Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “Nice to have that cleared up,” Jules Rules said.

  I imagined him staring at the shower floor, water streaming off his penis.

  “I like discussing heart disease, but I think I come across as rather a boor with my future in-laws,” said Phillip. “They don’t mind hearing psychobabble all day long, but when the conversation turns to real medicine, their eyes glaze over.”

  Psychobabble? Was that what he thought of Milly’s profession?

  “And you?” asked Philip. “What do you do?”

  Ah! Maybe he was complaining about his future in-laws to make Jules Rules incriminate himself. My own potential myocardial infarction eased up.

  “As you can see, this problem with my neck has kept me from doing much of anything recently, but I was a dentist. All that constant bending and looking into people’s mouths helped give me this wretched condition.”

  A dentist! I nearly leapt around the parapet.

  “Ah, a fellow medical man,” said Philip. “Sorry to go on about thrombosis. Did your doctors not give you hope in their prognosis?”

  Right then I heard the showers go off, so I sprinted out of the locker room and down the padded hallway toward the track without having heard Jules’s answer. What if he was a dentist? What proof did I have that Jules wasn’t truthful and Millicent lying, calling him a geologist in order to say that he’d been to Nigeria and therefore keep on going to his house?

  At first, I didn’t think anyone was on the track, but then I saw Milly, running along with an ease I’d always envied. Had I not been quite so flummoxed, I might have waited for her to come around, but no, I had to take off sprinting in order to catch her. Milly heard me galumphing up behind her and stiffened, until I asked, “How do you tell a dentist from a geologist?”

  “One puts metal in your mouth and the other takes it out of the ground? You don’t have better things to do with your retirement years than make up silly riddles, Dad?”

  “Retirement isn’t the word for it. You know very well I was forced out.”

  She slowed to a walk, as pretty as Millicent had been on the day I met her in London.

  “You put your years in,” she said.

  “I don’t think your mother sees it that way. I’ve been a disappointment to her, Mills. I was the spy in the family, but she spies something rotten in me now.”

  I knew Milly wouldn’t say “That’s not true” simply as a platitude, so I waited. We were alone on the track, drifting from lane to lane.

  “Now listen to me, Dad,” she finally said. “Do you remember how Mom was when we were on that boat? Happy and busy, getting to know Philip and sitting beside me on the deck while the sun went down?”

  “Of course I remember; it was only last week. What are you saying, we should always be taking boat trips?”

  It was terrible, but images of water flowing off of Jules Rules’s penis would not leave me alone. I imagined him standing on those paint stains he’d made on his roof, peeing off of it onto my head.

  “It isn’t boat trips; it’s the idea of breaking the tedium,” Milly said. “I think what Mom would like to do is go back to school. Finish what she started.”

  “Tedium?” I said. “Did your mother use that word?”

  “Now, now,” said Milly. “I’m not telling tales on Mom.”

  When I met Millicent, she was a budding social anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who attended a concert by the American folksinger, Malvina Reynolds, which I attended, too, in order to scope out the dissidents. We sang “Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky” until the pub we’d wandered into after the concert closed. And now, all these decades later, what was our house made of that she would want to date a man who could look only down?

  “She can go back to school if she wants to,” I said. “The University of Washington is downtown, and there’s the University of Puget Sound.”

  “That’s what I told her,” said Milly.

  We had come to a couple of benches, had sat on one of them, when Philip appeared, hair all blow-dried by one of those abominable hand-dryer things.

  “Philip …” said Milly, as in “Philip, don’t say anything,” but Philip’s one true connection to me was that he read Milly’s signals as badly as I did Millicent’s.

  “I’ve got to have my bicuspids fixed,” he said. “I knew there was something wrong and he’s just verified it.”

  “Having mastication trouble, eh?” I said, while Milly called him obtuse.

  One night while anchored off Point No Point on the boat, we’d had a lighthearted argument about whether or not cardiologists were the most distant of doctors. Obtuse didn’t exactly mean distant, but Philip looked at Milly as if remembering that argument.

