Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  I am easily the oldest, fattest person there.

  I am sitting in a corner at the far end of the bar, from where I can see the whole place and follow Leila with my eyes without having to twist and turn on my barstool. I can stare at her without drawing attention to myself. I am staring at her now. She is moving through the crowd, leading with her shoulder, wedging her way through dancers returning to their tables. In quick succession, I see her in profile, then head on, then from the back as she makes a U-turn and disappears in the throng.

  2

  My pursuit of her cab through the night streets of Venice was neither hectic nor high speed. The cab in which she rode kept to the speed limit, seldom exceeding thirty-five miles an hour.

  I was sure when the taxi stopped in front of the Cove that she was going there to meet someone, some man, perhaps the very man whose voice I had overheard leaving a message on her machine.

  Instead, what I discovered when I entered the place and took my seat at the bar was that she worked there as a waitress. It took something away, hard to tell what, hard to tell from whom, from her or myself, but something was taken away when I saw her waiting on tables with a pad and pencil in her hand. It wasn’t that she was lessened in my eyes for being a waitress. It was just that some comfortable supposition of who she was was taken away.

  3

  I order another drink and light another cigarette. I now have a whole pack in my pocket and an opened pack on the bar. Since nobody here knows me, I feel no need to play drunk. I just keep drinking as a way of paying for my seat at the bar. The bartender, ignorant of my drunk disease, is becoming a little annoyed by the amount of bourbon I am consuming without showing the slightest signs of intoxication. My sobriety bothers him. To him, I am an old cliché, the fattest, oldest cliché in the place, and he would like me to finish off the image by becoming a fat, old, drunken cliché. He brings me another bourbon, I thank him, he smiles, but he is tired of me. If I can’t cooperate and get drunk, then I should leave. There’s a nasty look to him, which brings on a nasty feeling inside me. My revenge will be to leave him a tip so large it will make his handsome head spin. A monster tip to remember me by, long after the memory of him and his teeth and his cheekbones and his hair is gone from my mind. I will erect a monument to myself with money inside his head.

  The dancers dance, the diners dine, the waitresses make their rounds, there’s Leila again, and the drumbeat beats on. The musical selections change, the couples dancing and the dances they dance seem to change, but the same drumbeat beats on. It becomes, after a while, an acoustical version of a strobe light pulsing, so that sight and sound, light waves and sound waves and brain waves become either interchangeable or indistinguishable one from another.

  The thoughts I’m thinking are not necessarily mine. They could be anybody’s thoughts. I could be anybody. A uniperson.

  4

  It’s all over now. The plug has been pulled. The music has stopped. The dance floor is deserted.

  It’s not yet midnight, but it’s already dwindling time at the Cove, dwindling time in Venice, dwindling time in LA and its environs.

  The bar is closed. I have paid my bill. All that remains for me is to leave my monster tip on the counter and follow Leila out of the Cove.

  The Cove is closed. You can only get out. You can’t get in anymore. And when you get out, as some stragglers are doing now, the manager escorts you to the door, unlocks the lock, pushes the door open for you, and then locks it again with a flick of his wrist.

  A few diehard diners still remain, but the waitresses now outnumber the customers. I can see Leila chatting with another waitress at the far end of the room. I can’t hear a word they’re saying, but they’re leaning against the wall and chatting in that end-of-the-workday way of working people.

  My problem is this. I know that as soon as Leila heads for the door, I will follow her out into the street but, having been beaten senseless by that drumbeat, I have only one opening line in my head, “Excuse me, please, but haven’t I seen you in some movie recently?”

  There is a big problem with that line, aside from its dreary overfamiliarity. The movie in which I have seen her will not be released for quite some time, if ever, and using the line would put me in a position of having to explain how I managed to see the film already. I would prefer not to have to explain anything, not my profession, nor my connection to the film. But I’m tethered to that line and I can’t come up with another.

  The only alternative would be to tell the truth. Excuse me, please, but are you the same person as the fourteen-year-old girl with whom I talked on the telephone from her hospital room in Charleston, South Carolina? Are you the one who gave her baby to me? Are you the mother of my Billy?

  The manager of the restaurant is releasing everybody except for a skeleton crew. One by one, the waitresses are leaving. Parting gestures. Parting remarks. On her way out, Leila stops at the other end of the bar and uses the telephone the bartender hands her. She makes a quick call to somebody and hangs up. She waves, smiles at the bartender, and heads for the door. The manager is waiting to let her out.

  I rise slowly, leave my monster tip on the bar, and follow her out.

  5

  She is standing at the curb when I come out, as if she is waiting for somebody. Her back is to me. Her head is turned toward the oncoming traffic. There is a stiffness to her posture, as if she knows there is somebody behind her and is aggressively ignoring him.

  “Excuse me, please.”

  My words make her spine stiffen even more. I wait, but she shows not the slightest intention of acknowledging me. I walk toward her.

  “I hate to bother you, I really do,” I say.

  “Good,” she replies, still looking away from me. “We have something in common then. I’d hate to have you bother me. So why don’t you just trot along.”

