“I just want to know what happened with him,” I said. She shrugged me off and got out of the car.
Supper was grim. Ray read the paper, Irene and I had a contest over who could eat less and act gloomier, and then we dove for the TV. At eight she disappeared, came out an hour later reeking of perfume and wearing black boots—she had explicitly, I thought, not worn the ones I had bought her—and this red second-skin T-shirt. Makeup too, and artfully tousled hair one might describe as modified Country Western.
“You’re dressed up,” I said from the couch across from her father where I sat slumped, drugged by TV.
“Just jeans,” she said, “you ready?”
“I’m gonna go change my shirt.” She sighed impatiently and threw herself at the couch. Her father’s eyes stayed nailed to the TV, where they were safe.
Walking out to the car five minutes later, her perfume—and it wasn’t her own perfume, either—made me feel queasy, with the heat that still hung in the deepening night and the taste of her father’s cigarettes in my mouth. The moon was huge and just rising, hanging over that one feeble tree in the yard as we drove away.
We traveled along Morgan for a couple of miles, out of the neighborhood and beside fields and the gurgling sound of a river. We turned onto a darker road, trees on both sides, made a few winding turns and came into a clearing where the moonlight came back; I heard music and saw a lighted building surrounded by trucks and cars. She didn’t drive up to the building but parked at the mouth of the clearing and shut off the headlights.
“I don’t need this caveman shit, Robert.” I looked over and she was crying. “I love you, don’t you know I love you?”
“Yes,” I said, but did not move to touch her.
“Why are you doing this, especially here? Don’t you know what it’s like for me here? Oh goddamnit, goddamnit.”
I put my hand on her arm then her shoulder, and she cried harder.
“Oh God,” she said, touched her cheek to my hand and I hated myself, hated her. “We’re already late,” she said, and jerked her shoulder, pushing me away.
“Irene—”
“Not now, Robert, please.” I sought her eyes, silvery, smudged, in the dark. I had nothing to say, but I kept looking at her as she wiped her eyes in the rearview mirror in the interior light just to see if I could get her to stop. “Let’s go somewhere,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere alone.”
“No.” She opened her door, “You’re nuts.”
Yes, and she was the Irene who ran off with Andre and the Irene I’d found at Floyd’s apartment that night of the pool.
Billy Wayne and Becca had a booth against the wall opposite the bar. “I thought something happened!” Becca said.
“We’re fighting,” Irene said, sliding in on the other side. She would say it.
“Right now?” Becca asked, interested more than embarrassed.
“Uh-huh,” Irene said, “I hate him, he hates me.” She picked up Becca’s glass of beer and gestured to toast me, then kissed me instead. Oh good, Irene, I thought, how disarming.
“Don’t drink my beer!” said Becca, taking it back. “Billy says I only get two ’cause I’m nursing and this is my second.” She wrinkled her nose at him and said, “Ogre.” Billy Wayne glanced at Becca with a faintly amazed expression, as if to say, “You’re not suggesting that we should fight, are you? If you are, I’ll get up and leave.” Maybe I overestimated what seemed his absolute mastery of their relations. But Becca smiled at him sweetly, submissively, adoringly, and he went to the bar for more glasses. There was a pitcher of beer on the table.
It was a small place, getting crowded, mostly men, a pool table through a square archway. Balls cracked through lulls in the music, when one of those country singers paused to bring home the depths of his despair.
Irene surveyed the environs hyperalertly, back over her shoulder at the pool table and down the line of cowboy hats at the bar. “I don’t know anyone anymore,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Becca said, “we never go anywhere, do we, hon? We’re always home.” Suits me, he answered silently.
Becca drilled me about the soap. I told her about the time I was shopping at D’Agostino and from behind me this woman yelled, “Radley Rutherford! I know it’s you! Turn and face me, or are you a lily-livered coward?”
“Geez,” Becca said, “did you?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What’d she do?”
