In Between Days (7 page)

“Who knows?”

“You say she does this a lot?”

“What?”

“Steps out.”

“Yeah,” he says. “All the time.” He looks at her. “Something about a low stress threshold or something. I don’t know. I don’t really understand. Too much intensity or something and she tends to bolt.”

Chloe nods.

“She’s got a couple screws loose, you know, but she’s a good woman. As long as you don’t talk about anything too upsetting or negative, she’s fine.”

“Oh.” Chloe nods, looking down.

“Why? You were talking about something upsetting?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I might have been.”

“There you go,” Dupree says, smiling. “But you know what? The old man’s worse. Her husband? That dude’s crazy. You complain about one little thing and he walks out of the room, or else he just zones you out, you know, starts humming to himself or looking through a magazine or something. It’s wack.” He smiles at her.

“So if they’re so crazy,” she says, looking at Dupree, “I mean, if they’re nuts, why do you work here then?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Just kind of fell into it, I guess.” He looks at her. “They’re actually not that bad most of the time. And besides, the pay’s good. Really good.” He smiles at her. “I thought at first they might
have been dealers, or maybe growers—a lot of these people are—and so I thought I might be able to do a little business on the side, but it turns out they don’t even touch the stuff. Say they don’t believe in it.” He laughs to himself then and shakes his head.

“So what does that make you then, a dealer?”

“Me? No. I’m no dealer, but I can get you just about anything you want, you know, if you’re interested. Weapons, fireworks, you name it. You want front-row seats to Radiohead, I’m your man. You like weed? I got a guy on the inside. A guy who drives the stuff straight up from Mexico. Has a special little deal down there with the authorities. Border patrol. Has it all worked out.”

She looks at him.

“Seriously. Anything you want, just let me know.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“What’s your name anyway?”

“Chloe.”

“Chloe,” he says, reaching out his hand. “Dupree.”

She takes his hand briefly, then drops it.

“So how do you know her anyway?”

She shrugs. “We used to be best friends,” she says. “A long time ago. Back in high school.”

“Oh.” Dupree nods.

“She was really different then, you know, really cool.”

“Yeah,” he says. “So what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe says. “I have no idea. I guess she just lost her shit, you know. This is the first time I’ve actually talked to her in, what, like five years.”

“Man,” Dupree says. “That’s really sad.”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding, realizing the truth of this.

A moment later, Dupree reaches into his wallet and pulls out a card, then slides it across the counter toward her. “In case you change your mind,” he says.

Chloe stares at the card. There’s no name on it, just a beeper number. She picks it up, smiles, then puts it into her purse.

“Well, I should probably get going,” she says. “You know, in case she wants to come back.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Dupree says. “She usually calls first.”

“She does?”

“Yeah. Whenever she disappears like that, she’ll call me like an hour later and be like
Have they left yet?
”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.” He laughs. “Pretty nuts, huh?”

Chloe nods, considers this, feels a sadness in her gut.

“Well, I should be leaving anyway,” she says. “It was nice to meet you, Dupree.”

“Likewise,” he says. “And just remember, anything you need, I’m your man.”

“I’ll remember that.” She smiles and then walks out the door.

Outside, the city of Houston is bright, humid. She walks to her car, her mother’s minivan, which she’s been sharing with her brother, Richard, since she’s returned. Inside, she turns on the air-conditioning and then wonders where to go next. If she had any money, she’d go to the mall. If she knew how to reach Raja, she’d call him. But she doesn’t have any money and she doesn’t know how to reach Raja, so she just sits there, staring out at the street. In the distance, she can see the overpass of I-10 looming along the horizon. She thinks about how nice it would be to just get on the highway and drive, maybe down to Galveston, down to the beach. She remembers going there as a child with her family, how pleasant it had been. Richard and her father trolling for redfish out in the ocean, she and her mother lying on the beach, playing cards. She wonders if they’ll ever do anything like that again, just the four of them, as a family.

After a moment, she starts up the car and pulls out on the street, and just as she’s passing by the small row of coffee shops and boutiques on the corner of the road, she notices a young woman sitting in one of the coffee-shop windows, staring out. She slows down the car, looks at the woman, and it takes her a moment, almost a full minute, before she recognizes the blouse, and realizes it’s Simone.

