Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  She waved it all away, turned to one side. “Oh God,” pressing fingertips against her hairline, “you must think I’m a total idiot acting like this.”

  “No. You’re right. It’s me. I have a way of missing out on obvious details. My jacket. It’s rolled up behind that chair. Go ahead in the pocket and take whatever you think’s fair.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “So they tell me.”

  She drew a bill from my pocket with two fingers, then looked over at me plucking hairs above my sternum. She had a laugh like a tropical bird, a trill I could watch moving up her throat.

  Lifting her eyes to the ceiling, “Mama, this ain’t how it looks.”

  “Not at all. I had a lovely time. What’s your name, anyhow?”

  “Linda,” she said, leaving no doubt it was a lie.

  “Linda. That’s Spanish, isn’t it?”

  She went out the door, then curled her head back around. “Something else you could do for me is quit throwing your dental floss in the sink.”

  Monday morning I was ready for her. I’d called in to the facility, reported car trouble, and when she showed around ten I had candles burning and a bottle of Solano County champagne iced down in the sink. Leaning up against her utility cart with bangs awry, she had a sullen white-trash look of too many years’ macaroni and soup beans.

  “What the hell are you up to?” she said.

  And I wondered myself. But once I’d coaxed her inside I sensed as before her scrawny heat, and desire rose in me like nausea. I popped the cork.

  She looked suspiciously into her glass. “If this is about the other day…Listen, I was under some pressure, driving all around for a place to let it out, and you got elected, that’s all.”

  “Salud,” I said.

  “What I mean is don’t take me at face value, okay?” Then she grimaced, tossed her head in a way that told me she had realized a possible reference to her homely features.

  “Sit back and relax,” I suggested.

  She turned from me to look out the window at the cars.

  “Linda,” I said, “I’m not worried about values at all. Now why don’t you sit down here and watch while I take care of the room.”

  I grabbed fresh linen off the cart and started stripping the bed.

  “You must be drunk already.” She reached for the bottle, willing to catch up with me.

  I wiped the ashtrays, emptied the wastebaskets, laid in fresh soap and towels. I made merry with brushes and spray bottles, touched up with aerosol disinfectant.

  “Very nice.” She was rolling soft candle wax in her fingers. “Is there a point I’m not getting?”

  “Now we’re on equal ground,” I said, having no idea what I meant.

  We sat watching television for an hour or so, and then I left for work.

  You were, I suppose, expecting a seduction. As there was no disappointment on my part, let there be none on yours. I cannot change the facts: Lust no more obviates the need for skepticism than it cures banality.

  Heidi was compliant in her thoughtless way, positioning herself amid the furniture like a showroom mannequin. Compliant but inapproachable. Something forced me back from my impulses to put on a tape of Enroll Garner playing “Penthouse Serenade,” to slide my hand along her spine and look for her heartbeat in the wrong place; some nameless instinct did this. But all I can be sure of is what I don’t know.

  On Tuesday I got her name and number from Opatowski, who volunteered that he’d only hired her because she looked so underfed.

  Her husband picked up the phone, instantly truculent.

  “Mrs. Romar, please,” I said in my own voice.

  “Yeah, who wants her?”

  I pretended to be from a national recipe contest, first prize a trip to Tokyo and ten thousand cash. He put her on.

  “Hi, it’s room six. Did I get you at a bad time?”

  She agreed. She agreed to everything. We would meet at a neutral site after midnight and take it from there. I purposely arrived fifteen minutes early, but she was already waiting.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  The stars were like pinpricks. We went behind some rocks, laid a blanket on the ground, and fucked like prairie dogs.

  14

  ABOUT SIXTY TIMES A second. That’s how fast the hummingbirds beat their wings as they hovered at the bottle of red sugar water that hung outside our bedroom window. Violet brightened on mornings they’d arrive, taking it as an omen of sweetness for the rest of the day. At night, like the birds, she would lapse into a state of torpor. It wasn’t the casuistries of the Soc-Anthro industry getting her down, but me. This was during my early wanderlust, after the first thirteen weeks of marriage had played.