  “I’m afraid my trotting days are all behind me.”

  Partially, but only partially, disarmed by my reply, she turns her head and suddenly there is her face, in a close-up, in front of mine.

  Her complexion is white. Not pale but white. There is a softness to her skin that makes itself felt without having to be touched. A face as soft and white as those seagull feathers one finds in the sand on a beach and picks up and carries and strokes with one’s finger for a while before discarding them in the sand again.

  “You sat at the bar the whole night, drinking and looking at me, didn’t you? And then when I left, you followed me out, didn’t you?”

  I nod to both accusations.

  “Are you trying to pick me up, mister?” She asks this question with all the sternness available to her, but somehow it is the sternness of a child playacting at being an adult rather than being one.

  “No,” I lie, “I’m not trying to pick you up.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I feel I know you.”

  “Oh, dear.” She sighs and shakes her head. “You are trying to pick me up. Don’t do this. My cab will be here any minute, and when I get in the cab and it drives away, you’ll feel like an idiot.”

  “I feel like an idiot most of the time,” I tell her, but she’s not interested in my sense of humor. “Just tell me one thing,” I go on. “That’s all. Just tell me this one thing and I’ll go away.”

  “What one thing?”

  “Haven’t I seen you in some movie?”

  She seems suddenly to grow very weary. Her shoulders slump, her face sags, she seems to age ten years. Only her eyes remain young and like the eyes of a child who’s been tricked by an adult. She glares at me with open disgust. Then her disgust turns to anger.

  I can read on her face what she is thinking. I might as well be looking at a face with subtitles.

  You creep, she’s thinking.

  “If you have no fucking respect for yourself,” she says, furious, “then at least have a little for someone who’s worked all night.”

  Words don’t suffice for her rage. Only in
women who have known me have I seen such rage before, and so, in an odd way, her disgust and fury are familiar, as if we were involved in a relationship already.

  Her taxi arrives. She rushes toward it. I follow, trying to get in a last word.

  “I’m sorry, I really am, if my motives seemed suspect to you. I honestly did think that I saw you in this film by Arthur Houseman, a director I happen to revere.”

  She has opened the cab door and is about to step inside when she hears the end of my remark, and then, as if snagged on a hook at the end of a line, she stops. She looks back at me.

  “You played a waitress,” I tell her. “Your hair was different in the movie and you wore a lot more makeup, but it was you, wasn’t it?”

  “You saw me?” she asks, as if her whole life is wrapped up in that question. “You actually saw me?”

  “Yes.”

  Having considered me to be some miserable lowlife, she now reverses herself completely and bestows upon me a look of such naked benediction (there are tears in her eyes) that I am made to feel, without exactly knowing why, not just a bearer of good news but an agent of her deliverance.

  “Oh, dear,” she moans. She pushes herself away from the cab and moves toward me. Then she stops and turns back to the cab, sticks her head inside, and tells the driver to start the meter but wait, and then she rushes toward me again. She does not embrace me, but I feel both embraced and kissed by the way she looks at me. She starts to apologize in a rapid but incoherent manner. I understand nothing at this point, except that something means too much to her. The depth of her emotion is of a kind in which a person can drown. There are tears in her eyes and they’re the kind of eyes and the kind of tears that suggest there are many more tears to come.

  “We have to talk,” she tells me. “You don’t know what this means to me. I want to know more. I want to know everything.”

  I feel trapped in her rapture, engulfed by her gratitude, knighted by her into some benefactor who with a single silly utterance has brought meaning into her life again. I seem to be doing her a lot of good, but the good I’m doing, its nature and substance, is beyond my comprehension.

  She’s thinking and talking, but there seems to be no difference between the internal and the external monologue she’s making. She looks at her watch and considers the hour. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe we should meet tomorrow.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “But, no, no.” No, she can’t possibly wait until tomorrow to hear the rest. What rest, I don’t know, but she’s certain that there’s a lot more to hear and she couldn’t possibly wait until tomorrow to hear it. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t possibly sleep tonight. Was I in the movie business?

  “Yes, that’s how I saw your movie.”

  No, no, no, she doesn’t want to hear another word about it, not a single word, not until we are seated somewhere so she can sit and listen, just sit and listen while I talk. Am I tired? Am I sleepy? Do I have somewhere to go? No? Wonderful! Then I must come to her place. I simply must. Fine, I agree. I’ll come.

  She considers the logistics.

  Do I have a car?

  Yes. I point across the street to where my car is parked.

  I offer to drive her home but, no, no, no, she couldn’t possibly come with me. The bartender Larry has told her that I consumed more alcohol than any man he has ever seen. She’s afraid of drunk drivers and afraid for them. I really shouldn’t drive myself. I’m too drunk to drive. I should come with her in a cab. I insist that I’m not drunk, but she has another argument against coming with me. She’s called a cab already and the cab came and the poor driver is just sitting there, waiting for her, and although she told him to keep the meter running, she still feels she must go home in a cab. They don’t make much, these poor drivers, and they work so hard.

