The Parallel Apartments (37 page)

The bartender, a slight, makeup-less woman in her mid-fifties wearing a striped vest and a bow tie, issued Lou an ashtray, a bowl of Chex Mix, and a coaster emblazoned with a cute cartoon bat. The mammalian, flying kind.

The bartender leaned forward. Her nostrils dilated appreciably.

“Been barhopping tonight?”

“No,” said Lou, which was the truth. He'd been drinking vodka he bought at Centennial Liquors off Fifty-First Street, which had been the first liquor store all day that hadn't turned him away for already being shitfaced.

The bartender leaned back and looked Lou directly in the eye. He hated looking right at people. It felt like they could read his mind and see the grotesque truths about him. It was much easier to stare at a neutral object, like a knuckle or a cue ball or a dirt clod, and maybe glance up now and then.

Lou tried to look back at the bartender in a sober, helpful way, but his eyes teared up and he had to look down at his bat.

“No vodka for you,” she said finally.

“Well, that's fine. I'm pretty tired of vodka, anyway. Rolling Rock?”

She brought him one.

“Dollar.”

Lou took a modest sip of fifty-ish degrees Fahrenheit beer. He looked back down at his bat again. He noticed that it had angry red eyes and little fangs; its cartoony cuteness was now just common malevolence. He placed his bottle on the bat, but still he felt it staring through the green glass at him.

“Whatcha got on tap there?”

“Seltzer,” said the bartender.

Lou ate some Chex Mix.

“No TV, huh?”

“It's four in the afternoon,” said the bartender. “Nothing on.”

Lou thought that was a little presumptuous. Who was she to say what he liked to watch? It was April. There'd be baseball, surely. Why wouldn't he want to watch baseball? Poor Dot. She'd hated baseball. She'd hated it so much that she used to delight in ribbing Lou about how stupid it was. How disgusting, with the bilious tobacco sputum puddles everywhere and lip-readable cussing and choreographies of crotch-tugging. About how corpulent all the pitchers and coaches were, and what pussies everybody was, with big leather gloves and shin guards and hard hats and padded masks. About how long the games were. How
poky.

“Unless you wanna watch
As the World Turns,
” said the bartender, with a big, brown smile. “You wanna watch that? Hold on. Hey, Dizz. Dizzy. Wake up.”

A man whom Lou hadn't noticed before and who was napping on the floor near the warbling video games sat up and rubbed his eyebrows with his palms.

“Dizz. Warm up that TV set. Our patron here would like to catch up on his stories.”

Dizz reached up and flicked on the TV. He turned channels, passing a Rangers game, Charlie Hough on the mound.

“Say, I noticed a ball game,” said Lou pleasantly. “Can we watch that?”

Both Dizz and the bartender turned to look at Lou. The bat was looking at him. Dot was out there in the parking lot, alone in the backseat of Sherpa's Monte Carlo, and here he was, Lou Borger, drinking warm beer and eating cold mockery.

The bartender snatched his beer away. Dizz, now fully awake and illumined by a soap opera, was the most menacing individual Lou had ever seen. He turned to
As the World Turns.

“I think I saw this episode, so I guess I'll be on my way,” said Lou, standing up and tipping the bartender a quarter. “I'm expected back home in Arabi, Louisiana, and furthermore I got someone waiting for me in the car.”

“Sheik,” said Dizz, who started to laugh like Horshack from
Welcome Back, Kotter.
“Ima Sheika Araby.”

Lou backed quickly out of the bar.

He climbed into the blue Monte Carlo. Dot was lying along the backseat, covered in her old favorite sun-bleached afghan. Lou had put her green marabou slippers on her feet before they'd set out that afternoon, just after Livia'd kissed him in the garage and he hadn't stopped her.

Lou parked at the same Centennial again and bought another quart of Smirnoff from the same clerk who was still trying to load the same spool of register tape into the same cash register that he'd been trying to load it into when Lou'd come in four hours before.

