Wanda clicked down my drink and glared fiercely into my eyes. “You better not hurt me.”
“I haven’t hurt anyone yet. No reason to think I’ll start with you.”
“When I give myself, it’s total. I believe in taking risks and putting my ego-center out there on the line.”
“I admire your frankness.”
“Honesty is all that matters. I won’t accept the hidden agenda.”
“My agenda is visible.”
“Sure.”
The Montana writer excused himself and went to the bathroom. Wanda and I spent the next two days eating room service food off each other’s genitals.
The lock was putty to the man with a Swiss Army knife. Two screws in the door and two in the door frame and here’s the lock in my hand. The first thing I noticed inside was a twin bed covered by my grandmother’s quilt. A bed hadn’t been among the charged items when Wanda outfitted her writer’s sanctuary.
The rolltop desk and typewriter sat in a film of dust. Left of the typewriter, a ream of paper collected its own evidence of non-use. On the right, a single sheet had been typed on: My heart screams into the black Void of an uncaring Universe. Not a bad start. A number of possibilities leapt to mind for a second sentence. Piles of Cosmopolitan magazines and National Star newspapers lay scattered on the floor, the Cosmo covers more breast obsessed than Playboy ever was, the Stars announcing miracle diets, ugly behavior by the famous, and bizarre copulations between aliens and lower-middle-income children. The Star on the bed, which must have been the last one Wanda read, featured a pair of New Jersey twins who had sex in their mother’s womb and the little girl twin was born pregnant.
The top file cabinet held a half-smoked pack of Chesterfields and two empty peppermint schnapps bottles. Wanda smoked Virginia Slims. I thought of her face. She had these tiny creases of dimples that you wouldn’t notice except when she laughed. Her chest was freckle laden down to the top of her bathing suit. Below that line she was white as a kitchen sink. Her pubic hair had been eight ball black and only slightly wavy, not curly like other women I’d known. Six months ago she’d shaved herself down there. Said it made her feel cleaner.
In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet I found a litter of used condoms. They lay amongst the colored cellophane of their torn wrappers. Some had leaked come out the top onto the dark green of the drawer. Others were tied off at the mouth, like balloons.
I closed the drawer quietly, walked over to the bed, and sat, facing the wall. She’d hand lettered meaningful quotes from writers and tacked them up at eye level.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a personal orgy.
We need myths to get by.
Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.
What did this intellectual dither have to do with screwing the pool man and God knows who else in my family’s home?
I worked open the window and looked down on my backyard, with its magnolias and Georgia hackberry trees sloping to the liver-shaped pool that I would probably never swim in again. The worst of it all was they stood in a circle and urinated on her. What was that supposed to signify?
I lifted Wanda’s Smith-Corona and carried it to the windowsill, where it balanced, keys facing inward. Ever since the third grade, when Lydia gave me her Royal portable, typewriters have been my sacred objects, magic machines that produce beauty a thousand times greater than the sum of their parts. A typewriter can actually give birth.
“Sayonara,” I said, then I pushed her out the window. She bounced off the roof of the screened-in veranda, broke into two sections, and tumbled down the sloping lawn, coming to a rest in the grass, well short of the swimming pool.
My own room had wagon-wheel lamps, a Two Grey Hills Navajo rug, a Molesworth desk, and twin antelope heads mounted on the wall. I lay on top of the Hudson Bay four-stripe bedspread with my shoes on and stared at the ceiling. I thought about baseball for ten minutes—the ’59 Dodgers, my favorite team of all time—then I rolled over and telephoned Lydia.
Hank answered, which was out of the ordinary. He’s usually out at the ranch, irrigating and pulling calves.
“Your mother is in jail,” he said.
Why wasn’t I surprised? “Who did Lydia kill?”
“She threatened the President’s dog.”
Lydia blamed Republicans for everything from urban blight to fluoride in skimmed milk, and she’d never bonded with dogs, but this was beyond cranky feminism.
“Ronald Reagan’s dog,” Hank added unnecessarily. “His name is Rex. She sent a telegram saying if Reagan didn’t appoint a female attorney general, she would assassinate Rex.”
I looked from one antelope head to the other. As a teenager, I’d written a short story in which my antelopes’ eyes hid cameras that recorded Lydia’s movements for a team of former Nazi scientists studying defective frontal lobes in white mothers. An editor at the New Yorker rejected the story with a personal note saying I lacked subtlety.
“Is anyone working on getting her out?” I asked.
‘‘Maurey won’t lift a finger—says a woman who threatens dogs deserves prison. Pud and I performed a ghost dance last night.”
“I mean bail. Lawyers. Reality.”
Hank made a deep chuckle sound. He and Lydia have been a couple for twenty years, a relationship held together by Hank taking whatever Lydia says or does as humor.
“They’d let her out on her own recognizance,” Hank said, “but she won’t go.”
“Because Thoreau refused to leave jail?”
“Because the women’s cell has a black-and-white TV and the men’s is color. Lydia organized a sisters hunger strike for equality.”
Here’s a problem I could deal with. There are so few, I like to jump on them when I can. “Look, Hank, call Sheriff Potter, tell him I’ll donate a color TV to the women’s cell.”
“Lydia will claim you cheated.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell her.”
4
I telephoned Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Co. and ordered a custom bumper sticker that read As God is my witness, I’ll never be monogamous again. Then I extracted Wanda’s Dodge Dart from the garage full of golf carts. Wanda took my Datsun 240Z. She said I owed it to her.
“It’s the least you can do after everything I gave up to support your vapid dreams the last fourteen months,” she said.
“What did you give up?”
Wanda tossed me a look of intense pity and sped off into the Carolina humidity.
I drove the Dart up Wendover Avenue through a high school parking lot to an open-ended football stadium where boys in full uniforms and helmets were running steps. Football practice is what I do whenever I’m worked up over life. I sit at the top of the bleachers and imagine the players raping Lydia. I choose five typical teenage boys and picture them on top of her, behind her, in her mouth. I picture them urinating on her nude body.
The coach stood at the bottom, wearing gym shorts and a cast on his left arm, shouting epithets of failure at the players. I got the idea they’d lost a game the night before and had been sentenced to a Saturday afternoon of running up and down the stadium stairs. The coach called the boys “girls,” meaning it as an insult.