I opened the equipment case and handed him the camera. He began snapping pictures of the house. The drapes of the front room moved gently as if the house was suddenly filled with breezes.
“I’m looking at those doors,” he said, sighting through the camera. “I’m looking at the shadow that falls across them on a severe diagonal due to the overhang above the steps. The effect, amigo, is grim. Now I’m sliding over to the left to include a piece of that window. This is interesting. This is the geometry of fear— a specialty of the Egyptians.” He snapped a few more pictures, then handed me the camera. “Everything makes a statement, whether it wants to or not,” he said. “It’s up to you, the photographer, to see and record it—in that order. Seeing, amigo, that will come with maturity.”
Billetdoux was full of himself. His eyes were shining with the power and accuracy of his perceptions. He looked stronger and more self-confident and even healthier than ever. He looked brave and intelligent and generous and sane. I raised the Argus and took a picture of him.
The front doors of the house opened. A tall, silver-haired man in a jumpsuit came down the steps shading his eyes to see us better. Seeing their master approach, the Dobermans renewed their attack. They leaped at the fence, turned full circles in midair, came down stiff-legged and gargling with rage.
“Down, Betsy, down, Arnold,” said the silver-haired man when he reached us. “Is there something I can do for you gentlemen?” he asked, a genuinely friendly smile on his handsome face. He was elegant and calm and undisturbed by us.
Billetdoux shoved his hand through the bars, offering it to the old man. “We’re doing some freelancing for the Clarion, ” he said. I waved the camera for proof.
“Ah, journalists,” said the man, dignifying us.
“Right,” Billetdoux said, grinning horribly.
“Well, why don’t you come inside and take some pictures of our antiques? Nedda, my wife, is a collector.”
Billetdoux looked at me, his face so deadpan that I almost giggled. We followed the old man along the fence to the main gate. He sent the dogs away and then let us in.
The man’s wife, Nedda, showed us through the house. She was tall and elegant with fine silver hair. She looked like the female version of her husband. They could have been twins.
The house was lavishly furnished with antiques. The dry, musty smell of old money was everywhere. It rose up in the dust from the oriental carpets. It fell from the handsomely papered walls. It lived in the stately light that slanted into the rooms from the tall windows. It was a forlorn, bittersweet smell, like stale chocolate, or maybe the breath of a Pharaoh.
After the tour, we were given ham sandwiches and coffee along with coleslaw. Nedda brought in a tray of wonderfully frosted cookies and refilled our coffee cups. Then we toured the house again, the fourth floor where Nedda kept her most prized antiques. Billetdoux, still playing the journalist, snapped a dozen flash pictures. He was working with a kind of controlled panic, on the verge of breaking an avaricious sweat. His jacket clinked with dead flashbulbs.
We went downstairs, exchanged a few more pleasantries, and left. “Guess you were wrong about them,” I said.
He brushed the air between us with his hand. “Petty bourgeois front, amigo. Don’t kid yourself.”
“What’s wrong with Lona?” I asked, surprising myself.
He shrugged. “The twentieth century,” he said. “It depresses her. She’s very sensitive.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You think being depressed is a picnic?” he said, annoyed at my tone. “It’s an illness, amigo, serious as cancer.”
“Really,” I said.
He looked at me strangely, then slapped his stomach hard. He made a barking sound.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t eat coleslaw. The bastards put out coleslaw.” We were halfway to the front gate. “I can’t make it, amigo. Let’s head back.” He turned quickly and headed back toward the front doors. The Dobermans didn’t come after us, though I expected them to come sailing around the house at any second. Billetdoux, doubled over and barking, ran up the steps of the front porch. He rang the bell until the door opened.
“The journalists,” said the pleasant old man.
“Please,” Billetdoux grunted. “Can I use your facilities?”
“Most certainly,” said the old man. “Do come in.”
The old man led Billetdoux away. I waited in the foyer. Nedda saw me. “Oh, you’re back,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “My boss had to use your bathroom. He can’t eat coleslaw.”
