Benchley, Peter - Novel 07

by Rummies (v2. 0)

  "He can mess her up something fierce ..."

  "You think I don't know that?"

  "... playing his sophisticated games with her. They don't mean anything to him, but she's like a Vietnam boat person landing in San Francisco. New rules, new world. You tell her black's white, she'll kiss your hand and follow you anywhere. She's probably already made him her father and her brother. It's no big step to—"

  "I know. And they leave here and he goes back East and there it is again: The world has fucked her over."

  "You got to throw him out."

  She paused. "Not yet."

  "Then wherf!” Dan shouted. "After he's humped her in the bushes? He's got no right to wreck her head. That's the rule and you know it: Kill yourself if you want, but you're not taking anybody with you."

  "First I want to make sure what really happened. Some of those security guards shouldn't be allowed to play with anything more complicated than a coconut. Then I'll have one last talk with Joe Ivy."

  "Talking to him's a waste of time. You just said so."

  Marcia shook her head. "Trying to embarrass him's a waste of time. Now I'm gonna scare him."

  "What, threaten to throw him out?"

  "Worse." She kicked off her running shoes and walked into the bathroom.

  She was at the front door, on her way out to her car, when she noticed the package on the floor. "What's this?" she called to Dan, who was in the living room reading the paper and having a last cup of coffee. She always left the building ten minutes before he did—a precaution lest someone from the clinic, a janitor or a cook or another counselor, should drive by and see them leaving together. Dan's own apartment was two buildings down the road in the Montevista complex, but the buildings were identical and only a dedicated sleuth would have remarked that he seemed to be coming out of the wrong one.

  "What?"

  "This package."

  “It came while you were in the shower."

  "He came to the door?"

  "He rang from downstairs. I buzzed him up."

  "What did he say?"

  "Nothing. He just wanted to be sure this was your apartment."

  "You signed for it?"

  "Of course."

  "With your name?"

  "What did you want me to sign?" He chuckled. "George Bush?"

  Marcia picked up the package and looked at it. Anger and fear rose together inside her like a bilious stew. She carried the package into the living room, dropped it on the coffee table and sat beside Dan on the couch. She wanted to slap him, to shriek at him, to grab him by the throat and terrify him. But he was trained to dismiss hysterical theatrics, so she swallowed her anger and clenched her fists so hard that she drove her fingernails into her palms, and she spoke in a soft, controlled, superficially loving but profoundly condescending voice.

  "Daniel ..."

  "Hmmmm?" He was reading the basketball line scores.

  "Why is it we play hide-and-seek about living together?"

  "For heaven's sake, Marcia. . . ." He glanced up from the paper. "We've been through this—" He stopped, seeing the intensity in her eyes. He sighed. "Okay. I say it's because we're not married. We live in a conservative, blue-collar community, and people who live together are sinners. You say it's because we're . . . we're-"

  “An Oreo cookie. You are white, a card-carrying member of the master race, and I am of the Negro persuasion. In the good old days, right-thinking people would have hanged us by the neck until we were dead. Now, in the age of enlightenment, they might settle for burning down our house and riding us out of town on a rail, covered with tar and feathers."

  "And I say you're being paranoid. No one gives a hoot. They're too wrapped up in car payments and overdue rent and how to feed their kids and—"

  ''Wrong. When things are bad and there's nothing they can do about it and they can't figure out why they're getting shafted, people blame dragons. Jews are dragons. Blacks are dragons. We're dragons."

  “You're crazy."

  “Am I?" Marcia paused. She closed her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose, searching for a new tack. "Okay," she said after a moment. "Forget our landlord. Forget our neighbors. What about the people at Banner? The board. Remember, these are people who think civil rights means the right to keep slaves."

  "How could they find out?"

  "You don't think they'd care enough to do their very best? To find out, I mean."

  "How could they?"

  Marcia picked the package off the coffee table and placed it between them on the couch. "The guy who delivered this, what was he, UPS?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did he wear a uniform?"

  "I didn't notice."

  "Do I order a lot of stuff from the Sharper Image?"

