Funny Once (19 page)

At a different AA meeting, earlier in the week, Hil had started the story of her longtime neighbor Bergeron Love at a different point. “So my neighbor the busybody once reported another of our neighbors to the child protective services.” This meeting was one composed solely of women; there was no friendly blind man upon whom to settle her eyes in this group. In fact, they were an altogether tougher audience, overall, than the meetings that included men. Less likely to forgive rambling or giggling shares, readier to call bullshit on somebody’s tears. “After my neighbor reported this guy, this huge tattooed Hispanic guy who was supposedly abusing his daughters, he started stalking her son.” Bergeron’s then-ten-year-old boy Allistair. Allistair the fair and pale and earnest and brave, who’d later walked Hil’s son around on Halloween, utterly unembarrassed by holding a five-year-old’s hand. Allistair was a good boy. Reporting the alleged abuse had been a lesson in minding your own business, Hil thought; Allistair had had to be moved to another school. Restraining orders had been required. Bergeron Love’s front yard had been egged, her car graffitied, her most beautiful live oak killed by mysterious means. The tree had fallen on her porch, her gentle awkward son had been separated from his familiar friends, she never knew what to expect when she opened her front door in the morning. That man still lived in the neighborhood. His daughters and wife, to this day, had never said a word against him.

“But my neighbor knew,” Hil told the group of women. “She’d heard him through the bathroom window with the girls. ‘Don’t, Daddy, don’t! It hurts, please, Daddy!’” Bergeron Love had gone from one house to another, pleading her case, her car with its windshield covered in red spray paint parked at the curb for all to see.
Racist wore!
it said. “I know it’s him because he didn’t spray the
car
! He cares so much about cars, he couldn’t spray the metal!” It was true that the man loved his vehicles; the house and yard were shabby, but his classic sedan and truck sat sparkling and cherry in the drive.

“It just seemed so unfair that her boy was suffering because of her,” Hil went on to the roomful of women, most of them mothers. Little Allistair Love, studious, dutiful, always alongside Bergeron at the polling stations on Election Day, shirt clattering with campaign buttons. “I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say, I guess, but she came to my house just the other night,
bing-bong
, most likely lonely for her boy, I’m thinking now. He’s all grown up now, living over in Austin. I mean, I can imagine how it’d be, having your son move away . . .”

Occasionally, on a bad night in the past, she’d heard teenaged Allistair trying to negotiate with his mother and Boyd when they took their drunken disagreements public, to the street. With a few drinks in him, Boyd could overcome his timidity, like a person in the woods encountering a wild animal, acting bigger than he was, defensive yet false bravado. Their issues were forgettable—certainly to them, tomorrow’s amnesia—blame and counter blame, outrage shouted upon outrage, insult on insult, but Bergeron’s son’s entreaties were always the same:
come inside, please get out of the street
. Heartbreaking, that pleading, unforgettable adenoidal voice.

“Every time she came to my door, it was, you know, like, ‘What fresh hell is this?’ I mostly only saw her when she was drunk, but I know she had some kind of wits about her, since she got shit done in our neighborhood. Since she seemed to bring up a pretty great kid, mostly by herself.” Bergeron the pitiful, whose first and only marriage it was rumored had not lasted more than a summer, that gold-digging, sperm-donor ex-husband who’d left her both pregnant and poorer by half. Also, Bergeron the bully, who’d driven off the homeless and their shelter, who’d prevented the presence of probably harmless AIDS patients. Bergeron the hypocrite, who’d fought and lost many a zoning battle from the confines of her own sagging antebellum monstrosity, in need of paint and roofing and porch repair, not to mention the proliferating cat population, inbred and unhealthy. And Bergeron the legend, debutante, socialite, donor, the Love name a lingering Houston institution, she some sort of mysterious yet powerful black sheep.

But at the evening women’s meeting, Hil didn’t mention what had happened that very morning. The ambulance and fire truck had roused the block at daybreak, pulling into place at Bergeron Love’s front walk from either side, a dozen uniformed people hopping to action, everybody else stepping out in their sweatpants and bathrobes and mussed hair, arms crossed over their chests, curious about what, now, mercurial Bergeron Love had set into motion.

