A California Closing
Page 14
She said ami, friend, and not amour, love, and that seems good, what fleshy friction so potentially complex should come to, not beyond the realm of friendship and playfulness, but firmly within that realm. On pace with the playful aspect, she says, “By the way, I know your real estate agent, that Judith Elizabeth Cranston Layne woman. I don’t know how you picked her. Or why. She drives a white BMW sedan, and when I asked her why, she said they loaned her a white one when her silver BMW was in for a service. She said all these years she’s thought white was stark and chalky. She got it right. But then a friend called out, ‘Nice car!’ So she traded her silver one on a white one. Her silver car was six months old, but she didn’t want it anymore, because BMW makes a statement, and nobody called out for silver, and white is perfect for what it doesn’t say. She said that. She says, ‘if you get my meaning.’ I haven’t the foggiest what she’s talking about, but I do get her gall.”
“I don’t follow her too well either. And I agree there isn’t much there, under the accessories. Except the teeth—for the quick close. But I didn’t choose her, and she’s not there for small talk. She’s there to sell.”
They come to the door. He steps out. “I hope we can …”
“You mean you didn’t choose her for the same reason you chose me?”
Mulroney stares at the two answers available in the brisk night air. The first: that he didn’t choose anybody—never has. He merely deferred to need, and she came along, perchance, with needs of her own. He wonders briefly if the moment is nigh, but alas, it is not.
He chooses the second potential answer: “Yes, choosing you was different than choosing her.”
She waits for elaboration and finally says, “It’s late. We came a long way in a short time. I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so restful. You could stay here, but …”
Mulroney steps off. “Thanks. You are a great hostess.”
“I should hope to say so.” She moves in for the cuddle and a throaty moan. “That was easy. I know you men—you real men.”
“Come. Hugs.”
She nuzzles in the commingled scent of sperm and flowers. Mulroney imagines it at the fragrance counter at Burnham’s: Honey Suckle Mayo. He laughs, amazed at his wit, wondering if he might have done better at merchandizing.
She joins his soft chortle, satisfied that a cuddle sums them up.
For his part, Mulroney is sensitive to her needs and feels the urgency of closing the deal prior to other necessities. He must keep hope alive, because a woman is still a woman at any age. “Maybe we can …”
“Maybe we can. Go now. Your wife must be worried sick.”
“No. She’s into cocktails by now.”
“Now, now. Give a woman her due.”
“Fair enough.”
So it’s farewell, so long, au revoire, auf viedersehen—till next time, with a peck on the cheek, since they only just met.
Mulroney strolls two blocks home, not feeling good or relieved but rather anxious, hoping the exchange will prove productive. If he’s truly honest with his inner satyr, he must ask himself the ever-present question on every man’s mind regarding the quality/satisfaction merit of the blowjob. So he asks, and he thinks, Yeah, that was terrific. Next time would be even better with the warm and fuzzies. Make that warm and cuddlies. The fuzzy thing could be a deal killer. Snapping the necks of baby animals? It’s not the best of images to keep old Betty looking good, so he hopes she has the sense to close the torture room door.
Entering quietly, Mulroney listens. Allison is sleeping on the sofa in front of the news—this just in. She calls it keeping up to date, her habit of fading away with the news on. A TV woman is reporting on the anguish etched so clearly in the face of another woman, an extraordinary woman who travels with a small harp, playing to random listeners on a busy city street, bringing joy to their otherwise hectic lives. Then comes a brief history of harps and some well-known harpists.
The story is wrapping up when it breaks for Breaking News and another woman telling the world that a car just ran into a fruit stand in India or Indiana and killed a man.
Mulroney checks his machine. Marylyn Moutard barks that she will not say no to the offer on the table without a good faith counter. Mulroney regrets her use of mood to compensate limited perspective.
Allison sits up, groggy. “You don’t even know who the harpies were! Do you?”
“Let me see … Weren’t they the original cunts?”
“That’s so negative!”
“Yes. I’m trying to change, but it takes time, along with the help of a patient community.”
She plops back and surfs the news line up, complaining of the sameness in all the news and the giant corporations with corporate family values that own the news channels, which is so fucked. Allison won’t use that language unless she’s loosened up with sauce.
“Don’t watch.”
“I really shouldn’t. It’s sick. It’s like that old guy in a coma like a cauliflower all those years, and they kept him plugged in because he was a billionaire. They spent millions keeping a pulse in the guy. Who in their right mind would want that? Then that bitch killed him. Oh, she killed him and everybody knows it. And she’s a slut too, an old one. And the news people pumped it up like a sporting event. Like that was good news, and they were in these people’s faces every time they smiled or cried. It got ratings. The guy died. So they made this TV movie about this family with all this money who kept the old guy alive. They should be shot.” The liquor also reveals her hostility. “She lives up the street, you know. Probably up there fucking a hobo right now. Fucking Republicans.”
“You never were so anti-news. Or political.”
“I’m not!”
“Maybe I misunderstood you.”
“You usually do.”
Mulroney rummages the fridge and finds potato salad on the far side of shelf life. He sprinkles it liberally with salt and pepper, shags a beer, and sits at his wife’s feet.
