Meanwhile, true to my word, I never shut the door between my suite and the Guinevere suite, where T.R., Muddy, and the children had settled. Except when the gang were out on one of their sprees, a constant river of sound flowed through the open door, voices chattering or quarreling, children babbling or screaming, the sound of TV game shows, the sound of rock videos, the sound of people splashing in the Jacuzzi.
I liked hearing the sounds at all hours of the day and night—I was never tempted to close the door. The sounds were a kind of rope I could cling to in order not to sink too deeply into the quicksand of the headache—they didn’t really pull me out of it, but they were cheering for me.
Once in a while I sensed that T.R. was in the room watching me. Once, when the headache had reclaimed the offensive and I was on the verge of nausea, I saw her standing just inside the door. I lifted my hand and waved weakly. She came a little closer.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like blowing my head off,” I said.
“You ain’t got a gun, have you?” she asked, looking worried.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not really going to blow my head off. I just said that.”
“You better not,” she said nervously. “We’re running up quite a hotel bill. I doubt we’d ever get it paid if you was to die.”
Once when I was feeling a little better she peeked in, wearing a sequined pink baseball cap.
“I took your advice and bought everybody new clothes,” she said. “Wanta see a few of us dressed up?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s have a little fashion review.”
Jesse led off. She seemed to have mastered walking, after a fashion, in the last two days. She wore a purple bathing suit and she covered her eyes in shyness when she saw me looking at her.
“We’ve been swimming six times, now Jesse don’t want to do nothing but swim,” T.R. said.
She herself was resplendent in a yellow blouse and stone-washed cutoffs. Bo wore tiny camouflage pants; he immediately raced over and machine-gunned me with a tiny AK-47.
“Bambo,” he said defiantly.
“Muddy got him that gun to keep him occupied,” T.R. said a little defensively. She had to go back into the other suite and virtually drag Muddy in for his inspection. Once I saw him, I could understand his shyness. He wore bright red cowboy boots, new Levi’s, and a rodeo cowboy shirt, but his hair had been dyed pink and cut in the latest Fort Worth punker mode. Unlike most punkers, he had a couple of Vegas-like gold chains around his neck.
“It was his birthday, that’s why I got him the chains,” T.R. said. “He wanted to be disguised as a cowboy, but you can take one look at Muddy and tell he ain’t a cowboy, so I decided we’d just punk him out. The cops won’t be looking for a punker with pink hair.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This county where we’re going is pretty conservative. Up there they’d probably arrest me if I had pink hair.”
“I got a hat,” Muddy said, brightening at the thought that it might be necessary to wear it.
He left and returned moments later, half hidden under a giant black cowboy hat.
“You look like a dipshit in that hat,” T.R. informed him. “It spoils the whole effect of punking you out.”
“If I was to get put back in the Houston jail with pink hair I hate to think what would happen to me,” Muddy said. “I’d rather take my chances with this hat.”
“You ain’t as much fun as you used to be—you know that, don’t you?” T.R. said. “Maybe I shoulda left you in jail—the pickings might be better up in this part of the country.”
“Just ’cause all them lifeguards over at the splash park have the hots for you don’t mean the pickings are that great,” Muddy told her. “Most lifeguards I’ve known have teeny little dicks.”
T.R. flushed and swatted his hat off.
“Watch your language, my daddy’s sick,” she said. “I don’t know why I even brought you here. You ain’t pretty and you ain’t nice.”
Muddy just smiled one of his faint, vacant smiles. Her obvious annoyance didn’t disturb him much.
“Uh, uh, uh, uh,” Jesse said. She was trying to crawl up on the bed. I reached over and lifted her up.
Dew wandered in at that point, flamboyantly dressed in silver pants and a bikini top of some sort.
“Ain’t you well yet?” she asked. “You’re missing all the fun.”
“Not anymore, I’m not,” I said. “Jesse’s here.”
Jesse, once on the bed, had again been overcome with shyness, but not for long; soon a pale blue eye was peeking at me through a web of small fingers.
“Where’s Sue Lin and Granny and Elena?” I asked.
