Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael Ryan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryan, Michael, author.

  Guy novel / Michael Ryan.

  Sag Harbor, NY : The Permanent Press, [2016]

  ISBN 978-1-57962-440-8 (hardcover)

  eISBN 978-1-57962-475-0

  1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 2. Humorous fiction. 3. Love stories. I. Title.

  PS3568.Y39 G89 2016

  813'.54—dc23

  2016013824

  Printed in the United States of America

  Men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

  —ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics

  These miracles wee did, but now alas,

  All measure, and all language,

  I should passe, Should I tell what a miracle shee was.

  —JOHN DONNE, “The Relique”

  1.

  It was raining in Santa Monica enough to flood the Pacific Coast Highway and knock out some electricity, so the ATMs were down and there were long lines at the bank, inside of which, for some reason, the computers were still working. There must have been a hundred people in there, soaked and steaming among the puddles and yellow plastic warning signs redundantly informing us that the floor was wet. I didn’t have any choice but to wait. I was getting married that day and driving to Baja for the honeymoon so I had to have the cash. It’s funny how things happen. A freak storm in August. What were the chances of that? If it hadn’t been raining so hard, if the ATMs weren’t down, if I hadn’t had to wait in line so long, I might not have started thinking about the teller. Was she the most beautiful woman I had ever seen? Probably not. She was about thirty, brown hair and black eyes, great bones, great carriage. She’d be gorgeous at eighty. She was standing in front of the counter, not behind it—the water on the floor must have been even deeper behind it. Her cash drawer was perched on the counter, so she had to twist to her right for cash and twist back to count it into the outstretched palms of the customers like kindergartners lined up for their snacks. She seemed amused by the novelty of it. She wore a snug green dress and white pumps that drew attention to her legs, which, as anyone would have to admit, could withstand the scrutiny. She probably grew up in Southern California— I had been out here fifteen years and still wasn’t used to it, this dressing for display like flashing a wad of bills, crude and obvious and almost as laughable, except for the fact that seeing a woman’s body continued to affect me in a way that I wasn’t affected by seeing their money. I guess I had found my own ways of trying to send the power it had over me back at them, but I was ready to be done with all that, which was one reason I was getting married, probably a bad one. Anyway, she seemed a little on the hard side, despite her delicacy—a little too savvy, like she had been around the block a couple too many times. Whatever it was, she had seen it before. Haughty was the word that came to mind—proud of her beauty, as if she had earned it herself, or at least was not surprised by it, which may be the only thing that enables us to forgive someone for being that beautiful, that they know how lucky they are. Otherwise they might use their beauty against us.

  Of course this was all just my head noise. I had no idea what she thought of herself, physically or any other way, much less anything she had done in her life, though it passed the time to imagine it. It couldn’t have been too thrilling for her cashing people’s checks and adding up their deposits, much less dealing with their impatience and grumpiness, but she seemed to be enjoying herself. She cheered them up. She kept smiling ironically and making little remarks to her customers that I couldn’t hear, then laughing and showing her sharp little teeth. Unfortunately I started imagining those teeth sunk into my shoulder. What a mouth she had, with a lower lip like the threshold to heaven. She could pout and grin at the same time. I bet she owned one of those Brazilian bikinis with the butt-floss bottoms. Bright red, I bet. Merciless. I bet she had a tiny coiled black snake tattooed on her butt. I kept seeing her flouncing toward me on the beach in Baja, a Windex-blue drink with a pastel paper umbrella sticking out of it in each hand and Do-I-Have-A-Surprise-For-You pout-grin on those lips. The woman I was about to marry was not in this picture. She did not own one of those Brazilian bikinis with the butt-floss bottoms. She did not have a tiny coiled black snake tattooed on her butt.

  But I am not the sort of person who breaks his commitments, especially what I regard as the ultimate commitment: marriage. I had spent at least twenty minutes in my head with the teller, enough for a few nights together and just about every act one body can perform upon another, but I figured no harm done. I had no intention of saying anything untoward when I walked up to the counter.

  Outside the rain was still pounding down in sheets.

  “Nice day for the beach,” is what I said as I handed her my check.

  “I’d like to go back to bed,” she said in response.

  “That sounds a lot more interesting,” came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  She looked at me. She hadn’t noticed me at all before. Now she did. I guess that’s what I wanted. With women I use my fast mouth. That’s what gets me into trouble.

  “I meant to sleep,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I answered, with exaggerated innocence.

  This got a laugh out of her.

  “You men are all alike. One-track minds.”

  “We’re pigs,” I said. “You can’t trust us.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  And this probably would have been the end of it. Except at that moment her supervisor, a young balding guy in a bad brown suit, appeared at her shoulder and told her that the bank was going to close in ten minutes because of the weather. Governor Wilson had declared a state of emergency. The flooding was getting worse. The zillion-dollar cliffside houses overlooking the ocean were sliding down again onto PCH, as they did at least once during the rainy season. The guards were locking the doors right now and letting customers out but not in.

  “Looks like you get your wish,” I said to her as her supervisor walked away.

