Carry your one canvas suitcase up the outside steps. Before you open the door, you know the apartment’s archaeology of scents: stained undershirts, empty ice-cube trays, faulty electrical wiring, chipped lead paint. Sit on the couch, the plastic upholstery reminding you of the seats in the blue convertible. Across from you is a bright square of wallpaper where a picture must have hung for years. From age, sun, neglect, the remaining wallpaper is the color of water-stained magnolia petals. A solitary cobweb trails from the ceiling. In the bathroom, rust corrodes the toilet, the sink. The mirror’s silver backing is tarnished. Avoid looking at yourself when you open the medicine chest. Dry mercurochrome smears one of the shelves.
A toaster, leaking crumbs, is plugged into a scorched socket in the kitchen. Open the refrigerator to discover an empty, washed mayonnaise jar, even the rim wiped clean. Remove, from your suitcase, a small slab of roast beef wrapped in aluminum foil. You brought it from the apartment where you lived with your husband, ten blocks away. Place the beef in the fridge beside the empty jar.
Open windows. Across the street is a rooming house. A man’s arm leans on the sill in a second-story window. In the lowering sun, you barely see his shadowed face. But you know a frayed rope belts his stained jeans. He eats deviled ham out of a can for dinner. He thinks it still costs three cents to mail a letter. Dry skin cracks his heels. You want to wave but know that’s not a good idea.
That evening walk to the seawall. Another day slips into the gulf, below water. No longer believing in romantic sunsets, enter the first club you pass, the Jean Lafitte; believe in the permanent neon night of bars instead. Slide onto a stool. Order bourbon and fries. One by one, dip them in ketchup. Glen Campbell sings “Galveston,” an obvious jukebox favorite. On the dance floor, not nearly as interesting as the Kon Tiki’s, sailors sway the Texas two-step, girls wearing western shirts with plastic, pearlized buttons. Ceiling fans churn cigarette smoke. Inhale it. Deeply. Glance at the pay phone by the front door. Think about calling blue convertible. Or your husband. Think about returning to the apartment you shared with him. But across from that apartment is the red door of the Kon Tiki. It would only be a matter of time before, lonely again, you watch neon penises flashing off and, better yet, on.
Besides, while you suspect what’s wrong, you don’t know how to explain it—to your husband or to yourself. You don’t quite know how to say that you once had a good job on Capitol Hill. But you left it, as well as your friends and your apartment, to move here to be with him . . . where he has a job directing a project to restore The Strand and the Victorian residential neighborhoods. Whereas you have no job at all. Nor do you know how to say you are angry he works long hours and weekends. At times, he doesn’t seem to remember he’s married. You might as well be a table or chair. He never says “I love you.” Nor can you explain your confusion as to why he never bought you an engagement ring or a wedding band. He ignored you during your wedding reception, dancing with virtually everyone else but you. He never apologized. But remember that love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Now what to do? Return to DC? Work on your marriage? File for divorce? Buds of indecision bloom—all you’re able to grow.
A drunken sailor approaches your bar stool. His face and clothes are wrinkled from salty air, alcohol, age. Halfheartedly, he attempts to pick you up, but you’re both too far gone to give it anything but a feeble try. Still, perhaps in his sadness as to what might have been—another night, another year—he generously produces a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, shoving it into your hand. Think about refusing.
Back outside, walk along the seawall lined with palms, wind-whipped fronds permanently molded in a northerly direction. Motorcycles roar along the strip. Teenagers blare music in Trans Ams, headlights and taillights dim portholes through night. Down on the beach jellyfish, washed ashore, lie strewn across sand like discarded wedding veils. Oil rigs, out in the gulf, flicker more brightly than stars, melting in the humid sky. Think about throwing yourself into the harbor. Instead, watch waves surge and collapse until you’re exhausted by their constant, useless movements.
