Tumbledown (32 page)

Laughter in the basement ricocheted off the walls, and Mick caught himself trying to see the echoes. He lost track of Maura’s story while he was trying to identify which of the many things that seemed to be bouncing about in the nether regions were echoes. He heard them all laugh again, but he didn’t know whether Maura had displayed herself to the dumb geniuses or not.

“You didn’t think that was funny?” Maura asked, her elbow whacking his ribs.

Mick explained about watching the echoes, and they all joined him.

“I saw a thought once,” Billy Atlas said, “a whole string of thoughts, actually. They were spilling out of this guy’s ear and circling his head. I mean, sure, I was doing acid, but that doesn’t mean thoughts can’t sometimes be seen.”

More laughter and echo hunting ensued. Whenever the hilarity slowed, either Maura or Billy would bring up something else they had seen or done, and another round of laughter would start. Even Billy’s girlfriend was laughing. Maura told about shoplifting a monkey wrench, and Billy said he made a
witticism
during a party in junior high and some bruiser held his head down in a punchbowl until he almost drowned, and Maura said she once slipped on the concrete around a public swimming pool and knocked herself out, and Billy revealed that he once peed in the open window of a car in a parking lot and then realized it was his car. When the two of them wearied of carrying the weight for the whole crowd, Mick felt he had to say something.

“When I got my mental illness, I drove my car into another car that was parked in a Burger King parking lot because I thought the other car was also my car and the two had separated and needed to be rejoined.” No one laughed. After a second, he said, “No, not Burger King,
Taco Bell!
”

Laughter ricocheted about the basement again.

It had never been a common occurrence and it hardly ever happened anymore, but there were moments in Candler’s life when the flesh of the world evaporated and he became privy to the bones of things.

He was seated in a wooden chair at a wooden table in the Phantom Limb, his friends’ band spanking through “The Shape I’m In,” a cold beer sweating circles on the round table, but he was also stepping onto the porch of his personal silence to look out through its screen. He understood that the bass line of the music was meant to beat along with the listener’s heart, so that the fast songs made one lively and the slow songs brought on tender feelings. This was not a profound thought, and yet its arrival at a loud bar that smelled of beer and feet
seemed
profound, and memory fed the feeling—not episodes from his life, but the body’s recollection of how those episodes felt, coursing through him in 6/8 time.

The substance of his working day was spent listening to other people. In moments such as this, he felt he was listening to himself—not to what he had to say, exactly, but to the rhythm of who he was. When he stepped out of himself, the world seemed to shuttle back, and he might gaze through that screen from a safe distance or he might consider the space between himself and the remainder of the human landscape, that hazy mystical trough. He was aware that he was in a bar with a concrete floor, and his work for the evening—parading his fiancée around for the board members, dancing with her long enough to make her happy—was done. He was waiting for Billy Atlas to show up. Billy not only knew about Candler’s moments of separation but claimed they were petit mal seizures. Billy had briefly majored in psychology in an attempt to prove as much, but he had never been much of a student.

Candler felt he knew better. The spells were not a disability but the distinctive thing he identified as his own. He had tried to explain this to Billy before, and in a moment of weakness, he’d called it
his deeper self.
He still hadn’t heard the end of that.

“If that’s your deeper self,” Billy had said, “then Pook was the deepest guy we ever met.”

Candler’s deeper self examined the women at the next table, how furtively they moved, women with ponytails, one two three of them, their golden beer in glasses gilded with frost. Like spies, they signaled with cigarettes, engraving the air with the secret text of the female. Smoky characters from the forbidden alphabet dawdled above their table, curling from their cigarettes, from their painted mouths, announcing themselves and vanishing in the same moment, like almost any act of beauty. It was so rare, these days, to see smoke in a bar, he thought, and yet it did so much for the atmosphere. It was a private party and smoking was permitted; his spells sometimes seemed to him like exactly that: a private party.

Thinking this took him off the porch and he was back in the bar once more. It sounded to him like that old Gene Autry song:
I’m back in the tavern again.

