“No. Would you believe this? I wish just once in my life that some plan would function without a hitch! I’m so tired of snarls! You hear me, God? I’m tired of stinking snarls!” And if Nancy had not been a witness, he might have commenced bawling.
All that waiting, all his terror, all his premonitions, all his paranoia, all his arrhythmic heartbeats had gone for naught. No cops had appeared, no dope had arrived, not even the evil Ray Verboten and his sanguinary Verbotenettes had made an entrance. What the hell was going on here, a Big Fat Joke?
The sullen driver was removing battered suitcases from the cargo holds. “I had a friend arriving on this bus,” Joe said. “He’s a muscular little guy, with curly hair and pop eyes and a big nose. He was probably wearing a black T-shirt.…”
“Nah.” The driver shook his head vehemently.
“Why don’t you come over to my house?” Nancy suggested. “I’ll give you a cup of hot chocolate.”
“I’d rather have a double shot of bourbon.”
“Then you’ll have to go elsewhere. I don’t stock liquor.”
“What are you, some kind of health nut?”
“I’m a vegetarian. And I don’t drink.”
“You just smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.” Joe loved it. The valley was crawling with freaks who shopped at the co-ops, ate only organic edibles, practiced yoga three times a day, and then blew out their anodes, cathodes, diodes, and guts with pot, mescaline, acid, Quaaludes, you name it. They all dropped dead at forty from hepatitis complicated by flashback traumas.
Nancy’s face was a study in amused chagrin. “Like the saying goes, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”
Given the hour and the situation, Joe knew he should go home. The evening’s tension had left him exhausted, and anyway, now he had auxiliary plans to fashion. Where was Peter? And the dope? They probably couldn’t meet in Tribby’s plane tomorrow. Suppose Peter had been arrested in Philadelphia? Or elsewhere en route? He had better telephone Peter’s wife, Julane. Though not tonight—no point in raising the alarm before his friend had had a chance to communicate, explaining things. I’ve suffered enough for one evening, Joe thought. What I need now is sleep. Heidi might worry if she awoke, finding him still absent. The day was over … good riddance … tomorrow would be better.
Yet Joe was caught in the grip of a childish truculence. He wanted to vent his relief, his anger, his frustrations. Or at least allow his disappointment to dissipate before heading home. Once more, for the ten billionth time, he had somehow been played for a sucker, been stood up again, been left holding the bag. He had psyched himself to be ready for anything—a shootout, death, life imprisonment, even success. Now he would have to prepare all over again: talk about fatigue!
Though technically he despised self-pity, Joe had decided to feel sorry for himself. And there was that hideously placid woman just sitting tight, smirking like a lobotomized ninny, totally in control of everything. Though the monkey had squashed a banana, pissed on the windshield, banged on the roof, and caught his tail in a wiper, she hadn’t once flinched! Joe hated her. Yet he could use a transfusion of such equanimity. Her calm near the heart of his storm seemed very seductive. So why not have a little adventure, indulge his curiosity? After tonight’s traumatic anticlimax he owed himself a favor. No point in trotting home obediently this empty-handed, especially when an explanation of utter disaster might await him there. “Joe, Joe, Peter got off the bus in Higginsville, Missouri, went to the corner café for a paper, and never returned!”
PHILADELPHIA WAITER, A MAFIA DRUG COURIER, DISAPPEARS IN MIDAMERICA! ROTH AND HOFFA BONES LOCATED IN SAME GRAVE!
“Oh all right,” Joe grumbled artlessly. “I guess I’d like to come over for a quick hot chocolate.”
Hardly had the words left his mouth than his entire innards lurched again, his groin prickled and contracted, he experienced a chilly sweat. Tonight hadn’t provided enough sensations already: now he was going for broke!
“Follow me, then.” Those words entered his ears sounding unlike any others she had spoken. It was as if they had been uttered in a foreign language. Loaded with positively thundering innuendo, they threatened to explode inside his head, splashing his brains all over the microbus.
“Ow!” Bradley shrieked. “Ow, ow, ow!”
“What’s the matter?” Nancy asked.
“Sasha bit me!”
“Oh that silly Sasha.”
“I’m gonna kill him, Mom! I’m gonna kick his guts out!”
