Inner Tube: A Novel (7 page)

She moved to the Valley, leaving no forwarding address.

It took some time to adjust to the ephemeral ambience, to find an empty socket in the fast-buck, dollhouse economy. But not that long. I had a two-room efficiency with fifties Sputnik furnishings, and thirty-two hours a week at a sporting goods warehouse. I was doing all right. With my off-time I did as little as possible: listened to the all-news station on the radio, began to keep a scrupulously trite diary. Rain arrived with the fall. I asked myself, Is this the way that Arthur Bremer felt?

Violet was in therapy at this point, compiling pills. She says now that the whole thing was an indulgence, like splurging at the dress shop, but I don’t know. At least she had a woman doctor. The doctor had a degree from the Sorbonne and a boundless faith in chemicals. Violet had such severe depression that she lost eighteen pounds and sensation in the ends of her fingers.

“The terrible thing,” she says now, “was that I’d look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘You’ve never been more beautiful.’”

Her mother came to live with her for a week, went home in tears. Violet stopped filling the prescriptions. After a while she could type again. The thing that brought her out of it was buying that car. The pine-green little scooper that slid us down Mulholland Drive.

Marsh and I talked security systems and watched the sun come up across from his deck. Marsh knew a guy who installed lawn sensors. He’d installed them for a French movie director who moved out two weeks later. Dobermans were more popular than ever. And someone had just opened a gun shop on West Wilshire, filigreed shotguns with pump action.

“I’ve got the flyboys right over here,” Marsh said. “My security comes free of charge.”

There was a sick beige light over the oil drum half we’d roasted a neighbor’s goat (strictly legit, a gift) on. A long night in the hills burning eucalyptus wood. I considered eventual billboards:
HOW MUCH SECURITY CAN YOU AFFORD?

“Just a little coffee and then that’s it.” My hands were shaking.

He went into his endlessly forming smile, leaning toward the water. “It’s full of submarines,” Marsh said.

Around eight-thirty I stopped at a doughnut shop to call the wife. Out all night with the car, still suffering from performance anxiety, and by no means just the one kind. A honey-I-fucked-up-again job.

She said, “I’ll cancel my classes. We’ll go to the beach.”

T
HE LAST FRINGE OF
afternoon has disappeared. With curtains drawn back, light in #6 is part blue, part gray. The radio says we should have unseasonably cool temperatures through tomorrow.

“Really, I have to leave.”

I slide up and kiss her eyes. “That’s what you said half an hour ago.”

“I can’t keep claiming I had engine trouble.” Her jutting teeth clamp on her underlip.

“Ten minutes, ten more minutes, and I’ll dress you myself.”

“Shit.” She reaches across me for the cigarettes. “I want to sleep beside you. We’ve never really done that.”

The phone goes off and we look at each other. If Heidi’s husband calls looking for her, Opatowski usually lets us know. She’s already got her panties on by the time I pick up.

But it’s Violet.

“Hi, sweetie. Going my way?”

I shake my head at Heidi, pat her half of the bed. “It’s been a while.”

“I know. Hectic out here. We had mudslides two weeks ago. You probably heard.”

“The place is all right?”

“More or less. A couple of new trees in the backyard, but the rest of it missed me somehow. Anyway, I’m sitting here listening to those Dinah Washington records and it made me think about you.”

Heidi looks inquiringly at me from the foot of the bed. Her arms hang like pale siphons.

“I always hated the arrangements. All those violins.”

Heidi mouths:
I’m going.
I pull her down next to me.

“But so romantic.” And there’s that Violet laugh, like water over cool rocks. “I always see a penthouse with the moon shining in.”

“Who is it?” Heidi whispers.

“Actually, this isn’t the best time for—”

“You’re put out with me, my long silence. Is that it?”

Heidi blows smoke in my eyes, flicks my nipple.

“I’m a little pressed right now, that’s all I meant.”

“Hurry, hurry. All right, good for you. I’ll give you the hard news and let you get on with whatever it is.”

“Don’t sulk. Please.”

“I’m not. Just shifting gears. I thought you might like to know a friend of mine has offered me a job in Virginia. He’s team leader on a dig starting up next month in Surrey. Seventeenth-century village, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, I can be their physical anthropologist if I want.”

“Real auspicious, Violet. Have you decided?”

“Violet?” Heidi’s tipped off now, pokes me hard. “Who’s Violet?”

