“What do you want to know about me?” the woman asked him. “Not one thing,” he said. “I’m happy to have you sit anonymously on my lap.”
She squirmed, and the movement of her thighs sent a charge running through him.
“What if I want to know something more about you?” she asked. “He’s a psychologist,” Billy said.
“No, I’m not,” Candler said. “Just a counselor.”
“Close enough,” Billy insisted. “He talks to people.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
It was his turn to stare at the ceiling. He could not tell a total stranger anything substantial about his clients, but he decided he could tell her something. “I have this client we call the War Vet, although he’s really still in the army.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty or so. I don’t remember exactly. Been in Iraq two tours already.”
“I like the story fair to middling so far. What’s happened to him?”
“He came to my office today to finish his evaluation.” Candler described the conversation he’d had with Guillermo Mendez and the man’s impossible request.
“And what have you done?”
He hadn’t done anything, but that made for a lousy ending. He shrugged. “I’m not supposed to talk about clients,” he said and she rolled her eyes as if he were teasing. He thought to look about for the Hao brothers. He ought to get this woman off his lap.
“Too late,” she said. “You have to tell me what report you wrote.”
He told her what she wanted to hear. “Against my better judgment, I recommended that he be kept out of Iraq and finish his duty in the U.S.” He told himself that he could actually write the report that way if he so decided. Simultaneously, he understood that he wouldn’t decide to do it. As long as the report was still unwritten, he wasn’t lying, merely pleasing this barefoot, damp-thighed, interesting woman. “I’m probably going to catch hell about it later.”
She kissed his cheek. “That story is completely self-serving. It makes you the hero.”
“Got him a kiss,” Billy said. “You expect him to tell stories that make him look bad?”
“I’ve regretted doing it.” Candler was extemporizing now. “I like the kid, but it’s going to blow up in my face. Could cost me a promotion.” He wasn’t so much working the story now as thinking aloud. He imagined making a deal with Mendez, requiring therapy in exchange for the report. Such things could be done, but he would not do them. Nevertheless, he believed he had made an impression on this barefoot woman, which must be what he had wanted to do.
“Don’t you want to know my name?” She put her free arm around his neck, her mouth close to his face. She set her shoes on the bar table and drank from his beer.
“I bet we can guess it,” Candler said, flashing Billy a conspiratorial look. “It’s Agnes, right? Agnes of the Beautiful Legs.”
“I’ll give you a clue,” she said. “It’s unusual. Not weird, just unusual.”
Candler could think of only one name that fit the bill. “Karly?” She rolled her eyes and looked to Billy. “You have a guess?”
“George Bush,” he said. “I know that fucker must be out here somewhere in disguise.”
“You remember Gorgeous George?” Candler asked. He and Billy had been fans of a professional wrestler who went by that name when they were boys.
“She’s not Gorgeous George in disguise,” Billy said. “I guarantee it.”
He wasn’t impressed with her, Lise decided. Even with her sitting on his lap, he’d rather reminisce with his friend. She felt a pulse of panic, which made her bold. It opened up the old bag of tricks. “Did you say George Bush or Gorgeous Bush? ’Cause people do have nicknames.”
Candler and Billy both reacted to this, Billy by rocking back in his chair and widening his eyes, and Candler by a hardening pulse in his cock, which rested beneath her bare and shifting thighs. It was the opposite of what he had felt this morning, hiding in his car, watching the house of the impaired girl while his body revolted against him. He had felt like a child caught in a disgraceful act. He could almost feel the movement in his mind, as she walked barefoot and with a drunken sashay into the chamber of a fascinating woman.
Candler was drinking but he was not especially drunk, and he was not simply a mindless male driven by sexual craving. He was flattered by this woman’s attention, and he felt a distinct sexual charge from her, but he did not believe he was in any danger of infidelity. Only this morning—but this morning seemed ages ago, and if the Road Runner had found the seam in the traffic instead of Candler, maybe it would have been the Porsche crashed by the side of the road, and he might not have been as lucky as the other guy . . . What was he thinking?
Billy was speaking, but Candler interrupted. “I punched a guy in the face today.”
