Waveland (5 page)

And now he had days filled with things that were annoying in their familiarity, and yet he could not quite remember them—gestures, remarks, fears, anxieties, hopes, plans. So he smiled and told jokes, tried to be friendly, tried to get by. He assumed this was what others were doing, too. Those who had been around awhile. He started thinking that his parents must have done this for years. His mother and father had endured a long, private decline in an apartment, the two of them jammed in there like gerbils, walking upstairs and down, watching television, eating meals together silently, watching more television, going upstairs and downstairs for thirty years or more after retirement. His father had complained. His mother had not complained. And then they died, one after the other.

A week later Vaughn, Greta, and Eddie were eating at Sun Deluxe, the Exxon station turned Chinese restaurant. Vaughn had talked to Greta about Eddie and now they were all pals, they were new best friends. They'd been hanging out nonstop. They were complaining about things in their lives, the ways things were going, Greta being tossed around in the paper again, Vaughn's trouble with Gail, Eddie fitting nowhere at all.

“After a while you start thinking stuff isn't too interesting,” Vaughn said. “Whatever it is other people are interested in. It's on television and you've seen it all before. Or they tell the story and miss about half of what's important.”

“What're you having?” Eddie said. He was flapping the menu with his hand, trying to get it to stay straight.

“When people don't get stuff, it's annoying,” Greta said. “It's like they aren't paying attention, usually.”

“What're you, an English professor?” Vaughn said.

“It's like you get to a point and it all falls away from you,” she said.

“You're not there yet,” Vaughn said.

“I am, sorta,” she said. “It's all twenty-year-olds now. They get the jobs, they're on TV. What can they do? They don't know anything.”

“That's the way people looked at us back when,” Vaughn said.

“I want some meat,” Eddie said. “Would you guys shut up and order?”

They ordered from a small Korean kid who could not have been more than twelve.

“Isn't that illegal?” Eddie said, pointing at the kid.

“Kids are okay,” Vaughn said. “They do stuff we don't know about. But they miss some stuff. So what?”

“Bob Dylan,” Greta said.

“A famous case,” Vaughn said. “I used to wonder about my father, why the things I talked about weren't interesting to him. I thought he didn't get it, but later I figured out he'd already been there and gone.”

“It's generations,” Eddie said. “Stuff gets squeezed down, dribbled out in pieces, leaving out half the shit.”

“You lose the thought,” Vaughn said.

“Pass the ketchup,” Greta said. She was fixing her hamburger, decorating it with the condiments available. She did a grid pattern with the ketchup, which was in a red squeeze bottle with a good pointy tip.

“How did you know you could get a hamburger?” Eddie said.

“On the menu,” she said. “Let me have that Chinese mustard, will you?”

Eddie pushed the pot of mustard her way. “I try to be friendly,” he said. “Not kill people. That's worth doing. It's hard though.”

“You're angry all the time,” Greta said.

“Well, people are always doing stupid crap all over the place. I'd be a great guy if it weren't for other people.”

“Eddie hates everybody equally,” she said. She opened wide to bite the hamburger.

Vaughn stood the tiny cobs of corn that had come in his vegetable lo mein up on end at the edge of his plate and put other little cobs across the tops.

“Cornhenge,” she said, nodding at his plate, her mouth full.

“Exactly,” Vaughn said. “But I don't want to hate everybody. It's kind of, you know, ungenerous. And I don't like that. I want to like everybody.”

“I like artists,” Eddie said.

“You should make paintings,” Greta said.

“I used to make paintings,” Vaughn said. “I can't remember how anymore.”

“I like thunder,” Eddie said.

Greta made a face and did kidlike explosion sounds. “Thunder knocks me out. I like thunder better than lightning.”

“Me, too,” Eddie said.

“I stop what I'm doing and listen,” she said. “I don't know anything about it, though. How it works or anything.”

“I saw a show about thunder,” Vaughn said. “I could tell you.”

“You going to eat those little corn thingies?” Greta said.

“Knock yourself out,” Vaughn said, carefully turning the plate so that the miniature corn cobs did not fall but ended up nearest her.

“Thanks,” she said.

