Stoat, massaging his forehead again, used his right hand to lift the glass and drink some beer.
“ ‘So they get overconfident, you know?’ ” Farrier said. “ ‘But what they forget is that flukes do happen—now and then even dumb cops catch a break, and I personally don’t feature goin’ to jail on no fuckin’ fluke.’ ”
Stoat sat down in the chair.
Farrier shrugged. “What can I tell him? He’s right. But tonight the result is, Nick’s lookin’ for him. He calls him at home and he can’t find him there; where the hell else can he call him? Nowhere else; there’s no other number. You know how it is, dunno what’s goin’ on, you got to do something, so what do you do? Call someone else, is what you do. Where else can Nick call? He calls here.” He drank, leaving his glass half full.
“I suppose,” Stoat said, flopping his left hand onto the arm of the chair. “What the hell do I know about anything anyway; why anyone does what they do? My wife’s gone to Memphis, to her first husband’s funeral.” He imitated Lily’s voice.
“VERY WELL, TOO, I THOUGHT,” Farrier said to Cheri later; “I think you would’ve had to agree. Not quite as mean as the take you do on her, but his version had spite; really captured her whine—” ‘I jes’ thank it’s ma place, to be there.’ ”
“I THOUGHT HER PLACE WAS TO be where I am,” Stoat said. “I am her husband now.” He drank some beer.
“Well Jesus, Darren,” Farrier said, “I mean, she wouldn’t argue you that. She’s probably just got some female-solidarity idea in her head—if all the others’re gonna be there, and she isn’t, they will’ve made her look bad.” He picked up his glass and drank beer. “Like she didn’t love him as much as they did—she was just after his money, and once she’d gotten all she could, had no more use for the guy.”
“Then they’d be right,” Stoat said sorrowfully. “That is why she married him, and it’s why she’s gone back now. The old boy still had years of income due him, well into the next century—from the deal when he sold all his funeral homes. She thinks he might’ve left it to his ex-wives, but only the ones who show up at his funeral, and that’s why he had his lawyer call. Put all of them on notice.”
Farrier chuckled. “That likely?” he said.
Stoat shrugged. “It could be. She got him to marry her, after all—must have some idea what made him tick—if tick’s the right word, for what she allowed him to do. Money’s what makes her tick. Money’s the reason she does everything, everything that Lily does.”
“Welll,” Farrier said, “I know she talks a lot about it, money. But look at what she does—her field is stocks and bonds. She’s only talking about what her work is, same way’s we talk about the Mob.”
“Nuts,” Stoat said forcefully. “Not the same thing. You didn’t marry Cheri because you thought if you did you’d have a better shot at the Mob. You married her because you loved each other, or lusted each other—something. Same reason why I married Lily—I was lonely; I was horny, and I wanted to spend my life with her. But she married me for my money.” He finished his beer and began refilling his glass from Farrier’s second bottle.
“Not sayin’ I was a great catch. I didn’t have anywhere near as much money as she would’ve liked, but she’s shrewd. Crafty. Her assets were gettin’ stale. She knew that Miss Memphis year of hers was gettin’ further ’n’ further behind her, while her behind was becomin’ bit bigger. An’ besides, she’d already cashed in on the act once, when she married the rich undertaker.
“Now don’t get me wrong. Lily’s still a fine-lookin’ woman, as she was when she married me—best-lookin’ one ever glanced my way. But like they say about expensive cars you can get for a price, she’d been ‘previously registered,’ and that’s the reason I’s able to … get her.” He drank some beer and reflected.
He nodded. “Rich man in the market for a beauty-queen trophy wife, he’s lookin’ for one steppin’ fresh off the runway, slip-pin’ out her little swimsuit right into his bed. Not an eighty-two, eighty-three model. And she knew it, too, better’n I did. By the time I met her, she was lookin’ to settle. I may not’ve been quite what she’d had in mind, but I was the best deal in sight.
