Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (7 page)

 4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.

 5. Eagerly, Oscar taught Bosie the backstroke.

 6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.

 7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.

 8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.

 9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.

10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.

Paul complained bitterly about Bonnie at home, especially on those days when she had caught him asleep in front of his monitor in the middle of the afternoon. What he didn’t tell Kym was that most of his coworkers were pert and stylish young women ten years younger than him, women just out of college who wore airy sundresses or tight, wraparound skirts to the office all summer long and decorated their cubes semi-ironically with magazine photos of pretty-boy actors. Some of these girls found Paul’s wiseass bitterness intriguing, and they slouched fetchingly in his cube doorway and flirted with him about books and movies, grad school life, or last night’s episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. One of them, a dark little Russian emigré named Oksana who worked in the Harbridge science department, took Paul into her bed on the evenings when Kym was working. Oksana had a wry twist to her lips and an adorable accent. “Say ‘moose and squirrel,’ ” he’d murmured to her in the clinch, and she’d slapped him on the backside and whispered salacious Russian in his ear.

On those evenings when Kym was working and moody Oksana did not want to see him, Paul haunted the coffeehouses near the campus, where he could eye bohemian young women or intense graduate students in sleeveless blouses over a copy of the local alternative weekly. He had prepared a story to explain
his situation in case he managed to engage one of these thrilling women in conversation; the last thing he wanted them to know was that he was a failed English professor. Instead, he told them that he was a former writer/producer for
The X-Files
, and that he had walked away from his television career and moved to Lamar to write a novel. “I wanted to get out before the show went down the tubes,” he was going to tell them, and he had prepared answers to the questions he thought he was likely to get: “He’s an asshole.” “She’s even smarter than she looks.” And “I wrote the ones about worms. If it had a worm or worms in it, that one was mine.” But in the end, he wasn’t able to use the story. In one of the coffeehouses, a renovated old house with creaking floors and mismatched couches and easy chairs, he ran into Virginia Dunning, an old friend of his ex-wife’s from graduate school. Paul had always considered Virginia a bit too, well, virginal for his taste, but since he had known her in Hamilton Groves she had picked up a mordant wit that Paul found instantly attractive. To Paul’s astonishment and envy, Virginia was not only a tenured full professor before she was thirty, she was already chair of the Longhorn State History Department. To his further surprise she invited him back that first night to her little Texas bungalow, where, as luck would have it, she lived with a cat, whose name was Sam, and who put his ears back and flattened himself to the floorboards at the sight of his mistress and Paul coming through the door. “Don’t mind him,” said Virginia, “he’s an idiot.” Paul laughed, but he wasn’t quite sure if Virginia was talking to him or to the cat.

Virginia’s avidity in bed was yet another surprise. “I’ve never fucked a department chair before,” he murmured in her ear, and Virginia flung him onto his back, straddled him, and said, “Let’s see if you’re tenure material, Professor.” Afterwards she rolled over and went to sleep, and on the drive home, Paul had time to contemplate the three women in his life, none of whom knew about the other two. He’d told Oksana that he lived alone, and he’d told Virginia that he was working as an “independent scholar,” a dodge he’d come across during his abortive attempt
to write a book. Rattling home through the hot Texas night, Paul thought, my life could be worse.

Shortly thereafter, it was. Oksana discovered Paul and Virginia tête à tête one evening in a coffeehouse near campus, while Kym coincidentally happened to be on the television set in the corner, making vapid small talk with the Weather Gnome. Oksana stalked across the creaking floorboards, screaming abuse in Russian. Then, as Virginia looked on in astonishment, Oksana emptied her double latte into Paul’s lap and stalked off, pausing only to add, in her adorably accented English, “Focking esshole!”

Oddly enough, this incident didn’t seem to bother Virginia, who simply shrugged it off. But later that same night, as Paul followed Virginia into her bungalow, Sam went into his crouch, hissing and growling before he bolted from sight.

“Idiot,” muttered Virginia.

“I don’t think he’s hissing at you,” Paul said, still brushing at the coffee stain on his trousers. “He’s hissing at your dog.”

