Lingering in the hall, Vera thinks she hears Rosie say “Carl” and puts her ear to the door. But they’ve gone on to Dungeons and Dragons. Kirsty’s Lady Velvetina, with 158 points on the side of Lawful Good.
Vera drifts toward the living-room window, where she stands watching Kenny and Dick walk Mister T., their Lhasa Apso. They’re chatting with their friend Hugh, who’s walking his Rottweiler. The big dog’s circling the Lhasa, the little dog’s trembling, but the three men look so neighborly, so relaxed, Vera’s heart constricts and takes jealous revenge in a headline: RONALD MCDONALD STRICKEN BY AIDS.
Though she knows drinking and drugs will only make her feel worse, she pours some brandy, lights a joint, and flips on the TV in time to catch a rerun of Fantasy Island about a con released from the slammer after thirty years with one desire—to find the bride he left at the altar when the cops nabbed him at his own wedding. Vera switches to People’s Court: a guy who dresses up as a giant Goofy and clowns at kids’ parties is being sued by some parents for failing to show. The judge speaks of broken promises, transgression, and penance. The giant Goofy’s convoluted arguments remind Vera of Raskolnikov. Another dog, another sign: if People’s Court’s sounding like Dostoyevsky, she’s watched too much TV.
By now the alcohol and marijuana have so profoundly damaged her logic that what Vera’s thinking is: If life is one broken promise after another, why not call the expert on broken promises, Lowell? Dialing his number, she steels herself. No one will be there, meaning Lowell’s gone off with someone else and the terms of their on-again, off-again ten-year marriage will finally have to change. Or worse, a woman will answer.
“Hello,” murmurs Lowell in his soft, shy telephone voice. When Vera says his name he yells, “Sweetheart! How are you? How’s Rosie?”
One thing Vera’s got to give him credit for: he really does care about Rosie. Once at a party Vera met a man who seemed nice until he started telling her how his wife had custody of their daughter and dressed her in designer jeans so tight she had to lie down to zip them. “She’s six years old,” he’d said, reaching for Vera’s hand, and Vera had left him there, reaching. Lowell would never serve Rosie up so some strange woman at a party would see him as a caring kind of guy.
“Does she miss me?” Lowell’s asking now. “Does she talk about her old Dad?”
“Of course,” Vera says, though the truth is: yes and no. Rosie misses him so much she can hardly say his name. And Lowell, for his part, would like nothing better than to have Rosie living with him. So Vera’s worst fear: Rosie is marking time, hoarding her allowance till she can run away to L.A. She’s already been there three times, each time for a week or so, and come home with tales of devoted attention and sacks full of wonderful gifts—a dayglo “giggle stick” that, when tilted, emitted a slow, froggy belch; a headband with its own little battery pack and tiny, sequentially blinking lights; a green plush caterpillar that, unzipped and reversed, turned into a butterfly with glittery wings. But what surprised Vera most was that Rosie and Lowell had gone shopping for presents and wound up with something remotely like what they’d set out for. She’d tried quizzing Rosie about what they’d bought where. But Rosie clammed up. It was private. And Vera felt jealous and stung, as if Lowell and Rosie were having a love affair and decided: for Vera’s own good, some things were better for her not to know.
“She’s fine,” says Vera. “Really.”
“What’s the latest?” Lowell says. “What’s she into?” The latest? How long has it been since they talked? A month?
“The same,” says Vera. “Ballet. Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Boys?”
“Give it a break,” Vera says. “She’s only ten.”
“Ten’s getting up there,” says Lowell. “Don’t underestimate heredity. If she’s anything like her Dad, she’s probably sneaking off to play hypnotist with the little boy next door.”
One of Lowell’s favorite stories: when he was in third grade at the Eskimo school, he took little Nancy Senkaku behind the bleachers and said, “You are getting very sleepy” till she lay down and let him take off her pants. Vera remembers where she heard it: on Louise’s couch in the dark. How proud she’d been to have a lover who’d been practicing since he was eight!
