McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (11 page)

 
          
 
After the handshake there was an awkward
pause, made slightly more awkward by the fact that the carry-out place whose
window Jean Arber nee Tooley was leaning against was full of GS-12s, many of
whom were staring at us as solemnly and dispassionately as if we had been a
couch.

 
          
 
Like the ones in the auction, these GS-12s
also wore beige trench coats and funny little woolen hats. Unlike the ones in
the auction they had hot dogs or pastrami sandwiches in their hands, eating
them dispassionately even as they directed the same dispassion at us.

 
          
 
"I hate those GS-12s," I said.
"Would you like to take a walk?"

 
          
 
I don't think Jean Arber had noticed that her
distress had provided fifty or sixty civil servants with something to look at
during their lunch hour.

 
          
 
When she looked around and saw them she
blushed and ducked down inside her puffy blue coat. I must say it made an
effective shield. She was a small woman and when she chose to pop out of sight
all that remained visible were her hands and her feet. The effect was so turtlelike
that I laughed.

 
          
 
Then I impulsively grabbed the coat by the arm
and hustled it a few doors down the street.

 
          
 
This effrontery caused her head to come back
up. It rested on a very nice neck.

 
          
 
Unfortunately, Jean still looked miserable. So
far my cheerfulness had had no effect. After all, I could afford to be
cheerful. I had the icon.

 
          
 
"I hate it when I do things like
this!" she said. "There's no excuse, you understand. I knew all along
I wouldn't get it."

 
          
 
"Why not?"
I asked. "After all, I might not have walked in just when I did. If I'd
caught one more red light it would have made the difference.”

 
          
 
"No, I wasn't even the
under-bidder," she said. "I only have seven hundred dollars to my
name and I certainly shouldn't blow it on something like an icon."

 
          
 
"Why not?"
I asked, having often spent my last seven hundred dollars on objects like
icons.

 
          
 
Jean Arber looked guilty. "Because I've
got two kids," she said.
"Little kids.
And
Jimmy is not exactly regular with his child support."

 
          
 
"Oh," I said. I could see that kids
put things in a different light.

 
          
 
"How high did you go?" I asked.

 
          
 
I still had hold of her arm and had begun to
ease us down the street. Without her noticing it, we had begun to take a walk.

 
          
 
"Seven hundred!" she said, spilling
a new freshet of tears onto the slick down coat. "I would have blown every
cent of it! My kids could have been starving by next week!"

 
          
 
I was feeling better and better. At long last
I had found a woman who was just like me. Kids or no kids, I would have done
exactly the same thing.

 
          
 
As we were passing an office supply store Jean
suddenly stopped and looked at
herself
in the window.

 
          
 
"I see a bad mother," she said
glumly.
"A very bad mother."

 
          
 
"Now, now," I said. "If your
kids were really starving you could pawn your coat. It's too big for you
anyway."

 
          
 
She glanced at her image again. "What's
wrong with this coat?" she asked, remorse over her deficiencies as a
mother being replaced by a note of defiance.

 
          
 
"I don't think it's too big," she
said, still looking. "It's down-filled."

 
          
 
"Right," I said, "and it fits
you like a duck blind. All I can see is the top of your head."

 
          
 
She stopped looking at herself and looked at
me.

 
          
 
"Well," she said, "you are
unusually tall. Most of the people in my life are short."

 
          
 
Then she shrugged, and we continued our
unacknowledged walk.

 
          
 
"Of course at the moment the only people
in my life are my kids, which explains why all the people in my life are
short," she said thoughtfully, as if she had just succeeded in explaining
something that had been puzzling her slightly.

 
          
 
"I should have been firm with
myself," she added, ducking her head inside her coat for a moment.

 
          
 
"Can you make yourself stop wanting
something just by being firm?" I asked. "That's real
self-discipline."

 
          
 
"It would be if I had it," she said,
ruefully. "I don't have it. Instead of being firm I make up
scenarios."

 
          
 
"What happens in the scenarios?"

 
          
 
She smiled, colored,
became
lovely. "I get whatever it is I want," she said. "Like the icon.
All the people with more money than me get the flu and stay home, or else they
get stuck in horrible traffic jams on
Connecticut Avenue
and don't arrive in time to bid against
me."

