There Must Be Some Mistake (4 page)

ONE AFTERNOON
later in the month driving south, toward Texas City, I got caught in a merciless thunderstorm and took refuge at Chantal White's bar and restaurant, Velodrome. She was once a beauty, apparently, as evidenced by beauty-contest photos hung lopsidedly around the room, but in person she was comfortably weathered. I introduced myself, told her I had a place at Forgetful Bay, and said that she knew my ex-wife, Diane.

“I do?” she said. “So, we're neighbors. Wait—Diane Webster?”

“Yes,” I said. “My name is Wallace.”

“Well, I'm pleased to meet you,” she said. “I liked Diane. I used to talk to her when she was out walking. I think I even walked with her once or twice. She's been gone awhile now, hasn't she?”

“She has,” I said. “You appear recovered from the Yves Klein malefactor.”

“That was strange,” she said. “I was terrified.”

“I'll bet. Sounded crazy.”

She was attractive, judicious with the makeup, attractive in that way middle-aged folks aim for. She could wear tights without embarrassment, and did—leggings and a shirt. I liked her right away. We sat at what I took to be her table, in a corner of the restaurant, chatting about Forgetful Bay, watching the rain out the window. We had coffee, then coffee and pie, and pretty soon the storm was gone and the night-shift people were coming in. I was nervous sticking around but curious about her, and after a bit we took the stairs to the apartment she had above the bar and had drinks. “For those dangerous nights,” she said, waving her drink at the apartment.

We chatted more and in time decided to have an early dinner, which she had brought up from the restaurant. When that was done she went down for fifteen minutes to look in on the business, and when she got back we decided to take a drive down the coast to catch the wind and the smell of the bay after the storm. It was prettier out there at night. So was she.

We got back late and the bar was lit up with floods high on the telephone poles in the lot and I got the midnight view—the building was like a giant rock, made out of that blow-it-on concrete that people make odd-shaped buildings with, except here the shape wasn't geometric, it was like a boulder the size of a small hay barn, all chiseled planes, small cliffs, irregular flat spots, poorly framed square holes for the windows, and with what looked to be a small Airstream trailer stuck up on top. Homemade architecture, what we once called ad hoc design.

“How about that?” she said. “I bought it because it's so strange. You've got to admire it. It speaks a language all its own.”

“It's terrific,” I said. “Peculiar.”

“And the trailer's not decoration,” she said. “You can go right through the apartment ceiling into the trailer. Sleep up there, whatever.”

“I look forward to it,” I said.

“Really?” she said.

The rock building sat low off the highway, sunk into an oystershell parking lot at the edge of a thirty-foot-wide strip of water she called a creek, but was really a cut in the marshland that surrounded the bay there. Next door there was one of those fenced high-voltage setups with the weird-looking curly electrical posts sticking out at odd angles from the tops of two-dozen red weatherproof cabinets. “Cancer farm,” she said. “I'm going to open it up one day and turn everything off.”

On the other side of the building there was a steep hill maybe twenty-five feet high and we climbed up to the top, where you could see what had once been the bike racetrack—a good-sized crater with a banked track that was half sunk in the ground and half built out of it. We went back down and then entered through a short tunnel to the track itself, where there was standing water, the banked sides leaning up and away from us like a sideshow trick. A wedge at one end had completely collapsed. We climbed back up on the inside, to a point near the trailer, and had a look over the layout, there in the moonlight.

“I like it here,” she said. “Sometimes I even have enough business to pay for the place. There are days in summer my lot is full of trucks and boat trailers. The boats launch, guys are gone all day, they come back in the dark, want a steak and some drinks. Nothing much.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

She led me back up to her apartment over the bar and then up the ladder to the Airstream. It was tiny inside. We were kidding around about the place being like a tiny dungeon, all that giant rock stuff below and the cramped quarters inside. I laughed about it and stretched out on the bed. It was OK, pretty paint on the walls, small windows with what must have been postcard views of the bay, though at night all you could see was the lit-up parking lot. There were fresh linens on the bed, a little TV, all the comforts of home, and I thought I might be comfortable there for a while. “I could get used to this,” I said.

