Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “I went out with Bill—”

  “Sounds fishy is all I’m saying.”

  “James, you’re being an absolute punter.”

  “I like him.” Lise touched Billy’s shoulder and then ran her hand through his hair: a rodent’s nest. “He’s kind and cute, and he drives a reasonable car. I couldn’t believe that thing you borrowed last night. Where did find such a pretentious piece of—”

  Violet’s laughter inadvertently cut her off.

  “It’s my car,” James said. “I tell everyone it was a mistake. Don’t I? Violet?”

  “An enormous mistake, looks like,” Lise insisted.

  “I’m rather fond of it,” Lolly said. “You boys should take Billy’s Dart to work. I’d look very dashing in that car.”

  “Is this house like a commune?” Lise asked. “It’s big enough to be a commune, and you have this convenient barn room.”

  “They call it the grand room,” Lolly said.

  “The house was a mistake, too. Okay? And it’s great room, not that it is, but that’s what they call it.”

  “You’re quite the Mr. Grouchy today,” Lolly said. “Serves you right for drinking so much and dancing with every woman in the bar.”

  “He didn’t dance with me,” Violet said.

  “Or me,” said Lise.

  “I saw you and Billy on the dance floor,” James said. “You make a lovely couple.”

  “Oh, Lise,” Lolly said, “we do have to teach your boyfriend some steps.”

  “Whoa now,” Billy said. “I know a lot of steps—the, ah, bob and weave, the bob and lash, the, ah, bob and bob.”

  “To bob is not to dance,” Lolly said.

  “To bob is mortal,” Lise said, “to actually know a few steps, divine.”

  “You’re a great dancer,” Billy said.

  “Thank you,” Lise and Lolly said simultaneously. They might have laughed, but neither did, which made it embarrassing—though not to either of them, evidently. Violet was embarrassed for them both.

  “You’re a polished dancer,” Lise said to James. “Did you take lessons?”

  He offered a modest shrug.

  “He used to pick up birds that way,” Lolly said.

  “She means chicks,” Billy said.

  “Were you terribly successful?” Lise asked.

  “Now and again. You never know, though, who it is you’ve met.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lolly, and at the same moment Lise asked, “What do you mean by that?”

  “The character of a person is impossible to judge from her dancing.”

  “His or hers,” Lise said. “The same is true, I would imagine, for men.”

  “He’s always telling me to be a more confident dancer,” Billy said. “I want to take you two up on the lessons.” He said this to both Lise and Lolly, but neither acknowledged him.

  “So do you,” Lise said, and then corrected herself, “did you—did you just take them home and screw them?”

  Lolly covered her mouth with her hand and tittered. “Do tell, James.”

  When Jimmy didn’t immediately reply, Violet said, “It’s time for me to get a shower. It’s been lovely meeting you, Lise. I hope Billy will have you over again.”

  Lise stood to shake her hand.

  “Yeah,” James said. “I’d just take ’em home and fuck ’em, but that’s all in the past now, the deep, dark, dim, distant past.”

  “It bloody better be.”

  “Can you take me home?” Lise asked Billy.

  “Not in my car,” James said.

  “That’s a relief,” Lise said.

  “Just gotta get some shoes,” Billy said. “And pants.”

  “Would you mind terribly if I took the first shower?” Lolly asked Violet, who had failed to make her getaway. “It’s just this hair. I ought to whack it all off.” She looked to James for a protest but he was staring resolutely at the wall.

  “Go ahead,” Violet said. “I may lie down for another few minutes.”

  In a matter of seconds, Lolly departed to shower, Violet to lie down, and Billy Atlas to dress, which left Lise Ray alone with James Candler.

  “We just slept,” she said softly, and her sentence was followed by the vibration of water pipes. “He was happy just to sleep beside me.”

  James made an uncertain gesture with his hand. “I was certainly surprised to see you last night.”

  “I wanted to get a look at her.”

