Tumbledown (42 page)

The Dart’s tank was empty, of course. She took a break to drive to a gas station and fill it. With Billy riding to work with James, the Dart was available every day. She wanted to drive to the ocean, but didn’t yet feel comfortable negotiating San Diego traffic. She needed a few less-ambitious journeys first. She had thought Lolly might help her clean, but Lolly had discovered a gym nearby that was open on Sundays, and she went there to exercise. The car took fifty dollars of gas.

Shortly after she got back to the house, a silver car pulled up. Violet was trying to decide what to do with a string of packaged condoms, linked like sausages, that she had found wedged in the crack of the passenger seat. A door to the silver car opened and Lolly climbed out, her gymwear made of shiny stretch material. A man had driven her home from the gym, a handsome man whose eyes took her in the way a hungry mouth devours a biscuit.

“Cheerio then,” Lolly called to him, and Violet cringed. The man said something in a low tone before driving off.

“Made a new friend?” Violet asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said, eyeing the condoms.

“You wouldn’t believe the rubbish in this car.”

“I wish I’d stayed and helped instead of going to the gym,” Lolly said. “I’m dreadfully sorry to dump it all on you. And it was a waste. The men in there just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“You’ll be happy to hear then that I’m not even close to finished.”

“If only I weren’t so knackered from the workout Rudy gave me. That was Rudy who brought me home. He’s a personal trainer. He’s been showing me what his workouts could do for me. Free sample. Obviously, he just wants in my knickers, but why not get the freebie?”

Billy emerged from the house with a bundle over his shoulder—a bedsheet, held by the corners, clothing stuffed inside. Shirt sleeves flapped free of the bundle. The thin dark man was with him. He walked directly past her without speaking, mounted his motorcycle, and sped away. Billy opened the Dart’s trunk and shoved in the clothing.

“Looks like I’ll be riding with you to Onyx Springs,” he said.

“Who was that?”

“A guy I know. He fixed the hall toilet, the ceiling kitchen fan, and the lock on the back door. Was here an hour and a half. I gave him twenty-five bucks. That’s fair, isn’t it?” It took him three tries to get the trunk to close around the bundle. “Thought it’d be a good parting gift, fixing the stuff Jimmy’ll never fix.”

“Parting gift?” she asked. “What are you doing?”

“Getting a life,” he said. “You told me I ought to. I got a place in Onyx Springs. Just confirmed it on the phone—a neighbor’s phone. The place doesn’t have a phone right now. It’s way cheap. Shorter drive to work. I’ve been here long enough, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said, but too forcefully and his face fell. “I mean . . . I’m happy for you.”

“I’ll let you know how it goes, and you can let me know how yours goes.”

“My what?” Violet asked.

“Your attempt to get a life.” He headed back to the house for another load, but he paused at the door. “Thanks for cleaning out the car. I’ve been meaning to do that for like fifteen years.”

Maura carefully poured gravy from the pot into a soup bowl—a gravy boat was not the kind of thing Barnstone would own. Maura had eaten Barnstone’s roast a few times, and this was her standard job. The roast was okay but it was obvious Barnstone wasn’t much of a cook. Maura ran a wooden spoon through the gravy, tasted it, and added salt. Adding salt was the sum of her talent with spices.

Mick finished the dishes. The blade had cut through the meat, and he himself made it happen. Hardly miraculous work, but he couldn’t remember the last time anyone offered him a knife. “Should you be doing that?” he asked.

“Loosen,” Maura commanded, shaking her behind as an example. “We need music.”

Mick followed her into the living room. He had not skipped his meds but had taken a two-thirds dose at bedtime instead of in the morning. He did not believe he might tip over into the irrational. Now and then he balanced it perfectly. But there was no system. He would need his regular dose tomorrow, and the day after he might not need any. He liked imagining the day that he would need nothing and would return to the world as it had been before. The simplicity of it, the basic clarity of existence, would once more belong to him. There were times when it was so near that he brushed up against it—a warm transparency. If he could lean down and position his arm just right, he should be able to nab it. Like at the door, he had heard Barnstone calling “Come on in,” yet the tone of the voice was crumbly, which could indicate that she meant the opposite, like how people would say
fuck you
while they were laughing, or how the same word from different mouths had distinct meanings, and the sunlight on the stoop merely emphasized the shadows, and the shadows made the whole house seem ready to fall. These things meant something. Even the disarray inside the house, the scatter of magazines and throw pillows, a guitar lying on the floor; they seemed to him not signs of a comfortable life but the
ruins
of an orderly life. This world, his world, was the ruins of the life he’d had before. Yet he could sense that other world lingering within the archaeological site, rooting for him, waiting until he could knock his head through the curtains.

