McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (8 page)

 
          
 
"Ho, ho, Cadillac Jack," Boog
chortled, when I walked into his
Cleveland
Park
house the next day. He was lying on one end
of a huge leather couch, looking deeply hungover, although it was
four o'clock
in the afternoon.

 
          
 
"Lookit him," he added.
"Pussy-whipped, weak in the knee joints, and deprived of his common
sense."

 
          
 
"What common sense?" Boss said. She
was sitting on the other end of the couch, wearing a red caftan. The couch was
littered with newspapers, as was much of the floor.

 
          
 
Linda Miller and Micah Leviticus sat on the
floor, playing electronic tennis on the TV set.

 
          
 
A tall, surly-looking man in green fatigues
stood over them, observing their every stroke and occasionally offering advice.
When Boog mentioned my name he strode over and shook my hand vigorously.

 
          
 
"Moorcock Malone," he said.
"Glad to meet you, fellah.
That was a fine thing you
did."

 
          
 
"What thing?" I asked
,
trying to remember some fine action I might have taken. I
knew, of course, that Moorcock Malone was practically the most famous
journalist in
America
, and that he was probably very well informed. Still, it was unsettling
to think he knew more about me than I did.

 
          
 
Meanwhile, he was still shaking my hand and
beaming his approval out of big serious brown eyes, though even while he was
beaming he tried to keep one eye on the tennis game.

 
          
 
"Down, down!" he said, after Linda
had just zipped two aces under the little bar of light that constituted Micah's
racquet.

 
          
 
Micah cast an anxious eye at Boss.

 
          
 
“Boss, I’m getting behind again," he
said.

 
          
 
"What fine thing?" I repeated.

 
          
 
"Why, stabbing those pugs," Moorcock
said.
"A fine thing.
Of course, drowning them in
the finger bowls would have been even better. That would have been an excellent
thing."

 
          
 
"There wasn't much water," I said.

 
          
 
"Oh, there's a way to do it," he
said. "I saw it done once, near Vals-les-Bains."

 
          
 
"Like shit you did," Boss said.

 
          
 
Moorcock Malone looked hurt by Boss's
disbelief. He stood without comment as Linda zipped another ace past Micah.

 
          
 
Then he suddenly furrowed his large brow, in
an effort to better remember the pug drowning. I got the sense that Moorcock
furrowed his brow as normal mortals might fiddle with the little knobs on a TV
set: in order to sharpen the picture, bring out the living detail.

 
          
 
"Nineteen sixty-two," he said.
"I was AP then, of course.
European desk.
Had been in
Berlin
, covering the Wall.
Seems hard to believe now, but the Wall was
a big story then. Jack Kennedy came over. The Wall was always worth a
trip."

 
          
 
Micah Leviticus, down two sets, was darting
anxious glances at Boss.

 
          
 
"Of course, the Wall got old,"
Moorcock said. "The Wall got very old.
Went to
Vals-les-Bains to interview General LaRoche-Jacquelin.
Played a hunch.
You could do that then.

 
          
 
"LaRoche-Jacquelin had a chateau near the
Vals-les Bains. It was a little messy."

 
          
 
"Them chateaus is hard to keep
clean," Boog allowed. "All the hired help run off and become movie
directors."

 
          
 
"Oh no," Moorcock said, looking
surprised. "The chateau was impeccable. It was the situation that was
messy. The General's aide-de-camp was his mistress' brother."

 
          
 
"Shit, I wisht I had an
aide-de-camp," Boog said. "First thing I'd have him do is go around
and whip my kids for me. Bunch of little smartasses
give
me a haid ache."

 
          
 
"The General was tired of his mistress,
and the aide-decamp was tired of the General,'* Moorcock went on. "
Can't blame him for that.
LaRoche-Jacquelin was a mean
fucker."

 
          
 
Boss got down behind Micah and began to rub his
neck. One reason Micah was so far behind was because of his obsession with
trying to put topspin on the httle electronic ball. Electronic topspin was
beyond his manual skills, a fact Linda coolly took advantage of.

 
          
 
"To make a long story short," Moorcock
concluded, "the aide-de-camp drowned the pug while the General was
reciting his favorite passage from the 'Chanson de Roland.'"

 
          
 
Boss looked up for a moment. "For your
information, Bobby," she said, "you don't make long stories short.
You make short stories long."

 
          
 
Despite this criticism.
Moorcock seemed satisfied with his account. He poured himself a drink from a
pitcher of cocktails sitting on the coffee table.

 
          
 
Micah stubbornly continued his quest for
topspin.

 
          
 
"I'd hate like shit to have to listen to
a French
general recite poetry," Boog said.

 
          
 
"Why, when you recite it to every little
hooker who will take your money?" Boss asked.

 
          
 
"Hail, I recite Thomas Hardy," Boog
said.
"A man of wisdom.
A man
who understood the human condition, which is more than can be said for any
French general."

 
          
 
"Match point," Micah said,
hopelessly.

 
          
 
Linda Miller had the killer instinct. She
seemed to be the Tracy Austin of TV tennis. Instantly she rammed home a final
ace and switched the game oflf. Micah turned to Boss for comfort, while Linda
ran and jumped on Boog's stomach, catching him by surprise.

 
          
 
"I heard you call me a smartass,"
she said. "You asked for it and now you're gonna get it."

