Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  So Krista stays in my place with me when I’m gone. She feeds Sparky (they have a great friendship), although if I’m going to be gone for more than a night I put him in the kennel, since it’s impossible to predict what Krista might do. The only alternative to just letting her stay with me when I’m gone seemed to be to move out of my apartment, but I didn’t want to move out and after I had given it some thought, it didn’t seem like such a big deal, certainly not worth slashed breasts. Plus I slept at Doris’s a lot of the time, and I thought I’d be ready to give up my place sometime after we were married, although not immediately. Doris owned a townhouse in Brentwood and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. It seemed inevitable that my life would gravitate there, that I’d probably start working more in New York. What Krista did drove Doris nuts. She claimed I wouldn’t put a stop to it because I was getting an ego stroke. And of course Krista hated Doris, although she never met her and couldn’t have seen her more than a couple of times since Doris wouldn’t put a foot in what she called my “lair.” She claimed she could smell the vaginal secretions on the furniture. Krista called her The Witchbitch. When Renate informed Krista that Doris and I were getting married, Krista said, “No, they’re not.” The psychiatrist had recommended that Renate tell Krista about my engagement while I was gone for a month on the armpit tour—comedy clubs in the Ohio-Indiana Rust Belt. When I got home, very tired and depressed (from doing comedy for unemployed alcoholics followed every night by the amenities of the local Motel 6), Krista was sitting in my big leather chair with her feet on the ottoman eating Dorritos and watching Montel Williams. When I walked through the door, she said, “You won’t marry Witchbitch.”

  I said, “Time to go back home, Krista.” But it turned out she was right.

  This time I walked in and Krista was in my bed. She was wearing one of my clean dress shirts, and a pair of my black Calvin Klein briefs on her head. They, happily, were also clean, as it turned out, although I wasn’t sure of that when I saw her. I couldn’t guess what it was at first. She looked like she was in a hijab, perhaps having converted to one of the more heterodox Islamic sects. She had the briefs pulled all the way down so that her ears stuck through the leg holes. She had never put on my clothes before while I was gone, much less my underwear on her head.

  “I’m not asleep,” she said.

  “Would you mind taking those off your head and giving me back my shirt?”

  “I don’t have anything on underneath.”

  “Where are your clothes?”

  “I’ve got them under the covers.”

  “I’m going into the kitchen and you put them on, okay?”

  “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  She was smiling mischievously with the covers pulled up to her chin. There was no way she could have known what had happened.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You stood her up at the church.”

  “How do you know that, Krista?”

  “I saw it.”

  “How did you see it?”

  “I saw it in my head. Witchbitch was crying,” she said with a huge smile.

  “Please get dressed and go home now.”

  “Make me eggs! Make me eggs!” This was a ritual. Whenever I found Krista sleeping in my bed, I had to make her eggs. I thought she wanted me to show that I wasn’t angry at her, but there was probably also some domestic fantasy in it that she wanted played out.

  While I was scrambling the eggs, Renate knocked on the door.

  “Is Krista here?” she asked.

  I told her she was.

  “I saw your car,” she said when I had let her in. “I thought you were not coming back until Monday.”

  “I didn’t get married,” I said. “You want some eggs too?”

  “You didn’t get married?” Renate repeated.

  “I didn’t get married.” I took two more eggs from the carton and broke them on the edge of the pan and tore into them with a whisk.

  “What happened?” Renate asked.

  “Let Krista tell you,” I said. “She saw it in her head.”

  Krista came in tucking her T-shirt into her jeans and buckling her belt. Renate did a double take.

  “He stood her up at the church!” Krista shouted gleefully.

  “Is that true, Robert? Why?” Renate asked, shocked.

  “Look how funny he looks, Mama,” Krista said. “No one would marry someone who looks so funny.”

  “That’s it,” I said to Renate. “No one would marry someone who looks so funny.” I dished the eggs up for each of them.

  “Witchbitch is dead, Witchbitch is dead,” Krista chanted.

