Godwin watched us grope for the receiver with amused detachment. He might have been a critic enduring the rehearsal of a not particularly adept comedy act. He didn’t say a word, but at least he’d stopped watching his Cheerios.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I accidentally dropped the phone.”
“A weird-looking Mexican came up and tried to sell me dope right here at this pay phone while your line was busy,” my daughter said, calming a little. “He had one of them pit bulls and I was afraid it was gonna get my babies, plus I was afraid you wasn’t ever going to believe it was me, anyway. I gave the dope dealer all my money just so he’d go away, that’s why I had to call collect.”
She sighed. I waited.
“The dream of my life is to have an inside phone someday,” she said quietly. “I’d have a couch, and I could sit on my couch and talk as long as I wanted and not have to mess with no change or worry about dogs getting my babies.”
She paused again. Godwin and Gladys were watching me closely.
“That’s something that’d be nice,” she said in a resigned tone—the very tone Jeanie Vertus sounded when she mentioned that the sun was not peeping through in New York City. What I heard in my daughter’s voice was the brief, deep resignation of those who feel that their simplest, most normal hopes cannot possibly come true—not the hope of a ray of sunlight, nor of a couch and an inside phone.
“Honey, you can have an inside phone,” I said.
“You’re saying it but you ain’t here,” she said. “Bo, stop throwing dirt on your little sister.”
“I like dirt,” a faint voice said, the voice, presumably, of my grandson. I decided to try a two-handed grip on the receiver, lest I drop it again in some reflex of emotion.
This got the full attention of Godwin and Gladys. On the whole this was the most exciting breakfast any of us had experienced for ages.
“Tell me where you are and I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll charter a plane. I’ll be there in an hour or two. I’ll make it all up to you.”
“Maybe you could,” my daughter said thoughtfully. “But first I gotta decide if you deserve the chance.”
Then she hung up again.
5
“You mean to say that child has called twice and you haven’t yet managed to get her name?” Godwin said, once the situation had been explained to him.
“Or even what town she’s in?” Gladys chimed in.
“Listen, I’ve only been an active parent for about ten minutes,” I reminded them. “Plus I’m very nervous. Don’t be so critical.”
“She’s probably in Miami,” Gladys said. “There’s nothing but Mexicans in Miami now, they say.”
“She didn’t sound that far away,” I said, wishing the phone would ring again.
“I once received a call from Nepal,” Godwin remarked. “The connection was remarkable. My friend might have been in the next room.”
Silence fell. I needed to piss, but didn’t feel like leaving the phone, even for a second.
“In retrospect it’s nice we had such a good connection that day,” Godwin remarked. “A day or two later my friend fell into a crevasse and that was the end of him.”
“Should have watched his step,” Gladys observed.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The operator asked if I would accept a call from T.R. Her name must be T.R.”
“Nonsense, T.R. stands for Teddy Roosevelt,” Godwin said. “Who would name a girl Teddy Roosevelt?”
“She was raised by savages, remember,” I reminded him. I had only met my wife’s parents once—the night they blocked me from the hospital where my infant daughter had been born—but my memories were vivid.
“Savages? You mean you got a half-breed daughter?” Gladys asked. “I thought you told me your wife’s folks were Church of Christ.”
“I think that’s it,” I said. “Some savage poor white fundamentalist sect. I didn’t mean to insult native Americans.”
“Well, I’m a native American and you’ve insulted me a million times whether you meant to or not,” Gladys said. “Even so, I don’t want no pit bulls getting your grandbabies. Why don’t you trace the call?”
“No, that might upset her,” I said. “She called twice, she’ll call again.”
“I wonder if she’s as beautiful as her mother,” Godwin said. “Imagine a young Sally in our midst, here in this pastoral Eden. I could teach her to swim if she doesn’t happen to know how.”
“Go write your book, Godwin,” I said. “I’m sure my daughter knows how to swim.”
