I don't know how long we would have sat had it not been for the restive Belinda, who after a time scooted out of her mother's lap and began to point out some of the noteworthy features of my car.
"Look," she said. "He's even got a telephone."
Jean looked. "What do you know about that?" she said.
Then Belinda looked at me coyly.
"Do you like cheeseburgers?" she asked.
Jean slumped against the door, watching her daughter without comment, as if amazed that anyone could be so young and alive.
In watching Jean, I momentarily forgot that I had been asked a question. To jog my memory Belinda crawled over in my lap, seated herself comfortably on the steering wheel, and grabbed me by both lapels.
"Don't you ever listen?" she asked. "Do you like cheeseburgers?"
"Sure," I said. "I like cheeseburgers."
"Then let's go get some," Belinda said.
I looked at Jean, who was still slumped against the door, her eyes empty. She was beyond protest, or interest, or response of any kind. I knew just how she felt.
The cheeseburger decision rested with the girls and me, and their position was clear.
"Come on," Belinda said, as confidently as if she were eighteen and inviting me to buy her a milk shake.
Then she stood up, grabbed me by my doeskin lapels again, and brought two implacable blue eyes so close to mine that our noses almost touched. All I could see were eyes and curls.
"You do it!" she demanded.
Women know instinctively when they can boss me around. I know it instinctively, too. The fact that Belinda was a child was irrelevant to the matter, both in her view and in mine.
"Burgers it is," I said.
Belinda stepped calmly out of my lap and-seated herself once again beside her mother and sister. She even gave me an approving pat on the leg.
I was so charmed that for a moment I just sat and looked at her.
For a moment too long, as it turned out.
"Jist go!" Belinda said.
Book III
Chapter I
At the hamburger stand I dawdled much too long, listening to the girls prattle and watching them familiarize themselves with the wonders of my car, while Jean listlessly munched her way through a footlong hot dog.
"The good thing about having one like Belinda is that when you don't feel like talking you don't have to worry," Jean said, staring at Belinda as if she were something rare and curious, like a Faberge egg.
"I'll talk," Belinda said, quickly.
"That's why I don't have to worry," Jean said. "You'll talk."
"She talks like a faucet," Beverly said. Then she pretended to be turning off a faucet, not looking at her sister while she did it.
Belinda gave her a cool look, then carefully selected a French fry, wobbled it around in the ketchup for a bit, and fed it to me.
"Not enough ketchup," she said blandly, ignoring her mother's and sister's veiled criticisms.
"You don't have to feed him," Beverly observed. Belinda had positioned herself comfortably on the soft velour divider between my front seats, assuring that she and only she had free access to me.
Belinda wobbled another French fry in the ketchup, and ignored the comment. It was plain that Jean and Beverly relied heavily on irony in their dealings with her. It may have represented their only chance, but it didn't work. Irony means little to a natural winner.
Belinda looked at her sister, calmly turned an imaginary faucet back on, and went on with her prattle, giving me a pat or a French fry or a big smile from time to time, to keep me under control.
"Thanks,” Jean said, when we got back. "I don't know why I ate that hot dog." She opened her door and got out, followed by Beverly.
"I still didn't get to see your antiques," I said.
Jean looked about to cry. "Oh well," she said. "It's just an excuse."
"What's an excuse?"
"My store," she said. "It allows me to pretend I know how to do something. Who would come here to buy an antique?"
"Me," I said.
She shrugged. "Yeah, but you're crazy," she said, peeping in at Belinda, who was waiting impatiently for the adult talk to be over.
"Coming with us?" Jean asked.
Belinda shook her head.
"He can take us home," she said. "Because it's not far."
"Maybe he has something better to do," Jean suggested.
Belinda thought it over, assuming a seductive look. Then she blew her mother a fine kiss.
"I think I'll just go with him," she said. "He can take me home."
"Get out of that car!" Jean yelled, suddenly. A good deal of rage, none of it really directed at Belinda, poured out with the yell.
Belinda hesitated for a moment, evidently contemplating a face-off. She read the impersonal nature of the rage as easily as I had. Then she thought better of it and turned and gave me a hug.
While we were hugging she put her hot little mouth in the vicinity of my ear.
"I want you to come back tomorrow," she whispered.
Then she popped a hand over my mouth, to keep me from making a reply.
"Can't I even ask why?" I asked, through her fingers.
Belinda glanced at her impersonally furious mother, then whispered the reason.
"So you can take us to Bask'n Roberts."
"You mean Baskin-Robbins, don’t you?"
Belinda looked exasperated. She plainly didn't welcome quibbles at such a time.
"Jist do it," she said, and hopped out.
Chapter II
Getting from Wheaton to Georgetown during the afternoon rush hour is not the easiest short drive in the country. At 5:30, the hour at which I was supposed to be at Cindy's, I was trapped on the Capital Beltway, directly beneath the Mormon Temple.
The temple and my Cadillac were the only white things in sight. All the cars in my vicinity were dark green, and all the people in them were men in trench coats and small woolen hats, perhaps the very GS-12s who had been at the auction that morning.
