McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (18 page)

 
          
 
Jean looked. "What do you know about
that?" she said.

 
          
 
Then Belinda looked at me coyly.

 
          
 
"Do you like cheeseburgers?" she
asked.

 
          
 
Jean slumped against the door, watching her
daughter without comment, as if amazed that anyone could be so young and alive.

 
          
 
In watching Jean, I momentarily forgot that I
had been asked a question. To jog my memory Belinda crawled over in my lap,
seated herself comfortably on the steering wheel, and grabbed me by both
lapels.

 
          
 
"Don't you ever listen?" she asked.
"Do you like cheeseburgers?"

 
          
 
"Sure," I said. "I like cheeseburgers."

 
          
 
"Then let's go get some," Belinda
said.

 
          
 
I looked at Jean, who was still slumped
against the door, her eyes empty. She was beyond protest, or interest, or
response of any kind. I knew just how she felt.

 
          
 
The cheeseburger decision rested with the
girls and me, and their position was clear.

 
          
 
"Come on," Belinda said, as
confidently as if she
were
eighteen and inviting me to
buy her a milk shake.

 
          
 
Then she stood up, grabbed me by my doeskin
lapels again, and brought two implacable blue eyes so close to mine that our
noses almost touched. All I could see were eyes and curls.

 
          
 
"You do it!" she demanded.

 
          
 
Women know instinctively when they can boss me
around. I know it instinctively, too. The fact that Belinda was a child was
irrelevant to the matter, both in her view and in mine.

 
          
 
"Burgers it is," I said.

 
          
 
Belinda stepped calmly out of my lap
and-seated herself once again beside her mother and sister. She even gave me an
approving pat on the leg.

 
          
 
I was so charmed that for a moment I just sat
and looked at her.

 
          
 
For a moment too long, as it
turned out.

 
          
 
"Jist go!" Belinda said.

 
          
 
At the hamburger stand I dawdled much too
long, listening to the girls prattle and watching them familiarize themselves
with the wonders of my car, while Jean listlessly munched her way through a
footlong hot dog.

 
          
 
"The good thing about having one like
Belinda is that when you don't feel like talking you don't have to worry,"
Jean said, staring at Belinda as if she were something rare and curious, like a
Faberge egg.

 
          
 
"I'll talk," Belinda said, quickly.

 
          
 
"That's why I don't have to worry,"
Jean said. "You'll talk."

 
          
 
"She talks like a faucet,"
Beverly
said. Then she pretended to be turning off
a faucet, not looking at her sister while she did it.

 
          
 
Belinda gave her a cool look, then carefully
selected a French fry, wobbled it around in the ketchup for a bit, and fed it
to me.

 
          
 
"Not enough ketchup," she said
blandly, ignoring her mother's and sister's veiled criticisms.

 
          
 
"You don't have to feed him,"
Beverly
observed. Belinda had positioned herself
comfortably on the soft velour divider between my front seats, assuring that
she and only she had free access to me.

 
          
 
Belinda wobbled another French fry in the
ketchup, and ignored the comment. It was plain that Jean and Beverly relied
heavily on irony in their dealings with her. It may have represented their only
chance, but it didn't work. Irony means little to a natural winner.

 
          
 
Belinda looked at her sister, calmly turned an
imaginary faucet back on, and went on with her prattle, giving me a pat or a
French fry or a big smile from time to time, to keep me under control.

 
          
 
"Thanks,” Jean
said,
when we got back. "I don't know why I ate that hot dog." She opened
her door and got out, followed by
Beverly
.

 
          
 
"I still didn't get to see your
antiques," I said.

 
          
 
Jean looked about to cry. "Oh well,"
she said. "It's just an excuse."

 
          
 
"What's an excuse?"

 
          
 
"My store," she said. "It
allows me to pretend I know how to do something. Who would come here to buy an
antique?"

 
          
 
"Me," I said.

 
          
 
She shrugged. "Yeah, but you're
crazy," she said, peeping in at Belinda, who was waiting impatiently for
the adult talk to be over.

 
          
 
"Coming with us?" Jean asked.

 
          
 
Belinda shook her head.

 
          
 
"He can take us home," she said.
"Because it's not far."

 
          
 
"Maybe he has something better to
do," Jean suggested.

 
          
 
Belinda thought it over, assuming a seductive
look. Then she blew her mother a fine kiss.

 
          
 
"I think I'll just go with him," she
said. "He can take me home."

 
          
 
"Get out of that car!" Jean yelled,
suddenly. A good deal of rage, none of it really directed at Belinda, poured
out with the yell.