Lou pulled onto I-290 east. He sighed at the micro-orgasm of the bottle's metal cap and tax label cracking open, and the coital slipperiness of the first swallow.

He signaled when he changed lanes. He drank through the side of his mouth so the bottle wouldn't obscure his view of the road. He drove three miles over the speed limit—the precise speed, he'd read somewhere, that was least likely to toll a cop's bells. He did not tailgate. With both hands he squeezed the hard blue sparkly steering wheel. He did not fall asleep. He tuned into and turned up loud a three-hour commercial-free heavy-metal marathon. And, with every muscle and neuron, Lou fought the Weave.

On the other side of Houston, Lou entered I-10 east toward New Orleans. It was getting dark. The temperature dropped. The vodka was nearly half gone. Lou was sleepy. He did not want to stop, even though he could feel that he was losing the fight against the Weave.

“A test,” said Lou. “A couple-hundred-mile-long goddam test.”

Lou squeezed the steering wheel harder. He held his breath and clenched the muscles in his neck and shoulders and face, making his eyes bug out. I
could sure use a cup of coffee. And maybe a cheeseburger. And a commode.

He let his breath out. He was even sleepier than before.

Ahead, dots of bright color. They resolved into emblems on towering poles: McDonald's, Exxon, Waffle House, and another… it looked familiar. Lou squinted.

“Wendy's!” Lou shouted. He glanced over his shoulder to tell Dot but remembered she was gone. When he turned back, the steel letters
GMC
filled most of the window. Lou crushed the brake with the heel of his boot to avoid rear-ending the pickup and swerved into the breakdown lane. A little orange Ford Fiesta was there, its hood up, its backseat alive with children and dogs.

Lou pleaded guilty to all charges, including five counts of vehicular homicide, and one count of abuse of a corpse. (It was not illegal to kill a dog in Texas.) Though the jury's recommendation had been “forever,” Lou was sentenced to twenty-two years of sober, hard labor, to be served at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

XII

May 2004

Driving home from Planned Parenthood, where she went at least once a week for a proper pregnancy test—fuck that e.p.t. noise—April Carole rolled down the window of the black Mini Cooper once owned by her now-dead sister, Bryce, and shouted at the scudding-by world, “I wonder who it was!”

There were a dozen or so possibilities, given the window of time during which conception might've occurred. It could've been the short guy who resembled Tom Hulce. He had been able to achieve the male's goal thrice, without withdrawing, in less than ten minutes, every second of which April admitted to both herself and to him (as a rule she did not compliment her lover's performances or moan overmuch during them) that she enjoyed quite a bit, particularly the unexpected basal flares and unusually brisk thunder that his weird barley-twist penis had been capable of provoking.

Twinges and twangs, and occasionally thoomps, constituted April's principal sexual jolts, and were really the only things she was able to enjoy during her swiving marathon, except for Scrabble-ating every single one of
her conquests, which caused many of them to want to show her a thing or two about dominance. April, and probably all the men, bandied dominance and virility.

Or it might have been the too-tall guy with the graying, moustacheless beard whose semen production, though dispensed only in a single dose, was delivered with substantial volume and muzzle velocity, and somehow felt
on target.

Or it had been the predictable, almost-forgettable guy she'd met on Atlanta Craigslist who arrived at her apartment to find that April had inked superb drawings of raspberries and stinging nettle and red clover all over her pelvic region in red and green ballpoint because she had been wondering whether
renditions
of the so-called fertility herbs would have more of an influence than the plants themselves, which had, so far, proved powerless.

Or maybe it was the Russian exchange student, a basso profundo with exactly the same hair as April's, whom she'd cornered at one of the UT practice rooms and who claimed to have once paid a disbarred surgeon to open him up while a local tattooer inked his liver with a likeness of Maria Callas. He showed April the scar. She thought she would like to have a child with Veniamin. She liked him. She'd swallowed her very last tiny egg just as he came.

