Lucky in the Corner (12 page)

“That’s Friday,” Harold says.

“Yes, and so Saturday we’ll come to your play. We’re all looking forward to it.”

They both taste the lie for a moment, then Harold says, “I’ll drop off some comps.”

“And I’ll call Mom,” she tells him as he gets out of the car in front of his place. “Get her on Dad’s case.”

“You won’t be disappointed,” he says, meaning the play. Unspoken between them is all the ghastly theater Nora has had to sit through over the years because Harold was a wife-poisoner in this, a spy in that. Once, he was Being in a theatrical interpretation of
Being and Nothingness.
They can never talk about that one.

DON’T KNOW WHYYY
...drifts out from Harold’s living room as Fern lets herself and Lucky in the front door.

Dolores is home, propped against the cushions at the end of the sofa, in her version of leisurewear—a long kimono-style robe printed with fans. Her hair drapes her shoulders. She is soaking the fingertips of her left hand, to release the two-inch, vermilion press-on nails Harold won’t be able to wear out this afternoon.

“Lena Horne doesn’t have enough tragic range for ‘Stormy Weather,’” she tells Fern. “I have the Judy Garland cover. With Judy, that sun’s not merely hiding behind a couple of gray old clouds. The apocalypse has already happened. That sun has abandoned the sky, for good.”

“Has it ever occurred to you...” Fern starts in, then gets cold feet, then warms them up enough for another try, which is, “I mean, have you ever noticed that your interests are sort of like the interests of, well ... of a gay guy?”

“Oh,” Dolores says, pulling her hand out of the soaking solution, plucking the nails off one by one, “wouldn’t that just simplify
everything
?”

From the stereo, Lena acknowledges that she can’t go on, that everything she has is gone, but her sorrows get muted by the bedroom door as Fern pulls it shut behind her. Lucky finds a corner, and, after several turnarounds, drops to the carpet for a nap. Fern is ready for work.

By conducting her business within earshot of Harold’s stereo, its ancient turntable always stacked with sputtering seventy-eights from the forties and fifties, Fern is acquiring a slouchy outlook on love. Everything that has happened to her, or will happen, has clearly already happened to someone else. It was a cold hand on her heart, the realization that the people who first found meaning in these songs of wry despair are now her grandmother’s age. In much the same way, all the vaporous futures predicted by all the fortunetellers before her are long since played out. But for her clients, who have their own contemporary anthems of sorrow, their troubles are still terribly alive, their futures lying around sharp corners, over steep rises ahead.

She positions herself diagonally on the bed; she has found she gets the best reception from this angle, that more information seems to come her way. This sort of thinking, which she would have found totally flaky a year ago, has become part of the new way she sees the universe.

It started with trying to be good at the job. At first she was punting with every call. Wildly scanning for clues—inflections in the client’s voice, pauses that might be pregnant with meaning. Guessing general, using the formats Mindy provided, then going to specifics when the clients’ interest seemed to perk up. Beating the bushes to flush out their pasts—hard childhoods, missed opportunities, estrangements.

Their present—a period of upheaval or searching.

Their future—growth and change ahead! Perhaps a new and significant person entering their life! Maybe money! (She tried to fill the future with capital letters and exclamation points.)

This is still her default method, but, more and more lately, she hears her callers’ questions, then waits along with them for her own response. She is sometimes not sure what she’s going to say until she says it. This is where the process gets interesting.

Star Scanners is happy with the increasing length of her calls, her rate of return callers. They want her to be plugged in from four to eight, three nights a week and Sunday afternoons, so her regulars will know when they can find her. In exchange for this firmer schedule, they have bumped her hourly rate up a couple of notches. Once she’s back at school next week, she’ll have to work the calls around her studies. Today, though, she can just stretch out and wait, passing the time thinking about all the potential in life as it lies ahead of her.

It’s almost five; she’s about to clock out when the phone rings.

“I know I’m late, but I just got in and I had to talk with you today.”

