Talk of the Town

by Mary Kay McComas

  Well, she'd suffer through it tonight, she decided, her heart laughing deliriously. She couldn't remember being happier. She poked her chest out and walked a little taller, a whole millimeter taller. It was this vertical enhancement that enabled her to spot Gary as he stood talking to two gentlemen and a striking woman in a dress as black as her hair.

  They appeared to be deep in discussion, and she hesitated, wondering if she should intrude or not. She still hadn't found Earl, and Justin was waiting for her. She could catch up with Gary later.

  ". . . a garbageman," she heard a woman's voice saying, somewhere to her right. It was like a television commercial for E.F. Hutton, when everything seemed to stand still and the only sound in the huge ballroom was the woman's voice. "He doesn't look like my garbageman," she said.

  "Are you sure?" her friend asked. "Since when can garbagemen afford to attend charity balls?"

  "Well, he's just a garbageman. He owns a recycling center and has several other financial interests, but he told Stan that his primary concerns were in everyday garbage."

  "You're kidding."

  "No. Stan said he was fascinating to listen to. Depressing but interesting and very amusing. Stan liked him. He gave the man his card and wants to invest in some new project he's been talking about."

  Rose had heard enough. Her anger swelled to explosion level. She was hurt and ashamed and mortified, too, but all she could feel at the moment was the outrage.

  Without looking more than a foot in front of her feet, she approached him.

  "Ah, there you are," he said, his familiar voice warm with pleasure. "I was beginning to think that I'd lost you for the rest of the evening. Rose, I'd like you to meet Councilman Yarrell and his wife, Judith. And State Representative Paul McManaway."

  "How do you do. Hello," she said, shaking hands but unable to look them in the eye.

  "I was just trying to convince Bob here to—"

  "Excuse me. I'm sorry," she broke in, weak voiced, trembling with indignation. "But I'd like to leave now. Please."

  With a quick glance she could see the concern on their faces and heard it in Gary's voice.

  "What's wrong? Are you ill?"

  "Yes."

  "Has something happened?"

  "No, no."

  "Are you sure?" he asked, sensing the end of his world and not knowing why or what had happened. Fear sank in bone deep, and he felt half sick to his stomach.

  "I'm so sorry," she said again to the most-official people she'd ever been close enough to spit on.

  While the three of them murmured their understanding and sympathy to Rose, Gary was shaking hands and promising to get in touch with them soon. She didn't move until she felt his hand at her back, and then it was if he'd flipped her switch and she all but ran to the exit.

  "Wait a second. Will you slow down?" He kept trying to take her arm and she kept shaking him off. "Rose. Hold on. What's happened?"

  She was slinking past people without seeing them and without touching them, like a black snake in a water maze. Her goal: to get out the end and disappear.

  "Rose," he said, taking a tight grip on her arm to slow her down. "Is it Earl? Has something happened? Or Harley? Is he all right?"

  She growled and tried to pull away to the anteroom a few short feet away, but he wasn't letting go.

  "Talk to me," he said, his tone demanding as he turned her to him and locked his left hand around her right arm.

  "No. Not here."

  Clearly she wasn't ill, but furious with him. He was so surprised, his hold slipped and she got away. He caught her again in the anteroom between an ancient bronze sacrificial wine holder from China, early Chon period, and a painted steel project by Robert Smithson —some other damn period.

  "Yes. Right here, right now," he said. "I want to know what's happened. Why are you so angry?"

  She stared at him for a moment, then glanced around to find only two other people in the room. She kept her voice low, but her emotions made it hiss.

  "I can't believe you'd do this to me."

  "What?"

  "Buy those tickets and get me to come and make it seem like something special, and all you really wanted to do is meet rich people and get their backing for your stupid furnace."

  "That's not true," he said, looking bewildered. "I did send the tickets, that's true. And I did want it to be special, but the rest—"

  "I trusted you. I thought you knew how important this was to me. I worried about Harley and Earl, but it never once occurred to me that you would deliberately do something like this."

  "What? What have I done?"