“
I DON’T REALLY
see it that way,” Richard is saying. “I mean, I don’t really see the point.”

He is sitting at a small outdoor café with Dr. Michelson and Dr. Michelson’s friend Elan. They have ordered, eaten, and now they are talking about Richard, about his future and his promise. Richard himself is still feeling a little hungover from the night before, the party at Beto’s, his third of the week. All around them, people are laughing and drinking, clinking glasses. In the distance, he can see the sun setting just beyond the palm trees at the far end of the street.

“Maybe you could elaborate, Richard,” Dr. Michelson says.

Richard pauses, looks at the men. “I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really see the point of going to grad school to learn how to write. I mean, William Carlos Williams never went to grad school, right? Plenty of poets didn’t.”

He is making an argument he doesn’t really believe, and perhaps Dr. Michelson senses this because he stops him after a moment and smiles.

“It’s okay to be nervous, Richard. Anytime you put your work up for evaluation, you run the risk of being rejected, and that’s a difficult thing to stomach for any of us. Believe me, I know.”

Richard doesn’t say anything to this. He tries to imagine the last time Dr. Michelson got rejected from anything.

“I was rejected forty-seven times before I ever published a poem,” Elan adds.

Elan says this smugly, as if his own remarkable success should be evidence enough to Richard that these things are possible. But still, Richard wonders, what type of success has Elan really had?

Earlier that night he had sat in a small parlor on the Rice campus and listened to Elan as he read his poetry to a small group of Rice students. Afterward, Elan had signed copies of his book and answered questions from the group. The room had been set up for a much larger occasion, complete with a fully catered hors d’oeuvres table, and the whole time Michelson had just stood there, shaking his head, wondering what had happened.
I sent out an e-mail
, he said.
Put up some flyers. Maybe people got lost trying to find this place. Or maybe they got the dates wrong
. Strangely, Elan himself hadn’t seemed nearly as distressed as Michelson by the poor turnout. In fact, he said he’d half expected it. And besides, he said, it wasn’t about the quantity of the audience members, but the quality, and he had been very impressed by the overall quality of the Rice students. Richard had wondered, even then, if this was just lip service, a lame excuse for what had happened. He’d driven all the way down from El Paso, after all, just for the reading, and how many books had he sold? Three?

Afterward, they had driven to the café, and all through dinner Michelson and Elan had gossiped about people they knew, various poets and editors, various luminaries and high officials of the literary world, going on and on about who had slept with who, who had won what, who was publishing where. After a while, Elan had started talking about his own book and how difficult it had been to publish, and how the literary establishment wasn’t accustomed to truly innovative work these days. He spoke as if he truly believed that the depth of his genius wouldn’t be discovered until after his death.

Richard had only half listened to his story, thinking instead about Beto’s and how much he’d rather be there instead of here. For the past several days he had been practically living at Beto’s. He and about eight or nine other guys who seemed to camp out there in the evenings after work. Discovering Beto’s house had been like discovering a lost oasis in the middle of a drought, a place that he had often dreamed about but never believed existed. A place where young people, just like him, could stay indefinitely. A place where no one asked you who you were or what you wanted to do. A place where there was endless booze and food and drugs. A place where you could lose yourself for hours on end, for days, for weeks, maybe even for years.

This is where he wishes he were right now, but instead he is sitting
here with Michelson and Elan, talking about himself, which is the last thing he wants to be talking about.

“What I’m saying, Richard, is that the public side of being a poet, putting your work out there for people to read and evaluate, is just as important as the private side.”

Richard nods.

“Look at Elan,” Michelson continues. “I’m sure he wasn’t too thrilled by the turnout tonight, but he didn’t let it bother him, did he? No, he stood up there and he read his poems and he sold a few books.”

Elan looks at Michelson, pulls out a cigarette from his pack. “I didn’t think it was
that
bad,” he says.

“Well, come on, Elan. It wasn’t great,” Michelson says and laughs.

Elan looks away and lights his cigarette.