The drift of his thoughts was obvious. Godwin was remembering Sally, my former wife, whose lover he had once been in the days when he was a respected sociology professor at the University of Texas. In middle age he had adroitly crossed the disciplines to classics, and for a time had held a chair in Greek. Now he was retired and living in my guest house, writing a book on Euripidean elements in the music of the Rolling Stones. Godwin was nothing if not mod.
“You can’t be sure until you ask her,” he said. “I have few peers when it comes to teaching the crawl. She might need to improve her crawl.”
“They say that people who keep on having fantasies live the longest,” Gladys observed.
“Don’t tell him that!” I protested. “I don’t want him having fantasies about my daughter.”
“How about your fantasies, my dear?” Godwin asked. He was not above trying a little Oxbridge charm on Gladys from time to time. “Perhaps you’d like to regale us with a few of them when you finish your grapefruit,” he said.
“Mine involve things that go on while you’re having a bubble bath,” Gladys informed him. “You can’t see much because of the bubbles.”
I was beginning to worry about the pit bulls. Perhaps my daughter really was in Miami. She’d said she’d given all her money to the dope dealer. For all I knew the situation could be deteriorating fast. I had suddenly been brought to grips with the fact that I had three descendants—a daughter and two grandchildren—and I didn’t know their names or locations. Godwin and Gladys’s idle banter, which normally I enjoyed, began to irritate me.
“You two aren’t taking this very seriously,” I said. “My daughter’s called twice. What do you think I ought to do?”
Before they could answer, two training jets from the air force base in nearby Wichita Falls roared overhead—“roared” was not too strong a word, either. They crossed the hill where my house sat at an altitude of about fifty feet, followed by a tidal wave of sound. When the trainer jets came over, there was no point in even trying to talk. The sound they brought with them had an almost paralyzing force; one just endured it, thoughtless, blank, and a little resentful at having the peace of the morning shattered.
The dark green fighter jets sped like darts toward the western horizon; the waves of sound that swept over us began to recede, and as it did we all heard another sound, a minute tinkle that had been completely smothered by the surf of jet noise: the phone was ringing. I grabbed for it instantly, but just as I did the ringing stopped.
6
“Oh, shit!” I said. “Oh, no!”
To their credit Godwin and Gladys were as horrified as I was.
“Sue the air force!” Godwin said, shaking his fist at the departing planes. “Get the Secretary of Defense on the phone. This outrage has gone on long enough!”
“That was probably just one of your girlfriends anyway,” Gladys said soothingly. “That Italian girl usually calls about this time of day.”
She was referring to Marella Miracola—the Miracle, to her worshiping public. Marella was a great star and a good friend, but it was no longer exactly accurate to call her a girl, and in any case she had fallen in love with a man half her age and hadn’t called for months.
“Now what’ll she think?” I said, fearing it had been my daughter. “She’ll think I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I’ll never meet my grandkids.”
“Might be a blessing,” Gladys said,
reverting to form. “I’ve met mine, and it’s my guess we’ll be lucky if half of ’em even manage to stay out of jail.
“The person who said children are a curse wasn’t far wrong,” she added. “Look at how cute puppies are when they’re young, but then they grow up to be dogs.”
“Well put,” Godwin said. “My own children seldom offer me the slightest assistance.”
I was well aware that I was not taking breakfast with two of life’s great successes in the parenthood stakes. Godwin’s attitude was frankly Casanovian: for him conception meant goodbye. In his wanderings as a young classicist he had fathered children in most of the places where the British flag had once flown: Cairo, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Cyprus, Kenya, all turned up regularly on my long-distance bill, but it was not clear to me that Godwin had ever actually seen any of his children. The only language he shared with them all was French.
Gladys had five girls, all clustered in a tight, bleak corner of the oil patch near Abilene, Texas. Their lives were a constant shuffle of divorcings, remarryings, new loves that soon seemed indistinguishable from old loves. The only thing more constant than this shuffle was the production of offspring; Gladys already had twenty grandchildren, and none of her daughters had yet reached her thirtieth year.