 
          
 
Everyone at the Millers' seemed to be in a strange,
Sunday afternoon mood, not easy to put one's finger on. Micah was the first to
articulate it.

 
          
 
"What we all need is Mary Tyler
Moore," he said. "I hate days when there are no reruns. I miss her
perky smile."

 
          
 
Moorcock Malone was glugging cocktails, a
little frustrated at not being allowed to finish his story.

 
          
 
"The aide-de-camp got cashiered," he
went on quickly. "Not for drowning the pug, for marrying a Greek woman.
Then LaRoche-Jacquelin got cashiered, for talking back to De Gaulle. That leaves
the mistress, who also got cashiered."

 
          
 
Boog sighed. "The French are a nation of
cashiers," he said.

 
          
 
"The mistress sold art," Malone
said. "She bought back art the Krauts had stolen from the French, only
when she got it back to
France
she refused to cough it up.
LaRoche-Jacquelin denounced her. Finally the CIA got her out, along with the
art, in return for services rendered. She lives in
Nashville
now.”

 
          
 
"My God," I said. "Mrs.
Chalcocondylas! I know her."

 
          
 
Moorcock swallowed an ice cube, so surprised
was he that a cowboy-looking person would have heard of someone he knew from
his days with the AP.

 
          
 
Actually Mrs. Chalcocondylas was quite a jolly
old lady, well known to every scout who had ever gambled a hundred bucks on a
worthless copy of some Old Master. She cheerfully bought them all, cleaned them
up, and fobbed them off for a few thousand dollars apiece on hillbilly record
producers who felt the need for cultural legitimacy.

 
          
 
I had sold her twenty or thirty myself She
lived in a big corny Southern mansion, filled with real Seurats and equally
real Vuillards.

 
          
 
"Jack, you darlink," she would
exclaim, when I pulled five or six crappy paintings out of the Cadillac.

 
          
 
In every possible way she modeled herself on
Marlene Dietrich, and since she was short and fat the accent was the only
possible way.

 
          
 
"Ecole de Titian," she would say,
scraping at a painting with a long red fingernail. "Ecole de
Raphael."

 
          
 
Ecole de Joplin
,
Missouri
,
would have been more like it. Somehow I
could never get across
Missouri
without buying several worthless paintings.

 
          
 
Micah switched the electronic tennis back on
and we all sat watching the little speck of light bouncing monotonously back
and forth across the silent set.

 
          
 
While we were amusing ourselves in that
fashion, Moorcock left abruptly, to catch the shuttle. Linda Miller could not
believe it.

 
          
 
"But he left his girl friend," she
said. "He just left her. He didn*t even go up to say goodbye."

 
          
 
"A blessing in disguise," Boog
assured her.

 
          
 
But Linda was outraged, "How could he do
that?" she asked, thumping her father a time or two for emphasis.

 
          
 
About that time the girl herself wandered in.
She was a tall skinny redhead in her early twenties, dressed in a green satin
running suit. I thought I detected a resemblance to Lilah Landry and I did. Her
name was Andrea, but everybody called her Andy. Andy Landry, Lilah's daughter.

 
          
 
When informed that her lover had left, Andy
expressed only mild dismay.

 
          
 
"Why that big ole asshole," she
said. "We were gonna run."

 
          
 
Then she spread her long legs and began to do
stretching exercises. When those were finished she began to jog in place,
looking thoughtful.

 
          
 
"Actually, I'd rather run by
myself," she said. "Bobby's always stopping to comb his hair."

 
          
 
And she jogged softly out.

 
          
 
"If a man did that to me I’d whack him,”
Linda said, looking pointedly at her father.

 
          
 
About a year later I was leafing through The
New Yorker, trying to satisfy my long-standing obsession with Boog and Coffee.

 
          
 
Everytime I see a New Yorker I grab it and
leaf through the ads, trying to anticipate what Boog might give her next. It's
not exactly that I expect to control Coffee for the rest of her life, and of
course I know she's not organized enough to set a price on herself, even subconsciously.

 
          
 
I think I'm just curious about what might
cause the little locket of her heart to spring open.
A dozen
Czechoslovakian Easter eggs?
An Icelandic poncho?
A Celtic cross from West

 
          
 
Wales
? Or a four-foot-long white aviator's
scarf,
a dashing reminder of the early days of flight?

 
          
 
I don't know, and I may never know, but while
I was trying to figure it out I came across a poem by Micah Leviticus. The poem
was called "Ode to Billy Jean." I don't know much about poetry or
tennis but it was clear to me that Mary Tyler Moore had at least one rival for
Micah's affections. It was a long poem and only the first stanza or two called
back that strange afternoon at the Millers':

 
          
 
Linda, implacable ... aces

 
          
 
Like
Tracy
's,

 
          
 
Seven of them on a windy afternoon.

 
          
 
The tall man did no running.

 
          
 
He was not Pancho Gonzales,

 
          
 
Far too tall to be Pancho Segura ... no

 
          
 
Topspin, despair, a scatter
of papers.

 
          
 
All three cashiered, mistress.

 
          
 
General, aide-de-camp, and the pug

 
          
 
Dead under the table

 
          
 
At Vals-les-Bains.

 
          
 
Billy Jean,

 
          
 
Teen queen of
San
Diego
,
sees

 
          
 
Wimbledon
rising ...