Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 9

  Noel let go of Trixie’s hand and leaned in through the door. He took a whiff. Kind of ammonia smell, you mean? He said, That would be your toilet. About every forty-fifty dumps, it needs a recharge. He did a little silent calculation. I’d say we’re right at about forty Judi shut the door.

  When we got home, Judi stood beside the car before going in. Spot heard the doors close and began to bark. The lights went on in Mr. Les-perence’s living room. Judi said, Look at those stars, all that darkness, Laf. Jesus. What do you suppose it means?

  That Pozzo’s home in bed, I said.

  19.

  A Life in Vermilion

  I DROPPED JUDI AT THE AIRPORT. SHE WAS OFF TO A WEEK-LONG CONFERENCE in Cleveland on therapeutic modalities or something. It was easier than I thought it would be, asking Pauline for a date. Why I asked, though, is another matter. Maybe I was feeling too attached to Judi or not attached at all now that she was away. I didn’t stop to think about it. I walked into Mr. Natural’s and waited around until the guy buying buckwheat groats, corn germ, and lentils paid up and left. Must be having a party. Then I told Pauline that I hadn’t come to shop, but to ask her out. She smiled. I tried to remember how to do this, I mean how to allure and seduce. I looked at her, cocked my head, raised my eyebrows, blinked—harmless little primate—and smiled. The chase was on. You’re making me blush, she said. Then she fixed her eyes on mine, narrowed her gaze, set her jaw, scrutinized me. Sure, she said, okay. I said, You like movies? We’ll go to a movie. Get a drink after. Is Wednesday good? Wednesday, then.

  So at about six on Wednesday evening I was telling Spot how excited I was, and he was wagging his tail a mile a minute because he figured from the tone of my voice I could only be talking about the beef brisket I had in the oven just for him. The phone rang. I heard Pauline’s voice on the machine, and I picked up. I wasn’t sure this was the right number, she said. She meant Judi’s voice on the tape, I guessed, but I didn’t offer any explanation. She asked me if I would stop at 235 Providence Street and pick up Marvin the sitter. Sure. He’ll be waiting outside at 6:45, she said. Well, Marvin the sitter turned out to be Marvin the estranged husband. I’ve heard a lot about you, I said. He shook my hand, said it was a real pleasure. What do you think of these? he said. For the kids. He showed me two neon-colored yo-yos. One green, one orange. They’re beauties, I told him.

  She probably told you about the drugs and shit, Marvin said. I nodded. A little, I said. He said, I’m off that stuff. Clean as a whistle. He rolled up his sleeves to prove it. Went through rehab at Marathon House. Sometimes you have to hit bottom, Lafayette, he said. He pronounced it “Laugh yet.” He told me how he had owned a produce market on Chandler Street and lost it all. My father’s business for thirty-eight years, and I pissed it down the drain. I became a total scumbag, he said. I wanted to tell him this was not an AA meeting, but he kept going. One time my buddy Albert Golden keeled right over in that alley behind the Peking Garden. I was so fucked up I pulled the spike out of his arm and fixed myself. Albert died and I wound up in detox. Saved my life.

  Was Marvin telling me this, that he probably was HIV-positive, so that I would keep my pecker away from his wife? I wasn’t sure, but I was certain that I shouldn’t take any chances. I realized I was temporarily unprepared, but how do you tell a guy you’re just running into the pharmacy for a pack of rubbers because the one thing you want most in the entire world is to have intercourse with his wife?

  Marvin told me he was into kundalini yoga now and meditation. Told me he worked out every morning at Lord’s Gym on free weights and the Nautilus. Best shape of my life, he said. I might do a little pot now and then, he said, but never around the kids. He tapped his head. You got to use common sense. He asked me to pull into the next parking lot, and I did. He ran into Iandoli’s Package Store, came back with a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Marvin opened a can for himself and offered me one. No, thanks. Then he said, If you store your guns in PVC pipe, they can last forever underground. No rust at all. I don’t have any guns, Marvin, I said. He seemed not to want to believe that. What kind of blue-collar philanderer doesn’t have himself an equalizer? He looked at me and back out the window, said, I’m going to be ready for the revolution when it comes.

