The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “And not that much of a stretch for you, either,” I said. “Playing a sleaze.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Birdsey. But really, though, the signs are all there on this one, you know?” He looked around, then leaned forward across his desk. Turned his voice to a whisper. “And get this. If I get the part, there’s this scene where the psycho bitch goes down on me. Just before she kills me. Don’t say anything to Angie if you see her, okay? She’d go apeshit. I started doing sit-ups this morning because I’m like 99.9 percent sure I’m getting the part.”

  “Black, two sugars,” I said.

  The front legs of his chair thunked back down to earth and he stood up. “Poison, Birdseed, I’m telling you. Live clean or die.”

  While I waited for him to get back, I walked around the showroom. Checked out an Isuzu truck they had parked over by the window. Thumbed through a couple of brochures. The sign-painter was on his second letter: G-O.

  I was glad my father-in-law wasn’t in. My ex-father-in-law. We’d always gotten along, Gene and me. He’d always favored me over Leo. Sometimes it was so obvious, it got embarrassing. We’d all be over at the house, some holiday or another, and Gene would invite the two Peters and Costas and me into the den for ouzo, or out for a walk through their orchards, and there Leo would be, in the other room with the kids and the women. It was sad, too, because it was an extension of the fact that the old man has always favored Dessa over Angie. That one was so obvious, it was painful. But all that changed. Ever since the divorce, if I dropped in at the dealership to see Leo and Gene was there, it’d be like I was the Invisible Man or something. Like I hadn’t been the guy’s son-in-law for almost sixteen years. Like I left her instead of the opposite.

  I could hear Leo out by the service area, yapping with somebody instead of getting me my coffee. Leo’s desk was one of four parked right out there on the showroom floor. Don’t ask me why I remember this, but I do: he started working for Constantine Motors the day Reagan got inaugurated and Iran freed the hostages. Nine years and still no private office. One time, when Leo was bitching about it, he said, “If it was you, Dominick, instead of me, you probably would have been a VP by now, never mind a simple office with a door on it.” And he’s right. I would have been.

  The Old Man’s office suite is something else. He’s even got a private bathroom in there—good-sized, too. Must go about eleven-by-eleven. It’s got a red tub with gold fixtures and a hand-painted mural of the Trojan War. How’s this for mature? Leo always makes sure he takes a dump in Gene’s private facility whenever the Old Man’s out on the lot or off someplace checking on one of his other gold mines. (Besides the dealership, Gene and Thula own a couple of strip malls—one here in Three Rivers and another up the road in Willimantic.) The Constantines are big into those hand-painted murals, though: they’ve got them over at the house, too—one in the dining room and the other up in Gene and Thula’s bedroom. The Aegean Sea, that one is. On the wall opposite their bed.

  Leo and I ended up getting engaged to the Constantine sisters the exact same week. Dessa and I had been making plans right along, but not Leo and Angie. Theirs was your basic shotgun situation. The Old Man sent word through his daughters that he wanted to meet with Leo and me at his place of business. Give us his big “future son-in-law” speech. This was before he knew Angie and Leo had a kid on the way—before Angie dropped that little bomb on her father, which she did in the limo ride over to the church. Leo and I could come in together for the big talk, Gene had said; what he had to say, he could say to both of us. I remembered it whole, that summit meeting in Gene’s private office. “Come in, gentlemen, come in,” he called to us after we’d sat a while in his outer office. Leo thought it was all a big goof, but for me it felt like waiting for the doctor to call you in and vaccinate you. “In here,” Gene said, and the next thing you know, we were in that frigging bathroom of his. He was taking a bath in his red tub. I stood there, not wanting to look at his hairy gorilla body or look him in the eye, either. Dessa wasn’t pregnant or anything, but it was thanks to birth control pills, not abstinence. I kept looking at the Trojan War over the Old Man’s shoulder—soldiers inside the gates, leaping from the belly of that fake horse.