“Now now, he didn’t mean to hurt you dear. It was probably only a love bite, because he’s glad to see you.”
By the time, three minutes later, that he pulled up behind her VW in a Perry Kahn Subdivision #4 tract-house driveway, flight, pure and simple, occupied Joe’s mind. “Go home, make sure the kids are covered,” he urged himself. “Go to bed. Snuggle up against Heidi’s warmth. Forget about Peter, forget about Nancy, forget about the coke, to hell with the land and Eloy Irribarren! There’s still time.”
Instead, he offered to carry Bradley inside. Thanking him, Nancy led Joe to the tiny concrete front stoop. Using no key, she opened the front door of her flimsy box-shaped dwelling. Sasha scampered in ahead of them twittering like a nervous bird.
“Don’t you ever lock your door?” Joe asked.
“Nobody will rob me.” She spoke with the type of assurance the pope might have used saying “I am a servant of God.”
* * *
JOE HAD NEVER entered a similar house in Chamisaville. A tiny three-bedroom ultra-tract building, it had one bathroom, a living room, and a linoleumed kitchen with a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, and a built-in stove. Clean as a whistle, completely deodorized, it seemed manufactured out of cardboard. Midnight-blue wall-to-wall carpet sheathed the living-room floor. Cheap gold drapes shielded the sliding aluminum windows. The few furniture pieces were modern Scandinavian, except for a large puffy couch. A single stained walnut bookcase housed a stereo set, an enormous color TV console, and many books on various aspects of psychic and spiritual experience, ranging from Alice Bailey and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross to Edgar Cayce and the Lao-tzu. All the walls were dominated by enormous Nikita Smatterling paintings. Garish, and clichéd, though somehow quite friendly, they featured wispy, cosmic monkeys dressed in flowing robes, and wrapped in brilliantly colored auras. Joe’s immediate reaction was simply that they were pretty but lousy paintings. Not the subject matter, but the fact that so many of them abounded, bothered him a little.
While she puttered elsewhere, Joe put Bradley down, saucepanned some milk for hot chocolate, and checked out the refrigerator. Absolutely devoid of life’s staffs—baloney, mayonnaise, Swiss cheese, marshmallow fluff—it teemed instead with vegetables, papaya juice, and jars of lecithin and tiger’s milk. Groaning, Joe retreated to the living-room couch, from where—like a befuddled tourist who had just tumbled down a rabbit hole—he glowered uncomfortably at the fluorescent monkeys peacefully mocking him. Sasha entered the living room, grinned at Joe, then turned, proferring his neat little butt. He stuck a marble into his anus and pooted it out propelled by a fart, so that it sailed a few feet before bouncing to earth.
Five minutes later, while they sipped on the warm milk to a musical background of Emmylou Harris and “Delta Dawn,” Joe asked, “How come so many monkey paintings?”
Nancy sat cross-legged on the blue rug in front of him. “I don’t think you would understand if I explained, so I’d rather not explain right now.”
They chatted about other things. Joe blithered through, nearly incapacitated by fatigue and disinterest. Life was a bitch. Half an hour ago he had been drooling for Nancy: but now he thought her silly, just another suburban housewife concerned about her kid, her vitamins, her interplanetary travels. Why is it, he brooded, that every twenty-eight-to-thirty-five-year-old single woman he had ever known came with a ready-made seven-year-old kid?
She disinterred the topic of their potential affinity for each other. A young Doberman pinscher padded th
reateningly into the room and sniffed him, then ambled to a corner, curled up, and started snoring with one eye open, glassily fixed on Joe. A parakeet cage dangled in a corner: gradually, Joe realized that a small bird was perched atop, rather than inside, the cage. A thick candle, in a tall glass holder on the fireplace mantel, flickered. An incense stick burned beside the picture of a cheerful roly-poly gnome in a gold frame. A similar photograph leaned against a potted aloe vera plant on the kitchen counter. Another likeness of the same jolly elfin fellow helped clutter the bathroom window ledge, Joe discovered, when he ventured yonder to take a leak.
Sasha opened the desk drawer, removing a box of rubber bands. Squatting in front of the Doberman, he fixed a rubber band on his index finger, pointed like a gun, and shot the dog in the head. The Doberman growled, but Sasha blithely continued his game. Each time a projectile bounced off the dog’s thick skull, it snarled irritably, but did nothing. Nancy ignored the whole scene.