He watched Greta destroy the miniature structures on his plate, carefully unburdening the pillars with her fingers. She was funny, she was deft. What was the problem, after all? What was wrong with
this!

“I remember stuff,” she said. “Guys I liked when I was young, nights by the fire, being sort of crippled there was so much love, frightened and excited, being touched, fingers along my cheek, the smell of a guy's hand, the look of his smile, his eyes.”

“I don't want to hear it,” Eddie said.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It's mostly gone now. Mostly I've got longing. Could be worse.”

Vaughn watched them. They got along fine. He thought she had the longing thing right, too. Longing was powerful and sweet, but not so sweet as the thing itself, whatever the thing was. Whatever it was, they were distanced from it. As they got older they lived an evaporated life. They were captives, now shoved back into the game by accident—the dead spouse, the divorce, a runaway husband or wife. They might have gotten there on their own, but more likely not. They were withdrawn and maybe afraid. And if not exactly afraid, then something else, resigned. They'd gotten older and given up immediate, sensory pleasures for the abiding ones—comfort, the warmth of rooms, the dog's smile, chairs sunk comfortably into, the routine, the television series, the books they could bear to read, the magazines in which they actually found the photographs interesting. Sometimes they were caught longing, thinking back to some boyfriend or girlfriend, some apartment or some day or night, some frozen dawn when they burned all the firewood, then burned the furniture
to keep warm. It was bad furniture. Burning it was fun. They thought back to a loft in New York, a house in Berkeley with tatami mats on the floors, somewhere in Colorado, or Florida, or Miami. The man or woman in memory.

For Vaughn it was hard to imagine how he'd gotten from twenty to nearly fifty. How he was this person when he had been that person. As a college kid he had been a painter. Then he had a breakdown and couldn't speak for six weeks. He went to bars with people every night. They listened to Edith Piaf on the jukebox. They drank beer. The others spoke; he did not speak. He went back to his place, an apartment over a store where he made big derivative paintings with whatever he had—footprints, sayings, cutouts, spray paint, tree parts, stuff nailed to the stretchers, lightbulbs, street garbage, Polaroids. He didn't speak (that was his memory of it) for six weeks. He didn't know why he had this breakdown, and he didn't remember the breakdown, just the fact of the breakdown. And the aftermath. He wasn't a bad-looking kid then, though kind of scruffy. When he looked at pictures of himself at that time he thought he looked a little haunted, attractively haunted. He was interested in what he had been thinking then. He was interested in how he looked, his shirt cuffs unbuttoned, his hair long, his beard full, his eye sockets deep. He wondered what had happened to all the people who were around in those days. All those conversations he had listened to—all the ideas people had then about the world, about painting, about what needed to be done, about what art was or might be. The bar—the bar was called George, he remembered that. The women were thin, all wry smiles and smoke. They wore lipstick and bracelets and rings. They walked like champions. They weren't the smartest women in the world, but in memory
they were unusually pretty—tired, sloe-eyed, smoky. He remembered thinking he was kind of dead. He couldn't talk. People kept asking him things, kept trying to help him talk. He'd get a word or half a sentence, the beginning of something, but he could never say it. It wouldn't come. There were times as the days wore on when a few words would come to him, then a sentence. He couldn't imagine what it was like, just that it was. He could say I like this, I want that, move over there, see this light. He remembered the boots he wore, heavy boots that hit the hardwood floors. He made pictures by intuition, imagination, the feel of the thing, the way a moment sits in time. The weight of it, the heft of it. The truth of it. The sense of fullness. It was not different from other things in life that were true. The crack of a ball against a bat when the sound itself said it was the long ball. The moment when a bolt began to thread or a bottle cap settled into its groove. But how was this turned into knowledge? How were such things explained to people who wanted the world simple, who insisted on
understanding!

“We're used to knowing how something works and thinking that how it works is what it means,” Vaughn said. “But how it works is only how it works; what it means is a completely different area of inquiry.”

“What?” Eddie said.

“Thunder,” Vaughn said. “I was thinking about thunder.”