  “Philip’s an idiot, Dad,” she said, “but if you want to know why Mom made up this geologist thing, I suggest you go home and ask her.”

  Oh God, she really had made it up.

  “What time is it?” I said. “She’s got her dinner date.”

  Milly looked at her wrist, though she didn’t wear a watch. She put an arm around my shoulder. “It’s a freckle past a hair,” she said. “Chin up, Dad.”

  In fact, it was a freckle past six-thirty, and Millicent’s date was set for seven. We could speed home, getting there before she left, but Philip suggested we stop for dinner ourselves, and that I talk to Millicent after her date. He held one of Milly’s arms as we left the gym while Milly’s other arm took mine, which I didn’t consider to be a very good omen.

  Jules Rules, I couldn’t help thinking, must have rushed home after his shower.

  WE DECIDED TO EAT AT THE HARBOR LIGHTS, down on Tacoma’s Old Town waterfront. We’d putted past the Harbor Lights at the end of our boat trip the week before, to watch the diners, so I thought we ought to look at any boats that might come by tonight, as if we were looking at ourselves. Philip said the meal was on him, in thanks for the hospitality afforded him by Millicent and me during his visit, though Millicent was just then sitting down to eat with someone else. In my old spy world, people were always pretending to be what they weren’t: geologists, bankers, businessmen, economists … But not doctors or dentists, since good advice on bicuspid maladjustments was a lot more difficult to fake.

  We ordered vodka martinis and Milly selected an expensive bottle of wine.

  “This all started so idiotically,” I said. “But now it seems as serious as a myocardial infarction.”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Philip. “But there’s no doubt at all that he’s a dentist. He had some terribly vivid pyorrhea descriptions when we were getting dressed.”

  If Millicent had been with us, she’d have ordered salmon, so that’s what I ordered, while Milly asked for lingcod and Philip ordered steak. A couple of boats came by, moon faces staring in at us. When our martinis arrived, one of the moon faces gave us the thumbs-up.

  “The trouble is that over the years a lot of things have started out idiotically, Dad,” said Milly. “You’re a regular Larry David when it comes to absurd situations. But with you, far too often, the comedy is missing. And Mom did say on the boat that she’s tired of it, that she thinks she might like to try living alone for a while.”

  She cast a hand toward the dying sunlight, tipping the rippling waves. The glass my heart was made of broke like it had been stepped on by a passing Jewish groom. “She did, Milly?” I asked. “Your mom said that?”

  “Milly, when we get married, what do you say we try to make a happy life?” said Philip.

  Milly took a sip of her martini. In the spy world, we sometimes played good cop/bad cop with informants, and I got the idea that Milly and Philip might be playing those roles now, with me.

  “But if she wants to live alone, what’s she doing at Jules Rules’s house? What kind of living alone is that?”

  “Shh, Dad,” said Milly. “We’re in a restaurant.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d been shouting until she said that.

  My martini was gone, so when our wai
ter brought us bread, I ordered another.

  “For what it’s worth, I think this is a test,” said Philip. “By that I mean she has no real interest in the man but wants to see what it’s like to eat and talk with someone else. I’d guess she’s more interested in taking her own pulse when she’s out and about than in whomever she’s out and about with.”

  Milly reached over and took Philip’s hand. “That’s smart, Philip Pirrip,” she said, and Philip smiled.

  I had thought “Philip Pirrip” was strictly between Millicent and me.

  My second martini came with the bottle of wine, our food right behind it. My salmon sat on the small cedar plank it had been cooked on. Millicent liked to call the current trends in food presentation “cuiscenery.” Whom would she say cuiscenery to if she lived by herself?

  “Okay, I admit to a small imbalance,” I said. “But tell me truly, Milly, is this all meant to scare me, or is it serious?”

  Milly had a mouthful of lingcod, while a hunk of Philip’s steak inched its way toward his face on the tines of his fork. The fork stopped in midair, while Milly’s lingcod slid down her throat like it had found a secret passage back to Puget Sound. That a dead cod could rise again, that was about as hopeful as I felt.

