“Come get me and do what with me?” she asked, after a pause.
“Bring you and the kids to the hotel,” I said. “I could get you a nice suite.”
“No,” she said. “I been dancing. I ain’t dressed right.”
“It doesn’t matter how you’re dressed,” I said. “It matters that you’re safe.”
“Why’d you ask me if I’d ever ridden on an airplane?” she asked, belligerence in her tone.
“Well, we were talking about airplanes,” I said. “I didn’t see anything wrong with asking.”
“I ain’t never ridden on one, if you must know,” she said defiantly. “If that makes me low class I guess I’m low class.”
“Honey, I never meant to imply that you were low class,” I said gently. “You sound anything but low class. You sound wonderful to me.”
She thought my compliment over for a minute.
“I don’t know how you’d know if I’m wonderful or not, since you’ve never seen me,” she said.
“I have heard your voice now, though,” I reminded her.
“You’ve mostly heard it hang up on you,” she pointed out.
“You are apt to hang up frequently,” I admitted. “But your voice is very lovely. It’s the kind of voice that could only belong to a wonderful person.”
“Right now it’s the voice of somebody who’s danced herself sleepy,” she said. “If I wasn’t holding this phone I’d probably just sit down and go to sleep right here in front of the Circle K.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’m sure that wouldn’t be safe. Why not let me come and get you?”
She didn’t answer. For a moment I thought she was going to carry out her threat and go to sleep on the sidewalk.
“Where are the babies?” I asked.
“They’re right here in their laundry basket,” T.R. said. “I think Jesse just pooped. She just got that little look of concentration she mostly gets when she’s wetting or pooping.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what are they doing in a laundry basket?” I asked.
“I found the basket in the Goodwill,” T.R. said in a voice that sounded sleepier and sleepier. “It’s a mighty nice basket and it only cost seventy-five cents. I pack the kids in it while I’m dancing. Otherwise there’s no telling where they’ll wander off to. Once Jesse gets her speed up she can wander off real quick.”
“I can’t wait to meet them,” I said. “They sound like wonderful children.”
“I wish you’d stop talking about how wonderful we are,” T.R. said. “You ain’t even met us, and you may not have the slightest idea what to do with us when you finally do.”
“I can’t claim much experience, I admit that,” I said. “But I’m willing to learn.”
“I’m getting too sleepy to think about you,” T.R. said. “Little Dwight just about danced my socks off tonight.”
“Dare I ask who Little Dwight is?” I asked.
T.R. chuckled. “I don’t know, Daddy,” she said. “Dare you or don’t you?”
“So who is he?” I asked.
“He’s one of those people you might meet if you’re really willing to learn,” she said.
Then she seemed to wake up a bit.
“Yep, Jesse pooped,” she said. “I can smell it. You better go back to sleep there in your fancy hotel, because once you meet up with this crowd of kids I got you’re gonna need more than willingness—you’re gonna need energy, and plenty of it.”
“I’ll be asleep in five minutes,” I said.
25
I wasn’t asleep in five minutes, or fifty minutes either. The thought that on the morrow I would finally be assuming not only parental but grandparental responsibilities made me wakeful. I spent an hour or two reading a wonderful book on Peru. It was called Cut Stones and Cross Roads and it convinced me that the Incas must have known more about the qualities of stone than any people who ever lived. One of the things I learned was that the Incas could lay stones together so skillfully and delicately that the stones could even pass the shock of earthquakes from one to another in such a way that the building they composed wouldn’t fall down. Spanish buildings erected over Inca buildings fell down in seconds, but the Inca buildings remained.
