HCC 115 - Borderline (2 page)

“You weren’t here yesterday,” she said.

“I was across the border. In Juarez.”

“All day?”

“All day and all night.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “You’re a bad boy,” she said playfully. “Those Mexican
girls can give you a disease.”

“I wasn’t with a girl.”

“Then why stay all night? You coulda driven back and slept at your own place. Why
stay over?”

“I had business,” he said. He wished she would shut up. Usually she made small talk
without making a pest of herself. But right now she was getting on his nerves. She
was asking questions, and he didn’t feel like being grilled. He felt like eating a
plate of ham and eggs and drinking a cup of coffee.

“Coffee,” he said. “Want to bring it now?”

“Oh, sure. Just a minute.”

She went to the coffee urn and drew a mugful for him. She set it on a saucer, put
the saucer in front of him. “Black,” she said. “No cream and no sugar. Right?”

“You should know.”

She was leaning forward now, again. He stirred his coffee with his spoon and tried
not to look at her breasts. He couldn’t help it. They were hanging there, ripe fruit
for plucking, and they were big and round, and they looked soft and touchable and—

Jesus, he thought, maybe I should have found a Mex girl, got some of it out of my
system. Three bucks for a nice hot Mex girl, a wham and a bam and a thank you, Ma’am.
But Betty had good breasts, big ones, and she stuck them out at you and you could
see their outlines clearly through the uniform, could see the way they twisted the
blouse of the uniform slightly out of shape. And she probably wasn’t even wearing
a bra; the way she was leaning, the way the breasts looked, and, oh, man!

“Betty,” the trucker said, “c’mere.”

“He’s calling you,” Marty said.

“He can go to hell,” she said. “Those truck drivers. All they want to do is joke dirty
and talk dirty and maybe touch you and proposition you. To hell with him.”

“And you don’t want to be touched.”

“Well,” she said.

He looked at her. There was a smile on her lips. She stuck out her tongue, licked
her lips like a tiger after a good meal. Her eyes were not so washed-out now. They
were a brighter blue, and her hair was spun gold, and her lips warm coral.

“Sometimes I want to be touched,” she said. “It depends who’s doing the touching.
It makes a difference.”

The cook broke things up by ringing a little bell. Betty turned at the sound and Marty
watched her walk to the window for his ham and eggs. The skirt of her uniform hugged
her buttocks, and they swayed as she walked.

She’s doing that on purpose, he thought. Swinging the rump for the same reason she
sticks the boobs out.

She brought him his food. The yellow yolks stood up like breasts on a girl, he thought.
And he wished he could stop thinking about girls in general and breasts in particular.
He took his silverware, wiped it with a paper napkin, attacked the food. Betty stood
there and watched him eat. It was annoying. He looked up at her, letting part of the
annoyance show in his eyes, and she turned away and walked back to the two truckers.
They wanted more coffee, and they wanted to talk to Betty.

He was hungry and he ate in a hurry. The coffee was barely warm when he got around
to it, and that was the way he liked it. Some men damn near burned their mouths with
coffee. He liked it warm, but not hot. That way you got the flavor of it.

He needed a second cup of coffee. He cleared his throat, once, and Betty turned away
from the truckers and hurried after him. She filled his cup and gave it back to him,
her eyes wide, warm.

“You were in Juarez on business,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of business?”

He thought of telling her to go to hell. “Private business,” he said.

“You in business for yourself?”

He permitted himself to smile. “You could call it that.”

“What kind of business? Monkey business? Sometimes that’s the best kind, you know.”

He took his last cigarette from the pack on the counter. He spun the wheel of the
Zippo, lit the cigarette. “I’m a gambler,” he said. “I went to Juarez to play poker.
I played until the game broke up. Then I came back to El Paso.”

“You’re a gambler?”

“Yeah.”

“You stayed there all that time for a poker game?”

He didn’t answer. He remembered the basement room at Navarro’s house, air-conditioned,
plush chairs, a green-shaded light hanging from the ceiling. No clock on the wall.
Chips on the table, chips that went back and forth. Now it was Friday morning. Around
ten Wednesday night he had sat down at the table with five hundred dollars worth of
chips. Two hours ago he had cashed in twenty-eight hundred dollars. Now it was in
a money belt around his waist. He remembered hand after hand after hand, voices that
said only the words needed to bet and raise and call and fold.

