13
I spent the night wondering why in fifty years I had not gained even the most elemental sense of what to say—or what not to say—to women. The thing that stuck in my mind was that T.R. had threatened to leave, and I soon convinced myself that she would leave. The thought made me so depressed that I couldn’t even get a migraine. A headache had been approaching, but it soon realized that it was going to be so far outclassed by my depression as to make the trip not worth it. I didn’t have a trace of migraine, but my depression was world-class.
As soon as it became morning in New York, I called Jeanie, an early riser. I had already given her several reports on T.R., to all of which she listened avidly but not uncritically. Invariably I was asked to describe what T.R. was wearing on a particular occasion; then I would be interrogated in fine detail on emotional matters: what T.R. said, how she phrased it, what T.R. felt, and what I was doing about it. There was no doubt as to whose side Jeanie was on. From the first she made it clear that she was on T.R.’s side; if there was doubt about a particular line of action, T.R., not me, would get the benefit of that doubt.
This time I didn’t so much wake her up as bring her to attention. She was sitting with her coffee looking out on Central Park. From the tone of her hello I could tell that it must not be the best of times, that her outlook for the day was not really an optimistic outlook; but at the sound of my voice she immediately rose from her drift and raised her antenna. Just thinking of her raising her antenna made me nervous and hesitant, because Jeanie’s receiving equipment—her brain and her intuitive faculties—picked up far too much, even when she wasn’t bothering to tune it, particularly. Even when she wasn’t paying close attention she heard more than I really wanted her to hear, and when she was paying attention, as she was now, she not only heard more than I wanted her to hear, she heard more than I knew I was saying.
That was one reason I loved Jeanie so much: she would hear more than I knew I was saying, and she would be forgiving. There might be some snap and crackle before we got to the forgiveness, but the forgiveness always came.
“I’ve had a terrible fight with T.R.,” I said at once.
“What did you do to her?” Jeanie asked.
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything to her, it was just kind of a disagreement,” I said. “Why would you assume I did something to her?”
“Because I can tell you’re ashamed of yourself,” Jeanie said—her receiver was obviously working well. “If you’re ashamed of yourself it means you did something to your daughter.”
“Well, I upset her but I didn’t mean to,” I said.
“What’d it start with?” Jeanie asked.
“I guess it started with the fact that I don’t really have a girlfriend right now,” I said.
Jeanie didn’t say anything. A little silence grew into a big silence. Nothing made me nervous quicker than Jeanie falling silent on the phone.
“I wish you’d talk,” I said. “Is it such a crime not to have a girlfriend?”
“That depends on why you don’t have one and what you’re planning to do about it,” Jeanie said.
There was a pause. I was beginning to feel very disorganized mentally, and also very distraught.
“In certain circumstances, not having a girlfriend can be just about the worst of crimes,” Jeanie said. “Not the absolute worst, but close.”
“Well, I don’t have any idea what circumstances you mean, in this case,” I said.
“The circumstances would be if you had a perfectly nice woman available to you and you did absolutely nothing about it—how’s that for being precise about the circumstances?” Jeanie said.
“I guess that’s deadly precision,” I admitted. “So now that I’m dead, what next?”
“Ordinarily there would be nothing next, but then we both know we’d rather be complicated than ordinary, so let’s pass on that point,” she said. “Just forget that I practiced my deadly precision and tell me everything you said when you upset T.R.”
“Well, let’s see,” I began, trying to remember at what point in the conversation I realized I had upset her.
“Hey, don’t start inventing it,” Jeanie warned. “No invention. Truth is the only thing that’s gonna save you. What did you say and what did she say?
“I’m gonna know immediately if you lie, remember,” she added. “I’m gonna know it, so this one time you better not lie.”
She sounded awfully alert, which meant there was no point in even attempting to lie. Sometimes when Jeanie was sleepy or distracted I could sneak a few small lies past her, although generally her intuition caught them and retained them somewhere in the great memory disk of her brain. A day or two later she’d call them up, examine them, and call to tell me exactly what I’d lied about.
