Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  That’s when the kid said, “It’s about that cowboy. The handsome one.”

  I froze, holding a freshly disentangled orange kitten clutched to my chest. The kitten’s teeth were just coming in, so he started gnawing on my thumb. I let him have at it, the way a mother plugs her infant’s mouth with a pacifier while she catches up on a favorite soap opera.

  “If you ask me, both our cowboys are beautiful,” Nina said. “Excuse me, sir. Take your lips off my face now, please.”

  I heard some snuffling noises, and Portia giggling. “He’s kissing you,” she said.

  “Yes, well, Dumpling has always been a sucker for a good-looking dame with a sad story or two tucked in her pocket and also maybe a sugar cube. So. Tell me which one of our boys you think is ‘the handsome one.’”

  “The one with the dark hair and the cleft chin. I keep wondering what it would be like to kiss him.”

  After that there was no way I could stand up to announce myself. The kid would die of embarrassment. I might, too.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about things like that?” Nina asked.

  “No,” Portia said. “How old were you when you kissed a boy for the first time?”

  “Twelve.”

  “I’m almost fourteen.”

  “My situation was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I was desperately in love. I figured we’d better get the kissing part behind us before we got engaged.”

  “People don’t get engaged when they’re twelve.”

  “Tell that to the royal families of Europe,” Nina said.

  “Was he a prince?”

  “I thought he was. But no. He was my next-door neighbor. We were friends from the cradle onward. Don’t make the same mistakes I have, Portia. Listen to your mother, and remember that beauty isn’t everything.”

  “My parents have been friends ever since they were born, too,” Portia said. “My mother likes to tell people that she and my papa took their first bath in a grown-up bathtub together. When they were babies.” After a beat she added, “At least she used to like to tell people that. I guess she doesn’t tell that story anymore.”

  Nina said, “Hey. Hey. Oh, geez. Come here.”

  “No. I’m all right,” the girl said, though she didn’t sound it. “I always hated that story anyway.” I heard more snuffling noises, and then Portia was giggling again.

  Nina said, “Dumpling, you old tart. Kissing another woman right in front of me.” I heard the stall door click open, and Dumpling’s ears floated out into the breezeway. “We’re going to try something new today, Portia. No saddle, no bridle. You’ll lean the way you want to go, you touch his neck, you use your knees. It’s a test.”

  “A test?” Portia asked. “For what?”

  “My flight instructor at Lambert Field rode in every day on a horse he called Proctor. Anybody who came for lessons he asked to ride Proctor around the hangar three times without a saddle or a bridle. That was his entrance exam. He swore the people who could guide a horse without a set of reins to saw on were born aviators.”

  “Are you going to teach me how to fly your airplane?” Portia gasped.

  “I’m going to show you my airplane, and explain all the controls to you,” Nina said in a solemn tone of voice I’d never heard her use before. “If you strike me as someone who might have a knack for flying and all involved parties are in agreement, then we’ll see.”

  Portia was silent for a moment. Then she asked, “Is that true? About equestrians and aviators?”

  “It sounds true, and that’s what matters, isn’t it? Look. You fly an airplane with your whole body, the way you ride a horse. Both feet working pedals that control the rudder, hands on the joystick that lifts and lowers the ailerons and elevators. It can be a lot at first unless you’re already good at something else that calls for the same sort of skills.”

  “So if you failed the entrance exam, your flight instructor wouldn’t give you lessons?”

  “If you failed he charged you three times what he charged the other pupils,” Nina said. “Now, put your foot in my hands and I’ll give you a boost up. One, two, three, hoop-la.”

  I heard Dumpling grunt a little when the kid landed on his back.

  “How’s the air up there, Ace?” Nina asked.

  “Excellent,” Portia said. “I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “How did you talk my mother into this?”

  “Into what?”

  “You teaching me how to fly your airplane.”

