by Chuck Kinder
When Ralph finished reading his story, the other writers in the class applauded, which Ralph told Lindsay later had never happened before, at least not since he had been there. Ralph’s best friend, Jim Stark, had not been in the workshop that day, and this had disappointed Ralph. Wonder where that old dog Jim is, Ralph had speculated. Old Jim never misses workshops. Well, Ralph concluded, Jim had probably been afraid Ralph’s story would be the hit it was and Jim just couldn’t handle the envy.
(Actually, Jim hadn’t been there that day because he was staking out the entrance to where his first wife worked, sitting across the street in his vehicle with his old film-noir fedora pulled low over his steely eyes, while he sipped from a pint of whiskey and waited, hoping to catch his first wife and her loverboy leaving together, arm in arm, or holding hands, whereupon Jim planned on displaying his displeasure by pounding his first wife’s boyfriend to a pulp.)
Lindsay and Ralph had driven up in the hills west of Palo Alto with several writers from the workshop to a roadhouse called the Alpine Inn, where they had all downed pitchers of beer until dark, and then later, when the other writers had one after another drunkenly departed, Lindsay and Ralph had pigged out on greasy cheeseburgers whose juice made their fingers shine. Ralph had licked Lindsay’s fingers clean, as they sat off alone at a picnic table under the trees by the creek bank. Looking deeply into his eyes, Lindsay had taken Ralph’s huge, hairy fingers into her mouth, one at a time, and Ralph had suggested in a quiet but urgent voice that they employ Lindsay’s plastic and grab a motel room down there for the night instead of driving all the way back to Berkeley.
2
In the motel room that night, after Ralph had fallen asleep, Lindsay had tilted the dresser’s lampshade and in the slant of light looked in the mirror at her hips. She jiggled her fleshy hips. The wife in Ralph’s story had given birth to two children, and yet, except for those blue highways in her flesh, she had been slim and firm. Lindsay had found a copy of the story in Ralph’s briefcase. She had noticed Ralph’s wallet on the dresser.
Lindsay locked the bathroom door. She lit a cigarette and sat on the toilet seat, flipping her ashes now and then into the sink. Lindsay flipped back through the story Ralph had read that day. In the story the wife had had a boy and a girl barely a year apart before she was nineteen. In the story the wife had been tall and slim, with blond hair that she wore very long and straight. Except for a couple of Ralph and Alice Ann, and one of Alice Ann and their two kids when they were very young, the pictures in Ralph’s wallet were mosdy of Alice Ann. Alice Ann had a long, thin, beautiful face, and in some of the pictures her long blond hair was almost white. Ralph looked so large and dark beside Alice Ann, a dark, hairy hand clasping a thin waist, a heavy arm hugging her slender shoulders. The picture of Alice Ann and the kids was taken on some beach, some ocean in the background. The kids were building a sand castle whose wet wall stretched to the ocean’s edge. The boy was as blond as Alice Ann, but his face was Ralph’s; the girl had dark brown eyes like Ralph’s, but the nose, mouth, and long, thin face of Alice Ann. Had Ralph snapped that picture of his little happy family at the seaside? Adults had obviously helped those kids build their elaborate sand castle with its many towers. Alice Ann was wearing a red bikini in that picture. She was smiling and shading her eyes with her hands, and she had her left hip stuck out so sassy and sexy.
Lindsay held the picture up to the light above the sink. She turned the picture in the bright light and looked closely at the firm, tanned flesh of Alice Ann’s upper legs and flat stomach. Just who was the real wife in the story? And the wives in all those other stories Ralph had written over the years? Stories Ralph had sent Lindsay to read over this past year and a half, which at that moment she wished she had never set eyes on— over this year and a half of whispery, late-night, long-distance phone calls, who were the real wives in all those stories? The wife who worked as a waitress to make ends meet, that student’s wife, now this wife with looks and personality and drive who could unload a Cadillac convertible in a hurry, who was desperate and angry and who had stretch marks running like roads through the flesh of her legs and hips because of bearing her worthless, bankrupt husband’s babies.
