The Jealous Kind (2 page)

“Come on, Val. We're a team,”
he said, wiping his face with a paper napkin. “You want another Coke?”

“It's over, Grady. You can't help what you are. You're selfish and dishonest and disrespectful and cruel. In my stupidity, I thought I could change you.”

“We'll work this out. I promise.”

She wiped her eyes and didn't answer. Her face was calm now, even though her breath was still catching, as though she had hiccups.

“Don't do this to me, Val,” he said. “I love you. Get real. Are you going to let a dork like this break us up?”

“Goodbye, Grady.”

“How you going to get home?” he said.

“
You
don't have to worry about it.”

“I'm not going to leave you on the street. Now get in. You're starting to make me mad.”

“What a tragedy for the planet that would be,” she said. “You know what my father said of you? ‘Grady's not a bad kid. He's simply incapable of being a good one.' ”

“Come back. Please.”

“I hope you have a great life,” she said. “Even though the memory of kissing you makes me want to rinse my mouth with peroxide.”

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I watched Valerie walk through the cars to the boulevard, her beach bag swinging from her shoulder and bouncing on her butt. Grady was standing next to me, breathing hard, his gaze locked on Valerie, just as mine was, except there was an irrevocable sense of loss in his eyes that made me think of a groundswell, the kind you see rising from the depths when a storm is about to surge inland.

“Sorry this happened to y'all,” I said.

“We're in public, so I can't do what I'm thinking. But you'd better
find a rat hole and crawl in it,” he said.

“Blaming others won't help your situation,” I said.

He wiped a streak of ketchup off his cheek. “I was hoping you'd say something like that.”

M
Y FATHER AND
I went to noon Mass the next day. Even though my mother had been reared Baptist, she did not go to a church of any kind. She had grown up desperately poor, abandoned by her father, and had married a much older man, a traveling salesman, when she was seventeen. She hid her divorce from others as though it had cheapened and made her unworthy of the social approval she always sought. Each Sunday she made a late breakfast for us, and my father and I drove to church in his company car. We seldom spoke on the way.

I never understood why my mother and father married. They didn't kiss or even touch hands, at least not while I was around. There was a loneliness in their eyes that convinced me prisons came in all sizes and shapes.

During Mass, I could smell the faint scent of last night's beer and cigarettes on my father's clothes. Before the priest gave the final blessing, my father whispered that his stomach was upset and he would meet me across the street at Costen's drugstore. When I got there, he was drinking coffee at the counter and talking about LSU football with the owner. “Ready for a lime Coke?” he said.

“No, thank you, sir. Can I use the car this afternoon?” I said.

“
May
I.”

“May I use the car?”

“I was planning to go to the bowling alley,” he said. “There's a league today.”

I nodded. My father didn't bowl and had no interest in it. The bowling alley was air-conditioned and had a bar.

“Come with me,” he said. “Maybe you can bowl a line or two.”

“I have some things to take care of.”

My father was a handsome man, and genteel in his Victorian way. He never sat at the dining or the breakfast table without putting on his coat, even if he was by himself. He'd lost his best friend in the trenches on November 11, 1918, and despised war and the national adoration of the military and the bellicose rhetoric of politicians who sent others to suffer and die in their stead. But he drank, and somehow those words subsumed and effaced all his virtues. “You dating a new girl?”

“I don't have an old one.”

“So you're changing that?” he said.

“I'd like to.”

“Who is she?”

“I don't know her real good.”

“Real
well.
”

“Yes, sir.”

I took the city bus up to North Houston. The previous winter a friend of mine had pointed out a one-story oak-shaded Victorian house with a wide porch on a residential boulevard, and said it was the home of Valerie Epstein. I couldn't remember the name of the boulevard, but I knew approximately where it was. When I pulled the cord for the bus driver to stop, I felt my stomach constrict, a tiny flame curling up through my entrails.

I stood in the bus's fumes as it pulled away, and stared at the palms on the esplanade and the row of houses once owned by the city's wealthiest people, before the big money moved out to River Oaks. I was deep in the heart of enemy territory, my crew cut and dress shoes and trousers and starched white shirt and tie the equivalent of blood floating in a shark tank.

I started walking. I thought I heard Hollywood mufflers rumbling
down another street. On the corner, a woman of color was waiting for the bus behind the bench, her purse crimped in her hands. She looked one way and then the other, leaning forward as though on a ship. There were no other people of color on the boulevard. These were the years when nigger-knocking was in fashion. I tried to smile at her, but she glanced away.

One block later I recognized Valerie's house. There were two live oaks hung with Spanish moss in the front yard and a glider on the porch; the side yard had a vegetable garden, and in the back I could see a desiccated toolshed and a huge pecan tree with a welding truck parked on the grass under it. Behind me I heard the rumble of Hollywood mufflers again. I turned and saw a 1941 Ford that had dual exhausts and Frenched headlights and an engine that sounded much more powerful than a conventional V8. The body was dechromed and leaded in and spray-painted with gray primer. One look at the occupants and I knew I was about to meet some genuine northside badasses, what we called greasers or sometimes greaseballs or hoods or duck-asses or hard guys or swinging dicks.

What was their logo? An indolent stare, slightly rounded shoulders, the shirt unbuttoned to expose the top of the chest, the collar turned up on the neck, the drapes threaded through the loops by a thin suede belt buckled below the navel, shirt cuffs buttoned even in summer, a tablespoon of grease in the sweeps of hair combed into a trench at the back of the head, iron taps on the needle-nose stomps that could be used to shatter someone's teeth on the sidewalk, the
pachuco
cross tattooed on the web between the left forefinger and thumb, and more important, the total absence of pity or mercy in the eyes. I know that anyone reading this today might believe these were misdirected boys and their attire and behavior were masks for their fear. That was seldom my experience. I believed then, as I do now, that most of them would go down with the decks awash and the cannons blazing, as George Orwell once said about people who are truly brave.