“I know what you’re saying,” Richard says finally. “It’s just that I’m not sure that I even want to get anywhere. I mean, I don’t walk around like you guys, thinking I’m a poet. I just like writing poems, you know. And I like going to those workshops you have. That’s all I really want to be doing right now.”

The truth is, Richard isn’t really sure what he wants to be doing right now. A part of him wants very badly to believe that what Michelson is telling him is true, that he has the ability to be a great poet, that he has the ability to go off to some distant city and study poetry writing among other great poets, but another part of him realizes that on the flip side of that is another very real possibility, the very real possibility of failing miserably and having to come back to Houston with nothing, with a worthless degree and a few thousand dollars of debt. He imagines having to explain this to his father, his friends. He imagines having to start over again at twenty-six or twenty-seven, having to reevaluate his life, having to reassess his situation.

A moment later, the waiter appears at their table with the bill, and Richard sees his opportunity to leave. As Michelson fumbles with his wallet, he stands up slowly and pushes his chair under the table. “I think I should actually be heading out,” he says finally.

“You’re kidding,” Michelson says.

“Unfortunately not.”

“But it’s still early,” he protests. “We have the whole night ahead of us.”

“I have to meet my father,” Richard says, which isn’t really true. His father had called him earlier that day to set up a contretemps, a little meeting to discuss his sister, but he’d declined. “It was great to meet you, sir,” he says to Elan, who smiles vaguely, still sulking.

“I’m going to be calling you next week,” Michelson says. “You’re not going to be getting out of this that easily.”

“Okay.” Richard smiles. Then he thanks them again and starts across the patio.

On the way home that night, he thinks about how different his life had been only a year before, how different everything had been. Only a few months shy of his graduation, he had had his whole future ahead of him. A degree from a prestigious school, a boyfriend who loved him, a family that was still functioning, a sister who was happily in college. And now, twelve months later, what did he have? What had happened? Marcus had gone off to Korea to study cooking, claiming it was only temporary but then breaking up with him a few weeks later; Chloe had gotten herself expelled from college; his parents had divorced; and his degree, as it turned out, wasn’t as valuable as he’d thought. Working for six dollars an hour at Café Brasil wasn’t exactly his idea of a promising life.

So now, armed with a worthless degree in English and no marketable skills to speak of, he wonders what he will do, what possibilities lie before him. According to his father he should be applying to graduate school in something practical, like business or marketing; according to his mother, he should be using his degree to teach English, to embrace what she calls “the noblest profession”; and according to Michelson, he should be pursuing a degree in creative writing, going off to graduate school and beginning what he refers to as his “career as a poet.” And it is this last prospect, the uncertainty of it, but also the strange temptation of it, that most unsettles him.

Back when he first started writing poetry, his junior year in college, he had thought of it only as an idle hobby, a casual pastime, a temporary distraction from his other courses. But somewhere along the way, something changed. He’d become drawn into it, seduced by the idea of writing poems that other people might want to read, entranced by the daily pleasure of putting words together with other words. It had become the part of his day he most looked forward to, the escape he most cherished. Still, what he couldn’t explain to Michelson or to Brandon or even to his
sister was that the thought of leaving Houston to actually pursue a career in it was utterly terrifying to him. Not because he feared rejection, not because he didn’t think he could handle the graduate-level coursework of an MFA program, but because he knew that once he left, once he defined himself as a poet, once he made that commitment, he’d never again be able to pretend he didn’t care. He’d have to acknowledge that on some level this was who he was.
He’d have to acknowledge to the world, and to himself, that he had something to say, and that he had something to say that he wanted other people to hear. For so long now, not caring had been his mantra. It had been the thing that defined him, the thing that had allowed him to work at Café Brasil for minimum wage, to date boys he knew he’d never love, to waste away his evenings at places like Beto’s house. In so many ways, it would be so much easier to just continue the life he’d been living, to lose himself each night in a haze of alcohol and drugs, to spend his evenings passed out on other people’s lawns, to continue writing poetry only as a casual hobby, an idle distraction, to tell people he was Richard Harding, a recent Rice graduate with no job prospects and no cares. He couldn’t live this way forever, of course, but he could live this way for a while, at least for the next few years, and in the meantime, he could enjoy the comfort of not caring, the anesthetizing freedom that came along with a life defined by excess.