Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  I like that. I’ll be dead, but my name will be uttered in kind remembrance at Ruth’s house. One mention of it there, it seems to me now, is better than having it live on forever on the sign above my automobile agency.

  “It was 1954,” I tell her, “so how old was I then, Ruth, forty-four?”

  “You’re a maths wizard, Mr. Kurt, a man who can add up taxes in his head. You know better than me how old you were.”

  “Okay, I was forty-four then, yes, and so unhappy that I rejoined the army after my divorce. I was one of those men who fought in World War II and Korea, and was stationed there after it, helping with the mop-up.”

  Ruth laughs at mop-up, saying, “Korea was your Mrs. Truman, Mr. Kurt.”

  “Actually, Korea was barren and burned by the Japanese and people lived in hovels and there were war orphans everywhere, Ruth … 1954, my God.”

  “Eritreans and Somalis lived in hovels in Nairobi,” says Ruth, “stealing and scheming and holding their hands out for alms.”

  That made me look at her. “But you weren’t one of them, right?” I say. “You got a job in a modeling agency.”

  I was after facetiousness, but Ruth heard sincerity. “I believe what most Americans believe,” she says. “We must pull ourselves up by our own feet.”

  “In 1954, a lot of Koreans believed that, too. If there were jobs at a U.S. base, people stood in line to apply for them.”

  “I was like the ugly stepsister beside those models,” says Ruth. “Yet here I am with a real good job, while they are still dreaming of pipes.”

  She tears off another bit of sponge bread and gives it to me. “Will you let me tell this story, Ruth?” I ask. “Let’s save Nairobi for tomorrow night.”’

  Ruth looks down. “Okay, Mr. Kurt. It was 1954 and the people needed dignity and work.”

  “Yes, they did; that’s a good way to put it. But some of the women, like the models in your agency, played the only cards dealt them—by that, I mean their physical beauty—and worked serving drinks to men. Outside the gates of the military bases, there were actual prostitutes, but my friends and I were far more interested in going into town and finding what they called gisaeng, like the geisha in Japan. Have you ever heard of them?”

  “Singing and dancing!” says Ruth. “With them, prostitution was out!”

  “Singing and dancing and flirting and touching. All the high arts, Ruth. And we were lucky enough to find a place called the Pusan House sitting on the edge of a river, and expensive … oh my gosh … if we’d tried to go there at night, we’d have had to pay a month’s salary. So we went on weekend afternoons, and the owner took pity on us.”

  Ruth’s eyes are as dark as coal and as bright as the fire coal brings to us. When any kind of entrepreneurship is at issue, she’s charged up.

  “No one else was there in the afternoon and we couldn’t speak Korean, but the same three gisaeng always came to sit with us, feeding us tomatoes and strawberries and working out a rudimentary method of communication, English phrases and Korean phrases and pointing out body parts. It was always the same three young women, Ruth: one for me, one for my friend Paul, and one for Paul’s friend Felix. They pretended to love us, but for me, at least, the love I felt was real. I was just plain gaga over Chung-ja, Ruth, the one who sat with me.”

  “Felix was Paul’s friend but not yours? Only three men and already there is a distance.”

  “Felix isn’t the issue here. His story left with him when his tour was up.”

  “Felix is gone, but his name remains in your story, like yours will at my house.”

  That moves me greatly. “Oh, Ruth, do you think love can be defeated as easily by a difference in age as by distance? Do you think the love of one’s life might be born fourteen years after him?”

  Actually, Ruth was born some fifty years after me, but that seems too great a number to state. She’s as moved as I am, though. She knows what she knows and bears that knowledge with composure.

  “Love can’t be defeated by anything, Mr. Kurt,” she says. “Who do you love in that book you are reading? Think how much older she is than yourself.”

  The moon shines through a gap in the curtains Lars hung, laying a small moon highway across my bed. In War and Peace I love Natasha, of course. People have been loving Natasha since before I was born, and now I’m closing in on death and love her, too.

  “One day, after Paul and Felix and I had been going to the Pusan House for a while, we decided to invite our three gisaeng up into the mountains, and through a series of gestures and looks we gained their acceptance of our invitation, forming a sort of conspiracy with them. We, after all, were Americans, and, like on the moon highway there on my bed, we might drive them out of the misery of postwar Korea.”

