Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (6 page)

“Ten times as much,” Mary whispered.

Rod didn't even look at her.

“That's big bucks,” Lyle said.

“The competition will be stiffer, so there's no guarantee, but I've seen her play. She's good.”

Lyle turned an eye on her and smiled. “She's a damn good pool player.”

Mary liked that Lyle was taking care of the business side of things, so she could simply sit there and sip her drink through the little cocktail straw. Who cared about sleeping in the LTD.
She wanted a man who could take care of business and Lyle was all about TCB.

Rod took a card from his inside breast pocket. Mary tried to get a glimpse of it, but Lyle pulled it away so she couldn't read it.

“More importantly, the good players will get sponsorship.”

“A steady paycheck,” Mary said.

Rod glanced at her, then back to Lyle. “About two thousand dollars a month.” He snapped his fingers and motioned to a guy eating peanuts and watching them from across the bar.

“Which means we can sleep in hotels,” Mary whispered, pretty much talking to her drink.

The peanut guy, a younger version of Rod, came over to the bar. He looked like he was all of seventeen. His suit pants were too short, what the kids called “high-waters.” “I want you to meet Giles Alberhaskie. My son. He's a representative of Viking Cues.”

“She uses a Viking cue,” Lyle said.

“I know she does,” Rod said.

“She likes it,” Lyle said.

Giles shook Lyle's hand.

Mary slid off her barstool. “I'm going to use the ladies' room.” None of the men looked at her.

Across the bar, she watched as Lyle's tongue pretty much went dog when Rod pulled out a contract and smoothed it on the bar. He signed it, then held up his glass for the other two men to toast him.

 

For the first few years Mary was a professional pool player, Giles Alberhaskie handed her a stipend check at every tournament. In fact, he picked Lyle and her up in his Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight and drove them to the tournaments. Mary usually rode in the backseat, watching the West Coast scenery blur by as Lyle rode shotgun and fiddled with the car's eight-track, playing rock and roll songs that he sang along with. At the tournaments, Lyle signed her in and carried her pool cue and ordered her tomato
juice that she sipped while she ran a couple racks to warm up. There was enough money to afford hotel rooms and steak dinners delivered to the room on a cart. Lyle took care of those, too, signing the room service bill. Of course, it was Mary's money, but still, he kept a pen on him at all times.

Since the tournaments were monthly, the couple spent a lot of time at their apartment in San Jose (no more LTD), a modest place with air conditioning and a television set that Lyle, sitting in his tank-top undershirt, put to good use while he drank beer. It was shaping up to be a pretty good life. Mary worked one weekend a month, and when something like a clogged toilet needed taking care of, Lyle got the plunger from the hall closet. If that didn't work, he picked up the phone and called a plumber. All Mary had to do was sit on the couch.

Only problem was that Lyle had a knack for spending money, and he wasn't bashful about it. He bought a Ford Mustang Mach 1, seven polyester suits, a dozen silk shirts, a pair of Italian loafers, a ten-speed Schwinn bicycle, tennis lessons, a color television, golf clubs, a waterbed, a mustache comb, a hi-fi stereo, three lava lamps, two hundred rock and roll records, Chicago Cutlery steak knives, a bearskin rug, and a white leather couch. Mary said nothing about the purchases. She just kept collecting the checks and watched the new things make their way into her life.

Then, it was 1982, and Mary was attending most of the tournaments by herself. Giles Alberhaskie had moved to Los Angeles to represent television stars like Bernie Kopell and Jon Cypher, while Lyle stayed home to “keep an eye on things.” The WPPA was on the decline; not many fans were showing up, even though the league sponsored promotional gimmicks like Kiss Your Favorite Pool Hustler. Mary hated those stunts—kissing a sweaty, fat guy for a dollar. Many of the women in the league had left and gone on to start families. This was what Mary wanted—her and Lyle and some little bambino and a house with a garage and a tree in the front yard.

Mary was jealous when a former WPPA player, Allison Whitman, showed up at a tournament in Reno with her seven-month-old son. The women cooed over the little guy, and it was right then that Mary made up her mind. She was going to downshift out of this life. She was almost forty. What did she have to show for all these years? Sure, they had the Mustang Mach 1 and a white leather couch. But what were they doing? When she'd left the apartment earlier that afternoon, Lyle was sitting in front of the television playing Atari.

