Tumbledown (41 page)

“I’m Karly,” she said.

The woman said her name, which Karly didn’t hear right because she had started drinking the water again. It was the best water! The woman wasn’t as old as the man and maybe was just a girl, like Karly. Then she remembered her ID folder, which was hanging around her neck, inside her shirt, and inside it was the square piece of paper with the phone number that belonged to Billy Atlas.

“I have someone to call right here,” she said, her hand over her heart.

“When you think about it,” Billy said, “our bodies are lousy machines. You have to lubricate them all the time. I must drink six glasses of water—or beer or whatever—every day, and if you had to lubricate some machine that often, like, I don’t know, name a machine.”

Karly smiled at him and handed over her key.

“Like the assembly machine at the sheltered workshop.” Billy took the key from her. “If you had to oil it or whatever six times a day, even Vex wouldn’t be able to keep it running.”

Karly nodded. “Everybody knows that,” she said softly.

He had been in Vex’s attic apartment when she called, and it had only taken a few minutes to get to the Newsomes’ house, the family that had taken her in and given her water and a sandwich and rubbed aloe on her face and arms and the back of her neck. “She’s out of it,” the youngest Newsome had said, a black woman roughly Karly’s age. Billy had not offered any explanation for Karly’s confusion except dehydration. “You’re very kind,” he said. He felt mature speaking that sentence, and he repeated it. “You’re all very kind.” His washing machine lessons hadn’t taken and her clothes stank. He made a mental note to study different kinds of washing machines for future reference.

And then the door to her house opened on a disarray that made him freeze on the threshold. Not that he was exactly Mr. Clean-and-Uncluttered himself, but the piles of things on the living room carpet unnerved him—dirty clothes and dirty dishes mixed together, three separate mounds of garbage, magazines splayed over the garbage, unopened mail in a corner, wrappers from fast food partially concealing her toothbrush and soap.

“Are you all alone here?” He had the funny notion that someone had made her do this.

“No,” she said and smiled. “You’re here.”

“Okay,” he said. “Do you know where the trash can is?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said and led him into the kitchen.

The white plastic container was under the sink and empty. Billy pulled it out and asked why she hadn’t used it.

“It doesn’t have a bag,” she said.

He nodded. Someone had told her not to use it without a liner.

“We’re going to make a shopping list,” he said. “Show me around.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to wash dishes or take out the garbage, he discovered, but between knowing and doing there was some impediment, a step she couldn’t take. Billy was no stranger to this condition. Sometimes people needed direction, someone to tell you things, to guide you around. He had known that his English papers were due, but he had never done them until the last minute, even after flunking English twice. He had spent ten years working at a convenience store for no good reason that he could see now, and that whole time he had told himself that the work was not permanent. One girl had to say
dead-end job,
or he might still be working there.

In each room, he encountered new calamity, including, in Karly’s bedroom, a big heap of dirt—black dirt that had to have been shoveled in.

“This is kind of unusual,” he said.

“Isn’t that funny?” Karly said, but she wasn’t sure and something besides her usual ebullience showed through.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “When I was a pizza guy, I had such a pile of pizza boxes in my room that I turned it into a project. You know? I wanted to pile them up until they were as tall as me.”

“The boxes were tall?”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “I stacked them up until they were as tall as me.”

“This tall,” she said, touching the top of his head.

“I called it the pizza man sculpture, but no one thought it was funny or even vaguely interesting.”

“Were you sad?” she asked, and Billy had a sudden desire to kiss her.

“I laughed it off.” He knelt to keep himself from touching her. “This is a lot of dirt.”

“If you put a seed in dirt,” she said, “it’s supposed to grow.”

Once pond a time frogs and bees and in the water things. Swimming.
“That buzzing is the dryer,” Billy said. “You have clothes.”

After the first load of clothing was clean and dry, Karly showered while Billy continued cleaning. He found watermelon seeds in the dirt and softening rind on the floor of the bedroom closet. He recalled one time, years ago, when he was a boy in Tucson and Pook had walked home with him from the Candler house. Billy needed to shower and put on clean clothes, and then they’d walk back. Having Pook along would keep his mother from corralling him and saying he had to spend a night at home. When he got out of the bath and dressed, he couldn’t find Pook. “Did he go home?” he asked his mother, knowing he hadn’t. Pook wasn’t one to abandon a friend. His mother leapt into a rant, how difficult her life was, how Billy was no damn help bringing such creatures into her house. She wasn’t a bad person, Billy knew, but she was afraid of Pook and that led her to say mean things. Billy backed out of the kitchen and looked in his room. He found Pook sitting on the closet floor, having carefully pushed Billy’s shoes aside.

