Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (9 page)

 
          
Binx
bobbled the ball. He recovered, dribbled the basketball left, dribbled it
right, faked out an entire squadron of imaginary defenders, struck di- recdy in
toward the broad white garage door, went up with beautiful grace for an easy
lay-up into the orange hoop, missed, and scrambled for the rebound.

 
          
“Bii-inx!”

 
          
That
was Marcy. Binx took the rebound, leaped straight up like a Masai warrior or
whoever it is, made a lovely one-hand push shot, and the basketball arced over
and fell straight through the center of the hoop. “Swish!” cried Binx, though
the net had rotted away from that hoop three years ago.

 
          
“Bii-inx!
It’s your party!”

 
          
There
was something to be said for that point of view, Binx had to admit. Over there
to the right was the party, and it was his, and he was expected to do something
about it.

           
The Binx Radwell castle was a
split-level ranch in a development of split-level ranches southwest of the
city, half an hour from work. Here Binx lived with his Marcy and some children
and a dog and probably a cat, two cats, maybe a hamster, possibly a parakeet.
The plots here were half acre, the developer had left many of the scrub pines
and had done other planting of his own, the roads curved and the bulldozers in
their clearing had created low hills and shallow dales, and with the
developer’s three different models and virtually infinite capacity for options
the place looked hardly like a development at all.

 
          
To
the left of Binx’s blindingly white house was his bottomless black driveway
leading up to his blindingly white two-car garage with orange basketball hoop.
Behind the garage and almost as big was his prefab metal storage shed from
Sears, and behind the house was the broad expanse of rich green lawn under the
Florida sun, sloping back and down to a rock garden, a trellis, some wooden
fence, some metal fence and some shrubbery, all hiding the neighbor back there
and all in need of work.

 
          
Here
and there on the lawn were a playground slide, a set of swings, a monkey bars,
a very large above-ground pool, two cabanas, and a large expensive wheeled
grill, at which Marcy stood, chatting with a neighbor wife and poking sometimes
with a wooden spoon at the grilling spare-ribs, and crying out Binx’s name from
time to time with that peculiarly ravenlike caw of a voice. Beyond all that,
another neighbor’s garage and shed and shrubs flanked the lawn on the far side,
creating privacy al fresco. Lovely place for a party.

 
          
Binx’s
party. About twenty-five adults, a few of them neighbors, but mostly people
from work, moved around the lawn, glasses or bottles in their hands, talking
together and waiting for food. In among them, under their elbows and between
then- knees and behind their backs, several thousand children scampered, like
cockroaches when the light is turned on, but louder. A smell of burning meat
was in the air.

 
          
“Bii-
inx!”

 
          
“Coming,
my love!”

 
          
Here
came Binx, with basketball. It was tough to dribble on grass, but when the
going gets tough, the tough dribble harder. Approaching the grill, Binx yelled,
“Yo, Chuck!” at a neighbor, and tried to bounce-pass the ball away, but it hit
a rock or a toy or Satan’s knuckle or some damn thing, and instead of going
over to the waiting grinning Chuck, hands held out, one with a beer bottle in
it, the basketball took a bad hop, caromed to the right, made a direct hit on
the grill— scattering ribs—and bounded away toward the swimming pool.

 
          
“Bii-inx!”

 
          
“Sorry,
Marcy,” Binx said, with his sheepish grin, and trotted after the ball.

 
          
To
the neighbor wife, Marcy said, “I never would have married him except my mother
hated him so.”

 
          
A
car engine sounded on the driveway beside the house, then stopped. Car doors
slammed. Binx turned, with basketball, to gaze bright-eyed toward the corner of
the house. More people. A bigger party.

 
          
Sara
wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but somehow nothing quite as
normal
as this. The clean
upper-middle-class suburb from the television commercials, complete with boys
on bicycles, sprinklers spit-spit-spurrrting, station wagons stopped on sunny
driveways. Riding through it all, Sara felt displaced, dislocated. Partly that
was because Jack’s car turned out to be an elderly red Honda Civic, the
seediest, oldest vehicle she’d yet seen any employee of the
Galaxy
drive. (Jack had volunteered no
explanation for the Honda, nor had she figured out a polite way to satisfy her
curiosity. And at least he was appropriate to national type; she’d noticed that
the Americans on the
Galaxy
*s staff
tended to drive glamorous or exotic foreign cars, while the Brits and Australians
preferred large boatlike American vehicles.)

 
          
But
mostly Sara’s sense of dislocation was caused by the person they were going to
see. The sweating, panicky, endlessly striving Binx Rad- well ought to live up
some long steep flight of stairs somewhere. This was a neighborhood that cried
out
success.

 
          
As
did Binx’s house, complete with basketball hoop over the garage door. Getting
out of the Honda, Sara grinned quizzically across its top at Jack, saying, “Is
this the real Binx?”

 
          
“There
is no real Binx,” he told her. His weekend manner was exacdy like his work
manner; brusque, impatient, distracted. “Come on,” he said.

