Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  The girl was as much an eyecatcher as Kath. Dory’s skirt was carhop-retro, a cherry electricity well above the knee. She’d topped that off with a rockabilly shirt, a spangled tornado across its back; plus, God knows why, she’d torn away the sleeves. Did she want to call attention to her skin? That indoor skin, white, chilly? Kath suffered the chill; she dropped her chin.

  Oh, Kath. Oh, didn’t she get off on teasing the heteros, throwing around a word like housemate. The fact was, she’d never touched the girl. Kath had never come closer than sitting in a heap outside the youngster’s bedroom door, buzzing with insomnia.

  By this time she’d even come up with tricks to help through the worst of the infatuation, the mania; an old woman has her tricks. Now, raising her eyes once more, she forced herself to picture how Dory would lose her looks. The girl had a mill worker’s thick trunk, and those upper arms were already as much pudge as muscle. Tonight’s event generally brought out a more hammered shapeliness.

  Tonight was a fundraiser, a benefit for a proposed performance center in downtown Corvallis. The small Oregon city had one sizable hotel, the hotel had donated its largest basement room, and the space looked nearly filled to capacity. Clusters of auction-goers sidled past each other, exchanging smiles over their shoulders, while champagne stewards in starched coats circled outward from the rollaway bar. Nonetheless there was almost no one with a beer belly, no one with saddlebags over the hips.

  In the Willamette Valley, the money crowd stayed in shape. Kath had seen more than a few of these people at the Fitness Center. She’d seen them hesitate between the Nautilus machines, heaving, doubtful, and then press on, no match for the social pressure. What other means of proving they’d made it did these people have? In the Valley, what wasn’t farmland was suburb, suburb without a city attached, without a place for the more oddball glitter. You wouldn’t find a colored face at the auction (other than in Dory’s piece, a portrait), none of the Asian or African or Middle Eastern influence that supposedly carried weight in the faster-moving markets. The Valley was high-tech pastoral. Dory’s getup had the women fiddling with their shoulder pads. And if a man found himself near the girl, he preened, cocking a knuckle at one hip and showing off a belt line crunch-trim. For a moment the people around her were nothing but a bunch of performing dwarves.

  Kath downed some champagne, hiding in the cup. She had to watch it on these mean thoughts.

  She turned back to the display, while others fell in beside her. The work was hung salon-style, crowded between the hinges of the room’s unfolded partition. Nonetheless whoever stood next to Kath would concentrate on their program, keeping their elbows to themselves. She would have thought it impossible to move around in a sardine-tin like this and not at least bump a few elbows. No wonder she had mean thoughts. Only once did someone say hello, one of her so-called friends from the Clinic, and the man immediately asked about her children.

  He flexed his mouth, but you couldn’t call that a smile. Kath lifted her chin, showing off her shoulders and pecs.

  “Oh,” she told him, “I keep the kids at Christmas-card distance.” She was divorced and remade.

  Then came Dory’s piece, in the corner. Kath couldn’t bid on it; the girl had made that a condition of coming. Dory had wound up sleeping with her subject, a married man, a father. God knows he must have seemed fascinating, a surgeon born in Morocco. Plus Dory had worked in pastels, which required repeated sittings, long hours together. Even tonight Kath had to admire the layered effect, like a winepress in which the grapes bulged yet froze, forever just at the point of bursting.

  The back wall held more, making sixty items all together. Dory’s piece however had left Kath distracted, frowning.

  “Who does these landscapes, anyway?” This was a stage voice, practically in her ear. “Do they have cars?”

  Kath turned, frowning. But this was Leo Farragut, one of her patients, one of the terminal cases. He sounded more rheumy since last time.

  “I’m asking, Mizz Wick. Do they have cars?”

  Her face relaxed. “I believe most of our artists can afford cars, Leo.”

  “Oh yeah? Real cars? American cars?”

  She opened her stance, the gargoyles clinking at her waist. “You’re saying you find our offerings a tad precious? A tad, oh—out of touch with the hurly-burly?”