  “Don’t go counting your chickens just yet, miss. Nobody’s agreed to teach anybody anything. First we test for aptitude. If all goes well, then we petition the authorities for clearance. Now, grip tight with your knees and grab a fistful of Dumpling’s mane. If you fall off and break a leg, you fail the entrance exam.”

  Portia clucked to Dumpling and the old gelding began plodding down the breezeway.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Nina said. “Aren’t you forgetting something? What’s Ward’s secret?”

  “Who’s Ward?”

  “The dark-haired cowboy.”

  “Oh, that,” Portia said. “I almost forgot. He’s—” Her voice sank to a confidential murmur, frustratingly harder to hear as Dumpling ambled away. Whatever the kid thought my secret was, I wanted to be in on it. I plunked the orange kitten unceremoniously on the floor beside me and sat up right quick. He mounted a mewling protest.

  “Whoa, Dumpling,” Portia commanded. The hoofbeats stopped. “Did you hear that, Nina?”

  “Hear what?”

  “It sounded like a kitten.”

  “It probably was a kitten,” Nina said. “One of the barn cats had a litter right after your mother got here. In the back seat of her car, in fact.”

  “That’s my father’s car. My mother bought it for his birthday last year.”

  “Fine. Your father’s car. I think Ward said the kittens are living in the stall next to Dumpling.”

  “Oh!” Portia said. “I love kittens. I want to see them!”

  I held my breath.

  “When we get back,” Nina said. “Those kittens aren’t going anywhere. So what’s the secret? Don’t make me beg.”

  “Well,” Portia said. Dumpling stepped out of the breezeway into the wider world then, so I couldn’t hear the rest.

  Just before dinner I was walking a bucket of Katie’s milk up to Margaret when I noticed Nina and Portia on the porch roof outside Coyote’s window. The two of them were poring over an oversized tome that was either Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a textbook on basic aeronautical principles, or a titanic potboiler called The Many Secrets of Howard Stovall Bennett III. That last one, I should note, was still a work in progress.

  I was so lost in wondering which title the two of them had chosen from Nina’s collection of canned remains that I came very close to bumping into Emily. When I finally saw her in my path I slammed on the brakes, spilling a little milk when I did so. The cats that had been tailing me from barn to house set upon it eagerly before it soaked into the earth.

  “I’m so sorry, Ward,” Emily said. “I assumed you saw me coming. What were you thinking about? You looked like you were a million miles away.”

  “I was calculating the chances that I’d get to the house without spilling any of this milk,” I said. “The cats would like to thank you for keeping that from happening.”

  “Where have you been all day?” Emily asked.

  “Here and there,” I said.

  “Well, you must have been here when I was there. Every time I thought I’d run you to earth, you evaporated. It was almost like you were avoiding me.”

  “Why would I want to do something like that?” I asked. My eyes wandered guiltily to Nina and Portia huddled on the roof, maybe or maybe not plotting a thrilling aeronautical adventure. Emily’s eyes followed mine.

  “Look at those two, would you?” she asked. “Aren’t they dear together? Margaret was so r
ight about Nina. She is a miracle worker. Portia has been almost civil to me all day long.”

  I put my burden down at my feet, flexed my right hand, and massaged my palm where the bucket’s wire handle had cut into it. “Good,” I said. “Well. I’d better get going with this milk. Margaret’s waiting for it.”

  “You are such an enigma sometimes, Ward,” Emily said.

  “An enigma?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know that word. You’ve always struck me as someone who’s surprisingly articulate, given your background. An ‘enigma’ is a mystery.”

  “Thank you for explaining that,” I said.

  “You’re probably wondering why I’m calling you a mystery.”

  “I guess you have your reasons.”

  “I do. Here’s one of them.” Emily took a piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. “I took a telephone message for you this morning.”

  I looked down. Daniel Horn was written on the paper in her girlish script, followed by a number I didn’t recognize. It couldn’t be my parents’ number, because they didn’t have a telephone anymore. Thanks to Daniel Horn.