“Haven’t any of your girls heard of contraception?” I asked once.
“It don’t work in our family because of metabolism,” Gladys informed me with a straight face.
Godwin heard her say it and bounced around in his chair for five minutes, making the strange gargling sounds that passed for laughter with him.
“Perhaps you and I have more in common than I supposed,” he said to Gladys, when the gargling stopped. “Metabolism has always been my problem too. I expect it explains why Daniel—who doesn’t seem to have a metabolism—will never understand the common lot.
“Not a bad title for a book,” he added, smiling brightly at me. “Why don’t you call your new opus ‘The Common Lot’?”
“Thanks, I have an excellent title already,” I reminded him. “I have a metabolism too, for your information.”
“What are you calling that book?” Gladys asked. “I know you told me, but my memory leaks.”
“‘My Girlfriends’ Boyfriends,’” I told her. “I think it’s a brilliant title.”
“It might appeal to the French,” Godwin sniffed. “Hearty folk, of which Gladys and I are two, won’t go for it, though.”
“Too subtle for you?” I suggested.
“Too corrupt,” Godwin replied. “The suggestion implicit in your title, that you permit your girlfriends to have as many boyfriends as they want, bespeaks an unhealthy complaisance.”
“That’s what I think too, and I come down with complaisance once and know exactly what I’m talking about,” Gladys informed me.
“You came down with complaisance?” I asked, twirling my finger around my ear in the universally accepted sign of insanity.
“Yeah, it was right after I had that bad bladder infection,” Gladys said. “Antibiotics didn’t do no good because it’s a virus.”
Shortly after that the conversation stalled. There were mornings when Godwin and I could team-tackle Gladys and force her back a few yards, and then there were mornings when it seemed pointless to try. If she wanted to believe she had once suffered from viral complaisance, why not let her?
I was more irritated with Godwin, anyway. In the twenty and more years I’d known him, his own girlfriends and boyfriends must have accumulated thousands of lovers—a Breughelian triptych would hardly have been sufficient to catalogue the writhings and squirmings he had been witness to. How dare he sit there and accuse me of complaisance!
Meanwhile the sun was well up, the day’s heat was coming, and I had missed my daughter’s call.
7
“There’s nothin’ I hate worse than waiting for the phone to ring,” Gladys said. She stood up as if to clear the table, and then sat back down and stared into space.
“How old would she be?” Godwin asked.
“Who?”
“Your daughter,” he said. “The young nymph with the two cherubs.”
“She’s twenty-two,” I said. “Twenty-three her next birthday. I just hope my agent doesn’t call. It won’t matter to him if I have fifty daughters—I’ll never be able to get him off the phone.”
The phone rang. I grabbed it so quickly it squirted out of my hand and popped up in the air, like a frog. Godwin began to gargle. I caught the receiver on its descent; to my immense relief it was the operator, asking if I would accept another collect call from T.R.
“Certainly, of course,” I said.
“Howdy,” my daughter said. She sounded slightly amused.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’m gettin’ the hang of this collect calling,” she said. “Shoot, if I’d known it was this easy I’d have been calling people all over the place and making them pay for it.”
“I’m sorry if that was you who called a minute ago,” I said. “Two jet fighters were going over and I didn’t hear the phone until it was too late.”
She didn’t reply. A pause lengthened, during which I became nervous. She might be getting ready to hang up on me again.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “Did I offend you?”
“Un-uh,” she said. “I was just watching Bo.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s trying to pee on a cat,” she said. “He’s at that tender age where he tries to pee on things. I feel a little sorry for the cat, but then a cat that can’t outrun Bo don’t stand much of a chance, in this part of town anyway. Bo ain’t quite three.”
Then her mood darkened.
