And as that dismal year winds down, she learns the word “can’t.” She can’t keep it together like she used, she can’t see anyone, she can’t be doing with them wankers, now Ralph can read the post.
“I can’t do cold turkey, but I can’t carry on, so Jim downstairs will give us one pill every day. Cause me, I can’t do willpower, I’d scoff the lot.”
And when she’d whittled it down to two milligrams oral methadone, tactically imbibed just before she’d have to leave the house, and even Mandy took notice and began to come by with cakes every now and then, and Lola’s skin knitted up, her face was face-shaped once more and you could see she was a striking woman
The ticket out
1Thick and thin, Lola kept her tarot pitch at Portobello.
2One day she told Peter Cadwallader’s fortune.
1He said he was a card player himself: flirting.
2She’d had their cheek for a lifetime. Parried: “That’s sixpence,” curt.
1But he could find nothing smaller than a pound note in his wallet,
2which was as fat as the Collected Works of Shakespeare, if all old Will wrote were fifty-pound notes.
1“I had him hooked that quick. Two weeks’ time! No worries. Course, it wasn’t me like you see me now.
2“Well, I thought it would be a bit of dosh for us for a change. I thought, you’d have a father, everyone was always giving me grief, you without a dad.
3“I did love him, though. Who knows what makes you feel things? He’s like a horrible dried-up lizard, isn’t he? Peter. Well, they say love is blind, don’t they? I’m the living proof. I loved that horror like the last man on earth.”
26. Montara Beach, California: One Hour Earlier / Eddie Knocking on Ralph’s door, unwelcome
“. . . honest Navajo blood vow, five minutes, this is only cause I had to talk to you for hours, and it is not the coke talking, it’s the same old her her her again, it just came up, is Chrysa listening? DON’T LISTEN.”
“Four minutes remaining.”
“NO, MAN: WHISPER.”
Eddie turned and closed the door gingerly behind him, wincing at the noise the knob made.
“Say it, then, what?”
Eddie whispered:
“Wow. You got some mean chair prejudice. Too good for furniture or what? That is fucked up.”
Ralph sat on the floor, demonstratively. Eddie narrowed his eyes at the sleeping mat, then sighed and sat, wincing at the cold parquet.
“Listen,” Eddie pointed at his head: “This shit is percolating. Denise Cadwallader?”
Ralph whispered, “What about Denise?”
Eddie said, “We can stop whispering now,” aloud.
Ralph looked away. “This is doing my head in.”
“Are you okay, man?”
“No. No.”
“That was a fucking Valium I gave you, cause, it could be anything, I’m not really Joe Organized?”
Ralph put one hand to his head and pressed, as if he had to hold his head on manually. That seemed to help, but he also had to say:
“About Denise, I can’t tell you anything.”
“Should I be getting you a glass of fucking water, cause I’m totally a veteran of the glass-of-water thing.”
“I can’t tell you anything, I said before.”
Then Eddie rearranged himself, meaning business. “No way,” he said. He pointed at the ceiling. “What are you under?”
Ralph sniffed, scratched his chin, looked at his knuckles introspectively – as if there had been a lull in the conversation. There was a pillow-feather caught in the hair on his wrist, and he was fishing it out, idly, when Eddie barked:
“MY ROOF.”
“That’s laughable,” Ralph said, courteous, surprised. “If that’s a threat?”
“NO, cause you’re fucking holding out on me, shitbag, and here I’m like succoring you in my own home?”
“I haven’t seen Denise since I was twelve. I don’t know what you think I can tell you.”
“Phone number. Mailing address. Cause you know where she is.”
“No.” Ralph sighed.
“I got about a million dollars. What do you got?”
“That won’t work with me.”
Eddie sat back. Spotting one of Ralph’s shoes by his hand, he picked it up and put it in his lap. He pulled the laces out industriously, left-right, left-right, complaining, “I get like, I feel alone here. I’m like a ghost that no one sees.”
“Never threaten me.”