“What are you doing in there?” Billy asked.

“Noticing,” Pook had said.

Billy was on his knees in Karly’s bedroom closet with a sponge when he heard the shower end and Karly step into the room. He could tell by the sound of her step that she was barefoot and by the dripping sound that she was still wet. He was afraid to turn his head, afraid that she wasn’t dressed, that she had stepped out of the shower into her room, and here he was on the floor of her closet like some perv waiting to get a peek. And he
did
want to look at her, which meant that he really was a perv
(big effing surprise),
but he didn’t look. The sponge was blue and bubbled with soap.

He said, “Are you decent?”

Karly laughed and said, “Don’t be silly.”

The gods too are fond of a joke.

—ARISTOTLE

Barnstone paused in the kitchen doorway to examine Andujar seated on the piano bench, hands over the keyboard, fingers a millimeter above the ivories. He was dark-skinned, born in Honduras but raised in California, a former client of Barnstone’s, and now? What was he now? He was her
roommate,
she supposed, but he had his own room—her
housemate.
He slept in her bed, though, and sometimes they had sex. He was her
lover.
That was misleading, as well. He was thirty-two and she, fifty-eight. She loved him but it was the love of a mother for a difficult and damaged son. The sex was like therapy for him.

Mercy,
that sounded like rationalization, even to herself.

His hands remained suspended over the keys. He waited. For what? What went through his head in such moments? He had written songs before his breakdown, but he could no longer read music and did not play anything recognizable. He composed
racket,
or so it had sounded to her until his playing woke her one night, and she realized she had been listening to it in her sleep. She heard it then as strange music arranged by association with the other keys. It would be like writing according to the order of the alphabet, so that
neck
and
head
would have nothing to do with each other, but
neck
and
nook
would be related.

She was expecting guests—Candler’s fiancée and sister, as well as Maura Wood and Mick Coury. Candler had talked his women out of volunteering, claiming a conflict of interest. A load of shit, but when Violet called with the news there was nothing to do but invite them over. They wanted to get to know some of the clients. Good for them. And screw Candler. Like every other professional at the Center, he had turned against her when he heard that Andujar was living with her. She clung to the belief that she’d had a good working relationship with them all before the disclosure.

In reality, the breach between Barnstone and the other counselors had always been wider than she imagined. She was as ambitious as any of them, but her ambition was tempered by a sense of humility and personal ethics that she thought everyone must possess, but which was in reality so specific to her character that to others she seemed in explicable. If she was forced to name this overriding characteristic, she’d have called it
integrity.
It was why she had to include lyrics in her songs that kept them off the radio, why she would never adopt the prevailing rock fashion onstage or in the music. Never mind that her early bands played music that appealed primarily to the head-banging set. It might have been bad music, but she had believed in it. The belief was complex and artful, even if the compositions had been trite and simplistic.

This same internal code forced her to take in Adam Herring when his funding ran out. He was a child and would have been on the street. A harmless, damaged boy, who needed the summer to finish his high school equivalency. Roommates for a couple of months was the plan, but he was late applying to colleges and how could she throw him out? She taught him to cook easy dishes, keep a checkbook, mow the lawn, do the simple repairs that made one
handy.
When he left for San Diego State, she felt good about his chances. And he was succeeding. His grades were not good, but he had what could pass for a normal life. Maybe it was a C-sort of life, but that was a passing grade.

The second roomer was a more complicated case. She might have
used
the idea of integrity to give herself permission to house him. Andujar moved in while Adam was still there, which meant he had to sleep on the couch, until one night he climbed into her bed and slept beside her. His full name was Joseph Andujar Freeman. No one knew they were lovers. No one but Adam Herring, who was busy in San Diego keeping his head above water.

Andujar was born in Tegucigalpa but sold to a couple from Chicago who could not get pregnant.
All right,
she conceded to her internal inquisitor, her love for Andujar was not like a mother’s for a son. No one would approve of their sleeping in the same bed, although everyone would acknowledge that physical closeness was good for him. They shared a mattress. She had made over Adam Herring’s room for him, but Andujar preferred to sleep beside her. After this had gone on for a while, one night he plopped his erection against her hip. It both put her off and turned her on. They had sex once every three or four months. Did she desire to see him live independently? To see him move away? Her feelings were so profoundly confused that she aggressively worked to make him independent to appease that dictator within her, that sense of integrity that created labor and held her back, that kept her honest and encouraged others to find her inscrutable.