  “He says he really needs to talk to you,” Emily said. “He also says that he’s your uncle.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and put the piece of paper in my pocket.

  A scrum of cats, God bless them, chose that moment to take advantage of my distraction to mount an attack on the bucket of milk. They tipped the whole thing over, drenching my boots and the two ringleaders, Cataclysm and Catapult. The cats washed themselves off, but an unpleasant whiff of curdled milk never came out of my boots. Not in the next couple of weeks, anyway, before I threw them and all my other cowboy gear away.

  “Margaret will be waiting for that milk for a long time now, won’t she?” Emily asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and picked up the empty bucket.

  “Are you going to call your uncle? I said you would.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Is everything all right at home?” Emily asked. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “Everything is fine,” I said, even though I had an uneasy feeling that everything was not.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The first time Emily kissed me, it was Nina’s idea.

  The next day the lot of our guests were going into Reno for a morning of shopping and what have you, the sort of adventure Emily and Nina usually opted out of. But Portia wanted a cowboy hat, and moreover she wanted Emily to come into town to help her choose it, an invitation that had Emily all but swooning with joy. So in we went, in caravan with the rest of the gang in the ranch’s Chevrolet. Nina had asked Margaret if she and Max could spare me to chauffeur the three of them into town in Emily’s automobile, as Nina had plans to meet a friend once their shopping was taken care of. You’d better believe me, I stood right at Nina’s elbow when she requested my services to be sure she actually got around to asking. I couldn’t be too careful.

  When Nina mentioned that business about meeting up with a friend, I figured her “friend” was just a fabrication, invented so she wouldn’t have to ride into town jostled between Zep and Mary Louise. I believe she almost regretted her decision not to ride with the others when, as they waited on the porch for Sam to pull the wagon around, the Zeppelin said, “Kudos, Mary Louise, for outliving an awful husband. How I’ve wished some of mine would be polite enough to drop in their tracks. Or on their cheap floozies, as the case may be.”

  “Oh, you can go to hell for wishing somebody dead,” Mary Louise said. “That’s what my pastor kept telling me. So I prayed for it instead.”

  “I’d like to be a fly on the wall for the rest of that conversation,” Nina said as she climbed in the back seat of the Pierce-Arrow between Emily and Portia.

  “Shouldn’t Mary Louise be leaving soon for her husband’s funeral?” Emily asked.

  “What? And spoil the rest of her vacation? Shouldn’t her husband have kept his pants on until after their divorce went through?” Nina asked.

  “Nina!” Emily said. “There are children present.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Ward,” Nina said.

  Portia giggled. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Emily smile and reach across Nina to pat Portia’s knee. “It’s nice to hear your laugh, buttercup,” she said.

  I also saw Portia pull her knee away.

  Sam cooled his heels in the station wagon while the Zeppelin, arm in arm with Mary Louise, shepherded the rest of her entourage, the various guests in your photograph, Liz, Theresa, Martha, and so forth, to a storied Reno lingerie emporium much beloved by dowagers and showgirls alike. “To negligees and new beginnings, ladies!” Zep called as she opened the door and waved the others inside.

  “I suppose this also means that Mary Louise will be cheating on the Spanish nuns with some cheap store-bought panties,” Emily said.

  “They won’t be cheap,” I said. “Even if they’re store-bought. Not in that place.”

  “Why are you so interested in Mary Louise’s panties?” Portia asked me. “Is it because you’re—oof—”

  I looked into the rearview mirror in time to see Nina removing her elbow from Portia’s ribs and holding a finger to her lips. I looked to see Emily’s reaction to that mysterious exchange, but she seemed oblivious. “I hope the nuns weren’t depending on Mary Louise’s business,” she said.

  “The Spanish nuns have more important things to worry about,” Nina said. “Don’t you read the papers, Emily? The Falangists and the Communists are fighting to the death in Spain. Blood is running in the streets. Come on. Let’s go find Portia’s hat. You, too, Ward. We need your professional opinion.”