“Yeah, only now you’re telling me what to do, so I could say the same thing to you.” Eddie threw the shoe down and shoved the laces in his jeans pocket.
“Why did you ask me here?” said Ralph.
They both looked at the venetian blinds. There was a ten-minute silence in which they both thought of the reasons Eddie had brought Ralph to California.
At the end of it, Eddie’s face was beaded with sweat. He said, “Fuck you, dude. Just, fuck you.”
Ralph said:
4.
1Ralph’s mother had died of an overdose in Kathmandu
•in a dirt parking lot, a roan mud around her thighs where the last vein used had bled for some time unstanched.
•Ralph found her. He lifted her, to walk her back and forth like in the movies. It was easy she was that light. Then her legs would not unbend, she was the only cold thing on that summer day.
•Peter Cadwallader was summoned to dispose of her: Irene had him on her flight documents as Next of Kin.
2He brought his daughter
•and at the airport, while Peter made the rote condoling remarks, Denise stood grinning. Her horsy face was sweet. She told Ralph, “Well, we’ve come to get you, finally.”
•He was wearing his old school uniform. Dipankar had cleaned and pressed it, but it looked chapped where the moths had been. The jacket cut him in the armpits, outgrown. “I can’t leave,” Ralph said. “I’ve got a job here. It isn’t only Mum, why I’m here.”
•“Of course we’re not going to make Ralph do anything he doesn’t want to do.” Peter cleared his throat.
•Denise looked at her father with a minutely composed scorn. She held it on him like a flashlight, exposing him, for a count of three, then wearily:
3“You don’t have to come, Peter.”
3.1She was polite the day she went with Ralph to the pottery.
3.2Meeting her, the boss looked at Ralph reproachfully – as if, up to now, Ralph had concealed the fact that he was English.
4Within three days it was out of control, Denise overwhelmed any other thing in his life.
4.1The cakes she brought him, the gifts of bundled rupees. Though she hardly spoke, she kept him up all night, he would sit beside her watching her foot dig thoughtfully in the street grit. When she said, “Oh, dear, this is fate,” his head spun, he was mortally afraid and joyous.
4.2Under her sway, he stole 10,000 dollars from Peter’s briefcase.
4.3They fled to Pokhara, a ten-hour bus ride to the high Himalaya.
5(On the way, standing in a sweaty knot of travelers, whose bags and livestock shifted noisily underfoot, Denise confessed to Ralph that she’d been stolen by aliens; since when, she was very very lucky – she bore down on lucky ironically, but wouldn’t clarify, just repeating: very lucky –
and changed the subject, subdued:
“I am sorry about your mum.”
She looked through the massed people then, the other travelers dim with their patience, at the brown huge slopes jiggling in the windows. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Well, you didn’t kill her,” Ralph said, angry.)
6Pokhara: a white cat stood at the roadside. As Ralph and Deesey disembarked, the cat meowed vehemently.
6.1“Oh! I see: we follow the cat now.”
6.2An hour later, it had become serious. The road led up. Their feet ached from the ride, they were dizzy. If they stopped, the cat hissed and crouched.
6.3Ralph suddenly guessed.
The cat leapt up and vanished into the sky’s jagged hem. He leapt after.
6.4The mountains swam in the deeps of the earth. Rhododendrons poured and grew. The clouds and their mother lakes entered the powerful stone, the grass drank them with its heels. Oceans swayed in the waist of the grass. This knowing was participation in its seamless play. It was a gladdened, headlong, adamantine life.
6.5Ralph saw himself stagger, a wet scrap below and Denise wheeled and saw him pass.
6.6He woke in a dusty tea shop, remembering that he’d forgotten –
6.7He couldn’t stop crying in front of her.
6.8In a frenzy, he gave all the money away. The beggar children swarmed round. They screamed to alert their friends. Denise came out and helped him: she couldn’t stop laughing. She cried, throwing money: “Hooray! Hooray! Free for all!”