Vaughn wanted to explain this to Greta, but he did not know where to begin; and he worried, quite properly, that he might struggle with the explanation, only to discover that she was there ahead of him, waiting, with a coffee and a tart.

Gail called at two
A.M.
They were asleep, Greta in her bedroom, Vaughn in the guest bedroom. He snored, she said, when they first tried to sleep together, and she poked him repeatedly until he woke up and moved back into
his
room. Later she got up and closed the door between the rooms. Now he bunked there nightly.

He struggled to get to the phone before it woke Greta, but they got to their phones in their separate rooms at the same time, their “helios” echoing.

“Can you come over now?” Gail said. “I've got some trouble here.”

“Are you hurt?” Greta said.

“Gail?” Vaughn said. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“He went nuts on me.”

“Tony?” Greta said.

“Right,” Gail said. “I can't deal with this alone, can you come? Police are here.”

“Shit,” Vaughn said. “We're coming.”

“We're on our way,” Greta said.

They didn't so much get dressed as carry clothes to the car with them. Jeans, belts, shirts. He got behind the wheel. Greta jumped into the SUV's passenger seat.

“Did she sound bad?” he said. “She sounded bad, didn't she?”

“Yes,” Greta said.

“Why can't she just curl up and weep like everybody else?”

“You are such a doll,” Greta said. She was tying her shoes, the balls of her feet cocked on the dash.

They got to the beach highway and turned left, heading up Kiln Road to Interstate 10. Because the bridge across the Bay St. Louis had been out since Katrina, they had to take the long way around—up to the interstate, east toward Gulf-port, and down to where his old house was in Hidden Lake. It was somewhat inland in a good section of the coast where the trees were old and gracious, the pine straw gently raked, the garages always closed, automatically. He and Gail had bought the house in higher times, when he was working for a developer, making a decent salary that was just begging to be spent on what was then an expensive quarter-million-dollar house. He thought at the time that it was above his pay grade, but Gail said everyone bought houses they couldn't quite afford. It was recommended. That worked fine until the bottom dropped out of the local market for upscale housing and Parsons, his boss at Parsons Development, turned out to have a unique idea about bookkeeping. Then the job went south and Vaughn never quite got it back together.

It took them nearly thirty minutes going the long way around. The house was brick and all lit up. There were five police cars, all of them with lights swirling and sifting across the neighbors' windows, striping the trees, lighting up the place like a gas station. They pulled into the driveway and found themselves with an eyeful of flashlight beam.

“Who're you?” the cop said.

“Husband,” Vaughn said. “Is she all right? What happened?”

“I.D.?” cop said.

Vaughn plucked out his wallet and got his driver's license. The cop skated his light over the license, then back at Vaughn, then back to the license. “Looks like you. This address, yeah?”

“That's right,” he said. “Used to be. Can we go in?”

Cop backed away from the car. “Who's the lady?”

“Her sister,” Greta said.

The cop grabbed the walkie-talkie clipped to his shoulder and said, “Got the husband coming in with a friend.” Then he flicked the light at Vaughn's waist. “Get your pants fixed, hey?” he said.

Gail was in the living room on one of the couches. She was crying and looked as if she'd been at it for a while. They had her stretched out and she looked lousy. She'd been hit hard and often, her face covered with bruises, scratches, cuts, and blood. Her lip was bloodied and blown up to the size of an oyster. There were cuts all over her face, neck, shoulders, and arms. Her hands were cut up—
defensive wounds
, he thought instantly, unable to stifle the TV cop show training. A large bruise was crowding one eye, shutting it down the way boxers get their eyes shut, tilted and squeezed. Her hair was matted
and shot out to the side as if somebody was still pulling on it. There were veils of blood on her shoulder, down her upper arms, and there was part of a torn white shirt soaked in the blood. Other than the shirt and an ice pack, she was pretty much naked except for a beach towel printed like an American flag that he'd bought as a joke one time. Some cop had thrown his leather jacket into the mix, too.

Vaughn sat on the coffee table in front of the couch. Greta stayed above and behind Gail, almost as if to stay out of her line of sight.

“Hey,” he said, reaching to move a twist of hair that was crossing the corner of her good eye. “What the fuck?”