“Honey,” she says, “it really doesn’t matter. I can always do those little bud vases. I’ll clean it up later.”
I put my foot on the bumper and hoist myself up into the back of the truck. The vases are wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin, and the bundle has slid to one end of the truck bed—it’s smashed up next to a box of gardening tools. I open the canvas gingerly, expecting a mess, but the bud vases, for whatever they’re worth, are still in one piece. I look up, relieved, but she has already turned her back. I can see the blond hairs on her arms lit up by the sun as she moves evenly toward the house, and I marvel at how young she looks still, as though nothing bad has ever happened to her.
the reverse phone book
Dallas’s dream was to someday live in an apartment large enough for him and his dearest friends to whip through it on roller skates, screaming, “It’s happening! It’s happening!” at the moment of his triumph, but he was already thirty, lived alone on a waiter’s salary, and had neither triumphs nor dear friends. His last friend had been his nearly silent college roommate, Chune Pei Liu, but Chune had gone to jail one night for uprooting and dragging a small holly tree across campus and then threatening the officers who tried to arrest him with kitchen knives, and he moved out without warning soon after that. He did not contact Dallas again, even though he left behind half his clothes and twenty Ramen Dinners and his Daisy Seal-A-Meal and a hairbrush full of hair. He must have undergone some sort of spiritual revelation or transformation, Dallas figured. He was mildly envious.
Dallas knew he should have a plan, but he didn’t have one. He loved music but had never laid his hands on a single musical instrument of any kind. Still, he often stayed up late at night listening to his old clock-radio, watching the flapping digits until they blurred and picturing his own hidden talent someday shooting out of him like staples from a gun. “This could use an arpeggio,” he liked to say, with authority, when listening. He loved arpeggios. He loved arpeggios and he adored the phrase WIDE LOAD. “WIDE LOAD, coming through!” he shouted whenever he had to carry a tray with more than three items on it out of the kitchen at the restaurant at which he worked. The restaurant was quite busy and so this happened several times each night, causing Dallas’s coworkers to treat him as though he were a moron. He knew they thought he was a moron and yet he couldn’t help himself.
Why was he given to such extravagance and exclamation? he wondered. Had he seen something, such as the Space Shuttle, explode when he was a child, and he just didn’t remember it? He had read somewhere that the children who witnessed that event were given to conditions like his, a chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world, something like motion sickness. They did things like bite the button eyes off their stuffed rabbits and choke, or grow up and refuse to move out of their parents’ houses. But Dallas was sure he hadn’t seen anything explode. Well, one time he had seen a potato his mother had failed to puncture explode in the oven but he loved that. “Poomp!” he had shouted at his mother, for weeks afterward.
He didn’t know why he was the way he was, but he was beginning to feel like he’d spilled something on his own life, ruining it even before it was fully his. The feeling was familiar; as a child he had accidentally broken almost everything he touched, including most of his own belongings. His mother had referred to him in conversation as Destructo. When he was nine, his new pet guinea pig unexpectedly gave birth one night, all the babies stillborn but one, a brown-haired sleek little thing that hopped around the aquarium just hours after its birth, seemingly unconfused about what was required of it—but Dallas accidentally killed it the next day by dropping it behind a chest of drawers. It did not die right away but lay in the corner of the cage with its eyes open, sighing, for hours, Dallas watching it desperately through the glass. “I told you not to pick it up,” his mother said, standing behind him. But it was so cute, how could he help himself? Destiny, he had named it, before he dropped it, because the mother had been carrying it around for so long without anyone knowing. And as it flipped out of his hands, behind the dresser, he felt the moment had already come, that it had been written down somewhere to wait for him.
As an adult Dallas still believed in fate, tried to recognize its clues and messages in his life, but he was beginning to see that fate was not, had never been, his friend. The simplest of pleasant events escaped him. He could not even get a girl to go out with him.