God,
he thought,
I’m drunk as a skunk.
He was drinking scotch. He had introduced his fiancée to so many people that
Lolly Powell
had begun to sound strange to him. He spotted Billy out on the floor, doing the crude, jiggling bounce that was supposed to pass for dancing. How many times had he tried to teach Billy how to dance? “You don’t have to be talented,” Candler had told him, “just confident.” He looked for Billy’s mystery date, but the crowd had closed around them. Candler had traded cars with Billy so Mr. Atlas could impress this woman, his first date since moving to California, the first since the divorce.

It was already clear that Billy was an improvement over Crews. His weekly reports—Candler had seen three by this time—were thorough and detailed, if also presumptuous and flowery. The clients liked him, and production rates were up. He had noted a few things that surprised Candler, including a detail that was undoubtedly important: Karly Hopper had come to the workshop in soiled jeans and a bulky sweater even though it was ninety degrees out. That meant the trucker was gone for good, and no one had moved in to help with things like laundry. When Karly came for her counseling appointment, she wore a clean white shirt with creases from packaging, but her pants were a mess. He asked her if she was living alone. She did not want to answer, seeming to think she might be in trouble. He had not pressed her; the evasive maneuvers were answer enough. After she left, he phoned her mother in L.A. and left a message, saying that he was concerned about Karly’s living arrangements. He was proud of Billy for noticing something most supervisors would have missed.

The song ended and Candler thought Billy might bring his date over to the table, but a new song began—a slow one—and Candler let out a laugh. Billy would seize this opportunity to hold the woman in his arms. The floor emptied out a bit for the slow song, and James was sure he would spot them. A hand touched his shoulder and Lolly spun into view. She knelt theatrically before him.

“Let’s waltz,” she said. “I want you to hold me.” She raised herself up just enough to kiss him quickly on the lips before tugging him out of his chair. He spun her around and pulled her close. She put her mouth to his ear. “Your colleagues are all hitting on me,” she said, clearly not complaining. “I left so they’d direct their attentions to Violet. I’m worried about her.”

“Don’t worry about Vi. She’s—”

“She’s in emotional peril, I think.”

“
Peril?”

“It’s a perfectly good word,” she said and laughed.

Over the exuberance of Lolly’s hair, he recognized not Billy or Billy’s date, but a dress, the dress he had purchased the day before Lolly arrived, a fantastically expensive and elegant dress. He focused so sharply on the garment that it took him a moment to realize that the woman in the dress was Lise and that she was dancing with Billy Atlas. He spun himself and Lolly away from them. His heart pounded farcically. He should have known something like this was coming. Reflexively, he told himself that it was stupid to blame Billy. If a pretty girl asked Billy Atlas to do something—almost anything—he was helpless to do otherwise. But god
damn
him anyway. Where’s his fucking brain? Of course it was Lise who had promised to disappear. Instead, she was pressing herself against his best friend, moving in approximate time to “I Wish I Were Blind,” trying to dodge the clod’s big feet.

“I’m getting dizzy,” Lolly said. “I’m going to swoon.” After a second, she added, “I always wanted to say that.”

He stopped spinning her. They were on the other side of the floor now. She leaned up to be kissed again, which he obliged. He believed the night he met Lise to be one of the most extraordinary of his life, although why he felt that way was mysterious to him. He and Lise had spent two weeks together—about the same amount of time he’d had in London with Lolly. Lise had given their interlude names:
The Days of Beer and Dandelions, The Year of Living Dangerously in Two Weeks, The Fourteen Days of the Condor with Sex Involved.
The names weren’t all that clever, he realized, but when she’d popped them off, they’d made him laugh. He had gone to see her at Whispers and Lies and pretended to be shopping for his wife. The place had intimidated him. It was an old house made over for retail, and both the prices and the garments were out of his league. Lise tried on one thing after another, helping him shop for this supposed wife, and finally he purchased what seemed to him a simple black dress but he came to understand that its fabric and cut made it special, made it emphasize the wearer’s beauty while the dress itself seemed to disappear.

Lise had known what was happening while it was going on, how he had cornered himself into buying something for her, and he realized later, after looking at the credit card receipt, that she had shown him the least expensive options, which were nonetheless more than he had ever spent on a gift for anyone. He didn’t care. He owed her a parting souvenir.