She touched her cheek with her fingers. “Oh dear,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I hope he isn’t too distressed. Would you like some candy while you’re waiting?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. So these are the Pharaohs, I thought.
She went out and came back with a box of chocolates. I studied the brown shapes, then selected one I hoped was filled with cream instead of a hard nut.
“Oh, take more,” she said, holding the box closer to me. “Fill your pocket. I’m not allowed them anyway. Neither is Burton.”
Billetdoux came in, smelling of expensive cologne. “Let’s hit the road, amigo,” he said. “We’ve bothered these fine people long enough.”
“No bother at all,” said Nedda. “We don’t get much company these days. I’m glad you came. Do drop in again, when you don’t have to take pictures.”
Out on the street Billetdoux said, “Christ, what a pair of phonies. I thought we’d never get out of there.”
“Better check your wallet,” I said.
He looked at me sharply but didn’t say anything. I popped a chocolate into my mouth. Mint cream. I didn’t offer him one. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small sculpture of a Chinese monk lifting a wineskin to his grinning lips.
“Look at this piece of junk,” he said. “I thought it was some kind of special jade, white jade maybe, but it’s only soapstone. Chances are all those antiques are phonies too.” He tossed the guzzling monk into a shrub as we walked downhill toward the car.
After my first one-hundred-dollar week, Billetdoux invited me over to celebrate my success. “You’re on your way, amigo,” he said, uncapping a quart of cheap vodka. He made us a pair of iceless screwdrivers and we clinked glasses before drinking. “Here’s to the hotshot,” he said. “Here’s to the man with the charm.”
We drank half a dozen screwdrivers before we ran out of frozen orange juice. Then we switched to vodka on the rocks, minus the rocks. His mood changed as we got drunk.
“Here’s to the hotdog capitalist,” he said, turning ugly. “Here’s to J.P. Morgan Junior.”
He spread the photographs of Nedda’s antiques out on the table before us. “There could be some money in these items, amigo. Enough to finance my retirement. Enough to escape the twentieth century. Unless they’re fakes.” He looked at me then, his eyes hard and rock steady. “How about it, amigo?”
“How about what?” I said, thick-tongued.
“How about we take it. How about we pay a midnight visit to Pinnacle Drive and get us a truckload of antiques?”
My mouth was already dry from the vodka, but it went drier. “No way,” I said. “I’m a photographer, not a felon.”
“Photographer my suffering ass!” he said. “You just don’t have the belly for it, amigo. Look at yourself. You’re about to muddy your drawers.” He laughed happily, poured more vodka. My stomach rumbled on cue, and he laughed again.
Dinner was a blistered pizza that was both soggy and scorched. Shyanne made it from a kit. She cut it into eight narrow slices. Billetdoux and I ate at the kitchen table. Shyanne carried a tray into Lona’s bedroom, then went into the living room with her two slices of pizza to watch TV.
“I should have gotten some T-bones,” Billetdoux said.
“No, this is fine,” I said.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, amigo,” he said.
To change the su
bject, I reminded him of some of my weirder customers. I told him about the old weight-lifting champ who posed for me in a jockstrap, holding a flowerpot in each hand to make his biceps bulge. I told him about the couple who took turns sitting in each other’s lap, touching tongues. Then there was the crackpot who wore a jungle hat and spoke German at a full shout to a photograph of his dead wife.
Billetdoux wasn’t amused. “You think the human condition is a form of entertainment for us less unfortunate citizens, amigo?” he said. “Remember, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”
I thought about this for a few seconds. “Sometimes it is,” I said, refusing to buckle under to his hypocritical self-righteousness. “Sometimes it’s entertaining as hell.”
He glowered at me, then brightened. “Hey, come out to the garage with me. I want to show you something.”
I stood up, felt the floor tilt and rotate, sat back down. When the room stabilized itself, I got up again.