“If them fighter planes you mentioned ain’t got nothing else to do they could come down here and bomb this part of town, for all I care,” she said. “I hate it.”
“Can I just make one request?” I asked.
“I guess, it’s your nickel,” she said.
I was beginning to love her voice. If I’m a connoisseur of anything, it’s the female voice. Through the years—fifty-one of them now—the voices of women have been my wine: my claret, my Chardonnay, my Chablis. And now I had found a new wine, one with depth and color, bite, clarity, body. I was lapping it up, ready to get drunk on it.
“Just tell me your name and what town you’re in,” I asked.
“My name’s T.R.,” she said.
“Which stands for what?”
“It stands for Tyler Rose,” she said. “What else would it stand for?”
“Well, it could stand for Teddy Roosevelt,” I said.
There was another pause. I had the sense that I didn’t quite have her attention.
“Oops, now he’s trying to hit the kitty with a brick,” T.R. said. “I’m gonna have to let this phone dangle for a minute, we don’t want no squashed kitties today.”
Godwin and Gladys were staring at me. They loved watching me talk on the phone. The concept of privacy held little meaning for either of them. Sometimes I got the sense that the romantic peregrinations of my far-flung lady friends were the only thing keeping them alive.
“My grandson’s trying to hit a cat with a brick,” I informed them. “He was merely trying to pee on it, but he seems to have become homicidal.”
“All kids are murderers,” Gladys remarked.
“All kids are murderers,” Godwin repeated. “Write that down. It’s another good title—rather Euripidean, wouldn’t you agree?”
Wails began to come through the phone. More than one voice could be heard wailing.
“What are you crying about?” T.R. said. “Your brother’s the one who got the spanking.
“Now both these babies are crying,” she said to me. “Jesse don’t like me to spank her brother, even when he’s being a dick.”
The wails of my grandchildren grew louder.
“I hate trying to talk on the phone with them squalling,” T.R. said. “That dope dealer’s still around, too. He’s standing a
cross the street trying to get his pit bull to bite a turtle.”
“You didn’t tell me what town you’re in,” I reminded her.
“I sure didn’t,” she said crisply. “Why would you even want to know, after all these years?”
“So I can come and see you,” I said.
The wails seemed to be diminishing, but T.R. was silent.
“It wouldn’t be Houston, would it?” I asked, making a wild guess.
“Mister, I don’t know a thing about you,” she said, her voice suddenly blistering again. “You could be an old scumbag, for all I know. You could have AIDS and give it to my babies.”
“I don’t have AIDS, are you in Houston?” I asked. “I wish you’d just tell me that much.”
“Wish all you want to,” she said more quietly. “Wish for me like I used to wish for you. I ain’t tellin’ you nothing. If you’re such a smart old fart, maybe you can figure it out. There’s two people waiting to use this phone, and anyway I got to get these kids out of this sun or they’ll be red as lobsters.”
She hung up with some force.
“I think she’s in Houston,” I said to Godwin and Gladys.
8
“So are you gonna pull yourself together and put some clothes on and go get her, or what?” Gladys wanted to know.
“Gladys, I’ve got clothes on,” I said. “A caftan is clothes. Millions of people in Africa wear them every day of their lives.”
“Maybe so, but this ain’t Africa,” Gladys said. “If you show up at some Dairy Queen in Houston looking like you look now, your daughter’s gonna take one look and run the other direction, that’s my frank opinion.”
I had picked up some caftans in Tunis several years ago, meaning to use them as crew presents for people who worked on my television show. But it was hot when I got back to Texas, so one day I tried one on, to see if what worked for North African heat worked for Texas heat, too. Pretty soon I was wearing caftans day and night, week in and week out. I don’t know that they made me cooler, particularly—what they did was eliminate the problem of thinking about clothes at all. I just wore my caftans; they were perfect for the reclusive life I started leading right after I sold my production company and departed Culver City forever.
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