Or it could have been one of the five nearly identical sailors who drank every beer in the refrigerator and wouldn't leave until April'd cherry-popped their one reluctant comrade, Morris, who, as it turned out, happened to be in control of a very sweet kissing style that April might've come to like had she not been on a mission.

Or it was Ryan, over whom April shook the powders of mercy during the salient period.

Whoever. April was now, officially, a mom-to-be. She looked down at her belly. She took her hands off the steering wheel and briefly used her belly to steer her Mini Cooper up Airport Boulevard.

“Whaddaya think of that, Montserrat! Or Ricky! Like driving?”

Presently April arrived at the Parallel Apartments, parked her car, and walked up to her efficiency, in which she found Ryan asleep on the futon.

“Wakey!” she said. “Guess what?”

“Nlph.”

“Just fourteen hours ago, I fucked my last stranger, the nine-hundred-sixteenth, some Kerneth Hanger, plus, just forty-five
minutes
ago, I got back a pregnancy test. And…”

“Mf. And… what?”

“Two guesses.”

“…positive?” said Ryan, now wide awake and sitting up.

“That is correct, motherfucker!”

Ryan jumped up and ran to the kitchenette. He returned with two bottles of beer. April knew that part of his enthusiasm was genuine happiness for her conceiving, but an equal if not larger part was the revived hope that April would now be available to him. But April had plans to be only with people she had real feelings for. And the only one of the 916 that she had crushed on was Veniamin.

Ryan handed her the beer.

“Slainte mhath!”
said he, tapping the body of her bottle with the heel of his and taking a long pull. April herself took a modest sip, her last for a long while, then smiled and reached up to kiss him on the cheek.

“You're my best friend, Ryan.”

“I know,” he said, two-thirds of his beer drunk up.

“You really know how to take care of a person,” said April

“I am really very good at that,” said Ryan.

“You stuck with me through all the year, all the slutting.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm done. I'm fine now, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

Ryan's beer was now gone.

“I can take care of myself.”

And April sent Ryan away.

The freedom accompanying escape from an existence whoring yourself out for more than a year, for
nothing,
is not just the snug, violet-scented solitude of your own apartment evacuated of all past evidence, but also a tower from whose highest point you can view both your history of compulsive promiscuity and your escape from it, without judgment, without falling back into the mire, without a crushing penalty waiting for you. That freedom, though,
requires maintenance, protection, and a handler practiced in issuing firm
no's,
and it must exist in a hostile world that makes its isle of freedom worth wanting.

April lived snug in her apartment for months, living off of a surprisingly lucrative and easy three-week temp job at the Texas Department of Public Safety (offices of Concealed Handgun Licensing) that she'd completed just a few days before she'd been declared pregnant. After the assignment, April began filling her now-wide-open schedule by not drinking alcohol, reading baby books, surfing baby sites, singing to her baby, doing scales, playing White Stripes records for the baby, regularly eating the vitamins she was supposed to, and carefully restoring her antique bassinet with new twigs of wicker, painting them with acrylics mixed in sympathy to the original palette of woody yellows, light browns, and straw. The bassinet and its baby developed apace.

April also watched in her mind vivid films of her year-and-more's worth of horizontal labor, which she finally escaped by achieving what she had worked for. April thought that she might've worked harder than anyone in history to get pregnant, and she deserved her freedom and solitude now. Especially immunity from the phone, which rang all day, still, the calls always from past conquests who had fallen for her and/or felt they deserved a little more, like,
Where was the fucking blow job?,
or from hopeful new “referrals” who sometimes left their entire credit-card number on voicemail, or from Ryan, just checking in to see if she needed anything. She never called anyone back. She never called anyone, period, except, once, the Time Warner guy. April needed him to come get her Dell Latitude back online. She had research and maternity-dress shopping to do.