Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  “What game’s that, Dad?” I asked, moving forward, trying to sound happy to be there.

  “Supposed to start. On the pre-game now.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said, glancing at the screen and noticing a couple of beefy-looking guys in suits standing on the sidelines of a football field wearing headphones and talking into hand-held microphones. Judging from the uniformed players passing behind them, it appeared to be a college game.

  Alice’s eyes met mine. She silently mouthed the words I’ll be in the kitchen and stepped away.

  I sat down next to my father, or rather this husk that had once been him. Watching football games on television with him were some of the only peaceful moments I’d ever shared with the man, some of the only ones that weren’t poisoned by tension and suspicion and anger. I never cared a whit for football or any other sport, yet sitting there led me to some vague, queasily nostalgic feeling.

  “Who’s playing?” I asked.

  “Kickoff in a couple of minutes.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” I sat staring at the silent screen for a minute, until a commercial featuring bikini-clad girls tossing cans of beer to eager young guys in swimsuits came on. “Hey Dad, how are you doing these days? How are you feeling?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. How are you doing?”

  “I’m doin’ fine,” he said, his tone defensive. His voice was unusually high and wheezy, as if he were whispering; yet he was speaking at a normal volume. “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

  “Well, I’m just interested, that’s all, Dad.”

  “Interested. Shit.” His eyes remained riveted to the screen as the babes and the young dudes all partied together on the beach and the logo of the company was superimposed over them. Ah yes, I thought, the great things that can happen in your life thanks to alcohol.

  “Well, I’m glad you feel fine, anyway. How’s Alice treating you?”

  “Alice?”

  “Alice. How’s she treating you here?”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  I looked at him. The bright sunlight in the room created shadows around the crevices in his skin. His fingers and hands looked somehow undernourished, more like fragile sticks with some kind of parchment stretched over them.

  “Alice?” I tried again. “Do you remember Alice?”

  “Shit.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Yeah, Alice, yeah. Makes me take that goddamn medicine.”

  “Well, it’s good for you, Dad.”

  “Tastes like shit.”

  “Do you remember who she is? Alice? The things we all used to do together?”

  “There’s a good-lookin’ one around here,” he said. “Pretty. I told her.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Young one. Bet she’s got a tight one.”

  “Well…maybe it’s not a good idea to tell her she’s pretty, Dad.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” The words were familiar but the tone was flat, affectless. “Any normal man wants to screw a good-lookin’ female.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “None a’ your fuckin’ business, far as I can see. Don’t know why you’re even talkin’ to me. You don’t know anything. Never did. Stupid shithead.”

  So he was still in there somewhere, my father. Buried under layers of age and confusion and incipient dementia, he was in there. And he remembered his nickname for me, uttered thousands of times in my youth. Shithead.

  “Dad, I just…”

  “I know more than you think I do,” he said, his eyes never leaving the television. “I know more’n all of you.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I know about that guy, too. Don’t think I don’t.”

  “Guy?”

  “The guy they got spyin’ on me. Follows me. I see him. Son of a bitch. Old guy.”

  “You think Alice hired someone to follow you, Dad?”

  “Don’t think. Know. See him in the corner of my eye.” He turned his head suddenly one way, then another. I noticed the overgrown white brows that grew every which way over his eyes, lending him, at least to me, the look of a geriatric Satan. “Nope. Ain’t here now.” He shook his head and his tongue ran over his lips, which were quivering slightly. “I’ll catch him. I’ll catch him and when I do I swear I’ll kill the fucker. You just see if I don’t. Buncha bastards,” he finished, more quietly. “Buncha goddamn bastards.”

  “Right.” I stood. “Well, listen, Dad, it’s been great to see you.”

  “Kickoff time.” He pointed. “Look.”

  I looked. “Hey, yeah, that’s great. I sure hope you enjoy the game. I’m going to have to go, Dad.”

  “Aw shit, they won the toss. Shit.”

