Tumbledown (15 page)

Candler could not place her, distinguished nothing beyond a nagging déjà vu.

“I like the way you dance,” she said, putting her hands over her heart. She had boldly plopped down upon him, but she didn’t know what to do with her hands. Once upon a time she provided strangers with lap dances, as many as a dozen in a night, and never worried about what to do with her hands. “Most men don’t dance worth a damn.”

“It’s my only talent,” he said.

“We’ll see about that.”

Candler introduced Billy Atlas, saying, “We’ve been friends since grade school.”

“You’d know then,” she said to Billy. “He have any talents besides dancing?”

Billy Atlas displayed his oversized teeth, happy to have a woman speak to him even if she was perched on another man’s thighs. “Let’s see,” he said,
“talent.”
His eyes worked the bar’s dim stratosphere for a moment, as if the details of their long friendship hovered there. Finally he said, “He knows the words to the preamble to the Constitution. We learned it in American history sophomore year.”

“Just the preamble?” she said and whapped Candler’s chest with her hand. “For once I’d like to meet a man who can get to the actual amble.”

Candler laughed. Though he could not have articulated the thought, the woman’s witty line reminded him of Karly Hopper. It was the kind of thing she might have said without irony or the intention of humor. This moment of cleverness pushed open a door in his mind to the cubicle bearing the label
an interesting woman.
His mind held many such rooms, and the one labeled
a worthy person
held Jane Goodall, Clay Hao, Cornel West, and even the Barnstone. But no one ever entered the room labeled
an interesting woman
but women he found both attractive and compelling, and they never stayed there long. They were either tossed out after he discovered their entry was in error, or they were ushered along to the next space, this one with the label
a fascinating woman.
With one exception, no woman ever made it to
fascinating
without first residing in
interesting,
and that exception was Lolly Powell. She burst through all of the barriers and splashed down in
fascinating
in the first moments of their acquaintance.

“What do you want to know about me?” the woman asked him. “Not one thing,” he said. “I’m happy to have you sit anonymously on my lap.”

She squirmed, and the movement of her thighs sent a charge running through him.

“What if I want to know something more about you?” she asked. “He’s a psychologist,” Billy said.

“No, I’m not,” Candler said. “Just a counselor.”

“Close enough,” Billy insisted. “He talks to people.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

It was his turn to stare at the ceiling. He could not tell a total stranger anything substantial about his clients, but he decided he could tell her something. “I have this client we call the War Vet, although he’s really still in the army.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty or so. I don’t remember exactly. Been in Iraq two tours already.”

“I like the story fair to middling so far. What’s happened to him?”

“He came to my office today to finish his evaluation.” Candler described the conversation he’d had with Guillermo Mendez and the man’s impossible request.

“And what have you done?”

He hadn’t done anything, but that made for a lousy ending. He shrugged. “I’m not supposed to talk about clients,” he said and she rolled her eyes as if he were teasing. He thought to look about for the Hao brothers. He ought to get this woman off his lap.

“Too late,” she said. “You have to tell me what report you wrote.”

He told her what she wanted to hear. “Against my better judgment, I recommended that he be kept out of Iraq and finish his duty in the U.S.” He told himself that he could actually write the report that way if he so decided. Simultaneously, he understood that he
wouldn’t
decide to do it. As long as the report was still unwritten, he wasn’t lying, merely pleasing this barefoot, damp-thighed,
interesting
woman. “I’m probably going to catch hell about it later.”

She kissed his cheek. “That story is completely self-serving. It makes you the hero.”

“Got him a kiss,” Billy said. “You expect him to tell stories that make him look bad?”

“I’ve regretted doing it.” Candler was extemporizing now. “I like the kid, but it’s going to blow up in my face. Could cost me a promotion.” He wasn’t so much working the story now as thinking aloud. He imagined making a deal with Mendez, requiring therapy in exchange for the report. Such things could be done, but he would not do them. Nevertheless, he believed he had made an impression on this barefoot woman, which must be what he had wanted to do.