Some of the Onyx Rehab crowd might have accused her of sleeping with Andujar if not for their flawed conception of her. They assumed she was lesbian. She was single, had never married or borne children, and she did not dress in an especially feminine manner. She never dated anyone at the facility, and the years of wailing away in smoky bars left her with a gravelly voice. She knew of this misconception and had been tempted to correct it, but that seemed to imply she saw something wrong with being lesbian. She made a conscious decision to not correct them. How else to avoid slipping into the same slough of prejudice? And so it was her integrity that let her keep a damaged boy in her bed without creating scandal or getting herself fired. If Egri discovered the truth and she was forced to resign, what would that be but another breakdown on a big highway? It could prove to be as lucky as the first accident.

The doorbell rang. Mick and Maura appeared on the stoop, visible through the side window, a half hour early. Andujar rose from the piano bench, and she gave him time to disappear down the hall. “Come on in,” she called.

The door partially opened, and Maura’s face appeared. “Will you tell this freak we can just waltz in?”

“Waltz. That’s an order.”

Mick Coury slipped through the door without opening it more than a few inches. Maura followed, throwing the door wide.

“You can see why we can’t ever have Rhine over,” Maura said as they entered. She spoke as if the house was hers, which pleased Barnstone.

“He’d have to straighten the cushions,” Mick said, “shake out the afghan, vacuum the rug. Are those albums in alphabetical order?”

“Hey, kids,” Barnstone said from the kitchen entry. “Want something to drink?”

Mick hesitated, froze, his expression that of a criminal caught in the act.

“What have you got?” Maura asked.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Mick said.

“Oh god, I know you’re thirsty.” Maura charged past Barnstone to the refrigerator.

“It’s my fault we’re early,” Mick said, taking in the kitchen with his nervous eyes.

Barnstone imagined how the kitchen must seem to him—crowded with things, the big appliances not matching and slightly askew from the walls. For a kid like this, the room would embody anxiety.

Maura spoke with her head inside the refrigerator. “Don’t apologize for that. I was so grateful to get away. They let me go with Mr. Reliable here ’cause you put in some kinda word?”

“Is that how you think of yourself?” Barnstone asked the boy. “Mr. Reliable?”

He offered a shy smile, which made him quite beautiful. “Not exactly those words.”

“What words then?”

“Mr. Goomball,” Maura called, coming out of the refrigerator with soft drinks.

Mick laughed. “I was thinking more like
Mr. Cool.
” He laughed harder and put his hand in his hair, tugging at the ends.

“Who else is coming?” Maura asked. “Andujar?”

“Of course,” Barnstone said. “Well, probably. He may or may not make an appearance. And the two women—Violet and Lolly.” She cast about for oven mitts and pulled a cast iron pan from the oven. She set it on the counter, a pot holder serving as coaster. She handed Mick a grill fork and a carving knife. “We’re having sandwiches,” she said. “You’re doing the slicing.”

“This is serrated,” he told her.

Barnstone merely waited. Patience was important with kids like this one. He stared at the blade for thirty seconds before plunging the fork and knife into the roast. He was perfectly capable. Violet and Lolly had asked specifically to speak to Mick. She wondered if one of them had a crush on this kid. She lit a cigarette and offered one to Maura. “Smoke?” she asked Mick.

“No, thanks.” He was sawing the meat. “I used to smoke. Before I got sick. Not a lot. At parties. In my car. Or when I was with friends. Certain friends. Most of my friends. Maybe a pack a week. I tried to stop but couldn’t. Urges. For some reason, don’t have the urges now.”

“What did you have?” Barnstone asked.

“Marlboros, when I bought them.”

“I mean what illness did you have. A pulmonary thing?”

“My illness. What put me in the Center.”

“It’s got a name, Mick,” Maura said. “You might as well say it.”

“I don’t like to say it.”

“It’s called monkey-headedness,” Maura said, “and you’ve got it bad.” Mick offered a happy, relieved laugh.

Barnstone had heard a lot about this boy from Maura. He hated the word
schizophrenia
and would not speak it. Maybe that was healthy, resisting the marker written on his file, branded on his forehead. And maybe it wasn’t healthy, a denial of his trouble. If she knew him a little better, she might be able to say which. And she might not. What
was
clear, though, was that he liked cutting meat. He was getting a kick out of it. Several slices of roast beef lay flat next to the remaining hunk, as if the first had tripped and caused a pileup.

