Love Me Back (9 page)

I opened my eyes. Did you come? he said. No, I said. Do you think these are too big? he asked. He held up a string of four plastic beads the size of large grapes. What are they? I asked. You’ve never tried anal beads before? he said. No, I said. What about just anal? he asked. Once or twice, I said.

It was really only once. When my husband and I went into the bayou between New Orleans and Baton Rouge for a week of intensive marriage counseling after I started burning myself. My parents paid for it and kept the baby. It didn’t work but we did have anal sex and the woman counselor gave me a recipe for oatmeal blueberry pancakes that I still make. When we went home no one wanted me to be alone
with the baby anymore and my husband wanted to go to college. She was weaned by then so my mother started watching her at night while he was in class. We filed for divorce and he gave me half his first student loan check so I could move to Dallas, where I rented an apartment that had a $1 move-in special. I didn’t have a job and I didn’t know anyone.

You’ll like these better, said Zeke. Turn over. I remember his fingernails had those white marks on them that your grandmother says means how many lies you’ve told.

The third day in Mexico we follow our guide single file through a forest and up the side of a mountain. At the top is a trout farm, which means a beautiful clear shallow stream flowing in narrow rows lined with round stones. There is a thatched shelter with long wooden tables where we sit and rest. We are three hours up and we can see all of the DF shimmering below. We are high enough that it looks almost like it did from the plane.

Our guide skims trout from the stream with a net and carries them over to an old woman, who cooks them whole over an open flame while she makes tortillas. The fire is in the ground under a grate. The fish smoke on the grate and the tortillas cook in an iron skillet. She squats, turning the fish and shaping the tortillas and looking at nothing. At intervals she scoops fat out of a plastic Big Gulp cup and flicks it off her fingers onto the skillet. When the fish are cooked she places each one on a tin plate and motions for us to come get them, one by one. We say Gracias, and she says Dios te bendiga to each one of us, looking into our eyes. When it is my turn I see that she has not been looking at nothing but I see that she knows I thought that she was.

We sit at the tables and eat. The fish still have their heads
and their tails. I have never tasted anything so good. There are no napkins so your dad takes his bandana out of his pocket and we share it to wipe the grease off our faces.

When everyone has eaten, they tell us to take our plates downstream from the fish and rinse them. I stand and take your dad’s plate and mine and step out from under the thatch, but as I move into the sun I look at the old woman and fall.

I don’t know that I fall. This is what your dad tells me later. The sun, the mountain, says the guide. It does that. One minute okay, then
—pff
, he says, making a motion with his hand like he’s letting go of an invisible dove. When I open my eyes the first thing I see is your dad’s face, and he looks so concerned I think If I could just stay here with him, looking at me like that.

You are strong. My father calls you Little Boot because when you fall you never cry. You can read when you are four and I ask you to help me memorize the parts of the cow. You have a lisp and I tell you to say brisket over and over just so I can hear it. But when you fall asleep I go into the bathroom and do lines off the map of the steer. I read about the difference between Kobe and Wagyu and I feel replete with the beauty of your small self. Just imagining it—the everything of you—my body tingles and quivers like the air inside a guitar. I am freezing. I get into bed with you. You like staying with me because you get to sleep with me. You are so warm but I can’t stop shivering. I feel a soaring bliss—I adore you—I feel a plummeting ugly resentment—I am a pile of shit falling endlessly down a dark shaft, I am the
hate that hurled the shit and the fear inside the hurled shit. If you slip out one stitch in your brain high and low are the same. I don’t realize I’ve said that aloud until you turn over to face me. Mama, you say, what’s wrong? I see in your face the deepest empathy and your mouth pulls down. I realize nothing else is happening in your life at this moment. You are here with your mother who is crying, so you cry too.

Intermezzo

Jimmy plays at The Restaurant three nights a week, from seven until eleven or until the last guest leaves, whichever comes first. When he sees the last guests cross the threshold of the door out of the dining room into the lobby he’ll stop in the middle of his chill Jobim or his John Williams show tune, right in the middle of an arpeggio, stand up, shut the lid, grab his bag, walk out. The effect is as abrupt as turning off a stereo except that sometimes the last note he played drifts there in the air, along with the smells of butter and salt.

