Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  My tuxedo and whatever other items I needed for our weekend in Pittsburgh were packed in one of those large garment bags designed to be taken on board. Which was what I had intended to do. But Leila didn’t want to take her suitcase on board. Despite my pleas, based on years of flying, she had to have her bag checked. “I don’t want to lug it around with me through two airports,” she told me. “If you want to lug yours, that’s fine.”

  Since we were going to have to wait for her bag in Pittsburgh anyway, I saw no point in taking mine aboard with me. So I checked mine as well.

  And so now, while I wait for the baggage carousel to start turning, I can’t help fussing about having to stand there and wait. If we had done as I suggested, we could have been in a cab already heading toward our hotel.

  It’s not the waiting per se that bothers me. It’s the interrupted rhythm of our trip. We had such a nice rhythm going. Everything was moving right along. We left on time. We arrived on time. And now this.

  Standing and waiting. The rhythm of motion replaced by this totally unnecessary immobility.

  The moribund crowd comes to life as the baggage carousel starts to turn.

  As luck would have it, as luck tends to have it on these occasions, Leila’s soft blue bag is one of the first to arrive. I snatch it off the carousel and wait for mine.

  The carousel keeps going around and around. I wait.

  A cramp is forming in my stomach.

  Had she only listened to me …

  I think I see my garment bag but no, it’s somebody else’s, not mine. It’s snatched off the carousel by its owner. I see other people snatching theirs. I see one bald man snatching one suitcase after another off the carousel. Five. I count them. Five suitcases and he’s still not done. He’s waiting there for more. The random dispensation of justice and injustice is making me sick. Five suitcases. The bald sonovabitch has five and I can’t even get my one and only. And I flew first class and I know he didn’t.

  I’m beginning to feel like a one-man riot in the making. If I see that motherfucker get one more suitcase before my garment bag arrives …

  I look away from him to keep myself from … God knows what. From something.

  “Relax, will you,” Leila tells me.

  She rubs my back with her hand.

  I know that she’s right. I know that I should relax. I know that if there’s one thing I mustn’t do it is to tarnish this weekend by my infantile overreaction to this insignificant little glitch with my garment bag. The last thing I need and the last thing I want to do is spoil the celebratory nature of our reasons for being here. Nothing, absolutely nothing must undermine the upcoming event.

  The rational man within me knows this and I know that the rational man within me is right.

  There is nothing in that garment bag that is of any value anyway. The single most important item is the tuxedo. But tomorrow is Saturday, and if worst comes to worst and my goddamn garment bag never comes, I’ll be able to rent a tuxedo somewhere in Pittsburgh. Razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, I’ll be able to buy those at the hotel.

  I consider leaving. I consider smiling at Leila, putting an arm around her shoulder and saying: “To hell with it. Let’s take a cab to the hotel.”

  But I linger and wait. I want this to be a perfect, weekend, and to leave without my bag would taint things. I just want the status quo. Leila with her suitcase. Me with my garment bag.

  Leila leaves to go look for a ladies’ room. Her parting words to me are “You’ll see. As soon as I leave, it will come.”

  I light a cigarette.

  The carousel goes around and around.

  The bald man with his caravan of suitcases has mercifully left without my seeing him go. Most of the passengers have gone. The group that remains waiting for their bags is composed (I count them) of seven people besides myself. I have no idea how I look, but the others either look frantic or fatalistic. One man just keeps shrugging.

  A modern-day Dante, I think, would have a circle in hell that was the baggage carousel. And there, while it turned, the doomed and damned would be damned and doomed for eternity to wait for their bags which would never come.

  Finally, I see my garment bag sliding onto the turning carousel.

  I am relieved. I am thrilled. I couldn’t be happier. But the time and passion spent waiting for it to appear have taken their toll.

  I get my bag back, but the carefree rhythm of travel is gone. The sense of being in a state of grace where nothing can go wrong.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  THERE WERE THREE telephone messages waiting for me at the hotel desk when we checked in. Two were from Cromwell. The first one asked me to call him as soon as I arrived. The second informed me that he had gone out to dinner and that we should talk in the morning. “How about breakfast?” he inquired.

  I hadn’t anticipated Cromwell’s being in Pittsburgh a day early.

  The third message was from Billy, only there was no message. Just the fact that he called. But called from where? There was nothing on the pink telephone message slip but his name and the time he called, a little over fifteen minutes before we arrived.

  On the off chance that he had changed his travel plans and arrived at the hotel ahead of us, I asked the receptionist if he had already checked in. She informed me that he hadn’t. So I left a message for him to call me as soon as he arrived.

  It was almost 8:00 P.M. His plane, if he had kept to the original schedule, was not due until after nine. Perhaps he had called me from Boston. Perhaps there was some delay and he didn’t want me to worry.

  “That’s probably what it is,” Leila agreed with me.

  I couldn’t help thinking, of course, that if it hadn’t been for the time spent waiting for my garment bag to arrive, I would have been there to receive his call. But not wishing indirectly to blame Leila for anything, I kept that thought to myself.

  There would be no arguments over trifles. No arguments or bad feelings between us of any kind.

