The Parallel Apartments (55 page)

There: Charlotte? Her back to him. Dressed in a loose black dress and a wide-brimmed hat; veilless. Men and women on either side of her. Who? Any one could be a husband, a lover, a friend. A
daughter.

The woman turned to her right.

Lord. She was the same. Her profile was exactly as he remembered it, except her cheekbones were now sharper and limned with maternal peach, her lips less full, as though from years of overindulgent kissing, and the slope of her nose, outgrown of its little convex arc, was now straight, its angle of decline like the bannister of a very steep staircase.

Charlotte turned her attention back to the casket, which had begun a vagrant descent. Does Charlotte hate her like I do? She kept us apart. That was—is—love, you old crone. Like Romeo and Juliet. Bye, Mère. Welcome to your skeleton.

Lou felt like a fool. Brown jacket, jeans, boots like ruined Pop Warner footballs. Stalking a lusty memory just hours after screwing a distressed woman at least six years younger than he. Why reunite here? At a
funeral
? What if everybody hates me? What if nobody does?

Lou ducked back behind his tree.

He had a hundred and something dollars. He could get a nice room with a swamp cooler and an old easy chair for that. Maybe even a duplex. There, Cherry could find refuge from whatever it was that so troubled her. They could play cards and make love and go to Longhorns games. He would confess his catalog of misdemeanors. He would tell her about Charlotte, and Dot.

What the hell was he doing here? Lou reviewed his life and realized he had never been so jammed full of mixed feelings. He might have fallen in love with Cherry. He might have fallen out of love with Charlotte. He might be in love with both at the same time. He might have lost his best friend. The only comfort he could find was imagining some boneyard functionary dumping him in Mère's grave. That would serve him just right—another eternity with Mère.

Lou sat down. He took out his hundred-dollar bill and put it up to the patchy sunlight coming through the leaves to see if it had an anti-counterfeiting strip embedded in the paper like it was supposed to. It did! Relieved, Lou put the banknote back in his blue-jeans pocket, right up against the Hershey-bar wrappers.

An aptly cheerless hymn started. Lou couldn't make out the words, but it sounded as if the mourners knew them—there was a lot of discordant
la-la-
ing.

One singer, a woman, was a little louder and a tone sweeter than the others: Charlotte. He stood and peeked around the tree, watching her from behind. Again, she turned to the right. Lou saw and heard her sing the only recognizable word in the hymn:
love.

When they were in school in 1951, they talked about love a lot. When Charlotte said it, her deep, warm
l
cozily flowered into the sexual sigh of the
o,
which, with a gentle bite into her lower lip, fell into the dark well of the
v.
Underneath a table perched on the school's vacant theater stage and covered with a long tablecloth that hid Charlotte and Lou from the rest of the school, Charlotte had told him she loved him, but he hadn't had time to say it back, because the theater had begun to fill with what sounded like teachers and, as it turned out, an even larger authority: Officer Kerr Furr, who threw back the tablecloth, dragged Lou out by his shirt collar, and hissed like a house cat at Charlotte. Lou had not seen her again. Until now.

The funeral was over. The crowd subdivided into cliques, each heading toward their cars in the freshly blacktopped parking lot. Charlotte,
accompanied by a group of older women who kept whispering and smiling, and by a man built like Gorgeous George who was holding a squat, ice-filled glass that looked like it might've recently been full of bourbon. They were all headed toward a gray Lincoln. Gorgeous George hugged her, then got into the Lincoln and drove away. The older women dispersed. It was just Charlotte, alone, standing in an emptying parking spot, looking left to right, behind her, obviously waiting for someone.

Lou came out from behind the tree and stood at the edge of the shadow it cast, looking at Charlotte. He began to walk toward her. He straightened his tie. He wished desperately he'd written to her over the years, the letters disguised as gas bills so Mère wouldn't suspect.

Then, two decades of wishes and shame—from the day he was sent to reform school until three hours ago, when he last saw Cherry—fell down on Lou like hail. The candy wrappers in his pocket felt profane, punishing; a cilice.

He was less than ten feet away when Charlotte saw him, and less than five when she recognized him. He stopped.

“Hello.”

“Lou Borger.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Are you here to rejoice in the death of my mother?”

“'Course not, she was a fine—”

“Come on now.”

“Well, I guess I'm glad she's inert.”

“Watch it. They haven't even buried her yet.”

An engine started somewhere. A muddy backhoe operated by a skinny man with very black skin appeared from around a corner and began to crawl heavily toward Mère's ditch. It scooped up a jawful of earth and dropped it into the grave.

Lou didn't say anything, but he imagined the falling earth, gravelly and moist, wrecking the finish on Mère's coffin.

“You better be here to be a daddy to your daughter. Did you know she buried her husband yesterday?”

“Aw, hell,” said Lou, despairing, feeling strange, atypically strange, more so than the sum of all the recent strange things. “No, I didn't know that.”

“And she could bury me tomorrow, and be without any people at all.”

“Don't say that.”

“Why didn't you come for me?” “I was afraid of Mère.”

“I knew you'd say that. Mère was all sound and fury signifying nothing. You could've gotten ahold of me if you'd wanted to.”

“I could say the same. But we were both cowards under Mère.”

“Well, she's gone now. I imagine you're here to propose.”

“I—”

“You're not married, are you? Remember, you may have only one wife at a time.”

“No, not.”

“All right, then. Go ahead.”

He thought of Cherry. He thought of Dot. He wished he were dead. He thought of his daughter, Livia. He was glad he was alive.

“Will you marry me?” The Hershey wrappers seemed to tear themselves in half in his pocket.

“Yes, I will, Lou. Now, I want to introduce you to your daughter, Livia Durant Moppett.”

