by Tim O'Brien
It was not a question of love. Amy was fifty-two years old, almost fifty-three. She no longer expected fairy-tale romance.
"Listen," Bobby said. "What's wrong? Tell me."
"I don't know."
"The money? The girl?"
"I don't know."
They took a walk along the lake outside the casino, in the dark, which felt dangerous with all that cash in their pockets. Later, back inside, Amy said she was going to bed. Bobby could do what he wanted.
A muscle moved at his jaw.
"In that case," Bobby said, "I want to ride the streak. Doesn't mean we're splitting up."
"It doesn't?"
"No."
"Then what does it mean?"
"Stay with me," he said. "Have fun."
"Bobby, it's not fun. I guess it's me, but even the winning feels dirty."
They were standing at the elevators across from a bank of slot machines. Amy studied the casino. Years from now, she knew, this would all be with her.
"I'm going to bed," she said. "You go wherever."
"You're angry."
"It isn't anger, Bobby."
"What then?"
"Math," she said.
Amy showered, turned on the radio, turned it off, packed her suitcases, sat on the bed, combed her hair, cried, then went out onto a balcony overlooking the lake. Dawn was coming. Something silvery. The lake itself was dark, scarcely a lake yet, but she could hear its fluid movements. To the north, over a great woods, the moon seemed shrunken and far away.
She lay down on the balcony.
Fifty-two years old, she thought. One hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
And then she thought about her wedding day, which had been fine except for the fact that marrying Bobby, or marrying anyone, had never been high on her list of things to accomplish. A year ago, when she'd told him yes, it had seemed such a tiny inconvenience. Now, stupidly, she found herself trying to erase the wedding in her head, subtracting things: the flowers and the old organist and the minister and the music and her blue dress, then Bobby, then herself.
All those winning hands. What incredible, heartless luck.
She was not in love.
Eyes open, Amy imagined her graying new groom downstairs. Maybe he'd fall for the pretty dealer. Save the girl from Winnebagos. Save himself from whatever this was.
She slept for an hour, then dressed and went down to the casino.
Bobby sat hunched over a pile of orange chips. His shirt had come untucked. He had a stale, chemical smell that made Amy back off a step. She watched him draw a pair of kings.
The dealer broke on a sixteen.
Bobby whooped and slapped the table.
"Your hubby," said the young dealer, "officially owns this joint. The man can't lose."
"Can't he?" said Amy.
They drove away with just under two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash. For three hours, heading south toward Minneapolis, Bobby would not stop talking about his good fortune, how for once in his life the breaks had gone his way, how he could do no wrong, how they'd just won themselves early retirement and a Mercedes and time to burn and maybe a nice little condo on a golf course in Arizona.
At one point he gave her knee a squeeze.
He laughed and said, "Amazing. We flat-out scalped them. No survivors."
"Right," said Amy.
At noon they stopped at a gas station outside the Twin Cities. Amy went inside, bought a Coke, and called a cab.
She had no plan.
For a time she stood in the doorway, drinking her Coke, watching Bobby tell the attendant about the streak. Both of them were laughing. It struck her that this was a story he would be telling for the rest of his life, which seemed an awfully long time.
Amy went into the ladies' room, locked the door, wiped the toilet seat, and sat down to wait.
She pictured a crocheted white sweater. A condo in Arizona. Perhaps when the cab came she would explain to Bobby that the marriage had been a mistake, a complete bust, and that his luck had run out. She wasn't sure. She looked for a sign, studied the graffiti. It was written by sixteen-year-olds.
In a few seconds, Amy told herself, she would probably change her mind. She'd probably march outside and get into Bobby's car and finish her honeymoon. Stop on a sixteen. Hope for the best.