  “Yeah, how am I going to get home? My roommate dropped me off this morning.”

  “I’m going to take you,” I said, the second remark that was out of my mouth before it had negotiated a route through my cerebral cortex.

  “Hmm,” she said. (She actually said “Hmm.”) She checked me out carefully. “You don’t look like an ax murderer.”

  “I’m afraid of blood,” I said.

  “Just a ride home,” she said. “Don’t get any ambitious ideas.”

  I held up my hand like a Boy Scout. “I’m a very unambitious person,” I answered. “A chronic underachiever.”

  This made her laugh again.

  “At least you’ve got money in the bank. That’s better than most guys I know.”

  This reminded me of why I had come there: to cash a check. I was getting married in six hours. What in the world did I think I was doing? I asked myself this question as I waited in my car outside the bank. Right off I could eliminate the idea that I was being a Good Samaritan. I did not offer a ride to the balding young man in the bad brown suit. I have had many experiences of not knowing what I wanted to do until I did it, but I also have had an equal number of experiences of not knowing until after I did it that I actually didn’t want to do what I had done. This was unfortunately shaping up to be one of those. They invariably seemed
to involve women. This one looked like it was going to be a doozy, unless I got a handle on it very soon. The rain was running off the windshield in waves as if I were driving headfirst into the ocean. I consoled myself by thinking that no one gets married without a little ambiguity beforehand and I was simply acting mine out. I was going to take this person to her house (notice she had suddenly become a “person”), let her out of the car, go home, get dressed, and get married. No one would ever have to know about it. Still, I was not enjoying myself at this moment. The car smelled like my dog, Sparky, after he plays in the ocean. The windows were fogged up. I remembered I forgot to brush my teeth that morning. I could have taken some pleasure in the fact that I was about to have this extraordinary arrangement of female flesh slide into my passenger seat (I was driving a year-old 1995 two-seat cherry pearl 300ZX Turbo with black leather interior and all the aftermarket bells and whistles, which I planned to trade in after I was married for a used white Volvo station wagon), but I knew what I had been enjoying was the fantasy of her not the reality. She was about to become real. I already had a real life. I didn’t need another one.

  Then the door opened and she was inside my car. What do they call the way a body senses another body? Kinesthetic? She was there. Very close. These are the kind of factors that don’t show up on the printouts. Her presence, if that’s even the word for it, was something else. She didn’t have a raincoat or an umbrella, and had run outside holding a huge purse against her chest and the front section of the Los Angeles Times over her head, which she dropped into the gutter. The headline said, “Plane Crash At LAX Kills 223.”

  “I ran ten feet and I’m soaked,” she said. “My shoes are ruined.” She pulled her white pumps off by the heels. Her black leather purse was as big as a couch pillow, and there was nowhere to put it except on the floor between her legs, so she did, spreading them a little. Even with the rain smacking the moon roof, I could hear her nylons. I wanted to establish permanent California residence where they met.

  “As Gary Gilmore said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” I said, pulling into the gridlocked traffic. “Since I can’t see anything, probably nobody else can either.”

  “Gary Gilmore, Executioner’s Song. His last words before they executed him. His brother, Mikal, published a memoir last year.”

  “You read,” I said, unable to hide my surprise, and immediately regretted it.

  “Was that a pop quiz?” she asked.

  I deserved that.

  “It really wasn’t,” I said. “It’s just a line I like.”

  “I like it too. I use it all the time.”

  I thought about that.

  “That’s an odd coincidence,” I said. “Sort of remarkable.”

  “If you want,” she said. Apparently it wasn’t remarkable to her, and certainly not worth further consideration.

  “Don’t you ever clean this car?” she asked. She held up a piece of inert brown matter that in my best recollection I had never seen before.

  “I was going to do it today, honest. That’s probably Sparky’s. You’d like Sparky. He’ll be upset that you moved it from where he buried it.”

  “Poor Sparky,” she said. “This could be a beautiful car. These Zs are so out there. You know who you’re dealing with.”

  “Remnant of a former life,” I said. “I’m getting married.” Somehow I had left out the logical transitions that went from the car to the marriage, but she got the point I wanted to make.

  “Congratulations,” she said after a moment. “When’s the big event?”

  “In about six hours, actually.”

  “In about six hours, actually,” she repeated. She stuck her tongue into her cheek and twisted that preternatural mouth of hers into a lopsided, ironic grin. “This is becoming an interesting day.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Malibu. But PCH is closed. Why don’t you drop me off at the coffee shop down here at the corner and go get married? I’ll sleep in a booth.”

  “I said I was going to drive you home and I am.”

  She gave me another one of those appraising looks like she had given me in the bank. This one was something like, Okay Bucko I’ll play this through, it’s not going to cost me anything. Or maybe it didn’t mean that at all.

  “That’s what I like about men,” she said. “So flexible. So reasonable.”

  “You’ve probably heard the reason only one sperm out of two million ever reaches the egg,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “They won’t ask directions.”

