Waveland (16 page)

“Hmm,” Greta said. “He has a point.” She clicked off the TV and patted Eddie's shoulder. “Time to motor on,” she said. “Monkey needs to get home.”

The party broke up just like that. Eddie departed without
another word. Gail said good night and retired to her bedroom. Vaughn and Greta repaired to the kitchen for ice cream and cake.

She said, “You look like something's bothering you.”

“Look at you,” he said.

“What?”

“No. I mean, yes. Something's going on. I think the whole game is going off the rails. Gail says she wants to get remarried. In the Church, she said.”

“Whoops,” Greta said.

“She said something last week, but I thought it was—I don't know—some kind of wouldn't-it-be-lovely moment.”

“Remarriage something you're interested in?” Greta said.

“Probably not,” he said. “But it makes things harder.”

“Well,” Greta said, carving some icing off the cake they'd uncovered on the kitchen table. “You're a popular guy.”

“Thanks, Vernon.”

“She has a weakness for you,” Greta said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she's just thinking backward. All we have to do is turn her around face front and she'll be totally repaired.”

He cut himself a ridiculously large slice of cake and toppled it over on its side on his plate. Then he realized it was way too big and tried to cut it horizontally, from the middle of the broad outside arc toward the pointed edge of the wedge. That wasn't working too well when Greta took the knife out of his hand.

“Let a cake girl do this, will you?” she said.

“I can't believe she's serious,” Vaughn said. “I mean, she's just talking, isn't she? Bored, alone, as tired as the rest of us. Just wants a friend. Think about it that way, you can't blame
her.” He wagged his fork at Greta. “Her idea is you can stay, too. Even Eddie. We become the Addams Family.”

“Probably not going to happen,” Greta said.

“Why do we bother to do any of this?” he said. “I mean, we do stuff and you know up front it's not going to work. I guess we're just passing time, waiting for her to get better, or waiting for things to change. Reminds me of my father.”

“Dead, you mean?”

“Cute,” he said. “No. I was thinking half-smart. He played the system to make a career. Taught me to do that. I was supposed to be this designer and what I really did was steal stuff and paste it together. I guess you gotta have an eye for what to steal. Then turn it on its ear and present it with authority. Not rocket science. Roughly the equivalent of wearing funny clothes.”

“I would have liked your father, I think.”

“He was okay. He wasn't a genius, or a hero, but he wasn't bad. There's something to be said for knowing, even belatedly, your limitations.”

“True that,” she said.

“My father taught me stuff, all kinds of things—taught me about tools, drawings, pencils, and later, about getting jobs, how to hold a woman while dancing. He taught me all this stuff, but it was peculiar, an odd mix. There was, for him, always an ideal form. Every act, every gesture, every remark, everything could eventually be discovered in its ideal state through focus and study.”

“You're lucky, then.” Greta got the ice cream back out of the freezer and dished herself another scoop. “You want one?” she asked, pointing at Vaughn with the pink plastic ice cream scoop.

“He had studied many things and had already discovered the ideal forms,” Vaughn said. “I, on the other hand, had a lot of bad haircuts. My father took pictures of every one of them, a chronicle of constant errors.”

“That wasn't so nice of him. Maybe he was just fond of taking pictures of you? I mean, that's another possible explanation, isn't it?”

“Hey, I never thought of that.”

“Fuck you very much,” she said, smiling.

“I don't know,” Vaughn said. “I'm feeling poorly about myself and my fellow creatures. This deal
seems
easy, but it's a tiny nightmare for me, and I'm thinking a nightmare for you, too, and for Gail, well, her three.”

“People make errors,” Greta said. “They find out later. It's fine.”

“I wish I was a better architect,” he said. “I always liked the art end of the business, peculiar architects who did peculiar things. It seemed possible to make a world that provided psychological beauty and stability sufficient to guide the user, or to counterbalance the effects of others. When I was in school my stuff was erratic. I was the patch-it-together guy. Got that from my instructors, I guess, before they fell off the planet. Ad hoc-ism, or something. Worked great when combined with haughty one-upmanship. Lo and behold, soon I was the hero student.”

“And the rest is history,” Greta said. She yawned and collected the plates, bowls, plastic silverware, rinsed everything in the sink and placed the pieces in the dishwasher.

