times. Sometimes I was late, but I sent them. But the fact is, I don’t like kids. Even my own. I’d get her on the weekends and wouldn’t know what to do with her. Drove me crazy. She didn’t like it much either, so I just stopped doing it. Then I moved.” “You could film her. Either instead of or in addition to Lucy. I suspect it’s not Lucy you’re obsessed with anyway, but filming, and with your daughter it would be sad and wholesome. Absent father tries to make up for lost time. A built in story. She’s never called you or anything?” “Twice, but we had nothing to say.” “Do you talk to her mother?” “No.” “Are you still in love with her mother?” “No. Probably never was.” “What was she like?” “My ex-wife?” “Yes. Just tell me that and I’ll shut up.” “Brainy, like you, but not as pretty, and she never shut up.” “She’ll call again. Your daughter, I mean.” “I don’t know.” “What’s her name?” “Molly. Maybe I could film you.” “Fuck me, film me. Anything else you want?”
I wondered if I would want him to film me. I’m pulling up my panties to the sound of a Super 8 camera, or pulling them down to pee, trying to sleep, cooking, making the bed, sweeping the floor. I demand that he pay me whatever he pays Lucy. Would I clean too? Should I demand more? Would he be hurt if I asked for anything? Another possibility would be that he film me at my house. Or the library. He could do a documentary on the library. I’d tell him it would be good for him, good for his art. Break him out of his rut. A new woman and a new place amounts to a new film. I could be good for him in general. Steer him away from that lonely death I’d predicted. I might invest a little time and try to soften him up, make him call his daughter, open his heart, improve his art and his worth as a human being.
I wondered if I would want him to film me. I’m pulling up my panties to the sound of a Super 8 camera, or pulling them down to pee, trying to sleep, cooking, making the bed, sweeping the floor. I demand that he pay me whatever he pays Lucy. Would I clean too? Should I demand more? Would he be hurt if I asked for anything? Another possibility would be that he film me at my house. Or the library. He could do a documentary on the library. I’d tell him it would be good for him, good for his art. Break him out of his rut. A new woman and a new place amounts to a new film. I could be good for him in general. Steer him away from that lonely death I’d predicted. I might invest a little time and try to soften him up, make him call his daughter, open his heart, improve his art and his worth as a human being.
One Wednesday night, he said, “If I’d stayed, I’d have wound up killing her. And then where would Molly be? We sat in a parking lot, about to go to a movie, and Molly wanted to know when I was coming back. I’ll never get over that. It’s stupid, it’s corny, and so on, but still, there it is and it won’t go away. I told my six year old daughter I was never coming back, she cried, but I kept my word. Kept it to this day. I didn’t say, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t want me living with that bitch you call your mother. All of our lives will be a living hell if I do. You may not be happy, you may never be happy, and it may all be my fault, but at least you won’t have to see me kill her.’ I didn’t say that, never said it. Never will say it, but between you and me, Sally, I’d have probably stomped her to death. Knocked her down and then kicked her in the face until she didn’t have one anymore. There are still moments, even after all these years, when the thought of that appeals to me. Maybe Frank should have left his family. Maybe that’s the only way for some men to avoid domestic homicide.”
*****
Affairs are much safer than marriages. Safer in every respect. I miss the judge, but not as much as I thought I would. Maybe we were too comfortable. He didn’t want to be close, not by my definition, nor did he want to control me, not beyond our basic and mutual understanding. I don’t think he’d have cared if I’d fucked a different man every night of the week as long as I didn’t brag about it and showed up on time at the lake on Fridays. That’s both the good part and the rub. I can’t get it out of my head that if he’d really loved me, he’d have wanted more control. He’d have fought to control me, and in the end, in the face of so much love, I just might have given in. Men are such dopes about that, at least the ones who know which fork to use. That’s the first thing they say: I don’t want to control you. If they only knew how cold that leaves me. Then what do you want, I wonder, to just play with me for a while, when the fancy moves you, and I happen to be free? Sure, they say, what’s wrong with that? Most men, of course, can’t live up to that when push comes to shove. Most want control, whether they know it or not, and leave it to me to hook up with one who didn’t. He had me showing up at the appointed place at the appointed time every weekend for many, many years, but for him I was an added benefit, never a necessity, and I was never convinced that he’d have shed a tear for me if I’d run off with someone else.
Of course it went both ways. I don’t think I ever wanted the judge to leave his wife. Why should I have? Actually, there were times when I thought it might be good for him. I know I should feel sorry for his wife too, but I don’t. I’ve heard people say that she wasted her life in bed, but I don’t believe it. That’s where she wanted to be and people let her get away with it. She spent her life watching television. Do you know he still slept in the same room with her? He used ear plugs to keep out the TV noise. Two queen size beds pushed together. They didn’t fight. They had coffee together every morning in bed and watched the Today show. He didn’t cook, so they had someone in to make lunch, their big meal of the day. He always went home for lunch, and always ate with her on a TV tray. Then at night he made cereal or canned soup and read in bed with his earplugs in until he fell asleep. On Fridays he’d come to the lake. We were there together until Sunday afternoon, until he went home and had dinner with her on Sunday night. Grilled cheese. I didn’t force any of that out of him. It was just that over the years that part of his life became obvious, from casual things he said and didn’t say. She tried to kill herself once when we were together. Sleeping pills. A half ass effort. They didn’t even pump out her stomach. Was I to blame? Beats me. She liked soap operas. The judge knew all about Days of Our Lives because it was on when he ate lunch. Any love story would do for her, is the impression I got, but I think her favorite was Wuthering Heights. And she had a crush on Stewart Granger. How do I know that? I don’t really. I’m basing it on what the judge knew about, things he wouldn’t find important enough to remember if there wasn’t some reason to, or if he wasn’t being constantly reminded. And things he didn’t know, like that Laurence Olivier played Heathcliff, and any other B list actor besides Stewart Granger. He never directly said a word to me about her. Did he love her? Probably. Did he love me? Probably not, or maybe, in a way. Why don’t I feel sorry for her? She had a happy marriage, that’s why. Did she know about me? Did she care? I like to think that she knew and didn’t care, that her attempt to take her own life had nothing to do with me. We each had our role to play and that was that. Is that too French movie for you? Maybe so.
After about a year, the judge sometimes forgot to fuck me. I had to remind him, and sometimes I forgot. It never got bad, though, or even tedious. We liked each other’s bodies. We were physically very compatible, but I think a lot of that was that we both just liked to fuck. It was never manic with us. It was my middle-age affair. At its best, it was exquisite. I often fell asleep more relaxed than I’d ever been in my life and even woke up euphoric, with an inexplicable sense of accomplishment, and starving. I could have gotten so fat during that period. That’s when I took up running. Out there at the lake while the judge was fishing or hunting, or just fixing up the place, being a handyman, I had miles of county road to run on. I’d often run out and walk back and never see a soul. Just me and the birds and the snakes. Nothing like it. Drenched in sweat, trying to stick to the shade, tired and loose, head as clear as a bell, still a little bit of cool left to the morning, looking forward to a shower and a slice of watermelon. I always had watermelon. My late morning snack.