“I can get a six-month leave of absence and…Is there someone with you?”

“In fact, yes.”

“You must be in bed. My God, where else could you be in a motel room?”

“Look, Violet…”

“Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed. You were incapable when I knew you.”

I’m wondering about this “friend” of hers. Probably an ursine type, pipe and corduroys, always under control, collects Elizabethan limericks. But not above exacting a favor in return for one of his own. I don’t like him.

Violet is tracing the mandatory ambivalences, teasing herself, while Heidi tugs on the phone cord.

I say: “Go ahead, talk to her.”

Heidi freezes up once she’s got the receiver. I can make out Violet’s voice, flat and clipped like a taxi dispatcher, but no words.

“I didn’t know,” Heidi says finally. She marches to the bathroom. Wham goes the door.

“What the hell did you say to her?”

“I can’t imagine. It was all perfectly neutral, factual. Is she upset?”

I sense Violet’s lecture-hall personality emerging. Maybe I can still head it off. “So you’re soaking up some Dinah, huh?” And I sing the last verse of “That Old Feeling.”

“I’ll miss you, Violet. Over there in Virginia with your relic brushes.”

“No need. They have telephones there.”

“But the geography is different, the mileage. You won’t be nearby anymore. Means nothing in practical terms, but that feeling, I don’t know, it always seemed important.”

Violet breathing into the mouthpiece is like a light rain on fallen leaves.

“You’re awfully sweet,” she says. “I should come and see you on my way across. I think I will. But go on now, you have to take care of your friend.”

Click.

I have neglected to tell you how beautiful Violet is. She knows it, too. No wonder her students kept calling at all hours. There is no excess in her face, no one element that dominates. Everything about her is smooth and light. Touching her skin had the delicacy of floating. And I remember her walking away from me one afternoon along a row of Lombardy poplars; she was tall and streamlined, like the trees, and her fox-red hair coiled around her head in the wind. “You don’t need me, you need an entourage,” I said. She kept on, but her stride shortened.

I open the bathroom door and Heidi’s hands come up over her breasts. Indignation has dissolved the casual laxity of fifteen minutes ago. Her mouth is tight and her lungs are pumping hard. On the edge of speech, she changes her mind and shoulders past me. Silently, and so vehemently I’m worried they’ll tear, she gets into her clothes.

“Heidi. We’ve been divorced for over three years.”

“And you still talk to her that way. ‘Ooo, Violet, it’s been such a long time.’” Her imitation is fruity, singsong.

“Am I obliged to hang up on her?”

Heidi curses the zipper on her dress, turns her back to me. “I don’t really care what you say or how. Forget that part. What hurts is you made her a secret.”

“Not like that, not like I was purposely keeping anything from you.” She jerks away from my hand as if it’s electrified. “So I was married for a while. That doesn’t amount to shit right now, right here.”

Heidi gains momentum as she untangles her hair, smears blusher on her pitted cheeks. “Right here. It’s like a coded message when I’m with you. We never talk. You never tell me things.”

“What is it you’d like to know?”

“Miss the point, go ahead.” She pops the p and a mist of saliva settles on my chin. “This thing or that thing, it’s not the facts I’m after. An even chance is all. You’re supposed to be so smart and I have to lead you by the nose. What does it come down to when people make secrets? What do you suppose it means when two lovers…We are supposed to be lovers,
verdad?
Or am I in the dark on that too? I’m not a pickup, goddammit.”

I know it’s a mistake, the contrition I give her. I know I should protect her from expectations. But I’m not a complete prick. Heidi’s entitled to some comfort. On any reasonable scale of operation, this comes under the heading of being polite.

I hold her, rock her. I promise not to hide things anymore. Running my hand up the back of her dress, I come upon a dot of crusted secretion, hers or mine. She says all I have to-do is trust her like a friend, and I say okay. We’re standing by the window, saturated by the yellowish light of the Golconda sign.
WEEKLY
&
MONTHLY RATES.
A trailer truck rolls past, air brakes snuffling. Dishes clank in the cafe and the jukebox comes on; someone’s pushed the buttons for a ranchero.

At last, Heidi peels herself away. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“I know.”

Her skin is cool, she’s smiling, and her eyes aren’t the least bit moist. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” She hurries toward her car, then turns back, rotating one finger against her skull. “Thank God.”

“Thank God what?” I’m standing in the doorway holding a towel closed around my waist.

