Waveland

by Frederick Barthelme

  “What can I say?” he said. “I'm not happy either. I wasn't happy about it when I left. I wasn't happy about it when I was living out there by myself. It was all about you. Then it sort of changed.”

  “What changed?” she said.

  “The whole deal. You got to be more trouble than, you know. It was too much trouble.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “So what am I now?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “You are what you are. Ex. Wife, partner, lover. Friend, pal, buddy. What's anybody? Know what I mean?”

  “No, I do not know what you mean,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “After a while, what's anybody you hang out with, go to dinner with, drive around with, do errands with, go to movies with? Anybody you make things for—drinks, coffee, you know? A member of your operation.”

  “Are you sliding around the question?”

  “I'm trying to,” he said. He moved over so he was leaning against the wall, sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall next to her. Their shoulders were touching. He could smell her and she smelled the way she had always smelled, kind of lovely and vaguely perfumed. A scent of some soap that wasn't too fancy but that smelled good anyway. The old scent. They watched some lights stretch across the windows in front of the house. She started disassembling the train set. He stopped her.

  “Leave it together,” he said.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Put it on a table somewhere. We'll run it later.”

  “I don't know how this is going to end up,” she said. “Is it going to get worse?”

  “Might turn out fine,” he said.

  “I wish you liked me more,” she said.

  “Not fair,” he said.

  “I apologize,” she said. “And I do sort of like her. Greta, I mean. I do and I don't.”

  “Figured that,” he said.

  “Are you in love with her?” she said.

  “I don't think that's happening anymore,” he said. “That love thing. Or maybe it just changed clothes and I don't recognize it.”

  “I shouldn't have asked,” she said.

  “It doesn't hurt anything,” he said. He was looking at some lights out the window. “Sometimes it's better just to go ahead and say stuff.”

  Porch light was throwing shadows through the glass upstairs across from the landing. A Palladian window, the house description said. As if after Palladio who, had he seen it, would have rolled over in his grave. The light coming through this arched window made a shadow like some kind of bat—big eyes, big ears. A strange shadow. He pointed it out to Gail and said, “You see this over here?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Here,” he said. He touched her shoulder to guide her.

  “Oh, yeah. I've seen that thing before,” she said. “He lives here.”

  He put his arm around Gail and pulled her toward him, kissed her temple, smelled her hair. They stayed there a few minutes, just breathing. It wasn't too bad. After a while she got up, patted Vaughn on the shoulder, and went into her room, leaving the train set in the hall. Vaughn stayed put for a minute, listened to her light switch snap, then got up and went down the hall and stood by Greta's door. Not a sound.

  18

  Vaughn woke up at about eleven in the morning with Gail sitting on the bed alongside him and poking his neck gently with the tip of a pink, resin-coated Japanese carving knife he had bought her a couple of years before. “Morning, darling,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “I see. How are you?”

  “I think you're going to love me,” Gail said, making motions as if to gently slice his throat. “I can be dangerous, too.”

  “Too playful,” he said. “Besides, I already loved you.”

  She put the knife under his ear, slid it down as if cutting his throat, a sawing motion from left ear to right. “Yeah, but you stopped,” she said.

  “I didn't stop,” he said. “I just got old or something. I went on sabbatical. You want to get off me here? I gave you this knife, you know.”

  “You remember,” she said.

  “Jump up, will you?”

  “I guess,” she said, rolling away from him. She held the knife out at arm's length and tried to get some light on it. “It's pretty, don't you think?”

  “It's prettier there than on my neck,” he said. “It's prettiest in the catalog.”

  “I would never hurt you, Vaughn,” she said. “What would be the percentage in that?”

  “I don't know—Gail works in mysterious ways?”

  “She certainly does,” Gail said. “I talked to your brother this morning. I asked him to come down and see us. I said he was needed here.”

  “Tell me this is another joke.”

  “He said if I needed him he will come,” she said.

  “That's all we need,” he said. “Little Newton.”

  “Not so little,” Gail said.

  By now she was on her back lying in the bed next to him. He sat up, smacking some shape into his pillow.

  “About Tony,” she said. “I like him, he likes me. He's fun. He's dumb enough for both of us. I like a dumb guy.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at Vaughn. “A dumb guy is a significant asset these days. He thinks the world of me.”

  “As he should,” he said. “He's nineteen and you are a legendary sex goddess.”

  “I hear that,” she said. “But when they're young and dumb, they're young and …”

  “Dumb,” he said. “What are the virtues of dumb again?”

  “He's not really dumb. He's more like … ill-informed.”

  “I don't like him,” Vaughn said.

  “Noted,” she said.

  “Does he have a job?” he said.

  “I don't think so,” she said. “He does tree work sometimes. He's a hanger guy.”

  “What's a hanger guy?” he said.

  “The guy who goes up in a tree and cuts out the little pieces that have broken off but are still hanging up there.”

  “No kidding? They've got a name for that?” Vaughn said.

  She nodded and sat up on her side of the bed, crossed her legs and faced him. “Newton is coming. I told him to come.”

  “Well, shit, Gail. Where's he staying? Here? If he's coming, we're going back to Greta's.”

