The Parallel Apartments (56 page)

Soon a pair of service personnel arrived. The first was a grumpy, cylinder-shaped woman carrying a black steel toolbox. The other, a short man with a red, shiny, closely shaved face, carried a plastic-wrapped pillow in one hand, and with the other guided an unstable cart burthen with Charlotte's dinner.

The cylinder and her toolbox disappeared into the bathroom. Soon the no-nonsense percussion of tools filled the hotel room.

The waiter, ignoring the gin-drowned person before him, parked the cart with one caster touching Bull's ear.

“May I replace your pillow?” said the waiter.

Charlotte nodded, indicating the lemon pillow.

The waiter unwrapped the new pillow, vigorously fluffed it, then took the bad pillow and placed it under the cart's tablecloth.

With an emcee-like gesture, he then said: “I present your dinner.”

On the cart were four metal domes, each ventilated with a finger hole. He stuck his finger into the largest dome and snatched it away.

“Voilà,” he said. “Chicken Kiev.”

He similarly discovered the cheesecake and the toast. The last dome had not a finger hole but a little knob.

The noise in the bathroom stopped. The waiter stepped back, apparently finished with his presentation. The maintenance lady emerged from the bathroom and joined her colleague by the dining cart. Bull snored, a rubbery flapping.

Charlotte gave them each a dollar, and they left.

She lifted the last dome. Her Preparation H.

She ate her dinner, then went into the bathroom to draw a bath. The maintenance woman had somehow managed to remove every speck of mildewy grout. The knob on the commode had been covered with a tiny baby sock.

After her bath, Charlotte applied her H. Charlotte especially liked the feeling of Bull's testicles slapping at her bottom during sex, but afterward her anus was always raw and itchy.

Bull was still on the floor, Mount Fuji undisturbed. She shivered, and so took Bull's bedspread for herself. Charlotte, about to get under the covers, stopped for a moment to appraise Bull.

It was against her bon ton to have sex after a bath, but Bull's erection, with its urethral opening that ran perpendicular to the normal, vertical opening and reminded her of a mopish, eyeless Charlie Brown head, invited her to fuck without, as it were, Bull and his sophomoric dirty talk, and so Charlotte climbed on. She was not a woman who'd ever had a problem with vaginal aridity, and Charlie Brown slid right on in. She could take another bath. There had been periods of wrath and dolor in her life that only long hot baths could soothe, and there were days she took several. After finding a position where neither her knees nor her aching corns would suffer too much, Charlotte leaned on Bull's chest and began to fuck him.

He didn't wake, but some deep id caused his hips to thrust and his hands to grope for Charlotte's breasts. He ejaculated, and soon after, Charlotte had her first orgasm of the evening. An attractive feature of this hotel was its old, thick, soundproof walls, the sort that would keep the vocalities of orgasm from reaching prude, judgmental ears.

Charlotte bathed again, then got into bed next to Bull, who had somehow pulled himself onto the mattress while she was in the tub.

She called downstairs again.

“Front desk, Nathan.”

“This is room 1214,” Charlotte said. “Thank you for attending to my complaints.”

“You're welcome,” he said.
Oh, how much like Burt Moppett he is.

“I'd like to order a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call.”

“Certainly.”

“Good night, young man.”

Charlotte switched off the light, and turned away from Bull Wheeler.

* * *

When Charlotte got home, she was out of breath from running away from the cigarette store. She found a Tuborg in the refrigerator, and located her emergency carton of Belairs. Charlotte ignored Dr. Gonzales's rolling voice in her head and instead listened for the serrated whine of Livia's Nissan, a racket as unique as a thumbprint. But only the whispery din of distant traffic on I-35 made it through the filter of several blocks' worth of trees and houses. In her youth, when the neighborhood trees were slimmer and the houses fewer, sometimes the screams of the deranged could be heard coming from the asylum two blocks away.

Charlotte hauled Lou's old suitcase in from the den and dropped it onto her grackle-watching table. No grackles in her yard, no squirrels.

Inside the suitcase were the two brownish-black leather diaries, their covers flaking and reddish at the extremities, the spines corrugated with vertical creases. Charlotte sucked hard on a Belair and blew a cone of smoke at the kitchen ceiling.

The first diary was filled not with words but with bristly and faintly wavy black lines, more than a hundred on each page, that reminded her of long, very narrow pipe cleaners. She looked close, squinting: ah. They were words. The lines were sentences, penned in the smallest hand she'd ever seen, though not quite as small as those in the microprinted
Oxford English Dictionary
she'd gotten for joining the BOTMC a quarter century ago.
How in the world can I possibly read this handwri
—

Charlotte jumped up and ran to the shelf in the den. She might never have had much need for the big dictionary itself, but at last its attendant magnifying glass would be put to use.

The first entry explained the diary's genesis:

          
December 25, 1957. Dear Diary, Today is Christmas day. This is my first diary page. I got these books from Fatty Marlon Chessman as a present because hes a book binder and knows how to make books a girl could like. They have 2 thousand pages each and the paper is thin like a Bibles so the books arent too fat. Fatty is the best baby in my book. Hay I dont mean this book but that other book haha. Fatty is a doll baby. Hes a face man and so I might let him go at it for love. This sharp fountain pen is nice too. I cant wait for tommorow
to write in you Dear Diary. Ill tell you about Rabbit Comiski. The are so many things to tell you so many babys to tell you about I cant hardly wait.