  As master of the upcoming ceremonies, the first thing I had to do was to master my own self and my own moods.

  Our happy rhythm of travel may have been lost, but that did not mean that I had to pout and fuss over it. I would replace it with another, even happier rhythm of my own making.

  If I overdid it, it was because there was no other way to do this kind of thing.

  I became aggressively amusing, entertaining, irrepressible.

  I chatted up and chummied up to the young woman at the hotel desk.

  I chatted up and chummied up to the bellboy who carried our bags. I harkened back (as we rode up in the elevator) to the glory days of the Pirates and the Steelers. Franco Harris. Mean Joe Greene. The Steel Curtain. And those Pirates! How about those Pirates! That wonderful motto of theirs: We are family!

  “I tell you, son,” I told him, “we’ll not see their like again.”

  I actually said this to him.

  2

  The color orange, burnt orange to be exact, served as the unifying decorative theme of our huge, luxurious suite.

  In addition to the huge bedroom (with a burnt-orange bedspread) there was a huge formal dining room with a dark cherry-wood table in the center of it. The tabletop gleamed like a frozen moonlit lake. Above the center of the table hung a crystal chandelier.

  The huge living room (with burnt-orange curtains) ran the length of the entire suite. Shaped like a long and narrow rectangle, it could be entered at either end. If you were so inclined, you could circumnavigate the suite, entering at one end and exiting at the other and then reappearing once again from where you began.

  There were lamps throughout of various shapes and sizes and styles, some with dimmer switiches and some not. Subtle variations on the burnt-orange theme unified all the lampshades into an orange grove of lights.

  There were two extra bathrooms in addition to the one off the master bedroom.

  There were three TV sets and in the master bathroom a w
all-mounted mini-TV.

  Flower vases of various shapes and sizes and styles, with flowers of various kinds in them.

  Strategically located mirrors everywhere.

  Ashtrays throughout. You could smoke a pack of cigarettes without ever using the same ashtray twice. Almost as many telephones as there were ashtrays.

  The walls of the suite were covered with abstract paintings of various shapes and sizes. The kind of abstract paintings found in the corporate headquarters of multinational companies. Abstract art, but without being an abstraction of anything in particular. Art once removed from everything. Nondenominational, nonsectarian, nonpolitical, non-ideological, nonregional, nonnational art. Perhaps it was universal.

  3

  I couldn’t stop talking.

  Since there was nobody else there to chat up and chummy up to, I chatted up and chummied up to Leila.

  It was as if I were trying to sell myself to her, or sell myself to myself, I couldn’t tell which.

  I couldn’t tell if I was in total control of what I was doing, or totally out of control. There seemed to be enough evidence to warrant either conclusion.

  It was not the case of somebody babbling away because he was in love with the sound of his own voice. Just the opposite. My voice, pitched a bit higher and much louder than normal, grated on my ears. It was irritating to hear myself chatter, but I chattered on. There seemed to be no way of stopping me, short of putting a bullet in my brain.

  My reasons for behaving like this were either all too obvious or completely inexplicable, it was impossible to tell which.

  The little we had to do, actually, physically do, was done very quickly. We had so little luggage, we managed to unpack in a matter of minutes. My chatter, while we unpacked, was at least connected to some real point of reference.

  I harkened back, while Leila hung up the dress she had bought for the premiere, to how she had resisted going shopping for the dress.

  I wondered out loud, as I took my tux out of my garment bag, if my tux would still fit me. Minutes later, I checked myself out in the wall of mirrors in the master bathroom and, patting my stomach, I laughed and made some ingratiatingly self-deprecating remarks about my swelling figure.

  Once we unpacked and there was nothing to do anymore, my chatter, by necessity, became divorced and disassociated from anything except some ongoing need to narrate my existence.

  I vamped.

  I vamped the way I had once seen an actor vamp upon a stage when a member of the supporting cast failed to make his entrance on cue. I remember feeling very sorry for that actor then. I felt very sorry for myself now. It felt terribly lonely to be chatting with and chumming up to the woman I loved. It was like vamping in a void.

  4

  Leila, unlike me, was the picture of composure. It was as if our roles had suddenly been reversed in regard to the events that had brought us to Pittsburgh. Whatever anxieties she might have had in New York about the premiere of her movie were gone now, or seemed to be gone, and were instead being played out by me in her presence. And just as I had once been in a position to “understand” what she was going through, she now seemed to “understand” what it was that was causing me to chatter away the way I did.

  The only response she made to my behavior was to regard me with silent compassion and, unless I was mistaken, a kind of loving understanding. There was a look in her eyes of a mother comforting an unhappy child.

  “There, there, Saul,” she seemed to be saying while words and sentences tumbled out of my mouth like Ping-Pong balls from a Lotto bin.

  She made discreet and painfully diplomatic attempts to get away from me to another part of the suite and give me a chance to settle down. But I followed her from room to room, from the bedroom to the dining room, from the dining room to the living room, jabbering away about this and that.

  About the view from our living room.

