“You all right?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you make it?”
“I guess I’m drunk.”
“I’ll get you home. Don’t worry about anything. You can count on me. We going the right way?”
When she began to cry, he was moved by a sudden conjugal sympathy. “I love you so much,” she said, and it was such an unexpected confession that he felt he had never been so happy. Pulling her up the dark stairway to her room, he felt that from now on everything would be different.
16
Billy Tully’s suitcase stood empty in the closet; his coats, slacks and shirts hung from wire hangers, and beside the suitcase and his canvas athletic bag was a carton filled with Earl’s clothes that Oma had taken down from hangers and removed from the dresser drawer where Tully’s gray underwear now was neatly stacked. The underwear he had ceased wearing, the T-shirts because of the heat, the tattered jockey shorts ostensibly for the same reason, but also abandoned for the sake of virility. He had found that hanging free facilitated desire. He was trying to be compatible. Though able enough, he felt he was a lover more from duty than from inclination. With his wife he had not had to try. From her he had met with reprimands for inopportune fondling, for lingering about, trying to embrace her over the sink or on her way between stove and refrigerator, for entering the bathroom to ask if he could join her in the tub. At times his wife had been coyly elusive, insinuating rewards for deferment, at times cross, shouting that he interfered with her housework and allowed her no peace. Then he had been hurt and sulked on the sofa, silently cursing her and grinding his teeth. Eventually he had gone to her with apologies and contrite embraces that again brought on a burgeoning of desire. That desire, that yearning for her, had been the foundation of his marriage, and after she was gone it had not left him. He yearned for her even while holding Oma Lee Greer in his arms.
On nights when Tully could not bear to hold Oma at all, after hours of bickering had made her so repulsive to him that he shrank from touching her, his desire for his wife was acute. Writhing in the darkness, he pined finally for any woman, other than the one beside him. On other, easier, nights, he enjoyed her with indifferent flamboyant vigor. But afterwards he experienced none of the affectionate gratitude he had felt for Lynn. He lay quietly, oppressed by a sense of dwindling life, of his youth dwindling away as he rested beside a woman he should never have known, here so far off the course he knew should have been his that he wondered with panic if it had been lost forever. He could feel no love, and the anguish of a life without it was greater now than when he had lived alone. Then at least there had been the anticipation; now, though there were comforts, there was no hope except in eventual escape, and of that he did not feel capable. When he imagined escape it was always to his wife that he fled, yet when an argument offered the break with Oma he had wished for, he knew, in the soberness of fear, that his wife was gone from him forever, that the course of his life could be no other than what it was, that without Oma he would be alone, that he was lucky to have her and would have to soothe her, agree with her and try in the future not to vex her. He rendered to her the same apologies and declarations he had rendered to his wife, and afterwards he felt a sad sense of sacrilege. Sometimes after Oma had gone to bed he stayed up with the light out and continued drinking by the open window, through which the warm September air, faint music, voices, the sound of shattering glass, the hum of cars and rumble of trucks entered with flashes of light that played over the sleeping form under the sheet, and he felt the guilt of inaction, of simply waiting while his life went to waste. No one was worth the gift of his life, no one could possibly be worth that. It belonged to him alone, and he did not deserve it either, because he was letting it waste. It was getting away from him and he made no effort to stop it. He did not know how. He fought urges to hurl his tumbler out the window. The chair he sat on smashed in his mind against the wall. Yearning for struggle and release, he felt he had to fight, as he had felt years before when he had come home from the army to begin his life and confronted the fact that there was nothing he wanted to do. But then he had had youth, and several service championships. His mother had died when he was a senior in high school, but his father and a brother and sister had still been in town. Now they were all gone, his father remarried and living in Phoenix, the brother in the Marine Corps, the sister living with her husband at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The last he had seen of any of them was over two years ago when he and Lynn had gone to visit his father prior to kidney surgery. But his father had passed the stones in the hospital and, relieved of the doleful prospect of an operation, had soon begun attacking his summoned offspring with the sarcasm of earlier years. A small red-faced, alcoholic cement finisher with brown teeth and an Oklahoma accent, the old man had got up from the hospital bed, gone home and got drunk. On the back porch, after a shouted quarrel with his father, Tully and his brother and his father’s wife had almost fought over the question of how much indulgence a son owed. Since then Tully had written a few postcards, but had seen none of his family. He thought of them with neither fondness nor dislike nor curiosity. He had left them behind, he told himself, the only one still here in the city where they had last lived together.
Tully continued to get up before dawn. Though Oma received monthly compensation for the death of her first husband, he dressed in the dark with the bitterness of one supporting a parasite. While Oma went on sleeping, he ate bread with coffee; if he had time he fried eggs and packed a lunch. Quietly he closed the door and went down the stairs and, as he hurried along lighted streets to the long lines of trucks and buses, a sense of relief at being alone came over him. He rode, sleeping, to peach orchards, where he spent the sweltering days on ladders among leaves filmed with insecticide, a kidney-shaped bucket hanging over his belly from a shoulder harness and thumping his thighs as he ran with it loaded to the train of trailers pulled through the shadows under the trees. By mid-afternoon he was back in the room. In his purple satin robe with BILLY TULLY across the back in white letters, he clopped in unlaced sockless shoes down the hall to the tub.
“You’re so handsome,” Oma said once as he stood in the robe after his bath, combing his hair in front of the mirror.
“I am?” Pleased, smiling, he turned, stretched luxuriously, moved to where she sat, and stood over her in coersive silence, a hand at the back of her head urging her to further homage.
In slacks and a short-sleeve shirt, the top buttons open, the sleeves folded up above his biceps, he took her out to eat. On the days when she was not in the room, he found her in the Harbor Inn, and after an early supper in a café crowded with farm workers, they spent the evening drinking.
One night in the sour twilight of Paris de Noche they met Esteban Escobar with a large young woman. Her hair was platinum blond, the pits in her face obscured by a coating of pink make-up, and in her presence Tully felt restricted by Oma; now that he had her he was no longer free to pick up a woman. The four of them drank together, Esteban at times placing an audible kiss on the girl’s fat white neck. He wore a well-pressed, tan summer suit, a yellow silk shirt open at the collar and immaculate brown and white wingtip shoes. His flat brown face was immobile, his irises as black as his oiled hair and as inexpressive as a bird’s. Tully felt an old ease around him. While never close friends, they had both been at their peaks together, and Esteban had lasted. A Filipino asparagus cutter, he could still draw his countrymen to the arena. He, and the girl beside him, renewed in Tully the belief that his own retirement might only be a protracted layoff between bouts. He asked who was at the gym, talked of past fights, progressed to the subject of mismanagement and eventually to his bout in Panama with Fermin Soto, which he viewed now, for the sake of convenience, as the pivotal event of a long-suspect relationship with Ruben Luna.