Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (5 page)

 

A
fter a ten-to-five shift at Fake and Bake, Nadine returns to her house in Cathedral City, just east of Palm Springs. Her place is a small, two bedroom bungalow, fourteen hundred square feet, built with cheap materials during the nineties real estate boom. The house had been foreclosed on six months earlier but Nadine is not the owner. A client from Fake ‘N' Bake is a loan company representative and he surreptitiously arranged for her to move in. The water was still running and Nadine found someone on Craig's List who knew how to hook up a generator so although she is technically a squatter, the place feels like a home, the Foreclosed sign in the front yard notwithstanding. An easy mixture of whites and Latinos, the low-key town is desert-on-a-budget and Nadine blends right in.

She puts a Lean Cuisine teryaki chicken dinner in the microwave and lets Diablo the Chihuahua out for a run in the fenced yard. Nadine straightens up while her food cooks. The place is sparsely furnished with a white velour couch, two upholstered chairs and a coffee table, all purchased at local garage sales. She removes the dish from the microwave and while it cools on the kitchen counter, she takes a shower. Hard called earlier and asked if he could come over. She had hoped he would ask her out to dinner but that wasn't on his agenda. She told him not to expect to be fed and he had said that was fine with him.

Nadine towels off and gets dressed. Her slim legs taper into delicate ankles, one of which is sporting a gold anklet Hard had given her. Examines herself in the mirror. She's wearing a pair of low-slung Capri pants from which a hot pink thong peeks in the space below a sleeveless white cotton blouse. She has been dieting and exercising at a hotel where she pretends to be a guest and her already attractive form is in fine shape.

Nadine fishes in the medicine cabinet, locates a bottle of Valium. She had taken one about three hours earlier, as far as she can remember, and wonders if it's too soon for another. But she was feeling on edge today, figures she can start cutting back tomorrow. Down it goes, chased with a Diet Coke. Sitting in a chair with a magazine, she wonders when her life is going to change. Nadine did not have a lollipop childhood, and hoped that the dark clouds that shadowed her early years would finally dissipate. She thinks about her mother, who ran off with a friend's husband when she was little and her father, a Navy veteran who raised her and an older sister on a restaurant manager's salary, bringing the girls to free tennis clinics in the city parks. The sister didn't take to the game, but Nadine loved it, playing for her high school team and earning a spot on the varsity at San Diego State. Her father had been a heavy smoker and was sipping a whiskey sour in a Tijuana bar when he went into cardiac arrest. Nadine took it hard and dropped out of college a year short of graduation. San Diego was starting to feel old and she found a job as a tennis instructor at a desert resort. But a month after she arrived, the property was sold and the new owners wanted to give it a facelift so she found herself filing her nails on the unemployment line. To her chagrin, Nadine discovered there were not a lot of tennis instructor jobs to be had. She saw an ad in the paper one day and so began her career as a tanning technician. The job is a stopgap; something to do while she tries to determine her future. Now she has been assisting people with their tanning needs for more than a year and is getting antsy. The Valium's taking the edge off that feeling. At least that's the idea. When Hard is an hour late, she wonders if she should take another. How many has she taken today? Recently she's been losing count. The bottle advises no more than one every six hours, Nadine leaving that suggestion to the amateurs. Figures the chemical palliative is easier on her internal organs than the four tequila shots it takes to get the same effect. She calls Hard, but it goes straight to the message.

Now she's tap-tap-tapping on her beat-up iBook, filling out an on-line application for a popular reality show. A professional football player from the depths of the eighties is allegedly in search of a wife. He made a couple of bad action movies, had a DUI arrest, then declared bankruptcy. In his picture on the web site for the show he has a mane of hair blown dry from here to Las Vegas and full lips that have been god-knows-where. Wrapped in fake endangered species skins, his entire mien screams STDs but Nadine doesn't care. She's not planning to marry the guy, and since twenty women are going to be chosen as contestants she probably won't have to anyway, assuming she is even selected. But she likes the idea of being brought to Los Angeles for a few weeks, installed at the mansion where the show is taped, given free food, a shopping spree at a mall, and the other seductive perks made available to those women lucky enough to be chosen.