The song ended and Lolly wanted a drink. “You go ahead and dance,” she said, pronouncing it in the English fashion,
dahnce.
Once, years ago, when James was a boy traveling in Europe and trying to pick up girls, he had ruined an opportunity for himself when the Danish blonde he was squiring had ridiculed his U.S. pronunciation of
dancing,
and each time Lolly said
dahnce
seemed to him like a slap in the face. She was from New Jersey, after all.

“I’m going to find your sister,” she continued. “I’m genuinely concerned for her. You should be, too.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said, confident she would turn him down. She liked the attentions of men. James didn’t blame her. He liked the attention of women. He didn’t think Lolly was in any danger of falling for one of his colleagues.

“No, you want to dahnce,” she said. “Go ahead, but not with any of the pretty ones.” She pointed then across the room. “Dahnce with that Barnstone character.”

“Pass.”

“Dahnce with some of the bloody wives, then. Make their night.”

No sooner had Lolly left than Kat McIntyre grabbed his arm to drag him out to the floor. “She’s a real cutie, your fiancée,” Kat said. “I’m happy for you.”

Kat was a polished but predictable dancer. He supposed that people thought that about him in his day-to-day life, polished but predictable. His sister seemed especially disappointed in the realities of his existence. She even seemed to have doubts about his marrying Lolly. The song ended and another began, a fast one. He and Kat continued dancing. When he spotted Lise and Billy again, he understood that he wanted terribly to lead Lise to the parking lot and have sex with her in Billy’s ugly Dart. He and Lolly would undoubtedly make love in his big, comfortable bed after this event was over, but the two acts barely seemed related—the furtive, urgent humping in the public dark and the slow caress beneath the dim of a nightlight. Both activities were swell, but they were hardly the same thing.

He and Lise had fucked on the beach, and he not only enjoyed it but
appreciated
that a woman might not mind sand on her butt in order to have sex by the ocean with the likes of him. But his fiancée was here now, and that time of his life was gone, and probably the beach was gone, too, he thought, washed away, a new layer of sand supplanting the old, much the way layers of flesh rotate themselves over the body. He was soon to be married, and by the time he took Lolly to that beach they would probably have children and middle-aged spreads, and the beach would be a plutonium mine, and the only women there would wear goggles and space suits and breathe through their mouths, including Lolly, his beautiful Lolly, and the government wouldn’t let nursing mothers within five miles of the place. Not that he’d ever had sex with a nursing mother on the beach or, for that matter, anywhere else, and he’d never had sex of any kind in a mine, but still, who would want a plutonium mine where you used to have sex with a lovely young woman, the downy hair on her sacral dimples like mist on water, her young body eager to be handled? What did it make the two of them if not utterly alive? With Lise, he felt powerfully virile and handsome, as potent as a manhattan mixed by a bartender with a heavy hand and trying to impress a woman—maybe the same woman, small-chested and perfect in the ass, and so lovely (okay, not beautiful; Lise was not even pretty, but incredibly
lovely
) as to make him forget whatever was fucked up in his life, at least for the duration of the evening, her panties catching for an instant between her thighs as she pulled them down.

“Fuck your boss,” she had said to him. They had been talking about his promotion. Lise was against it. She thought he should work with clients, finish his study, become a psychologist. He had tried to explain all that John Egri had done to make it possible for Candler to take over, but she had interrupted. “Do what’s in your heart.” Such a corny line, but she had delivered it without irony or—there she was again, in the black dress, her skin pale in this light, contrasting with the dress, her ass shaking for him and him alone. That ass was expertly aimed and sending its ineluctable messages. Did Billy suppose she was doing anything but using him?

“Hey,” Kat said. A space had opened beneath the colored lights near the stage, and she wanted the maneuvering room. He followed her, knowing that now Lise would see him dance, and his ass would be (there could be no doubt) aimed at her and, yes, his ass would be speaking for his heart. Not that he was in love with Lise (that wasn’t possible), but he was still occupied with her mind and heart and body. He wished his ass could articulate this precisely, but he knew it would merely be saying
Desirable me is aware of desirable you, here where I cannot have you and you cannot have me.
Or something like that. Something like that (why deny it?) times ten.