“You were a commercial artist?” she said.

“I was a regular artist first,” I said.

“Who isn't?” she said. “I want to hear your story, whatever it is.”

“It's not fancy,” I said.

“That's fine,” she said. “Unfancy is good.”

“Maybe I'll hang out here for a while,” I said. “How'd that be?”

“Is it a
long
story?” she said.

“Ain't short. We can start tomorrow.”

“Thought you said you were an all-night guy.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “Tonight I could sleep for a week.”

She shrugged. I always like people who shrug instead of speaking. There are lots of different kinds of shrugs, but hers were the best kind. Tiny, offhand, a lot of it the eyes, the brows.

I fell asleep in the trailer, and when Chantal came to check on me later I said I probably ought to go home, but I knew I wasn't going home. “I've got to close up downstairs,” she said, and I waved as she went back out. She closed the trapdoor and then, oddly, locked it. I listened to the deadbolt slide into place, and I was surprised, then amused.

So I stayed put for a few days. She ran the restaurant. Sometimes I was locked in the trailer, sometimes I was free to move around. It was a curious game.

At night, after she locked up, we rode around or watched television in her apartment. Eventually we had sex, which wasn't too bad. It wasn't Hollywood, but it wasn't awkward and messy, either. It was OK. There was some oral copulation and some non-oral. Nights, while Chantal tended the business, I read or was online or sat at the Airstream door and watched the clouds go by like chilly streamers. I smelled the food cooking. I listened to the sounds from downstairs, the laughter, the jukebox music, the arguments. There were always arguments. A few loud remarks would be exchanged and then people would spill out into the parking lot and a car would screech away, and then more laughter, the screen door slapping against the jamb as people settled down, got back to their real business. And at the end of every night she'd come up to the trailer and sit for a while, and then go down to her apartment. I stayed up in the trailer or went out and walked the parking lot or the shoreline across from the place; sometimes I took the laptop down to the bar and sat there until daylight.

Days passed. The sun was nice in the morning. Some afternoons we drove around, ran errands, took in the Kemah Boardwalk, a noisy tourist thing that still managed to have that mark of decay about it, even though it was new. The town wasn't pretty, and the huge bay didn't help that much. It was an acquired taste, we decided. Kemah was twenty miles up from Galveston but had been a fiefdom of the Galveston Mafia, sort of a suburban extension and playground. My grandparents told me about the Galveston Mafia. I remembered mostly the names of the gambling and nightclub spots in Galveston—the Balinese Room, the Hollywood Dinner Club, Murdoch's, and a couple others supposedly notorious. By the time I got there, all that was gone, much whispered of.

I was satisfied hidden up in that trailer. Chantal gave up on the lock, but I didn't budge. Every once in a while we took a drive. My divorce was years gone, and it hadn't been particularly bad, but I still felt only half connected, so it was a relief to hang out with her. I called Morgan to let her know where I was, tell her I was OK.

“The attacked woman?” she said. “Is she still blue?”

“Funny,” I said.

“Well, she's age appropriate,” Morgan said.

“Use the condo if you want,” I said. “Call Jilly. Tell her I'll be missing awhile.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said.

I thought I was starting something new this way, in that trailer, alone at night and aimless by day. Chantal and I spent a lot of time in the car. We ate in the car, drank in the car, smoked in the car. Everything was a day trip, because at night she had to open the place. I started making postcards to send to old friends from my New York days, people I hadn't been in touch with for years. It was a small thing, the postcards, but it was something. And there was a precedent, there were several precedents. I was making things again, and making something, almost anything, seemed like a giant step.

“You look businesslike,” Chantal said to me one afternoon when she caught me at work on one of the cards. “You're impressive that way. I like it.” She put her arm around me, pulled me to her, pressed her head into my neck.