“That should be plenty,” Barnstone told him.

Mick put the utensils in the sink, which was full of dirty dishes. He began rolling his sleeves.

“The profession tosses around a lot of labels,” Barnstone said. “They’re useful, but they can encourage circular reasoning and they often cause pain. Most things are like that. Take this roast, for instance.” She leaned over the counter and inhaled the odor. “Good for my taste buds and bad for my thighs.” She slapped her thighs. “Christ, I’ve got to get dressed. Are you going to do the dishes?”

He paused in his sleeve rolling, eyes zipping about, trying to figure out his own intentions. “It looks like it,” he said.

He was struggling, she understood. The boy probably never willingly took his meds. She would only mention it if he was really in trouble. This was how they learned what they needed.

“You’re a saint,” she told him.

“Saint Brown Nose,” Maura said.

Who could blame him for wanting to be on his toes? Barnstone had never been a heavy drug user, unlike many in the rock world. Perhaps if she’d ever had the luxury of success, she might have felt she could indulge. She could not judge this boy, who was kind and handsome and intelligent, and whom, Barnstone was increasingly certain, Maura loved. She wondered whether Andujar would join them or spend the whole evening in his room. She was in the same position with him as Maura was with Mick. If Andujar were well, he would not be with a woman almost thirty years his senior. It meant she had to do all she could to make him well, or she’d become one of the self-serving ones who fed on the illness of others. Did Maura understand this? Was this something they could talk about?

In her bedroom, Barnstone discovered Andujar standing in the corner he liked, a lit joint in his mouth. He was not beautiful like Mick Coury but he had an aura of masculinity that Mick lacked. She knew it was a facade and yet she liked the facade. He bent down and blew smoke through the screened window. “I thought you were at the park.” She had heard him leave while she was in the kitchen. He liked to walk down to the fountain and through the town park.

Andujar nodded. “There and back. Got a little feeling edgy.”

The window screen was bent, and she understood that he had climbed in through it, which was why she had not heard him return. The flimsy aluminum frame was cockeyed from his comings and goings. It would never again be truly straight.

“Our guests have begun to arrive,” she said.

“I know Mick. He goes way back.”

“And you’ve met Maura.”

“I’ve met Maura.”

“All right then. Put that out and let me change clothes.”

“I’ll wait in my room.”

“All right then.”

But Andujar didn’t move. She would have to change in front of him. She didn’t much care for showing off her body in daylight, but it was a silly concern. Andujar would not be affected one way or the other. Perhaps that was why she didn’t want to do it.

Violet spent the morning cleaning Billy’s Dart. He promised to let her use it for the Barnstone excursion, and it was distressingly filthy. She found a rather amazing array of items beneath and between the seats, including several partial baggies of pot. The usual detritus—pens, coins, dollar bills, keys, ragged road maps—she put in an empty flowerpot by the front door. The drugs—she found unidentifiable pills, as well—she threw away. But what was she supposed to do with the Astral Personal Vibrator? It was the size of a ballpoint pen and looked unused. There was an enormous pacifier, too large for a baby’s mouth; a pair of joke eyeglasses that permitted the wearer to see behind him; bread crusts from perhaps a dozen white-bread sandwiches; three dirty and chipped coffee cups, one of which was shaped like a woman’s breast; earplugs; nose clips; a blindfold; an eye patch; filthy earphones; a Lumberjacks baseball cap; a crud-encrusted stuffed animal of indeterminate species; parking tickets dating back nine years; cracked CD cases; two paperback novels; used tissues; unused tampons; a Polaroid of a woman’s bare thighs and knees; and a pair of coffee-stained (she hoped) boxer shorts decorated with clocks. There were perhaps thirty lists, written on the backs of envelopes or scraps of paper—grocery lists, to-do lists, book lists, lists of names, lists of places, lists of mysterious words that made no sense to her—each in Billy’s awkward hand.

Violet found the letter written by Billy’s wife saying that she was leaving him, a brief, nicely written letter, explaining that she had adequately mastered English to pass a citizenship exam, and she no longer needed to be married to him. Didn’t he want this? Didn’t he feel obliged to hold on to the important documents of his life? She might have dragged Billy out to go through the things, but a dark, slender man had arrived on a motorcycle to visit him. Except for Lise, this was the only visitor of Billy’s she had seen. And Lise, as Violet might have predicted, had never returned for a second visit.