  “Stop it, Krista,” Renate said.

  “Eat your eggs, Krista. They’re getting cold.” I made a pot of coffee and poured myself a cup and sat down with them. Renate kept looking at me, waiting for the explanation which I was not about to give her either then or later, and Krista was shoveling her eggs into her mouth, holding the plate up to her chin like a rice bowl.

  “You forgot toast!” she shouted. I had never seen her so happy.

  I was actually also happy they were there. This was not a day I was looking forward to. My answering machine pulsed red on overload. No way was I ready to listen to those messages.

  The three of us finished our eggs like a normal family having breakfast. Since I clearly did not want to answer Renate’s questions, she stopped asking them. Krista, however, wanted to know what I was going to do that day.

  “I’m thinking of seeing if I can lock myself in my refrigerator,” I answered. “Did you get that when you were a kid in Germany?” I asked Renate. “Never climb into an abandoned refrigerator? Who in the hell would abandon a refrigerator?”

  “I want to go to the zoo,” Krista said. Renate looked at her and at me. Krista wouldn’t leave her house except to sneak into my apartment. She would never go anywhere. When she had her psychiatric appointments (three times a week), she insisted on riding there in the backseat of the car lying on the floor. Renate had to lead her into the building while Krista covered her eyes.

  I said, “I can’t today, Krista. I’m sorry.”

  She started to cry. “Why not?” she moaned.

  Renate said, “Robert just got home, Krista. He’s tired. He has important things to do.” But she looked at me as if I had committed a crime.

  “We can go this week,” I said. “I just can’t go today.”

  “Oh, Robert, you don’t have to do that,” Renate said.

  “Promise?” Krista said.

  “Promise,” I said. “We’ll all go. It’s fine, Renate. It’ll be fun.”

  I started clearing the dishes. Renate shooed Krista out of the house in front of her, and whispered to me, “Don’t worry if you’re too busy. She’ll forget about it in twenty minutes.” But I knew that wasn’t true, and so did Renate.

  “It will be fun,” I said. “But I can’t take her by myself.”

  “Oh, I’m going. You can count on that.”

  “Then we’re on,” I said. As I closed the door behind them, I could see over Renate’s shoulder that Krista was throwing me a kiss.

  5.

  After they left, I surveyed the leavings: four empty cans of Diet Coke on the floor next to my chair, an empty bag of Ripples, the box from a Weight Watchers lemon chicken dinner that Krista must have brought with her to microwave. Since I had been intending to come right home from the bank instead of via the quaint detour to Mexico, I had left papers on my desk (including the unsigned marriage license) and dishes in the sink. Krista didn’t disturb the papers nor do the dishes. Her vision of my standing up Doris at the church seemed somewhat less mystical since she no doubt saw the unsigned marriage license on my desk—although her instincts about me were often uncanny, whether they issued from her preternatural attention to me or her schizophrenic brain chemistry. Three of her heavy metal CDs (by Death, Fear Factory, and Weird Looks), which she had probably listened to in my bed, probably at full volume, were on the floo
r next to the bed, along with her Discman. I pulled the sheets off, which I always did after I found Krista sleeping there, not wanting, frankly, to smell her when I tried to go to sleep. Not her vaginal secretions (despite what Doris thought)—she just had her own smell the way everyone does, and I didn’t care to be that intimate with it. I pulled the covers off onto the floor, and underneath them was a vial of pills.

  Oh God, I said aloud. Oh no.

  It was Demerol, twenty fat tablets shaped like toy footballs, one hundred milligrams each, enough to drop a rhinoceros. Where the hell could she have gotten them? I didn’t use drugs except ibuprofen when I had a bad muscle pull, and since Krista had been occupying my apartment I kept even the ibuprofen locked in the glove compartment of my car. I looked at the name on the prescription: Karle Ochte. I didn’t know any Karle Ochte. Whoever Karle Ochte was, it was Krista who had been in my bed with these pills, and these pills certainly would have killed her.