“Always thinking,” I said. The card read
WALLACE WEBSTER'S ONE-MAN SHOW CLOSED TODAY
. “Thought I'd mail this out to some people,” I said.

She had that fresh smell in her hair, on her skin, that scent I'd become attached to quickly. It wasn't ornamental, it was plain scrubbed, soaped, always the same Dial soap. I liked the ads for Dial that I saw on television, mostly because she used it, because we both used it now, but also because Dial was so ordinary. I liked that we were the same as other people.

I guess I thought I'd be with Chantal for a while. I started telling her stuff all the time, stuff about my family, my background, all that. It wasn't extraordinary, but it was stuff I didn't tell everybody.

JILLY CALLED
and left a message on my phone, but I didn't call back. I was still with Chantal, talking too much, pleased to have a fresh audience. I told her one of my favorite early memories was of car trips from Houston to Galveston to visit my grandparents, my father's parents. They had moved to Galveston from Long Island in some long-since-lost fog of history. By boat, they had moved
by boat
from Long Island to Galveston. My grandfather was a Triple-A ballplayer who owned a bar in New York, and my grandmother was a short, stout woman from Poughkeepsie, which, being Texans through and through, my brother Raleigh and I thought was the strangest thing we'd ever heard. What kind of name was that? So we mispronounced it in every possible way we could think of on those long drives and laughed hysterically, made up facts about it, and generally misbehaved in the car the way kids did.

I recalled my father at the wheel of his precious yellow 1957 Chevrolet convertible, already by that time a classic, with the top down, my mother's pinned gray hair blowing in the wind as we sailed down the two-lane Gulf Freeway to the old, slightly disreputable beach town where the houses were carpenter gothic, the palms seriously grizzled, the awnings orange striped and wind whipped, and the sandy streets had names like Avenue I½, which, when spoken, was “Avenue I and a half.” Half an
I
—confounding wonder. Over the course of my childhood we visited often enough for me to see this little city, hear about its past, and to remember the long weekend drives to and from my grandparents' house on Cedar Lawn North. We went fishing out by the causeway or in the surf at Stewart Beach and, later, West Beach. We ate Sunday dinners at John's Oyster Resort, which was barely there by that time, and occasionally the Galvez, and we drove the seawall for late-afternoon entertainment.

“Everybody's been to John's,” Chantal said. “Even me. I saw a mouse running around in that place the last time I was there. We were eating and we were the only ones there and this mouse had the run of the place. Is John's still there?”

“Doubt it,” I said.

“Food was great,” she said.

“I always liked Galveston,” I said.

More than any other broke-down Gulf Coast town, Galveston was all about the air, that army-brown water that wouldn't give an inch when asked to be beautiful, and the sand thrown around in breezes all the time. I loved the way the beach seemed the abrupt and not-a-moment-too-soon end of everything. The Dead End of the World.

The Galveston Mafia stories were the icing on the cake, the benevolent Maceos and the less benevolent Fertittas, the hushed talk of gangland empires, smuggling, gambling, bootlegging, and other dark pursuits. One of the Maceo brothers had lived right across the street from my grandparents behind an eight-foot brick wall. Of course, by the time I came along all the intrigue was largely a thing of the past, veneered by then with the upright facades of ordinary businesses.

I never lost that feeling of being at the edge of the world when I went down to Galveston, and that feeling was always more poignant on the Gulf Coast than anywhere else. Towns on the Atlantic coast, in New York, Virginia, Georgia, were still connected to the rest of the country, while the Gulf Coast was something else, some shank of the land where things flat ran out. The Pacific coast was showtime,
Arizona Highways,
and all that. Picturesque to the point of parody. But Galveston—and Kemah, Texas City, Matagorda—all the little bay and coastal towns were places nobody stayed unless they had to, unless they were aiming to steer clear of the line of fire. Everywhere along the coast, from south Texas to Louisiana, there was this worn-out feel, some godforsakenness that drifted through the air like sad Latin music. Things were slowed down and nothing seemed to matter all that much. You did your business at a stately pace, meaning if you got around to it, and if you didn't there was always tomorrow, or the day after.