It was a saddening fact, however, that the Incas themselves hadn’t remained—just their superb stonework. They themselves had succumbed to Spanish diseases and Spanish greed. Their civilization proved fragile, and, on a vastly smaller scale, so did my mood. At reading of the sadness of Peru, I became depressed. Resolving never to go to Peru didn’t help much, either. One reason I read so much travel literature is that it helps me avoid places where I might get too sad. This time, however, I got as sad as if I had actually been walking in the streets of Lima or Cuzco. Part of my sadness was the realization that I was getting a migraine. It seemed to me that the cells in my head were arranged more on the Spanish than the Inca model; instead of passing the shock of events or moods along from synapse to synapse, they allowed the shocks to fall with earthquake-like force right on my brain, whereupon my whole systemic mass began to shudder with migraine.
It shuddered with migraine for several hours at the Warwick. I knew that fear of meeting my daughter caused the earthquake that was pounding my brain cells to mush, but knowledge didn’t help—it never helped. I turned on the TV but could scarcely see it—a certain amount of visual distortion is likely to accompany my migraine quakes. I thought I heard the voice of Don Ameche, though.
I got up, gobbled four amphetamines, filled a bathtub with very hot water, and sank into it. The speed and the heat of the water soon began to reduce the force of the tremors. I kept filling the tub, keeping the water as hot as I could stand it. Eventually my brain stopped quivering, the aftershocks subsided, and I was able to get back into bed. I felt a little spacy from the speed, but the main quake was over.
Since there was no likelihood of my going right off to sleep, with all that speed in me, I picked up the phone and called my message machine.
The first message was from Viveca Strindberg, another of my lost continental loves.
“Allo, this is Vi-ve-ca,” she said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly. “I love you. Call me sometime.”
I could have called her right then; it was late morning in Paris, where Viveca lived. But Viveca had a certain Baltic heartiness that didn’t fit well with my after-quake mood. She wasn’t working too much these days, but she had married a rich Finn who let her bat about the world pretty much as she wanted to—last time we talked she had been to Bangkok and had taken opium. “What a hangover!” was her comment. “I am depressed ever since and I don’t want sex either.”
I decided I’d call and catch up with Viveca in a day or two, and took the next message, which was not a message but just one of the many occasions when Gladys and Godwin picked up phones at the same time, oblivious to the fact that the machine was recording.
“What do you want now?” Gladys demanded to know. “I’m on my coffee break.”
“Your whole life is a coffee break,” Godwin said irritably.
“How would you know, you ain’t in this part of the house ten minutes a year,” Gladys said. “I slave my life away, and who cares?”
“If Leroy calls while I’m in the shower please be polite to him,” Godwin said. “He’s rather shy, and easily frightened.”
“If he’s easily frightened, what’s he doing running around with a sex maniac like you?” Gladys asked.
“Oh, do what you’re told, you ugly slave!” Godwin said.
“You ain’t paying my wages!” Gladys reminded him, at which point I fast-forwarded until I was well past their argument. I came in on a message from Jeanie and had to backtrack a few beats to get the beginning of it.
“Hi, Danny, was it your daughter?” she asked. “Are you there, are you there?
“I guess you’re not there,” she went on, a little sadly. “But maybe that’s good, maybe that means you’re with your child. That’s gotta be go
od, if you’re with your child. Look, I’m gonna get off.”
There was a click, then, immediately, another message from Jeanie.
“Danny, I’m just gonna take a minute to describe this script,” she said. “It’s about this woman who devotes her life to birds. She’s kind of a zoologist and has a lab in her garage. Now the thing that’s not too good is that she lives in Nebraska, and I don’t know if I could play a person who lives in Nebraska. I don’t think it’s very urban out there. Otherwise, though, I like the woman and I like the script. She’s kind of like that woman you had in ‘Al and Sal’ who was crazy for buzzards, only this time it’s sandhill cranes, which I guess are a troubled species or something. Her name is Nellie, which I also like—I could be a Nellie, probably—and she gets more and more obsessed with cranes and starts neglecting her husband and children and stuff, which I could also easily do if I had any to neglect. Also she offends a lot of people, the governor and people who make the rules about birds, and in the end she just sort of loses track of normal life completely and becomes a crazy bird woman.”