This time I described our day, and when I came to the evening and the conversation by the pool, I told her, as accurately as I could remember, every single word that T.R. and I had said to one another.
Retelling it upset me. I remembered how T.R.’s face had filled with pain. I felt terrible for having caused my daughter such pain. My voice, in recalling it, began to crack. I sniffed a few times and stopped talking. All of a sudden I began to cry. It seemed too sad; I regretted my emotional ineptness too much.
Jeanie waited me out, but this time I didn’t feel any threat in the silence.
“I want to meet this girl,” she said eventually. To my surprise her own voice was shaky and tearful.
“You can meet her, of course you can meet her,” I said. “I’d love for you to meet her. I’m so proud of her I can hardly stand it.”
“I’m glad you said that, Danny,” Jeanie said. “You should be proud of her. She cracked the wall, and I never thought I’d live to see it cracked.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What wall?”
“The one you built around you,” Jeanie said. “Don’t say it wasn’t there. It was there. I tried to crack it but I didn’t have the confidence, you know? What happened is, it cracked me, but that’s okay, I’m working around my crack pretty well. But you were dying behind your wall, and you’re lucky to have a daughter who had the guts to crack it. I hope she smashes it to fucking smithereens and you never have another peaceful day in your whole fucking life, Mr. Deck!”
Slam! went the phone.
I was horrified. What had gone wrong? I thought I’d better wait five minutes and call her back, but after about two minutes she called me back.
“I apologize for my outburst,” she said, although she didn’t sound remorseful, particularly.
“I don’t know that it was an outburst exactly,” I said.
“Right, it was only the trailer for an outburst,” Jeanie said. “I’m putting the rest of the outburst in trust for you. The next time you provoke me I’ll run the whole outburst for you, how do you think you’ll like that?”
“I doubt that I’ll like it much but I’m sure I’ll deserve it,” I said.
“Oh, fuck,” Jeanie said. “When are you going to learn to stop pleading guilty? Your miserable little guilty pleas just make me angrier. There’s never been any doubt about your guilt, so spare me your contrition.”
“What if my contrition is all I have to offer?” I inquired.
“Offer it to somebody else,” Jeanie said firmly. “It won’t get you a peanut-butter sandwich at my place. Stupid men and their stupid contrition are not my favorite things in life.”
“I imagine T.R. feels the same way,” I observed.
“Of course she feels the same way,” Jeanie said. “She sounds a lot like me, only tougher.”
“I hope she’s not tougher,” I said. “I hope no one’s tougher. But if she is, how am I going to make up with her?”
“Not by talking,” Jeanie said. “You may have to actually show some initiative. Women get tired of supplying all the initiative, you know. You said she likes to dance. Did you ever think of taking her dancing?”
“Jeanie, it’s six in the morning,
” I reminded her. “It’s kind of unusual to go dancing at six in the morning, and besides I really can’t dance.”
“Okay, spurn my suggestion,” Jeanie said. “I’d be wildly happy if someone called me right now and offered to take me dancing right now, even if it is a little early. Who wants to look out the window and talk to stupid men on the phone every morning of their lives? I’d rather be dancing.”
There was a very long silence.
“Hey, don’t be sad,” I said.
Jeanie didn’t reply.
“I think you’re a wonderful and beautiful genius,” I said. “I think you’ve given me the perfect suggestion. I think I’ll get my daughter up and take her dancing.”
“Good, that would be a very advanced act,” Jeanie said, but the clear note of sadness was in her voice.
“I wish we could end this conversation on an up note instead of a down note,” I said. “You’ve helped me a lot. You always help me a lot.”
“Bye, Danny,” Jeanie said.
14
T.R. was sitting in the kitchen watching early-morning TV with Gladys on the midget television set Gladys kept on the kitchen table. They were both smoking. Jesse sat on the floor playing with an egg beater. I was surprised to see the egg beater. One whole side of the kitchen counter was covered with blenders; why would anyone in my house ever need to beat an egg?
“Where’d you get that egg beater?” I asked. “I haven’t seen an egg beater in years.”
