Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (8 page)

Lindsay held the picture up
to the light above the sink. She turned the picture in the bright
light and looked closely at the firm, tanned flesh of Alice Ann’s
upper legs and flat stomach. Just who was the real wife in the
story? And the wives in all those other stories Ralph had written
over the years? Stories Ralph had sent Lindsay to read over this
past year and a half, which at that moment she wished she had never
set eyes on— over this year and a half of whispery, late-night,
long-distance phone calls, who were the real wives in all those
stories? The wife who worked as a waitress to make ends meet, that
student’s wife, now this wife with looks and personality and drive
who could unload a Cadillac convertible in a hurry, who was
desperate and angry and who had stretch marks running like roads
through the flesh of her legs and hips because of bearing her
worthless, bankrupt husband’s babies.

Lindsay had brushed her
teeth until she tasted blood. She examined her bleeding gums in the
mirror, for all it mattered. Lindsay hated her wide mouth and big
buck teeth. She had the big mouth of a horse. Trigger was one of
her nicknames she hated. Table Legs, Fat Farm, Pimple Plantation
were other childhood nicknames that broke her heart. Lindsay tore
the seaside picture of Alice Ann and the kids in two and tossed it
to float among the cigarette butts in the toilet. Alice Ann floated
face up, and Lindsay’s hand had hesitated at the toilet’s handle.
With a thumb and forefinger, Lindsay fished Alice Ann out. She
shook this part of the picture over the sink and patted it dry with
a towel and put it into her leather cigarette case. She washed her
face and hands and rinsed her sore mouth with warm water. When
Lindsay flushed the toilet, it sounded like thunder.

But it didn’t wake Ralph.
Ralph was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched
over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked
desperate in his heavy sleep, his jaws clenched, his arm flung out
across Lindsay’s side of the bed. Lindsay nestled back in bed with
her bottom next to Ralph’s. There was a sound coming from inside
Ralph’s nose when he breathed. Lindsay tried to regulate her
breathing to Ralph’s, but she couldn’t catch his jagged rhythm. She
could hear traffic from El Camino Real up the street, and through
the motel’s thin walls sudden laughter from the next room. She was
afraid to turn off the soundless television set and be plunged into
total darkness in this strange room. And then Lindsay had the
thought that in all the motel rooms of her memory the television
was always on. Why should questions of happiness make Lindsay
always suffer?

Lindsay lay there wide-awake
in the half-light and listened to the sounds of sex from the next
room. She then had an idea of her life as just a long deflowering.
She would never have another husband, or give birth, she realized.
In her imagination motel rooms opened endlessly onto more motel
rooms, like grains of sand in some kids’ castle at an ocean’s edge,
countless cells of sex. Through the papery walls came moans that
could wake the dead. Lindsay covered her ears and shut her eyes.
Now I lay me down to sleep, Lindsay said to herself. If I should
die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Daddy
and Mommy. God bless Ralph.

Lindsay opened her eyes. If
she fell asleep her soul would leave her body. Lindsay uncovered
her ears and placed her hand palm flat against the thin wall and
let her memory work. Stale smoke filled the motel rooms of her
memory, ashtrays of butts, plastic cups of bourbon, greasy boxes of
leftover pepperoni pizza, and across the motel room that night was
a barely touched family-pack bucket of Kentucky fried chicken on
the dresser which Ralph had insisted they pick up for when they
would surely be ravenous at midnight. Beside it was the Bible
Ralph had found in a drawer, and from which after they had made
love the first time this night he had read the Song of Solomon, his
voice sonorous, now pitched low and somber, now rising, now
thrilling, a voice even richer than when he had read his own story
earlier this day about that desperate wife with veins like roads in
her flesh.

