Though Lucy knew that she was really talking to herself, she said, “I guess that when Piggy saw the roses he could have pretended they were there by mistake.”
“That’s figuring that the carhop didn’t know who Barbara Gerrald was,” Nicole said.
“You really think he knew?”
“I don’t want to get into it, but anybody but you would know who Barbara Gerrald is.”
“But it was a surprise — the guy wouldn’t stand around and talk about it, would he?”
“I don’t know how it turned out,” Nicole said. “The thing that might have saved him was that even if the carhop did say something, it probably didn’t make any sense because those guys are so speedy. What a lot of them do is drop acid before they have to start parking the cars. One night when I was out with Bobby Blueballs and his mother, the guy that brought the car had flipped out, and he thought he was in the belly of a whale. It was about a hundred degrees out, and he had the windows up and he was sweating like mad, waving his arms around trying to swim. He sideswiped a Mercedes coming up to the front door. The cops had to smash a window to get him out, and there was an ambulance and everything, and they had to give him a shot of Thorazine and peel him off the wheel.”
Edward and Noonan pulled into the driveway, in Peter’s car. They were picking up Nicole, and they were going into town to see the two o’clock matinee of Gremlins.
“Get her to tell you her story about the new Jonah,” Lucy said.
“Hi,” Edward said. “What story?”
“What story?” Noonan said.
“Jonah?” Nicole said, turning to look at Lucy. “Who’s Jonah?”
10
IN his fantasies, Hildon was a shit kicker. He honestly believed that people who were less intelligent had superior lives, and the more stubbed the toes of their Corfam boots were, the better. Someone had to keep the garages of the world pumping gas. Someone had to think that politicians were going to improve their life. Shit kickers were up front about wanting to be studs and down home with their cooking. Seeing the charcoal glowing in their barbecue grills as he drove by, Hildon felt the same sense of peace and contentment that people feel in front of the candles lit on the altar of the church. He was simply fascinated to live among them, after a lifetime in the Ivy League. He liked it that as he lit his after-dinner Gauloises, they were wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands. Although they barely noticed that he was alive, their existence pointed out to him that he was absolutely absurd. Little Hildon with the heart murmur, who had squinted over Plato’s arguments until he ended up with thick glasses at twelve, now read first-person accounts in Soldier of Fortune of men blowing away gooks and grizzlies. He bent his beer cans before throwing them away, sent $4 for an assortment of mail-order Superstud prophylactics and spread them out over his kitchen table with the reverence of someone laying out the Tarot. The summer before, he and Lucy had driven to another town to go to a summer street festival, and Hildon had totally indulged his fantasies. He had worn a Born to Lose T-shirt, torn jeans, pointed-toe boots with spurs and walked along paring his nails with a file clicked open from his knife. He ate hot dogs without spitting out his gum. He wanted to stop at a bank to apply for a loan to buy a dishwasher. That was the point at which Lucy put an end to it, and drove them back in the borrowed pickup, with Merle Haggard singing Bob Wills’s songs on the radio and a smile on Hildon’s face as though he had just gone to heaven.
Today Hildon stood next to Lucy at the horse auction. He had on a straw hat, a T-shirt full of holes, torn jeans, the boots with spurs. His face was burning in the hot sun. He should have been at work, but what the hell. Who was going to point a finger? The pointed finger was never feared anymore; if anyone saw anything so silly, it was meant as an impossibility come true: E.T.’s magic finger aglow, not the demanding Uncle Sam Wants You point or the crooked finger of the Wicked Witch.
It was Hildon’s theory that nobody was doing what people assumed in the afternoon — that whatever he was doing, millions were doing with him. Nothing erotic happened at night, but everywhere, all over, all day, people were pretending to be Tinkerbell or Mr. T or marine sergeants or Godzilla and being hung by their thumbs and checking into motels with their lovers to put on diapers and play patty-cake until they came. That was why the chief loan officer wasn’t yet back from lunch, why the mechanic called in sick, why the judge threw the case out of court when the prosecutor’s only witness didn’t show. Doctors were checking in late for surgery, accountants were filing extensions, roofers weren’t appearing to repair leaks, bakers burned the bread. All day, people were so lost in passion and fantasy that they could barely get the essentials accomplished so they weren’t fired, the mortgage was paid, the children fed. Discos were a farce, and only geriatric cases ever attempted romantic weekends, following the recommendations of New York magazine. Everything stopped at night, and on weekends. Summer vacation you could forget entirely. At best, it was when people rested from their double, triple, and quadruple lives and took a break from the frantic fun they had all year long. Who was going to envy a cat for having nine lives when huge numbers of people had that many and didn’t have to pay the price of eating Puss’n Boots. How many people were really going to go home and confess an affair? And if they did, how many weren’t going to live to tell? Wives who were told their husbands were in a meeting would never know that they were off at nude archery practice. The real big deals of the world were five eight and blonde. There wasn’t a traffic tie-up on the GW bridge — their husband was tied up, being flogged. Rapists were sleeping with their parole officers. Speeders were propositioning state patrolmen. And all the while, Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, was committing adultery in his mind. Knowing how to move your fingers up and down the stem of your champagne flute was the new equivalent of dropping a glove. Platonic love was about as probable as the last game of the World Series being televised without Instant Replay.
And where, Lucy asked, did he think his wife was? “Sleeping,” he said.
They decided to leave and to eat lunch. As they walked away from the roped-in area, there was a boy, not yet a teenager, holding a pony. The pony was brown and white. It was eating clover, and the boy watched it with a real look of love on his face. Bees buzzed through the clover. In the distance, someone started a lawn mower. Many of the small willow trees that bordered the path to the parking lot had died.
They went to Montville, to the diner he liked. He ordered scrambled eggs and double-fried ham, and toast with extra butter. He was a little surprised when the waitress looked at Lucy, and she just smiled and said she’d have the same and handed back the menus. He put fifty cents in the juke box and played four Charley Pride songs. The Stanley Brothers were singing.
The waitress had a little hint of a smile this time. He thought that she recognized him. In the booth behind them, two men were talking about the train that had derailed in Burlington. “I don’t guess anybody on that train is going to be in much of a hurry to get to Montreal,” one of the men said. They had actually been there — seen the wreck. One of the men preferred Toronto to Montreal. The other preferred planes to trains. They ordered more coffee.