  It put a new spin on things here. Suddenly there wasn’t anything cute about it anymore. I got mad at Renate, mad at the shrink. This wasn’t my responsibility. I just wanted to punch something, so I did. I went into the kitchen and punched my refrigerator. It hurt my hand. Surprise. And put a dent in the refrigerator that I’d have to pay to repair (if I didn’t abandon it).

  I would have to talk to Renate about this. Later. I had enough to take care of right now. Although there weren’t any cops waiting for me, I might still be the accessory to a bank robbery. Maybe the bank didn’t realize that the money was gone. They may have shut down their computers because of the flooding. It had been Friday (less than forty-eight hours ago!), the bank was closing at the time, and wouldn’t open again until tomorrow, Monday. This gave me exactly one day to do something about it. I may not have been arrested when I pulled into my driveway, but I was hardly out of trouble. Now was the time to get some information if I could. Then I had to go to the kennel and pick up Sparky.

  I dialed my friend Don’s number and he answered on the second ring.

  “Don. Robert,” I said after his sleepy hello.

  “The shitheel,” he said. “The infamous cad.”

  “The very one.”

  “Where the hell are you? What time is it?”

  “Home,” I said. “I don’t know what time it is. Seven thirty.”

  “Seven thirty on a Sunday morning. How nice of you to call. I thought I might be getting some sleep after this nightmare weekend you caused, but no. Did you get my message?”

  “No, I haven’t listened to my messages. The little red number on my machine says 54. I’ll need about a day and a half.”

  “My message said, ‘Don’t ever call me again.’ ”

  “How nice.”

  “Francine made me leave it.” (Francine was Don’s wife and Doris’s best friend.) “You are persona non grata here, pal. Joseph Goebbels would be more welcome at our house. If Francine ever sees you, you’re dead meat.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Lucky for you, she is with Doris on Maui at the moment, spending about $10,000 of our money we had not planned to spend, so you owe me there, too, motherfucker.”

  “When can I see you?”

  “Now if you want to. Kids were asleep until the phone rang. Now they aren’t. They’re in the next room murdering each other. I’ve got them the whole day the whole weekend. For which you also owe me.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  “Christ, give me twenty minutes anyway. I’ve got to brush my teeth.”

  Don’s house was four blocks away, up San Vincente, toward OJ land. Another mile up San Vincente is the Mezzaluna Ristorante where Ron Goldman worked. In this neighborhood it’s pretty hard to keep up with the Simpsons. Francine makes 400 grand a year giving lectures on college campuses at five grand a pop on “Images of Women in the Media” and “Anorexia: The Atrocity of Advertising.” She bills herself as Dr. Francine Leach, the “doctor” part being an EdD in education, which they give you if you can make the verb agree with the subject for three sentences in a row. I saw her lecture once: she’s excellent. Witty, smart—and she’s physically attractive. She’s also obsessed with being physically attractive, which I happen to know from Don. She’s afraid if she gets too old or ugly she’s out of business, because her social criticism might seem like personal whining. Francine and I tried very hard to like each other. I respect her work so I could sincerely tell her so, but it seems that she can’t even look at me without a palpable twitch of disapproval. She introduced Doris and me, reluctantly (a story in itself). Marrying Doris was my big chance for redemption in Francine’s eyes. I can’t say I’m sorry about being unredeemed there. I’d positively enjoy never seeing Francine again, although it would be harder on Don if I were the one refusing to see her.

  Don is a big bear of a guy, with a beard he’d let go bushy if he lived in Oregon, but which he trims twice a week so he’s not a dead ringer for the Unabomber. He manages the Francine corporation, HMR (Hear Me Roar) Enterprises, Inc: the books, the videos, the lecture tours. He’s also Mr. Mom. And he writes poems—little Zen things that when he reads them publicly seem incongruously delicate coming out of this flesh-mountain. Plus he does some part-time teaching in both the preppy private schools in Brentwood and the roughest public schools in Compton. But Francine is the breadwinner, and sometimes (in my opinion) she acts like the tyrannical dad in the old sitcoms about the one-earner nuclear family. The irony of this has occasionally worked itself into my routines, to her displeasure when she has heard about it. Whereas Don is so secure in himself and our friendship he has to pretend to be unamused when I do them as a female Archie Bunker and a male Edith. Good for three or four minutes, to an older audience.

