McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (28 page)

 
          
 
"How long have you been open?" I
asked.

 
          
 
"About a month," Jean said,
sleepily. "It's an old established business we have here."

 
          
 
"We run it," Belinda said.

 
          
 
"You don't,"
Beverly
pointed out. "Momma runs it. Besides,
you broke a cup."

 
          
 
"Shut up about that cup," Jean said.
"She didn't mean to break it. Anybody can break a cup."

 
          
 
"Would you take a thousand for the
chest?" I asked, sort of testing the waters.

 
          
 
"I guess so," Jean said, without
much conviction. "However, I think it's mean of you to force me to be
professional when I've just spent two hours on the phone. I'm not myself.
Anything I do I'm liable to regret tomorrow."

 
          
 
She had such nice color that she appeared to
be blushing when she wasn't. What she was doing was flirting, which was not
what I had expected, exactly. Previously she had seemed too involved with the
end of her marriage to be capable of flirtation.

 
          
 
"Is he coming home with us?" Belinda
asked, divining as if by magic her mother's newest mood.

 
          
 
"I don't know," Jean said.
"He's welcome, if he likes. I’ll even make him dinner when I wake
up."

 
          
 
"Goody,"
Beverly
said.

 
          
 
"With peas?"
Belinda asked, poking her mother.

 
          
 
"With peas," Jean said. "Don't
poke me."

 
          
 
"Of course he's undoubtedly a popular
gentleman," she added, sinking deeper into the chair. "He's probably
too busy to come to our house tonight."

 
          
 
"No, he isn't," Belinda said,
glaring at me. "Are you?"

 
          
 
"I am tonight," I said, remembering
Oblivia Brown. "But I’d love to come to your house."

 
          
 
"He doesn't really want to," Jean
said, from behind Belinda. "He just wants to see all the things I haven't
brought to the store. He wants our goodies, not us."

 
          
 
Both girls looked at me solemnly, to see if
this could be true.

 
          
 
"No fair," I said. "I’d love to
come to your house."

 
          
 
With a sigh Jean roused herself and sat up.
She looked at me studiously. I’ve been looked at a lot of ways, but never quite
so studiously. She had very clear eyes.

 
          
 
"Well, tomorrow night's open," she
said.
"Along with the next twenty or thirty years.
Take your pick."

 
          
 
"I’ll take tomorrow night," I said,
instantly casting about in my mind for a lie I could tell Cindy. After all, we
were still vaguely planning to set off for
New Mexico
once we had discharged our obligations to
Oblivia Brown.

 
          
 
Jean was still watching me. I got a strange
feeling. I can tell when Fm being sized up.

 
          
 
"You don't have to buy a thousand-dollar
chest just to impress me," she said.

 
          
 
"I wasn't," I said, which was true.
I could move the chest for two thousand easily.

 
          
 
"Are you sure?" she asked.

 
          
 
"Of course," I said. "I was
just worried that you might be attached to it."

 
          
 
She grinned. "I’ve got another one,"
she said. "This one is second best."

 
          
 
"Oh good," I said. "Then I can
buy it."

 
          
 
Actually, I felt trumped. If the one I was
buying was worth a thousand, how good was the one she was keeping? My reputation
hadn't been built by buying second-best things.

 
          
 
I sat down and wrote the check anyway. The
second-best chest was worth every penny of it, though it was already fading in
my favor. I no longer felt it was exceptional—just first rate. I would get rid
of it quick, and the purchase might further other purposes.

 
          
 
Also, it would accustom Jean to selling
things, which was important. The thrill of the sale might get her in gear, and
once she got moving as a dealer she might keep moving. She would learn the first
great lesson, which is that there are always more things to buy.

 
          
 
Of course, on another level I was doing it to
impress her. At least it might impress her. Women seem to detest parsimonious
men, and yet they often marry them. They seem to adore men who spend money like
water, but I don't know that they take them very seriously. Perhaps they
secretly believe that tightwads have the right slant on life, or at least the
right slant on money.

 
          
 
Jean picked up the check and looked at it for
a while.

 
          
 
"What do you know?" she said, to the
girls. "He bought my chest. It's not mine anymore. I think I'll cry."

 
          
 
The girls, who were still in
their harem-girl loll, straightened up and looked at their mother, to see if it
was true.
It wasn't. Jean looked slightly stunned, but not tearful.

 
          
 
"You're not cryin'," Belinda pointed
out, with a touch of sternness.

 
          
 
"Nope," Jean said. "Guess what
this means?"

 
          
 
"What?" Beveriy asked.

 
          
 
"New clothes for all," Jean said.

 
          
 
"Bloomingdale's?"
Belinda inquired hopefully.