5. LITTLE PEOPLE
AFTER JAN HUEBNER graduated from Darton Hall College in June of 1969, she performed for several months with a street theater troupe in the Twin Cities area, alerting a distracted citizenry to the horrors of ongoing genocide in Vietnam, or to what Jan saw as genocide—a war of hegemony and dissimulation and free-fire zones and racism and presumptuous Lone Ranger geopolitics. A born clown, funny just to look at, Jan Huebner played Lady Bird to a Texas T. She did accents. She was good with Spiro Agnew's dumb-boy bullyisms, Westmoreland's kill ratios, the parched apologias of the Bundy brothers. She did a terrific Nixon, a prim, slicked-back Robert McNamara. Comedy was Jan Huebner's special gift. "That girl of mine," her mother used to brag. "Ugly as North Dakota, but I swear to Pete, she could squeeze a laugh out of a Baptist."
Comedy or convent? It wasn't hard to choose. Jan had been a jokester since childhood, which kept her sane, and in July of 1969 she was able to wring reluctant smiles from the most ho-hum, is-there-really-a-war-on noontime crowd.
The work seemed important to her. She liked the street, the zeal and fellowship and daily drama. The only drawback, she concluded, was that food and rent were not to be found in the tin cups of guerrilla theater. Jan was broke, dope was expensive.
She felt fortunate, therefore, to be approached one evening by a diminutive, large-headed young man with an offer of fifty easy dollars. It was twilight on Hennepin Avenue. Jan stood smoking, alone, off to the side, watching the troupe put on paper police hats for their Mayor Daley finale. "Fifty for what?" Jan said, although she had an inkling, and the young man, who seemed harmless enough—not five feet tall, not a hundred pounds without the head—looked away and blushed when he said, "What you trying to do, embarrass me?"
"For what?"
"Fine, make me say it. Half hour. Strip naked." He looked up at her with a pair of bulging, bright blue eyes. The man's huge head and tiny body made it hard to tell his age: maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five. "A personal photo shoot. Satisfied? I feel small."
"How personal?" Jan said.
He glared at her, then sighed a light, fraudulent sigh. "Listen, pumpkin, I bet anything you know what naked is. Buff. Birthday suit. Stick your butt in the air, smile pretty, go spend my fifty bucks. You're a virgin, say so."
For a few seconds Jan watched the troupe launch its police-state assault on a half-dozen pedestrians. She was not a virgin.
"Fifty in advance," Jan said.
"Forget it. Afterward."
"Where?"
"Around the corner," he said. "My studio."
"Why me? 'Cause I'm cute as a button?"
The man averted his eyes. "Not exactly. But you're Snow White, aren't you?"
It was not a studio, it turned out, but the living room of a cramped apartment off Hennepin. The poses were standard. Arched back. Ecstasy. The odd little man kept his hands busy, humming under his breath, paying more attention to shutter speeds than to Jan herself. In a way, although it disgusted her, she could not help feeling flattered. The word "homely," Jan sometimes imagined, had entered the dictionary on the bleak November day of her birth. Her hair was a thin, muddy brown, her jaw sunken, her thin legs jury-rigged to the hips of a sumo wrestler. She had learned early to be funny.
Except for a few curt instructions, the young man said nothing for five or ten minutes. He hummed, played with his lenses, took the pictures, changed film, and then motioned for her to sit on a wastebasket.
"Wastebasket?" Jan said.
"Fifty bucks, you can sit on a wastebasket."
Jan squatted down and mugged for the camera. "Well," she said, "isn't this fun? Ask nice, I'll pass some gas, blow myself off this
dumb wastebasket."
She crossed her eyes.
"Cut the monkeyshines," the man said. "My dime, honey. This ain't a circus."
"Oh, wow. Sensitive psycho."
"Mouth closed," he said. "Legs open."
It was a vicious summer: frantic music, frantic sex, chemicals in the sugar, felons in the White House, predators in public places, B-52s dropping death all over Southeast Asia. Jan Huebner expected the worst, and 1969 delivered. At some point, she was almost certain, the young man would put aside his camera and require of her what the times required, which was inordinate risk, and it came as a surprise when he placed fifty dollars in her lap and said, "Good enough."
"That's it?" she said.
"What else you think?"
"Nothing. I don't know."
The man laughed. "I'm a dwarf. I know where the lines get drawn."
