Vaughn said something about this to Greta, who nodded and threw something that she'd been playing with off the deck—maybe it was a chip of wood she'd picked up, he didn't know; but he saw her throw it and admired the motion of her arm, a remarkably wooden motion, as if her arm was not connected to her body in any way, as if her arm, peculiarly white and almost translucent in the decaying moonlight, had a mind of its own.
22
Vaughn and Greta spent the next few weeks on the deck at the hijacked beach house, shuttling back and forth between the beach house and her house on Mary Magdalene and Gail's house. They were at sixes and sevens. They ate a lot of Chinese food. They ate barbecued ribs, pulled pork, Key lime pie. They ate steamed gyoza. They ate hamburgers in cars in parking lots and French fries and onion rings and chocolate shakes. They ate fried oysters, calamari, redfish, flounder, and pine nuts. They spoke softly.
They'd spent a lot of time on Gail, taken her on as a project, a community project—something they might figure out, even repair—and it wasn't entirely fair, insofar as Gail wasn't exactly clued in on the deal. But now that Gail had departed they were free to do whatever without worrying too much about her, who she was talking to, who she was meeting in the middle of the night, where she might be sitting in her car at dawn scribbling notes to her friends on the backs of business cards. Now, in hindsight, Vaughn wondered if moving over there had been foolhardy. Ex-spouses were never quite ex enough, and weeks, months, years later they were still close by, attached to your world. You had to pay attention to them. And in this case there was the more immediate need: protection. Tony was around. He had beaten her silly, and maybe it wouldn't happen again if they were at the house with her. In fact, it hadn't happened again, but Tony was still very much in the picture throughout, even if he and Gail saw each other only on the sly, as if Greta and Vaughn were the parents and Gail the bad-girl daughter, sneaking out late at night to meet up with her too-rough friends.
So when Gail pulled out, Greta and Vaughn didn't know quite what to do. They sat out by the sea night after night watching the flounder fishermen, watching the moon, listening to the sound of the surf, leaning their backs against the tattered walls of somebody's given-up beach house, a house torn apart in the storm a year before, but also in who knows how many previous storms, and now, finally, recognized as more trouble than it was worth.
On one night when the sky was just speckled with stars, a thin haze around the perimeter, the half moon rising in the east with its reflection trailing toward them over the surf, moving sidewinder style, like a bright snake moving across a dark desert floor, Greta asked him what they were going to do, and he said he did not know. He said he hadn't the slightest idea. He said, “Why don't we just do what we used to do?”
“What's that?” she said.
“I don't remember,” he said. “Go to dinner, watch television. Remember that big-screen television we used to watch all the time over at your house?”
“Eddie's watching that one now,” she said.
“Maybe we can get another one,” he said. “We could stay at Gail's house and move the TV, put it at the foot of the bed, and get into bed every night and watch it. We could watch all the tripe they serve up, the cop shows, the CSI shows, Court TV, all that cable stuff like National Geographic's Explorer and Extreme Machines, and reality cop shows like that one from the files of Dayle Hinman, and we could watch news and sports and those incredible game shows and Lost, which seems to have a lot of sex in it, and HGTV, all those house-buying shows, and design shows, and stupid reality shows, all the gory excess of this stupid and vulgar culture, the idiot news every night, with a blown-up building one night and a mother killing her children the next, and with women disappearing off the streets and guys who sit in the Wal-Mart parking lot the better to watch the women, and guys who will tell you that and do it, too, and the cooking shows, the British TV shows, the high-definition shows, the HBO specials, and the sex shows. We could do that every night, and while away the hours.”
“Uh, no,” Greta said.
The surf that night was a sort of silvery green, a green that was barely perceptible as green but which was nevertheless green. They watched the lighted fishing boats slide across the water, listened to the groan of trees pushed by wind, caught out of the corners of their eyes the giant birds that flew inland every once in a while, dark shadows against a lighter sky. Pelicans, maybe, off schedule. Sea birds.
“Is she coming back?” Greta asked.
“Don't know,” he said. “But if she is, we don't have to do what we've already done. If she comes back she's on her own.”
“Until the first time somebody beats her up. Or when she calls with some crisis, or when she says she loves you and wants you back. Then what?”
“I'm going to hide behind you,” Vaughn said. “I'm going to be direct and honest and forthright.”
“So you're quitting her? For real?”
“You're all about the movies, huh?” Vaughn said.
“I don't buy it,” Greta said.
“Wait and see.”
“We should bring peanut butter sandwiches,” she said. “Tomorrow. Are we coming tomorrow? Let's bring peanut butter sandwiches. Do you want to make them or should I?”
“Does it have to be decided right this minute?” he said.
A motorboat with a red light on the front of it and a white light at the rear, lights the size of Christmas lights, trolled across their vision left to right. The lights reflected in the surf, the sound of the motor constant—a drone, an ache, like a door opening, opening, opening, like someone saying Ahh endlessly.