“She listens to awful stuff,” Maura said, “but I left some of my CDs here.”

He asked, “Do you know a song that has a sewing machine in it?”

“Imogen Heap,” Maura said without looking up from the CDs. “Or maybe it’s Regina Spektor. I don’t have any of their stuff here.”

“I drove to this beach one time. My car was full of people.” He told her about taking friends from Yuma to Mexico, a remote beach so vacant that it seemed like a landscape out of a dream. They had stayed the night, three girls, Mick, and another guy. The girls were all supposed to be spending the night at each other’s houses.

“A nice trick,” Maura interrupted to say, “and not as hard to pull off as you might think.”

Mick could not imagine trying to pull it off now. “I wasn’t pretending. I just told my parents that I was going to be out all night.”

“They let you do that?”

He shrugged and continued. They built a campfire. The girls were in the choir and sang songs. One of the songs had a sewing machine in it. Late in the night, they went skinny-dipping, and still later the ocean suddenly became a source of light. They all witnessed it. There was a full moon, and when they went to the water’s edge to investigate, they saw that the whole beach was glimmering. It was covered with tiny silver fish. “Grunion,” Mick said. “I didn’t know the name for them at the time, but they’re grunion. They mate on the shore.”

“You were the kind of boy who went off with a bunch of girls and stayed out all night?”

Thinking about it now, he wondered at the confidence he’d had, the ability to feel wonder, to let himself become part of an unknowable world.

“When I take my meds before bed,” he said, “I have dreams that are just pictures.”

“You want Arcade Fire?”

Luckily, she waved a CD case at him. “Sure,” he said.

“What do you mean pictures?”

“Like a movie screen of things.”

“A landscape.”

“More like a toolshed. Or medicine cabinet. Or kitchen cupboard.”

“You dream a cupboard? What happens to the cupboard?”

“There’s just a cupboard or one time a desk. The dashboard of a car. I’m not in the dream in any way.”

“There’s nobody?”

“Just this image—not like a photograph. It’s real enough. Like someone could reach up and take something, but there’s never anyone there to do it.”

“That’s a really lousy dream,” Maura said. “If you were Barnstone’s boy, she’d take you off that shit. She took me off everything but iron and an antidepressant.”

“I need it some, for another week or two. But if I take it every day, I get . . .
flat.
”

“I’ve seen you like that. You’re like a zombie.”

“Maybe I never told you, but when I got sick, I was in my room watching
Night of the Living Dead.
”

“You should sue.”

“I didn’t become a zombie. It’s the meds that do that.”

“What did you do?”

“I started writing down all the lyrics to the movie.”

“It’s not
lyrics.
”

“I wrote page after page, I couldn’t keep up, and for some reason it wasn’t okay to pause the DVD. When the movie was finally over—it makes a movie long, believe me, to write the whole time. When it was over, I couldn’t read what I had written. It looked like it was that Japanese picture writing.”

“I think it’s called calligraphy.”

“I thought maybe I just couldn’t read my handwriting, so I picked up one of my textbooks. The writing looked like English but the words kept coming loose and sliding up to the next sentence, and they got jumbled. I remember one thing I was trying to . . . something like . . .
The Paleolithic bony mass conforms to expectations.
I kept thinking that was the key to everything, and I copied it down and watched it change into Japanese as I wrote it. My hand would form a letter but it would come out a picture word.”

“That’s a weird breakdown.”