Lindsay had brushed her teeth until she tasted blood. She examined her bleeding gums in the mirror, for all it mattered. Lindsay hated her wide mouth and big buck teeth. She had the big mouth of a horse. Trigger was one of her nicknames she hated. Table Legs, Fat Farm, Pimple Plantation were other childhood nicknames that broke her heart. Lindsay tore the seaside picture of Alice Ann and the kids in two and tossed it to float among the cigarette butts in the toilet. Alice Ann floated face up, and Lindsay’s hand had hesitated at the toilet’s handle. With a thumb and forefinger, Lindsay fished Alice Ann out. She shook this part of the picture over the sink and patted it dry with a towel and put it into her leather cigarette case. She washed her face and hands and rinsed her sore mouth with warm water. When Lindsay flushed the toilet, it sounded like thunder.
But it didn’t wake Ralph. Ralph was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his jaws clenched, his arm flung out across Lindsay’s side of the bed. Lindsay nestled back in bed with her bottom next to Ralph’s. There was a sound coming from inside Ralph’s nose when he breathed. Lindsay tried to regulate her breathing to Ralph’s, but she couldn’t catch his jagged rhythm. She could hear traffic from El Camino Real up the street, and through the motel’s thin walls sudden laughter from the next room. She was afraid to turn off the soundless television set and be plunged into total darkness in this strange room. And then Lindsay had the thought that in all the motel rooms of her memory the television was always on. Why should questions of happiness make Lindsay always suffer?
Lindsay lay there wide-awake in the half-light and listened to the sounds of sex from the next room. She then had an idea of her life as just a long deflowering. She would never have another husband, or give birth, she realized. In her imagination motel rooms opened endlessly onto more motel rooms, like grains of sand in some kids’ castle at an ocean’s edge, countless cells of sex. Through the papery walls came moans that could wake the dead. Lindsay covered her ears and shut her eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, Lindsay said to herself. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Daddy and Mommy. God bless Ralph.
Lindsay opened her eyes. If she fell asleep her soul would leave her body. Lindsay uncovered her ears and placed her hand palm flat against the thin wall and let her memory work. Stale smoke filled the motel rooms of her memory, ashtrays of butts, plastic cups of bourbon, greasy boxes of leftover pepperoni pizza, and across the motel room that night was a barely touched family-pack bucket of Kentucky fried chicken on the dresser which Ralph had insisted they pick up for when they would surely be ravenous at midnight. Beside it was the Bible Ralph had found in a drawer, and from which after they had made love the first time this night he had read the Song of Solomon, his voice sonorous, now pitched low and somber, now rising, now thrilling, a voice even richer than when he had read his own story earlier this day about that desperate wife with veins like roads in her flesh.
The toilet flushed in the next room, and when it flushed immediately again, Ralph sat up in bed. Ralph stared at the television set, his eyes wide and bright as a bird’s. He clutched the covers to his chest and looked wildly around the room. Ralph looked at Lindsay as though she were some vegetable he would not eat as a child. Are you okay, honey? Lindsay asked him. Ralph lay back down without answering and pulled the twisted covers over his head. Ralph’s red pajamas, which he had had stuffed in his briefcase, clearly planning all along on not driving back to Berkeley, and which he put back on after each time they made love, were covered with tiny blue sailboats. Perhaps his mother had given them to him. For Christmas. For his birthday, maybe. Would any wife buy her husband, her lover, red pajamas with tiny blue sailboats on them? Let him kiss m
e with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine, were lines Lindsay ran through her mind as she lay there in the half-light. She heard more moans from the next room. O thou fairest among women. O thou whom my soul loveth. By night I sought him who my soul loveth. I sought him, but I found him not. A cry came from the next room.