 
          
 
Belinda hesitated for a moment, evidently
contemplating a face-off. She read the impersonal nature of the rage as easily
as I had. Then she thought better of it and turned and gave me a hug.

 
          
 
While we were hugging she put her hot little
mouth in the vicinity of my ear.

 
          
 
"I want you to come back tomorrow,"
she whispered.

 
          
 
Then she popped a hand over my mouth, to keep
me from making a reply.

 
          
 
"Can't I even ask why?" I asked,
through her fingers.

 
          
 
Belinda glanced at her impersonally furious
mother,
then
whispered the reason.

 
          
 
"So you can take us to Bask'n
Roberts."

 
          
 
"You mean Baskin-Robbins, don’t
you?"

 
          
 
Belinda looked exasperated. She plainly didn't
welcome quibbles at such a time.

 
          
 
"Jist do it," she said, and hopped
out.

 
          
 
Getting from
Wheaton
to
Georgetown
during the afternoon rush hour is not the
easiest short drive in the country. At
5:30
, the hour at which I was supposed to be at
Cindy's, I was trapped on the Capital Beltway, directly beneath the
Mormon
Temple
.

 
          
 
The temple and my Cadillac were the only white
things in sight. All the cars in my vicinity were dark green, and all the
people in them were men in trench coats and small woolen hats, perhaps the very
GS-12s who had been at the auction that morning.

 
          
 
Already I was getting the sense that
Washington
was a very cellular place. The motif of the
cell recurred. Ail the men in trench coats and woolen hats probably spent their
days in cell-like offices in vast gray buildings. Then when the government let
them out they squirmed like larvae into small cell-like cars and rushed across
the river or around the Beltway to vast gray apartment buildings, where they
inhabited cell-like apartments.

 
          
 
During the day, in their cell-like offices,
they probably spent their time hatching plots the size of microscopic
organisms, directed at people in nearby cells.

 
          
 
While I was stuck beneath the
Mormon
Temple
I bethought myself of Coffee, whom I had
promised to call back.

 
          
 
For some reason I felt guilty at the thought
of her—an irrational guilt, since we had been divorced for years.

 
          
 
Anyway, just as the icepan of traffic began to
break up—with chunks of cars breaking off and swirling down the Beltway for
half a mile or so, until they hit the icepan again—I picked up the phone and
called Coffee.

 
          
 
It was worse than I expected.

 
          
 
"Who are you fucking now?" Coffee
asked,
a wild, un-Coffee-like note in her voice.

 
          
 
Then she began to make sounds on the order of
those a horse makes when it drinks. It was basically a sucking sound. Coffee
hated any breach of bodily discipline, such as tears, vomiting, farts, etc. She
never vomited and seldom cried, and the sounds now coming over the phone meant
that she was fighting tears in the only way she knew, which was to suck them
back up into
herself
before they could fall. It was a
ghastly sound and didn't help my guilt at all.

 
          
 
"Coffee," I said. "Don't do
that. Just go ahead and cry."

 
          
 
The strange sucking continued. It was
something that should have been on the sound track of a horror movie.

 
          
 
The chunk of cars I was in broke loose and
swirled all the way down into the vicinity of
Bethesda
while I was listening to Coffee fight back
her tears.

 
          
 
Finally the sucking stopped. There was silence
on the line.

 
          
 
"Do you feel better now?" I asked.

 
          
 
"No," she said. "I feel worse.
There's never any Kleenex in this office."

 
          
 
"Why would there be? You never cry. You
seldom even blow your nose."

 
          
 
Coffee was always thunderstruck when I pointed
out some obvious fact about her. She regarded it as highly unnatural that I
would notice something she hadn't noticed herself.

 
          
 
"I don't need to blow my nose," she
said. "We have a really good climate here."

 
          
 
I couldn't argue with that. It was so typical
of her mode of reasoning that I began to hope the conversation would become
normal and cheerful. I was too optimistic.

 
          
 
"Nothing will ever happen to me,"
Coffee said suddenly, in a voice of utter hopelessness.

 
          
 
It is the statement I dread most from women,
and now I was hearing it twice within half an hour, for that was what Jean
Arber had meant when she said her antique shop was just an excuse. What she
really felt when she said it was that nothing would ever happen to
her.

 
          
 
"Don't be ridiculous," I said.
"A lot will happen to you. A lot has already."

 
          
 
But my statement was a lie. Coffee was not
being ridiculous, just honest. Not much had happened to her, and unless she got
lucky, not much would. Something had evidently just brought her face-to-face
with her own insignificance, at a moment when nobody was around to distract her
from it.

