The Clarinet Polka (27 page)

“Oh, my God,” and she grabs my hand and starts squeezing it. “Don't look,” she says. “Just look at me,” and she scrunches back in the booth like hiding behind me.

Well, I've got to sneak a look. I just can't help it. And there's this couple in a hurry, walking away from us. I'd heard the girl's heels on the floor and hadn't paid any attention, but they must have been right smack in front of our booth, and now he's hustling her out of there. He's a thin little guy with a mustache, thirty-something, wearing fancy bell-bottoms—an older guy pretending he's a hip young dude—and she's a little bleach blond honey who's trying to look like Linda McCartney.

“They gone?” Connie says.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I saw them go out the door. Hey, take it easy,” and I pry her loose from that death grip she's got on my hand.

“Oh, God,” she says, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Oh, God, I think I'm having a heart attack.”

She's fanning herself. Whatever it was she was drinking that night, she downs it. “Let's get out of here.”

So we go burning down the river road back to Raysburg. We couldn't get there fast enough to suit her. “That was Dr. Andy Hamilton,” she says. “From New York City, hot damn. Family practice. He's supposed to be first rate. Married to a really sweet girl. She has a bit of a weight problem. They have the most beautiful little baby boy—well, not a baby anymore. About eighteen months. The trashy little slut who was with him is one of the nurses—Jayelle or Rayelle or some damned Elle. I don't care what her name is.”

“You sure they saw you?”

“Of course they saw me. He looked straight at me, and then he did a double take and looked again just to make sure.”

“He going to tell on you?”

She thought about that for a while. “No. There's nothing in it for him. If he told on me, I could tell on him, and then where would we be? Two wrecked marriages. No, it's not him I'm worried about, it's that little white-trash slut. Oh, God, I hate it that she has something on me.”

“Well, you've got something on her.”

“Big deal. What's she got to lose?”

“Well, her job for starters.”

“I hadn't thought of that. Yes, she could very well lose her job, if it all came out.”

So we've got to go over every possible angle of who's got something on who and trying to guess the motivations of everybody involved, like, you know, trying to work out the plot of a spy movie, and the more we talked about it, the clearer it was getting that nobody had any room to maneuver and if anybody opened their mouth, the whole scene would be blown wide open and they'd all lose. “See,” I said, “you're safe.”

“Safe? Oh, Christ, is that ever funny.”

We get back to my trailer, and she says, “I was going to go home, but that would be stupid, wouldn't it? What was I thinking? That would be really really stupid. I should go home at exactly the same time I always go home.”

She couldn't sit still. She kept pacing up and down. She was shaking all over. Even her teeth were chattering. “Turn on the goddamn heat in here, will you?” she said. It wasn't that cold a night.

I thought she was just scared, but that wasn't what it was. She asked me for a drink so I poured her a shot. She held it in her hand and looked at it. Then she dumped it down the sink. It drove me crazy the way she could waste things like that.

“I don't want to drink,” she said. “Just for once, for Christ's sake, don't you drink either,” and she took the glass out of my hand and set it on the counter. I almost said, “Screw you, Connie,” but then I took a good look at her and I kept my mouth shut.

It's hard to describe what she was like. Energy was crackling off her like to the tune of about four million volts. If you could have figured how to plug her in, you could have run the whole Ohio Valley off her for a year or two.

“I have to figure things out,” she said. I thought she meant the whole spy movie thing, and we'd already been over it, but that's not what she meant.

“Is it worth it?” she said.

“I don't know, Connie, you tell me.”

“Are we hurting anybody?”

“I don't know, Connie, are we?”

“Fuck you, Jim. Don't do that to me. I asked you a question. Are we hurting anybody?”

I told her the truth. “Shit, honey, we're probably hurting lots of people.”

“But it shouldn't be like that, should it? It shouldn't make any difference what we do, should it?”

There's not a lot of room to walk up and down in a trailer. She goes pace pace pace to one end, turns around, goes pace pace pace to the other end.

“I don't want to wake up one morning with no husband and no kids,” she said, and she laughed. “You know why? Because what would I do then? I wouldn't have anybody to blame but myself.”

I tried to say something, and she told me to shut up. “Just wait a minute,” she kept saying. “I've got to figure this out.” She wasn't talking to
me
. She was talking to herself inside her head, and every once in a while she'd fill me in on the latest thing she'd just said to herself.

She was real hard to follow. A lot of it I don't remember, but one of her things was what she called “the hollow landscape.” That's when you realize that nothing's real, that everything you're looking at is hollow like a movie set and all the people around you aren't people at all, they're robots. Then the next step is you realize that you're a robot too—just a beautifully designed machine.

Sometimes she'd stop to stare at me—I mean stare right into my eyes—and then she'd go back to her animal-in-a-cage routine. Talking all the time. Nonstop. It was not a lot of fun to watch her go through this shit, and I really needed a drink. “Connie,” I said. “Hey. Come back to earth. You're acting crazier than a bedbug.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah, you are.”

I kept telling her that, and eventually it had an effect. “You're right, Jim. Yes, you're right,” and she opened up her purse and pulled out a pill bottle and popped a pill.

“What's that?” I said.

“Just something I take. I'll have that drink now, please.”

We each had a drink, and very slowly she started to come down. “When I'm with you, Jim,” she said, “life is always interesting. Life is not very interesting most of the time. Don't you find that to be the case?”

She must not have been coming down fast enough to suit her, so she popped another pill. “Do you know what you're doing?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes. Don't you know that about me yet? I always know exactly what I'm doing.”

I could see her energy draining away right before my eyes. She plunked herself down on the chair. She was going, “Pain or nothing, pain or nothing, pain or nothing,” almost like she was praying, and other stuff I couldn't make out.