Jan put on her bra and panties, unsure where this was meant to go. "I wouldn't say dwarf."
"Wouldn't you?"
"No. Short, I'd say."
"Well, gee whillikers, I feel human now." The young man sneered, popped the film from his camera, and slipped it in his pocket. "You're Snow White, I'm Bashful. What's the plan? Plant a smooch on my forehead? Make me see stars?"
"That's ridiculous."
"Girls like you. Free love—what a joke."
It felt awkward to be sitting on a wastebasket, defenseless, un-funny, staring into those brilliant blue eyes. Jan pulled on her jeans and shirt and leather sandals.
"Your attitude," she said, "sucks."
"Sorry for that. Guess I'm Grumpy."
"Yeah, whatever," Jan said. She went to the door. "Thing is, man, you're not a dwarf. You're an asshole."
Jan Huebner had been an English major at Darton Hall, a B student, a dorm counselor, a confidante of pretty girls, a Saturday-night bridge player, a chain smoker, a clown. Until her senior year she had slept with no one at all. She made men laugh, made them into pals. She joked away her own misery. Skillfully, hiding things even from herself, Jan came up with one-liners about all the bucks she'd saved on beauty aids, how nobody ever dumped her, how she was her own best lover and a thoughtful one at that. She wore bib overalls and baggy sweatshirts. She hid copies of Cosmo under her mattress. On Saturday nights, after bridge, she would pick up a pizza and lock herself in her room and devote herself to articles on breast augmentation, ten sure ways to land that special guy.
What saved her was the war.
A miracle, it seemed.
In the spring of her senior year, Jan found herself occupying the Darton Hall admissions office, sharing sleeping bags with a number of passionate, very earnest young men. She suddenly had friends—Paulette Haslo and Amy Robinson and Billy McMann—people who liked her and whom she genuinely liked back. A new confidence came over her. She had a knack for the broad-stroked theatrics of peace; she belonged to something. In six weeks Jan dropped fifteen pounds, mostly from her hips, and at times, impossibly, she felt close to pretty, close to desirable. True, she remained quick with a joke, but now she was equally as quick to cry, and on those occasions there were caring people to embrace her and to offer comfort—many of them men, many of them good-looking men. Maybe it was the music, maybe the dope, but for once in her life Jan Huebner felt wanted and appreciated, even loved, for something beyond a laugh.
A morbid irony, Jan realized, but slaughter had given her a life. Napalm had made her happy. She hoped the war would never end.
Word, apparently, got around. Through that white-hot July of 1969, Jan made her bread posing for what the street called "personal photography sessions." The men were losers, one and all—guys with cheap cameras and greasy cash and little else. Mostly old, mostly fat, uniformly creepy. But still it seemed safe enough. Even sanitary: strip, smile, collect. There was a hands-off protocol, a street ethic that promised honor among perverts, and except for a couple of would-be gropers, Jan encountered no dangers worth troubling about. The few problem cases she handled with humor and dispatch.
As a moral matter, Jan entertained only petty misgivings about her new trade. Granted, it was not something she would soon mention to her mother, nor to the college friends she bumped into that summer. But given the copious evils of 1969, a few photographs seemed insignificant. Her body, after all, was no temple. Ramshackle at best, built by a blind man, so why not turn it into a bank? Also, despite herself, there was the undeniable flattery factor. Guys were paying for it. Not even for it: just a few ill-focused images of an emaciated, sad-looking woman she barely recognized. At times, Jan thought of the work as artistic modeling. Other times she saw herself as a kind of social worker, a Salvation Army volunteer minus the uniform, passing out Thanksgiving turkeys to the homeless and sexually underprivileged.
In the third week of July, with more than twelve hundred dollars in her savings account, Jan moved out of the apartment she'd shared with six members of her troupe and took lodging in a cheap efficiency on Lake Street. She bought a couple of flashy wigs, new underwear, and a set of secondhand photographer's lights. She also bought a police whistle.
Her business thrived. She took on the street name Veronica. A pretty girl's name, she thought.