Lindsay paced the room smoking. As though grains of light flowed from the room into the television set, surfaces seemed deflated. Lindsay’s flesh felt like foam. She shivered violently. She put on Ralph’s shirt and sat in the chair before the dresser. She drew her feet up underneath the shirt. On the television were shots from news helicopters of a freeway pileup, police cars* flashing red lights far below, bleeding flares. Then a cut to a toothpaste commercial and a zoom-shot kiss. Behold thou are fair, my love. Thou has dove’s eyes within thy locks. Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
The next room’s door opened and shut. Lindsay hurried to the window and pulled back the curtains. The parking lot below was full. Up the side street a red light blinked on the corner of El Camino Real, and liquefied traffic in the bluish, mercury-vapor lights shone sleek and mysterious, and Lindsay recalled her girlhood feeling that the night held some great adult secret she would never come to know.
In the parking lot below a man kissed a woman passionately. She was a pretty woman, wearing a checked sundress, and there were silver barrettes in her short brown hair. They held each other for a few moments, and then the woman unlocked the driver’s-side door of a small station wagon parked next to Ralph’s car. The man was wearing a white belt and white shoes, and he waved to the pretty woman playfully the whole time she backed her station wagon from its slot and drove onto the side street toward El Camino Real and her home just blocks away on Matadero Road. The man cut across the pool area toward the side street. He walked around the pool’s deep end and then stopped and stared into the shivery water, where bluish lights bobbed like bright birds about to break the surface into the night air. The man stared across the small pool as though he were studying some distant shore of lights. The man glanced around him and then pulled out his penis and began urinating into the pool. Ralph made a sound in his sleep and then talked in what sounded for all the world like tongues. Lindsay was afraid to turn away from the window. She felt that if she turned from the window, turned around and looked at Ralph, she would fall out of the state of love forever.
The phone’s busy signals were like the sounds of some lost race, an electric language Lindsay could learn over time. She sat with her back to Ralph’s sleeping form. He mumbled again and again in his desperate sleep. In its reflection in the mirror above the dresser the bed was a maw and Ralph was twisted in its covers like some huge blue-spotted tongue. The television light was as cold and startling as a refrigerator’s opened in the middle of the night. When Lindsay dialed Alice Ann’s number the next time, only moments later, it was too late, for Alice Ann was already out the door.
Alice Ann was on her way to meet somebody for a drink and a long talk. Jim, namely. Alice Ann had called Jim to see if he had any idea where in the fuck her so-called husband, old rotten, Running Dog Ralph might be. Jim had told her he didn’t have a clue. Jim had told Alice Ann he didn’t even know the whereabouts of his own wife that night when flaws in time kept them, all the sundry players, locked relentlessly in parallel planes.
Lindsay let the phone ring off the wall. There was a comfort in the ringing, the ringing and ringing only Lindsay could hear. Chicken bones in an ashtray looked blue.
You Are Not Your Characters
1
To celebrate their seventeenth wedding anniversary Alice Ann had made reservations for her and Ralph at a restaurant in one of those little, chic shopping malls full of import shoppes, expensive boutiques, and Dalton bookstores, so popular on the peninsula south of San Francisco, and she had invited Jim and Judy to join them. At some point, during a weak, sentimental moment, Jim had crossed his heart and hoped to die while promising Judy not to beat her new boyfriend to a pulp, and as they were more or less on speaking terms then, they agreed to go.
The restaurant Alice Ann had selected for the joyous occasion featured Greek cuisine, and it was obviously a place she was familiar with, the way she raved around about the food. Ralph hated it, of course, oily, smelly, foreigner’s fare. The joyous, celebratory evening was off to a flying start by the time Ralph inquired about who Alice Ann had been in this wretched establishment with before. For it sure hadn’t been him. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Some of Alice Ann’s new hipper-than-thou chums probably was what Ralph speculated out loud. He was already about half drunk. So was Jim, and they all had smoked a couple of killer
doobies in the parking lot. Rather, Ralph, Alice Ann, and Jim had, for, as usual, Judy was the designated driver.