  "How should I know? I don't—"

  "What do I need from the Sharper fucking Image?" Her anger overflowed. "An electric fork? A nuclear-powered razor? You see me throwing my goddam money down the toilet?"

  "What's the matter with you?"

  "Look at the package, Dan." She held it up and pressed it to his face. "Look at it."

  He pushed it away. "I see it."

  "We're in the last few years of the twentieth century. Computers run our lives."

  "So?"

  "When was the last time you saw an address label from a corporation that probably does fifty million dollars a year . . . when was the last time you saw an address label from a company like that handwritten?''

  Dan looked again at the package. He said nothing, nothing at all.

  X

  PRESTON WAS LATE, the last to arrive in Chaparral's lounge area, and all the chairs, couches, bean-bag pillows and squooshy cushions were filled. The members of both therapy groups were there, assembled to celebrate Lewis, who sat on the throne of honor: a Windsor chair placed in the center of the room. Lewis wore white espadrilles, no socks, white ducks, a red-and-white candy-cane-striped silk shirt and a red silk neckerchief knotted at the side. He was trying to look serious, but he couldn't stop grinning and touching his hair.

  Preston thought Lewis looked like a waiter at a pretentious New Hope restaurant, one of those androgynous types who come to your table and say, "Good evening, my name is Sean, I'll be your waiter tonight. Before I take your beverage order, may I tell you our chefs specials?" and then reels off the entire menu from memory, including the things nobody ever eats, like brains in black butter and squid in its own ink, and then ends with a flourish as if expecting applause for reciting the whole damn Koran without a mistake.

  It was an uncharitable thought. Lewis was a nice guy, genuinely and unselfishly nice. He was graduating. Let him have his moment.

  But Preston didn't feel charitable. He felt empty, wasted, which wasn't surprising since he had spent the past ten minutes clutching the rim of a toilet bowl and puking up his guts, out of . . . what? Fear? Anger? Resentment? Frustration? He didn't know and at the moment didn't care, but whatever it was had come on him like a stroke or a seizure, had caused him to lurch out of Marcia's office and bolt for the John. He had stopped in his room to wash his face and brush his teeth, which was why he was late.

  Marcia hadn't begun to speak, but she was already circling Lewis like an auctioneer at a cattle sale. Preston knew she saw him come in, wouldn't have been surprised if she fired a lethal dart at him, but she ignored him as he looked around for an empty seat, didn't find one and so sagged down onto the carpet and leaned up against a wall at the back of the room. He assumed Priscilla was somewhere in the room, but he didn't look for her. He was curious—curious? frantic!—to know if she, too, had been subjected to an inquisition, but not desperate enough to risk eye contact with her. He didn't need another session with Savonarola just yet.

  "Dearly beloved," Marcia began solemnly, "we are gathered here because"—here she smiled and stamped her foot and gave herself a high-five—"because, god-damnitall, Lewis has made it!" She applauded and everyone applauded with her. Lewis blushed, and one of his hands flutter
ed over his hair like a hummingbird.

  "You may wonder why it's so amazing," Marcia continued. "After all, a lot of people make it through Banner, and some of them actually stay clean. Lemme tell you what we saw, I mean Dan and I, when Lewis got here. Here was a man with two and a half strikes against him. He's a rummy, he's gay and he hates himself for being both. It's all his fault. He's worthless, lower than snail shit, and his Significant Other—not exactly a straight shooter himself—gets his jollies by convincing Lewis that he's right: He is worthless."

  Significant Other. Preston smiled and stopped listening to Marcia's account of Lewis's ascent from the slough of self-hatred. Of all the in-group terms, all the A.A. bumper-sticker slogans—like "One Day at a Time" and "Easy Does It" and "Keep It Simple, Stupid"—he liked "Significant Other" best. It used to be that drunks had wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends. Not anymore. Nowadays, guys did it to guys, girls did it to girls, nieces shacked up with uncles, deacons socked it to choirboys. Establishment labels became value judgments, value judgments bred guilt in the nonconforming, and here in treatment guilt was a villain. They had to find a neutral term, something that would connote a relationship without judging it, something that would work as well for a man married to the same woman for forty-three years as for a freak who had taken to poking his pet llama.