  “Right, well—I’ll see you, Dad.”

  I left him sitting forward in his chair, staring at the silent TV. I moved into the kitchen, where I found Alice staring out the window with a mug in her hands.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  She nodded, gestured vaguely toward the stove. “There’s coffee if you want it.”

  “He told me that you hired a guy to follow him? An old guy?”

  “Ben, that’s him,” she said softly. “Sometimes he doesn’t recognize himself in mirrors anymore.” She looked at me. “What did he say about Mindy?”

  “Just that she was pretty. That’s all. Sis, he’s going to have to be hospitalized.”

  “I know.”

  I stood there stupidly, studying her profile as she looked out at the backyard. After a moment I realized that she was crying. There was no sound, her shoulders didn’t shake; I just saw a tear run slowly down her cheek. I’d hardly ever seen my sister cry. Yet when I went to her, touched her shoulder, she put down her coffee and turned quickly to me, letting loose a flood of wailing into my shoulder.

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Finally, after a few minutes, she pulled herself together, turning from me and splashing some water from the sink onto her face, drying herself with a dishcloth.

  “I look,” she said at last, “so much like Mom. We both do. Me and Mindy, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s just—” She shook her head. “It’s just so sad.”

  “Yes,” I said, memories of a thousand shoutings and ravings about the government and the niggers and the Jews clattering through my head—my shit head.

  “Yes. It’s so sad.”

  # # #

  By the time I got back to Dupont Circle the clouds had closed in again and it was cold. My well-warmed apartment beckoned, but it was only four o’clock and I knew that if I went straight back I was as likely as not to simply crawl back into bed again. I can sleep for eighteen hours at a stretch sometimes. And yet I’m never particularly refreshed upon waking.

  Instead I wandered into the Olsson’s bookstore on 19th Street and looked around for a while. For someone who was supposedly a writer I seemed to read little these days, though I still enjoyed being around books, touching them, fanning their pages. But the effort of actually reading any often seemed more than I was willing to undertake. Once upon a time I’d lived, breathed, virtually eaten books, especially novels and poetry: there was nothing—maybe not even sex—to equal the sensation of sinking into the world of Faulkner or Hawthorne or Rilke or Hardy. I could read, read all day and all night; when I was twenty-three I devoured Anna Karenina in a single stupendous sitting of nineteen straight hours, stuffing bread and donuts into myself as necessary, collapsing mesmerized, overwhelmed, into my bed as I finished in the pinkening dawn. I was changed, changed forever. Or so I thought.

  And so it had been with my writing, then: the passion, the wild verve with which I scribbled vignettes, stories, whole novels in pencil on my long legal-sized legal pads, transcribing the results on my little Olympia portable typewriter and, later, a computer. My first publications happened, short stories in the little magazines, university quarterlies. No money, but the invincib
le glory of print. Nothing else seemed to matter: absorbing books, writing, writing, writing.

  How long ago it all was. So much energy dissipated, wasted. So much life lost, never to return. I’d written little in the past decade; nothing at all since my six days’ wonder of a hack novel made me very slightly famous for perhaps eight excruciating months. The faucet had slowed to a drip, then dried up altogether. I still made desultory attempts every now and then, sharpening my pencils carefully and propping the yellow pad on my knees as I once had. I rarely came away with more than a few disjointed sentences, leading to nothing.

  As I glanced across the lines of mysteries I reflexively checked under “F” to find my novel, though I knew it wouldn’t be there. It was out of print; I hadn’t seen it on a bookstore shelf in years. The only way anyone could buy it now was at a used bookshop or from one of those new online second-hand sellers. Sometimes I purchased things from those “virtual bookstores” myself, but it never felt right, somehow—it never felt real.

