The News of the World (10 page)

We will be on an illicit honeymoon, that's what he'll call it.

And how do I feel about the future? How do you feel? How do I feel about my death?—seeing it? I'm looking forward to the trip. I've never been to Mexico.

It will be wonderful to see that whale again.

I READ
a lot. I mean: I read
everything.
I always have. It used to really drive Grant crazy. My whole side of the bedroom was a hazard: stacks of pamphlets, magazines, papers, paperbacks, and about four dozen hardback books which I received from my book club and the library. But I love to read. Grant would say, “What's in that damn book, anyway?” But he really didn't want to know. I know this because several times I answered him. “Honey, this book is about Bud Sackett trying to deliver cattle to Santa Fe …” or “The woman in this article says she lost forty pounds of ugly fat by chewing each bite thirty-one times. …” But before I could finish the explanation, Grant was in the other room cranking the channels like he was trying to start an outboard motor.

I read a lot of trash. I do. I read
The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World
from cover to cover. I've read all the stories about people coming back from the dead, and all twenty-one people have said about the same thing: there's that white room and some floating and their relatives and most of the time some music. I have also read some fine books, such as
Madame Bovary
, the biography of Dorothy Kilgallen called
Kilgallen
, which my book club sent me, and a large book called
The Gulag Archipelago,
a book which scared the devil out of Grant. “What language are you reading now?” he said.

Maybe I read too much. But I always felt it was better than drinking too much or chasing around. Later, that is what Grant got into. I suspected he was having troubles, and then I found out when he gave me herpes two. It's a virus. He stopped coming home. I really started reading.

I was reading fourteen hours a day. In one day I read
Are You a Genius? Great American Mystery Stories
(the whole volume),
The Book of Lists II,
and
Frankenstein,
which turned out to be different than I had ever thought. I was during this heavy reading period that Susan, my maid of honor, my best friend from high school, since before high school, called, and that led to how I died and why I'm in the hospital now.

Susan has a great attitude. She got married in high school to Andrew Botts, one of the most popular guys in our class, and then about three years ago, Andrew split. He's in California now, but Susan never let it get her down. She smiles about him like she knew it all along.

She used to call me up and talk, and then sometimes I'd have her over for dinner with Grant and me. Grant didn't like her, because he couldn't figure her out; but it was okay, because he would eat and then go in the other room and crank the channels, and Susan and I would talk for three hours. In fact, I'd rather be with Susan, talking, than alone reading in bed. She's a crazy woman and always has a new story about some new man in her life and what he's trying to get her to do now. She can laugh way down in her throat for about a minute without taking a breath.

So, when she called the last time she said she had heard about Grant leaving, and she laughed and said, “That's the real facts of life, Linda,” which was exactly what she said at my wedding. Anyway, she said I was definitely going to stop reading for one night and go out for a night with the girls. I had been reading back through a stack of
The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World
at the time, and didn't want to go, because I was reading a pretty good series on UFO's, which have already picked up fifty-four people who have never been seen since and who are living better lives somewhere, according to their relatives and sometimes according to the sheriff. I was also rereading about the twenty-one people who had died and come back. Their stories all matched perfectly even though some of their stories were in different issues. It is their stories which really bother me, because now I have died and I
know
that there are twenty-one people who have fooled and lied to
The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World.
But, when Susan called, I decided to close the papers and go out. Sometimes Susan can be just the wild thing I need.

When she picked me up in her Pinto, she told me we were going to a Daycare Fund Raiser at the Redwood Club, and that there would be a male stripper, and she laughed and blew cigarette smoke all over the windshield. I have read about male strippers in at least five magazines. The women all had good things to say in the articles, and in the pictures, the women looked like they were having a good time.

It was twelve dollars at the door, and the woman stamped our hands with a little purple star. The Redwood Club is just a big barroom with a real low sparkling ceiling. Susan knew a lot of the women there and we joined a table with three of her friends near the front. We had been drinking a little vodka in the car, and we had some more, and it was just flat fun being half high out of the house with a room full of women who were just roaring and carrying on.

There were actually two strippers. The first guy was announced as Rick. He came out to a record, the Supremes singing something, and he was very serious about removing his brown silk shirt, and then his brown silk pajama bottoms or whatever they were, and then he played a coy game of thumbs with his G-string for the rest of the song. The second and final song for Rick was The Four Seasons singing “Big Girls Don't Cry.” He came stepping between the tables like a stretching cat, and Susan actually reached out and stuffed a dollar bill inside his jock along with all the other dollars hanging there like a bouquet.

I'm a buns person. Why that is, I don't know. But buns can start me up. I loved the arch of Rick's rear, and when he finally stripped off the G-string and flopped his petunia before us all, Susan and the girls went wild! Susan was laughing and bouncing in her seat and reaching for what she was calling “that banana.” But Rick was a professional; I could tell by the way he kept just beyond an arm's length.

Then there was a very funny vodka intermission with everyone groaning and laughing and snorting and Susan laughing and asking me wasn't I glad I came, and you know, I was glad. Not because of Rick's buns, but because of a warm feeling I had. I really liked Susan and her attitude and the fact that she was a friend of mine.

In high school, when we were juniors, she stopped me after homeroom one morning in the spring and took my arm tightly and walked me down to her locker, smiling so her eyes nearly shut, and she told me she was going to get married. “You're the first person I've told,” she said to me. “And you're the only person. Do me a favor,” she laughed, “break it to our dear classmates.” And then she said, “You know why we're doing it?” And she laughed so hard she dropped a book and could hardly get through her own answer, which she had to whisper: “To give the baby a father!” Then she straightened herself out and lifted her chin like a queen and walked off down the corridor, turning once to announce: “The facts of life.”

