Warren's usual reaction was to hug her and whisper to her, massage her back the way he'd seen mothers do to babies who hadn't burped. She summed it up once: "I'm insecure. It's common among kids from divorced families — I'm going to do a good documentary on that someday. My real father jerked us up and down the whole East Coast until I was ten years old. By the time I was twelve I'd gone to five different schools. I never could keep a friend. And then I got hauled out here. I have no roots."
"You do," Warren would reply. "You have them here. Now, with me."
But now in the bedroom in the fading light he didn't comfort her with his hands or soothe her with his words. He no longer knew how.
She went to the bathroom to wash her face. During that time Warren put on a pair of freshly washed jeans, a clean white shirt, and his cotton windbreaker. Promises to keep, miles to go before I sleep, as the poet said. He sat on the floor and worked his feet into the old cowhide boots.
When she came out, he repeated, "Tell me about it."
"That won't help."
He understood she was referring to herself. There was a terrible meaning to the words.
"Maybe it will help me, Charm."
She was thoughtful for a while, perched once more on the bed, a box of Kleenex at her side.
"All right. Maybe it will."
He was a lawyer — civil, not criminal. A partner in a big firm. Which one? Never mind. He was from New York. His name? Beside the point. A few months ago he'd had some business at the station, some potential libel suit, and he had come over from his hotel and questioned her. They had a margarita, then dinner.
"We liked each other. He was bright, and funny. So we decided to be friends. I never told you because, frankly, you and I have been leading pretty separate lives this last year."
"Not my choice," Warren pointed out.
"Are you going to argue and interrupt? If so—"
"Go ahead, Charm."
The man had returned to New York, but he'd called several times and then come again for a week on the lawsuit business. She had seen him, and they had started an affair. He was in love with her, he claimed. She wasn't sure how she felt about him. She might have been in love with him too.
"Have been, or are?"
"I don't know the answer to that."
In love with. He wanted to tell her that was chemistry and lust, nature's way of getting the species to propagate. Nature's dirty trick. Chemistry was unstable. Lust ebbed and flowed. She loved him, she was his wife. They were partners, companions. That had substance, richness, longevity.
But none of this could he squeeze into acceptable words. He tried to make his thoughts show in his eyes and propel themselves across to where she sat hunched on the edge of the bed.
Her lover kept calling her from New York. He took two weeks off and flew out a third time. He was separated from his wife back in Manhattan, awaiting a final divorce decree. He had three children. He hadn't been looking for something like this to happen to him so soon after the breakup of his marriage, but it had happened.
"Three children. Jesus," Warren muttered.
"Is that meant to be a snide comment?"
"It just slipped out. How do you feel about all this?"
"Confused."
"I can imagine. And what about our marriage?"
That was at the root of everything, wasn't it? She wouldn't have begun the affair if the marriage wasn't failing her in some fundamental way. She had lost faith in Warren—she saw him as a man going nowhere, a man, as she'd said a while ago, with no zest left in him. Their sex life had improved, then waned. He didn't communicate with her; hadn't for a year, not since their try at therapy. What was going on inside him, behind the shell? She had no idea. All their dinner parties were with lawyer couples, and the only subject was what went on at the courthouse: the endless sarcastic analysis of cases, judges, prosecutors — lousy legal gossip. Outside of work, her life was dull. Unfulfilled. He bored her. Probably, doing all this court-appointed stuff, and putting on his chef's cap to make his cordon bleu, and using the remote to flip through the forty-seven TV channels after dinner while he sat mired in his easy chair, he bored himself. That was the impression he gave. Maybe she wasn't in love with him anymore.
"'In love' is an irrational state. But you love me," he said doggedly. "There's a difference."
"Don't treat me like an adolescent. I understand the difference. Yes, I do love you. I care for you. And the last few years I've felt sorry for you."
No more than I've felt for myself, he thought. But it wasn't like that anymore. He wanted to tell her that, but the words felt pretentious and silly, and wouldn't come.
"Do you want to leave me and marry this guy?"
"He puts a lot of pressure on me."