She didn't stick around to play her first match that day. She checked out of her hotel, leaving the key on the bed and not even bothering to get her money back. It was a five-hour drive back to San Jose. Mary did the drive in four hours and twenty-six minutes. At the apartment door, she could hear Journey's “Don't Stop Believing” blaring on the hi-fi. It was only 9:00 p.m. She'd burst in and lay it all out: “Lyle, we gotta make a change . . . ” She dug in her purse for her keys. When she got the door open, her stomach turned inside out and a wave of shock spiraled through her body. A naked black woman with a huge, helmet afro was on top of Lyle. They were on the floor in front of the television, and Mary had a full-on frontal shot of this woman. Her eyes were closed, and she was pinching her own nipples while making a high-pitched whimper. Mary stood in the open door taking in the scene—the woman, Lyle, and the whimpering crescendo of Neal Schon's guitar solo.

She quietly closed the door and went down the stairs and out into the parking lot. It was a warm night. The traffic flew by on Saratoga Avenue, the busy street lined with fast food restaurants and dry cleaners that ran in front of the apartment complex. Mary found Lyle's Mustang Mach 1 in the parking lot. As she sat behind the wheel, her mind flashed to that afternoon when Lyle signed her contract to play professional pool. On the way out of the bar, he held the door open for her. In the car, he leaned over and grabbed both her cheeks with his hands and mashed his
mouth onto hers. She loved it, the power, the aggression. Lyle was her man, and he was taking care of her.

During the next few months, Mary tried to get her mind off Lyle, but she couldn't; she loved him. Honestly, she did, but when she thought about going back to the apartment, her mind seized on the image of opening the apartment door and finding him fucking that woman. One afternoon she went inside a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. All she had to do was ask for cigarettes, but she couldn't move her mouth. “Lady, there's like four people behind you.” She looked over her shoulder at a longhaired kid with a skateboard and a pregnant woman.

She wrote Lyle a letter. It was short and to the point and told him that she never ever wanted to see him again. He could have all their stuff, she didn't care, but he needed to get out of the apartment. In fact, he needed to get out of California. He should move to Virginia. Or New Hampshire. Somewhere. Anywhere but California or Las Vegas or Reno. She couldn't take the risk of bumping into him at a movie theater or grocery store. If she did, she didn't know what she'd do—most likely break down in tears.

Her new Viking representative, Pete Lemmingworth, was a chubby guy with curly hair who never showed up at any of her tournaments and didn't care if she stuck with it or not. He knew the league was a mud puddle and the sun was coming out. Mary called him for advice. Were there other pool circuits? What about Las Vegas? Los Angeles? Were any Bmovies looking for women who were good at pool? What should she do? When she started crying and blabbering about Lyle, Pete hung up. She called back, but he didn't answer. She called the next day, and he wouldn't take her call. She had enough money to do nothing but drive around San Jose, checking in and out of hotels, eating at restaurants by herself, going to movies, walking around the zoo.

A few months after she sent the letter, she stopped by the old apartment. There was a FOR RENT sign in the window. Mary still
had her key, and it worked the lock. The living room carpet had indentations where the couch had sat. On the kitchen counter was a book of matches from a steak place on Hillside Avenue. She put the matches in her purse. The closet door was open in the bedroom. Lyle had left twenty or thirty wire hangers behind. Mary stood there, staring into the closet, imagining Lyle's silk shirts and polyester suits. In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet seat to feel the coldness of the plastic, to feel something, anger, betrayal, loneliness. She wanted to be in Lyle's LTD trying to sleep, listening to the hum of the interstate, Lyle in the seat next to her, snoring.

Over the next few years, there were other men, a lot of other men, too many other men. She got married to a guy named Jack, but that lasted six, maybe eight months. She couldn't remember. It didn't matter. She moved to Los Angeles, hoping to run into Giles Alberhaskie. She tracked down his number and gave him a call, hoping he could get her a part in a television show or something, maybe a car commercial, but his secretary said he was “with a client.” She was staying in a little roadside motel in Encino, but most days she sat in her car in some grocery store parking lot, smoking cigarettes and watching people get in and out of their cars. Some pulled their wailing, screaming kids behind them; others were alone, like her, and walked across the parking lot, hands in their pockets, looking around for something, someone, some sort of distraction from the loneliness that was crushing them.