Outside, the air was crisp. A cold wind seemed to be falling straight down out of the sky. Billetdoux opened the garage door and switched on the lights. “Ta da!” he sang.
A long, pearl-gray car gleamed in the overhead light. “Wow,” I said, honestly impressed. “What is it?”
“That is a car, amigo,” he said. “It’s a 1941 LaSalle. I got it for a song from an old lady who didn’t know what she had. It’s been in storage—only eleven thousand miles on it.”
We got in. The interior was soft, wine-dark plush. Even the door, when it latched, sounded like money slapping money. Billetdoux started it and backed out onto his lawn.
“It’s a little dusty,” he said, getting out of the car. “I’m going to hose it off. Dust will murder a finish like this.”
I went back into the house. I found the vodka and poured some into my glass. Noise, like a mob of crows in flight, passed through the kitchen. I looked out the kitchen window. Billetdoux was leaning against the front fender of the LaSalle. He saw me and winked. He began to undulate, as if performing sex with the car. “I think I’m in love!” he shouted.
What had sounded like a mob of raucous crows was actually Lona. She was singing in a language that might have been Egyptian. She could have been strumming her guitar with a trowel for all the music that was coming out of it. Then a tremendous crash shook the house. Glass tinkled.
Billetdoux came in. “Are they at it again?” he asked me. Glass shattered. Wood splintered. “Oh oh,” he said.
Oh oh seemed like a totally failed response to the din.
Billetdoux sighed weakly. “I smell trouble,” he said.
We poured ourselves some vodka. The uproar changed in character. Two voices were now harmonizing in throat-tearing screams. Now and then something made the walls shake.
“Maybe we’d better have us a look-see,” he said, sipping.
I sipped too. Outside the kitchen window the perfect LaSalle gleamed like a classy rebuttal to human life.
We went to the back of the house. Lona’s bedroom door was open. For a second or two I didn’t understand what I was looking at. What I saw was Lona and Shyanne kneeling face to face on the bed, combing each other’s hair. A dresser was lying on its side and a mirror was on the floor cracked diagonally in half. I saw then that neither one of them had combs in their hands. Just great knots of hair. Lona was growling through her clenched teeth and Shyanne was hissing. Shyanne’s mouth was very wide and the teeth were exposed past the gum line. She looked like a cheetah. Then they fell over and rolled to the floor. They rolled toward us and we stepped back, holding our drinks high. The air before us was filled with flailing legs and whipping hair. “Knock it off, okay?” Billetdoux suggested meekly. He watched them a while longer, then set his drink on the floor. “Give me a hand, will you, amigo?” he said.
He grabbed Shyanne under the armpits and lifted her off Lona. She continued to kick out at Lona as Billetdoux pulled her into the hall. I reached for a waving leg, then thought better of it. Lona got heavily to her feet. Her gray hair had shapes wrung into it. Homs, knobs, antennas. Lumps that suggested awful growths. She picked up a lamp and flung it at Shyanne, who was no longer in the room. It exploded against the wall, next to my head. “God damn you to hell,” she said to me, but meaning, I think, Shyanne.
“Fat witch! Pus hole! Slop ass!” Shyanne yelled from somewhere in the house.
“Bitch whore! Scum! Strumpet!” Lona countered.
After things quieted down, Billetdoux fixed us a new round of drinks. Vodka and warm apricot nectar. “That was embarrassing, amigo,” he said. “They go ape shit like that about once a month or so. Don’t ask me why.”
I made some kind of suave gesture indicating the futility of things in general, but it didn’t come off well since I was barely eighteen and hadn’t yet earned the right to such bleak notions. I pulled in my gesturing hand so that it could cover my mouth while I faked a coughing fit.
Billetdoux wasn’t paying any attention to me. “The television, the guitar,” he said. “This house is too small for us. They tend to get on each other’s nerves. Sometimes it comes to this.”
