Driving on the Rim (34 page)

Jocelyn’s ardor proceeded from one extreme inspiration to another. I couldn’t imagine what dark place needed such fulfillment. I was hoping I’d held up my end, but I honestly wasn’t sure. When she sat up on the bed, I asked, “Who exactly is Womack?”

Jocelyn arose and dressed. She said, “I thought you knew better than that,” and left. I looked at the doorway as though she was still in it.

I slept for a few more hours, got up, ate breakfast, and went to the paint store for rollers. When I got to the Haineses’ house, formerly amiable Mrs. Haines was waiting for me. Her husband, agog with worry, watched from behind the screen door.

“You scoundrel,” she began. “Are you ever going to finish painting my house? You’ve been scraping and showing up when you feel like it and leaving the ladder leaning against the front. The neighbors think we can’t afford to pay and a half-painted house is going to ruin their property values—” I looked over at the husband, probably for support. “Don’t look at him. He can’t help you. I’m in charge here!” She gazed at my hat and seemed to be spelling out the words, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’.”

So my hope of correcting the poor impression I had left with Jocelyn—and doing it that day—went up in smoke. I slaved away until sundown, when evening shadows crossed the surface upon which I was rolling Chantilly Pearl enamel—never saw either of the Haineses—and headed straight to the pharmacy for aspirin. I could barely move.

I was in something of a bad mood. Bad moods for me usually consisted in being unable to grasp the meaning not of life necessarily—that was hopeless, as witness the thousands of years of philosophical mishmash—but simply of the way people lived. Happily, this terrible impulse only surfaced occasionally. Today, with a bottle of aspirin in hand, I strolled the neighborhoods that usually cheered me, and arrived at the sort of overview I hoped would soon go up in smoke, even as I conceived it.

Staying in one place long enough, you saw the rise and fall of domestic
arrangements and the physical appurtenances that accompanied them. At a certain hormonal stage, tempered by moderate practical knowledge, the couples formed and began to construct the cheese ball. The cheese ball consisted of a building known as the home, the transportation equipment, the sustenance gear including heating and cooking facilities, the investments and liquidity that kept the cheese ball from rolling backwards and ruining its owners; then, in most cases, the eventual collapse of the agreement that had generated the cheese ball in the first place and the subsequent deliquescence of the cheese ball itself into its component parts, to be reconstituted in the generation of new cheese balls by less-fortunate couples or, in some cases, the complete vanishing of the cheese ball entirely.

Only at the end of this rumination did I recognize that I myself had no cheese ball and, moreover, that I had always wanted one. Perhaps I was needy. Needy was bad. I knew needy was bad, but I embraced needy. Needy was human. My principle in life so far had been to avoid dying with a grievance on my lips; maybe that was not enough. Maybe I needed to change. I had two more days’ work painting the house for that poor old man and his asshole of a wife; after that I was hanging up my roller.

When I first saw the judge, Daniel Bowles Lauderdale, I thought I recognized him, if dimly. For a moment I wondered if he was a relative of some sort, or a friend of my parents. I was able neither to rescue his face from memory nor get it out of my mind. Until I heard his voice: this was the Billings lawyer of my school days who had declined to pay me for painting his cabin in Harlowton! He still had the perm but it had gone gray. I supposed the secretary he’d been squeezing in the cabin had been replaced with a fresher one. I don’t think Throckmorton had gauged the potential bellicosity of Judge Lauderdale. When he, Throckmorton, opened up the matter of Tessa’s previous brushes with the law, Lauderdale exploded. “That’s enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” And we went to recess. Throckmorton slumped briefly in his seat and said, “That’s the only piece of rhetoric the old turd ever learned. Nevertheless, I think I got us off on the wrong track, which I shall undo: crow is best eaten when it is still warm.”

Once we were before Lauderdale again, the judge said to Niles, “Attorney Throckmorton, I too survived law school at Missoula. I too endured life among woebegone professors and hippie degenerates. But that does not make us soul mates.”

“Of course, Judge, of course you’re right.”