The toilet flushed in the
next room, and when it flushed immediately again, Ralph sat up in
bed. Ralph stared at the television set, his eyes wide and bright
as a bird’s. He clutched the covers to his chest and looked wildly
around the room. Ralph looked at Lindsay as though she were some
vegetable he would not eat as a child. Are you okay, honey? Lindsay
asked him. Ralph lay back down without answering and pulled the
twisted covers over his head. Ralph’s red pajamas, which he had had
stuffed in his briefcase, clearly planning all along on not driving
back to Berkeley, and which he put back on after each time they
made love, were covered with tiny blue sailboats. Perhaps his
mother had given them to him. For Christmas. For his birthday,
maybe. Would any wife buy her husband, her lover, red pajamas with
tiny blue sailboats on them? Let him kiss me with the kisses of his
mouth, for thy love is better than wine, were lines Lindsay ran
through her mind as she lay there in the half-light. She heard more
moans from the next room. O thou fairest among women. O thou whom
my soul loveth. By night I sought him who my soul loveth. I sought
him, but I found him not. A cry came from the next room.

Lindsay paced the room
smoking. As though grains of light flowed from the room into the
television set, surfaces seemed deflated. Lindsay’s flesh felt like
foam. She shivered violently. She put on Ralph’s shirt and sat in
the chair before the dresser. She drew her feet up underneath the
shirt. On the television were shots from news helicopters of a
freeway pileup, police cars* flashing red lights far below,
bleeding flares. Then a cut to a toothpaste commercial and a
zoom-shot kiss. Behold thou are fair, my love. Thou has dove’s eyes
within thy locks. Thy breasts are like two young roes that are
twins, which feed among the lilies.

The next room’s door opened
and shut. Lindsay hurried to the window and pulled back the
curtains. The parking lot below was full. Up the side street a red
light blinked on the corner of El Camino Real, and liquefied
traffic in the bluish, mercury-vapor lights shone sleek and
mysterious, and Lindsay recalled her girlhood feeling that the
night held some great adult secret she would never come to
know.

In the parking lot below a
man kissed a woman passionately. She was a pretty woman, wearing a
checked sundress, and there were silver barrettes in her short
brown hair. They held each other for a few moments, and then the
woman unlocked the driver’s-side door of a small station wagon
parked next to Ralph’s car. The man was wearing a white belt and
white shoes, and he waved to the pretty woman playfully the whole
time she backed her station wagon from its slot and drove onto the
side street toward El Camino Real and her home just blocks away on
Matadero Road. The man cut across the pool area toward the side
street. He walked around the pool’s deep end and then stopped and
stared into the shivery water, where bluish lights bobbed like
bright birds about to break the surface into the night air. The man
stared across the small pool as though he were studying some
distant shore of lights. The man glanced around him and then pulled
out his penis and began urinating into the pool. Ralph made a sound
in his sleep and then talked in what sounded for all the world like
tongues. Lindsay was afraid to turn away from the window. She felt
that if she turned from the window, turned around and looked at
Ralph, she would fall out of the state of love forever.

The phone’s busy signals
were like the sounds of some lost race, an electric language
Lindsay could learn over time. She sat with her back to Ralph’s
sleeping form. He mumbled again and again in his desperate sleep.
In its reflection in the mirror above the dresser the bed was a maw
and Ralph was twisted in its covers like some huge blue-spotted
tongue. The television light was as cold and startling as a
refrigerator’s opened in the middle of the night. When Lindsay
dialed Alice Ann’s number the next time, only moments later, it was
too late, for Alice Ann was already out the door.

Alice Ann was on her way to
meet somebody for a drink and a long talk. Jim, namely. Alice Ann
had called Jim to see if he had any idea where in the fuck her
so-called husband, old rotten, Running Dog Ralph might be. Jim had
told her he didn’t have a clue. Jim had told Alice Ann he didn’t
even know the whereabouts of his own wife that night when flaws in
time kept them, all the sundry players, locked relentlessly in
parallel planes.

Lindsay let the phone ring
off the wall. There was a comfort in the ringing, the ringing and
ringing only Lindsay could hear. Chicken bones in an ashtray looked
blue.

