Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

When the topic petered out, Lise asked him, “What do you want to do now?”

  “Take you home with me,” he said. Then added, “If you’ll drive.” She studied him for a long moment before shrugging and taking his hand.

  Violet had steered Lolly away from the young men, and now they were with a number of dreary women. “I’m getting tired.” Violet spoke softly so only Lolly would hear.

  “It’s not late,” Lolly said. She took Violet’s hand. “You’re grieving. It wears you out.”

  Yet another presumptuous comment. The truth: she was relieved that her husband was dead. Someone like Lolly could not conceive of the idea that Vi simply didn’t want to talk about it. Lamentation seemed to be the national sport these days, but Vi would not become a player.

  “We all like James,” one of the women said. She wore cat’s-eye glasses and had an oversized whirly hairdo, dyed an unnatural black. Violet hoped it was an intentionally ironic look. “He’s such a gentleman, and without being so . . . without being ah . . .”

  “Without being a wimp,” another put in. This one was younger and drunker. “We get a lot of wimps in this line of work.”

  Lolly basked in the conversation, as if they were talking about some quality of her own. “What if I don’t like gentlemen? What if I adore wimps?”

  “It’s gonna be your field day then,” the drunker one said.

  When Violet had told Jimmy, all those years ago, that she was going to marry her boss, he had said, “Arthur? I love Arthur.” No hesitation, no crack about the difference in ages. Why oh why couldn’t she show him the same generosity?

  A middle-aged Asian woman whose surname, if Violet heard correctly, was How, asked for her impressions of California.

  “I was expecting more stars,” she said.

  “Go to Santa Monica or Beverly Hills,” one of them said. “I saw Lisa Kudrow in a boutique in Santa Monica looking at stockings.”

  “Celestial stars,” Violet corrected. “I grew up in Arizona and the sky would fill with them. I was looking forward to seeing them again.”

  “The smog,” said the Asian woman. “The ocean breezes it all up here.”

  “Pooh on the stars,” Lolly said. “I want to meet the borderlines, the obsessive compulsives, the bipolars.”

  Violet could not help a tiny smile. Lolly could not tolerate the conversational orbit going beyond her gravitational pull. Thank god they had Billy’s Dart. In the Porsche, she had to ride in a cubby space behind the seats like an oversized bag of laundry. The Dart was old and unhygienic but the backseat was at least designed for humans.

  The women were trying to find a way to respond to Lolly’s outburst. The one with the hair said, “You can’t help meeting them now and again. If you see James for lunch, go early and wait in the anteroom. They’ll trudge past.”

  “I want to get to know them,” Lolly insisted. “What they feel and think and dream.”

  Was this why she had fallen for Jimmy, the stories he told about his patients? Perhaps she did need to meet them and be stripped of her romantic notions about damaged people. More likely, of course, she wanted to assert her own authority, the counseling certification she’d earned one summer. Her fingertip massage and blenderized flowers. You re tooo hardon her.

  “I’m as compassionate as the next chucklehead,” the blotto woman said, “but these people . . . they suck up your life.”

  “That’s not how I’d put it,” the older woman said. Her eyes, magnified by the glasses, zeroed in on Lolly. “But you do have to keep some distance. Many of them simply frighten me.”

  “Are they violent?” Lolly asked hopefully.

  “If they have a history of violence, John won’t let them in. He’s scrupulous about that. It isn’t that kind of fear.”

  “Afraid it’ll rub off on you?” the drunken woman said.

  “They’re . . . unsavory.”

  Patricia Barnstone spoke then. She was one of the counselors but James didn’t seem to think much of her. He called her the Barnstone, as if she were an architectural feature. “You could volunteer,” she said. “We need the most volunteers with the Minton House—that’s the severely mentally impaired clients.”

  “John is phasing them out,” the woman with the hair said.

  “Candler doesn’t work with them,” Barnstone acknowledged, “but you could get a sense of the Center and what your boy does.”

  “That’s a smashing idea,” Lolly said.

