by Rick Lenz
I turn the key from the inside and lock the deadbolt. Although Margaret and Richard are married, they don’t spend their nights in the same bedroom.
Richard is scrupulous about his privacy.
I lie down on his single bed, which has a very soft mattress, and try to feel what it’s like physically to be Richard Blake. I stretch out my arms and legs, and after a few moments experience the odd sensation of being comfortable living in someone else’s body.
I get up from the bed, take off my jacket, shirt, and tie and look at myself in the mirror above a mahogany dresser. Richard Blake takes care of himself. Except for Jack’s judo practice and a little weekend tennis, I’ve never been able to find the discipline for regular physical exercise. Now it’s been done for me. Richard is very fit, with good definition to the muscles of his arms and chest. I suppose it’s all that running around the countryside digging up mineral specimens.
I feel a little embarrassed about what I do next, but there is no question of not doing it. I take off my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear and have another good look at myself.
“Du-ude.”
5
I’m driving the Oldsmobile. Margaret sits next to me. She has a silver French flask with a filigreed overlay in her purse from which she takes a sip every once in a while. Lily is in the back seat. The night is clear and starry, the moon full with only an occasional wispy cloud drifting in front of it.
“If we got pulled over by the police and they found that, we’d be in trouble,” I say.
“We aren’t going to get pulled over, Richard. You never drive over the speed limit.” She stares out at the passing countryside. “Who’d have dreamt my heart would one day go pitty-pat from the thrill of getting out to a scrubland suburb for a not even mediocre dinner.”
“We could go into the city,” I suggest.
“You know we can’t do that. You know it excites her too much.” She glances over her shoulder at Lily, who is gazing out the side window. Margaret takes another sip from her flask. “My father took me on a business trip once when I was a child. And he always wrote me when he was away. He always called me his ‘best beloved. Do you see?’ See, after he called me his ‘best beloved,’ he would always add ‘Do you see?’” She giggles. “Do you see?”
“I’m sorry, Margaret,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
In the back, Lily chants, “I’m sorry. Do you see? I’m sorry. Do you see?” Abruptly, she informs us, “Mr. Eisenhower played golf today.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, yes. He played golf all right.”
“Well, that’s nice.” My reactions are getting automatic.
“Oh, yes. I heard it on the radio.”
“Did you?”
“Um-hmm. But he didn’t break eighty. He’s always wanted to break eighty.”
“Well, someday perhaps.”
There’s a short pause.
“Eighty what?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She is looking out the window again. “Ooooh. The lights. Look at the lights.”
We’ve come to the center of a village on the road to Ojai.
Margaret says, “Can’t we just skip the restaurant, Richard?”
“But you haven’t had dinner.”
“I’m not hungry, and Lily’s not going to be able to eat. She’s too excited. Let’s go in here.” She points to a big square building with a neon sign that announces The Rat Hole. A few people who look like stunt doubles for Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra and so on stand around in front of the place. The steady thrum of rock and roll can be heard from a jukebox inside.
“We don’t want to take her in there,” I say.
“She might just enjoy herself,” says Margaret. “She might like to have the experience.”
I feel like I’ve had a dozen cups of coffee. I pull the car off the side of the road and we get out.
Inside, the Rat Hole is a homey kind of dive. There are eighteen or twenty linoleum-topped tables with fake candles on them. The windows are decorated with red chintz curtains, and the two waitresses and both bartenders wear white cotton shirts with humorous red and black rat logos. There is a dance floor that can accommodate about two dozen couples, and on one side of the room, a long bar with imitation oak veneer on the front of it. Opposite it, surprisingly, against a pale green cinderblock wall, is a state-of-the-art Wurlitzer jukebox.
We take seats at a table off to the side as “Mr. Wonderful,” sung by Sammy Davis Jr., plays. A lean, laconic waitress who stands with all of her weight resting on one leg, which clearly says she has better things she could be doing, takes our order. Margaret asks for a gin and tonic. I order a beer for myself and a Coke for Lily.
Lily is pouting. “No. I want a grown-up drink.”
The waitress, chewing gum, stares at her, and Margaret says, “Let’s let her have a drink tonight. It’s an occasion.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
Margaret ignores me and tells the waitress to bring Lily a Tom Collins.
“Yes, ma’am,” says the waitress, glancing at Lily and cracking her gum.
Margaret and Lily survey the room, and I watch them.
Margaret looks at the people around us as if she’s trying to remember something she’s lost, as if the disappointments of her life might still be reversed and—with a little luck, if she concentrates hard enough—this could be the night and the place.
Lily thinks the Rat Hole is a wondrous discovery. Everything she sees and hears fascinates her—the people, the atmosphere, Nervous Norvus singing the novelty hit “Transfusion” on the jukebox. Her only frustration might be that she can’t take it all in at once.
She watches with great interest as a beefy young man approaches our table. He has a pack of cigarettes rolled up in a sleeve of his T-shirt and sports a carefully tended duck’s ass haircut.
He stops in front of Lily. “May I say that you are a mighty, mighty fine-lookin’ dish? My name is Daryl. You’re not with him, are you?” He points at me.
“He’s with me,” says Margaret.