About halfway through his hot chocolate, Joe’s mood altered again. Pleasantly woozy, he gave himself up to drifting, answering her probes and inquiries good-naturedly and half-assedly without paying much attention. Things chugged, clicked, and hummed in her efficient little tract home, and to his surprise, once the initial shock wore off, Joe liked it. The place felt cozy. Not for ages had he sat in a house that wasn’t crammed with spider webs and hundred-year-old vigas spilling dust down from dirt roofs onto ragtag conglomerations of colorful, secondhand (asthma-inducing) furniture.
After a while, her talk honed in on left-brain and right-brain people. A few complex German names that she threw out meant nothing. His cultural deficiencies started glaring. But eventually she got down to it.
“You know, Joe, I think it would be really interesting to have a relationship with you.”
His stomach sent messages up to the brain: Start functioning, kid. Wake up! Be alert! “What kind of relationship?” he asked.
“That would depend. I really believe there’s been a certain chemistry working between us for a long time. You may not have been aware of it, but I was every time we had a conversation. I definitely know that something between us was meant to be. Haven’t you ever been able to focus in on the energy?”
Warily, Joe shook his head. “Not really. I don’t think so.” Don’t hurt her feelings, an inner voice coached. Get the hell out of here, turkey! another voice warned. A third voice cautioned, Stick around, pal, something interesting might develop. A fourth counseled greedily: If you want to, you can ball her. Then a fifth voice chimed in: Ball her, idiot, and if you think you were up the creek without a paddle before tonight, well let me tell you something, Miniver, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Was all of this innocent friendly palaver? Or, suddenly, was he looking down the barrel of a very complex, very clever, very devious human being with designs on his ass?
“I mean,” he added, unwittingly sculpting his grave, “I’ve always been attracted to you. You’re, you know, you’re a very lovely woman. But…” In desperation, he grasped at a straw: “Uh, how old is that Doberman, by the way?”
Nancy had become intense. Joe didn’t understand it exactly. Her speech sounded almost lazy, good-natured humor beamed from her pretty eyes. On the surface she was just another genial, casual chick, disarmingly regular and pleasant. Why then did he flinch every time she opened her mouth?
“Tell me truthfully, Joe: would you like to start something with me?”
“Start what? I mean, what do you mean when you start talking about starting a relationship?”
“Well, naturally we’d have to define it. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be sexual.”
“But I’m getting all these sexual vibes.”
“Of course, it could be sexual. But it doesn’t have to be anything, don’t you understand? There wouldn’t have to be any pressure attached. It’s the pressure that always confuses people and scrambles their energy.”
“But we’re already friends. So in a sense, we’ve already started something. Naturally, I’d be glad to continue being friendly. I enjoy talking to you.”
“It could be a lot deeper, however, than just the superficial relationship we’ve had in the past.”
“Yeah, okay. But I don’t think I understand exactly what you’re driving at. I’m getting all kinds of confused signals.”
“Suppose we made love. Tell me frankly, do you think you would want to go to bed with me?”
Ah-hah! “If I wanted to hopelessly complicate my life and lose my wife, yeah, I guess I could enjoy going to bed with you.”
“You don’t really sound as if you’d like it, then.”
“I wasn’t aware that’s what we were dickering over.”
“Dickering?”
“Well, I mean, I didn’t think…”
“It’s not important, the sexual thing so much, as what we could give to each other if we just let ourselves get that close.” Smoke issued languidly from her nostrils. “I think we could share some very relevant things.”
Joe had a brilliant idea. It sent electricity all the way down into his toes, and beyond. “Why don’t we shack up, right now, just once? Just for fun. Just for a lark.”
“I wouldn’t want it to be that way. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“But I got a wife, I got kids. I’m trying to hold a family together.”
“I understand. Our relationship wouldn’t interfere with any of that.”
“But if we balled, how could that not interfere with my family? I mean, Heidi would shit a blimp.”
“Well, of course, I don’t know all that much about Heidi. But there would be no reason whatsoever for her to feel any kind of jealousy toward me.”
“Wait a sec.” Joe leaned forward. “Lemme get this straight. When you were married to old what’shisname, to old Carter. Suppose you decided to shack up with somebody else. You mean to tell me that that wouldn’t have made him flip his biscuits?”