“Nothing. We talked and she asked for my autograph. She wasn’t that crazy.” Becca looked delighted, Billy Wayne’s forehead knit an inscrutable frown. Irene was down near the bottom of her second glass of beer, preternaturally bored, as though what I was saying inspired in her a yearning to kill herself with drink.
“What’s it like kissing someone you don’t know?” Becca said. “That girl—Silver!”
“Well, I knew her,” I told her, and she laughed loudly.
“Excuse me,” said Irene. I stood, and she slid out of the booth. “I’m going to the rest room.” Did not deign to look at me; did a walk in the direction of the poolroom that turned heads at the bar.
“Billy Wayne, get another pitcher for the rest of you, will you?” Becca said. I was barely drinking, I wanted to keep my head clear. Irene may have gone to the rest room but her larger intention was to scope out the poolroom, and when she came back ten minutes later she had a tall cowboy in tow.
“Look who’s here!” she exclaimed.
“Why, hi, Hook,” Becca said.
“This is Robert,” Irene said, holding Hook’s arm.
“Pleasure,” tipping his big-hatted head at me; the hat was one I’d tried on; tan, $19.95.
“Robert was on a soap opera,” Becca said. That sank to the bottom of nothing.
“You don’t say,” he replied; he was top-heavy, a wedge balanced on poles.
“I’m gonna go shoot some pool,” Irene said.
I had to be careful not to turn around and look at her through the square archway of the poolroom too often. The third time I did Becca said, “Are you and Irene still fighting?”
“Oh no-oo,” I said.
Billy Wayne got quietly, steadily drunk; his eyelids hung lower and his round head sunk further into his shoulders. Becca’s high spirits diminished once Irene left the table and she’d finished her beer.
Irene had been gone half an hour or so when Billy Wayne sucked back the last of the pitcher. I saw her at the end of the bar nearest the poolroom talking with Hook, who was buying her a drink. Becca and Billy Wayne got up to go and after the good-byes, I moved to their side of the booth so I’d have an unimpeded view of Irene. She came back to the table and told me we’d leave, as soon as she finished the game.
“Want to come watch?” she asked.
“No.”
“Fine. Sit there and glower.”
What was it about women and pool that was supposed to be so goddamned sexy? I thought. It was too obvious to be sexy.
At the end of the game, after downing a shot Hook had bought her, she came, reluctantly, I assumed, back to me. By then I’d had to give up the booth to a group of five. As I stood at the bar the man at my side, offended by my irresponsiveness to his boring comments about the weather, had discovered the object of my attention—it could not have been hard. He watched her walk over to me and his jaw dropped, as if he believed I had summoned her by sheer desire.
“Jesus, Robert,” Irene said as we went out the door, “I know those guys, all right?”
“I thought you just knew Hook.”
“Forget it.”
“Hook, what sort of a name is Hook?”
“Oh, it’s Hook now, is it?”
“All I’m saying is he has a dumb name.”
“He’s a roper,” as if that explained it.
“You’re drunk, give me the keys.”
“I am not,” but she was.
“He’s a roper, so?”
“It has to do with the rope, what he does with a rope.”
“That’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
“Well, what were you doing back there?” I asked.
“What do you think I was doing?”
“You answer me that.”
“Can we go?” We were sitting in the dark car, and someone blinded us with the headlights of their truck. “Tell me where to go,” I said.
“Right at the end of the clearing. I wasn’t doing anything for your benefit, I was trying to turn an absolutely miserable night into a little bit of fun. Just follow the road, I mean, what am I supposed to be now that we’re fucking each other?”
That’s a nice way to put it, I thought, aware that nice wasn’t an adjective I could apply to anything I had said either.
“Why can’t you adjust to me for a change?” she asked. “Why for once can’t you accommodate me?”
“It is difficult for me to count on the fingers of one of my hands the occasions I haven’t accommodated you.”
We drove on in silence. I glanced at her and she was resting her head against the window looking tragic.
“I miss Patrick,” she said, “I miss Patrick so much.”
“Why did you say that?” I asked. She didn’t answer.