 
          
 
We were walking past a large restaurant.
Instead of being full of GS-12s it seemed to be full of high school kids from
Wisconsin
, come to see their nation's capital. The
tour bus that had brought them was waiting outside the restaurant, waiting to
take them back to
Wisconsin
.

 
          
 
"Have breakfast with me," I said.
"It's your duty as a mother."

 
          
 
"Pardon me?" she said, indicating
that the logic of the statement eluded her.

 
          
 
"I know your kind," I said. "In
fact, I am your kind."

 
          
 
"Now you're telling me you're a
mother?" she asked, looking amused.

 
          
 
"No, a buyer," I said. "Like
you. Therefore I know perfectly well what you'll do if I turn you loose."

 
          
 
She waited curiously for me to tell her what
she'd do.

 
          
 
"You'll run right back into that auction
and buy something you don't really want
,
to make up
for losing the icon."

 
          
 
It was not a particularly discerning remark,
since that is what any auction-prone person would do, but Jean looked at me as
if I were Sigmund Freud.

 
          
 
While she was looking I hustled her into the
restaurant, which may well have contained every teenager in the state of
Wisconsin
.

 
          
 
Jean stared at me from the depths of her coat.
She ordered coffee and Danish. I ordered a huge breakfast.

 
          
 
Now that we were alone and hidden from the
world by several thousand teenagers, we both seemed to feel a little shy.

 
          
 
I put my hat on the table and Jean nervously
reached out a finger and touched the albino diamondback hatband.

 
          
 
"That's beautiful," she said.
"Is that from a rattlesnake?"

 
          
 
Then, even more nervously, she felt the sleeve
of my doeskin jacket.

 
          
 
"Gosh," she said. "That's
beautiful, too."

 
          
 
The feel of my sleeve seemed to cause the
down-filled jacket to lose a few points. She unzipped it, but it still
surrounded her, more or less like a duck blind.

 
          
 
"What would you have bought if I hadn't
forced you in here?" I asked.

 
          
 
"I'd have bought a few trunks," she
said. "They're really my favorite thing.
Wooden
trunks."

 
          
 
I should have guessed it. She had the look of
a trunk person: delicate, wistful,
a
little withdrawn.
I've known many trunk people and
I'm
convinced they
accumulate trunks in order to have places in which to hide themselves away when
the world becomes too much—as sooner or later it will.

 
          
 
However, I wasn't about to offer Jean Arber
that analysis.
Far better to offer her a trunk.
It was
clear she would be offended if I tried to give her the icon, so if I was going
to ply her with anything it had better be trunks.

 
          
 
"Hey, I've got a wonderful trunk in my
car," I said, thinking of my brass-bound traveling trunk. It was one of my
favorite possessions, but then again it was hardly the only brass-bound
traveling trunk in the world. Every rich Englishman of the nineteenth century
had one, not to mention all the Continental nobility.

 
          
 
I could easily get another, and possibly a
better, traveling trunk, but there was no guarantee I could get Jean Arber at
all. She was looking at me with the quiet wariness that is characteristic of
trunk people.

 
          
 
Nonetheless, thirty minutes later I sold her
my little trunk for only two hundred of her precious dollars. Fortunately her
wariness was not as strong as her need for beautiful things.

 
          
 
"Oh, gee!" she said, when she saw
that trunk. It was a lovely trunk, but then it caused Jean to smile her lovely
smile.

 
          
 
By happy coincidence her beat-up old camper—a
relic of her marriage, as she said—was parked right behind my

 
          
 
Cadillac, in front of a row
of gay burlesques, porn theaters, and cut-rate liquor stores.
A number
of black dudes in pimp clothes were eyeing my car respectfully.

 
          
 
I had of course taken the precaution of
removing the Valentino hubcaps, and also a graceful little Brancusi hood
ornament I had acquired in
Scottsdale
. Brancusi had made it for a rich and titled Lesbian who had had the
eventual misfortune to die in
Phoenix
.

 
          
 
Jean was too delighted with her trunk to pay
much attention to my car. She continued to smile while we put the trunk in her
camper, but, as her pen was poised to write the check, the smile was briefly
replaced by a look of mild suspicion.

 
          
 
"Are you just doing this because I got so
upset about the icon
?*
* she asked.