Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “None of them would be friends.”

  “Who do you look forward to seeing?” Violet said, trying to help.

  “I’m not even supposed to talk about them.”

  “But you always do,” Violet insisted.

  “I don’t know. The higher-functioning ones are more interesting.”

  “What about Mick?” Violet said.

  “How do you know about Mick?”

  Violet explained getting lost. “I expected one of your colleagues, but he was so young. Not that there seemed anything wrong with him.”

  “Adolescent onset of schizophrenia.”

  “A schizophrenic!” Lolly said to Violet. “No fair. You got a schizophrenic.”

  “It’s pretty common in our circles,” Jimmy said, seeming to sober up as he spoke. “We have a lot of high-functioning schizophrenics. Mick was an ordinary kid, and then he wasn’t. He’s sort of in love with another one of the clients, a damaged girl. I’m worried about him.”

  “Isn’t love good for them?” Lolly asked.

  “I can’t talk about it, but he’s a fragile kid.”

  “He didn’t seem fragile,” Violet said. “He was so courteous. He made jokes and he . . . well, he didn’t seem like someone you had to worry about.”

  “We’re always having to believe things that seem unlikely.” He said something more that Violet could not hear, and then he said, “They don’t like to take their meds. Schizophrenics, especially. It permits them to get by in the world, but it steals something from them.”

  “I can understand feeling that way,” Violet said. She surreptitiously touched her face with her fingers to erase the tears. She must be exhausted. She hardly knew Mick Coury. Something had to be wrong with him, so why did this diagnosis bring on tears?

  “There was a basketball player, an all-pro NBA star,” Jimmy said, “and he was great, would tear up the defense, and then after the game he would go in and tear up the locker room. Couldn’t help it. So he’s making, I don’t know, a million dollars an hour, and he’s able to get the best help, the perfect medication, and sure enough he can function without the destructive behavior, but guess what? He’s not quite the same player. In fact, he goes from being all-pro to not quite good enough to play at all.

  “That won’t do. They try changing his dose. Lower it and he can play, but his life’s out of control. Raise it high enough to help, and—you have to keep in mind that those guys in the NBA are all great. The difference between the top and the bottom is a half step here, a second of anticipation there. Raise his meds, and he washes out.”

  “So what happened?” Lolly asked.

  “He’s still playing. Got suspended early on this season for going after a fan who was harassing him.”

  “They don’t give him his medication so he can play a game for them?” Violet said. “That’s obscene.”

  “I’m sure it was his decision. Think about it. Your choices are being a hero athlete and millionaire, or just some guy.”

  “We should have Mick over for dinner,” Lolly said. “He’d like that, wouldn’t he?”

  Jimmy sighed. “There was this one client when I first got here. Smart, high-functioning, lively guy. I liked him, and I didn’t know anybody. He was walking home—he lived independently, an interesting person. Anyway, I gave him a lift. We got to talking and decided to have dinner together later in the week. No big deal, meet at a steakhouse and talk.

  “What do you think happens? He tells everyone that we’re pals, implying I like him more than the others. Which was true. I did like him more, but you can’t have your clients thinking that way. They all became needy as hell—and hungry, like I was supposed to go out with all of them. I canceled the dinner we’d planned and traded him to another counselor. It was a dumb mistake, and I haven’t repeated it.”

  Violet was disconcerted by the story. Shouldn’t he have taken them all out to eat? Didn’t he dismiss this person simply for his own convenience?

  Lolly spoke to Violet to fill the silence. “That Egri character practically guaranteed that James would get the position, that he’ll be the super of the whole place.”

  “He was loaded,” James said. “There are two other finalists. Just announced this morning. Clay Hao is one. He was in the band. The other is this psychologist who got an article published in some important journal. Got her an interview, but no way they’re hiring a psychologist as administrator.”

  Violet said, “Who’s the girl Billy was with?”

  Jimmy grunted something unintelligible.