  “No, you're staying here,” she said. “He's staying here. Greta can stay, too. If you must have her close by.”

  Vaughn gave her an eye-roll.

  “Jerry Colonna,” she said, getting out of the bed. “See? I remembered.” She twirled the knife in her hand, then tried tossing it at the floor to see if she could stick it mumblety-peg style. It bounced. “Why don't you get up and we'll go out,” she said. “Get your friend and the three of us will go somewhere.”

  They went to Target. Target was full of young girls wearing blue jeans that made their butts look like they didn't fit in the jeans. Made their butts waddle as they walked. He pointed this out to Greta who said, “Keep looking, Bozo.”

  “It's the rage,” Gail said. “I'm thinking about going that way.”

  “This is a post-slice-of-stomach thing?”

  “The stomach is still present, you will notice,” Greta said. She pointed out a girl in jeans and a short top walking by. The girl was pretty. Her stomach was pretty. Her butt looked like it was too large for the jeans, but it was still pretty.

  “They want you to look at their butts,” Gail said. “Well— not you, but, you know.”

  “What are we doing here?” Vaughn said.

  “We're having a ménage,” Gail said. “A relationship. The three of us. We're turning over a new leaf. We're making a new start. We're keeping me away from Tony, and we're getting an iPod. All those things.”

  “Gail wants an iPod,” Greta said.

  “Then she shall have an iPod even if every right-thinking individual of sound mind in these United States deplores the iPod utterly,” he said.

  “Whoa,” Gail said. “I want one I can put a
ll my music on.”

  “Game, set, match,” he said. “You've got no music.”

  “I do, too,” she said. “I remember music from before your time. Before you I was a woman who loved music. Then you married me and took my music away. You made me feel so bad about loving music that I never listened to music again. But now I'm going to listen to music all day and all night on my iPod.”

  “Got it,” Vaughn said.

  They went through the bra section where all the bras looked like car bumpers, big rose and blue car bumpers. “In my day,” he said, pointing at the brassieres.

  “We know, we know,” Greta said.

  “Nipples,” Gail said. “Nipples be gone.”

  “What a world,” he said.

  “That's one of his favorite expressions,” Gail said to Greta.

  “I know,” Greta said. “He uses it when he means to draw attention to what he thinks is the extreme peculiarity of the way we live now, in this case as exemplified by women's undergarments.”

  “Right,” Gail said.

  “He's got a great deal of range,” Greta said.

  “He sees the world in a brassiere,” Gail said.

  Then they arrived at the iPod aisle. All things iPod were represented on this aisle. Actually, it was half an aisle, but it was all iPod all the time—sweaters, ear buds, earphones, cases, stands, speakers. All cute and all brightly colored. Many, many white. It was iPod World.

  They looked at the iPods available and Greta and Gail were fascinated. They compared the iPods, one against the other— the size of the Shuffle and of the new Shuffle, and the size of the Nano and the size of the Mini, now long discontinued but still available in lime at this Target. Then they compared capacities—one hundred and twenty songs, two hundred and fifty songs, five hundred songs, thousands of songs.

  “It's way too late to get an iPod,” Vaughn said.

  “We're older people now and we can get iPods whenever we damn well please,” Greta said.

  “Are you getting an iPod, too?”

  “I might,” she said. “Have you something against that?”

  “I have something against it coming to rest in the closet two weeks from now,” he said.

  “Put it on eBay,” she said. “If that even happens.”

  “Where are we going to lunch with our iPods after we get them?” Gail said.

  “Chinese,” he said.

  “You always say that,” Gail said. “He always says that,” she said to Greta.

  “I know,” Greta said.

  “Why don't we go to some real place,” Gail said. “Like a delicatessen or some sandwich place.”

  “I'd like some Fritos,” Greta said.

  “You guys are too hard to please,” Vaughn said.

  “I invited his brother to come down,” Gail said to Greta. “He doesn't like his brother. He thinks his brother is too something. What is it that you think your brother is?”

  “Too short,” he said.

  “His brother's a walking man,” Gail said. “He walks tall, all the time, night and day. Three o'clock in the morning and he's out walking tall.”

  “That could be dangerous,” Greta said.

  “It's good for his heart, though,” Gail said. “What's-his-face here could use some of that. He's a little thick through the you-know-what.”

  “Skull?” Greta said.

  “Let's get some Chinese food first,” Vaughn said. “Sesame beef.”

  “What about this one?” Gail whispered, pointing out a young girl in lemon-colored, skin-tight knee-length stretch pants who came into the aisle talking on a cell phone and fingering the iPod accessories.

  “Naked Came the Stranger,” he said.

  “Could be a very attractive thong,” Gail said.

  “I'm going to the car,” Vaughn said. He waved and walked out, leaving them there among the iPods. He didn't know why they were suddenly mad for iPods, why they were being so friendly to each other, why he and Greta were still at Gail's house. He didn't know why anything was happening, and what was happening seemed sort of out of control.

  Most of all he was unhappy about Newton. He did not want to see Newton, did not want to endure Newton's smug face, Newton's half-thoughts, Newton's great success.