  “I hear the Japs now’ll sell you a car like this one.” Leo raised a discolored finger towards a lithograph, a beige heron taking off over swoozy reeds. Every curve in the picture was a Coca-Cola wave. “They got a car that just floats out there.”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m telling you. The thing’s made for a painting like this, it never touches the ground at all.”

  “We live in an amazing country, Leo.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Japan.”

  She chuckled, her cup to her naked breastbone. Above the man’s ears, his grinning, his shaved head wrinkled. Cases like Leo had come her way a few times before. While she filled out the prescription forms they would stand around hitching their belts, loudly up front about their dying. Gal, let me tell you about bad. Gal, it’s got me nailed to the wall. This when Kath had to work in a cubbyhole—the Clinic didn’t allow much room for a physician’s assistant. Nonetheless whenever Leo or one of her other terminals went into their act, playing cowboy past the graveyard, Kath found herself cheering them along. She let them strut all over her cubbyhole. Now she made a fuss over the man’s hat, a stiff and short-brimmed black fedora.

  “It’s a rapper’s hat,” he said. “All the little black kids wear ’em.”

  “Looks like Bo Diddley to me,” she said. “Bad to the bone.”

  The couples within earshot smiled wanly, not quite risking eye contact.

  “Bo…Diddley?” Leo asked. “Where’d someone like you ever hear about him?”

  “You remember my friend.” Kath kept her tone sprightly. “The singer.”

  Of course he remembered. Kath’s story had all but made the headlines—-Mother Of Two Dating Feminist Folksinger. Her husband had actually found someone to serve her with papers at one of the woman’s concerts. Kath was using a little stage savvy of her own, here: Leo, let me tell yon about bad. The old man, give him credit, said nothing stupid. His nod and his grin remained decent.

  “Say, Leo,” she said then, “have you got a table yet?”

  The two of them had to circle the room to pick up his bidding paddle, and then they slowed down for hors d’oeuvres. But Kath didn’t mind the additional averted faces and uptight elbows. She enjoyed—though appropriately jaundiced about what she was doing here, her debutante’s ball for one—a mounting excitement. Under the stage lights, the auctioneer appeared enlarged, a Rockwell centerpiece in bow tie and suspenders. Around him the volunteers running the show fretted over clipboards and wads of champagne scrip.

  Once she and Leo were seated, he asked if she were alone. Kath turned, pointing. Against the bar, the dark service entrance, Dory’s arms and legs appeared to glow.

  Kath hid in her purse, the stink of rain on leather.

  Wonder Woman, she recalled, used to change costumes simply by whirling in place. Too sudden for the naked eye. But Kath lacked the power, especially after fifteen or twenty minutes polishing a different act. Since her last look at Dory, she’d been working the crowd, conventioneering, and it took effort to switch to a more intimate brand of theater. Yes, these three months sharing the house had been continual theater, more smoke and blue lights than Kath would have thought she had in her. She’d even learned to poke fun at the girl’s determination to get back to art school. What Dory was really studying to be, Kath would claim loudly, was a martyr. And yet how many nights had she ended up outside the girl’s door, buzzing with insomnia? How many times had she replayed her fantasies, imaginings by now as brown and worked-over as her showy new pecs and abdominals?

  Even here at the auction, Kath realized, she might have some seduction scheme going. Kath might have a back-of-
the-mind notion that Leo here, old Heparin-dosed Leo, would somehow make her interesting. Oh, Kath. Please. These days Dory found no one in Corvallis interesting.

  She’d begun writing to New York, to Dr. Ossaba, the surgeon in her pastel portrait. Dory would vanish upstairs as soon as she saw the man’s postmark; Kath knew only that the last two letters had been finger-thick. What could they have to say to each other? No question, the girl had wanted the doctor’s picture out of the house. Kath had needed every trick in the book just to get Dory to come watch the item get sold.

  The gavel sounded, rick-kity wick.

  Everyone else sat heads-up. Earrings appeared elongated, under slant working-woman haircuts, and the men ate carefully, using both hands. Then Dory hurried over, a head-clearing tang of soap and baby powder. At first she wouldn’t sit.

  “Hey there, gal,” said Leo. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “You won’t believe who’s here,” Dory said.