“What dog?” Virginia whirled on him.

“That big black dog that came in right behind you,” Paul said. “I assumed he was yours.” He glanced about Virginia’s living room. “I don’t see him now.”

Virginia stared at him, all the blood draining from her face. “Get out!” she gasped.

“Sorry?”

She drew a shuddering breath, as if gasping for air at high altitude, and shouted,
“Get out!”

“Is this about the girl at the coffeehouse?” Paul asked, as she slammed the door in his face. “I can explain that!”

The following morning he lost his job at the textbook company. A sharp-eyed copy editor had caught some of Paul’s subliminal messages, and that morning the efforts of the entire department had been diverted to reading through every grammar exercise written in the last six months.

“ ‘EAT ME SATAN’?” said Bonnie, gleeful with schadenfreude. “I suppose you think that’s funny?”

In the end Paul was escorted from the building by a beefy
security guard who repeatedly called him “sir” as he yanked Paul’s arm up behind his back and marched him to the elevator on his tiptoes.

“I have a real Ph.D. from a real goddamn university, not some peckerwood teacher’s college in Arkansas!” Paul shouted. “I graduated summa cum laude! I was a finalist for a Guggenheim!” He glimpsed Bonnie’s triumphant gaze one last time, and he shook with rage in the guard’s painful grip.

“You fucking cow!” he roared as the elevator doors closed.
“I was almost a Fulbright!”

By late that evening, Paul was drunk on wine coolers, the only alcohol Kym allowed in the house on the theory that they were less fattening than beer. He lounged in bed watching cable, a clinking heap of empties beneath the bedside table. Hypnotized by the endless whine of some NASCAR race on ESPN, he dirtily heard the front door slam and managed to push himself up in bed as Kym posed primly in the doorway in her lime green on-air suit, broad in the shoulders and nipped in at the waist.

“We have to talk,” she said, very gravely.

“I can explain,” Paul said immediately. In his fruity stupor he tried to cipher out what Kym knew and how she knew it.

“I’m in love with someone else,” she announced, luckily before he started to stammer about Oksana, Virginia, and the loss of his job.

Paul stopped trying to stuff the latest empty under the covers. “What did you just say?”

In a matter of moments Paul learned that Kym was carrying the Weather Gnome’s child. His immediate reaction, even drunk, was to imagine Kym and the Weather Gnome and their child as a row of lawn statuary.

“This is
outrageous!”
he cried, rising from the bed in manufactured dudgeon. But he bungled the effect by tangling his ankles in the bedclothes and toppling flat on his face.

In the end Kymberly paid him to move out, loaning him enough money for a damage deposit and a couple of months’ rent on a new place. He quickly learned that he wasn’t able to
afford a place in the leafy collegiate neighborhoods he wanted to live in, nor was he able to afford even one bedroom in the nicer apartment complexes in south Lamar. He had to settle for the third part of Lamar, the commercial wasteland past the interstate, which he was now entering on his way home from work. Twenty-five minutes in the car in the heat and traffic had largely cooked away his elation over his raise. Like Dante descending into the lower tiers of seducers, deceivers, and falsifiers, he entered into a curbless region of self-storage units and U-Haul dealers behind cyclone fences and curls of razor wire, interspersed with empty lots of yellowed grass and heat-baked earth. He passed a catfish parlor advertising
ALL-U-CAN-EAT
in huge block letters on its blank concrete wall; a vast barn of a Texas dance hall with a corrugated tin roof and a neon sign that read
RIDE ’EM, COWBOY
! in a script of looping lassoes; a ramshackle wooden vegetable stand slung with bunches of desiccated jalapeños; and a windowless cinder-block tavern called This Is It. With a sinking heart he turned down the cracked old two-lane highway to San Antonio, towards his home for the moment, his temporary refuge from the blows and buffets of the world, the small apartment complex he called the Angry Loner Motel.