On that earlier, naked night, Hil had excused herself briefly to Bergeron and Janine. In the hall she was grateful for her son’s resolutely closed door. She dialed her neighbor’s number, making her way to the study, the window of which looked out on the street. From there, Hil could see the Love house, the shape of Boyd through the tall front window watching television. But he wouldn’t answer the phone, on the first call. “Oh, hell no,” Hil murmured, dialing the number again. She could almost hear it ringing over there. Could almost hear Boyd’s mighty reluctant sigh as he rose, this time, and picked up. “Hello,” he said hopefully, as if he hadn’t already seen who it was on caller ID. As if he had no idea what he was going to be told. He was a chinless man who had routinely and voluntarily let himself be bossed around, made small. Bergeron wouldn’t marry him—“Fool me once, shame on you,” she’d said on the subject of marriage. “Fool me twice? No, ma’am”—wouldn’t let him be anything other than her aging sillily named
boyfriend
. “You maybe want to come retrieve Bergeron?” Hil said to him.

“She told me she was setting out to get arrested.”

“That hasn’t come to pass just yet. I guess I could call the cops, if you really think she needs all that drama.” Bergeron would not fear authority; her family was superior to most forces. “But it takes so long when there’s uniforms involved. The paperwork.”

Five minutes later Boyd stood wearily at the door. Wearing clothes, Hil was grateful to see. But instead of pulling Bergeron out of Hil’s house, Boyd accepted the reluctantly offered invitation inside and sat in the second of the blue chairs. “Want a drink?” Janine asked him, probably dying to sneak another chocolate bar for herself.

Now that there seemed to be a party going on, it was impossible for Jeremy to ignore the strange ensemble in the living room. Hil hated to hear his bedroom door open.

He greeted Boyd first, Boyd who’d ferried Jeremy many a time across the busy lanes of traffic to his elementary school, whistle shrieking, hand protectively on his back, sign waving. Then Jeremy spotted Bergeron Love in his favorite chair wearing no clothes. He immediately turned away, blushing, a gesture Bergeron pounced upon.

“You can’t be shocked!” she declared. “Give me a break! I betcha you’ve been all over the Internet looking at porn!”

Boyd provided Jeremy with a grimacing shrug; Bergeron Love, in her hat, on the chair, was nothing like Internet porn.

“What are you, on drugs?” Bergeron demanded, faced with Jeremy’s silence. “Are you high?”

“No, ma’am,” Jeremy said, now turning on her his sober, scornful glare. Did she know he was telling her, in his way, that he was fully aware that he was the only unintoxicated person in the room? He next fixed his eyes on the television screen, where the bullet through the heart remained like a new piece of art on the wall, that mesmerizing solar system of bloody mayhem.

“Oh, don’t get all saintly,” Bergeron said, smiling suddenly at Jeremy’s indignation. “Be patient with your elders. Cut us some slack.” She added fondly, “You’re just like Allistair. All serious and all. You remember my son, Allistair?”

Jeremy said he did.

“He didn’t like to be put on the spot, either, didn’t like a direct question, didn’t like a big to-do. Played things pretty close to the vest. He was embarrassed about his mom, too.”

“He’s not embarrassed,” Hil said. Jeremy glanced at her in what she hoped was agreement. After all, it wasn’t Hil who routinely grew drunk and then was driven to getting a few things off her chest with anybody who’d listen. Hil had not, tonight, exited her house wearing nearly nothing to parade around in public. Jeremy went to Al-Anon meetings because his father had made it a condition of their custody arrangement. “They’re OK,” he’d reported to his mother, concerning those meetings. “Lots of hugging. A little too much god talk, for me. I don’t say I’m an atheist anymore, though.”

“That’s a good lesson to learn wherever you hear it,” she’d agreed.

“Allistair was embarrassed, but he loved me,” Bergeron went on. “He’d of done anything for me. Not like Boyd here. Boyd doesn’t love me. The people who love me are all gone except Allistair. Mother and Daddy, my brother George Junior, although not my brother Allistair, that’s Allistair the first. Everybody dead and gone except Allistair the second.”

“I love you,” Boyd put in.