“That's what made Kemah my target when I was looking to get out of Houston,” I said. “Maybe the coast is no different from the suburbs, as superficial and empty, but it's still a little bit haunting. Probably the endless water, and memory, before memory was forgotten.”

She looked a little puzzled, reared an eyebrow.

“Never mind,” I said.

We went to dinner at a shack on the bay called Leitter's Oysters, big pine decking up on phone-pole pilings, two piers running out and bridged with these oddly irregular cuts of wood, the main part wood siding with zipped-down plastic sheeting for windows, and the kitchen another trailer stuck on the back end of the place, right on the edge of a shell lot.

“You been here?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said, like I was an old hand, though I'd only been there once.

We put in our orders and went back through the main shack, sat out by the edge of the place, water lapping up under us maybe five feet below the decking. We could see it right through the gaps in the so-called floor.

I told Chantal I'd driven the whole Texas coast in my early twenties, one end to the other, starting at Brownsville, where the town was trying hard not to be Mexico, and where it was impossible to imagine why it wasn't. I had gone down there with a friend who was headed into Mexico permanently, for reasons unknown, and I rented a car, a Cadillac, some years old and black with gray leather, and I began the long drive up the coast, staying as close to it as I could, stopping at every dinky town on the route. Some I knew, like Port Isabel, Tonsil City, Corpus Christi, and Aransas Pass, and some I didn't know at all, like Seadrift, Teacup, and Boiler, which was one stinky little town.

A woman came out with a couple of red plastic baskets piled with oysters and fries and called out Chantal's name. “White?” she said, and we waved her over.

“So what happened on the trip?” Chantal said, squeezing a lot of lemon on her oysters.

“I kept going,” I said. “Went up to Beaumont, and then, for a laugh, threaded my way across the Louisiana swamps from Houma up to New Orleans, down to Grand Isle, up to Slidell, and then across the coast of dreadful Mississippi, where gambling had not yet become the salvation so desperately needed.”

“They got it eventually,” she said.

“I know,” I said. The oysters were a knockout, and the fries weren't bad, either. I kept eating and talking, and explained that I went through Biloxi and on to the industrial burnout of Pascagoula, which looked about the way it sounded, and then across Alabama via the Dauphin Island Ferry to Gulf Shores and Orange Beach and into the garish far-western Panhandle of Florida at Perdido Key, and drove right on to Gulf Breeze, home of the Gulf Breeze Sightings, and Santa Rosa Island and then steadily along the long Florida run to Mary Esther and Fort Walton and 30A, to Pine Log and Panacea, Seaside, Apalachicola, and eventually turning south toward Crystal Springs and then Saint Pete, and down to the pricey heaven of Captiva and Sanibel and then that swampy alligator cross-country to Leisure City, and the high-rise route out to the Keys.

“It was fun,” I told Chantal. “It was like running away from home and staying home at the same time. Maybe dangerous here and there.”

“Yeah, but not for a kid who loves fried food, trashy motels, and girls that hang out in cheesy nightclubs.”

“Well, I didn't take the girls too seriously. I figured I could run faster than most. Even the all-out ratty joints seemed safe by the time I got to them. I thought I'd get tired of the tacky crap, the minigolf and souvenirs and franchise restaurants, but I never did. Not for years.”

“You going to eat that?” she said, her fork poised over a small oyster in my basket.

“Nah. He's all yours,” I said. I tossed a chunk of bread out the unzipped plastic window, and immediately it was hit by a couple of passing gulls. “It wasn't all shantytowns and pearly fish scales,” I said. “Used-car lots with colored spinners on long wires overhead, but those were the places I liked best. I kept a diary of the trip, wrote down what I saw, all the junk architecture—I was still planning on studying architecture at that point.”