“Jesus H. Christ!” said Eddie. “No. That’s too far! Didn’t they just tear you limb from limb and eat the flesh?”
“No, people in Nepal are surprisingly polite.”
“I gotta say, you didn’t tell me, when I employed you for the guru service, actually you hid from me you’d had this God thing.”
Ralph frowned then and shifted: “What would it take –”
They both stopped dead. The mood became cautious.
Eddie finally:
“Yeah, dude, I’m hurt, though, you can’t tell I care.”
Ralph got to his feet. He said quietly, “I think I’m in love with your sister.”
“Excuse me? Cause . . . cause, sorry, I’m back with the space invasion topic. Nix on the . . . Japanese game-show topics.”
“No . . . I thought I should talk to you –”
“Not funny.” Eddie scrambled to his feet.
Ralph repeated, “I’m in love with your sister.”
“NO. No, I’m in love with your sister. Keep it straight! Or is this some tit-for-tat vengeance deal I do not want?”
“No,” said Ralph. He shook his head. “Look, forget it.”
“No – my sister? You go ahead, fuck her, what do I care. Only, take my advice and use a condom. Cause, thing about Chrysa is, she was a major slut? Before the crack-up thing, she slept with anything. Men, women, plague rats, spores, dead bodies. Shit, I even fucked her a couple times.”
“Okay, I think I’ve had enough.”
“In fact, that was her who gave me crabs, the second time? Big as mice, you could hear them! So . . . I can’t believe how you totally just mind-fucked me. And I noticed you didn’t tell me what I need to know, so.”
Eddie’s mobile phone began to ring. He blinked in surprise, swatting at it under his jacket. Fumbling it out, he poked buttons at random. “Shit. It never did that before.”
“Can you take that outside, please?”
“Look, man!” Eddie shook the phone at Ralph. “This baby’s ornamental. It can’t ring!”
“Out. Please.”
“Just, help me, where’s the OFF?”
“Out.”
“Off!”
“Eddie, don’t make me –”
“You Can’t Go Home Again On Your Own Two Feet”
Ralph sprang back from the heartfelt punch, flexing his hurt knuckles. He looked at me and I was saying something frightened. Eddie was against the wall: small, befuddled, bleeding. “I’ll leave you to it,” Ralph said, scorning us, but didn’t move.
Our hearts were pounding. We were breathing so emotionally it was like speech.
And Ralph left.
Eddie stanched his bleeding wound with one of my clean socks, while I called an ambulance on his mobile. I said that it was an emergency, but I could tell the receptionist could tell it wasn’t. When I hung up, Eddie muttered, “Nice try.”
We tiptoed past Ralph’s room and out to wait by the untidy gravel drive.
We stared at the moon as if the ambulance would come from there.
From time to time we waved our arms over our heads, to idly retrigger the burglar light. Then we could see the Hyundai’s tracks in the gravel where we’d come back from Pizza Hut, when we were still friends.
I was tongue-tied and cold.
Eddie whispered:
“No, I’m so not violent, but I’ll come back with a sledgehammer. I’ll come back with Spiz.
“I mean, I’m trying to be a friend to the guy, give him some break, and he attacks me? Physically? Cause tell me, what did I do? What did I do to him?
“This is the last thing I’m saying: throw him out now. Cause after that, I’m actually in fear of my life.”
When the ambulance came, he told the paramedics he’d walked into a door, and we all had a good laugh. Then I stood in the courtyard waving as they drove off. I heard them start the siren as they hit the main road.
Back in the Bedroom: A Tenacious Burro
They were gone! They were gone! I ran up to my room and sprawled groaning on the bed, stretching to rest my bare toes on the Jackson Pollock. For a long time, I pretended Ralph was going to come in and do all the talking for me. God! I didn’t want to say a damn word!
“I have to think this over,” I lied to myself –
and thought about that time I’d had to crawl to my mother’s office, with Eddie mock-kicking me from behind. How I’d been like a mighty pack donkey, carrying the whole family’s stinking baggage. I saw myself shuffling down an infinite hallway, with doors at regular intervals, behind which solitary family members watched TV.