Now she says, “Not in this neighborhood. The little boy next door is a fag.” She hesitates, not quite trusting what he’ll do with this information, then goes ahead anyway. “As a matter of fact, I think she does like some kid in her summer program. Not that she’d tell me. Norma wormed it out of her at dinner.”
“She’ll do that,” says Lowell. “Talking to Norma’s like taking a giant hit of sodium pentothal.” Vera laughs, then thinks how few people know her well enough to make such jokes. Especially as she gets older, friends and family never meet. If she waits another ten years, then falls in love with someone new, chances are that person will never meet her parents at all.
After this cheering thought, there’s a silence. “Want to hear a joke?” says Lowell. ‘Why did Reagan invade Grenada?”
“To impress Jodie Foster,” says Vera.
“How’d you know?” he asks.
“I heard it last year,” she says. “Only then it was, ‘Why did Begin invade Lebanon?’”
“It’s better about Reagan,” Lowell says.
“I don’t know,” says Vera. “What’s new with you?”
“S.O.S. Same old shit. I gave the script to some hotshot lady agent. She’s from Canada originally, so I figured she might know what I was talking about.”
Vera’s read Lowell’s script. Called Polar Bear Boy, it’s about a guy from Minnesota who around 1900 took a trip to the Arctic Circle and decided there was money to be made trapping polar bears and selling them to all the new zoos starting up in the various cities of America. So he caught dozens of them and, when the market slowed down, began leading tours for rich society folk who wanted to see polar bears in their natural habitat. He married a girl he met on the tour and stayed married ten years, until it turned out she was some kind of wildlife preservationist way ahead of her time—also crazy and overbred. Finally one night she laced his after-dinner cognac with enough arsenic to kill a bear. Though it’s not a bad story—utterly improbable despite the end, when a credit tells you it’s all true—and has room for lots of documentary nature footage and turn-of-the-century furs, Vera knows it will never be made. Polar bear jacking is hardly the world’s most commercial subject, and besides, Lowell’s humor doesn’t quite translate onto the page. You need to hear him reading it in your head. For starters, thinks Vera, he might consider retitling it, Polar Bear Man.
“Have you heard from her?” Vera says. “The agent?”
“Shit, no,” says Lowell. “It blew her right out of L.A. My script was the absolute last straw. She disconnected the phone, fired her secretary, hopped the first plane back to Vancouver, and married her high-school sweetheart.”
Decoded, this means the secretary gave Lowell’s script back without saying anything. “She’s probably better off,” Vera says. “She should have stayed there in the first place.”
“Probably,” says Lowell. “Hang on. I need a smoke.” When he comes back and Vera hears the altered intake and puff of breath, she wants a cigarette so bad she’s shaking. She’s thinking of mornings, coffee and cigarettes shared with Lowell in that first Hayes Street apartment—gray, uncomfortable, hung everywhere with their art-student landlady’s work: a series of abstracts based on Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Even so, she’d rather be there than here. Than anywhere.
“Speaking of smoking,” says Vera. “Yesterday I wrote this Bigfoot story—”
“Bigfoot!” crows Lowell. “My main man!” Lowell considers Bigfoot a kind of personal totem. In fact he claims to have sighted one in Oregon. One night, he and his friend C.D. were out camping. They saw Bigfoot and Bigfoot gave them the V-sign. Peace and love. How typical of Lowell’s stories, that flat, understated joke. Nature at its most mysterious and elusive, every c
ryptobiologist’s dream resolving itself in a hippie cliché.
“—about Bigfoot knocking over a gas station and stealing some cigarettes—”
“You still not smoking?” Lowell says.
“Barely,” says Vera.
“Good for you!” says Lowell. There’s another pause, then he says, “What else is happening with you guys?”
“Plenty,” says Vera. “Listen. The staff photographer at the paper gave me a photo of an old house with some kids in front of it selling lemonade. So I made up a story and now it turns out that the names and ages I dreamed up are the kids’ real names and real ages. I hit the whole family history right on the fucking head, and now they’re suing me for libel and invasion of privacy.”