  “You look too young for Candler,” Barnstone went on. “Aren’t you worried about him sitting in some rocking chair while you want to boogie?”

  Lolly laughed and explained that she and James were only seven years apart.

  “Years?” Barnstone said. “Who’s talking about years?” She flexed her shoulders and gestured with her hands. She took up a lot of space, Violet noted. The other women were backing off and slipping away. “Egri will tell you not to volunteer. He’s afraid if you get your hands dirty—and you will get your hands dirty—you’ll make Candler move to Europe or San Francisco or some other damn place, and then he won’t have his fair-haired boy.”

  “I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty,” Lolly said.

  Violet had to admit this was true of Lolly. “I’m only a little afraid of it,” she said.

  “It’s settled then. You two staying with Candler? I’ll call with the details.”

  “Do you know a young man named Mick Coury?” Violet asked. “He may be one of Jimmy’s patients.”

  “Jimmy. I can’t get used to that. Your brother can be stiff.” She twisted her head to include Lolly. “That’s what I meant about being so much older than you. There’s not a stiff bone in your body.” She zeroed in on Violet again. “Mick Coury, nice kid. Lives off-campus with his mother and brother. His father used to have to commute fifty miles. They moved here so Mick could get treatment. A lot of people do that. Full residential is prohibitive for most families. Mick’s father got an apartment in the city so he could skip the drive now and then. Then he found god—and probably some heavenly woman—and dumped his wife. Yeah, I know Mick. Drives an old Firebird. Not one of mine, but you get to know most of them, one way or another. If he could relax, which he can’t, he might be a movie star. Such a pretty kid.”

  The How woman reappeared—Joan? Violet had met too many people to remember all their names. “I just wanted to say good night,” she said. “I’ve called a cab. I’ve got a headache and I know my husband wants to keep playing as long as there’s even one person on the dance floor.” She rolled her eyes and smiled.

  “It was so nice to meet you,” Violet said.

  “The body holds all of the daily karmic insults in the epithelial tissue.” Lolly stepped near Joan as she spoke. “If you don’t work them out, they sink down into the deeper tissues until they reach your organs, your brain being the most vulnerable of the organs, and you get a headache.”

  Violet instinctively scanned the room for exits.

  “There’s a pressure point here,” Lolly said, pinching Joan at the base of the neck. Only Patricia Barnstone seemed to be watching, as far as Violet could tell. Thank god the room was dimly lit. “This touch is seeking your pain. You have to let it flow to this spot.”

  Violet stepped back, separating herself from the cosmic connection.

  Lolly used her free hand to touch Joan How’s forehead. “This completes the circuit.” She moved the hand to the temples, stretching her palm over Joan’s face. “Feel the flow of energy.” Lolly held this pose for several seconds, which passed like minutes, and then dropped the hand to Joan How’s chest. “Your heart is alive,” Lolly said, and then she took her hands away. “How do you feel?”

  “Weird,” the woman said immediately. “Good, though. It made my legs weak.” She smiled weakly. Perhaps she always smiled that way. “My cab is probably waiting.”

  Barnstone stepped in again. “Where’d you lear
n to do that?”

  “I’m out of practice,” Lolly said and launched into her history of fingertouch counseling, emphasizing the importance of practice.

  Violet tried not to listen. Was there one meaningful thing in life that you could consciously practice? You rarely got to practice anything important, and yet you almost certainly would be tested, and you would not know the terms of the test until it had already transpired, and by then your evaluation would be unchangeable.

  “It’s all about positive and negative energy,” Lolly was saying, “and flow. Everything depends on flow.”

  Stoned, Mick hid under Maura’s bed at curfew as if armed men were coming at any moment to hunt for him. Maura dragged him out after bed check, and he called his mother to tell her he was sleeping over.

  “Is that permitted?” she asked, and Mick assured her that everything was fine. “You sound like you’re having fun,” she said. “But is this a good idea?”

  “Don’t call Mr. James Candler,” he said.

  She assured him that she would not, and following a number of repeated assurances, the conversation dwindled and died.

