The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (7 page)

Sydney Lawton Square is a park for a transient population; there are no benches. You can walk it end to end in minutes. The architect for the Gateway Condominiums squeezed it in between the barbecue place and the parking garage. You would put quotes around this “park” the way you might send traffic fines to the Hall of “Justice.” But this feeble attempt at nature is walking distance from the club—so that’s where I meet Wesley, at the Fountain of Four Seasons.

The fountain yields dead earthworms, not coins; the worms outnumber pull-tabs, cigarettes, and leaves. At the nearby north entrance to the square there is a faded brick arch with a bronzelike plaque that says
HISTORICAL SITE
. All of it is contrived to suggest that something was once there, but none of it tells you what.

Wesley calls out “Ahoy,” so I know he has made up his mind.

“You think it’s a crime to change your mind?” he says. “Just because you are able to do a thing doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do, does it? Because I could but I don’t want to,” he says as we walk the tarmac path.

He is talking about performing. He’s still funny, and he wants to stop.

“I could keep on,” he says, “and you know what I’d have to show for it? Ten percent liver function and a felony in my bed.”

“I think what counts is timing,” I say. “As long as you try your first choice first.”

Three popes walk into a bar.

A guy in the airport Clipper Club recognized Wesley and bet him he couldn’t get a punchline out of it. They boarded a plane in Honolulu; Wesley had the five hours to San Francisco to make it a joke.
Three popes walk into a bar.
He lost money on this, but I didn’t ask how much. Coming off a tour he is sick with foreign germs. I met him at the gate and drove him straight to the club. It’s what Eve usually did, but she delegated to me. Eve Grant is Wesley Grant’s future former wife.

“Eve cabled the hotel that she’s coming tonight,” Wesley said. “But she won’t laugh.”

“You won’t hear her not laughing over the six hundred other people,” I said. “You’re sold out.”

“But I always know. You
know.
She wants me to buy a boat, is all. After, of course, I have stopped performing.”

“What’s it to her?” I said. “She’s leaving you.”

“Or not,” Wesley said. “Maybe she’s not leaving if I buy the boat.”

“That doesn’t put you on the spot or anything.”

“You talk to her tonight,” he said.

About Eve Grant, Wesley has said that he married the most beautiful woman he ever saw and learned the irrelevance of beauty.

He met her at a club where she danced topless. She told him that Wesley was the name of the first monkey in space. She told him how NASA used that Wesley up and then abandoned him to an animal shelter for destruction. Then a group of women kidnapped that Wesley and took him to a zoo, where he lived out his life in comfort.

Wesley knew the monkey’s name was Steve, but thought it was sweet of her to say otherwise.

With Wesley’s encouragement, Eve stopped dancing and pursued a career in journalism. She thought she would be a natural at it because people always wanted to talk to her. She wrote an article on spec for the Sunday paper and had it returned six weeks later. Wesley asked the editor what was wrong with it, wasn’t it boring enough? Then he cashed a favor with a publicist and got Eve a job at a fanzine doing a monthly column on vanished TV actors. The column was called “Where Are They Now?” but we all called it “Why Aren’t They Dead?”

Wesley signaled the waitress and placed a special order. In a moment, she returned with a bowl of canned peach halves. Wesley took a bottle of Romilar cough suppressant from his coat pocket and poured most of it into the bowl.

“I really admire you,” I told him. “I couldn’t go out there and make people laugh if
I
were sick.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You couldn’t do it if you were well.”

He forced down the reddened peaches.

“But I’ll tell you what you
can
do. You can tickle me,” he said.

Eve usually did that, too. His grandmother started it when he was a boy. She used to tickle Wesley beyond fun, he said, until he felt trapped and helpless and would have cried except that he learned to give in to it, and at that moment felt relief and calm move in.

It is this tickling and giving in that makes him funny, he thinks. Like every kind of recovery, comedy demands surrender.

Wesley cleared away the chairs and squared off in front of me. At the signal I dove at his belt.

I get something out of this, too.

The club manager’s office was open and empty, so we took a couple of drinks in and closed the door. Wesley scanned the shelves of videocassettes, pulled one out, and popped it into the deck. He joined me on the couch.

It was a tape of every low-budget commercial he had made for local affiliate stations. This, Wesley said, is comedy.

The tape kicked in and there he was in suit and tie for the Cherry Hills Shopping Mall over in the East Bay.

“Tell me when it’s safe,” he said, and covered his eyes with a hand.

On screen, he said, “That’s Cherry Hills, between the MacArthur and the Nimitz. MacArthur and Nimitz—both fine men, both fine freeways.”

“Oh, I hate myself,” he moaned.

The machine sizzled with static.

“This next one is Eve’s favorite.”

The product was a deep-penetrating epoxy sealer that you pumped into cracked cement to bind it into one integral piece again. The homeowner in the background eyeing his cracked sidewalk was Wesley’s former partner, Larry Banks. They split up a couple of years ago when Banks ran for mayor on the campaign platform “Anything You Want.”

The machine jammed on the tagline “Cement cracks, this we know.”

Wesley turned off the machine and opened the door. He asked the waitress for vodka.

“I tell you about the night I met Banks?” he said. “My manager brought him to watch me work. Then after the show we all go to this Polynesian place to get stewed. Banks, he was just starting out, he orders this sissy drink for two, only he doesn’t realize it’s for two. So the waiter shows up with this washpan of rum, and Banks is all embarrassed and so on. I told him, comics can’t
get
embarrassed.”

Wesley sat back down beside me and said it was time to change his life. He wanted to. “But how does a person start?”