The Ford pulled to the curb, the twin custom mufflers throbbing. “Looks like you're lost,” said a greaser in the passenger seat.

“I sure am,” I replied.

“Or you're selling Bibles.”

“I was actually
looking for the Assembly of God Church. Y'all know where that's at?”

I saw his eyes take note of the bad grammar and realized he was more intelligent than I thought, and no doubt a more serious challenge.

“You're cute.” He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth but didn't light it. His hair was jet-black, his cheeks sunken, his skin pale. He scratched his throat. “Got a match?”

“I don't smoke.”

“If you're not selling Bibles and you don't have a light, what good are you? Are you good for something, boy?”

“Probably not. How about not calling me ‘boy'? Hey, I dig y'all's heap. Where'd you get the mufflers?”

He removed the cigarette from his mouth and pinched it between his thumb and index finger, shaking it, nodding as though coming to a profound conclusion. “I remember where I've seen you. That bone-smoker joint downtown, what's it called, the Pink Elephant?”

“What's a bone-smoker?”

“Guys who look like you. Where'd you get that belt buckle?”

“Won it at the junior RCA rodeo. Bareback bronc and bull riding both.”

“You give blow jobs in the chutes?”

My eyes went off of his. The street was hot and bright, the lawns a deep green, the air swimming with humidity, the houses an eye-watering white. “I can't blame you for saying that. I've shown the same kind of prejudice about people who are made different in the womb.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“The Bible.”

“You're telling us you're queer?”

“You never know.”

“I believe you. You got a nice mouth. You ought to get you some lipstick.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

He opened the door slowly and stepped out on the asphalt. He was
taller than he had looked inside the car. His shirt was unbuttoned, the sleeves filling with wind. His stomach was corrugated, his drapes low on his hips. His eyes roved over my face as though he were studying a lab specimen. “Can you repeat that?”

I heard a screen door squeak on a spring and slam behind me. Then I realized he was no longer looking at me. Valerie Epstein had walked down her porch steps into the yard and was standing under the live oaks, on the edge of the sunlight, shading her eyes with one hand. “Is that you?” she said.

I didn't know if she was talking to me or the greaser on the curb. I pointed at my chest. “You talking to me?”

“Aaron Holland? That's your name, isn't it?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, my throat catching.

“Were you looking for me?” she said.

“I wondered if you got home okay.”

The greaser got back in the Ford and shut the door. He looked up at me, holding my eyes. “You ought to play the slots. You got a lot of luck,” he said. “See you down the track, Jack.”

“Looking forward to it. Good to see you.”

He and his friends drove away. I looked at Valerie again. She was wearing a white sundress printed with flowers.

“I thought I was marmalade,” I said.

“Why?”

“Those hoods.”

“They're not hoods.”

“How about greaseballs?”

“Sometimes they're overly protective about the neighborhood, that's all.”

The wind was flattening her dress against her hips and stomach and thighs. I was so nervous I had to fold my arms on my chest to keep my hands from shaking. I tried to clear my throat. “How'd you get home from Galveston?”

“The Greyhound. You thought you had to check on me?”

“Do you like miniature golf?”

“Miniature golf?”

“It's a lot of fun,” I said. “I thought maybe you'd like to play a game or two. If you're
not doing anything.”

“Come inside. You look a little dehydrated.”

“You're asking me in?”

“What did I just say?”

“You told me to come inside.”

“So?”

“Yes, I could use some ice water. I didn't mean to call those guys greaseballs. Sometimes I say things I don't mean.”

“They'll survive. You coming?”

I would have dragged the Grand Canyon all the way to Texas to sit down with Valerie Epstein. “I hope I'm not disturbing y'all. My conscience bothered me. I didn't go looking for you last night because I had to get my father's car home.”

“I think you have a good heart.”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me.”

I could hear wind chimes tinkling and birds singing and perhaps strings of Chinese firecrackers popping, and I knew I would probably love Valerie Epstein for the rest of my life.

S
HE WALKED AHEAD
of me into the kitchen and took a pitcher of lemonade from the icebox. The kitchen was glossy and clean, the walls painted yellow and white. She put ice in two glasses and filled them up and slipped a sprig of mint in each and set them on paper napkins. “That's my father in the backyard,” she said. “He's a pipeline contractor.”

A muscular man wearing strap overalls without a shirt was working on the truck parked under the pecan tree. His skin was dark with tan, the gold curlicues of hair on his shoulders shiny with sweat, his profile cut out of tin.

“He looks like Alexander the Great. I mean the image on the coin,” I said.

“That's a funny thing to say.”

“History is my favorite subject.
I read all of it I can. My father does, too. He's a natural-gas engineer.”

I waited for her to say something. She didn't. Then I realized I had just told her my father was educated and her father probably was not. “What I mean is he works in the oil business, too.”

“Are you always this nervous?”

We were sitting at the table now, an electric fan oscillating on the counter. “I have a way of making words come out the wrong way. I was going to tell you how my father ended up in the oil patch, but I get to running on.”

“Go ahead and tell me.”

“He was a sugar chemist in Cuba. He quit after an incident on a ferryboat that sailed from New Orleans to Havana. Then he went to work on the pipeline and got caught by the Depression and never got to do the thing he wanted, which was to be a writer.”