“What about money?” Greta said.
“We have money,” he said. “If we don't move fast or travel to distant lands, we'll be fine. We'll live the small life.”
“Hmm,” Greta said, as if considering the virtues of this. “La petite vie.”
The boat with the lights came across again, going in the other direction now, now shining a spotlight up on the house where they were sitting, shining the light right in their eyes, heading toward them and then crossing in front of them, very close to the beach.
“I should feel something about Gail,” he said. “Or think something. But I don't. Nothing. She's like a neighbor now.”
“Wow. You are the quick and the mean,” Greta said.
“Not,” he said.
“Is that the way it is with you about everything? When you're done, you're done? I'm beginning to get the idea that you really have checked out.”
“Something like that,” he said. “I don't think I have to be heard on every single subject. When I was a younger man…”
“And you were a younger man only weeks ago.”
“Here's the new me: a nice, easygoing, regular guy. If somebody does something stupid, it's fine with me. If somebody on TV does something stupid, it's fine with me. If somebody on TV does something stupid and gets paid millions of dollars, also fine.”
“You're out of this world,” Greta said. “You're a go-along guy.”
“Finally,” he said.
“You're following your bliss.”
“Well, not exactly,” he said. “If we're getting uglier and coarser, as my father said, who wants to live in a toilet? Is there a point at which it stops getting coarser and starts getting finer? Is that point coming along, or are we going to miss it? Where's Dad? I want to ask him. If my parents were less coarse, and I am more coarse, maybe my children will complete the cycle and become less coarse.”
“Your children?” she said, handing him a brand new bottle of OFF!
“Figuratively,” he said. He turned his flashlight on the anti-mosquito can and read the label. “‘Repels mosquitoes that may carry West Nile Virus.’ You picked a good one here.”
“You're a coarse piece of business, aren't you?” she said.
Her cell phone rang. It was Eddie calling from the house.
He wanted to know if they were coming there later or if they were going to the big
house. She looked at Vaughn, asked, and he said, “I don't know. Whatever you want to do is fine.”
“Why?” she said into the telephone, then listened. “That's fine,” she said. “We'll see you tomorrow. Right.” Then she closed the phone, slipped it back into her shirt pocket. “He has a friend.”
“Oh, my god,” he said. “Of what denomination?”
“He did not say,” she said.
“Should we move him back to the garage? It would be mean to move him to the garage,” he said.
“If we move over there, he's going back,” she said. “But for the moment I'm enjoying this brief respite from responsibility delivered to us by the departure of your ex-wife, the lovely Gail, the brotherfucker.”
“Okay, that's over the line. There's a line there and you're over it.”
“Couldn't resist,” she said.
23
Three weeks to the day after she left, Gail called to say she and Newton were having trouble. “We're not getting along,” she said. “He doesn't really want me here. He says he loves me, but he's not in love with me. He says he needs to find himself. He says he's a work in progress and he's just been reading about this, and understanding this, and getting back with me after all this time is not the way forward for him, at least not yet.”
“Well, that surprises me,” Vaughn said.
“Are you being wry?”
“I thought I was,” he said.
“Are you trying to hurt me?”
“No, I'm not. I've never tried to hurt you. Not once.”
“That's true. I remember that about you,” she said.
There was a silence on the phone. He toyed with some shells that Greta had picked up on the beach on their travels to the beach house.
Gail said, “Vaughn? Are you there? Vaughny?”
“I'm here. I'm here. What?” he said.
“I may have to come back there,” she said.
“There are worse things,” he said.
“We're not getting back together, are we?” she said.
“I don't think so,” he said.
“This is like really the end of our marriage,” she said.
“I think so. Yes,” he said.
“It's about time, isn't it?” she said.
That caught him. He wasn't ready for that. It didn't seem like something Gail would say. He didn't think it was intended to be mean, but it sounded a little mean. Maybe it was just fatigue. Maybe she was as fatigued as he was.
“I guess it is. We had a good run.”
“What's that? Something from some TV movie?” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “But still, it's true. We did have a pretty good run.”
There was more silence, and then she said, “Yeah, I guess you're right. It could have lasted two years and been in the dumper.”
“What are you going to do when you get back here?” he said.
“If I come back,” she said. “I don't know. Same shit. I may stay here. Maybe I could lean on Newton for a while.”
“I thought he loved you but wasn't in love with you?”
“I don't need him to be in love with me,” she said. “I need him to like me and to go to dinner with me and to be a close friend occasionally.”
“A close friend I don't want to hear about.”
“I just need somebody to hang out with,” she said. “Hang out is what I do these days. That's what I miss about our marriage. You know, all the time we spent together, messing around, doing nothing. Going to the grocery store.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
“But you've got Greta now,” Gail said. “She's a nice woman, Greta.”