“But,” Bergeron said, taking a few breaths, “sometimes? Sometimes, it’s like Allistair might as well be dead, for as often as I see him. For as often as he seems to think of me.”

Janine cleared her throat quietly.

“He thinks of you,” Jeremy said.

“Bless your heart,” Bergeron told him, “but how in the world would you know?” She then turned to Boyd. “And as for you, Boyd, y
ou
just learned how to say the words
I love you
. I taught you those three words, and how I wish I hadn’t. I might as well live with a parrot, for all they mean to
you
. Hey, where’s your dad, anyway?” Bergeron turned back to Jeremy. “Whatever happened to him? How’d you end up with this big gal in your house instead?”

“Hey now,” said Hil. “No need to be bitchy, Bergeron. You can be naked, and you can interrupt our TV program, but no getting flat-out rude.” Poor Jeremy. What would he tell those hugging teenagers at the next Al-Anon meeting? Did they, like AA, warn of the forbidden thirteenth step? Was it frowned upon to date one’s fellow members?

Jeremy moved to take a seat next to Janine on the couch, loyal to his late-night gaming buddy. As for Janine, she was studying the coffee table, the part in her hair a bright humiliated red. Like many an obese woman, she tended to her hair and makeup fastidiously. Hil tried to remember if this was the same coffee table she and her husband had brought when they moved into the house, twenty years ago. Was it the same one on which Bergeron Love had stood, during her first visit to them, giving her city council campaign speech? Perhaps.

“Do you remember when you were running for city council?” Hil asked.

“Which time?” Boyd said. “She’s run more than once. And lost.” He added this last quietly, somehow vindicated.

“A real reformer is never popular!” Bergeron declared.

“Nineteen ninety or so,” Hil said. “You guys were canvassing the street, Bergeron stumping for herself on the Democratic ticket, and you, Boyd, signing up Republicans. You got up on this very table to give your speech.” Boyd standing aside with his clipboard, as if knowing Bergeron was a perfect argument for the opposition.

Jeremy and Janine laughed.

“Oh, make fun,” said Bergeron. “Go ahead, Bergeron Love’s a crackpot and a nuisance.” She struggled out of the blue chair now, glass of ice in one hand, toothbrush in the other. “Nobody was ever grateful for anything I did, nobody, not you homeowners or your kids, not you, Boyd, you damn cringing mynah bird, not even my own son, Allistair, not even
Allistair
, everybody’s a fucking ingrate. Why run for office? Why give a shit? Why have children?” She turned to Jeremy, who blinked at the force of her fervor.

“Well,” he said, taking a moment to put it politely, “it’s not exactly like he asked you to do it.”

At the meeting that was mostly men, mostly professional men in the medical district, they’d laughed to hear about the naked social call, appreciating the ludicrous image, the backstory details of previous drunken escapades featuring wild card Bergeron Love, even admiring Jeremy’s visit-ending remark. That innocent teenage observation had defused poor Bergeron Love, and Boyd had then been able to rise from the matching blue chair he’d been occupying so ineffectually and guide her limpily out the front door.

“Wow,” Janine had said. “Talk about true crime.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy had agreed. He’d seemed to be studying the paused image on the television.

At the front door, Hil had hugged Bergeron Love, taken into her arms that molten clammy body.

“Don’t tell Allistair, will you?” Bergeron had said into Hil’s ear, no longer angry, no longer an incendiary force, no longer anything but very tired. “Don’t tell my boy.”

After she’d told the medical district AA group all about it, after she’d acknowledged their applause, the mild smile still on the blind man’s face, Hil and her friend Joe went as usual to their favorite Mexican restaurant to debrief.

Joe said, “You didn’t share the part about Bergeron Love being dead now.”

“Yeah, that part would kind of ruin the fun. It doesn’t feel like a satisfying third act. Everybody would get all ashamed when they found out they were laughing about a dead person, right? In between the naked visit and the heart attack was only about five days.”

“Short shelf life, for a crazy story.”

“Exactly.” Joe didn’t care that Hil ordered a beer at Chuy’s. It was his opinion that beer didn’t actually count, as it took so much of it to provide a buzz. He hadn’t had a drink in five years, but it had only been two hours since he’d downed a few Xanax. He was checking his watch to see when he could have another.