Round Rock (12 page)

“I’ve seen you before,” Lewis said, pouring her a cup of coffee. “Frank slept in your car.”

She remembered vaguely that there were two men that morning, now months ago—the mahout and the trespasser—but she never would have pegged Lewis as the latter.

He tapped on her violin case. “Taking lessons?”

“I play.”

“In an orchestra?”

“In a band right now.” Was she imagining it, or did his face fall? Why was it that things considered so aphrodisiacal in a man—being smart and funny, self-sufficient, playing in a rock ’n’ roll band—are such turn-offs in a woman?

“Huh,” he said. “And you know Billie Fitzgerald, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Billie’s cool,” he said.

Libby was glad he mentioned Billie, who’d called an hour ago with a migraine and wanted Libby to pick up a prescription. “That reminds me, I gotta go,” Libby said. “I gotta get some medicine over there before her head explodes.”

He walked her out to the Falcon. He had an old car too, he said, as if this signified some deep psychic affinity. “Let’s have coffee again sometime.”

“Sure,” she said. “Well, maybe not
that
coffee.”

His laugh was good, if a little loud. “Drunks’ll drink anything. Listerine. Lemon extract. Aftershave. This coffee’s nothin’.”

“To tell the truth,” she said, “I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee since I moved up here.”

“Oh, I’m lucky,” he said. “Guy I work for has his joe sent UPS from Berkeley. Best coffee in the world. I could get you the address of the place. I’ll call with it tomorrow, if you give me your number.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“No, seriously. It’s nothing. I’d have to read a label, no big deal.”

She would never order coffee from Berkeley, and she wasn’t sure she’d go out with this man, either. But somehow, she found herself writing her number on the proffered matchbook. After nine years with Stockton, she’d forgotten that this part, the phone-number exchange, was accomplished so obliquely, as if it was about
coffee
, for crying out loud.

B
ILLIE
was lying on the floor in the library with one ice pack supporting her neck, another covering her eyes. All the lights were out. Banked coals yielded just enough light to prevent Libby from crashing into furniture as she brought Billie a glass of water and two Vicodin. “Met your friend Lewis tonight,” she said.

“Do I know any Lewises?” Billie the lifted the ice pack. Blue hollows cupped her eyes. “What does he look like?”

“Tall. Black frizzy hair. Thin. Yogi thin.”

“I like the sound of ‘yogi thin.’ ” Billie put the pills in her mouth, gulped down some water, then pressed the ice pack back down over her eyes. “Oh, I know,” she said. “Grubby? Kinda sullen?”

“Grubby, yeah. Sullen, no. Good laugh, actually.”

“Yeah. That’s who it is,” said Billie. “Red Ray’s secretary. I’ve talked to him. We’ve seen him at Happy Yolanda’s.”

“We have? He’s not weird, is he? I gave him my phone number.”

“Tries a little too hard. Smart, though.” Billie pointed weakly toward the fire. “You mind sticking another piece of wood on that? This ice is freezing. But, you know, that gives me an idea. I
should
take you out to the drunk farm. Two dozen men at any given time, you’re bound to find something.”

“You mean to date?”

“Why not?”

“They’re alcoholics, for Christ’s sake.”

“You think you’d do better at the bars? At least at Round Rock, they’ve
stopped
drinking. And there’s always Red Ray, who’s adorable. I know you don’t think so, but …”

Libby most certainly didn’t think so. Ever since she and Stockton had separated, people had been offering to set her up, and it was always with someone they, the setter-uppers, wouldn’t be caught dead with: someone too eccentric or old or pathetic. Her mother’s best friend took her to meet a man obsessed with grandfather clocks. His living room and dining room were so packed with the clocks and their components, only a narrow path ran from room to room, and there wasn’t a single place to sit. Who, except her mother’s oblivious friend, would ever think this man wanted another person in his life? And then a friend in Hollywood introduced her to a gorgeous man—a homosexual, it turned out, who was contemplating going straight.

Libby wedged a split oak log into the fire. “If Red’s so great, Billie, why don’t
you
go for him?”

“What do I need a man for? I’ve got all the money I could ever want. I’ve got Little Bill and Dad and you. And besides, Red and I aren’t a good match. I don’t mind that he’s—”

“Old and fat?”

