Her cell phone rings and she checks the caller. Chief Harding Marvin. He’s more than an hour late so she debates for a moment whether or not she should answer.
“What?” Hoping her tone will instantly convey her level of displeasure.
“Sorry, I didn’t call sooner.” Nadine listens in chilly silence. “I was doing some work for Mary Swain. I’m a precinct captain for the campaign. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Yeah, Hard, you told me. Like, ten times.”
“You still want me to come over?”
“You can do what you want.”
He tells her he’ll be there in half an hour.
Nadine mixes a pitcher of margaritas. Decides if Hard so much as looks at her cross-eyed, she’ll empty it on his head. She reapplies her makeup and evaluates her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Other than the dark circles under her eyes, she likes what she sees. When the doorbell rings, Nadine waits a full second before getting up to answer it. Hard is holding a dozen roses and a paperback book that he thrusts toward her.
“The Collected Poems of Robert Service?”
“Best American poet in history.” He walks past her into the house. “M. V. goddamn P., Nadine. Most Valuable Poet.”
Nadine fills a vase with water. While she is arranging the flowers, he reads her The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a manly poem about a fellow who gets into a scrape in the Yukon and pays for it with his life. There is a catch in Hard’s throat when he gets to the end. Nadine is touched by this, Hard not one to display his emotions anywhere they can be seen. When he kisses her neck, she elbows him away, wanting to punish him for his tardiness, his insensitivity, and what she worries is the general pointlessness of their arrangement, but he persists and when he tries again she lets him. Then they are in the bedroom having sex, Hard on top of her, Nadine staring at the ceiling thinking about whether or not she’d even run off with him were he to ask her, and she briefly wonders if she would even be letting him fuck her had she not overdone it with the Valium.
After sex the two of them quickly dressed. It was as if they didn’t want to face the intimacy their nakedness suggested. Now her legs are crossed, accenting the fuscia paint on her toenails. Nadine and Hard are seated on the sofa drinking margaritas. Diablo is watching them from his perch on the chair across the room. She finishes her drink and asks Hard if he wants another. When he says no, she gets up and pours one for herself.
She returns to the sofa and sips the drink. She crosses her legs again, lets her sandal dangle. A while ago Hard had talked about taking her down to Cabo for a weekend to go deep sea fishing and she is hoping he’ll mention it again so they can firm it up. He had told her he had to get home in an hour and she wanted some sense of a plan before he departs. This is when he mentions perhaps they should not see each other any longer. Nadine’s sandal drops to the floor.
“Why?”
“It’s not like I don’t want to but my life’s complicated enough. I’d love to keep doing this.”
“You mean you want to keep fucking me?”
“Come on, girl. That’s not fair. I don’t give The Collected Poems of Robert Service to everyone.”
Nadine takes a moment to register the absurdity of the words Hard has just spoken. As if she cares a dust mote for Robert Service, or any other poet for that matter. Hard could have recited Purgatorio from memory and it would not have made a difference. Synapses firing wildly, her only concern is survival. Her hold on a stable life is slipping and the poems of Robert Service are, in this context, a provocation.
“I can’t stand Robert Service! I don’t care about the friggin Yukon!” He has no response for that. A man’s taste in poetry is a sensitive place in which to strike. Trash his personality, but hands off The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Nadine senses his goal is to get out of there without a scene. Something in her does not want that to happen.
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Why can’t you leave her?”
“This is tougher than I thought, telling you. You’re my gal.”
She thinks he might actually mean it. He sounds sincere. But to her ears, they always do. She can’t judge anymore, has no faith in her ability to discern the slim reeds of truth in the limitless swamp of prevarication. When she’d been confronted with similar situations in the past, she had had cried but she does not want to do that now.
“I thought we were gonna get married.”
She wants him to take her hand and tell her what he said was a mistake and he can’t live without her anymore but she’s still sober enough to realize that is ridiculous. This won’t be the moment he confesses his love but the one where he tries to weasel out of every cheap word he’s ever served her.
“I think that’s probably not gonna happen.”
The margaritas are strong and hers have travelled directly to her impulse inhibitors. This becomes clear when she realizes the words coming out of her mouth are: “What would you think if I told your wife about us?”
He takes another sip of his drink and regards her with what she views as a certain degree of detachment. She doesn’t like it. “What would I think? I’d think it was not the best course of action.”
“Not the best course of action.” Nadine is mocking him and, further, she understands the price he has to pay for the sex is the acceptance of her mocking—at least temporarily. She knows he considers himself a gentleman and will at least hear her out before departing. “Why not?” It is a ridiculous follow-up, but she can’t think of anything else to say.
“Now, look,” he says, as if to a child, “I’m not gonna leave Vonda Jean and she’s not gonna leave me.”
“How do you know?” Nadine senses she is starting to sound desperate and pitiable and that makes her angrier than she already is. She wishes she hadn’t consumed the second margarita. And all that Valium.
“I’ve done this kind of thing before. And she knows.”
“She does?”
“And she hasn’t left.”
