Tumbledown (17 page)

If she was still in school and a teacher offered a class in “Maura Wood Climbs the Stairs,” and the teacher was actually good at his job and it was Maura’s only class, she might ultimately be able to account for the weird flux of emotions that made her big and then small, wide and then narrow, as she stepped up the dozen stairs to the lighted windows over the two-car garage. It seemed to take a long time, that climb, as if she were on a rickety ladder that leaned over a dark precipice. The image embarrassed her, and she might have slowed even more to come up with something less melodramatic. Shadows appeared on the curtains, elongated and not quite human in shape. Her climb of that flight of stairs was like a condemned man climbing to the gallows, where maybe the governor waited with a pardon but . . .
Crap,
there was no way
that
was less melodramatic.

At the same time, despite the excitement and trepidation that carried her up the steps, she also understood that she was a teenager with a crush on a boy who liked but didn’t love her, and despite how large Mick Coury loomed at this moment in her mind, he was just a boy with nice eyes and a brain that had to be tuned daily with medications to keep it operating. Which meant what? That even as she felt this was one of the most important nights of her life, she also understood she was embracing the role so tightly that it was slightly phony, like a girl playing house but with details from a specific movie, so she was playing Scarlett Johansson playing house, and she herself was suddenly the least important element in her own play.

She knocked on the door.

Alonso swung the door open. “Maura!” he barked out. “Rhine, it’s Maura!”

Rhine appeared next to him in a freaky suit like a bad carnival ride. “You just missed Karly,” he said sadly. “She was supposed to ride home on my cycle.”

Maura understood what that meant. Mick’s car was gone and Karly was with him.

“Maura’s crying,” Rhine said. “Maura, are you crying?”

She thought to say,
Somebody raped me,
but she didn’t want anyone to know, and it wasn’t even true, was it? It was just a finger, and she didn’t even mind, did she? She had told him to go ahead, and if Mick were here, she wouldn’t even be upset, would she?

Alonso rocked from one foot to the other, staring at Maura. Crying made her into someone he didn’t know. Rhine understood, though. He might cry if he went to a party and just missed Karly. He had almost cried when she left with Mick.

“I didn’t cry tonight, Maura, but I’m a man,” he offered, as words of condolence. “I can give you a ride on my cycle, Maura. It’s parked on this side of the street. You can see it from the porch. Look, Maura. See my cycle?”

Candler and the barefoot woman walked the few blocks to his house, the giant frame-and-stucco ranch-style job with a fatuous front room—
the great room,
the real estate agent called it. The high ceiling had a dopey chandelier that looked like an oversized bird’s nest made of glass. He didn’t turn on the light for fear she would comment on the thing. He had not done much with the place: hung framed prints by the Impressionists, kept the sheets clean, dishes washed. Every other week a Guatemalan woman vacuumed and scrubbed. Before too long, a plague of mortgage failures would cause the value of the house to drop ninety thousand dollars below the amount Candler owed, and he would walk away from it. By that time, the circumstances of his life would be radically altered.

“Home,” he said.

“I’ve got to pee,” the woman replied.

He took her through his bedroom to what the real estate agent had called
the master bathroom
and he had thought
masturbation room,
and even now he wouldn’t let himself say
master bathroom
for fear of saying
masturbation room.
God, he was drunker than he’d thought. He nabbed the framed photo of Lolly and him in Trafalgar Square, tucking it in his underwear drawer. He was ridiculously pleased with himself to have this woman here and have the bed made and condoms in the nightstand. If there were going to be doubts and self-recrimination, they would have to wait for sobriety and daylight. It was, quite obviously, the kind of night that might cause him trouble. Or maybe it was a freebie, a night he’d never have to fret about. He might treasure it as a secret rebellion against the promise of fidelity for the remainder of his life. The message light on his answering machine was blinking. Probably Mrs. Coury, or possibly Mick himself. But, no, it was his cell phone he used with clients. It was likely Lolly then, and he certainly did not want to hear her voice at this particular moment. What was it she called a condom?
A French letter.
He laughed aloud. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet door creaked. Candler pushed open the bathroom door.