Lou smiled.

“Okay.”

“I want you to tell her that you love her and that you're sorry and you'll be around from now on.”

“I will.”

“Livie,” said Charlotte, looking beyond Lou, “there you are. Where have you been? I thought you'd fallen into a grave. Now come here and say hello to your daddy. Say hello to the man who's going to marry your poor spinster mother.”

XX

May 2004

In Dr. Gonzales's waiting room, where Charlotte was seated next to Livia—who seemed to be holding her breath—and waiting impatiently for Alva to slide her window aside and call Charlotte's name, she looked down at her hands, wondering why they were stained red and blue. Oh yes: gnomes. Fimo clay. She had spent hours molding and baking those gnomes today. And when Livia had come over to give Charlotte a ride to the doctor, she gave her mother nothing but grief about the little figures.

“Durant, Charlotte Gue!” shouted Alva. Charlotte leaped.

Without a word of greeting, Dr. Gonzales took Charlotte's purse away from her, dug around till he found her pack of cigarettes, and wadded them up in front of her, flakes of tobacco snowing onto the clean white floor of the examination room. She submitted to a blood test and a few gruff questions about her symptoms, then Dr. Gonzales sent her away.

That was twenty-five minutes ago; fifteen minutes in the car with Livia, and ten minutes walking toward home after she abandoned her daughter at a construction site. Her feet were beginning to hurt.

On the other side of Forty-Fifth Street, Charlotte stopped at a tiny neighborhood store that she'd driven past thousands of times but had never entered.

“I would like a pack of Belair cigarettes, please,” Charlotte said to the clerk, a child of ten or so.

The child stepped up on a crate of empty Dr Pepper bottles and reached up to get the cigarettes. Charlotte could not decide upon the gender of the child.

“That's four dollars and seventeen cents,” said the child, whose voice gave away nothing.

“You know, I really shouldn't be smoking, darling, but…”

Charlotte reached to unzip her black patent-leather purse, but it wasn't there. A feeling of sudden, hot nakedness came over her, as if an antimatter pantsuit had by chance collided with her matter pantsuit, annihilating both.

The child had eighty-three cents out on the counter, ready for a five.

“I believe I've left my purse in my daughter's car. Did you know, I've never forgotten my purse. Ever.”

“Oh.”

“I'd sooner forget my own head. Ha ha!”

They both eyed the cigarettes.

“Or my daughter's name.”

“What is it?”

“Livia.”

They smiled artificially at each other for a moment.

Then: “Daddy daddy help crazy lady stranger danger hurry!”

Charlotte darted out the door. She began to run.

After never running in her life, this was the second time she'd been forced to run in as many months. The last time was to catch a taxicab that had arrived at her house after midnight to take her to the downtown Marriott, where she was to meet her old pinochle partner, Bull Wheeler. Charlotte had not been quite ready—she had been experimenting with bras—when the cab arrived, and it took her a good five minutes to choose a slightly padded and seamless pale-green article, and finish dressing. When she finally opened the door to leave, she saw the cab begin to drive away. She took off her heels, chased it, and finally caught it.

Charlotte had been having an affair with Bull for decades. They used to meet once a month in a nice hotel, sometimes in Houston or San Antonio, but lately they'd been meeting every few days. Charlotte wondered how
much Livia knew—her remark about Charlotte's having the number memorized had rattled her. On the other hand, who cared?

On the night she'd had to run to catch the cab, Bull had been in an especially good mood.

“Church bells need a-ringing,” Bull had said, standing naked on the edge of the trampoline-like queen-size bed, holding a Tom Collins in a paper cup in one hand and the ceiling fire-sprinkler in the other. His testicles, like racquetballs in a tube sock, pendulated beneath his eager, unfellable, non-Viagral erection.

“Bull, you'll activate that sprinkler if you don't let it go,” Charlotte had responded, while adjusting her pillows behind her head in order to read the room-service menu in comfort. One pillow had a curious hard spot, as if there were a lemon inside it.

“If I let go I might fall off the bed and snap off the old oyster spoon.”

“Get down, and pull those drapes. The people on First Street can see your penis.”

“What? Please speak into the microphone.”

“I'm tired, and my feet hurt. And you've made me itchy again.”

Bull let go of the sprinkler and immediately slipped off the bed, landing hard, pecker side up, on one of Charlotte's high-heel shoes. He squawked once and passed out.

She called room service and ordered chicken Kiev and a slice of blueberry cheesecake. Then she called downstairs.

“Front desk, Nathan.”

“This is room 1214. I would like to register complaints. The grout… can you hear me?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said the clerk. “…the grout in the tub is mildewed. There is also a suspicious lump within one of the pillows. And the handle on the commode is ice cold and covered in dew.”

The desk clerk said he'd immediately send up another pillow, but added his regrets that the black grout and the condensation on the toilet handle were not things he had any idea how to fix.

“Would you like another room?” offered the clerk, who had a Longview drawl that reminded Charlotte of Burt Moppett.

Charlotte had been cranky when she called, but the clerk's voice made her soften. She liked to think about Burt.

“No, no, darling, never mind,” said Charlotte. “I think I would like you to send up a tube of Preparation H from the gift shop. Is it still open?”

“Yes it is, ma'am.”

“You shall be discreet.”

“Yes, ma'am. Is there anything else?”

Charlotte paused to analyze the clerk's voice for smart-aleckiness or false sincerity or giggle-suppression. None.

“That is all. Thank you.”

Charlotte got up. She put a pillow under her lover's head and covered him with the bedspread, which, as it settled, assumed contours similar to Mount Fuji's—Bull's erection had not wilted, even with the dormancy of its steward.