That cute remark is in reference to my est group, Alice Ann had smilingly informed Jim and Judy, slowly twisting the ends of her long blond hair around in her fingers as she talked. Alice Ann really was a good-looking woman, and Jim had always thought her hands were especially lovely, with long, slender, expressive fingers that always flashed with rings.
That’s the crowd you pay an arm and a leg to, to tell you you’re a turd, Ralph had said.
Cute, dearest, Alice Ann said.
First it was those meditation classes, Ralph said. —Then that yoga farm where she went on that suspicious retreat. Wonder what in the world you grow on a yoga farm?
Isn’t our anniversary boy amazing? Alice Ann said. —To criticize me for trying to broaden my horizons. Ralph takes pleasure in making light of me trying to expand my consciousness.
Do you plant little yoga seeds? Ralph said. —What’s a yoga taste like, anyway? To the best of my knowledge, I, for one, have never personally eaten a yoga. Is it anything like a carrot? Okay, okay, I’ll admit I’m not much of a, you know, connoisseur, but there are things in this world I wouldn’t put in my mouth if you paid me. Why does it have to be so dark in here, anyway? Ralph said, and held his hand up before his face. —You can hardly see your hand in here.
Ambience, hon, Alice Ann said.
It is pretty dark in here, Judy piped up. She’d been sitting there with a faraway, dreamy look in her lovely brown eyes, probably missing, Jim had reflected, Melvin’s member. Judy really was a good-looking woman, too, Jim had to admit, his litde blow-job queen, while Jim, on the other hand, looked like a heavy, hirsute, lowlife rider of Harleys.
You can say that again, Ralph said. Ralph picked up a small candle-lantern from the center of the table and held it above his menu. He frowned and shook his old, woolly head. —This is all Greek to me, he said, and chuckled.
I think it’s tres romantic, Alice Ann said. —Where’s your sense of romance, Ralph?
What’s this? Ralph said, and pointed to an item on the menu. —Number six. Under the dinners. I can’t even pronounce it.
That’s pastitsio, hon, Alice Ann said. —Which is layers of macaroni, grated cheese, and sauteed ground beef. It’s topped with a rich cream sauce and baked. It’s yummy, but you ought to try their souvlakia.
You don’t say? Ralph said, and looked up at Alice Ann with a frown. —Well, maybe I can just order me a nice sirloin burnt to a crisp, the way I like it. And a good old American baked potato. Slavered with sour cream and chives.
Oh Christ, Ralph! Alice Ann said. —It’s our fucking anniversary! If you love me, Ralph, you won’t act like a horse’s ass, and you’ll get into the spirit of an anniversary evening. If you don’t love me, then you won’t.
I know it’s our anniversary, Alice Ann, Ralph said. —You don’t have to remind me of our seventeen years together for a minute. We have those criminal, thieving kids at home to do that every miserable waking moment.
Ralph hides goodies from his own kids, Alice Ann said. —He keeps a stash of chocolate-chip cookies in his underwear drawer so he won’t have to share with his own kids. That’s why they are reduced to thievery.
Those c
riminal kids can get plenty of goodies of their own, Ralph said. —All they do is stuff their greedy little ferret faces with goodies. Then who pays when their pointy little teeth rot out? Tell me that. And that boy has taken to stealing my, you know, Trojans. Right from my underwear drawer, after he’s helped himself to my chocolate-chip cookies. I know it. I’m a man who keeps count of what’s his. I have that criminal boy dead to rights. A boy stealing his own old dad’s Trojans, can you imagine? Is nothing sacred? But, Jesus, what can I do about it? Ralph said. —I can’t even beat the boy to a pulp, which, in my book anyway, is the sort of discipline he sorely needs. That boy is bigger than me.
Ralph, Alice Ann said, is the one who could use some discipline. If Ralph had a little more discipline, he’d pay a little more attention to the quality of women he’s eating out. And then maybe he wouldn’t always be getting those little, runny sores around his mouth.