In many ways, Jan lived a triple life that summer. She remained an active member of the troupe and of the antiwar movement in general. Also, at least as far as her mother knew, she was working nine to five as a bookstore clerk in Dinkytown, marking time until graduate school began in mid-September.
But more and more, she was Veronica.
For steady customers, and for those who could be counted on to offer a modest gratuity, Jan began providing her home telephone number. It was risky, she knew, and often a nuisance. Which it was on the twenty-eighth night of July, well after midnight, when she was awakened by a rude, belligerent drunk who said, "If it isn't Snow White."
It took a few seconds to attach a history to the high-pitched, surly voice.
He was at a phone booth down the street. At the present somewhat inebriated moment, the young man told her, he was the proud new owner of a two-inch erection, which for him was enormous. He also had thirty-eight dollars burning a hole in his shorts. Was she interested? Could she find it in her snow-white heart to spot him the missing twelve bucks?
"Shop's closed," Jan said. "Maybe tomorrow, if you learn some manners."
"Yeah, fine. Kiss off a dwarf."
"You're not a dwarf, this isn't a kiss-off."
"No? And what about my record-setting two-incher?"
"Rub it with ice, hit it with a hammer," Jan said. "Maybe it'll grow."
He made a sound that might've been a chuckle. "Okay, you caught me, I exaggerated. Two inches, that's stretching things. Wanted to impress you. Like my mama used to say ... I mean, she's this normal-size bitch, right? I'm this kid. So she looks down at me, sort of squinting, and she goes, 'Oh well, no big deal.' Get it? No big deal. Mom's idea of a knee-slapper." He hesitated. "Thirty-eight bucks. No cameras. Won't take long. Just talk."
"Talk about what?"
"That," he said, "is what we need to talk about."
Five minutes later, when Jan opened her door, the man stood dressed in a red polo shirt, baggy gray shorts drooping to his ankles, and a blue cap that said TITLEIST. For longer than was comfortable, he peered up at her as if waiting for an invitation of some sort, or perhaps the opposite, and then he made a huffing sound and walked in and sat on the couch. His white sneakers, Jan noted, did not reach the carpet.
"Well," she said. "Back from miniature golf?"
"Miniature, that's hilarious. You mind?"
He pulled a whiskey bottle from his shorts, took a swig, waved the bottle at her. Jan shook her head.
"Here's the deal," he said. "Dwarfs don't fall in love, too risky, end up getting stiffed. Let's just say I've fallen in real serious affection. Landed you some customers, didn't I? Passed the word?"
"You did. Thank-you note's in the mail."
The young man didn't seem to hear this. His huge blue ey
es surveyed the apartment, finally settling on the photographer's lights and a large, soiled bed sheet she'd strung up as a backdrop.
"Professional, aren't we?" he said.
"Making ends meet. What do you want?"
The eyes twinkled. "Well, see, there's a couple answers to that. What I did want, what I do want." He seemed to measure her for something, a frame, a future. "All those ads in the paper. Fancy lights. Police whistles. I mean, holy cow, I'm impressed. Pretty darn streetwise, huh?" The twinkle again. "Should I call you Veronica?"
"Sure," she said.
"Sure," he said, mocking. "Take a nip. Won't kill a street girl."
"How'd you know about the whistle?"
"How do I know about everything? Wear it around your scrawny neck, don't you? I see the pictures. Do me a favor—one tiny nip. Old times' sake."
She took the bottle from him, pretended to swallow. Outside, it had started to rain. She felt a little frightened.
"One more time," she said. "You want what exactly?"
"Well, jeez, like I say, there's did want and there's do want. What I did want, I was gonna prove how smart you are, this hip English major, this strip-naked money machine who thinks she's Mona Lisa. Gets herself this cool summer job. Other kids your age, they're bagging groceries, detasseling corn. Not you. You're Veronica." He kicked off his sneakers, tipped his cap back, crossed his legs beneath him on the couch. "So what I wanted, see, I was gonna ask for—I don't know—what you got in the bank, sweetie?"