“Connie, for Christ's sake, make sense, all right? You want somebody to lock you up over at the RGH?”

“No, no, it wouldn't be the RGH. They'd keep me right there in the St. Stevens Clinic. They'd just lock me in an examination room and throw away the key. But my little dilemma, my little dilemma— Oh, I've always felt free with you, Jim. You have always made me feel as though I could do anything I wanted.”

I watched her run right down. She was melting into that chair. She yawned a couple times. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It was quite a shock seeing that asshole Hamilton. I really am quite sorry. I suppose I should go home now. Is it late enough for me to go home? Will you help me up, please? If you don't, I'll just sit here forever, and I'm sure you wouldn't like that very much, now would you?”

I helped her up. She started taking her clothes off—you know, so she could put her underwear back on—and she looked at me and said, “Oh, poor Jim. We didn't get to do anything tonight. There's still a few minutes if you want to.”

“It's okay, Connie,” I said.

“No, really. We have at least another fifteen minutes.”

“It's okay.”

“Would you like me to give you a blow job? It's no trouble, really.”

“Connie, honey, I'm not exactly in the mood.”

“Oh, I thought you were always in the mood. Oh well, next time.”

I asked her if she was okay to drive and she kept telling me she was. I walked her out to her car. “I'm worried about you,” I said.

“Don't be,” she said. “I have a husband to worry about me. He worries about me and doesn't fuck me. You don't worry about me and you do. You see, it's the perfect division of labor.”

*   *   *

That one left a bad taste in my mouth, so one night I'm having a few with Georgie Mondrowski—well, to tell you the truth, he's having a few and I'm having lots. I say, “Hey, Mondrowski, you know I'm seeing that doctor's wife again, don't you?”

He just smiles and nods. Something goes click in my head and I say, “Does everybody know I'm seeing her again?”

His smile gets wider and he nods again. I say, “Am I making an asshole out of myself?”

He's grinning ear to ear. There's a beer glass and a shot glass sitting in front of me. The beer glass is half full and the shot glass is empty. He reaches over and goes
ping
on the shot glass. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “When's the last time you went a whole day without a drink?”

“You're a great one to talk, asshole. When's the last time you went a whole day without a smoke?”

“Grass is different,” he says. “Booze is an evil drug. Doesn't do a damn thing for your head, man. Just wrecks you. Besides which, we're talking about
you
right now. I know I got problems. You want to talk about my problems, we'll talk about my problems later. Just let me ask you again, when's the last time you went a whole day without a drink?”

That was, like they say, one of those damn good questions. “I don't know,” I say, “back at Carswell, I guess.”

“So how long's that?”

“Three years—maybe close to four. What, you think I'm drinking too much?”

“No, man, that's not the point. It's not that you're drinking too much. It's that you're hooked. You got to get off that shit. A lot of the fucking up you been doing's directly related to that shit. Like the Pączki Ball. Let's just put things in perspective here. Why'd you start seeing that doctor's wife again?”

I was really pissed off at him. “Because she's a good fuck,” I said. “Come on, asshole, do you mean to tell me you'd pass up a good fuck?”

“Hey, Jimmy, did you forget who you're talking to? It's me, your ol' pal, Georgie Mondrowski.”

“Oh, hell, man, I don't know why I started seeing her again. She's crazy. I mean really crazy. She scares the bat piss out of me, if you want to know the truth. Yeah, I'm in way over my head. The sex we're having is—I don't know, it's getting kind of over the edge. Screwing in parking lots and that kind of shit. I mean it's great sex—but hell. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not even sure I like her.” I didn't know I thought any of that until I heard myself saying it.

“I've been worried about my drinking for a while now,” I said, “but I can't seem to do a damn thing about it. My whole life feels like it's pointless. Like there's no purpose. Shit, I might as well have stayed in the air force. You know, Mondrowski, what's the saddest thing? I can't even think of anything I want—you know, like seriously
want
. I used to want to go to Austin, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. If it wasn't for going to work for that asshole Vick, I wouldn't have any reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he says.

And we talked about his problems a bit. His insomnia and all that, and jumping ten feet every time he heard a car backfire, and once he gets to sleep, waking up about an hour later, pawing around in the bed for his weapon that's not there, and other cheery little difficulties he was having trying to reintegrate himself back into civilian life. And we did what we've always done all the way back to high school—gave each other a good pep talk and said we'd get together and do something. “They've got some beautiful new equipment in at the Y,” he says. “Let's go hit it. Let's pretend we're getting in shape for football season.”

“Yeah,” I said, “great idea,” but even when I was saying it, I knew I wasn't going to do it.

*   *   *

Comes the next Wednesday of The Italian Renaissance and Connie doesn't show up. I've got back from the shop, and I've had time to shower and change my clothes, and still there's no sign of her. Then the phone rings. I did not get a whole hell of a lot of calls on that phone.

She was cranked, talking a mile a minute. I gathered that the shit had hit the fan. “What?” I said. “That doctor tell on you?”

“Oh, no. But it's almost as bad. He found out I haven't been going to The Italian Renaissance.”

“Oh, great.”

So they'd been locked into one of their marathon, two-person encounter groups ever since, and she'd told him some lie and ducked out to call me. And she's going, “I won't be able to see you for a while, but I'll call as soon as I can. When's the best time to get you? Maybe we can arrange something so you'll be there at a certain time every day, and if I can get out, I'll call. He's bound to go back to Baltimore sometime. He always does. Oh, Jim, I'm so sorry,” and on and on she goes.

Something in me snapped, and I said, “Connie, let's just forget it.”

She goes, “What?”

I said, “Look, honey, you just pull this one out of your ass the best you can, and let's just forget it.”

There's a long pause, and then she says, “I'm calling you from a phone booth.”