Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  John remembered him: barrel chest, Le Coq Sportif tennis shirt, Suntan U. Law School, internship at Merrill Lynch. Four-star consumer. He drove a Mustang and smiled at Christina when he washed it in front of their building. He suggested that they all be friends, invited them to play a round of “goff” at the Doral Country Club, boasting about his handicap, and adding that his grandfather had been an original charter member. John declined for both of them, explaining that his grandparents had been killed by putters.

  “Not too far to go for a cup of sugar,” he said, hurt by the mediocrity of his replacement and the thought that Christina might have started with Michael before he had bought his plane ticket.

  “In case you didn’t notice, you left!” Christina told him.

  “Two days ago!” John matched her indignation. “Thanks for your period of grieving, but you should find some way to go on with your life. It isn’t right holding this torch. I don’t even have an IRA account.”

  “Two days is right,” Christina retaliated. “You didn’t even bother to call. How do I know what you’re doing out there?”

  “They didn’t turn on my telephone until today,” John said, Sarah entering his mind for the first time since he had been sober. “And I got sick.”

  “Too sick to find a pay phone?” Christina demanded. “They don’t have pay phones in California, only ashrams?”

  “I did call from a pay phone, but the line was busy,” John said. “Then I got sick.”

  He didn’t add that he had also been hung over, attacked, and Maced. Essentially he had told the truth, the chronology was just wrong.

  “Anyway, what difference would it make?” he said. “You would have been talking to Good Neighbor Michael, discussing jurisprudence and tanning lotion. Tell me, when you graduate from law school at U.M., do they give you the police radio with your diploma or do you have to go buy it yourself?”

  “If I want to see someone else,” Christina said, “you can be certain I will. You left.”

  “You didn’t follow,” John said.

  “I was supposed to follow?” Christina asked. “Is that your patriarchal take on things? I’m expected to waste away or follow my man because I don’t have my own identity?”

  “Did I say that?” John replied. “If anyone’s called the shots in this relationship, it’s been you. And if anyone’s been in danger of losing their identity, it’s me.”

  “When did you join this men’s group, John?” Christina said. “Before you left? Or did they recruit you on the plane?”

  “I wanted to leave Miami a long time ago,” John said. “I followed you by staying right there. I didn’t mind either, until I realized we were both unhappy and standing still. That’s when I made this move, for both of us.”

  “If I’ve been so awful,” Christina said, “then you should be happy with your decision. Bon voyage.”

  “I didn’t leave,” John insisted. “You didn’t come!”

  “You left!” Christina screamed. “You left! You left! You left! I’m here in what used to be our apartment, surrounded by everything that used to be ours. Everybody keeps asking, ‘What happened?’ My parents, your parents, our friends, the fucking dry cleaner. I tell them John’s an asshole, that’s what happened!”

  John rubbed the back of his neck. He had to admit that it must be awful to be in the apartment alone, looking at extra hangers in the closet, empty drawers in the dresser, doing the dishes without bumping elbows. No sounds coming from any room but the one you were in. As improbable as it may have seemed, it was probably easier to be out here where everything was unfamiliar.

  John turned to the picture of Christina resting on the nightstand, glassless now after Blindman’s visit. He recalled how they had met, second semester, sophomore year, English 250. Stumbling in late, the professor signed John’s transfer, telling him, “Ask a student who arrived on time what you’ve missed.” Filling a desk in the back row, John asked the girl to his left if he had missed anything worth writing down. It was Christina, before hardship or happiness, expectation or fulmination. Completely intact. Before the static electric longing that precedes a couple’s first kiss. Her pink tongue had appeared from behind pearl-white teeth to tap seductively a single word, “Lo-lee-ta.” That became their first private joke. Later, as they ate lunch in the cafeteria, John told her, “She was plain Chris in the morning, studious Christine in the afternoon, but in English 250 she became Chris-tee-na.”

  This wasn’t the time to dredge up fond memories, John warned himself. Nostalgia can navigate the most jilted of hearts.