"That's not an answer, Charm."
"I don't know what I want to do."
He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to eight. "I'm sorry," he said. "More than you know. I guess I've been letting you down. Maybe you've been letting me down too. I want to talk to you about all that. And I'm also sorry that I have to go. We'll talk when I get back. Or else tomorrow."
Charm's blurry eyes took on some heat. "You're going? Now? Where?"
He was already headed to the bedroom door, reaching for his car keys in the pocket of his jeans.
"To the ball game, with Scoot Shepard and a client."
"Are you serious? To the ball game, when our lives are falling apart?"
"I have to go. It's business." He hated the words even as he said them.
She jumped off the bed and hurried after him, barefoot, through the hall and the living room to the vestibule. When his hand was on the front doorknob, he turned to face her.
"Fuck you!" she shouted.
He put a hand out to touch her shoulder, but she jerked back from him. He said softly, "Charm, listen carefully. I still love you, and I won't let you go."
He opened the door and stepped outside into the thick evening warmth. It had grown nearly dark. Then he turned and said more strongly, "As for this New York lawyer with the wife and three kids — his story is as sorry as a two-dollar watch. I'll bet he drinks martinis before dinner and wears shirts with alligators on the pocket. If I ever catch him hanging around my house again, it's him I'll stomp on."
But saying all that didn't make him feel any better. Driving to the Astrodome he felt a fool, a cuckold, a homeless man. As homeless as Hector Quintana. In the car, he cried.
The Astros took an early lead on a home run by Glenn Davis with two aboard, and the crowd in the air-conditioned Dome grew boisterous. From the box seats behind third base, Warren cheered and hooted. Ordinarily he was not a great fan of the Houston team, but he had a particular rooting interest tonight against the New York Mets.
"Pile it on!" he yelled, after the home run. "Let's go!"
Mike Scott was pitching for the Astros. "Show 'em the spitter, Mike! No mercy!"
At his side, Johnnie Faye Boudreau gave a snort of laughter. "You sure are having a good time, Mr. Blackburn. I appreciate that kind of enthusiasm."
Scoot drank Wild Turkey from a silver flask. Warren and Johnnie Faye and a man named Frank Sawyer, who said he was from Alabama, drank beer from plastic cups. Sawyer was clean-shaven, about thirty, with light blue eyes and close-cropped fair hair. He seldom spoke, and forced a reluctant half-smile whenever Warren looked over at him. Military, Warren decided. He seemed to be both bodyguard and stud. A bouncer at her club, Johnnie Faye said. I'd like to hire him, Warren thought, to bounce that fucking New York lawyer.
And you wouldn't want Sawyer to bounce you. He had the lean nasty look of certain southern deputy sheriffs, his black T-shirt revealed a weight lifter's biceps and shoulders, and he was tattooed on both arms: a blue-and-red spitting dragon on one, an anchor and the word "Rosie" on the other. Warren wondered if he had done time like the dead Dink and the vanished Ronzini. Whenever he traveled up to Huntsville to visit one of his clients, he noticed how many inmates had their lif
e stories inscribed on their arms and chests. Virgil Freer had flexed a naked dancing girl on his left deltoid.
Warren chatted idly with Johnnie Faye, but images of Charm kept invading his mind like mosquitoes swarming through a torn screen. In the bottom half of the fourth inning, Johnnie Faye asked him if they should be talking about the case.
"This isn't exactly the right time and place," Warren said, as cordially as he could. "But why don't you tell me about yourself?" He could see her eyes flicker with appreciation; he had opened the door to everyone's favorite subject. "Scoot told me you were a beauty queen," he prompted.
"One of the high points of my life." She smiled. "Tried to take Texas women with me into the twentieth century."