“If she lets you fool around, then why can’t we go to Cabo? It’s an open marriage, right?” This is reflexive, and the desperate pathetic feeling already pulsing through her intensifies. Why can’t she just dump her margarita on his thick-skulled head? Because she has already drained it. There is the remainder of the pitcher, resting in the pass-through window of her kitchen. But does she want that kind of melodrama? “You said it was open, Hard. The marriage.”
“That was kind of an exaggeration, maybe. Nadine, look. A lot of people depend on me, not just my wife. They don’t need to know about this. We had a good time and I do care about you.”
“What about that job in your office we talked about?” She’s already retreating from the marriage fantasy, trying to tamp her pique into the manageable form of a job request.
“If you call in a month or so, we’ll see if we can’t get that set up. I’ve got to help Mary Swain get elected first. She’s an important woman.” This assessment pierces Nadine, who looks away and thinks about Hard’s implication.
Nadine has suffered through enough similar situations to recognize a blow off. What will happen if she calls police headquarters: polite runaround and no job. It wasn’t like there was a quid pro quo when they started sleeping together, but the highhandedness, the dismissal, galls her.
She rises and walks to the kitchen a little unsteadily, carrying her empty glass with her. There, she fills it with water from the tap and chugs it down. Despite her admonition that he should not expect to be fed, Nadine had prepared a bowl of melon balls before Hard’s arrival, taking the time to scoop out the cantaloupe and honeydew and arrange them artfully in a State of New Mexico commemorative bowl she had purchased on a trip to a tennis clinic in Albuquerque. The melon balls were going to be served with the margaritas but what was the point now? She looks at her recalcitrant soon-to-be-ex-lover and inhales through her nostrils trying to steady her nerves. The post-coital relaxation she was experiencing earlier has vanished. The emptiness she usually feels�
��the accrual of bad memories, wrong choices and rotten luck—tiptoes back in, and gets comfortable. Taking a salad fork, Nadine spears a melon ball and places it in her mouth. She chews and lets the cool juice wash down her throat. Her stomach gurgles and she remembers she forgot to eat dinner. Glances over and sees the Lean Cuisine teriyaki chicken congealed on a plate next to the microwave.
Through the pass-through window she can observe Hard facing away from her, sipping his drink. Nadine thinks about the Mexican he claims to have killed while working with Immigration. How he seemed to take on a new persona, Hard Plus, just like the Hard she knew, only stronger, more formidable. And how men like Hard never seem to pay a price for their actions but are allowed to repeat them again and again.
Taking the bowl of melon balls, Nadine steps out of the kitchen. She regards Hard from the rear, an Indian peeking out from behind a rock at a settler encampment. Sees the bullet head set on broad shoulders. She can discern the outline of the muscles in his back against the tightness of his khaki shirt. Hard seriously Alpha. She can see why he is a leader, a man with a future and not just in law enforcement but to hear him tell it, in politics, too.
When Nadine stabs him in the neck with the salad fork she misses the jugular vein by less than an inch. Still, there is a lot of blood. He doesn’t scream but leaps from the chair, grabs her wrist and wrestles the weapon from her, cursing. Then he roughly shoves her away. When she staggers back, her heel catches on the cheap knit rug and she falls to the floor where she watches Hard press his palm to his neck for a moment, then hold it in front of him, dripping with blood. Hard walks toward the bathroom as Diablo bounds from the other side of the room and barks like someone has fastened an electroshock ring to his little scrotum and turned the dial to ten. Astonished at her own audacity, Nadine remains on the floor as Hard emerges from the bathroom, a bloody towel now pressed to his neck, keeping a wary eye on his tormentors. Top volume shrieking pours from the dog. When Hard makes for the door, the animal bolts across the floor and leaps at him. Still holding the towel to his wounded neck, he kicks the Chihuahua away but this only further animates Diablo, who clamps his jaws on the man’s left ankle. It takes a well-placed kick to dislodge him and the Desert Hot Springs Police Chief wisely uses this gap in the action to slide through the door.
There’s an advantage in stabbing a married guy, Nadine thinks. He doesn’t have much in the way of recourse.
After Hard leaves, she lies down on her bed cradling Diablo and looks at the Taser she had surreptitiously liberated from his belt when he had gone to the bathroom after sex. Why had she stabbed him with a fork when she had had the Taser at her disposal? It certainly would have conveyed her feelings more forcefully. Jam it under his armpit and the man would have thought the Devil had stuck him with a pitchfork. Why did she always do things in half measures? In considering the efficacy of Tasers versus forks, she finds herself reflecting that perhaps she should stop dating for a while since it is obviously causing more stress than she had realized.