There was silence as the tape ran on.
“Now that I’ve described it I think I’ll just leave matters to you, Danny,” she said. “If you think I ought to do it give me a call right away. I have to let them know Monday.”
The next message was also from Jeanie.
“You know, you don’t have to help me with that one, Danny,” she said. “I’m sorry I bothered you—you’ve got your child to consider now—at least I hope you do. The only thing that really worries me is that it’s Nebraska—I’m not sure I can be that rural. My hope would be that the writer can think of a troubled bird that lives a little closer to the city. If not, I guess I better just say no, I like her obsession and all but I’m just too worried about Nebraska. All things considered I think I better pass on this one, Danny.”
There was a lengthy pause; I could almost hear Jeanie’s spirits sinking.
“It’s nice to get hired, though, you know,” she said. “They came up with the bucks, that means they want to hire me. In this business you can just get forgotten—they hire you for a while and then pretty soon they just forget you’re there and hire someone else. I’ve seen that happen. One of these days it’s gonna happen to me.”
She sighed; there was a final pause. “Maybe I could manage Nebraska,” she said, her tone brightening a little. “I could pretend it was just the park, only bigger. I think I’m gonna go over to the park right now and see if I get any vibes that feel like Nebraska. That’s it. That’s what I’m gonna do. Thanks for listening.”
I decided not to get the rest of my messages. I read a little more in my Peru book. It was still a few hours before dawn, though, and my headache was not really gone. It had subsided, but only as a retreating surf subsides. Any minute the surf might come crashing back.
To take my mind off this possibility I called the machine once more, and once more, as I had expected, got Jeanie.
“I took that picture about the woman in Nebraska,” she said in a tone of rich unhappiness. “I figure, at my age, if they still wanta hire me, I better let them—maybe Nebraska will get changed, the writer kind of sounded surprised when I asked about it, but he didn’t entirely rule it out. So that’s what happened, Danny, the decision got made. Call me sometime and tell me what your daughter’s like.”
26
Jeanie Vertus was forty-one, which meant that each role she got offered was an invitation to walk along the knife blade that separates stars who are still bankable and sought after from aging actresses who will never be bankable or sought after for star roles again. Over the years I had watched a number of talented, spirited women walk that knife blade. The most brilliant among them, with the broadest skills, the best instinctive choice-making apparatus, the most photogeniety, and some enduring energy and sexual radiance, might make it to forty-six, even forty-eight or fifty before making a fatal slip—and with aging actresses, two flops in a row generally constitute a fatal slip.
Others slipped at once and were reduced to playing small roles in PG comedies, or larger but more embarrassing roles in cheap European films, where often they would have to show a flash of tit but would at least keep their billing a year or two longer before slipping forever from the list of those stars producers automatically think of when they’re casting their leads.
Jeanie, Nema, Marella were all dancing on that knife blade now, and Viveca Strindberg had already slipped fatally; it had been seven or eight years since she’d been in a film in which she got to keep her clothes on.
I hung up again, depressed, and spent most of the rest of the night trying to decide if Jeanie could keep herself upright on that thinnest of edges—a star career—by playing a Nebraskan version of Jenny Sondstrom, with sandhill cranes instead of buzzards.
I decided she couldn’t and resolved to call her the first thing in the morning and tell her to try to back out of the deal. In my view the quickest way to get severed from stardom was to start taking jobs just because someone was still willing to offer them to you; for the most part those were roles that had already been rejected by the hot actresses of the day, and rejected for good reasons. Taking them on for no better reason than that they had been offered was no way to advance along the sword’s edge.
I decided to call my machine once more, though so far it had not been contributing to the sort of calm mood that helps one get over a migraine.