“You’re kidding,” says Lowell. “Run that by me again.”
Vera does, partly to make sure he’s got it straight and partly because she likes the version she’s telling: bizarre as ever but somehow less serious. She’s left out the ruined lawn, the damaged cardiology practice, the tiny school careers nipped in the bud. Also the part about her maybe being fired.
“Jesus,” says Lowell. “Synchronicity central.”
“You said it,” Vera says. “I’m going out there to see the kids’ parents Monday, get to the bottom of this—”
“No bottom to get to,” Lowell says. “Just your basic warp in the general weave. They’re usually a good sign. Something special’s on the way. Don’t fight it.”
“I don’t have to fight it,” says Vera. “A whole team of lawyers is fighting it for me.”
“The synchronicity defense,” says Lowell. “I love it. Some guy could make his career on that.”
Vera tries to imagine Mr. Goldblum making his career on the synchronicity defense. She can’t even imagine suggesting it.
“Their suing you is very unprogressive.” Lowell sucks in the end of his sentence.
“I don’t know,” says Vera. “What can I do?”
“Do?” Lowell repeats, a peculiarly rounded tone. He’s blowing smoke rings through the word, like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. “Don’t do a goddamned thing,” he says. “Just hang on. It’ll do you.”
And so Vera’s forced to confront what she’s always known. Her version of what went wrong between her and Lowell is like one of Lowell’s own stories: flat, understated, a joke. The truth has less to do with his unique approach to grocery shopping than with this—his hillbilly fatalism. Just hang on, it’ll do you. Though it’s not so different in spirit from what she wants to tell Dave, Lowell’s interpretation of events has always alarmed her. It’s no accident that Lowell’s favorite song is a hymn called “You Can’t Hurry My God”:
He’s the kind you can’t hurry
He’ll be there, don’t you worry
He may not come when you want Him
But He’s right on time.
Right on time? However would one know?
What used to scare her was the possibility that Lowell would always work on the loading dock and on screenplays no one would film; she would always write for the Downtowner. Sometimes she thought she knew the whole future, could see their lives sped up like those time-lapse sequences in Disney films that show you all the cacti in the desert blooming at once.
Now, of course, she understands that these were the fears of youth. What’s impossible, she’s since learned, is for anything to stay the same. Nor has her life without Lowell been a model of forward progress. All this might seem reason enough to try once more with him, if not for the evidence: He’s still waiting for some gangster to come along and lend him an old Smith Corona. Putting on your shower sandals every few months and bringing your script to an agent hardly constitutes taking active charge of your life. Lowell’s not what Vera needs, not yet. Still she doesn’t want to lose him and doesn’t like the sound of her voice when she says, “That’s a very sixties attitude. Very spiritual. You know what they call that now? Retro hippie.”
“Go with the flow,” Lowell says. “Don’t push the river. Fuck you.”
Vera would hate the conversation to end this way, but what can she say to that? Finally Lowell says, “Sweetheart? Are you there?”
“Are you stoned?” asks Vera.
“During working hours?” says Lowell. “Stoned as a Wheat Thin.”
“Were you working?”
“Sure. Flat on my back in the sun.” Lowell is always brown. Even in February, in New York, he’d go up to the roof and lie there in his down jacket. Perhaps he’s never gotten over those twenty-four-hour Alaskan winter nights. Vera’s stoned, too, but not so out of it she can’t count. It’s eight P.M. in California, not enough sun for anyone.
“Well…” She draws out the word.
“Hey,” Lowell says. “Do you have a copy of that story? Fountain-of-youth lemonade?”
“I don’t think so,” says Vera, but when she checks in her purse, it’s there. She must have taken it from Shaefer’s office.
“Send it to me,” Lowell says. “I’d like to see it.”
“Sure,” Vera says. “I’ll send it right out.”
“All right, then,” says Lowell. “A big kiss and hug to Rosalie.” It sounds as though he’s ending a letter. “And to you.” It is the way he ends his letters.
