Secrets & Surprises (22 page)

That night Starley and Alice met him for drinks at My Blue Heaven. They were late, so at the time Donald was to meet them, he crossed the street and went into the bar. He had almost finished his gin-and-tonic when they came in. He was sucking on the wedge of lime, and liking its greenness. The booths were padded in blue plastic, and there were silver-flecked blue Formica tabletops. Up near the ceiling were tiny twinkling blue lights. On the wall in back of the bar was a big cutout of Rita Hay worth, in a striped bathing suit; it had been stuck on a piece of board lettered “The One That Got Away,” which had formerly held the huge plastic fish that was now hanging at the other end of the bar, its snout pointed up the skirt of Marilyn Monroe, who was pouting and pushing her full white skirt down as if, unexpectedly, a wind storm had just started up between her knees. There was, next to this, an anatomically correct baby-boy doll, painted Day-Glo blue.

“None of this would have happened if you had gone to the beach for your vacation,” Alice said to Donald.

“I wanted to be with her. Her kid was in school. Everything was going fine until the little bastard flunked plane geometry.”

“Get him a calculator,” Alice said.

“Plane geometry isn’t the sort of course that a calculator would help in,” Starley said.

“Give me a light, Dickie,” Alice said.

He lit her cigarette.

“I don’t think this place is as funny as I used to,” Alice said. Nobody said anything.

“I’m in a bad mood, and I apologize for it,” Alice said. “All week I’ve been trying to give up smoking by smoking these cigarettes that are made of lettuce.”

“Why don’t you call Marilyn and see if she won’t come have a drink with us?” Starley said.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do we have to be here if he’s going to have a drink with her, Dickie? I’d feel awkward. I already feel sick to my stomach.”

“Then put that thing out.”

“I can’t. I need to smoke in social situations.”

Years before, in New York, Starley had told Donald that his only misgiving about marrying Alice was her chain-smoking. The smoke made him cough. At the wedding reception there had been little silver trays with pastel-colored Nat Sherman cigarettes.

They sat looking at the tabletop. The waiter was avoiding them. The waiter had apple-pink puckered cheeks like Howdy Doody.

“Do you think you would do us a favor?” Alice said. “Dickie and I haven’t been out to dinner in so long that I can’t remember it, and the sitter could only come for an hour tonight. Do you think you could go stay with Anita?”

“Alice!” Starley said. “He doesn’t want to be our baby-sitter.”

“That’s okay, Starley,” Donald said. “It doesn’t matter where I brood. You go out and have dinner. I’ll go over to your place and watch Anita.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.

Starley rolled his eyes dramatically. He stood up, and then Alice bumped out of the booth. She looked heavier. Her skirt was wrinkled. Mascara had smudged under one eye. The summer before, he and Starley had picked up a whore after a day of fishing on Chesapeake Bay, and while he went at it with her, Donald had sat drunkenly on the floor across the room, casting his line into her hair. There was a little plastic worm attached to the fishing pole, and once he missed and she reached down and pushed the thing off of her breast, saying, “Ugh! Make him stop!” “She says she wants you to stop, Starley,” Donald said. Then the whore started giggling, and Starley frowned at him. “She says she wants you to quit it,” he said. He was drunk. He was naked. Earlier (this was in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge) he had put his underpants on his head and marched around saying he was Ponce de Leon (Florida was on his mind; his son was on his mind). They played tag. The whore was easy to catch because she didn’t want to play tag in the first place, so she never really tried to get away. When she bumped into a table and nicked her shin, she refused to play anymore. They all sat around drinking gin-and-tonics. She flipped a coin to see who got her first. Whoever got “tails” got her. Much later the three of them stood, in towels, on the tiny balcony outside their room. In the parking lot a family was unloading their station wagon. There was a windblown mother, and a husband not quite as tall as she was who carried an infant in a baby seat, and a little girl, about five, who sat on the gravel and made demands as her father removed suitcases. The little girl started crying, and her mother fumbled her up in her arms, and they all marched into the Howard Johnson’s and disappeared.