  “I know what,” she announces a solution.

  I should get in my car and follow her. That’s what we’ll do. She’ll take the cab and I’ll follow.

  6

  And so, once again, after making a sweeping U-turn, I’m sitting behind the wheel of my rented car and following her cab through Venice, only this time I’m doing it at her insistence.

  I feel like a stalker who’s been subverted, incorporated, into the life of the object of his pursuit.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  I FOLLOWED THE cab back to the semicircle it had taken me so long to find the first time. It was almost routine now, as if I lived there. The cab stopped and I, without thinking, as if I lived there, parked once again in my old parking space.

  There was something charming and gracious, although a bit theatrical, about the way she inserted her arm under mine in that Gone with the Wind kind of way and then led me through the moonlight down that narrow sidewalk of a street toward her home. We did not and would not talk of “her movie” until we were comfortably settled inside. We chatted instead about how hot it had been earlier in the day and how much cooler it was now. There were always cool breezes in Venice at night, she told me. I realized, as she lifted the latch on the gate of her chain-link fence and swung the gate open, that we had not introduced ourselves and that she didn’t know my name, but I decided not to spoil the ease and intimacy between us by bringing it up.

  2

  She seemed to have second thoughts about something, about everything, as soon as we were inside. About my being there. About “her movie.” About the improbability of good news coming her way. I could see her worries and anxieties and her efforts to dispel them as clearly as if her face were a series of slides with captions of the emotions she was feeling. I had to keep looking away from her, breaking eye contact, and this just contributed to her unease.

  But I had to keep looking away. The completely open window of her face made me feel like a voyeur of her disrobed inner life. Nobody should be that open, I thought. Nobody.

  She ran around turning on every single light in the living room, little lamps with little shades of various colors, pale yellow, pale blue, pumpkin orange, as if all that illumination could dispel her anxiety. She talked the whole time, telling me things about Venice I already knew, and the whole time she talked, I could tell, anybody could tell, that what she really wanted to talk about was “her movie” but that having been burned once before kept her from bringing up the subject for fear that she would be burned again.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she announced when there were no more lamps to turn on and she had nothing left to tell me about Venice, “I’ve got to get out of this dress. I only wear it to work and I feel like I’m still working when I wear it, so I’ll go put something else on and then I’ll be right back. And then—” she paused and summoned whatever courage she possessed “—you’ll tell me all about my movie, all right?”

  “All right.”

  I could hear her traipsing through various rooms, half-humming some song, staying in touch with me through the noise she was making. I heard the faucets run. I heard the toilet flush. I heard her opening doors and drawers. I heard the rattle of ice cubes falling into the kitchen sink and the clink of a bottle neck against a glass and knew, both by the state that she was in and by the sound, that she was having a drink in the kitchen to compose herself. Which was fine for her. But what could I have to drink, burdened as I was by my disease, to compose myself?

  Breezes blew through the living room from various directions and at different elevations. Some of them carried my cigarette smoke away and expelled it through the open windows, others rubbed against my ankles, blowing the other away.

  The living room was decorated with clutter. A clutter of couches cluttered with little pillows. A clutter of cocktail tables, three of them, cluttered with magazines. Fashion. Fitness. Interior decorating. The floor around the couch on which I sat was cluttered with books. Romance novels. With romantic titles. Written by authors with romantic pseudonyms.

  There, among the clutter on top of the end table to my right, I caught sight of a box of English Ovals, a brand I used to s
moke.

  I leaned forward and reached for the box. I opened it. There were still two cigarettes inside. I took one out, tapped the end on the hard surface of the box, just as I used to do, and lit it.

  What the taste of madeleines was to Marcel Proust, the scent and the taste of various brands of cigarettes were to me.

  The campus of Columbia rolled into view with my very first puff. The way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I talked and thought, for I walked and talked and thought and dressed differently in those days.

  Dianah came back as she was when we met, because I was smoking English Ovals when we met and fell in love. When we got married and when I had a cigarette after our lovemaking, it was still English Ovals that I smoked. I smoked them when I first tried writing. I smoked them when I gave up writing. I smoked them when we decided to adopt a child.

  Leila reappeared. She wore a strapless black gown and high-heeled black shoes, bearing liquor bottles in her arms. She announced herself by tossing her head back and saying, “Ta-da!” In addition to the bottles pressed against her breast, she carried two tall glasses in her hands. She was a little less tense and a little more composed, as people who are a little drunk tend to appear at first. Even so, she couldn’t quite pull off saying “Ta-da!” Dianah could do it perfectly. Dianah could “Ta-da!” with the best of them. But not Leila.

  “This was going to be my gown for the premiere of the movie I was in, but the premiere went off without me, so I thought, why not premiere it tonight? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea and a beautiful dress.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She placed the bottles and the glasses on top of the magazines on the cocktail table in front of me.

  “I have vodka and I have gin and I have Scotch.”

  I meant to smile but wound up laughing. It was the way she pronounced “Scotch.” She chirped it like a little bird. The sound of her voice tickled.