Golden States (13 page)

Rob sat on the sofa and David did too. “So here I am, bouquet and everything, just like a suitor,” Rob said.

Janet sat holding the armrests of the chair with both hands, and she kept her feet on the floor. “A suitor is the last thing I want,” she said.

“You hear that from a lot of women these days,” Rob said. “How’s your other boyfriend?”

David’s blood went cold. A high, thin ringing seeped into his ears.

Janet paused, smiled, and said, “Fine. All my other boyfriends are just fine, thank you.”

“Good,” Rob said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“How are your other girlfriends?” Janet asked him. “How’s the stripper’s dissertation coming along?”

“Getting tired of her,” Rob said, sipping his drink. “I’m thinking of getting rid of her.”

None of this made any sense. Was it possible Janet actually
had
another boyfriend? Had David stumbled blindly onto the truth?

“Don’t get rid of her,” Janet said. “You may need her.”

“I don’t think I will. I know exactly what I need/’

“I think maybe you just feel guilty,” she said.

“What have I got to feel guilty about?”

“There’s the telling statement, right there.” Janet stood up, as she had been waiting to do. “Excuse me,” she said in a stage whisper. “I’m going to go check on the state of the salad dressing.”

“Be kind,” Rob whispered back. Although David believed Lizzie should be called on her tricks, he didn’t like the idea that Rob and Janet shared a secret image of her that differed from her own. Janet walked out of the room and left David and Rob sitting together on the sofa.

Rob stretched his long arm out along the backrest. His fingers brushed the knobby bone of David’s nearer shoulder, and David automatically pulled his shoulder away.

“Do I make you nervous, my man?” Rob asked.

“No,” David told him.

“Good. I’m your friend, I shouldn’t make you nervous. Tell me, David. Did you make that up about Janet having a boyfriend?”

Here it was. David’s face burned, and he heard himself say, “Uh-huh.”

Rob’s expression did not change, his tight smile held steady. “Did you really?” he asked.

David nodded. He was afraid his eyes would begin to tear if he spoke. He tensed as for a blow.

“Well, it’s all right,” Rob said, and laughed like it was a good joke, a normal funny thing to have done. “I won’t tell.”

“Oh,” David said.

“I’ve told a few myself,” Rob said. “Matter of fact, that’s one of the things lawyers are paid to do.”

“Uh-huh,” David said. For a sharp, thrilling moment he loved Rob. He looked at Rob’s shirtfront with moist eyes, wishing more than anything to butt his head gently into the snowy cotton. After a moment he asked, “Can I have a sip of your drink?”

“I guess a sip won’t hurt you,” Rob said. “Don’t tell.”

“I won’t.” David took the glass from Rob’s hand and drew a practiced draught, nowhere near big enough to be risky.

“Glad to see you can appreciate the right stuff, David my man,” he said, and David loved him all the more even though he knew there was mockery in his voice. How could he have been so wrong about Rob?

Janet came back, and David handed the whiskey glass to Rob. “Don’t let him con you into getting him drunk,” she said.

“David’s not conning me about anything,” Rob smiled. “How are things in the kitchen?”

“Fine, if you like ketchup on your salad. Pretend you like it, or there’ll be a scene that’ll curl your hair.”

“She gets away with an awful lot, doesn’t she?” Rob said. David thought gratefully,
At last.
Someone besides him realized the truth about Lizzie.

“Please don’t draw conclusions about what you don’t understand,” Janet said. “Let’s just say she was dealt with a little harshly when she was a baby. She and some other people too. Are you ready for dinner?”

“Starving,” Rob said, and he gave her the smile. David imagined Rob smiling at him that way.

Everybody seemed to have a good time at dinner. Mom began to relax, and by dessert she was telling jokes, including a long one David lost track of halfway through. Something about Moses and a talking dog. David laughed along with the others, for appearance sake, and then Rob told a simpler one about two Polacks who go skydiving. He looked at David as he told it, and David could hardly hold still from nervousness and laughter. He thought the joke was really funny.

Janet didn’t laugh much. She sat smiling with her head cocked, and when the others quit laughing she said, “Did one of the men at the firm tell you that one?”

“I guess so,” Rob said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it just doesn’t sound like the kind of joke you’d tell, is all. You used to tell a different kind of joke.”

“People change,” he told her.

“You’re telling me.”

“Anybody want more coffee?” Mom said. “Rob? More tea?” “Please,” Rob said.

