What the Bowery Boys called a number seven. I landed neck deep in slop.
I read in one of Wanda’s
Shannon and Gilia thought my predicament was a hoot. Cause for belly laughs all around. Eugene had fallen on the floor, struck down by hilarity. Even Gus chuckled.
I sat up, grabbed Gilia by the arm, and yanked her into the pile—where her intense laughter turned into a shriek. Shannon put out a Blackfeet war cry—taught to her by Maurey, who learned it from Hank Elkrunner—and dived on both of us.
Shannon apologized to me the next morning, an event worthy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
“I’m sorry I said you were woofing it up on a married woman yesterday,” Shannon said. “You’re such an easy target, sometimes I forget you have feelings.”
I hung my head and stirred my red beans. “You cut me to the quick.”
“I realized that afterwards. You got so pale.”
Was she being ironic? Lydia and Maurey taught me long ago never to take a woman’s word at face value. I decided the proper course was silent yet wounded. Lies of omission are easier to cover than the out-loud kind.
Shannon brought her coffee and sat down opposite me. “Gilia is amazingly nice—I can’t remember the last time a nice woman liked you—but you know how it is when a daughter’s father gets a new girlfriend. There’s a moment of jealousy.”
“Gilia isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Daddy, don’t be a fool. Of course she’s your new girlfriend. I think she’ll make a wonderful mom.”
As a responsible parent, my job was to disagree. “She’s only five years older than you are.”
“If the shoe fits, don’t ask how old it is.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did, the night you went off with Jimmy Otake’s grandmother.”
Why don’t children ever forget? Shannon had been seven when I went off with Jimmy Otake’s grandmother.
“But Gilia’s a blonde,” I said. “I don’t care much for blondes.”
Shannon’s laugh was effervescent. “Daddy, you want any woman who wants you. This time you lucked out and found a good one, so don’t blow it. Here, she left me her phone number. It’s a personal line into her room, so you don’t have to deal with the family.”
I looked at the slip of paper in my hand. Gilia was a high-quality woman, which was the last thing I needed coming off the hard rebound from Wanda. Gilia was young, good-looking, and energetic—all that potential and long legs too—and she would break my heart. No, now was not the time to mingle with lovable women.
“I’m not going to call her,” I said.
“Give me one semi-rational reason why not.”
“To start with, Gilia might be my sister.”
“Gilia told me her father is left-handed. You’re right-handed, therefore her father isn’t your father.”
“Gilia’s right-handed.”
“Perfect. He’s not her father either.”
Gus stood in the parlor with her arms crossed over her chest. Orange slop hung from the piano, the chairs, the table, the William and Mary desk and bookcase, a Matisse print, and a Schenk original. I tried to remember the difference between stalagmites and stalactites.
“It’s drying hard,” Gus said.
“I don’t suppose you’d—”
“In a pig’s eye. I’d quit and go work for Jesse Helms before I’d clean this room.”
I’d suspected as much. Spontaneous messiness always brings backlash.
“Call Manpower and have them send over a team of winos. Tell them I’ll pay double.”
“You’ll pay triple.”
Gilia answered on the seventh ring. “What took you so long?” she said. “I thought you’d never call.”
“I planned to never call, but I thought I should explain why I can’t call you.”
“Are you going to Tex and Shirley’s for breakfast? Skip’s detective says that’s what you usually do about now.”
“Two days in a row. I hate it when you do something two days in a row and people start calling it a rut. That detective is damn presumptuous.”
“He’s only been on the job a day and a half.”
“I refuse to be predictable.”
“I only asked because I’m thinking I might join you there.”
“At Tex and Shirley’s?”
“We could talk.”
“What about?”
“Sam, didn’t you ever meet someone for breakfast? You sit and drink coffee and shoot the shit.”
“I’m real bad at shooting shit.”
“I’ll teach you, Sam. Hanging out is one of my talents.”
Blues music came from Gilia’s end of the line. She must have been listening to it when I called, but if so, why take seven rings to answer?
“Won’t the detective tell Skip, who’ll tell Cameron, and Ryan will box your ears?”
“I’m twenty-four years old, they can’t control me with threats.”
“They can me.”
Gilia’s laugh was clear water bubbling down the side of a mountain.
So, Gilia and I started meeting each morning at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It’d been so long since I’d talked to anybody about anything, that, at first, I felt exposed. I kept expecting her to get bored, like the two mental therapists I’d been dragged to over the years did. Lydia seduced the first one, and the second one, in college, told me to grow up.
“The prom’s over,” he said. “Stop your whining.”
But Gilia never acted bored or impatient. She listened while I rambled on about life with an airhead mother, and metaphors in baseball, and the transcendence of Young Adult sports fiction. The trick to seducing women is to shut up and listen to them—no one’s probably done that before and they’ll generally sleep with you out of gratitude—but with Gilia, I didn’t want to seduce her so much as get to know her real well. And that meant allowing her to know me.
This is revolutionary stuff here.
She mostly talked about prep school and college and the strange men and women who live in Washington, D.C. I’d been raised rich, at least until Caspar cut us off there for a few years, but I’d missed the prepster- debutante-networking thing. I guess Lydia wanted me to grow up normal.
Gilia was very passionate about art history. She had real opinions on movements and periods and all that stuff that most people only fake having opinions about. Her favorite American painter was an Impressionist named Lilla Cabot Perry. Once Gilia got started on Lilla Cabot Perry, she would go all morning if I didn’t jump in when my turn came to talk.