After about a year, the judge sometimes forgot to fuck me. I had to remind him, and sometimes I forgot. It never got bad, though, or even tedious. We liked each other’s bodies. We were physically very compatible, but I think a lot of that was that we both just liked to fuck. It was never manic with us. It was my middle-age affair. At its best, it was exquisite. I often fell asleep more relaxed than I’d ever been in my life and even woke up euphoric, with an inexplicable sense of accomplishment, and starving. I could have gotten so fat during that period. That’s when I took up running. Out there at the lake while the judge was fishing or hunting, or just fixing up the place, being a handyman, I had miles of county road to run on. I’d often run out and walk back and never see a soul. Just me and the birds and the snakes. Nothing like it. Drenched in sweat, trying to stick to the shade, tired and loose, head as clear as a bell, still a little bit of cool left to the morning, looking forward to a shower and a slice of watermelon. I always had watermelon. My late morning snack.
Of course you’ve never had fresh fruit unless you’ve been to Mexico, or some other tropical country. After the judge died I went for a few weeks every summer to brush up on my Spanish and eat melon. That’s what I told people, just to confuse them or piss them off. Avoiding Patti was sometimes awkward, but I managed. She never went to Morelia, my favorite place. Being a middle-aged, unattached gringa in Mexico is flattering to the ego, even if you know they just want your money. Poetic justice. The tables turned. And of course they knew I liked fucking. Men just know. You can talk about little signs we women give off all you want. Long earrings. Bleached hair. A little cleavage. Painted nails. I suppose it adds up, but none of that means anything if you are frumpy at heart. On the other hand, if you are sensual, you can try how you might to sabotage it, make yourself plain and ugly, bite your nails down to the nub, never do a thing with your hair, wear sensible shoes, old lady jewelry, and it won’t matter. Sit at a sidewalk café by yourself and they will come. Believe me.
*****
If my admirers wanted to talk about themselves, I listened, but I kept my distance. Sometimes I felt like a psychoanalyst. I didn’t take notes, but I nodded from time to time, made little noises to show them I was still listening, and never gave advice or sympathized. Understanding, not sympathy, is what most people want in a listener. And a lover. I just figured it was an extension of fucking. Make yourself comfortable, sweetie, and tell me how sick in the head you are. As a rule I didn’t mind, and I was well compensated. The hard part was that their lives often depressed me, especially the attorney’s, which I still sometimes have bad dreams about. It was like reading a contemporary novel about a midwest suburb, one of those where you hope everyone will slit his wrist, just to get it over with as soon as possible. It was like visiting my brothers, any of them. Like eating Jello-O for dessert, watching reruns of Danny Thomas. I don’t know why those things threaten me. My life was never like that. Could it be that I always felt on the precipice? After all, I was fucking somebody whose life was like that. Not just fucking. Living off of him. He hated going to his in-laws for the holidays. His oldest daughter would go into her room with boys and lock the door. One of his sons was dyslexic or bi-polar or whatever was in fashion back then. The other one had some absurd number of speeding tickets. I forget what else, but it went on and on, and there were times when I came very close to saying, plain and simple, shut the fuck up.
I guess I could have said, leave your disaster of a family and let’s go live in Rio, but I was not a jezebel, nor even an adventuress, never a real threat, so my life was never in danger. I’ve been reading mostly women lately, and most of them foreign and veterans, so to speak, of the Second World War. Natalia Ginzburg. Sybille Bedford. Colette. I feel a little guilty, and relatively dull, not having had a war to deal with. Daddy was already back, all limbs in tact, before I knew he’d ever been gone. I don’t think it changed him much, if at all. He mostly worked on planes, and as far as I could tell, he hardly noticed being in England. My middle brother was career Army and did something in Viet Nam, but I’m not sure what. I never talk to him. I know a couple of guys in my high school class who went, but I didn’t know them well enough for it to mean anything to me, except to figure they were unlucky or crazy. I know one didn’t make it and one did. Johnny got out of it because he stayed in school until they didn’t want him that bad and then his luck held. Asthma, I think he told me once. Frank wanted to go, Johnny told me, or said he did, but he was married, had a kid, and was in medical school. So no mourning for me, never mind a foreign occupation to endure. I’ll never know if I could have been as strong as those women, as able and determined as they were to deal with catastrophe and get on with their lives, and I don’t flatter myself that accepting my family as it was is in any way comparable to living through a war. I flirt with the comparison only because it’s all I’ve got. Three deadbeat brothers, an alcoholic lunatic father, and a mother whose way of coping was more like ignoring her life than accepting it. Big deal. Join the crowd. I thought of putting my mother in with those writers I mentioned, but it didn’t work. Oblivious. That was Mom. I’m not even sure she had a clear concept of what it meant to go to war. She put in her time at the pants factory and came home and switched on the radio, then later the TV. We all ran wild, not just me. I taught myself everything. How to cook, and even, after a fashion, how to sew, both more from necessity than an eagerness to learn. I was a poor girl right through graduate school. I worked my butt off at any job I could find and saved my pennies. But that’s nothing. I wasn’t a brat, a spoiled rotten rich girl, and I knew how to roll up my sleeves and get to work when the need arose, but I never really got the chance to test my courage. No long marches in China. No hiding out in God-forsaken Italian villages. Not even any peacetime challenges. No rape. No husband that beat me. No life-threatening disease. No child that died. No debilitating addictions. Not even an abortion. I’m tempted at times to look back at my life and yawn.
I say I had a lunatic alcoholic father, but the two vivid memories I have of him are benign: his cheerful face at the breakfast table and his pitiful confusion in the hospital. The “nut house,” I should say, to honor him. That’s what he always called it. I was eight when he went there for good, my brothers all teenagers. They were probably not as bad as I remember, just wild and coarse, and at least they taught me how to be invisible. Mom was no shield. She never protected me from anything, except of course being an orphan, but she also never asked me to do anything around the house, and she didn’t do too bad a job of keeping it clean and putting food on the table, at least on a very basic level. Actually, it wasn’t so much from necessity that I taught myself household things. She did what was necessary. I just wanted more than that after a time, and it wasn’t in any of us to complain about the basics, not even my brothers. We all liked Mom, and looking back, I think her secret was that she never worried. I don’t know why, how she acquired that gift. If she’d been of my generation, I’d have wondered if she wasn’t smoking dope all the time, but that’s not likely, and she never drank anything but iced tea, which she had with her all the time. She even took it to work, already made up in a pickle jar. A big pickle jar, wrapped in a towel so that it still had little bits of ice floating in it at lunch time. That and Fritos, every day. I don’t know what she did at the pants factory. She never talked about it. She never talked about anything, and I soon learned not to ask. Was Mom like Patti? Was she able to never get irritated by and always ignore my questions because she had no answers? What was it like, Mom, to know that Daddy might get killed in the war? That he was in an insane asylum? She’d shrug her shoulders. “That’s just how it was,” she might say, if she said anything. What do you do at work? “You don’t care about that.” Do you fuck a lot of guys? No, I didn’t ask her that, but if I had, she’d have probably just shrugged. Nothing made any difference to my mom. She did her chores, lived up to her obligations, and that was that.