  Don has a high butcher block table in his kitchen and when I arrived his kids were at it faced off across from each other, scowling. Jeb is nine and Emma is seven. They both look exactly like Francine, which shows who has the dominant genes; they’re both petite like she is with sharp pretty features like china dolls. Jeb is going through the stage of hating being so little and pretty and compensates for it with spectacular aggression against his sister whom he whacks every time he can get away with it. Francine goes nuts when she sees him do it, but she’s rarely home during the school year. If he whacks Emma in front of Don, he’s sent to his room for an hour. Jeb has, in his own opinion, spent a lot of unquality time there recently, so he was currently devising various creative ways to torment Emma without touching her. When I walked in, he was snarling at her, and she was shouting, “Daddy, Jeb is being Monsterdog at me.”

  “Quit it, Jeb,” Don said absently. Don was cleverly making them oatmeal, because it would cause them to unite against him in their refusal to eat it.

  “See this oatmeal,” he said to me, as he pushed a grotesquely big bowlful in front of each of them. “If you had been here yesterday, Francine would have pummeled your face until it looked like that.”

  “I’ve always wanted to look like a healthy breakfast cereal,” I said.

  “Oat-Meal!” both kids whined in unison. Don then poured them each a bowl of Sugar Stars and whipped cream as he had planned to all along, and put the kids together in the TV room to watch The Lion King for the 800th time. Don and Francine owned all the Disney videos compliments of Doris. Plus all the novelizations, the most recent of which Francine displayed on the living room coffee table as if they were actual books.

  When Don came back to the kitchen, I was finishing Emma’s oatmeal. I had already eaten Jeb’s.

  “All right, let’s hear it,” he said.

  I told him what happened, from the time I walked into the bank until waking up alone in the hotel to the banana peel atop Sabine’s note.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. A couple of times, it looked like he was going to interrupt to say something not very nice about me but then stopped himself. Finally he said, “Let’s see the note.”

  I took it out of my anorak and handed it to him. After he read it, he
said, “If it weren’t for this note, I would have said you must have eaten some funny mushrooms and hallucinated the whole story.”

  “What the hell am I going to do?” I said.

  “About which?”

  “About being the getaway driver. What do you think?”

  “I didn’t hear about any bank robbery. That’s big local news. It wasn’t in the paper yesterday. We can check the paper this morning, but I bet one of the neighbors would have mentioned it to me if it had been reported.”

  “So what do I do, walk into the bank tomorrow and say excuse me I was just wondering if you’re missing anything?”

  “I think you should hire Johnny Cochran.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I know of a guy, not personally, I’m happy to say. He got Francine’s imbecile brother off the twelfth time he sold crack to an undercover cop. Hot-shot criminal defense lawyer, used to be a prosecutor. LA district attorney until he got the call from Washington. He’s still mobbed up with the DA’s office. He can make a discreet inquiry. He’s expensive though. Six-fifty an hour, and somehow he works thirty billing hours a day even when he plays golf. Amazing how these lawyers can work on your case and play golf at the same time. But you don’t have much choice but to hire him. Sometimes these kinds of inside jobs don’t get reported in the press. Gives the employees naughty ideas. But if the cops had anything on you, they would have picked you up by now. Maybe because of the rain nobody caught your license.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have come to Sabine’s house?” I asked, which I had figured they would have if they knew she had taken the money.

  “What house? Sounds to me like she didn’t live there. She took all her clothes, right?”

  “And then some,” I said.

  “Who knows where she got the key? There’s just too much you don’t know. And this note, why would she bother? It only makes her more vulnerable. Why didn’t she just split? I don’t think you’ve seen the last of her. Sounds like she’s got a major Jones on for you, buddy.”