Her house was small but decorous. Glass swans on the kitchen table. Cut flowers. A David Hockney photograph.
Henry had a couple of clients considering investing in art. Hockney, he thought. The bastard’s everywhere.
“Cream and sugar?”
He felt a little pang. She’d forgotten already. “Just black,” Henry said.
“The thing is, The Los Angeles Times earns more money in a year than any of the Central American countries it covers. How can you get balanced reporting out of that? I mean, there’s something wrong there, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said.
“I’m telling you, Henry, since taking this new position, I’m learning so much more than I ever dreamed about the media. I’m meeting publishers and editors and TV anchors from both coasts — they all seem to pass through Houston. What about you?”
“I live here, remember?” he said.
“No, I mean what about now? What are you up to?” She sat in the green recliner.
In their recent conversations, her voice had been flattened by the phone. Thank you for choosing American Telegraph and Monotone, Henry thought. She sounded rich now, robust and full of promise.
“I’m in love with a pregnant lady,” he said. His stomach curled. Why had he told her this?
“Yours?”
“No.”
“What is she, then, a charity case?”
He sipped his coffee, with sugar and cream.
“I swear, Henry.” She laughed. “You’re amazing. Always let the other fellow do it, right?”
He tried to laugh with her, to show her there were no hard feelings.
His hand shook, spilling coffee. He felt his face go hot. His feelings were hard. “Damn it, Meg. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
He stood. On his way over, he’d thought of several ways to free the subject, like prying a stone from a dam, but none of them would work. He couldn’t even remember them now. He was too tense. He’d had no practice taking the initiative. “It was my baby too,” he said. “I should’ve had a say.”
Meg blushed. She set her cup down. “Henry …”
“Can you tell me now?”
She looked at him, astonished, for a couple of minutes or more. Her eyes misted. “I did,” she said finally. “I tried to tell you.” The richness in her voice had vanished.
“Only after the fact.” But was that really true? Would a keener man, a man more used to women’s spaces, have discerned more than he had? “God, Meg. I could’ve helped.”
She laughed softly. “You? You, Henry? The kid would’ve been in college before you decided to keep it.”
Henry rubbed his face. “The truth is, Meg, for all your talk about wanting me to do more, you couldn’t step back.” His eyes stung. “It was my baby too.”
She nodded. “Yes. It was.” She started to pour herself more coffee, then set the pot back down. “It wasn’t like me, to be so careless. I was exhausted, that spring, every night after work … what made you realize —?”
He pictured Laura’s face in the clinic. Heard, again, the humming of the ceiling lights: a drizzle of bees. “Was it awful?” he said.
“It’s what I had to do.”
He jammed his hands in his pockets, not knowing what to say.
“For both of us,” she said.
“I understand.” Though he didn’t. Not really. He turned to go.
“Henry? Henry, what about the chair?” She tried to smile. Her face had fallen, like a dark, failed cake. “Aren’t we even going to haggle?”
He stared at the swans on her table. Their necks intertwined. “Take care of yourself, Meg.” He closed the door behind him.
The leaves on the trees outside, in the glare of the streetlamp, made gentling shapes on the walls. Just below the sill, the liquor sign pulsed, purple and green. Kate kissed him. “Happy birthday,” she whispered. She pointed at a dozen pink shoe boxes, stacked together loosely. “Except I’m the one who got gifts. You’re too good to me, Henry.”
“They were a bargain. I had inside info.”
He pulled her to him, in bed. The arc of her belly reminded him of his mother’s old cedar trunk in the back of her closet. As a boy, he’d always wondered what was in it. “You know,” he said softly, “you have to decide.”
Purple. Green. Purple.
She frowned. “I can’t, Henry. Not now. Let’s not talk about it.”
“I want to buy you pumps, more sneakers, high heels, boots — ”
She stroked his chin with her thumb. “Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? One step at a time, okay? I swear, I’ve never met a man so certain — ”
“I’ve never been so certain,” he said, and he was pretty sure this was true.
“Why now?”
He touched her mouth. “I don’t know. Birthdays. I’m aware of getting old.”
“Oh, right.”
He dropped his voice: a gruff John Wayne. “Or maybe, pilgrim, I have the sense that time’s a-wastin’.”
She laughed.
He reached over and put her hand on him.
“God …”
“What?”
“It’s so strange when men get hard. It never ceases to astonish me.”
The leaf-forms on her walls squirmed like little fists. Tomorrow he’d take her to the movie — The Magnificent Seven, her first Western. He’d hold hands with her in the cool, flickering dark. On Saturday, she was meeting Ben for lunch.
Shortly, then, in the baking light of day, she’d have to decide about The Bastard.
Tonight, all he could do was continue to astonish.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
He grasped her shoulders. “I’m thinking, I don’t know how you can resist me.
“I don’t know.” She smiled, smoothed his hair, his brows, his lips. “I really don’t know.”
Tombstone Television
Pedro Alcala died of influenza in November 1922, at the age of three-and-a-half — or so said an overworked general practitioner in the Houston barrio where Pedro’s mother had given birth to him. Two hours after the informal funeral service, Pedro awoke in his coffin. A gravedigger — probably overworked, paid hourly, no doubt, by the city — heard him crying.
He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He told me this the day I first listened to his story, about a year ago. “Cain’t teach nothing to a dead man,” he said. As a dropout, he hung around movie houses. “The movies was still pretty new back then. Innocent. Flashy lights, sexy ladies. I figgered, whatever problems in the world, the movies can fix ‘em.”
After a tour of duty in Belgium during the Second World War, he returned to Houston and devoted his life to erecting a monument in the boneyard where he’d nearly been buried.
Kewpie dolls, deer figurines, tapestries adorn his dusty grave. He’s even hooked up a portable television in a gruta in the middle of the stone, running a triple-ply cord to an outlet in a nearby mausoleum.
I met him shortly after interring my family in the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery. Car wreck. The groundskeeper had warned me about Pedro (“He’s a little spooky, unnerves our older visitors, but you’ll get used to him”).
After we’d introduced ourselves, and I’d told Pedro what I was doing there (I was standing in the rain that day, clutching a dozen roses), he asked about my “people.” “Was it their time to go?”
“Is it ever time to go?” I answered. “I mean, really?” And that’s the last we’ve spoken of my family.
“So you live here?” I asked him, incredulously.