Cadillac Jack

by Larry McMurtry

  I am not ungifted at the wild lie. A number of remarkable ones have popped out of me, when events or women make me really nervous. It may be because I seldom meet meek women. Or if I meet them I don't really notice them. I once thought Coffee was meek, but it turned out she was merely sleepy.

  It might just have been that Coffee had so much Texas in her voice that it made me homesick. Innocent Texas voices are hard to resist. For the space of a mile or two I felt an urge to go back to her, watch her buy some more lamps and chairs. But then she had to hang up to take a business call, and the spell was broken. Instead of turning toward Austin, I sort of put myself on automatic pilot, and the Cadillac nosed on into Georgetown, to a parking lot one block from Cindy's stores.

  Chapter IV

  The first thing I noticed when I walked up was that Harris seemed to be losing ground. Instead of being stuck astraddle of the threshold he was standing on the sidewalk near a parking meter, wearing a black raincoat and holding a rolled-up black umbrella. He was looking up at the sky, which was drizzling slightly into his face.

  He wasn't really leaning on the parking meter, but he seemed to draw a certain comfort from the fact that one was near. He had a look of anguish on his face, only instead of directing it at the doorway he was directing it at the drizzling sky.

  I felt I knew him, even though we hadn't been introduced.

  "Hello, Harris," I said.

  Being spoken to startled him a good deal. He gripped his umbrella a little tighter. His fingers were long enough to curl around it several times, like the toes of a sloth. He didn't answer me.

  Meanwhile, Cindy's window had been transformed into a display case for my cowboyana. A bull's skull I had bought in Fort Stockton was the centerpiece, around which were piled horsehide lariats, Mexican spurs, a couple of Army Colts, and some horseshoeing tools. It was a nice display and almost everyone who walked in front of the shop stopped and looked at it. There were even two or three marshal's badges that may or may not have been worn by the Earp boys when they were working the Arizona territory.

  Cindy was in her dress shop, opening packages of dresses. I felt like I had lived a life and a half in the hours since I had seen her last, but Cindy looked like she had only lived about five minutes. She was fresh, vigorous, and annoyed.

  "Don't you ever listen?" she asked.

  "I listen constantly," I replied, truthfully. "I'm sorry I'm late."

  "I thought you kept your appointments," she said.

  "I'm keeping my appointment," I said. "I'm not in Ohio or Mexico. I'm just a little late."

  "When I say five thirty I mean five thirty," she said. "If you'd been on time we could be at a cocktail party at Oblivia's right now."

  "I'm less than an hour late," I pointed out.

  Cindy stopped talking. She turned her attention to a beautiful sleeveless black dress she had just taken out of a box. She opened two more boxes without looking at me or saying a word to me at all.

  I began to wonder why I was still there. I think it may have been because I liked the alert way she read the Sunday papers, sitting naked and cross-legged on her bed. I also liked the way she smelled, night or morning, and I particularly liked the way she said words like "yeah" and "naw." She spoke in the tones of a real girl, however much she may have enjoyed social climbing.

  "I bought a quadripartite icon today,” I said, in an effort to change the subject.

  "Big deal,” Cindy said. Her irritation had not exactly subsided.

  "It is a big deal,” I said. "How many have you ever bought?”

  Testy women seldom mind a little backtalk. In fact, they usually require it. Cindy looked at me as if I were a rock that had suddenly grown vocal cords and made a sassy remark. She apparently saw no point in answering a rock.

  "How come you own an antique store if you're so fuckin’ uninterested in antiques?" I asked, warming to my point.

  "Listen, watch your language,” she said hotly. A talking rock was one thing, a profane rock something she evidently didn’t intend to tolerate.

  "I have employees, "she added, though none were in sight. I had noticed several thin-faced girls with fashionably frizzled hair in the various shops, but so far Cindy had not bothered to introduce me to any of them. They seemed to be silent minions. They all wore black sweaters and looked intelligent.