That night, lie atop the chenille bedspread in the valley of the mattress, still in tank top and cutoff jeans, the edges frayed. Worry the sheets haven’t been washed since the Eisenhower administration. From downstairs, pulleys and levers whir as the quadriplegic lowers himself to sleep, while his breath bubbles from watery lungs. Imagine his soft, slug-like body. No. Don’t. Fumes from your own mattress rise around you. Be afraid to yawn or close your eyes. Be afraid, if you move, tethers will shred. You’ll slide deeper into inertia. Think about the man who lives in the rooming house across the street. Feel the breaths of all three of you becoming gossamer—or fog.
Through the double-hung windows, humidity swells the night with longing. Display the sailor’s twenty-dollar bill on the dresser, a memento of your first night alone in Galveston.
Stalking for Love in All the Wrong Places
One dusk a week later, strolling the east-end neighborhood, see the blue convertible. The car isn’t parked outside his own house. This is not the street where he lives. Feel a tremor behind your knees. Stumble on a magnolia root that cracks the sidewalk. Glance at surrounding windows and doors. Guess which one. Think about ringing the doorbell, calling his name. Instead, sit on a seesaw in a playground at the end of the street, watching for him. You want to say something, though you’re not sure what. Maybe you and he can try again. Maybe he can still save you, though you don’t know from what. Your need is indefatigable as waves.
He still hasn’t appeared by eight o’clock. Lights have gone on in windows. Off. On and off in all the Italianate, Carpenter Gothic, Victorian houses being restored—part of your husband’s project—the yards dense with pin oaks and crape myrtles. Retrace your steps to the blue convertible. Glance through the windshield to the upholstery where you once sat driving to Matagorda, pretending he was John Travolta, though a short, blond, nearsighted John Travolta. Recall that the inside of the car smells of plaster casts and distilled alcohol from the hospital where he works. But now the scent would seem foreign. You don’t understand the dislocation of time—how you sat in this car thinking you’d be part of it forever—whereas now his car and he are a distant vibration of memory.
Follow your instincts. You know what he is doing and what you will watch him do. Drag a porch chair down a narrow path between two Greek Revival houses. Stand on it. Lean forward, palms against the frame of a dimly lit window. Sheer curtains cast a faint pall on bodies. He is naked. So is she, where they lie together on a rumpled bed. Roy Orbison sings “Blue Bayou” . . . and you inhale the slow decay of cypress roots, the stagnant tremble of muddy sludge. Your own pulse deepens, to blue. His fingers trace her skin. Feel it on your own, small eruptions that ache. Your breath mists the window. Palm fronds rustle like words spoken a long time ago.
Place your own fingertips on the pane. Your prints are smudged evidence of all that’s tangible of you—as if there’s no “you” behind your skin. Even your skin feels like a filigree of foam . . . you, yourself, transparent water draining down panes of glass.
Watch the apartment you shared with your husband in one of the restored iron-front buildings at the corner of Tremont and The Strand. Here, the third-story arched windows are dark. Picture the marble tabletop you and your husband bought in Portugal. Miss the sunflower plates, the silver candleholders from Mexico, your pretty dresses hanging in the closet—even though you don’t want to claim any belongings. Rather, you want your old life to be a museum, as if a ghost of you still lives there.
Glance across the street. A spotlight illuminates the red door of the Kon Tiki. The soles of your feet feel the bass disco beat, neon penises throbbing.
At Thorne’s, a new restaurant a few blocks away, stand on the sidewalk gazing through floor-to-ceiling windows. Candlelight flickers on forest-green walls, white tablecloths, the mahogany bar. The ornate mirror behind the bar reflects bottles of liquor. Your
husband, holding a Black Russian, sits with couples who used to be your friends, before you caused a scandal by running off in a blue convertible. Now they no longer speak to you.
Reflected in the window, see yourself superimposed on the room. But imagine the way you looked when you dined here. You wore long skirts, silk flowers in your hair. You sipped Sambuca with a coffee bean garnishing the bottom of the crystal glass. All evening your husband talked about the restoration project. He loves these buildings . . . and, sure, you love them, too. But you want him to love you more.
Leave before anyone sees you lurking.
Back in your apartment open the refrigerator. See the roast beef in shiny aluminum armor. Peel open the package. Smell the meat’s greenness.