“A good secure job, a good pension plan, too. Plus I did have some money at least. Never’d made what you’d call major dough, but I never spent any either. I’d never been married; never had to pay alimony, child support. I’d never had any kids to support, braces and tuitions to pay for. And I hadn’t been like you, going off with the guys, even though you were married, doin’ glamorous things that cost money.” He paused, looking at Farrier speculatively. “You probably had a Harley,” he said. He drank some beer.
Farrier grinned. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “Always wanted one, though, and I would’ve, I guess, dough hadn’t gone in the divorce.” He sipped his beer.
“Uh huh,” Stoat said. “Well, all the same. Scuba diving and skiing, all of that guy stuff; I never did any of it.
“I did used to play tennis,” he chuckled bitterly. “Back when I lived in Alexandria, before I moved to Foggy Bottom—cut down the commute, put more time in on the job—two evenings a week, and three sets on Sunday mornings. Me and another young single guy; he was an economist, had his Ph.D., Indiana, worked for Agriculture, and he had no social life either. Then. We weren’t very good tennis players, but in a way that was good—meant we could really compete.” He drank.
He glanced at Farrier and smiled. “Rick also cooked, for the same reason I did—it was that or starvation; so we competed in cookery too. It was nice. The complex we lived in had six lighted courts and four more in a bubble. But for some reason, careers, probably, not many who lived in it played. Never a problem, getting a court. So we could play nights, if it rained or was windy, anything like that. And then after we showered, make something for dinner, or on Sundays, for brunch. Unless we went over to Georgetown, to Clyde’s, that was the place to be then. ‘Alla broads go to Clyde’s’—it was true, too, good-lookin’ women, though fat lot of good that did us. But we’d watch the Redskins game there and have brunch. With so many other people you could hardly move. But it was nice.” He nodded, musing. He drank a swallow of beer. “Yeah, very nice.”
Then he put the smile away and looked at Farrier with something close to scorn. “You’re now thinking, of course, ‘Uh huh, oh yeah, I can imagine: a couple of fairies, swappin’ their recipes after their tennis, swappin’ spits after dessert.’ ”
Farrier prepared to reply but Stoat’s expression dissuaded him.
“I’m sure that’s the first thought that most people had, if they saw us together more than once. So was Rick. We used to joke about it … but it really wasn’t funny. Our real reaction was ‘fuck ’em,’ but that’s not a viable way to respond to people even if they do look at you funny. Not if they live in the same building with you. Next thing you know they’ll be stealing your newspapers, deflating your tires. Spray-painting fag on your windshield.” He drank.
He took a deep breath and exhaled it. “I dunno—might’ve been better, we’d been queer. Might’ve been happier if they’d been right. But they weren’t—we were just friends. All we had in common besides tennis and pretentious cooking was hard work and ambition. Nothing sexual between us.
“Rick’s hard work paid off before mine did. He got promoted and reassigned to run a new section. Met a woman there he sort of liked. She in turn sort of liked him. Only natural—just by looking at her you could tell she was female, without any question, but other than that she was sort of like both of us. Just the same as us, really, another member in good standing of the wallpaper people; we seem to fit most rooms all right, without ever really standing out in any of them. Beige lives.
“The kind of people,” he said, smiling crookedly at Farrier, “that people like you, all you hotshots—when you see us for the tenth time we sort of bother you. You seem to remember meeting us, somewhere, but where, when or why it was, you can’t quite recall. It’s very irritating.”
He drank some beer, then emptied Farrier’s Harpoon into his glass.
Farrier returned his gaze but said nothing.
“WHAT’M I GONNA SAY?” HE SAID to Cheri later. “In the first place, I don’t want to make the guy feel bad. Like you said, I want him to feel good. And if I’d wanted to see him torn down, made into a total zero, how could I’ve improved on his own work? He was doing a great job himself. I couldn’t’ve made him feel worse. So I didn’t say anything, and after he’d stared at me for a while, just resenting the hell out of me, you could feel it, he got up and went into the kitchen again. I wasn’t sure this was such a great idea, he was drinking them so fast, but he seemed steady enough—he fetched us a couple more beers.”