  "It’s a valid question,” I insisted. "You own an antique store but you don't know a thing about antiques and what's more you don’t really want to. How come?"

  "Because I'm normal, that's why," Cindy said, in a voice full of very normal-sounding irritation.

  "I'm normal, too,” I said. "I just also know a lot about antiques.”

  Even as I was saying it I wished I wasn’t saying it. Cindy put me away with a sharp volley, as if I were a tennis ball that had floated weakly up to the net where she was waiting.

  "You were never normal a day in your life," she said, with such cool conviction that anyone listening would have been compelled to agree, though she had only known me for two days of my life.

  "All you antiques people are kooks,” she added. "I just bought this store in order to get the dress shop.”

  I began to feel depressed. Some hopeful part of me still wanted her to be an antiques person. In fact her attitude toward antiques was not much different from Coffee's.

  "If I’m such a kook, what about us?" I asked.

  Cindy walked past me to hang up some dresses. In passing she gave me a good swift jab with her elbow, as final punishment.

  "I've fooled around with a lot of kooks," she said. "The good thing about you is that you're tall."

  It didn't surprise me. I knew my height was an advantage —one of the most basic advantages, probably.

  A second later, Cindy echoed my thought.

  "It's basic," she said. "This town is full of shrimps."

  Chapter V

  At Cindy's house, while we were changing for the embassy party, some fooling around occurred. I started it. It's seldom a bad idea to fool around with women who've recently been mad at you. It may not lead to the heights of passion, but it will often suspend their memories and keep them from getting mad at you again over the same thing.

  Besides, Cindy had very sexy shoulders—they were both strong and soft, rounded and dimpled, tanned and lightly freckled. In effect her shoulders were a kind, of microcosm of the body that lay below them. I liked them a lot.

  She was not loath to be fooled around with, either. I believe she felt I owed her something for having caused her to miss an important cocktail party. The dress she had chosen for the evening was a beautiful white one that covered one shoulder and left one shoulder bare—it was while she was considering it that the fooling around started.

  It ended with Cindy having secured herself two orgasms, the second strong enough to send her into a form of repose. She didn't close her eyes, but she was in repose. Her eyes were bright, her body utterly still, and her face blank and smooth, like the face of a child who has just awakened from a nap.

  My own exertions had been sufficient to induce a nap, though it turned out to be a very short nap. Cindy woke me with her favorite tactic—an elbow. I felt very sleepy. Cindy had apparently just come out of the shower. She looked very awake. Like Boss Miller, she evidently had excellent cells. She looked ready for about three sets of tennis.

  "You look pretty sluggish," she said. "I think you should watch your diet."

  It was an absurd thing for her to say. I was sluggish but it was because she had just let me sleep about eight minutes. People who think everything is a function of diet give me a pain. In her preoccupation with waking me, she had forgotten to dry her legs and little streams of water were running down them onto her rug.

  "Dry your legs," I said, "unless you want to drip."

  She thought that was amusing and went over and got the white dress. Her closet contained more dresses than her dress store, which only contained maybe fifty dresses. They were costly dresses, but their numbers were
not large.

  An eight-minute nap disorients me. Instead of postcoital sadness I woke to postcoital surrealism. It seemed surreal to me that I was about to go to a party with a girl whose dress shop only contained fifty dresses. I don't know why that fact struck me, but it did.

  I took a cold shower to try and reduce my disorientation and only succeeded in making myself feel sexy, which in itself was surreal. A cold shower is supposed to reduce one's ardor, and I had no reason even to have any ardor just at that time, but nevertheless I got an erection.

  For some reason this made me reluctant to come out of the shower. I turned off the water, to see if that would have any effect on the erection, but it didn't. About that time Cindy came into the bathroom to look for a comb and noticed that the shower wasn't running and that I wasn't out. These facts struck her as novel.

  "Hey," she said. "What's with you?"

  I hardly knew what to say. I didn't really know. So I said nothing.

