Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  TANGO

  L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with views of several mountain ranges, including the Absarokas, the Bridgers, and the Crazies. The second floor kept his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two apartments, one of which housed his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in the summer, a textile historian, employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.

  The year the historian died, I was still premed and was painting houses to support myself; I moved into the vacated apartment. Acknowledging that there is a difference between being naïve and being innocent, I will say that I was entirely naïve back then. My parents lived only a few miles away, but we weren’t getting along, and I needed some distance, despite the fact that my mother was sick and often ranted about God. How was I to know that she was about to die? Like most aspiring to study medicine, I planned to get rich, but I wasn’t rich yet; I was just a poor housepainter, out of work and hoping for something to come along, and, despite all other evidence, I feared that I would be one forever, packing a great wheel of color chips from one indifferent house to another. I don’t mean to suggest mild insecurity here: by any reasonable standard, I was losing my mind.

  Tessa Larionov was the daughter of a Russian engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1953 and found his way to Choteau, Montana, where he set up business building bridges for the railroad. Tessa’s mother was not Russian; she may have been Italian. She had met Tessa’s father in New Jersey, when he first landed. Tessa was a powerfully built but attractive woman, with black hair, black eyes, and the look of a Tatar—humorous and a little dangerous. She was liked by everyone who knew her. Trained in library science, she had worked as an archivist at some very august places, including the Huntington, in San Marino, where she’d met her employer and our landlord, L. Raymond Hoxey, who had let her talk him into retiring to Montana with his rare-prints business, which she was now helping to run. Hoxey was eighty-one years old, and his arrangement with Tessa was really just a way of avoiding assisted living. She was very fond of him but had wanted to move home, and this arrangement worked for them both. Tessa was exactly thirty, still single, though she had enjoyed an active love life, leaving behind only grateful hearts, or so she said. “They’re all still crazy about me—that’s why I left California,” she told me. Settling down was of no interest to her; the prints were her life, and she wanted to keep her eye on Hoxey. I was twenty, but she treated me as if I were even younger—a salute to my retarded behavior, I’m sure.

  My father was a pipe fitter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. (In the world of corporate takeovers, the railroad had actually changed its name several times, but “Northern Pacific” was the one that stayed in all our minds: it meant something; “Burlington Northern” meant nothing.) My mother was a hairdresser and, because of her big mouth, she had enemies all over southwest Montana and very few customers. As an only child, I was driven back and forth between our house and the less fashionable grade school in the area, then the local high school, where I was anonymous, never having been allowed by my overprotective mother to learn a sport. But I liked to fish. I’d fish anywhere there was water; I fished in a lot of ditches where there was no hope of success. I commuted to college and lived like a monk, on a small scholarship. I now understand that I was a weirdly underdeveloped human being for my age, ripe for just the sort of encounter that I would have with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, “Stop staring at people!”

  It was Hoxey whom I got to know first. The day I arranged to rent from him, he happened to have received several Reginald Marsh prints, of which he was very proud. I acted as if I’d heard of Reginald Marsh. I didn’t know one painter from another, but I had a hunger for this sort of information—I was sure that it would be useful later, when I was rich. Hoxey was a pleasant old man who must have once been very fat, because he had loose flesh hanging from him everywhere and as many as seven chins. I always tried to count them while he was speaking to me, but then something in his remarks would break my concentration. This physicality, which bespoke a lifetime of phlegmatic living, gave his discourse on prints the authority that a weathered desert rat would have if he told you about cactus. I remember Hoxey carefully unpacking one of the prints—a kind of crazy thing with blank-faced people swarming in and out of doorways, no one reacting to anyone else. He said that it was the calmest Reginald Marsh he’d ever seen. “No Moonlight and Pretzels in this one!” he cried. I could see both that he’d be an agreeable landlord and that many health issues lay before him. As someone studying medicine, I could make a little game of guessing which one would kill him.

  A few days after I moved in, Tessa asked me over for drinks. She had done a beautiful job of making her apartment habitable, with old, comfortable furniture that she’d bought cheap and re-covered. She also had a good many of Hoxey’s prints on loan, though, as she explained, she was really just providing storage for them, and her collection changed as things were sold. She made a little face when she told me that she couldn’t afford to get attached to any of the prints, a particular trial for her as she loved the art of all nations. Cocktails and art, I thought—maybe I’ll get into her pants. I’m sure that I had a big goober smile on my face as I contemplated such an outcome.

  “Because I work upstairs, I’ve had to become a walker just to get outside,” she told me, as she mixed our drinks in a blender. “You start getting curious about different neighborhoods—where the railroaders lived, where the ranchers retired, where the doctors and bankers live. In the winter, when the wind starts up, I have to tie a scarf over my face. Anybody you see in the street is ducking for a building, kind of like in the Blitz.”

