So I look away, into the sure alignments of this airline ticket. Depart. Arrive. Carrier assumes no responsibility for…
For ex-wives who, to be sure of anything, require regular distress. And not enough the subterfuges of students or some incident on the freeway. Violet needs the intimate, twisting jabs of someone close. But her mother is too old and soft to peck as she once did, her twist-expert sisters gone with their ambitious husbands to Bahrain and Fort Worth, her usual friends too feckless or too repressed. Why can’t I comfort her? Make the awful quiet go away? Because the speed and the stamina are all gone. As James Brown used to croon, I’m tired but I’m clean.
Here. I’m here, Violet, and that’s all. I’m all packaged up here, in my viewing booth, in my car, in an air-conditioned unit that Heidi keeps straight for me. Yes, Violet, and it’s so easy to be with her in that cool, dark room. She’s tense and bony as a child. She’s fitful and clammy and disorganized. And when the mucus pours from between her legs, mouth around her own frantic fingers, Heidi doesn’t know who I am — or care. Nothing asked or surrendered. Two creatures following the dictates of their chromosomes.
That’s right, sure. Smoke is just particulate matter in suspension. And the television picture is only a description of light — light hitting a surface.
28
MRS. O. MUST BE feeling stronger. For the second Saturday in a row she’s in among the flowerbeds with clippers and weeding claw. The sun is high and she wears a maroon-and-white baseball cap advertising electrolyte salts for livestock. Strap-on rubber pads protect her knees.
I’m here with my feet propped on the air conditioner, watching her through the window. A slow news day. My pet scorpion slumbers under pine bark, water drips from the showerhead, and all I see when I close my eyes is a plate of shredded lettuce floating in space. The old lady shames me. Come on, slick, get those corpuscles moving.
Into the heat, across the empty parking lot. I squat down slowly and dabble my fingers in the dirt, ask Mrs. O. if she could use some help.
“My biorhythms are very favorable today.” She grins, a display of shoepeg teeth. “I like to get nice and dirty when I can.”
“I could do the edging along here. I’m good at that.”
“Sometimes, when I have to stay lying down, it’s like forgetting who you are…. The size of him! Those worms mean good aeration, you know!”
The sun is like something prying at me, a sharp tool.
“Do you want your package now?”
“Now?”
“With the prettiest stamps all over. You’ll see.”
The stamps, from the American Reptile series, are avocado green. Another book from Violet: Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone. A bold black box on the flyleaf in which the publisher promotes his whole line: “These spirited tales are impressed upon the memory and their reading is productive only of good.”
Without explicit warning, Violet went to Mexico for a divorce. She took me out to dinner the next week, and, in the middle of a monologue on Toltec burial practices, handed over a teller’s check for two thousand dollars.
“Your settlement,” she said. “It would be more, but they rolled back my cost-of-living adjustment.”
Eyes fixed on my mulligatawny soup, I said, “I’m a chiseler, Violet. I held out on you from the start.”
“Relax, you earned it. Hazard pay.”
I wasn’t talking about money, and she knew that. But she was so prepared, so clipped in her attitude. I wanted to explain where the fault lines were, why I’d dodged away, what to avoid next time.
Violet pressed cool fingers over my mouth. “Send me a letter.”
At eleven that night I boarded a Trailways Night Owl Express for Las Vegas. Crescent moon over the Shadow Mountains, high school lovers across the aisle. I smoked until my throat felt torn, surprised to discover so many regrets. At sunrise a wide woman with greasy blonde hair stepped into the toilet with a flight bag and came out dressed as a cowgirl.
Breakfast at the top of the Strip: silver dollar pancakes, keno numbers dropping out of the loudspeaker. The man on the seat next to me held a vibrating device to his throat in order to speak.
“Lost my wife,” he said, sounding like a Martian. “Wouldn’t mind ’cept she’s got the car keys.”
That seemed like my cue to get started. Nothing in the way, so run. I took my divorce money to the cage, came away bulging with chips, found an empty blackjack table where I could play multiple hands. Lorraine, the dealer, kept pulling four-and five-card miracles and I was down six hundred before I could finish my first gratis cocktail. Nice.
I went up a brass escalator, into something called the Red Rooster Room, where dull-eyed union musicians played sleeve-garter jazz. I had some martinis and thought how grim industrialized pleasure could be. Right on schedule. I was lighting the filter ends of cigarettes and talking to myself, about to cross over into perilous nobody-seems-to-care territory. Blessed instinct led me back to the pack. I wobbled south past the Stardust and the Flamingo, where Bugsy Siegel started it all, from crap table to crap table, throwing away ten dollar chips on the field numbers, into and out of Romanesque bathrooms to confirm my hunted look in mirrors. Bells and bars and plums. I finally went broke, quarter by quarter, in a shiny corridor of slot machines, bellowing my relief until ejected by a black security guard.
Next thing, I was crouching by a fountain lit with blue lamps. Above me on fluted columns rose a huge sign announcing the week’s headliners: SHIRLEY BASSEY and JACKIE GAYLE. I crouched and shivered and rubbed my red eyes. A car pulled up on its way to the street and the driver rolled his window down.
“It ain’t deep enough to drown in.”
I peered at his ruffled shirt, velvet bowtie hanging from the near half of its open collar like a festive little animal. I thought about our wedding chapel, Violet’s and mine.
“Scene of the crime,” I muttered.
“Take it to the pit boss, they’ll usually come up with your bus fare home.” He looked away from me to study his teeth in the side mirror, big wide teeth. “Okay, so get in, go ahead. I feel righteous tonight and you look harmless enough. Jesus, do you look harmless.”
The name was Vic. He worked the lounge backed by a trio. Ballads and belt, special material written specially for him. He showed no curiosity about me, probably figuring he knew my story without having to listen to it. He drove carelessly, ignoring lights, to a mini-mall east of downtown and sent me to pick up his order from Joey’s Jade Pagoda. Vic was in a hurry, still five sets to do.
“Drop you and the chow off with Addy, then I got to get in the wind.”
Addy?
She was Vic’s “baby” sister: pallid skin, heavy glasses, beer opener nose, and a quilted satin jacket that matched the spread on the enormous circular bed. She didn’t want to shake hands with me for fear I might give her something.
“Bad kidneys, weak heart,” Vic whispered as I began to unpack egg drop soup, steamed noodles, sweet-and-sour chicken wings.
Addy rolled her eyes and clucked impatiently for her dinner. I couldn’t tell if the fumes made me ravenous or sick.
“Really, no fucking around,” Vic said on his way out. “She keeps a gun under the pillow, and believe me, she’ll use it.”
It was past noon when I woke up on the floor near Addy’s bed, face down in orange shag carpeting that smelled like baby powder. I heard television voices’ debating the international debt crisis, then Addy saying her toenails needed trimming.