“I stayed there all that time,” he said. “For a poker game.”

“You win?”

“Yeah.”

“You usually win?”

“I’m a gambler,” he said, annoyed again, annoyed with the silly words and the big
breasts and the thorough lack of subtlety. “Of course I usually win. Otherwise I’d
do something else for a living.”

She digested this. He stood up, tired of the girl, tired of the diner, tired of the
clothes he’d been wearing since Wednesday. He dug into a pants pocket, found a loose
single to cover the food and coffee. He added a quarter for the girl.

“You’re a gambler,” she said.

He thought that if she leaned over any further, she was going to drill boob-shaped
holes in the counter’s Formica top. He picked up his cigarette from the little glass
ashtray and put it between his lips.

“You could gamble on me,” she said. “You could try your luck.”

He reached out a hand and touched her breast with it. The flesh was firm, unyielding.
He wanted to squeeze, to caress it.

Instead, he let go.

“I’m a gambler,” he said. “But I never play sure things.”

He turned around and left the diner. She yelled something dirty after him, something
dirty enough to make the truckers spin on their stools and laugh. Outside, he crossed
the street to the Olds, opened the door and got behind the wheel. He put his key in
the ignition, started the car, pulled away from the curb.

It was hot, he thought. Not even eleven in the morning and hot as hell already. By
afternoon, when the sun really got warmed up, it was going to be horrible.

He drove home.

* * *

Meg Rector slept until noon. Sleeping was easy. The hotel was expensive and the air-conditioning
worked the way it was supposed to. The bed she slept in had a firm mattress. The sheets
were good percale, and they were perfectly clean. She’d had half a pint of Beefeater
gin before she went to bed, not enough to leave her hung over in the morning, just
enough to make deep sleep come in a hurry.

At noon she awoke. For a moment there was a nebulous where-am-I feeling, the unfamiliar
sensation that comes with waking in a strange bed in a strange room in an unfamiliar
city. This didn’t stay long. She stretched and shook her head and remembered where
she was.

The Hotel Warwick, in El Paso. A room on the tenth and top floor with a view of the
city, for what it was worth. Alone, of course. Alone, and twenty-six years old, and
divorced, and bored. And, now, awake. She got up from the bed, her hair black and
loose and long, trailing down over bare shoulders that were just barely tanned. She
was wearing a nightgown sheer and black, and she looked down at it and laughed humorlessly.
You don’t have to wear a nightgown anymore, she told herself. You’re not married anymore.
You can sleep naked, the way you used to.

She stepped out of the nightgown, walked to the closet, hung the gown on a wire hanger.
Then she changed her mind, took the nightgown from the hanger, balled it into a nylon
ball and stuffed it into the wastebasket by the dresser. You can sleep naked, she
told herself again. No more nightgowns. So why fill a closet with them?

Meg walked naked into the bathroom. Her toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste
were on the rim of the sink where she had left them before going to bed. She brushed
her teeth, rinsed her mouth. She unwrapped a small cake of soap, turned on the stall
shower, got into it. She lathered herself thoroughly, washed herself thoroughly, holding
her head back to keep the water away from her hair. She got out of the shower, dried
off with a towel, went back to the bed and sat on its edge.

El Paso, for God’s sake. She remembered getting there, remembered first of all flying
to Mexico City from Chicago just a week ago, remembered spending a week at an expensive
American hotel on Reforma while her divorce went through. It wasn’t like being in
Mexico. The whole street was for Americans, everybody spoke English, and it was like
Miami or Vegas or Palm Springs, just another resort for Americans with too much money.
She killed a week, talking to no one, staying in her room for hours on end and sipping
Beefeater gin from a water tumbler. She ate all her meals in the hotel’s dining room.
Then the divorce was through. She wasn’t married to Borden Rector any more, she was
an emancipated woman, and there was no reason to stay in Mexico City anymore.

She would have had to wait eight hours for a nonstop plane back to Chicago. There
was a flight leaving right away, stopping at El Paso and Kansas City before it got
to Chicago. She took it, using the return half of the round-trip ticket that Borden
Rector’s attorney had given to her along with a sheaf of forms and a bundle of expense
money.