Suzanne, the girl he wanted, worked as a server with him at the restaurant, though she also had another duty there which made her seem to Dallas hopelessly, unreachably superior: she described the daily specials to people who called in to place their orders on the telephone. The restaurant, though located near an industrial park in the ugly, empty part of town, offered progressive entrees made up of ingredients one would never expect to find together on the same continent, let alone in the same baking pan, and so Suzanne, using her precise, highly credible voice, would explicate the recipes to the wary. Whenever she was called upon to do this, Dallas managed to stop what he was doing and listen. If he was delivering a tray full of steaming plates he would pause by the front desk where the phone was and pretend to rearrange a fruit garnish. “What would you like described?” Suzanne always said. The sexual innuendoes suggested by this kind of talk were so obvious that no one, not even the giddy waitresses who were Suzanne’s buddies, bothered to make them, but Dallas always felt when he heard her that an evil cartoon sex fiend ghost, something like the Tasmanian Devil, was inside of him, trying to punch its way out.
Suzanne, like everyone else, thought Dallas was a fool. When he spoke to her her pretty lips flattened into an impatient line, and twice he’d seen her roll her eyes at the mention of his name. Her boyfriend, a long-haired classical cellist, picked her up each night at closing time, the heroic weight of his instrument hanging all around him like a cloud of scent. He looked like Robin Hood, bounding sensitively in and out of the restaurant. Dallas knew there was no way he could compete.
Once, before Robin Hood had started showing up, Dallas had had Suzanne over to his apartment for pork medallions. He had taken advantage of the fact that she had only been working with him a week, knowing she was bound to fall in with the rest of the staff sooner or later. The knowledge that he’d had to resort to this strategy sat like an undissolved lozenge at the back of his throat the day of their date, and he passed by the shabby Winn-Dixie where he usually shopped and drove four miles across town to Publix, where an amazing thing happened: while he was standing in the checkout line, a bird sailed by overhead, disappearing into the wall of houseplants that fronted the produce section. Dallas looked around, and a few other people looked around with him, blinking in a blank sort of way. A moment later the bird sailed back over their heads, a regular brown bird like you would see outside, and a woman in front of Dallas said, “Whose job is it to take care of that?” Before anyone could answer, the bird sailed over a third time, crashed into the glass wall near the exits, and fell open-winged to the floor. Without thinking about it, Dallas sprinted over to the stunned bird and threw his windbreaker on it and took it outside, where he deposited it under a hedge that bordered the lot. Then he jogged back in and paid for his groceries and went home.
By the time Suzanne arrived, he could barely contain himself, he had been thinking about the incident all afternoon. He took Suzanne’s jacket, told her about the bird, and imitated for her the response of the checkout girl: “‘When I saw you running for the bird, I said, There’s a man of action!’” Suzanne seemed to smile. He was sure she had smiled. As he brought out their beers and Li’l Smokies he said, “You know, the truly amazing thing was how nobody wanted to be the one to say they saw it. Just like when someone gets murdered in New York City in front of everyone but nobody says, Hey, you know, cut that out. Not that I’ve ever been there, but you know what I mean?” Suzanne looked pretty, biting daintily at her wienie, he thought. “Of course, you never realize how big these stores really are until you see a bird in there,” he told
her, over their main course. “I mean, it was really flying. It had a long way to go.” Then, during dessert, he worried again about whether the bird would be permanently traumatized, whether other birds would smell person on it, etc. “The bush I left it under was pretty small,” he said. “It did hop, but I’m thinking maybe I should have taken it across the street to the park …”
Suzanne suddenly said, “If I hear the word ‘bird’ one more time, I’m walking out that door.” Dallas was surprised and a little embarrassed.
“Okay,” he said. Only then, a moment later, he remembered the most miraculous thing, which he hadn’t yet told her. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly and conspiratorially, “but I forgot to tell you the most amazing part: I could feel the you-know-what’s heart beating! Through my windbreaker, I could feel it in my hand! It was so fast you couldn’t even make out separate beats!”
Suzanne flung down her napkin and left.
He thought immediately of calling her, then thought of how much better a note would be and, leaving their plates of red velvet cake on the table, ran to the closet and lugged out the Smith-Corona he’d received for his high school graduation and set it up on the floor beside an outlet. He would explain, the elite typeface lending dignity to his words, that she had not seen the real him. He wasn’t himself, it was that simple. It was like that post-traumatic stress thing, the Space Shuttle thing, reactivated by seeing the bird (though the bird didn’t explode). He would not pass her the note childishly at work but send it through the mail, bespeaking civility, self-control, breeding. He began to type, but a second later stopped: he didn’t know her address, not even her last name! Her phone number was all he had.