“Sue Lin’s down playing video games, that’s all she likes to do now,” T.R. said. “Elena got homesick for her sisters and took the bus back—she can’t stand being away from her sisters. Granny Lin’s still trying to read magazines.”
Jesse crawled over my stomach and peered off the other side of the bed. Bo raced up and machine-gunned her loudly; he was about to brain her with the toy gun when I snatched her out of the way. She regarded her brother stoically, neither frightened nor amused.
“Cool it, Bo, you ain’t Rambo,” T.R. said. “I wish just once you’d make a good impression on somebody.”
“He’d rather gun ’em down,” Muddy observed.
“Well, you bought him the gun,” T.R. said. “I was just gonna get him some balloons.”
The low-barometer feeling came into my head again—the headache didn’t welcome the rivalry it was getting. It wanted me for itself. Although I was sort of glad to see everyone, I really had already begun to wish they’d leave—some of them, at least, except T.R. and Jesse.
“We could give him some cocaine,” Dew suggested, noticing that I looked dim. “Maybe he could snort that old headache away.”
“I don’t know if he even uses drugs,” T.R. said. “He gets along with Jesse, though, and you don’t see that too often. Jesse’s particular.”
“She ain’t, she’ll flirt with anybody,” Muddy said.
“Daddy looks awful, let’s go and leave him in peace,” T.R. said. “Just looking at him makes me glad I don’t have headaches.”
She stooped to pick up Jesse, but Jesse immediately flung herself on the other side of my body.
“Wah!” she said angrily. She turned red in the face and seemed to be gathering herself together for a squeal.
“That’s okay, just leave her,” I said. “I like having Jesse around.”
T.R. darted around the bed to try and catch her, but Jesse was just as quick, flopping over me again and squeezing herself between the pillow and my head.
“Wah!” she warned again, even louder.
“Hold your ears, she’s gonna squeal when I catch her,” T.R. warned.
“You don’t have to catch her, just leave her,” I said.
“Nope, she’s too quick for you,” T.R. said. “Next thing you know she’ll slip off the bed and pop into that Jacuzzi to show off her swimmin’. I ain’t riskin’ no drownded babies.”
She leaned across me and extracted a rigid little girl from behind my head. Jesse did indeed squeal. Before the sound receded to the depths of the adjoining suite the whole group had vanished, including Bo, who paused in the doorway and flung a few parting bursts of machine-gun fire my way.
The barometer in my head kept dropping; brief as the visit with T.R. and her gang had been, it had allowed the headache to regain quite a bit of lost ground. I lay very still with my eyes closed, hoping it would get bored soon. I may have slipped into a brief, oppressive sleep; then I felt the bed sag and I jerked awake.
T.R. was sitting there, wiping tears off her cheeks.
“Daddy, don’t die,” she said. She looked utterly miserable.
“I’m not dying,” I said. “I just have a headache.”
“You don’t look like you even want to live,” she said. I noticed she had a bit of a mouse beside one eye.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked.
“Muddy’s fist happened to it—the little turd hit me,” she said. “You sure don’t look like you want to live. It’s got me real nervous.”
“Nobody with a bad migraine looks too eager to live,” I said. “But in fact I am eager to live, now that I’ve met you.”
“Baloney,” T.R. said dejectedly. “Meeting me’d probably make you want to die sooner. I’m nothing but problems.”
I reached over and took her hand, which seemed to surprise her.
“Why’d he hit you?” I asked.
“’Cause I’m always saying horrible things to him. I don’t even blame him,” she said.
She lay down beside me and began to sob. I put my arms around her and let her cry. In time she stopped. I thought she might have slipped off to sleep, but then she lifted her head.
“I spent all that money of yours,” she said. “It’s ten times more money than I ever spent in my whole life put together. I don’t know what happened. I just started spending it and pretty soon it was gone. I guess I can work for you and pay it back in a few years.”
“T.R., you don’t have to pay it back,” I said. “I gave it to you. I’m not mad that you spent it. Money’s only to buy fun, you know. I hope you bought a little fun for everybody.”
