Inner Tube: A Novel (6 page)

He stops, waiting to be prompted, but we look blank. I’m wondering what song the anarchist was singing.

“The whole thing is this: to go out of this world as late as possible.”

“That’s it?” Heidi says, like someone’s just taken her last dollar with a pair of loaded dice.

“Strive to survive and fight for every last day you can. That’s all there is, dearie.”

“This shit I don’t need.” Heidi gets up and heads for the car. She’s genuinely pissed.

No more than a mile since we passed a speed trap, but there’s her foot pressing down on mine and the gas pedal is to the floor.

“Lighten up, sugar. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“You always say that.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, it’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?”

She has a taste for absolute terms—always, all, never—and I have neither the desire nor the arrogance to try and interest her in subtleties.

“Sleepwalking through life, that’s me.”

“You asshole, and you’re proud of it.”

I start to touch her face and she plasters herself against the door. “There are things that matter, you know. It’s not all just a dance.” Her arms are folded tight, her lips stretched thin.

I don’t understand this friction, do you? A perfect day. She said so herself.

R
OMANCE IS FOR MOST
of us like a career; we pursue it solemnly, unscrupulously, and meet its usual disappointments with ill grace. In the course of things I have slept with seventeen different women and the lies I told them were ones I myself believed. Complacence, inconsistency, self-defense—I am a thoroughly ordinary man. But think of this: The cruelest thing we can do to one another is to have expectations.

Just now I am having an affair with the maid at my motel. Heidi is straitened, but a woman who breathes freely no matter what. She has hard eyes and a ninety-six pound whippet body. Her face is a battlefield—long nose, prominent teeth, and the acne scars that shame her, that she tries to disguise with Max Factor foundation, which cakes up like silt in the pits. There is ambivalence in her, but no confusion. Families are the affliction of her life. The family she came from, the one she helped to start. Heidi needs to be alone. I want to help her.

She was fourteen in Zanesville, Ohio, when her mother died like this: Working part-time at a luncheonette, she was badly burned by the deep-fat fryer. A friend volunteered to drive her to a hospital but the manager said for insurance purposes she should go in an ambulance. The ambulance hit a patch of ice, flew into a lake, and all aboard were drowned. Heidi answered the phone and it was a state trooper calling.

A couple of months later she moved west with her sisters and her father, the mine inspector. She went to high school in five different states and married the first man who thought to ask her.

I had been at the Golconda less than two weeks. It was a Saturday morning and a girl let herself into my room with a key. I was naked in bed, smoking and watching the set: cartoons with no sound. Like a lush-worker on New Year’s Eve, wasting no time, she started right in on me.

“You got any complaints about the room, mister, I’d like to hear them.”

The best I could do was “No,” and spread out the sheet a little.

“Okay then. Maybe you’re from Canada or somewhere, but we got a deal out here where you leave a little something for the girl who does up your room. I been waiting on you, figure maybe you’re one of those end-of-the-week, hide-it-under-the-pillow types. But nothing. Not gratuity one do I see from you. Maybe you think I don’t mind bending over to wipe scum off the toilet rim or pick toenails off the carpet. But it’s some shabby work moving through strangers’ crap every day. They pay me like an Indian and never once…”

She waved it all away, turned to one side. “Oh God,” pressing fingertips against her hairline, “you must think I’m a total idiot acting like this.”

“No. You’re right. It’s me. I have a way of missing out on obvious details. My jacket. It’s rolled up behind that chair. Go ahead in the pocket and take whatever you think’s fair.”

“You’re serious?”

“So they tell me.”

She drew a bill from my pocket with two fingers, then looked over at me plucking hairs above my sternum. She had a laugh like a tropical bird, a trill I could watch moving up her throat.

Lifting her eyes to the ceiling, “Mama, this ain’t how it looks.”

“Not at all. I had a lovely time. What’s your name, anyhow?”

“Linda,” she said, leaving no doubt it was a lie.

“Linda. That’s Spanish, isn’t it?”

She went out the door, then curled her head back around. “Something else you could do for me is quit throwing your dental floss in the sink.”

