Yellow Mesquite (21 page)

“I’ll call you,” he said.

He watched her drive off, and then went in and got his seat assignment on the Trans-Texas flight to Houston.

ABOVE THE HOUSTON
skyline
,
the sun, a quivering red disk, pulsed on a flat purple sky. The captain announced that the temperature was a hundred and three Fahrenheit, the humidity ninety-eight percent. The runways looked sticky. The smell of refineries and petrochemical plants seemed to give extra weight to the humid air.
 

Harley flagged a cab and headed downtown to a bookstore. He browsed through dozens of art books and chose
Modern Art Since 1900
, a book with good color reproductions. Mavis was familiar with these paintings and it was something she could enjoy, bedridden. He had it gift-wrapped, then bought a book on art criticism for himself:
The Anxious Object
by Harold Rosenberg. He felt a rush of euphoria, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something to do with the city, with Sidney and conversations about art. He thought of how animals must feel when let out of a cage back into their natural habitat. Even Crump appeared as a well of warmth in a landscape sucked dry of soul.
 

He took a cab to a Holiday Inn.
 

When he entered the motel room, his eyes were drawn immediately to a print of a clown with a big tear on his cheek, the kind of sentimental crap the comedian Red Skelton painted. There were walls and walls—millions and millions of walls—all over the world supporting the worst kind of cheap, maudlin art. One had to go to a museum or a bookstore to find anything fit to look at. There was something immoral about it. Worse than daytime television. He grinned a little, wondering if he might be an art snob. Ironic, considering.

THE HOSPITAL WAS
a sprawling maze of long white corridors smelling of illness, medications, disinfectant. He recalled Sherylynne in her candy stripes, the stolen moments in his room. He picked up a visitor’s pass and a nurse led him to Mavis’s room in one of the cancer wings. The nurse knocked and opened the door a crack.

“Mrs. Whitehead? Visitor.” The nurse stepped back, gave him a quick sympathetic smile, then turned and left.

He stepped inside, then hesitated, jolted. Mavis lay back in her bed, arms disappearing like papier-mâché sticks into the sleeves of a shapeless rose-colored dressing gown. Her eyes were remote, gazing out from her wasted face. She watched him dreamily, almost without recognition as he approached her bedside. He only hoped the shock he felt didn’t show.
 

“Mavis.”

“It was good of you to come.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Better than I look.”

“No, no,” he said, too quickly. “You look good.”

Medical equipment surrounded her bed. On the little crank-up utility table were boxes of tissue, paper cups,
Th
e
Wall Street Journal.

“Harley, dear, I look absolutely horrendous.” Her voice was weak, a low, rasping whisper.

“Brought you something,” he said, handing her the book.

“Oh?” She gazed at the beautifully wrapped present, and then let her shrunken smile linger on him a moment before fumbling with the bow.

“Here, want me to do that?”

“You’re a dear.”

The paper made a lot of noise.

Her eyes brightened. “Oh… Thank you. It’s perfect.” He realized she was too weak to hold it.
 

He took it, laid it aside and reached in his shirt pocket. “Sherylynne asked me to give you these pictures of Leah.”

Mavis took the envelope and let it lie in her hand, limp on the bed, her eyes clouding into the distance.

“She sends her love,” he added.

Mavis’s eyes shifted to him, lingering, vaguely unfocused. She took a pinch of her dressing gown between her fingers and held it up. “What do you think of this color?”
 

“What? That gown? Nice.”

“I’m having an awful time. It seems everything I wear looks like… Well, it makes the ill look even more so.”

“No, no, Mavis—”

“I’ve tried blue, green, lavender, this rose, they…they only make me look worse. My skin amplifies the color…and vice versa.” Her breath was short, catching in the middle of sentences.

“No, no,” he said quickly, not daring to focus on the greenish hue of her waxlike flesh. “Really, you’d look good in anything.”

Her gaze rested on him, gentle. “It isn’t the dying that’s so dreadful, but the indignities that…that go with it.”

He forced a smile. “Mavis, you couldn’t be undignified if you tried.”

Her face softened. “You’re a dear, Harley.”