“Well, Muddy had a nice birthday for once,” she said. “Them boots cost six hundred dollars. I just thought, fuck, why not buy ’em? You spoiled me, or something. I would never have bought no six-hundred-dollar boots before I met you.”
“Relax about the money,” I said.
“How can I?” she asked. “Now you’ve started something. I never realized I had such greedy friends. Dew’s bugging me to take her shopping right now.”
“Look in my pants pocket,” I said. “There should be at least another couple of thousand in there. Take them on one last spree. I should be okay by this afternoon, and we’ll go home.”
“I wish now I’d never brought any of them,” she said. “I’m thinking of calling the cops and having them come pick Muddy up. At least we’d be rid of that little bum.”
“Is he often violent?” I asked.
T.R. shook her head. “He ain’t big enough to be violent,” she said. “He just flies off the handle ’cause he don’t know what to do about me.”
“I’m afraid that’s common male behavior,” I said.
T.R. nodded. “If he ever hits me again I’ll kill him,” she said. “That’ll be the end of one stinkin’ little male.”
“On the other hand, he’s Jesse’s father,” I said.
T.R. looked at me neutrally. “He is, but it won’t save him if he ever throws another fist at me.”
Then she got up, rummaged in my pants, extracted my last wad of hundred-dollar bills, held them up for my inspection, and started for the door. I thought she was going to leave, but she changed direction and came and sat back down on the bed. She put the money on the bed table.
“There’s no reason you should waste your money on those people,” she said. “You don’t even know them. You just let ’em come along to be polite. All you really wanted was me and the kids.”
“That’s true, but it’s not particularly important,” I said. “Your friends are very likable, and there’s nothing wrong with being polite.”
“There could be such a thing as too polite, though,” she said. “It ain’t my failing, but maybe it’s yours.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to think so,” I said. “All my women friends think I’m too polite. They think it’s wimpish and it bores them shitless. They’d rather have men like Muddy who fly off the handle from time to time.”
“What do you say to that?” T.R. asked. She looked surprised.
“I say help yourself,” I said. “It’s not hard to find men who’ll fly off the handle.” I briefly replayed, in memory, hundreds of conversations in which various women, exasperated by my politeness, tried to goad me into something a little more forceful, if only into an expression of pique.
“Do you have a lot of girlfriends?” T.R. asked. Her mood was lightening; she seemed relaxed and curious.
“In a sense I do and in a sense I don’t,” I said.
“No wonder they get mad at you, if that’s the straightest answer you can give,” she said. “Is there some woman waiting in this place we’re going to if we ever get out of here?”
“There’s Gladys, but she’s not a girlfriend, she’s a housekeeper,” I said.
“In other words, you don’t have a girlfriend, right?” she said.
“Not at the moment,” I said. “Not precisely.”
“I guess that’s why you came down to Houston and got me,” she said. “You just felt like having a woman around.”
“I felt like having my daughter around,” I corrected.
She looked out the window for a bit. Then she felt my forehead, glanced out the window, reached over and took a few of the one-hundred-dollar bills, and stood up.
“You might have bit off more than you can chew this time, Mr. Polite,” she said as she was leaving.
13
While T.R. and her friends were out on a last little spree, my migraine finally left. Within the space of an hour, the barometer in the peculiar ecosystem of my skull began to rise; the pressure diminished, the thick, threatening cranial weather cleared, and I soon felt as light and fresh as if I had just stepped out into a fine spring morning.
The light feeling was partially deceptive—it had been a three-day visitation, and my hand still shook so that I could hardly get my socks on—but the headache, my demanding guest, was gone. As always, the first hour of release seemed like a miracle—almost a rebirth.
No one was there to share my return to life, so I picked up the telephone and made a few calls. The first was to my message machine. Calling it always involved a measure of apprehension, particularly when I’d been remiss and neglected strict message-machine discipline for three days. Lives can change completely in far less than three days, as I was well aware. By unilaterally absenting myself without consultation, I ran certain risks: friendships nurtured for years on the long, loose intimacies made possible by the telephone might, if a critical moment was missed through inattention, cease to be living friendships—the remoteness that Jeanie warned against might insinuate itself too deeply, turning something vital, if peculiar, into something formal.