 
          
They
walked together toward the party noises around the rear comer of the house, and
there was the yard, the people, the party, the
stuff.
And Binx, grinning manically at them, holding something.
“Yo, Jack!” he cried, and shot a basketball in a line drive pass.

 
          
Jack
wasn’t ready. Before he could react, the basketball hit his chest and bounced
off, leaving in its wake a reddish brown sticky stain that looked a lot like
barbecue sauce. “Well, thanks, Binx,” Jack said.

 
          
“Oh,
wow!” Binx cried, stupendously contrite, hurrying over. “Jack, I’m sorry!”

 
          
“It’s
okay,” Jack said, “it’ll wash off.” To Sara he said, “I’ll be right out,” and
he went away toward the rear door of the house, waving along the way at an
irritable-looking woman with a wooden spoon over by the grill.

 
          
“Jeepers,”
Binx said, looking after Jack. Then, abrupdy cheerful, he took Sara’s arm,
saying, “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

 
          
She
allowed him to lead her out over the yard. The woman next to the grill kept
glaring in his direction. Noticing Sara noticing her, Binx explained, “Over
there, that’s some woman I’m married to. She’s mad at me right now.”

           
“Did you hit her with a basketball?”

 
          
“Worse,”
he said, shaking his head. “Far worse. Comere, lemme show you stuff.”

 
          
Behind
the garage was a large prefab shed. Its door stood open, revealing a full and
cluttered interior. Stopping in front of this structure, gesturing, Binx
rattled off, as though fulfilling a duty, “That’s my power mower, that’s my
roto tiller, that’s my tractor, that’s my seeder, that’s my golf cart, that’s
my moped, that’s my shredder, that’s my table saw, that’s my rubber raft.”

 
          
“And
this is your shed.”

 
          
He
grinned, and pointed. “And this is my grass and that’s my house and these are
my friends.”

           
“This is your life,” Sara finished.

           
Showing alarm, Binx said, “Gee! You
think so?”

 
          
Looking
at the shed and its contents, somehow depressed by it all, Sara said, “All
these things you own.”

 
          
“You
ought to own something, too,” Binx said, taking her arm again. “I’ll give you a
beer.”

           
“Okay.”

           
They walked back toward the house.
The woman by the grill—she probably
was
Binx’s wife, actually—had gone back to her cooking now, was no longer glaring
at anybody.

 
          
The
house provided a narrow swath of shade across the back, in which a long folding
table stood, bearing three open coolers filled with beer bottles floating in
ice water. Approaching this, Binx explained, “They pay me too much, so what am
I gonna do? Buy this.”

 
          
“The
salaries here ...” Sara said, and shook her head, thinking of her own
ridiculous income.

 
          
“You
show me yours,” Binx suggested, “I’ll show you mine.”

 
          
Startled,
she said, “What?”

 
          
“Salary,”
Binx said. Opening a beer, he said, “Actually, I know your salary. Here.”

 
          
“Thanks,”
she said, taking the beer. “Thirty-five,” he said, opening one for himself.

           
“That’s right.”

           
Binx shook his head, grinning at
her. “Honey,” he said, “nowhere on
earth
does a starter try-out reporter get thirty-five grand a year. You know what I
get?”

 
          
Sara
didn’t. “Sixty?” she guessed.

 
          
“Ha
ha,” Binx said, without humor. “I am paid eighty-five thousand U.S. dollars per
annum.”

    
       
“Wow.”

           
“I say exactly that same thing,”
Binx told her, “every week. Wow, Mr. DeMassi, I say, I’m not worth
half
this. I know, he says, but take it
and be happy. The
Galaxy
sells five
million copies every week. We got the largest editorial budget in the
world.
You see these people?”

 
          
“Yes,”
Sara said.

 
          
“We’re
all
overpaid by the
Galaxy,”
Binx said, gesturing at the
partygoers with his beer bottle, slopping a litde on his hand, not nodcing. “You
know why? You get a little scared someday, a little depressed about yourself,
you think maybe you’d like to go back to the real world, guess what?”

           
“What?”

 
          
“You
can’t afford the real world,” Binx said, and looked up cheerfully as Jack came
out of the house and walked over, the stain on the front of his shirt somewhat
paler and streakier. “Oh, good,” Binx told him. “It came right off.”

 
          
“Mmm,”
Jack said, reaching for a beer.

 
          
“You
two play,” Binx said. “I have to grovel with Marcy a minute.”

 
          
Binx
wandered off toward the grill and the woman with the wooden spoon. Watching him
go, Sara said, “Binx isn’t really happy, is he? Under all the joking, he’s
really kind of desperate.”

 
          
Jack
took a long swig of beer, then said, “He tried to get another job a couple
years ago. Soon as people saw
Weekly
Galaxy
on the resume, that was the end of it.”

 
          
Startled,
thinking about her own career, Sara said, “Is that true?”

 
          
“The
rest of the world of journalism looks with disapproval on the
Galaxy ”
he said.

 
          
“Then
he’s—” Looking over at Binx, theatrically apologetic to the woman with the
spoon (who was not relenting), Sara said, “He’s like a slave.”

 
          
“He
enslaved himself,” Jack commented, and shrugged.