  “It isn’t only your current craziness; it’s years and years of it. Of course it’s serious, Dad. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you!”

  “Think of it as a plaque buildup,” said Philip.

  “You two should put your wedding off until Millicent and I get squared away,” I said, but Milly didn’t hear me.

  “Why does everything have to be so difficult?” she asked. “Why couldn’t you have tried to look at things like a normal person?”

  I noted Milly’s past-perfect tense.

  My second martini had a couple of extra olives in it, which I transferred to Milly’s glass. It wasn’t Milly who liked olives, though, but Millicent. “Should I go over there now?” I asked, “barge in and claim my wife?”

  “He lives in a house, not a cave,” said Milly. “And 007 you aren’t.”

  “Maybe not,” said Philip, “but he did have two vodka martinis.”

  Two vodka martinis and half a bottle of wine, since Philip didn’t drink.

  MILLY WANTED ME TO LEAVE MY CAR at Harbor Lights, but I promised I’d drive straight home and they could follow. Philip wasn’t used to American driving, though, so it was easy for me to lose them, wending my way up the Thirtieth Street hill, then dodging into a side street, back toward our house, and up the alphabet streets to Jules Rules’s place, which had lights on in its dining room, and Millicent’s ancient Volvo out in front. It wasn’t much of a house for a dentist to live in. Maybe Bean’s facedown syndrome had caused such havoc in his life that he’d had to give up dentistry early. Maybe he’d moved from a better place in order to pay his medical bills.

  I parked across the street, then sprinted over to hide behind a rhododendron, in order to get my bearings. Thirty years of marriage, with six brief moments when something got hold of me to make me crazy. Six moments! Or eight, at the most. And some of them were funny, like the time I challenged the Russian spies to a hot dog–eating contest, and they showed up wearing Lenin masks. That wasn’t funny? I beg your pardon! If you take the humor out of spying, all you have left are reams and reams of unreadable reports.

  But was this what I had been reduced to, climbing up a ladder to peer in someone’s window in search of my wife? It was true I hadn’t climbed the ladder yet, but an unclimbed ladder is the inanimate manifestation of an unexamined life, so three rungs up I went, until my eyes were level with his dining room table, his gauzy curtain like the cataracts that Milly suggested covered my eyes. “Oh, Millicent, do you remember the little boxes made of ticky-tacky?” I cried.

  Millicent was facing me, Jules in the chair nearest the window, so all I got to see of him was his back. It looked exactly as if Millicent were eating dinner with a headless man. I leaned in closer, to try to get her attention, my nose against the glass. While I sang the beginning of the ticky-tacky song, Millicent’s face flattened out, not as if she heard it coming from me, but as if she heard it coming from within herself. She pushed her chair back and stood. I had promised her a ticky-tacky-free life on the evening we met. “Oh, you can’t eat hot dogs through a Lenin mask, even of the slyest agent that’s too much to ask …” were the lyrics we used to sing to Milly.

  Millicent walked across the room, picked up her sweater from the couch, and turned to face Jules Rules, who had stood, too, the top of his head out toward her. She could have drawn a smiling face upon it.

  “Good luck, Jules,” I wanted Millicent to say. What I didn’t want her to say was, “Good-bye, Jonathan.”

  It wouldn’t be good for me to be there when she came outside, so I sprinted back to my car, the vodka martinis and the half bottle of wine sloshing around inside of me to the tune of “Oh, You Can’t Eat Hot Dogs Through a Lenin Mask.” I changed the words as I drove away from Jules’s house, headlights still off, like a spy in an old Aston Martin. “Oh, you can’t eat hot dogs … Oh, you can’t … Oh, you can’t leave me, Millicent. What would I do without you? What would I do with the rest of my life?”

  But it didn’t work; it didn’t sound good that way. I wasn’t the songwriter in the family; I was the spy, and six times the troublemaker. Or eight, at most. I saw Jules Rules on his porch in my rearview mirror, looking down at his doormat as if Millicent’s departure would ruin him, too.