  Cindy had no patience with mysteries. Also, it was her shower. She opened the door and saw me and my erection. At the time she was brushing her dark blond hair and she kept brushing it. A man in her shower with an erection was no big deal in itself. For all I knew it could have been an everyday sight.

  "What was Harris doing standing by that parking meter?" I asked. I had meant to ask earlier but had forgotten to.

  "He was trying to decide if it was raining enough for him to open his umbrella," Cindy said.

  "Do you mind if I just stand here for a minute?" I asked, since she was still brushing her hair. I was beginning to be aware that I was probably only a temporary indulgence on Cindy's part. I wasn't exactly her chosen mate. I could feel my own temporariness, dripping like the shower. After a week or two of dripping I would be gone, probably.

  At least her good humor extended to my erection.

  "Why have you got a hard-on?" she asked pleasantly.

  "I don't know," I said.

  Actually, I felt a little blue. All at once I had the sense that I understood the workings of life. It worked through irony and paradox, like a metaphysical poem. The chief paradox seemed to be that what you most wanted was what you were least likely to get.

  Cindy evidently sensed something plaintive in my attitude. The orgasms had eliminated her memory of my recent failings, as well as much of her natural combativeness. A faint sexual afterglow in her smooth cheeks was nicely set off by the white dress. She seemed willing to overlook the fact that I was standing in her shower with a hard-on just as she was almost ready to leave. She looked girlish, friendly, and a little absent.

  "If I told Oblivia about you she wouldn't believe it," she said.

  "Why not?" I asked.

  Cindy let her head hang to one side and brushed her hair that way for a while. The head hanging kind of kept the afterglow from fading.

  "Oblivia doesn't understand people who don't do things at the right time," she said. "She was brought up among successful people."

  "Come on." I said. "Nobody does everything at the right time."

  "Oh yeah, around here they do," Cindy said. "Somebody like the Secretary of State isn't going to get a hard-on just before a party."

  It was plain that my aberrant behavior intrigued Cindy a little. It might make me unfit for a Cabinet post, but I had a feeling that it kept me in the running with Harris, for at least one more day.

  "I just don't know what she'll think of you," she said, laying down her brush. The uncertainty seemed to excite her. I was an ambiguous factor, socially and otherwise. On that provocative note, we left for the party.

  Chapter VI

  The first person I saw at the Embassy that I recognized was Boog. He was talking to the second person I recognized, Sir Cripps Crisp. The two of them were standing by a small tree that had somehow been coaxed up through the floor of the Embassy.

  Apart from the fact that he was standing upright. Sir Cripps gave no sign of life.

  Boog was wearing a raspberry tuxedo that would have nicely outfitted the maitre d' of a dinner theater in Killeen, Texas, or somewhere.

  "There's Boog," I said to Cindy, but she was by this time well out of her period of afterglow. Also she was pissed at me for having taken too long to park.

  "Do I look like I'm blind?" she said.

  At the time we were about eighty-sixth in the receiving line, a position Cindy clearly did not relish. Her natural impatience, deflected briefly by a little sex, had returned with a vengeance.

  "At least Khaki's here," she said, having evidently spotted someone she knew.

  Her impatience made me nervous. I myself evidently have too much patience—a useful quality if one spends half one's life waiting in auctions—and female impatience always makes me nervous, as if it were somehow my responsibility to hurry the universe.

  "Khaki who?" I asked,

  Cindy turned and looked at me. The friendly look she had given me when I had the hard-on in the shower might have occurred a year ago. My reluctance to park my Cadillac in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue had finished off the friendliness, at least for a time. She insisted that the middle of the street was under the protection of the Embassy, but I didn't believe her. I parked anyway.

  "Haven't you ever heard of Khaki Descartes?" she asked.

  "I may have," I said, trying to look thoughtful.

  Cindy waited, skeptically. I kept looking thoughtful for about thirty seconds, and then gave up.

  "I guess I haven't heard of her," I admitted sorrowfully.

  "You could try reading a newspaper," she said.