  “I’ve talked to Billy every day since we arrived, and he hasn’t said a word about her,” Lolly put in. “He’s told me all about the people at his workshop but nothing about this woman. He certainly seemed happy to be with her.”

  “I’ll say,” James said.

  “I can’t recall Billy ever having a girlfriend,” Violet said. “He’s such a lummox with women. I assume he must be less of a lummox otherwise.”

  “He’s always a lummox,” James said, “but it’s worse with women on the scene.”

  “I thought she was cute,” Lolly insisted.

  “If you go for that type,” Jimmy said.

  This struck Violet as a peculiar statement, but Lolly had a different reaction. She crawled over the seat and into the back, her bare foot tapping the side of Violet’s head.

  “I want to kiss you,” Lolly said.

  Violet concentrated on the road and the sky. There was a blanket of stars now in the expanse between Onyx Springs and the coast. They burned millions of miles away, consuming themselves. It was the least she could do to acknowledge their beauty.

  Candler was not surprised to see that Billy had parked the Porsche not in the garage but at the curb. He hadn’t bothered with the cover. The light in Billy’s bedroom was off, and Candler decided against barging in. Instead, he snatched the spare key from the hook in the kitchen.

  No sooner did he start the Porsche than he noticed the purse on the passenger seat—a billfold on a cord. Lise kept her identification and cash in it. This would give her an excuse to call Billy again. Perhaps she even calculated that James would find it and take it to her. He pulled free the driver’s license to look at her face. If he had only the photo to judge by, he would have thought her plain. There was the attractiveness that any fit body carried for the duration of its youth, but the real woman had more, something about the way her body was an expression of who she was, how some aspect of her self animated her body. What did you call that part that shone through and made her face not ordinary but lovely? Her personality? Such a flimsy word, worn down by overuse until it was nothing but a transparency. Her character? Better, if old-fashioned, but what did he know of her character, really? Did he genuinely believe he could intuit her character from the time that they’d spent together? Her soul? That was the word he wanted, all right, except he didn’t believe in souls. Nevertheless, it was the precise word he was looking for. Her soul animated her otherwise ordinary face and made it lovely.

  The clicker for the garage door was on the sun visor, and Candler had shown it to Billy. He wondered why he hadn’t used it. Unless, he thought, as he clicked the device, a complicated feeling seeping into him, unless Billy hadn’t been driving. Billy didn’t handle a stick very well. Candler engaged the ignition, shifted gears, the vehicle moving slowly forward, while his thoughts attempted to back away. Was it possible that Lise was in his house, lying in Billy’s bed, possibly even lying beneath Billy? He dropped the keys twice getting out of the car.

  He found Lolly and his sister in the kitchen making tea. Why would anyone want tea at four in the morning? It seemed to him that he had been in the garage a long time, and he had expected them to be in bed, at least in their pajamas. But here they were in the kitchen, muddling around in their rumpled party dresses.

  “Billy up?” he asked.

  “Someone’s in the loo,”
Lolly replied. “Tea?”

  “I guess.” He leaned against the opening to the hall, which provided a view of the bathroom door.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Lolly said.

  In the moment that followed, Candler felt the guilt and shameful culpability over his affair with Lise that he had managed to skip earlier, and it turned him solid, a statue. He felt like a grotesque figure in an Italian frieze, the single humpbacked, multi mouthed creature lingering among the innocents. How could they fail to recognize his misshapen, monstrous self?

  “You can wait till the morning to tell him he’s supposed to leave your precious car in the garage and not out in the elements.” She laughed. To Violet, she said, “Men are so predictable.”

  Candler felt the terrible urge to laugh with her. He held it back, his face coloring and seeming to collapse inward. What had he done? What had he been thinking? Any moment now, the curtain would pull back and they would see him for what he was. The bathroom door opened and a woman stepped out. She wore one of Billy’s shirts. Her legs were bare. There was water on the bathroom floor. She eyed him steadily. Lise. His Lise. Her eyes had no color in the dim hall, only depth, and such depth, one could build a fortress with that kind of space.