She nodded. “You might have been a good architect,” she said. “You've got an architectural look about you.”

I took a minute to figure that out, got nowhere, continued my report. “I liked everything from beach dives to peach-colored stilt houses. I looked at what I figured was overlooked—lumber, seasonings on dive tables, wall colors, electric light. I thought you might be able to build junk for people and make it work. Houses like yours, for example.”

“I don't really call that a house,” Chantal said.

“Whatever you call it, that's what I was thinking,” I said. “I was sure that everything was already trash, garbage, artifice and mimicry, remake, rerun, for better or for worse, and that try as we might to change it we only made new layers of waste. That suggested we should embrace this line as the future of building. There were already guys working the territory, I'd read about 'em. I figured I was getting set to join 'em.”

“And so you did, sort of,” she said.

“Before I got religion,” I said.

“Religion?”

“Art. Takes you over, leaves you gasping. Like religion.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Well, not seagull art.”

“I figured you'd like seagull art,” she said.

“You got me,” I said. “I'm a little inconsistent. Still gasping after all these years.”

“I see that,” Chantal said. “Coming out around the edges.”

“I like the coast,” I said. “Peppered with crap, the too-tired-to-fix-it kind, the wait'll-it-breaks kind. Where the too-lazy-to-perform end up because it's easy enough, and there's still something purely rewarding about spending another inessential day next to the unwashed. The Gulf is a neglected animal in a zoo, an animal nobody wants to see, on display so deep in the property no one ever goes back there.”

“Look at you,” she said. “You poet.”

“I apologize. I regret it all. Take me back and lock me up again.”

“I will do that,” she said.

All this talk was fun for me, and Chantal was the perfect foil, she being more authentic and about twice as beat down as me, hard as nails, apparently, and skating with her on the surface of things was good therapy and heartwarming to boot. I was interested in the surfaces, the reflection of bright light, the appearance of things, the society of strangers. Surfaces are kind of final, kind of real in a way nothing else is. You can't really take it back once it's out there. I figured what I was doing with Chantal was taking the temperature of the patient, me, postdivorce, laying my palm across my forehead. I was already a fan of junk culture, every excess, every heartbreakingly bad idea some fool came up with, every pathetic effort we made to clean up our act and our lives, every crummy joke, every dumb gesture, every pretense to profound thought, deep spirituality, or, going the other way, low self-loathing. We were blockheads and ninnies, and I liked that about us, even the grand and miraculous, who knew not this rarefied enlightenment.

“I wrote in my diary that a parking lot in Bear Claw, Alabama, was exquisite, and I meant it heart and soul. I was a kid then. Life by television, for television. I did this monster drive given over to motels, fast food, tourist joints, gas stations, flying fish, bad signage, seaweed, short people, and fierce suntans. And all I wanted was to run into one person as marvelous as any one of those guys in the movie
Vernon, Florida,
which I'd just seen. That guy with the five balls of brains was my hero for a while.”

“Pay the bill, hotshot,” Chantal said. “I'm headed for the Land of Mystery.” She swung out of her chair and went to find the ladies'. I was left at the table waving at the woman who was wiping her pen off on her apron.

“Everything good?” she said when she got to the table with the check.

“The best,” I said. “I loved it.”

“Huh,” she said. “That's good news. If you ask me, there are many things to love in this world, and if you don't love something, your life's probably not worth the napkin it's printed on.”

“You got that right,” I said.

“Yessir,” she said. “Love is lucky. You see our gorilla?”

“What gorilla?” I said.

“We got a new gorilla out front,” she said. “I always wanted one and we picked one up at a place down the coast. It's only about ten feet, a ten-foot gorilla, but we like it. Needs paint. Check it out when you leave. I don't know how you missed it coming in.”

“We were talking,” I said. “Probably not paying attention.”