Life Its Ownself (7 page)

Shake threw down a young Scotch, motioned for another, and said, "Barb, old buddy, I'll be honest with you. There's no girl I'd rather be with than you. Never was, never will be. But I've got this weakness in my character, as we know. I can't be faithful to one woman. Great as you are in the sack, I'll always be looking for another Flying Wallenda."

"Eighty-eight," said Barb, putting her hand on Shake's shoulder and calling him by his football number, "I look ahead twenty years from now, and you know what I see? I see a lonely man eating dinner by himself in a Piccadilly Cafeteria somewhere in north Florida."

Shake said, "Not if there's a friendly bartender left in the civilized world. Besides, I'll always have you and Billy C."

Shake loafed around Europe for three months. Researching life its ownself, he called it. He spent most of his time in London.

"They speak real good European in England," he reported in one of his letters.

We received a dozen letters and postcards from him. He dismissed the Riviera as France's revenge for the Battle of the Somme. Scotch was up to $10 a glass, and the beaches were so crowded that trying to find a patch of sand was like going to the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. Madrid had a layer of smog that would choke a werewolf. Rome was falling apart. Ruins everywhere. The sidewalk cafes of Paris were no longer bristling with novelists. They had been taken over by Japanese tourists and guerrilla-theatre groups. Switzerland was extremely tall. London was the only city. People faithfully curbed their dogs, shepherd's pie was tasty. Everybody kept their brass polished. And you could even meet the friendly barmaid who knew a supplier for monologue- inducing chemicals and the ever-popular paralysis weed.

One of his letters meant more to us than the others.

He wrote:

Hidy, gang-

By now, it has probably dawned on you goofy kids that you've always been in love, subconsciously anyhow. You belong together. Remember, Barb, you only started dating me instead of Billy Clyde in the first place because I won more medals in the j'unior high track meet.

You have strong physical attractions for each other's body parts. All of us know it. It's been very honorable of you not to ravish one another behind my back, but now it would be stupid. Two people who think so highly of Home Ec ought to get married. If you do, I promise to be there, even though they're yelling at me to finish the novel about Brett and Jake.

We have to keep Barbara Jane in the family, B.C. Overaged preppies are lurking around every corner, trying to grab her. I wasn't man enough to make the sacrifice, but you are. Running backs are tougher.

You will find going out together awkward at first, I imagine. That's because of our history. But there's a solution. Go to picture shows and hold hands for a start.

Then some evening when you get back to the apartment, I find that, by and large, it makes a difference in a relationship if one of you will tie the other to a bedpost and lick their whole body.

Jesus used a Smith-Corona,

Old 88

Shake had been right about the awkward part. I mean, there we were living in the same apartment and "dating."

It wasn't so much a case of dating. More accurately, we were just a couple of old friends keeping each other company as dinner companions and drinking buddies. Barb would go out with other guys, but it was usually a business dinner of some kind. She'd spring loose early and come and meet me.

One night we both got very drunk, likewise adventurous, and we did out best to make love. Barbara Jane kicked me out of her bed before we got too far along. It had something to do with my wisecracks about Mopsy Newsome and Mary Alice Ramsey.

Everything changed one evening. We were staying home to enjoy a pace night from the saloons. We were sprawled out on opposite ends of the sofa in the living room, watching the fire, drinking bottle-cap wine, listening to soft country music. Elroy Blunt was singing an old one.

I'll be feelin' better later,

Mr. Mood-Elevator.

Reach into my jeans

For more amphetamines.

Then I'll start to hum,

Me and Librium.

But soon I'll get my fill,

And I know one thing is true.

Ain't no druggist got a pill

To get me over you.

I didn't see Barb coming when she slid over next to me.

"I want to try an experiment," she said, putting her arms around my neck.

"I better call Nine-one-one," I said, being a wise guy. It was the police emergency number in New York, or as Burt Danby once said, a nickname for the Puerto Rican Day parade.

"Shut up," Barb said. "Don't laugh. Don't say anything about high school or college. Don't even grin. I mean it, Billy C. If you say one word right now, I'll tear your fucking throat out."

She then kissed me in a way I had often dreamed about.

I returned the kiss with what you might call a dedicated inventiveness. That kiss lasted a month. When our tongues came back from dry cleaning, we went to Fort Worth and got married.

The ceremony took place in a chapel of the University Christian Church, which was across the street from the TCU campus. It wasn't a formal wedding. We only rounded up some people who looked as if they had nothing better to do before going to lunch at Herb's Cafe.

Shake Tiller returned from Europe to be my best man and Barbara Jane's maid of honor. Big Ed was there to make sure the minister got tipped properly. Big Barb rearranged her shopping schedule to be present. Uncle Kenneth didn't have a baseball parlay working until that night. He was free to attend.

That was the guest list. Dr. Elwood Lindley blessed everybody at TCU and in most parts of Forth Worth. He blessed Big Ed's oil bidness, said young people were the hope of the world, acknowledged the talented tap-dance team of Jesus and Mary, forgave the Catholics and Jews, and pronounced us man and wife.

Then we went to Herb's Cafe.

Herb's had been our hangout on the South Side since before we were old enough to drink beer, but did. It was an old, lopsided, add-onto place with a bar on one side and a dining room on the other. If you could stand the smell of grease and cheap perfume, Herb's chicken-fried steak was probably the best in town.