“Actually, we had what we claimed was an open marriage.” She eyed him curiously—taking his measure?
“Did it work?”
She laughed, and her laughter mollified his pounding ticker. “No, of course not.”
“Well, there you go.”
“But we wanted it to work. We both knew that for either of us to be happy, it had to work. We just hadn’t grown up enough, while we were together, to make it work.”
“Although you are looking at a man who has registered thirty-eight years on the surface of this planet,” Joe said, “it so happens that I have an emotional age, especially when it comes to sex and jealousy and other assorted accoutrements to the emotional rat’s nest that surrounds the introduction of the penis into the vagina, of a three-year-old.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way all your life. You have so much potential, you just need to recognize it, that’s all. That’s why I’m really interested in you. I keep feeling that I could lead you into a realm that would really blow your mind.”
“Blow my ‘mind’?” he leered coyly.
She shifted, ever so slightly, but in a way that translated to him as icily provocative. The merest budging of a haunch called his attention to that haunch as an almost deliriously attractive portion of her anatomy. When she dropped her shoulders back a fraction, minutely altering the thrust of her bosom, Joe wanted to grind his teeth. How did people learn such tricks?
Sasha leaped onto a drape at the north end of the couch, by Joe’s feet. He scrambled up to the rod, which popped free of the copper hookholder, spilling Sasha, enveloped in the drape, back onto the couch atop Joe’s ankles. Twittering frantically, the little beast punched and clawed at the muffling material, trying to free himself.
Nancy said, “If nothing else, perhaps we could try each other out, experimentally, just to see what might happen. Personally, I don’t like one-night stands. I’ve never gone to bed with anyone simply to get my rocks off.”
“Suppose you really feel horny, though, but you haven’t got a steady old man?”
/>
“I dislike it, but sometimes I masturbate. It makes me nervous, yet it’s better than getting involved with somebody in an uncaring way.”
“But if we made love—let’s say if we went to bed right now—well, that’d be pretty cold and deliberate.” Sasha’s little fists continued to flail at the heavy material engulfing him. He chattered hysterically. But if Nancy could ignore him, then what the hell?—so could Joe.
“No it wouldn’t, Joe. You’re not hearing me. I don’t feel that way about you. I think if we made love that something incredibly beautiful would happen. It might be a terribly intense and special interaction. We could create a whole new reality.”
Okay—he had a hard-on. His shoulders pulsed with sexual anticipation. The bundle of drapery rolled onto the floor, unraveling in the process: Sasha popped free looking positively apoplectic, and sprang into Nancy’s arms for soothing comfort.
“The problem is, Nancy, if we went ahead and balled tonight, that’s all it would be, just a one-night stand.”
“You say. But you can’t possibly know before the fact.”
“But I love my wife and the kids. I couldn’t jeopardize that.”
“You wouldn’t be jeopardizing those things. I already explained that. Those things are precious beyond belief. Ours would be a separate reality.”
“Yet you’re willing to mess with my family, and you have no guilt?”
“I’m not ‘messing’ with them. You wouldn’t go to bed with me unless you wanted to. And if you wanted to, it means that I have something to offer you that you’re not getting, and you know it. People reach out for things they need. There are no accidents in life.”
Joe said, “I don’t think I could trust you not to get involved with me in a way that I couldn’t handle.”
“If you wanted to handle it, you could handle it. Easily. It’s merely a question of accepting your own needs and desires. Without guilt.”
“Listen: first off, I already got a relationship. With Heidi. It’s complex, aggravating, tenuous. Scary sometimes, also; often bitter; and usually pretty loving.” Sasha left Nancy’s embrace, plucked a newspaper from the wastebasket, and began methodically tearing it to shreds. “And it’s not just between her and me, it’s between her and me and the children—we’re all intertwined. From time to time, it makes me very happy. It also has me climbing the walls. Often I think I can’t take it anymore, I need a divorce. Otherwise I’ll be dead before I’m fifty. Too much angst, it ain’t worth it. Naturally, when I consider divorce, I start thinking about other women, having affairs, all the crap that goes on when you’re out in the arena. In fact, sometimes it feels like I’ve spent half my life tormenting myself with sexual fantasies.”