Monday morning I was ready for her. I’d called in to the facility, reported car trouble, and when she showed around ten I had candles burning and a bottle of Solano County champagne iced down in the sink. Leaning up against her utility cart with bangs awry, she had a sullen white-trash look of too many years’ macaroni and soup beans.

“What the hell are you up to?” she said.

And I wondered myself. But once I’d coaxed her inside I sensed as before her scrawny heat, and desire rose in me like nausea. I popped the cork.

She looked suspiciously into her glass. “If this is about the other day…Listen, I was under some pressure, driving all around for a place to let it out, and you got elected, that’s all.”

“
Salud,
” I said.

“What I mean is don’t take me at face value, okay?” Then she grimaced, tossed her head in a way that told me she had realized a possible reference to her homely features.

“Sit back and relax,” I suggested.

She turned from me to look out the window at the cars.

“Linda,” I said, “I’m not worried about values at all. Now why don’t you sit down here and watch while I take care of the room.”

I grabbed fresh linen off the cart and started stripping the bed.

“You must be drunk already.” She reached for the bottle, willing to catch up with me.

I wiped the ashtrays, emptied the wastebaskets, laid in fresh soap and towels. I made merry with brushes and spray bottles, touched up with aerosol disinfectant.

“Very nice.” She was rolling soft candle wax in her fingers. “Is there a point I’m not getting?”

“Now we’re on equal ground,” I said, having no idea what I meant.

We sat watching television for an hour or so, and then I left for work.

You were, I suppose, expecting a seduction. As there was no disappointment on my part, let there be none on yours. I cannot change the facts: Lust no more obviates the need for skepticism than it cures banality.

Heidi was compliant in her thoughtless way, positioning herself amid the furniture like a showroom mannequin. Compliant but inapproachable. Something forced me back from my impulses to put on a tape of Enroll Garner playing “Penthouse Serenade,” to slide my hand along her spine and look for her heartbeat in the wrong place; some nameless instinct did this. But all I can be sure of is what I don’t know.

On Tuesday I got her name and number from Opatowski, who volunteered that he’d only hired her because she looked so underfed.

Her husband picked up the phone, instantly truculent.

“Mrs. Romar, please,” I said in my own voice.

“Yeah, who wants her?”

I pretended to be from a national recipe contest, first prize a trip to Tokyo and ten thousand cash. He put her on.

“Hi, it’s room six. Did I get you at a bad time?”

She agreed. She agreed to everything. We would meet at a neutral site after midnight and take it from there. I purposely arrived fifteen minutes early, but she was already waiting.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.

“Me too.”

The stars were like pinpricks. We went behind some rocks, laid a blanket on the ground, and fucked like prairie dogs.

A
BOUT SIXTY TIMES A
second. That’s how fast the hummingbirds beat their wings as they hovered at the bottle of red sugar water that hung outside our bedroom window. Violet brightened on mornings they’d arrive, taking it as an omen of sweetness for the rest of the day. At night, like the birds, she would lapse into a state of torpor. It wasn’t the casuistries of the Soc-Anthro industry getting her down, but me. This was during my early wanderlust, after the first thirteen weeks of marriage had played.

Violet was altogether charmed by the idea of “keeping” me, and for a span so was I. It’s not easy to denounce pampering no matter how kenneled up you start to feel. So I donned the Chinese silk pajamas, shaved more often than was necessary, tried different fruit combinations in the juicer (her parents’ hesitant wedding gift), and when toward evening I grew punchy, I would sometimes read aloud to myself of infant mortality patterns in Southern Asia or of Uzbek shamanism from the scholarly journals my wife stacked like furtive beaver mags in her closet. A day would perish by a kind of melting process. Never fully awake, I found it the most natural thing to slither into bed whenever Violet came in. Dinner was brought to me on a tray.

Still, it was a purely expository interlude, like the tumbling calendar leaves of an old movie. A vague fragrance of bed linen followed me everywhere and I started to cut myself up while shaving. Violet crayoned in my silences with the records she brought home by the armload; guaguancos and sambas, gamlans and cane flutes. Soon my nastiness was uncontainable.

“No,” I shouted, “I don’t want you to run me a fucking bath!”