  I figured—wouldn’t you?—that Marvelous Marvin was some unreconstructed old new lefty who was holding on to the dream of a socialist revolution. Power to the people, and all that. I was afraid I was going to have to like the guy.

  “President Clinton’s got a black son,” Marvin said. “Keeps him hidden away in a private school in Ohio. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  Was he joking? I didn’t know if this was some subtle junkie irony that I was just too unhip to pick up on or what.

  Then Marvin told me about the Council of the Hundred, headquartered in Zurich, that rules the world. We were stopped at a red light on Belmont Street by Memorial Hospital. You really never heard of this? he said.

  I said, No. I didn’t say, Because I’ve been living on this planet the whole time.

  He took a breath and explained that the Council was made up of members of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission, the Yale University Skull and Bones Society, the World Bank, UNESCO, the CIA, the British MI-5 and MI-6 intelligence agencies, the College of Cardinals, the former Politburo, and the Elders of Zion. The light turned green.

  I was speechless. I wanted to ask him to write all this down for me. Material like this doesn’t step into your life every day. He told me that the NEA’s sole purpose was to destroy the minds of the youth of America, turn them against God, liberty, and make them tools of the Council.

  I said, “Marvin, do you have many friends?”

  “Friends are from the past,” he said, “and I don’t live in the past. I live in the here and now.”

  “You know, Marvin, I was a teacher, a card-carrying NEA member, and I never once got instructions to fry anyone’s brain. I might have done it on my own, I admit.”

  He said, “Two plus two equals four.” He looked at me. “That’s what you teach. Well, what’s two? How do you know two equals two?”

  I took a left onto Everard Street.

  “Tenth house up on the left,” Marvin said.

  Tenth, Marvin? I thought.

  Mick and Keith went nuts when they saw their father. Each of them grabbed a leg and hugged it, and then they took turns being lifted for a kiss. Pauline looked on, warily, it seemed to me. Mick and Keith were willowy boys of six and seven, I guessed, with shoulder-length sandy hair, sallow skin, and bruised knees. They were dressed in their Jockey shorts. They wanted their dad to come look at their room. Sure, he said, but first he had a surprise. He pulled out the yo-yos, and the boys whooped. Pauline said, All right now, you know the rules. In bed by eight-thirty She kissed them good-bye. Be good for your father, she said. And then they noticed the stranger standing by the fridge. Who’s he? the younger one said. Pauline introduced me. I smiled, said hi. The older one said I had a dumb name. The younger one said, What happened to your teeth?

  We went to see Elvira Madigan at the Paris. I hadn’t seen it in about fifteen years. I had once cherished the tragic notion that you could pretend the world does not exist if you are in love. Was I wanting to feel that way again? Pia Degermark is beautiful, of course. I tried to imagine what she looked like now, almost thirty years later. More beautiful. But I’m afraid that the story didn’t hold up all that well over the years, and I was disappointed. Whenever I could during the movie, I leaned toward Pauline so that our arms might brush each other, or our shoulders. I thought if I could gently press my cheek to hers, I would find bliss. I held her hand.

  After the movie, we walked across the street to the Soho Pub. Pauline made a call home while I ordered a pint of Watneys for me and a sparkling water for her. “How’s everything?” I said when she sat down.

  “Under control,” she said.

  Pauline thought the movie was sad, their suicides and all, how they both had so much—each other—to live
for. But any other ending would have been even sadder. She said, “I always wanted to live in a town where the railroad tracks came right down the main street. I must have read about it as a child or seen some show about a town like that.”

  “Did it have a name?”

  “Vermilion.”

  Pauline told me about Vermilion. “Well, I have a cozy, white house. It’s got a front porch and a gabled roof.”

  “And a white picket fence?”

  “I don’t see one,” she said. “A catalpa in the front yard. I hang out the morning wash on the clothesline and listen to the wind snap the sheets. I put my baby in her Snugli, and we walk and walk, and I sing to her until she sleeps. At night I watch the moon rise over the town. In winter, the snow drifts against the house, and I have to stay in. Sometimes I walk to a coffee shop that faces the railroad. I go there to hear the dishes clatter in the kitchen.”

