The Evening Star (15 page)

“Oh, stop it,” Patsy said. “Those cops are looking at you. They don’t see many ladies your age doing handstands in parking lots. They may think you’ve just been let out of a bin of some sort.”

Rosie righted herself and glared across thirty yards of asphalt at the policemen, who repaid her with hostile looks of
their own. They wanted to enjoy their coffee and not have to deal with anything out of the ordinary for a while, and an old lady in a leotard doing handstands in a parking lot was out of the ordinary, and, in their view, suspicious. They thought it best to keep an eye on her.

“I can remember when this country wasn’t no police state like Romania,” Rosie remarked loudly, as she brushed the dust off her palms.

“Well, I don’t know that it
is
very much like Romania,” Patsy said. “They haven’t arrested you or beat you or anything.”

Rosie was not mollified. The thought that policemen would look at her suspiciously just for doing a few handstands made her want to join a demonstration as soon as she could find one. Maybe Peter Jennings would be around to report on the demonstration for ABC. Maybe he would even get to ask her a question or two as she was being handcuffed and booked. She had seen women not much younger than herself being handcuffed and booked, and she was sure it would happen to her as soon a she began her life as a demonstrator. She hurried on to the exercise class, eager to get some exercise. She wanted to be in tip-top shape when she started her career as a demonstrator for the rights of men or women or Americans or blacks or pregnant women or whatever. After all, she was tiny, and many cops were large. Unless she was in good shape and had mastered a few resistance techniques, some big ugly cop would probably just pick her up like a sack of flour and carry her off.

“I ain’t gonna go like no sack of flour,” she said, turning to Patsy, who was tying up her hair. Patsy had had long hair all her life—Patsy with short hair was a sight no one had ever seen. But long hair was a drag when she exercised, so she usually arranged it in a bun as she was walking into class.

“Go where? This is just an exercise class,” Patsy said. “What are you talking about?”

Rosie realized that she had let her imagination carry her away a bit, down the stream of fantasy and into the police
state America that she felt she was living in—or, if she wasn’t yet, that she would be living in any day.

“Oh, nothing, I just hate cops,” she said, before doing a back flip onto the gym floor.

13

Melanie had just washed her hair and was indulging in the first Diet Pepsi of the day when she heard a car outside. She looked out the window and saw Bruce pull up to the curb in the Ferrari. He eased up right behind her car until the bumper of the Ferrari was just touching the bumper of her Toyota.

The sight made Melanie sort of hopeful. That was a special thing she and Bruce had done when they were first dating—they always left the bumpers of their cars touching as a symbol of their love. Kissing cars, Bruce called it. The fact that he had just kissed the bumper of her Toyota with the bumper of Beverly’s Ferrari gave her a jolt of hope. She wished she hadn’t washed her hair just then—it seemed to her that she looked fatter with her hair wet—so she hastily got a big towel and wound it around her head. It was only eleven o’clock, and Bruce wasn’t usually even out of bed by eleven o’clock. Something weird must be happening. Also, why was he in the Ferrari, when Beverly’s parents had made it quite clear that he wasn’t even welcome to
ride
in the Ferrari?

Bruce didn’t get out of the car immediately and start racing
up the stairs or anything. Bruce was prone to being a little slow and a little indecisive. He didn’t just hop out of his car and let you know what was on his mind. Half the time he didn’t know himself what was on his mind. He was kind of like a person that had a stutter, only Bruce didn’t stutter when he talked, he stuttered when he acted. Moving in with Beverly right after she got the Ferrari was one of the most decisive things Bruce had ever done. He knew he wanted access to that Ferrari.

But usually, when it came to action, he stuttered. Teddy’s take on Bruce’s indecision was that it was the result of the fact that Bruce’s father thought Bruce was a worthless person. Bruce’s father was a self-made oilman, and he saw no reason why Bruce couldn’t be more ambitious. He wanted Bruce to pop right out of high school and either go to college or get to work becoming self-made. Plus, when Bruce’s parents divorced, his mother promptly married a Cuban billionaire who didn’t treat her any too nice, or his stepson Bruce any too nice, either. Bruce’s parent situation was just not a great situation; Bruce mainly handled it by taking drugs and staying out of sight as much as possible.