“You don't have to rinse them for this dishwasher,” Vaughn said. “Gail demonstrated that for me once. It's in the manual.”

“Got you coming and going, huh? You ready for bed?”

“So anyway, I had a long and profitable career. Heady days, until I couldn't stand it anymore. I quit the last place, moved to the coast, took small jobs for local architects—just drawing, a skill that I finally mastered. I didn't do design. I was just that weird guy who drew pretty well.”

She tugged on his arm, pulling him out of the chair. “And you faked them out for a really long time, is that it?”

“I guess,” Vaughn said.

“And you're a bad person, and your dad, well, he was, as they say, a dream. I see where you're going with this, Vaughn. And it's
really
maudlin. You got maudlin written all over you. You're rolling in maudlin, dripping with it. You gotta stop. You're lucky I've got a high tolerance, you know? Normal woman would've slapped you silly a half hour ago.”

“Yeah yeah,” he said. “Bite me.”

“I don't know,” she said, reaching for his hand to lead him from the room. “You might get lucky. You might trick me.”

Tony showed up in the front yard in the middle of the night Saturday with a garden hoe and a pickup truck the size of a tank. He was yelling for Gail to come out and talk to him. Gail was in her room—maybe she was asleep, maybe she was awake. Vaughn didn't know which. It was very late. He went out on the balcony outside his room and said, “Who are you and what do you want?”

“I'm Tony,” Tony said. “And I want to see Gail. Who're you?”

“I'm her husband.”

“Oh,” Tony said. “I didn't know she had a husband.”

“Yeah, she does, and it's me,” Vaughn said.

“You were out of town,” he said.

“I've been out of town awhile. About a year.”

“Well, tell her I want to talk to her, will you?”

“She's asleep,” Vaughn said. He thought he probably should have said she wasn't there, but he wasn't thinking that clearly.

“Wake her up?” Tony said.

“I'm not going to wake her up. What the fuck do you want anyway?”

“You want to start something with me?” Tony said.

“It's the middle of the night and you're in my front yard with a truck. You want me to call the cops? What're you doing here?”

“I'm her boyfriend,” Tony said.

“You're her boyfriend?” Vaughn said. “That the same boyfriend who beat the crap out of her a while back?”

“Nothing like that,” Tony said. “I guess I need to talk to you, if you're her husband.”

“I don't want to talk to you,” Vaughn said. “I want to go back to sleep.”

“Is she right there?” Tony said. He pointed at Vaughn.

“No, she's not here. She's in the other room. I just came out here to see who was yelling.”

It was one of those chilly nights, wispy sky was moving fast. There were a few stars behind the clouds. Dogs were barking in the distance. Vaughn could hear the cars out on the coast road.

“What's with the hoe?” he said.

“What?” Tony said.

“The garden tool,” Vaughn said. “The hoe.”

Tony looked at it as if he'd forgotten he had it in his hand. He was leaning on it, sort of like that painting. “I don't know,” he said. “I just had it in the truck. I was hoeing some stuff earlier.”

Vaughn nodded and wiped his eyes, rubbing them with
his thumb and index finger, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Well, can you call tomorrow?” he said.

“What?” he said.

“Call tomorrow,” Vaughn said and turned to go inside.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Tony said. “We need to talk.”

“We don't,” Vaughn said.

“We do,” Tony said. “You got me all wrong. Come on down, will you?”

Vaughn was guessing at his easiest path out. Was it call the police or go inside and hope Tony would leave? Tony didn't look like a guy who was going to leave.

“Just get out,” Vaughn said. “Go on home. Come back when you're sober.”

“I'm sober now. I want to talk to you. I think we'd better have a conversation.”

“What about?”

“Her,” he said.

Vaughn looked up at the sky. The moon was almond-shaped, like a person's eye. He couldn't figure it. He motioned toward the back door. “I'll be down in a minute,” he said. “Put away your weapon and get the truck out of the yard.”

Tony wanted a beer and Vaughn gave him one and they sat together at the kitchen table. The kitchen was spotless, the way it usually was. The beer was Mexican. Tony looked at the label and chuckled. “No shit,” he said.