  He seemed to accept that. He didn’t offer a full nod but his head jiggled. Lise understood that she was a ridiculous figure, a spurned woman trying to measure the meaning of a man’s waggling noggin. Amazing how long it had taken for that insight to reach her: this affair was a joke, and she was the butt of it. She felt a deep stab of self-hatred and looked away from him, saying, “She’s pretty. She seems nice.”

  “She’s beautiful,” he said softly. “She’s wonderful.”

  The disconnect became palpable: this man was nothing but a shadow of the man Lise had met in Los Angeles, the man whose life she had worked daily for years to imagine. This man was petty and capable of cruelty. He was arrogant and he drank too much. He loved another woman and treated her, as well as Lise, dishonestly. She felt this break between the first James Candler and the second in her chest, but not as if her heart were breaking, more like the way a hiker who has ascended a ridge only to discover yet another ridge beyond it feels disappointment and resignation, along with a powerful announcement of fatigue. This particular hiker, though, was not tempted to turn back; if anything, casting away that initial image of the man had lightened her pack.

  “I’m not going to say anything to anyone,” she told him. “If that’s worrying you—I would never do that.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “Evidently, I do.”

  “Don’t be a prick.”

  He said nothing for the longest time, and then he said, “Sorry.”

  “I thought I could disappear from your life.”

  “You going to see Billy again?”

  “He sort of proposed to me on the drive home. I don’t think I can just dump him.”

  “When I saw you last night, I . . .”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. It was—”

  “I was thrilled,” he said. He had spoken too loudly, and now he whispered, “It was thrilling. I wanted to take you to the parking lot and . . .”

  Inexplicably, she began to cry. She tried to hide it but there was no use. One of the hall doors opened, and she said quickly, “I won’t sleep with you while she’s living here.”

  “All right. That’s fair.”

  “What’s fair?” Billy Atlas asked.

  “Nothing is,” Lise said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Driving Lise to Ocean Beach took Billy thirty minutes. That Lise fell asleep on the drive was a relief, as he had run out of conversation and didn’t want to ruin a perfect morning. At her apartment, she gave him a kiss on the cheek but did not invite him in. Nonetheless, he was elated on the return drive and disappointed to find the house empty.

  Lolly had left him a note:

  Billy!

  If you’re not too zonked after all the rumpus with your girl, get your arse to the Blue Willow for some food and a few rounds with Vi & James & me! Who knew you were on the pull all this time! Give us the lowdown. Your girl is lovely!

  Lolly

  The meaning of the note was mostly discernible (rumpus?) and the tone was friendly, but he had decided to send Lise flowers. It would take time to pick a florist from the yellow pages and to get up the nerve to make the call. (He knew from experience that roses could backfire.) He didn’t much feel like drinking, anyway, and talking about Lise in front of Jimmy could be iffy.

  He got out the phone book to begin the
deliberations, confident that he’d order flowers and confident, too, that it would take him twenty minutes to convince himself to make the call.

  After he got off the phone with the florist, he dialed Lise, reaching her voicemail.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’ve thought about you all day—since getting back from dropping you off, I mean. It’s only been an hour, holy cow. Anyway, what I’m saying is, you’re not here, which is a bummer. That reminds me how Lolly says bum for butt, and how you’ve got such a nice one. Nice bum. And if the doorbell rings, answer it. I won’t say why, but it won’t be me. Had a great time just talking to you at the house and on our drive, the part where you were awake. And the cuddling last night. And, well . . . got to do some important work, so . . . Enjoy the rest of the weekend. This is Billy. Atlas. The guy you spent the night with. ’Bye for now.”

  He would like to revise the message, especially the bum part, but it could all use a red pencil. Once he had written out everything he meant to leave on a woman’s machine, and he called and recited it all without realizing that he had gotten the actual person. “Have you had a stroke or something?” she asked.