Daryl is still looking at Lily. “May I have the pleasure of this dance?”
Lily shows him a shy, almost flirtatious smile, then she looks at the floor. Richard’s knowledge of her tells me she is always bashful when spoken to by strangers. Daryl stands in front of her, waiting.
Richard churns up enough courage to say, “Sorry, but she can’t. She’s … just not able to.”
“I saw her walk in here, studly.”
“She can’t dance with anyone,” says Margaret. “Richard?”
“Look, really,” I say to Daryl. “She doesn’t dance.”
Daryl swings his gaze toward me and raises his upper lip on one side, the way Elvis could, exposing—in Daryl’s case—one yellow incisor. He blinks several times, slowly, dead-eyed, like an iguana. Then he looks back at Lily, opens his mouth and rolls his eyes a little, indicating what an amorous guy he can be. He turns around and swaggers back to the bar.
“I want to leave,” I say. Both women ignore me.
Margaret, already pretty buzzed from her tippling as we drove here, accepts her gin and tonic, then when the waitress has gone away, says to no one in particular, “My daddy called me his best beloved. That comes from Rudyard Kipling. He would say to his reader, ‘In those high and far-off times, there was a painted jaguar. And so that was all right, Best Beloved. Do you see?’ After ‘best beloved,’ he would add, ‘Do you see?’” She looks at me. “Do you see?”
“Yes, I see.”
She looks away again.
I think of the concept I learned in acting school called “cognitive dissonance.” Tonight, I feel as if it belongs to me alone (well … and Richard, too, now). The idea is that people believe in what they find themselves doing—that it creates a new and complete reality. A girl is walking home at night from the corner store. She thinks she hears footsteps across the street. She looks over and sees no one. She walks faster, only
now the footsteps seem to be directly behind her. Whoever it is is catching up to her. The girl begins to run, but she’s waited too long. She still hears the footsteps—except now they’re the pounding footfalls of something huge, not human—subhuman, brutal, a monster with blood in his eye who means to snuff out her life, and this thing is running now, too, and he’s almost on top of her, and he will kill her. In the grip of terror, her entire organism is frozen by feelings so primitive reason can’t penetrate them. She stops—so terrified she can’t run, or turn around, or even breathe.
I look at Lily, still scanning the room, bright-eyed. I want more than ever to get out of here, but something is stopping me from mentioning it again.
“Richard, I want to dance,” says Margaret. From the jukebox, Pat Boone sings “April Love.”
I frown and nod toward Lily, but Margaret gets her attention. “We’re going to dance now, Lily. Lily? Do you mind?” It makes me nervous, Margaret asking her that, but Lily smiles distractedly and says she doesn’t mind; she’ll be fine by herself.
Margaret’s feet aren’t steady beneath her, so I hold her firmly. She smells like musky roses—Tabu perfume and gin. I feel a tingle in my groin. It’s awkward, being close to her, foreign, but familiar. I like it, but more than ever, I don’t want to be here.
“April Love” ends, and Elvis begins to sing “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Margaret looks up at me. “See how nice it can be?”
“I used to love dancing with you.”
She sighs, puts her head on my chest, and holds onto me tightly.
On the jukebox, Elvis is replaced by the Cheers featuring Bert Convy singing “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots.” We don’t know how to dance to that and give up.
As we start back to the table, we both see Lily at the same moment. She is on the other side of the dance floor, swaying back and forth from one leg to the other. Daryl is holding her close to him. His hands are on her hips, and his head is crooked in over her shoulder, his cheek crowded up against her neck.
I send Margaret back to the table, walk over to them, take Lily’s arm and tell her it’s time to go.
Daryl whacks my hand away. “I’m dancing with the lady.”
“I told you she can’t. We’ve got to go. I’m her brother-in-law.” There is a claw of fear in my belly. “She’s not well. I’ve got to take her home.”
“She looks real healthy to me. What do you say, sugar?”
“Excuse us.” I step quickly between them, grab her by a shoulder and walk her as fast as I can back to our table, where Margaret is waiting. I push both of them ahead of me and, without looking back, out the front door.
Outside, we hurry along the gravel sidewalk toward the car, which is parked on the same side of the road as the Rat Hole, just past a side street. As we get to the intersection, Daryl, flanked by two unclever-looking country boys, appears in front of us, blocking our path.
Daryl has his thumbs in the front belt loops of his Levi’s. He makes a loud sucking noise with his tongue and teeth. “It don’t pay to be a gentleman anymore.”
Lily and Margaret look at me.
I concentrate on not swallowing. “We’re going home now.”
“A lady wants to go home,” says Daryl, “I say the gentlemanly thing is to let her.” He looks from Lily back to me. “But the thing is, you see, I didn’t hear the lady say she wants to go home.” His eyes return to Lily. “Do you want to go home, puss? Or do you want to stay here with me?” He smiles obscenely.
Lily looks up at me and says softly, “I want to go home.”
Daryl draws back his upper lip, exposing his teeth again. Neither of his companions makes any move to get out of the way.
“Listen, we made a mistake to come here,” I tell them. “Would you please just let us pass?”