  We drove back to Everard Street. The house was quiet, and we tiptoed across the kitchen. Mick and Keith had fallen asleep on the floor of their room. Pauline put them in bed, tucked them in, closed the door. Marvin had fallen asleep in his wife’s bed. Pauline and I sat on the couch in the living room. I drank one of Marvin’s Budweisers. I asked Pauline what she thought about Marvin’s politics of paranoia. She guessed he needed something to take the place of heroin. He’s better off, she told me.

  Marvin yelled from the bedroom. “Are you coming to bed, Pauline?”

  Pauline looked at her watch, saw that it was nearly midnight. She said she really should get some sleep—work in the morning, day camp for the boys. At the door she kissed me, thanked me. I wanted to touch the small of her back, pull her toward me. I didn’t dare. Friday night? I said. She nodded, smiled. She put her finger on my lips. Come by about nine. I’ll have the kids in bed, she said.

  When I got home, I told Spot the whole story There was a message on the machine. Judi was checking in to say hi; everything’s cool in Cleveland. Bye. No rejections in the mail, at least. I did get this small manila envelope, postmarked Dania, Florida 33004. My father had meant to write “Do not bend” on the envelope, but the “bend” came out “bond.” Inside was a photograph of me holding up an ugly-as-sin fish. I’m about six or seven, and I’m standing on the wharf in Provincetown. It’s me, all right, I can see that, this figure of shade and light, me staring into the camera, one eye squinted shut, and there’s my father the photographer, his long shadow covering me like a blanket. I wondered now if I had been happy that morning. And if I could remember that moment, any bit of the holiday in Provincetown, would I be happy now? Would I even be the same Lafayette Proulx?

  Before our second date, I was so tense with the anticipation of making love to Pauline that I nearly deep-fried my hand at work. I told Nicky what was going on. He said, I know that woman. She’s a knockout, he said. I was so worked up I thought my nose was going to bleed. Nicky said he used to have a wicked bad crush on Pauline, as bad as the one he’d had on Princess Summerfallwinterspring. But look, he said, do you think you should be doing this?

  I showed up at nine. The kids were awake, and they were irascible. I could see that they were trying to protect their mother and their futures from the fishy-smelling guy with the peculiar teeth. I sat on the couch in the living room, reading Prevention and listening to Pauline try to reason with her sons. One wanted to call Daddy. The other had a stomachache. One wasn’t tired. The other wanted a story. Like that. I read about preventing kidney stones the natural way, about platelets, the little lifesavers that can kill you, about the anticancer vitamin combination. One of the boys began to cry

  In her bedroom, Pauline put the lights out and kept her T-shirt on. Our lovemaking was deliberate and intense. Pauline scratched, writhed, and cried quietly, never spoke. Were the tears about the children down the hall? We finished. I listened for footsteps. I thought I should get up, but I wanted my lips on her neck, my knee between her legs, my hand on her breast forever. We made love again. This wasn’t fun for Pauline; this was serious. Her gravity flattered me, but I didn’t understand it.

  When I dressed to leave, Pauline thanked me and cried. I kissed her eyes. We walked to the back door. The sun bloodied the eastern sky. We heard a whine. One of the boys, his hair bed-tousled, stood in silhouette at the doorway to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He cried, said, Ma, I’m all wet. Pauline tapped my hand, turned to her son. I stepped out of his life for the moment and closed the door behind me.

  I wanted to believe that if we decided to, Pauline and I could drive off together into the sunset, begin a new life in Vermilion. I wanted to believe that this would not disrupt or destroy anyone’s life. That’s what Pauline did to me. How can a body have so much power?

  20.