“You, too,” says Vera, and hangs up the phone.
JUST BEFORE DAWN VERA dreams she gets a message: GOD WANTS TO ASK YOU A QUESTION. God’s holed up in a cheap motel on one of those sleazy strips you find in Western cities. Miracle Miles. Sitting on one of the double beds is a slight, middle-aged Oriental who asks her this: If you found dinosaur bones—a complete and perfectly preserved brontosaurus skeleton—what would you do? Vera doesn’t even have to think. First she’d ship the main bones to the Museum of Natural History. Then she’d take half of what was left and mail it in small packages to her friends. Then she’d hide the remaining fragments all over her house—in the medicine cabinet, the silverware drawer, the spice rack—places she’d find them when she was least expecting it.
This answer seems acceptable and Vera wakes up happy despite the fact she’s sprawled on the living-room couch with all the lights on, nose to nose with a sour, alcohol-smelling glass, an ashtray full of roaches, and the knowledge that the God of her dreams is the former Saigon police chief immortalized by photography in the act of blowing a suspected Viet Cong’s head off; recently she saw him interviewed on Eyewitness News in his present incarnation as a prosperous Georgetown restaurateur. Vera’s good mood lasts as long as it takes her to feel something lumpy beneath her and identify it as the crumpled copy of This Week she found last night for Lowell.
Already the air’s hot and so sticky you’d think you could walk up the walls like Spiderman. The gray light promises to stay that gray all day. Standing up seems like too much of a commitment; without quite making it, Vera limps to the window and looks out onto the street where, even at this hour, everyone seems to have shopping carts or arms full of brown paper bags. It’s Saturday; and the grocery shoppers have a demoralized, wallflower look—one drawback of living in a neighborhood in which a large percentage of your neighbors know someone with a house in Rhinebeck or Fire Island.
Years ago, when she was freelancing and all seven days were the same, she used to hate weekends, when everyone else seemed so happy; used to envy the secretaries’ Saturdays and even the Monday-to-Friday toil that glorified their days off. And later, when Rosie was small and Lowell was with them, she had some sense of what such weekends could be. Trips to the zoo, the Tibetan Museum, Sleepy Hollow; though she knows it can’t be accurate, her memory is of all those outings taking place on bright autumn afternoons. Then she went to work full-time and back to hating weekends, understanding then that the secretaries’ Saturdays weren’t idyllic at all but occupied with survival, with laundry, shopping, paying bills, with all the essential and tedious chores that the rest of the week left no time for. Often Vera felt like the subject of some cruel experiment, a cat prevented from licking itself five days out
of seven.
Some things she likes about weekends: One, not going to work. Two, small, manageable activities like cleaning her apartment. What a strain it was with Rosie toddling at her heels, messing up everything she’d just straightened. Perhaps that’s why God gives you small children: for the rest of your life, certain things seem effortless. Now Rosie’s asleep, will stay asleep till eleven or twelve, then get up and pick up the phone and—depending on everyone’s ballet lessons and divorce settlement visitation rights—get a game of Dungeons and Dragons going. Vera wonders if she’s dreaming of Haunted Thickets or of Carl.
Vera pauses outside the kitchen, contemplating the drainboard, imagining how nice it will look without that bowl of soggy cornflakes on it. She knows Rosie will just leave another one there this morning, but somehow that doesn’t bother her, no more than it bothers her to know that all her bustling around will just be tidying, not cleaning. She’s not interested in dirt she can’t see. The dark brown, copper-flecked oven hides grime and probably always will. The drawer stuffed with bill stubs and phone numbers won’t get emptied or sorted out. If she dies in this apartment, someone else will have to come in and excavate. That bothers her; she hates thinking of things she’ll never do: see Africa, live in London, learn Italian, have a son.
Still she has her rituals, her little compulsions like everyone else. Everything that doesn’t belong in the apartment—garbage, dirty laundry, letters and bills to be mailed—has to be out before she can start cleaning.
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