Then, in a flash, he remembered the reverse phone book—Chune Pei Liu had told him about it once in the middle of the night—a phone book that would tell you, if you had a number, who the person was that it belonged to, and of course where they lived. The book was top secret, Chune said; only phone company officials were allowed to see it, but he had managed to get a copy, and now it was gone. He would be sent to jail! he’d yelled at Dallas. He was searching the place frantically, pulling up the edges of the carpet and dragging the refrigerator away from the wall; he pushed Dallas out of bed so he could check between the mattress and the box spring. In the morning, though, he was a little confused. Maybe he’d only dreamed that he had a copy, he said. Or maybe he’d dreamed that the book existed in the first place.
Dallas sighed. The local white pages were short, only one or two hundred pages—how long could it possibly take to skim through, if he looked only at first names and 335 prefixes? He sat Indian-style for an hour or so, running his finger down the columns, sometimes going back and rereading a page when he thought his mind might have wandered, but he didn’t find anyone who could have been her. Finally he gave up and went to bed.
Dallas still thought about the evening all the time, though it had been over a year ago. He saw Suzanne almost every day, and sometimes she smiled and sometimes she didn’t. He kept waiting for the right thing to say to her to leap into his mind, but the thing remained obscure, even cagey. He sometimes began to feel that the thing should not have to be an apology, that none of this was his fault, that there was no logical reason why he should not be allowed some gratification in the world, but the thing itself seemed to rebel at this show of independence on Dallas’s part, assuring him that whatever he came up with would be wrong, and that anyone, everyone, most particularly Suzanne, would know it.
• • •
ATTENTION: BUG PEOPLE, said the mailing label he’d lettered and stuck on his front door, warning the exterminator that he was allergic to every kind of spray, but when he got home from work one Friday night he heard noises in there anyway and realized with disappointment that Donna Long was there. He just wanted to be alone—he’d relayed three phone messages from Robin Hood to Suzanne that evening, which he had hoped meant they were breaking up but which had turned out to mean that they were planning a camping trip. “I could take care of your cats while you’re away,” Dallas had said to her, but she’d only laughed.
Donna’s car, a swanky royal-blue 1966 Chevy Impala, must have been parked in the back. The car was always larger than Dallas believed possible, and it embarrassed him a little, as though Donna were not the building’s plumber but some backwards friend of his who had come to stay. She had been trying to fix his slow shower drain off and on for eight weeks, and he felt that this reflected on him personally, on some embarrassing defect of his body or character. She sometimes went out for a chemical or part and returned eight hours later as “The Tonight Show” was coming on, or eight days later, out of nowhere. He coughed as he let himself in; he felt he had to appear soberly busy with important tasks at all times whenever a maintenance or repair person was in his home.
“Yoo-hoo!” Donna Long yelled from the bathroom. “I finally got my hands on that clog, and you won’t believe what it was.”
Dallas stood in the doorway and watched Donna’s broad bent back straining the seams of her plaid flannel shirt. From the back, she could have been a man. She had one arm deep in a fresh hole she had made in the tiled wall. “Six-inch stopper chain,” she said, into the hole. “Wound around enough hair to build King Kong. Hair would’ve gone, but no chemical I know eats through a chain.”
“So that’s it, you’re done?” Dallas said.
“Not quite, dude,” she said. “Got some reassembling to do.” She withdrew her arm slowly and he looked away, as though he might have seen something obscene. When he looked back she had straightened up to her full height of six feet and stood there grinning at him and holding her black hand away from her body. She looked like an oversized baby doll, he thought, and he noticed that her face appeared worse than usual, her eyes unusually bright and damaged-looking.
“I see you looking at that,” she said, touching the skin under one of her eyes, “but you don’t need to get alarmed. I just had a little conflict with my sister the other night. Debbie. She’s a big bruiser like myself. She been staying with me at my trailer since her old man run off, and she gets to drinking, you know what I mean?”
