Tumbledown (33 page)

He did a triple spin, three full revolutions, and felt the incredible desire to lean forward and kiss Kat as a way to punctuate the sentence his body was conveying to the woman who was not his fiancée and who was dancing with his best friend.

He did not kiss the woman dancing with him, but his able, shifting feet were on fire.

Slow-dancing at the Phantom Limb, his arms wrapped around a gorgeous woman, high as a communications satellite, Billy Atlas was ready to marry Lise. He didn’t know her last name, but he was ready to say
I do.
His divorce was final, and what the hey.

He hadn’t had sex with her. This was their first date, and he couldn’t help but notice the flickering glances in Jimmy’s direction. Okay, so what? Lise had called
him,
hadn’t she? She was here and in
his
arms (when the music was slow), and eventually, he had faith or wanted to believe or could at least imagine that she would want to be with him for the sake of him alone. Or not. He was a realist. He was thirty-three years old, and he’d had non professional sex with only two women. One of them, twenty-five times; the other, just the once. He’d had a girlfriend in middle school for a month (hand-holding while they were walking around campus was the gist of their relationship), and since then (excluding the citizenship angle) nothing. The long ago girlfriend was named Paulina Peters, and his mother had told him that she lived in the San Diego area now, too.
Hope springs eternal,
he thought. Paulina had dumped him when she found out he ate only Cheerios and potato chips. That was his diet for years, with the occasional baked potato and a morning glass of orange juice. Other foods were disgusting to him, and he could not stand to put them to his mouth. Jimmy introduced him to pizza and insisted he eat a slice, and of course, he liked it, even though it was a Pizza Shack pie—the worst restaurant pizza in the country. Billy had eaten pizza almost exclusively for six months, and by the end of that period he refused to eat Pizza Shack or frozen pies, preferring gourmet pizzas. He taught Jimmy the difference between good pizza and bad. Years later, as an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, Billy became a pizza chef. He genuinely knew pizza. It occurred to him that he could have gotten work again as a pizza chef, but the idea did not appeal to him. A step backward. He was now a man with health insurance, which had to be one of the sexiest things a guy could have these days.

Lise was a fantastic dancer. Most women were good dancers. He wasn’t. He was still looking for exactly what it was that he was good at that mattered. Knowing pizza lengthened the list of foods he was willing to eat, and now he liked a lot of different foods; also it had provided gainful employment. But unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life smelling of oregano, it wasn’t something that mattered beyond a single stage in his life. Not that being a good dancer particularly mattered, although it had gotten Jimmy laid at least a dozen times, and maybe, who knows, fifty or a hundred times. Maybe Billy had a lousy sense of what was going to matter.

For example, chess. Jimmy got a chess set from some dotty aunt of his when they were in high school, and he invited Billy to play and destroyed him. Billy didn’t like getting destroyed, and it seemed like knowing chess was a good thing in which to invest himself. Chess almost certainly would matter. It was a measure of intelligence, wasn’t it? There was no more challenging or sophisticated game, was there? Chess had legitimacy.

He read books and studied game histories. He joined the chess club. By the end of that same month, he was defeating Jimmy routinely, and by the conclusion of the school semester, he was the best player in the chess club. Within a year’s time, he played in competitions at the state level. The next summer, his mother sent him to chess camp, where a nine-year-old boy from Ecuador beat him twenty-seven consecutive times, and Billy quit studying chess. He could still out-maneuver nine out of ten players, but what did it matter? He could have played the nine-year-old another million times and never won. That kid was now twenty-something and likely having regular sex with Arina Mikhaylova or some other supermodel but most likely one of the Russians. In Russia, chess mattered. Maybe in Ecuador, too, who knows?

How about this: he valued people. He was good at that. He was valuing Lise the whole drive over and he made her laugh when they smoked dope even though she hadn’t gotten high, and he was valuing her now while they were dancing. He had picked her up in Jimmy’s car.

“You trying to impress me?” Lise asked when she saw the Porsche.

“You mean this old thing?”

“I know it isn’t yours,” she said, “and it’s a brainless car, anyway.” She smiled at him, and he imagined kissing her and falling into her mouth and staying there, sleeping like hard candy on her tongue.