  While I was musing on these topics I crossed into the Fiction and Literature section and noticed a young woman at the other end of the aisle, around “G.” Her head was angled sideways to read the titles on the spines of the books. She looked like hundreds of other young women in D.C.: slim and serious, with long straight hair, small stylish glasses, and something of a pinched look about her eyes. Twenty-five years old, I guessed, give or take. No wedding ring. She wore one of those ubiquitous black overcoats all women in D.C. have. Her legs were bare—the lower half of them, anyway—in a female fashion I’d never understood; surely it was too cold for bare skin. She had on black boots. On impulse I moved near to her.

  “Excuse me,” I said, scanning the books before me, “are you standing in front of Graham Greene?”

  She looked up from her browsing. “What?”

  “Graham Greene.”

  Though she hadn’t been smiling before, her face definitely frowned now. “Um…I don’t know.” She looked. “Yeah. Here.” She backed away to let me see.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked, smiling as pleasantly as I could. “I could help you find it. After all, you helped me find Mr. Greene.”

  She shook her head. The frown became a scowl. “I’m just looking around.”

  I followed her a few steps. “What do you like to read?” I asked. “Novels?”

  Her eyes went back to the books. “Not really,” she said in a dismissive tone. She turned away.

  “They have a little coffee bar here,” I said, insisting on the point even though I could see I would get nowhere with this woman. “We could get a cup of coffee and look at books together.”

  She studied me, not looking particularly happy to be doing it. “I don’t think so.”

  “My treat.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said lightly, my best casual smile creasing my face. “One cup of coffee, on me. You’ve got nothing to lose but your loneliness and pain.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said, suddenly turning on her heel and marching toward the front door. Before she’d gone three steps I heard her mutter quietly—but not too quietly—“Asshole.”

  I waited a few minutes, then left the store as well. I knew I’d gotten what I deserved. I would do this sometimes—approach a woman who was obviously not going to be available to a middle-aged, balding slob like myself, just for the sheer masochistic pleasure of the rejection. How long ago it all seemed, the times when I could walk into a bookstore just like this one and, with little more than my smile and a dopey line or two like “You’ve got nothing to lose but your loneliness and pain,” walk out not with a book, but with a girl. Well, sometimes I’d get a book, too. Usually she’d pay for it.

  I stopped at the Bank of America ATM and withdrew three hundred dollars, which was the maximum allowed, then trudged through the quickly-darkening afternoon toward the apartment. When I got there I forced myself to stay out of the bed, instead putting water on for tea and turning on the computer in my bedroom. Since I’d only gone online the year before, the Internet was still relatively new to me. I was amazed at how quickly it had come to dominate my life. E-mail still seemed a small miracle; my desk drawers contained envelopes and stamps that I imagined now I would never use. There was nothing much of interest today, though, so I wasted time book-browsing as I drank my tea. Then I cruised around on a few nudie sites, trying to keep the vision of the woman in the bookstore out of my mind. She’d been attractive—not wildly so, but quite acceptably. I still longed for such trysts, though I hadn’t had one in many years. They belonged to a time in my life when everything had seemed easy…well, not everything, maybe. But how pleasant it had been to have that available practically whenever I’d wanted it. It sometimes felt as if I might recapture that time, that charisma or whatever it was that I’d had, but I knew it wasn’t true. I could lose fifty pounds, I supposed, and try hair implants or Rogaine, but I’d still be a thirty-six-year-old high school teacher, divorced and all but broke, rather than the young dashing long-haired boy I’d been—back when my poverty was more like a style statement for the fledgling artist I was, when girls were all too willing to feed me before and after the main event of the evening. Ah, God.

  Too many things to not think about. The vision of the woman in the bookstore vied for attention with my leather-faced father, his remarks about my niece’s prettiness and her “tight one” and his determination to kill the old man he thought pursued him. My sister, totally uncharacteristically crying on my shoulder. Then I thought of all the grading I had sitting in my briefcase, waiting for me patiently, as malevolent things often do.

  Sighing, I picked up the phone and called Tracy, asking her to come over.

  “Are you free?” I said.