  “Getting old is hell,” he said to a woman his age who was going out the door of Target with him. She looked startled.

  Vaughn was glad to get to the car, to climb inside, to click the seatbelt into place even though he was parked in the parking lot. He was glad to hear the door shut and to smell the interior—the leather. He was glad to touch the steering wheel, the shift knob, the radio buttons. He felt safe in the car. He felt protected. He watched the people in the parking lot and thought things about them. He thought: That one's pretty and that one shouldn't wear those pants, those three must be related, look at the way that one walks, that one sure is fat, she sure bought a lot of stuff, he's too tall, why are they laughing like that, that woman looks like a duck with those feet, I like her hair, he spits like a jerk, that one's too tucked-in for my taste, I wouldn't mind having a bite of that. He watched these people pack their bags into the backseats of their cars and get in and drive away, backing out of slots carefully and not so carefully. He watched the traffic. He watched the whole thing—the little breezes blowing the helpless trees, the tall solid lamp standards, the brick buildings, the giant red balls in front of the doors at Target, dividing the walkway from the roadway. He liked being in the car better than anything that had happened to him in days. He was thinking that maybe he should just go around and sit in parking lots in his car as much as possible. He wondered if he would get bored doing that, if the charm would wear off like it wore off everything else. He decided it probably would, but that there were alternatives, that he could go to a fast-food restaurant and get a hamburger if that happened, or to a frozen yogurt drive-thru, or another parking lot. There were many possibilities, he decided, enough to sustain him should the pleasures of this particular parking lot wane.

  Out the windshield clouds clogged the sky. Big white, thick clouds looking like the world's intestines wrapped around themselves. He started the car and turned on the air conditioning, put it on low, leaned his head against the seat. Without looking, he reached for the switch to lock all the doors, pressed the button and heard the satisfying thunk. He listened to the muffled chatter and scratch of passersby—their feet on the asphalt, their voices rising and falling. He wondered if he would ever get out of this. And if so, then what? He wondered if a new dog would be a good idea. Maybe a cat named Frank who hunted at night and brought him field mice and cardinals. Why not marry her? he thought. Meaning Greta, he was pretty sure. Why fool around? Because he missed the past so much, all those other times, all those other moments, all those other things, places, and people, all those events. All that. There was so much stuff back there, behind him, now lost, vanished, but for that no less troubling. The world of distant memory. The world of the barely recalled, of a life that was like a movie he had lived in. A wonderful movie with weather and women, sparkling streets at night, tight embraces in dark, unrecognizable rooms. A world that now might just as well have never existed, but plagued him sorely.

  He sat up, slid the gearshift into Drive, and drove across the parking lot diagonally, toward the Burger King.

  Fifteen minutes later, having enjoyed a very satisfying and salty Whopper, Vaughn rolled back around to Target and found Gail and Greta standing out front. They'd been waiting there for him. They were both wearing white Apple ear buds, and they both had iPods strung around their necks. They looked like sisters.

  19

  It had taken Vaughn too long to figure out being a good architect and being a successful architect were two distinctly different things, and that getting his name and his buildings in the magazines was not going to bring him lasting satisfaction. He had spent the best part of his life working toward that, and had succeeded in some measure, in a regional way, among the architects and designers of Dall
as and Atlanta; but as it became less important to him, he became a man with fewer ideas and opinions. At some point not too long ago he more or less gave up the pursuit and went into some kind of death spiral, dropping one job after another, slipping down the architectural food chain until he was detailing toilet stalls for a company that sold and installed them. That's when he stepped out entirely, went to the community colleges and offered his services, which were warmly received.

  His brother, Newton, by contrast, was a believer. Success was available and real, true, honest, genuine, and fundamental. Good work was rewarded, poor work was scorned. Money was an accidental side-benefit. Newton was much more successful than Vaughn had ever been. Newton lived in Oregon and Seattle. Up there in the Great Northwest, as Newton had once called it. He started a small computer company working with secondary Internet searches, and he eventually sold the company to one of the big Internet search engines. As part of the deal, Newton now had a position with that company, or one of its subsidiaries, which didn't require him to do much of anything but deliver an occasional opinion about an idea produced by one of the company's one hundred design teams.

  He and Newton had never been the best of friends, even as children, so he was not pleased when Newton showed up in Gulfport at Gail's invitation. Vaughn's view of his brother was poisoned by envy; Vaughn knew it, but was helpless to correct it. He didn't see eye to eye with Newton, never had. Newton was the family favorite; Vaughn was the black sheep. Newton was the successful one. Newton was in his time, while Vaughn was out of his. Vaughn believed his mother loved his brother more than she loved him, and his father made no secret of his preference for Newton. And there was the matter of Gail having been Newton's lover before she was Vaughn's. It was a short romance, only a month, or six weeks, but fierce and exciting for both of them before they called it quits.

  So when Gail called Newton, Vaughn was displeased.

  Newton hadn't ever visited Mississippi, and Vaughn only spoke to Newton on holidays, the required calls. But now Newton was arriving at the airport and Vaughn was sent to fetch him.