  Significant Other.

  Preston's Significant Other was Margaret. Technically. No question, though, in the past three weeks the relationship—in Preston's mind, anyway, and he had no j idea what was going on in Margaret's—had become much more Other than Significant. Probably because of the isolation, the lack of contact. Possibly because of Priscilla.

  Forget it. Forget Priscilla. Or if you can't forget her, stay away from her. Or if you can't stay away from her altogether (and that's downright impossible around here), at least ignore her.

  Sure.

  You better.

  Or else.

  He had been almost finished with his therapeutic duty (this week, as "Mr. Clean," his task was to tidy up the common-room kitchenette) when Marcia had snapped at him that she wanted to see him in her office now. He had been expecting it, had prepared a reasoned response that contrasted appearance with reality and cited Rashomon (he thought he could get away with this, in private) as a paradigm. The security guard had seen one thing; that was his reality. But interpreted reality was not necessarily truth.

  Preston would tell Marcia the truth.

  Simple.

  He never had a chance.

  Marcia sat at her desk. Preston stood before her. He had to. There were no other chairs in the room. Where the hell had they gone? He towered over her, had the advantage of height, but by sitting down she dominated him.

  On purpose?

  Probably.

  For sure.

  She had a manila folder open on the desk. Inside was a piece of paper with a lot of typing on it. The arresting officer's report. She scanned the paper, then shut the folder and looked up at him. He saw that her eyelids drooped, giving her a look that was less angry than carnivorous. Like a reptile. She was going to eat him.

  "Last night, at nine forty-five p.m., you were seen—"

  Preston put one hand in his pocket and raised the other, trying to look casual, in command. "The guy's a jerk. He wanted to see something, so he saw something. Nothing hap—"

  "You were kissing her."

  "No. I mean, not exactly. If anybody was kissing anybody, she was kissing me. We were talking, about friendship, if you want to know, and she—"

  "Don't pull your glib pop-psych bullshit on me, Scott. The two of you were kissing, right?"

  Preston sighed the sigh of a martyr. "If you say so."

  "I say so. Jorge Velasquez says so. The 'jerk.' He makes seven-fifty an hour, Scott. He supports three kids, a wife with a club foot and a mother-in-law dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease. In the daytime he pumps gas. He hasn't had a drink or any weed in six years. How long has it been since your last drink, Scott?"

  Uh-oh. "I apologize. But he came on like—"

  "How long, Scott?"

  "Seventeen days."

  "How many steps are there in A.A., Scott?"

  Preston bit his lip, forcing the rising anger back into its pit. "Can we skip the seminar? You want me to grovel, I'll grovel. But just—"

  "Answer the question!"

  "Twelve."

  "How many have you dealt with?"

  "Two, maybe three."

  "Which ones?"

  Preston began to relax. Her attitude was becoming clinical. He could answer questions. "Well, number one: I know I’m powerless over alcohol. My life had become unmanageable. Two and three are tough, fuzzy—the higher-power and turning-it-over-to-God stuff."

  "What about number four?—'We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.' "

  "It's not something you do all at once. You do it—"

  " 'You?' Who's 'you'?"

  "I. All right. I. I do it a little bit every day. I chip away at it."

  "And what have you turned up?"

  It was getting easier. A chat. He wished there were a chair so he could sit down, not stand there as if this were a court-martial. "A lot of my problem's self-esteem. I have a really crappy opinion of myself, deep down. It's something I suppose I'll have to work on all my life."

  She didn't say anything, just looked at him with those hooded eyes and tapped an eraser on the desk. Then she bit.

  "I wouldn't bother," she said.

  "What?" He must have misheard her.

  "Why fish in an empty lake, Scott? Your self-esteem can't be as low as it should be. 'Cause deep down, where it counts, in the core where the truth lives, you're a shit."

  All Preston could manage was "Hey ..." before his throat closed.

  “Who wants to take inventory of a warehouse piled to the ceiling with cases and cases of shit?"

  Preston didn't know he had spoken, thought he had only thought the words "What are you doing!" until he saw her start out of her chair and slam her hand on the desk.