  As I listened, I found that I was leaning forward in my chair with my hands pressed between my knees. It was only when she stopped to look at me that I realized that my posture was strange. I pretended that I was just stretching and leaned back in an apparently casual but quite uncomfortable position. As Tessa came toward me with a brightly colored drink, it seemed as though both she and it were expanding, and when she handed me the glass I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough to hold it. I felt suddenly as if everything were bigger than me, as if I were in over my head, trying to handle the kind of situation that, when I was rich, I would take to like a duck to water. But things settled quickly once she sat down, and I was glad to have the drink because I was a bit cotton-mouthed. I had gone from my first impulse to get into her pants to fearing that she’d try to get into mine.

  I’m not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental jaunt into a local bar. I felt that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber, middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was going out of my conversation. Finally, he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go: you’re creeping me out.”

  “Now,” Tessa said, “let’s start at the beginning: what do you think being a doctor will do for you?”

  “I don’t know.” My answer came out so quickly she looked startled. She leaned back into the sofa—she was at one end, I at the other—with her elbow propped and her fingers parting the hair on the side of her head.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I wish I did. Sorry.” I involuntarily sang out this last word.

  “No, that’s all right. That’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’m okay with that.”

  I didn’t share the image I had of myself: still dark haired but with a graying mustache, marching up the gangplank of a yacht. I kept looking into my drink as if it were a teleprompter and I were the president of the United States. The colorful liquid seemed like something I had found and
would have to turn in. I don’t know why I made people so uncomfortable. As a kind of icebreaker, I thought to ask her a question.

  “When people use the expression ‘Rest in peace,’ do you think they have some basis for saying it, or is it just wishful thinking?”

  I can’t imagine what made me think that she’d have the answer to this doleful conundrum. But surely my mother’s poor health was on my mind.

  “You mean, about the dead?”

  “Sure.”

  Tessa looked at me for a very long time before saying anything.

  “You know, let’s try this another time. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me, but at this point in time and space it’s just not happening.”

  I backed out of there like a crab. I felt sorry for Tessa; she’d probably have trouble sleeping after this weird visit from the new neighbor. I just didn’t know what to do about it—an apology from me would have made it all seem even weirder.

  Thereafter, we sometimes ran into each other in the hallway between our apartments, and things did not get any less awkward. I made increasingly maladroit attempts to be cordial, attempts that were received with growing skepticism, even revulsion. Finally, upon seeing me, Tessa would dart into her apartment and slam the door. What was strange is that whenever I lingered in the hallway after she’d gone inside, I always, moments later, heard her phone ring.

  Once she said to me, “I know you’re tracking my movements.” And another time, “Don’t think you’re fooling me.” And another, a cry: “Please stop!”

  “Stop what?”

  A mirthless laugh followed and a slammed door.

  I made every effort to avoid these encounters. Indeed, I did start tracking her movements, in order to avoid her. She headed upstairs to work for Hoxey at exactly nine, out for the mail at ten-thirty, lunch with Hoxey in his apartment, catered by Mountain Foodstuff, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, out to lunch Tuesday and Thursday but always back by one-thirty, UPS and FedEx and other outbound packages at four o’clock, and then her workday was over. On the weekends, I really didn’t have a pattern of her activities and nervously came and went from my apartment. When she had men over, they seemed to linger around my door as if they were on the lookout for me. One afternoon, a strapping man positioned himself as though to actually block my way. I gave him a big smile and pushed past. He smelled like motor oil. He said, “Hello, Doc.” Tessa must have told him that I was premed. I said hello. I was glad to get inside and, when I looked through the little spy hole in the door, I was looking into his ear.

  Concentrating on the help-wanted ads calmed me down. I had discovered that I needed to look for work in other towns, as people in Livingston knew who I was and—this really is very funny—held my studies against me.

  “You can’t paint my house,” Mrs. Talliafero said. “You’re going to be a doctor!”

  “Not necessarily!” I said in my warmest tone, while hers cooled markedly. I have no idea why I answered her that way. I was sure that I was going to be a doctor, but when I was under pressure to make conversation it was as if all my life plans went up in smoke.

  I kept studying the paper. I recognized the real opportunities that exist for those who wish to sell cars or apply siding, but the trouble I was having with my communication skills made me fear that those occupations might not be my line. I really thought that once I got my timing back—and it was a timing issue—I’d be able to look into a different set of prospects. I was very much focused on my chances of being unexceptional; if I had any opportunity to keep my head down, I meant to take it.

  I got a job working for a very nice guy, or so I thought, named Dan Crusoe. He was an attorney in Billings who specialized in whiplash and owned a cute little turn-of-the-century cottage in Harlowton, which he used as a weekend place—or, rather, somewhere to get away with his secretary, who did not enjoy the same legal standing as his wife. “Lawyers like me make doctors leave the profession every day!” he joked. “Stick to painting houses.” But he was an amiable fellow with a big laugh that led one’s attention away from his shrewd, close-set eyes. His dark curls were so uniform and regular they suggested the work of a beautician. When I asked him if they were natural, he told me to mind my own business with such vehemence that I actually jumped back. The previous owner of his cottage had used stolen Forest Service paint for the trim and shutters, and Dan wanted it all yellow, “like sunshine, get it?” I was rehearsing what I thought to be the appropriate style for my current position when I said, “No problema,” but Dan seemed to detect some awkwardness in my delivery, for his eyes grew narrow and he just said, “Right.”