  Mick shut Maura’s cell phone and tossed it onto the mattress. He was sitting on the bed and she was standing at the window. “Now what?” he said.

  “I think this is the point where we take our clothes off and suck on each other.”

  Mick laughed hard enough that Maura laughed, too.

  “You have any food?” he said. “I’ve got hungry feelings.”

  “Some things,” she said. She had a mini fridge with carrots, tomatoes, and celery cut into snacking lengths. “Barnstone has changed the way I eat. I’m like a health fiend now. I don’t let myself have junk in the fridge. It’s a good thing, too, ’cause if I had my typical crap, I’d eat like a pound of candy right now.”

  “A pound sounds good,” Mick said. He bit into the celery. “The meds I’m on make some people gain weight, but not me. What I say, I say they steal my appetite. I had one once.”

  Maura wanted sex. Partly because she just wanted to, but mainly because she wanted Mick to get the idea that she could be his girlfriend, and that she’d be a lot better at it than the skinny ditz he was engaged to marry. Earlier in the week, while everyone else was gone for lunch, Vex had led her around the corner of the Old Farts Center, pushed her up against the block wall, and pulled down her pants. What are you doing? she hissed, and he said, There’s plenty of time. His brain, he confided, kept better time than atomic watches. He said all this while he was pressed against her, and some part of her had liked it. Another part of her, though—her fist—had clobbered his skull. While he grabbed his head, Maura pulled up her pants and underwear. The bulge in his jeans—his unzipped jeans—she also took in before scampering around the corner.

  He reappeared saying, “Your unconscious messages are all the fuck cross wired. Like if I flip the headlamp of my Electra Glide and the fucking engine dies, that’s you and your pussy.”

  She didn’t know how to argue with that but demanded rolling papers and tobacco, which he obediently handed over, still ranting about her pussy and why persons unnamed should never hit anyone on the head. Vex wasn’t even vaguely sexy but he was very male. Way more than Mick, and maleness had a definite draw. Maybe she had accidentally sent the grimy muckbrain scrambled signals. Girls were turned on by horses, but they didn’t actually want to screw them, and this scrawny gorilla did tingle her parts, but between that tingle and the desire to actually drop drawers and mingle was a distance wide enough for a several semis to pass through.

  A lot of men seemed to think that if you took the time to creatively insult them, you must want their penis plunging into your major orifices. This was not only annoying, it cramped her style. The fact that she was a virgin made it worse, like she had no platform to stand on, and so she had no choice but to take a bunch of shit from people, and now she was going to have to start wearing a belt. How had he gotten her pants and undies down so fast? Some men seemed to be born with very specific talents and even though they’ve had an electric beater shoved into their gray matter and the setting pushed from blend to whip, these profoundly male nutjobs still knew how to get a girl’s pants and panties to her knees in one slick, two-second maneuver.

  From that moment, she began plotting to get Mick into her dorm room and granny-give-a-fuckall (one of Vex’s expressions) that he was engaged. She wanted to press up against him and pull his pants down. He was wearing cords.

  “This is the best celery I’ve ever eaten,” Mick said. “Why haven’t I been eating celery every day? Why isn’t it like chips and salsa, so you go to a restaurant and get a bowl of celery?”

  “You’re high,” Maura said, “which makes you completely unreliable.”

  “I can still taste, can’t I?” He remembered the waitress: How does everything taste?

  “Yeah, but don’t make decisions based on what you’re tasting right now.”

  “Don’t go buy ten pounds of celery?”

  “I had chocolate milk one time when I was stoned, and the next week I complained to my parents about never having any chocolate milk in the house, and now my dad brings little cartons that fit in my fridge whenever they visit. I can’t stand the viscous, smacky stuff.”

  Mick laughed at smacky. He smacked his lips. “I’m maybe going to pass out here soon.”

  “Pass away.” She sat beside him on the bed. “Anything you do is okay with me.”

  “Really?”

  She looked him in the eyes without laughing or smiling and said, “Anything you want.”

