“Well, what do you think?” asked Julia.
“I love it,” I said. “I feel perfect.”
“Excellent,” said the tailor. He started to help me take the jacket off, but I wasn’t having it.
“No, I think I’ll just leave it on,” I said.
“It’s only for the interview,” said Julia.
“No. I think I’ll just wear it all day long.”
“But I have to take it in,” said the tailor.
“What?”
“You have to take it off so I can fix it.”
I almost strangled him right here, I think. I don’t know why, but for a second there I just really didn’t want to take off that suit. I got myself together pretty quickly, though, and the tailor marked up the whole thing with chalk before he took it off me. Julia gave him her father’s credit card and he told us to come back in an hour.
“Perfect,” said Julia. “That’s just the right amount of time to get you a nice haircut.”
“A haircut?” This was the first I’d heard about this. “Why?”
“We’re just going to clean you up a little bit. It’s not that I hate the moppy look, but I can barely see your eyes. You have such a high, noble forehead, but you don’t let anybody see it.”
“I like my hair the way it is.”
“It looks a lot like Alvin’s haircut.”
“So what?”
I could tell she didn’t really want to answer me, but finally she did.
“I’m just trying to make sure you get this job,” she said finally. “It’s not like it’s a big deal. I just think you’re better off if nobody knows you’re Alvin’s brother.”
“Why?”
“I think it looks strange. My ex-boyfriend is gone less than a week, and here I am recommending his brother for a job.”
“You said we don’t even look alike.”
“There’s still a resemblance. Look, I might as well just say it. Alvin wasn’t the most popular guy around here. He didn’t leave on the best terms. You know how he is. Always messing with people.”
This wasn’t hard to believe. Most of the people who knew Alvin were angry at him most of the time.
“I’m just saying, why not make a completely fresh start? Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”
“Of course.” I honestly hadn’t thought of it, but now that I heard Julia say it, a fresh start sounded like a good idea.
“You don’t want everyone to think of you as Alvin’s brother, do you? Don’t you want to be known as your own man?”
It wasn’t that hard to convince me. An argument will usually work on me no matter what it is. Julia had a lot of good reasons, and the only reason I had was that I liked my hair the way it was. But I wasn’t the one who was going to have to look at it.
It turned out to be the shortest haircut I’d ever had, so short that you couldn’t even part it, but I had to admit I liked the way it felt. It made my head cooler, and it made me feel lighter and faster. And besides, Julia said she loved it. While they were cutting and washing my hair, she had decided to get her hair dyed to this very light blonde color so I had to wait around a while when I was done. I missed her old hair, and I told her so, but she said this blonde was actually the original color of her hair, and that the fiery red I loved so much had been an artificial dye. It seemed so strange to me, the idea of dyeing your hair back to its original color. She said they matched her natural color pretty well, but not perfectly, so I guess I never did get to see the real color of Julia’s hair.
I couldn’t stop rubbing my head while we picked up my suit and then got back in the car and left the city behind us. Soon we were driving down a one-lane road with beautiful forest on both sides. It was getting to be late afternoon as we turned down a little dirt road that went right through the forest. We still had to get rid of the car, because it was the last connection between me and Alvin, so we hid it under a tarp in the woods and walked the rest of the way on a little dirt trail through the trees, around a little pond, and then I think along this old abandoned logging road until we finally arrived at the Oakwood Hotel. It was a big brown wooden building with a pointed roof, three stories high, with maybe twenty rooms on every floor. You could tell that half the building had been a barn a long time ago, because the wood was so old, but the rest of it looked as new as the buildings in Los Angeles. There was a huge lawn next to the gravel parking lot, and this tiny restaurant where nobody ever seemed to eat, and a swimming pool about the size of Marcus’s apartment. The hotel was surrounded by forest on all sides, and the whole place smelled like tree sap all the time.
I guess Houston hadn’t arrived yet, so Julia went upstairs to her room and left me in the lobby rubbing my new haircut until he showed up. I was expecting him to look like Julia, but his skin was much darker. He didn’t have any of the little freckles that she had, and his hair was totally black and straight like a horse’s. He wasn’t wearing any suit—just blue jeans and a short-sleeved collared shirt—but it definitely still felt like he was totally in charge. Being around Houston, you got the feeling that he was the only one who knew exactly how everything worked and how to fix it when it broke. He was used to everybody doing what he said. Later I found out that he’d only been out of college a year, but he was more of an adult than Marcus, because Houston always talked and acted like a man twenty years older than he was. Just like Julia, he’d worked in hotels his entire life.
I made sure my first handshake with him was extremely firm, and I looked straight at his eyeballs while I did it, just like I’d practiced with Julia in the car. Then he took me into this tiny office behind the front desk, where we sat across from each other at a little wooden table with three different phones on it. Before we started talking, Houston just sat there looking at me for a minute. I was already sweating through my suit, because I knew he was looking at my face and that my chances of getting this job probably depended on what he saw there.
“Coffee?”
“I don’t really drink it.”