  Violet was altogether charmed by the idea of “keeping” me, and for a span so was I. It’s not easy to denounce pampering no matter how kenneled up you start to feel. So I donned the Chinese silk pajamas, shaved more often than was necessary, tried different fruit combinations in the juicer (her parents’ hesitant wedding gift), and when toward evening I grew punchy, I would sometimes read aloud to myself of infant mortality patterns in Southern Asia or of Uzbek shamanism from the scholarly journals my wife stacked like furtive beaver mags in her closet. A day would perish by a kind of melting process. Never fully awake, I found it the most natural thing to slither into bed whenever Violet came in. Dinner was brought to me on a tray.

  Still, it was a purely expository interlude, like the tumbling calendar leaves of an old movie. A vague fragrance of bed linen followed me everywhere and I started to cut myself up while shaving. Violet crayoned in my silences with the records she brought home by the armload; guaguancos and sambas, gamlans and cane flutes. Soon my nastiness was uncontainable.

  “No,” I shouted, “I don’t want you to run me a fucking bath!”

  Poor confounded Violet. I was worse than one of her students. It was a larger sample that was missing. I needed to hear someone else’s thoughts and opinions.

  I had a friend who lived in Tuna Canyon, as yet a lightly populated zone. His place was up high near an air force radar tracking station and you could step out on his deck to look over dark sky and water and say, “It’s a tuna moon-a tonight.” The sun was direct all day long, could make things pretty stifling in the greenhouse; you misted yourself along with the plants. My friend’s business was illegal horticulture. Opium poppies, psilocybe mushrooms, Hawaiian wood rose, like that. He also brokered smuggled tropicals (even orchid collectors have their intrigues), and serviced an impressively wide market for bootleg roses. That’s right. Next time you buy one of those boxed hybrids, look at the little medallion it wears: ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION OF THIS PATENTED PLANT WITHOUT LICENSE IS PROHIBITED.

  So I was up there one day singing my usual blues as I watched Marsh feed seedlings with an eyedropper.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t get all this static you’re putting out. She’s a bloody gem.”

  “But, Marsh, I live like an invalid.”

  “Exactly. That’s what paradise is all about in this town. Those Bel Air grandees spend all kinds of money and effort to achieve that state of utter helplessness. So get with the program, son, join the party.”

  Okay, paradise meant having your own nutritional counselor and a Central American refugee to pumice your bunions. This was not an insight I could use.

  “I daydream about auto accidents.” Taking a defensive sip from my rum collins. “I call up dentists and make imaginary appointments.”

  “You should stop fighting your own normalcy, that’s my opinion.”

  “It’s consumerism. Nothing but appearances.”

  Finally Marsh told me to cheer up or shut up, I was disturbing the plants. I decided to do both.

  But three days later Violet’s car was stolen from her campus parking space and we were plunged into a time of internal exile. Huddled in the apartment like a couple of Soviet dissidents, we developed
a conversation of codes after wearying each other with previously covert intimacies. Traditional doubts, the plucking of questions—they belonged in this space. But a sense of artificiality was best for both of us. It was simpler to play hand after hand of five hundred rummy. We were such lazy people.

  “The only things you can fix are machines,” Violet said after another immaterial call to the police.

  I adored her sloppy exasperation, the rabbity twitching of muscle pads along her jaw as she ground her molars. I did not like to think about how much she’d invested in me.

  “My darling,” I hummed.

  “I mean it,” she said.

  The timer dinged for the cheese pudding she had in the oven, and then I said something about what was one more missing Fiat, they were busy keeping the streets safe for plutocracy. Violet sometimes worried that I was in love with my own mouth. She stood up with such sadness in her loose arms and…well, certain things do not wish to be described.