  I rented a pressure washer, masked everything, used a quality primer, and picked my weather for the final coat. The house looked much better, but Crusoe never responded to the bill I sent, nor to the second or the third notice. Live and learn. I wasn’t much interested in exploring my remedies, and, since other revenues were unassured, I sold my car and went on a grocery binge. Also, to celebrate my first two months in the apartment, I bought a bed and put it out in the middle of the living room, where I could luxuriate in all that space and gaze east, west, and south, but not north, out of fine windows at prospects that were better than any painting, in that they were full of those moving, changing parts called Life.

  One morning, I heard a timid knock on my door and called, “Enter!” I was stretched out on my new bed in my shorts, reading a newspaper I’d found in the doorway of the bank, when I learned that my visitor was the chief of police. I was really pleased to see him, so pleased that I easily set aside my worries about the reason for his visit. I suppose that I was lonely. In a decent society, the chief of police is the one stranger you should be able to welcome into your home without reservation. But the first thing he told me was that I’d better get dressed, as I was going to jail. He gazed at me with sad knowingness. He had a big, warm face; it shouldn’t be misunderstood if I state that he looked like Porky Pig, with all that guileless amiability, the same pink complexion.

  “Tessa Larionov”—he gestured with his head in the direction of Tessa’s door—“has charged you with making obscene phone calls to her.”

  “Oh?” I said. “I don’t have a phone.”

  For one miraculous moment, there were people passing all three windows and the chief remarked that I needed curtains.

  “How bad were these calls supposed to be?” I tried to picture myself as the twisted man dialing her number. In a weird way, it seemed plausible.

  “They were not nice.”

  It comes as a great surprise to anyone who spends some time in a small-town jail that it is a remarkably stress-free environment. If your reputation is of no concern, your troubles are behind you. The Livingston jail was as good a place as any in which to unravel all the causes for the state I was in. In a rare moment of lucidity, I suggested a wiretap. The chief didn’t take my idea seriously, but tomorrow was a new day because Tessa would inform him that the calls had continued while I was in jail, and so the wiretap came into play after all.

  It soon paid off. Hoxey had been making the calls. Tessa declined to press charges, and it all went down as a lovers’ quarrel, once you swallowed the fifty-one-year difference in their ages. Tessa’s routine remained the same, except that her phone no longer rang so much after her workday was done. I finally ran into her in the hallway one afternoon, just as she was coming down with the packages. She stopped in her tracks, arms loaded, and regarded me quizzically. “Hello,” she said. I waited before replying. I wanted her to think about what she had done to me. But she didn’t seem worried, and the longer I waited the less worried she looked.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You look like you’ve been painting.”

  “Yes, I’ve been painting a house.”

  “Here in town?”

  “Yes, a doctor’s house on Third.”

  “How funny. But you’re going to be a doctor.”

  “Yes, I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “I don’t
suppose we’ll ever get to the bottom of that.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “If you were sick, would you go to a doctor, or treat yourself?”

  “Oh, I’d go to a doctor. I’m not a doctor yet.”

  “I mean if you already were…Oh, never mind. Can you help me with these?”

  We took the packages to the post office and I stood outside on the steps while she shipped them. I watched a grackle walk between parked cars, one of which had an American flag on its antenna. A strong young man was wheeling a cart of pies into the back of a restaurant. He looked too powerful to wheel pies. My mother drove past, blowing her horn and revealing her colossal agitation through the windshield. People in town enjoyed such scenes.

  Once Tessa had sent the packages, she commended me for having taken the jailing episode with such good grace. I told her that I didn’t know how I could have done otherwise, which she mistook for some form of courtesy. I used both speech and body language to indicate that I mostly understood, and that what I didn’t understand I forgave.

  I had been brought up to believe that time delivers our dreams and quietly carries our nightmares away, and that most of what lies before us is welcoming and serene. This was part of the strange but cozy world of my home, with God in the role of Mr. Goodwrench. Or, at least, that’s how I looked at it, peering out from the cocoon of my oddly sheltered Pentecostal household, where the only thing I had to worry about was the flames of eternal damnation, which didn’t seem like all that much. I saw Satan as just another person who could be bought after my career took off. My mother was always telling me how deceitful the devil was, but that only made me feel that I could handle him.

  Tessa soon took charge of my life, and she decided that it would be good if we were to do something together, just for fun. “Mr. Hoxey feels terrible about all that has happened,” she said. “He wants to treat us to a night on the town.”