“Small,” I said. “Start small and work up. The way you would clean a house. You start in one room. Maybe you give yourself more time than you need to finish that room, just so you finish it. Then you go on to the next one. You start small, and then everything you do gets bigger.”

I myself have never done it this way.

“Of course, I could be different,” Wesley said. “Maybe everything I do will get smaller. On the other hand, there’s still the stage, you know—when it’s good up there, when I stand up there and have nothing to say but it has to work! It’s—being human on purpose, it’s falling back on the language in your mouth. It’s facing these people and saying, You think Jesus had it rough! Ah, when it’s good,” he said. “And when Evie’s good, too. When Evie’s there. In the night. Do you know what I’m saying?” he said. “Because she’s the one who is there in the night. Before her I had what you’d call contacts. Like the last one, this one that was hanging around one of the clubs—so I asked her if she’d like to go out. And she said she did. She said she wanted to go all the way out.”

Wesley swallowed vodka.

“Which is something I don’t even understand,” he said. “How about you? Did you ever want to die? I mean, try to
make
yourself die?”

“Only once,” I said. “I drove my car real fast and I was going to have an accident but then I wasn’t going to.”

“Well, not me, not ever,” Wesley said. “I sometimes think this is how depressed the people who commit suicide get. And then I thank God I’m a Leo.”

An hour before the show, Eve met us in the bar. She looked good; Wesley said so, and everyone else noticed right along with him. Marzipan skin, white-blond hair that always looked backlit. Eve would look good in barbed wire.

“God, my jeans are full of me,” Eve said, and undid a narrow snakeskin belt.

A waitress came to our table and asked what could she get us.

“I’m not drinking,” Eve said. “Just a 7UP.”

The waitress asked if Sprite was okay.

“No—then make it a Tab.”

“Eve here used to live next door to the vice president of 7UP,” Wesley explained, “so she’s hip to lemon-lime drinks.”

“So who’s here?” Eve said. “L.A.?”

L.A. is any Hollywood agent who comes north to look at talent.

“Supposed to be, but not,” Wesley said.

“It’s just as well,” Eve said. “They’re such a tease. They fall all over you and then you never see them again.” She sighed. “Just like everybody else.”

She touched Wesley’s shoulder, and he turned in his seat so that she could massage his neck with both hands.

“She’s too good to me,” Wesley said.

“Oh, I’m banking this,” Eve said. “I’m not just throwing it off a cliff.”

A voice broke in behind them. “Who said comedians don’t have groupies.”

It was the owner of the club, the man who would introduce Wesley onstage.

The owner told Wesley to join him backstage. Eve and I blew a kiss and carried our drinks upstairs. We passed people in line at the ticket window. To one side of the box office there was an eight-by-ten of Wesley. It was a publicity shot from years ago, the sincere-looking one. It was the same picture he had on his mantel at home, only there it carries a caption: “He aimed for the top. He started at the bottom. He ended up somewhere below in-between.”

We found the small round table reserved for us up front. Eve offered me the first sip of her Tab so that it would be me who would get the one calorie.

“Look over there,” she said, nodding far right. I looked, and saw four men, twentyish, crowded together, a pitcher of beer on their table. They were novices who played smaller clubs on open-mike nights.

“They’re something,” Eve said. “Watch them when Wesley’s on. When he makes you laugh, look at them. One will say,
‘That’s
funny,’ and they’ll all nod their heads madly and none of them will smile.

“A couple of months ago that little blond one opened for somebody here. He saw us in the bar after and asked Wesley what he thought of his act. Wesley said, ‘Well, Bob Hope can’t live forever.’ The guy took it as a compliment.”

Eve smiled her great rectangular smile.

I asked if she had changed her mind about Wesley, and she said, “Mmmm. Can we not talk about that?”

I worked at my drink. Eve stared at the empty stage. I said I was glad we weren’t talking about
that.

“I have a fondness for him,” she said. “Sometimes it’s weak…Did he seem nervous to you?”

“Always.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “That’s why the boat. That’s why,” the lights went down, “I’m always here.”

The owner of the club bounded onto the stage. He grabbed the microphone off its stand and began to speak. Seconds later the sound came on.

He said, “Every night I come out here and tell you what a great show we have and you know, it’s the God’s honest truth. But tonight I really mean it.”

Eve and I scooted together till our shoulders touched. We heard him say Wesley’s name. A blue spotlight followed Wesley onstage. We heard Wesley tell the audience how great it was to be back in L.A.

In Sydney Lawton Square, the knolls roll carefully into each other, but the trees don’t match, and there aren’t enough of them. Wesley and I pass the doggy station—half a dozen segments of yellow-painted phone pole carved into hydrants, to
receive
water, not give it.

“I did what she wants,” Wesley says. “I got a boat, and we’re leaving the first of whatever comes after July. Hell, I did what
I
want. I’ve always been a seaman at heart—your Conrad, your Old Man and the Sea, your fish. It’ll be good to get out on the waves and sort of expand my limitations. Sink in
water
for a change.

“As for Eve, she’s not sure it will work. But it will. I told her, The trick is this—I do what I want, and you do what I want.”

He laughs at himself. “And because, too, I love her to death. I watch that girl like a movie. ‘Eve Grant Does Three Hours of Laundry.’ I’m watching.”

“Why don’t you tell her these nice things?” I say.

“I could,” Wesley says, doubtful. “But, hey—I guess I’m just a jerk.”

“Can you just up and go?” I say.

“I get residuals, remember—Cement cracks, this we know. And Eve can always apply for Aid to the Totally Disabled. You’ll want to tell her I said that.”