  Lolly and Violet turned at the sound of the door, but only James could see her walk down the hall, her white thighs, bare feet. She disappeared into Billy’s room.

  “See if he wants tea,” Violet said to James.

  “It wasn’t him,” he said softly.

  Violet and Lolly exchanged a look. They poked their heads through the door, but she was gone.

  “Good for Billy,” Lolly said.

  “Oh,” said Violet, pointing. “The commode’s misbehaving again.”

  James nodded, his throat too tightly constricted to permit a reply.

  Lise had told herself that the best thing was to let him go. Instead, she got hold of Billy Atlas. She went to the dance party and saw that the flesh-and-blood fiancée was much like her photograph. She reminded Lise of a stripper who had called herself Minx and dressed in short plaid skirts and regular white cotton panties—never the frills or thongs the other girls wore. My, how thrilled the johns were when those panties came off! As if, even in a strip club, they could not see through the charade. How could she hope for James to imagine that his sweet girl from London who called herself Lolly, like the sucker, was anything but as advertised?

  She had lain beside Billy Atlas listening for the others to arrive. “No sex,” she had told him. “We can lie together. Snooze together. That’s it.” He agreed readily. Maybe he was even relieved, which might have made him seem pathetic if he hadn’t said, “As long as we can cuddle.” It was a line that on some other night, in some other house, might have won her over. She was hardly a prude, after all, and far from a virgin. But when she and James made love that first time, she was no longer a former prostitute, she had never been one.

  When she heard the car park at the curb, she slipped into the bathroom and waited until she was sure that James would be out there, that he would know and be in the hall looking for her. She flushed the toilet and ran water in the sink, as if to wash her hands. The toilet leaked at its base. No handyman, that one, she thought, as she pushed open the door and stepped into the dim hall to let him see her.

  What she was doing now she didn’t know or couldn’t bring herself to say. It was no longer merely a pastime. She recalled again the night she first drove to the Corners, coasting soundlessly by this very house—a house designed to look both southwestern and ostentatious, the stucco painted a light shade of sand, as if to pass for adobe, but no one would actually mistake it for adobe, the walls too perpendicular, the corners too sharp, the bloated garage too incongruous, the color too pale—an off-white shade that one clothing manufacturer called tusk.

  She had eaten that night in a Corners diner, thinking about the awful house—not that it affected her opinion of Candler. Rather she was trying to think if there was a term for the way the builder had cast a nod at traditional southwestern construction without trying to pass it off as genuine. The house did not look southwestern but it indicated southwestern style. Television comedies were like that, she thought, not actually funny but indicative of humor. She paid her bill and motored by the house again. There was a light in the front room now. He was in there, just across a stretch of recently mowed grass. She could follow the red paving stones to his door.

  Instead, she had a drink in a Corners bar, maraschino cherries bleeding exuberantly into her drink, before heading down his street once more, passing slowly, treading water, stars appearing in her windshield as well as in her chest, stars of apprehension, anticipation, trepidation, and glee.

  So many things had happened since that night, but not the right things, or not enough of the right things. She was here in the ugly house but in the wrong bed. Be careful what you wish for. She propped her head up to stare at the man sleeping beside her. He was sweet. He was kind. He wasn’t handsome, but he was okay. Those people in the basement smoking pot thought the world of him. She could choose him, and he would marry her. He would be thrilled to spend the rest of his life with her. He would never stray into another woman’s arms. He would love her as she had never been loved. She touched his hair, which was stiff with dried sweat. James Candler was a better dancer than Billy but less likely to be a faithful husband. His relationship with her was proof of that. James was quicker and more handsome, but he was not as naturally kind and he would never be as devoted. The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way. She lowered her head carefully and lightly kissed Billy’s forehead, his salty skin. A perfectly fine man, she thought, and not at all for me.