It’s my brothers I hated. The oldest one became a fire and brimstone preacher. Itinerant, of course, and a hillbilly Casanova of sorts. My middle brother worked at odd jobs to supplement his Army retirement pay and probably beat his wife and abused his children, and my youngest brother was a petty thief who ate himself to death and died in prison. They never complained about Mother’s housekeeping, probably because they didn’t know any better, but they all treated her like shit and seemed to assume that her passivity meant approval of their crimes and stupidity. They were always wronged. Misunderstood. Everyone was against them. They had the worst luck. What a relief it was to me when they were all dead. No more worrying about whether my mother was giving them money, or whether, after she passed away, they’d show up some night, cold and hungry. They still haunt me, nevertheless. There’s no escaping that, but their deaths do offer small consolations. My youngest brother always called me a whore, but never knew how right he was, and I fucked the judge for the first time on the morning of his funeral. I tried to shed a tear later, to please my mother, but I couldn’t manage it. Not even a tear of joy. At the funeral I was still glowing from the sex, which may account for the look she gave me. Oddly enough, on the rare occasions when she chose to notice something, I could never fool her. Insight and indifference, a confusing and maddening combination. She never said anything, not even when I told her that I was moving back home to work in the library, but I always knew when she put two and two together, and if anything held me back when I was a kid, it was probably the fear that she’d unexpectedly take her eyes off the TV for a minute and look at me. She haunts me, I admit, and I’m never sure whether I’m glad to see her or not. She favored my brothers, just as Daddy favored me, while he was there. God knows how much of the money I gave her wound up in their pockets, which makes them pimps as well as pricks. My father is the only ghost I always welcome with open arms. He was a mechanic, and he was cheerful at breakfast because he was already drunk, and unless he was on the wagon, which I dreaded because it made him irritable and nervous, he’d talk to me like a good friend, his best buddy, even when I was only six, while I ate my cereal. By the middle of the morning, or so I gather, he was more often than not falling asleep under a car or tripping on an air hose or throwing wrenches around as he looked in his tool box for the right one. And then, when he got to the point where he couldn’t do anything right, he’d hit something or someone with whatever he happened to have at hand. They put him away. Luckily, he hadn’t done too much damage and the sheriff liked him, Daddy’s family had been part of the scene around here forever, they were distant cousins or something, or he’d have wound up in prison. Instead he went to the nut house, and I guess it’s true that he was still a little crazy even when he was sober, although I’m sure I could have taken care of him. When we visited, just mother and me, my brothers would never go, he never made sense. He kept asking about us as if the two people right in front of him weren’t us. I was always six years old. Mother was still his cute virgin bride. He wanted to hear all about those people. It might have been the medication, and if he’d lived long enough, I’d have probably found out, done something, but by the time I was able, he was dead. 56 years old. Lung cancer.
I guess I could have said, leave your disaster of a family and let’s go live in Rio, but I was not a jezebel, nor even an adventuress, never a real threat, so my life was never in danger. I’ve been reading mostly women lately, and most of them foreign and veterans, so to speak, of the Second World War. Natalia Ginzburg. Sybille Bedford. Colette. I feel a little guilty, and relatively dull, not having had a war to deal with. Daddy was already back, all limbs in tact, before I knew he’d ever been gone. I don’t think it changed him much, if at all. He mostly worked on planes, and as far as I could tell, he hardly noticed being in England. My middle brother was career Army and did something in Viet Nam, but I’m not sure what. I never talk to him. I know a couple of guys in my high school class who went, but I didn’t know them well enough for it to mean anything to me, except to figure they were unlucky or crazy. I know one didn’t make it and one did. Johnny got out of it because he stayed in school until they didn’t want him that bad and then his luck held. Asthma, I think he told me once. Frank wanted to go, Johnny told me, or said he did, but he was married, had a kid, and was in medical school. So no mourning for me, never mind a foreign occupation to endure. I’ll never know if I could have been as strong as those women, as able and determined as they were to deal with catastrophe and get on with their lives, and I don’t flatter myself that accepting my family as it was is in any way comparable to living through a war. I flirt with the comparison only because it’s all I’ve got. Three deadbeat brothers, an alcoholic lunatic father, and a mother whose way of coping was more like ignoring her life than accepting it. Big deal. Join the crowd. I thought of putting my mother in with those writers I mentioned, but it didn’t work. Oblivious. That was Mom. I’m not even sure she had a clear concept of what it meant to go to war. She put in her time at the pants factory and came home and switched on the radio, then later the TV. We all ran wild, not just me. I taught myself everything. How to cook, and even, after a fashion, how to sew, both more from necessity than an eagerness to learn. I was a poor girl right through graduate school. I worked my butt off at any job I could find and saved my pennies. But that’s nothing. I wasn’t a brat, a spoiled rotten rich girl, and I knew how to roll up my sleeves and get to work when the need arose, but I never really got the chance to test my courage. No long marches in China. No hiding out in God-forsaken Italian villages. Not even any peacetime challenges. No rape. No husband that beat me. No life-threatening disease. No child that died. No debilitating addictions. Not even an abortion. I’m tempted at times to look back at my life and yawn.
I say I had a lunatic alcoholic father, but the two vivid memories I have of him are benign: his cheerful face at the breakfast table and his pitiful confusion in the hospital. The “nut house,” I should say, to honor him. That’s what he always called it. I was eight when he went there for good, my brothers all teenagers. They were probably not as bad as I remember, just wild and coarse, and at least they taught me how to be invisible. Mom was no shield. She never protected me from anything, except of course being an orphan, but she also never asked me to do anything around the house, and she didn’t do too bad a job of keeping it clean and putting food on the table, at least on a very basic level. Actually, it wasn’t so much from necessity that I taught myself household things. She did what was necessary. I just wanted more than that after a time, and it wasn’t in any of us to complain about the basics, not even my brothers. We all liked Mom, and looking back, I think her secret was that she never worried. I don’t know why, how she acquired that gift. If she’d been of my generation, I’d have wondered if she wasn’t smoking dope all the time, but that’s not likely, and she never drank anything but iced tea, which she had with her all the time. She even took it to work, already made up in a pickle jar. A big pickle jar, wrapped in a towel so that it still had little bits of ice floating in it at lunch time. That and Fritos, every day. I don’t know what she did at the pants factory. She never talked about it. She never talked about anything, and I soon learned not to ask. Was Mom like Patti? Was she able to never get irritated by and always ignore my questions because she had no answers? What was it like, Mom, to know that Daddy might get killed in the war? That he was in an insane asylum? She’d shrug her shoulders. “That’s just how it was,” she might say, if she said anything. What do you do at work? “You don’t care about that.” Do you fuck a lot of guys? No, I didn’t ask her that, but if I had, she’d have probably just shrugged. Nothing made any difference to my mom. She did her chores, lived up to her obligations, and that was that.