This is Marsha, a nurse—nurses and beauticians are her most frequent callers. Marsha is a regular about whom Fern has not yet received so much as the vaguest psychic insight. All she can give her is common sense laced with a mystical flavor. Marsha has been involved for a couple of years with a married guy and has recently found out that he has also been seeing yet another woman—a girl really, a college friend of his daughter. Marsha is trying to bend the facts enough to keep thinking the guy—Phil—is an okay, simply confused person.

Fern wishes Marsha would stop calling. She is done with this client, has nothing more to offer her. Nada. She has told Marsha flat-out that she doesn’t see this liaison occupying any good place in her future, that she sees her going on to someone who is neither married nor dating someone else (instead of both), that she sees the aura of distant travel, an adventure deep into a foreign culture. Not even this exotic note did much to pry Marsha off her Phil obsession. Although she pretends to take Fern’s—which is to say Adriana’s—advice to heart, and hangs up at the end of each of their sessions utterly resolved to get free of Phil, she has not yet made it a whole week before she’s back on the phone to report a new glimmer of possibility.

“We had a very important talk today,” Marsha says.

“Yes, I see it. I see you sitting very close to each other. Your expressions are very serious.” She knows they were close since the only places Phil, nervous about discovery, will take Marsha is to a budget motel or out in his car where they park like teenagers.

“He’s not serious about her,” Marsha says.

“The new girlfriend?”

“No. His wife. Their parents were friends. It was practically an arranged marriage.”

“But they’ve been married for years, right?”

“Eighteen, but it’s been dead in the water for a long time.”

“But what about the college girl?”

“If I can get him to dump the wife, the girl will be a piece of cake.”

Fern doesn’t like Marsha’s attitude. More and more she is sounding like someone who will deserve Phil if she gets him. “I see you with someone else.” Fern hangs tough.

“Look harder,” Marsha says, with a bossy edge in her voice which Fern doesn’t like, doesn’t like at all.

By the time she has hustled Marsha off the phone, then logged out, Dolores is just a kimono left on the sofa and Harold is off to a rehearsal of his play. Fern heads home and on her way ties Lucky’s leash to a parking meter and ducks into the Blockbuster to pick up a movie for herself and Jeanne. She is making a gesture of thanks. When Fern went out to the cottage in Michigan with her dad and Louise in July, she couldn’t bring Lucky (Louise is allergic to everything but humans and fish). Her mother loves Lucky and can be counted on to feed him and take him on the slow, sniffing-opportunity walks he enjoys; she would never let him languish. Jeanne, though, throws herself into dog care with enthusiasm. She takes Lucky to the park, and on what she calls “happy rides,” which are to the drive-thru at McDonald’s. This time she took him so often that he was a little portly by the time Fern came back. She had also—a minor miracle given Lucky’s age and lifelong resistance to doing anything cute—taught him to shake hands.

Jeanne is all cultural on the surface, it’s all Joffrey and Symphony and Yo-Yo Ma. She is also the mildest person, a pacifist both personally and politically. And yet she is a sucker for the most violent American movies, anything with mobsters or drug kingpins, and lots of resolution achieved with semiautomatic weapons.

A small bonus is that Nora hates these movies, has made a point of being above them, and is, Fern can tell, jealous in a small way that Fern and Jeanne have this trashy thing they enjoy together from which Nora has excluded herself.

In the Blockbuster, on her way to the Action section, Fern sees Cooper. All this time and suddenly there he is. Hunkered down in front of the lower shelves in Cult. He’s wearing black jeans and a vintage leather jacket, although outside it is too warm for the jacket. Weather is not much of a consideration for Cooper. “Outside” is a brief area of transit for him between one interior and the next.

He neither looks up, nor turns. He’s unaware of Fern’s presence. He’s reading, through tiny wire-rim sunglasses, the back of a video box. Probably one of the mondo bizarro compilations he enjoys—disturbing things done in remote areas of the world. Cooper is an anthropologist of an amateur variety.

She doesn’t want him to see her. Then they would have to stumble through one of those phony “hi, how are you” things. She knows she couldn’t bear it; she would buckle in some uncool way—something blubbery and collapsing or something eye-darty and anxious. The only possible good meeting would be the one following the two or three calls where he begged her to take him back.