  “Gentlemen,” Diogenes began. “My two daughters have enjoyed a good life up to this point. Their mother and I have done our best to provide them with all of life’s necessities and some of its luxuries as well. And now, they’ve chosen to move from our home to your homes.” Nervous or not, I got a silent chuckle out of that one. The Constantines live in this fourteen-room “shack” on Bayview Terrace with apple orchards and a grape arbor and a built-in swimming pool. At the time of our big bathroom summit, I was living in a ratty over-the-garage apartment on Careen Avenue with a refrigerator door I had to keep shut with electrical tape.

  “Now, I don’t require my daughters’ husbands to be millionaires or heroes,” Gene continued. “The only things I expect from you two are happy, healthy grandchildren and the knowledge that my girls are lying down each night beside God-fearing, honest men. If you can honor those requirements, then I welcome you to the family with my blessing. If you can’t, then say so now and we’ll part as friends.”

  Leo did most of the talking for both of us—gave the old man his best Eddie Haskell “yes, sir” and “no, sir” kiss-up routine until Diogenes got to the end of both his big speech and his bath. He stood up, took the helping hand Leo offered him out of the tub, and lit us all Panatela Extras. Buck-naked still. It didn’t occur to the guy to put on a robe until after the three of us were all puffing away.

  Neither Leo nor I said a word to each other as we walked back through the showroom and out the door, trailing cigar smoke and getting stared at by every single employee at the dealership. When we got back in Leo’s Kharmann Ghia, I flopped my head back and groaned. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know about honest and God-fearing, but you already got the grandchildren part of the equation under way.”

  “Did you check out that shriveled little weenie of his?” Leo said. “Shit, man, I’ve seen bigger ones in a bottle of Heinz baby gherkins.” Pulling out of the lot, we both broke out in that kind of laughter that almost chokes you to death. The tears fell, we laughed so hard. “If I ever get saggy tits like that, do me a favor, will you, Birdseed?” Leo managed to get out. “Take me someplace and shoot me.” Speeding along the access road, laughing our fucking heads off, we rolled down our windows and chucked those stinking cigars.

  I still say it’s screwy when you think about it, though: the way Dessa and I derailed and Leo and Angie didn’t. Well, they did derail, for a while—back when that dance club Leo was managing went belly up. Le Club, it was called. The owner was this coke-headed rich boy from Fairfield who got Leo fond of blow. Rik, the guy’s name was—used to have a heart attack if someone accidentally put a “c” in his first name. That was the one time when I let my friendship with Leo lapse. I just couldn’t stomach what the coke was doing to him—the stunts he was pulling, the way he was treating Angie. Then Rik’s daddy’s accountant drove up one afternoon and went over sonny boy’s books. Next thing you knew, Leo was out on his ass.

  While Leo was in drug rehab—which the Constantines financed—it came out that he’d knocked up one of the hostesses at Le Club. Even I didn’t know about that little adventure; like I said, Leo and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time together back then. The hostess—her name was Tina—had already gotten the abortion but decided to ring Angie’s doorbell one afternoon for spite. Angie got a legal separation, and she and Shannon moved back to her parents’ home. Then, three months after Leo got out of treatment, Angie and he were pregnant again. The old man had a shit fit; he’d been lobbying hard for a divorce. Instead, he ended up hiring Leo as a salesman at the dealership.

  That was one of the few times I ever saw old Diogenes cave in on something. Angie had had to beg her father to give Leo that job. She argued that people can change for the better—that Leo had changed. That he was a wonderful father
to Gene and Thula’s only grandchild. That if Angie herself could forgive and forget, why couldn’t the Old Man? Gene told her forgiving and forgetting was one thing and putting that hemorrhoid on the payroll was another. Then Angie delivered the clincher: if it had been Dessa asking, he’d say yes without blinking. Dessa wouldn’t have to stand there and humiliate herself like this on top of everything else she’d gone through.

  Which was probably true.