  Karly could not find the remote and got up to turn off the television. The windows in the room were like water you shouldn’t drink, which meant it was morning almost. Something was wrong with the phone, which she held to her ear. It didn’t even make the bong sound, and she couldn’t call anyone, not her mother, not her sister, not even Mr. Billy Atlas, who said to call him plain Billy, and he wrote down his phone number on square pieces of paper and gave each person in the workshop a square. He had slipped her square in the ID folder that she wore on a chain around her neck. “So you’ll always have it with you,” he said. Now she always had it with her.

  She stepped carefully around the clutter on the floor and made her way to the bedroom. Beetle Man wasn’t coming back. She could tell by how dirty the place was. Did she ever go get the wheelbarrow? It belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hoeksema who lived next door and liked to swim in their swimming pool without any clothes, which Karly didn’t do even when Mr. Hoeksema said it was okay, he would go inside. Her mom said when in doubt keep your clothes on. She had her clothes on now. Her pants didn’t smell very good, and the sweater was hot until she turned up the a.c., which she did by turning the number down. Down was up. That was so funny.

  She smiled and went into the bathroom, which was on the way to the bedroom, to look at her smile in the mirror over the bathroom sink. She looked just like she thought she would look. That was what people liked about her, how she looked. And it was the same. Why wasn’t Beetle Man coming back? What he said and what he meant by what he said were different, like that game he couldn’t teach her, where she was not supposed to say a whole list of words to make him guess a word like Oz, and she couldn’t say wizard or Toto or Dorothy or good witch or tin man, and what in the world was left while sand was running out of the little tipper? “You could’ve said, ‘Not in Kansas no more,’ ” he told her, “or whatever, it don’t matter. Do another one.” This time he didn’t even turn over the sand tipper, and the card said rain check and it took a long while for her to say, “Put your hand out the window,” and then they both played solitaire and now he wasn’t coming back.

  Her desktop computer was still making light on her desk by her bed. It was supposed to screensave, but som
etimes it didn’t screensave. Her screensaver was jungle animals. Her favorite jungle animal was the meerkat like in Lion King and also in the San Diego Zoo, where she had seen all the jungle animals on her screensaver. It wasn’t Beetle Man who took her to the zoo, but her mom and sister when they visited last time. She missed her mom and sister, and her father, who was dead and used to tell stories to her when it was bedtime about all the mountains he would cross to be with her. They were hard mountains, but he always made it.

  Earlier that night, on the internet, she had taken the If you were a Muppet what Muppet would you be? quiz, and she was Elmo, which was the best one to be unless you were Kermit or Big Bird. Before that, she took the Friendly Clouds–Unfriendly Clouds personality test and scored 80 percent, which was good and promised fair skies, and she did the Do Aquarians Have More Fun? and it said that she did have more fun. Her ranch on Saturn was growing corn as tall as tall buildings, and as soon as they sprouted corn on the cob there were only two more levels before she was an honorary Saturn citizen, which would give her a golden hoe for her satchel. She used to wear a golden ring on her finger so people would think she was married, but it was plastic and the golden wore off. She was so tired, so very tired, but sleepy was different from tired, and the house was scaring her by having no one else in it for so many days now and getting so dark.

  She clicked the computer screen button to make it go off. She pulled her ID folder necklace over her head and changed into her pajamas. Not the pajamas that Beetle Man gave her because they were uncomfortable on her bottom, but the ones that her sister gave her that had Josie and the Pussycats playing guitars. Beetle Man said her life was too complicated for him anymore and he didn’t like men coming over to hit him, which she had thought he was making a joke. Jokes were hard to get, but she liked them. His joke was about her life. That was what he said, her complicated life. What was funny about her life? She didn’t like being alone in her house all the time, which wasn’t so very funny.