After two months she left Encino for Eureka. After six months in Eureka, she headed to Portland, then Yuma, Arizona, then Las Vegas, then Reno, then Tahoe for the winter ski season of 1988. In Tahoe, Mary met Pierre Bontemps, who promised he'd take care of her. He wore a fur coat and drank champagne for no particular reason. But he didn't take care of her. He couldn't even take care of himself. Every morning he rolled over and asked her to make breakfast. She didn't want to make breakfast. Why couldn't they go out to breakfast?

All told, she was married and divorced nine times. There were also the men she never married, like the cowboy in Flagstaff, Arizona. This was in 1990, and she was working at a Chi-Chi's by I-40. When she got off her shift at ten, the cowboy was sitting at the bar eating a chimichanga. Mary sat next to him, and Julio, the bartender, brought her her usual—a shot of Cuervo and a Budweiser. The cowboy was a traveling salesman who sold power tools. They started talking while Julio kept setting shots in front of them. At midnight, Mary went back to his hotel, the Ramada Inn next door. The two of them rolled around on the king-size bed pawing at each other. Mary kept glancing at the hotel room door, thinking his wife or girlfriend was going to barge in.

Afterward, she couldn't sleep, but the cowboy nodded right off, sprawled out on his stomach, the bedsheets twisted around his body. Mary tried to remember if he'd put a condom on or not. She'd done too many shots. Her mouth was dry. It felt like a thousand angry bees were inside her skull. She checked the nightstand hoping to find a spent, shriveled rubber next to the clock radio. There wasn't one. She checked the bed, pulling the sheet back and exposing the cowboy's hairy white ass and his ugly feet with yellowing toenails. She checked the floor around the bed, then under the bed, then the garbage can in the bathroom. Nothing. She sat on the toilet and looked at her vagina and willed the semen to leak out. She tried to pee but only a little urine tinkled into the toilet water. She unrolled a mound of toilet paper and scrubbed her vagina. Then, she quickly got dressed and snuck out of the hotel room.

On the way back to her apartment, Mary stopped at a Walgreens and bought a pregnancy test. She pissed on the stick as soon as she got home, not even bothering to take off her coat. It came back negative, of course. You're pregnant, a loud voice inside her head said. It doesn't matter what the test says. You're pregnant. P-r-e-g-n-a-n-t. No you're not, a whisper voice said. You're forty-four years old. You are, the loud voice said. Mary sat
down on the toilet. She could feel the baby inside her; it felt like a goldfish swimming circles in her stomach. Actually, she knew it was smaller than a goldfish—a minnow. Actually, smaller than a minnow, a guppy, actually smaller than that, a cell, a single cell orbiting in her womb, getting ready to multiply. The capper, the true indication of her pregnancy: her crotch was burning.

The next morning, Mary called her manager at Chi-Chi's and told him she wouldn't make it in for her lunch shift. She drove straight to the Brass Bull and ordered a double gin and tonic. Her plan was to carpet bomb the baby with G&Ts. She wasn't wearing underwear, and every hour or so, she went into the bathroom and smeared anti-burning cream on her crotch. By five o'clock, she was slurring her words and couldn't hold her head up. She began pounding her fist on the bar and repeated, “I need someone to take care of me. I need someone to take care of me. I need someone to take care of me . . . ” The bartender at the Brass Bull, a woman with dream catcher earrings, started filling her glass with only tonic. After a while, Mary laid her head on the bar and started snoring so loud she could be heard over the jukebox. When the crowd thinned out around midnight, the bartender woke her up and told her she knew someone who might be able to help.

Mary perked up, wiped her eyes. “Who?”

“An herbalist. His name is Mr. Purty.” The bartender leaned in to tell Mary that she'd suffered from night sweats and insomnia, but just last week, she'd gone to visit Mr. Purty out in the desert, and after only one visit, her symptoms disappeared. “Just one visit.”