  “What do you think of your sister’s request?” the Old Man sat on our sofa one night and asked Dessa. Thula sat next to him, silent and sulky, her arms folded over her big belly. They’d driven over in their big New Yorker after fighting about it for a week. In sixteen years of marriage, it was the only drop-in visit Dessa’s parents ever paid us.

  “I guess I vote for anything that might heal things, Daddy,” Dessa said. “But it’s up to you. Can you handle Leo working there?”

  “Can I handle it? Yes. Do I want to come into my place of business every morning and face that idiot she was foolish enough to marry? No, I do not.”

  I sat there and kept my mouth shut, but it wasn’t easy. Sure, Leo had his faults. Sure, he had fucked up royally. But it pissed me off when Gene called him that. We had a history, Leo and me. He had his good points, too.

  “You’re not doing it for him,” Thula said. “You’re doing it for your daughter. Your flesh and blood.”

  “Who says I’m doing it, period?” the Old Man shot back.

  “Angie’s got a point about Leo being a good father, though,” Dessa reminded him. “He and Shannon are crazy about each other.” Dessa and I were crazy about our niece, too, though being around her was a mixture of pleasure and pain for Dessa. She’d had two miscarriages by then. Having kids was the one thing Angie could do better than Dessa. Now that she and Leo were back together, she’d told her sister, she wanted another one after this second one was born. Maybe more.

  “Where would you be, I’d like to know, if my father didn’t give you a chance?” Thula asked her husband. I didn’t get the full significance of it at the time, but in her quiet way, Thula was bringing out the heavy artillery in front of Dessa and me. As shrewd a businessman as Diogenes Constantine was, his original capital had come from his wife’s family—a fact he never forgot and always, ultimately, respected.

  So that was that. By the end of the month, Leo was one of “Gene’s Boys” in the full-page newspaper ads of the Three Rivers Daily Record—his wide, goofy face staring up at you from the newsprint, a cartoon bubble hovering over his head that declared the Constantine Motors motto: “Make me an honest offer, I’ll give you an honest deal!”

  Leo came back carrying my coffee and sipping one for himself. Which was just about average for one of his self-improvement plans. “Goddamn you, Birdsey,” he said. “If I didn’t have to make a fresh pot and stand there smelling this stuff, I wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  The sign-painter had three letters stenciled now: G-O-D.

  “God?” I said, nodding toward the window. “You guys getting religion around here or something?”

  “Nah. When he’s finished, it’s going to read, ‘Goddamn It, Get in Here and Buy a Car Before We Go Under!’”

  “That bad?”

  “Welcome to the nineties.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice. “The Old Man took a hit on his third-quarter numbers. He was on the phone half of yesterday with the regional manager. With United Nuclear closing down and Electric Boat talking about more layoffs, nobody’s buying. Everyone’s just holding on to what they’ve got. Hey, how old’s that truck of yours, anyway?”

  “Eighty-one thousand miles old,” I said, “and running fine.”

  “We could put you in a new Dodge or an Isuzu for—”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “No, listen. That Isuzu five-speed is a nice little truck.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the chariot of the gods, Leo. I got a compressor that’s wheezing like it’s got emphysema and power-washing equipment I’ve got to replace in the next couple of years. Not to mention a brother who’s locked up with a bunch of—”

  “Hey, I hear you, Dominick. But Pop and I could put you into a—”

  “Uh-uh. No.”

  “Okay, okay,” Leo said, palms up. “All I’m saying is if you change your mind, me and Pop’ll fix you up.”

  I yawned. Took another slug of coffee. Yawned again.

  “You look like shit, Birdsey,” Leo said. “You been sleeping?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t think so. No offense, man, but you’re starting to look like a basset hound. Don’t worry. You’ll get him out of there. I’m telling you. Go see a lawyer.” He stood up again, yanking his lapels and checking himself out in the plate glass. “See, the thing you don’t get about these threads, Dominick, is that it’s the law of the jungle. Granted, fourteen-fifty’s a lot to pay for a suit. But if you want quality, you’ve got to pay for it.”