  “I killed your fish,” Christina said, breaking the silence. “Instead of giving them away, I flushed them down the toilet.”

  “Well,” John said, searching for something to say he wouldn’t regret, “I love and miss you too.”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” Christina said. “For the record, it was you who stood still, I was moving. I brought home a bigger check. I paid for the health club, the dining room set, birth control, anything we wanted that was nice. If I left things up to you, we would have spent every weekend at the beach.”

  “You’re right,” John admitted. “I would have given us both melanomas.”

  “Never serious when you should be,” Christina said. “I hope you’re happy with your decision.”

  “I hope you are too,” John said, realizing they had come to a point beyond apology or reconciliation; even if she were to ask him back, or suggest that she move to Boonville, or if he requested permission to return, it wouldn’t work.

  “Christina?” he said. “Do you remember that night we went to Bean Bean’s and left with a bottle of champagne? We walked on the beach, acting like I was on shore leave and going off to fight in the war. We pretended we might never see each other again. You filled my glass and then poured the rest of the bottle on yourself, saying, ‘Drink up soldier.’ We made love and you said, ‘I hope I’m pregnant, because you’re the only man I’d want to father my child.’”

  “I remember,” Christina answered, conceding nothing.

  “For the first time in my life, I felt a part of me was squared away and I could begin fixing the rest.” John told her. “I couldn’t imagine a future without you.”

  John could hear Christina moving around the apartment, padding across the carpet and then the unmistakable sound of a refrigerator door opening, followed by the crack of a soda can. Diet Coke, no doubt. She would cut a wedge of lemon and pour it into a glass with no ice. He heard the slide of a drawer, then her fishing around the cupboard. She was walking again, settling back to wherever she had been sitting.

  “Do you remember the next day?” John said.

  “When you puked all over everything?” Christina asked. “I washed our comforter about a dozen times before I got out that smell.”

  “No, I meant the morning,” John said, wondering how he had forgotten that part. “It was my first month at Leggiere and Philips, and I felt horrible. You said, ‘Come back to bed.’ You held the sheets open for me. I crawled back in, and you smiled the most satisfied smile I’ve ever seen.”

  “Then you threw up,” Christina said.

  “No,” John said, upset she wouldn’t lend herself to his sentimentality. “I threw up after I ate that shitty takeout from the Chinese place I hate but you always order from anyway, Rat Scabie Szechuan.”

  “Poo Ping,” she corrected.

  “Fuck it,” John said.

  “That’s the Thai restaurant,” Christina replied.

  This was why it didn’t work, John thought. We can’t even have a basic conversation without breaking into a hostile Abbott and Costello routine.

  “What’s your point?” Christina asked. “Or did you call to reminisce?”

  “No point,” John said. “For some reason, I wanted you to remember that for me. Regardless of what happens, wherever we go, I will be grateful for having been at peace with myself in your arms. But apparently we don’t share the same memory. That’s our problem
though, isn’t it? We don’t exactly complement each other.”

  “I guess we don’t,” Christina agreed. “I’m just glad I didn’t get pregnant, because if I did, I have the feeling I’d be taking care of a baby by myself right now. Someday, maybe I’ll be able to forgive you for being an asshole, but if we had a child, I don’t think I ever could have. At least you did something right.”

  John didn’t know how to respond. He almost said, “Thank you.”

  “Take care of yourself, John,” Christina said, abruptly, “I gotta go.”

  “All right,” he replied, wondering where she had to go, suddenly aware that this was goodbye. “Take care of yourself too.”

  “I already am,” Christina said.

  “I love you,” John said, but the connection had been terminated.

  He sat on the edge of Grandma’s bed, holding the receiver, running everything through his mind, the conversation, his old apartment, the cabin, champagne kisses, 60-40 memories, Christina, Good Neighbor Michael, bad Chinese food, Miami Beach, Boonville. The possibility of children. He searched the room expecting a response from somewhere between the planks or above the light fixtures. He put the receiver back in its cradle and reached for Christina’s picture. He laid it face down on the nightstand in exchange for the telephone, which he rocked in his hand, feeling its weight and significance. Then he fired it across the room, scattering squirrels like bowling pins.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled.

