Losing Clementine (5 page)

A
whoosh
from the front door and more
clackity-clacking
.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “For the puff, too.”

He nodded and turned back to his T.V.

“All dressed up for nothing,” I told Chuckles when I got home over an hour later. While I'd been chasing geese, the 101 had been filling up and overflowing, backing up cars onto the entrance ramps. There were stoplights that let only one or two cars merge at a time. It was supposed to alleviate gridlock. It did not.

Chuckles was standing on the worktable and raised his smooshed nose toward my neck when I bent to pet him. He sniffed and turned his face. He disapproved of the perfume.

The answering machine blinked the number 4 at me. That was four more messages than were usually there when I got home. I poured what was left of the Jack Daniel's bottle into a juice glass and pressed the
PLAY
button.

Carla's voice came out of the speaker all four times, each time angrier and more desperate than the last. She threatened to call Jenny. She threatened to sue me. She did call Jenny. I hit
DELETE
after all of them then stripped naked and dumped the clothes in the overflowing hamper after first pulling the ones from that morning out.

I put my gray denim work apron on over my tank top and jeans and went to mixing acrylics. I made up a dove gray with a little blue, the same color as the guard's uniform. I mixed a lot of it and chose a good-size brush and started at the bottom of the canvas. I laid it on heavily and blended upward. Darker at the bottom and feathering until it disappeared into the gesso white. It wasn't enough. I added a little black and blended it into the mix on the palette. Blend, blend, blend. I loaded my brush and went at the base again, brushing up toward the center. I added some dark, dark green and blended. I brought the color up higher and higher until only a strip toward the top stayed white. Then I started a new mix, blending more blues this time. I started at the top and painted down, down, down. The bristles of the brush scratched at the canvas surface as the paint deposited and left the bristles dry and unlubricated.

I took a step back and then forward and mixed again, yellow this time, using my brush to pull some of the blue and gray mixes from before into it, making it murky and dirty. I started in the middle where the two colors already on the canvas met and became one. Beginning on the left, I made long strokes up and down, blending in both directions at once. One-third of the way across the canvas, I stopped and left it.

Chuckles was yowling inside his carrier as if all the vets in California were after his testicles. I put him in the backseat and went to toss my bag into the trunk.

Mrs. Epstein, who was nearing Aunt Trudy's age, was standing in front of her own trunk unloading cases of soda and oversized bottles of dishwashing detergent and toilet paper. She stared at me out of the corner of her eye. I had not been forgiven for the teapot incident, nor should I have been. I did, after all, lack remorse. I was a hardened criminal.

“You going on a trip?” she asked, looking at my bag as if it might be full of venomous snakes.

“Yep.” I avoided eye contact, closed the trunk, and opened the driver's door, which unmuffled the sounds of brutal torture coming from inside the carrier. It was possible Chuckles was throwing his body against the metal door. Soon he'd start expelling fluids from every orifice. I hoped to be at Richard's house when that happened.

“Where are you going?”

“Tijuana.”

“You can't just drive to Tijuana.” She dropped her detergent to the concrete floor with a thud, barely missing her off-brand tennis shoe. “You could be kidnapped and turned into a drug runner.” She pointed at me. Her finger was weighed down with a large silver and turquoise ring. “I saw a program on CNBC where women were forced to be prostitutes and carry cocaine in their lady parts.”

I hadn't considered exactly how I was going to smuggle the tranquilizers back across the border. That was an interesting possibility.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, dropping into the driver's seat and pulling the belt across me. “Have a nice week.”

“There is something wrong with that cat,” she spat, just as I slammed the door closed and pushed the button to raise the gate.

Richard still lives in our house. He got it in the divorce. I still consider it part mine in a cosmic sense. This is preferable to the literal sense because the house is in Sherman Oaks, which is less suited to painters than to Amway salesladies and people who purchase potpourri in bulk. Also, Sheila has taken up semipermanent residence on my side of the bed, which would be awkward if I were still sleeping in it.

The last time I was over, which was two breakdowns ago or about a month, Richard claimed Sheila just came over a few days a week to visit, but when I riffled through the bathroom cabinets, I found two of her prescriptions, both for urinary tract infections. One I knew from experience turns your pee orange. Part of me hoped her doctor didn't warn her about that ahead of time.

Richard objects to my referring to it as “our” house, but when you know where all the Tupperware lids are, even the ones that always go missing, I don't know how it can be otherwise.

I parked in the oil-stained driveway and heaved Chuckles, who had given up yowling for a throaty growl, out of the car. I pushed through the wrought-iron gate in the hip-level hedge that surrounded our front yard and took the cracked walkway up to the front door. Then I laid on the doorbell because I was in that sort of mood, and there were no teapots around.

“Jesus Christ, Clementine, what do you want? And what happened to the front end of your car?”

The cut on Richard's cheek was almost healed. He was wearing a wrinkled T-shirt that he'd probably slept in and a pair of bright green soccer shorts that went
shish-shish-shish
between his thighs when he walked. Richard had played intramural soccer in college and still liked the uniform.

“Here.” I shoved the carrier at him. Chuckles gave his best yowl.

“I am not adopting your cat.” He threw up his hands as if I were handing him a leaking bag of poop, which, depending on how quickly he took the carrier and let the cat out, I might be.

“It's just for a couple of days. I'm going on a trip.”