On the Lam without a Thing to Wear
By September, almost broke, consider what illegal act to commit in order to be locked up either in jail or an asylum. Don’t be fussy, don’t care which. Free room and board. Except you’re not sure how to pull it off. Recall that for the past year an arsonist has set fire to a few buildings on The Strand. Some were razed. Others can still be restored. Maybe you should buy matches.
Instead, drive to the air-conditioned Rosenberg Library for relief from the heat. Glance through Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, books you read years ago. You’ve always admired the dramatic gestures of Russian novelists, authors who know how to pull out all the stops. Both war and peace. Crime and punishment. On a grand scale. The beating of chests. The pulling of hair. The whole shebang. On the first page of the library copy of Crime and Punishment is a faded smear of blood. Someone else with the same idea as you? Someone who takes her Dostoyevsky literally? But consider yourself on the seedy Gulf Coast, wailing country-western. Wilting beaches instead of frozen steppes. Shiner beer instead of Stolichnaya. You’re not sure you have the fortitude, the depth of character of Raskolnikov or the underground man.
Beside you on the library table is today’s Houston Chronicle. Flip through it. See the ad for a temporary employment agency in Houston. They claim they’ll find you jobs by the day, the week, the month. On a whim, drop coins into the library’s pay phone. Set up an appointment. Write down directions to San Jacinto Street. Wonder whether a temp job is better than suicide or arson.
At the Olga Employment Agency, pass the typing test. With flying colors. Although you’ve had responsible jobs, this feels like a stunning achievement. You are told to report to Schroeder Oil Company the next day. They anticipate the assignment will last a week.
You are on the lam without a thing to wear, however. For the interview you dressed in your best floral bell-bottoms, but you need a few additional outfits.
Drive around the Loop to the Galleria. Park your rusty, dented Volkswagen beside Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. Since you’ve lived almost in isolation the past few months, now, inside the mall, feel overwhelmed. But persevere. Check price tags on dresses. Technically, you could charge clothes. Technically, you’re still married. Nevertheless, technically, the credit card belongs to your husband so, up until now, you’ve used it sparingly.
Decide—although you more or less knew it all along—to shoplift.
Perhaps this is due to Crime and Punishment. Perhaps this is your sorry attempt at a grand gesture. Perhaps if caught and arrested, sent to jail, you won’t have to return to your apartment. Your life.
In the dressing room slip on a red-and-pink polyester dress, flimsy enough to fit beneath your clothes. The clinging material is the kind worn in Saturday Night Fever. That won’t wrinkle. Ever. That you can rinse in your bathtub. That will air dry, even on the damp Gulf Coast, immediately.
Glance in the mirror. Wonder if you’re sexy. Pretty? On your honeymoon night, in a suite in the Plaza Hotel, your husband fell asleep without so much as kissing you goodnight. Right now, this one fact—that you married someone who doesn’t love you—scares you. Slide onto the floor in the dressing room. Hug your knees to your chest. The song “People” plays on the Muzak. This version—thin, pathetic, yet trying so very hard to please—causes despair to cascade through your heart.
Stop! Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Continue with your plan.
Pull on your own clothes over the polyester. It bunches across the thighs. Smooth it out. Better. If caught, don’t make excuses. Admit guilt. Accept responsibility. Demand a prison sentence. But only if caught, of course.
Back in your car, feel drunk with success. Not altogether unlike how you felt when you ran away with blue-convertible man.
Shoplifting: A Cautionary Tale
When your Volkswagen drops a rod on I-45 outside Texas City on the way home, consider crime and punishment. You are now hunkered on the shoulder. Semis and Texas-sized Caddies whiz by, your car shimmying in the gusts. The wind, however, is more like an equatorial nightmare than a fresh breeze off the gulf. Especially wearing two layers of clothes. The polyester feels like a hair shirt against your skin (which of course you deserve). The stuffing, leaking out of the split in the upholstery, pokes your left thigh. Smoke billows in the distance, tarnishing the sky, oil refineries processing crude. Take a deep breath. Think about sitting in your car until your skin grays with soot. Think about penance.