“Looking for something?” he asked.

“Evidence of a wife,” the young woman said. He still did not know her name. She had a nice, slightly crooked smile. She turned away from him to flush the toilet.

“Ain’t got no wife,” he said. After a moment, he added, “Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” she said, “sure it does.”

She put her arms around him, leaning against him so that he backpedaled to the bed, falling onto it with her on top of him. Their heads bumped.

“I have a riddle for you,” she said, settling on him, her hands in his hair, his hands lifting her skirt. “How does the Venus de Milo scratch her butt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “How?”

She shook her head. “It’s a fucking mystery.”

They kissed and the clothing came off.

Long after the Haos left and the band quit playing, Billy Atlas and Enrique drank together. When their strength was fortified to the point of falling down, they picked themselves up and approached two women sitting alone at a nearby table.

“
Men,”
one of the women said, as they advanced, “who’d’ve thought we’d meet
men?
”

The other woman laughed.

“So charm us,” the first woman demanded.

She was likely forty, Billy guessed, almost a decade more experienced than he, and the top she wore, which was made of a shiny turquoise material, was too tight, squeezing her breasts up and out as if they had just bubbled to the surface of a mountain lake. Enrique immediately chose the other one, leaving Billy with the talker.

“I’m Billy,” he told her.

“Like the goat,” she replied, adjusting her glossy top. “You’ve got big teeth, don’t you?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“You could use some sun, too. We’re both drinking piña coladas.”

“I’ll get this round,” Enrique said. He knew Billy was out of dough. “Yours is cuter,” Billy’s gal said to the other woman.

“Yours is better dressed,” she responded, which made Billy look appraisingly at his clothing: the suit he had borrowed from Candler’s closet.

“I’m pretty drunk,” he said. “I’m not much of a drinker.”

“I assume you know how things work.” The woman’s mouth had a natural frown. Her whole face seemed defined by lingering disappointment. “You have to pursue me, buy me drinks, give me compliments, put out for a few meals, maybe some flowers if you’re a real catch, and, I don’t know, let’s say a bracelet, and then I let you in my bed.”

“That sounds about right,” Billy said. “Or we could skip that long first part.”

She snorted. “Fat chance.” After a moment she added, “Don’t bother being funny unless you absolutely have to. I’m not all that impressed with
funny.
”

“I’ll try not to be,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t help it.”

“After we go to bed a few times,” she said, picking up the thread, “you’ll act like a shit, and I’ll start feeling bad about myself. We’ll get into an argument at some revolting restaurant where you’ve taken me to save a few stinking pennies. We’ll make up, break up, see a counselor, and so on until we can’t stand the sight of each other.”

The way she looked at him, it was clear he had to contribute something. Her eyes were hopeful while the remainder of her face was steeped in a combo plate of cynicism and low expectations. It occurred to him that she hadn’t offered her name.

“I’m Billy,” he said again.

“Like the fucking goat,” she said.

Her name was Alice, and she worked at Neiman Marcus in leather goods and travel commodities. Enrique made it back with the drinks, but Billy could only stare at the frosted glass of beer, a pretty color but he had passed his limit. He was starting a new job in the morning. Alice had siblings, parents, a condo, a cat, a 401(k) with a hefty number of zeros, a used Rabbit, and plans to take a cruise to Alaska. She thought it likely that she could spend the rest of her life working for Neiman Marcus because she liked leather and had no larger ambitions. That statement came off as a challenge, but Billy let it slide. He offered but she did not want to hear anything about his peyote vision.

“Hearing about somebody’s psychedelic trip is like listening to another person’s dream,” she said, “boring as
hill.
” She wanted to know what he did for a living.

By this time, Billy understood the futility of the truth, and yet he was reluctant to commit an out-and-out lie. “I’m not a psychologist, exactly,” he said. “You want to hear about a patient?”

“As long as it’s not a long story. I don’t like long stories.”

