Western Swing (14 page)

“Hey, I didn't give her shit. I asked if she had a personal problem.”

The cowboy pushed back his chair and stood. “That's not giving her shit?”

“Nothing like the shit you're giving me.”

“I'll show you shit.” He stepped around the table toward me. The whole dining room drew in its breath, poised on the edge of a disgusting scene, and, from the sound of the general buzz, public opinion ran with the cowboy.

As usual in these situations, I was saved by the intervention of a woman. The hostess stepped between me and the cowboy, leaving me with a view of the bra line on her back. She sniffed a couple of times. “It's okay. It's not his fault. I shouldn't have come to work tonight.” Her back quivered a second. “I just thought work might be good for me. I thought I could make it through the shift, but I was wrong. I shouldn't have tried.”

The cowboy was out of sight in front of the hostess, but from the expression on Ann's face, I gathered he wasn't going to stomp me after all. That was nice. Getting stomped would have messed up my birthday.

While Ann and the hostess hem-hawed around, apologizing to each other, I poured myself a margarita and considered the implications. Two of my primary goals are to complete life without hurting anyone or pissing anyone off, yet I seem doomed to fail at every turn. In fact, I hurt more often than I help. How do people manage inoffensiveness? Do people manage it or are my goals automatic failures?

“That sobered me up,” Ann said. “Let's order another pitcher.”

• • •

We finished the second pitcher before the waitress took our orders, so I don't recall what I ate. Ann had the chicken tacos and I think I ordered something green and stuffed. Like magic, more margaritas appeared in front of my plate. The way this kind of restaurant works is they make you wait for a table so long that by the time the food arrives, you're too drunk to know if it's any good. The rest of my birthday evening was like trying to watch two television shows on one television. Awareness came in, went out, came in again, but the plot kept moving right along whether I was there or not.

I did come around for some important information. From the blur, Ann's voice said, “I've been offered the assistant directorship of a community day-care center, a hundred and twenty kids, eleven teachers, fenced-in play area, a cook who fixes lunch and snack, then cleans up the mess. What do you think?”

“I thought you loved your own kids?”

Ann nodded. “I do, but Thamu Kamala leaves for kindergarten in three weeks, and the Wilderness Society is transferring Jesse's dad to San Francisco, something to do with whales. The other kids could probably come with me.”

I dropped my fork. I don't know whether someone picked it up or gave me a new one, or maybe I picked it up myself, although I doubt that. All I know is my hand soon held a fork that looked and felt similar to the one I dropped.

At some point, the cowboy stood over me, breathing like a tired bear. His hands were clenched, so I didn't look any higher. I concentrated on my refried beans, pretending they so engrossed me that I couldn't notice anything else. He didn't say anything that I remember. Later, I raised my head and he was gone.

Ann was still talking, but I'm not sure if I missed a little or a lot. “I'm tired of doing all the work myself, and it would be nice to be around other women. At the big center I'll earn vacations so we can travel and go camping. I really miss camping. I haven't been once since Buggie was born.”

“I didn't know you liked outdoors.” Every time I felt certain about Ann's values and opinions, she'd say something new and I'd have to start all over.

“Besides,” Ann said, “with the kids gone you could move into my apartment. Or we could rent a house together. Wouldn't that be neat?”

“You mean live together full time? Leave my place? All my books are there.”

I have a feeling this conversation lasted clear through whatever we ate, but my brain switched to another channel and didn't come back until I found myself pressed against Ann as she leaned back on the car hood.

I heard myself saying, “Let's go to my apartment and make love.”

Ann glowed. “Loren, I'm so happy. We're going to have the most wonderful life together, you wait and see. All my dreams are coming true.”

“Or would you rather do it on the car?”

She kissed me a long time. Finally Ann pulled back and looked full into my face. “Don't you love being happy? I never thought it could be so much fun.”

The drive home has left my memory banks, thank God. The next awareness wave caught us in bed in my apartment. I wanted to slow down so I could enjoy the prospect of sex without a child between us, but Ann was in too big a hurry to enjoy prospects. She never was big on foreplay. I think Ann got most of her foreplay in her imagination during the daytime, so when our bodies came together, she didn't have to waste any time.