 
          
 
"I'm gonna have you sheared," Jean
said, ruffling her daughter's ringlets. "You got too much hair."

 
          
 
Belinda reached in the desk drawer and pulled
out a mirror. It was an old, silver-backed mirror. As I left, their three heads
were squeezed together, as they all contemplated new hairstyles with the aid of
one mirror.

 
          
 
"You can change your mind about coming if
you feel like it," Jean said. "You don't have to let us bully
you."

 
          
 
"You didn't bully me," I said.

 
          
 
"I did!" Belinda said.

 
          
 
Oblivia Brown lived only three blocks from
Cindy, so we walked to the party, holding hands. It was a sharp, clear night.
Clouds of frozen breath streamed behind us as we walked, like vapor trails.

 
          
 
Oblivia's house was only slightly smaller than
the
Executive
Office
Building
, and hailed from about the same period. The
butler who let us in was a dour little shrimp, the antithesis of Benson. He was
so fish-eyed and uninterested in life that he didn't even change expression
when I handed him the Stetson with the diamondback hatband. He reminded me of
the croupiers in minor casinos in places like
Elko
,
Nevada
.

 
          
 
As we started to go down a hallway hung with
not very good mirrors in not very interesting frames I saw a dog standing in
our path. It was black and extremely shaggy and seemed to have a hump of some
sort. It looked like a miniature buffalo.

 
          
 
"That’s Felix," Cindy said.
"Hi, Felix."

 
          
 
Felix retreated in a hurry. He went bounding
up some stairs. As we passed he was standing on a landing, looking very much
like a small buffalo.

 
          
 
A large number of people were assembled in a
long living room. Our hostess immediately spotted us and swam through a sea of
pinstripes to our side. I had expected her to be beautiful, or at least stylish,
but she was neither. She had a thin
face,
her hair was
limp, her complexion blurred, and her look vague. She wore a dowdy-looking gray
dress and a string of imitation pearls that looked like they'd been bought at
Woolworth's.

 
          
 
"So tall," she said, looking at me.
"Adore those yellow boots. I just hope they're not made from the skin of
some pathetic endangered creature. My charity, you know.
Very
partial to creatures here.
So yellow.
I've
never seen such a yellow creature."

 
          
 
Oblivia stood at a kind of angle to us, so
that she could speak to us and yet keep an eye on the crowd, which I noticed
included both old Cotswinkle and John C. V. Ponsonby.

 
          
 
"The boots are just armadillo," I
said. "They're not endangered."

 
          
 
"Oh," Oblivia said.
"Armadillo.
I thought that was where Prub lived."

 
          
 
Cindy smiled. "That's
Amarillo
," she said.

 
          
 
Oblivia smiled. "So far," she said.
"Can't keep places straight unless I've been to them."

 
          
 
Prub I knew. He was a crazed liberal trial
lawyer who lived in
Amarillo
. His real passion in life was collecting minor league baseball teams.
At the time he owned eight, scattered from
Puerto Rico
to
Vancouver
. I had once sold him a baseball autographed
by Heinie Manush, one of his true heroes.

 
          
 
"Is Prub here?" I asked hopefully.

 
          
 
"Well, I hope not," Oblivia said.
"Of course, the man's brilliant, but so difficult.
Won't
eat asparagus.
Insulted my chef so badly he almost
quit.
Told him the sauce had curdled. Of course it had—Jean-Luc has an
off night once in a while. Nobody but Prub would have dared mention it.
Jean-Luc had one of his rages— so fierce.
Didn't bother
Prub."

 
          
 
"Why won't he eat asparagus?" Cindy
asked.

 
          
 
"Claims he ate it on his wedding night
and a bad thing happened," Oblivia said.

 
          
 
Actually Prub had been married six times. Every
time he won a big case his wife of the moment divorced him and took half of his
fee. One of them had been a friend of Coffee's, so I was no stranger to stories
about Prub Bosque.

 
          
 
Cindy had had enough of such chitchat. She
started into the crowd, only to be immediately embraced by a short man in a
tweed suit. The short man stood on tiptoes and kissed whatever she would allow
him, which was just a cheek.

 
          
 
"So lecherous," Oblivia said.
Something like a spark of hatred appeared in her otherwise unfocused eyes.

 
          
 
"Who's that?" I asked.

 
          
 
"George," she said. "Can you
imagine those tweeds?"

 
          
 
I remembered that someone named George
Psalmanazar was the boyfriend of Khaki Descartes, but that didn’t explain the
spark of hatred. George also had snow-white hair. His teeth were clenched as if
he had a pipe in them, but he didn't.

