“Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” She looked at me as if I were that shirtless African hoeing weeds in her living room. I withdrew my feet from the coffee table and offered polite salutations. She retired to the kitchen, where the volume increased, but still I couldn’t make out the specifics of the dialogue.
Then the door bounced open, Melanie walked arm-in-arm with her parents into the living room, and there were smiles all around.
“Won’t you stay for lunch?” Her mother said.
“No, I’m sorry, we have to go,” Melanie answered. I had been robbed of a meal again. She made up an excuse, and we left abruptly.
It had begun to rain, and the small car steamed up almost immediately, opaquing the windows.
“I’ll be leaving before the end of August, you know. Orientation and that sort of stuff,” she told me.
I felt tired, rejected, lost. What did I have left to lose? “Why don’t we drive out to the school,” I said with a straight face. “We can visit the bus again.” There was hurt and bitterness in my voice, but I wondered if love minus love could still equal lust.
“No,” she said, her own voice softening. “Right here will do just fine.” She snuggled up to me and began kissing me with more enthusiasm than I’d seen in long while. I found it hard to breathe.
“We can’t make love here in front of your frigging house.”
“Why not? Nobody’ll care. Nobody will know.” She reached over to her door and slid the bolt into place. It was like a steam bath. No one could see in. But I was sure her father would be out to see what was going on if we sat there long enough. Or her mother. To hell with the neighbours, but I couldn’t see the need to insult her parents that much.
“Anywhere but here,” I told her. “You name it: McDonald’s beneath the arches, Kmart beneath the K, stalled in the middle of the causeway, at a ten-minute parking meter, or in line at a drive-in bank. Maybe even going through a car wash. But not here.”
“Chicken.”
I started up the car, wiped a hole through the condensation, and drove off. It was a long way home.
I wrenched my clothes off inside the shower stall and took a long, warm, detoxifying shower. Halfway through, Richard began to knock on the door from inside the apartment.
“Fred, is that you? I know it’s you. I can tell by the way you splash. Come on, open the door. You’ll never believe it.” He sounded awfully happy about something, and I didn’t want to hear anyone happy. I opened the door, tilted the shower head, and sprayed him with water. If it had been a machine gun, he would have been riddled.
“C’mon, man, I’m not supposed to get the cast wet.”
“Fuck the cast.”
“It’s good news, Freddy,” he blathered, undaunted by the water bouncing off him and all over the apartment.
I snapped off the shower. “I don’t want any good news.”
“But it’s the car. I went to see the cops. My four-hundred-dollar bid, that is, your four-hundred-dollar bid gets the car. He said that if we can get it off the lot when they’re not looking, we won’t even have to hire a tow truck. It’s yours, Frederico. And mine — to borrow, of course.”
The last thing in the world I wanted to think about was Richard’s obsession with a hunk of metal, British or otherwise. Sometimes a man just wants to suffer, and when that time comes, it’s better just to leave him alone. “Screw the car.”
“C’mon, Fred, you can’t do this to me. I’m this close. Besides, it will be yours, not mine. Brian says he’ll be more than happy to buy your VW for a hundred clams.”
“Is that true?” I asked Brian, who was lying on his bed with his feet halfway up the wall.
“Sure, your car’s not so bad. I like your car. You sell it to me for a hundred and I’d be very happy. I can’t live without a car.” I had forgotten that this was all part of the plot: keep Brian from becoming lost in a wheelless wasteland, turn Richard’s wet dream into a reality, and do what for me?
I borrowed Richard’s Christian Science suit, Brian’s coffee-stained tie, and some shineable shoes from a guy upstairs. I shaved, groomed, crimped off a tiny pimple on my chin, and drove down Hibiscus toward the parlour district and the Household Finance office. Compared with the clientele I had seen waltz, stagger and veer in and out of there, I came off like Jean Paul Getty. A heavily mascaraed secretary showed me almost immediately into a barren office with cigarette-burned wall-to-wall indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. “This is Mr. Donovan,” she said, introducing me to a corpulent man who looked as if he had not moved from behind his rubber-topped steel desk in forty-seven years.
“Hello, Mr. Donovan,” said the voice inside my suit. “It’s so nice to meet you.” Donovan wasn’t overly impressed with me. His demeanour told me he wouldn’t be moved by a stick of dynamite up his ass. He’d seen it all. Heard all the stories. Loaned the bucks at exorbitant percentages, and if you didn’t pay him back, he took your kitchen table and sink.
“I’d like a loan,” I said.
“How much?”
“Three.”
“Thousand?”
“No, hundred. Just three hundred dollars.”
“So little?”
“I’m just buying a second car.”
“Do you own a house?”
I shrugged.
“For collateral.” This man would take away a house for an unpaid three hundred dollars.
“No. No house.”
“But you have a car?” He started to smoke, relax. He seemed to be enjoying himself. This was how he got his jollies. I looked hard at him, but he had a concrete block for a face. Thick glasses hid his eyes, made him look as if he was coming at you from about five hundred miles away.
“A nice car.” I smiled to show him how nice.
“Why do you need a second?”
“It’s a good deal.” I corrected myself. “A good investment.”