It’s my brothers I hated. The oldest one became a fire and brimstone preacher. Itinerant, of course, and a hillbilly Casanova of sorts. My middle brother worked at odd jobs to supplement his Army retirement pay and probably beat his wife and abused his children, and my youngest brother was a petty thief who ate himself to death and died in prison. They never complained about Mother’s housekeeping, probably because they didn’t know any better, but they all treated her like shit and seemed to assume that her passivity meant approval of their crimes and stupidity. They were always wronged. Misunderstood. Everyone was against them. They had the worst luck. What a relief it was to me when they were all dead. No more worrying about whether my mother was giving them money, or whether, after she passed away, they’d show up some night, cold and hungry. They still haunt me, nevertheless. There’s no escaping that, but their deaths do offer small consolations. My youngest brother always called me a whore, but never knew how right he was, and I fucked the judge for the first time on the morning of his funeral. I tried to shed a tear later, to please my mother, but I couldn’t manage it. Not even a tear of joy. At the funeral I was still glowing from the sex, which may account for the look she gave me. Oddly enough, on the rare occasions when she chose to notice something, I could never fool her. Insight and indifference, a confusing and maddening combination. She never said anything, not even when I told her that I was moving back home to work in the library, but I always knew when she put two and two together, and if anything held me back when I was a kid, it was probably the fear that she’d unexpectedly take her eyes off the TV for a minute and look at me. She haunts me, I admit, and I’m never sure whether I’m glad to see her or not. She favored my brothers, just as Daddy favored me, while he was there. God knows how much of the money I gave her wound up in their pockets, which makes them pimps as well as pricks. My father is the only ghost I always welcome with open arms. He was a mechanic, and he was cheerful at breakfast because he was already drunk, and unless he was on the wagon, which I dreaded because it made him irritable and nervous, he’d talk to me like a good friend, his best buddy, even when I was only six, while I ate my cereal. By the middle of the morning, or so I gather, he was more often than not falling asleep under a car or tripping on an air hose or throwing wrenches around as he looked in his tool box for the right one. And then, when he got to the point where he couldn’t do anything right, he’d hit something or someone with whatever he happened to have at hand. They put him away. Luckily, he hadn’t done too much damage and the sheriff liked him, Daddy’s family had been part of the scene around here forever, they were distant cousins or something, or he’d have wound up in prison. Instead he went to the nut house, and I guess it’s true that he was still a little crazy even when he was sober, although I’m sure I could have taken care of him. When we visited, just mother and me, my brothers would never go, he never made sense. He kept asking about us as if the two people right in front of him weren’t us. I was always six years old. Mother was still his cute virgin bride. He wanted to hear all about those people. It might have been the medication, and if he’d lived long enough, I’d have probably found out, done something, but by the time I was able, he was dead. 56 years old. Lung cancer.
*****
I try to keep Johnny sober when I’m with him, but it doesn’t always work and he’ll get carried away. “A lot of it,” he told me once, “my fear, was from immaturity. Not only was I intimidated by convention, but I didn’t know, stupid kid that I was, how rare and perfect you are.” “Bullshit.” At that point I could have said ‘go fuck yourself,’ and it wouldn’t have phased him. “Of course you’re pretty and smart, that goes without saying and everyone knows it, but what’s really important, what separates you from the rest is that you look at things in a way that I immediately get. You know that. You feel it too. Don’t deny it and don’t be so sensible. Here’s what will happen if you’ll just let go for once. For at least six months, maybe a year, maybe two, we’ll fuck like rabbits, and what’s wrong with that? Who knows what will happen in the long run, but who cares? And what do you have to lose? This may never happen again, for either of us. Probably won’t. It’s never happened before, has it? A man has never swept you off your feet before, you’ve all but admitted that, you’ve never completely surrendered, and this is your chance.” I shook my head. “It’s not something you decide. You know that. And I’ve become such a good actor, it’s second nature to me now. All those people I know now? The townies? The library patrons? I tolerate them. I sneer privately while nodding, smiling, waving. I’ve always sneered at them, my whole life, but now I know how to keep them from despising me. I’m the perfect hypocrite. Actor is just a euphemism. I’ve never had an identity crisis. Nothing I fretted about endlessly, lost any sleep over, never thought of myself as being more than one person, never wondered who was the real me. It’s so simple, always has been. My private face is the real me, yes, of course, always has been, and my public face is whatever I want it to be, whatever suits me at the time. I turn tricks. I do a magic act, and everyone gets what he pays for, more if I’m up to it, if I’m inspired. You did inspire me.” “Past tense?” I reached across the table and took his hand. “Also, I wasn’t as good back then at staying detached.” I squeezed his hand and gave him a friendly smile.
“And there’s more. You don’t want me. We’d wind up like Frank and Ginger. You’re better off with Lucy. I’d drive you nuts. I’d try to tell you how to film me. Even how to fuck me. I’d make you lose weight, wear nicer clothes. I’d probably even try to get all your money.” “I don’t have any.” “You have property. I could use some real estate to round out my portfolio. I need to diversify.” “Move in with me and I’ll give it to you.” I laughed. “You sure got into the whore thing fast, Johnny. You should have been a pimp.” “You inspire me too, you know.” “I could make you kill me.” “I’m sure you could make me want to. Is that what you did in your former life? Play with that?” “No. It was just a fantasy, like most of the rest of my life. My former life, as you so sweetly call it, was just a variation on the judge. Safe. I’m beginning to think that we never really do anything different in life. No one does. Just the same thing over and over again.” “Sounds like me and my films.” “That’s right.” “I do wonder tho why you have never tried to tell a story.” “I have. I like stories, admire them, some I love, and I tried to tell them for a long time, but I couldn’t. I was no good at it.” “On film?” “Not with a camera, but screenplays, but also plays, stories, novels, poems. Songs even. For a while I tried stealing plots, ready made ones, old chestnuts, the idea being that something new would evolve out of it as I went along. But that didn’t work either.” “Why not?” “Probably because I got bored, and I was too lazy to acquire the skill. I’ve told you before about myself and craft. I hated thinking about it. I bored myself to death, especially when I tried to answer that very old-fashioned but essential question of why. So I finally decided to just have fun and not worry myself about it. Or anything else. I still use Super 8 because I don’t want to learn anything new. I’m lazy. Impatient. Always have been, but I don’t fight it anymore.”
There’s always something erotic about a man telling you about his work, his real work, and as I listened to Johnny I thought about how the sex part with him hadn’t been much different from the others at the drive-in. We were way too young, and the script I imposed was too restricted. No room for improvisation, even if we’d known how, which we didn’t, or hadn’t been too shy, which we were. Locked together on the front seat at the drive-in movie, face to face, in spite of the interesting ways the shadows played with us, we squandered the sex part. The best was afterwards, when we sat like bookends, leaning away from each other against the doors, me talking about my Russians, he about his things, very American things at that point. Jazz, baseball, Kerouac. All juvenile crap, no doubt, both of us, but to our ears at the time neither of us could say anything wrong. I played it safe with tidy little opinions about my Russians that I’d stolen from somewhere. Tolstoy was Apollonian. Dostoyevski was Dionysian. That sort of thing. Johnny was probably no more original, but he sounded spontaneous, which is what I told myself I fell for, but that’s not quite right. I got so carried away at times that it felt like he was writing me poems right off the top of his head. Poems about jazz, baseball and Kerouac, but love poems nevertheless. One night he raved about something called a “Kerouac orange,” which I think was Zen inspired, maybe from The Dharma Bums. Child that I was, I thought of my well-crafted, succinctly put conceits, all about my Russians, as answering kisses and carresses. Little pearls, just for him. My pearls, his orange, and in that way we made love.