“Built for comfort, let’s say. But he’s too good for me, too pure. Monkish or something.”

“And you think that suits me?”

“You’re good, too,” said Billie.

“Oh, right.” Libby turned to leave. She had to get home, go to sleep, and be back at work, all in eight hours. “That’s okay. I’m resigned. This may well be a long dry spell when it comes to men.”

D
URING
the first four months of his sobriety, Lewis had suffered from more or less constant low-level pain. Something was always aching. He moved his head and a clear, electric flash of pain shot down his spine. Other times, the pain seemed to rise out of his blood like a fog. The roots of his hair hurt, or his teeth. Sometimes his entire skin seemed tender to the touch. He gobbled aspirin by the handful and found that lying facedown on the ground worked wonders. Floors were okay, but grass, even asphalt or dirt, was better. When he was flat out against something solid and gritty, inhaling the smell of soil and rocks, the pain seeped out like moisture.

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Red said when Lewis described his symptoms. “When I first got sober, I thought I had the flu all the time. Come to find out, I was angry.”

According to Red, the pain was part of Lewis’s detoxification: as residual alcohol was leaving his system, the anger he’d avoided by drinking was now surfacing. What would help him through the long, slow process of shedding this anger was an inventory of everything and everybody he felt uncomfortable about—Red suggested he write separate lists of grudges, fears, money problems, sex problems, and secrets. “That’ll bring all this unresolved crud to light,” Red said. “Often the light alone makes it shrivel up, like pulling weeds and leaving them in the sun.”

Before he went to sleep at night, Lewis composed a list in his head. Money, starting with outstanding debts. Better than a sleeping pill.

B
EING
the new secretary of Round Rock was okay. To make order from someone else’s chaos
was
satisfying. He did everything from updating client files on the computer to fetching Frank from his rambles, and was in charge of making follow-up calls to track the progress of former Round Rock residents. Against his better judgment—it seemed like prying—he routinely asked men if they were sober, going to meetings, and weathering crises without drinking.

He went with Red on supply runs, ostensibly to learn the route. Red had sold him the reconditioned Fairlane for two hundred dollars so he could make the runs himself; but after several months, for sociability’s sake, they were still doing them together. Lewis was using the Fairlane mainly to commute from Rito, where he had rented a room in the Mills Hotel. Red had tried to talk Lewis into staying on at the farm, even offering to refurbish a bungalow in the village for him. But after ninety-six days and four roommates at the Blue House, Lewis wanted more freedom and more privacy.

Living at the Mills, Lewis found, was not, in fact, all that different from living at Round Rock, though the architecture wasn’t nearly so grand and the Mills’s winos were still putting away the quarts of Tawny Port. The important thing was, Lewis had his own room—single bed, bureau, wobbly desk, minimal bathroom—and no curfew. And no rules about women, either.

He drank his first cup of coffee each morning at the grocería, leaning against the counter as Victor Ibañez delivered a crash course in small-town life. “That Fairlane you’re driving? Used to belong to old Tillie Prouch,” said Victor. “She’s been legally blind for years, but kept nosing her way downtown every day for mail and groceries. Then the county put in a stop sign up on Church Street. Same day they put it in, Tillie took it out. That crease in your front bumper? The end of one woman’s driving career.”

Victor was bold, too, with medical advice: “That rash on your arm? Looks like eczema. Old Rafael Flores got rid of mine overnight—a little vinegar and a sweeping’s all it took. Want his number?” Lewis, picturing his arm being scraped raw with a steel brush, demurred.

Lewis ordered takeout breakfast burritos from Happy Yolanda’s, bought vintage gabardine shirts at St. Catherine’s Thrift Store, did
laundry at the Casa de Wash ’n’ Dry. Where, on a Saturday morning in June, he found a phone number on a matchbook pulled from a pair of jeans. Under the number was an H or an L, followed by a squiggly line. While kids raced wire carts inches from his toes, Lewis sat in a yellow molded-plastic chair and tried to remember whose number it could be. The prefix was local. Probably a newcomer he’d met in a meeting. Dodging crazed children, Lewis left the laundromat and crossed the street to a pay phone. Once the ringing began, he remembered.