“How old are you?”
He didn’t like the answer. “Problems,” he said. “Not impossible...but problems.” He pulled two sets of forms and a leaky ballpoint pen from a desk drawer.
“Name?”
“Fred Winger.”
“Winger...Winger?” He seemed mildly interested. Something about my name. Good or bad? “You’re not related to Edgar Winger from Argyle?”
“He’s my father.”
“Kingpin Winger is your father?” Donovan had come alive, blood seemed to flow suddenly up to his face. His eyes bulged behind his lenses. “Kingpin Winger. God damn!”
“Kingpin?”
“I used to bowl with your father when we were teenagers. He always won. The son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”
“Your father could break wind and knock off a strike.”
“He hasn’t bowled in years. Calcium deposits.”
“Too bad. A good bowler. Too good.”
“Were you two friends?”
“Something like that.” What he meant was that he had hated my father’s guts.
“Will Kingpin pay up if you screw the loan?”
So that’s what it would come down to. He’d loan me the money if he thought I’d mess it up and then he’d have to go to my old man. Just for old times’ sake. Get back at him for one spare too many. The ball was rolling back to him this time, and the pin-boys were primed and ready.
I heard myself saying, “No problem. Kingpin told me he’d cover me if I ever ran into trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“I meant it figuratively.”
Donovan nodded. He didn’t know what I meant by “figuratively” and neither did I, but it worked. He didn’t want to pass up a chance to get into another game against Edgar (Kingpin) Winger.
“Cleo, bring me in three hundred crisp ones for the boy here,” he said into a little brown plastic object
on his desk. Cleo brought in the three hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me.
“Count them if you like,” she said.
I could see that there were three.
“Sign here,” Donovan told me, handing over the pen. Just let me see your driver’s licence. And write your father’s address in up there. Don’t worry about all that other stuff. First payment is due the first of next month. Good luck with the car, Winger.”
Cleo showed me out. “You must have the golden touch,” she said as I opened the door to the street.
“He just has a heart of gold,” I lied to her. She gave me a baffled stare as I gently pulled the door closed behind me.
By nightfall the car, the red MGB, sat on the street in front of our apartment building. I called in sick. I didn’t want to stare down another monster movie all night. And I didn’t want to see Melanie. Not right now. I wanted her to be the one to say she was sorry.
We had the old damaged fender off in no time at all. The new one worked just fine, aside from the fact that it was still Day-Glo orange against the rest of the car’s fire engine red. Richard hobbled around the car, inspecting every inch of it. He kept harping away about “the beauty of the vortex.”
“It all just came together like we said it would,” Richard coached while I tightened a few bolts. In the morning we replaced the necessary parts from the spare engine in his room, and it started up on the first turn of the key, thanks to a car battery we found that very morning in our neighbour’s trash.
And while the car came together, assembling itself from the trash heaps of the world, my life unravelled. I now owned a spiritually endowed MG. But I was losing Melanie. I didn’t understand her at all, and I discovered that the less I understood her, the more I loved her.
By the next day I found myself unable to even speak to her as I passed the ticket booth. Instead I gave her a letter. Twenty pages long. I had stayed up all night, listening to the marathon of night showering, writing my guts out. She read it during the second showing of Beach Blanket Bingo, but when I came out to find her afterwards, she was already gone from the booth. My letter had been torn into a thousand neat little squares and left in a pile on the sidewalk in front of the ticket booth, and the night breeze was gradually wafting the fragments down the street. I drove home in my cold, empty MG (the heater, so far, had failed to work — its only fault). The seats smelled of mildew, stale perfume and, somewhere in the upholstery, the collateral of death, left over from the swinger who had swung his final trajectory into a heart attack. I drove down to the sea, parked near the pier, and watched the darkening clouds scud off to sea. Bobby Vinton sang on the juke box in a nearby coffee shop. We could all have lived without him and “Mr. Lonely.” I snapped on the car FM radio and found Jefferson Airplane doing “Three Fifths of a Mile in Ten Seconds Flat” followed by “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”
I emptied my pockets at a nearby self-service gas bar and drove off down the highway until I came to a long, empty stretch of beach where a hurricane had carved through the island a couple of years before. I parked behind a low dune surrounded by the remains of a thousand teenage parties — broken bottles, empty boxes, garbage of all kinds. There I hunkered down for the night. The mosquitoes ate me alive, and I didn’t care. I played the radio until the dash lights began to dim, then smoked several joints until I was so blitzed that even the mosquitoes inside were humming along with Bob Dylan, who was “stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.” In the morning the world would crack right open.
Infrared
I pulled up in front of 307½ Hibiscus. The street still looked incomplete without Brian’s hulk propped against somebody’s trash can. Instead, my old Volkswagen was parked immaculately between two lethargic Buicks. All I could think of was crawling into bed and sleeping the day off, burning the light away with sleep and waiting for darkness. Then I would stay up all night drinking Paisano, smoking more of the free dope and simply doing my best to encourage oblivion.