A police cruiser pulls onto the shoulder behind you. Glance in the rearview mirror to make sure no price tags stick out from under your arms or the back of your neck. Notice that, having driven with the windows open, your ponytail looks like a bristle brush.
“Trouble?” he asks.
Explain.
When he offers to call the nearest service station, accept.
Think about confessing. After all, he is cute, with blue eyes and black hair. He, in fact, looks more like John Travolta than the blue-convertible man. If he forgives you, you will be saved. He, in fact, will save you. Don’t heroes love to save sinners? Consider what it’s like to be married to a cop. Wisely decide not to ask.
Two hours later your car is in the shop. Lacking options, call your husband for a ride home. By now, you’ve sweated through both layers of clothes so that, if you look closely, the red-and-pink polyester is visible beneath the bell-bottom outfit. If your husband notices, he says nothing. At this point, however, you no longer care.
His Ford Mustang is air conditioned. Cold slices you like a blade of ice. Sweat freezes your skin. Develop a headache behind your right eye. Press a palm against your throbbing lid.
He stops the car outside the quadriplegic’s house, the engine idling.
“Oh, we sold the Tremont Building,” your husband says. “With façade easements.”
The Tremont Building is part of his restoration development project. Façade easements protect, architecturally, the exterior of the buildings, requiring owners to give the fronts facelifts. “Super.”
He explains how the developer plans shops on the ground floor, apartments upstairs.
You sit beside him in the car feeling cold and frail, but he doesn’t ask how you’ve been, if you’ve been eating, if you’re lonely.
Never mind.
By dusk, as sweat evaporates, your skin feels gritty, sandy. The polyester outfit, which you are now regretting on every level, hangs in the bathroom, drying. Lie on your bed in your underclothes, a washcloth on your forehead, your body settling into the familiar hollow in the mattress. Your palms are up, forming shallow, empty cups. Feel like a Victorian girl with ague. The vapors.
Notes from High above Ground
In December, begin your thirty-fourth temp job in Houston, each in a different downtown high-rise. Every morning cross the causeway over Galveston Bay to the mainland, returning every afternoon, back and forth, north and south on I-45, now in your Volkswagen with a rebuilt engine. Which cost $750 to fix. Which your husband loaned you. Which you are now repaying from weekly paychecks, depleting the four to five dollars an hour you earn.
At each job sit at a desk that is yours for the day or the week. Liken it to renting a motel room for an hour. Aspire to nothing else. Instead, on an IBM Select
ric, type reports for oil companies. You are a good typist. You proofread. No one complains. Typing is clear-cut, keeps you focused on punctuation, on minutiae. Little time or energy to consider a failed marriage, neon penises at the Kon Tiki, shoplifting, spying on blue-convertible man . . . or the distant, unseeable future.
Pass entire days barely speaking. You aren’t allowed to make personal phone calls. There is no one to call. During lunch sit at your desk reading. Or, through lowered lashes, watch coworkers, women efficiently dressed in pantyhose and business suits—women with real jobs, families, homes. Photographs of children adorn their desks. Their closets do not contain shoplifted clothes. They do not live across the street from rooming houses.
These women seem unknowable. Different. Adult. You fear you are not. You know you are not, you, with your Monday-Wednesday-Friday peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. On Tuesdays and Thursdays you bring strawberry yogurt and an apple for lunch. Pack a dented spoon from your furnished apartment in your brown-paper sack. To save money, drink a glass of tap water. Use a paper towel from the bathroom for a napkin.
Feel as if you are sliding far away from normal behavior. Hope, at least, you are more interesting than your coworkers—like a starving artist. Or begin to feel almost Russian, that you are living underground. Take a revolutionary stand against capitalism, civilization.
Perhaps you are having an existential crisis.
Also suspect, however, you are simply unoriginal, lost, confused.
Don’t think about the permanence of a temporary life.
You are asked, at one oil company, only to answer the telephone, no typing. Buy Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and read it, day after day, nine to five. Remove a piece of stationery from the desk drawer and print out the following line from the book: “There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey.” Finish the book while sitting at your neat desk under fluorescent lights on the fifteenth floor. Wonder whether human faces, like buildings, can have façade easements.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 10