I told Al I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore,
Libby wrote in her journal.
I said it was getting too weird with the girlfriend, the lying, etc. He said he was sorry about the lying, sorry it had to end, and sorriest about all the sex we wouldn’t have. I feel nothing but detached. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a man. Going in, taking what I want, getting out fast. The Billie Fitzgerald approach: use ’em and lose ’em, she always says. I asked her if she’s ever been in love. I hope not, she said. I hope none of those regrettable skirmishes with the opposite sex was love.

Not even with Little Bill’s dad?

Her face gets that plaster of Paris look. That’s not a topic for today.

How can she be so intrusive and so secretive at the same time? Maybe that’s not such a—

The phone rang.

“Sorry I never got back to you about the coffee,” Lewis said. “I lost your number, but I’m doing my laundry and and I found it in a pocket. I don’t have the coffee information with me. Maybe you’ll talk to me anyway. Laundromats make me so forlorn. Am I taking you away from anything?”

Were all men going to apologize to her this week? Was she insane to be charmed by this outburst?

“Before I forget,” she said, “are you Red Ray’s secretary?”

“Yeah! How’d you know?”

“When I described you, that’s who Billie thought you were.”

“And how did you describe me?”

“Thin, black hair, good laugh.”

He demonstrated the laugh, then said, among many other things,
that he was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, son of a Hollywood producer—a TV producer, nobody famous. He’d been married once, and divorced, “back in the Neolithic.”

“What about you?” Lewis said abruptly. “Ever played your violin in a symphony?” He was a particular fan of Beethoven and Mahler, he said, and she could’ve guessed. Wagner, too. The tonnage. The origins of gravity.

“So you want to have dinner sometime?” he said.

“Okay.” She felt a little worn out just from listening to him.

“Saturday? A week from today?”

She checked the calendar, half-hoping the Cactus Pharaohs had a gig. No dice. “That’s fine.”

Should he come pick her up? At first she thought, no, no, better to agree on some public place. In Rito, however, that meant bars—not such a good idea, given his AA status. Then she remembered that Lewis had already been to her trailer; if he’d wanted to come and chop off her arms at the elbow, he could have done so months ago.

“That would be good,” she said.

Falling asleep that night, it hit her. Unless she counted caving in to Al Keene’s ever-present horniness, this was her first real date in nine years.

With a drunk, no less.

L
EWIS
bit into his sandwich, a peculiarly fluorescent-pink ham salad on white, yet another Round Rock variation of shit on a shingle. Friday was Ernie’s day off, and the replacement cook reliably presented food that made everyone grateful even for Ernie’s meager abilities. “Where do you take someone out to eat around here, anyway?”

“The Basque Garden in Buchanan’s pretty good,” Lawrence said. “It’ll run you, oh, twenty per person.”

“I’m looking to spend about half that.”

“Jeez, Lew. Who’s the lucky girl?”

“A friend,” said Lewis.

John, the house manager, lowered himself into the chair next to Lawrence, and Lewis regarded him warily. Since Lewis had joined the staff, John’s private mission, apparently, was to cut him down to size whenever possible, preferably in front of residents. John had once come up to a group and said, “Lewis, you may be one of those guys who’s just too smart to stay sober.” A few days later—similar scene, a few guys talking—John approached him again: “You know, Lewis, I was wrong. You’re not so smart, just lucky.” Then, a couple nights ago, John handed him what looked like a business card; one side said “KISS” and the other side, “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Was this hostile or what? Yet the other guys seemed to like John. He sponsored eight or nine of them, including Lawrence.

“Is this a friend-friend,” asked Lawrence, “or a girlfriend?”

“A friend.”

“Better not be a girlfriend,” John said.

“Excuse me?” said Lewis.

John unloaded his tray and pushed it to the end of the table. “You better not be getting into a relationship so soon.”

“So soon to what?”

“Your first year of sobriety.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Hasn’t Red told you? No relationships in the first year.”

“Why would Red tell me that?” This was the first Lewis had heard of such a thing. He turned to Lawrence. “Is he making this up?”

Lawrence gave Lewis a sad, anxious look. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t had a date in five years.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news”—John’s eyes twinkled with malice—“but really, it’s in your best interest. Face it. What do you have to offer anyone, anyway? What kind of woman goes for someone who’s bankrupt—emotionally, spiritually,
and
financially? All I have to do is think about what I dated my first year to—”