Poor confounded Violet. I was worse than one of her students. It was a larger sample that was missing. I needed to hear someone else’s thoughts and opinions.

I had a friend who lived in Tuna Canyon, as yet a lightly populated zone. His place was up high near an air force radar tracking station and you could step out on his deck to look over dark sky and water and say, “It’s a tuna moon-a tonight.” The sun was direct all day long, could make things pretty stifling in the greenhouse; you misted yourself along with the plants. My friend’s business was illegal horticulture. Opium poppies, psilocybe mushrooms, Hawaiian wood rose, like that. He also brokered smuggled tropicals (even orchid collectors have their intrigues), and serviced an impressively wide market for bootleg roses. That’s right. Next time you buy one of those boxed hybrids, look at the little medallion it wears:
ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION OF THIS PATENTED PLANT WITHOUT LICENSE IS PROHIBITED.

So I was up there one day singing my usual blues as I watched Marsh feed seedlings with an eyedropper.

“Frankly,” he said, “I don’t get all this static you’re putting out. She’s a bloody gem.”

“But, Marsh, I live like an invalid.”

“Exactly. That’s what paradise is all about in this town. Those Bel Air grandees spend all kinds of money and effort to achieve that state of utter helplessness. So get with the program, son, join the party.”

Okay, paradise meant having your own nutritional counselor and a Central American refugee to pumice your bunions. This was not an insight I could use.

“I daydream about auto accidents.” Taking a defensive sip from my rum collins. “I call up dentists and make imaginary appointments.”

“You should stop fighting your own normalcy, that’s my opinion.”

“It’s consumerism. Nothing but appearances.”

Finally Marsh told me to cheer up or shut up, I was disturbing the plants. I decided to do both.

But three days later Violet’s car was stolen from her campus parking space and we were plunged into a time of internal exile. Huddled in the apartment like a couple of Soviet dissidents, we developed a conversation of codes after wearying each other with previously covert intimacies. Traditional doubts, the plucking of questions—they belonged in this space. But a sense of artificiality was best for both of us. It was simpler to play hand after hand of five hundred rummy. We were such lazy people.

“The only things you can fix are machines,” Violet said after another immaterial call to the police.

I adored her sloppy exasperation, the rabbity twitching of muscle pads along her jaw as she ground her molars. I did not like to think about how much she’d invested in me.

“My darling,” I hummed.

“I mean it,” she said.

The timer dinged for the cheese pudding she had in the oven, and then I said something about what was one more missing Fiat, they were busy keeping the streets safe for plutocracy. Violet sometimes worried that I was in love with my own mouth. She stood up with such sadness in her loose arms and…well, certain things do not wish to be described.

Violet garnished our plates with sprigs of cilantro and carrot coins and I dealt another hand. That night we went for a walk, held hands, saw a huge man playing on his lawn with a turtle. He called it by name. Fritz. We held hands and looked at the stars (but only out of the corners of our eyes) and we wished for something. We were always wishing for something.

When I first came to L.A. I didn’t know anyone. It was summer, dead center. I sunned on bus stop benches. I looked at women browsing in drugstores. Burritos three times a day. Hunting for toilets. Mumbling into the wind. I wanted a job at the zoo. A Mexican in gumboots was hosing out the lemur cages and he laughed when I asked about it.

“You got to take a test,” he sad, and wrote his initials on the back wall with spray.

Violet, at this same time, was involved with someone ten years younger. Fragile. A troubled homelife. He was a lifeguard at a condominium tower in Marina Del Rey.

“I sort’ve liked it when he tied me up,” Violet told me. “An enthusiastic kid. Such bright black eyes. It felt like a camping trip or something. He’d want to show me every knot.”

Other men stressed her, but she always felt cool inside with him. Violet, sober by profession, don’t forget, distrusts flash and style (translation: anyone else’s), and he was so impervious, so very much without either, even wearing turquoise glasses and glistening with cocoa butter in his high white chair.

So imagine, please, her grim contorted Violet-like sense of shock when, on a weekend she was visiting her parents, he let himself in with the key she’d given him and slashed all her clothes, cut careful triangular holes in the crotch of all her panties.