Charlotte sucked on her cigarette. Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut. She felt a little like she had when she read
The Prince of Tides
—she was dying to get to the end but if she skipped ahead she
knew
the end wouldn't be as satisfying as if she'd just stuck with it. So she'd read
Prince
all night, called in sick to the bank, and read the last words around lunch. Her eyes had burned, one elbow was chafed and scaly from leaning on it, her left thumb developed a strange cramp from holding the stiff paperback open—an ache that lasted for weeks afterward and that renewed itself whenever she sat down to read. Like now.

She skipped to the entry a couple weeks before Mère was buried.

          
August 29, 1969. DD, Lou is gone. I hope Kelly didn't get him. Maybe he is safe back in the joint. Maybe he just got tired of Texas City and left town again and went to New Orleans even though he doesn't like it there, he knows the place and could hide easy, not like Texas City where everybody knows where everybody is all the time. But he sure always had bad timing if he went there with that hurricane a couple of weeks back. I wished I did'nt kick him in the face like I did, I kicked him harder than I was meaning to, I know he was just being Lou. Maybe I'll leave too. I just hope he didn't go up to Austin City, with all that old trouble there waiting on him.

He did, though, didn't he, goddam him.

Ah, the Nissan squeal. It stopped, followed quickly by a hammering at the door.

“Mother! Are you in there? Open up this instant!”

“I'm busy right now,” said Charlotte, just loud enough for Livia to hear through the door.

“Busy! What's got into you? Why are you behaving like a lunatic?”

Charlotte ignored her.

“Are you reading those diaries? Let's read them together! Mother! Open up!”

But Charlotte wasn't listening.

XXI

September 1969

“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.”

Charlotte took Lou by the shoulders and spun him a half turn. His body was normally tense and solid, but it relaxed and yielded at her touch, just as it always had. She left her hands on his shoulder blades. Then, just as she was about to give him a gentle push in Livia's direction, he froze up solid again.

“Go,” she said, pushing a little harder. “This is all a big surprise so let's just get it over with and go home and catch up.”

Livia had also stopped, mid-step. She and Lou faced each other, three strides apart.

Charlotte gave Lou one more gentle shove, allowing her fingers to arc just enough where it felt like she was getting a precious handful of him, but he wouldn't move.

“This is him, darling,” said Charlotte, letting his deltoids go and standing off to his side.

Pretending to be bored and annoyed, Charlotte gestured at Lou. “I told you you two didn't look a whole lot alike, but believe you me, this is the man.”

Charlotte couldn't pretend nonchalance any longer. She clasped her hands together like Mary Poppins. Her smile broke out, bright and white, under her black, wide-brimmed hat.

“Lou. Livie, darling. Oh my.”

Charlotte grabbed each of them by a hand and pulled them into a three-way hug. She held Lou across his wide back, her red nails gaffed into a belt of muscle; Livia she held around the waist. Charlotte's head was between them, tears mixing with the sweat of her daughter's bare collarbone and spreading into the starched cotton of Lou's shirt.

She raised her head.

“Livie, Lou proposed to me. I made him.”

Father and daughter looked at each other. Then Livia looked at her mother with an expression that reminded her of a woman being dragged into hell by the devil in a sixteenth-century painting.

Livia began to cough. It was a smoker's cough, abdominally deep, with sustained, staccato exhales, but Livia had never smoked. Not as far as Charlotte knew. Charlotte let go of Lou and began to clap Livia on the back with her palm.

“Wrong pipe,” Charlotte said to Lou, who still had not moved. Even his face seemed cured solid, like ceramic.

Livia kept coughing. She fell to her knees, then to her hands. And then she stopped, in mid-hack, as if her fit were just a vinyl recording, its needle lifted away.

Sudden panic made Charlotte's hands cold.

“Are you choking? Liv!”

Livia's hair fell all around her face. She made no sound; the needle was still raised.

“Lou, come here and help me.”

Lou still did not move, except to touch his forehead and then look at his fingers, as if he expected running blood.

The needle came down: Livia resumed the long, lone cough as though it had never been interrupted. It diminished into a tiny cry that reminded
Charlotte of an orange kitten she'd found in a ditch when she was five, so little its eyes had yet to open. She had named it Polka Dot.

“Liv, darling, it's all right. It's a shock to me, too. But it's all right. It's all right. Lou?”

Charlotte looked up. Lou was staring at his hands.

Livia sprang. She ran off toward the parking lot. After a moment, she ran around the corner of the gravedigger's stone house, and was gone.

Charlotte said, “It's all right, Lou. Let's just leave her alone. She's a wreck right now. Burt's gone—old Burt. You'd've liked him. He was a good boy, a good man.”

She took Lou by the hands and put them on her cheeks.

“You didn't ever forget me, did you?”

“No,” said Lou. “I never did.”

Charlotte took his cheeks in her hands and gave them a little squeeze.

“Your hair looks pretty good,” she said.

“Well, I got it trimmed yesterday.”

“I'm going to cry pretty hard in a minute.”

Since Livia had apparently disappeared with the car, Charlotte asked Merlin Waller, the gravedigger, if he'd give her and Lou a ride home.

Merlin shimmed them into the backseat of his Charger. By the time they were nearly home, Charlotte's tears had dried, and all she could think about was the glittering glass needles in her thigh—the one that was touching Lou's.

“We ought to just run over to a church and see if there's someone around that'll marry us right now,” said Charlotte. “Merlin, would you drive us to University Baptist, first?”

“Y'all have y'all blood test?” said Merlin.

“Mind your own beeswax,” said Charlotte.

“Y'all can't just get married,” said Merlin. “They forms. They tests. They
laws.
”

At that moment, Charlotte realized she cared less about marriage than she did about sex. Marriage, she figured, could wait a couple of days. Plus, it wasn't as if she had to choose. Why, she could have both.