  The four of us ambled into Parker’s Western Wear together and wandered its aisles with cowboys both real and of the drugstore variety. You’ve never heard of a drugstore cowboy? Oh. Well, in the early days of Hollywood that’s what they called men, some in fact real cowboys, who turned up at studio gates looking for work as extras in movie westerns. Since there were no chuck wagons handy, those cowpokes ate at drugstore lunch counters nearby where food was cheap and the coffee tasted as if it had been stewing in a tin pot since Prometheus brought mankind the gift of fire. Once other actors realized acting like real cowboys might land them work, they adopted the wardrobe, squint, frontier accents, and colorful sayings. People started calling the lot of them “drugstore cowboys.” Sam had done time as one before he gave up and headed for Nevada. His doppelgänger Gary Cooper, too.

  I hung back a bit while the women examined the hat display. Nina plucked a towering ten-gallon from its peg and asked, “What kind of cowboy would choose a hat like this?”

  “The kind Sam calls ‘Big hat, no cattle,’” I said.

  “You could give a baby a bath in that hat,” Portia said.

  “Have I ever told you the story about the first bath I had in a grown-up bathtub?” Emily asked Portia. The kid started to roll her eyes, rethought, then threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “Only about a million times,” she said. “So you do miss Papa, don’t you?”

  Emily looked like she might crumble to dust and blow away. She stroked her daughter’s head hesitantly and said, “Maybe just a little.”

  I noticed a pair of drugstore cowboys, his and hers editions, trying on ten-gallon hats together in front of a three-way mirror. “If you want to know what kind goes for a hat like that,” I murmured, and inclined my head in their direction.

  The ten-gallon cowboy slipped his hand into his ten-gallon cowgal’s back pocket and pulled her flush against himself. They kissed, and their brims collided. The man’s hat bucked off and landed upside down on the floor behind him. Underneath the hat his head was as smooth as an egg.

  Nina snickered, but honestly, I felt a little cheap for making a joke at the lovebirds’ expense. If I learned anything in my time at the Flying Leap it was that passion in any relationship could be so fleeting that any evidence of it should be celebrated, not laughed at. When Emily looked up to see what w
as so danged funny, she stiffened. Portia followed her mother’s gaze to the couple, mirrored in triplicate. Portia gasped, let go of her mother, and fled.

  “What just happened?” Nina asked. “Hasn’t Portia ever seen a bald man kiss a woman before?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. “Not that woman, though.”

  She spoke hardly above a whisper, but even from half a showroom away, there was no mistaking that voice. The bald man unlocked his lips, looked up, and exclaimed, “Emily!”

  “That’s her?” the woman asked. “The wife you came here to unload?”

  Nina hissed, “I’ll go after Portia.” She gave me a discreet shove in Emily’s direction. “Emily,” she said. “Kiss Ward.”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “No,” Emily gasped. “Why?”

  “Archer’s going to try to talk to you otherwise. Can’t you see that?”

  Emily looked at Nina, then at me. I gave a little shrug of assent.

  When I was a kid an older boy had described his first osculatory experience to me, saying: “When she kissed my lips, it was like she’d unbuckled my belt with her tongue.” At the time I didn’t see how such a thing could be anatomically possible, but that afternoon in Parker’s Western Wear, I understood what a poet that young man was. Doorknockers had actually taught me very little, I realized. By the time Emily had finished ascertaining that my tonsils were in the places indicated by the illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy, Archer and his lady friend had vanished. The sad, empty giant of a hat that lay upended on the floor was the only evidence that ten-gallon infidel had ever been there.

  When she pulled away from me, Emily croaked, “Sorry.”

  “No harm done,” I said. “Happy to help out in any way I can.”

  We finally found Portia crumpled between Nina and Sam on the shady bench I liked to sit on. Nina had her arm around the kid.

  “Here’s your mama, miss,” Sam said when he saw us coming. He hopped up, took off his hat, and swept the bench with it, then directed Emily to sit. “I’ll be going now.”