Mick listened to music without speaking, a love song, though not a very happy one. Why was love so depressing? Karly was avoiding him. For instance, why wasn’t he with her today? He should be upset with her, but how he felt about Karly was like a thin raincoat he had to wear inside out. Try putting
that
into words that would mean something to somebody. He was grateful to Karly, even for snubbing him. The way the dog that’s been spanked still wants in the owner’s lap? More like the blind man who trips over his guide dog and falls onto broken glass, but while his eyes are full of shards, he can see color where before there was only the black. Is that something a person could speak?

There was one time his father picked Mick up after a session with his psychologist, this nice woman who wore dresses that were like suits, which seemed to Mick like banners she waved to prove she was qualified for her job. The day was cool and his father had the heat in the car on high. He probably meant to be respectful and show interest in his son by picking him up with the heat on high and then saying, “My therapist knows your therapist.” There, coming out the door, her professional flag bearing the pressures of her body, was Mick’s psychologist, walking in those stiff psychologist shoes along the hard, cold sidewalk. His father’s therapist was a marriage counselor, and Mick imagined the two therapists talking and his dad’s counselor saying,
If you can just get that boy to straighten up, this marriage will be fine.

Now, if he tried to say how he was grateful to Karly, and how his new way of seeing made him want to say
thank you
to her (if she would only let him near), Maura would likely only get enough of it to feel bad, which was how Mick had felt with his father. The problem with complicated feelings (were there any other kind?) was that the small part you could put into words was never enough to take the listener all the way to the end. If he could be like a dog or an elephant or the bird that flies low and hungry over the ocean thinking only
fish, fish, fish,
then he would have no trouble explaining, and Maura would hear him and shrug and start on some other topic. But he wasn’t that dog, that elephant, that ravenous bird. And wasn’t
ravenous
a word to mean
full of the raven?
Could there be a seabird full of the raven?

Maybe he should have taken a scribbling bit of his meds this morning, he thought. Just licked the pill.

Candler was to meet John Egri at a bar in La Jolla. “If I’m not there when you arrive,” Egri had said over the phone, “sit your butt down and wait for me. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.”

“Is all this intrigue necessary?” Candler asked.

“I don’t know,” Egri replied. “I don’t think our phones are tapped—though I’m calling you from a pay phone just to be safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m being followed. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but you be careful going down there. Make sure no one is on your tail.”

Candler felt idiotic doing it, but he took elaborate precautions, driving north on Liberty Highway and stopping on a deserted stretch, studying the cars that passed him, doubling back to look for parked cars, and then heading north again. He took a county road west to the coast, where he drove south into La Jolla. Vigilant today, but the night before, he had told Lolly that he was secretly meeting with Egri about the promotion.

“I feel weird about the whole thing,” he told her.

“We’re going to need the money.” She had been over his finances. Without the promotion, they would be pinched until she got a job—and it’d have to be a decent job, as she would need a car. The conversation took place in bed with the lights off. “I spent a big part of my life trying to believe that money doesn’t matter much,” she went on, “but I was lying to myself. I
like
money, and so does everybody. People who say otherwise are liars or pretending.”

She began a story about her days as a school teacher in New Jersey. This was after she had given up eking out a living from fingertouch but before she left for London. “It was a suffocating job,” she told him. To survive it, she colored her hair every Friday after school. “Dyed it the black of plastic cooking utensils.” She filled her piercings with rings and studs, and spent entire weekends in New York, sleeping on a friend’s floor or in some man’s bed. She interrupted the story to say, “I hope this doesn’t upset you.”

“I like hearing about your sordid history.”

“
Wanker.
I’m trying to tell you something important.”

“I’m listening,” he said. “Hear me listening?” On one of their last dates in London, she had shown him the tiny scars from her piercings, which (except for the earlobes) had all closed. She produced a photograph. He did not recognize her: Lolly slouched on the asphalt of a city street in full regalia—eyebrow toothpicks, lip and nose studs, a hoopsnake ring dangling from her nostrils, a half dozen earrings to the right, and three more to the left. Her bare midriff revealed a tattoo: an octopus, its arms arranged in a V. Even her jeans had holes. “No piercings in the tongue, nips, or snatch,” she had said, “so don’t get too aroused.” She’d had the tattoo removed but it was still visible, though indistinct. The first time Candler noticed it, he’d thought it was a birthmark. “That’s the shadow of my former self,” she had said.