At El Paso she got out of the plane, managed to get her luggage back even though it
was checked through to Chicago. She didn’t know anybody in El Paso, and didn’t want
to. Nothing fascinated her about El Paso. But she had realized, while the big plane
was in the air, that she had no desire at all to return to Chicago. And flying was
dull, monotonous.

So here she was, in El Paso.

She stood up. Her purse was in the dresser’s top drawer. She found her cigarette case
in it, took out a cigarette, lit it and smoked. She caught a glimpse of herself in
the mirror on the closet door, stopped and regarded herself thoughtfully. She saw
the long black hair that had remained miraculously dry in the shower, saw the tall
body with the full curves and the trim waist and the full, flaring hips. Her arms
and legs and face were slightly tanned, but the rest of her body was a very pale white,
with the white breasts almost shocking with their crimson tips.

She looked at herself.
Nude Smoking a Cigarette
she titled the picture. She laughed again, an audible laugh, a mirthless laugh. She
ground out the cigarette in an ashtray and put clothes on.

Downstairs, in the lobby, she walked to the room clerk’s desk and coughed until the
little round-shouldered clerk scurried over to her.

“Where’s a decent restaurant?”

“Just around the corner,” he told her. “You go out that door—” he pointed “—and turn
right, and walk to the corner, that’s Carleton Boulevard and you turn right again.
Giardi’s Restaurant is just four doors from the corner.”

“Italian food?”

“Italian and American. It’s very good there.”

His brother probably owned it, she decided. But he didn’t look very Italian. Maybe
his brother-in-law owned it. Or maybe his brother had purchased it from Giardi, or—

The clerk was still waiting patiently. “Listen,” she said, “what the hell do you do
in this town?”

The clerk looked puzzled. He was wearing glasses, thick glasses, and they made his
eyes seem enormous.

He said, “Do?”

“For excitement. What goes on?”

The clerk took a short breath, thought, expelled the breath. “Why, there are movie
theaters,” he said. “And night clubs, of course. There’s a listing of entertainment
in the daily newspaper, the
El Paso Sun
. And then there is Juarez, of course.”

“Across the border?”

“Yes. It’s a…a border town. Not a very decent sort of place, I’m afraid, but quite
a few persons go there for…for amusement. But it depends what sort of excitement—”

She told him to forget it. She turned around, went out the door he had pointed to,
walked to Carleton Boulevard and found Giardi’s. The food was better than she had
expected. She asked for a breakfast menu, found out they had stopped serving breakfast
two hours ago, and stopped the waiter in mid-sentence when he started to offer to
get her an omelet, maybe, or some wheat cakes, or—

She had a plate of spaghetti with chicken livers and a bottle of red wine. She had
never cared much for breakfast food, hated eggs and couldn’t stomach cereal. But Borden
liked breakfast. Every day, for four years, Borden liked breakfast.

Four years of Borden. Four years of marriage, four years that added up to fourteen
or fifteen hundred days, and every day the same, except that each was a little more
horribly monotonous than the last. Four years of wearing a nightgown to bed because
Borden thought it was indecent to sleep in the raw. Four years of making love briefly,
and rarely; four years of on-again off-again, with Borden finished and ready to sleep
just as she started to get interested in the game.

A year, perhaps, of running to the bathroom and finishing the job herself. Then three
years of not bothering, because Borden had not even managed to arouse her. Three years
of cheating now and then; not out of need as much as out of boredom. Four years of
dullness and drabness, of having money without enjoying it, of living, damn it to
hell, with Borden.

For excitement, she had told the clerk. What did it mean? God, how did she know what
it meant? Maybe it meant getting laid or getting drunk or shooting dice or taking
dope or driving in a fast car. She hadn’t seen any excitement in too long. She hardly
remembered what it was like.

She had a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette with it. El Paso, she thought. And
Juarez. Somewhere in one town or the other, there was going to be a little excitement.
Somewhere in Texas or Mexico there was going to be a reprieve from the boredom, a
respite from the monotony. Call it excitement, or call it something else. It hardly
mattered.