“Did he have it coming?” she asked, while Billy said, “You didn’t tell me about that.”
“He was a jackass, but it was a stupid thing to do.”
“How was he a jackass?”
“He was taking advantage of a client, someone who can’t take care of herself.”
“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “I think you spent the whole day in your office prowling the internet for porn.”
He nodded. “That’s where I’ve seen you before.”
She laughed but the statement was too close to home, and she felt a sudden appalling fear. She leaned in close to him. Her breath pulsed against his cheek as she spoke.
“Take me out of here,” she said.
Then: “I need shoes.”
The heavily slurred, delicately tinkling imperative and declarative sentences might have marked the end of his body’s controversy; after all, he certainly wanted to go to bed with her. But some marginally sober part of him resisted.
“I shouldn’t,” he said.
“You shouldn’t let me get shoes?”
Billy, looking for a way back into the conversation, said, “Barefoot women are unbelievably sexy.”
She put her arms around Candler’s neck in order to stretch her leg and drop a foot in Billy’s lap. “Your friend likes me,” she said. “Why not you?”
Candler eyed her leg and didn’t reply.
“Why really did you punch that guy?”
“He did the old joke . . .” He put his finger on her stomach, and when she looked down, he ran the finger over one breast and up to her chin.
“Not great humor,” she said, “but I can’t see hitting him. What are you leaving out?”
“He sort of accused me of something.”
“You must be guilty of it to get that angry.”
“Not possible,” he said, but his throat tightened and he barely squeezed it out. To cover, he put his hand on her thigh. When she stood, he stood beside her. Though he did not recognize this woman, he knew her, and that connection, because he could not name it, seemed like something else, possibly something profound. He did not know that the meeting was no accident, and her audacious placement of herself in his lap and her dogged persistence in the face of his resistance were the product not of some general passion or stubborn pathology but of the popular delusional state known as love. She had loved him for years. She had followed him to Liberty Corners. Her hair was a different color now and her body was no longer cocaine skinny or silicone voluptuous, but some part of Candler’s mind identified her, situated her in relationship to him, recognized her as a former client—he had called them patients back then, and the term better fit her, as she had taken her time seeking him, a patience that was either heroic or preposterous, and this night would go a long way toward saying which. He knew all this and did not know it. Why she spiked certain of his erotic chords remained mysterious to him, but the spikes hit their target. She had been in his care for only an hour, a forbidden, lovely client making eyes at him from across a desk.
Ignorant of th
e deepest movements taking place inside himself, he became dismissive of his resistance. Why was he pretending that he was anything more than just a man? Why, he asked himself, was he acting as if he were not subject to the follies to which men have always succumbed? Why not have a final fling before the yoke? A tiny, expulsive laugh escaped him, a clank of a laugh like a pin slipping from a hinge, at the absurdity of the rationalizations, as he took her hand, leading her unsteadily to the exit.
At the door, as Mick and Karly were leaving, Rhine reminded her that she had promised to ride with him on his cycle.
“Oh, that,” she said, laughing and touching his pink shirt. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I brought an extra helmet for you, Karly,” Rhine said, a despondent tremor in his voice. He held it out to her. On each side, neatly printed in Magic Marker, it said: KARLY’S HELMET FOR RHINE’S CYCLE.
“That’s so sweet,” she said, and hugged him, taking the helmet with her as she gripped Mick’s arm.
The spring night reminded Mick of thunderstorms even though the sky had only a few slight clouds—a terribly distant sky and the same purple-blue of the hydrangeas that lined the walk of the senior citizens facility. He breathed in the lush air, and because Karly was beside him, descending the stairs with him, he discreetly tucked his nose in her hair. She smelled incredibly fresh. It was mint, he realized. She must have a mint shampoo, but when they reached the concrete drive and she spat into the hedge, he realized it was her gum he had smelled.
In the car, she became exuberant. “That was so fun. Wasn’t it fun, Mick?” She crossed her legs and took off her shoes, placing them on the floor, beside the helmet.