Now, I'm no good judge of penises. Grant had one, I'm sure. He must have, I think. But the next stripper, Doug, made it clear from his entrance on, that he was out to set new standards for us all. Susan was crazy for him. He would back way up then open his shirt and stride toward the audience as if he was going to jab us all with that heavy G-string. Everyone would scream when he did that. Susan couldn't stop laughing. She did yell: “What have you got in there anyway, Dougie?” And everybody thought the same thing: that is not all him. Susan would yell, “What is that, a shoe?” and the Redwood Club would just go nuts. But at the end of the third song (Doug stretched his strip to three records), which was Elvis singing “My Way,” we all found out the truth. He turned his back on us and flexed his buns in a way that almost made me shudder, and he flipped his G-string into the fourth row, another eruption of screaming, and he rotated to us revealing the most god-awful THING—and that is the right word, “THING”—in the whole world. It looked like a hammer. The place exploded. There was more screaming than if there'd been a fire. He lobbed it around for a good while, and I'm sure people passing by in cars could hear The Redwood Club rising off the earth. It's lucky for me I like buns, I told Susan, or I would have embarrassed myself. A lot of women did.

After that session died down, we plunged outside and the fresh air really made us drunk. Susan hopped on the hood of her car and leaned against the windshield. The sky was full of stars. It was funny sitting there. I thought: all these stars, are they out every night? I'd never seen the stars before. We sat on her car and drank a little more vodka. Susan had been sweating and the hair over her face was wet in a little fringe. She was smiling, kind of wicked, like she knew things were going to be like this all along. After a while, she said, “You know, all this entertainment has made me kind of hungry. Let's go eat.”

We went over to Rose's, where I'd never been at night before, and the place was empty except for Leo, Rose's husband, who served us two Burrito Specials and cold beer. God, it was fun sitting there at night, like being girls. When Leo would bring another beer, Susan would keep her head down, her eyes under her eyebrows going to his crotch, and then back to my eyes, and we'd laugh until we couldn't even eat. It was like we had this great big secret on all men.

Grant had never liked to go out to dinner with me. I always liked to read the whole menu, every word. For me it's part of the pleasure of dining out. Grant liked to order the same thing all the time: spaghetti or burgers. He'd order and I wouldn't be through reading Column A. I loved to read phrases in some of the places like “nestled amid french fries aplenty” or even “smothered with onions.” I always ordered the item which was the most well written. I don't need to tell you what Grant thought of that.

The rest of the night with Susan happened a little too quickly. We were driving down Front Street and we hit the hill a bit fast, and Susan couldn't make the corner. That part went slow. We drifted wide in the turn, and when the tire hit the island between the four lanes, I looked at Susan, and she was still smiling like this was all expected. The Pinto wouldn't straighten up. It rose over the island and gently and quietly steered into the deserted lobby of the Cambert Hotel. Grant and I spent our wedding night at the Cambert Hotel, and as the glass doors burst and I saw the front desk, I knew I was going to die. There was no sound. The last thing I felt was my back coming through my chest, and I was dead.

Now, this is the real part: it was not a white room. I did not float above a white room. There was no white room into which my relatives floated one at a time. Do you see? There was no white room. It was not a room at all, but a tiny cave, black as black, no light whatsoever. No relatives drifting in to hug me. I felt like I'd been hammered in the little cave, and there was a pair of sunglasses underneath my right hip, poking me. It really hurt. I could feel the cave wall with my hands and the wall was damp and cold, and I could tell I was stuck. There were piles and piles of old shoes on top of me and
there was no music.
I listened for a long time and there was a little noise, it was a distant rasping, muffled by all the shoes, and it sounded like a fork on a pie plate. Then it was quiet for I don't know how long. I couldn't move and I couldn't go to sleep. But there was no music. I waited and waited, just feeling those sunglasses under my thigh, and I thought any minute I might hear Susan laughing or see some person in a white robe coming to greet me. Nothing. I was smothering under all those shoes in a dark cave, rubbing my fingertips up and down the walls feeling the slime, and I did this for a long time. I mean, up to what I thought was three or four weeks. Nothing. And I came to know that this was it: I was dead, that's all. I wished I had something to read. But even if I'd had something, it was too dark. I did get kind of mad at those twenty-one liars who had made money spinning fibs to
The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World.

Later I heard some quiet chipping noises, like someone putting cups away. Then in the quiet dark, I realized that I was going to come back from the dead. All that happened was this: the rock became softer and I stretched my legs through it and pushed my hands through it and reached around and removed that damn pair of sunglasses jabbing my butt and the shoes floated away and I leaned my head back into the soft putty-like rock and I was in this bed. A moment later Dr. Fergus came in and used his little flashlight on me.

Later still, Grant came by and brought me some magazines and said some words while I lay very still and squinted at his crotch.

So, all I want to say is this. I've read those god-damned liars in the papers, and I'm here to tell you there's no white room. I crashed into the lobby of the Cambert Hotel, where I spent my wedding night, and I was killed along with my best friend since before high school, Susan McArgul. And after being dead for three and half weeks my time, and almost four minutes your time, I was allowed to return from being dead. Susan McArgul didn't get to return. Now, those are the real facts of life.

EVERYTHING
that happens when I sleep does not need explanation, only some things. I am sixty-six years of age, which seems about right. Lorraine is sixty-six years of age as well, and this, if you think about it, is simply a coincidence. We have both been married forty-one years, because we are married to each other. And now, in the nights when the bedspread leaves for the floor, after such an epoch of remaining on the bed, I want to know why.

The bedspread is the center of my inquiry and is becoming the main topic in my conversations. Lorraine, who has made the bed every day for forty-one years, is not interested. She is not the one who wakes up cold in the morning; she is not the one of us who anticipates being cold when we lie for sleep.