Hush Hush (3 page)

“Only women understand me,” he says. With the help of a wealthy coal widow he started
The New Bituminous Review
and filled it with uncanny and haunting work by the editors of other magazines. Then for three years he fearlessly walked up and down Sixth Avenue, filling out grant applications, winning nine. “It’s a poet eat poet world out there,” he says.

They don’t only argue. Last week, God and Jesus were in the main lobby, rolling on the carpet, laughing about Hell. “Who could have known that they’d take that
seriously
?” God said. “They’ve been worrying about that for two
thousand
years!” he snorted, and fell into convulsions of laughter. “And—and—” Jesus said, wiping tears from his shining eyes, “and we were only
kidding
! God, they must think we’re mean!” And they walked off slapping their foreheads and kneecaps and Jesus’ hat fell off. His eyes are intensely beautiful, blue. Very tall.

The poet is thought to have a very good gamey look, I told my sister. One of the top five, among contemporary American poets. His wife won’t mind, I said, because he’s an artist. What is his poetry about? she said. Anguish, I said. Black
woe. Raw unashamed passion. Black Lung. A number of his newest poems shockingly unmask the pylorus, where a valve inextricably links man’s stomach to his small intestine.

My death came about in this way: I poisoned myself, with loathing. And envy, there was some envy. Mostly loathing.

The poet is off the phone. He has a legal pad and a blue and black German pencil, working probably on “Reflux.” It’s a new one in the Los Angeles Lakers series. “Overweight and eager …” the poem begins. He pauses, pencil to his lips. He is thinking. I ask if he will stay to dinner, and he slams the pencil down, enraged. “Oh, Christ,” he says, “can’t you see I’m working? What’re you having? I’ll invite Peesha, Pasha, and Tony. It’s all ruined now,” he says. The pencil is very beautiful. He picks up the telephone.

Jesus comes over to me when I’m out on a chaise beside one of the pools; he’s holding a fat red book in one hand and in the other, two lemonade cans from the vending machine. He hands me one. Frigid. All around us, people are getting to their feet. Music is playing somewhere.

“A hat?” I say. “You’re never in a hat in the pictures.”

“I’m two thousand years old,” Jesus says, and pats the leather hat. “I’ll wear a hat if I feel like it.” He gives a droll smile. “I have you down here for loathing and envy,” he says, looking up from the red ledger. “You must forgive him.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” I say, and take a drink. It’s Handel, the music.

“Bo, I’m Jesus. Why are you bothering to lie to me?”

“Yes, sorry, I forgot. Gosh, this lemonade is cold.”

Jesus sighs. “That’s a nice touch, that ‘Gosh.’ A little foolish, considering that you’re already in heaven. Still, ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.’ ” He shrugs. “It’s in 1st Corinthians.”

“That’d be Chapter 1,” I say, “verse 27?”

He glances sharply at me for a second but recovers, nods, and slaps the red book on his pants. “You must forgive him.”

“Okay. I forgive him.”

Jesus looks at me with his brilliant eyes. It’s the sort of long, theatrically patient look one gets not from a father but from a beloved older brother.

“Okay, I don’t forgive him. Okay.” The breeze in heaven is soft, sweet, smells delicately of oranges.

The poet wants to write good poetry, I know he does. He does not think of himself as a dull, careerist predator and sham. He could be a counterfeit and write great poetry at the same time, perhaps. He wants to know awe. He wants to have important things to say to his fellows, to make cold souls warm, to ease hurt, to praise love, to give hope to the despairing and companion to the lonely, to hold the breath of wisdom in his hand for an instant, to add to what we have. He wants to
see
. Even a blind squirrel finds a … No, nevermind that.

“Jesus, this is hard. This is hard,” I say, “Jesus.”

His eyes are terrible.

Three weeks after Terry Quinn quit his fancy job at the law firm, got in his car, left Atlanta and drove a thousand miles back to Texas, he went to a party. He had been living at a motel since he’d arrived in Austin, and for three weeks had spoken to no one but gas station clerks, waitresses, and supermarket checkers. The law office was looking better and better, in hindsight. Maybe, he thought, running away from home at thirty-two wasn’t such a great idea.