I
T WAS AN OLD MOTEL
from the fifties, two separate oblongs of colorless cinder block, two stories each, facing each other across a wide parking lot of parched asphalt, seamed with cracks and punctured exactly in the middle by the square, rusty, rattling grate of a storm drain. The place’s official name was the Grandview Arms, but the only view from Paul’s front window was of the apartments across the way, and the only view from his tiny bathroom window in the back was a stretch of Texas savannah littered with rusting pickups and abandoned appliances. Paul’s shoulders clenched as he turned off the highway, clanked over the grate at the middle of the lot, and pulled into the space in front of his apartment. He switched off his car, and the engine gasped to a stop. Paul’s Colt was the smallest and youngest car in the lot; each of his Angry Loner neighbors drove an enormous, spavined automobile from the seventies and eighties, some extinct Detroit saurian that listed to one side or the other or dragged its rear end as if it had a body in the trunk. Whenever one of these aircraft carriers came to life (which invariably
required a two- or three-minute warm-up period of guttural, unmufflered roaring), its engine grumbled, its tailpipe rattled, and its shocks—or what was left of them—groaned and squeaked like old men.

Paul rolled up his windows, snatched his dress shirt off the passenger seat, and hustled out of his car. Two or three of his neighbors always seemed to be lounging in the open doorways of their apartments or slouching over the rail of the second-story balcony, each man dangling a burning cigarette or a can of beer from his big-knuckled hands. He had as much difficulty telling the men apart as he did their cars; they might all have been brothers from some inbred, clannish, conniving family out of Faulkner. The younger Snopes brothers wore scuffed motorcycle boots, tight black jeans, and faded t-shirts, while the older Snopeses wore ancient cowboy boots, blue jeans baggy in the seat, and denim work shirts, untucked over rock-hard beer bellies. Each one, from twenty-five to fifty, had leathery skin and lank black hair and two or three days of thick stubble along his sullen jaw. Some had streaks of dirty gray in their hair; some wore handlebar moustaches, some goatees; but none of these distinguishing marks made them any easier to tell apart. All of them, young and old, had dark, penetrating eyes that seemed to look through Paul to his bones. None of them were bald.

Clutching his limp shirt to his chest, Paul fumbled his key into the lock. The only thing scarier than his neighbors was what waited for him in his apartment. He drew a deep breath. It wouldn’t make any difference where he lived, he’d always be coming home to the same thing. He turned the stiff lock and pushed open the door, and the smell of cat pee stung him to the back of his sinuses.

“Oh, Paul! Mr. Trilby!”

Paul paused in his doorway. Mrs. Prettyman, his landlady, was mincing across the parking lot. She lived in what used to be the motel’s office, a little brick building at the far end of the lot, and the very instant she stepped out of her door, all the loitering Snopeses along both sides of the motel ducked into their doorways and locked themselves in their rooms. Mrs.
Prettyman curved neatly around the wide indentation of the drainage grate.

“I’m so glad I caught you.” Her sharp little heels somehow never caught in the cracks and potholes. “I’d just like a word.”

Paul waited in his doorway, his back to the shadowy room behind him. Mrs. Prettyman called herself “the manageress” of the apartments, though Paul was certain she owned the place. This evasion allowed her to deflect any requests for maintenance or extra time in paying the rent. “I’ll have to take that up with the owner,” she’d say, in her buttery Texas singsong, and then, twenty-four hours later, “The owner says the refrigerator is supposed to make that sound,” or, “I’m afraid the owner needs your rent payment this afternoon.”

She stopped with one hand on her hip and another, proprietary hand on the doorsill. “Hon, I know you got a cat in there.” She gave him a glittering smile, all steel and no magnolia.

“Really.” Paul did not invite Mrs. Prettyman in. “Have you ever actually seen a cat come in or out of my apartment?”

“Well now.” She waved her hand theatrically in front of her nose. “I don’t need to
see
it, darlin’, I know it’s in there someplace.” She replaced her hand on her hip. “It might be you just don’t notice it anymore.”

Oh, I notice it, Paul thought. That smell had caused him to be evicted from every apartment he’d had since moving out of Kym’s house. The Grandview was the last stop on Paul’s descent, the one place he was reasonably certain wouldn’t evict him. “On my word of honor,” Paul said, certain that Texans liked that kind of thing, “there’s not another living creature in here but me and the cockroaches.”