“Don’t you want to know my name?” She put her free arm around his neck, her mouth close to his face. She set her shoes on the bar table and drank from his beer.

“I bet we can guess it,” Candler said, flashing Billy a conspiratorial look. “It’s Agnes, right? Agnes of the Beautiful Legs.”

“I’ll give you a clue,” she said. “It’s unusual. Not weird, just unusual.”

Candler could think of only one name that fit the bill. “Karly?” She rolled her eyes and looked to Billy. “You have a guess?”

“George Bush,” he said. “I know that fucker must be out here somewhere in disguise.”

“You remember Gorgeous George?” Candler asked. He and Billy had been fans of a professional wrestler who went by that name when they were boys.

“She’s
not
Gorgeous George in disguise,” Billy said. “I guarantee it.”

He wasn’t impressed with her, Lise decided. Even with her sitting on his lap, he’d rather reminisce with his friend. She felt a pulse of panic, which made her bold. It opened up the old bag of tricks. “Did you say George Bush or
Gorgeous
Bush? ’Cause people do have nicknames.”

Candler and Billy both reacted to this, Billy by rocking back in his chair and widening his eyes, and Candler by a hardening pulse in his cock, which rested beneath her bare and shifting thighs. It was the opposite of what he had felt this morning, hiding in his car, watching the house of the impaired girl while his body revolted against him. He had felt like a child caught in a disgraceful act. He could almost feel the movement in his mind, as she walked barefoot and with a drunken sashay into the chamber of
a fascinating woman.

Candler was drinking but he was not especially drunk, and he was not simply a mindless male driven by sexual craving. He was flattered by this woman’s attention, and he felt a distinct sexual charge from her, but he did not believe he was in any danger of infidelity. Only this morning—but this morning seemed ages ago, and if the Road Runner had found the seam in the traffic instead of Candler, maybe it would have been the Porsche crashed by the side of the road, and he might not have been as lucky as the other guy . . . What was he thinking?

Billy was speaking, but Candler interrupted. “I punched a guy in the face today.”

“Did he have it coming?” she asked, while Billy said, “You didn’t tell me about that.”

“He was a jackass, but it was a stupid thing to do.”

“How was he a jackass?”

“He was taking advantage of a client, someone who can’t take care of herself.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “I think you spent the whole day in your office prowling the internet for porn.”

He nodded. “
That’s
where I’ve seen you before.”

She laughed but the statement was too close to home, and she felt a sudden appalling fear. She leaned in close to him. Her breath pulsed against his cheek as she spoke.

“Take me out of here,” she said.

Then: “I need shoes.”

The heavily slurred, delicately tinkling imperative and declarative sentences might have marked the end of his body’s controversy; after all, he certainly wanted to go to bed with her. But some marginally sober part of him resisted.

“I shouldn’t,” he said.

“You shouldn’t let me get shoes?”

Billy, looking for a way back into the conversation, said, “Barefoot women are unbelievably sexy.”

She put her arms around Candler’s neck in order to stretch her leg and drop a foot in Billy’s lap. “Your friend likes me,” she said. “Why not you?”

Candler eyed her leg and didn’t reply.

“Why really did you punch that guy?”

“He did the old joke . . .” He put his finger on her stomach, and when she looked down, he ran the finger over one breast and up to her chin.

“Not great humor,” she said, “but I can’t see hitting him. What are you leaving out?”

“He sort of accused me of something.”

“You must be guilty of it to get that angry.”

“Not possible,” he said, but his throat tightened and he barely squeezed it out. To cover, he put his hand on her thigh. When she stood, he stood beside her. Though he did not recognize this woman, he knew her, and that connection, because he could not name it, seemed like something else, possibly something profound. He did not know that the meeting was no accident, and her audacious placement of herself in his lap and her dogged persistence in the face of his resistance were the product not of some general passion or stubborn pathology but of the popular delusional state known as
love.
She had loved him for years. She had followed him to Liberty Corners. Her hair was a different color now and her body was no longer cocaine skinny or silicone voluptuous, but some part of Candler’s mind identified her, situated her in relationship to him, recognized her as a former client—he had called them
patients
back then, and the term better fit her, as she had taken her time seeking him, a patience that was either heroic or preposterous, and this night would go a long way toward saying which. He knew all this and did not know it. Why she spiked certain of his erotic chords remained mysterious to him, but the spikes hit their target. She had been in his care for only an hour, a forbidden, lovely client making eyes at him from across a desk.

