Waveland (22 page)

“I should feel something about Gail,” he said. “Or think something. But I don't. Nothing. She's like a neighbor now.”

“Wow. You are the quick and the mean,” Greta said.

“Not,” he said.

“Is that the way it is with you about everything? When you're done, you're done? I'm beginning to get the idea that you really have checked out.”

“Something like that,” he said. “I don't think I have to be heard on every single subject. When I was a younger man…”

“And you were a younger man only weeks ago.”

“Here's the new me: a nice, easygoing, regular guy. If somebody does something stupid, it's fine with me. If somebody on TV does something stupid, it's fine with me. If somebody on TV does something stupid and gets paid millions of dollars, also fine.”

“You're out of this world,” Greta said. “You're a go-along guy.”

“Finally,” he said.

“You're following your bliss.”

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “If we're getting uglier and coarser, as my father said, who wants to live in a toilet? Is there a point at which it stops getting coarser and starts getting finer? Is that point coming along, or are we going to miss it? Where's Dad? I want to ask him. If my parents were less coarse, and I am more coarse, maybe my children will complete the cycle and become less coarse.”

“Your children?” she said, handing him a brand new bottle of OFF!

“Figuratively,” he said. He turned his flashlight on the anti-mosquito
can and read the label. “
‘Repels mosquitoes that may carry West Nile Virus.’
You picked a good one here.”

“You're a coarse piece of business, aren't you?” she said.

Her cell phone rang. It was Eddie calling from the house.

He wanted to know if they were coming there later or if they were going to the big house. She looked at Vaughn, asked, and he said, “I don't know. Whatever you want to do is fine.”

“Why?” she said into the telephone, then listened. “That's fine,” she said. “We'll see you tomorrow. Right.” Then she closed the phone, slipped it back into her shirt pocket. “He has a friend.”

“Oh, my god,” he said. “Of what denomination?”

“He did not say,” she said.

“Should we move him back to the garage? It would be mean to move him to the garage,” he said.

“If we move over there, he's going back,” she said. “But for the moment I'm enjoying this brief respite from responsibility delivered to us by the departure of your ex-wife, the lovely Gail, the brotherfucker.”

“Okay, that's over the line. There's a line there and you're over it.”

“Couldn't resist,” she said.

Three weeks to the day after she left, Gail called to say she and Newton were having trouble. “We're not getting along,” she said. “He doesn't really want me here. He says he loves me, but he's not in love with me. He says he needs to find himself. He says he's a work in progress and he's just been reading about this, and understanding this, and getting back with me after all this time is not the way forward for him, at least not yet.”

“Well, that surprises me,” Vaughn said.

“Are you being wry?”

“I thought I was,” he said.

“Are you trying to hurt me?”

“No, I'm not. I've never tried to hurt you. Not once.”

“That's true. I remember that about you,” she said.

There was a silence on the phone. He toyed with some
shells that Greta had picked up on the beach on their travels to the beach house.

Gail said, “Vaughn? Are you there? Vaughny?”

“I'm here. I'm here. What?” he said.

“I may have to come back there,” she said.

“There are worse things,” he said.

“We're not getting back together, are we?” she said.

“I don't think so,” he said.

“This is like really the end of our marriage,” she said.

“I think so. Yes,” he said.

“It's about time, isn't it?” she said.

That caught him. He wasn't ready for that. It didn't seem like something Gail would say. He didn't think it was intended to be mean, but it sounded a little mean. Maybe it was just fatigue. Maybe she was as fatigued as he was.

“I guess it is. We had a good run.”

“What's that? Something from some TV movie?” she said.

“Sorry,” he said. “But still, it's true. We did have a pretty good run.”

There was more silence, and then she said, “Yeah, I guess you're right. It could have lasted two years and been in the dumper.”

“What are you going to do when you get back here?” he said.

“If
I come back,” she said. “I don't know. Same shit. I may stay here. Maybe I could lean on Newton for a while.”

“I thought he loved you but wasn't in love with you?”

“I don't need him to be in love with me,” she said. “I need him to like me and to go to dinner with me and to be a close friend occasionally.”