Already I was getting the sense that Washington was a very cellular place. The motif of the cell recurred. Ail the men in trench coats and woolen hats probably spent their days in cell-like offices in vast gray buildings. Then when the government let them out they squirmed like larvae into small cell-like cars and rushed across the river or around the Beltway to vast gray apartment buildings, where they inhabited cell-like apartments.
During the day, in their cell-like offices, they probably spent their time hatching plots the size of microscopic organisms, directed at people in nearby cells.
While I was stuck beneath the Mormon Temple I bethought myself of Coffee, whom I had promised to call back.
For some reason I felt guilty at the thought of her—an irrational guilt, since we had been divorced for years.
Anyway, just as the icepan of traffic began to break up—with chunks of cars breaking off and swirling down the Beltway for half a mile or so, until they hit the icepan again—I picked up the phone and called Coffee.
It was worse than I expected.
"Who are you fucking now?" Coffee asked, a wild, un-Coffee-like note in her voice.
Then she began to make sounds on the order of those a horse makes when it drinks. It was basically a sucking sound. Coffee hated any breach of bodily discipline, such as tears, vomiting, farts, etc. She never vomited and seldom cried, and the sounds now coming over the phone meant that she was fighting tears in the only way she knew, which was to suck them back up into herself before they could fall. It was a ghastly sound and didn't help my guilt at all.
"Coffee," I said. "Don't do that. Just go ahead and cry."
The strange sucking continued. It was something that should have been on the sound track of a horror movie.
The chunk of cars I was in broke loose and swirled all the way down into the vicinity of Bethesda while I was listening to Coffee fight back her tears.
Finally the sucking stopped. There was silence on
the line.
"Do you feel better now?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I feel worse. There's never any Kleenex in this office."
"Why would there be? You never cry. You seldom even blow your nose."
Coffee was always thunderstruck when I pointed out some obvious fact about her. She regarded it as highly unnatural that I would notice something she hadn't noticed herself.
"I don't need to blow my nose," she said. "We have a really good climate here."
I couldn't argue with that. It was so typical of her mode of reasoning that I began to hope the conversation would become normal and cheerful. I was too optimistic.
"Nothing will ever happen to me," Coffee said suddenly, in a voice of utter hopelessness.
It is the statement I dread most from women, and now I was hearing it twice within half an hour, for that was what Jean Arber had meant when she said her antique shop was just an excuse. What she really felt when she said it was that nothing would ever happen to her.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "A lot will happen to you. A lot has already."
But my statement was a lie. Coffee was not being ridiculous, just honest. Not much had happened to her, and unless she got lucky, not much would. Something had evidently just brought her face-to-face with her own insignificance, at a moment when nobody was around to distract her from it.
I had lied because I felt a little panicky. I didn't want Coffee to sit around Austin thinking about her own insignificance. Nor did I want Jean Arber to sit around Wheaton brooding over the fact that she didn't really know how to do anything except breed natural winners.
Jean herself was not a natural winner, but she was nice, and while Coffee was not significant, she too was nice, in a vacant sort of way.
For no clear reason I felt responsible for their common feeling that life was somehow lacking. This strange, irrational sense of responsibility is probably responsible for most of my problems with women.
At bottom I must think of myself as more like a chemical than a man. Once the chemical me is infused into the life of a woman the woman ought to feel competent and important, not skill-less and cipherlike, and if they don't I feel guilty. I realize such a guilt is arrogant and sexist, but I still have it. It comes over me whenever I hear a certain hopeless tone in a woman's voice, even though I know that hopeless tones are not permanent, and not really my fault, either.
The phone at my ear resonated with silence. Coffee had just said the truth and was now waiting for me to persuade her it was a lie.
"How can you say that nothing will ever happen to you?" I said, falling back on the Socratic method.
The virtue of the Socratic method, with women, is that it forces them to talk. Once they talk a little their natural volatility works in your favor. From talking about despair, meaninglessness, empty days, and loveless nights one can usually segue into talking about the movies they've seen lately or their agenda for the coming weekend.
Which is not to say I think the sorrows of women are shallow. The sorrows of women are deeper than mine—but their optimism and resiliency are also deep.
"How can you say nothing will ever happen to you?" I repeated.
"Because nothing's happened to me for over a year," she said. "I don't see how anything's gonna start."
"But things can always start," I reminded her.
"Not unless there's somebody to start them," she said, sighing like Eleanora Duse. The depth of the sigh surprised me. In all the time I'd known her Coffee had never given much thought to herself. She'd only cried once during the breakup of our marriage and that was because she couldn't get the hippo chair into the back of her car when she decided to go back to Austin.
Suddenly she was heaving tragic sighs. I had no idea what that meant. So far I had been very cautious in talking with her about her boyfriends, although when she had one she had no reticence about talking about them to me. In fact many of our hours on the phone were spent reviewing the inadequacies of Coffee's boyfriends.
"Has anything happened?" I asked, phrasing matters as vaguely as possible.
Coffee sighed again. "I haven't told you about Emilio, have I?" she asked.