  A police car came out of a side street, so I turned on my lights, but it was too late. The policeman growled his siren at me and pulled me over. I looked down at my crotch, ready to explain that I’d just had an attack of a long-troubling, terribly debilitating condition, which had accosted me just as I reached for my light switch. Bean’s facedown syndrome.

  If he bought it, I’d say, “Please, Officer, can you take me to the hospital?” From there, I’d call Millicent, ready with the medical evidence necessary to prove that, for all these many years of our married life together, the man who had really looked at the floor was me.

  The Day of the Reckoning of Names

  [1960]

  IT ALL STARTED ON THE AFTERNOON of my grandmother’s funeral. There are these caves down the beach from our house, tucked in among the trees and poison oak, and when Dad and I got home from the funeral and Dad decided to go for a run, I changed into these ridiculous Hawaiian swimming trunks I’ve got and went down to the caves. The tide was high, giving me only about six feet of beach to walk on, and the bay was still churning from a storm we’d had that morning. When I got there, I climbed the bank and sat at the entrance to the nearest cave in order to decide what to do with a three-ring binder that I’d shoved down the front of my swim trunks just before I left the house. It had my grandma’s diary in it, her memoir, I guess you’d called it, which no one else knew about, and which, for some damned reason, she gave to me the day before she died.

  Here are the facts about my grandmother. Her name was Flora Magnolia Marigold Lilly, with Lilly being our last name. She was born in 1867 and died right now, in 1960, at the ripe old age of ninety-three. “Ripe old age” is how her minister put it in his pathetic eulogy. What got me was that he came out of retirement to say it, at the ripe old age of about one hundred and fifty himself.

  The binder had belonged to my dad when he was in high school and was covered with scribbles that mostly said “Loretta sucks hind tit!”

  I had just started thinking about what to do with the binder when down on the beach, hopping from boulder to boulder, came this kid I know named Perry White, with rocks in his hands and a slingshot in his pocket. He was a lousy sort of kid most of the time, but the most amazing shot with a rock in all of Brown’s Point, in all of Tacoma, probably. So I had a choice to make before I could decide about the binder, because Perry knew the caves as well as I did and might be coming here to smoke and look at dirty pictures. The choice was this: Should I call to him or stay quiet and hop
e he’d go away? It was important because if he saw me and I hadn’t called him, he might start slinging rocks.

  Perry stopped below me to shoot a couple of the very rocks I was worried about at this metal buoy out in the bay. Ping! Ping! said the buoy. Two rocks, two hits, like always.

  “Heeeeyyy, Perry!” I hissed, or not exactly hissed, but brayed, in what I thought of as a good imitation of a goat’s voice. Our next-door neighbors used to have a goat in their backyard. Perry was in love with one of their daughters.

  “What the hell?” he said, and I said, “Up here” in my regular voice.

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah. Just got back from my grandma’s funeral.”

  “My condolences,” said Perry.

  I was surprised he knew the word but kept my mouth shut. He was wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt, his uniform for as long as I could remember. He ran up the bank and fell down beside me.

  “How old was she,” he asked, “hunnert, hunnert’n one?”

  “Ninety-three. We buried her next to her husband, who’s been dead since 1945 himself.”

  “Nineteen forty-five …” Perry said it like it was the Jurassic Age, though it was the year we both were born in.

  “Wanta know how he got killed?” I asked. “He was a preacher, my grandpa, with the actual name of Tiger Lilly.”

  I opened the binder so I could read about him, but all Perry did was stare at “Loretta sucks hind tit!” And then he told me in this belligerent way to go ahead and read it. He was changeable like that, cheerful one minute, grouchy the next. I found the spot and read: “‘One summer when a local girl was caught drinking with some lumberjacks, Tiger decided to give a sermon about cupid and use his prowess as an archer to drive the point home. So he got out his bow and we walked down to an open space behind the lighthouse.’”