Mick recalled Peggy Stein, her bare feet in his lap, her knees bent, the skirt riding up her pale thighs. As if she could read his mind, Karly pivoted and touched his knee with her toes.
“Wasn’t it so much fun, Mick?”
Mick agreed that it was fun.
“I like everybody so much,” she said. “I like Rhine. I like Alonso . . .” She ran down the list of guests, ending with Mick. When she said his name, she rubbed her entire instep over his knee.
A thumbprint moon found the piece of sky directly above Onyx Springs and lit the few windblown clouds. The cloud’s light, in turn, backlit the tree limbs that arched over the street above the black asphalt and the moving car, the wobbling leaves casting nighttime shadows.
Mick took his foot from the accelerator to let the car coast through the complicated light. Cars parked in driveways seemed like mottled messages, as if the general design of automobiles was a means of cloaking in metal their vehicular secrets. Some nights, such cagey cars would have made him uneasy, but this night he understood the city was like a storybook forest: alive and mindful and willing to guide him. He understood that his encounter with Ms. Patricia Barnstone—even her name sounded like an enchantment—had helped him see the forest, something in her ordinary friendliness had opened the window, but it was Karly, riding beside him, her bare arches against his thigh, who had made the world come alive. And the living world gave him courage. But was it enough courage? He wanted to tell Karly that he loved her. He wanted to propose marriage. You ought to do exactly what you want to do, Ms. Patricia Barnstone had said. How had she known precisely what he needed to hear?
A block before Karly’s street, Mick said what he had wanted to say for months. He told her he loved her. She was describing her session with Mr. James Candler, and how he had been racing his car on the freeway. The story sounded improbable, but Mick had decided to believe every word she spoke, and that faith—along with the night, having talked to Barnstone, remembering Peggy Stein—led him to finally speak his heart. He had been dying to say it for so long.
“Oh, Mick,” she said. “That’s so sweet.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned over him, as if to kiss him, but instead she put both her hands on his chest, her face just an inch from his cheek.
The car bounced onto the curb.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“Oh, that,” she said, raising a hand to wipe the air clean of his mistake. As he bumped back onto the asphalt, she said, “Mrs. Karly . . . What’s your last name?”
“Coury,” he said.
“Mrs. Karly Coury.” She put her hand over her heart and then put her other hand on top of the first. “That’s so pretty.” Then: “You have to let me out at the corner.”
He pulled over. She didn’t like anyone to drive her to her door. She lived with family, Mick knew, but not her parents. A cousin, perhaps, an uncle or aunt, maybe grandparents. She wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. Her family worried about people taking advantage of her. Yet he knew which house was hers. He had watched her walk and counted the houses. Later he coasted by and memorized the number. Late one night, when his mother thought he was sleeping, he circled her block twelve times to stare at her black windows. He thought, I’ll do this every night, but he had never driven by again. It was enough to know it was there.
“It’s dark,” he said now. He wanted to show her that he knew which house was hers. It seemed proof of his love. “You shouldn’t walk alone in the dark.”
“Everyone knows that,” she said, opening the Firebird’s door. He didn’t know how to respond. “So it’s settled then?”
“Of course, silly.”
“We’re engaged then?”
“You and me?” she asked.
“You and me,” he said. “We’re engaged to be married. You’ll be Mrs. Karly Coury.”
“And you’ll be Mr. Karly Coury,” she said and laughed.
He laughed, too. When she got out of the car, she said, “That was so fun.” Then she sang, “Wayne’s World, Wayne’s World.”
He watched her form retreat into the darkness of the street. Her hair disappeared first, and then her cut offs, and then her legs and arms, and then the straps of her halter top. For an instant, he could see the white fringe of her cut offs, riding up and down like tiny, incandescent teeth. And then she was invisible.
“Mr. and Mrs. Karly Coury,” he said, and burst into laughter again, but this bout didn’t last long. He was engaged to be married. He needed to take his life seriously.