  At the time of his portrait, Ossaba had been the hottest new arrival at the Clinic. He’d come to town as a transfer from Harlem Hospital, with a smart-mouthed two-year-old and a wife who taught a section of French at Oregon State. The one thing that none of the gossips seemed to know was just how he and Dory had met. Now the girl came to Kath and Leo with the news that the wife—the ex-wife—was at the auction.

  “Mrs. Glynde,” she kept saying. “Mrs. Glynde.”

  Did she feel safer using the woman’s new name? Kath looked in the direction of Dory’s nod. The French instructor preferred what used to be called ajean Seberg cut, the only woman here besides Kath with such short hair.

  “I see,” Kath said.

  The ex-wife lifted her champagne, oblivious. But then why should anyone watch her? What sort of fuss was Kath supposed to make, with Leo at the table? The man had tipped back his bowler, and his look carried the obvious question. Who is this girl? Kath fumbled ahead with the introductions (“Number twenty-three in your program, folks”), meantime trying to catch Dory’s eye. But the youngster only made a face: I do not want to be here. She chose the chair beside the old man, across from Kath.

  “Dorr,” Kath tried, “in this town, you were bound to run into her sooner or later.”

  The girl stared away, showing her spangled back. Around them the bidding began, the paddles going up. Kath thought of flamenco dancers raising fans, hiding their heat.

  “So,” Leo said, “you’re one of the artists.”

  “Well, I was.” Now all of a sudden, Dory was smiling. “The money ran out before I finished sophomore year.”

  “Then tell me something, gal. Do you own a car?”

  The girl allowed herself maybe two seconds of looking confused. Then she snatched Leo’s paddle from the table, she jabbed him in the chest. Typical: Dory had him sheepish, explaining himself, and when a boy came by with champagne, Leo said he’d buy her a second glass. Another minute and he and Dory were playing tug of war. They gripped opposite ends of the paddle’s wooden spine, almost giggling, and Kath took more of the bulk-order champagne herself. She got a mouthful, an eyeball-tickling belt.

  “What’s the big deal about the doctor’s wife?” she asked. The girl broke off the game, blinking.

  “Dorr, you were bound to run into her.” Levelly Kath reminded her that the woman’s new husband—“Mr. Glynde”—was a vice president at the university. “Look, that’s why they have the fundraiser in November. Most of the OSU people haven’t had a decent paycheck since June.”

  Dory’s mouth had gone square.

  “Listen,” Kath went on, “I used to think my husband was sentimental about November. It was the only time he ever took me to a restaurant.”

  “Oh, Katherine,” Dory said. “Common-sense Katherine.”

  Kath fought an impulse to lift her drink again. “Common-sense?” she managed. She pinched up one strap of her top and with the other hand gestured at herself.

  The girl refused to smile, she turned toward the stage. That left Leo. Kath kept her hand at her top-strap, making a fist. Tell me, Leo—you’ve never met our Dory? You didn’t know our Dory won an undergraduate award?

  The man’s face wrinkled in new places, twitching.

  “You didn’t see the notice in the paper? You’ve never heard of our Dory?”

  Leo wiped his lips; he licked them again. Kath had another question but lost it somehow in the man’s doddering gesture, his undone flesh. One of those moments when her Master’s of Health flickered in her mid’s eye. She let go of her top. Dory’s look was no fun either: like the girl had just come out of her Friday-night shift at the Video Circle. Kath checked out the stage. A volunteer beside the podium held up a miniature, a square piece that fit in one hand.

  In her program Kath had marked this item a Maybe. A doll-sized robe, vaguely Oriental, it had hems and borders the yellow of split wood. From her seat Kath could see the sequins glimmer. Leo went on twitching, redoing his lips, and with that in the corner of one eye Kath put in the first bid, the minimum asked in the program. Twenty dollars more and the thing was hers. By the time someone brought the receipt the old man’s face had better color. His finger steady, he pointed out a woman at the next table.

  “That gal made the thing,” Leo said.

  The artist looked to be about forty, with an enjoyable swank in her grin. Her husband was dressed out-of-season, a canary shirt. Hello, Kath grinned back. Welcome to the party—the Desperate Debutante’s ball.