“No thanks,” Janet said. She rested her palm on her coffee cup and looked at Rob.

“Something funny about my face?” he asked.

“I’m just trying to remember you,” she said.

“I’m sitting right here.”

Lizzie said, “Rob, do you know how to play crazy eights?” “No, but I bet I could learn.”

“Don’t let Lizzie teach you,” David said, “She’ll leave out half the rules until you start playing. I’ll teach you how.”

“I will,” Lizzie said.

“I will.”

“I will.”

“I’m going to put gags on both of you in about two minutes,” Mom said. She went into the kitchen for the tea.

“Maybe you can both teach me,” Rob said.

“I’ll tell you all the things Lizzie leaves out,” David said.

Lizzie thrust her lower lip at him and he turned away, cringing, as if she was too ugly to look at. When he turned his head he noticed that Janet was watching Rob with a sad smile on her face, her hand still covering her empty cup.

They all played crazy eights at the dinner table. David, remembering his promise to himself, managed not to fight with Lizzie even though he knew she was cheating. As they played David noticed Rob’s wrists, which were thinner than you’d expect, covered with fine reddish hairs that curled slightly in a uniform sickle shape. Rob’s fingers picking up the cards were long and graceful, with tufts of paler hair at the knuckles. David’s own hands were pink and stubby. Whenever anybody said something funny David smiled hugely, with his upper lip raised, showing his gums.

Once, after losing three hands in a row, Lizzie said to him, “Why are you smiling like a monkey?”

“Why do you smell like a fish?” he asked her, and decided the truce had been a stupid idea. You couldn’t be nice to someone like Lizzie.

After they got tired of playing cards they went into the living room to watch TV. Lizzie was told she could stay up until the end of “Dynasty” and no longer. She plopped poutily down on the sofa next to Rob, not daring to press the issue because “Dynasty” already ran a half hour later than her usual bedtime. David slotted himself in quickly on Rob’s other side, and noticed for the first time a deeper smell of Rob’s, under his cologne, something like pencil shavings when you empty the sharpener.

Janet and Mom sat in the two orange chairs. Janet had brought out the last of her dinner wine, and Rob was drinking another Old Bushmill’s. Occasionally he passed it over to David in silence, as if they had a private understanding, and David took big, chancy sips. Everything felt so solid and fine; he was so happy just to be sitting on the sofa taking swallows of Rob’s drink.

After the program ended, Lizzie was maneuvered upstairs into bed. David thought she would kiss Rob good-night but she was humiliated at being the first to go and didn’t speak to him at all. She just trudged noisily upstairs. David knew so well the regret she felt afterward he could almost feel it, dripping through the ceiling like a leak.

He himself didn’t have to go to bed for another hour, and he sat luxuriating in his one undeniable, irrevokable privilege. He was older than Lizzie, and always would be. There was nothing she could do to catch up. He accepted another sip of Rob’s drink as the news woman, the one whose hair came to a single perfect hook on one side of her head, appeared on the screen and said in her urgent, honest voice, “Good evening. President Reagan announced at a press conference today that he would seek to increase the defense department budget by ten billion dollars in 1985. More on this and other stories at eleven.”

“Asshole,” Janet said.

“You mean Reagan, or that woman?” Mom asked.

“Oh, both of them. I don’t think the world has ever had so many assholes in it as it does right now.”

The newswoman had been replaced by a commercial, the old ladies who liked to squeeze the toilet paper. Rob said, “There have always been plenty of assholes. You’re just learning to spot them better.”

“I’ve always known how to spot them,” Janet said.

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It seems like the older you get,the harder it is. I’ve voted for a new asshole every four years since, oh, Kennedy. But he was one too, in a way.”

“Everybody has their reasons,” Rob said.

The toilet paper commercial dissolved into another one, for coffee, with a husband wrinkling his nose over his cup as if it had a rat turd floating in it. This struck David as funny. He tried to hold it in, though, because the talk around him was turning serious.

“But when did we all get so damn reasonable?” Janet said. “At what point exactly did we sort of shrug our shoulders and say, ‘What the hell, you can’t fight it, everybody’s got their reasons?’ ”

“It’s always been like that,” Rob said.