“I’m going to wind this up until I can speak to and/or depose some of Dr. Pickett’s colleagues. Otherwise, I am obliged to listen to you, Attorney Throckmorton, and you are unreliable.”

As we sat in Niles’s Audi, ruing the day, his phone rang and he answered it. After he listened for a moment, he told the caller the police were taping the call. Then without further comment, he hung up and said, “Disgruntled husband. Idle threat. Stock item in the trade.”

When I was a boy, I made a few trips with my mother to Arkansas. My father stayed behind. Our trips to Arkansas were mostly taken up with Pentecostal doings which included my maternal grandparents and involved the usual strumming, staggering, falling out, and most alarming, “holy laughter.” To me, that was Arkansas; imagine my surprise when an Arkansan became president of the United States. A fellow medical student, a reasonable young woman with whom I fornicated purely as a relief from our studies, theorized that my experience in Arkansas surely left me with religious longing, a theory I tested by attending several churches, starting with the Catholic church, which astonished me by its morbidity. When I told the pleasant young priest that I thought I’d try some of the others, he said that I was wasting my time and that those churches were “spin-offs.” I tried them anyway and was briefly tempted by an Episcopalian congregation whose pastor was a lesbian in a tuxedo. I thought the discourse was at a higher level, featuring such concepts as “ecumenical” and “ecclesiastical,” but in the end it seemed bloodless. It was too bad that I found the Pentecostal church absurd, because that’s really where my heart lay. As insincere as my occasional episodes of falling out and jerking on the floor may have been, the approval I got as a child who had been touched by the Holy Ghost was transforming, even if my father, learning of it, called me a bullshit artist.

I remembered a conversation I had with Alan Hirsch about our work. He remarked that there was a fine line between a rut and a groove in a
way that suggested we were in a rut, and that professional life necessitated recognizing that you were in a rut; but most pointedly I recalled feeling that this didn’t ring a bell at all and that I badly needed to get out of my very satisfying groove and broaden my life with travel, romance, etc., because I liked my work too much. Now that work was somewhat withheld, this was a painful thought.

I wished this recollection had waited, because little old Mrs. Haines was closely supervising my work as I prepared to scrape and mask around the window frames. “I’m just not going to put up with careless work,” she said. I hung on the ladder with a gallon can dangling from my other paw trying to find a place for my scraper, my sanding blocks, and my masking tape. I didn’t really need the paint yet; it had been a mistake carrying it up here imagining I had a place for it, but I was reluctant to let Mrs. Haines see me reverse course and return to the ground. I should have suffered that loss of face, because in attempting to rest the bucket on the shelf at the top of the ladder, I lost control of it and it fell to the ground, followed by my tools, making a big, terrible splash of Spicy Chrysanthemum exterior paint and setting off the most god-awful caterwauling from Mrs. Haines, as well as the barking of Mr. Haines, who asked, “Do you know what you’re doing?” That was the first I’d ever heard from him.

“I’ll replace this myself,” I cried out to the old bat.

“What about the grass you’ve killed?” the vicious old whore inquired. I told her that it would recover in no time. “Why did we ever decide to trust you to paint our home?” she wailed.

“Yes, why?” the husband inquired from behind the screen.

“I quit,” I said. This brought them to their senses. The hubby emerged.

“But what will we do?” she asked, eyes wide with fear of the current half-finished project. The spineless hubby suggested that we let quieter heads prevail, which brought out the obsequious side of the devious banshee, who allowed she thought I was doing the best I could. I told her she could bet her ass on that one. The old couple tried laughing at my careless vulgarity. I aimed the bristles of the brush, still miraculously in my hand, at the bargain-hunting couple and said that I would proceed to finish the job if I could do so without supervision and that I would do
the best job I was capable of in accordance with our original work agreement. “Now let’s see a couple of smiles.”

What actually happened was that I finished the job in what I thought to be an adequate fashion. I did not stop by for my paycheck or even reimbursement for the paint, on the grounds that these dim bulbs had suffered enough in my pursuit of folly and sublimated frustration. I accepted that my nostalgia for plain folk was challenged by the experience and acknowledged that by any ordinary standards I was flailing—yes, flailing and making a fool of myself.