“If you like the type,” he said.
“Come on,” Gail said.
“Was a joke,” he said.
“Yeah, I completely missed it, you know,” Gail said. “I unlearned everything in the last fifteen minutes.”
“It was sort of a joke,” he said.
“Are you alluding to the fact that, how shall I say, she's rough-hewn?” Gail said.
“I was not alluding to that,” he said. “And furthermore, and for the record, she is not rough-hewn, whatever you might mean by that.”
“I apologize for that,” Gail said.
“Accepted,” he said.
When he told Greta that Gail might come back to town, Greta shrugged and shook her head and rolled her eyes and wagged her hands in the air. All at once.
“She gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Greta said.
“I don't think she's going to bother us anymore,” he said. “We'll probably have to move out of the house.”
“I'm ready to go,” she said. “Why don't we go tonight?”
“We've got to get Eddie out of your house first,” he said.
“I'll call him,” Greta said.
So at two o'clock in the morning, they started packing the cars, collecting the stuff they'd brought over from Greta's house, and the stuff they'd accumulated since living at Gail's, slapping it into their two cars. Trip after trip into the big house.
“This is fun,” Greta said, passing him on her way in as he was coming out.
“Is it?” he said. He was carrying a bunch of shirts on hangers and a couple of pairs of shoes. She was going back for another load.
“Think this'll work?” Greta said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I look forward to it,” she said. She gave him a little kiss on the forehead, then pushed him toward the stairs.
It took them only about an hour and a half to pack. They became less careful as the packing went on. At first they maintained a coherent plan, isolating things that didn't want to be folded or didn't want to be crushed or that wanted to be hanging on the rod, which was running across the backseat of her car; but after a while, they were just throwing stuff into both of the cars. It didn't matter. Boxes of cereal landed on top of freshly washed jeans. Skirts were wadded up and stuffed into the space behind the backseat. It was a mess. It was an escape. It was cowboys and Indians.
Closing on four o'clock they trailed through town the few blocks to the beach road, then up to Interstate 10 and across to the Bay St. Louis exit, and down to Greta's place in Wave-land. Greta in front in her car, him in his car behind. There was something of the celebration about the trip—the slow drive with the windows down, the clammy gulf air blowing through the car windows, the empty streets, the almost slow-motion of a parade.
He wondered if she was driving so slowly because she was enjoying it or if she had some other motive. Maybe she was showing him something. Sometimes people liked to tell you things without telling you things, he thought. Sometimes they liked to show you things, demonstrate things, and why shouldn't they? Sometimes the things you learned from demonstration stuck with a fierceness that could not be matched.
When they got to Greta's house, Eddie was on the porch, sitting in an aluminum deck chair, drinking a Bud. Monkey was by his side, asleep, upside down. “It's all yours,” Eddie said. “I've just been keeping watch. The place is clean as a whistle. You could eat off the floors in there.” He wiggled the neck of the beer bottle toward the front door.
He didn't get up to help them unload the cars. They put one of the cars in the driveway and the other in the yard, and then they carried everything inside. Greta's house looked just as it had before they left. Eddie had returned everything to its prior state, as if he had photographed it the morning they left and used the photographs to set things back in order. An episode of Dominick Dunne's Court TV show was running—a story about a fat white guy and his wife, who had fallen in love with a black man and had decided to shoot her husband so that she could be with her new lover. Vaughn couldn't figure out how that qualified for the rich and famous murder show that Dominick Dunne presented, but there it was. They watched it in bits and pieces as they unloaded the cars. Eddie stayed on the porch, nodding every time Vaughn walked past.
“You guys here to stay awhile?” he said on one trip. “I don't mind moving back to
the garage apartment,” he said on another trip. “You look good totin' that bale,” he said on a third trip.
Vaughn said, “You missed me, huh?”
“Is it evident?” Eddie said.
They put all of Greta's stuff in her room and all of Vaughn's stuff in his room, and neither he nor she made any effort to put the stuff away. It was more or less dump-it-on-the-bed time.
After they got everything inside, they got beers and sat outside with Eddie. They were a couple of blocks off the Gulf, but you could still hear the surf, a murmur in the background, and the buzz of a few streetlights, and a few air conditioners cutting on and off around them.
“So, what happened?” Eddie said. “Why this sudden change of heart?”
“Gail's coming back,” Vaughn said. “She's probably coming back. Well, I don't know that she's coming back, but she may be coming back.”
“We thought we would just get out of the way,” Greta said. “Whether she comes back or not.”
“I get it,” Eddie said.
“Knew you would,” she said.
“So, what happens next?” Eddie said.
“What happens next is we're going to bed before the sun comes up.”
“Together?” Eddie said.
“We're going to rest awhile,” Greta said, patting his arm to tell him she appreciated the joke.
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