  “For you, anything, baby doll.”

  She arrived an hour later, after I’d wolfed down leftovers from the refrigerator for my dinner. Tracy is a good-looking woman: hazel eyes, shoulder-length auburn hair, curvaceous as all hell. She was wearing the incongruous combination of goose down coat and mini-skirt, with black hose and very high stiletto heels that looked painful, even if she was aggressively graceful in them.

  “Jesus,” I said, welcoming her in and giving her a peck on the cheek. “A mini-skirt? In this cold?”

  “It was okay,” she said, grinning and stripping off the coat. “I took a taxi. It was warm.”

  “Well, thanks for coming on short notice.”

  “Oh, no prob. Only I need to go by ten, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She nodded toward the bedroom. “Want me to go in?”

  “Yeah. Sure. You know where it is. Hey, do you want some wine?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to a glass. Just a little one. I have to keep my wits about me.”

  I laughed and she disappeared into the bedroom, slipping off the heels as she moved. I found the half-full bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge and poured two glasses. By the time I made my way to her she was already undressed and in the bed, sitting up and looking toward me.

  “Hey, thanks,” she said, taking the wine and sipping at it while I took off my clothes and joined her. We drank wine for a few minutes, not speaking. My free hand moved up and down her body. Finally we put the glasses aside and she took the lead, kissing me deeply and touching me everywhere. Tracy knows what she’s doing, without a doubt.

  But tonight it wasn’t working. I seemed to feel nothing but desolation as I lay there, watching her heroic efforts to make my body respond. This happened more and more these days; a new kind of sparking-out, another kind of onrushing failure, unimaginable only a few years ago.

  “Let’s give it a few minutes, okay?” I said at last.

  She smiled cheerfully, as she always does, and pulled herself up next to me, kissed my jaw. “Sure thing,” she said. “Whatever you want. You’re tired tonight, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That’s okay. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Nothing,
right now. Let’s just stay here for a while.”

  “Fine with me.”

  We lay there together, my arm around her in the darkness. I could hear the night wind pressing lightly against the bedroom window. It felt good to be there with her—warm, soft, quiet. I felt I could nod off to sleep with her, wake with her the next morning. How I wanted to—how I didn’t want to have to return to this bed alone, pulling the covers over myself, blocking out the world. But I knew I would. She’d already said she had to go. I knew she wouldn’t stay.

  I studied her body absently, touching the freckles on her shoulders and stroking her little round bottom. Time drifted. I think I nodded off to sleep for a time, then woke again to discover her still there beside me.

  Sorrow poured over me then in sudden black waves and I felt dirty, ashamed of myself; for a ghastly moment I thought I would start to cry, but I held it in. Finally I guided her hand to me and we tried again for a few minutes, but there was nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last, sorrow and shame sheeting through me.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. Want to do something else?”

  “I guess not. Unless you’ve got a cigarette.”

  “Ha! That, I do have.” She reached over to the chair where she’d left her purse and pulled out a package of Virginia Slims, one of my least favorite cigarettes of all time—surely the bland, unsatisfying things were created by some non-smoker somewhere with the specific intent of killing a person’s desire to smoke. But right now it didn’t matter. We lit up and drank what was left in our wine glasses.

  “You okay?” she said at last.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Wish you smoked a better kind of cigarette, though.”

  “Hey, these are the healthy kind. Smoke away.”

  I chuckled. I genuinely liked Tracy, who had a good sense of humor—or seemed to. It was hard to tell, really, since there wasn’t a single moment we ever spent together in which she wasn’t playacting, pretending to be my sweet and supportive quasi-girlfriend.

  At last it neared ten o’clock and, with a final, quick kiss, she got up and dressed. I wanted to pull her back into the bed, but I just watched until she was finished, then got up and wrapped my bathrobe around myself. We made our way back out into the main room and as she pulled on her coat I found my wallet and brought out the three hundred dollars, handed the wad of bills to her.