  Ruth makes legs out of two of her fingers, leans forward on the stepladder, and stands them on the moon highway. I make legs out of my fingers, too, but they remained upside down in my lap.

  “In order to be sure they understood us correctly we spent hours teaching them to say ‘Let’s meet Saturday and have a picnic’ in English. We made them repeat it and repeat it, with my girl, Chung-ja, easily surpassing the others in clear pronunciation. She was the prettiest, too, I haven’t said that yet, and though you can’t see it now, I was better-looking than either Paul or Felix.

  “Let’s meet Saturday and have a picnic,” says the woman standing on the moon highway on my bed. The moon has shifted, moving the entire highway, and Ruth’s finger woman, too, close enough for me to right my finger man and walk him up to where he can better see his beloved waiting for him.

  “All the following week, I was of two minds. One—I’m not afraid to say this to you, Ruth—was that it would be fun, booze and sex in the burned-down mountains for a man from Tacoma, Washington. But two, the other mind, told me that I would take Chung-ja to the U.S. embassy in Seoul and make her my wife.”

  “Only the single-minded save themselves,” says Ruth.

  Her highway woman turns away, so I make my finger man step toward her. The act of leaning forward in the bed is hard on my back, which is broken and sore and the reason I had to come here in the first place. Seeing me in pain moves Ruth to bring her finger woman off the safety of the moon highway and across my blankets, until she’s standing near my finger man, looking at him steadily in the dark.

  “Finally the day of reckoning came. Paul and I went shopping for beer and soda, the freshest bread, and fruit—oh my, we had such mounds of fruit that it would hardly fit in our backpacks. Felix, meanwhile, brought a bottle of scotch and a couple of packages of condoms. We went to our appointed meeting place at our appointed time.”

  “But the girls didn’t come,” Ruth says.

  “How did you know? Can you feel the disappointment that I felt that day?”

  “No,” says Ruth, “I simply remember such things from the modeling agency.”

  IN War and Peace, most of those with steadfast hearts are rewarded for their goodness. There is time for that in novels, with the characters forever on the cusp of things, while I, Kurt Larson, have no cusps left, except at the nubs of my worn-out teeth.

  Ruth takes three days off, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Lars and Lars Junior come to see me, talking their talk and looking at their watches. Lars Junior visits twice as often as his father, but it is his father whom I want. His mother turned him against me somehow and I was never able to win him back.

  On the night Ruth returns, the two Larses arrive with her at 7:00 P.M. Dinner is over and I am sitting with Mrs. Truman in the TV room, not expecting them, not even expecting Ruth till midnight. I have just told Mrs. Truman the septic tank story again, hoping she might spit up on another woman’s birthday cake, when they walk in, a Lars on either side of Ruth, who looks refreshed after her three days away from Tobey Jones.

  “Hi, Dad!” says my son. “Look who we found in the hallway!”

  Lars Senior is emphatic. Though deafness surrounds me, and I, too, tend to shout at my c
oevals, my own hearing and eyesight are less impaired than those of either of the Larses. I may have the look of a broken-down mule, but I can hear and see and smell death coming. Not like poor Mrs. Truman, who smiles now, thinking that Ruth and the Larses have come to see her.

  “Hello, Ruth,” I say. “Hello, Lars and Lars Junior.”

  Ruth hasn’t put on her uniform yet, is wearing Eritrean dress, some kind of wrap, gold or dark yellow, with a leafy blue pattern on it. She looks fabulous, like in a poster for Eritrean Airlines. “Hello, Mr. Kurt,” she says. “And how are you this evening, Mrs. Truman?”

  Mrs. Truman says, “One morning a wide brown lake appeared in our front yard.”

  That is the beginning of my septic tank story. Lars Senior looks at her and then at his watch. He once admitted in a fit of rage that he became a milkman to hurt me, since I had spent a lot of money sending him to college and graduate school, where he did all the work but his dissertation for his Ph.D. in geography. I don’t know how he came up with milkman as a way of hurting me, but it worked.

  “Mr. Kurt—” Ruth says, but Lars Junior interrupts her.