  "Why?" she asked, forgetting to keep her voice down.

  "Why what?" He was at the end of his wits and his voice rose as well, drawing unnoticed stares from the ballroom. "You're going to have to calm down and tell me what I've done. I don't know why I'm defending myself."

  "You wouldn't. You have no pride. No, you have too much pride. That's what it is. But you should know by now that the world doesn't begin and end in garbage dumps."

  His eyes narrowed for a moment as if he were trying to decode a secret message from an alien planet. Then, suddenly, awareness dawned in his expression. He released her and stepped away as if she'd turned slimy in his hands.

  "Is that what all this is about?" he asked, overwhelmed with shock and a terrible squeezing ache in his chest. "What I do? The recycling center? The landfills? The incinerator? I wasn't supposed to talk to anyone about them tonight, was I? I wasn't supposed to tell anyone what I do for a living. If they asked, I was supposed to make something up. Lie. But I sure as hell wasn't supposed to tell anyone I was a garbageman, was I, Rose?"

  "You could have told them you were something else, yes. It's not as if you hang off the back of a truck. You could have said—"

  "Oh, but I do hang off the back of the tracks sometimes. Remember? I told you that the first day we met. You knew who you were getting involved with. I never lied to you. I told you I was a garbageman, and that's exactly what I am. And damned proud of it."

  "You've made that very clear. Telling a state representative ..."

  "And you've made it very clear that you're ashamed of it." His words vibrated off the walls, sending back waves of hurt and disappointment. Anger too. "Well, I'll tell you something, Miss Rosemary Wickum. I don't have a thing in the world to be ashamed of. I don't have to go to fancy parties to pretend to be something I'm not, and I don't have to let pompous pinheads dictate what I do or build things I hate. I am who I am. I won't apologize or pretend otherwise. I'm not like you, Rose."

  If she were still fighting mad, she might have asked what he meant by that last remark. But she wasn't angry anymore. She was thinking more clearly, and she knew what he meant.

  "As for telling McManaway who I was and what I do, I didn't have to," he said, his voice cold and calm now. "I'm on his subcommittee for urban renewal and refom. Yarrell is working with the Planning Commission to get my incinerator approved. And in case you hadn't noticed, neither one of them was embarrassed to be seen talking to a garbageman tonight."

  "Gary, I—" By the time she thought to beg his forgiveness for being shallow and stupid and selfish, he'd stepped around the last of the sculptures and disappeared.

  She wasn't sure how long she stood there, wishing the last few minutes away, before the music seeped into her consciousness. The Patrons' Ball. She looked up. Too many accusing eyes stared back at her. She felt like Cinderella at 12:01. Her true identity exposed. Her dress tattered and torn. With no glass slippers to prove the miracle had ever happened. No Prince Charming to love her or come to her rescue. No fairy godmother to give her a second chance.

  An incorrect analogy, really. She couldn't be Cinderella. Cinderella was good and sweet and kind. Rose was an ugly stepsister, hateful and mean, pretending to be Cinderella. Always pretending to be someone she wasn't.

  Pretending not to care, when she did. Striving to look perfect, when she wasn't. Sacrificing her life to avoid
gossip. Wasting a year and a half welding sculptures she hated to please other people. She was a great pretender, and not much more.

  One would have hoped that seeing Harley and Earl in the gathering at the ballroom doors would be a relief. It wasn't. They walked toward her with mixed expressions of sadness, disappointment, regret, disapproval, and confusion. Harley tried to smile, he really did, but he couldn't quite manage it. He didn't understand, couldn't imagine why Rose would want to hurt Gary the way she had. He'd wanted Gary to stick around awhile.

  Earl, on the other hand, looked resigned. He looked tired. Weary and reconciled to picking up the tiny pieces of her life once again. By the time he reached her, her gaze was locked firmly to the floor, where her hopes and dreams lay drained and desolate. She was prepared for his silent censure, assuming he'd simply take her arm and lead her away. The light touch of his fingers beneath her chin was a surprise then, and she looked at him.