I try to keep Johnny sober when I’m with him, but it doesn’t always work and he’ll get carried away. “A lot of it,” he told me once, “my fear, was from immaturity. Not only was I intimidated by convention, but I didn’t know, stupid kid that I was, how rare and perfect you are.” “Bullshit.” At that point I could have said ‘go fuck yourself,’ and it wouldn’t have phased him. “Of course you’re pretty and smart, that goes without saying and everyone knows it, but what’s really important, what separates you from the rest is that you look at things in a way that I immediately get. You know that. You feel it too. Don’t deny it and don’t be so sensible. Here’s what will happen if you’ll just let go for once. For at least six months, maybe a year, maybe two, we’ll fuck like rabbits, and what’s wrong with that? Who knows what will happen in the long run, but who cares? And what do you have to lose? This may never happen again, for either of us. Probably won’t. It’s never happened before, has it? A man has never swept you off your feet before, you’ve all but admitted that, you’ve never completely surrendered, and this is your chance.” I shook my head. “It’s not something you decide. You know that. And I’ve become such a good actor, it’s second nature to me now. All those people I know now? The townies? The library patrons? I tolerate them. I sneer privately while nodding, smiling, waving. I’ve always sneered at them, my whole life, but now I know how to keep them from despising me. I’m the perfect hypocrite. Actor is just a euphemism. I’ve never had an identity crisis. Nothing I fretted about endlessly, lost any sleep over, never thought of myself as being more than one person, never wondered who was the real me. It’s so simple, always has been. My private face is the real me, yes, of course, always has been, and my public face is whatever I want it to be, whatever suits me at the time. I turn tricks. I do a magic act, and everyone gets what he pays for, more if I’m up to it, if I’m inspired. You did inspire me.” “Past tense?” I reached across the table and took his hand. “Also, I wasn’t as good back then at staying detached.” I squeezed his hand and gave him a friendly smile.
“And there’s more. You don’t want me. We’d wind up like Frank and Ginger. You’re better off with Lucy. I’d drive you nuts. I’d try to tell you how to film me. Even how to fuck me. I’d make you lose weight, wear nicer clothes. I’d probably even try to get all your money.” “I don’t have any.” “You have property. I could use some real estate to round out my portfolio. I need to diversify.” “Move in with me and I’ll give it to you.” I laughed. “You sure got into the whore thing fast, Johnny. You should have been a pimp.” “You inspire me too, you know.” “I could make you kill me.” “I’m sure you could make me want to. Is that what you did in your former life? Play with that?” “No. It was just a fantasy, like most of the rest of my life. My former life, as you so sweetly call it, was just a variation on the judge. Safe. I’m beginning to think that we never really do anything different in life. No one does. Just the same thing over and over again.” “Sounds like me and my films.” “That’s right.” “I do wonder tho why you have never tried to tell a story.” “I have. I like stories, admire them, some I love, and I tried to tell them for a long time, but I couldn’t. I was no good at it.” “On film?” “Not with a camera, but screenplays, but also plays, stories, novels, poems. Songs even. For a while I tried stealing plots, ready made ones, old chestnuts, the idea being that something new would evolve out of it as I went along. But that didn’t work either.” “Why not?” “Probably because I got bored, and I was too lazy to acquire the skill. I’ve told you before about myself and craft. I hated thinking about it. I bored myself to death, especially when I tried to answer that very old-fashioned but essential question of why. So I finally decided to just have fun and not worry myself about it. Or anything else. I still use Super 8 because I don’t want to learn anything new. I’m lazy. Impatient. Always have been, but I don’t fight it anymore.”
There’s always something erotic about a man telling you about his work, his real work, and as I listened to Johnny I thought about how the sex part with him hadn’t been much different from the others at the drive-in. We were way too young, and the script I imposed was too restricted. No room for improvisation, even if we’d known how, which we didn’t, or hadn’t been too shy, which we were. Locked together on the front seat at the drive-in movie, face to face, in spite of the interesting ways the shadows played with us, we squandered the sex part. The best was afterwards, when we sat like bookends, leaning away from each other against the doors, me talking about my Russians, he about his things, very American things at that point. Jazz, baseball, Kerouac. All juvenile crap, no doubt, both of us, but to our ears at the time neither of us could say anything wrong. I played it safe with tidy little opinions about my Russians that I’d stolen from somewhere. Tolstoy was Apollonian. Dostoyevski was Dionysian. That sort of thing. Johnny was probably no more original, but he sounded spontaneous, which is what I told myself I fell for, but that’s not quite right. I got so carried away at times that it felt like he was writing me poems right off the top of his head. Poems about jazz, baseball and Kerouac, but love poems nevertheless. One night he raved about something called a “Kerouac orange,” which I think was Zen inspired, maybe from The Dharma Bums. Child that I was, I thought of my well-crafted, succinctly put conceits, all about my Russians, as answering kisses and carresses. Little pearls, just for him. My pearls, his orange, and in that way we made love.
Opposites attracting, I’ll give him that. Up to a point I was good at crafts. ABD from Harvard, fluent in Spanish, now a bona fide and certified librarian. I actually did translate a couple of Russian novels and still get a royalty check now and then. He never had the patience for anything like that, and I nearly laughed in his face when he told me he’d tried to go to law school. “You have to be kidding. What were you thinking?” “About making a living, but I didn’t even make it through the first year. I didn’t even care if I got drafted, and they were still sending people directly to Viet Nam.” “You must have hated it.” “On bad days I still sometimes say to myself, at least I’m not in law school. Law school or football practice. Or digging ditches. Thank god ashtma got me out of the Army. That would have been the worst of course. Until you get to whatever level of hell Brutus and Cassius were on, there’s always worse.” “The ninth” “Thank you, Miss English Major. Actually, I did work for lawyers for a short time, to eat and pay the rent.” “What did you do?” “Research. Public records mostly, courthouse stuff, and now and then more than that. Talking to people. Even following them. Had a bad experience, though, and that’s when I headed west.” He told me about it, the bad experience. It seems that he took some pictures of a guy’s wife in bed with another man. “You did that? You mean literally? Graphically?” “Yes. I needed the money. And I trusted the person who hired me.” “Trusted him how?” “Not to let me do anything stupid. Too risky. Or even too immoral.” “And he screwed you?” “Let me down is more like it. It’s complicated.” “What happened?” “The guy she was screwing disappeared and I tried to find him, more or less on my own. Turns out he was murdered by the husband.” “You found that out yourself? And you’re sure?” “I stumbled into it, and yes, I’m sure, but the guy was too well connected and Leo, the one I’d trusted, wouldn’t back me up. I left town because I was told I’d better. It would be good for my health.” “Damn. That sounds like a detective story.” “It felt like one, and it cured me of poking into other people’s business. I’m not a tough guy. And there are real people out there, believe it or not, who play for keeps.”