  There was no answer except for the echo of the telephone’s broken ringer, which John imagined emanating from his cabin, drifting down off the hill through the weeds, past the fence, sifting through tree branches, over graveled roads, vibrating by busted bottles, beer cans, torn truck tires, road kill, and into the town of Boonville like rings of pond water set in motion by the stone of a mischievous child.

  9

  John was trying to write a letter to Christina, but the first line kept wanting to become a haiku:

  You’ll probably end up

  being a lesbian,

  and I’ll have another thing

  to figure out.

  The wastepaper basket overflowed. He stared at the page, two-thirds blank, waiting for the rest of the words to come. Something had been left unsaid during their telephone conversation three hours ago, but it wouldn’t reveal itself. He realized there was no product to sell, but he wondered when his marketing experience would pay off with a series of tight sentences. Chewing on his pen, he was gaining new respect for Margaret Washington.

  A knock interrupted him, not a violent rapping, but a normal request to see if anyone was home. John decided it couldn’t be anybody he had met recently, they would have just kicked in the door and started swinging. He abandoned the letter and looked for a weapon to be on the safe side, settling for a squirrel sculpture with a long tail that he could brandish as a club. Holding it behind his back, he approached the front door.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “It’s Sarah,” the voice answered. “Is that you, John?”

  “Maybe,” he said, not wanting to fall for the old “bait and switch.” It sounded like Sarah, but Daryl could be behind her holding a hatchet to her throat and when he opened the door, hack!, hack!, hack!, both of them would get it in the neck.

  He grabbed another squirrel off the coffee table.

  “Are you alone?” John said.

  “What’s the big deal?” Sarah asked. “Are you O.K.?”

  Element of surprise, John told himself, flinging open the door and leaping into the threshold with a squirrel in each fist.

  Sarah jumped back. John could tell she didn’t know whether he was going to assault her or start juggling. She was by herself, a mud-streaked Toyota pickup parked in the driveway next to the Datsun. It had to be her vehicle, Daryl undoubtedly drove something American and with a gun rack. John lowered the squirrels.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little edgy.”

  “No shit,” Sarah said, before noticing his swollen face, split lip, and the hypnotic swirl of purple beneath his eye.

  John knew his bruises were at a point where they appeared worse than they felt, although it was debatable, and he could see that Sarah recognized the signature in his contusions, the handwriting of a closed fist that spelled DARYL.

  “Jesus,” Sarah gasped, “please tell me you fell in the bathtub.”

  “I thought news traveled fast in this town,” John said.

  “It does, but they’re not exactly into current affairs where I live, or town gossip, or most types of communication for that matter,” Sarah said, stepping forward and putting a hand to John’s face. “God, I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I breathe,” he said.

  It wasn’t the pain that bothered him now so much as the I-want-to-go-to-sleep-for-the-rest-of-my-life feeling that had accompanied him ever since the scuffle, intensifying with Blindman’s visit, and nearing a state of narcosis after his goodbye to Christina. He had thought writing a letter would revive him, but that had backfired. So, seeing how there were no tall buildings to jump off, he was resigned to jeopardizing what little life-force he still possessed by conversing with Sarah. Since his coming to Boonville, death didn’t scare him half as much as living a long life.

  “Apparently your ex got the worst of it,” John said, and told Sarah about the aid he had received from Pensive and her can of Mace, how Deputy Cal, Billy Chuck, and Hap had been no help at all. Then, as if talking in his sleep, he related his experience with Blindman, the nightmares, and his phone call to Christina.

  “It hasn’t been a good week,” he confessed, wondering what it was about Sarah that made him spill his guts.