As Nadine strokes Diablo’s head, she reflects on the threat she has made. What could possibly be gained by calling his wife? As a mostly rational person, she knew the answer: not much. Nonetheless, she is still irate at what she perceives to be the arrogant way in which she has been treated and deeply resents how powerless it makes her feel, how inconsequential. And that only makes her more irate. Although she has already stabbed him in the neck, she wants to hurt him in a more lasting way, a way that goes far beyond insulting his taste in poetry. And then she wants to go to Mexico with him, drink cocktails festooned with umbrellas, and at sunset have sex on the beach while fishermen unload their nets in the dimming distance. Nadine can hardly begin to understand herself. At least she had the foresight to purloin the Taser. It will probably come in handy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The hillside home of the Duke family is nestled in the Little Tuscany section on the northwest side of Palm Springs. In the long shadow of the rust-colored San Jacinto Mountains, the house is a perfectly restored exemplar of the mid-century modern style. Relatively modest, especially in contrast to nearby architectural showplaces once owned by such luminaries of yesteryear as Dinah Shore and Bob Hope, the wood post and beam L-shaped one story structure has a pleasing flow. The living room comprises one wing and is walled on two sides entirely in glass through which the garden, the pool and the mountains provide a magnificent panorama. The kitchen is at the fulcrum and the three bedrooms lie at the other, longer end of the house. Built in 1955, it is furnished in a style that quotes from the era, without replicating it. Randall had no interest in mid-century modernism and neither, initially, did Kendra. It was Maxon Brae, a member of the Palm Springs Architectural Conservancy, who prevailed on her to purchase this home when it came on the market. Maxon had informed Kendra that it would only help the family business if they had a house on the local preservationist tour. Insecure about her own non-musical aesthetic sense she signed on to Maxon’s vision. As for Randall, he would have been happy to buy a house on a golf course but acquiesced to his spouse and advisor.
Kendra sits on a kitchen stool eating chocolate ice cream from a glass mug with the words Gerald Ford Invitational Golf Tournament embossed on it and trying to forget the reason the Palm Springs Academy had called earlier. She can’t figure out her daughter. The girl is unusually intelligent, a straight A student taking Advanced Placement courses who writes superbly and until recently played the violin in the school orchestra before deciding it no longer comported with her image of herself, whatever that was. And why she would be sending naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend Scott, a weedy high school senior with a vacant quality that Kendra correctly ascribed to excessive dope smoking, was impossible to understand. Brittany claimed he was some kind of computer genius but if that were true, why did the picture scandal erupt? Did he not know the word encryption? In the car ride back from school, she had barked at her daughter for a few minutes about the shame she had brought on herself and her family but her intensity drained when the girl offered no defense. They entered the house in strained silence. Brittany headed to her room and Kendra to a calming glass of Zinfandel. The girl is now writing a school-mandated essay on why this kind of moral turpitude, if not held in check, will lead to the disintegration of Western Civilization.
A laptop lies open in front of Kendra and she is reading the latest posting on a blog written by some supercilious jerk calling himself Desert Machiavelli. She has no idea who this person is but she hates him. Desert Machiavelli is brutal toward everyone but it’s Randall he’s taking aim at today so Kendra is already tense when she hears the word “Mom!” discharged from behind her like a weapon. Turning, she faces an annoyed Brittany. “Why did you write ‘please start your essay’ on my Facebook wall?”
“Because it’s the only way I know you’ll pay attention.”
Brittany makes a sound involving both snorting and coughing distributed in equal measure and intended to convey extreme displeasure. The teenager twirls a lock of magenta-streaked hair. A tight white spaghetti strap shirt is stretched over her nearly flat chest and a black miniskirt rides high on pipe cleaner thighs. In her hand is a paperback copy of Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the pages overflowing with post-it notes.
“Do I have to go to that lame party with Daddy tomorrow?”
“The Purity Ball?”
“I have a paper on Joan Didion due at the end of the week and I’d like it to be good.”
“Well, you’d better get cracking because you’re going to that event with Daddy.” Brittany’s spirit deflates at this news, a phenomenon to which Kendra pays no attention since it happens on a daily basis. “In the meantime, you have to eat something. There’s lasagna in the oven.”
“I had some raisins, okay?”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Boxes?”
“Raisins.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No!”
&nbs
p; Kendra regards her daughter helplessly. The two of them have been engaged in a variation of this conversation for the past several years and she is justifiably concerned that the girl has an eating disorder. But Brittany’s energy level is high and that stare of hers bores right into you! It has a spooky power, the kind exhibited by certain religious leaders. There are times Kendra can feel her daughter looking through her, past her eyes and into her brain, as if the kid could understand not only what her mother was thinking but what she would be thinking a minute from now. She has discussed this with Randall but he claimed to have no idea what she was talking about. It’s not as if Brittany has superpowers or something; there’s nothing paranormal happening, Randall said. She’s just a little intense sometimes.
But the girl sees everything going on around her. There are times Kendra just has to look away. Through the kitchen windows the ragged mountains are visible in the distance, bronze in the afternoon light.
“You are going to sit at that table and eat lasagna.”
“That’s child abuse,” Brittany says. “What if I have, like, ten raisins?”
“You’re going to starve to death, Brit.” The hum of a vacuum cleaner drifts in from the living room where the Salvadoran cleaning lady is working. The woman, a grandmother, does not understand anorexia. It is not something they have in El Salvador.
“I won’t starve,” Brittany assures her. “I’m just not hungry right now.” The girl runs her hand through her hair. It does not escape Kendra that her daughter did not appear that different from runway models she had seen on television. But in her view, their haunted, emaciated look does not belong on a high school senior.
Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) Page 6