Daryl emits a low, mirthless rattle—his laugh. “Would I pul-eeze just let you pass? Well, pul-eeze just pardon me all to fuckin’ hell.” He does his version of a court bow to Margaret and Lily. “Go ahead, ladies. I guess you’ll want to be on your way then.”
He moves off to one side, and the two rednecks back off to the other. Margaret hurries between them. Lily follows, but when she passes Daryl, he reaches out with one meaty hand and grabs her around the waist. He pulls and lifts her to him, forces an open-mouth kiss on her, then sets her back on her feet again. “That’s the kind of lovin’ you ain’t gonna be gettin’ none of tonight.”
Richard’s voice is high and thin. “She’s been haunted by people like you her whole life.”
“Wha-aat?”
“I mean it’s easy to be a bully when you have your friends with you.”
“Friends?” He thrusts his face to within inches of mine. “Well, I’ll tell you, Richard, the truth is, I can be a motherfucker of a bully all by myself.” The cast of his eyes pirouettes into a fair impression of psychosis. “But I always make a point of being a gentleman whenever it’s possible.”
He slowly smiles and starts to move away. Then, after a flawless pause, he turns around and takes a step back. “Of course, the way some people are, it ain’t always possible.”
He gut-punches me five times, rhythmically, as if a metronome is timing him, until Richard and Jack feel themselves drop in slow motion to the gravel below.
We look up to see Daryl standing directly over us.
“Good evening then, Richard.”
Listening to the retreating footsteps, I review the circumstances, skipping the immediate predicament of being on my back in the gravel with aching innards.
I know for sure that Jack can’t talk to Richard, and Richard can’t talk to Jack. If there is a Richard (if there is even a Jack, for God’s sake), they don’t conflict. But they don’t communicate, either—except, now that I think about it further, maybe we are starting to. It feels to Jack as if Richard is an innocent bystander in his life, but it also seems obvious that we are changing and becoming a not-quite-so-naive amalgam of both of us. Jack thinks this because he is aware that he is acquiring at least some embryonic access to Richard’s knowledge and experience, and he assumes it works both ways.
The thing that puzzles me most is the distinct feeling that I’ve known Richard all my life. The only possibly good thing about that is that I am now able to put a tentative name to the alien within me.
The downside is that it feels as if I am in jeopardy of completely losing myself to it and to this trance I appear to be permanently stuck in. Then again, maybe it’s the upside. I once did what I considered, while I was doing it, an extremely wacky, “spiritual” sort of play.
I wish I could do it again. I’d do it with a greater sense of … uncertainty. In that play, I recited a line by mystic and philosopher Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov:
Turn back to the higher planes and plunge into the cosmic ocean once again … People think that it is in the details that they will find the light, the precision, they are looking for, but this is an illusion. You will find far more light in what is vague and indistinct … The human soul needs immensity; only in immensity can it be happy and feel free to breathe.
Sophie once told me the idea of immensity scared her. It’s big and unknown and space junk could hit you, and you’re hopelessly lost if you’re out there in the immense cosmos.
But what if the immensity is inside you, and you have all that room to wander, and it’s not scary, it’s safe? It’s a different kind of immensity, a peaceful lostness. This immensity is your home, it’s your garden, and it’s welcoming and altogether friendly.
I could be just fine in an immensity like that.
Margaret has sobered up fast and drives us home.
I sit in the passenger seat.
At one point, Lily says, very brightly, “The man kissed me. Maybe he loves me.”
I turn on the radio as Margaret looks at me out of the corners of her eyes. “What did you mean about Lily being haunted?”
“Nothing. He’s just the kind of man who does that to girls like Lily.”
A country vocalist sings about trouble. There is a burst of static, then silence, and I remember the radio has been failing lately. Now, it seems, it’s completely gone.
When we get home, Lily kisses both Margaret and me on the cheek and goes up to bed. Margaret brings me a cup of tea and one of those old-fashioned ice packs that look like a deflated chef’s hat for me to hold against my gut. She sits down next to me.
“It was my fault,” she says. “I drink too much. But do you understand?”
“I’m sorry.”
She flares. “For what?”
“I’m sorry that life is … hard for you.”
“You’ve never objected to Lily living with us.” She shakes her head minutely. “The alternative is just too awful. I could never do that to her.” She looks at me, then away again. “You could get another teaching job—back east. You could get a job in New York. We could sell this house and move back east.”
“I don’t seem to do well teaching, do I?”
“You’re afraid of people. That’s your problem. You’re terrified of people.”
“It’s not only me. It’s you too. You could get out more. You could get a part-time job or take a class. You use Lily as an excuse.”
She looks away.
“I feel badly that you have to stay with her all the time, but you have to do something about it for yourself. She’s not going to burn the house down. She can be on her own for a few hours at a time.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Yes, I do. I know her. Very well.”
She swings her gaze back to me. “What is it you want, Richard?”
I feel as if Richard’s response might be that it would take several years to answer the question. “I’d like to have … a little freedom sometimes.”
“And sometimes not, right? Because freedom means responsibility?”
“I’m only suggesting you might be a little happier, and maybe so would I, if you could get away from Lily once in a while.”