Inner Tube: A Novel (13 page)

The last television appearance of her paltry career, a cosmetics spot. Immaculate, she moves dreamily at the edge of a formal garden.

“Treat yourself like royalty,” my mother says.

On her pilgrimages into Manhattan, she usually had lunch with Sonia Brooks. They had both sung in the choir at Temple University, had both seen their young ambitions wither in the perpetual shade of a city too tall. Sonia would never get a seat on the stock exchange and my mother wasn’t going to star in a prize-winning revival of
Anna Lucasta,
so they foraged for ethnic restaurants and obscure museums, drank in hotel bars and flirted hazardlessly with waiters.

Soma’s husband, a Scottish homosexual, ran an advertising agency named after himself. His client list included a hotel in the Poconos, a commuter airline, textile mills and medical supply houses, the tourist bureau of a blighted Caribbean island, and a brand-new product called Dewbeads.

“Made from goat placentas or something.” Sonia tied a knot in her cocktail straw. “And this TV ad they’re planning—I’ve seen the storyboard and all—it’s perfect for you. Mature but handsome, a vision from the tennis court, like—”

“Too bad I don’t work anymore,” my mother said.

“Damn you.” Sonia hissed like a sub-code steam line with drunken belligerence, her tipped Punt E Mes bleeding into the tablecloth. “Damn your reticence. Ian has an awful case of amoebic dysentery and he’ll do anything I say. Do you want the thing or don’t you?”

Rising at 4 a.m., breakfasting on vodka and grape juice, my mother was limousined to the location, an estate in Lyme, Connecticut, that had recently come under the aegis of the National Historic Trust.

The company man was distressed. “It’s a fucking castle. It’s intimidating,” he said. “Okay, the look is nice, but we’ve got to move product.”

“Exteriors only,” said the director, a graduate of the Austrian State Film School. “No castle.”

In the garden, union men in green jumpsuits sprayed blossoms with glycerin water while my mother circled a marble fountain and tried to remember her lines.

“You must be calm but underneath in flames,” the director told her. “You await your lover here. You are wet between the legs in anticipation. In every movement of your body, we must read this sad history.”

On the first take, she trembled so badly that the company man asked if she was on drugs. She took it too fast, too slow, missed marks. A light stand fell, a plane passed overhead. On the sixteenth take, she tripped on a flagstone and soiled her white dress.

“Better pull yourself together,” the wardrobe lady cautioned. “They’re really frantic out there.”

My mother sobbed on a cot inside the little airless trailer. She considered making a break, heading off into the trees, but imagined them tracking her with dogs.

“Just pretend everyone else is like out on bail,” said the wardrobe lady. “That’s how I do it.”

Outside, the sun was high, seemed to pulse. Unhappy with lighting conditions, the director worked himself into a tantrum, struck at a mike boom and ripped open his hand. The company man fled to phone New York.

“There was something about the sight of blood,” she later told us. “It filled me with a sense of peace.”

They wrapped on the twenty-first take and my mother passed out on the limo ride home, dreamed of Sonia selling shares in a Viennese blood bank.

The Dewbeads commercial aired for the first time on a network telecast of
Charade
with Audrey Hepburn, and we all circled the set to applaud.

“I’ve never seen you look so beautiful,” Carla breathed, plucking her lip, smelling of bath talc.

“Convincing,” judged Gordo, and filled his mouth with cashews.

I said: “Mom, this is what you need to get restarted.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She looked wistfully at the screen, where George Kennedy was swinging the shiny metal hook he had in place of a hand. “I even have new pictures to send out.”

I no longer believe, as I did then, that she allowed herself any real expectations. And, in fact, nothing ever came of it, beyond a personal appearance at a shopping plaza in Valley Stream. Dewbeads, widely reported to cause skin rash, was eventually removed from the market by the Food and Drug Administration. Sonia Brooks went to live on a Moravian farm near Wilmington. The glossy eight-by-tens remained in a bedroom drawer, unsent.

I watch it over and over again. The tidy rows of zinnias and marigolds, boxwood and hemlock in topiary geometries, sun glinting on the fountain’s distant spray. In white, lovely as a stranger…

I am bound to her by chemical strands impossible to sever, by an overwhelming, overriding instinct: avoidance of pain. Damn our reticence. I’ve thought of her countless times in the long years since her dive into the tube and never once missed her, never once wanted to pull her back out. She is where she belongs, and so am I. On opposite sides, each one, blinking reflexively.