“ELLEN BLENDED IN JUST LIKE we blended in, and pretty soon she’d blended all the way into Rick’s apartment, living with him. And why not? They were meant for each other. And guess what? She played tennis too, also not very well. They were nice to me about it—people like us always are, nice to others. They didn’t want to make me to feel bad, and I didn’t want to make them feel bad, by acting like they’d made me feel bad. People like us have very complicated lives. So for a while the three of us played and had meals together. All spring, in fact, well into June, but I can tell you, it was forced. Now instead of Rick playing tennis with me, and my having dinner with Rick, they were inviting me to play tennis, and I was having them over for dinner.
“What Rick and I had done had been fun because it was effortless—just by being ourselves we furnished the entertainment in each other’s lives. Rick said, ‘We’re each other’s videos.’ Whereas what Rick and Ellen were now doing was very self-conscious. It did require effort, a great deal of effort, on their part, making room in their life for me, and that was the end of the fun. Three really isn’t much of a crowd, but it seems like one because it never works—not very well, very long.
“I moved to Foggy Bottom in July. Naturally I didn’t want to make them feel bad—I was still who I was, after all—so I said it was because I was fed up with wasting six percent of my life, ten hours a week, fighting the traffic, morning and night, the miserable Fourteenth Street Bridge. It was true, but it wasn’t the reason.
“Then that November I went back to Knoxville for the twentieth homecoming reunion of my college class. There was a football game, of course, which I didn’t go to—because how on earth can you meet anybody, much less look for a woman, which was why I was going, by sittin’ in a stadium, watchin’ a damn football game?” He finished his fourth beer and refilled his glass.
“See, now finally I had a plan. When I was in college I’d had a few sort-of romances, never really went anywhere, and then I graduated. The years went by, and I didn’t meet anybody to have a romance with, and—see, I knew I was lonely, which was at least something. Lots of lonely people never do figure what is bothering them, go to their graves still kinda wonderin’, ‘Something was wrong—what was it?’ And I’d read in the alumni news that this one I’d dated’d gotten her graduate degree in nursing, and that one’d had her third kid … well, I suppose at first I didn’t realize I was doing it—but I was trying to follow their lives, in those pathetic little dispatches, thinking that the husbands Tom and Chris and Buddy, well, they could’ve been me. Tried to imagine what they looked like, how they acted. I was playing make-believe.
“I guess my logic must’ve been that since by then I’d spent seventeen years as a single man in Washington, a town alive with single women, yearning to get serious, teeming with them, if I’d heard right, and I hadn’t managed to have even one relationship; but I’d at least dated three or four women in college, the answer must be that I had to know I had something in common with a woman before I could even talk to her. Like I did when I was in college and the women were in college. And in Washington I hadn’t had that common ground. So the thing for me to do was go back to Knoxville sometime when I knew women of my vintage’d be going back there too, and, who knew? Maybe one of my old, ah, flames would turn up, and, well, why not? It happens—turn out to’ve been divorced. And be even better-lookin’, and we’d reignite the flame.” He sighed, and drank.
“So I flew down in time for the Weekend-Kickoff Gala cocktail reception and informal dinner Friday night, and of course I recognized hardly anyone, or saw one single woman there. There were two other guys I knew, majored in finance with, both looking great and doing very well—like people at reunions always are doing, because those who’re doin’ terrible don’t go to the reunions. Their smug little wives were with them, and one of our professors, by himself.
“Perfectly nice fellow, always neat, polite and friendly. Must be pushing seventy by now. Took a real interest in us students, back in my day, at least, but back then too he always came to our events by himself. Showed no evidence of family then and no signs of any now? I’d always assumed that he was gay, and now, by God, I knew I’d been right.
“Since he was alone that night, I assumed he was between boyfriends—although I’m actually not sure whether a gay man with a boyfriend on the faculty down there’d even dare to bring him to an alumni shindig. Anyway, I figured he probably had nothing else to do that weekend, a situation I was all too familiar with, and so to make a few easy brownie points with his colleagues he’d volunteered to be a faculty rep at one of those boring reunions. Him I wanted to avoid. I was there to look for women, not to fraternize with fairies.”
He drank some of his beer.