Dallas nodded and quickly retreated into the kitchen, embarrassed. “Yup, Debbie don’t like Debbie, that’s the problem,” he could hear her saying. “Debbie got to learn to like Debbie first.” The way she kept talking to herself reminded him of the endless family of gray cats who lived near the dumpster behind the restaurant and spent their days and nights strolling around and crying, begging, never getting enough of whatever it was they wanted. They were cute cats, but nobody ever took one in. Their wiggly bodies and bright eyes, which would have seemed adorable on other, calmer cats, seemed, oddly, only to make them more pathetic, even slightly grotesque.
Donna clanked around in her toolbox for a moment and then began to hum in a high, surprisingly feminine voice. Dallas got a Baggie full of yogurt-dipped peanuts from the refrigerator and stood in his kitchen, eating them one at a time and listening. The tune arrested him. It was slow and sad in an old-fashioned, respectable way, as though whoever wrote it took sadness for granted. He didn’t think he’d heard it before, but it reminded him of a golden summer twenty years ago when he had become obsessed with stamp collecting. He remembered crouching over his album on the sunny floor of his bedroom for days on end until the muscles in the backs of his knees got sore and he could hardly stand without falling down. And then came a terrible evening when he had almost fainted in his bed when he felt a stray stamp hinge tickling his ankle and believed for a moment that it was a black widow. “I told you not to overdo it,” his mother had said. Donna’s sad, wordless vibrato was bringing this all back to him.
“What song is that?” he called to her.
“What’d you say, honey?” Donna yelled.
Dallas headed down the dark hall, shouting, “What song is that?” and slammed into Donna’s flannel front. He leaped backwards.
“‘I Missed Me,’” she said.
“You missed me?�
�� Dallas said.
“No, the song is ‘I Missed Me,’” she said. “The legendary late Jim Reeves. I ordered it off the TV.”
“Oh,” Dallas said. “I listen to classical music.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a classic, but it sure sticks with you,” Donna said. “Had it in my head for a week. Even dreamed it.”
“Uh huh,” Dallas said. He was embarrassed to be standing so close to her in the dark.
“Hey, what are you eating there?” she said.
He offered her a yogurt peanut.
She chewed with concentration and her eyes widened. “Dude!” she said. “These are great!” She stared at him disbelievingly, as though he personally had been hiding all yogurt peanuts from her her whole life.
“You can have them, take them,” he said.
“Thank you!” she said.
“So you’re coming back to seal that up?” he said.
“Yeah, tomorrow,” she said. “But where do you get these?”
“Any grocery store,” Dallas said, edging back toward the front door.
“Well, good night,” she finally said. “Dude, yogurt! I just can’t get over that!”
Dallas got into his pajamas, trying without success to whistle the song. He realized a moment later that he had forgotten to ask her whether he was allowed to shower.
• • •
“Your Uncle Lafitte was always a melancholy man,” his mother told him on the phone the next morning. “Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside, as they say. But when he went on the road, he became a new man.” She was implying that Dallas took after Lafitte, but Lafitte had died of tequila poisoning when Dallas was still very little, and Dallas barely remembered the man. He had seen him maybe once, at someone’s wedding. He had a picture in his head of a stout, gleaming man in a crisp white shirt and trousers that looked like they’d been assembled out of bed-sheets, sitting heavily in a straight-backed chair next to a buffet table on which was an enormous silver urn full of whipped cream. Dallas made several trips to the table to gaze up at the whipped cream, whose merry peaks he could just see rising above the rim of the urn, and every time he approached the table his Uncle Lafitte was making a pronouncement. “Well, you might be in the water, but you sure ain’t getting wet, you know what I mean?” Uncle Lafitte roared. “Well, you might be breathing, but you sure ain’t getting any air, you know what I mean?” he shouted. “Well, you might be on the highway, but that ain’t your car, you know what I’m saying?” Dallas had no picture in his head of the person to whom his uncle was speaking. He had, in fact, a suspicion that the whole memory was false, that like the reverse phone book it was only a dream.
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