“There was this boy in the army, and he wanted out,” Billy said. “So I wrote a report that got him out.”

“That
was
short.”

“Actually, it’s my friend who’s not a psychologist, not me.”

“You’re not not a psychologist?”

“Not even close to not being a psychologist.”

“What does that make you?”

“I’m not not anything,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Well then,” Alice of Neiman Marcus said cheerily. “Fuck off, why don’t you?”

Billy nodded and stood. “I need to throw up anyway.”

In terms of the physical movement and the specific sensations of the body that accompanied such physical movement, the sex between James Candler and Lise Ray would have fallen into that great, wide, generous category of
so-so.
But a participant’s evaluation of intercourse is never merely a measurement on some orgasm scale, and despite every thing that pornographic movies have taught us over the years, the corporeal whatnot is rarely first in the hierarchy of sexual pleasure, and this was definitely true this particular night for our participants. Candler loved the wicked mischief of finding a willing and attractive woman and bringing her home to his bed just a couple of weeks before his fiancée would arrive and permanently end his wandering. The whole business was just
so
not him and yet he had pulled it off. And Lise felt the liberation that comes from accomplishing a treasured goal of long standing. That may seem a prosaic description given how lengthily she had imagined the encounter, but rarely is it possible for any event to equal such a buildup. In the release from long-held aspiration, there is also an element of wonder, like the virgin thinking,
I’m doing it, I’m doing it;
which is both rousing and a distraction. She enjoyed the sex more as an event than as a passionate act, a marker on the road that proved she was making progress.

The sex, then, had been thrillingly adequate for both.

The lights were out, the sheets a mess, and their naked bodies were perched on the mattress like fallen figurines on a game board. He weighed more than she had imagined but she did not particularly care about his body. Her hip bones showed sharply, much like her cheekbones, and he liked this anatomical symmetry.

She said, “Are you ready to know my name now?”

Some rather elemental part of his personality did not want to know her name, but he could not say that. He nodded, and she told him. “Lease?”

She spelled it.

“What brings you to live all the way out in the county?” He was suspicious of any woman living alone in the Corners. Women out this way tended to have husbands, and while he had no intention of seeing her again, he nonetheless hoped she was not another woman hiding a relationship.

“I wasn’t wild for San Diego,” she said. “The whole beach culture, it’s all body nazis and dimwits, or Elmer from Bumfuck, Kansas, with his wife and their three paleface blobs in swimsuits advertising Corona beer or Johnnie Walker or Microsoft.”

“You’re hardly being fair to Bumfuck,” Candler said, “or Microsoft.”

“Oh?” she said. “You like ’em corn-fed?”

All at once he realized that he hated this conversation.

“Let’s not be so entertaining,” he said. “Let’s just talk. Tell me something about yourself.”

She pulled the sheet over them. He had no idea that she had loved him for what seemed to her a very long time. She intuited that she would have to continuously forgive him for that ignorance, or she would not be able to be with him. She liked that he had stopped the exchange, that he wanted them on a more meaningful conversational road. When they first entered the room, she had noticed the photograph of him with an attractive woman, younger than Lise and prettier, though overly cutesy in her frilly dress and skillful smile. While she was in the bathroom, he had hidden the picture and she appreciated that. (That he was cheating on someone had been evident from the start.) After sex, when it was his turn to duck into the bathroom, she opened the drawer by his nightstand, where she found a stash of mild sex magazines:
Penthouse
and something called
Naked Volleyball,
the porn of generations past. This find also pleased her. It made him seem upstanding in a retro way, without being a complete stooge. When Lise liked somebody, she accumulated evidence that supported her estimation of his character. No matter what the evidence happened to be, she managed to find it endearing. Now he wanted to know something about her. Her evidence would make him flee. She had reinvented herself, turned her life around, become a new person. That might impress him, but it required her to divulge the past, the thorny mire from which she had emerged. Those thorns were sharp.

She leaned down and touched her lips to his chest, a quick kiss, and said, “I like men who can dance. Your turn.”