  I looked up at him. “That’s not the law of the jungle. The law of the jungle is: Only the strong survive. Eat or be eaten.”

  “Exactly!” Leo said. “Next audition I go to, the casting director walks out in the waiting room. Who do you think he’s going to notice first—all the miscellaneous assholes wearing Levis and sweatshirts or the guy in the Armani?”

  Omar walked by drinking a Diet Coke. Wearing a lime-green suit.

  “Yo, Omar, get over here,” Leo said. “This guy sitting here says the law of the jungle is: Eat or be eaten. What do you think?”

  Omar took a swig of his soda. “Either one’s fine with me,” he said. “When’s she getting here?”

  “My man!” Leo shouted. He jumped out of his seat and high-fived the guy. He’d been the hero of the sports pages four or five years back: Omar Rodriguez and his famous buzzer-beater that had won Three Rivers the state high school championship. He’d gone on to UConn; it was during the mideighties. Played for them a couple of years. It was just before Calhoun came in as coach and UConn hit pay dirt in the NCAA. If I remembered right, Omar played a season in Europe before he packed it in. Point guard, he was.

  “You hear that, Lorna?” Leo said. The saleswoman across the floor looked up from her paperwork. “Omar says, eat or be eaten. It’s ladies’ choice.”

  She looked down again, shook her head. “You guys,” she said.

  “Cut the crap, Leo,” I mumbled. “You’re embarrassing her.”

  “Am I embarrassing you over there, Lorna?” Leo called. “Hurting those virgin ears of yours?” Without looking up, she gave him the finger.

  Leo turned back to me. “See, it’s the same with selling cars, Dominick. Which is why this suit’s a smart investment twice over. Joe Six-pack comes in here with his fat-assed wife and his Patriots cap, you got basically one whack at him, see? So you stand up, let him know he’s dealing with class—intimidate the slob a little with how good you look. Use the upper hand to your advantage. Shoot a little spark up the little woman’s thighs while you’re at it, too, see, so that she’s in your corner at decision time. Gives you a hidden advantage before you even open your mouth. You see what I’m saying? The law of the jungle.”

  “So who does that make you?” I said. “Cheetah?”

  He adjusted his tie, yanked on his shirt cuff. “Hey, what do you know, Birdseed? Like I said, you wear bib overalls.”

  “And that makes you a better person than me, right, Leo?” I shot back. “The fact that you dress up for work like a high-class gigolo?”

  Lorna looked over at me. I cleared my throat, looked away.

  “No, Birdsey, it doesn’t make me a better person. Or a worse person, either. Because we’re all whores. Even what’s her face—that dried-up little nun over there in India, looks like a monkey. Even the Pope. Even housepainters.”

  I snorted at him. “How’s a housepainter a whore?”

  “Would you climb up a second-story ladder and scrape paint up your nostrils for free? For the fucking art of it? You got your b
od out there like the rest of us, Numb Nuts. Don’t fucking kid yourself.”

  “All right. How’s Mother Teresa a whore?”

  “I couldn’t tell you how,” he said. “I don’t know the woman personally. I just know the theory’s right. That we’re all playing bang-for-the-buck. Putting whatever we got out there on the open market. I’m just being honest about it.”

  A couple of racquetball games ago, Leo himself had called car sales a “whore’s game.” Had started blabbing about this top-secret book on the psychology of selling cars that no one in the business is ever supposed to talk about. Last winter, Gene, Costas, and Peter Jr. went to some “Meeting the Challenges of the Nineties” convention down in Miami—Leo got his nose whacked out of joint because he wasn’t invited—and when they came back, the three of them with their Mediterranean tans renewed, they began making changes. Pushing leasing, hiring women and minorities to sell. The Old Man paid big bucks for these “consultants” to come in and work with the new sales team. Taught them how to categorize each potential victim who’s outside on the lot peeking at sticker prices. They’ve got this system where they know before someone even walks through the door which salesperson’s going to stand up smiling with his hand stuck out, and which approach they’re going to use.