David took Rob’s glass from his hand and helped himself to another sip, and another. The husband liked the new coffee better. He closed his eyes and smacked his lips like it was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. A sputtering laugh escaped from the side of David’s clamped mouth like air from a balloon. He had an alternate version of the commercial in his mind: the wife says, “Honey, what’s wrong with my coffee?” and the husband says, “Well, it’s got a rat turd in it.” He couldn’t not think about it.

“That sounds like revised history to me,” Janet said. David looked at her with bug-eyed seriousness, thinking,
Hmmm,
like a professor. This was funny too. A glow had come over him, a good warm haziness that started in his blood and tingled his skin from the inside. Everything was so fine, and so completely itself. As the others talked David sat appreciating the sofa, the comforting familiar scratch of its stiff gray fabric. It was a perfect version of a sofa, and it was his. His sofa, the one out of all possible sofas.

Rob was saying something about Indian reservations, how the Indians never wanted a lot of white kids there helping them in the first place, it was all a big joke to the Indians. Davidlooked over at Mom, who was following the conversation with her eyes like she was watching a tennis match but a more serious kind of tennis match, one in which the ball might blow up at any second and kill whoever had it on his side of the net. She was so fine. And she was his. His own perfect mother. He thought hard about the fact so he wouldn’t forget it.

“That sounds like asshole talk to me,” Janet said.

Here, honey, try this coffee. Mmm, that’s the way I like it, with no rat turds.

David held the laugh until he thought his head would explode. Then in a moment of blissful giving-in it shot out his nose. He snorted, and the sound of his own snorting was funny. He laughed so hard he lost his breath, and Rob’s drink, which he was still holding, splashed onto his shirt.

“Hey, what’s so funny?” Rob asked.

“Wait a minute, he’s drunk,” Mom said.

“David?” Janet looked at him questioningly. “Shit, you are, aren’t you?”

The idea appealed to him. Drunk, he was drunk. He had crossed over into another country, one he’d been wanting to visit for a long time. This was it. A warm floating feeling like your whole being is in your head, and everything around you small and funny. Funny. He just couldn’t stop laughing.

“Whoa,” Rob said, pulling the glass from his hand. “God, I had no idea.”

David wanted to say to them, “Wait, I’m still here,” because they were treating him like he’d been completely transformed when in fact all he was was himself pushed up a little bit higher, better able to see the hilarity of things. But he was giggling too hard to speak.

“Bed,” Mom said. “Somebody get on the other side, he’s too heavy for me.”

Rob hoisted him up with difficulty (Rob wasn’t so strong!) and though David felt sure he could walk perfectly well on his own, he gave in to the occasion of his drunkenness and lethimself be half carried, half dragged between Mom and Rob. His laughter was solidifying into something else, a hard ball that stuck in the back of his throat, but he kept laughing for fear of having to know what to say if he stopped. As Mom and Rob guided him upstairs he laughed until the laughter took on its own unraveling force, until it became a thing that lived outside him and hung in the air over all their heads, a ghost. By the time they reached the top step (the stairs were both impossibly long and brief, a huge journey over in an instant), the hard ball had slithered down into his stomach, which bucked and trembled. The first heave came so fast he had only a moment to stop laughing, poised silent at the top of the stairs, held by firm hands—he had that one clear moment in which he saw himself, his own exact size and shape, his position in the world—and then he bent forward and vomited, a flecked brown streak that flashed raggedly across the carpet. He heard Mom say, “Bathroom,” in her dead-calm voice.

He was carried to the bathroom and managed to hold down the second wave of vomiting until they reached it. A thick thread of saliva dangled from his chin. Mom held his shoulders as he bent over the white, gleaming toilet bowl. He retched and retched but the ball wouldn’t dislodge itself from his belly. Faintly, he heard Rob’s voice from above, saying, “I’m sorry, God, I had no idea.” Mom’s voice replied, “It’s all right, he’s been trying to get drunk since he was nine. Now he knows what it’s like.”

When he was finished throwing up, when the sickness had settled into a solid immovable thing in his gut, Mom stripped his shirt off and washed his face and chest at the sink. He saw his face in the mirror and was surprised by it. His eyes looked back at him like somebody else’s. He saw that they were brown with spots of gold in them. His skin in the hard white light seemed to have turned gray. After Mom had rubbed him clean with a washcloth, which left red blossomings on his bare chest, she steered him out into the hallway toward his room. Janetand Rob were in the hall, standing close together, and when David negotiated the first few uncertain steps in their direction Janet came and smoothed his hair, saying, “Well, I guess tonight you’re a man.”