  Violet garnished our plates with sprigs of cilantro and carrot coins and I dealt another hand. That night we went for a walk, held hands, saw a huge man playing on his lawn with a turtle. He called it by name. Fritz. We held hands and looked at the stars (but only out of the corners of our eyes) and we wished for something. We were always wishing for something.

  When I first came to L.A. I didn’t know anyone. It was summer, dead center. I sunned on bus stop benches. I looked at women browsing in drugstores. Burritos three times a day. Hunting for toilets. Mumbling into the wind. I wanted a job at the zoo. A Mexican in gumboots was hosing out the lemur cages and he laughed when I asked about it.

  “You got to take a test,” he sad, and wrote his initials on the back wall with spray.

  Violet, at this same time, was involved with someone ten years younger. Fragile. A troubled homelife. He was a lifeguard at a condominium tower in Marina Del Rey.

  “I sort’ve liked it when he tied me up,” Violet told me. “An enthusiastic kid. Such bright black eyes. It felt like a camping trip or something. He’d want to show me every knot.”

  Other men stressed her, but she always felt cool inside with him. Violet, sober by profession, don’t forget, distrusts flash and style (translation: anyone else’s), and he was so impervious, so very much without either, even wearing turquoise glasses and glistening with cocoa butter in his high white chair.

  So imagine, please, her grim contorted Violet-like sense of shock when, on a weekend she was visiting her parents, he let himself in with the key she’d given him and slashed all her clothes, cut careful triangular holes in the crotch of all her panties.

  She moved to the Valley, leaving no forwarding address.

  It took some time to adjust to the ephemeral ambience, to find an empty socket in the fast-buck, dollhouse economy. But not that long. I had a two-room efficiency with fifties Sputnik furnishings, and thirty-two hours a week at a sporting goods warehouse. I was doing all right. With my off-time I did as little as possible: listened to the all-news station on the radio, began to keep a scrupulously trite diary. Rain arrived with the fall. I asked myself, Is this the way that Arthur Bremer felt?

  Violet was in therapy at this point, compiling pills. She says now that the whole thing was an indulgence, like splurging at the dress shop, but I don’t know. At least she had a woman doctor. The doctor had a degree from the Sorbonne and a boundless faith in chemicals. Violet had such severe depression that she lost eighteen pounds and sensation in the ends of her fingers.

  “The terrible thing,” she says now, “was that I’d look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘You’ve never been more beautiful.’”

  Her mother came to live with her for a week, went home in tears. Violet stopped filling the prescriptions. After a while she could type again. The thing that brought her out of it was buying that car. The pine-green little scooper that slid us down Mulholland Drive.

  Marsh and I talked security systems and watched the sun come up across from his deck. Marsh knew a guy who installed lawn sensors. He’d installed them for a French movie director who moved out two weeks later. Dobermans were more popular than ever. And someone had just opened a gun shop on West Wilshire, filigreed shotguns with pump action.

  “I’ve got the flyboys right over here,” Marsh said. “My security comes free of charge.”

  There was a sick beige light over the oil drum half we’d roasted a neighbor’s goat (strictly legit, a gift) on. A long night in the hills burning eucalyptus wood. I considered eventual billboards: HOW MUCH SECURITY CAN YOU AFFORD?

  “Just a little coffee and then that’s it.” My hands were shaking.

  He went into his endlessly forming smile, leaning toward the water. “It’s full of submarines,” Marsh said.

  Around eight-thirty I stopped at a doughnut shop to call the wife. Out all night with the car, still suffering from performance anxiety, and by no means just the one kind. A honey-I-fucked-up-again job.

  She said, “I’ll cancel my classes. We’ll go to the beach.”

  15

  THE LAST FRINGE OF afternoon has disappeared. With curtains drawn back, light in #6 is part blue, part gray. The radio says we should have unseasonably cool temperatures through tomorrow.

  “Really, I have to leave.”

  I slide up and kiss her eyes. “That’s what you said half an hour ago.”

  “I can’t keep claiming I had engine trouble.” Her jutting teeth clamp on her underlip.