  Then came the heron over the reeds, the swoozy beige floater. A couple of rich men started a bidding war. Five-dollar increases went back and forth between Mr. Glynde from the university and, let’s see, who was Dory looking at this time…of course. Another administrator wanted the print for his office. One of the muckety-mucks at the Clinic, his bidding sloppy with alcohol. Kath bent over her miniature; a runner had brought it to the table. But the fluorescents above her were reflected in the tiny robe, painful in its Chinese glitter. Behind her, some flunky loudly egged both bidders on: “Great piece! Terrific piece!”

  The auctioneer socked his gavel against the podium. Applause rippled briefly through the underground room.

  Dory was leaning into Leo. “I don’t even want to know who got that one.”

  Kath lifted her head. “Don’t be mean,” she said. “It’s for a good cause.”

  The girl turned. Her look might have been a quick hazel tree-dweller, stilled at a sound it didn’t understand.

  “Don’t be mean,” Kath said. “I’ve got to live with these people.”

  “With what people?”

  Leo broke in, extending one thin arm. A stage whisper: “Not now, ladies. This one’s the best thing here.” And Dory played to him again, her face reanimated: “Oh yeah, oh really. Check out the scumbling.”

  What? Dory and Leo were talking about a wall-size oil, a stretch of Peoria Road in winter, roughed out in descending swaths. Rain, road, scrub. Midway up the closest foreground there jetted an orange flare, some New-Year’s blossom, which made it look as if the murmurous view might split down the middle. Was that “scumbling?”

  But the artist had set too high a minimum, six hundred dollars. Nobody lifted a paddle.

  “This is humiliating,” Dory said. “It’s like a ritual slaughter.”

  “You know,” Leo said, “you really should be more generous. You heard our Mizz Wick.”

  “What, about living with people?” Dory faced her; it felt like too soon after last time. “Kath, I don’t get it. You’re a grownup. You don’t have to live with anybody.”

  “Well…”

  “I mean, the only people you really have to live with—right?—are your lovers.”

  Unexpectedly Kath found herself laughing. Her chin dropped, her hand felt its way across her loosening mouth—and what, had she forgotten about laughing? About giving herself a break? The auction program on the table before her for once looked nothing like an actor’s promptbook; its print had turned to feathers, to bugs.

  �
��What’s so funny?” Dory asked. “There’s your lover, like whatever you have with him. And then there’s everyone else.”

  Kath’s diaphragm rippled, and along her waistline the gargoyles winked. Yes, laugh, Kath. Just laugh.

  “Mizz Wick?” Leo asked.

  “Hey, I mean it,” Dory said. “There’s your lover and then there’s everyone else.”

  After all, Kath reminded herself, it wasn’t going to get any easier tonight. The item after next was Dory’s. And God knows Kath could make herself crazy with that face up beside the podium. That proud glare: Hey, Wick—/ had her and you didn’t.

  “Come on, Kath,” Dory said. “At least get it together while they sell off my piece.”

  Kath fought for a breath, she reached for the champagne. With that she noticed the faces nearby. The woman who’d made the miniature was watching again, with her Broadway grin. When Kath caught her eye the woman nodded, and meantime the artist’s husband, eyebrows up and grinning himself, tapped a thumb against his canary’d chest. Well, well. The acoustics in the hotel basement had protected her. The wrangling with Dory had gone unheard; all that had come across was an interesting threesome having themselves a time. Kath checked left-right, she knew how laughter freshened her look, and she was met with honest eye contact. One or two of the men licked hors-d’oeuvrey fingers, but that was better than the rigged faces she was used to. Well. The only meanness she could find belonged to Dory’s Moroccan doctor, up beside the podium.

  No doubt as Dory had laid on the pastels, she’d fallen into a recapitulation of her father. The family lived in Unity, in the high desert country, and the hint of home gave her sheeny layers a baleful depth. Now bidding was brisk. No surprise to Kath, after the team spirit she’d read in these faces. The closing offer came from Mrs. Glynde.

  “I…can’t…believe it,” Dory whispered.

  When the girl had no expression—other than those puzzled eyes—you saw the baby fat in her cheeks. She leaned across the table, doser to Kath than she’d been all night. “I mean, what’s going on?”