“I can’t drive it either,” he told her. “It’s a stick. I stalled three times coming over. Jimmy’s sister wanted my car ’cause it has a backseat.”

Lise drove very competently. “Okay, I’m not endorsing the thing,” she said, “but it is fun to drive.” After a second, she added, “As long as you know how to shift and all.” She asked him to tell her things about himself that she didn’t know.

“That would be pretty much everything,” he said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Something specific.”

He told her about his chess successes and ultimate failure.

Afterward, she said, “I’m going to tell you something I never told James. You ready? I have trouble recognizing faces. It’s a condition with a name and everything.” The dysfunction was called prosopagnosia, and she discovered only recently that she had it. “You tend to think your memory is messed up in general or that you’re dumb in a very specific way, but it has to do with
locking in
on a face, which I just don’t do. If I see somebody in a different context, or if maybe he’s cut his hair or changed his shirt, I don’t know him. It’s not like I’m blind, but most people pick up on facial arrangement some way I don’t get.” The underlying topic—why she hadn’t told Jimmy—took them all the way to Onyx Springs. Summarized: she was afraid he would think of her as damaged goods. She did not want to be in the same category as his clients.

Billy liked that conversation and in the basement of Danker, high on this Colombian pot that the utterly insane Vex brought, he told all his funny stories, the laugh always on him, but what diff did it make as long as she was laughing? Once they reached the bar, though, he ran out of material. He knew better than to go into detail about his marriage. He had discovered (the hard way) that discussing the truth about his arranged marriage, bimonthly sex, and eventual divorce was a turn off for women—and even for men. The Hao brothers had seemed especially put off by it, and Violet hadn’t even let him begin. Billy had known Violet forever, since he and Jimmy were eight. On the night she and Lolly arrived from London, Billy had waited up for them, taking advantage of the alone time to smoke dope on the patio. When Jimmy introduced him to Lolly, he said, “This is my buddy Billy. He’s been smoking pot on the patio. Don’t smoke on the patio, Billy. I’m a counselor and I can’t have a bust on the premises. This is my fiancée, Lolly.”

“Sorry,” Billy said, “and nice to meet you.”

“I’ll smoke with you,” Lolly said, “but not now. I only want to sleep now.”

From just beyond the door, Violet said, “You’re blocking the entrance.”

Jimmy and Lolly apologetically moved out of the way. Violet set down her suitcase to give Billy a hug. “Jimmy said you’d be here.” It was the kind of greeting he expected from her, the embrace combined with the noncommittal comment, a sort of intimate disdain.

He didn’t much care to tell Lise about any of that. What did people talk about? Sometimes Billy felt he had a great deal to hide and very little to discuss. There was pizza, still. He had held that back. Also, he had once owned a collection of three hundred bluegrass record albums, and he was knowledgeable about its roots, the differences between bluegrass and folk or country or old-time music, the difference between bluegrass and Irish folk music, the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between progressive bluegrass and traditional bluegrass. He’d owned (before he sold it) a bootleg album of Bill Monroe playing with Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt that Monroe and Scruggs had both signed. But he didn’t listen to bluegrass anymore.

At the conclusion of a Prince cover done with a country beat, Lise said, “Let’s sit.” They made their way to the lobby. She wanted a vodka collins and Billy ordered himself a tap beer. He had a strange moment during which he thought the girl busing behind the bar was Karly Hopper. It wasn’t, of course, and when she straightened, fingers inserted in beer glasses that she had swished in soapy water and rinsed in a gray sink of slightly less soapy water, he realized she looked nothing like Karly except for being fit and brown-haired. Could Karly bus tables or work behind a bar? She’d definitely get a shitload of tips, and maybe she’d let him drink for free.

Returning with the drinks, he realized he was going to have to resort to pizza episodes. His mind was otherwise blank. Lise seemed to be studying him as she sipped her vodka. She put her hand on his arm and asked him what he had done in Flagstaff to make his living.