The piano sits on a dais in the middle of the open kitchen, right in front of the dining room. It’s a black Yamaha concert grand, and too nice to be in The Restaurant’s kitchen. When Lissandri hired him eight years ago Jimmy didn’t mention that, afraid he would sell it when he learned its worth, since the rate Jimmy was offered to play there was less than he was used to. That was right after Valentino’s burned down, and he needed the work so much he didn’t bother to argue with a man he knew from
D Magazine
to be one of Dallas’s wealthiest. Valentino’s had been a great gig, five nights a week and just two blocks from his M Street bungalow. He walked there, he didn’t wear a tie, the bartender poured him
a glass of Chianti as soon as the rush was over. Best of all the owners liked to close early and often. That gave him plenty of downtime, and freed up New Year’s Eve for lucrative one-offs at mansions in Preston Hollow or hotel galas or even, once, he made a thousand dollars playing for Emmitt Smith and his wife while they sat on their couch and watched the ball drop.

Jimmy had to drive into Uptown to play at The Restaurant, and the valets were stingy with their spots so he parked his minivan on the street somewhere in the neighborhood. It was supposed to be a nice part of town, all the most expensive restaurants and condos, but his driver’s-side mirror had been broken off once before he started folding it in, and the managers wouldn’t let the girl employees leave at the end of the night without a man to walk them out. Jimmy had to wear a suit and tie but he left the top button of his shirt unbuttoned, and sometimes he wore the same suit and tie all week. He saw the servers being reprimanded for wrinkled sleeves or dirty aprons or ties tied sloppily and prepared an excuse for his unbuttoned button that had something to do with mobility and piano playing, but no one ever said anything to him. Often he had trouble finding a parking spot near the restaurant and this frustrated him until he settled into it as a believable excuse for being a few minutes late every time he played, and sat in the van for a short spell even when he found a space on the first try. No one seemed to notice that either, and when he did walk in he made sure it was with the same quick keen purpose every night. As if he couldn’t wait to get in there and play.

His second night in The Restaurant he’d closed the keyboard
lid at eleven and left his bag of charts on the dais while he stepped into the bar. He asked the bartender—who also lived in the M Streets and whom he knew as a patron of Valentino’s, and who had done him the favor of telling Lissandri he knew a piano man, he knew the best piano man in town—for a glass of whatever Italian they were pouring. He took a stool at the end of the bar and had sipped only two sips when he felt an arm around his shoulder and there was the man himself on his left, saying Buddy you’re here to play not drink all right?

All right, all right, so he played. He was a little late and he was quick to leave but he played. He played the requisite mix of big band and lounge and pop and he played Happy Birthday four or five times a night when the servers took out chocolate soufflés with candles in them. For kids he played The Rainbow Connection and songs from
Beauty and the Beast
and
The Little Mermaid
. He played the Elton John, the Billy Joel, the Norah Jones their parents asked for. Hey sure I know Your Song! Comin right up! Come Away With Me? Sure I know that! You got it ma’am! When the guests asked he played the Jim Brickman, which he resented even more than the Cielito Lindo he played for Hank Earl Jackson, a gigantic six-foot-seven alcoholic with a head the size of a steer’s who owned an eponymous bar in the Fort Worth stockyards. Hank Earl’s was more than a bar, it was an A-list venue for any country act that came to Texas, and while Hank Earl was famous for it that wasn’t how he made his money. He was an oil man, like Lissandri was an investment man, their nightlife ventures only toys, things they did with the money they’d already made. Jimmy had been playing
in restaurants long enough to know that actually making money from a restaurant was hard to do.

Hank Earl never requested Cielito Lindo until late in the evening, after he’d had at least two or three bottles of chardonnay poured over ice. Cielito Lindo was a cow-herding song, a ranchero song, a mariachi song, and often Jimmy would hear a tired Mexican cook behind him sing along,
Ay, ay, ay, ay
, while he cleaned the broiler. Over the years Hank Earl had requested the song almost every time he was in the place, which was at least three or four times a week since he lived across the street in the Hotel Fitzandrew. His driver picked him up in the porte cochere at the hotel, made a right out of the driveway and then an immediate left into The Restaurant’s porte cochere, repeating the trip in reverse at the end of the night. Hank Earl had vomited, pissed, and passed out in the back of the town car on the way back across the street so many times that the driver, Hector, told Jimmy he was grateful when only one of the three occurred, and would have chosen piss if he could, since the man was impossible to wake or move and at least some of the piss would stay on Hank Earl’s pants. If Jimmy had found a prime spot on the street in front of The Restaurant, near where Hector waited with the town car, Jimmy and Hector would chat sometimes when Jimmy stepped out for his break at nine, to smoke his pipe in the minivan. He would sit in the driver’s seat smoking his pipe with the window rolled down, listening to Mose Allison.