Neither answered or even turned her head to look at me. The provenance of the egg beater held not the slightest interest for them, although Jesse had already learned to work it and was making the little blades go round and round.
Out the back window I could see Buddy and Bo cleaning fish.
“Hey, they caught some fish,” I said. “Are we going to have fish for breakfast?”
“Swim,” Jesse said immediately. Her brain had instantly connected fish-water-swim. She dropped the egg beater and began to take off her gown.
“Swim,” she said again.
“No, we ain’t goin’ swimmin’, keep your gown on, Jesse,” T.R. said, in a monotone.
“Swim!” Jesse insisted—there was a threat of squeal in the way she said the word. She continued to undress. T.R. reached down and swatted her twice on her behind. Jesse looked stricken.
“I told you to keep your gown on,” T.R. said.
For a moment Jesse tried not to cry, but the bitter injustice of life was too much for her; her face collapsed and she flung herself, sobbing, into Gladys’s lap.
“Well, mind your momma, honey,” Gladys said, picking Jesse up.
No one as yet had taken the slightest notice of me.
“Would anyone like to go dancing?” I asked, feeling profoundly silly. The prevailing mood in the kitchen did not suggest dancing.
T.R. finally looked at me. “Come again?” she said.
“I just wondered if anyone wanted to go dancing,” I said. Repeating such a ridiculous suggestion made me feel even more foolish than I had felt the first time. Why had I let Jeanie talk me into doing something so absurd? Go dancing at six in the morning? I was not a man known for his dancing skills, either.
But T.R.’s face brightened as if I had turned on a light. She immediately stood up.
“Shoot, just let me put on my dancin’ shoes,” she said. “I’ll be ready before you know it.”
“I don’t know where we’ll find a place to dance at this hour,” I said. The immediate success of my suggestion made me a little apprehensive.
“There’s always Aunt Jimmie’s,” Gladys reminded me.
“Swim,” Jesse gulped. I believe she was merely trying to reassert the reasonableness of her wish, but then the hopelessness of the situation overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears once more.
“Don’t take it so hard, honey, it’s temporary,” Gladys said. She was looking out the backdoor, watching Buddy and Bo clean fish. It was not hard to tell she had her eye on Buddy.
Before I could reflect on what Gladys’s new interest might mean for the stability of the household, T.R. reappeared. Her energy level had risen so rapidly while she was dressing that my spacious kitchen seemed too small for her. Her eyes were already dancing; she radiated youth, health, mischief, sex. She had thrown on a skirt and a blouse, both red, and proceeded to dance her way around the kitchen table.
“Boy, I love to dance,” she said.
At the sight of her beautiful mother dancing, Jesse forgot her woe. She gazed at her mom with forgiving wonder.
On the way to the highway we saw a small cloud of dust approaching, preceded by an ancient blue Volkswagen. It was Godwin, of course, returning from a nocturnal hitchhiker sweep of the surrounding counties. I pulled over to the side and stopped and waited.
“Good idea,” T.R. said. “Let’s take L.J. He ain’t the world’s best dancer, but he gets out there and tries.”
Godwin was not in his teak-plantation mode this morning. He looked as if he had spent the night wallowing in fetid drains. He seemed half blind and kept peering at us through cupped hands, as if he were not quite sure who we were.
“We’re going dancing,” I said. “You can be invited if you want to.”
Godwin considered his invitation for a few seconds, blinking. The delay was short, but even so, it was more than T.R. was in the mood to tolerate. She hit the horn and held it down for twenty seconds. Godwin, who probably had a fairly advanced hangover, held his ears and writhed as if he were being tortured.
“Get in if you’re coming,” T.R. said, when she let up on the horn. “And if you ain’t going you might as well drive that little blue car off a cliff because I ain’t never speaking to you again.”
Godwin immediately ditched his Volkswagen and got in with us.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said. “It’s my eyes, you see.”
“What’d you get in them, cum?” T.R. asked happily, offering him a stick of gum.