*****
At night these days I sometimes don’t make it until nine o’clock. In the summer I doze off reading when it’s still light outside, but I don’t feel old, not even when I look in the mirror. I just look like me. Wrinkles don’t bother me. I still look like me and wrinkles don’t really change that. What worries me is losing things. Teeth. Hair. Appetite. Yes, even my sex drive. I remember when I got my first tooth pulled. A molar I didn’t need and no one would ever notice was gone, but I was depressed for days. It made me think of two things. First was that Poe story where the man has nothing left of himself after he takes off everything that’s fake. The second was of how easy it is, up to a certain age, to look fresh and natural. I’ve always taken care of myself. To this day I can’t fall asleep, no matter what, until I take off my makeup, shower and put on moisturizer. It seems like the natural, sensible thing to do, and always has. That and a few other things I think of as routine maintenance, like oil changes and brake checks, but lately I’ve been thinking it’s not just to stay healthy and fit, but more like preservation, that it’s come to that. It’s not that I imagine I do it for men. I don’t anymore. I do it for the same practical reason I floss my teeth and comb my hair out every night, the same reason I remove the sleep from my eyes every morning and regularly push back the cuticles on my nails, pride, my mother would say, and yet I have this thing, a thing that feels a little desperate, about staying me for as long as possible. Preserving myself. That’s what losing my looks would mean, looking in the mirror and not seeing me. It would scare me to death. Too bad I’m not a suicide, at least not yet, but maybe there’s a tipping point. One tooth too many. Even one too many wrinkles or gray hairs. I’d always told myself I wouldn’t fight it, and for the most part I don’t. The judge made it easy. As far as I know, for twenty years, right up until the day he died, he failed to notice that I wasn’t thirty-five any longer. And Johnny, bless his heart, has always been the same. He still sees me when he looks at me, I can tell, and that should be enough. There’s no good reason to envy youth, not even my own. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t pay. It’s no good to look in the mirror and wish pitifully that I could once again be a ripe little pear, as Colette might put it.
Speaking of which, ripe little pears, these days it’s usually Patti who makes me think about Ginger Cook, not Johnny. Patti will outlast me. Skinny people take a long time to dry up completely, but one consolation for people like me, with more meat on our bones, is that we tend to kick off suddenly with a heart attack or a stroke. I guess the joker in the deck is cancer, but I’ve never been one to be morbid about things like that. Patti might be. Now and then she tells me about friends of hers with cancer. It seems to be on her mind a lot. Maybe it would be on mine too if I had any friends, aside from Johnny and my cat. I’ve had three cats, all named Helen, all strays, all free to roam, and the first two lived to be nearly twenty, despite all the squirrel meat they ate, the predators, the scrapes they got into with other cats, and the cars that tried to run them down. I do get them fixed, which may or may not make them smarter, but it’s easier for me. I couldn’t believe it when Colette’s Claudine drowned her cat’s kittens. Or had her servant do it. The way she talked about it really shocked me, as if it were one of those grim necessities of life, no more regrettable than putting an old dog down or a lame horse. I don’t like to think of myself as queasy. I don’t want to shrink from death. I’ve cleaned my share of fish and fowl, and even helped the judge butcher a deer once. That was a job. We strung it up on a winch in the shed at the lake. I never have but I’m sure I could ring a chicken’s neck or stick a pig if I needed to. I’ll step on a cockroach without giving it a second thought, but drowning kittens is not something I think I could do, even if I thought it necessary. I’m not even sure I could persuade myself to get a servant to do it, if I had one. When it comes to kittens, I’m too sentimental, and it’s not something I’m proud of. The mother cat doesn’t give a shit, as long as you leave her one, at least according to Colette, so why should I? To say they’re adorable simply insults everyone involved, trivializes it, but I can’t deny it either. They are adorable. The trick of course is to not see it, or see it some place separate from where you are going to hold them over the wash tub, and that way you can honestly say you didn’t know what you were doing. But how do you hold a kitten you are going to drown? Do you wear gloves? How long does it take?
Frank’s been dead now about twenty-five years, but every time I see Patti I wonder how often she thinks about it. Not Frank the person. It. What he did. Can she have any pity for him? For Ginger? The coach would be a cinch for sympathy, if she thinks about him at all. Helpless as an old dog, a lame horse, a kitten. Take your pick. Betrayed twice over. Life a dismal failure even without that. Terminally ill. The coach would have been the hardest, if killing people can be ranked. If I’d been Frank, I’d probably have left him alive. The ones you pity the most, always the youngest and the oldest, ironically the ones closest to not living, are the hardest to kill. There’s no point in it. The baby hasn’t fucked you yet. The old person won’t be able to again, but maybe you get on a roll. Collateral damage. Adrenalin makes you high and you start wondering, who’s next? Might as well finish this now, get it all out of my system, and you’re sorry when you run out of victims. Maybe that’s an effective way to commit suicide, work yourself up to it, although a lot of times you hear about them putting it off or making the cops do it. Many killers, or so I’ve heard, sleep an abnormally long time after they’re done, the after effect, I guess, of that adrenalin rush. Can’t get enough, then you crash. I honestly don’t know what Ginger saw in Frank, but I often try to imagine what she saw that day from the couch. A terrifying spectacle, no doubt, a cold as ice approaching force she’d not anticipated. She’d pull up her knees, put her palms out to fend him off, grimace, face horribly contorted, ugly in fear and panic. She knows she can’t control him at that point, but does she know she’s going to die? Probably not. Even when she sees the gun, even when it touches her forehead, she might wince, close her eyes, but she’s still thinking that there’s bound to be a way out of this, as we all do, I suspect, down to the last minute. He won’t do it. He’s fooling me. It’s not fair, Frank. What did I do to deserve this? Just tell me what you want and please don’t kill me. She tries to make herself say those things, beg, plead, reason with him, but she can’t.
In movies they say I don’t want to die and start sobbing, which I like to think I wouldn’t stoop to. I wouldn’t go so far as to demand of myself that I reject the blindfold, smoke the last cigarette calmly, flirt with the attendant, wave gaily goodbye to the firing squad, but maybe I’d have the nerve to keep talking, try my best to talk my way out of it, right down to when the trigger is squeezed. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d have asked for it, on purpose, and I don’t have second thoughts. I’ve looked in the mirror and seen an old lady I don’t recognize, and I can’t bring myself to just end it, I’m too queasy after all, so I do something crazy. For a worthy cause, let’s hope, although the older I get, the harder it is to think of any. And I’m still cautious, which is a kind of fear. I might still play with risk now and then, and I know anything can happen, but the odds are on my side, I don’t really make trouble for myself. Even people who do can usually get it right eventually. My mother and the judge for example. They’re in my camp, on my side of things, unlike those who come to no good end. My awful brothers. The judge’s wife. Frank. Ginger. The coach. I did screw married men, and I suppose I could have been stalked by a jealous wife, but they knew I was just a whore. I insist on that. I certainly didn’t want the men to change their lives for me
Frank’s been dead now about twenty-five years, but every time I see Patti I wonder how often she thinks about it. Not Frank the person. It. What he did. Can she have any pity for him? For Ginger? The coach would be a cinch for sympathy, if she thinks about him at all. Helpless as an old dog, a lame horse, a kitten. Take your pick. Betrayed twice over. Life a dismal failure even without that. Terminally ill. The coach would have been the hardest, if killing people can be ranked. If I’d been Frank, I’d probably have left him alive. The ones you pity the most, always the youngest and the oldest, ironically the ones closest to not living, are the hardest to kill. There’s no point in it. The baby hasn’t fucked you yet. The old person won’t be able to again, but maybe you get on a roll. Collateral damage. Adrenalin makes you high and you start wondering, who’s next? Might as well finish this now, get it all out of my system, and you’re sorry when you run out of victims. Maybe that’s an effective way to commit suicide, work yourself up to it, although a lot of times you hear about them putting it off or making the cops do it. Many killers, or so I’ve heard, sleep an abnormally long time after they’re done, the after effect, I guess, of that adrenalin rush. Can’t get enough, then you crash. I honestly don’t know what Ginger saw in Frank, but I often try to imagine what she saw that day from the couch. A terrifying spectacle, no doubt, a cold as ice approaching force she’d not anticipated. She’d pull up her knees, put her palms out to fend him off, grimace, face horribly contorted, ugly in fear and panic. She knows she can’t control him at that point, but does she know she’s going to die? Probably not. Even when she sees the gun, even when it touches her forehead, she might wince, close her eyes, but she’s still thinking that there’s bound to be a way out of this, as we all do, I suspect, down to the last minute. He won’t do it. He’s fooling me. It’s not fair, Frank. What did I do to deserve this? Just tell me what you want and please don’t kill me. She tries to make herself say those things, beg, plead, reason with him, but she can’t.