“That’s good. You’re lucky. But I’m going to have a cup.”
While he made the coffee, I realized that my hands were shaking. Houston sat down again with his coffee.
“Where’d you grow up, Joe?”
“I moved around a lot.” This was true, although we had only really moved around a lot inside Los Angeles. Julia had helped me memorize a bunch of lies—how I’d moved to Tennessee with my mother, and met Julia in a church—but I didn’t want to use them if I didn’t have to, because I felt like Houston would know. Luckily he never pushed me very much on where I came from.
“Julia certainly speaks highly of you. She tells me that you’re looking for a job.”
“That’s right.”
“Any job in particular?”
“Not really. Just whatever you need me to do.”
“Well, I’m not sure if she mentioned it, but our most urgent needs right now are at the swimming pool. Any experience with swimming pools?”
“Just the basics, mostly. But I’d be excited to learn.”
“I’m talking about standard maintenance and cleaning duties. You’d also be responsible for the hot tub and the equipment shed, as well as the pool laundry. The job involves some picking up after guests. Are you still interested?”
“Absolutely. Yes.”
“Now, for whatever reason, pool men have always been a tricky hire for me. Don’t ask me why, but the job tends to attract the worst kind of people. Antisocial and disruptive people. We’ve had a few terrible pool men. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, just to get to know you a bit. I can’t stress enough that none of the questions have right answers, so you can just relax and tell the truth.”
“Okay.”
Houston took out this pad of paper from the drawer under the table. “What’s your biggest weakness?”
I couldn’t believe he started with such a tough question. It definitely wasn’t one that Julia and I had practiced
, and plus I didn’t like being interrogated, and I was already starting to go on tilt pretty badly. But just when I was starting to give up on the entire interview, suddenly an answer just came out of me.
“I feel pretty confused almost all the time,” I said.
Houston chuckled, and made a little note on his pad. “That’s a good one, Joe. Don’t we all.” I was surprised at how much he seemed to like my answer, because I thought it sounded pretty awful when I said it.
“Are you punctual?”
“Yes.”
“Do you drink?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“What?”
“Are you a loyal man?”
“Yes.”
“And what are your ambitions?”
“Ambitions?”
“What are your plans beyond this job?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
Again I felt like I’d said the wrong thing, but Houston seemed to like that answer even more than my first one. He was the opposite of Marcus in a way.
“You don’t have any plans? You’re not looking to move on to something better?”
“No.”
“Any interest in college?”
“Not yet.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I was a fine pool man at fifteen, if I do say so myself. Our father made sure we learned every job in the hotel. Did you graduate high school?”
I’m pretty sure Julia had told me to lie about this, but somewhere in there I had decided that I would just tell Houston the truth, because he never reacted the way I thought he would anyway.
“Not quite yet,” I said.
“Education isn’t important to you at all?”
I shook my head.
“You think you could be happy being a pool man all your life?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Houston was beaming at me now. He looked like he was having the time of his life. “So far, Joe, you’re probably the best candidate for pool man that I’ve ever interviewed,” he said happily. “It’s about time someone had some respect for this job. Our last pool man thought he was too good for the position. He couldn’t see the dignity in it. But if you look closely, this is the only job in the hotel that’s done by a single person, all alone. The pool man takes orders from nobody, and nobody helps him, and nobody notices his work until the day the pool is not perfect. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“Of course.”
“I’m looking for someone to lock down this job and make a lifetime out of it. And when you die, we’ll bury you under the pool, and your son will fill in the final patch of cement, and then he’ll refill the pool and clean it, because he’ll be the new pool man.”
I could see that Houston was passionate about what he was saying, and I could see it pretty clearly too. I could imagine teaching my son all the secrets of the pool, while Julia stood by with her arms folded, smiling at us in those beautiful white shorts.
“Sounds good to me.”
“Can I ask you one more question? Please don’t be offended.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you ever cleaned a pool before?”
I rubbed my new haircut for a little while before I answered. “I’ll be totally honest,” I said finally. “I have no experience in any job at all. I’m not trained to do anything. I don’t even read well. I’ve never done anything. Ever.”
Houston studied me for a second, like he thought I might be making fun of him, but then his whole face broke into a huge smile. “What a wonderful answer,” he said. “Not only does it show exceptional honesty, but I’d actually prefer to have raw and unmolded potential. No bad habits to eliminate. Let’s head over to the pool and put you in charge.”
“So I passed?”
“That’s right.”
“I have the job?” I couldn’t believe it was happening so fast. I’d never applied for a job before or officially asked for something that I wanted, so I never imagined it could be this easy. “So I have a good face, then?”
“Ha! Julia told you I’d look at your face!” Houston thought that was the best thing in the world. He couldn’t stop chuckling about it. “What did she say?”
“Just that you’d be looking at it.”
“That’s great. That’s classic. What else did she say about me?”
“That you’d notice my suit.”
“She was right about that. Anything else?”
“I think that’s pretty much it. Oh, and she said you were very instinctive.”