At the house the leaves stirred in the tree and the sound, the invisibility of the breeze, and the corporeality of the leaves in motion made me think of the multitude of realities we couldn’t see, couldn’t know. I had to touch her, so great were the number of things I felt acutely conscious of and could never penetrate. I said her name in the yard and she stopped, let me put my hands to the sides of her hair, let me hold her head, though she didn’t look at me.
“We need to leave,” she said.
“I think so,” I answered. I drew her into me, felt her weight letting go, thought I love you I love you.
“I’m tired, love, I want to sleep,” she said.
SHE AWAKENED ME in the morning, knocking on my door; the bright light in the room blocked out whole patches, a bookcase, the closet door.
“My father wants to go out for dinner.” Dinner was lunch, supper was dinner; I recalled where I was.
“When?” She wore the dress.
“Forty-five minutes?”
“All right. My watch read 11:30. Sunday. Tomorrow we would leave.
We went to Lester’s Cafeteria on Ninth Street and sat among a veritable sea of gray heads and the shrill, sudden ringings of hearing aids. Mr. Walpers was a youth in this crowd, Irene and I children.
Mr. Walpers sat at the head of our table and neatly sliced pieces of ham, and took sips from his coffee. Irene had told me that apart from his shirts and jeans, he had a sharkskin suit for special occasions, a surprising revelation. What, I asked, would be a special occasion in his life? Invitations to weddings from employees he couldn’t turn down; a holiday foisted upon him by relatives he rarely saw. But a sharkskin suit—the hint of a spark of vanity, riskiness, humor? The suit was a dark midnight blue. Irene got him talking about his development plans by an artificial lake. I looked around at the people who were born in Coffeyville’s heyday.
There was a pause in the conversation. Mr. Walpers lit a cigarette and I watched the smoke veil his eyes.
“You say you’ve been to the museum?” he said. Days ago, but he hadn’t even reacted when we told him. Now he was making one of his typical efforts with me, asking a question that I couldn’t fathom, that led nowhere.
“The Dalton Museum.”
“Robert loved the museum,” Irene said.
He crossed his arms over his chest and smoked with his left hand. “They tell you they moved the hitching posts?”
“The hitching posts?” I said. “No—”
“The robbery was planned down to the second,” he said. “Just enough time to get in and get out. But they moved the hitching posts the day before. They were caught because it threw off the timing.”
Wow, I thought. He had a real little story going there, suspense, some narrative energy in his voice.
We traveled in a congenial silence back to the house, but Becca’s place was off-limits today, and after we dropped Ray off we did errands as the heat soared.
My blood ran too thick and my breaths were shallow. There was a fragility about us both, both of us knowing we had to be careful and everything felt very taut, very intense, was just shy of too much to cope with.
After we stocked up Ray’s kitchen and dropped off a cake Irene had made for her aunts, we pulled into a gas station to fill up the car.
Two old men in cowboy hats sat under an overhang, and one of them turned and spit into a can. While the attendant pumped gas Irene got out to clean the windshield, and the sight of her in that dress made me dizzy.
I closed my eyes, heard another car drive in and park. Then Irene said, “Rudy!” I opened my eyes to see her greeting a young guy sans hat, a more nondescript, conservative type.
I got out of the car. “This is Robert,” she said. “Robert, Rudy.”
Then she took his hands, and when she touched him my skin contracted across my face and I felt an equal tightening in my gut that went all the way down to my scrotum, and she perceived it, and our truce tumbled down like an edifice—this, this was the truth: she didn’t love me, never had, never would.
“Why did you look at me like that?” she said in the car.
“I imagined you in bed with him.”
“Why?”
“I imagine you in bed with everyone.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I don’t understand you either.”
One of the old men sitting under the overhang whistled, a sharp quick blast.
“Can we get out of here,” I said, “can we please get out of here.”
“Can you leave me alone?” she said. “Can you let me be until we’re back in New York? If you don’t, I’ll start screaming and I won’t be able to stop.”