  It was the kind of innocuous stuff that passes for comedy on Leno and Letterman (I should know, since I once told that joke on both shows in the same week—and was never invited back to either of them), but she chuckled politely. “You don’t mind me telling you how to get to my place, do you? Or would you rather intuit it?”

  To get to Malibu we had to drive all the way up Sunset and around and back through Topanga Canyon. Ordinarily it would have taken about twenty minutes via PCH to get to her place from the bank. Today it took two hours. Her name was Sabine, or so she said. (It is an LA thing to change your name if you don’t like the one you were born with. I have met any number of Ashlees, Shannyns, Karmas, and Starrs.) I had fun with Sabine. A lot of fun. Too much fun. She was very sassy and we took that back and forth, mostly on the men-and-women-as-cats-and-dogs-theme. We kept it light all the way. I needed some lightness. My fiancée Doris likes to talk about Her Issues, whereas I am your basic Guy kind of guy. You can talk about feelings until your ears fall off and end up back where you started, only without ears. As far as I’m concerned feelings are just that: feelings. Did you ever see a two-year-old in a restaurant? One second he wants the steak knife more than anything he has ever seen before and it’s a tragedy of international proportions that his parents won’t let him have it so that he can stick it into his eye. The next second he’s happily sucking a paper napkin. The steak knife never existed. I think that’s the way we all are when we grow up, too, bouncing from one feeling to the next. So what matters is not what you feel, it’s what you do. “Know me by my actions” is my main motto.

  So what was I doing with this strange woman in my car on the day of my wedding?

  She lived right on the beach in a spectacular house, where the real estate starts at three million and up. One of the Allman brothers was her neighbor. She said he was completely fried by this time of day. He went out on his deck every morning and howled at the moon. As we pulled into the driveway, I couldn’t help observing out loud that the Bank of America must be paying its employees very well these days, and she said the house belonged to her roommate’s boyfriend, a producer or something who was shooting a movie or something in Africa or somewhere. She and her roommate were house-sitting. In fact, the roommate had flown off last night to rendezvous with the producer (or something) in Paris.

  “You told me she dropped you off at work this morning,” I said.

  “Did I? That was another friend,” she said. She opened the passenger-side door and the little light went on over her legs. It had been very dark all day, but it seemed even darker, except for what was illuminated by the little light. “I’d invite you in, but I don’t date married men.”

  “That gives us about four more hours,” I said. “Some of my most meaningful relationships have lasted way less than that.”

  “It’s your funeral,” she said, getting out. She ran up the stairs to the house in her stocking feet.

  “Wedding,” I yelled after her as I stepped from the car into the deluge. “Not funeral. Wedding.”

  2.

  When I woke up from the nap afterward, it was six forty-five p.m., which gave me fifteen minutes for the three hours it would take to get dressed, home, changed, and to the church in Palos Verdes, not to mention cleaning out the car. Sabine was still asleep. The rain had stopped and the air had that incredible clarity after a big storm in the LA basin when the smog has been temporarily vaporized. That what you can see then had been
there all along is surprising every time, like a great insight that rearranges your understanding of yourself until you forget it and fall back into the usual muddle. The sun was dropping under the ocean’s horizon, and the light through the window bathing Sabine’s body was a muted bronze, as if we were actually characters shot through a gauze filter in some insufferably wistful French movie.

  It was hard to feel sorry for myself at that moment, though later I would manage very nicely. I sat on the side of the bed, naked, facing the ocean, which was still pretty upset, the waves slamming the rocks beneath the house. The only furniture in the room was the mattress and box spring on the floor. All my friends, most of the people I cared about, the woman I supposedly loved, her friends, and most of the people she cared about, were at that moment gathering at the church where I was supposed to appear, flushed and embarrassed, tousled and grinning, running up the walk and tying my tie. I would have an explanation for the delay (gridlock on the freeway would serve fine; in LA, all you have to say is, “It was a parking lot,” and everyone instantly forgives—it’s part of the liturgy). Doris would kiss me and say something humorously demeaning about my endearing incompetence and everyone would laugh with relief at the disaster averted. I would be chided affectionately. I would be returned to the fold. We would all then compose ourselves and stroll into the church. Afterward we’d have a banquet at Missillac, our favorite restaurant, which Michel Borchard himself was preparing at that very moment. Something with lobster, then rack of lamb, I believe Doris said (she planned the menu, of course; I was not consulted), after Michel’s ineffable and sublime foie gras en croute. There would be wine from Margaux and oysters from Locmariaquer and live sea snails unobtainable more than five miles inland from the Brittany Coast. The lobster would be flown in from Maine and the lamb from Sonoma, first class, wearing little Dolce & Gabbana suits. Some of Doris’s seemingly infinite clients and business associates whom I refused to invite would have extravagant gifts delivered (she once took me to a party of a Disney executive where an electric train driven by a duck took guests to different variously themed parties on the estate, one of which featured a model in a toga walking two white panthers on a leash). Limos would pull up at the restaurant and clowns would pop out carrying balloons and jeroboams of Dom Pérignon sporting bows of red ribbon.