  “Grandpa, Ruth and I have something to tell you. We’ve been seeing each other, and tonight’s Ruth’s last night here at Tobey Jones. She’s coming to work for me at Lars Larson Motors.”

  Lars was my father’s name, so I named both my company and my only son after him. “Seeing each other?” I ask. “Does this have anything to do with my stepladder?”

  Ruth smiles. When Lars put my curtains up, she’d steadied the ladder for him, though it had only three steps and didn’t need steadying. I thought at the time that Lars was a dunderhead for not noticing her, but I guess I was wrong.

  “Well, criminy, Ruth,” I say, “what did Lars say you’d be doing at the company?”

  I feel choked up but hide it well.

  “Accountancy,” says Ruth. “That is what I did at the modeling agency.”

  “Accountancy,” Lars Junior repeats, like he’s never heard anything so cute in his life.

  Lars Senior is looking at his watch again and sees me catch him at it. Lars retired from delivering milk a few years ago and is finding it difficult to know what to do with himself. “I know, Dad,” he says. “Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but it hasn’t done it with us, right?”

  Maybe seeing his son fall in love again broke something loose in him, because this is the first time since he became a milkman that Lars has confronted the issues between us, and I’m as stunned at that as I am by the coming loss of Ruth. It’s the age-old nursing home dilemma, how to love the life you lived and not the one that escaped you.

  “What did you do, Ruth, give Tobey Jones a one-day notice?” I ask. “I thought two weeks was customary. And yes, Lars, time went on holiday with us, but it’s not too late for us to catch it.”

  Lars Junior is standing close to Ruth now, as if making his announcement gives him the right of encroachment.

  “I did give them two weeks’ notice,” says Ruth. “It’s you whose notice is shorter, Mr. Kurt. I thought that two weeks of thinking about this might not be so good for you.”

  “One day is better,” Lars Senior says. “In our case, what good did forty years’ notice do, Dad?”

  Was Lars a milkman for forty years?

  “It didn’t do any good,” I admit. “But to work for a man you’re involved with, I don’t know about that, Ruth.”

  My eyes so unexpectedly fill with tears that I look at Mrs. Truman, as if she is responsible for them. Mr. Truman lived at Tobey Jones, too, but died two weeks before my arrival, thus giving Mrs. Truman two weeks’ notice on the transfer of her affections to me.

  “I would like to come to your room tonight,” says Ruth. “I would very much like to hear the end of our story.”

  She says it like I might not want her to come to my room, and when I nod in a jerky kind of way, tears land on my gnarled hands.

  “Okay, then,” says Lars Junior “I’ll take off till your shift is over, hon …”

  He’s talking to Ruth, of course, his tone open and cheerful, ready for whatever a life together might bring.

  “This is going to surprise you again, Dad,” says Lars Senior, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll hang back a bit, stay a little longer just for tonight.”

  Mrs. Truman looks up and says, “Of course you can stay, Harry. You know as well as I do that you should never have gone away in the first place.”

  AT MIDNIGHT, I’M ALONE IN MY ROOM with another book in my lap, this time Middlemarch, open to a section where Miss Brooke’s strength of character is in evidence. Middlemarch and War and Peace have been my touchstones since I came to Tobey Jones.

  Mrs. Truman is in the hallway in her wheelchair, staring through my open door. On the lenses of her glasses I believe I can see a projection of the images that penetrate her thoughts. She is watching Mr. Truman, ill with one of his many diseases. Twice now, Ruth has walked past. Before she comes to visit me, she’ll roll Mrs. Truman into her room and put her to bed, removing her glasses and the images pulsing across them. Lars’s glasses were bright with memory, too, earlier, when he lingered in the TV room.

  “May I come in?” Mrs. Truman calls from the hallway.

  “No, Mrs. T., you may not. I’m Kurt Larson. Your husband, Harry, is dead.”

  Actually, her husband’s name wasn’t Harry, but that’s the name she has given him now.

  Earlier, in the TV room, Lars waited until Ruth rolled Mrs. Truman out of earshot before he said what he’d stayed to say, which was, “I know a lot of time has passed, Dad, but I want to get involved with Lars Larson Motors. My name is over its door and … well, it’s my goddamn legacy.”