At supper, she sipped from a glass of whiskey and watched her father and me warily. Mr. Walpers asked a few cursory questions and picked up the paper. While she washed the dishes, I went to the family room with her father to watch TV, but I couldn’t stand it for long and returned to the kitchen.
She’d taken the Wild Turkey bottle from the cupboard and was refilling her glass, spilling a little on the counter.
“If you would have told me, none of this would have happened,” I said. She put down her glass, took the towel and mopped up the whiskey. “I know you slept with him, and it’s okay, I just wanted you to tell me.”
She looked at me, “Slept with who?”
“Billy Wayne.”
“Goddamn you,” she struck the counter with the towel and let it drop to the floor. “Goddamn you, Robert, Goddamn you to hell,” and went out the back door.
I heard something behind me and turned, and her father had entered the kitchen. It occurred to me that after days of knowing she and I were having trouble he wanted to help, which was somehow shocking, sad, and repellent at the same time. His dry lined face and his sterile life reminded me of someone preserved and barely alive. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head slowly.
“That girl has never been contented and she never will be.”
“Excuse me,” I said, and went after Irene. She’d been on the stoop but now she went down the steps and out to the yard. It wasn’t quite dark yet; I felt the presence of the sun and moon both, in the light and the suspension of the heat. I followed her.
“Irene—”
She pulled away violently. “Don’t, don’t.”
We were partway down the slope and stood facing each other, but she moved side to side with small feinting steps, as if about to attack me, to hit me.
“I slept with Billy Wayne,” she said, “I slept with Hook, I slept with a lot of people, not Rudy if you want to know.” She pushed me, her eyes saying fight me, come on!
“Irene, I just—”
“I was lonely.” She was crying. I reached out to her and again she pulled away, pu
t her arms up over her face as a shield, her hands over her head.
“I’m—”
“They keep pulling it out of you—” she garbled. “They take it, they take it from you, and you take it too.” She started further down the slope and I helplessly followed, but then she swung back around. “You don’t know what it’s like for a girl! To be young, to feel wild, you don’t think we want to do every crazy thing you do? We do, but we’re not free. You know what he did?” she said, pointing at the house. “He shot my horse! He shot Mercury! Because I left!” She looked up at the house. “He’s watching us,” she said.
We were at the bottom of the slope near the barn, and she went in and I followed.
The smell pricked at my nostrils—old wood, dry dirt, and moldering hay. It was divided by a partition, one side a stall and the other an open space. She leaned against the wall, slid down to the ground. I sank down across from her. A coiled rotted rope lay in the corner. She drew up her legs and wrapped them with her arms.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last.
We sat quietly. “When my teacher Rose died I had to leave. I was seeing Billy Wayne then. He was good to me. I will always think well of him for that. I was going to—” I waited. “I’d arranged for Beau to take Mercury, he would have come the next day. My father didn’t do it out of any real need for me, or love. He did it out of anger. I swore I’d never come back.
“When I was running around with men, he never said anything. Don’t you think he should have warned me? Don’t you think he should have told me I might get hurt?” She started crying again, terrible crying, hard to stand, and I went and hunkered down in front of her.
“I trusted you,” she said, “and I’ve never trusted anyone really except you and Patrick—” and she took my hand, I think just for something to hold on to, and held it hard.
“You’re hurting my hand,” I said.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She loosened her grip.
“You and I,” she said, “it’s the funniest thing you and I, you weren’t like a man, well, you were but you were my friend first and I never had that, and when we became lovers I thought, why didn’t I know this is how it should be? It was like sleeping with a brother but it wasn’t. You made everything okay somehow. It felt like equals. Even back that one time at the pool.” I could barely see her, but I saw her rub her head, her eyes, and she said, “But then New York got harder … sometimes I wonder, is it wrong to love things too much? How I love acting. My God, to find your true thing and then have it taken away. To find out that nothing can ever live up to it again. It feels like a curse….
A Company of Three Page 24