Waveland (10 page)

He had worked at a gas station when he was a kid, just a few weeks one summer. He also worked in grocery stores, in a laundry, in a drugstore; he remembered all those, but didn't remember the gas station all that well. He didn't have a paper
route either, though he helped this guy named Bubba with his paper route sometimes. He liked to roll the papers, holding that string in his mouth, whipping it around the paper after he'd rolled it, snapping the string when done. Sometimes on Saturdays, when the paper was really thin, they folded the pages into little, tucked-in squares, skidded them onto the driveways like stones on a lake.

The idea of staying at his old house with Gail was uncomfortable. There would be memories, emotions, awkward moments. It seemed bound to fail. But it was a big house; maybe there was enough room. Gail needed help; he cared about her, about her being in trouble, about her having a hard time. It wasn't really his job to help her get sorted out, but that didn't matter. There wasn't anyone else around to do it.

Maybe he should have insisted that he stay in the first place, instead of the divorce—retired gentleman spends his days looking out the window at leaves rattling in the breeze, sunlight sparkling in the afternoon. He rakes the yard, works the flower beds, washes the car, cleans up around the house. He could have been a house-husband. And maybe, every once in a while, he could have written his name on her neck.

After the divorce he was scared about all the terrible things that could happen to her that he would not be there to prevent. He never prevented anything terrible from happening to her in the years they were married, but when he moved out he was worried about that anyway. He kept calling her. How are you? Are you all right? Are the doors locked? Over and over, night after night.

She complained about it. She got tired of it.

What his father had complained about as he got older, into his seventies, was something that surprised Vaughn. Old people complain all the time anyway, and they are treated like duffers, as if they are buffoons and just don't understand the world they live in anymore because they are old and many changes have taken place. Others ignore their remarks and opinions, which is fine, because old people are often out of touch. But what Vaughn's father complained about was that the world had grown coarser in his lifetime. People were coarser than they had been when he was younger, Vaughn's father said. At the time Vaughn didn't think it was true, but as he grew older he began to think his father might have been right, that maybe it was inevitable that the world got dirtier and smaller and crueler with every generation. Coarser—his father's word—was the best word for it. Perhaps individuals were less supple, imaginative, compassionate—less
human
—with every generation. This was a startling proposition, to suggest that the dominant process over time was not development but deterioration.

Of course, what the world would say was that there were a lot of other explanations for this opinion of his father's, and that the opinion was ill-informed. The world would say that the world had gotten more complex and daring than it was in the past, that the world they lived in now was completely different and enormously more thrilling than ever before.

They moved into the house with Gail a week after she came home from the hospital. There wasn't a lot of discussion, just a quiet, uncertain drift in that direction until one night Greta suggested they do it and not worry so much. As far as Vaughn could tell, she didn't have any misgivings. She suggested he go alone, but he didn't want to do that and said so. Then they had discussions. Greta was fine with it. Gail wasn't demanding that they do it—in fact, she'd sort of apologized for asking—but it was clear to Vaughn she was still unsteady and could use the company.

“We'll be coming back here for stuff all the time anyway,” Greta said. “If it goes wrong, we can just leave.”

Eddie agreed to look after Greta's house. He was planning on staying in his apartment, but he brought some things inside for the sake of convenience.

At breakfast the day they were set to move Greta said, “This is not going to make any difference between us, is it?”

“No,” Vaughn said. “I'd rather let it be, but I should do this for Gail.”

“She still loves you,” Greta said.

“I love her, too, some way or other. But that's not the deal. The deal is getting her settled down. Distracting her. Whatever.”

“I know that,” Greta said. “You don't have to talk me into it.”

“I'm talking
me
into it,” Vaughn said.

“We're doing it together,” Greta said, lifting her coffee cup at him. “It's a togetherness thing. The family that saves the ex-wife together …”

“I don't think I'd do it without you.”

“Oh, no. Of course not.” Then she served the poached eggs on little pieces of toast without crusts, like rafts. The eggs looked lonely. “Can I cut them?” she said. “I like to do that.”

So she cut the eggs, a single light slice across the yolk with the honed edge of the knife, like a razor cut no deeper than the skin, and the yolk oozed out over the whites, over the toast. “I am an artist of egg cutting,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

They ate silently, looking out the door at Monkey, who was on the other side of the screen looking in. “He's had his pills? Does Eddie know about the pills?” Vaughn said.

“Yes,” she said. “I wrote everything down and marked the bottles.”

“What about the Frontline?”

“He's got a couple weeks yet.”

“Eddie can bring him over sometime,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “That'll be good.”

“I'm thinking we take our stuff, make a beachhead, then head out for a movie or something. How about that?” “No movies until one, Vaughn,” Greta said, “lust an idea,” he said.

Eddie rode over to the house with them to help with the move. Vaughn thought he just wanted to be included, or maybe wanted to see where Vaughn had come from.

The house in Hidden Lake wasn't distinguished in design, or finishes, but it was more house than they'd had before— four bedrooms, three and a half baths, brick, two-story with wood floors and high ceilings, a glassed-in office off the deck, and a large kitchen. It was too big and they knew it, but they took it anyway. They got a good mortgage, so the payments weren't too bad. The lot was around an acre, maybe an acre and a quarter, and it curled along this small lake in the back and had a dead-end road in front, a cul-de-sac called Tilted Tree Lane. There were big oaks and sixty-foot pines in the front, and river birches and weeping willows out back. The house had a three-car garage, which was suddenly useful, though it had never been useful before, except as storage.