She asks, “Want to see if a movie’s on?”
“Sure.” So they settle in to two hours of thought deferment on a painless amusement they’ll forget by tomorrow. They turn in. Mulroney could use a shower, but that’s a chore and would wake him up again. Besides, Allison is snoring. Fuck it. Plenty of time in the morning. But he’s got all this scented lotion and spit on his dingdong, so he gets in and gets stuck, thinking into not thinking, then getting out and quickly toweling and turning in before things revert, as they usually do.
Maybe he feels a loss of traction in his tentative connection to polite society. He’s a salesperson, a used-car salesperson at that, a proven producer in a most competitive arena, where jugular instincts prevail. The years brought him a customer or two who walked in, pointed to the car of choice, and plunked down the dough, but the massive hoards needed to be sold—wanted to be sold—demanded that Mulroney convince them that purchasing a particular car would be the wisest decision of the day. Mulroney was the best. He could never actually train a staff to be so good, but they came close. So what happened? Did he squander margins on creeping overhead? Did sales slump? Did some lots shift inventory to steal profitability from other lots? Did Californians begin to think that pre-owned sounds better than used, and new sounds best of all? Or was it the lenders, hell-bent on ruining a used-car magnate with reduced value factors on anything not fresh from the factory? Fuckers. You can’t devalue a car on a whim. A used-car guy only makes a go of it because a car cost thirty grand new but then devalues to fifteen in no time, even with low mileage. There’s your value, your bang for the buck, no matter how much happy horseshit is loose in the ether. It’s the year of manufacture that determines value. Yes, it’s skewed and wrong, and nobody wants a nearly new car with high miles. But low miles in cream puff condition, nobody gives a flat flying fuck what the little digits on the title say. So why do they bust his balls on the greatest OK deals around, on what they call market fluctuation?
It’s Mulroney’s cross to bear, and so is the
solution, which is actually no solution at all. What would he do with a measly hundred grand? He’d buy time, and if time ran out, he’d worry about getting more. Or not, if he moves to Hawaii and opens a used surfboard lot. Or a used golf cart lot.
Hey, has time ever not run out?
What if they had a drug to make a man more romantic—or crave foreplay? That would make this easier. They do, kind of, but a boner pill that drives a man into the nearest hole is not exactly a joy to anticipate. He can’t feel good about wooing Betty Burnham. She’s so odd—make that bizarre, with her Republican values and animal cruelty. Still, the solution to what ails Mulroney’s World appears to be as easy as low-hanging fruit. That would be him, Mulroney, the original low hanger. And to think, a guy had only to walk up the road to get a hummer and a loan—make that a grant, most likely.
Mulroney drifts. One day he’ll be stooped, old, and unable to mount, much less ride, much less uphill. Then what?
In the morning Casa Mulroney wakens to birdsong and garden titter, with Allison urging everyone to breathe the morning air and eat birdseed and be happy—that would be her friends, the birds, including Victoria, the chicken who showed up last month, out of the blue. Allison calls her a harbinger of things to come and tells her to be nice and share with the other birdies. She doesn’t drink in the morning and, as usual, is free of the sundown demons and their day-after consequence. With childish innocence she feeds and waters, encouraging the birds and flowers to express themselves in song, color, and scent. “Or why be?” And if they have other concerns, they can speak, in their way. She asks that the birds, please, drop no dukey on the flowers. She assures them she’s not mad at them—but it would be best if they dropped it, you know, near the flowers and not on them. Okay?
•
What a woman. She’s nuts like the old bag up the road, but it’s different. Mulroney could embrace her right then on sheer affection—make that love, most of the time, and a familiarity of years and so many things between them that he values, especially her thin body, but she’s in the garden. He rolls to one side and feels his age and determines the morning might be good for massage. Hey—how can you tell if you’re getting old? You get stiff in the back more often than the front. Ha! Mulroney just made that up. But that’s another great thing about bicycling: anyone can get a massage, but after a thirty-five miler, a massage means so much more.
Mulroney moans, imagining the ration of grief Suzette will give him for getting so tight. That’s okay. It’ll be a tune-up, with Mulroney coming back together to run smooth for a few more miles. So he dials the number he knows by heart. Suzette is six one and a hundred pounds and reads books on correct eating, stretching, cleansing, sleeping, meditating, chakra adjusting, aura alignment and so on. She’s too thin, at times painfully, like when her chest looks bony. Her bookshelves read like Fellini’s library: Integrative Karma, The Tao of Gallbladders, Your Spleen & You.
Her hands are magic—the first time he thought her amazingly in tune, as she lifted his nutsack casual as squeezing his ear lobe and pressed underneath to relieve tension in the lower back. “You’re making tension in my lower front.”
“Yes, it’s all connected,” she explained.
Mulroney didn’t think Suzette so old as himself, maybe because she doesn’t drink, smoke or use negative language. She’s three months younger actually, with a mystique. That would make her a few years younger than Betty Burnham. Suzette tolerated his humor too, laughing him off, which was different than jacking him off, which he thought at the time she was bound for. He didn’t mind. What the hell. Suzette has great hands and might need a few bucks extra, and there he was on the table, all lathered up.
