McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (19 page)

 
          
 
"Does he sell furniture?" I
ventured.

 
          
 
"I don’t think so," Coffee said,
surprised at the suggestion. "He hasn't sold any of mine. It's just that
he beats me a lot"

 
          
 
I was so stunned I couldn't respond. What sort
of man would beat Coffee?

 
          
 
Of course, being Italian, maybe he expected
her to cook, something she hadn't any idea how to do, her culinary skills being
pretty much encapsulated in her name. And even her coffee was far from world
class.

 
          
 
"What does he do besides beat you?"
I asked.

 
          
 
"He sells dope," Coffee said.

 
          
 
Some days bring many shocks. Not only was the
Smithsonian for sale, Coffee was being beaten regularly by an Italian dope
dealer. It seemed unfair. Coffee was just a girl from
Baytown
whose only mistake had been going away to
school, where she had gotten kind of lost.

 
          
 
But she had stopped sounding wan and sounded
merely conversational. I think she was looking forward to describing her
beating in some detail, but that was nothing I wanted to hear. The traffic was
beginning to break up and I had to decide whether to jettison all my
fast-gathering
Washington
possibilities and go save her. I could be in
Austin
in about nineteen hours, time enough,
probably, to keep Coffee from being beaten too many more times.

 
          
 
"I'm confused," I said. "Do you
want the guy for a boyfriend, or what?"

 
          
 
"I guess so," she said. "Robert
got married."

 
          
 
Robert had been the most recent lawyer.

 
          
 
Though not exactly a ringing endorsement for
Emilio, it was enough to discourage me from a nineteen-hour drive.

 
          
 
In the shock of hearing about the beatings, I
had forgotten several things, one of them being Coffee's profound passivity. If
Emilio was possessed of even a normal amount of Italian volatility he would
soon go off and find someone more responsive to beat.

 
          
 
"I wish you'd figured it out,"
Coffee said, remembering her original complaint. She sounded genuinely
melancholy when she said it, so much so that it touched me.

 
          
 
"Aw, Coffee," I said. "Don't
you remember? You used to hate it when I figured out things about you."

 
          
 
"Yeah, but people can change," she
said. "Now I like it."

 
          
 
"Why?"

 
          
 
"Because it means something could still
happen," she said simply.

 
          
 
It took the heart right out of me. Suddenly my
most girlish girl had the voice of a grown-up, sad and only faintly hopeful.

 
          
 
The hope that something could still happen is
the loneliest hope of all.

 
          
 
When I lived with her, Coffee had seldom been
awake enough to notice that not much had happened yet.

 
          
 
"So when are you coming?" she asked,
assuming that she had made her case.

 
          
 
"Maybe in about two weeks," I said
weakly.

 
          
 
It was enough. Coffee brightened immediately
and began to tell me about a dope ranch in the hill country where all the dope
dealers went when they weren't beating their girl friends. In the course of the
story it came out that Emilio only weighed 102 pounds.

 
          
 
"Yeah, and do you know what, he carries a
purse," she added. From what I could gather, that exotic fact seemed to be
his chief attraction.

 
          
 
When Coffee hung up I was almost to
Georgetown
. At the end of the conversation she was
perfectly cheerful, having transferred her emptiness to me. I sang with it. It
seemed to me I was beginning to pay for having failed to keep a clear
distinction between objects and people. After all, I could start a relationship
with a new object every day. Try that with people or—to be narrow—with women,
and a lot of trouble would ensue.

 
          
 
It was rainy and gusty—wet fall leaves blew
off the trees that hung over the road. Some of the leaves plastered themselves
to my windshield—others sailed off toward the misty
Potomac
. In
Georgetown
the streetlights were already on.

 
          
 
For a moment I had the urge to pick up my car
phone, call

 
          
 
Cindy, and tell her some wild lie. I could tell
her I had just mutilated myself through careless handling of some sharp
antique, like a hangman's axe. It meant I had to rush straight to
Houston
, to the world's best plastic surgeon, or
else be disfigured for life.

 
          
 
I am not ungifted at the wild lie. A number of
remarkable ones have popped out of me, when events or women make me really
nervous. It may be because I seldom meet meek women. Or if I meet them I don't
really notice them. I once thought Coffee was meek, but it turned out she was
merely sleepy.

 
          
 
It might just have been that Coffee had so
much
Texas
in her voice that it made me homesick.
Innocent
Texas
voices are hard to resist. For the space of
a mile or two I felt an urge to go back to her, watch her buy some more lamps
and chairs. But then she had to hang up to take a business call, and the spell
was broken. Instead of turning toward
Austin
, I sort of put myself on automatic pilot,
and the Cadillac nosed on into
Georgetown
, to a parking lot one block from Cindy's
stores.

 
          
 
The first thing I noticed when I walked up was
that Harris seemed to be losing ground. Instead of being stuck astraddle of the
threshold he was standing on the sidewalk near a parking meter, wearing a black
raincoat and holding a rolled-up black umbrella. He was looking up at the sky,
which was drizzling slightly into his face.