“A close friend I don't want to hear about.”

“I just need somebody to hang out with,” she said. “Hang out is what I do these days. That's what I miss about our marriage. You know, all the time we spent together, messing around, doing nothing. Going to the grocery store.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“But you've got Greta now,” Gail said. “She's a nice woman, Greta.”

“If you like the type,” he said.

“Come on,” Gail said.

“Was a joke,” he said.

“Yeah, I completely missed it, you know,” Gail said. “I unlearned everything in the last fifteen minutes.”

“It was sort of a joke,” he said.

“Are you alluding to the fact that, how shall I say, she's rough-hewn?” Gail said.

“I was not alluding to that,” he said. “And furthermore, and for the record, she is not rough-hewn, whatever you might mean by that.”

“I apologize for that,” Gail said.

“Accepted,” he said.

When he told Greta that Gail might come back to town, Greta shrugged and shook her head and rolled her eyes and wagged her hands in the air. All at once.

“She gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Greta said.

“I don't think she's going to bother us anymore,” he said. “We'll probably have to move out of the house.”

“I'm ready to go,” she said. “Why don't we go tonight?”

“We've got to get Eddie out of your house first,” he said.

“I'll call him,” Greta said.

So at two o'clock in the morning, they started packing the cars, collecting the stuff they'd brought over from Greta's house, and the stuff they'd accumulated since living at Gail's, slapping it into their two cars. Trip after trip into the big house.

“This is fun,” Greta said, passing him on her way in as he was coming out.

“Is it?” he said. He was carrying a bunch of shirts on hangers and a couple of pairs of shoes. She was going back for another load.

“Think this'll work?” Greta said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I look forward to it,” she said. She gave him a little kiss on the forehead, then pushed him toward the stairs.

It took them only about an hour and a half to pack. They became less careful as the packing went on. At first they maintained a coherent plan, isolating things that didn't want to be folded or didn't want to be crushed or that wanted to be hanging on the rod, which was running across the backseat of her car; but after a while, they were just throwing stuff into both of the cars. It didn't matter. Boxes of cereal landed on top of freshly washed jeans. Skirts were wadded up and stuffed into the space behind the backseat. It was a mess. It was an escape. It was cowboys and Indians.

Closing on four o'clock they trailed through town the few blocks to the beach road, then up to Interstate 10 and across to the Bay St. Louis exit, and down to Greta's place in Wave-land. Greta in front in her car, him in his car behind. There
was something of the celebration about the trip—the slow drive with the windows down, the clammy gulf air blowing through the car windows, the empty streets, the almost slow-motion of a parade.

He wondered if she was driving so slowly because she was enjoying it or if she had some other motive. Maybe she was showing him something. Sometimes people liked to tell you things without telling you things, he thought. Sometimes they liked to show you things, demonstrate things, and why shouldn't they? Sometimes the things you learned from demonstration stuck with a fierceness that could not be matched.

When they got to Greta's house, Eddie was on the porch, sitting in an aluminum deck chair, drinking a Bud. Monkey was by his side, asleep, upside down. “It's all yours,” Eddie said. “I've just been keeping watch. The place is clean as a whistle. You could eat off the floors in there.” He wiggled the neck of the beer bottle toward the front door.

He didn't get up to help them unload the cars. They put one of the cars in the driveway and the other in the yard, and then they carried everything inside. Greta's house looked just as it had before they left. Eddie had returned everything to its prior state, as if he had photographed it the morning they left and used the photographs to set things back in order. An episode of Dominick Dunne's Court TV show was running—a story about a fat white guy and his wife, who had fallen in love with a black man and had decided to shoot her husband so that she could be with her new lover. Vaughn couldn't figure out how that qualified for the rich and famous murder show that Dominick Dunne presented, but there it was. They watched it in bits and pieces as they unloaded the cars. Eddie
stayed on the porch, nodding every time Vaughn walked past.

“You guys here to stay awhile?” he said on one trip. “I don't mind moving back to the garage apartment,” he said on another trip. “You look good totin' that bale,” he said on a third trip.