  Evidence of Things Unseen

  ON MONDAY AFTERNOON AT THE AIRPORT, AWAITING JUDI’S ARRIVAL FROM Cleveland via Newark, I held a pair of conflicting images in my head. The boy with the bed-tousled hair, crying, rubbing his eyes, smelling of urine, was one. The second was Pauline’s breath on my cheek as we lay in bed, the breath delicate, warm, susurrus, that breath and the heady smell of her dampness, like milk and pears and must. And two emotions: fear and pleasure. And what is the image in this boy’s mind as he stands there, shaken from his dreams, scared into incontinence? What does he see in that shadowy kitchen? My overcoat and leather shoe? The steely glint in my eyes? Have I marked my scent on the linoleum? Does he sniff dominance? Does he hear the jays’ first squawks outside in the fir tree? And will he always hate those birds? And how does he name this perception? “Mother Leaving with Stranger”? or “Intruder Backs Away from Trouble”? or “I Don’t Care; I’d Rather Die Than Ask Them for Help”? When I heard that the Continental flight from Newark was delayed, I went into the lounge, got a coffee, and sat at a table. I opened my notebook.

  Theresa was dressing the kids in front of the television, getting them ready for the weekend trip. Dale was dropping Keynes off at his sister’s house. She asks him could he change a fuse for her. She’s such a klutz. The power’s off in the bedrooms and bathroom. He does and kisses his sister Magda on the cheek, thanks her again for watching His Highness. Dale and Theresa were ready for the drive, but I wasn’t.

  Something was missing, I knew. I know that what’s not in a story counts as much as what’s in it. And I didn’t know clearly enough what I was leaving out. So what I decided was that Dale and Theresa had been holding something back from each other and from me. Well, they could be cautious with each other, as lovers sometimes are, but before we took this trip, they’d each have to tell me one secret about themselves. And the secret would have to do with the first two notions that popped into my head. Dale’s secret, then, would pertain to salacious behavior; Theresa’s had to do with Peter’s birth. At first I thought that maybe Dale kept skin magazines in his room and that Theresa blames herself for Peter’s retardation because she smoked and drank alcohol during her pregnancy.

  Ten years ago, it turns out, Dale dated a woman who was new to the faculty, fresh out of grad school up in Clovis. She taught ESL. During the course of their semester-long romance, Dale spanked her with a hairbrush during sex because she asked him to. She needed the pain to feel alive, she told him. What Dale is afraid of or ashamed of, or both, is that he enjoyed it. He was relieved when this woman took a job in Fort Collins.

  Theresa’s revelation was this—that her ex-husband was not Peter’s father. She had been having an affair with an intern at the hospital. When her husband became so distraught over the child’s condition, she could not bring herself to tell him the truth. She thought she was protecting him. And despite what she told Dale, she does know where Dan is—Odessa—and she would never ask him for child support. She still sees the intern on occasion. She never told him. He has a family practice in town. He’s married. Theresa’s seen the photos of his baby girl. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew this information would make itself felt in Capitan or in Lincoln, and I knew as well it would not appear on the page.

 
I heard the announcement that Flight 3660 from Newark was arriving at Gate 2. I closed my book. Judi was frantic. She had twenty minutes to make her appointment with Dr. Stouder. She couldn’t possibly cancel again. I told her just to drop me near downtown on her way I told her I’d probably go to the library, and I’d meet her back home for supper.

  Of course, I did not go to the library, but trucked right over to Mr. Natural’s. Pauline stood behind the counter waiting on an elderly gentleman who wanted something for the constant ringing in his ears. Well, not a ringing, really, more like a buzzing. It’s unbearable sometimes, he said. Pauline gave him zinc and chromium supplements and prescribed three ounces of beef a day, liver if he liked it, with sweet potatoes, carrots, or spinach. When the man left, I told Pauline we should get some lunch. She took off her apron, told someone in the office she’d be back in a half-hour.

  We went to the common and sat on a bench and watched people. I bought a hot dog and a root beer from Harmonica Hansel’s cart. We sat quietly while I ate. Pauline asked me did I want to know what this meal was doing to my body? I don’t think so, honey. She took out a squeeze bottle of sunscreen and applied the lotion to her face and arms. She leaned back on the bench and closed her eyes. She smelled like coconut and bananas.

  “The other night,” I said. “When your boy saw us. Is that what’s bothering you?”

  She looked at me, squinted. “I’m just letting myself get angry at you,” she said. “No reason.” She held my hand and then let go. “That way it’s easier for me to tell you what I have to tell you. Marvin and I are getting back together.” She said she had to be heading back to work. I walked with her.

  “Don’t go back with Marvin just to get rid of me,” I said.