“Later,” Billy Atlas called, as Candler and the woman made their meandering way out of the bar. Billy wondered whether they would miss the doorway and bounce off the wall like the cartoon characters he and Jimmy had loved as boys. The band went on break, and Billy looked at women’s legs—a scrutiny unlikely to call up their scorn, as he seemed to be staring at the floor. He missed having a woman around. His ex-wife married him to get her citizenship, a fact he had understood and verbally agreed to from the outset. He had a year of sex, good enchiladas, and frequent bouts of kindness, and now he had the allure that went with being a divorcé.
Before Pilar, he’d had exactly one girlfriend and never had sex with anyone but prostitutes and once, years ago, with Candler’s longtime girlfriend Dlu, who had been trying in her way to encourage Billy to see himself as worthwhile. After Candler dumped Dlu, Billy attempted to get rebound action, but she told him very definitely there was no chance. He and Pilar had had sex twice a month. Exactly twice. You could (and he had) set your calendar by it.
The Hao brothers, whom he hardly knew, returned to the table, bearing the prized guitarist, a balding Chicano with a massive frowning mustache, as black as three a.m. Both the Haos had grown beards for their country-and-western band. Really lousy beards. Billy was reminded of his mother’s incompetently frosted cupcakes. That’s a bunny hutch, she’d explain. That’s mud wrestling.
Clay introduced the guitarist as Enrique, who offered a long-fingered delicate hand. “You in the band?” he asked.
“God no,” Billy replied. Fearing he’d insulted the Haos, he added, “I have no musical talent whatsoever. I couldn’t carry a tune in a suitcase.” Their polite smiles were on Candler’s behalf, Billy understood. They were being well
mannered with Candler’s boring friend. He had already made the mistake of saying, I didn’t know Calamari was Chinese. They had let him know the band’s name had nothing to do with their ethnicity. “I hang out with these guys to feed off the leftover groupies,” Billy said. This earned him a laugh from the Hao brothers, which doused the momentary hopefulness that had crept into Enrique’s black eyes.
“Jimmy took off,” he added.
Clay and Duke Hao exchanged a look. They’d seen him leave. Billy wished some pair of brothers somewhere had, once upon a time, shared such a look over Billy’s departure with a pretty girl when he was engaged to another pretty girl. No such swap of looks had ever happened on his behalf, and he suspected it never would.
“Whatta you do?” Enrique asked him.
“Nothing at the moment,” Billy replied. He explained that he only recently moved to town. “Starting tomorrow I watch over this workshop for differently empowered individuals.” He said this carefully because Clay Hao worked with James, and he wanted to sound like a professional.
“That’s worse than me,” Enrique said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I’m cleaning swimming pools. Of course, I’m twenty-four. If I’m cleaning pools when I’m your age, I’ll off myself.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, “I hear exposure to chlorine makes you simpleminded and in the long term renders people suicidal.”
The kid responded by wagging his head vaguely and drinking from his beer. If he understood that Billy was needling him, he gave no indication. Much of Billy’s wit went unnoticed, flung over the head of the intended like an errant—but very sharp—spear. This was the curse of being Billy Atlas. One of many curses.
The impassive oaf’s gaze that fixed his expression did not genuinely express his character, Billy believed, and yet it was the look he most often gave the world—or at least the masculine world. For as lame as his life with women was, his way with men was worse. Even when he needed nothing from them, he wanted their acceptance, and the role of fool was one men would willingly accept. They generally liked having him around, and they demanded very little of him, only to serve as the constant reminder of what they had surpassed, no matter how measly their circumstances. Billy did not know why he was this way. It had taken him a decade to finish college, and not because he was dumb. It didn’t require a lot of smarts to get a degree, but he kept coming up against blockades—all stemming from his screwed-up self. He’d forget deadlines, sleep through exams, work furiously on a paper for weeks but only half finish and have to tack on a conclusion at the last minute. Why? Because that’s what it was to be Billy Atlas, and it was relentless. He wasn’t a nice-looking guy like Jimmy, but who was he kidding? He looked okay enough. A lot of absolutely goofy-looking men had women, and sometimes they were babes. It wasn’t so much what you looked like but how you were perceived, and that stemmed from some cave of personality so deep down in your soul it was like pulling teeth to change it.
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