Now her attention is drifting from the application. Is that the Valium? Wonders whether or not taking too much Valium can cause some kind of hyper-activation in the brain. She's heard it can put a girl on the crazy train. But if you take too much Valium, you'd die, right? Or would you go crazy and then die? And if she were to go crazy, would she be aware of it? Did crazy people know they were crazy? It was a conundrum. She'd have to get on the Internet and do a little research.

If her social life were better she's certain her tranquilizer intake would drop precipitously. Lately it's been an utter disaster. From the time Nadine was in high school she displayed an unerring lack of discernment when it came to men, which she mistakenly attributed to her occasional bi-sexuality. She has gone back and forth between men and women with a pendulum-like regularity and occasionally wonders if this fluidity has hindered her deeper understanding of either gender. But she has listened to straight girlfriends with their endless complaints about the inscrutability of boyfriends, and to straight men that cannot fathom their incomprehensible girlfriends. She is comforted by what seems to be an endemic ignorance on the entire subject.

Before Hard there was the fling with the married woman with a successful husband and a kid. The woman claimed it was the first time for her, the cheating part and the same-sex angle. Nadine was sad when her lover ended it, and in a place of genuine vulnerability. That was the week she had met Hard. She wishes she could transplant her Chihuahua's personality into Hard. She gazes at her dog, lying on the rug at her feet, chewing a golf ball. Diablo looks at her with large brown eyes that bespeak a world of understanding, sympathy and love.

She suspects Hard no longer loves her, if he ever did. Their relationship had begun in a burst of optimism, Nadine hoping her streak of bad luck had come to an end and was extremely disappointed when she discovered he was married and seemed ambivalent about leaving his wife. And this was five minutes after meeting him. She wonders whether her life is on some kind of frantic loop, an endlessly repeating catastrophe? Are there any men who are not incorrigible liars or manipulative cheats? If there are, they must exist in a shining realm to which Nadine has not gleaned the access code. And she is sick of it. It isn't like Nadine to raise hell, particularly when it comes to men, but she has reached a point where she is feeling like the universe has painted a target on her back and the gods are hurling darts.

Her cell phone rings and she checks the caller. Chief Harding Marvin. He's more than an hour late so she debates for a moment whether or not she should answer.

“What?” Hoping her tone will instantly convey her level of displeasure.

“Sorry, I didn't call sooner.” Nadine listens in chilly silence. “I was doing some work for Mary Swain. I'm a precinct captain for the campaign. Didn't I tell you that?”

“Yeah, Hard, you told me. Like, ten times.”

“You still want me to come over?”

“You can do what you want.”

He tells her he'll be there in half an hour.

Nadine mixes a pitcher of margaritas. Decides if Hard so much as looks at her cross-eyed, she'll empty it on his head. She reapplies her makeup and evaluates her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Other than the dark circles under her eyes, she likes what she sees. When the doorbell rings, Nadine waits a full second before getting up to answer it. Hard is holding a dozen roses and a paperback book that he thrusts toward her.

“
The Collected Poems of Robert Service
?”

“Best American poet in history.” He walks past her into the house. “M. V. goddamn P., Nadine. Most Valuable Poet.”

Nadine fills a vase with water. While she is arranging the flowers, he reads her
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
, a manly poem about a fellow who gets into a scrape in the Yukon and pays for it with his life
.
There is a catch in Hard's throat when he gets to the end. Nadine is touched by this, Hard not one to display his emotions anywhere they can be seen. When he kisses her neck, she elbows him away, wanting to punish him for his tardiness, his insensitivity, and what she worries is the general pointlessness of their arrangement, but he persists and when he tries again she lets him. Then they are in the bedroom having sex, Hard on top of her, Nadine staring at the ceiling thinking about whether or not she'd even run off with him were he to ask her, and she briefly wonders if she would even be letting him fuck her had she not overdone it with the Valium.

