Hush Hush (7 page)

The place was all dark when Bailey got there, and he sat in his car out front, trying to think of a way to put it, something to say to her, looking at the still, sleeping apartment building. But what did he want to say? The small lights in glass at the corners of the building, marking the ends of the three walkways into the interior courtyard, seemed friendly, almost like living things. He turned the key partway in the ignition to get the dashboard clock to light. 4:24. This is not normal behavior, he thought. This is the way I used to behave, before I got a job. Marketing.

On the concrete walk, he stepped as lightly as he could, making his way into the courtyard and then past a half dozen doors to hers. His knock was stuttering, and waiting, he glanced quickly up and back the walk, afraid to see a light come on in some other apartment. Claire’s door swung open a few inches, and she stood blinking her brown eyes at him, holding her shoulders. Air conditioning floated out around her.

“You’re late, Bailey,” she said, and frowned. “You’re way late.” She was dressed in an aluminum colored negligee edged with lace, and floppy white socks. She was wearing her glasses, and Bailey felt suddenly as if he had accidentally touched her, bumped into her. It seemed unfair that he was so close to her and she should look like this, like she had a life, preoccupied. It wasn’t what he had expected, although he hadn’t really expected anything. But it was as if they had agreed ever since their final separation to meet in a certain way, relaxed, not formal, but not en dishabille either, not personal.

“For dinner, I mean,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“I brought your money back,” Bailey said. “All of it.” It
sounded pathetic, but everything else he could think of seemed wrong.

She began to laugh, sleepily, and then nodded, more to herself than to him, and opened the door. There was a gray dog standing beside her. The apartment’s white walls looked faintly yellow in the moonlight. “By all means, then,” she said. “Come in.”

Bailey stood staring at the dog, the same dog from yesterday afternoon, or its twin brother. He was shaking his head, trying to sort it out, trying to separate the scene in the parking lot and Claire, Claire and the dog, four o’clock in the morning and—

“Come in,” she said again, emphatically. Behind her, standing in the tiny hall at the doors to the apartment’s bathroom and bedrooms, was the boy who owned the dog. He was holding a pair of slacks in one hand, barefoot on the wood floor, wearing boxer shorts and brushing his hundred dollar haircut back with his hand, looking at Bailey, who didn’t really know what to do.

Bailey stepped inside and the air conditioning hit him full force. The dog loped back to the blond boy. The boy put his pants on.

Claire, having added a pale blue oxford shirt, tried to shake off Bailey’s stare, looked away, looked back, then again, the same gesture, and failing, started talking.

“Oh stop. It’s the middle of the night and you have come to my place ostensibly to return some money at—” She checked the clock on the microwave on the kitchen counter, squinting. “—at four forty-five a.m., which is not really banking hours, you know, after failing to appear at a dinner at which you agreed to appear and which was bought and cooked as per agreement, if you know what I mean. So stop fucking staring at me.”

“I think you’d just better go,” the boy said.

“Dave,” Claire said, and shot a glance at him.

“Okay,” he said.

“This is Bailey Long,” she said. “My old flame. Love of my former life. Bailey, Dave Boyette, my fiancé.” She slid up on a barstool beside the counter.

“Hi,” Bailey said, and then to Claire, “We ran into each other yesterday.”
Davey
, he thought, still trying to assemble the pieces of the situation into something coherent. The old man called him “Davey.” “Somebody put a cat in my car,” he said, and then he thought, She won’t get that, that doesn’t make any sense at all. “It’s a long story,” he said. “This kid carries a gun, did you know that? It’s in his car? It’s one thing to hang around with teenagers, but
armed
teenagers?”

“Look—” Dave began, but this time Claire only had to look at him. He sighed. “Okay,” he said.

“Bailey, this is Dave Boyette. My fiancé,” she said, and wiggled her toes in her sock, pointing. “The one I told you about.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t take you seriously,” Bailey said.

“You probably should have,” the boy said, advancing into the front room for the first time, passing between Bailey and Claire and walking around the counter into the kitchen, taking a new tack. “Do you want a beer or something? Pepsi?” His dog came with him, shy of Bailey, settling on a throw rug near Claire’s feet.

She slid off the bar stool. “Well, if we’re going to have … conversation,” she said, “I’ll feel more comfortable with some clothes on. I’ll be a minute. You boys can start over, how about?” she said, and walked back into the bedroom.