Ignorant of the deepest movements taking place inside himself, he became dismissive of his resistance. Why was he pretending that he was anything more than just a man? Why, he asked himself, was he acting as if he were not subject to the follies to which men have always succumbed? Why not have a final fling before the yoke? A tiny, expulsive laugh escaped him, a clank of a laugh like a pin slipping from a hinge, at the absurdity of the rationalizations, as he took her hand, leading her unsteadily to the exit.

At the door, as Mick and Karly were leaving, Rhine reminded her that she had promised to ride with him on his cycle.

“Oh, that,” she said, laughing and touching his pink shirt. “I didn’t mean
that.
”

“I brought an extra helmet for you, Karly,” Rhine said, a despondent tremor in his voice. He held it out to her. On each side, neatly printed in Magic Marker, it said: KARLY’S HELMET FOR RHINE’S CYCLE.

“That’s so sweet,” she said, and hugged him, taking the helmet with her as she gripped Mick’s arm.

The spring night reminded Mick of thunderstorms even though the sky had only a few slight clouds—a terribly distant sky and the same purple-blue of the hydrangeas that lined the walk of the senior citizens facility. He breathed in the lush air, and because Karly was beside him, descending the stairs with him, he discreetly tucked his nose in her hair. She smelled incredibly fresh. It was mint, he realized. She must have a mint shampoo, but when they reached the concrete drive and she spat into the hedge, he realized it was her gum he had smelled.

In the car, she became exuberant. “That was so
fun.
Wasn’t it fun, Mick?” She crossed her legs and took off her shoes, placing them on the floor, beside the helmet.

Mick recalled Peggy Stein, her bare feet in his lap, her knees bent, the skirt riding up her pale thighs. As if she could read his mind, Karly pivoted and touched his knee with her toes.

“Wasn’t it so much fun, Mick?”

Mick agreed that it was fun.

“I like everybody so much,” she said. “I like Rhine. I like Alonso . . .” She ran down the list of guests, ending with Mick. When she said his name, she rubbed her entire instep over his knee.

A thumbprint moon found the piece of sky directly above Onyx Springs and lit the few windblown clouds. The cloud’s light, in turn, backlit the tree limbs that arched over the street above the black asphalt and the moving car, the wobbling leaves casting nighttime shadows.

Mick took his foot from the accelerator to let the car coast through the complicated light. Cars parked in driveways seemed like mottled messages, as if the general design of automobiles was a means of cloaking in metal their vehicular secrets. Some nights, such cagey cars would have made him uneasy, but this night he understood the city was like a storybook forest: alive and mindful and willing to guide him. He understood that his encounter with Ms. Patricia Barnstone—even her name sounded like an enchantment—had helped him see the forest, something in her ordinary friendliness had opened the window, but it was Karly, riding beside him, her bare arches against his thigh, who had made the world come alive. And the living world gave him courage. But was it enough courage? He wanted to tell Karly that he loved her. He wanted to propose marriage.
You ought to do exactly what you want to do,
Ms. Patricia Barnstone had said. How had she known precisely what he needed to hear?

A block before Karly’s street, Mick said what he had wanted to say for months. He told her he loved her. She was describing her session with Mr. James Candler, and how he had been racing his car on the freeway. The story sounded improbable, but Mick had decided to believe every word she spoke, and that faith—along with the night, having talked to Barnstone, remembering Peggy Stein—led him to finally speak his heart. He had been dying to say it for so long.

“Oh, Mick,” she said. “That’s so sweet.”

She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over him, as if to kiss him, but instead she put both her hands on his chest, her face just an inch from his cheek.