“He’s fine,” Travis said. “He asked about you.” He started the car and pulled away from the curb slowly. The old Chevy’s engine sputtered and tried to die, then caught.
“He did?”
“Yeah, he couldn’t understand why your mother didn’t eat her young.”
“I didn’t have a mother.”
“Do you think she’d claim you?”
Catch grinned. “Your mother wet herself before I finished her.”
The anger came sliding back over the years. Travis shut off the engine.
“Get out and push,” he said. Then he waited. Sometimes the demon would do exactly what he said, and other times Catch laughed at him. Travis had never been able to figure out the inconsistency.
“No,” Catch said.
“Do it.”
The demon opened the car door. “Lovely girl you’re going out with tonight, Travis.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
The demon licked his chops. “Think what?”
“Get out.”
Catch got out. Travis left the Chevy in drive. When the car started moving, Travis could hear the demon’s clawed feet cutting furrows in the asphalt.
Just one more day. Maybe.
He tried to think of the girl, Jenny, and it occurred to him that he was the only man he had ever heard of who had waited until he was in his nineties before going on his first date. He didn’t have the slightest idea why he had asked her out. Something about her eyes. There was something there that reminded him of happiness, his own happiness. Travis smiled.
12
JENNIFER
When Jennifer arrived home from work, the phone was ringing. She ran to the phone, then stopped with her hand on the receiver, checked her watch, and decided to let the answering machine get it. It was too early to be Travis.
The machine clicked and began its message, Jennifer cringed as she heard Robert’s voice on the answer tape. “You’ve reached the studios of Photography in the Pines. Please leave your name and number at the tone.”
The machine beeped and Robert’s voice continued, “Honey, pick up if you’re there. I’m so sorry. I need to come home. I don’t have any clean underwear. Are you there? Pick up, Jenny. I’m so lonely. Call me, okay? I’m still at The Breeze’s. When you get in-”
The machine cut him off.
Jennifer ran the tape back and listened to the other messages. There were nine others, all from Robert. All whining, drunken, pleading for forgiveness, promising changes that would never happen.
Jenny reset the machine. On the message pad next to the phone she wrote, “Change message on machine.” There was a list of notes to herself: clean beer out of refrigerator; pack up darkroom; separate records, tapes, books. All were designed to wash reminders of Robert out of her life. Right now, though, she needed to wash the residue of eight hours of restaurant work off her body. Robert used to grab her and kiss her as she came in the door. “The smell of grease drives me mad,” he’d say.
Jenny went to the bathroom to run her bath. She opened various bottles and poured them into the water: Essential Algae, revitalizes the skin, all natural. “It’s from France,” the clerk had said with import, as if the French had mastered the secret of bathwater along with the elements of rudeness; a dash of Amino Extract, all vegetable protein in an absorbable form. “Makes stretch marks as smooth as if you’d spackled them,” the clerk had said. He’d been a drywall man moonlighting at the cosmetic counter and was not yet versed in the nomenclature of beauty. Two capfuls of Herbal Honesty, a fragrant mix of organically grown herbs harvested by the loving hands of spiritually enlightened descendants of the Mayans. And last, a squeeze of Female E, vitamin E oil and dong quai root extract, to bring out the Goddess in every woman. Rachel had given her the Female E at the last meeting of the Pagan Vegetarians for Peace when Jenny had consulted the group about divorcing Robert. “You’re just a little yanged out,” Rachel had said. “Try some of this.”
When Jenny finished adding all the ingredients, the water was the soft, translucent green of cheese mold. It would have come as a great surprise to Jennifer that two hundred miles north, in the laboratories of the Stanford Primordial Slime Research Building, some graduate students were combining the very same ingredients (albeit under scientific names) in a climate-controlled vat, in an attempt to replicate the original conditions in which life had first evolved on Earth. It would have further surprised her that if she had turned on a sunlamp in the bathroom (the last element needed), her bath water would have stood up and said “Howdy,” immediately qualifying her for the Nobel prize and millions in grant money.
While Jennifer’s chance at scientific immortality bubbled away in the tub, she counted her tips, forty-seven dollars and thirty-two cents’ worth of change and dollar bills, into a gallon jar, then marked the total into a logbook on her dresser. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Her tips and wages provided enough to make the house payment, pay utilities, buy food, and keep her Toyota and Robert’s truck in marginal running order. She made enough to keep alive Robert’s illusion that he was making it as a professional photographer. What little he made on the occasional wedding or senior portrait went into film and equipment, or, for the most part, wine. Robert seemed to think that the key to his creativity was a corkscrew.
Keeping Robert’s photography business buoyant was Jennifer’s rationalization for putting her own life on hold and wasting her time working as a waitress. It seemed that she had always been on hold, waiting for her life to start. In school they told her if she worked hard and got good grades, she would get into a good college. Hold, please. Then there had been Robert. Work hard, be patient, the photography will take off, and we’ll have a life. She’d hitched herself to that dream and put her life on hold once again. And she had kept pumping energy into the dream long after it had died in Robert.
It happened one morning after Robert had been up drinking all night. She had found him in front of the television with empty wine bottles lined up in front of him like tombstones.
“Don’t you have a wedding to shoot today?”
“I’m not going to do it. I don’t feel up to it.”
She had gone over the edge, screaming at him, kicking wine bottles around the room, and finally, storming out. Right then she resolved to start her life. She was almost thirty and she’d be damned if she’d spend the rest of her life as the grieving widow of someone else’s dream.
She asked him to leave that afternoon, then called a lawyer.
Now that her life had finally started, she had no idea what she was going to do. Slipping into the tub, she realized she was, in fact, nothing more than a waitress and a wife.
Once again she fought the urge to call Robert and ask him to come home. Not because she loved him — the love had worn so thin it was hard to perceive — but because he was her purpose, her direction, and most important, her excuse for being mediocre.
Sitting in the safety of her bathroom, she found she was afraid. This morning, Pine Cove had seemed like a sweatbox, closing in on her and cutting off her breath. Now Pine Cove and the world seemed a very large and hostile place. It would be easy to slip under the warm water and never come up, escape. It wasn’t a serious consideration, just a momentary fantasy. She was stronger than that. Things weren’t hopeless, just difficult. Concentrate on the positive, she told herself.
There was this guy Travis. He seemed nice. He was very good-looking, too. Everything is fine. This is not an end, it’s a beginning.