“She’s a great lady,” Dave said, breaking the silence. “You want something?”

“Beer. A beer,” Bailey said. He sat at the table off the
kitchen by the front window and took the money out of his shirt pocket, set the roll in front of him and counted off eight hundred dollar bills, his debt. “Listen, I’m sorry about the other afternoon. It really wasn’t my cat.”

“So you’re the big gambler,” Dave said. He handed a bottle over to Bailey and took a chair across from him. “I go down there sometimes.”

“No, I’m a department store salesman who plays too much blackjack,” Bailey said, looking around for Claire.

“What’s all that?”

“Money,” Bailey said.

“I could tell that much.” Dave sat back in his chair. “You’re making this harder than it has to be, you know? I’m trying to get along, and I really don’t have any reason to.”

Bailey settled his head in his hand and shook it gently. This must be what it comes to, he thought. Sitting here sick at your stomach, getting advice about life from a teenager. This is how you pay for rank stupidity, for slovenliness, for falling a little short at everything your whole life long.

He looked across at Dave. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be making it hard. That’s money I owe Claire, some of it is, which I am paying her back, which she lent me.” He looked over his shoulder toward the back of the apartment. “Sorry I woke you up. When it is you’re getting married?”

“December,” Dave said. “I wanted to do it right away, but Claire wanted to wait. Her parents are in Fort Worth—but I guess you know them.”

Bailey nodded. He heard a whistle from outside the window, and then again. That’s a bird, he thought. That’s morning. He looked toward the window, but the sky hadn’t begun to light. “What do you do for a living, Dave?”

“Now you sound like her parents,” the boy said. “I’m
second year at the law school. I was managing Bechtold’s—the restaurant—but you know, I needed to make—” Bailey looked up, then followed the boy’s glance to Claire, who had apparently been watching. “That’s better,” she said. Now she was wearing white jeans and a shirt of her own, white, a short sleeveless tunic.

“A Snapple?” Dave said, standing and reaching for the refrigerator door. She smiled, his answer.

Bailey looked at the table in front of him. “I guess I’ll go,” he said. “Sorry to barge in, I don’t know what I was doing. No, I know what I was doing. I just won sixteen grand and I had to tell somebody, I guess.” He picked up his money and stuffed it into his pocket. “Here’s the eight I owe you,” he said and handed Claire the hundreds he had taken from the roll.

She took the money and kissed him, laughing. “You really won sixteen thousand dollars? That’s great, Bailey. Aren’t you happy? You’re going to quit now, I hope?”

Dave let the refrigerator door fall closed and handed her a bottle of what looked like pink lemonade. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Bailey?” Claire said.

“I gotta go,” he said, and nodded to Dave. “It was good to meet you.”

Dave stood to shake hands. The dog got to its feet. “Good to meet you,” Dave said.

“I’ll walk you out?” Claire said. She took a drink of lemonade and set the bottle on the table beside the hundreds, but then thought better of it and picked the bottle up again and walked out the door, leaving Bailey and the boy standing there.

“Good night,” Bailey said and turned and followed Claire outside.

He found her sitting with her lemonade beside her on a
low concrete wall at the edge of the property, near where his car was parked. It was still not quite morning, although the air was wet and birds were already chirping and whistling all around.

“I wanted to show you all this dumb money,” Bailey said, taking it out of his pocket in a ball, staring at it. “Isn’t that pathetic?” He settled beside her on the concrete wall, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “You’re busy doing the watata with the sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.” He threw the money on the grass.

Claire laughed. “And you accuse
me
of making movie gestures?” she said, and slipped off the wall.

“Okay,” Bailey said, “right. Give me that back. Make sure the ink isn’t running on that damn check.”

She handed him the dewy money, yawning.

“All the good gestures have been gestured,” he said, replacing it in his shirt pocket. “So, I mean, what are you thinking? Breeding stock? It’s not only that he’s not me, he’s not even
like
me.”

“You’d like that better?” Claire said, sipping lemonade. The glass bottle clanked when she set it back down on the wall.

“No, I guess not. But he has a dog. He has a gun. He’s a goddamn norm. He’s the enemy.”

“He wants to have children.”