  In the sky behind her, John saw a large bird circling without flapping its wings, round and round, descending with certainty toward its prey. The wind pushed it off course for a moment, but it spiraled back, a holding pattern.

  “Would you like to come in?” John said, realizing they were on the porch. “I could make some tea. You could fill me in on our night together. I blacked out. Maybe I did something worth getting my ass kicked?”

  “You were a gentleman,” Sarah replied, still examining his busted face as if she had hit him herself. “Tea would be nice.”

  Inside, John asked Sarah to make herself at home while he went into the kitchen to put a kettle on the range. He selected an herbal, non-caffeinated Zinger, thinking it might be what hippie girls drank when they weren’t bottoming quarts of whiskey. In the cupboard he found some tea biscuits, a purchase made in the heat of his shopping excursion. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Sarah take off her jacket, suppressing her amazement at all the squirrel sculptures. She adjusted the flue on the wood-burning stove to generate more heat, took notice of the busted telephone and the matching fracture in the wall, saw the kindling box full of more squirrels, read the first sentence of his letter, and sat down on the couch.

  “Is it the fear of every man that their lover will leave them for another woman?” she called out to John.

  “I don’t know,” John answered from the kitchen, pouring steaming water into two cups. “That was supposed to be a love letter.”

  “I think if I found out Daryl was gay, I’d be relieved,” she said, examining one of the squirrels John had selected to defend himself, passing her fingers from teeth to tail, searching for meaning in its texture, feeling its heft, then lifting its end to determine the sex; smooth as a Ken doll, nutless. “He’d have an excuse for his anger, denying his sexuality, trying to be somebody he wasn’t. As it stands, he’s just an asshole.”

  John handed her a mug and put the plate of biscuits on the table in front of them, proud of his domesticity. He sat down beside her. Not too close. Sarah set the sculpture aside and blew on her tea, looking like the-girl-next-door, no makeup, hair tousled, wholesome as a borrowed cup of milk.

  “You know, you look like one of them,” she said, nodding toward Grandma’s handiwork. “You shouldn’t burn any, you might b
e incinerating your own spirit.”

  John was disturbed that Sarah could see his countenance in the carvings. He had tried to put the idea of intentional likeness out of his mind, but again was forced to wonder if he had been the source of Grandma’s inspiration. Maybe that day on her lap had been indelibly etched in her memory too? His flight from her scent the final repudiation? But she must have known he had never deserted her in his heart.

  “I’m not sure what Grandma had in mind,” John said. “But it’s unnerving to have so many of them looking at you with that expression.”

  “I’m sure that’s what she thought,” Sarah said, withdrawing her mouth from the lip of the mug. “I always thought it was weird that ‘Chip ’n’ Dale’ out front faced the house and not the valley. Then I snuck up here once and stood in front of them for the full effect. It’s as if the whole world is scorning you. I wonder why your grandma did that to herself?”

  “You want milk or sugar for that?” John said, taking a drink of his tea, not wanting to talk about the squirrels or to be linked with Grandma’s ostracism.

  “No, I’m O.K.,” Sarah answered. “I wish I had met your grandmother. I saw her in town, sometimes with Margaret Washington and Step, but I never talked to her.”

  “Step?” John asked.

  “That’s what they call Margaret Washington’s boyfriend because he’s always walking two steps behind her with his head down,” Sarah said. “It might have to do with Stepin Fetchit, too, but her boyfriend’s white. I don’t know. Everybody has a nickname around here, Digger, Swoop, Squirrel Lady. The intimacy of a small town. I think I’m locally known as Megabitch.”

  She tried her tea again, letting that one sink in.

  John remembered Christina saying that for men, women fell into three categories: bitch, virgin, or mother. For women, men also came in three flavors: assholes, guys you’d screw, and your boyfriend. “What about father?” he had asked. “Whether women want to admit it or not,” Christina had replied, “Father fits into one of the first two categories.” She never said what the categories were for women classifying women or men classifying men. But now John knew where Boonville had lumped Sarah.