Probably the reason he wasn’t out of his car yet was that he had a tape on and was waiting for the song he was listening to to be finished. Or he might be waiting for the whole tape to be finished—in fact, he might sit there half the morning listening to tapes, and then start the car and drive off, if he thought of some scene he wanted to check out. He might be so stoned that he didn’t realize it was her car he had kissed with the bumper of the Ferrari—there was just no knowing, with Bruce. After several minutes had passed, Melanie began to have a hard time hanging onto her hopeful feeling. Bruce was so unpredictable—sometimes being in love with him was real unrewarding. She knew he liked the fact that she was loyal to him, but there were times when that didn’t make the situation a whole lot more rewarding.

To her relief he did get out of the car and start up her stairs—he didn’t look any too happy, though. Melanie felt herself starting to get nervous. It was horrible to have to get nervous
every time the one person she really wanted to see came to see her, but it was happening.

She liked it that he was tall, though—tall and with a lot of hair. One thing that made it hard to take Koko seriously was that he was short and had a crew cut—great pal though Koko was, he did look sort of Boy Scout age, which kept her from getting into it too much sexually. That was not a problem she could imagine herself having with Bruce.

Melanie thought maybe she ought to pretend she didn’t see Bruce kiss bumpers—he might have just done it out of habit or something, and it might piss him off if she made a big deal out of it. She was going to try to be cool and wait for him to knock, but then she got so excited at the thought of this early visit that she yanked the door open before he even got to the top of the stairs.

“Hi,” she said.

Bruce smiled. He saw that Melly was trying to be cool but couldn’t handle her own excitement. That was one thing he really liked about Melly—she could never handle her own excitement. It just sort of overflowed and made her do all sorts of impulsive things that weren’t necessarily in her own best interest. This trait might not be so smart, but it was part of what he really liked about Melanie. Nobody could ever accuse her of not being vulnerable to her own feelings—they just kept getting loose from her and overflowing. An example was her telling him right off that she had slept with two other guys the week she got pregnant. If she had had more cool, she would have tried to hook him back to her by pretending that he was her one and only lover so that he would feel he had to marry her or at least help her pay her bills. But Melly just came out point-blank and admitted that she didn’t know whose child it was, letting him off the hook immediately.

Of course, Melanie’s taking the hook out wasn’t quite the end of it, though—not really. At first he had felt a huge relief, but, to his surprise, within an hour or two the relief started dribbling away. For one thing, he didn’t really believe Melanie had gotten pregnant by anyone but him. He was the one Melanie had had the hot act with—Koko and Steve were just
accidents. Despite himself he started to believe it was his baby, which sort of removed the area of relief. What was Beverly going to say when Melanie had a baby that looked like him? She was already madly jealous because one night he had let slip that Melanie had no trouble having orgasms—a skill that Beverly had not yet entirely mastered. Actually, Beverly was pretty constrained in that department—she wouldn’t do or let him do a number of things that Melly had no problem with—in fact, that she liked a lot. Bruce had the feeling that if he added many more causes for jealousy, such as a baby, to what Beverly was already dealing with, something was probably going to crack.

Add to that the fact that her parents really thought he was the scum of the earth, and you had quite a few problems to stack on top of the ones he already had with his own parents. Bruce felt that the stack of problems was getting too high, and the only person who understood that and really cared to help out and see that he had a few moments of enjoyment now and then was Melanie.

“ ’lo,” he said, when she yanked open her door.

“I just washed my hair,” Melanie said.

“How’s the kid?” Bruce asked. In the night he had had a terrible dream in which Melanie’s baby came out too soon and they both died. He was even dreaming about the funeral when he finally woke up; then he didn’t want to go back to sleep, for fear he’d dream the dream again. He remembered that he and Melly had had a fight, during which he’d sort of shoved her, causing her to fall over a chair. He had heard that little accidents such as that could cause women to lose their babies, so he spent quite a bit of the night worrying that Melanie might have had a miscarriage. It was an unnerving dream, but it made him realize that maybe he had more going with Melly than he thought.

