by Tim Sandlin
“They can me.”
Gilia’s laugh was clear water bubbling down the side of a mountain.
***
So, Gilia and I started meeting each morning at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It’d been so long since I’d talked to anybody about anything, that, at first, I felt exposed. I kept expecting her to get bored, like the two mental therapists I’d been dragged to over the years did. Lydia seduced the first one, and the second one, in college, told me to grow up.
“The prom’s over,” he said. “Stop your whining.”
But Gilia never acted bored or impatient. She listened while I rambled on about life with an airhead mother, and metaphors in baseball, and the transcendence of Young Adult sports fiction. The trick to seducing women is to shut up and listen to them—no one’s probably done that before and they’ll generally sleep with you out of gratitude—but with Gilia, I didn’t want to seduce her so much as get to know her real well. And that meant allowing her to know me.
This is revolutionary stuff here.
She mostly talked about prep school and college and the strange men and women who live in Washington, D.C. I’d been raised rich, at least until Caspar cut us off there for a few years, but I’d missed the prepster-debutante-networking thing. I guess Lydia wanted me to grow up normal.
Gilia was very passionate about art history. She had real opinions on movements and periods and all that stuff that most people only fake having opinions about. Her favorite American painter was an Impressionist named Lilla Cabot Perry. Once Gilia got started on Lilla Cabot Perry, she would go all morning if I didn’t jump in when my turn came to talk.
Gilia won Judy over that first Monday.
“His wife treated him poorly,” Judy said as she poured my coffee.
“She must have had bad tastes,” Gilia said.
“It was because his kitty passed on and he was vulnerable.”
Both women looked at me with obvious sympathy. I ate it up.
“When did your kitty die?” Gilia asked.
“Two years ago, the last weekend of March.”
“You must have really loved her.”
“My cat’s name is Judy,” Judy said. “We’re very close.” Gilia didn’t ask why a waitress named Judy had a cat named Judy. Instead, she went into what kind, how old, what do you feed her, don’t you just love it when she lies on your neck and purrs.
“You must have a cat yourself,” Judy said to Gilia.
“I have a Siamese named Beaux, but he thinks he has me.”
In no time flat Judy was bringing extra strawberries for the strawberry pancakes and not charging for coffee. “This one won’t get jealous of a passed-on cat and leave you,” Judy said.
“She’ll find another excuse,” I said, and they laughed as if I were kidding.
When it came time to go, Gilia waved to a man who sat a couple tables over, reading a Sporting News.
“Mike, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Gilia said. Mike was a little guy with muscles and a narrow mustache.
“Mike Newberry, meet Sam Callahan. Mike’s the detective who’s been researching your life.”
He held out his hand, but I hesitated a moment, unsure if it’s proper form to shake with the man who’s tailing you. Were we supposed to be adversaries or just two people trying to get by? In the end, I decided it didn’t matter and shook his hand anyway.
He pretended not to notice my hesitation. “I’ve heard so much about you, I feel like we’ve already met,” Mike said.
“How is Wanda?”
His mustache crinkled into a frown. “Angry.”
“Is she taking care of her health?”
“She was drinking like a fish, but I couldn’t see as it bothered her health.”
“What is she doing?”
Mike folded the paper under his arm. “Mostly she bad-mouths you. She thinks you did something terrible to her.”
I looked at Gilia. “I was monogamous, I swear.”
“You’ve got me convinced,” Gilia said.
“I never did her any disservice.”
Mike cleared his throat—a male habit that has always irked me. “She thinks you were holier-than-thou.”
You can’t win with a righteous woman. You either mess up and give them cause for hatred, or you don’t mess up and they call you a goody-two-shoed wimp.
“Listen, Mike,” I said, “it would be nice if you didn’t mention Gilia in your report to Skip. Her family might not understand.”
“Shit bricks are the words,” Gilia said.
Mike smiled, showing slick teeth. We were playing on a field he understood. “I think that can be arranged.”
“In fact, how would it be if I pay the same fee Skip is paying, then, instead of wasting your time following me, you could stay home and watch television, and every evening I’ll telephone a report of my day?”
He rubbed his chin, as if he’d once had a beard. “You’ll report everything? Not hold back the dirt Mr. Prescott wants to hear?”
I gave him the innocent face, which works a lot better on strangers than daughters. “Why would I hide anything?”
“Except me,” Gilia said.
“This way you collect from Skip, you collect from me, and your time is free to take on more clients.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Mike said.
“Quite reasonable,” Gilia said.
“How much do you want for the down payment?”
***
“Drink like a fish” is one of those expressions that won’t stand up to close scrutiny, along the lines of “work like a dog” or “sweat like a pig.” Obvious questions come to mind. A more exact wording might be “Wanda’s psyche is immersed in fluid, much like a fish is immersed in water.”
Drinking like a fish wasn’t a habit Wanda picked up after leaving the manor. She specialized in sticky liqueurs—flavored schnapps, Grand Marnier, that sort of thing. When we first met she used to drink herself comatose and pass out with my penis clutched tightly in her fists—or fist if I wasn’t hard. If I tried to roll over or, God forbid, get up to take a leak, she would squeeze like vise grips on a hose. At the time, I took this as a sign of love, but five hundred miles of pedaling the Exercycle 6000 brought me an insight: Wanda is afraid of being alone. The sticky liqueur and tight penis hold combine to give the illusion of beating back the void.