I was drunk enough to say, “How come you let your daughter treat her mother that way?”
Billetdoux looked at me. “My daughter?” he said. “What are you saying, amigo?”
“Your daughter, Shyanne, she...”
“My daughter? You think I’m beyond insult, amigo? You think we’ve reached a point in time where anything at all can be said to Price Billetdoux?” For the first time he pronounced his name in accurate French.
“She’s not your daughter?” I said, completely numb to the hard-edged peculiarities of Billetdoux’s life, but somewhat surprised anyway.
“Damn, ” he said glumly.
“Then Lona...”
“Lona? Lona? Jesus, amigo, what godawful thing are you going to say now?”
“I thought Lona was your wife.”
“Lona,” he said, measuring his words, “is my mom.” His voice was dark with a dangerous reverence that adjusted my frame of mind for the rest of the evening.
Shyanne came into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Upper Ten. She made a face at Billetdoux, then at me. “Oh baby baby,” Billetdoux said, his voice wounded with love.
“I think you should tell her to move out,” Shyanne said.
“Oh, baby. No. You know I can’t do that. It would kill her.”
“How do you think I feel?” she said. “Maybe you want me to move out. Is that what you want?” Her small red lips puckered into a hard, toy-doll pout. “I’ll go. I’ll just go.”
“Don’t say that, baby,” Billetdoux said, miserably.
Shyanne still looked twelve years old to me. But the hard, unwavering stare she had leveled at me was not something a child was capable of. I moved her age up to sixteen or seventeen. But something older by five thousand years hung stupidly in her face.
“Say the word, daddy, I’ll go pack,” she said.
I went out into the living room as Billetdoux began to weep on the small breast of his teenage wife.
I switched the TV to the “Perry Como Show.” I watched it all. Then I switched to “Wagon Train.” I had ignored the sounds coming from the kitchen—the soft, sing-song assurances, the cooing words that dissolved into groaning embraces, the serious oath-making, the baby-talk threats, and, finally, the mindless chit-chat.
Billetdoux came in and sat on the couch next to me. He was eating a peanut butter sandwich and drinking beer. “What can I say, amigo?” he said. “Are you going to think of me now as an old cradle robber? Hell, I’m only thirty-eight. Shyanne’s almost sixteen. You think that’s too young?”
I shrugged. “What’s a dozen years more or less,” I said, my arithmetic deliberately sentimental.
He straightened up, set his sandwich and beer down on the coffee table. “My situation is not easy, amigo. I’m so crazy about Shyanne. I can’t live without her. You understand? No, you don’t. Maybe someday you will, i
f you get lucky. At the same time, I’ve got to think about Lona. I can’t set her adrift after all she’s done for me, can I?”
“No,” I said, remembering to be careful.
Billetdoux was chewing his lower lip and absent-mindedly cracking his knuckles. “Mom thinks the world of me,” he said. “Did I tell you that? She calls me her Honey Boy.”
I went back to the kitchen to get myself an Upper Ten. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a cat. Shyanne was still at the table. She was looking at her hands, studying first the tops, then the bottoms.
“They’re red,” she said, without looking up. “I hate these hands. Look at them. They’re not very elegant, are they.”
I got my Upper Ten, opened it.
“I’m sick of my hands,” she said. “I’d just as soon cut them off.”
She tried to show me her hands, but I walked past them and back to the living room. Billetdoux was pacing in front of the TV. “I’m going to Carnuba the LaSalle,” he said. “It’s been on my mind.” He stalked out, like a man with pressing business.
I sipped my pop. Some kind of detective show was on now. After a while, Shyanne came in and sat next to me. Lona was strumming her guitar again and singing in Egyptian. “Are you going to take me fishing or not?” Shyanne said, her lips brushing my ear. Her tone of voice made me feel as though I’d broken every promise I’d ever made.
“Did I say I would?” I said.
“No one’s taken me fishing since we came to this dumb town.”
Borrowed Hearts Page 4