  “Ten minutes, ten more minutes, and I’ll dress you myself.”

  “Shit.” She reaches across me for the cigarettes. “I want to sleep beside you. We’ve never really done that.”

  The phone goes off and we look at each other. If Heidi’s husband calls looking for her, Opatowski usually lets us know. She’s already got her panties on by the time I pick up.

  But it’s Violet.

  “Hi, sweetie. Going my way?”

  I shake my head at Heidi, pat her half of the bed. “It’s been a while.”

  “I know. Hectic out here. We had mudslides two weeks ago. You probably heard.”

  “The place is all right?”

  “More or less. A couple of new trees in the backyard, but the rest of it missed me somehow. Anyway, I’m sitting here listening to those Dinah Washington records and it made me think about you.”

  Heidi looks inquiringly at me from the foot of the bed. Her arms hang like pale siphons.

  “I always hated the arrangements. All those violins.”

  Heidi mouths: I’m going. I pull her down next to me.

  “But so romantic.” And there’s that Violet laugh, like water over cool rocks. “I always see a penthouse with the moon shining in.”

  “Who is it?” Heidi whispers.

  “Actually, this isn’t the best time for—”

  “You’re put out with me, my long silence. Is that it?”

  Heidi blows smoke in my eyes, flicks my nipple.

  “I’m a little pressed right now, that’s all I meant.”

  “Hurry, hurry. All right, good for you. I’ll give you the hard news and let you get on with whatever it is.”

  “Don’t sulk. Please.”

  “I’m not. Just shifting gears. I thought you might like to know a friend of mine has offered me a job in Virginia. He’s team leader on a dig starting up next month in Surrey. Seventeenth-century village, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, I can be their physical anthropologist if I want.”

  “Real auspicious, Violet. Have you decided?”

  “Violet?” Heidi’s tipped off now, pokes me hard. “Who’s Violet?”

  “I can get a six-month leave of absence and…Is there someone with you?”

  “In fact, yes.”

  “You must be in bed. My God, where else could you be in a motel room?”

  “Look, Violet…”

  “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed. You were incapable when I knew you.”

  I’m wondering about this “friend” of hers. Probably an ursine type, pip
e and corduroys, always under control, collects Elizabethan limericks. But not above exacting a favor in return for one of his own. I don’t like him.

  Violet is tracing the mandatory ambivalences, teasing herself, while Heidi tugs on the phone cord.

  I say: “Go ahead, talk to her.”

  Heidi freezes up once she’s got the receiver. I can make out Violet’s voice, flat and clipped like a taxi dispatcher, but no words.

  “I didn’t know,” Heidi says finally. She marches to the bathroom. Wham goes the door.

  “What the hell did you say to her?”

  “I can’t imagine. It was all perfectly neutral, factual. Is she upset?”

  I sense Violet’s lecture-hall personality emerging. Maybe I can still head it off. “So you’re soaking up some Dinah, huh?” And I sing the last verse of “That Old Feeling.”

  “I’ll miss you, Violet. Over there in Virginia with your relic brushes.”

  “No need. They have telephones there.”

  “But the geography is different, the mileage. You won’t be nearby anymore. Means nothing in practical terms, but that feeling, I don’t know, it always seemed important.”

  Violet breathing into the mouthpiece is like a light rain on fallen leaves.

  “You’re awfully sweet,” she says. “I should come and see you on my way across. I think I will. But go on now, you have to take care of your friend.”

  Click.

  I have neglected to tell you how beautiful Violet is. She knows it, too. No wonder her students kept calling at all hours. There is no excess in her face, no one element that dominates. Everything about her is smooth and light. Touching her skin had the delicacy of floating. And I remember her walking away from me one afternoon along a row of Lombardy poplars; she was tall and streamlined, like the trees, and her fox-red hair coiled around her head in the wind. “You don’t need me, you need an entourage,” I said. She kept on, but her stride shortened.