“Dewbeads,” my mother says. “Because we deserve it.”

O
VERTRIMMED WHITE HOUSES WITH
circular driveways. Lawns clipped and edged, alike as burial plots. Two girls in pleated skirts and kneesocks who rush excitedly toward an open convertible where lettermen slouch in wait.

The marine amoebae Formanifera exist inside calcite shells and send out branched filaments in search of food. One million fibers make up the human optic nerve and mine are hard at work, assembling this picture of an unlisted street, an invented town.

That kind of day at the facility: imagining relationships that aren’t there, looking over my shoulder. Too much time underground and I suspect myself. Now here’s Eduardo with the mail cart and a smile that slides all over his face.

“Something personal.”

He dangles the envelope and I see a jaggedly halved lipstick heart on the flap. Violet, only Violet. A collector of the gestures of romance.

“Going to read it out loud?”

“Not to you.”

He tugs at his left ear, mangled by a highway patrol bullet. “You shouldn’t be so stingy with Eduardo. Don’t you know he’s culturally deprived?”

The envelope is thick, addressed in the angular, pressured handwriting.

Darling—

This took courage to send, but I had some saved up, there being little call for it out here. The Virginia position I phoned about has evaporated…funding cuts as well as “personality differences.” A juicy tale here, which you can only have in person. It’s a round-trip ticket, as you can see. No traps. Last night I cried just from looking at a cake pan. I remember small things with you, and the smaller, the more trivial, the sharper the twinge. Please say you’ll come. I’ll bake unforgettable cakes.

Vee

Sharply pointed Vee, expert scene designer, quick-change artist, greatest fuck of my life. I never could keep up with your generous provocations, or the empty difficulties that came up just as fast. But when you had a grip on yourself, which, as I discovered, was just barely most of the time…

No traps, you say? Don’t feed me that angel food. I can match you recall for recall: winding, with a tight focus anticipating the classroom, your German alarm clock sans numerals; that pertinent walk when you weren’t really going anywhere, arms swinging close as if you were polishing yourself; exuberant eyes as your machine emerged from the car wash slick and glistening like a newborn; a low, two-syllable hum while I excavated by suction those rich salt deposits below the rim of your instep.

So on and on. Uninterrupted, uninterpreted. Letting images spill is the easy part, no distinctions made. But to look away, to say no when temptation is hard and sharp against your stomach like a spear, is connivance at its best. Anyway, something close to it.

There is no more call for courage where I am than where you are, but the air is light and easily penetrated. I see things: my narrowness, blundering capacity for harm, suspended appetite for the activities that make up a “life.” Dear angular, deeply clefted Vee, I am useless to you, a hard, rebuking vacancy like the silence after a thousand cake pans clatter.

Skirts and letter sweaters swirl in the flimsy-looking malt shoppe, below the sign that says
NO DANCING.
Youthful high spirits, Mr. Mayor. They’re celebrating the big win over South Central State. Lindyhopping fringe bit actors whose animating thoughts are of doing
Bus Stop
in an amphitheater, or an unannounced, show-stopping Cohan medley at a benefit for crippled children; who celebrate raw delusion with every swirl.

So I look away, into the sure alignments of this airline ticket. Depart. Arrive. Carrier assumes no responsibility for…

For ex-wives who, to be sure of anything, require regular distress. And not enough the subterfuges of students or some incident on the freeway. Violet needs the intimate, twisting jabs of someone close. But her mother is too old and soft to peck as she once did, her twist-expert sisters gone with their ambitious husbands to Bahrain and Fort Worth, her usual friends too feckless or too repressed. Why can’t I comfort her? Make the awful quiet go away? Because the speed and the stamina are all gone. As James Brown used to croon, I’m tired but I’m clean.

Here. I’m here, Violet, and that’s all. I’m all packaged up here, in my viewing booth, in my car, in an air-conditioned unit that Heidi keeps straight for me. Yes, Violet, and it’s so easy to be with her in that cool, dark room. She’s tense and bony as a child. She’s fitful and clammy and disorganized. And when the mucus pours from between her legs, mouth around her own frantic fingers, Heidi doesn’t know who I am—or care. Nothing asked or surrendered. Two creatures following the dictates of their chromosomes.