  In fact I often try reading newspapers. I'm just a flop at it. The only part that really interests me is the want ads. The news itself seems to be an interchangeable commodity: Today's is seldom very different from last week's.

  But want ads are ever fresh. What people are willing to try and sell or buy bespeaks the true variety of the human race. News only bespeaks the old constants: war and famine, earthquake and flood, politics and murder.

  That very morning I had clipped a wonderful ad from the Post. "Authority on animal architecture wishes to sell approx. 10,000 nests," it said.

  I thought that was wonderful. Some old person had actually spent a lifetime collecting nests. In all my years as a scout I had only seen one or two varnished hornet's nests for sale.

  Naturally I called the collector at once and made an appointment to see his nests. He sounded like he was munching a nest when I called, though probably he was only eating Shredded Wheat.

  Just having the appointment made me feel hopeful. A world that harbored a nest collector was a world that could be enjoyed.

  The minute we got through the receiving line Cindy abandoned me.

  The experience of the receiving line was not very enjoyable, either. A row of diplomats was planted at the head of it like small tuxedoed shrubs. Shaking hands with them turned out to be really creepy. Their hands were like fleshlike plants. Their plantlike fingers made no attempt to close around my hand, or any hand. We just rubbed palms—their hands swished slightly as the receiving line trotted by. Most of their palms were clammy, too.

  The minute Cindy got through the line she made straight for a small ferretlike redhead in a khaki safari suit. Within seconds they were chattering like sisters. The redhead stared at me, but Cindy didn't beckon me to join them.

  It was clear she was not the kind of girl who forgives a slow parker.

  Feeling at a loss, I turned toward Boog, only to discover that he and Sir Cripps had left their position by the tree and had disappeared. Like Brisling Bowker, they moved with stealth when the mood struck them.

  I let a stream of people carry me through a door into a huge hall, where the first person I saw was Boss Miller. She was walking along talking to a tall, graying, tightly wound man with an aristocratic manner. I would have bet he was a squash player, squash being a game the tightly wound excel at.

  Boss seemed greatly amused by him, but then she was greatly amused by most men, myself, Micah, and Bo
og being no exceptions. She was wearing a black silk dress and a magnificent string of pearls. Boog had expended a whole oil well on the pearls, in Paris years before.

  Coming upon Boss unexpectedly, in the great hall of the Embassy, put life in a new perspective, suddenly. Boss seemed not merely beautiful, she seemed timeless. She could have been wearing that dress and those pearls in any capital, in any modem century.

  Boss tossed her head in a way that meant I should come over, so I went over.

  "Have you met Spud?" she asked, nodding toward the tightly wound aristocrat at her side.

  Spud took me in at a glance. His glance did not have the radarlike qualities of Freddy Fu's, but it certainly had flash. When he looked at me I felt like I feel when a flashbulb goes off": exposed. Then he gave me by far the hardest handshake I had ever had from anyone in a tuxedo.

  "Spud Breyfogle," Boss said, "meet Cadillac Jack."

  "A pleasure," Spud said.

  He nodded at me, gave Boss a knowing look, and turned away. For some reason he reminded me of Paul Henreid, in Casablanca, although he looked more like William Holden than Paul Henreid.

  "He doesn't look like someone who would be named Spud," I said. The only other Spud I had known had been a small saddle-bronc rider from Junction, Texas. His name had been Spud Welch.

  "Spud's a nickname," Boss said. "His real name is Newton. He's the most competitive man I ever met."

  Then she slipped her arm through mine in a friendly way.

  As we were promenading I noticed that Boss had an avid look in her eye. I followed the look, to see if there was a man in the crowd that she could be wanting, and discovered that we were actually promenading along beside a feast. One whole side of the great hall was given over to tables heaped with food. Three or four lambs lay atop great piles of rice, cooked to a crisp. Other tables were piled with seafood: shrimp, squid, smoked salmon, tiny fish. There was even a vast tureen of caviar. It seemed to be the caviar that prompted Boss's avid look.