Damn. Someone was in the frigging shower — the last, the very tail end of the night showerers, someone who had pushed the night full to the limit and was washing away the sins in my doorway. I knocked, but no one answered. No one ever did. I should have walked away, but there was too much bile in me. I was still half-stoned, and the mosquito bites were itching like hell.
With a demented yell, I pulled hard on the wooden door and broke the latch off. The door flapped open, and there were two naked bodies inside.
“I came looking for you,” Melanie said to me as if it were all my fault. She was full of fire and indignation and made no effort to cover herself.
Brian turned the water off. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, his voice cracking.
The vortex had reversed itself. Everything that was me was being emptied into a great dark void, and, like some third-rate character in a B movie, I felt dizzy with revelation. My knees were weak, and I thought I would pass out. It was all shot to hell now. Melanie had gone into the apartment.
Richard was yelling at somebody — at her, at Brian, “I told you. You asshole!” I could hear Brian sobbing. There was nothing I could say. Once, when I was a kid, somebody had ripped the skin off a baseball and then began to unravel this ugly, rubbery string until he came to a hard wooden core. That’s what I was thinking about.
Brian, still naked, walked out into the cold, dewy back yard and sat down on the loose stones and dandelions. “You should have come back last night, Fred. You really should have.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“You just don’t know what it feels like to be me. If you knew, you’d understand.”
“I don’t need to understand.” I wasn’t mad at him. I had never been mad at Brian in my life, not even when he had socked me in the gut. I wasn’t even mad at Melanie. I could see her through the door, putting on her clothes in the kitchen. There was something really tough in her, the way she did it. She looked calm and unshaken. Then she walked back out to where we sat. She stood there, her long brown hair dripping onto the old flannel shirt of mine that she used as a jacket.
“If you had been here, I would have tried to explain. I tried to explain before.” Still that defiance, resolution. Not a woman of apologies. I remembered her shouting down her father on that first visit home. I understood what he had felt, and that made me want to cry. But I wouldn’t do that. Not me. Not now. Brian sucked in a sob. Melanie said nothing to him. He hung his head between his knees.
“I’m in love with her,” he said to the earth. I looked at Melanie again. She had heard him. And was walking away.
Brian wanted to move out, but I wouldn’t let him. Melanie had taken an apartment, and he was chipping in for the rent. He stayed there a few nights, but he didn’t move in. He didn’t talk in his sleep any more. After about a week, he even started smiling. I diverted him every time he tried to do a good deed for me to help erase the guilt.
I started driving a lot at night after that — up and down the coast, always looking for an empty place. I’d sit out on the beach, toke up, then drive around some more. One morning I came home at around five. The light was on in Ella’s room, and I took the chance. She opened the door, and the apartment was empty. The towel was in place. “I was just about to wash up,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Just thought you might have some advice.” I tried to explain how I was feeling but didn’t do a bang-up job of it.
“If you can’t stand the heat, get the fuck out of the kitchen.” She ruffed up my hair as if I were a little kid. She saw the little-boy-lost look on my face, dropped the towel and gave me a long, sloppy kiss. There was nothing to it, just two faces coming at each other from out of the darkness.
“When in doubt, pretend. Don’t be stupid. Go on, get into bed. I gotta take a shower first. I smell like a hyena.”
But when she came back, I was sound asleep. I don’t think I coul
d have made love to her anyway. It just wasn’t in me. When I woke up around noon, she was gone but had left three different brands of cereal on the table with a note for me to eat up, have coffee and get the Jesus out before her boyfriend showed up at two-thirty. I downed one bowl each of Cap’n Crunch, Flintstones and Cheerios. Kids’ stuff. I also ate a cold, half-consumed can of Spaghettios she had left on the table. Then went home. Summer had lost its meaning. Brian was still sleeping. His arm still stuck up straight against the wall, a finger pointing to heaven like somebody in a Michelangelo painting.
As I was staring at Brian, Richard arrived at the door. He had just had his cast removed.
“A free man, Freddy boy. You and me, tonight we go cruisin’. Just the two of us. We’ll have to scrape the women off the windshield when they see two hot brothers like us tool-and-dying around town. Look, I got two legs.” His newly unplastered leg was pale, pasty and somewhat withered. Really weird looking. “And look what else.” He held out a sighting scope from a rifle. “Infrared. All we need is a hole, one half inch across.”
“Where’d ya get the money?”
“I sold what was left of the seized engine for scrap.”
Richard had been good to me lately. I had underestimated him. Recently he had babied, mothered and brothered me until I was getting sick of it. Now that his cast was off and he was returning to his old self, I felt free to get my revenge on his kindness, so I smashed him with my fist. It came down hard on his face. I shoved him out into the back yard, where we fought until we were both aching and bruised. Then we were the best of friends again. And I decided that I was all right after all. He had pounded the ache out of my chest, rewound the rubbery string back around the wooden core until I was just an old baseball with a few weak stitches that flapped when it took a line drive.
Brian had become a new man. He talked differently. He looked like someone else, and he ate real food. He slept at night without screaming, and he changed the oil in my Volkswagen for maybe the first time in its career. He even stopped apologizing to me every time we were in the same room together.
The Summer of Apartment X Page 9