In movies they say I don’t want to die and start sobbing, which I like to think I wouldn’t stoop to. I wouldn’t go so far as to demand of myself that I reject the blindfold, smoke the last cigarette calmly, flirt with the attendant, wave gaily goodbye to the firing squad, but maybe I’d have the nerve to keep talking, try my best to talk my way out of it, right down to when the trigger is squeezed. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d have asked for it, on purpose, and I don’t have second thoughts. I’ve looked in the mirror and seen an old lady I don’t recognize, and I can’t bring myself to just end it, I’m too queasy after all, so I do something crazy. For a worthy cause, let’s hope, although the older I get, the harder it is to think of any. And I’m still cautious, which is a kind of fear. I might still play with risk now and then, and I know anything can happen, but the odds are on my side, I don’t really make trouble for myself. Even people who do can usually get it right eventually. My mother and the judge for example. They’re in my camp, on my side of things, unlike those who come to no good end. My awful brothers. The judge’s wife. Frank. Ginger. The coach. I did screw married men, and I suppose I could have been stalked by a jealous wife, but they knew I was just a whore. I insist on that. I certainly didn’t want the men to change their lives for me
Now there’s Johnny to worry about, but I don’t know for how much longer. I know he’ll die before me, and I’ll miss his company and even his persistence. He lists his lovers for me, don’t ask me why, or better yet, why he thinks it will have any effect. I’m trying, he says, to tell you how much you mean to me, relatively speaking, but you don’t love me, do you? No, I’ve told him, but if it’s any consolation, I know I’d be happier if I did. And he takes that as his cue to suggest that we go park somewhere and do it the old-fashioned way, for old times’ sake, as if he might fuck some sense into me, now that we’re in our sixties. An odd idea, I know, but I have a soft heart. I don’t like to say no, and it’s true that the best ones never give up, so yes, I’ve considered it, been sorely tempted even, but it’s gone on for so long now that I’ve become superstitious. Maybe at first it was revenge, my refusal, but now it would be like rocking the boat. Tempting fate. I like things just as they are.
Aside from work and Johnny, I live in my house, a two bedroom frame that I’ve turned into a small town version of my little Tudor. Built in the twenties, it has a big front porch and lots of windows. Right after the judge bought it for me, I ripped up the carpet and got the floors redone. I bought awnings and had the attic fan repaired, which cost an arm and a leg. I bought mahogany bookcases with glass doors. I planted rose bushes out front and have a vegetable garden in the back, but aside from that, I pretty much ignore the yard, as always. I like to see what happens when it’s left on its own. My cat and my yard, and I guess I’m that way in general, except for what pays the rent. The library and my body are as scrupulously kept as possible. My closets, however, are hopeless. I learned a long time ago that as long as you keep buying things, you can look good, and I get tired of most things very quickly. I’m so disorganized that I’ve actually bought the same dress twice, and I’m the same about books and movies and music. I just keep piling on with little regard for the past. I figure that what was good will stay with me, or keep popping up, the good penny, and the same is probably true of clothes. Don’t look back. It’s a sign of old age.
Lucy’s dead too, the star, the cast of one, of Johnny’s films. He’s doing profiles now, on tape, fifteen minute studies of one person, most of them strangers he happens to find somewhere, which solves his finishing block. At least he didn’t just fall right back into the same routine with someone else. He’s never asked me to do it, maybe for that reason. He’s afraid I’d become the new Lucy. Lucy but not Lucy. By now we’d be on part 34 of Lucy II. Plus, I’m afraid we’d wind up screwing. I suspect that there’s something a little too intimate about being filmed like that. Sharing a booth at IHOP is plenty close for me, although sometimes I go up there and we go to a film and get a bite to eat. He often talks about his films, this or that weird person he met the other day, and I talk about my reading. It seems to be an inexhaustable subject for me. Reading. Graduate school almost made me hate it. In fact, I did hate it, which I turned into something useful by losing myself for a while in a whore’s life, learning my craft. How to decorate myself, how to play men better, all the while suppressing, or maybe expressing, my bitterness about how the scholars nearly ruined my life with their craft, their precision instruments. You see, I don’t go too far with the craft thing, I’m not a pedant, which is what enables Johnny and me to have a common ground. Only gradually did I edge back into serious reading, the world that exists in exactly the way I prefer, the only one I’ve ever submitted to willingly. Truthfully. Want to know the first book I read after graduate school? Grace Livingston Hill. I read dozens of her romances before I ran out of steam. It took me five years to get back as far as Jane Eyre, and not entirely through romances. I liked true crime thrillers as well. Ann Rule. Tommy Thompson. Then I went through science fiction, crime novels of all types, biographies, travel, and I’m still always looping back to any or all of those. I have no plan. I could never have been a scholar. I’m too indulgent. Lazy. Isn’t that a truism? All whores are lazy? Reading is too much fun to fuck up. I make myself go with what strikes my fancy or is at hand after I read the last page. Animals. Colette. Biographies. Faulkner. Simenon. Astronomy. Keats. If every book I read was a point in a line, the lines would look like an abstract expressionist painting. No rhyme or reason, no form as form, but maybe some innate pattern of interest. I can’t say that for sure, though, because I don’t care enough. I do look back, I admit, but only for pleasure, not to arrange anything, or find out anything important, which is where Johnny and I meet. We’ve both decided in our separate ways not to look for anything important. My reading like his films has no narrative, yet that’s all I read, narratives, unless you count that vague notion of a pattern of interest. I say I do it just for fun, which is not true, the whole truth, but it’s all I usually want to say. I don’t even have the ambition to read everything, never mind understand it, and there Johnny and I meet again. We agree that ambition is just about the worst thing in the world. We decided that at IHOP one night during a thunderstorm. We almost had to spend the night there it was so bad. Creeks flooded. The power went out for a short time. Cops came in with people whose cars had nearly been swept away. People were frantic, mostly about having to be somewhere, while we were just cozy, snug and smug. Ambition is worse than envy. Maybe not by a lot, I guess one leads to the other, but I think ambtion is the clear winner. I nearly got myself into a serious pickle, bit off more than I could chew, when I was in my whoring prime. Had all this money and thought I should do something useful with it. I decided at one point that I wanted to have an empire. Girls working for me. A high tech office, all the trimmings, and even considered selling my little house, in favor of a luxury penthouse. Celebrity clients, politicians. Not for glory. No ego involved. I was just bored, needed something to do. But thank God I never did it. The taxman would have nailed me to the wall, or else I’d have been tired of it in six months and had a nervous breakdown, lost everything. My accountant, a man who helped me figure out how to invest and pay taxes and not get arrested, talked me out of it. He had a lot of sense. He never stole from anyone except the government, which left him with a spotless reputation in my circles. He said, “Sally, what do you like most to do in the world?” Read and fuck, I told him. No hesitation. “Then don’t do this. You won’t have time for either.” How could I argue with that?