“Oh, Jesus, it
is
breeding stock.” Bailey caressed the concrete wall absentmindedly, then realizing it, lifted his hand to touch his forehead with the tips of his fingers, then clapped his hand on his jeans above the knee. “Look, marry me. We’ll have children, tomorrow, or Friday. I’d like to have children. Can we use a Skinner box? We have these gahunga cat carriers for dogs at the store—perfect for children. Claire?”

She was watching a police car cruising up the street and
past the apartments. The cop, a kid wearing sunglasses even though it had barely gotten light, gave them his best stare as he passed. “Only you are good enough for me, is that it?” she said.

Bailey’s heart sank a little. That was it. It occurred to him for the first time that maybe it wasn’t true, or that maybe the whole notion of “good enough” didn’t have anything to do with it. “No,” he said, weakly. “Don’t be silly.”

“We’re in love,” Claire said. “Whether we meet your specifications or not.”

“I got a new cat,” Bailey said. “Somebody here put it in my car Monday while I was talking to you. When I came out, it was in the car. I tried to leave it here. Then your precious boyfriend drove up and offered to blow it away with his big pistola. I guess he’s a dog person.” He feigned a smile. “I keep trying to figure out when my life ended. It wasn’t when we split up, it was before that. It was when I got that goddamn job, I think. I just didn’t notice because the job itself was distracting. Anything can be interesting for a while. And then you dumped me. It’s like, this money, this sixteen grand? I stopped caring about it ten minutes out of Biloxi. What good is it? I can pay off credit cards.”

“You had another girl,” Claire said. “Did you forget? She was about twenty and very tall, if I remember correctly.” She laughed, then stopped as abruptly as she had started and rubbed her chin, a weird, mannish gesture. “I remember every damn thing about her. She had a stupid name. Dashy. One of her charms, I guess.”

“You don’t feel like your life ended? Really? I don’t mean when we split up.” Bailey looked at her, looked away. “Like what you’re doing now is just so much busy work?”

In her white outfit, in the soft morning light, she didn’t
look so much uncomprehending as horribly indifferent. She shrugged. “I got older.”

Bailey stood up. “All that time, the time when we were together, when I was a lowlife, a slacker, every goddamn day, it was electric. Something wonderful was coming. I remember how wonderful stuff at the grocery store was, those Rubbermaid things and the little hardware display and funny vegetables. Then I got a job and a nice fat salary.” He turned his palms up and gave her a puzzled look. “All gone,” he said.

“Bailey, I don’t—”

“No,” he said sharply, suddenly afraid. “Nevermind. Sorry to bother you with this rot.” He smiled, a quick fake. Who knows what she might have been about to say, he thought. It was okay that she was intending to marry some perfectly ordinary young blond boy and go off to believe with him in everything that in the past they together they had not believed in. It was even okay to no longer believe in the things that they had believed in together. But he didn’t want to hear that it had never happened, that he had understood it wrong, that he had in fact been alone then, too. The idea of it made him shudder. She put her arm around him, leaning in, as if to kiss him, and hesitated. “Bailey?”

“Anyway, this cat is skinny,” he said, “looks like he hasn’t eaten since the Bicentennial. You’ll come see him sometime. He’s black, looks a little like Otto.” He glanced vaguely out into the damp morning air, closed his eyes, and shuddered again. “Still like cats, don’t you?” he said, waiting, urgently, for her kiss.

I had been gambling for more than 36 hours, begged off work the next day, called my wife and told her I wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, hadn’t slept and hadn’t eaten and was about out of money when Richie called me and told me he was coming to meet me at the casino. I was almost at the point where you can’t remember the rules of blackjack, where you have to play standing up, where you look at your cards and you’re trying to remember what the object of the game is, and how to add. I may have been seeing things, too, a little, corner of the eye stuff that wasn’t there, that sort of thing.

Richie brought a friend, a little guy named Freddy Hylo, pronounced High-Low. They showed up around midnight. It gave me the creeps because the only time I had ever heard that name, it was in a story I heard when I was a kid, a story about a guy busting out another guy’s teeth by breaking them on a piece of sandstone in his mouth. And this guy was scary. I’m six-one, 195, and he couldn’t have been more than about five-nine, but he was sort of terrifying. I don’t know what it was, something in his face, his eyes, you looked at him and thought, this is a guy that doesn’t care about
anything
.