  He wished he did have some important work to do. On weekends he missed the workshop and the workshop gang. The job had exactly the right element of demand and reward, and his flock was an interesting bunch of misfits, like those army movies. All it took was a brave sergeant and they became a troop or outfit or whatever it was men became, ready to conquer the world, or at least some Nazis.

  Thinking about this, he recalled the stories he had them write. He hadn’t read them. He came up with the idea of their writing stories while he was riding home with Jimmy one evening. Jimmy was praising Billy’s work and trashing the previous supervisor. “One day the electricity went out at the facility and to keep them busy, Crews made them wash his truck.” Jimmy laughed and shook his head, but it set Billy to wondering. What would he do if the electricity shut off?

  He made a list of possible no-electricity activities. He had already started special projects for them—making change with Karly; teaching Rhine chess, and when that didn’t work, checkers; teaching Karly how to use a washing machine; smoking a joint with Mick; showing Alonso some tasteful nude photos from a safe soft-core site; giving Vex an ANGER RUINS JoY T-shirt; and teaching Karly what he remembered of the foxtrot from his aborted Dance 101. That class was a bad memory. When he finally got to dance with the woman he was attracted to, she said, “With you it’s more like the hippotrot,” and while he had laughed at the time, he never returned to the class.

  He needed something the whole group could do. Ultimately, writing a story topped the list. Counseling, as he understood it from his own brief experience with it in college, was mostly telling stories on yourself. Billy had seen a mental health counselor at the university after having sex with Dlu while she was still Jimmy’s live-in girlfriend. “I loved it,” he told the young woman, whose great square glasses made her seem remote, and the room was so dim she melted into the paneling, and it seemed like he was talking to one of those mounted heads, like a deer or a moose, but a human mounted head, who nodded now and again and took notes. “It was slow,” he said, meaning sex with Dlu. “She wouldn’t let me do anything fast, and while I was kissing her . . . her parts, I . . . You need background here, about my sexual . . . attempts. If success in bed is making your partner satisfied and making yourself satisfied, then my batting average would be precisely zero. Partly, granted, because I never had an unpaid partner before, but . . . I’m getting off the subject. What I mean to say is, I got a satisfactory erection, solid and sensitive and at the ready, which, in my history, anyway, is rarer than you might think . . .”

  Sex with Dlu: she initiated it, of course, one weekend when Jimmy drove home because his sister was visiting. Why hadn’t Dlu gone with him? She didn’t like Violet. Billy never understood why. The relationships of women had too many secret panels and trapdoors for Billy to analyze. In any case, Dlu invited him over to eat the remains of a pot roast that hadn’t come off. Jimmy had cooked the roast the night before, his turn to make dinner, and he didn’t let it cook long enough. Billy saved the evening by making a pizza from stuff he found in the cupboards. He couldn’t remember all the ingredients, but capers was one and raisins another. Dlu had let the roast cook another few hours and she didn’t want to eat alone. That was important because later, halfway through dinner, she touched her napkin to her mouth and said, How do you manage all those meals alone?

  At this point, just when he finally got to the meat, so to speak, of his story, the wall-mount said, “That’s all for today,” and sure enough the hour was up. Why hadn’t he ever gone back to her? Counseling was free at the university, and Billy had never been short on time, but he didn’t go back. It wasn’t a pity fuck, he wanted to say. Dlu loved him. Not the same way she loved Jimmy, but it was still love.

  His briefcase, which he bought at Goodwill for three dollars and had only required two short strips of black tape, was in the kitchen, beside the table. He had to put it on the kitchen table every night so he’d see it in the morning when he swilled his coffee; otherwise, he’d forget it. Tactics for getting by—it took a lot of them to keep him from screwing up. Someone—probably Violet—had moved his briefcase to the corner. She was reluctant to appreciate other people’s tactics because she didn’t need any. She sailed through daily life as if it took no concentration to manage all the requirements of food and bath and so on. Not that she knew what the hell to do with herself since her husband died. Billy had never met him. He counted this as one of the big regrets in his life.