She had been brought up in Odem, she said, a little town west of Corpus Christi, with her beloved twin brother, Garrett, her older brother, Clinton, and a younger sister, Jerene, who still lived in Odem and was married to a pharmacist. Daddy was a part-time Baptist preacher who ran the filling station there. A sign outside read: ED'S EXXON
AND HOUSE OF PRAYER. JESUS IS COMING SOON! COLD
BEER TO GO. It was the kind of small town where you dialed a wrong number and talked for fifteen minutes anyway. When she got out of high school along came Vietnam, which, in Johnnie Faye's book, we should never have got involved with in the first place. That was not so much a political opinion as a personal one engendered by tragedy: her brother Clinton had been blown up by a mine at Da Nang, sent home to Texas in a body bag. And now the goddam gooks were here, buying up everything from shrimp boats to convenience stores, and their black-haired deadpan kids were nailing down all the scholarships that real Murkin kids couldn't get anymore.
"I wanted to go to college," she told Warren, "but I couldn't afford it. Biggest regret I've got."
She pumped gas until she'd saved enough money to move to Corpus Christi, where she waitressed at an International House of Pancakes, fooled around with boys, survived a coat-hanger abortion, wasted time. By then she'd realized Corpus was a backwater, best epitomized by a guy who came into the coffee shop and asked for a piece of pie and when she asked what kind, said, "Tater pie, gal! What the hell you think pie's made of?"
She considered herself an authority on guitar picking and rattlesnake killing but not much else. For a few semesters she took night courses at Del Mar College. She wanted to make something of her life. Then she met a couple of local women who were burning their bras on Ocean Drive and holding parking lot rallies about women's rights. One of them was a lesbian. Johnnie Faye tried it. Didn't hate it, but preferred men. She burned her bra outside the pancake house. ("Made no difference," she confided to headquarters in Dallas and was called SPIT, Society for Protesting Injustice in Texas. "I guess I needed friends."
In the fifth inning, with two out, the Mets scratched together a run on a walk, an error, a bloop single. The mosquitoes came back, swarming, stinging. Was Charm with her New York lawyer? What was she doing at this precise instant? Warren sifted through his memory of her words, frowning.
"We'll win," Johnnie Faye said. "Don't you fret about it." She turned to Sawyer. "You eavesdropping on my autobiography, Frankie, or you watching the ball game?"
"Which y'all want me to be doin'?" Sawyer drawled.
"Whatever pleases you, big boy." She patted the dragon tattoo on his biceps, then continued her tale.
A few women from Dallas SPIT came down to Corpus Christi to give a pep talk. Johnnie Faye was twenty-one years old, but with presence, a ripe body, a sweetness in her lips not quite extinguished by the downpour of experience yet to come. The annual Miss Texas Pageant was coming up in Austin, and before that there would be local qualifying contests all over the state. The SPIT women were militant and imaginative. They asked, "Can you sing, honey?"
She gave them a colorful rendition of one of her favorites: "Bobby Joe, Your Wife Is Cheatin' on Us Again."
They bought her a modestly cut black one-piece bathing suit, an expensive white glitter gown, a push-up bra from Frederick's of Hollywood. One of the women, a hairdresser, dyed Johnnie Faye's hair to a pale gold color and stationed her under a sunlamp.
Johnnie Faye won Miss Corpus Christi, and with the title came a prize of $1500. The only reason the judges hesitated, they explained, was that they thought her a bit too sexy, "and maybe too assertive."
With that in mind, the women tutored her. Before the Miss Texas Pageant she dieted, did three hours of exercise every day in a gym. She practiced demure, took singing lessons, read Seventeen.
There was one problem: in the local gym she met a curly-haired young fiddler with a country music band — his name was Bubba Rutherford. He reminded her a lot of poor Clinton. She hopped into bed with Bubba and decided she loved him more than her current boyfriend. Bubba promised her the world, and two weeks later she married him at the Corpus city hall.
Up in Austin she lived in a household with SPIT women but spent her nights with Bubba in his RV at a nearby trailer park. Her SPIT friends, when they found out, warned her to shut up about it. All Miss Texas contestants had to be single.
After the preliminary rounds the pageant officials again instructed her to tone down her personality, be more dainty, and lose a few more pounds. Most of the other contestants were on speed to keep their weight down; others were bulimic, pigging out and then stuffing their fingers down their throats to vomit it back. "They lifted their boobs with duct tape and sprayed their derrieres with Pro-Grip. They were a bunch of flakes and hysterics. I felt sorry for them."