I lay there wishing I wasn't so drunk and likely to switch channels in the middle of something nice. This was my chance to writhe around, make all the noise I wanted, and actually think of myself during sex for a change. But somehow I didn't feel like you're supposed to feel when you make love on your birthday. I felt like I was listening to the sound track of a dirty movie.

My mood must have rubbed off on Ann because after a while she lay still with her face in my shoulder hollow.

I said, “I love you,” to see how it sounded, but again, the words came out like in a movie.

Ann cried a few minutes, either out of happiness or misery, I have trouble telling the difference. Then I woke up alone in a room full of light.

• • •

The sweat-soaked sheets twisted around my legs, making my first thoughts run to tequila paralysis. Then, when I shook the sheets off and tried raising myself into the hands-and-knees sick-dog position, I discovered I'd slept with my faceless alarm clock as a pillow. The hands had been circling for hours, tying hair and clock into a solid, immovable tangle stuck to the side of my head. Every ticktock boomed in my ear like bombs marching into Hanoi.

I leaned over the edge of the bed and spit some very old-tasting saliva into the wastepaper basket. I said aloud, “This won't do.”

The pounding clock on my head and the dropping-through-space stomach were awful, waking up alone in my own bed was disorienting, but the bad news was the room full of light. Brightness meant I was horribly late for work. One hand on the clock so its weight wouldn't rip out my roots, I stumbled across a pile of dirty clothes to the phone and called the Hard Wok.

What I should have done first is put on my boxer shorts because the Chinese gentleman I spoke with fired me and I don't handle adversity well naked. Who does? A person would have to maintain an almost egomaniacal self-image not to be affected when he's standing naked and sick with a clock hanging off his head while a short foreigner fires him from the scummiest job on earth. The man said he'd been waiting for an excuse to get rid of me. He said the kitchen crew refused to work any longer with a spook who argues with himself in funny voices and slow-motion fistfights the dishmachine. That was his exact word for me—spook. Maybe it means something different in Chinese.

Midway through the conversation, the green, stuffed thing unexpectedly came back up. I returned as soon as possible, but the phone line was dead. I found my boxers and put them on and sat, watching
Guiding Light
and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't hold a job I didn't want anyway. I've never been good at doing things I don't want to do. Soon the room stopped lurching and I staggered downstairs to see if Ann could cut the alarm clock out of my hair.

• • •

My firing brought a quick end to the separate apartments debate before it even began. The Guaranteed Student Loan wouldn't pay off until school started in mid-September, two weeks after rent was due. Moving in with a woman out of economic distress is generally a major error, but, in this case, I probably would have taken the plunge anyway—eventually. Besides, there wasn't a whole lot of choice.

We boxed up the books, plants, TV, underwear, and posters of famous (dead) writers, carted the load downstairs, and stuffed it into two vacant baby beds. Ann was tickled pink.

“It was all on purpose, you know.”

“What was on purpose?”

“I got you drunk and seduced you on your birthday just so you'd oversleep and lose your job and move in with Buggie and me.”

“Seduce means to persuade somebody to do something they don't want to do. I've never been seduced in my life.”

“Well, I did it on purpose anyway. I want you stuck with us forever.”

I have to doubt that Ann got me drunk so she could get me fired. Ann was incapable of harboring an ulterior motive.

Before I lost the dishwashing job, I didn't realize the amazing amount of difference between living with a woman and staying with her every night. Bathroom privileges, for instance, or the fact that
Exercise with Jeanie
came on opposite
Andy Griffith
. Or dishes. Whenever I washed the dishes before my books moved downstairs, I was rewarded with deep appreciation and love. Suddenly I was
expected
to do my part. No more “Oh, Loren, you're so sweet, you don't have to clean up this mess.” Instead, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and every other Sunday, she flopped on the couch with Buggie and said, “Your turn, pal.” Same with laundry, trash, and dirty diapers.