Johnny finally showed some emotion about Frank, a couple of years ago after we’d seen a movie at a university film series. Trouble in Paradise. Lubitsch. He doesn’t hold his booze very well, the main reason I avoid seeing him except for the IHOP, and I guess the movie made him sentimental. I understand that. Comedies always make me cry and I was close to tears myself. He’d just started on his second glass of wine when tears came to his eyes. It embarrassed me. I’d never seen that happen, and there was no preamble. He said, “Sorry. I was just thinking about Frank.” And then he couldn’t say anything else, and I quickly changed the subject. I rattled on about something or other and we were soon hard at it, jabbering away at each other. Johnny and his Kerouac oranges. Me and my Russians. I haven’t lost my touch.
Aside from work and Johnny, I live in my house, a two bedroom frame that I’ve turned into a small town version of my little Tudor. Built in the twenties, it has a big front porch and lots of windows. Right after the judge bought it for me, I ripped up the carpet and got the floors redone. I bought awnings and had the attic fan repaired, which cost an arm and a leg. I bought mahogany bookcases with glass doors. I planted rose bushes out front and have a vegetable garden in the back, but aside from that, I pretty much ignore the yard, as always. I like to see what happens when it’s left on its own. My cat and my yard, and I guess I’m that way in general, except for what pays the rent. The library and my body are as scrupulously kept as possible. My closets, however, are hopeless. I learned a long time ago that as long as you keep buying things, you can look good, and I get tired of most things very quickly. I’m so disorganized that I’ve actually bought the same dress twice, and I’m the same about books and movies and music. I just keep piling on with little regard for the past. I figure that what was good will stay with me, or keep popping up, the good penny, and the same is probably true of clothes. Don’t look back. It’s a sign of old age.
Lucy’s dead too, the star, the cast of one, of Johnny’s films. He’s doing profiles now, on tape, fifteen minute studies of one person, most of them strangers he happens to find somewhere, which solves his finishing block. At least he didn’t just fall right back into the same routine with someone else. He’s never asked me to do it, maybe for that reason. He’s afraid I’d become the new Lucy. Lucy but not Lucy. By now we’d be on part 34 of Lucy II. Plus, I’m afraid we’d wind up screwing. I suspect that there’s something a little too intimate about being filmed like that. Sharing a booth at IHOP is plenty close for me, although sometimes I go up there and we go to a film and get a bite to eat. He often talks about his films, this or that weird person he met the other day, and I talk about my reading. It seems to be an inexhaustable subject for me. Reading. Graduate school almost made me hate it. In fact, I did hate it, which I turned into something useful by losing myself for a while in a whore’s life, learning my craft. How to decorate myself, how to play men better, all the while suppressing, or maybe expressing, my bitterness about how the scholars nearly ruined my life with their craft, their precision instruments. You see, I don’t go too far with the craft thing, I’m not a pedant, which is what enables Johnny and me to have a common ground. Only gradually did I edge back into serious reading, the world that exists in exactly the way I prefer, the only one I’ve ever submitted to willingly. Truthfully. Want to know the first book I read after graduate school? Grace Livingston Hill. I read dozens of her romances before I ran out of steam. It took me five years to get back as far as Jane Eyre, and not entirely through romances. I liked true crime thrillers as well. Ann Rule. Tommy Thompson. Then I went through science fiction, crime novels of all types, biographies, travel, and I’m still always looping back to any or all of those. I have no plan. I could never have been a scholar. I’m too indulgent. Lazy. Isn’t that a truism? All whores are lazy? Reading is too much fun to fuck up. I make myself go with what strikes my fancy or is at hand after I read the last page. Animals. Colette. Biographies. Faulkner. Simenon. Astronomy. Keats. If every book I read was a point in a line, the lines would look like an abstract expressionist painting. No rhyme or reason, no form as form, but maybe some innate pattern of interest. I can’t say that for sure, though, because I don’t care enough. I do look back, I admit, but only for pleasure, not to arrange anything, or find out anything important, which is where Johnny and I meet. We’ve both decided in our separate ways not to look for anything important. My reading like his films has no narrative, yet that’s all I read, narratives, unless you count that vague notion of a pattern of interest. I say I do it just for fun, which is not true, the whole truth, but it’s all I usually want to say. I don’t even have the ambition to read everything, never mind understand it, and there Johnny and I meet again. We agree that ambition is just about the worst thing in the world. We decided that at IHOP one night during a thunderstorm. We almost had to spend the night there it was so bad. Creeks flooded. The power went out for a short time. Cops came in with people whose cars had nearly been swept away. People were frantic, mostly about having to be somewhere, while we were just cozy, snug and smug. Ambition is worse than envy. Maybe not by a lot, I guess one leads to the other, but I think ambtion is the clear winner. I nearly got myself into a serious pickle, bit off more than I could chew, when I was in my whoring prime. Had all this money and thought I should do something useful with it. I decided at one point that I wanted to have an empire. Girls working for me. A high tech office, all the trimmings, and even considered selling my little house, in favor of a luxury penthouse. Celebrity clients, politicians. Not for glory. No ego involved. I was just bored, needed something to do. But thank God I never did it. The taxman would have nailed me to the wall, or else I’d have been tired of it in six months and had a nervous breakdown, lost everything. My accountant, a man who helped me figure out how to invest and pay taxes and not get arrested, talked me out of it. He had a lot of sense. He never stole from anyone except the government, which left him with a spotless reputation in my circles. He said, “Sally, what do you like most to do in the world?” Read and fuck, I told him. No hesitation. “Then don’t do this. You won’t have time for either.” How could I argue with that?
Johnny finally showed some emotion about Frank, a couple of years ago after we’d seen a movie at a university film series. Trouble in Paradise. Lubitsch. He doesn’t hold his booze very well, the main reason I avoid seeing him except for the IHOP, and I guess the movie made him sentimental. I understand that. Comedies always make me cry and I was close to tears myself. He’d just started on his second glass of wine when tears came to his eyes. It embarrassed me. I’d never seen that happen, and there was no preamble. He said, “Sorry. I was just thinking about Frank.” And then he couldn’t say anything else, and I quickly changed the subject. I rattled on about something or other and we were soon hard at it, jabbering away at each other. Johnny and his Kerouac oranges. Me and my Russians. I haven’t lost my touch.
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