“I was a pizza chef for a couple of years, and then I worked at a convenience store.” He provided a few details about the U-TOTE-M chain of stores. He had worked at one store for the past ten years. “I guess I’ve been drifting.”

“The same job for a decade doesn’t sound like drifting,” Lise said. “Sounds more like an anchor.”

What he did not want to explain—what he did not think he could articulate—was the pleasure his job had given him. In some neighborhoods, a convenience store has a position of importance, given that everyone winds up there now and again. His role lent him authority. Not that people looked up to him so much as they recognized him, acknowledged his competence. He’d had a place in the community. People wondered why a guy like him was working at the U-TOTE-M, which made him think that the key to competence was finding something just below your level of ability. Too often it worked the other way around. He secretly suspected that this discovery would be in store for Jimmy if he got the job directing the center. Running a giant organization might be too much—or if he managed to be successful, it would come at the expense of something real in his personality: his sense of humor, maybe, or his ability to relax.

When the topic petered out, Lise asked him, “What do you want to do now?”

“Take you home with me,” he said. Then added, “If you’ll drive.” She studied him for a long moment before shrugging and taking his hand.

Violet had steered Lolly away from the young men, and now they were with a number of dreary women. “I’m getting tired.” Violet spoke softly so only Lolly would hear.

“It’s not late,” Lolly said. She took Violet’s hand. “You’re grieving. It wears you out.”

Yet another presumptuous comment. The truth:
she was relieved that her husband was dead.
Someone like Lolly could not conceive of the idea that Vi simply didn’t want to talk about it. Lamentation seemed to be the national sport these days, but Vi would not become a player.

“We all like James,” one of the women said. She wore cat’s-eye glasses and had an oversized whirly hairdo, dyed an unnatural black. Violet hoped it was an intentionally ironic look. “He’s such a gentleman, and without being so . . . without being ah . . .”

“Without being a
wimp,
” another put in. This one was younger and drunker. “We get a lot of
wimps
in this line of work.”

Lolly basked in the conversation, as if they were talking about some quality of her own. “What if I don’t like gentlemen? What if I adore wimps?”

“It’s gonna be your field day then,” the drunker one said.

When Violet had told Jimmy, all those years ago, that she was going to marry her boss, he had said, “Arthur? I love Arthur.” No hesitation, no crack about the difference in ages. Why oh why couldn’t she show him the same generosity?

A middle-aged Asian woman whose surname, if Violet heard correctly, was How, asked for her impressions of California.

“I was expecting more stars,” she said.

“Go to Santa Monica or Beverly Hills,” one of them said. “I saw Lisa Kudrow in a boutique in Santa Monica looking at stockings.”

“Celestial stars,” Violet corrected. “I grew up in Arizona and the sky would fill with them. I was looking forward to seeing them again.”

“The smog,” said the Asian woman. “The ocean breezes it all up here.”

“Pooh on the stars,” Lolly said. “I want to meet the borderlines, the obsessive compulsives, the bipolars.”

Violet could not help a tiny smile. Lolly could not tolerate the conversational orbit going beyond her gravitational pull. Thank god they had Billy’s Dart. In the Porsche, she had to ride in a cubby space behind the seats like an oversized bag of laundry. The Dart was old and unhygienic but the backseat was at least designed for humans.

The women were trying to find a way to respond to Lolly’s outburst. The one with the hair said, “You can’t help meeting them now and again. If you see James for lunch, go early and wait in the anteroom. They’ll trudge past.”

“I want to get to know them,” Lolly insisted. “What they feel and think and dream.”

Was this why she had fallen for Jimmy, the stories he told about his patients? Perhaps she did need to meet them and be stripped of her romantic notions about damaged people. More likely, of course, she wanted to assert her own authority, the counseling certification she’d earned one summer. Her fingertip massage and blenderized flowers.
You re tooo hardon her.

“I’m as compassionate as the next chucklehead,” the blotto woman said, “but these people . . . they suck up your life.”

“That’s not how I’d put it,” the older woman said. Her eyes, magnified by the glasses, zeroed in on Lolly. “But you do have to keep some distance. Many of them simply frighten me.”

“Are they violent?” Lolly asked hopefully.