 
          
 
He wasn't really leaning on the parking meter,
but he seemed to draw a certain comfort from the fact that one was near. He had
a look of anguish on his
face,
only instead of directing
it at the doorway he was directing it at the drizzling sky.

 
          
 
I felt I knew him, even though we hadn't been
introduced.

 
          
 
"Hello, Harris," I said.

 
          
 
Being spoken to
startled
him a good deal. He gripped his umbrella a little tighter. His fingers were
long enough to curl around it several times, like the toes of a sloth. He
didn't answer me.

 
          
 
Meanwhile, Cindy's window had been transformed
into a display case for my cowboyana. A bull's skull I had bought in
Fort
Stockton
was the centerpiece, around which were
piled horsehide lariats, Mexican spurs, a couple of Army Colts, and some
horseshoeing tools. It was a nice display and almost everyone who walked in
front of the shop stopped and looked at it. There were even two or three
marshal's badges that may or may not have been worn by the Earp boys when they
were working the
Arizona
territory.

 
          
 
Cindy was in her dress shop, opening packages
of dresses. I felt like I had lived a life and a half in the hours since I had
seen her last, but Cindy looked like she had only lived about five minutes. She
was fresh, vigorous, and annoyed.

 
          
 
"Don't you ever listen?" she asked.

 
          
 
"I listen constantly," I replied,
truthfully. "I'm sorry I'm late."

 
          
 
"I thought you kept your
appointments," she said.

 
          
 
"I'm keeping my appointment," I
said. "I'm not in
Ohio
or
Mexico
. I'm just a little late."

 
          
 
"When I say
five thirty
I mean
five thirty
," she said. "If you'd been on
time we could be at a cocktail party at Oblivia's right now."

 
          
 
"I'm less than an hour late," I pointed
out.

 
          
 
Cindy stopped talking. She turned her
attention to a beautiful sleeveless black dress she had just taken out of a
box. She opened two more boxes without looking at me or saying a word to me at
all.

 
          
 
I began to wonder why I was still there. I
think it may have been because I liked the alert way she read the Sunday
papers, sitting naked and cross-legged on her bed. I also liked the way she
smelled, night or morning, and I particularly liked the way she said words like
"yeah" and "naw." She spoke in the tones of a real girl,
however much she may have enjoyed social climbing.

 
          
 
"I bought a quadripartite icon today,” I
said, in an effort to change the subject.

 
          
 
"Big deal,” Cindy said. Her irritation
had not exactly subsided.

 
          
 
"It is a big deal,” I said. "How
many have you ever bought?”

 
          
 
Testy women seldom mind a little backtalk. In
fact, they usually require it. Cindy looked at me as if I were a rock that had
suddenly grown vocal cords and made a sassy remark. She apparently saw no point
in answering a rock.

 
          
 
"How come you own an antique store if
you're so fuckin’ uninterested in antiques?" I asked, warming to my point.

 
          
 
"
Listen,
watch
your language,” she said hotly. A talking rock was one thing, a profane rock
something she evidently didn’t intend to tolerate.

 
          
 
"I have employees, "she added,
though none were in sight. I had noticed several thin-faced girls with
fashionably frizzled hair in the various shops, but so far Cindy had not
bothered to introduce me to any of them. They seemed to be silent minions. They
all wore black sweaters and looked intelligent.

 
          
 
"It’s a valid question,” I insisted.
"You own an antique store but you don't know a thing about antiques and
what's more you don’t really want to.
How come?"

 
          
 
"Because I'm normal, that's why,"
Cindy said, in a voice full of very normal-sounding irritation.

 
          
 
"I'm normal, too,” I said. "I just also
know a lot about antiques.”

 
          
 
Even as I was saying it I wished I wasn’t
saying it. Cindy put me away with a sharp volley, as if I were a tennis ball
that had floated weakly up to the net where she was waiting.

 
          
 
"You were never normal a day in your
life," she said, with such cool conviction that anyone listening would
have been compelled to agree, though she had only known me for two days of my
life.

 
          
 
"All you antiques people are kooks,” she
added. "I just bought this store in order to get the dress shop.”

 
          
 
I began to feel depressed. Some hopeful part
of me still wanted her to be an antiques person. In fact her attitude toward
antiques was not much different from Coffee's.

 
          
 
"If I’m such a kook,
what about us?"
I asked.

 
          
 
Cindy walked past me to hang up some dresses.
In passing she gave me a good swift jab with her elbow, as final punishment.

 
          
 
"I've fooled around with a lot of kooks,"
she said. "The good thing about you is that you're tall."

 
          
 
It didn't surprise me. I knew my height was an
advantage —one of the most basic advantages, probably.

 
          
 
A second later, Cindy echoed my thought.

 
          
 
"It's basic," she said. "This
town is full of shrimps."