“Thank God my casserole only needs to be heated.”

W
AKE UP THIS MORNING
with pizzicato
Lunchtime Movie
music running in my head. It won’t stop. Implanted violins follow me in and out of the shower. I Q-tip my ears extra hard, but the plinking doesn’t leave with the wax. Turn on the radio to drown it out and a baritone reads to me:

“Puerto Rican terrorist Concepcion Buendia said today that he spared the life of Treasury Secretary Richard Goodyear when Secret Service agents made their dawn raid to rescue the kidnapped official because he couldn’t bring himself to hate him.

“‘I had all the time I needed to shoot,’ Buendia told investigators. ‘But I could not succeed in seeing him as an enemy, only a man who was sleeping.’”

I think that once or twice watching a woman sleep, overcome by her stillness, I have wept. Not something I am particularly proud of, but there it is. Every tub on its own bottom. Every lonely beast in its own separate bed.

No time for coffee, have to get moving right away. This
Lunchtime Movie
room is like something pressing on my throat. I’ll drive with all the windows open and the speedometer pinned. A couple aspirin for my stiff neck and then I wrestle clothes on over my wet skin. Boots in case I feel like hiking, a hat to shade my eyes. On the way out, I check one of my experimental stations. Day 10 for the mold garden, if I haven’t flubbed my count, and a good crop of cottony mycelium growing on the Little wedge of papaya; thousands of light-gray spores so it resembles mouse fur. In the other mayo jar, beginning liquefaction of a freestone cherry indicates the presence of larval maggots. Some things are running smoothly and right. The speechless things.

Mrs. O. is folded into the cement bench by the office, waiting for a cab. Her feet dangle in the air. She looks ready to turn to powder inside, and seeing her just now, for some reason I imagine small birds spit-roasted over an open fire. I pick her lumpy red handbag up out of the petunia bed.

“Took no notice when I put it down,” she says. “Been fasting and I’m just a bit lightheaded.”

“Fasting?”

“Fruit juice four times a day. I needed to move out all the starch that was clogging me up.”

Mrs. O. is planning to spend the afternoon at her breath alchemy workshop with Master Han. Self-healing, she explains, is the only kind that works, but at the same time you need to be guided.

“Master Han believes in reeducating the brain by tracing how a person moved in infancy from prone to standing up. He tries to discover gaps in your movements supported by the endocrine system. Glands can reflect mind states, you know.”

“You want to save the cab money, I’ll ride you over.”

She grins and runs her knuckles up my arm. “You’re a good New York boy, anyone can see that. Generous. No, you go ahead your way. I like to talk to Mr. Suarez on the trip and I brought him kugel.”

One of the lumps in her bag, cold starch. So I leave her there by the petunias with the sun sparking yellow on her stainless steel cane.

I head west out of town, a squirrel’s jawbone swinging from my rearview mirror on black thread. I picked it from desiccate remains near a convenience grocery, just a few feet beyond the asphalt apron in a snarl of sticks and paper. Kneeling there, smelling the exhaust of cars left running for the quick-stop shop, I tugged at the small worn teeth and they came away in my fingers. I head west toward itching thirst and the air force test range. The matinee violins are still with me, but the tempo has slowed.

The topography of space operas. Except for what my three thousand pounds of Detroit steel displaces, the air is motionless. But something in it seems to bend the light, angle it into my face so that even behind my defenses of tinted glass, visor, and hat I must squint. As I go straight and hard down the blacktop I pass a million invisible roads of lizard, millipede, coral snake, tarantula, giant hairy scorpion. Scattered plants are spiked or spined or even venomous. No escape from this landscape, its inaudible ferocity.

Now begins the barbed fencing, the fat red lettering of
NO CIVILIAN ACCESS
Bleak buzzard acres you could prospect for spent casings and pilots’ bones, where the shallow soup holes are poisoned with radon and sulfur. Far off, below the rusty red foothills, I sight a line of sheds. Hard glare on metallic roofs, and tan smudges that must be plywood nailed over doors and windows. Haunted barracks, maybe a nerve gas depot now, heavy drums all sealed away. Another mile of fencing,
AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY,
a corroded and de-tired Jeep—human earmarks more ominous than forlorn. And somewhere it can’t be seen, so Opatowski says, they’ve built a replica of Saudi oilfields for paratroop maneuvers, and a dummy target range of silos.