So I shook from more than the aftershocks of migraine when I hit the code and waited for the message machine to reveal where we all were at with one another, so to speak. I was remembering that in another migraine-induced period of dereliction I had had to wince my way through more than twenty messages from Nema, who was experiencing rough weather, thanks to the violent mood swings of a manic-depressive firearms instructor she had fallen in love with at a shooting range. Nema was a good shot who practiced often, and she was quite prepared to gun down anyone who gave her serious trouble, but the canker in this particular fruit was the knowledge that the firearms instructor—Rick was his name—might well be an even better shot; Nema’s imagination was nothing if not dramatic. Indeed, it was a Jungian goulash of warring archetypes seasoned with images from the lower depths of popular culture. In a sense, she saw life, particularly romantic life, as a series of shoot-outs in which the fastest gun survived. How she had evolved this crude dramatism puzzled me. No empress of old, not Theodora, not Cleopatra, not Catherine the Great, could have been more confident than Nema, but the confidence was based on the conviction that she would always be the fastest gun. In light of this, her dalliance with the firearms instructor was particularly unfortunate—somehow she had chosen to fuck the one gun who happened to be faster.
This resulted in a string of messages that quickly escalated from agitated to furious, the fury resulting from my failure to call her back. By the time I came out of that headache and did call her back the crisis was over and the firearms instructor in jail, not because he had tried to shoot Nema but because he had fallen for a sting
operation and been arrested for selling fully automatic machine guns.
“I could have been killed,” Nema insisted for the next few months. “He was a Green Beret.”
“Did I tell you to get involved with a Green Beret?” I asked, taking what seemed to me a plausible line of defense.
“You didn’t stop me,” she said. In her book that amounted to the same thing. She was determined to wring an admission of remorse from me.
This time my tape was empty except for a three-second query from Jeanie.
“Are you there? Are you there? Bye,” she said.
Following that was a polite, nervous call from the local fire department inviting me to its annual picnic. As a big contributor, I always got invited to the annual picnic.
I toyed with the notion of calling Godwin and Gladys to inform them I was arriving with a considerable party, but I finally decided against it. Life held few surprises for Godwin and Gladys; their existences were complacent existences, essentially. All I had done for the last two years was lie around the house and watch European videos in the spaces between phone calls to women all over the world. In the past six months I had not even started my Mercedes, and they had not really started their cars either—if starting a car can be used as a metaphor for the active approach to life. In all that time Godwin had only written eight pages of his book on Euripides and the Rolling Stones; Gladys had not extended her reach much, either. She was nominally the cook, but instead of learning a new recipe once in a while, she had dropped most of what she did know from her repertoire, substituting a pantryful of cornflakes and a freezerful of frozen pizzas for the chicken-fried steaks, pinto beans, and cream gravy she had once produced with a certain flourish.
I could have picked up the phone and warned them that those languid days were over: T.R. and company were arriving. There were grandchildren to be raised, and a triracial assortment of permanent and semipermanent guests to absorb. Gladys might really have to cook again; Godwin would have to start wearing clothes, and exercise a little more discretion in the matter of whom he brought home.
I stood by the big picture window of the King Arthur suite, happy to be on my feet for the first time in days. I felt a little like King Arthur myself, or maybe like Richard the Lionhearted or some triumphant Crusader. The trip to Houston had been my Crusade. I had awakened from deep slumber—the slumber of emotional withdrawal—and fought that well-armed Saracen, indifference. Somewhere in the sun-splashed water park across the teeming freeway, my family were probably swimming or otherwise disporting themselves. They were the Grail I had recovered. Standing by the window, I shed a tear or two—self-congratulatory tears, I imagine, but real nonetheless. It’s not every rich, middle-aged, totally self-indulgent man who suddenly gets the gift of human beings as unignorable as T.R. and Jesse.