  "What am I doing? It's what you're doing, Scott, and what you're doing is taking. Take, take, take. You're like a hyena or a buzzard or something that sucks the eyes out of the weak and weary.''

  "Can I say something?" He had no idea what he wanted to say. He wanted to stop the assault.

  "Go ahead."

  "Yeah . . . well . . . you know, it takes two to tango."

  She blinked and hesitated, looking for the meat beneath the banality. There wasn't any. "Oh, very good, Scott. Very aware. Very profound. And the Holocaust was really the Jews' fault for not standing up to Hitler, and the kids in the ghettos could make something of themselves if they'd only for God's sake get a job. There're no victims in life, right, Scott?"

  "You think I'm victimizing her?"

  "What would you call it? You may be a retard, all addicts are retards, maybe you stopped growing at nineteen or twenty or twenty-five. But you're a grown-up. Relatively. That girl is a baby.'"

  "But I haven't done anything!"

  "You're doing it. You're getting her to lean on you, confide in you, count on you, maybe even fall in love with you. She has no foundation in her life, and you're letting her build one on you." She paused. "And all you're interested in is a cheap piece of ass."

  "You're nuts! You don't know anything. Worse than that security guard what's-his-name who you think is the Second Coming because he doesn't take dope anymore. You want to see something, so you see it. Everybody fits a pattern. Life is a Jell-O mold."

  “So it's more than that. Not just jumping her bones.''

  “That has nothing to do with it."

  “You care about her. ..."

  What was this? Suddenly Marcia's voice had gone soft, conversational. He said, "Damn right."

  Watch out! He must have said too much, or the wrong thing, put his foot in it. Somehow. Keep your mouth shut.

  “. . . 'cause I'd hate to think your brains were all in your pants, s
mart guy like you." She smiled. "So tell me: What happens when you get out of here? You tell . . . Margaret, is it? . . . you tell Margaret so long, you've got your act together now, you're taking off, and you and Priscilla head for Barbados or someplace? I mean, we both know she's loaded."

  "I don't-"

  "Or maybe you hang in there with the marriage for a while, see how things go, let Priscilla get an apartment and you see her when you can, and every time Margaret looks at you sideways or says something that ticks you off, like 'Why can't you pick up your socks?,' you make a little mark on your mental blackboard, until finally you've got so many marks against her that she says one more thing and blammo! you split, feeling like a goddam saint for having put up with her so long."

  "You have a nasty mind. Christ! I haven't thought half that far ahead."

  "That's my point, Scott." Again she smiled, and now there was no irony in her voice. "You haven't thought ten seconds from now. You've taken ‘One Day at a Time' and twisted it to mean there's no yesterday, there's no tomorrow, there's nothing but right now. No guilt, no responsibility. If it feels good, do it. If somebody gets hurt, too bad. Look out for number one." She bent down and pulled open a bottom drawer in her desk. “But that's not the way it works, Scott. Priscilla's already wounded. I'm not gonna let you cripple her."

  He wanted to shout, to hit her, to rail against the wrong she was doing him, but his mind was like a wasps' nest sprayed with poison—full of creatures dying, furious, perplexed and frightened. Words tried to form themselves and escape, but they merely buzzed around and dropped.

  Marcia reached into the drawer and pulled out a pint of vodka. Popov. She put it on the desk and pushed it toward him. "Have a drink, Scott. Not your brand, but what the hell, right?"

  He stopped breathing and, without realizing it, took a step backward.

  "Go ahead. You're never gonna make it through here, so why put off the inevitable?"

  "Yes, I am," he whispered.

  She shook her head. "Not a chance. Oh, I don't think you'll sneak out and get wrecked, or smuggle something in, or steal something—any of the stuff the real high-wire artists do that gets them booted—but if I get one more word that you and Priscilla have been doing anything more than saying 'Howdjado' in the hallway, I'll have your sorry ass out of here so fast you'll think you had a blackout. And I will get another word, Scott, because you will do something more with Priscilla. You know why? Because you don't have the guts not to." She stood up and lifted the bottle and unscrewed the top and pressed the bottle on him. "Go on, Scott. Save me the trouble."