  The briefcase held very little but the papers, which were crinkled and wadded up now, among the remnants of several lunches. Why did he continue to bring bananas when he never ate them? He flattened the sheets of paper and spread them out on his bed, leaving his door open in case Lolly or Violet passed by and he could tell them about the work he was doing. Of course, they weren’t home. He wondered how often he did this. How often did he orchestrate his actions to accommodate contingencies that were not in play? He guessed the answer was all the time, and even now, even after thinking about it, he didn’t want to shut the door, and the way he displayed the stories and even the way he leaned over to read without lifting the pages from the bedspread was a performance for an imaginary audience.

  Rhine’s paper had so many erasures, the paper was see-through in several places.

  Once upon a time. The boy had one mother and one father. The boy had one brother and one sister. The boy and the one father and the one mother and the one brother and the one sister all lived together in one house. Each person had a bedroom each. The mother and father shared a bedroom, but each of the other ones had one bedroom each.

  That was as far as Rhine got.

  Karly’s handwriting was large and looping, but her story was short.

  Once pond a time frogs and bees and in the water things. Swimming.

  Billy liked this one. Once pond a time sounded like poetry. He needed to go to Karly’s house to do her laundry. The washing machine in the utility room at the senior citizens facility was a top load and Karly’s, according to her pantomime, was a front load, and it was too confusing to her—and to him—to make it clear what she needed to do.

  “Boys and girls are different,” Karly said to him the day he was trying to teach her how to use the washer.

  “Boy howdy,” Billy replied.

  “Boys do whatever you want them to,” she explained. She smiled at him and shook her head to make her hair swing.

  Billy had to quit thinking about her or he would never get through the stories. The girl broke his heart.

  Alonso’s paper featured no words but only circles, fairly neat ones, in three rows, like a stack of firewood seen from the side.

  OOOOOOOOOO

  OOOOOOOOOO

  OOOOOOOOOO

  That was Alonso, all right. All logs and no flame. Mi
ck’s story:

  Once upon a time in the land of Yuma, Arizona, when the boy was in high school, and he was fine back then, and he was happy it seemed like all the time, he went to a beach with his friends. They slept on the beach, which was long and made of sand, which is just rocks that the ocean has taken a million years to soften, and there were three girls and just two boys, and they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend and the numbers didn’t match up, and that made it easier because they could just be friendly, and late at night when for some reason they woke up, the boy is saying he was going to swim and he took off all his clothes right there—how could he be the person who did that? He didn’t know how, but back then, he took his off, and the others did theirs, too. It was five not dressed people in the water, and in the water they swam, and back on the sand they ate cheese and honey sandwiches with no clothes on and they slept with no clothes on, and later on, back in Yuma, after he was sick, one of the girls that had been there came every day to see him for a while, and one night she said, “You have to get better.” She said, “That was the best night of my life.” And if only

  It stopped there, and Billy thought it was a pretty good story, given the naked girls and everything. He had driven through Yuma once, but all he could remember were gas stations, fast-food places, and the heat, but he knew there was a prison, an old-west prison where desperadoes were sent. He made a mental note to ask Mick about it, and maybe he would rent that old cowboy movie 3:10 to Yuma and they could watch it together.

  Maura had turned Little Red Riding Hood into moderately effective porn. She might have a future writing the stuff. Not for the movies. He was pretty sure porn movies didn’t waste money on writers. It took him three seconds to imagine a script:

  The plumber arrives.

  Housewife happens to be wearing thong when she opens door.

  Plumber: “You got a plumbing problem?”

  Housewife: “What big tools you have!”

  The movies were just a stall until the clothes came off, but there was an overlooked market of porn readers, people turned on more by reading about sex than by seeing video. Billy counted himself in this group. His favorite type of story involved surprise. An unsuspecting man would see a female friend, and this guy would say just the right thing, and the woman would . . . He had to quit thinking about this, too. Reading such stories made him horny, but thinking about them made him sad. He could never write that kind of story, but maybe it was Maura’s particular gift.