 
          
 
"Such a crowd," Oblivia said, taking
my hand in order to lead me into it. Her hand was damp, as if it had been left
in a dim room in a tropical clime too long. I was puzzled as to why old
Cotswinkle might be fucking her, when he had a wife who was fifty times more
beautiful. His wife was standing nearby, in fact, looking even better than she
had at the Penroses'.

 
          
 
The clammy hand of my hostess pulled me deeper
into the pinstripes. The crowd sucked at us like an undertow and before I knew
it we were over in a comer, far from safety, where Khaki Descartes was in
earnest conversation with John C. V. Ponsonby.

 
          
 
"Knew I’d find you together,"
Oblivia said. "George is drunk."

 
          
 
"Don't be silly," Khaki said.

 
          
 
John C. V. Ponsonby said nothing. He appeared
to be in a hypnotic trance. Perhaps over the years he had learned to sleep on
his feet, like a horse. His silence had an equine quality.

 
          
 
"George is drunk," Oblivia repeated.
The flash of hate came in her eyes again.

 
          
 
"Moreover," she said, "he is
talking about
Iran
. I consider that ominous."

 
          
 
"Well, go tell him to shut up about
it," Khaki said. "You know him as well as I do."

 
          
 
"Not the case," Oblivia said.
"That was long ago.

 
          
 
"I put him at my table only because he
gave his word not to talk about
Iran
," Oblivia continued, "He gets so
pettish if he's not at my table."

 
          
 
George seemed to be clinging to Cindy like a
small tweedy burr.

 
          
 
Meanwhile Andy Landry and Eviste Labouchere
had just stepped into the room. Eviste was wearing a white suit. From a
distance it made him look a little like Claude Rains.

 
          
 
"My god," Khaki said. "Where'd
he get that suit? Look at that suit."

 
          
 
"More to the point," Oblivia said,
"where did he get Andy? I thought Lilah was the one who liked him."

 
          
 
"You're slipping a little. Via,"
Khaki said. "Lilah just took him home by mistake. She thought he was
Jean-Luc."

 
          
 
"My chef?"
Oblivia said. "Why that's an outrage. Much as I like the woman I won't
have her sleeping with my help."

 
          
 
Khaki allowed herself a trace of a smile.
"Not your chef," she said. "Jean-Luc Godard."

 
          
 
Since neither of them was paying any attention
to me I edged away. I wanted to try and have a word with John C. V. Ponsonby,
who was still holding his position in the comer, staring hypnotically at an
ugly green drape.

 
          
 
However, I was a little slow: A tall, aquiline
young man in impeccable pinstripes reached Ponsonby just before I did.

 
          
 
"Hello, Jake," he said. "I've
been in
Riyadh
. That place is really shaping up."

 
          
 
This piece of information made absolutely no
impression on Ponsonby. Thinking, perhaps, that he was hard of hearing, the
young man repeated it. Ponsonby continued to stare at the drape. Having taken
two called strikes, the young man gave up and edged off into the crowd.

 
          
 
The reason I wanted to speak to Ponsonby was
because I happened to know that he was the world's foremost collector of
truncheons and it so happened that I had an excessively rare truncheon, one of
the very few Ponsonby did not possess,

 
          
 
"Mr. Ponsonby," I said, "
are
you still buying truncheons?"

 
          
 
The word "truncheon" penetrated his
hypnosis more effectively than the word "
Riyadh
." The film over his eyes quickly
burned away. He turned his head and looked at me with marked distaste.

 
          
 
"Why are you here?" he asked.
"This is an eminently civilized occasion."

 
          
 
"I just came here to sell you a
truncheon," I said. It was more or less true.

 
          
 
"That in itself is reprehensible,"
he said. "This is a social occasion. If you are a tradesman you should
apply to me at my home."

 
          
 
"I like to deal catch as catch can,"
I said.

 
          
 
"Then deal with someone else," he
said.

 
          
 
"Well," I said, "I have one of
the Luddite truncheons."

 
          
 
That gave him pause. In fact, he seemed to
find it a real pisser. If he had had my Luddite truncheon in his hand at the
time I think he would have bashed me with it.

 
          
 
In fact, Luddite truncheons were originally
used to bash the Luddite rioters—their rarity is a result of the fact that many
of them were used for firewood, in the grim aftermath of the Luddite riots.

 
          
 
I had not really taken the time to delve
deeply into the matter, but I did know that Luddite truncheons belonged to that
small class of objects, the true rara avis, for which all scouts continually
search: cire-perdue Lalique, rosethrow whimsies.
Sung vases,
and great historical artifacts such as the boots of Billy the Kid.

 
          
 
"I believe you are lying," John
Ponsonby said. "No Luddite truncheon has changed hands in this country since
1946. There are, in fact, only two in this country, one in the
Metropolitan
Museum
, where it doesn't belong, and the other in
Boston
, in a private collection."