“BUT HE WAS DRINKING IT SLOWER,” Farrier said, telling Cheri. “That gave me some hope I wouldn’t be putting him to bed and dishing dinner up by myself by the time the lads arrived.”
——
“BUT IT WAS LIKE AVOIDING swine flu—he made very sure on Friday night that I’d be at the cocktail party and formal dinner Saturday, so it was clear I’d caught a bad case of old professor, and I was going to have him next to me at every damned event I attended until I left for the airport Sunday afternoon. And I couldn’t figure it out, what the hell my attraction was. Did he think I was queer? Could’ve been—like I said, I’m sure people have. Or was he an FBI buff? You’re familiar with that breed, I’m sure.”
“Oh yeah, God love ’em,” Farrier said. “Them and their opposites, the people who despise you for it. The ones in tie-dyed jeans an’ Max Yasgur’s Farm tee shirts. Woodstockers with sixties hangovers, hate you for chasin’ their draft-dodgin’ boyfriends all the way to Canada.”
“But the reason didn’t matter,” Stoat said. “I was beside myself.
“I thought about trying to change my airplane reservation—just skipping the second cocktail party and dinner dance Saturday. But since I had one of those tightwad-specials, three-weeks-in-advance reservations, I didn’t know if I could. And anyway, why? As usual I had no plans in Washington, that Saturday either. I figured the hell with it, ‘I paid for this disaster fair and square, might as well at least get the drinks and dinner.’
“That night the professor arrived with a date, and a very presentable one. Lily, it seemed, was his teaching assistant. If you went by the dress that she nearly had on, he clearly was not homosexual. It was sleeveless, what she called ‘lettuce green,’ jersey or something, I don’t know fabrics, very soft and clingy, with a high stand-up collar and a very deep vee neckline. She still looks darned good, for a woman close to fifty, but that night, in that light, she looked sensational—could’ve passed for being in her late twenties. My two classmates were at least as impressed as I was—their wives didn’t like her at all.
“They needn’t’ve worried. I still don’t know for sure whether my old professor’s queer—I’m surer now that he is—but he wasn’t with Lily. He was trolling her for me, at her behest. She’d obviously ingratiated herself with him; she’s good at that—beguiling older men’s not her only speciality, but it may be her best. She enlisted him to be on the lookout for a second husband for her, and by interviewing me the night before he’d found out enough to make her think I might be worth a look-see.
&nb
sp; “She seemed to be very impressed that I was FBI, and she knew enough about how the bureau works—and what my place in it was—to make me ask her if she once considered applying for a job. She was vague about that, but of course she hadn’t. What she’d done was spend a couple hours at her computer in the library, swotting up on the Bureau to make me think, ‘My gosh, she’s smart’; and then three or four at the beauty parlor, so she could bowl me off my feet that night.
“Obviously it worked. I was back in Knoxville the next weekend. She came to Washington the weekend after that. And so on and so forth, her different strokes for different folks more than adequate to turn me into her little lapdog. We went out a few times with Rick and Ellen, three or four, not many, but enough to make it clear to them that if I was going to have Lily around all the time, there’d be no further need of them and their compassion.” He sighed again. “Too bad. I could use some of it now.” He drank some beer.
“Ah, cut it out, Darren,” Farrier said. “This’s a temporary thing. All marriages go through them. You think it’s all over, world’s come to an end, whole happy life’s been destroyed. You wanna know somethin’? People get through those periods. You’ll survive, believe it or not. Six months from now if I ask you about it, you’ll look at me like I’m crazy. ‘The hell’re you talkin’ about?’ The way that I see it, worst thing that can happen? Turns out she was right about Wallace, he did what she suspected, she comes back with a new source of income. And the best that can happen’s exactly the same thing—she comes back with a whole bunch of money.
“Your masculine pride’s not involved in this, Darren. Try not to get it involved. Lily’s spending a few days with four other women anna corpse. She’s not between the sheets with her former husband, hummin’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in bed. And when her trip’s over, she’s coming back right here, not runnin’ off with him again—his runnin’ days’re over; he is dead.
At End of Day Page 34