Johnnie Faye made it to the final eight, and in the talent portion of the finals, when she sang in her down-home voice "He's Gone, and He Took Everything but the Blame," she won the second-place silver trophy.
If she had won the gold, the plan was to keep buttoned up until the Miss America pageant. But that wasn't the case, so she stood at the microphone, flashed her white teeth at the TV cameras, and said, "Folks, I'm about to tell you now what this contest is all about…" The pageant officials tried to cut her off but the TV people loved it. She went on to describe the daily lives of her vitamin-deficient, anorexic, duct-taped, emotionally battered fellow contestants. The response was so enthusiastic that she veered from the prepared script and revealed to the world that she was really Mrs. Bubba Rutherford, but she'd had to keep that under her hat: "Virginal meat is the only kind the male chauvinist pigs will let you show off in this circus."
The SPIT women carried her out of the auditorium in triumph.
She was stripped of her runner-up title, which she had expected, and picked up some modeling offers from a Houston advertising agency, which she hadn't expected. Soon she became bored with SPIT and bored with Bubba. Forever wasn't nearly as long as they'd planned on.
"So I got a divorce and stayed on here. Meanwhile my brother Garrett showed up and moved in with me. I supported him. He had nightmares and he was a junkie. The war did that to him. I used to tell him, 'Garrett, you did what you had to do. You can't be sorry for wasting those yellow fuckers — they deserved it.' But he went off one weekend with some of his so-called buddies and o.d.'d on heroin. I loved that kid, and that was the worst thing ever happened to me, even worse than when my daddy passed away. I was dancing by then and I was worn out. Found a backer for Ecstasy a few years down the pike, and the rest is history. You want to hear that part too?"
Scoot had excused himself and left in the sixth inning. Now, in the eighth, the Mets had nibbled away at the Astros' lead and tied the score.
The buzzing refused to leave Warren's head; he kept having visions of Charm and her New York lover. And to try to exorcise them, he cheered even more vigorously than before for the Astros. Johnnie Faye told him how she redecorated and restaffed the club, married a guy who turned out to be a no-good drug dealer — "got caught delivering twenty keys, so I divorced him." The game went into the tenth. Strawberry clubbed a home run for the Mets and in their half of the inning the Astros couldn't get the ball out of the infield.
"I still go
down to Odem three times a year to see my mama, and I'm loyal to anyone's loyal to me. That's my creed," Johnnie Faye concluded.
They filed up the ramp toward the exit. At the hot dog concession, Johnnie Faye dug her heels into concrete and leveled a finger at his chest. "Good buddy, I've got a beef, and it's also my creed to speak what's on my mind. Since the fucking seventh inning you haven't heard a word I said. I'm divulging my entire life story, which you asked for, and you're sitting there worrying whether some peckerhead's gonna get ball four or strike three!"
"That's not it," Warren said.
"Then what is? You're supposed to be my lawyer along with Mr. Shepard. He told me to talk to you and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, which I did. But I don't know if I want a lawyer who can't bother to listen. I won't raise any more sand, but you owe me an explanation."
Warren took a shaky breath and said, "My wife just told me she's having an affair. She might leave me. That's what was on my mind. Not the game."
Johnnie Faye's face bloomed like a pink rose. The darkness left her bicolored eyes. "You should have told me that before, Warren," she said, while the crowd ebbed around her. Her voice softened: "Nothing in this world I don't know about what goes on between men and women. I've been around that block so many times I could write a guidebook."
She hauled Frank Sawyer close to her and kissed him on his bony cheek.
"You go on back to the club, honey. I'm taking my new friend to a bar and listen to his story. The lawyer man needs help."
She gave Sawyer a push, then slipped her arm through Warren's. "You give her half a chance, there's a kind of woman will tear your heart out and stomp the sucker flat. Is your wife like that?"
"No," Warren said, "she's not."
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 9