You Are Not Your
Characters

1

To celebrate their
seventeenth wedding anniversary Alice Ann had made reservations for
her and Ralph at a restaurant in one of those little, chic shopping
malls full of import shoppes, expensive boutiques, and Dalton
bookstores, so popular on the peninsula south of San Francisco, and
she had invited Jim and Judy to join them. At some point, during a
weak, sentimental moment, Jim had crossed his heart and hoped to
die while promising Judy not to beat her new boyfriend to a pulp,
and as they were more or less on speaking terms then, they agreed
to go.

The restaurant Alice Ann had
selected for the joyous occasion featured Greek cuisine, and it was
obviously a place she was familiar with, the way she raved around
about the food. Ralph hated it, of course, oily, smelly,
foreigner’s fare. The joyous, celebratory evening was off to a
flying start by the time Ralph inquired about who Alice Ann had
been in this wretched establishment with before. For it sure hadn’t
been him. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Some of Alice Ann’s new
hipper-than-thou chums probably was what Ralph speculated out loud.
He was already about half drunk. So was Jim, and they all had
smoked a couple of killer

doobies in the parking lot.
Rather, Ralph, Alice Ann, and Jim had, for, as usual, Judy was the
designated driver.

That cute remark is in
reference to my est group, Alice Ann had smilingly informed Jim and
Judy, slowly twisting the ends of her long blond hair around in her
fingers as she talked. Alice Ann really was a good-looking woman,
and Jim had always thought her hands were especially lovely, with
long, slender, expressive fingers that always flashed with
rings.

That’s the crowd you pay an
arm and a leg to, to tell you you’re a turd, Ralph had
said.

Cute, dearest, Alice Ann
said.

First it was those
meditation classes, Ralph said. —Then that yoga farm where she went
on that suspicious retreat. Wonder what in the world you grow on a
yoga farm?

Isn’t our anniversary boy
amazing? Alice Ann said. —To criticize me for trying to broaden my
horizons. Ralph takes pleasure in making light of me trying to
expand my consciousness.

Do you plant little yoga
seeds? Ralph said. —What’s a yoga taste like, anyway? To the best
of my knowledge, I, for one, have never personally eaten a yoga. Is
it anything like a carrot? Okay, okay, I’ll admit I’m not much of
a, you know, connoisseur, but there are things in this world I
wouldn’t put in my mouth if you paid me. Why does it have to be so
dark in here, anyway? Ralph said, and held his hand up before his
face. —You can hardly see your hand in here.

Ambience, hon, Alice Ann
said.

It is pretty dark in here,
Judy piped up. She’d been sitting there with a faraway, dreamy look
in her lovely brown eyes, probably missing, Jim had reflected,
Melvin’s member. Judy really was a good-looking woman, too, Jim had
to admit, his litde blow-job queen, while Jim, on the other hand,
looked like a heavy, hirsute, lowlife rider of Harleys.

You can say that again,
Ralph said. Ralph picked up a small candle-lantern from the center
of the table and held it above his menu. He frowned and shook his
old, woolly head. —This is all Greek to me, he said, and
chuckled.

I think it’s tres romantic,
Alice Ann said. —Where’s your sense of romance, Ralph?

What’s this? Ralph said, and
pointed to an item on the menu. —Number six. Under the dinners. I
can’t even pronounce it.

That’s pastitsio, hon, Alice
Ann said. —Which is layers of macaroni, grated cheese, and sauteed
ground beef. It’s topped with a rich cream sauce and baked. It’s
yummy, but you ought to try their souvlakia.

You don’t say? Ralph said,
and looked up at Alice Ann with a frown. —Well, maybe I can just
order me a nice sirloin burnt to a crisp, the way I like it. And a
good old American baked potato. Slavered with sour cream and
chives.

Oh Christ, Ralph! Alice Ann
said. —It’s our fucking anniversary! If you love me, Ralph, you
won’t act like a horse’s ass, and you’ll get into the spirit of an
anniversary evening. If you don’t love me, then you
won’t.

I know it’s our anniversary,
Alice Ann, Ralph said. —You don’t have to remind me of our
seventeen years together for a minute. We have those criminal,
thieving kids at home to do that every miserable waking
moment.