Vaughn said, “You missed me, huh?”

“Is it evident?” Eddie said.

They put all of Greta's stuff in her room and all of Vaughn's stuff in his room, and neither he nor she made any effort to put the stuff away. It was more or less dump-it-on-the-bed time.

After they got everything inside, they got beers and sat outside with Eddie. They were a couple of blocks off the Gulf, but you could still hear the surf, a murmur in the background, and the buzz of a few streetlights, and a few air conditioners cutting on and off around them.

“So, what happened?” Eddie said. “Why this sudden change of heart?”

“Gail's coming back,” Vaughn said. “She's probably coming back. Well, I don't know that she's coming back, but she may be coming back.”

“We thought we would just get out of the way,” Greta said. “Whether she comes back or not.”

“I get it,” Eddie said.

“Knew you would,” she said.

“So, what happens next?” Eddie said.

“What happens next is we're going to bed before the sun comes up.”

“Together?” Eddie said.

“We're going to rest awhile,” Greta said, patting his arm to tell him she appreciated the joke.

“Then we'll do whatever comes after that,” Vaughn said. “When the time rolls around. We're going to try not to worry too much. We're going to take it easy.” He looked at Greta, raised his hands, as if to ask her if that was what they were going to do.

She said, “Exactly right.”

“We decided we were too involved with my ex-wife,” Vaughn said. “I was too involved with my ex-wife. I love my ex-wife, but I'm not in love with my ex-wife. Wait, that can't be right. That's what my brother said.”

“You ought to treat your brother better,” Eddie said. “I know some guys who never had a brother. I know some guys who had brothers, but they got killed. I know some guys who killed their brothers. That ain't right. It's not what you're supposed to do. I don't know what's wrong with you not getting along with your brother any better than you do. He's your flesh and blood. He's your fruit of the loin, whatever. You should be kind to him and care for him, and he should do the same for you. I don't know what's wrong with the two of you. You make me ashamed to be a person.”

“They have a vexed relationship,” Greta said. “They're like Siamese fighting fish.”

“We're pretty, all right,” Vaughn said.

“That's not the part I mean,” she said.

“I know all about Siamese fighting fish,” Eddie said. “Would you shut the fuck up about Siamese fighting fish? I'm saying this thing with his brother is wrong.”

“There's a backstory,” Vaughn said. “I have this brother and, you know, everybody liked him.”

“Liked him better than you,” Eddie said. “He was smarter and prettier. And nicer and funnier and more genuine and less defensive.”

“Had more friends,” Vaughn said.

“I was listing things people like,” Eddie said. “I know some shit. I've been around places. I've met some people. He came up in a different time.”

“No, same time,” he said.

“He was a smoker,” Greta said. “That'll get you some friends right there.”

Vaughn looked at her and shook his head. He had no fucking idea. “I think it's getting late,” he said. “People are saying stuff.”

“It's a fact,” she said.

“You should make up with him,” Eddie said. “You should get back together with him and make up.”

“We're fine,” he said. “We've always been just a little bit, you know, edgy with each other.”

“He thinks Vaughn's dumb and Vaughn thinks he's dumb, and that's the way that works,” Greta said.

“He's not dumb,” Vaughn said.

“Well, whatever you want to call it,” she said. She stood up and poured the last bit of her beer into the flower bed. “I really don't believe he came down here and took Gail with him back up there to wherever the fuck he went. I really don't get it. I watched it all go on, and I don't believe any of it. I couldn't figure it out.”

“I think she likes him better than she likes me,” he said.

“She married you,” Greta said.

“I know, but he was already gone by then,” he said. “They'd had their deal.”

“When he left here,” she said, “when she went with him, did you actually think they were going to stay together up there?”

“No,” he said. “Well, I guess I thought it was possible.”

There were sirens off in the distance. They were quiet listening to the sirens for a few minutes. The sound was coming toward them, then went past them. The reflected lights shot through the trees on Mary Magdalene Street. Some guy in a milk truck went by. Vaughn pointed to the truck and looked at Greta and said, “Is that a milk truck? They still deliver milk around here?”