Then Beverly woke up and he was so blanked out from his dream that he actually told Beverly that he had dreamed Melanie had had an accident. Even blanked out, he had had sense enough not to mention baby or miscarriage or anything, but Beverly freaked out anyway, and kept on freaking
out until he wanted to pop her. He thought a little sex might make it possible for her to stop freaking out, but Beverly couldn’t come, which made matters even worse.

“I hate her, I hate her, I hate her,” she said, referring to Melanie.

Bruce didn’t say anything. Fortunately Beverly wasn’t able to freak out too much longer because her mother was taking her to New York that day on a shopping trip. Beverly’s mother was from New York and went back at least once a month to get in a little shopping. Beverly’s dad had a private plane and pilot and everything, so it was no big deal for them to hop up to New York for a little shopping.

Then while Beverly was dressing she got worried that Bruce would go back to Melanie while she was gone; she left him the keys to the Ferrari, despite the fact that she had been strictly warned never to let him behind the wheel of the Ferrari again. Beverly did it anyway—she was thinking how horrible it would be if she got back from New York only to discover that Bruce had gone back to Melanie. Maybe a whole day with the Ferrari would make him love Beverly more, or something.

When Bruce asked how the kid was, Melanie had to think a minute to realize he meant the kid inside her. Even though she knew very well that she was pregnant, and spent many hours a day wondering what the baby would look like and how she’d do as a mother—what if she got distracted and let it fall off the bed and it broke its neck or something?—there were other times when it went out of her mind so completely that she was apt to be surprised when someone reminded her of it.

But once Bruce reminded her of the baby she remembered their fight and the fact that she had fallen over a chair—probably that was why Bruce had come so early, looking so guilty. He was worried about her, a thought that touched Melanie so much that she just wished Beverly didn’t exist, so they could be together again.

“I was worried because you fell down—I thought it might have hurt the baby,” Bruce said, looking out the window as he said it.

“I shouldn’t have shoved you,” he added. “I know it’s bad to shove someone who’s pregnant.”

Melanie couldn’t believe her ears. Now he was actually apologizing to her, or at least coming close. Bruce had never apologized to her before—when they had a fight he usually just stalked off, and when he finally showed up again he would pretend that nothing had happened. This was the first time since they began dating that he actually acknowledged that something bad had happened, and that it was his fault.

“Hey,” Melanie said. “You don’t have to worry. The baby’s just fine. It’s not like you knocked me down or anything. I just sort of fell.”

Bruce kept looking out the window. He was feeling that he couldn’t take it anymore—his father always putting him down because he didn’t have a job; his mother always complaining that he wasn’t in college; Carlos, his mother’s billionaire, always griping about the fact that his mother gave him money; Beverly always crying and freaking out if she didn’t happen to come, calling Melanie a fat whore and stuff. Plus his friends were always bugging him to haul dope around—even the ones in college were more into drug dealing than they were into getting educated. It just seemed like a lot, and Bruce could see no end to it unless he did something radical. One reason he had come to Melanie was that she was the only person he knew who might have the guts to do something radical, if she happened to feel like it.

Bruce kept feeling tight inside—he really didn’t feel like he could take it anymore. He’d just as soon be dead as take it anymore; on the other hand, he didn’t really want to kill himself or anything and he didn’t want to desert Melanie and their baby, either. The one good thought he had was that Melanie might want to go away with him. America was this free country—why couldn’t they go away? His own parents, when they had first married, ran away from Corsicana and went to Midland and got rich; but they hadn’t been rich or anything when they were doing the running away part.

The one thought that seemed to be positive was that maybe Melanie would want to run away with him. Of course, it was a big thing to ask of someone pregnant. He had to
psych himself up for the question, but then he began to feel silly—how long could he stand there and look out the window?—so he turned around and made an attempt to get the words out. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here right now.”