  “Thanks.” His head tilted back and fell against the mattress. He reached beneath his back and withdrew the cell phone, which he placed on his stomach. Within seconds the celery stalks fell from his hand.

  Maura touched his belt but did not undo it. She crawled on top of him, the phone a warm hard spot between them. She imagined pulling his pants down, taking his shirt off, running her hands over his body. Instead, she pushed him to one side and pulled the sheet from beneath him. She undressed in front of his shut eyes, then put on a T-shirt and lay next to him. She lifted his flaccid arm and put it over her.

  Violet got Jimmy and Lolly in the car and on the road before four a.m. “This whole thing,” he said jubilantly, drunk and driving on the interstate, “the whole party started when I told them that you were coming here.”

  “No fooling?” Lolly asked. “The party was just for us?”

  Violet, from the Dart’s rear seat, wanted to point out that they’d known this all along.

  “It appears that I brought you up maybe ten thousand times,” Jimmy said. “It’s so nice, isn’t it?” He angled his head slightly to call into the backseat. “Isn’t it nice, Sis? I’ve been here less time than any of the other counselors? Almost any. And this shindig for my girl? Nice?”

  “Very generous,” Violet agreed. “I wish you’d let me drive.”

  Jimmy nodded and spoke to his fiancée. “She has a point there, Loll. You and I are tanked, skewered.”

  “Off our trolley,” she said.

  He swerved into the exit lane and pulled up to the stop sign at the intersection. Violet and her brother traded places. The freeway was wide and empty, the sky wide and dark. The alcohol she had consumed was not enough to hinder her driving, and neither was it enough to make the dark world beautiful, but just another obstacle to get beyond.

  “Patricia Barnstone thinks I could do fingertouch counseling at the Center,” Lolly announced.

  Violet knew the woman had said no such thing.

  “That’d be something,” Jimmy said. “Maybe Egri would approve. You must’ve danced ten times with him.”

  “Is my boy jealous?”

  “Of Egri? I think not.”

  “That’s good because I think he may have a crush on me.”

  Violet could not quite believe that even Lolly would say that. She looked
for the radio.

  “What right-blooded man wouldn’t?”

  “You’re drunk, James Candler.”

  “I stand accused. Only I’m not standing.”

  They laughed. Violet drove. Perhaps a minute passed.

  “You’re a good sister,” Jimmy said out of the blue.

  “And a good friend,” Lolly said. “Isn’t she?”

  “Please don’t.” She knew where this turn in the conversation would take them. Her brother thought they needed to talk about her husband’s death. For a counselor, he had a capacity for complete insensitivity to the desires of others. His hand tapped her shoulder.

  “I am so sorry about Arthur.”

  “Thank you, but—”

  “No, honestly. I’m just . . . it’s not fair.”

  “Yes, it is,” Violet said, more forcefully than she intended. “Arthur had a good life, better than nine-tenths of the people born in this world. He lived well. Not as long as any of us would have liked, but we all die. Everyone dies. It’s what living things ultimately do.”

  The car was quiet. Lolly slipped a hand back to him.

  “I’m just sorry is all,” Jimmy said.

  “Thank you,” Violet said.

  “So,” said Lolly, “which one of your patients do you fancy most?”

  “We call them clients.”

  “Okay, which bloody client then?”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean? I don’t like the ones who are hard to work with, I can tell you that. And I don’t like the ones who are, I don’t know, tacky.”

  “Tacky?” Violet said.

  “Grungy? Not dirty exactly.”

  “Unsavory?” Lolly said.

  “There you go. Just . . . there’s this guy—a complete grown-up agewise, but he jerks off five, ten times a day. They all think it’s this big success that he’ll go into the john now and shut the door. He used to just whip it out. He’s not high on my list, but he’s in the workshop.

  He’s not that bad, I guess, but I can’t say I fancy him.”

  “She asked who you like,” Violet said, “not who you don’t like.”

  “Who’s like a friend?” Lolly said. “Or would be your friend if you weren’t his counselor?”