Maurey Pierce drank like a fish throughout college and that farcical marriage to Dothan Talbot. After her dad was killed by her horse she wallowed in the bottle until social services took her other child, Auburn, away from her and she reached that crossroads where you either lose everything that matters and die or you go to meetings in church basements the rest of your life. Maurey chose meetings.
At Auburn’s custody hearing Maurey and Dothan each paraded out a Goddamn plethora of witnesses to show the other was an immoral, unethical, unfit sleazeball. Maurey flashed her clear blue eyes at the judge and convinced him she was a cleaned-up sleazeball, or recovering sleazeball, as she put it, so she won custody of Auburn, and in the parking lot outside the courthouse Dothan slapped her in the ear and Lydia decked him with a Sage Graphite II fly rod case. A baseball bat couldn’t have knocked him any flatter.
Except for a month-long backslide when her mother died, she’s kept to the clean liver program ever since. The bender at Annabel’s death surprised me some because Maurey and her mother never got along that well, even more so than the average parents and children who don’t get along. Basically, the thing came down to they were both in love with the same man, Maurey’s father, and they never worked out the jive you’re supposed to work out about that.
The summer Maurey was pregnant by me, Annabel fell off the deep end, mental hygienically speaking, and she never quite came back. She lived a foggy, scattered existence more or less held together by pharmaceutic
als and Maurey’s little brother, Pete. Six years ago Annabel buffed her Thorazine with too much Halcion and tried to fly off the Snake River bridge. Maurey got drunk and disappeared, then a few days later Pud Talbot disappeared, and before I made the connection, they reappeared together.
I turned jealous jerk and gave her grief over noodling another Talbot and we went eight months without speaking before we had an emotional best-friends-in-spite-of-you-being-an-idiot reunion where we hugged and cried and pledged eternal trust. Eternal trust or not, Maurey still hasn’t told me what happened during the missing month. Sometimes I daydream that I was the one who went after her instead of Pud.
***
Trolling town looking for someone to talk to. Manic-depressives have all the luck; they soar between crashes. The best us regular depressives can do is battle our way up to normal every now and then. Talking about Alice had left me bummed and flat, and while you’d think the new friendship with Gilia would pep me up, I was in one of those states where even when something good happens you dwell on the fact that it can’t last. After bitter experience, I’d found the black states can be lightened somewhat by massive exercise, being around cheerful strangers, or seeing I Was a Male War Bride, starring Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan.
Which is why I trolled Battleground to the Baskin-Robbins corner in search of the happy, pregnant girls. My hope was they went for ice cream about the same time every day and their giggles would improve my outlook.
Fat chance.
Babs sat alone on the bench, tears dripping from her pink chin onto a rocky road sugar cone. She whimpered, “I’m never telling my baby his father’s name.”
I wished she’d said that earlier. “Why?”
Babs made an effort to smile, but failed, which only made me sadder. “Guess what?” she said. “Lynette run off with Rory Paseneaux.”
“Your husband?”
“I’m gonna get him annulled. He took my best friend and my grandmother’s afghan and run off to Charlotte. Says he’s gonna drive stock cars.”
“Let me get you a napkin.”
I went inside to find a napkin and collect myself. I hate it when people other than me get hurt. Somehow, pain is worse for happy people and puppies because they don’t expect it; they’re not mentally prepared.
Back outside, I asked, “When did this happen?”
“Last night Rory ordered pizza and him and Lynette went to pick it up on account of my feet being swollen. They knew my feet would be swollen, they planned it all out.”
“They leave a note?”
Babs cried with one hand on her belly and the other holding the cone. Her eye makeup left a single black trail down her face. She nodded to my question. “In the refrigerator, but I knew before that they’d snuck off. Lynette’s overnight case was gone. She don’t need a toothbrush to pick up a pizza.”
When Wanda left me she didn’t sneak off at all. She announced her plans during The Yellow Rose, when I was in the midst of a tremendous Cybill Shepherd fantasy involving an electric piano and yards of Saran Wrap.
Wanda stepped between me and the TV and said, “You have driven away the only good thing that will ever happen in your life.”
I said, “What’s that?”
She had me carry her baggage out to the 240Z, where Manny the pool boy sat with the engine running. Knowing Wanda’s convoluted sense of honor, sneaking off would have been dishonest. Sleeping with the neighborhood was allowed, but sneaking away wasn’t.
Babs sniffled. “Me and Lynette have been best friends since second grade. If we have girls, we was going to name them Babs and Lynette, after each other.”
Even though friendship is more important than romance, there’s no depths to what friends can do to each other in the name of romantic love. “Maybe she’ll come back,” I said.
“I wouldn’t speak to her if she did. She stole my Rory.” Babs dropped the ice cream; her chest shook like she was hyperventilating. I put my arm over her shoulders and rocked her gently while she pressed her wet face against my shirt.
“What am I gonna do now?” she asked.
“Have your baby.”