He lowered his gaze, unable to bear how much she looked like one of Edvard Munch’s death-figures.

“Harley,” she said, “I had a reason for asking you here. It wasn’t only…that I wished to see you.”
 

“I tried to come before.”

“I know. It’s odd…you can only have visitors after…after they’ve given up on you.”

“Nobody’s giving up on you.”

She turned toward the window. Harley took the envelope with the photos from her hand, laid it on the utility table, and cupped her little bird-feet fingers in his. Without turning from the window, she said. “I asked you to come…to beg your forgiveness.”

“What?” he muttered with surprise.

“I have been so very selfish.”

He stared. “Selfish?”

“All this time…you’ve wanted to study in New York, I…I never encouraged you.”

“Mavis, you’ve always encouraged me.”

“I let you spend money you needed because…because I wanted you close by…to…to fill the emptiness in my life.”

“Mavis…”

Her eyes filled. “It was wrong of me.”

“Nobody makes me do anything. You know that.”

“No. I don’t know that…and you don’t know it, either. Wendell and I—and yes, Sherylynne, too…we’ve all used you…in that we’ve only thought of ourselves. Selfish.”

His brain scrambled, at a loss. “If anyone’s selfish, it’s me, always trying to get off to New York, regardless of what Sherylynne or anyone else wants.”

“You’re obsessed, yes. But any artist worth his salt is single-minded to a fault. They must be. The truth is, I simply didn’t want you to leave.”

He thought of Sidney, Sidney’s self-serving mono vision. That might work for Sidney, but that wasn’t who he, Harley Jay Buchanan, was.

 
“Pride. That’s your trouble, Harley. Pride. A man’s greatest assets are also his greatest weaknesses…because he does them to excess. You have no money because…because you insist on being independent…paying your own way. You take Sherylynne to expensive places in order to keep up with Wendell and me, and…and you simply don’t have the resources. I’ve known this and yet I let myself be a part of it. I’ve…asked you down here so…so I can ask your forgiveness…to tell you I’m so very, very sorry.”

“Mavis, you don’t have to apologize to me for anything. My life’s been so much better, just knowing you.”

“You heap coals of fire upon my head with kindness.”

“Listen, I don’t regret one minute I’ve spent with you.”

A shadow flickered behind the wet light in her sunken eyes. “I–I’m afraid for you. My heart aches for you.”

“Afraid?”

“There’s something I must tell you…b–before I die.”

“No, no, you’re not going to die.”

“Please…don’t be upset. I’ve grown accustomed to…to the idea. It’s perfectly all right.”

He hesitated. “Does Wendell know?”

“Yes. Of course.” She gazed at him, her eyes two pools of black water. “There’s…something else…” Struggling upright onto one elbow, she pushed the tissue box aside and took a slip of paper from underneath. “Harley…I–I don’t…” She fumbled the paper, then collapsed as he put his arm under her and let her back down on the pillow.
 

“Mavis…? You okay?”

“Y–you go on to New York,” she whispered, lifting the slip of paper toward him with trembling hands. “You hear? Don’t you listen to…to Wendell Whitehead and…and don’t you listen to Sherylynne, either. You don’t owe them anything. They owe you…they owe
you
!”

He took the slip of paper in numb bewilderment. “Owe me? What do you mean?”

She covered her face with veined, feeble hands.

“Mavis? You okay?”

She nodded weakly toward the paper pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “She’s a…a dear friend…Frankie Mussette. Her name…her number…in New York.”

He glanced at the paper, perplexed.

“She’s expecting you to…to call. She’ll help…get…get you settled…”

 
“Mavis, you know I can’t do that. Ask somebody I don’t even know for help?”

A hint of light brightened in the sunken depths of her eyes, a touch of a smile at the corners of her shriveled mouth. “Willful pride…a-again.”
 

He tucked the scrap of paper in his shirt pocket, a concession to Mavis, knowing he’d never use it.
 

“There’s so much I…I want to say…but…but I…I tire…so…so easily.”

“I’ve exhausted you. I should go and let you rest.”