That’s right, sure. Smoke is just particulate matter in suspension. And the television picture is only a description of light—light hitting a surface.

M
RS. O. MUST BE
feeling stronger. For the second Saturday in a row she’s in among the flowerbeds with clippers and weeding claw. The sun is high and she wears a maroon-and-white baseball cap advertising electrolyte salts for livestock. Strap-on rubber pads protect her knees.

I’m here with my feet propped on the air conditioner, watching her through the window. A slow news day. My pet scorpion slumbers under pine bark, water drips from the showerhead, and all I see when I close my eyes is a plate of shredded lettuce floating in space. The old lady shames me. Come on, slick, get those corpuscles moving.

Into the heat, across the empty parking lot. I squat down slowly and dabble my fingers in the dirt, ask Mrs. O. if she could use some help.

“My biorhythms are very favorable today.” She grins, a display of shoepeg teeth. “I like to get nice and dirty when I can.”

“I could do the edging along here. I’m good at that.”

“Sometimes, when I have to stay lying down, it’s like forgetting who you are…. The size of him! Those worms mean good aeration, you know!”

The sun is like something prying at me, a sharp tool.

“Do you want your package now?”

“Now?”

“With the prettiest stamps all over. You’ll see.”

The stamps, from the American Reptile series, are avocado green. Another book from Violet:
Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone.
A bold black box on the flyleaf in which the publisher promotes his whole line: “These spirited tales are impressed upon the memory and their reading is productive only of good.”

Without explicit warning, Violet went to Mexico for a divorce. She took me out to dinner the next week, and, in the middle of a monologue on Toltec burial practices, handed over a teller’s check for two thousand dollars.

“Your settlement,” she said. “It would be more, but they rolled back my cost-of-living adjustment.”

Eyes fixed on my mulligatawny soup, I said, “I’m a chiseler, Violet. I held out on you from the start.”

“Relax, you earned it. Hazard pay.”

I wasn’t talking about money, and she knew that. But she was so prepared, so clipped in her attitude. I wanted to explain where the fault lines were, why I’d dodged away, what to avoid next time.

Violet pressed cool fingers over my mouth. “Send me a letter.”

At eleven that night I boarded a Trailways Night Owl Express for Las Vegas. Crescent moon over the Shadow Mountains, high school lovers across the aisle. I smoked until my throat felt torn, surprised to discover so many regrets. At sunrise a wide woman with greasy blonde hair stepped into the toilet with a flight bag and came out dressed as a cowgirl.

Breakfast at the top of the Strip: silver dollar pancakes, keno numbers dropping out of the loudspeaker. The man on the seat next to me held a vibrating device to his throat in order to speak.

“Lost my wife,” he said, sounding like a Martian. “Wouldn’t mind ’cept she’s got the car keys.”

That seemed like my cue to get started. Nothing in the way, so run. I took my divorce money to the cage, came away bulging with chips, found an empty blackjack table where I could play multiple hands. Lorraine, the dealer, kept pulling four-and five-card miracles and I was down six hundred before I could finish my first gratis cocktail. Nice.

I went up a brass escalator, into something called the Red Rooster Room, where dull-eyed union musicians played sleeve-garter jazz. I had some martinis and thought how grim industrialized pleasure could be. Right on schedule. I was lighting the filter ends of cigarettes and talking to myself, about to cross over into perilous nobody-seems-to-care territory. Blessed instinct led me back to the pack. I wobbled south past the Stardust and the Flamingo, where Bugsy Siegel started it all, from crap table to crap table, throwing away ten dollar chips on the field numbers, into and out of Romanesque bathrooms to confirm my hunted look in mirrors. Bells and bars and plums. I finally went broke, quarter by quarter, in a shiny corridor of slot machines, bellowing my relief until ejected by a black security guard.

Next thing, I was crouching by a fountain lit with blue lamps. Above me on fluted columns rose a huge sign announcing the week’s headliners:
SHIRLEY BASSEY
and
JACKIE GAYLE. I
crouched and shivered and rubbed my red eyes. A car pulled up on its way to the street and the driver rolled his window down.