“Mace,” Godwin said gloomily. “I really must make a point of avoiding Oklahoma. They Mace people at random up there.”
“Who Maced you and why?” I asked.
“A service-station attendant Maced me for no reason whatsoever,” Godwin said. “I was merely chatting him up a bit; he was quite a good-looking young chap. He came over with a bottle of something and I thought perhaps he was going to clean my windshield. I was prepared to tip him lavishly, and what did he do but Mace me savagely.
“My dear, you look ravishing,” he said to T.R., as we bumped on toward the highway. “You’re as beautiful as Helen.”
“Helen who?” T.R. asked. “Is she one of Daddy’s so-called girlfriends?”
“Oh, no, Helen of Troy,” Godwin said, and proceeded to try to explain the Trojan War. T.R., who couldn’t have cared less, turned the stereo up as far as it would go and put in a heavy metal tape.
“Hers was the face that launched a thousand ships,” Godwin screeched into the music.
“I don’t want to hear about it, I get sick in boats,” T.R. said.
It didn’t take us long to reach Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, a weather-beaten county-line roadhouse with a large jukebox, a small dance floor, and a few tables where one could eat if one chose, or simply sit and drink beer and brood silently if that was one’s mood—and it often was the mood of the roughnecks, cowboys, truckers, hay haulers, tool pushers and coyote trappers who frequented that lonely corner of the county. The roadhouse sat on the bleak gray prairies, and things were just as bleak inside as out. One felt that not a dime’s worth of paint had been expended on the building since it was built, and it had been built in the thirties.
Not a dime’s worth had been expended on Aunt Jimmie either; she sat by the cash register all day, smoking, reading the newspaper, and watching soap operas or whatever else offered on a blurry little black-and-white TV. People who had known Aunt Jimmie all their lives could not remember hearing her say anything. Service at the lounge was minimal. Her cooks—generally fortyish coun
try women who were between marriages—never lasted long, but there was an endless supply of fortyish country women between marriages in that part of the country; Aunt Jimmie was rarely without a cook. Generally she also had a shaky, busted-up cowboy or retired roughneck as dishwasher, general factotum, and consort. Everyone had just called them boyfriends until Godwin came along, but he insisted that they were actually consorts. Efforts to make him explain the difference between a boyfriend and a consort proved fruitless. He may have known something none of the rest of us knew, though, for Aunt Jimmie seemed to like him and occasionally even let him clean up in her bathroom when he stumbled in from some particularly fetid roll in the drains.
T.R. marched right in, talked Aunt Jimmie out of a roll of quarters, and fed the roll hastily into the jukebox, punching in her selections as rapidly as if she were programming a computer.
I thought I might sit at a table, have a few cups of coffee, and contemplate dancing for a while, but T.R. would have none of that. She grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor immediately. Aunt Jimmie’s jukebox was liberally sprinkled with golden oldies, but it was still a bit of a surprise to find myself, at that hour of the day, dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz,” as sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford. I was a stumbling waltzer at best, but T.R. was a strong one and carried me with her. She put her head on my chest as we danced. I thought nothing of that until I felt a wetness seep through my shirt and realized she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed. I tried to lift her chin but she dug her face tighter into my chest and kept on dancing.
We were, of course, the only couple on the dance floor. Godwin had gone into Aunt Jimmie’s bathroom to clean up a bit. Aunt Jimmie was watching the morning news. There were three oil-field workers at one table, two dairy farmers at another table, and an old cowboy sitting in the corner, smoking and looking out at the gray land. No one seemed to think it odd that I was dancing with my glorious young daughter at six-thirty in the morning, or that she was hugging me and crying. There was something Balkan in the indifference of everyone in the bar to the fate of everyone else. The roughnecks looked bent, the dairy farmers defeated, the cowboy old and grizzled and sad. My troubles and T.R.’s didn’t touch them; they were hard people in a hard place, so unconcerned about us that I didn’t even feel embarrassed about my bad dancing. Aunt Jimmie’s lounge might have been in Albania or some impoverished, rocky part of Greece for all the sympathy the customers showed for us or for one another.
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