Gail had money, family money, but it didn't show up too much in the marriage. Vaughn never asked. She had people that dealt with it. She'd get mail and occasionally telephone calls, but she had little interest in the money or what she could do with it, little interest in spending it. He knew they were safe buying the house, because if worse came to worst, she could just handle it. They mentioned this, but only in passing, when they bought, and it never came up again. Her money wasn't a source of difficulty for them, though there
was a sense in which they were both aware of it, a kind of lingering, out-of-sight
thing
between them.

There were four bedrooms. Under the new arrangement, Gail had the master, he and Greta took two rooms on the south side next to each other, both rooms on the front of the house looking out on the yard and the cul-de-sac. There was a balcony that ran along the outside of the house between the rooms.

Eddie came upstairs with the last of the suitcases. “This place is the shit,” he said. “I'd like to live here myself.”

“You've earned it,” Greta said. “But you have duties in Waveland.”

“There's another bedroom,” Gail said, adjusting her hair as she walked into the room. “We'll make it a foursome.”

Eddie did a weird little head shake. “Can't. I've got to do my research anyway. My laboratory is over there. All my paperwork is there.”

“What research?” Gail said.

“He's keeping tabs on the government,” Greta said.

“Yeah, just little stuff,” Eddie said. “Though I'm thinking this Pentagon conspiracy deal is real.”

“Which Pentagon conspiracy is that?” Gail said.

“Nine-Eleven. A lot of people think it was a rocket, maybe fired from an Air Force plane, that hit the Pentagon.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Greta said.

“I don't make the stuff up,” Eddie said. “There's a whole theory; people are all over it—lectures, photos, sound recordings, proofs of all kinds.”

“Charts and graphs,” Vaughn said.

“So where's the plane? Wasn't there a plane?” Gail said.

“I don't know where the plane is,” Eddie said. “I think that's part of the problem.”

“Where do people say the plane is?”

“They don't know where the plane is either,” he said.

“It's probably still out there,” Vaughn said. “Flying around. Sort of like
Mr. Arkadin.”
Everyone looked at him. He said, “Orson Welles. Very famous.”

“One of Vaughn's favorites, apparently,” Gail said to Greta, and they both nodded.

“I'm not a conspiracy guy,” Eddie said.

“Sure you are,” Greta said, dusting imaginary dust off his shoulders.

“Well, that way, maybe. It's a mean country,” Eddie said.

“And yet, here you are,” Gail said.

“One-handed,” Vaughn said, giving her a look.

“I remember when it was a great country,” Gail said. “When it was a country that did the right thing. That's what it was when we were growing up; that's what was in the history textbooks.”

“I loved those books,” Vaughn said.

“Quit it, will you, Vaughn?” Gail said.

“I'm trying to participate,” he said.

“I'm going out,” Gail said. “Will you guys be all right? It's really nice of you to move over here.”

“We didn't actually
move,”
Vaughn said. “We're just coming to visit for a while.”

“I know,” she said. “I know exactly what's going on, and I appreciate it.” She gave Vaughn a kiss on the cheek. She gave Greta a hug. She gave Eddie a handshake.

That night Vaughn and Greta had dinner in Biloxi and went to a movie. They got back late and the house was dark. Gail's car
was there but her bedroom door was closed and they didn't hear anything at the door. They went out to sit on the deck and have a beer. “You think she's asleep?” Greta said.

“Could be a nap,” he said. “She takes naps.” She clinked Vaughn's beer bottle with hers. “This went okay, didn't it? For the first day?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Some difficulty with Eddie, there in the early going,” she said.

“Where'd you get Eddie, anyway?”

“I don't know,” she said. “He's been around on and off. He knows a lot of people.”

“He looks like one of those weird military spooks—I mean, like I imagine those guys look.”

“I get that,” Greta said. “Kind of
could-explode-at-any-moment.”

The lake was glassy and mirrored the lights in the houses across the water. They could hear the sounds of the air-conditioning units on the side of the house, the compressors working away like the industrious little angels they were.

“I wish we knew more people like him,” she said. “You get people now with clever names and they don't know where to stop. They think being Pond or Able makes everything different, and suddenly they're on television or something. We should know people of good, hardworking stock. People who bowl for a living or design great buildings.”

“I did not design great buildings,” he said.

“Okay, maybe that was wrong,” Greta said. “We should know some people who killed some people.”

Vaughn gave her a squint and a raised eyebrow.

“Please,” she said. “Moving along here, I'm thinking we
should know race car drivers with magic names. Or George Clooney. Or Charlie Rose. I hate him, though. He's unctuous.”

“We wouldn't have to have him over,” Vaughn said.

“What was your nickname when you were young?”

“Tug,” Vaughn said.

“Your nickname was Tug?” she said.

“I just said that to be interesting.”

“You're making fun of me,” she said. She took a long drink from her beer, and he took a long drink from his, and they sat quietly listening to the sounds of the night. They could hear cars and crickets, electronics, water, ducks. The balcony had a white rail made of wood. It seemed kind of springy with his feet on it. Across the lake, a matter of four hundred yards, other houses were barely lit up. Sometimes they could make out someone crossing a window or opening a door, but mostly it was just small yellow squares in the inky darkness of trees against a night sky.

He was worried about what was to come. Was it a good idea to stay at the house? Would it help Gail? He thought he knew what she felt like. You get to a point and things that used to mean something don't mean what they used to mean. The game changes. You don't want what you used to want. You don't care about what you used to care about. You don't need what you used to need. The whole world becomes a backdrop, a kind of cartoonish painting at the rear of the stage to which you pay not much attention. You only half listen to what people say, you only half see what's out the window. Sometimes you see people in stores or restaurants and you can't understand how they got there, what they think they're doing, why they're got-up so, why they're trying so
hard, what they're after, what they hope for, what they wish. It's impossible to figure these things out and you don't care anyway. You drift through the days. They come and go.