I sat there and listened to a local station that played rock and roll in the afternoon. I was nostalgic about rock, because it’d changed, too.
They played a lot of Fabian and the Kingston Trio and, God almighty, novelty songs like “Pink Polka-Dot Bikini.” And then I started thinking about Buddy Holly again and how Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss, of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine, maybe when his brother died. I guess I had too, this melancholy, and somehow Buddy Holly dying at least gave me a tangible reason for this feeling.
Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.
Ruthie came out the front door as I’d expected. I was parked up the street. She looked preoccupied and didn’t see me. She just started walking fast toward downtown, which was three blocks north. It was overcast now and the temperature was dropping and the school seemed shabby suddenly, shabby and old, and the sense of loss I had became anger and I felt cheated then, as if my past really hadn’t been all that wonderful, as if I’d made up a fantasy about my past just because I was afraid to face adulthood. Maybe Joyce Brothers, the psychologist who’d won all that money on the Tv show The $64eajjj Question before everybody found out some of it was a fake, maybe she could explain my sudden mood swings. Nobody in this little Iowa town could, that was for sure.
When Ruthie reached the corner of the school grounds, I was there waiting. She got in.
I said, “Did you try that stuff?”
She stared straight ahead. She looked pale and tired. “It didn’t work.”
“Oh.”
“And it really burns down there now.”
“Maybe-”
“Just don’t give me any advice right now, okay?” She still didn’t look at me.
“Okay.” Then, “How’re you feeling, physically, I mean?”
“I’m too tired to know. Let’s just not talk, all right?”
“All right.”
“Could I turn that off? Why can’t they play anything decent?”
She snapped off the radio. The song had been “The Purple People Eater.” Then, “I’m sorry I’m so bitchy.”
“It’s all right. I’d be bitchy, too.”
“I just need to handle this.”
“Don’t do anything crazy, Ruthie.”
“I don’t think I’m the “crazy” type, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“I’ve got a couple of girls working on a couple of things for me.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. They just both said they could probably come up with something.”
“God, Ruthie, didn’t you hear what happened to the girl they found last night?”
“Oh, I heard, all right. But it was obviously somebody who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“You shouldn’t let anybody except a doctor touch you.”
“It doesn’t have to be a doctor. It’s not a tough thing to do if you know what you’re doing.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, Ruthie.”
“My life’s over if I have this baby.”
“I know, Ruthie. But still-”
“Here we are.”
I pulled over to the curb. Sheen’s Fashion Fountain was the most expensive woman’s apparel shop in town. It was where you bought your girlfriend a gift if it was her birthday or if you’d really, really pissed her off.
She opened the door right away. I had one of those moments when she didn’t look familiar.
Her fear and grief had made her a stranger.
I reached over and touched her cheek. “I love you, Ruthie. You know that. I wish you’d let me help you.”
“I did this to myself. It’s my responsibility.”
“You need a ride home tonight?”
“I can ride with Betty.”
Betty was one of the older clerks. She drove to work and lived about two blocks from Mom and Dad.
“I know some people in Cedar Rapids,”
I said. “They may know a doctor there.”
She leaned over and returned my cheek kiss.
“Thanks. But let me see what my friends come up with first, all right?”
“Just please let me know what’s going on.”
“I promise.”
She got out of the car. I sat there in gloom, gray and cold as the overcast afternoon itself. Then a car horn blasted me. I was in a No Parking Zone and holding up traffic.
Twenty-two
Maggie Yates lived above a double garage on the grounds of a burned-out mansion. One of the servants had lived in the garage during the better days of the manse. Now it was rented out as an apartment. Maggie’s bike lay against the wooden steps leading up the side of the garage and Miles Davis’ music painted everything a brooding dusky color. I had to knock a couple of times in order for her to hear me above the music.
Maggie was dressed in black. Black turtleneck, black jeans, black socks.
Her long red hair was, as always, a lovely Celtic mess and her Audrey Hepburn face was, also as always, a lovely Celtic mess of winsomeness and melancholy.
The walls behind her told the story.
Photographs of Albert Camus, Jack
Kerouac, James Dean, Charlie Parker and Eleanor Roosevelt covered one wall, while album covers of Gil Evans, Jerry
Mulligan, Odetta and Dave Brubeck covered another.
Maggie was the town’s resident beatnik. She was somewhere in her early thirties, had graduated from the University of Iowa and was holing up here, she said, so she could write her novel. A lot of times I’d pull up outside and I could hear her banging away on the portable typewriter that sits on the table next to a large window overlooking what used to be a duck pond. As yet, she hasn’t let me see as much as a paragraph of the book. But she keeps promising that I’ll be the first to read it.
She said, “C’mon in. But I better warn you, McCain. My period started today. And you know I just don’t like to do it when I’m menstruating.”
I tried my best to sound hurt. “You think the only reason I come over here is for sex?”
“Sure,” she said. “And that’s the only reason I let you in. I mean, I get my jollies, and you do, too.”
I guess this was the brave new world Hugh Hefner talks about all the time. You know, frank and open discussions between the sexes about so-e-it. In some ways, I like it. It’s nice coming over here and spending a couple of hours in Maggie’s bed and then just leaving and going back to my own little world. I usually make it over here once or twice a week. She has a great body. She says I’m the only “civilized” person in town except for Judge Whitney, whom she says is a “fascist.” That’s why she sleeps with me, she says, me not being one, a dope or, two, a redneck. She won’t accept compliments or anything remotely like affection. One time I said to her, “You really are beautiful, Maggie.” She said, “Can the crapola, McCain. You’re here because you need sex. That’s all that’s going on here.”
I always felt cheated. I want to say lovey-dovey stuff, maybe for my sake as much as hers. The lovey-dovey stuff is nice to say even if you don’t mean it-or sometimes even if it’s being said to you and you know she doesn’t mean it. It’s like having a smoke afterward.
She said now, “I’m in sort of a hurry.
Pete Seeger’s in Iowa City tonight. I was just getting ready. My ride should be here any time.”
I tried very hard not to look at the sweet smooth curves of that body packed into the black sweater and black jeans. Why not combine a little sex with detection? Hadn’t Mike Hammer shown us the way?
The apartment consisted of a large living room that looked surprisingly middle-class given all the jazz musicians and literary heroes on the walls; a small bedroom with a very comfortable double bed and a kitchen and bathroom big enough for only one person at a time.
“I didn’t know you hung out with Susan Frazier,” I said.