She wonders how much time she has before she will filter into his peripheral awareness and he will look up and over. Anyone else would have by now. But Cooper stays pretty enmeshed in his own reality. She has time to imprint this image of him, like one of those long exposures required for photographs taken in caves. She wants to burn this one in, for future reference.

He looks a little different, more relaxed. She can’t tell, though, what’s new and what’s always been there only she couldn’t get enough distance to see it back then. Like when he broke up with her, it was supposedly about a Vietnamese girl his family approved of. And then, a month or so later when Tracy mentioned seeing him at a party with a blonde, Fern, instead of coming to the logical conclusion that he’d been lying, instantly concocted a Vietnamese girl with blond hair. She could see her so clearly, the child of a Vietnamese father and a Scandinavian mother. The mind, she can see based on personal experience, is an incredibly powerful mechanism, especially when it’s hard at work against logic. But why not keep being stupid about Cooper? Now that he’s gone, she doesn’t have to be smart about him. It doesn’t matter
what she
is about him, as long as she keeps it to herself.

She slips out of the Blockbuster without renting anything. She and Lucky stop off at the small neighborhood shop where they let him come in with her. Ron Video. Apostrophes seem to be disappearing a lot from signs around where they live, a nononsense approach to the English language by foreign shopkeepers. (There is also a Sue Cleaners a couple of blocks over.) Ron doesn’t have a great selection, but with a little looking, Fern comes up with a copy of
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.

Later, she and Jeanne sit in front of the TV, eating a pizza Jeanne ordered when Fern showed up with the video.

Lucky is raising his paw repeatedly for Fern to shake it. Now that he has this trick up his sleeve, he’s trying to get some mileage out of it. The movie is up to the scene where Treat Williams has been lying in wait for the hit man, is now blasting him to smithereens. A huge bloodstain mushrooms on the wall behind the victim.

“This is such an excellent film,” Jeanne says.

Fern is paying only the lightest attention. Seeing Cooper has run a rough, hot cloth over surfaces she has only just been able to cool down, smooth out a little. Her old juju thinking kicks in with a flutter of superstition that Cooper’s presence in the Blockbuster was a sign that he would
not
be happy if anything happened between Fern and the skateboarder she met yesterday. This old line of internal chat gets interrupted, though, by a small, newer voice that says “So what?”

“
AND TONIGHT’S SPECIAL GUEST,
a show biz jill-of-all-trades—dancer, singer, actress, comedienne—let’s have a big hand for Lynette Lambert!” As he shouted, Harold extended from behind his back a baseball mitt, to represent the big hand.

This bit cracked up their father and mother, who were the cohost and guest respectively on
The Harold Dennis Hour.
At eleven, Harold featured himself the world’s youngest talk show host. All he needed to make it into the big time were a network slot, guests who weren’t his relatives, and a sport jacket that fit. He was wearing one of his father’s tonight, smoking a cigarette from a pack Art had left in the pocket. He was allowed to smoke on his show, because Johnny did.

Art was already on the sofa as Harold’s overly appreciative sidekick. Lynette came onstage direct from the kitchen, where she had been cleaning up after dinner. She was still holding a dishtowel in one hand as she shook Harold’s baseball glove with the other.

After refusing to make an appearance on the show, Nora had been relegated to the armchair in the corner, where she was serving as the sole member of the program’s audience, also the only one in the room who thought Harold was tragic. The talk show was his latest foray into entertainment, following his puppet theater and, before that, a hapless collection of card tricks. Her parents’ encouragement was relentless. Sometimes Nora would wake up on a Saturday or Sunday, go downstairs, and, simply from sitting, eating toast in the middle of all the optimism in the kitchen, become exhausted and have to go back upstairs and sleep two or three more hours.

The person Lynette most admired was Harriet Nelson, the way Harriet was able to parlay her singing career into a TV series with Ozzie and even bring her kids onto the show. This would have been Lynette’s dream life—a total blurring of the line between onstage and off, a singing-dancing-acting family with Art for a manager. Harold had totally bought into this vision; Nora was the only one fighting it.