But she only wanted to ease the tension in his back, in her odd way. Besides that, she laughed at some of his jokes and ignored his reaction to treatment—roustabouts never got the tent up quicker on fewer moves. Then she was on to thighs and calves in her magical, soothing way.
“Hello, there. It’s me, Suzette. I’ll be gone till the twenty-eighth. Please leave me a message, and have a most wonderful day.”
Gone. He could check the Happy Daze listings for massage therapy. But on his last try he waited twenty minutes past his scheduled time. The Big M—twenty minutes. Then she came out eating parrot shit on a rice cracker—spirulina, actually, smeared all over her face as if to look disgusting by design—her design. That’s how the kids taunt and make a point.
They call it political, but it has no point, as in pointless. Mulroney asked if that was parrot shit on that cracker. She laughed, no; it was, in fact, the richest source of riboflavin in the known universe, which is bigger than the whole wide world. Uppity kids want to one-up on everything they do. Her girlfriend came out for the public display of affection, with a big wet kiss, right in the spirulina. And he’d only wanted a massage.
Let’s see: Dr. Feelgood. Lotus Unfolding. Soothing Outcall—Wait! Rosa Massage. Outcall OK. Great hands. That’s Rosa in Watsonville! Bingo!
So he punches the number and Rosa picks up. “Hello.”
“Hi, Rosa. It’s Michael, on the bicycle. Remember me?”
“I do. How can I help you?”
“I saw your ad in the Happy Daze.”
“Yes. I have an opening at three. What’s your address?”
“Oh. Well, I’ll come to your place.”
She hesitates. “You’ll be more comfortable at your place.”
“Nah. We have a showing this afternoon. I gotta be scarce.”
“Well … I suppose …”
“If it’s a problem I can …”
“No. Not a problem. I’d like to see your house sometime.”
Does she want to case it for artwork? “Yes, well, I’d love to show you sometime. Three?”
“Sure.”
“Luego.”
“By-ee.”
Why do they do that? Must they jump on every chance to sound stupid? What are the odds that she makes tiny hearts above every i and at the ends of sentences? At least the gold digging is transparent and up front, unlike the more civilized social segments, who have the couth and forbearance to get acquainted. So the day reveals its plan, with a ride and a rub foremost but beginning with a few unsavory tasks. Because an ugly fact of life and business is that anxiety desperation still requires paper pushing and phone calls. So he heads down to it, ready to plow the drift on his desk.
Which seems like a curse on a man with better things to do. Then again, how much more can he do? Not much is the short answer. He needs money in the short term in order to enable reasonable cash flow to float the show for the long term. And the question persists on each call and sheet of paper, whether this snippet or that blurb will affect meaningful change on the … er … uh … situation. The answer persists as well: Nah. Not likely. He could sell three cars from each lot daily and still need to weather a six-month low-pressure system.
Mulroney doesn’t mind the tedium or the pressure. He hasn’t minded for many years, when mechanical effort led to leverage in all things, and a man on paper could be a king in the marketplace, where the greatest stuff can be had. Now the mechanical effort is reduced to mechanics and maintenance, a chore, but he’s done it for so long and knows the moves so well, he just knocks it out. Takes what, an hour?
Johnny Lunchbox might grit his teeth when the alarm goes off an hour before sunrise for another goddamn shift with the two-hour commute and job politics—but there’s none of that where Michael Mulroney lives. Business independents and self-starters understand retirement; it’s not the end of work. It’s the end of mandatory tasks. Take Allison: she works the garden and loves it. Mulroney works his way up hills on a bicycle and loves it. That’s the true definition of retirement: not having to do what you don’t want to do. Sure, the bullshit and melodrama never completely go away; they’re part and parcel with sunrise. And the rant and rave to close a deal takes a bigger toll as the years stack up. But all told the world is good, and it promises more of the same, if only—
Mulroney had this tax lawyer once on a state audit—Mulroney was clean, but the state bastards took him for the ride. The bureaucrats saw him making more dough than the entire State Tax Division payroll. That gets a bunch of GS-7s pissed off. Mulroney met his lawyer once because that’s all it took. The lawyer got high marks for keeping the ride short and going toe-to-toe with the nimrod tax bullies. He was big money, but at his level what can you do, quibble? Three calls to check the guy out came up cherries: this lawyer was the go-to guy on state audits. So Mulroney went. The guy was with one of those six-name law firms, and he wasn’t one of the names. The firm had the entire nineteenth floor in a prime location, all paneled in endangered hardwoods for the spendiest show in town, chrome and steel outside, plush, cushy and heart-grain inside. Mulroney opened with the key question: why wouldn’t an outfit like this want the go-to tax guy on the letterhead? The guy laughed—said the firm did want him there, but he declined. They insisted, and he threatened to leave. Sure, he was a bullshitter, but that was later. For openers, he said, “Twenty-six partners and associates in this firm all submit personal financials annually, and only one is solvent.”