  "When you were young, you ran away from it. Then you came back and hid from it. And now you're trying to destroy it. You only get one chance, you know. So before you waste your only shot at this life, you'd better figure out what it is you're aimin' at," he said, then he slipped an arm about her shoulders, turned her, and led her away from the ball.

  ELEVEN

  The two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Redgrove the next day was difficult, to say the least. The strain between the passengers in the long black limousine was brittle and fragile. Gary's generous nature and the prepaid bills on the hotel suite and the limo contrasted like diamonds in a coal mine to Rose's egotistical, self-indulgent, and hypocritical behavior of the night before. No one spoke and they all found a window to stare out off, fearing that the slightest unguarded glance could disrupt the delicate balance of guilt, love, reproach, support, frustration, and crushing loss between them.

  There had been a message waiting when they returned to their rooms, from Lu of all people, insisting that Rose make time to browse the Cannery—a building once owned by Del Monte, now converted into shops and restaurants—before she left San Francisco. Most important.

  Not much of a shopper in the first place, Rose dismissed the suggestion immediately. Shopping and chocolate and long-distance running—or any of the other coping mechanisms other people used—had never worked for Rose. Alcohol was the traditional escape she was most familiar with, and she had been tempted.

  She didn't sleep in the huge bed she'd planned to share with Gary that night. She'd cried some, but she couldn't sleep. She'd cried, not because he was angry with her, but because she'd hurt him. She'd cried, not because she was alone again, but because of the person she was alone with, the person she'd let herself become.

  Who was she? When had she become so unthinking and cruel? Having felt looked down upon through most of her life, how could she belittle someone else? Having felt unloved, how could she forsake Gary's kindness and care for false preconceptions and narrow-minded intolerance? If she loved him—and the soul-crushing misery she was feeling actually confirmed that she did—how could she have treated him so badly? If she'd ever felt shame before, it was nothing to the self-loathing she felt now.

  The old gas station seemed to be located at the farthest end of the world by the time they got home. Small. Shabby. Off the driven path. A nowhere place that she called home. She wandered restlessly through the garage, eyeing the near-finished but incomplete sculptures that stood in the shadows as the afternoon light began to fade in the windows.

  Who was she? she wondered again. Small, shabby, frightened Rose. Living in a hole beside the ocean where no one would find her. Rigidly walking the lines down life's highway to avoid being noticed; to escape the pain of feeling too much; to evade other people's opinions and prejudices.

  She was a void, she thought, running her hands across the cool, lifeless steel without feeling it. A good word: void. She had depicted more of herself in these pieces than she realized. They were very much like her. She was a form that occupied space. She had very little spirit, no meaning. Even the motivation for their creation was bogus, and therefore they had no real purpose. If they had a function at all, it was for profit and recognition. Trifling ambitions. Very superficial. They were as empty as she was, just as insincere and just as contrived.

  If true art is an extension of the artist's soul, she was one hell of a craftsman.

  There was an almost-knock on the office door, a sort of on-the-way-through rapping on the glass as the door opened and Lu blew in.

  "Rose?" she called, starting up the stairs, stopping midway when she answered from below. "What are you doing here?"

  "I live here."

  "No, I mean, so soon. I just got back myself, and I wasn't at a ball last night. I had one, but I wasn't at one," she said, laughing at her own joke. "Tell me all about it. How was it? Give me every detail." She stopped. "What's wrong?"

  "Me. Everything." As much as she needed someone to hold and comfort her, force of habit had her turning away to hide the extent of her pain. "Me, mostly."

  "Why? What happened?"

  "I don't know. Well, I do know, but I don't know how to explain it. . . . Actually, I can explain it, but I can't believe I did it."

  "So, are you going to tell me what this thing that you know and can explain but don't believe is?"

  Rose turned to face her, shaking her head, tears spilling onto her cheeks. "It's too awful. You won't want to know me anymore."

  "Tell me anyway."

  She lowered her gaze to the concrete floor. She walked slowly to the work table, seeing nothing. She picked up an old glove with a hole in the index finger and began to tell the story.