Even worse, I lost my safety valve. When Buggie decided he hated everyone and everything, or when Ann played her Rod McKuen albums about the earth and the sky, or when I simply felt like being by myself for a while, I could no longer say, “See you later, honey,” and go home. I considered taking up smoking so I could run out to the 7-Eleven once a day, but that idea seemed stupid even for me.

Another thing—a person who lives alone for many years tends to develop disgusting habits. Thoughtless nose probing, for example. Talking to myself at meals, leaving notebooks and socks wherever they drop, drinking straight from the milk carton, leaving the toilet seat up, scratching whenever and whatever itched. Overnight I had to start watching myself. I hate watching myself.

• • •

Another main difference between living alone and living with a woman and her child is that you're forced to pay attention to holidays. Holidays are a time set aside for feeling secure and smug, and they tend to be depressing if you aren't. Secure and smug. The year before Ann, my junior year at DU, I beat the holiday manics by reading
The Grapes of Wrath
clear through Thanksgiving weekend. Christmas—the biggie—I settled into bed with a family-size bag of Doritos and a notebook and spent the day listing 101 offbeat ways a person can get himself killed. Easter was easier. Good Friday I ate a half ounce of psychedelic cacti and dry-heaved from the Passion to the Resurrection.

But people with children actually look forward to the holiday season, at least they pretend to. They use holidays to mark the passage of time, bring out the cameras, record growth. Holidays become bribes: “No bubble blower now, maybe if you're a good boy Santa will bring you one,” or deadlines: “If this kid isn't out of diapers by Labor Day I'll scream.” When a couple gets old, they fondly look back on the Easter Dobie wet his pants in church or the summer vacation they packed four kids and two dogs into the station wagon and drove to Knott's Berry Farm.

I can't really say what it felt like or what I thought about on a day-to-day basis that first year. The routines are fuzzy, but each holiday is stored on tape somewhere in my cerebral cortex to be replayed whenever the nostalgia impulse overcomes common sense.

There's Halloween. I dressed up as Aunt Jemima, black face, boobs, the works. Buggie took one look and cried for three hours. Thanksgiving we ate fresh pineapple and trout a la Hemingway for breakfast, then drove down to Colorado Springs to visit Garden of the Gods Park. Buggie said a five-word sentence and that night Ann and I made love on the couch while
Casablanca
played on the Channel 11 holiday movie.

Buggie was still too young to understand Santa Claus theory—the strange fat man who brought free stuff in the night—but he liked to open boxes. Ann individually wrapped all kinds of stocking stuffers, and Christmas morning while we sat on the couch, warming our hands around mugs of hot coffee and rum, Buggie tore through package after package. Colored felt-tip pens, tiny race cars, bags of gummy bears, pop-up books, a pretend telephone that rang when you twisted the dial—Buggie pulled each one out of its colored paper, glanced at it a moment, then tossed the present toward us, the paper toward the tree, and moved on to another box.

“He'd be just as happy if I'd wrapped forty empty boxes,” Ann said.

I leaned back, faked a yawn, and slid my arm around Ann. The feeling of family was almost spine-tingling. Why hadn't anyone ever told me what Christmas morning with a loving woman and a young child would be like? I'd have run off and married at fourteen.

Ann shifted into my arm. “I hope he likes the turtle.” She'd spent weeks choosing between a stuffed giraffe and a cow, and, as the stores closed Christmas Eve, ditched both for a giant green turtle with half-closed eyelids and a striped baseball cap that I objected to on the grounds of unrealism. A turtle can't pull a baseball cap into its shell.

“I bet he loves it.”

“You always bet he loves anything, Loren. Do you realize how important presents are at his age? That turtle could affect Buggie's whole life?”

My present for Buggie was a twelve-volume set of O. Henry short stories that I'd found at a yard sale across from campus. The plan was to read Buggie one story every night at bedtime—all 241 of them over and over—until he was old enough to read by himself. I thought an O. Henry story a night for several years would affect Buggie's later life more than a turtle with a baseball cap, but Ann had been so proud when she brought the turtle home from the Target Store that I didn't say what I thought.