“Rich,” a high-pitched voice called from the kitchen, “who is it?”

“I didn't see Sheila's car,” I said.

I looked back over my shoulder and scanned the street for her lime-green new Beetle, which, in my opinion, was a car better suited to cheerleaders than tax attorneys. Maybe it was her way of rebelling.

“It's in the garage,” he said and then called over his shoulder, “It's Clementine. She's trying to drop off her cat.”

Sheila did not respond. We didn't like each other, Sheila and I. That had always been true, and I didn't know if she knew about the incident with the fan or not. The injury was unmistakable, but Richard could have made up a story: I fell down the stairs. I ran into the doorjamb. They were shameful abuse-victim stories, and I still hoped he'd told one, because I didn't want her to know how much better she was than me.

“Why can't Jenny take care of him?” he asked.

“I fired her. I don't think she'd do it pro bono.”

“You can't fire Jenny. You'll die.”

I decided to appreciate that joke on the inside.

“Take him,” I said, “or he'll make himself vomit.”

Richard took the carrier.

“Where are you going?”

“Tijuana.”

“You can't go to Tijuana. There's a drug war. You'll be killed and abducted into slavery by gangs.”

“That appears to be a very popular opinion,” I said, remembering it was Richard's habit of telling me what I couldn't do that had played a large part in our divorce.

He scowled at me the way he did when he thought I was being unreasonable and I thought I was being clever.

“Why are you going?”

“That's where they keep the medicine.”

He set the carrier down with the door pointed toward the kitchen and pinched the release mechanism. Chuckles went shooting out like flames were coming out of his butt and disappeared behind the couch.

“Why do you need medicine? Are you sick?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

He was looking toward the couch, and I answered the back of his head.

“Cancer.”

The lie just popped right into my mouth, and I paused to taste it. I liked it even if it was false. It was sort of like how strawberry candy doesn't taste anything like strawberries, but we all collectively agree that red dye number five and corn syrup will be called “strawberry” anyway. My disease would be called “cancer.” And it was, in its way, like cancer. My brain had certainly turned on itself.

Richard looked me right in the eye. “That's not funny.”

“I didn't think it was particularly hilarious myself.”

We stood there facing each other on opposite sides of our threshold. His hair was standing up on top like he'd been running his hands through it a lot and maybe hadn't showered since yesterday morning. He didn't look so good now that I was looking. The wrinkles that sprouted from the corners of his eyes were deeper, and something was pulling down on the corners of his mouth. I tried not to look at the faint pink line across his cheekbone.

He watched me, and I watched him until eventually it started to feel like a staring contest. As much as I wanted to win, I couldn't help but let one eye wander to the white scar down the middle of his chin that looked like a Cary Grant cleft and was the result of a skateboarding accident when he was thirteen.

He acknowledged his win by speaking.

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

His face broke right down the middle. “Oh, God.” We stood there looking at each other for a beat. “Jesus. Where is it?”

“In my brain.”
Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry
.

His eyes were a mixture of disbelief and pity. “When did you find out?”

“Something's been wrong for a while.” Truth.

“How are you treating it?”

“Palliatively.”

“Clementine, fucking hell, can't they do anything?”

I shook my head. I was starting to feel a little guilty and didn't know why. This was more humane than being honest. It did, after all, explain a lot.

He chewed on the inside of his cheek then spun around on his heel and headed back toward the hallway that branched off into our bedroom. His shorts
shish-shish-shished
until he had almost disappeared.

“Wait for me in the car,” he called over his shoulder. “I'm coming with you.”

He took longer to come out than it would take to pack a duffel bag for a couple of days. He took just the exact amount of time I estimated it would take to pack a duffel bag for a couple of days and have a big argument with your maybe-live-in girlfriend about taking a road trip with your ex-wife to purchase illegal prescription drugs. It was an argument I knew he'd win, because even a lawyer can't find a loophole big enough to jump through in “she's dying.”

When he came out, a small dark cloud was hanging over his head, and it followed him all the way to the car. He opened the passenger door and shoved his bag between the two headrests, knocking the sunglasses perched on my head. He'd changed into jeans and a gray T-shirt with fewer wrinkles.

“You never said what happened to the front of your car.”

“I hit somebody.”

“An actual somebody or a car?”

“A car.”

“On purpose?”

“Pretty much.”

He shook his head but smiled a little, which is easier to do when you're no longer on my insurance policy.

“Sheila's allergic to cats, you know.”

I started the car and tilted my head to the side like this was new information. “Is she?”

“You can't possibly have to pee again.”

“You're right,” I said. “I just have a burning desire to see what kind of paper towels the Jack in the Box uses.”

“You don't have to get pissy.”

“You don't have to complain every time I have a bodily function.”

He pushed back into the passenger seat and leaned against the headrest. I left him there while I went inside. By the end of our marriage, we had stopped traveling together. He would fly to San Francisco while I drove. That turned out to be only the most temporary of solutions.

Tijuana is a straight shot on the 5 south from L.A. I took the last U.S. exit, which spit me out in front of a series of giant parking lots, one after the other all the way to Mexico. The monotony of row after row of cars was broken only by bright neon signs over small offices advertising Mexican auto insurance. I pulled into a lot and took my ticket, promising to pay my eight dollars a day and agreeing that should I fail to return after more than two weeks, they could tow and auction off my car.