He’d been told about the party by a woman named Liz, an attractive half-Japanese woman who he had met once ten years earlier. It happened that she worked at the branch library where he had spent a long afternoon reading some hopeless career-change book with an embarrassingly silly name. The ten minutes talking to her was so pleasant to him that even though he usually hated and feared parties, he had decided to go. He had considered offering to take her, but decided against it, unsure of what her casual “You should come” might have meant. So he went back to the motel and thought about her and waited for nine o’clock.

The party was in a big stone house beside a lake, and music and people spilled out onto the courtyard and a paved area adjacent to it. Liz was only there for half an hour or so, but she was even more enchanting in the evening than she had been in the afternoon. They stood together outside in the night air, talking about law school, which she had quit, and
cats, or kittens, which she was giving away. As she spoke, she absently buttoned and unbuttoned the cuff of her sleeve. After talking for a while Quinn managed to make a date to take her to dinner the following Tuesday, which as it turned out was her birthday. When she had gone he lingered, watching people drink and dance, remembering why he didn’t like parties, sometimes entering into brief conversations with friendly drunks.

One was a man named Allen Powell, a chunky, hard-faced guy who drew from people an urgent and automatic deference and who seemed to own a number of businesses—an apartment complex, at least two restaurants, a delivery service, and others, some less savory, apparently. Powell had a dull, distracted, almost pensive expression as he stood outside with Quinn, staring out at the dark lake, watching lights ripple on the water.

“So, what do you do?” he asked, and when Quinn said that he was out of work, Powell offered him a job in a car repair shop—completely indifferent to his meager experience—and instructed him to talk to a man named Rollo, or failing that, a drunk named Lancaster. Quinn laughed, thanked him, and left. As he was walking off, he thought he heard someone say, “Well, fuck you,” and as he turned back to look, his shoe slipped on a stone step and he twisted his knee. Powell had disappeared.

Quinn had just rented a small apartment, but hadn’t yet quit the motel, and the twenty-one hundred dollars cash money he had brought with him from Atlanta was almost gone. The initial exhilaration of ditching his whole life had shortly worn thin, and his few attempts to find work had been as fruitless as they had been desultory, consisting mostly of studying the want ads and remembering that he didn’t know how
to do anything but tax law, and that even if he wasn’t good at it, no one had ever seemed to notice. It bewildered him. He was a fraud, but no one cared.

He had resolved not to do law anymore because this feeling of fraudulence about work, which everyone seemed to feel but most people forgot or shrugged off, bothered him unduly. The fraud had extended past work, though, to his purchase on everything in his life, including the wife from whom he was separated, and whose diagnosis was that he had unrealistic expectations. She had once suggested what she called “What Did You Expect Therapy.”

Three weeks in Austin, where he had gone to school, had reminded Quinn how much he had depended on his job, fraud or no. The city had not changed much, but it wasn’t his anymore.

During the day, driving his old car, he felt the shiny new Acuras and Saabs and minivans pushing him off their clean streets and freeways. He would signal and then switch lanes, thinking, They belong here. Sometimes at night he stood at the front window of the motel room, holding the curtain aside, watching headlights of the cars on the streets, envying the drivers their jobs, houses, children, garden hoses, and the newspaper which appeared on their driveways each morning.

So even though Powell was clearly some kind of drug baron or celebrity felon, a few days after the party Quinn decided to become a mechanic. He had fixed some cars, once. Even got paid a couple of times. Anyway, he was running out of money.

But he felt things were looking up. The utilities were on now in his tiny new apartment and he had got the telephone turned on. And the woman from the library held out the hope that women always did, that everything might be different.

It was Tuesday, not much past noon, when he limped up
to the motel office to settle the bill, thinking, Move out, move in, get a job, go to dinner, fall in love, Wednesday.

The day clerk, a Spanish man, balding, very tall, was sitting on a stool, watching a Mexican television show and reading a newspaper. He rose as Quinn walked into the lobby, and standing, he looked like NBA material.

“Through tomorrow noon,” Quinn said. “What does it come to?”

The clerk pulled out the bill, unfolded it on the counter, bent over and wrote furiously with a gold pen. He twirled the bill around.

Quinn looked at the six hundred dollars left in his wallet, took out a credit card. He assumed that by now his wife had already cancelled all the cards—I would, he thought—but it was worth a shot. “Try this.”