“I’ve been reading this book,” Nema said. “My masseuse gave it to me. It’s called Oral Sex. It describes a couple of things I don’t think I’ve ever done, but maybe I have done them, maybe I’m just confused by this writer’s terminology. I wish you’d call so I could discuss some of these terms with you. It’s kind of frustrating not to know whether you’ve done a particular sex act or not. You know me, always willing to give things a try, particularly new sex acts. It’s kind of exciting to think there might be some new ones, at my age—I could get some nice fantasies out of it, even if it didn’t turn out to be so great in practice, or even if I couldn’t get A.B. to do it. He’s pretty vanilla in his way of proceeding with sex, but he can be coaxed, and I could probably coax him.”
There was a pause—I heard her turn a page of her book on oragenitalism.
“Hum,” she said. “Irrumation. It doesn’t sound familiar but I may have done it with Joe. Joe certainly wasn’t vanilla to the extent that A.B. is. It’s making me horny just to read about it—I wish I were doing it right now.”
There was another pause. I assumed Nema’s imaginative temperature was rising, as it often did when her mind was alertly exploring the possibility of new sex acts, or old sex acts with new partners. But this time I was wrong; for once reality seemed to be winning the constant battle it fought with fantasy for the control of Nema’s spirit.
“There’s this young guy I’m gettin’ interested in,” she said. “He’s younger—I see him around the lot once in a while. He’s a driver, but not for me. Unbelievably cute, Danny, but not too good a brain, from what I can judge. He’d do this irrumation with me in a minute, or anything else, either. Every time I run into him I have fantasies about him for two or three days. But I don’t know—suppose I grab him? It’s not going to be as good as the fantasies, no way. Either he’ll get scared and I’ll have to chase him or he’ll fall in love and I’ll have trouble gettin’ rid of him when things cool down.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I used to just grab these cute young guys and deal with the mess when the mess came along, but I guess I’m losing my nerve or something. More and more I don’t grab them. I remind myself that the fantasies would undoubtedly be better than the realities, and I stop with the fantasies.
“I don’t know,” she said again in a discouraged tone. “I guess I don’t respect my new approach. I’d really just like to grab that kid and fuck him and sort things out later. That would seem more brave—besides, I bet it’d be fun.”
She sighed. “But I don’t know if I will,” sh
e said. “This one might stay a total fantasy. Do you think it’s because I’m older?
“If you’ve got that business with your daughter straightened out I wish you’d call,” she said. “There’s irrumation and a few other terms I want to discuss with you. Bye.”
The final two calls on the machine were both from Marella Miracola and were made from a car phone somewhere outside New York—she was there promoting a new film. Unfortunately my message machine didn’t handle car phone calls very well—it interpreted little cellular signals as hang-up signals, and it hung up, only allowing Marella about five seconds each time.
“Hello, it’s Marella, I’m driving around,” she said; then the beep cut her off.
The second call was no less brief, but its few seconds were packed with Latin indignation.
“It cut me off, I hate your machine!” Marella yelled. “I hate it, it’s giving me dread!” She got the word “dread” out just in front of the beep, after which no more was heard from her. It was too bad, but I’d told her a million times the machine was erratic with car phones.
After that I backed the tape up and played another snatch or two of Gladys’s argument with Godwin, to see if it had gotten serious or had merely remained rhetorical. Fortunately the latter seemed to be the case; the two would probably not come to blows for at least a day or two, so all I had to remember was to call Jeanie and advise her to get out of the bird-woman movie, then call Nema and encourage her to fuck the cute young driver. Probably she would never get around to it, but the encouragement alone would be a tonic. It seemed to me that Nema was a little too young to allow her sense of adventurousness to fade into the light of common caution.
Outside, the sky was lightening, finally. I went out on my little balcony and sniffed the misty, slightly fetid Houston dawn—the smell awakened old memories, not merely of the several years I had spent in earlier life, smelling the city’s dawns; but memories even older, cellular memories, perhaps, of life in the primordial swamp, which Houston in some ways resembles.