“Imagine that,” said Houston. “She picks up on everything, doesn’t she? Yes, I’d say I’m quite instinctive. And for the record, you have a very good face. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”
The sun was already going down, but Houston wanted me to start work the next day, so he showed me the basics of the job that very same night. He taught me how to check the filters and the chlorine levels and the hot tub temperature. The towels were also my problem, and I had to keep the deck chairs in order and fix them once in a while, and I had to clean about a million different things. But it was a good job for me because there was no reading involved.
“People think cleaning a pool is easy, and in a way it is,” Houston said. “But it’s not the kind of work where you can try to get it over with quickly. You can’t finish in half the time by working twice as hard. You have to always be at the pool. If an acorn falls in the pool, a great pool man will fish it out before it starts to sink.”
“How long is that?”
“I’ve timed it actually. It usually takes about thirty seconds for the acorn to sink.”
I liked hanging out with Houston right from the beginning. He lived at the hotel in the city but came by to check on Julia a few times a week. He never forgot to come by the pool and say hello. Houston and I turned out to have a lot in common, and gradually we spent more and more time together, and he eventually turned out to be my first good friend.
I took care of that pool for about two months, I guess. From what Alvin had always told me growing up, I figured I’d hate having a job. But it wasn’t that hard to keep the pool clean, and swimming in it obviously made people happy. I hadn’t ever tried to learn anything but basketball and poker, and those were a long time ago, so I’d forgotten what it felt like to practice something and slowly get better at it. For the first few weeks I focused mainly on the swimming pool. But once Houston saw that I was getting the hang of it, he gradually gave me more and more to do. Eventually I could sweep and make a hotel bed in a pinch, and later I also did some laundry work and learned how to fix certain problems with a toilet. I even spent a little time inside the kitchen when they needed extra help in there.
I slept in the smallest guest room on the second floor of the hotel. It was supposed to be temporary, but I never got around to finding a place of my own, and nobody seemed to care. The hotel was never full anyway. Not even close. We had more than fifty rooms, but we only filled up when there was a big horse race down the road. On those weekends the pool would be totally packed, and everyone would have to work like crazy, and I’d sleep on the couch in Julia’s room. She lived at the hotel because her dad lived two hours away, and because she didn’t want to live with her mother. She said she wouldn’t live with her mother in a million years. She wasn’t officially allowed to have boys in her room past midnight, so whenever I slept over I’d have to wake up early and sneak out before anyone saw me.
Julia lived for the summer in this pretty big kitchen suite on the third floor, but it looked more like an apartment than a hotel room. All her old stuffed animals were in there, and the walls were totally covered in photographs—some in fancy frames, others stuck to the wall with double-sided tape. They were full of people that I eventually got to know: Cecily and Granddad, Mr. Manning and Ms. Delancey. I knew most of her family before I ever met them.
Some of the pictures had Julia i
n them. A few were taken at the hotel, or at her school, or on a river-rafting trip somewhere, but most of her life had happened at this huge wooden country house that I didn’t get to see until later. The pictures had been taken over many years, and looking at them was like watching a slideshow of Julia growing up.
You could see that she liked being photographed, because she was always in a pretty good mood, and she never had her eyes closed or a weird expression on her face. As a little girl her hair was bright, bright blonde. It felt strange to see her with a chubby little four-year-old face, because I’d never imagined her ever having been so young. As her hair got a little darker, she got taller and paid more attention to her clothes. She was pretty skinny for a year or two, and later on she got braces, and then broke her leg. Her smile got smaller, then bigger again. She drove a truck and played field hockey. She got a saxophone. A few different boys walked in and out of the pictures, but they never stayed long. I didn’t see any pictures of Alvin.
In one picture, Julia was standing next to that beautiful mansion on top of a hill. The picture is taken from a ways down the hill, so you can see just how big the house is, and how small she is against the house, and the forest all around. That was my favorite picture, and the first time I saw it I decided to steal it. I slipped it into the pocket of the suit pants that I wore almost every day by then. That was the first time I’d ever stolen anything where I didn’t get the idea from someone else.
I hung out in Julia’s room a lot, either watching TV or playing poker. Most of the time we’d end up kissing a little bit, but she would always make us stop. Then she would say it was still too soon after Alvin, and that it felt too strange. This happened over and over again, and I also remember that for the first few weeks she couldn’t look straight at me, at least not for very long. If she tried to look into my eyes she’d lose control and get all giggly.
I slept on the sofa when I stayed over, and I would sometimes wake up to find her sitting up in bed, churning her arms and legs and talking in her sleep. She always worried for a minute about breakfast the next morning, who would make it, and what exactly it would be. Once I calmed her down about that, she’d usually go back to sleep, but sometimes she’d stay up and talk to me some more, and it was always very interesting because Julia was a different person while she was sleeping—very calm and unafraid—and she would tell me things she wouldn’t normally. That’s how I learned her father had almost gone to prison the year before and that her parents had divorced during the trial. That’s how I learned she thought her mother had gone crazy.
This One Time With Julia Page 8