  “It’s too bad, it really is,” I jabbered on, “that we didn’t come just a couple of hours earlier, because then we could have seen the confluence at sunset. It’s a stunning view. Truly stunning. You’ll see. Tomorrow morning, we’ll see the sunrise and I assure you it will be something you’ll never forget. I know I haven’t since the first time I saw it several years ago from this very hotel. I had no idea what was there because I had checked in late the previous night. But then I pulled open the curtains in the morning and there in front of my eyes was one of the most beautiful …”

  She stood there listening to me with that look of compassion for what I was going through.

  I had no idea what I was going through, or why, but she did. Or seemed to. And because she did and I didn’t, because our roles were somehow reversed, it also seemed that it was she who had brought me to Pittsburgh for a presentation of some sort. That she was the master of ceremonies and not I.

  This impression and my speculation on what the nature of those ceremonies might be made me chatter away all the more.

  5

  There is no hut, office, apartment, nook, or cranny on earth that does not become a waiting room where a man waits for something to happen.

  I had waited so long for Pittsburgh and now here I was waiting in Pittsburgh.

  Waiting for my compulsive chatter to cease.

  Waiting for Billy to show up.

  Wondering what was keeping him, worrying, and since I could neither worry nor wonder in silence (a temporary condition, I hoped), I worried and wondered out loud.

  At first Billy was just a little late. I chattered away about Friday being the busiest travel day of the week and that as a consequence delays were to be expected.

  “I know, from personal experience, from all the flying I’ve done, that given a choice I’d never fly on Friday. Saturday is the best day for travel by far. Unless we’re dealing with holiday weekends, Thanksgivings, Christmases, things like that, in which case …”

  I had followed Leila, while I talked, to every part of our suite. Eventually, realizing perhaps that wherever she went I would follow her, Leila gave up trying to elude me and sat down in the middle of the huge living room. She was sitting there now, as if she had no intention or strength to ever move again.

  I sat opposite her, chattering away.

  A rectangular glass cocktail table stood between us. We sat in identical easy chairs. Leila had her legs curled up under her and she had a small, burnt-orange throw pillow in her lap. Her hands, spread out like a book she was reading, lay on top of the pillow. She either looked up at me as I talked, or she gazed down at her hands in contemplation, the way she had done while we were on the plane.

  The expression on her face when she looked up at me was always the same, or a new variation of the same thing. It wasn’t really an expression at all. It was openness. Such total openness that all possibilities were contained within it. The terror or the joy, it was hard to tell which, of beholding such infinite richness in another human being made me chatter away all the more.

  It was now well past ten o’clock. Billy was not just late, he was over an hour and a half late and there was still no word from him.

  The three of us were supposed to be in the middle of our dinner by now.

  I asked Leila if she wanted me to call room service. Have a little bite while we waited?

  She shook her head.

  A light snack or something?

  No, she smiled, and shook her head.

  “I wonder what could be keeping him,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  And then somewhere along the way I made the transition from worrying about Billy to just babbling away about him. What a great kid he was. (“Kid nothing, he’s a giant, right? Ha, ha, ha.”) How proud I was of him. How much I loved him.

  “It hasn’t been that easy for him, it really hasn’t. Having the kind of father, or lack of father, that he had for all those years. The thing is, I’ve always loved him. Always. It’s just that … I don’t know. Something kept me from giving him that love. But all that’s behind us now,
thank God. We’ve gotten to be real close this year. He tells me everything and I tell him everything. We couldn’t be closer, he and I. We’re like this.” I crossed my fingers. “We really are.”

  I was near tears while I talked, either from my depth of feeling for him or from the frustration that I wasn’t able to stop talking.

  There, there, the motherly compassion in Leila’s uplifted eyes washed over me. There, there, Saul.

  Hearing myself talk and trying like some disinterested third party to discern some sense in what I was saying, I had the impression that the person in question (I) was pleading his case. That what he was really saying was this: Despite my faults, I am a good man who should not be hurt.

  Please don’t hurt me, I seemed to be imploring somebody in so many, many words.

  The notion of my pleading and imploring intrigued me. There is something there, I thought. Something very revealing. And then I forgot all about it.

  The next time I wondered (out loud) what time it was, it was an hour later.

  The luxury suite where Leila and I were waiting suddenly felt like a wake.

  A convulsion of symptoms gripped me and all of them sought expression. I would have needed half a dozen mouths to give voice to them all.

  Panic. Despair. Grief. A fury of some kind. A pleading of some kind. A desire to make a deal of some kind.

  Then I remembered an incident from the past and brought it up for discussion as a way to soothe my troubled mind.

  I brought up Spain. Sotogrande. Leila and Billy’s trip to Ronda.

  “Ronda?” Leila asked, puzzled by what Ronda had to do with anything.

  “It’s just like Ronda,” I was almost shouting, so thrilled was I by the similarity. “Don’t you remember? The two of you went off to Ronda and didn’t call me when you were supposed to. I stayed up half the night worrying and wondering what happened to you. Imagining terrible accidents in which both of you died. Anyway, it’s just like this. I’m sitting here now and worrying and wondering about Billy when there’s probably nothing to worry about at all. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for Billy’s tardiness, just as there was a simple explanation why the two of you didn’t call me when you were supposed to.”