After sex the two of them quickly dressed. It was as if they didn't want to face the intimacy their nakedness suggested. Now her legs are crossed, accenting the fuscia paint on her toenails. Nadine and Hard are seated on the sofa drinking margaritas. Diablo is watching them from his perch on the chair across the room. She finishes her drink and asks Hard if he wants another. When he says no, she gets up and pours one for herself.

She returns to the sofa and sips the drink. She crosses her legs again, lets her sandal dangle. A while ago Hard had talked about taking her down to Cabo for a weekend to go deep sea fishing and she is hoping he'll mention it again so they can firm it up. He had told her he had to get home in an hour and she wanted some sense of a plan before he departs. This is when he mentions perhaps they should not see each other any longer. Nadine's sandal drops to the floor.

“Why?”

“It's not like I don't want to but my life's complicated enough. I'd love to keep doing
this
.”

“You mean you want to keep fucking me?”

“Come on, girl. That's not fair. I don't give
The Collected Poems of Robert Service
to everyone.”

Nadine takes a moment to register the absurdity of the words Hard has just spoken. As if she cares a dust mote for Robert Service, or any other poet for that matter. Hard could have recited
Purgatorio
from memory and it would not have made a difference. Synapses firing wildly, her only concern is survival. Her hold on a stable life is slipping and the poems of Robert Service are, in this context, a provocation.

“I can't stand Robert Service! I don't care about the friggin Yukon!” He has no response for that. A man's taste in poetry is a sensitive place in which to strike. Trash his personality, but hands off
The Shooting of Dan McGrew.
Nadine senses his goal is to get out of there without a scene. Something in her does not want that to happen.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Why can't you leave her?”

“This is tougher than I thought, telling you. You're my gal.”

She thinks he might actually mean it. He sounds sincere. But to her ears, they always do. She can't judge anymore, has no faith in her ability to discern the slim reeds of truth in the limitless swamp of prevarication. When she'd been confronted with similar situations in the past, she had had cried but she does not want to do that now.

“I thought we were gonna get married.”

She wants him to take her hand and tell her what he said was a mistake and he can't live without her anymore but she's still sober enough to realize that is ridiculous. This won't be the moment he confesses his love but the one where he tries to weasel out of every cheap word he's ever served her.

“I think that's probably not gonna happen.”

The margaritas are strong and hers have travelled directly to her impulse inhibitors. This becomes clear when she realizes the words coming out of her mouth are: “What would you think if I told your wife about us?”

He takes another sip of his drink and regards her with what she views as a certain degree of detachment. She doesn't like it. “What would I
think
? I'd think it was not the best course of action.”

“Not the best course of action.” Nadine is mocking him and, further, she understands the price he has to pay for the sex is the acceptance of her mocking—at least temporarily. She knows he considers himself a gentleman and will at least hear her out before departing. “Why not?” It is a ridiculous follow-up, but she can't think of anything else to say.

“Now, look,” he says, as if to a child, “I'm not gonna leave Vonda Jean and she's not gonna leave me.”

“How do you know?” Nadine senses she is starting to sound desperate and pitiable and that makes her angrier than she already is. She wishes she hadn't consumed the second margarita. And all that Valium.

“I've done this kind of thing before. And she knows.”

“She does?”

“And she hasn't left.”

“If she lets you fool around, then why can't we go to Cabo? It's an open marriage, right?” This is reflexive, and the desperate pathetic feeling already pulsing through her intensifies. Why can't she just dump her margarita on his thick-skulled head? Because she has already drained it. There is the remainder of the pitcher, resting in the pass-through window of her kitchen. But does she want that kind of melodrama? “You said it was open, Hard. The marriage.”

“That was kind of an exaggeration, maybe. Nadine, look. A lot of people depend on me, not just my wife. They don't need to know about this. We had a good time and I do care about you.”