At Herb's, we celebrated with extra cream gravy on our chicken-fried steaks and biscuits. We gathered around a table in the bar and listened to the jukebox and the chimes of the pinball machine. Big Barb reiterated her disappointment that Barbara Jane hadn't wanted a proper Fort Worth debutante wedding. Nonny Fulton's wedding dress had been fabulous, Big Barb said. Woody Herman's orchestra had played.

"Nonny Fulton's a pink balloon" Barb said to her mother. "She married an ice sculpture."

Big Ed expressed relief that his daughter had married one of us, me or Shake. "I was beginning to think you people had one of those menage-la-twats going on," he said.

I've always found it impossible to explain good friends, old friends, to others. Most people don't have close friends, probably because they drive everyone away with their grinding small talk about small problems. Whatever it was that held Barb and I and Shake together might have seemed strange to Big Ed, but it was as natural to us as it must have been special.

We never thought there was anything odd about the fact that we loved, respected, understood, forgave, trusted, and looked out for each other. That was what good friends did— and did better than most families.

What happened over the next four years was that Barbara Jane and I made love like alligators eating marshmallows and still never missed a cocktail party or night out in New York to pay our respects to all of our cozy barstools.

Barb combined the roles of homemaker and famous model with an ease that everyone, myself included, found bewildering. How could that lovely cover girl have been such a good little cook and scrubwoman, too? I felt luckier than Cary Grant.

I continued to be regarded as an all-pro runner despite the nosedive of the New York Giants and the fact that I had to learn how to change light bulbs and carry out trash bags.

We invited Shake to keep living in the Park Avenue apartment after we were married. He said he would hold on to his co-op shares as an investment, but he really thought he should have his own place. Domestic serenity made him seasick. And he said he needed privacy for his clacker.

Clacker was what he called his typewriter.

He said, "Writers have to dwell a lot. They need privacy for their clackers when they work on their dwells."

The Two Crazy Kids in Love were now Barb and me, not Barb and Shake. We kissed in public places, shared secret glances. We might as well have thrown snowballs, rode bicycles, and gone to street fairs.

We were the boy and girl in those movies that always have a sequence in which the lovers romp in a park or stroll past a river while leaves turn and dialogue is suspended long enough for a Marvin Hamlisch song to fall out of the sky.

If Barb and I would begin to act a little too cuddly, Shake would say, "Begin Central Park montage."

Shake by then had become the guy who occasionally found himself in the company of your killer-stud disco maven.

Barbara Jane reviewed Shake's girls just as she had once reviewed mine, but her reviews had no effect on Old 88.

"Some people call it spirituality; I call it a swallow," he said.

Barb often had difficulty finding something to discuss with Shake's fiancees.

There was this night when Shake was with another Shelly something-or-other, the usual twenty, the usual creamer, the usual six months removed from Hermosa Beach. The four of us were sitting in a booth at Runyon's.

We discussed a number of topics and Shelly listened patiently. She interrupted only once to ask if Nigeria was where Zulus came from.

Barbara Jane made an attempt to lure Shelly into a conversation. Leaning into the table, sipping a fresh young Scotch, she peered into Shelly's vapid eyes and said:

"Surf, ski, scuba, or skydive?"

Shelly's "huh?" was punctuated by a frown.

"What are you interested in, Shelly?"

Shelly wrestled with the question carefully; then with a bolstered smile, she said:

"I like shopping!"

That was when Barbara Jane spewed her drink on the table, and raced madly into the powder room. Barb's howling laughter could be heard at our table.

Those four years of marriage were the happiest of my life, football excluded. I rigidly believed that if you couldn't be the King of Morocco, the next-best thing was to be married to Barbara Jane Bookman.

Then came television.

Now it was that night in early September and I was lying in a hospital bed in New York with a knee that looked like condemned property, and the woman I loved was speaking to me from Los Angeles in a somewhat cheerier voice than I had wished.

After her opening line about Quasimodo, Barbara Jane said, "I didn't get to watch the game. We rehearsed all day. I looked in the control room to see if they had it on, but they were watching the Dodgers."

Barbara Jane was calling from her suite at the Westwood Marquis, a hotel to which Hollywood celebs were fleeing now that the Beverly Hills Hotel had been overrun by Midwest paving contractors and Long Island dentists.

"You missed one of the great two-yard runs," I said.

"How long will you be out?"

"It's the medial collateral."

"Not the medial collateral we know and love?"

She had heard me talk about football knees, about the medial collateral. She had seemed to understand that a football player would rather surrender a lung or an eye than a knee ligament. I wasn't one of those athletes who thought his body was a temple, but I'd keep myself in good condition the year round to avoid injuries.

"I'm out for the season, Barb."

There was a pause. Then she said:

"Aw, babe, I'm sorry. I know it must kill you, but, hey, all is not lost! You're a cinch to wind up on TV!"

"That makes three."

"Three what?"

"You're the third person tonight who's said I'm going to be on television."

"You'll be terrific. Just talk natural. Be you. Say all the things you say in bars, only leave out the fucks and shits."

"I'd rather play football."

"Babe, I know how much you love the game, but think about it. We're getting more mature, aren't we? This is a blessing! Now you have to find another career. You should go with CBS, even if the money's less than NBC's offer. CBS has higher ratings. ABC might be interested, but I doubt it. They've already got more announcers than events."

"Is this what mature people talk about? Television?"

Another pause.

"Do you hurt much?" she asked.