The man nodded. “You got a weekly rate,” he said, and laughed.

Quinn looked at him.

He smiled. “We don’t use it very often. But we got it so you got it.” He flashed the credit card through the slot, and then ran off the slip and handed the card back. After a moment, he shook his head in a showy sort of way, and said, “I am sorry, but could I try this card again? The machine, it’s—”

“That’s all right,” Quinn said. “I’ll pay cash.”

The clerk tore the credit card slip in half and handed it across the counter, took the five hundred dollar bills. “You stay here a long time. We hope you enjoy your stay,” he said, and wrote
Paid
at the base of the bill.

“I like motels,” Quinn said.

The guy turned back around, smiling. “You know, I do too. I take a room here, too. Sometimes I stay a week, two weeks.” He nodded, settled back on his stool. “This a great
job. Nobody believes me, you know, but this a great job.” He smiled and rubbed both hands over the hair left at the sides of his head. “I am sorry about the Visa card.”

Quinn laughed. “My mistake,” he said, and waved the card. “It’s …” He blinked and looked at it. “Broken,” he said, finally, and shrugged. On his way out, he bought a paper. The knee he had twisted on the steps at the party felt better, almost well, as he walked the narrow sidewalk in front of the rooms.

Back in his room, he remembered reading the want ads, or trying to, the jobs he couldn’t do or had never heard of, “Junior Liaison Engineer, nut test, P-test specializations,” other weird notices written in code. Nurses. References, he thought. Must have own tools. He shuddered. I used to have potential. But you probably can’t have “potential” at thirty-two.

This a great job
, he thought. Jesus, what must that be like? The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not work. No, not it. He slipped his car keys off the night table. Happily, he thought, there’s a path of least resistance available. I used to like fooling with cars, anyway.

The Car Clinic was out in a field under a too blue sky in a depressed part of town near the intersection of three highways. The road in front of it ran between alternating fields of tawny weeds and low industrial brick buildings inside hurricane fences. The full name was Lancaster Car Clinic and Fine Auto Detailing, Inc. It occupied three steel buildings each with a concrete apron spreading out in front, and between the concrete slabs were two alleys of red mud, dry and hard now, flecked with scrub grass. An old Checker taxicab was parked at the back of one of these mud alleys, along with two weathered
VW’s, and some seats, fenders, batteries, starters, and lumps covered with thin black plastic which looked big enough to be engines or transmissions. The farthest of the three tin buildings had the big doors shut. Four kids, three skinny boys and a very tall girl, were sitting around just inside the nearest steel shed, passing a joint and laughing. One blond boy with rock ’n’ roll hair was holding a big silver wrench in his hand.

“Help you?” he said, when Quinn walked up. He looked about eighteen.

“Help you?” the girl said, mimicking him. Striking blue eyes, made more striking by her hair—boy cut, dyed black. She was wearing black leggings with big holes in them, under a T-shirt, even though it was nearly 95 degrees.

“Shut up, Dix. Don’t mind her.”

The girl was staring. “I
love
your shoes,” she said. “Are they Bally? What size are they? They might fit me.”

“Bigfoot,” one of the others said.

“I’m looking for a guy named Rollo,” Quinn said, leaning down, rubbing his knee with the heel of his hand. “Allen sent me.”

“
Wooooo
,” the kids said, in unison.

“
Al-len
sent him,” the girl said. “What’d you, just get back from Huntsville?”

“Shut up, Dix,” the blond kid said again.

“He’s not very pretty,” she said. “Most of the guys from Huntsville are rhinopretty.” She grabbed at the remains of the joint, which the first kid held up out of her reach. “C’mon, gimme,” she said. She frowned. “You are acting like a child.”

“My name is Morton,” the blond kid said. “Mort.” He handed the girl the joint, pointed with his wrench. “Dix. And Dave, and Patricio. Rollo’s never here, really. Just as well. He couldn’t fix a car if his life depended on it.”

“
Woooo
,” the others said again.

“Like, quality control,” the one called Dave said.

“You couldn’t either, Mort,” Patricio said. He looked at Quinn. “Don’t think he knows how to use that wrench. Yesterday, he asked me what a head gasket was.”