McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (5 page)

 
          
 
"A man your age needs
responsibilities," she said.
"Kids, in other
words."

 
          
 
It was a common theme. Both of my ex-wives had
hinted darkly that our marriage would probably have worked out if we'd only had
children, though, so far as I could see, they were both as frightened of the
prospect as I was.

 
          
 
"
If you don't want none
of your own you could always marry a divorcee," Beulah suggested.
"Plenty of them around, and most of them got kids they don't know what to
do with."

 
          
 
"I don't think I'd know what to do with
them, either," I said, honestly.

 
          
 
Beulah snorted. "Raise 'em to be solid
citizens," she said.
"Decent citizens."

 
          
 
She had a profound belief in the decency of American
citizens in general, though the mostly seedy citizens of her own decrepit
neighborhood had often let her down.

 
          
 
"You want to know something, Jack?"
she said. "I stole them hubcaps.
The one criminal thing
I done in my life, besides taking off my income tax, once in a while."

 
          
 
"My goodness," I said.
"Why?"

 
          
 
"Justice," she said. "I figured
they
was
my due. I worked for the man eleven years.
Some queer would have got them if I hadn't, so I stole 'em in the confusion.
And you finally bought 'em off me, after all this time. Life's funny."

 
          
 
And she laughed at it cheerfully, the laugh of
a decent old lady from
Topeka
who had managed to go only slightly batty.

 
          
 
"It's a good thing
L.A.
is a big town, with fat phone books,"
she said. "Otherwise I'd be eatin' off the floor."

 
          
 
Six months later, when I checked in again,
Beulah was dead, buried, and forgotten, except by me. A family of nine
Vietnamese lived in her apartment. They hadn't met Beulah, but they remembered
her final table.

 
          
 
"Many phone books," the father said,
and the whole small, neat family smiled.

 
          
 
What I supposed, when I finally set off for
Georgetown, was that even a lady who owned three trendy stores might derive a
faint buzz from the combination of doeskin jacket, yellow boots,
albino-diamondback hatband, and Valentino hubcaps, not to mention six feet five
of me.

 
          
 
In the event, Cindy hardly gave the
combination a glance.

 
          
 
"It was a little over-studied," she
said later, with characteristic candor.

 
          
 
When I wheeled the pearly Cadillac into a
parking place right in front of Schlock, Cindy was standing on the sidewalk,
studying her window display, and Harris was standing in her doorway, looking
this way and that.

 
          
 
What really impressed Cindy was that I drove
straight to the parking place as if I’d known it would be there waiting for me,
although it was Saturday afternoon and the rest of Georgetown was a maelstrom
of frustrated parking-place seekers.

 
          
 
"We must be meant for one another or you
wouldn't have got that parking place," she said, without irony, when I
introduced myself.

 
          
 
The fact that someone meant for her had driven
up in a Cadillac filled with steer horns, antelope skulls, Hopi basketry, and
Mexican spurs didn't seem to surprise her.

 
          
 
"What's your sign,
Tex
?" she asked. Then she stepped right
over and linked her arm in mine, studying our reflections in the window of her
antique shop. It was as if she had decided to try out the concept—or at least
the image—of us as a couple, right off the bat.

 
          
 
Then she led me into her store, right past
Harris, who, I now realize, was engrossed in his own dilemma. An hour later,
when she had dragged me off to buy a dinner jacket from a grumpy
old
Russian tailor, she casually informed me that the man in
the doorway was her fiance.

 
          
 
Cindy was one of those near-perfect physical
specimens that sprout, unblemished as tulips, in certain
California
suburbs—Montecito, in her case. Words like
"gorgeous" and "knockout" applied to her precisely. I was
unprepared for such looks in an antique dealer—I guess I had expected to find
one of the humorless, overeducated young ladies who populate the antiquities
departments of museums and major auction houses. Antiquities seldom attract
your giggling ninnies.

 
          
 
My first thought, on seeing Cindy, was that
she was probably into mountaineering—a deduction partly based on her glowing
health and partly on the fact that she had several antique alpenstocks in her
window.

 
          
 
In fact, Cindy was into mountaineering, only
the ascent she had in mind involved the sheer, ice-coated face of American
society—a peak I had never so much as glimpsed, in all my driving.

 
          
 
For the moment she was concentrating on
ascending what might be called the East Face, but there was no doubt but that
hers was the large view. There was an East Face and a West Face, a crumbling
pinnacle or two in the South and a few rockspurs in the southwest, but it was
essentially one mountain, broad at the bottom and narrow at the top.

 
          
 
All this was fascinating to me: I had never met
a beautiful girl social climber before. Cindy was not reticent about her
ambition, either. Reticence was right up there with patience on the list of
things she didn't have.

 
          
 
Looking back, I can see that it was a measure
of my naivete that I could suppose mention of Big John Flint, the trader from
Ohio, would prompt a beautiful social climber to invite me to a Georgetown
dinner party, even though he was, in my view, more remarkable by far than Big
John Connolly, to whom I had sold a couple of Rainey oils. Among Big John
Flint's many triumphs was the discovery, in a warehouse in
Poughkeepsie
, of more than 100,000 pre-1925 Boy Scout
knives.