Because of her faith, my mother faced mortality with something approaching glee. At the end, she had so many things wrong with her that I, her physician, and other doctors ended up lumping them under some lupus-like autoimmune disorder that produced terrific suffering including joint pain and widespread rashes. Then the adult-onset asthma and bacterial infections in her lungs started her down the road to the end. I had called in Blake Cohen, an internist who died several years ago, and Blake did everything in his power to help my mother; he was at her bedside more often than I. My mother accepted her suffering as little more than the clarion call of approaching Rapture. Making the rounds of other sick, even terminal, people, I had to consider the great emotional protection my mother’s faith had provided her. In my then scientific turn of mind I wondered whether biology and evolution hadn’t produced this endorphin engine. However, I was tempted to exempt my mother from my scientific worldview. In fact, I did exempt her. That is, I concluded that her physical discomfort was cured by death though she died contradictions intact, with her last breath calling solicitous Blake Cohen a kike. I regarded her corpse as a troublesome object she was well rid off. The most important aspects of my mother seemed to have gone on, flitting about with all those waves and signals I held between my hands. Her voice, that semiliterate Arkansas twang, was clear as a bell.

I tried to understand why the fiasco of house painting triggered such a painful state of mind. It felt very much like loneliness, but I didn’t think it was, and I was nearly bent over with an aching heart that manifested itself in all sorts of ways, loss of appetite for one and a conversational
style that turned casual encounters into occasions for gruesome discomfort and stampedes of fleeing acquaintances. I locked all my doors, drew the shades, selected the room closest to the center of the house, sheltered by the most walls, and abandoned myself to a kind of objectless grief. This proceeded on a futon in a storage room. It was far easier to acquire a futon than to get rid of one, and this one had languished in an unused room for a long time. A leak only recently repaired had soaked it, and the damp seeped into my clothes, discomfort overcoming my grief. This turned out to be an excellent thing, since grieving over apparently nothing was disorienting me and suggested that in terms of my mental health I was a pickle short of a jar and had better get a grip before my large problems became even larger. I did have one commonsense thought, which was that I just wanted to go back to work. I stood on the futon and said “work” out loud, bestriding the waterlogged pad with a defiant air. I was imagining myself useful again.

I actually caught family members of Ernest Leeteg, b. 1928, d. 1989, moving the flowers I had planted at my parents’ graves to that of Mr. Leeteg. I made sure they saw me arrive before I went over to stand wordlessly before them, two women old enough to be the sisters of the deceased, rural in appearance and handy with their trowels. One looked ready to argue but the other, sharply elbowing her in the side, directed the restoration of my flowers into the uncovered holes the pair had left behind. I did not say a word.

I was not much for prayer, though as admitted, I did sometimes give it a try, but my reason for regularly visiting the graves of my mother and father was to think about them. I felt that so long as I did this, they continued to exist in some way and of course I still loved them. So many people did likewise that it must have been instinctive. Contrary to appearances or the sort of representation such activity might get in books or movies, we did not stand before the final resting places of our parents eaten up with lugubrious and undifferentiated piety. What we did was try to figure out who they were and what they were doing together. I doubted anyone was deterred by realizing we’d never get to the bottom of it, that their lives and our inquiries would travel on parallel courses until no one remained to pursue the matter. But all this flower tending at the cemetery seemed to help a lot of people with their sadness,
as though death was a jeweled bower through which you skipped on your way to glory.

The woman I found at the graves of Cody and Clarice turned out to be Cody’s mother. I thought I’d breeze by with a few absorbing glances, wiggling my fishing rod absently, but just as I passed, she said firmly, “Hey.” A pair of picnic chairs faced the headstones. “Have a seat.” I looked again at the direction in which I had been arbitrarily traveling, as though I had other business than passing this way. But I sat down and learned that the woman, who looked to be about my own age, was named Deanne. She seemed slightly mature for the clever T-shirt she wore: “Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War.” Or the open-toed shoes and the tiny stone in her nostril.