She certainly hadn't. Most of Coffee's boyfriends had names like Richard or Robert, and almost all of them were lawyers. Somehow Emilio didn't sound like a lawyer. It was obvious things were changing, down in Austin. "Who's Emilio?" I ventured.
"I guess he's my boyfriend," she said.
"You guess?"
"Okay," she said. "You don't have to jump down my throat.
"I've only been living with him a month," she added. "I thought you'd figure it out, but you didn't."
"Coffee," I said, "I haven't seen you in two months. How was I supposed to figure out you were living with someone named Emilio if you didn't bother to mention him?"
"You could have figured it out," she said, in her wannest tones.
I knew what was coming, and a second later it came.
"I guess you just don't care anymore," she said. "When we first broke up you figured out things like that even when I didn't want you to.
"You figured out practically every one of my boyfriends within a week," she added, with a bit more spirit. The reason for the spirit was because she had just summed up her case against me with incontrovertible logic: If I had stopped deducing the identies of her lovers it could only be because I had stopped loving her myself.
Actually, the reason the identities of her lovers had been easy to guess was because they had all been named Richard or Robert.
"Most of your boyfriends have been Texans," I said, in my own defense. "It's easier to sense Texans. My antennae don't work so well where Italians are concerned."
"Oh," Coffee said. The point seemed to exonerate me to some extent.
"He is Italian, isn't he?"
"Yeah," she said. "He comes from some place called Milan."
It occurred to me that Italians made very fine modem furniture, including chairs and lamps. They had probably decided Austin was where the money was and shipped over a lot of chairs and lamps. Emilio had probably won Coffee's absentminded favors with some Milanese abstraction he had convinced her was a chair.
"Does he sell furniture?" I ventured.
"I don’t think so," Coffee said, surprised at the suggestion. "He hasn't sold any of mine. It's just that he beats me a lot"
Chapter III
I was so stunned I couldn't respond. What sort of man would beat Coffee?
Of course, being Italian, maybe he expected her to cook, something she hadn't any idea how to do, her culinary skills being pretty much encapsulated in her name. And even her coffee was far from world class.
"What does he do besides beat you?" I asked.
"He sells dope," Coffee said.
Some days bring many shocks. Not only was the Smithsonian for sale, Coffee was being beaten regularly by an Italian dope dealer. It seemed unfair. Coffee was just a girl from Baytown whose only mistake had been going away to school, where she had gotten kind of lost.
But she had stopped sounding wan and sounded merely conversational. I think she was looking forward to describing her beating in some detail, but that was nothing I wanted to hear. The traffic was beginning to break up and I had to decide whether to jettison all my fast-gathering Washington possibilities and go save her. I could be in Austin in about nineteen hours, time enough, probably, to keep Coffee from being beaten too many more times.
"I'm confused," I said. "Do you want the guy for a boyfriend, or what?"
"I guess so," she said. "Robert got married."
Robert had been the most recent lawyer.
Though not exactly a ringing endorsement for Emilio, it was enough to discourage me from a nineteen-hour drive.
In the shock of hearing about the beatings, I had forgotten several things, one of them being Coffee's profound passivity. If Emilio was possessed of even a normal amount of Italian volatility he would soon go off and find someone more responsive to beat.
"I wish you'd figured it out," Coffee said, remembering her original complaint. She sounded genuinely melancholy when she said it, so much so that it touched me.
"Aw, Coffee," I said. "Don't you remember? You used to hate it when I figured out things about you."
"Yeah, but people can change," she said. "Now I like it."
"Why?"
"Because it means something could still happen," she said simply.
It took the heart right out of me. Suddenly my most girlish girl had the voice of a grown-up, sad and only faintly hopeful.
The hope that something could still happen is the loneliest hope of all.
When I lived with her, Coffee had seldom been awake enough to notice that not much had happened yet.
"So when are you coming?" she asked, assuming that she had made her case.
"Maybe in about two weeks," I said weakly.
It was enough. Coffee brightened immediately and began to tell me about a dope ranch in the hill country where all the dope dealers went when they weren't beating their girl friends. In the course of the story it came out that Emilio only weighed 102 pounds.
"Yeah, and do you know what, he carries a purse," she added. From what I could gather, that exotic fact seemed to be his chief attraction.
When Coffee hung up I was almost to Georgetown. At the end of the conversation she was perfectly cheerful, having transferred her emptiness to me. I sang with it. It seemed to me I was beginning to pay for having failed to keep a clear distinction between objects and people. After all, I could start a relationship with a new object every day. Try that with people or—to be narrow—with women, and a lot of trouble would ensue.
It was rainy and gusty—wet fall leaves blew off the trees that hung over the road. Some of the leaves plastered themselves to my windshield—others sailed off toward the misty Potomac. In Georgetown the streetlights were already on.
For a moment I had the urge to pick up my car phone, call
Cindy, and tell her some wild lie. I could tell her I had just mutilated myself through careless handling of some sharp antique, like a hangman's axe. It meant I had to rush straight to Houston, to the world's best plastic surgeon, or else be disfigured for life.
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