 
          
 
I had lied because I felt a little panicky. I
didn't want Coffee to sit around
Austin
thinking about her own insignificance. Nor
did I want Jean Arber to sit around
Wheaton
brooding over the fact that she didn't
really know how to do anything except breed natural winners.

 
          
 
Jean herself was not a natural winner, but she
was nice, and while Coffee was not significant, she too was nice, in a vacant
sort of way.

 
          
 
For no clear reason I felt responsible for
their common feeling that life was somehow lacking. This strange, irrational
sense of responsibility is probably responsible for most of my problems with
women.

 
          
 
At bottom I must think of myself as more like
a chemical than a man. Once the chemical me is infused into the life of a woman
the woman ought to feel competent and important, not skill-less and cipherlike,
and if they don't I feel guilty. I realize such
a guilt
is arrogant and sexist, but I still have it. It comes over me whenever I hear a
certain hopeless tone in a woman's voice, even though I know that hopeless
tones are not permanent, and not really my fault, either.

 
          
 
The phone at my ear resonated with silence.
Coffee had just said the truth and was now waiting for me to persuade her it
was a lie.

 
          
 
"How can you say that nothing will ever
happen to you?" I said, falling back on the Socratic
method
.

 
          
 
The virtue of the Socratic
method
,
with women, is that it forces them to talk. Once they talk a little their
natural volatility works in your favor. From talking about despair,
meaninglessness, empty days, and loveless
nights
one
can usually segue into talking about the movies they've seen lately or their
agenda for the coming weekend.

 
          
 
Which is not to say I think
the sorrows of women are shallow.
The sorrows of women are deeper than
mine—but their optimism and resiliency are also deep.

 
          
 
"How can you say nothing will ever happen
to you?" I repeated.

 
          
 
"Because nothing's happened to me for
over a year," she said. "I don't see how anything's gonna
start."

 
          
 
"But things can always start," I
reminded her.

 
          
 
"Not unless there's somebody to start
them," she said, sighing like Eleanora Duse. The depth of the sigh
surprised me. In all the time I'd known her Coffee had never given much thought
to
herself
. She'd only cried once during the breakup
of our marriage and that was because she couldn't get the hippo chair into the
back of her car when she decided to go back to
Austin
.

 
          
 
Suddenly she was heaving tragic sighs. I had
no idea what that meant. So far I had been very cautious in talking with her
about her boyfriends, although when she had one she had no reticence about
talking about them to me. In fact many of our hours on the phone were spent reviewing
the inadequacies of Coffee's boyfriends.

 
          
 
"Has anything happened?" I asked,
phrasing matters as vaguely as possible.

 
          
 
Coffee sighed again. "I haven't told you
about Emilio, have I?" she asked.

 
          
 
She certainly hadn't. Most of Coffee's
boyfriends had names like Richard or Robert, and almost all of them were
lawyers. Somehow Emilio didn't sound like a lawyer. It was obvious things were
changing, down in
Austin
. "Who's Emilio?" I ventured.

 
          
 
"I guess he's my boyfriend," she
said.

 
          
 
"You guess?"

 
          
 
"Okay," she said. "You don't
have to jump down my throat.

 
          
 
"I've only been living with him a
month," she added. "I thought you'd figure it out, but you didn't."

 
          
 
"Coffee," I said, "I haven't
seen you in two months. How was I supposed to figure out you were living with
someone named Emilio if you didn't bother to mention him?"

 
          
 
"You could have figured it out," she
said, in her wannest tones.

 
          
 
I knew what was coming, and a second later it
came.

 
          
 
"I guess you just don't care
anymore," she said. "When we first broke up you figured out things
like that even when I didn't want you to.

 
          
 
"You figured out practically every one of
my boyfriends within a week," she added, with a bit more spirit. The
reason for the spirit was because she had just summed up her case against me
with incontrovertible logic: If I had stopped deducing the identies of her
lovers it could only be because I had stopped loving her myself.

 
          
 
Actually, the reason the identities of her
lovers had been easy to guess was because they had all been named Richard or
Robert.

 
          
 
"Most of your boyfriends have been
Texans," I said, in my own defense. "It's easier to sense Texans. My
antennae don't work so well where Italians are concerned."

 
          
 
"Oh," Coffee said. The point seemed
to exonerate me to some extent.

 
          
 
"He is Italian, isn't he?"

 
          
 
"Yeah," she said. "He comes
from some place called
Milan
."

 
          
 
It occurred to me that Italians made very fine
modem furniture, including chairs and lamps. They had probably decided
Austin
was where the money was and shipped over a
lot of chairs and lamps. Emilio had probably won Coffee's absentminded favors
with some Milanese abstraction he had convinced her was a chair.