Donald held the door of the bar open for Alice and Starley. He shook hands with Starley and kissed Alice on the cheek, and then he walked to Starley’s to baby-sit Anita, thinking all the way of the whore’s legs—kissing her scraped shin to make it well.

An hour later Donald was going out to eat chicken with a kid who had never liked him, his relationship with Marilyn over, the fan belt in Alice’s car squealing. Nothing he had ever done had made his own son like him. Joshua hated him, failed his course to get even with him, no kid
ever
liked him. He even had trouble making friends with other kids when he was a kid. Starley had been his first close friend. He drove, in the rush hour, brooding, wanting to put the silent Anita out of the car and go back to My Blue Heaven and make the waiter wait on him until he had had all the drinks he wanted.

Two summers before, the whore in the Howard Johnson’s had asked: “Were you guys in Vietnam?”

“No,” Starley said. “We’re too old.”

“Do we act like we were in Vietnam?” Donald asked her.

“How old are you?” she asked Starley.

He made her guess. She guessed wrong, by almost ten years.

“Thirty-five,” he said.

“You’re his age?” she said.

Donald nodded.

They were eating crabs. The crabs came in a black bucket, and the waitress rolled out thick paper on the table and gave them a pile of napkins, but no plates. The whore was having crab cakes, which were very expensive. As they drank beer she drank a Coke. She sipped it through a straw, like a little girl.

“How old are you?” Donald asked her.

“Twenty-three,” she said. She looked twenty-seven or-eight.

“Are you married?” she asked Donald.

“No,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked Starley.

He squinched up his face and waved his hand from side to side—a gesture that meant “so-so.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked him.

“One kid.”

“I’ve got a friend who’s a Vietnamese woman,” she said, “and she told me about soldiers who came into the village who pushed her down and one of them fucked her while the other one held the rifle underneath his friend, touching her asshole.”

She finished her Coke, sucking in mostly air. Donald thought that maybe she was twenty-three. It was just that she had sweated and not washed her face, and the make-up had caked on her cheeks.

“If you two want to do it again after dinner, you’ll have to pay me more,” she said. She looked into her empty Coke glass. “I guess it would have been only fair to tell you that before I let you take me to dinner.” She put her finger in the glass and brought out a piece of ice and sucked it. “I just didn’t think of it,” she said. “I honestly didn’t think of it.”

When it happened, Donald had just recently begun to feel happy—happy for the first time in months. (Marilyn never called; when he called her, she wouldn’t see him. Not any of the four times he called.) It was the first of November—the same day he had half a cord of wood delivered, which was stacked in what used to be a closet in the living room (door now removed). A fire was burning. Getting close to midnight, alone (but there had been someone earlier), having a cup of coffee that would keep him awake, but what the hell—the next day was Saturday—the phone rang. He crossed the room and picked up the phone and heard the voice of a stranger telling him, in a flat voice, that his friend Starley was dead.

Starley and Alice had been having a party—a party to which Alice had invited her important friends and to which Donald had not been invited—and Starley went out to get ice cubes. They were drinking mint juleps. (This gets crazier: they had all brought beach towels, were sitting around wrapped up in them with the heat turned up, pretending they were Arabs in the desert.) It was nine o’clock, around there, and Starley said they were running out of ice. (Correction:
Alice
said they were running out of ice, for which she will never forgive herself; yes, she realized that he, too, would eventually have noticed it. But if he had noticed five seconds later—probably
one
second later—the truck that went out of control would have passed that stretch of street Starley was crossing.) Starley had put on his black jacket and taken Alice’s scarf and, cold as it was, decided that the store was two blocks away, so he’d walk. (Alice, later, was sure that he had opened the door of the Fiat—his car was in the garage—and looked for the key under the floor mat—the one time she had left her key in the kitchen instead of in the usual hiding place. She was sure that he had tried to drive, had not found the key, had then and only then decided to walk. If he had taken the Fiat, he would be alive.)