“Rory took our half of the rent. The other half is Lynette’s and she’s gone too. And I was on his insurance at the plant, only now he don’t have a job. Who’ll pay the doctor?”
“Don’t worry about the money,” I said. “I’ll take care of that. You just take care of your baby.”
16
Most of my heroes committed suicide. That thought came to me late Monday night when I should have been asleep, but, as usual, wasn’t. I’d ridden the Exercycle 6000 twenty miles at high tension, but stopped because I couldn’t concentrate on Wanda. Gilia’s face kept getting in the way.
I lay in the bed with three pillows next to me for the arm and leg that had to be draped over someone before I felt okay enough to sleep. No help. I didn’t feel okay and I wasn’t asleep. Buttons in the mattress poked into my ribs. Why do mattresses have buttons? I got to thinking about Alan Watts and his views on sleep, which led to a local poet named Randall Jarrell, then Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe, who Maurey says slept naked, and it dawned on me that these four people had two things in common: They were all my role models and they all killed themselves. And my heroes who didn’t kill themselves on purpose—Gram Parsons and Hank Williams—killed themselves accidentally. Were these people I wanted to model my life after?
Baseball heroes don’t commit suicide. Sandy Koufax, Moose Skowron, Vin Scully, I could think of a dozen admirable baseball people who hadn’t killed themselves, but let’s face it, at thirty-three, you can’t sign on as disciple to a baseball player.
The door cracked open and a form slithered into the room. My first thought was, Skip’s hired a hit man.
“Who’s there?”
“Who do you think, darlin’?”
“Oh, shit.”
“You don’t sound happy to see me. I can’t believe it, you must be covering up your true delight at my arrival so I won’t become overconfident.” She was wearing a nightgown, a filmy, flowing number with ruffles. She floated through the dim moonlight like a short ghost.
“Katrina, this isn’t a good time. I have someone with me.”
“No, you don’t.”
I sat up in bed. “How can you tell?”
“Those’re pillows. Anybody can tell the difference between pillows and women, ’cept maybe a horny man.” Katrina slid across the room. “I was lying there next to old Skippy, tingling from head to toe on account of what you did this morning.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. Her fingertips brushed my arm. “I decided once wasn’t enough.”
“Katrina, that’s not fair. I do you a favor and now you want more. How did you get in, anyway? The door’s locked.”
“The side door isn’t.” She ran her fingernails up and down the inside of my elbow. I swear, she purred like Alice.
“We don’t have a side door.”
“Behind the weeping willow.”
“That’s the servants’ entrance. Nobody’s used that door in twenty years.”
She leaned so close her lips grazed my ear and said, “It still works.”
“Am I wrong or did you pick up a French accent since this morning?”
Her tongue flicked in and out of my ear. In my experience, women who are into tongue flicking all read Danielle Steel.
“My grandmama was French. It comes out whenever I’m crazed with lust.” She lifted the sheet and slipped under. I slipped right out the other side—stood there feeling foolish in plaid boxer shorts.
“Sam.” Katrina blinked seductively. “If you reject me there will be repercussions.”
Veiled threats are a sure sign that a relationship is fixing to wash down the tubes.
“I’m not rejecting you, Ka
trina. I just can’t have sex in my own home. What if my daughter hears us?”
Katrina giggled. “Does your daughter sleep three doors that way?”
I nodded, not liking the giggle.
“She should be worried about you hearing them, not the other way around.”
“Them?”
Katrina made her face into a pout and talked baby talk. “Uh-ho, Sammy’s wittle baby is making diddle-widdle wight under Sammy’s nose.”
I hate women who talk baby talk. It’s all I can do to sleep with them.
“Don’t go away,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Honey, I wouldn’t think of leaving.”
***
I’m a spy in my own home. I stood outside Shannon’s door, barefoot in boxer shorts, listening to the sounds of passion. The bed rocked a steady rhythm, chunka chunka chunk. I bought that bed for Shannon at the High Point furniture mart. She chose it because she liked the ironwork design on the headboard. In my mind, I could see her hands intertwined in the iron design while Eugene’s sweat dribbled into her pores. You try to be both mother and father, you try to set a good example, you want to lock them up so they’ll never be hurt, but the books and magazines all say “Set her free, let her go.” And look what happens. A balding male who can’t even talk right charms his sleazy way into her body. God, I hate men.
What to do? Call the police? Ignore the atrocity? In the olden days a man would have smashed down the door with a shotgun and forced Eugene to marry her, but times have changed. Marriage is the last thing I want for a daughter of mine.
Shannon made a low gasp followed by a series of peeps. I’d heard those peeps before. In the throes of sex, each woman emits a unique sound. I’ve been with screamers, cursers, huff-and-puffers, and women silent as stone until that sudden shriek. One woman actually shouted “Bingo!” The tones, rhythms, even the words are like snowflakes, similar from afar but up close no two are the same.
Yet Shannon was pretty darn close to someone I’d heard before. My mind raced back through the years and bodies until it suddenly struck me—Maurey. Her mother. At thirteen Maurey had sung the gasp, gasp, then five peeps in a row. The peeps had been like a two-minute warning.