  “Why not ask your son?” I told him. “He’s the company president.”

  Maybe that was churlish of me, or—what do they call it now?—passive-aggressive, but this issue of Lars’s joining Lars Larson Motors was what caused our falling-out in the first place. It was 1967 when I made him an offer to join our sales force and work his way up. I knew he might refuse, but you’d have thought selling Jaguars was a crime against humanity, that we packed every new model with Agent Orange, by the way he articulated his refusal.

  “I did ask him and he told me I’d be welcome,” said Lars.

  Out the windows of the Tobey Jones TV room, I could see the trees of Point Defiance Park, where generations of Tacomans have gone to swim in Puget Sound, look at zoo animals, or stop at some secluded spot along the Five Mile Drive to wax their cars. I hadn’t remembered it until that second, but we’d been there ourselves, my son and I, in the shade of some pines, when I asked him to join our sales force. The shade and the trees are still there, of course, while I am nearing the end of my life and, a few years into milkman retirement, Lars is at the end of his rope.

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked. “You wanted to start in accountancy?”

  Mrs. Truman hasn’t gone away and Ruth hasn’t come to get her. I don’t think Ruth will learn to love my grandson, though she might believe it now. What she will learn to do is add up sales taxes in her head.

  “Okay, Mrs. Truman. You can come in,” I call, “but you have to leave again when Ruth gets here.”

  The planes of her glasses come up. It’s like watching the movement of the Hubble Space Telescope.

  “Okay, no more flippancy,” I told Lars in the TV room, when he didn’t respond to my accountancy dig. “What do you want to do at the company, and why start now? Did you tell Lars Junior you had anything particular in mind?”

  Lars was looking out at Point Defiance Park, too, possibly remembering the same day I did.

  “Don’t laugh, Dad, but I’d like to take over the advertising, put myself on TV, see if I can’t increase our revenues. I’m a natural at stuff like that.”

  It has taken Mrs. Truman time to find her hands in her lap and move them to the handles of her wheelchair. Also, she’s forgotten to put her feet on the footrests and they’ve turned in, pigeon-toed
in multicolored socks, like the feet of that witch in The Wizard of Oz.

  “Didn’t you used to scoff at those ads?” I asked Lars. “Didn’t you like to say they played to our lowest common denominator? Something like that?”

  “That’s because they were never well done. I have a really classy idea in mind, Dad. We’re selling Jaguars, after all, not goddamn Kias.”

  “Jaguars and Volkswagens,” I reminded him. “‘Master Craftsmanship for Any Pocketbook’ has been our slogan since I started the company.”

  “Yes, and for forty years I’ve had to read it on the license plate holders on half the cars I came up behind in my milk truck. How do you think that made me feel, Dad? My father and my son are out making money, while I’m stuck watching cartons of milk and cottage cheese come forward on my conveyor belt.”

  “Do people still order cottage cheese?” I asked. “And television ad campaigns are expensive, Lars. For Volkswagens, it might make sense, but we get by on our name alone when it comes to Jags.”

  “The operative part of that sentence of yours is ‘get by,’” Lars said.

  “You look bad, Harry,” says Mrs. Truman now. “I wish you’d let me take the burden from your shoulders like I did in the old days.”

  She has finally worked her way to the side of my bed.

  “Don’t forget now, Mrs. T., as soon as Ruth gets here, you’re on your way.”

  I want Ruth to take the burden from my shoulders, not Mrs. Truman, which goes to show that I haven’t learned any more about life than Lars Senior has, though I’m my son’s senior by a couple of decades.

  Lars’s ad campaign idea, as he told it to me in the TV room, consisted entirely of himself in various sets of clothing, first old hippie garb, then his milkman uniform, then in a series of progressively more expensive suits, from the leisure suits of the seventies to suits made of cotton and wool and cashmere, which the dealership would apparently buy. He said that as a hippie he’d step out of an old VW bus, as a milkman out of a Beetle, hurrying off to deliver an emergency milk order. In the leisure suit, he’d hold a tiny milk bottle to his lips, so the viewers would know it’s him, and so on and so forth as he worked his way up to cashmere and our most expensive cars. He wants to call the whole campaign, “We Will Sell No Car Before Its Time.”