The truck, a United Van Lines truck, its brakes not working properly as it came down the hill, and then the ice patch that threw it off course, right into him, on his way to buy ice cubes…

Donald heard all this when he picked up the phone. He could not really focus on the fact that Starley was dead; he could think only of himself, and the guilt he felt thinking, Hey—he’s dead and I’m alive. The guilt he felt thinking that if he had been invited to the party, he would probably have been the one to go for ice.

After Donald put down the phone (the anonymous voice having said, two times: “Come to the hospital for
what?”)
and he was standing there, disbelieving, the memory of the summer before with the whore making him smile and encroaching on his sorrow, the phone rang again. It was the woman who had been at his house earlier. It was Susan with her lovely, soft voice, calling to tell him she loved him. A few seconds after she hung up, wandering through his apartment, Donald was not clear what he had said to her. He knew that he should call her back, but he had no time. He was on the road, sad but full of purpose, an hour after both phone calls, headed for North Miami.

The drive took several days. The last night before he got there, he slept in a Howard Johnson’s, wanting to indulge all his maudlin instincts and be done with them. But this motel was not like the other one. The only room they had had one twin bed, and the room they had rented on the fishing trip had been much larger, with two double beds. This motel was loud. People in the next room sang along with a singer on television, other people joined them, they had a party. Donald stood staring out the window (no balcony off this room) at the pool, flat and blue, just a little too far away to be inviting, the night a little too cool for swimming.

From a phone booth on the highway that afternoon he had called his boss. His boss had met Starley at a party at his apartment once, but said he didn’t remember him.

“I flipped,” Donald said. “It made me realize that while I was alive there were things I had to do. Please don’t fire me.”

There was static on the line; a bad connection. His boss was placating: of course he wouldn’t fire him, but when did he think—(cars roared by). They hung up, both joking about Florida oranges.

He had tried to call Joanna from another phone later on, to say he was coming. There was no answer. He tried to call Susan, but of course she was at work, no answer there either. With the back of his arm he wiped the sweat off his forehead. What the hell had his boss been joking about—what was funny about Florida oranges?

Joanna’s house was only a ten-minute drive from the highway. It was a small pale-green house. The lawn was full of exotic bushes. In front of the house a pink 1955 Cadillac convertible was parked. The upholstery inside was white, in perfect condition. Whose was it?

He went up the walk and knocked on the doorframe of the screen door. A girl came to the door when he knocked.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Does Joanna still live here?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“I’m Bobby’s father.”

“What do you mean?” She looked confused. She put her face closer to the screen. Her eyes were large, like Anita’s. She was prettier. Older.

“I’m his father. I came to visit him.”

He snapped his arms into his sides. He had been standing there like a bear, leaning forward, arms away from his body.

“What does he look like?” she said.

“He has medium-length brown hair. He has braces. Wait a minute—he was getting braces when I was last here, but I don’t know if he got them. He looks like me. Don’t you see the resemblance?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”

“Who are you?” Donald said. “Where are they?”

“Bobby’s gone over to a friend’s house. I’m waiting for him to get back. Your wife is playing volleyball.”

“Where?” he said.

“Do you know the Orrs?”

“No.”

“She’s there.”

They stood facing each other. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was about to light the filter.

“It’s to surprise them,” he said. “They didn’t know I was coming.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Wrong end,” he said, reaching out to touch her hand before she could touch the lighted match to the cigarette.

The television was on, but she had turned down the volume before opening the door. Red Skelton was gesticulating, his face expanding and contracting as if it were made of putty.

“If you’re going to be here,” she said, “I might as well go.”

He nodded. She was going down the walk when he remembered about paying her. She turned around when he called after her and cocked her head. “Pay me?” she said. “Joanna’s my friend. I watch Bobby and she watches my daughter.”

“You have a daughter?” he said.

“Yes. I have a four-year-old daughter.” She smiled, deciding to be more friendly. “Her father is watching her. They went to the beach. I just live three streets over.”

She waved. She went out to the car and started it. The radio came on when the car started. It was a fine car: in perfect shape, motor idling quietly, paint sparkling. She waved again. Donald waved. She was gone.