  "And you haven't heard from him?" Lu asked when the tale was told and Rose was down to sniffing and wiping her eyes on her shirttail. "Well, it's only been a day. He's probably pretty mad still."

  "I don't expect to ever hear from him again." Fresh tears pooled in her eyes. "Of all the people in the world to be mean and nasty to, why'd I have to pick on him?"

  "Did you get my message about the Cannery?" she asked, offering no sympathy.

  "Yes."

  "I bet you didn't even go over and browse like I told you."

  Rose scowled at her. "I was a little busy ruining my life at the time. I couldn't exactly take time out to go shopping, now could I?"

  "I said browse. I didn't say anything about shopping. here is a difference, you know. And now you'll just have to go back and do it."

  "Some other time, all right?" she said, getting testy. For crying out loud. Shopping and browsing were the last things she wanted to do. She hated to shop, browsing was worse, and Lu knew it. Couldn't she see that Rose would rather be slitting her throat than browsing?

  "Nope. Gotta go now," she said, ignoring the thorny inflection in Rose's voice. "You can use my car if you don't think your heap’ll make it."

  "Lu. I'm not going back to San Francisco tonight. Or any other time in the foreseeable future for that matter. I—"

  "Yes you are."

  "No. I am not." Now she was angry. "What is the matter with you? Can't you see I'm hurting here? My life—"

  "You're hurting? Your life? See, that's the thing with people like us, Rose, it's always our pain. Our shame. Our life that's going down the tubes. We're so used to being hurt that after a while that's all we ever see. But think about it this time. Who hurt you this time?" She paused. "Gary? Or did you hurt yourself by hurting him?"

  Her eyes narrowed in thought. "Yes. The second one. I hurt me by hurting him."

  "So, technically, you're not really hurt. You just feel bad because you did something stupid. Right?"

  "I guess." But miserable was miserable, wasn't it? No matter how you got there?

  "Okay. Think it all the way through now. Are you going to do what we usually do by locking yourself up with this imagined pain that's really just guilt for doing something you shouldn't have? Or are you going to do something about it? Are you going to close out the world again, spend your life alone or with a new
man in your bed every night? Or are you going to break out of the pattern and go after the man you want?"

  Rose wasn't missing the references Lu was making to her own life. She'd always suspected her past hadn't been pleasant, but she'd never thought to draw any comparisons between the two of them until now. In a way she supposed they were opposite ends of the same stick Lu protected herself by dating one malleable young man after another until she was bored with them, never forming an attachment, and Rose survived by pushing everyone away from her to sustain her aloneness.

  "Even if I wanted to break this . . . pattern you're talking about, what makes you think that Gary'll come back?"

  "I don't think that. If I were Gary, I wouldn't have anything to do with you." She stopped to watch the hope drain from Rose's face. "But then again, I'm not Gary, am I? I can't say I'm sorry and I never learned to forgive—which is why I avoid situations where one or both might become necessary. I find it much easier to simply say good-bye."

  Rose's heart went out to her, and to herself. Lu deserved a better life—and so did she.

  How was it that Lu knew herself so well and yet hadn't tried to change? Was her pain so deep? Did she enjoy living alone with it? Rose looked at the rest of her life and found it long and bleak and lonely.

  "I don't know what to do, Lu."

  "Say you're sorry."

  "That's it? Just—"

  "No, no. Say it. Now. Out loud. Over and over. Practice it. Get used to saying it and to hearing it said out loud. It's not that easy. No one ever told us they were sorry, did they?" Rose glanced away and shook her head. "And we were always the ones getting hurt, so we've never had to say it, right? Well, you hurt yourself this time, and the only way you'll ever feel better about it is to make Gary feel better about it. You have to do whatever it takes to get him to forgive you. Now say it."

  "What if he doesn't forgive me?"

  "Then he doesn't. But you tried, and that's the first step to forgiving yourself. Say it."

  "Lu?" she said, a nagging question filling her mouth so that to breathe, she had to spit it out. "If you knew this . . . about us ... all along, why haven't you—?"