Suddenly the scene changed: the donkey alter ego shambled through an antiseptic tundra. From the far blank quarters, Ralph’s voice rumbled, formlessly threatening. The plucky burro soldiered on, butting the fierce wind, hell-bent on the great Unloading Bay of the Arctic Sea.
Scene cuts to icebound Unloading Bay, a glittering harbor overlooked by dark glaciers. Kicking away from the snowy beach, the donkey skates off over the sea. It passes a dining-room table leg, lodged diagonally in the ice. It lingers dolefully to sniff at a discarded sandal. It trots on, gamely skidding, toward its rendezvous.
At noon, a figure comes striding from the glassy horizon: a shadow man, his features indistinct with sadness. The burro balks, affrighted.
“Don’t throw me out,” the figure pleads: “I’m Good Ralph.”
The donkey bows its shaggy head low to the ice, quivering like a virgin bride. The shadow man stoops to untie its burden –
I mouthed to myself: “This is sheer procrastination. Get up! Get up! Nobody’s listening!”
I got up and walked over to the partition door, feeling tearful already, when it opened by itself.
WE HAVE SEX FINALLY
Ralph looked so pleased to see me. He put his arms out. “God, Chrysa . . .”
His face was in full color and detail: he looked completely different from what I had pictured. I had to consider he might be Bad Ralph.
I let him hold me, just, to see what he had to say. He sighed and nuzzled my hair as if he needed comfort. And murmured:
“Is Eddie gone?”
Although I knew in my stomach it was base treachery, and I had a sexual agenda, and I mustn’t, I admitted that Eddie was gone.
Then Ralph began to stroke me. His hand went all the way down my back. I was all choked up, I unconsentingly yelped but
“I love you, do you know I love you?” Ralph actually said.
I burned from these mere words and had no choice.
A Battle Between the Forces of Good and Evil
1We were grappling on the floor. He groaned and I said Jesus Christ. The weight of his body on me, its warm intent. Then the clothes –
2We had to stand up again to walk to his bed.
2.1Then I realized what we were doing.
3Because there was only that paltry near-futon, I felt exposed. It made our embrace seem like an experimental procedure, from which all extraneous variables had been removed. A parallel Ralph/Chrysa coupled elsewhere in an identical chamber, and a science team would study our comparative success. The second couple were the control group, in w
hich Ralph had not just bashed in my brother’s face.
3.1Ralph would leave tomorrow morning, with some stammering excuse. I would smile and say I understood because you’re not allowed to cower on the ground, screaming. It would be sunny and the windows would be happy blue. The birds would twitter cheerily and hop.
Once Ralph left I would get under the bed/I would not get under the bed/I would/no, I would not
I would cut off both my hands. I would bleed expressively, waving my grisly fountaining stumps like roach antennae.
3.2You won’t be able to do this thing on a basis of distrust.
4Thinking – bad.
4.1He was stroking me as if no one was there. There was something reverential in the way his big hands slowed to entirely feel me that made me want to cry. It occurred to me he really did want to have sex with me: he wasn’t just trying to be nice. I couldn’t really give that much credence, but I reminded myself how people say that men will fuck anything, and maybe I should just take that at face value.
5“You aren’t really into this.” Pulling back from me slightly, he made me hold his hand.
I said, almost in time: “No – no fear of that.”
Then I wanted to laugh intimately but Ralph didn’t laugh. He stroked my brow in an interpreting way, caring what was wrong. I didn’t care what was wrong with me, I wanted to shout, Oh, do it!
He said, “But, you’re sure?”
(Well, once people started asking things like “But you’re sure?” you can forget it. We would now sheepishly retreat into our clothes. We would have a cup of coffee or something else that people really do) but I rebelled against this certain knowledge, peeping:
“Oh, I’m really very sure.”
– flamboyantly unsure, but he pretended to believe me –
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 15