Vaughn sized the kid up. Vaughn was bigger than him by half a foot, but Tony looked fit and strong. He might have been thirty, soaking wet. Vaughn figured if it came to that, he
could probably cool Tony just by wrapping him up and hustling him out the door; but if the kid started swinging, Vaughn was going to get hit. He figured Tony didn't really want to get into a fight. Sometimes it happens, but more often than not, even if the guy doesn't want to admit it, he is looking for a way out. Vaughn could make that work for him.

“So what's the deal with you and her?” Tony said.

“We're married. We've been married for a hundred years. Sometimes we live apart, sometimes we live together. Right now we're living together. Since that show you put on a few weeks ago, you're not really welcome around here.”

“She started it,” he said.

“I don't care who started it,” Vaughn said.

“She hit me right here with a beer can,” he said. He drew his hand along his cheekbone, alongside his left eye.

“She could have hit you with a hoe, for all I care,” Vaughn said. “You beat the shit out of her.”

“Did not. I didn't beat her. I just pushed her around a little bit,” Tony said. He did a long tug on his beer. “She fell down a couple times.”

“You guys,” Vaughn said. “We went to the hospital.”

Tony looked at him for a minute, sort of looking past the neck of his beer, and said, “So that's when you came back, right?” And he smiled.

It was Vaughn's turn to scratch at the beer bottle. He did that for a minute, watching his fingernail cut the label. “Yeah, well, maybe you've got me there, Tony,” he said. “But I've been here every day since.”

“Who's the other woman?” he said.

“What other woman?”

“The other one. You know,” he said. “The other one I always see you leaving with.”

Vaughn watched the second hand on the clock, thinking it had been a long time since he'd been in a situation like this. He was trying to figure out which one of them was ahead. Tony seemed plenty docile, so that was points for Vaughn. On the other hand, Tony had made it into the kitchen, which was big for him. If he made a break for the door into the rest of the house, Vaughn would have to hit him with a chair, he figured. He looked at the chair—where would he grab it?

“She's an old friend of ours,” he said.

“She is?” Tony said. “What about the guy over on Mary Magdalene?”

“Yeah, he's a friend, too,” Vaughn said. “Eddie. His name's Eddie. Greta stays over there sometimes. Sometimes she stays over here. It just depends.”

“He's only got one hand,” Tony said. “That Eddie. How'd he lose it? The hand?”

“Desert Storm,” Vaughn said. “What do you care? You've been following us around a lot, have you? That's not exactly legal. That's not exactly the smart thing to do after what happened with you and Gail, is it? Police might be interested in hearing about you.”

“Police, schmolice,” Tony said. “You aren't calling any police.”

“I did last time, didn't I?”

“You didn't. She did,” he said, pointing up into the house. “I know what goes on. She told me. She told me everything.”

“Oh yeah? When was that?” Vaughn said.

“I see her,” he said. “When I want to, when she wants to.
She comes by. We see each other. We're grown-ups. What, that's news to you?”

Vaughn shrugged. Tony was ahead by more than he'd figured.

It wasn't too bright there in the kitchen. There wasn't much light. The only lights on were the ones over the stove and over the sink. There were lots of shadows. From outside there were tree shadows on the glass. Vaughn got the feeling he'd made a pretty big mistake letting Tony into the house. He got the feeling he ought to get him out of the house, if he could.

“Here's the deal,” Vaughn said. “We've got an arrangement. We've got a deal, so you can do whatever you want. But we're not doing it tonight. Okay? Tonight you're finishing the beer and going home.”

“You giving me orders?”

“No,” Vaughn said, sighing. “I'm not giving you orders. I'm suggesting in the nicest possible way that maybe the best thing we could do, the best thing
you
could do right at this moment, is finish that beer and walk out the door.”

“Then what?” he said.

“Whatever you want,” Vaughn said. “This house is going to sleep.”

“What about us?” he said.

By this time Vaughn was making big gestures every which way. He realized that the gestures were
too
big. He was shrugging and holding his hand up in the air and making faces, rubbing his hand over his scalp. He was clearly at a loss. Tony couldn't miss it.

“What about us?” Vaughn said, turning his head and squinting a little.

“What's this deal you've got with her? You're living here, she's living here, she's going out with me—what kind of deal is that?”