“No…I’m sorry. But yes…I…I…”

“Mavis, I’m going to let you rest, but first I want you to know I wouldn’t trade my time with you for any art school anywhere.” He bent, carefully placed both arms around her frail little body and gently pressed his face against hers, and for that moment he tried to be Buddy for her—
was
Buddy, the only thing he could give this dear, lonely woman. “You’ve been like a mother to me,” he said earnestly. “Thank you, Mavis. Thank you.”

He rose then and went out without looking back.
 

He turned into a telephone booth in the hallway just off the waiting room, pulled the door closed and stayed until he was able to control the convulsive shaking wracking his body.

HE SAT IN
a molded plastic chair in his motel room and stared unseeing at the clown painting. Mavis had asked him down here to tell him something. But what? That she was sorry she had helped keep him from going to New York? Was that it? That he should go ahead now and not listen to Sherylynne or anybody else? That’s what she’d said. He removed the slip of paper from his shirt pocket:
Frankalena Mussette
,
21 West 54th St., New York, NY 10019, 212 555-9400
. Mavis had called her “Frankie.” He started to trash the little scrap, but that seemed disrespectful to Mavis. He tucked it behind his driver license in his wallet.
 

He felt wired under the skin, as if he were about to explode. He loved Mavis. He would never see her again.
 

He leaped out of the chair, tore the clown off the wall and beat it to pieces on the back of the chair.

THE NEXT MORNING
he turned the key in at the motel desk, paid his bill with his BankAmericard and laid twenty-five dollars cash on the counter. “For the frame,” he said, and left the registrar staring after him as he exited through the double doors.
 

He took a cab to Bergdorf Goodman where he picked out a white dressing gown and had it gift-wrapped. He wrote a note to go with it:
 

Dear Mavis,
 

White. It goes with holy people
 

and represents purity.
 

God chose it for the angels.

Love always, Harley

He decided the note was corny and overly sentimental.

He sent it anyway.

Chapter 24

The Work

T
HEY TOOK COFFEE
out to the backyard and drank it under the mesquite as they did each evening, sitting at right angles in the aluminum lawn chairs. Leah sat swaddled in her playpen, happily gumming the nose on a teddy bear.

He had grubbed the briars and prickly pears out of the yard and put down plugs of Bermuda, but it hadn’t taken very well, even with regular watering from the well. A few flowers had bloomed along the chain-link fence near the butane tank, but had faded with the summer heat. The little garden he had put in was dying too, vines shriveled, rattling in the hot, dry September wind. In the middle distance toward Odessa, a devil duster chased itself in circles, kicking up dust and trash across a plain of oilfield equipment and a thin scattering of trailer houses.

“Maybe we can eat early,” Harley said. “I’d like to get back to work on that
Yellow Mesquite
piece.”

“Wendell’s coming to dinner.”

Harley sighed. “Again?”

“Well, he gets lonesome out there in that big old house all by hisself.”

Harley sipped his coffee.

“He doesn’t have anybody now. And besides, he’s been good to us.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Been good to us? Where the hell did you get that?”

“Well, he has.”

“What, you think he pays me to go out there and sit on my ass all day?”

She said nothing but got up and dumped her coffee dregs in a corner of the yard.

“Nobody’s being good to us. You keep that in mind, okay?”

“You don’t have to get huffy about it.”

They sat for a moment in silence.

Sherylynne went inside, then returned with two letters and handed them to him. “From your mother. Your girlfriend got divorced.”

He looked at her, perplexed.

“That Darlene what’s-her-name.”

He stared at the letter. The other letter only had a return address, no name. He opened it first. From Sidney:

Great news here, my boy. I sold

out a show in Brussels and I’m
 

relocating to New York. So what do
 

you think of that?

I’d love to see you if you can
 

put me up for a couple of days. Here
 

is my phone number. 214 555-5699.
 

Thanks,

Sid

Sherylynne was less enthused. “So why does he want to come see you, anyway?”

“He’s a friend.”

“He’s weird is what he is.”

“Because he’s an artist?”

She got up with Leah and went inside.

HARLEY WATCHED THE
bus pull into the Midland station. Sidney got off, sockless, elbows akimbo, eyebrows peaked. He grabbed Harley and hugged him. “Gads! What a country! Ideal for a minimalist!”