 
          
 
I had only dropped his name because it was
obvious at a glance that four-fifths of the antiques in Cindy's store came from
him. She went in heavily for overpolished American furniture,
nineteenth-century tin boxes, chums, weather vanes, early tools, duck decoys,
salt-glazed crocks, dining car china, and inkwells, all items Big John
dispensed by the thousands.

 
          
 
I found out later that she bought most of her
stuff from a scout in
Pittsburgh
, who obviously trucked it right in from
Zanesville
. She had never heard of Big John, and
what's more, she wasn't particularly interested when I told her about him, the
next morning in bed. Cindy was more interested in having her fill of salami and
Brie.

 
          
 
"Why are you telling me this?" she
asked, whacking me on the sternum with the handle of the knife.

 
          
 
"Because it could save you money," I
said.

 
          
 
She shrugged her beautiful, lightly freckled
shoulders. If anything was wrong with Cindy's body, only X-rays could have
discovered what. I even liked her feet, big though they were. They looked like
feet that had trod a lot of beaches and worn out numerous pairs of tennis
shoes.

 
          
 
"How much did you pay for those duck
decoys?" I asked.

 
          
 
"Twenty-five apiece," she said, her
boredom deepening.

 
          
 
"Big John sells them for eight."

 
          
 
Now that the point was made, Cindy ignored it.

 
          
 
"If you're just out to get Harris, you
better be careful," she said.
"Pm very protective
of Harris."

 
          
 
This intermittent conversation forced me to
acknowledge what I already
knew,
which is that
relations with women are never simple.

 
          
 
The reason the conversation was intermittent
was because Cindy took time out to eat the lion's share of the salami and most
of the Brie. The fact was she didn't feed me very much, and while I was lying
there watching her eat the mental me reasserted itself over the physical me. I
should have got up, scrambled myself some eggs, and met the day on the level of
the basic appetites, as Cindy had.

 
          
 
I do have the basic appetites, but
unfortunately the mental me is the one with the real staying power. It will
only stand aside for the basic appetites so long, and the minute it returns the
trouble starts.

 
          
 
Cindy was a supremely beautiful woman, and she
sat not three inches from me, having just reduced
a large
salami to a pile of scrapings.

 
          
 
My heart should have soared at the mere sight
of her, but instead my heart sank like a lead turtle. I felt like I had
ingested the lead turtle while Cindy was ingesting salami.

 
          
 
What did it was her indifference to Big John
Flint. How could I be falling in love with an antique dealer who didn't want to
hear the story about Big John? Most of the antique dealers in
America
sat in their stores all day, gasping like
fish out of water for want of the latest news about Big John.

 
          
 
In fact, I had the latest news, which was that
he had bought a small town in north
Georgia
and was dismantling it house by house,
mainly to get the antebellum fireplace moldings. His passion for duck decoys
was as nothing to his passion for antebellum fireplaces. There had only been
twenty-seven people left in the town and all of them were tired of it, so they
sold it to Big John.

 
          
 
So far as I know, Big John Connolly has never
done anything as interesting as buying a town in order to get fifty or sixty
fireplace moldings.

 
          
 
I don’t mean to suggest that the general
public should be expected to judge the two men accurately. The general public
knows nothing of Big John Flint, a quasi-mythical figure even in
Zanesville
.

 
          
 
But Cindy wasn't the general public. She was
an antique dealer, whose stock, though predictable, was far from hopeless. She
had an ivory-tipped elephant goad, for example. I bought it instantly and sold
it to Boog two days later.

 
          
 
In certain moods Boog could be persuaded to
buy almost anything. Objects and people constantly vie for space in his houses.

 
          
 
"Hell, I got a daughter who's an
elephant," he said, handing me $400 and waving the goad playfully in the
direction of Linda Miller, a sweet teenager who happened to be going through a
pudgy phase.

 
          
 
"Get fucked, Daddy!" Linda said
,
whacking at him with a razor strop I had sold him a few
days earlier. It had not yet made its way off the kitchen table.

 
          
 
The Miller kids were scrappers. Linda's whack
caused Boog to spill most of his breakfast toddy on a suit that was the color
of fresh slime.

 
          
 
Micah Leviticus was sitting next to Boss,
eating a bowl of Cheerios and watching an early morning Mary Tyler Moore rerun
on his tiny TV. I glanced at it just in time to watch Mary fling her cap up to
be freeze-framed. The sight seemed to cheer Micah immensely. His tiny face lit
up.

 
          
 
"Look," he said. "It's Mary."

 
          
 
We all looked. It was Mary, sure enough.

 
          
 
"Don't you love her perky smile?"
Micah said.

 
          
 
Boss reached over and ruffled Micah's hair.

 
          
 
"It's because of you I'm fat—it's your
genes," Linda said, still whacking her father. "I wish I didn't love
you!"

 
          
 
Boss
laughed,
a loud
immediate peal of delight that filled the kitchen. It startled Micah so much
that he blinked and looked up from his milk-logged Cheerios, looking almost as
out of it as had the congressman from
Michigan
, when Pencil Penrose's two black pugs
trotted across the seventeenth-century table and began to eat his coq au vin.